by Howard Engel
“The Lord Advocate said that ‘we know nothing about the man’s movements from six o’clock to a quarter to ten that night.’ In fact, he was seen by several independent witnesses close to his flat in Howe Street during that time. Is that good enough, Dr Bell?”
“It’s good, but not good enough. I’m looking for better. Can you find it?”
“The maid, Hélène André, stated once that she did not see the face of the murderer, because he was walking away from her. To Mlle Clery’s agent she said that she did see his face and that the man was known to her. More about that later.”
“Ah-ha! Now we are getting some place! That would account for the curious incident of the door.”
“What curious incident?” I asked. “The door has not figured in this investigation in any way.”
“That is the curious incident,” Bell said. “In all the talk of robbery, we have seen no sign of a forced entry. How is that possible when the door is heavily locked from the inside? There are only three ways that the door could have been opened: the door was left open and this accidentally coincided with the arrival of the assassin, which seems highly unlikely; the murderer had his own keys; or one of the victims opened the door and let the murderer into the flat. There is no other way. The maid may have left the door unbolted when she went out, but there were two spring locks, which would have kept an intruder powerless unless he had brought with him a battering ram.
“This explanation makes excellent sense in the light of a robbery that took nothing from the flat. Only the diamond brooch was missing from the jewel box in Mlle Clery’s bedroom. A bagatelle among so many riches. I suspect the maid might have been made to account for that loss if her belongings had been searched. Too late now, of course.
“Only two things were taken from the flat that night. Two precious and irreplaceable items.”
“If you rule out the missing brooch, Doctor, to what do you allude?”
“I allude simply to the lives of the victims. The murders were not by-blows, the frantic act of a desperate criminal in pursuit of valuable property. No! The murders were an end in themselves.”
“But to what purpose?” I demanded. “Mlle Clery was universally loved and admired.”
“That is so. Nevertheless…”
“Dr Bell,” said Bryce. “You may well be right. But how do you propose to prove it in seven days?”
“As you say, it may tax my skill to the breaking point. But that may never be put to the test.”
“Why?” I asked.
“We have another and perhaps more serious problem.”
“Which is?” Here both Bryce and I spoke together.
“If you look at the door to the tearoom, you will see the sweating face and sturdy trunk of Inspector Webb standing with four constables. I don’t imagine that they are here to taste the oatcakes.”
“What are we to do?”
“That is a very good question!”
SEVENTEEN
With my back to the entrance, it was difficult for me to turn to confirm what Bell had said without giving notice that the policemen had been discovered. I saw all I needed in the eyes of my companions. I repeated my question about what we were to do and again got no very clear answer.
“I suspect that they will not bother us as long as we appear to be engaged in talk. I suggest that we continue,” said Bell. “You said earlier, my friend, that the maid said some startling things. I wonder if, when I return, you will tell us about them.” Here Bell slowly got to his feet and walked over to the stove, temporarily abandoned by the cook, who was haranguing a customer about a bad copper. Bell very deliberately, but without any quick or awkward motions, moved the toast rack over the blazing stove lids. Next, he threw some confectioner’s sugar, which stood conveniently nearby in a brown earthenware bowl, on another stove lid. Just as slowly as he had gone, he returned to us.
“Joe…?”
“Dinna fash your mind about it, Conan. I have merely prepared for our hurried departure. But it will not ripen for some moments. Meanwhile, Bryce, pray continue.”
“The maid, Hélène André, spoke to Mlle Clery’s agent, a man named Tom Prentice, in nearby Canning Street on the night of the murder. When he was questioned, he told the officers that the woman told him that she did indeed see the visitor’s face and that she recognized it as being ‘like,’ she said ‘like,’ a man she knew. The officers took down that name and reported it to their superiors.”
Slowly, as we talked, a fine mist of smoke was building up around the stove. With the pipe and cigarette smoke already filling the room, nobody noticed. But I could see a thicker cloud of denser smoke developing from the burning sugar. Meanwhile, Bryce continued his story.
“Who that man was, we do not know. Nor do we know what he said to the officers when, in turn, he was called upon to make a precognition. In all the reports referring to this gentleman, the name never appears; in its place the initials ‘XYZ’ are used. When I was brought into the case I was told to inform Tom Prentice that his statement about XYZ had been looked into and that there was no point in that line of inquiry. XYZ had satisfied the investigating officers and no point would be served by proceeding further in that direction. Of course, by that time, the chase had moved on to young Lambert, who had sailed to New York in what was then seen as undue haste.”
“Where is Tom Prentice now?” I asked, thinking that perhaps he might be encouraged to identify Mr XYZ.
“He returned to New York as soon as the trial was over. He runs an artists’ management agency on Fifth Avenue.”
“Doyle is right. We should cable him at once. There is no time to waste.”
The smoke in the tearoom had now become impressive. I was not afraid to turn to look at the door, for I could hardly see half the distance with any clarity.
“Gentlemen,” Bell announced, getting to his feet and placing a few coins on a saucer, “I believe the time has come to make our departure. Come.” Without showing the least awkwardness, Bell moved smoothly through the tables to a small door against the east wall of the tearoom. It opened easily, once a crate of fresh herring had been moved away from it. We had followed Bell at a sufficient distance so as not to tread on his heels. Bryce was ahead of me and through the door before me. The small landing led to a flight of steep stairs which were wide enough for one person at a time. When I saw them first, Bell was nearing the top, with Bryce somewhere in the middle. I closed the door behind me, sighting through the glass a room now overwhelmed with smoke. People were on their feet and rushing towards the main entrance. Webb and his escort moved through the smoke, while the cook swatted the smoke with her apron. Bell opened a door at the top of the steps and I hurried to catch up.
We were on the roof of Waverley Station. Unlike the stations in London and elsewhere, where curved iron arches held up a large area of glazed roof, the Edinburgh station rejoiced in a flat roof, enlivened from time to time with ridges of inverted V-shaped walls of windows which brought light into the structure while keeping the weather at bay. I was still blinking in the daylight, when Bryce grabbed my arm and hurried me with him behind Bell’s rapidly disappearing back. He was headed along the rim of the roof, where it overhung the market, and moving in a westerly direction against the wind. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw Inspector Webb just coming through the door to the roof. At his heels his posse of four came coughing into the air. Webb quickly picked a path along the edge of the roof and closed the distance between us. Bryce, who was ahead of me, saw this and moved past me towards our pursuers. Without preamble, he clashed with Webb on the very lip of the roof. They grappled like urchins in the market below, each taking and giving advantage as they struggled. In a moment they were rolling near the edge, still clasped in one another’s strongest grips. Bryce’s leg hung for a time suspended over empty space, but he righted himself, got to his knees and was soon coming after me again. Webb’s minions had caught up by this time, and were able to assist their chief, whose foot had somehow gone
through the roof and made his leg prisoner almost to the kneecap.
I saw all this as I ran, as though my life depended upon it, after Bell who was still a short distance in front of me. Soon we came to Waverley Bridge, which spanned a dozen railway lines that vanished under the bridge and into the station. Towards the middle of the station roof, coinciding with a supporting arch of the bridge, a colony of gulls took to the air. Through the froth of feathers in movement, I saw what Bell was heading towards: a ladder which led from the station roof to the bridge railing. Without turning around, Bell reached up and grabbed the highest rung and quickly scrambled up the black, and, as I found a moment later, none too solidly anchored, iron ladder. Bell’s feet rang on the rungs like reports of gunfire in a belfry. Fragments of rust and paint floated down upon us so that it was necessary to avert our eyes from the scrambling form above us. On reaching the top, he climbed over the railing onto the pavement of the bridge, heavy with its daily round of carts, drays, carriages and omnibuses. In less time than it takes to describe it, we made the same ascent and joined him on the sidewalk. Limping, Webb had not yet reached the foot of the ladder.
“I think that it might be useful if we lost ourselves in the university for an hour. What say you, Doyle? Do you think you can seek out some congenial prospect out of the wind?” My first thought was to lead them to Rutherford’s bar, but at this hour it would have been a noisy hive of students with more money in their purses than sense of what to do with it. (You see, my Catholic upbringing had not made me proof from Calvinist judgments. Here in Auld Reekie these sentiments are imbibed with our mothers’ milk.)
Bryce had hailed a four-wheeler and we quickly packed ourselves inside. I gave the driver an address on South Bridge Street, which was close both to Bell’s house and to Drummond Street in case we wanted Rutherford’s after all. I felt my face wet with perspiration. Bryce’s face was shining with his exertions as well. Only Bell, who never did a stroke of exercise as far as I knew, remained cool. His breathing was calm and unhurried, unlike Bryce and me, who were puffing like a pair of grampuses. Bell leaned his head back on the headrest of the cab and closed his eyes as though a flight from the police was a common pastime with him.
It was not a long ride, just a medium run down Cockburn Street, then along the Cowgate a short distance to South Bridge. The university looked busy enough to intimidate all policemen. Before the cab came to a stop, scraping its wheels against the curbstones, Bell, without opening his eyes, demanded of Bryce:
“Who else, besides Prentice and Hélène André, knows the identity of XYZ?”
“Constables Weir and Douglas took the precognitions. Weir is retired now in Gairloch, where his people come from. Angus Douglas is in charge of the wee stationhouse in Thurso, near John o’Groats.”
“Both conveniently remote.”
“Aye, and neither will say aught M’Sween hasn’t authorized.”
“As I suspected. Go on.”
“Webb had access to the original precognitions. All I saw were copies with the pseudonym and an epidemic of asterisks showing where part of the statement had been omitted in making the copies.”
“Who else saw the original?”
“Webb’s immediate chief, M’Sween, the deputy chief constable.”
“Who else?”
“The Procurator-Fiscal, Sir William Burnham.”
“How that name keeps popping up, young Doyle. Do you detect a pattern here?” I delayed my response as we climbed out of the four-wheeler and sorted ourselves out again on the sidewalk.
“It would seem, sir, that as head of the whole process, the man who had to determine whether it was murder or not, his name was bound to be attached to statements at the highest level.”
“As a layman,” Bell said without feigned modesty, “I would accept that as accurate. But what do we know? Another thing, are other precognitions normally subject to this sort of censorship, Bryce?”
“No, Doctor. I have seen everything else. Only this was withheld.”
“So! Our Mr XYZ may demand to be handled with kid gloves. The affair between Mlle Clery and Mr Eward may become fodder for the press, but Mr XYZ is well above such discourtesy. Not only is his name shrouded in secrecy even in official private police reports, but you, Bryce, are sent out to tell the witness who originally brought the name up to forget the whole business.”
“It smells like a month-old kipper to me,” said Bryce.
“It smacks of tampering with the truth at a high level,” I added.
“I agree with you both. A very pocky business. The question is: what are we going to do about it?”
EIGHTEEN
Bell cabled Tom Prentice at his talent agency in New York from the trans-Atlantic cable office in Bank Street. That was our outside chance. From the safety of America, he might be willing to send the name he had been encouraged to forget. But we did not have the luxury of waiting for the answer. Bell began hammering Bryce with questions about Inspector Webb. As the other person who knew the identity of XYZ, he moved to the centre of our enquiry. It did not escape Bell’s notice that we were now in search of the man who had only a few minutes ago tried to find us in the market tearoom. “The detective detected,” he muttered as Bryce tried to recall what he knew of the man. We both looked at Bryce.
“Webb is a man who has been walking on my shadow for the past fifteen years. He has been studying my methods. I never liked the man, although I’ve tried. He refuses to use the sense he was born with. He’s always trying to think of the answers he gives in political terms: what is the answer they want to hear? He is a fellow who makes Uriah Heep look like a good, matey sort, if you know what I mean. Robbie Webb is…” He stopped, then continued after a moment for reflection: “a good policeman by most standards. He’s dogged, thorough and clever. Bristol fashion all round. But, as I said, he follows orders. When Keir M’Sween orders Webb to soop, Webb will find a broom and soop. He will find out what the deputy chief wants to know. He will find evidence that I murdered Mlle Clery if that’s what M’Sween sends him out to find.”
“His name is Robert Webb? I know something of the man,” said Bell. “His home was near Dundee, I believe. I remember that he served on the police force there.”
“Yes, Robert Fergus Webb, born in Dundee, son of the town drunkard. He set out to better himself and did so. I don’t think he ever forgot his origins, nor forgave them.”
“If he was trying to arrest us at the market an hour ago, what time will he finish his shift today, Bryce?”
“Unless he has an appointment which will take him away from the station or he has been ordered to work a double shift, he will finish at six o’clock. He lives in one of the lands in a close off Richmond Lane. One of the old tenements.”
“Tonight, I mean to pay him a visit.”
“You will never get him to say a word, Dr Bell.”
“Lieutenant Bryce, you may not remember, but when you came to see Doyle and me the first time, you said many things that you didn’t mean to say. Everybody does. Unless I find him gagged, he will undoubtedly tell me something of value.”
We parted in the small museum, near the Etruscan antiquities, after Bryce had given me Webb’s address hurriedly written on the margin of his newspaper. “Will you not come with us?” asked Bell.
“It’s a broken sea, Dr Bell, and I have no desire of broaching-to with our friend Webb. You have no history with the man. You’ll do better without me.” With that, he nodded farewell and loped off down the wide steps. Before we parted, Bell gave me instructions to meet him at six o’clock at a place we both knew in a close behind the City Chambers.
In a short time, I had walked to the free library. On entering the reading-room, I was annoyed to find that the place at my accustomed table was occupied. My pique turned to joy as I recognized the form of Louise Lambert. She was reading an atlas illustrating our most recent discoveries concerning the lakes of central Africa. By that token, I guessed that she had not been waiting long. I
had told her that I could often be found there, and once she had accompanied me to the very table.
“Miss Lambert!” I said, in some surprise.
“Mr Doyle, I have been waiting for you. I hope—”
“I am delighted to see you.” She closed the tome and looked up at me, turning in her chair and creating a delightful effect with her chin raised on a flawless neck: like some splendid crane from the plashy brinks of those distant equatorial lakes.
“I must talk to you, Conan. May I use your Christian name?”
“Of course. Tell me, tell me.”
“I can no longer keep to my father’s instructions. There is too much at stake and time is slipping by.”
“Yes.”
“When we last spoke about Alan, I told you what my father intended me to say to you should we meet. As a dutiful daughter, I played my part. I told you to stop trying to help Alan, lest that well-intended interference spoil the few chances that might save my poor brother.”
“Of course, I remember very well.”
“I spoke to you as I was instructed. You have not heard from me. Dare I speak my mind to you?” I nodded, holding my breath. What a lovely thing she was, with her head lifted, her face catching the light from the high windows. “Please, Conan, please, do not confuse me with the sentiments of which I have been the unwilling messenger.”
“But, Louise, you mustn’t think for a moment that we paid attention to what your father wanted. Bell saw through that at once.” For a moment, Louise looked shocked. Then she peered at me very closely.
“You mean, you saw through the stratagem? Was I as transparent as glass?”
“By no means. We were determined to prosecute our investigation despite all opposition. Your father’s wishes played no part in our plans. Alan was our only object. If we can save him, we will.”
“If you can save him, you must!”