“After I left you yesterday I made some particular inquiries at Lloyd’s through a friend of mine, an underwriter himself. I find that the sole owner of the Egret was one Herbert Roofe, trading as Herbert Roofe & Co. The firm is a very small one, as shipping concerns go, and has had the reputation for a long time of being very ‘rocky’ financially; indeed it was the common talk at Lloyd’s that nothing but the wreck of the Egret saved Roofe from the Bankruptcy Court, and he is supposed now to be ‘hanging on by his eyelashes,’ as my friend expresses it, with very little margin to keep him going, and in a continual state of touch-and-go between his debit and credit sides. As to the rumours of the wilful casting away of the Egret, my friend assured me that the thing was as certain as anything could be, short of legal proof. There was something tricky about the cargo, and altogether it was a black sort of business. And to complete things he told me that the bankers of Herbert Roofe & Co. were the Eastern Consolidated.”
“Phew! This is getting pretty warm, I must say, Mr. Hewitt.”
“Wait a minute; my friend aided me a little further still. I told him the whole story—in confidence, of course—and he agreed to help. At my suggestion he went to the manager of the Eastern Consolidated Bank, whom he knew personally, and represented that among a heap of cheques one had got torn, and the missing piece destroyed. This was true entirely, except in regard to the heap—a little fiction which I trust my friend may be forgiven. The cheque, he said, was on the Eastern Consolidated, and its number was B/K63777. Would the manager mind telling him which of his customers had the cheque book from which that had been taken? Trace of where the cheque had come from had been quite lost, and it would save a lot of trouble if the Bank could let him know. ‘Certainly,’ said the manager; ‘I’ll inquire.’ He did, and presently a clerk entered the room with the information that cheque No. B/K63777 was from a book in the possession of Messrs. Herbert Roofe & Co.”
The inspector rose excitedly from his chair. “Come,” he said, “this must be followed up. We mustn’t waste time; there’s no knowing where Roofe may have got to by this.”
“Just a little more patience,” Hewitt said. “I don’t think there will be much difficulty in finding him. He believes himself safe. As soon as my friend told me what the Bank manager had said I went round to Roofe’s office to ascertain his whereabouts, prepared with an excuse for the interview in case I should find him in. It was a small office, rather, over a shop in Leadenhall Street. When I asked for Mr. Roofe the clerk informed me that he was at home confined to his room by a bad cold, and had not been at the office since Tuesday—the next day but one before the body was discovered. I appeared to be disappointed, and asked if I could send him a message. Yes, I could, the clerk told me. All letters were being sent to him, and he was sending business instructions daily to the office from Chadwell Heath. I saw that the address had slipped inadvertently from the clerk’s mouth, for it is a general rule, I know, in city offices, to keep the principals’ addresses from casual callers. So I said no more, but contented myself with the information I had got. I took the first opportunity of looking at a suburban directory, and then I found the name of Mr. Roofe’s house at Chadwell Heath. It is Scarby Lodge.”
“I must be off, then, at once,” Truscott said, “and make careful inquiries as to his movements. And those cinders—bless my soul, they’re as precious as diamonds now! How shall we keep them from damage?”
“Oh, the glass shade will do, I fancy. But wait a moment; let us review things thoroughly. I will run rapidly over what I suggest has happened between Roofe and Pullin, and you shall stop me if you see any flaw in the argument. It’s best to make our impressions clear and definite. Now we will suppose that the Egret has been lost, and Pullin has come home to claim the reward of his infamy. We will suppose it is £2000. He goes to Roofe and demands it. Roofe says he can’t possibly pay just then; he is very hard up, and the insurance money of the Egret has only just saved him from bankruptcy. Pullin insists on having his money. But, says Roofe, that is impossible, because he hasn’t got it. A cheque for the amount would be dishonoured. The plunder of the underwriters has all been used to keep things going. Roofe says plainly that Pullin must wait for the money. Pullin can’t reveal the conspiracy without implicating himself, and Roofe knows it. He promises to pay in a certain time, and gives Pullin an acknowledgment of the debt, an IOU, perhaps, or something of that kind, and with that Pullin has to be contented, and, having no money, he has to go away on another voyage, this time in a ship belonging to somebody else, became it would look worse than ever if Roofe gave him another berth at once. He makes his voyage and he returns, and asks for his money again. But Roofe is as bard up as ever. He cannot pay, and he cannot refuse to pay. It is ruin either way. He knows that Pullin will stand no more delay, and may do something desperate, so Roofe does something desperate himself. He tells Pullin that he must not call at his office, nor must anybody see them together anywhere for fear of suspicion. He suggests that he, Roofe, should call at Pullin’s lodgings late one night, and bring the money. Pullin is to let him in himself, so that nobody may see him. Pullin consents, and thus assists in the concealment of his own murder. He waits at the front door smoking his pipe (you remember that Mrs. Beckle told me so), waiting for Roofe. When Roofe comes Pullin takes him very quietly up to his room without attracting attention. Roofe, on his part, has prepared things by feigning a bad cold and going to bed early, going out—perhaps through the window—when all his household is quiet. There are plenty of late trains from Chadwell Heath that would bring him to Stratford.
“Well, when they are safely in Pullin’s room Roofe hears the front door shut and bolted, with all its squeaks and thumps, and decides that it won’t be safe to go out that way after he has committed his crime. The men sit and talk, and Pullin drinks. Roofe doesn’t. You will remember the bottle on the table, with only one glass. Roofe produces and writes a cheque for the £2000, and Pullin hands back the I0U, which Roofe burns. That would be the lower of the two charred pieces of paper, which we have there with the other, but can’t read.
“Then the crime takes place. Perhaps Pullin drinks a little too much. At any rate Roofe gets behind him, uses the sharp seaman’s knife he has brought for the purpose, and straightway the skipper is dead at his feet. Then Roofe gets back the cheque and burns that. After that he ransacks the whole room. He fears there may be some documentary evidence, which, being examined, may throw some light on the Egret affair. Then he sets about his escape. To make the thing look like a murder for ordinary plunder, and at the same time account for the upset room, he takes away all the dead man’s valuables tied in that shawl. He sees the hook—just the thing he wants—and of course the sheets are an obvious substitute for a rope. He takes away the door-key, to make it seem likely that somebody inside the house had been the criminal, and then he simply goes away through the window, as I have already explained. At 5.45 there would be a train to Chadwell Heath, and that would land him home early enough to enable him to regain his bedroom unobserved. After that he wisely maintains the pretence of illness for a day or two.
“I guessed that the things carried off would be in that ditch, for very simple reasons. I looked about the house, and the ditch seemed the only available hiding-place near. More, it was on the way to the station, the direction Roof e would naturally take. He would seize the very first opportunity of getting rid of his burden, for every possible reason. It was a nuisance to carry; he could not account for it if he were asked; and the further he carried it before getting rid of it the more distinct the clue to the direction he had taken, supposing it ever were found. The behaviour of some of the people in the house might have been suspicious, if I hadn’t had so strong a clue in my hand, leading in another direction. Foster probably pawned all his clothes, and put those bricks in his boxes to conceal the fact, so that Mrs. Beckle might not turn him away. He owed her so much that at last he hadn’t the face to go and eat her breakfast when he h
ad no money to pay for it. He went out early, met friends, got ‘stood’ drinks and came back drunk. Probably he had been kind to the girl Taffs at some time or another, so that when she found he was suspected she refused to give any information.”
“Yes,” the inspector said, “it certainly seems to fit together. There’s a future before you, Mr. Hewitt. But now I must go to Chadwell Heath. Are you coming?”
At Chadwell Heath it was found that a first-class return ticket to Stratford had been taken just before the 10.54 train left on the last night Abel Pullin was seen alive, and that the return half had been given up by a passenger who arrived by the first train soon after six in the morning The porter who took the ticket remembered the circumstance, because first-class tickets were rare at that time in the morning, but he did not recognise the passenger, who was muffled up.
“But I think there’s enough for an arrest without a warrant, at any rate,” Truscott said. “I am off to Scarby Lodge. Can’t afford to waste any more time.”
Scarby Lodge was a rather pretentious house. It was arranged that Truscott should wait aside till Hewitt had sent in a message asking to see Mr. Roofe on a matter of urgent business, and that then both should follow the servant to his room. This was done, and as the parlour maid was knocking at the bedroom door she was astonished to find Hewitt and the police inspector behind her. Truscott at once pushed open the door and the two walked in.
It was a large room, and at the end a man sat in his dressing-gown near a table on which stood several medicine bottles. He frowned as Truscott and Hewitt entered, but betrayed no sign of emotion, carelessly taking one of the small bottles from the table. “What do you want here?” he said.
“Sorry to be so unceremonious,” Truscott said, “but I am a police officer, and it is my duty to arrest you on a serious charge of murder on the person of— Stop, sir! Let me see that!”
But it was too late. Before Truscott could reach him Roofe had swallowed the contents of the small bottle and, swaying once, dropped to the floor as though shot.
Hewitt stooped over the man. “Dead,” he said, “dead as Abel Pullin. It is prussic acid. He had arranged for instant action if by any chance the game went against him.”
But Inspector Truscott was troubled. “This is a nice thing,” he said, “to have a prisoner commit suicide in front of my eyes. But you can testify that I hadn’t time to get near him, can’t you? Indeed he wasn’t a prisoner at the time, for I hadn’t arrested him, in fact.”
THE CASE OF THE “FLITTERBAT LANCERS”
First published in The Windsor Magazine, April 1896
It was late on a summer evening, two or three years back, that I drowsed in my armchair over a particularly solid and ponderous volume of essays on social economy. I was doing a good deal of reviewing at the time, and I remember that this particular volume had a property of such exceeding toughness that I had already made three successive attacks on it, on as many successive evenings, each attack having been defeated in the end by sleep. The weather was hot, my chair was very comfortable, and the book had somewhere about its strings of polysyllables an essence as of laudanum. Still something had been done on each evening, and now on the fourth I strenuously endeavoured to finish the book. I was just beginning to feel that the words before me were sliding about and losing their meanings, when a sudden crash and a jingle of broken glass behind me woke me with a start, and I threw the book down. A pane of glass in my window was smashed, and I hurried across and threw up the sash to see, if I could, whence the damage had come.
The building in which my chambers (and Martin Hewitt’s office) were situated was accessible—or rather visible, for there was no entrance—from the rear. There was, in fact, a small courtyard, reached by a passage from the street behind, and into this courtyard, my sitting-room window looked.
“Hullo, there!” I shouted. But there came no reply. Nor could I distinguish anybody in the courtyard. Some men had been at work during the day on a drainpipe, and I reflected that probably their litter had provided the stone with which my window had been smashed. As I looked, however, two men came hurrying from the passage into the court, and going straight into the deep shadow of one corner, presently appeared again in a less obscure part, hauling forth a third man, who must have already been there in hiding. The third man struggled fiercely, but without avail, and was dragged across toward the passage leading to the street beyond. But the most remarkable feature of the whole thing was the silence of all three men. No cry, no exclamation, escaped any of them. In perfect silence the two hauled the third across the courtyard, and in perfect silence he swung and struggled to resist and escape. The matter astonished me not a little, and the men were entering the passage before I found voice to shout at them. But they took no notice, and disappeared. Soon after I heard cab wheels in the street beyond, and had no doubt that the two men had carried off their prisoner.
I turned back into my room a little perplexed. It seemed probable that the man who had been borne off had broken my window. But why? I looked about on the floor, and presently found the missile. It was, as I had expected, a piece of broken concrete, but it was wrapped up in a worn piece of paper, which had partly opened out as it lay on my carpet, thus indicating that it had just been crumpled round the stone.
I disengaged the paper and spread it out. Then I saw it to be a rather hastily written piece of manuscript music.
This gave me no help. I turned the paper this way and that, but could make nothing of it. There was not a mark on it that I could discover, except the music and the scrawled title, “Flitterbat Lancers,” at the top.
The paper was old, dirty, and cracked. What did it all mean? One might conceive of a person in certain circumstances sending a message—possibly an appeal for help—through a friend’s window, wrapped round a stone, but this seemed to be nothing of that sort.
Once more I picked up the paper, and with an idea to hear what the Flitterbat Lancers sounded like, I turned to my little pianette and strummed over the notes, making my own time and changing it as seemed likely. But I could by no means extract from the notes anything resembling an air. I half thought of trying Martin Hewitt’s office door, in case he might still be there and offer a guess at the meaning of my smashed window and the scrap of paper, when Hewitt himself came in. He had stayed late to examine a bundle of papers in connection with a case just placed in his hands, and now, having finished, came to find if I were disposed for an evening stroll before turning in. I handed him the paper and the piece of concrete, observing, “There’s a little job for you, Hewitt, instead of the stroll.” And I told him the complete history of my smashed window.
Hewitt listened attentively, and examined both the paper and the fragment of paving. “You say these people made absolutely no sound whatever?” he asked.
“None but that of scuffling, and even that they seemed to do quietly.”
“Could you see whether or not the two men gagged the other, or placed their hands over his mouth?”
“No, they certainly didn’t do that. It was dark, of course, but not so dark as to prevent my seeing generally what they were doing.”
Hewitt stood for half a minute in thought, and then said, “There’s something in this, Brett—what, I can’t guess at the moment, but something deep, I fancy. Are you sure you won’t come out now?”
I told Hewitt that I was sure, and that I should stick to my work.
“Very well,” he said; “then perhaps you will lend me these articles?” holding up the paper and the stone.
“Delighted,” I said. “If you get no more melody out of the clinker than I did out of the paper, you won’t have a musical evening. Goodnight!”
Hewitt went away with the puzzle in his hand, and I turned once more to my social economy, and, thanks to the gentleman who smashed my window, conquered.
At this time my only regular daily work was on an evening paper so that I left
home at a quarter to eight on the morning following the adventure of my broken window, in order, as usual, to be at the office at eight; consequently it was not until lunchtime that I had an opportunity of seeing Hewitt. I went to my own rooms first, however, and on the landing by my door I found the housekeeper in conversation with a shortish, sun-browned man, whose accent at once convinced me that he hailed from across the Atlantic. He had called, it appeared, three or four times during the morning to see me, getting more impatient each time. As he did not seem even to know my name, the housekeeper had not considered it expedient to give him any information about me, and he was growing irascible under the treatment. When I at last appeared, however, he left her and approached me eagerly.
“See here, sir,” he said, “I’ve been stumpin’ these here durn stairs o’ yours half through the mornin’. I’m anxious to apologize, and fix up some damage.”
He had followed me into my sitting-room, and was now standing with his back to the fireplace, a dripping umbrella in one hand, and the forefinger of the other held up boulder-high and pointing, in the manner of a pistol, to my window, which, by the way, had been mended during the morning, in accordance with my instructions to the housekeeper.
“Sir,” he continued, “last night I took the extreme liberty of smashin’ your winder.”
“Oh,” I said, “that was you, was it?”
“It was, sir—me. For that I hev come humbly to apologize. I trust the draft has not discommoded you, sir. I regret the accident, and I wish to pay for the fixin’ up and the general inconvenience.” He placed a sovereign on the table. “I ’low you’ll call that square now, sir, and fix things friendly and comfortable as between gentlemen, an’ no ill will. Shake.”
The Arthur Morrison Mystery Page 64