“I think,” she answered slowly, “because he saw there was a lot of money concerned, and he hoped to get hold of it for himself. I think he hoped to be able to say: ‘I know all about the game that’s going on here, and I’m going to the police about it, but, if you hand over enough of the money you’ve got, I’ll let you have warning in time for you to get away first.’”
She paused, as if inviting comment, but Bobby made none. The explanation seemed to him plausible enough; it fitted in with what he knew of Norris’s character, and his association with the Berry, Quick Syndicate explained his recent affluence. He might have suspected he had been selected as a victim of the future, but in the interval he was receiving more money than ever before, and he might easily have thought himself clever enough to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, so securing a large share of the booty for himself before taking action to expose the conspiracy he suspected.
Alice went on:
“That left only Dr. Beale. I hadn’t thought of him at first, because it looked more as if he were one of the people they were planning to rob. But afterwards I felt sure it was he, only I couldn’t be sure he and Mr. Norris weren’t working together. So I got Meg to watch and see if Dr. Beale went to visit Mr. Norris’s flat. If they were partners, they would have to meet there – they were never both at the office at the same time. And, from the way Mr. Norris had asked me questions, I was sure something was going to happen. Meg watched Dr. Beale go to the flat, and then she saw Mr. Lawrence. She saw Mr. Lawrence leave, and afterwards Dr. Beale came away, too. He was carrying an attaché case he hadn’t had with him when he came, and he looked all worked up and funny, as if something had happened. She thought she would follow him and try to get hold of his attaché case. And she did, and there it is; and I don’t know what’s in it – nothing perhaps,” she added, with sudden discouragement.
Bobby, nursing the attaché case on his knee, wondered, too, what it held – nothing of interest possibly, or it might be the evidence needed. He said:
“You had never met Lawrence, had you, before that night on the Embankment?”
“No.”
“How was it you were there? There was a man who was looking for you?”
“Does that matter?” she asked wearily. “Step by step – there was a book in the sitting room at home: Step by Step it was called – that’s how I got where I was that night – and birth control,” she added. “When I was a girl,” she went on – she could not have been much more than twenty-five, but she spoke of her girlhood as might have done a woman of eighty – “I thought birth control made everything just the same for girls and men, too. They all said it did. It doesn’t – nothing ever makes it the same for a girl and for a man; and after a time nothing seems to matter any more; and you have to live, or you think you have, and you don’t care much – only, one day you are with the others, standing in the street, for sale. And I got to know Sandy – Sandy Watson. I thought he was sorry for me. He used to say I was such a kid. He promised to help me. He said he would see I got a square deal. I was glad to have someone who seemed a friend, and he was good to me at first; only, presently, he began to show he was a devil, really. He knocked me about, too. I didn’t mind that so much – you expect that – but there were other things he wanted me to do, and one night I went down to the Embankment. I meant to jump off the steps when no one was looking – they said it was quite easy once you were in the river, and no one could interfere. But Sandy followed, and he found me, and he was putting the lighted end of his cigarette on my wrist when Mr. Lawrence stopped him. I’ve never seen him since. Mr. Lawrence spoke to me, and what he said showed what he really felt. If he had said anything nice or kind or comforting I shouldn’t have noticed so much. He just thought of me as a bit of dirt that he had trodden on, and yet he had done that for me. I hated him worse than anyone ever hated before, and I followed him, and I watched, and I found out he had got a job in an office. There was one girl in the office and no one else, and it was quite plain there was something funny going on. I made up my mind to find out what, and I borrowed some money from Meg and I scared the girl who was there into going away and letting me be there instead. Mr. Lawrence hardly even noticed. He was like – like what I had been the first time I stood in the street. You just feel nothing matters because nothing’s real any more – it’s not you, only a kind of doll that’s there. Mr. Lawrence might have been dead.”
“You wanted to make him come alive again?” Bobby asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“When you thought something was wrong at the office, why didn’t you come to us?”
“A street woman, an ex-convict,” she answered simply, quite without bitterness, merely as stating an incontrovertible fact. “They don’t go to the police so easily as that.” She added: “Besides, I was not sure what Mr. Lawrence had to do with it.”
Bobby supposed that was the real reason. She had been afraid, had probably at first believed, that Lawrence was involved or at least had guilty knowledge.
“You would never have believed or understood how dead he was to everything,” she continued. “How little anything mattered to him any more.” She stared at Bobby, and was silent. Then she said: “Did you know they had flogged him?”
Bobby nodded.
“It killed all feeling in him,” she said. “Whipping people isn’t any good except for people it doesn’t make any difference to. All it did to him was to make him go dead all over.”
“He told me once it was being treated like a thing, not like a man,” Bobby observed. “I don’t quite know what he meant. I think he must have realized after a time what the Berry, Quick Syndicate was up to.”
“Yes,” she agreed. After a pause, she let fall the one word: “Murder.”
She was silent then, and so was Bobby. Somehow that one word had dropped into their talk like a prohibition. Bobby got to his feet to go. He looked across the table at her. He said:
“Are you ready?”
She seemed then to think there was another question in his eyes. Answering it, she said:
“Yes, he knew after a time, but I knew first. If I had told you, you would have been sure he was doing it all; the only thing you would have thought of would have been getting him hanged. He would have had no chance when there was so much you thought you knew about him. So I waited and watched, and that’s why I got Meg to watch, too, and some of the other girls. And that’s why I had to have money – I had to have money to pay them, and pay Meg what she had lent me, and to have some, too, for Mr. Lawrence to go abroad with, if it turned out he had to.”
“That’s why you were working yourself blind, then,” Bobby said. “Your sight wouldn’t have lasted another week.”
Her gesture put that aside as of no importance.
“My eyes were always bad,” she remarked, “but they would have lasted more than a week. They only said that at the hospital to frighten me. They would have lasted till it was over. I would have made them.”
It was Bobby’s turn to stare at her now, for she had uttered that last sentence almost casually in a way, and yet with such an accent of tremendous will it almost seemed as though she could at her wish have compelled the natural event to her obedience.
“I suppose all this means,” he said, half to himself, “that you’re in love with Lawrence.”
Again her gesture waved aside a detail without importance.
“He was dead, as I once had been,” she answered, “and I knew it was my job to make him come alive again.”
“Oh, well, now then,” Bobby muttered, and it seemed to him these were waters of emotion and of feeling too deep for his plumbing.
They went out together, and, on their arrival at the Yard, Bobby explained their errand and surrendered the attaché case to be opened with all due form and ceremony. During the delay while the preliminaries were being accomplished Bobby was summoned to the phone, and found it was his cousin, Chris Owen, who was ringing up in considerable agitation.
“I don’t think so,” Bobby answered, “but it’s true enough Norris has been found dead in his bath. Murder has not been established yet. I think it might be as well if you came round here. Some of the chiefs might like to see you.” Chris agreed, and soon made his appearance, still very agitated and disturbed.
“Lady Endbury told me,” he said. “What’s that piece she bought got to do with it?”
“We hope you’ll tell us that,” Bobby answered. “We’ve been trying to get hold of you the last day or two. The man in your shop said you were cataloguing Lord Westland’s collection, but now we find all his stuff is packed away for the time.”
“That’s right,” Chris answered. “I’ve been over in France with him. He didn’t want it known. He’s buying a lot of stuff from a johnny near Bordeaux – a big wine merchant who’s hard hit, and wants to realize without anyone knowing what he’s doing, or else all his creditors will be getting the wind up. Westland wanted expert advice, so I went along. You can ask him.”
“That’s all right, then,” Bobby said. “By the way, Norris told me once you were on the board of the company owning that block of flats – he said you had been investing rather big sums?”
“No business of his,” grumbled Chris. “Nosing round in what didn’t concern him. It’s Westland’s money, really – I’m acting as his nominee. You can ask him that, too, if you want to, only don’t go telling everyone. He wants it kept quiet. ”
“That’s all right,” Bobby repeated. “There is one thing turned up we rather wanted to ask you about – a bit of Chelsea china you sold Lady Endbury?”
“What about it?” asked Chris sharply. “I happened to see it in a flat in the building where Ronnie was living. Nothing to do with him, or with what happened afterwards. I saw it there and liked it, and bought. In my line, you have to keep your eyes open. Why?”
“You didn’t tell us you knew where Ronnie was living? I suppose you did know? It wasn’t chance you were there?”
“No-o,” answered Chris hesitatingly, very much as if he would have said “Yes” had he dared. “I knew where Ronnie was all right, but only by accident, and I never dreamed it was murder or any suspicion of it, or anything like it. The verdict was ‘Death by Misadventure,’ and that’s what I thought it was, and, anyhow, buying a bit of china in the flat underneath his couldn’t have anything to do with it one way or another.”
“I don’t see why you didn’t say something when you knew murder was suspected,” Bobby said. “If people hold things back, they can’t complain if we wonder why.”
Chris muttered something inaudible. He got up and took a turn or two about the room. Finally he said:
“I suppose it doesn’t matter so much now. I was seeing rather a lot of Mrs. Barton at the time – you know – awfully nice woman, but somehow we’ve drifted a bit apart recently. It’s Scales Barton who is her husband, the K.C. Well, it was this way. She took a little flat on her own round about where Ronnie was living. The idea was, her friends could visit her there without any gossip going on. In the afternoon, you understand, or at the week-end, when she was supposed to be visiting her sister in the country. The thing is, everybody knew we were great pals, and if it came out I had been wandering round a place like Islington where nobody ever goes – well, Scales Barton had been asking questions already, and he might have put two and two together and misunderstood things and then there would have been hell to pay. I promised her I would hold my tongue. And I didn’t see why not. I hadn’t an idea in the world there was anything behind the verdict or anything queer about poor old Ronnie’s death. Look here, hang it all, it won’t have to come out about Mrs. Barton, will it? There wasn’t anything to come out, you understand, but – well – you know how people talk.”
“So they do,” agreed Bobby. “I don’t see that anything need be said now – and I suppose it really wouldn’t have made any difference at the time. It was all done so neatly, and so cleverly, I don’t know even yet there’s any proof we can dig up. Always, it’s not the knowing but the proving that we trip over. But I think the man who killed Ronnie may hang for another job, and, if it turns out that way, there’ll be no object in carrying on. A man can only hang once.”
Chris looked, and was, very relieved. He added, with a touch of defiance, that, if he had to, he was fully prepared to deny on oath all he had just told Bobby about the Mrs. Scales Barton adventure that was now ancient history.
“I hope it won’t be necessary,” Bobby said, “but if it is, and you try that, you will probably tie yourself up in awful tangles. By the way, have you seen Cora recently?”
Chris shook his head.
“She’s at Torquay,” he said. “Didn’t you know? Been there some days now.”
“I wanted to be sure,” Bobby said, “she had no idea whereabouts Ronnie was living in Islington.”
“I am sure she hadn’t,” Chris answered. “After she put her advertisement in the paper she told you about, it was Charing Cross where they met.”
“They did meet, then?” Bobby asked quickly. “She didn’t tell us that.”
“She told me long ago,” Chris answered. “You mean she didn’t say anything about it that day she told us she thought he had been murdered. Why should she? There was no connection, was there? She was a bit overwrought, too. After the advertisement he put in in reply to hers, he rang her up and asked her to meet him at Charing Cross, to talk. And she did. That was when she gave him the signet ring. He took nothing with him when he disappeared, you know – nothing at all. But she brought the ring with her when she went to meet him that day, and gave it him as a kind of token, and that made it all the worse when after that she never heard anything more.” Bobby frowned. He felt he ought to have noticed the tiny discrepancy between the statement that Ronnie had taken nothing away with him and his possession of the signet ring, and have endeavoured earlier to clear it up. Not that it mattered much, only it would have saved certain faint, troubling doubts that had thus been unnecessarily added to his worries; and then, before he could say anything more, word came that he was to present himself at the opening of the attaché case now about to be undertaken in the Assistant Commissioner’s room.
CHAPTER 30
THE ATTACHE CASE
A little group of senior officers had assembled for the opening of the attaché case, most of them eagerly expectant, one or two plainly incredulous. The Assistant Commissioner himself presided. A portly superintendent, who had not altogether forgotten certain exploits of his younger days, enjoyed himself with a bit of bent wire and the locks, and had little trouble in getting them open. Within were various bundles of papers, neatly tied up and docketed, and – what took the eye more dramatically – a rubber truncheon. With careful precautions it was lifted out, and the Assistant Commissioner said:
“Sort of thing you could lay anyone out with and nothing much to show. Better have it examined – we have Beale’s fingerprints, haven’t we? The doctors had better be asked to take another look at Norris’s body, too; they may spot something if they know what to look for.”
The truncheon was duly taken off for testing and examination, and the Assistant Commissioner turned his attention to the papers. They were in folders, neatly endorsed, and the Assistant Commissioner whistled softly as he picked each up in turn.
“Details of how Beale worked it all, apparently,” he said. “This one, marked ‘A,’ deals with the Ronnie Owen affair, apparently, and the other folders with the other cases. They’ll have to be gone through and checked. Hullo, here’s one with nothing in it marked ‘Percy Lawrence.’”
“There’s an endorsement, sir,” someone pointed out.
“So there is,” agreed the Assistant Commissioner. He read it aloud: “‘P. L. seems half-witted, apparently neither knows nor wants to know anything.’ Um-m. Where is Law
rence, by the way?”
“He was told he might go home, sir, but to stay there and be ready if we wanted him for further questioning,” answered a chief inspector. “It was thought best, if you remember, sir.”
The Assistant Commissioner nodded. He knew well, he shared it himself, that the one nightmare of Scotland Yard, the one thing calculated to reduce all there to dithering despair, was the thought that possibly they might have arrested an innocent man. The mere suggestion was enough to set them all positively grovelling. Nothing is too good for anyone believed to have been unjustly suspected: Lawrence, for instance, had been taken home in one of the Yard’s cars in the company of an officer who had positively oozed friendliness and affection the whole way, though Lawrence himself, lost now, not in apathy, but in a tumult of conflicting thoughts, had remained quite unaware of any change in the official atmosphere.
“Looks,” said the elderly superintendent who had opened the attaché case, “looks as if Norris had the goods on Beale all O.K.”
“Looks,” commented someone else, “as if that was why Beale did him in.”
“If Norris suspected what was up,” asked the Assistant Commissioner, “why didn’t he come to us? There’s more than enough here to take action on.”
“The insurance companies have paid out something like £60,000,” the elderly superintendent pointed out, repeating independently the explanation Bobby had already heard. “That’s a lot of money, sir, and though overheads were pretty high, no doubt, there must be a good share left. I suggest Norris may have meant to blackmail Beale into parting with some of that money.”
“Look at this other folder, sir,” another man said, holding it out. “It’s endorsed: ‘Notes of attempts to get me insured and to take charge of L.B. & S.C. office. Getting warm. Got to look out. R.N.’ ”
“He evidently had his suspicions,” agreed the Assistant Commissioner. “The same old idea, I suppose – insured to cover risk of loss to partner if death occurred. Evidently Norris had tumbled to it, and it does look as if he thought he could fleece Beale and get a share of the plunder. Played with fire, did Mr. Norris, and got burned. Only, if Beale knew, and knew himself cornered, and went to such lengths to get possession of the evidence Norris had collected, why is he so calm about it? He must have found out by now he has the wrong attaché case, and that the right one may be opened and examined any minute. Yet he doesn’t seem at all uneasy. How’s that? A bit of a snag, isn’t it?”
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