Death of a Frightened Editor

by E.

  “According to all I have heard about him,” Betterton added, as though by after-thought.

  “So you think it might have been accidental. It may occur to you that if Mr. Mortensen took strychnine accidentally, it must have been from a container—a pill-box or something of the kind. Did you see anything near him when you examined him in the lavatory?”

  “No. Actually, when I realised it was strychnine poisoning I did casually glance round. Training, I suppose.”

  “Did you have a Bismuth tablet from his bottle last night?”

  “As a matter of fact I did. I think it was the only time I have indulged. But I had sardines on toast, and you know what they do to you.”

  “Do you see my dilemma?”

  “I do, indeed. Let us argue on the lines that the strychnine got into the food. Then Mortensen should have been attacked with this fatal illness before five o’clock. Whereas he was attacked just before six o’clock. So any poisoning after five o’clock must have been self-inflicted.”

  “A volte face, Mr. Betterton,” Manson reminded him. “You were arguing for accident just now.”

  “Only because I could hardly believe in suicide for Mortensen.”

  “Because, you said, he was fond of living and could well afford to go on living. Did you know Mortensen at all—I mean outside the Pullman?”

  The Harley Street man did not reply for a moment. He passed over a gold cigarette case to the officers and took a cigarette himself. Not until he had blown a smoke-ring did he reply.

  “No, I did not know him personally,” he said. “I do not recall ever having seen him in Brighton.”

  “Or in London?”

  “No. I do not think I was qualified in his eyes for inclusion in ‘Society’”—there was sarcasm in his voice—“I would be small fry there.”

  “Did you ever visit him?”

  “Good heavens, no—never.”

  “You visited the other passengers?”

  “Yes, we had frequent weekend meetings, bridge, golf and a theatre.” Manson rose. “Thank you, Mr. Betterton, for being so helpful. We may want to see you again, some time.”

  The door closed behind the surgeon. “Did you get all that, Barratt?” Manson called. The Yard sergeant came out from behind the screen folded across a corner of the room.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ve a verbatim note.”

  “Right. Get it transcribed as soon as you can.” The Doctor slapped Inspector Edgecumbe on the shoulders. “Well,” he said, “how many of them were lying?”

  “Eh, what!” The Brighton inspector looked astonished. “Lying . . . how many? What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, I know one of them was lying. And I know which one. What I don’t know is which others are also lying.”

  “And I don’t know WHY they are lying.”

  6

  The Yard officers caught the two o’clock train back to London. They left the sea-side resort with Inspector Edgecumbe arranging to make an examination of the homes of the seven Pullman travellers.

  “Merely routine, of course,” Manson had said. “But make it thorough—bottles, packets, any kind of receptacle, even anything thrown away in the dustbins. I suppose they are only emptied once a week.”

  Back at the Yard, the Yard Scientist and his Deputy climbed up to the Laboratory on the top floor. The exhibits from Mortensen were lifted from the Murder Bag and placed in one of the glass cabinets lining the walls over the test benches until such time as they could be more closely examined. About one exhibit, however, the Doctor was anxious immediately to satisfy himself. From the envelope in which it had been placed he extracted the small piece of chemist’s paper picked up from the floor of the Pullman lavatory. It was still flat as he had teased it from the crumpled ball which it had been when first retrieved. The outline of an oblong object that had been wrapped in it was plainly visible.

  From a cupboard the Doctor lifted a colour slab, and placed the paper on it. With a capillary tube he extracted a drop of sulphuric acid from a bottle and dropped it on to the centre of the paper. After it had soaked in, a second drop was added.

  Next, from a jar labelled manganese dioxide he took a few black granules and tipped them on to the dampened paper. With a glass rod he stirred the granules gently into the dampness, the while he and Merry watched for any reaction. None appeared. The paper then joined the other exhibits in the glass cupboard, and the Doctor, after scribbling a few notes in a casebook, picked up the telephone and asked for Bow Street.

  “Manson here,” he said. “Anything come of that watch on the offices of Society?”

  “No, sir,” came the reply. “Except that a member of the staff of the paper arrived this morning. The constable went up to the office with the man, after which he reported back to us. There seemed no reason to keep him there any longer.”

  “None at all,” Manson agreed; and telephoned Superintendent Jones, the burly and ponderous colleague who usually shared in the Homicide investigations.

  “’Allo,” said a voice.

  “Get that dossier of William Lethbridge, old Fat Man, and we’ll see the A.C. and dispose of it.”

  “Thought you . . . Brighton . . . with bag.” (He meant the murder bag which every investigating officer carries when on a ‘death’ inquiry).

  “I was—and I’m back. See you in The Room.” (‘The Room’ is the office of the Assistant Commissioner (Crime) New Scotland Yard.)

  William Lethbridge had been a man of independent means, aged 38, married and with one child. He had inherited a tidy sum from his father in stocks and securities and lived at Hartwell Manor, a Tudor house in Sussex, where he kept a comfortable establishment, with servants, a stable with several hunters, and about 100 acres of rough shooting. Three days before the death of Mortensen Lethbridge had been found shot through the head in the saddle room of his stables. The police had called in Scotland Yard, and Doctor Manson on the ruling of the A.C. that the Doctor MUST be told of all cases of sudden death went down with Superintendent Jones and Inspector Kenway to look into the occurrence. It was found that a considerable sum of money drawn from his bank three days previously, could not be accounted for.

  The family insisted that the dead man had no known worries, was comfortably situated and had shown every desire to continue living. Doctor Manson had probed the circumstances diligently, and was now reporting, finally, to the A.C. Sir Edward Allen already had the completed dossier; he also had, by now, the started dossier on Mortensen. The other officers concerned were already in the room with the A.C. when Manson entered.

  “So it’s suicide, eh?” the A.C. said.

  “Beyond any question. The revolver bore only his fingerprints, and they had not been imprinted on it by his fingers after death—a device popular with detective story writers, but one that would not deceive a Hendon Police College first-year student. The wound was in the place where nine out of ten suicides with a revolver put it. There were only the footprints of Lethbridge across the stable yard, made since heavy rain in the early morning, and they weren’t made by somebody walking backwards.”

  “Darn funny affair,” opined the A.C. “No ruddy sense to it. Rich young chap, happily married. What’s the reason—the motive?”

  “I’ve nothing to do with motives in a case of suicide, A.C. That’s a family concern. Motives interest me only when there is foul play.”

  “Suppose you’re right. But dammit, why do they do it?” His voice rose shrilly, and his monocle dropped from his perfectly good left eye, and tinkled against the surface of the desk. “Why, in the name of Lucifer, must they go round killing themselves? What do they reckon to gain by it? Nothing. They go making nasty messes of themselves, so that even their own folk don’t want to see ’em afterwards. They waste the time of coppers and cost a mint of public money to find out whether they’re murderers or something. There’s no ruddy reason to it.

  “With blade, with bloody blameful blade

  He broached his boiling bloody b
reast.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think you are the figure for Quince,” said Manson, a little staggered at the display of histrionics, “and you’re making A Midsummer Night’s Dream something of an Autumn nightmare. As to why, perhaps Cassius has it:

  “So every bondman in his own hand bears

  The power to cancel his captivity.

  “Who knows from what hidden captivity Lethbridge cancelled himself?”

  Sir Edward snorted. “Captivity, my foot,” he said. “Life’s all right if it’s lived properly. They don’t follow the rules. Comblast it there were six of them last month wasting our time.” He pointed a pencil at Manson. “Now they’re starting all over again Here’s Lethbridge at it, and now Mortensen. Hell and damnation, why do they do it?”

  “He didn’t you know.”

  The A.C. stopped, rammed his monocle back into eye and stared.

  “What, what did you say?” he demanded.

  “I said he didn’t you know.”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Didn’t commit suicide.”

  “Hell and damnation,” roared the A.C. “You’ve just said he did.”

  “I mean Mortensen.”

  “Ha! Here we go again!” Superintendent Jones snorted. “He’s havin’ us out again . . . murder hunt.” He sat back and mopped his forehead with a vilely-coloured silk handkerchief with red spots. The A.C. looked at it in shocked amazement.

  “What in the name of Lucifer is that, Jones?” he asked. The fat man put it back hastily into his pocket. Sir Edward, his attention no longer diverted, returned to Manson.

  “Doesn’t it shout suicide to high heaven, even more than in the case of Lethbridge?”

  “How come?” The Doctor looked bland innocence.

  “Look at it, man. Mortensen had a meal before the train started—nearly an hour before. All he had after that was a whisky. And that was about thirty minutes before he went into the lavatory. Then he dies from strychnine poisoning. Look at it.”

  “I have been looking at it for hours, A.C. And I don’t see your answer.” Doctor Manson blew a puff of smoke at the ceiling. “What is it?” he asked.

  “It won’t work, Doctor,” Jones said—and snorted. “Strychnine acts within a quarter-of-an-hour—at the outside—and you know it.”

  “And Mortensen had gone double that time without having taken anything in food or drink,” the A.C. added. “So HE must have had the poison in HIS possession when he went into the lavatory. He took it there. Isn’t that certain suicide?”

  Doctor Manson nodded slowly. His eyes had retreated in their deep sockets, and his hands were tapping on the sides of his chair. “I agree that it is reasonable hypothesis, A.C. That is, judging by the bare facts as you have stated. But there are other facts. Unfortunately they are not so convenient, though just as plain.”

  “Such as?”

  “If you are contemplating suicide, A.C.,” Manson said slowly, “there is no immediate hurry, is there? I mean you haven’t to dash out at a given time. You’ve all night in which to do it.” He paused and let his gaze wander over the faces around him. “For instance, if you are listening to a rattling funny story, and are bending forward so as not to miss any of it, and have been so interested that you have laughed at its highlights, would you go out and swallow strychnine before you had heard the end? And would you take the trouble carefully to dispose of the something that had contained the strychnine—as Mortensen did if he committed suicide . . .”

  “But, Doctor, there was the crumpled paper,” Kenway pointed out. Manson studied him for a moment.

  “Yes, there was the crumpled paper,” he said; and continued. “And would you, knowing that you were going to commit suicide, book aeroplane passages to Paris and a room in a Paris hotel for a day after you knew you’d be dead? Or take the trouble to check on your watch, and wind it up?” He paused to allow the officers, and the A.C. time to digest the points. “Mrs. Harrison said,” he went on, “‘It’s better to die comfortably.’ It is. Cyanide is an instantaneous death. Arsenic is fairly quick, and both are easy to obtain. Strychnine is the most uncomfortable of all deaths, and is exceedingly hard to obtain.”

  He paused and a smile spread over his face, not a humorous smile, but one grim in its lack of expansion over the scholarly face. “Read through the dossier, particularly the interviews with the seven fellow passengers, and see what you make of them. And I’ll give you a third point for consideration—a very curious point, indeed”:

  “Look up what Mr. Mortensen hadn’t got in his pockets when we went through his clothes.”

  “What he hadn’t got?” said Jones. “What the heck are we now? Thought-readers to a dead man?”

  7

  The Registered offices of ‘Society’ were so far removed in character from the paper’s name, and presumed contents, that Superintendent Jones, arriving outside them in company with Doctor Manson stood in shocked surprise. They were in fact a set of rooms and a box room on the first floor of a dingy building in Covent Garden. The ground floor disclosed itself, olfactory as well as visibly, as the sale-room of a firm of wholesale fruit merchants. The passage to the stairway was littered with boxes of fruit and fruit underfoot not in boxes; and over all was an aroma of decaying comestibles standing in bins and awaiting the arrival of a pig owner who contracted each day to remove over-ripe and unsold fruit to add to his ‘swill’. The street itself was littered not only with fruit, but with vegetable leaves which had been lopped from the outside of cabbages, cauliflowers and other vegetables, and with debris that is the mark of Covent Garden at 10 o’clock in the morning.

  “Society!” said Jones; and spat in disgust in front of a notice threatening people expectorating with a fine of 40s. “Nice place, I don’t think, for Society people.”

  Doctor Manson grinned broadly. “You forget, Old Fat Man, that this is a fashionable rendezvous on occasions for the people called Society. Covent Garden Opera House is just round the corner. Haven’t you seen the pictures in the papers of elegantly gowned ladies and their escorts picking a way between cabbages and peas?”

  Jones grunted. “Often wonder why it’s called Covent Garden, and who Covent was,” he said.

  “He wasn’t! Convent garden, Jones. That’s what it was in the first place. The garden attached to the old Westminster convent. They grew vegetables here in those days, not waited for them to be brought in from other gardens. Times change, you see.”

  They started up the stairs to the first floor. A man stepped out as they reached the floor level. Jones peered through the gloom and identified Crispin.

  “You’ve been a hell of a time getting here,” protested the journalist. “I’ve gone nearly blind in this half light waiting for you.”

  “Then you can go out again, into the light,” spat out the Superintendent. “Ruddy nerve you’ve got to be here at all.”

  Manson waved a hand forwards. “Let him stay, Jones,” he said. “He’s one of the suspects, so we may as well have him on hand. Besides he’s a newspaper man and may be able to help us here. Neither you nor I know anything about conducting newspapers. But you’ll stay put, Crispin, and only write what you are asked to.”

  “What. . . mean . . . one . . . suspects?” asked Jones.

  “He was one of the passengers in the Pullman, Old Fat Man.”

  “Then he probably did it, if anyone did,” said Jones, slanderously. He had a dislike of all Pressmen, a feeling common to many executives of the C.I.D.

  The outer office of Society was a large square room of singular discomfort. The wooden floor was uncarpeted; piles of papers in bundles were stacked along one side. A wooden bench, parallel to the wall, and waist-high ran along the other side. It held a file of papers, obviously, the current editions of Society. Alongside was a file of the ‘engagements’ page of ‘The Times’; two spikes projecting through the margin suggested that the file was in daily order.

  Two wooden chairs completed the furnishings, except fo
r a large table in the centre of the room, and a filing cabinet. The office’s only occupant was sitting at the table. He was a little man with a high-domed skull with sparse grey hair brushed across it. His face was wrinkled, his mouth fidgitty, and he had pale grey eyes in which the small pin-pointed pupils were dead black. On his face was an expression of foreboding which looked as though it were fixed with invisible gum. He looked up as the officers entered the room.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he greeted; and the tone of his voice suggested that no morning could possibly be good. “What can I do for you? Mr. Mortensen does not come in on Saturdays.”

  “What!” roared Jones. “Don’t come in on Saturday? Don’t come in any more at all. Mean to say you don’t know he’s dead?” he demanded.

  “Dead!” The man jumped up. He appeared to be on the point of breaking into a song and dance. He hurried round to the side of the table. The action caused the upholstery to fall from his chair, which had one arm missing. It was a dilapidated cushion with additional height provided by an old coat folded in three.

  “Dead!” he ejaculated again.

  “Dead . . . in train . . . Brighton.” Jones supplied the news item. “In . . . morning paper . . . He (pointing at Crispin) wrote it.”

  “I haven’t seen the morning papers, gentlemen. I only see them in the public library if I go out to lunch. I can’t afford to buy newspapers.”

  “We are police officers,” Manson said. “Who are you?”

  “Silverman, gentlemen. Alfred Silverman.” He choked back a gulp of alarm on hearing the identity of his visitors. Jones eyed him curiously. He seemed frightened. However, most people are nervous when confronted unexpectedly with a police officer; few of us but have done something at some time which we hope is never going to be found out, and conscience is an unpleasant companion.

  “And what are you, Mr. Silverman?” Doctor Manson sought enlightenment.

  “General clerk to Mr. Mortensen, sir. Four pound ten a week I’m getting—was getting,” he added, rubbing a hand across his forehead. “Hardly enough to keep body and soul together these days, me having an invalid wife. But nobody else would employ a clerk over 60. You have to take what you can get.”