‘Nice private little room upstairs, saire,’ insinuated the proprietor as ‘the two’ looked round. He guessed that they shunned publicity, and he was right, although not entirely so. With a curt nod the man led the way up the narrow stairway to the equivocal little den on the first floor. The general room below had not been crowded, but this one was wholly empty.
‘Quite like old times,’ said the woman with an unmusical laugh as she threw off her cloak—there was little indication of the sorrowing widow now, ‘I thought we had better fight shy of the ‘Toledo’ for the future.’
‘’M yes,’ replied her companion slowly, looking dubiously about him—he no longer wore glasses or moustache, nor was his left hand, the glove now removed, deficient of a finger. ‘The only thing is whether it isn’t too soon for us to be about together at all.’
‘Pha!’ she snapped expressively. ‘They’ve gone to sleep again. There isn’t a thing—no not a single detail—gone wrong. The most that could happen would be a raid here to look for Peter the Italian!’
‘For God’s sake don’t keep on that,’ he urged in a low voice. ‘Your husband was a brute to you by what you say, and I’m not sorry now it’s done, but I want to forget it all. You had your way: I’ve done everything you planned. Now you are free and decently well off and as soon as it’s safe we can really marry—if you still will.’
‘If I still will,’ she repeated, looking at him meaningly. ‘Do you know, Dick, I think it may become desirable sooner even than I thought.’
‘Sssh!’ he warned; ‘here comes someone. You order, Kitty—you always have done! Anything will suit me.’ He turned to arrange his overcoat across an empty chair and reassured his hand among the contents of the nearest pocket.
Downstairs, in his nondescript living-room, the proprietor of the Restaurant X was being very quickly and efficiently made to understand just so much of the situation as turned on his immediate and complete acceptance of it. In the presence of authority so vigorously expressed the stout gentleman bowed profusely, lowered his voice, and from time to time placed a knowing finger on his lips in agreement.
‘Hallo,’ said the man called ‘Dick’ as a different attendant brought a dish. ‘Where has our other waiter got to?’
‘Party of regular customers as always has him just come in,’ explained the new one. ‘’Ope you don’t mind, sir.’
‘Not a brass button.’
‘It’s all right, inspector,’ reported the ‘waiter’. ‘He has the three marks you said—mole, ear, nail.’
‘Certain of the woman?’
‘Mrs Poleash, sure as snow.’
‘Any reference to it?’
‘Don’t think so while I’m about. Drama just now. Has his little gun handy.’
‘Take this in now. Leave the door open and see if you can make him talk up.…If you two gentlmen will step just across there I think you’ll be able to hear.’
Carrados smiled as he proceeded to comply.
‘I have already heard,’ he said. ‘It is the voice of the man who called on Mr Carlyle on September the third.’
‘I think it is the voice,’ admitted Mr Carlyle when he had tiptoed back again. ‘I really think so, but after two months I should not be prepared to swear.’
‘He is the man,’ repeated Carrados deliberately.
Inspector Beedel, clinking something quietly in his pocket, nodded to his waiter.
‘Morgan follows you in with the coffee,’ he said. ‘Put it down on the table, Morgan, and stand beside the woman. Call me as soon as you have him.’
It was the sweet that the first waiter was to take, and with it there was a sauce. It was not exactly overturned, but there was an awkward movement and a few drops were splashed. With a clumsy apology the waiter, napkin in hand, leaned across the customer to remove a spot that marked his coat-sleeve.
‘Here!’ exclaimed the startled man. ‘What the devil are you up to?’
It was too late. Speech was the only thing left to him then. His wrists were already held in a trained, relentless grasp; he was pressed helplessly back into his chair at the first movement of resistance. Kitty Poleash rose from her seat with a dreadful coldness round her heart, felt a hand upon her shoulder, cast one fearful glance round, and sank down upon her chair again. Before another word was spoken Inspector Beedel had appeared, and the grip of bone and muscle on the straining wrists was changed to one of steel. Less than thirty seconds bridged the whole astonishing transformation.
‘Richard Crispinge, you are charged with the murder of this woman’s husband. Katherine Poleash, you are held as an accessory.’ The usual caution followed. ‘Get a taxi to the back entance, Morgan.’
Half a dozen emotions met on Crispinge’s face as he shot a glance at his companion and then faced the accuser again.
‘You’re crazy,’ he panted, still labouring from the effort. ‘I’ve never even seen the man.’
‘I shouldn’t say anything now, if I were you,’ advised Beedel, on a quite human note. ‘You may find out later that we know more than you might think.’
What followed could not have been charged against human foresight, for at a later stage it was shown that a certain cable failed and in a trice one side of Warsaw Street was involved in darkness. What happened in that darkness—where they had severally stood before and after—who moved or spoke—whose hand was raised—were all matters of dispute, but suddenly the black was stabbed by a streak of red, a little crack—scarcely more than the sharp bursting of a paper bag—nearly caught up to it, and almost slowly to the awaiting ears came the sound of strain and the long crash of falling glass and china.
‘A lamp from down there!’ snapped Beedel’s sorely-tried voice, as the ray of an electric torch whirled like a pygmy searchlight and then centred on a tumbled thing lying beyond the table. ‘Look alive!’
‘They say there is gas somewhere,’ announced Mr Carlyle, striking a match as he ran in. ‘Ah, here it is.’
No need to ask then what had happened, though how it had happened could never be set quite finally at rest; for if Kitty Poleash was standing now, whereas before she had sat, the weapon lay beyond her reach close to the shackled hands. A curious apathy seemed to fall upon the room as though the tang of the drifting wisp of smoke dulled their alertness, and when the woman moved slowly towards her lover Beedel merely picked the pistol up and waited. With a terrible calmness she knelt by the huddled form and raised the inert head.
‘Good-bye, my dear,’ she said quietly, kissing the dead lips for the last time; ‘it’s over.’ And with a strange tragic fitness she added, in the words of another fatal schemer, ‘We fail!’
She seemed to be the only one who had any business there; Beedel was abstracted; Carlyle and Carrados felt like spectators walking on a stage when the play is over. In the street below the summoned taxi throbbed unheeded; they were waiting for another equipage now. When that had moved off with its burden Kitty Poleash would follow her captors submissively, like a dog without a home.
‘It isn’t a feather in our caps to have a man slip away like that,’ remarked the inspector moodily as the two joined him for a word before they left; ‘but, of course, as far as they are both concerned, it’s the very best that could have happened.’
‘In what way do you mean the best?’ demanded Mr Carlyle with a professional keenness for the explicit.
‘Why, look at what will happen now. He’s saved all the trouble and thought of being hanged, which it was bound to be in the end, and has got it over without a moment’s worry. She will get the full benefit of it as well, because her counsel will now be able to pile it all up against the fellow and claim that he exercised an irresistible influence over her. Personally, I should say that it’s twelve of one and thirteen of the other, and I don’t know that she isn’t the thirteen, but she is about as likely to be hanged as I am to be made superintendent tomor
row.’
***
‘Max,’ said Mr Carlyle, as they sat smoking together the same night, ‘when you think of the elaboration of that plot it was appalling.’
‘Curious,’ replied Carrados thoughtfully. ‘To me it seems absolutely simple and inevitable. Perhaps that is because I should have done it—fundamentally, that is—just the same way myself.’
‘And got caught the same way?’
‘There were mistakes made. If you decide to kill a man you must do it either secretly or openly. If you do it secretly and it comes to light you are done for. If you do it openly there is the chance of putting another appearance on the crime.
‘These two—Crispinge and Mrs Poleash—knew that in the ordinary way the killing of the husband would immediately attract suspicion to the wife. Under that fierce scrutiny it could not long be hidden that the woman had a lover, and the disclosure would be fatal. Indeed, if Poleash had lived, that fact must shortly have come to light, and it was the sordid determination to secure his income for themselves before he discovered the intrigue and divorced his wife that sealed his fate and forced an early issue.
‘If you intend to commit a murder, Louis, and know that suspicion will automatically fall on you, what is the first thing that you would wish to effect? Obviously that it should fall on someone else more strongly. But as the arrest of that someone else would upset the plan, you would naturally make his identity such that he would have the best chance of remaining at large. The most difficult person to find is one who does not exist.
‘There you have the whole strategy of the sorry business. Everything hinged on that, and when you once possess that clue you not only see why everything happened as it did but you can confidently forecast exactly what will happen. To go on believing that you had talked with the real Poleash it was necessary that you should never actually see the man as he was. Hence the disfigurement. What assailant would act in that way? Only one maddened by a jealous fury. The Southern people are popularly the most jealous and revengeful, so we must have a native of Italy or Spain, and the Italian is the more credible of the two. Similarly, Mr Hipwaite is brought in to add another touch of corroboration to your tale. But why Mr Hipwaite from a mile away? There is a locksmith quite near at hand; I made it my business to call on him, and I learned that, as I expected, he knew Poleash by sight. Plainly he would never have served the purpose.’
‘Perhaps I ought to have been more sceptical of the fellow’s tale,’ conceded Mr Carlyle; ‘but, you know, Max, I have a dozen fresh people call on me every month with queer stories, and it’s not once in a million times that this would happen. I, at any rate, saw nothing to rouse suspicion. You say he made mistakes?’
‘Crispinge, among divers other things he’s failed in, has been an actor, and with Mrs Poleash’s coaching on facts there is no doubt that he carried the part all right. Being wise after the event, we may say that he overstressed the need of secrecy. The idea of the previous attack, designed, of course, to throw irrefutable evidence into the scales, was too pronounced. Something slighter would have served better. Personally, I think it was excess of caution to send Mrs Jones out on the Thursday afternoon. She could have been relied upon to be too ‘mithered’ for her recollections to carry any weight. It was necessary to destroy the only reliable photograph of Poleash, but the risk ought to have been taken of burning it before she went off to establish her unassailable alibi, and not leaving it for her accomplice to do. In the event, by handling the frame after he had burned his gloves, Crispinge furnished us with the solitary finger-print that linked up his identity.’
‘He had been convicted then?’
‘Blackmail, six years ago, and other things before. A mixture of weakness and violence, he has always gravitated towards women for support. But the great mistake—the vital oversight—the alarm signal to my perceptions—’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, I should really hardly like to mention it to anyone but you. The sheet and the bolster-case that so convincingly turned up to clinch your client’s tale once and for all demolished it. They had never been on Poleash’s bed, believe me, Louis. What a natural thing for the woman to take them from her own, and yet how fatal! I sensed that damning fact as soon as I had them in my hands, and in a trice the whole fabric of deception, so ingeniously contrived, came down in ruins. Nothing—nothing—could ever retrieve that simple, deadly blunder.’
The Magician of Cannon Street
J. S. Fletcher
Joseph Smith Fletcher (1863–1935) was a Yorkshireman who moved to London and carved a successful career as a journalist and author. He wrote historical books before turning successfully to crime. Some of his crime fiction was set in Yorkshire, but his most famous mysteries, The Middle Temple Murder (which was admired by President Woodrow Wilson) and The Charing Cross Mystery both benefited from London settings.
Fletcher’s focus was on producing lively entertainments rather than the elaborate puzzles of whodunit, whydunit or howdunit favoured by the likes of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley. He created a number of detectives, including Paul Campenhaye, a master of disguise and keen observer of humankind who features in a collection of stories with settings in London and Yorkshire, Paul Campenhaye, Specialist in Criminology. It is an obscure book, but it deserves to be better known.
***
My reason for going down to Cannon Street at all that morning was not connected in any way with crimes and mysteries—I had no idea of either in my mind when I stepped out of the Underground at the Mansion House Station. I was on a much pleasanter errand than the solving of problems arising from crimes; the fact was, that, having matrimony in view, I was busy in reconstructing and remodelling a beautiful old Jacobean house which I had just bought, away out in a Surrey village, and I had been recommended by my architect to visit a man in Budge Row who had some good scheme or idea about patent flooring. I had meant to have a leisurely half-hour’s chat with him, but as luck would have it, I was not in Budge Row for the space of five minutes, and I went out of it, not only in a state of hurried precipitation, but also in one of considerable surprise. And in spite of the hurry and the surprise I had wit enough to gather that I was in for an affair.
It was raining that morning—a November morning. I thought as I turned into Budge Row from Cannon Street that the City (a quarter of the town rarely visited by me) looked infinitely miserable under rain. There was slop on the roofs, and slop in the streets; it was one of those days on which the sight of an umbrella suggests thoughts of infinite wretchedness, and men turn up the collars of their coats out of sheer sympathy with the weather. In the narrow confines of Budge Row there were few people about; it a little surprised me, therefore, to see at the corner one of those individuals who are known as ‘gazers,’ which term, I may explain to the uninitiated, means those street merchants who stand in the gutters supporting small trays on which are set out cheap mechanical toys, usually sold at the price of a penny. This particular gazer rather attracted my attention; he was a tall, well-built fellow, arrayed in a multiplicity of old, odd-coloured garments, finished off by a tattered waterproof cape; he was lame of one leg, and supported himself by a crutch; there was a scar that looked very like an old sword-cut, on one cheek, and his right eye was obsessed by a black patch. On his tray he displayed a number of small metal tigers: you pressed a spring and the tiger’s eyes glared and his tail waved; it seemed to me that the sudden lighting-up of the yellow eyes was the only sign of warmth in that wind-swept street. The vendor cried at intervals in a hoarse, fog-spoilt voice:
‘The real Royal Indian Tiger from Bengal! One penny!’ And as I passed him he muttered thickly: ‘Buy a tiger, captain—just the same as your honour’s shot in the jungle—all alive, captain!’
I suppose it flatters every civilian to be accused of relationship with the Army; anyhow, having one handy in my ticket pocket, I dropped a shilling on the gazer’s tray
as I walked by. He picked it up, spat on it, and thanked me with an eloquent look which was almost a wink, and fell to crying his wares still more raucously and loudly.
***
Where the ancient church of Saint Anthony, patron saint of the good grocers of London, once stood in Budge Row, shrining the bones of many estimable citizens who in their time were aldermen and sheriffs of our proud city, there are now certain of those modern abominations called chambers, wherein a man may as easily lose himself as a mouse might in entering a thickly-populated rabbit-warren. The man I wanted to see had his place of business in one of these barrack-like buildings, and my first proceeding, on discovering the set of chambers which I wanted, was to read the names on the list of tenants that was posted up at the door. This occupied some time; there appeared to be some dozens of floors and scores of separate offices. And, as I stood in the entry, my hands behind me, reading steadily down one side of the list, preparatory to going methodically up the other, I felt something thrust into my fingers, and turning sharply round, saw an urchin throw me a backward grin as he darted into the street and vanished in a neighbouring entry.
I glanced at what this impudent gamin had thrust into my hand. A scrap of paper—creased, damp. Nevertheless, I opened it, on principle, having long before made it a strict rule of life to attend to the smallest details in a day’s adventures. There were words hastily scribbled on that bit of paper; they ran thus:
‘For God’s sake, Campenhaye, get out of that doorway and away from this street, quick! But come, see me at my rooms at four o’clock, and if you still have him, bring that clerk of yours with you. Now scoot—and look neither right nor left.—Tregarthen.’
I obeyed this command to the letter: I did not even wait to fold up the paper. Crushing it in my hand, I shot hurriedly out of the doorway, up the street, and into a taxi-cab which happened to be passing. Not until I was west of St. Paul’s did I begin to ask myself what had really happened.
Capital Crimes: London Mysteries Page 14