by E.
“Mary Ross.”
“Right. Give Miss Ross a chair,” Manson said. He waited until she was seated. “Let us talk about Mr. Mortensen. So far our knowledge of him has been confined to his gentlemen acquaintances. How long have you known him?”
“For five years or more.”
“Do I gather that he has been your friend all that time?”
“Yes.”
“Here?”
“Oh, no. I have a flat in Town. I only come down here at weekends. Mrs. Goodenough—she’s the woman who cleans the place up—was never here on Saturday or Sunday.”
“This flat of yours—where is it?”
“Montague Mansions, Bayswater Road. Number 12a.”
“Mr. Mortensen wasn’t married, was he?”
“Oh, no.”
“Why not?”
The girl stared, round-eyed. “I don’t understand,” she said. Doctor Manson looked her thoughtfully over. His eyes rested on the sheer-nylon clad legs, at the expensive shoes, the fashionably-cut suit. There was an air of elegance about her; and yet, also a curious restraint, as though she were acting a part.
“What I mean, Miss Ross,” he said at last, “is that Mr. Mortensen seems to have thought very highly of you, if one may judge by your appearance. Since he is a single man, I am wondering why he did not marry you, instead of . . .” He did not complete the sentence.
“Instead of keeping me, you mean? Well, there were circumstances on both sides which made a less public association than marriage an advantage. And I could not have been better off in the married state.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“At a country house party in Berkshire. We were mutually attracted.” The girl smiled. It seemed to Manson to be a distant smile, more of a reminiscence of that day in the past than an answer to his question. There was a mischievous quality in the eyes that looked into those of the scientist. He left the subject, abruptly.
“Are you by any chance acquainted with a Mr. Arthur Moore?” he asked.
“Arthur Moore?” She echoed the name. She repeated it, thoughtfully. “No. I have never heard of him. Who is he?”
“I do not know. But if you cannot identify him it is of no consequence. The name cropped up in connection with Mr. Mortensen’s death.
“Speaking of death, Miss Ross, when we came in you made a remark to the effect that we had killed him. I take it you meant Mr. Mortensen. That was a very curious allegation. What did you mean by it? So far as we know, Mr. Mortensen took poison.”
“No!”
“You seem certain of that?”
“I am certain.”
There was a silence. The girl’s demeanour had changed with the denial. The cultured tones, the soft voice had given place to a hard intonation. For the first time in the questioning she showed a trace of passion. Not the passion of the bereft lover, said Manson to himself, but a kind of acrimonious protest against the means whereby a financial prop had been cut from beneath her. Watching the emotions play over her face, Manson noted that there seemed nothing in them of sorrow for the dead man. He looked away from her, at the thick pile carpet, the luxury of the room in which they sat. At last he said:
“Yet all alone he took poison?”
She spoke suddenly again.
“I say he was killed.”
“By whom?”
“I have no idea. That is the job of the police to find out. Suicide was the last thing Alex would have thought of. He was too fond of life for that. I was with him during the early afternoon. We had lunch at Paganini’s. And we made plans for a visit to Paris this weekend. There was no intention on his part then of dying.”
“What kind of a man was he, personally?”
“An exceedingly kind man, and very generous to many people.”
“In what way. And to what kind of people?”
“Lots. For instance, if a man was out of a domestic job, or a woman either, he would put advertisements for them in Society and never charge them anything, not even if they found a job through the advertisement. And if they were down and out, he would make them a small allowance until they found a job. Not much, of course, but enough for them to live on.”
“You say he was killed. What grounds have you for saying that?”
“Because he was frightened. That was the reason he had the windows barred here and the doors double-locked. It is the same in his office.”
“We gathered from Mrs. Goodenough that it was the fear of the loss of his valuables that led to the bars and the bolts.”
“That’s what he used to say. But I don’t believe it. It was people he was frightened of. He would always open the door on the chain if the bell rang, and he was not expecting anyone he knew to call on him.”
“Did he ever mention the names of anyone of whom he was frightened?”
“No. As I have told you he always said it was the valuables in the flat that were the excuse for the bars.”
Doctor Manson had been scribbling on the back of an envelope as the girl answered the last question. He now looked up at her. “I am going to read out to you a list of names, Miss Ross,” he said. “Will you listen, and tell me whether you recognise any of them as friends of Mr. Mortensen, or as people of whom he has spoken?”
He called over the names of the Pullman car passengers. Miss Ross shook her head. “I have never heard him mention them,” she replied.
“Just one last question. Had Mr. Mortensen any hobbies?”
“He liked football, but that is all. We sometimes used to watch Brighton on a Saturday.”
“And racing, perhaps?”
“No. He didn’t bet, if that is what you mean. He always said it is a mug’s game and he wasn’t giving money to the bookmakers.”
“Well, Miss Ross, thank you for answering our questions so fully,” Manson concluded. “I wonder if you would mind leaving us in the flat now for a quarter-of-an-hour until we finish our examination of the rooms. Then you can come along and pack your belongings. But I am afraid I shall have to ask you to give up your keys.”
“That’s all right, sir. I shall not be coming back to the flat. I only came now to collect my clothes.”
With the girl out of the way Manson wandered from room to room without finding anything, apparently, of value to the inquiry. He opened the cupboard door in the hall, switched on the light and inspected closely the safe. Inspector Edgecumbe looked on.
“What are we going to do about getting it open?” he asked.
“The company will send one of their safe-breakers,” Manson replied. “When he has opened it, I’d be glad if you’d bundle all the contents into a receptacle of some sort and send them up to me by a constable. I’ll go through them in the Yard.
“I think that’s all,” he said, “except for one thing.”
He picked up the telephone, asked for Scotland Yard, and got through to Superintendent Jones. The fat superintendent listened for a minute. Then:
“Any ideas?” he bellowed. The super was one of those people who do bellow into the mouthpiece of a telephone, apparently under the impression that the voice goes down a hollow tube to the receiving end.
“No, Old Fat Man,” said Manson. “I’ll leave the fact-finding to you. The address is 12a Montague Mansions, Bayswater Road, and the girl is here in Brighton at the moment.”
11
“For a suicide there is a remarkable series of coincidence, don’t you think?” said Doctor Manson. There was a faint suggestion of sarcasm in his eyes as he asked the question.
The investigating officers were at conference. The A.C. had asked for reports on progress in the Mortensen dossier.
“Here is a man in a perfectly good and respectable position as Mortensen. He never goes to his bank; his manager has never seen him. But as Mr. Moore he has a current account of more than £25,000, all of which has been paid in in £1 notes. And he goes to the bank as Mr. Moore and does the paying-in himself. This is the man who is found poisoned, thought by some people”—
he looked hard at the A.C.—“to have committed suicide. He is also the man who had planned that very morning to go to Paris for the weekend on a joy-trip.”
The A.C. hemmed. He gave ground a little. “Twenty-five thousand pounds is certainly a large sum to be paid all in pound notes,” he mused.
“Twenty-five thousand pounds is a very small sum.” Manson met the look of surprise from the A.C. at this declaration. “Surely you see that?” he said. “That total is what is left in the bank after the differences between his income from Society and his mode of living has been bridged. The sum is £25,000 plus all the money he has spent over several years over and above the £100 a week, less income tax, he has taken out of Society. And all of it has come in pound notes.”
“Perhaps he had money of his own,” Merry suggested. Manson snorted.
“He was a gossip writer on an evening paper, Jim,” he retorted. “Before that he was a provincial journalist and wouldn’t have been getting more than £8 a week. How did he save thousands of pounds?”
“The cashier was under the impression that it was money won on the racecourse.”
“It wasn’t. The girl in the flat said he regarded racing as a mug’s game, and wasn’t giving any of his money to the bookies.”
Lathom interrupted. “I was going to say,” he explained, “that the only way he could have got pound notes that way would be by staking on the course. Any credit account would be paid by cheque. Mortensen’s photograph has been shown to all the leading bookies who do course betting, and not one recognises him as a client. I reckon they’d know any punter who had taken thousands from their satchels.”
“What’s this about a girl in a flat?” The A.C. looked round. “It’s the first I’ve heard of a girl in the case.”
Doctor Manson described the scene at Black Rock, and the hidden safe in the flat.
“Seems almost as queer as the man’s death.”
Manson glared. “Still harping on suicide?” he said.
“I’m harping on the difference between fifteen minutes and an hour,” the A.C. retorted. “You solve that and I’ll be convinced.”
“I can’t,” Manson admitted. “Nevertheless it wasn’t suicide. There’s—”
The telephone interrupted him. Sir Edward lifted the receiver and listened. “For you, Jones,” he said, and handed over the receiver. The superintendent listened to the strangled voice.
“Gorblimey!” he said. He clapped his hand over the mouthpiece and looked across at Doctor Manson.
“Mortensen’s office was bust into last night. Clerk Silverman reported . . . when found . . . door open upstairs.” He spoke again into the phone.
“What . . . taken?” he demanded.
The strangled voice answered.
“Any fingerprints? . . . All right . . . I’ll hear . . . rest later. Busy now.
“The safe was forced,” he explained.
“Love’s labour lost,” said Manson, and laughed. “He was like me—too late.”
Jones snorted. “You said that before,” he roared. “What . . . hell mean . . . always talkin’ . . . riddles . . . you are.”
“I mean,” said Manson, softly, “that last night’s visitor was the third mystery figure in this case who has been looking for something. The devil of it is I don’t know if the first one found the something or not.”
“Looking for something?” The A.C. dithered. “Looking for what?”
“If I knew I’d know the answer to Mortensen’s death—or I think I would.”
“Who . . . three . . . looking?” demanded Jones. “Stone the crows, you do keep things to yourself.”
“I’ve kept nothing to myself where you’ve been with me, Old Fat Man. The first visitor lost no time. He was in the office on the night of Mortensen’s death.”
The Doctor paused. He was acting, and he liked acting. “And he went in with Mortensen’s own keys,” he said, “and afterwards threw them into the doorway in Covent Garden.”
“How come?” asked Jones.
“I knew it as soon as I entered Mortensen’s room with you, yesterday morning.”
“You asked . . . clerk had been in,” Jones admitted.
“I did because someone had been in. Remember how we found it? The blotter dead straight, as though laid on the desk with the aid of a T-square. The desk had an ashtray half full of cigar ash. It was standing at the very back of the desk. Yet there wasn’t even a flicker of ash on the desktop. For Mortensen to have smoked cigars there and flicked the ash into the tray at the back of the desk without a grain of it falling short would be a miracle. And I don’t believe in miracles.
“And look at the chair. Dead square to the desk, and close to it. Yet Mortensen had got up from it, and left for home. The chair should have been pushed back, and it would be turned slightly to the left. You try getting out of a chair at this table, and see how you leave it.”
The A.C. rose and looked at his own chair. He nodded, slowly. “I see the point,” he acknowledged.
“But, best of all, Mortensen had sat at that desk all Friday, and there wasn’t a single fingerprint to be found anywhere on it, nor on the safe, nor on the arms of his chair. The intruder had polished everything clean.”
“That’s one searcher,” the A.C. reminded. “Last night’s burglar was the second. Who would be the third one?”
“The girl in Mortensen’s Brighton flat.”
“I thought she explained that she had come to take her things away,” the A.C. said. “It sounds reasonable.”
“Which is doubtless why her fingerprints were all over the front of the safe and the combination wheel. Piffle, A.C. She’s been trying to open the safe.”
Jones sat silent. He was thinking. His thoughts came at last to words. “And the visitors . . . too late, Doctor. How come?”
“I said your man last night was too late, Jones. The first person probably wasn’t. It was I who was too late on that occasion.”
“YOU!” the A.C. said.
“Before Mortensen’s body was taken out of the Pullman car his pockets were emptied. You all know that is routine work. The contents were put into the Murder Bag. It was not until after we got back in the hotel from visiting his flat that we went through them. Even then I didn’t see it for some minutes.”
“What?” echoed the A.C. He was tapping impatiently with a pencil on his desk. “Didn’t see what?”
“That there were no keys in Mortensen’s pockets. Either of his office, which he had locked up, or of his flat into which he had to enter. I telephoned Bow Street to put a constable on the doors of Society and hold anyone entering or leaving. My call came too late. You know how we came by the keys. The key of the safe was on the ring when the keys were handed in to the insurance office.” Manson looked at Inspector Lathom. “Which was doubtless why there were only books and papers in the safe when we opened it,” he said.
Superintendent Jones looked up. “But that would mean that one of the seven people in the Pullman nicked his keys?”
Manson nodded.
“And went up to London that night and searched the office?”
Another nod. He spoke at last. “One of the seven,” he said. He looked hard at the A.C. “And one who must be possessed of second sight if he knew that Mortensen was going to commit suicide, and give him the chance to get the keys.”
* * *
“There’s another possibility, Doctor.” Kenway broke into the discussion. “But it’s one that knocks haywire our theories of Mortensen’s death. Supposing he lost his keys in London, or had his pocket picked of them. Then a lot of our conjectures go west since we’re losing a supposed plot on the Pullman and a scampering to London and Mortensen’s office looking for something which we presume Mortensen to have possessed.”
“It won’t wash, Kenway,” Doctor Manson chided. “Have you ever known a burglar looking for nothing in particular, but only what he can pick up and leave the office afterwards as neatly as Mortensen’s was left? He might wipe away his
prints but the chair and the secrecy wouldn’t matter. Anyway, Mortensen had the keys in the Pullman. Look at Edgar’s examination.” He skipped through the dossier. “Here you are:
“Mortensen asked me if I had the correct time. I said I had. I had checked my watch with Big Ben striking five. It was 5.10. Mortensen looked at his watch and said: Damn. It’s stopped. And he wound it up and set it right.”
“How did Mr. Mortensen wind it?”
“With a key. He opened the back, inserted the key and turned.”
“The key, Kenway, is on the key-ring along with the safe, office and flat keys.”
“Any case,” said Jones. “Who in Hell wants to pick a man’s left-hand pocket? Nothing worth picking in there.”
Doctor Manson looked up. “What did you find in the girl’s flat, Fat Man?” he asked. “Anything helpful?”
“Nuthin’, Doctor. It was just a nice cosy flat. Cost . . . mint . . . money . . . fix . . . up. But nuthin’ . . . papers, drawers, connect . . . Mortensen. Only clothes . . . and things,” he added.
“Clothes and things? How come?”
“Cor stone the crows,” said Jones. “Things like I’ve never seen before. Night-dresses so godammed thin I could have read a newspaper through ’em. Frocks”—he leaned forward and tapped Kenway on the knees—“as would have showed her navel if she ever wore ’em. Name inside, Dior. French bloke, ain’t he?”
Manson nodded. “A hundred guineas a frock. What else?”
“In a locked cupboard a mink coat, ruddy huge collar and in a big bag. What . . . hell . . . want to put . . . bag for?”
“Moth bag, I expect,” said Manson. “Sure it was mink and not something else?”
“Yes. Mink. ’Nother coat, too. Something else, like my missus’s. Coney. That’s rabbit, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But don’t tell Mrs. Jones that. Anything else?”
“Mink and coney,” said Kenway. “That’s a queer mixture, isn’t it? I suppose it depended on whether she was going to the Savoy Hotel or the A.B.C. round the corner.”
“Shut up!” said Jones, and continued his inventory of Miss Ross’s flat. “There were some dresses like I’ve seen . . . Marks and Spencers. Black dresses with white collars on ’em.”