by Vernon Loder
‘Now, Mrs Hoe,’ he said presently. ‘You and I know enough of the world to understand that the character of the person murdered often gives as clear a clue to the tragedy as that of the murderer. I know you were a friend of the dead woman. Could you throw any light on the situation from that angle? What sort of woman was she?’
Mrs Hoe screwed up her eyes a little. ‘She was charming, and a great pal. But I don’t think she was very warm-hearted really, and I feel sure she would be ready to sell nothing for something. I know that sounds catty, but it isn’t. She was born so. I didn’t like her less for guessing the truth about her.’
‘You can only put it at “guessing”,’ he replied. ‘But what you say may be important. As you will realise this business of being found in the Stores during the weekend will suggest to many a possible intrigue.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t believe it. Not of that kind—if you mean that kind. If she was going to marry, it was because she was conventional. I mean to say she was the sort of woman who had to have a husband and house—an establishment. She would have hated to be an old maid, because old maids are sometimes stupidly looked down on. But I don’t think she would have made love her whole existence. I’m not sure that she was in love at all.’
He nodded. He was glad he had come. ‘You mean she was temperamentally cold?’
‘Yes, I am sure she was. She wouldn’t go anywhere for adventures. She wasn’t that type.’
‘But undoubtedly she did go to the Stores yesterday.’
She shrugged. ‘I see you are wondering where Mr Mander came in? She never mentioned him to me except in connection with business, but if he was infatuated with her, he would stand a lot, wouldn’t he?’
‘“Faint yet pursuing”,’ quoted Devenish, thoughtfully; ‘well, that sort of thing has happened. But if he was infatuated with her, and her engagement to Mr Kephim was announced, would it help her? You are hinting so far at an ambitious but cold woman who might lure Mander on to improve her own position.’
‘That’s how I see her. But did Mr Mander know that she was engaged to Kephim?’
He bit his lip. ‘That is a point. But it would be bound to come out.’
Mrs Hoe offered him a cigarette, and lit one herself. ‘That may be the trouble,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think so?’
‘You have met her fiancé, Mr Kephim?’ he asked, letting the other question slide.
‘Several times. It struck me that he was a nervous man, and rather in awe of her.’
‘I suppose you could not say if he was likely to be a jealous man?’
‘Let us say “guess”, inspector. You corrected me before on that. I should certainly say he—guess he—might be jealous. He was very much wrapped up in her. But then you would have to prove he was there—’
Devenish shrugged.
‘We don’t know where Mr Kephim was last night.’
She stared. The journalist in her made her avid for details, though she had no intention of selling them. It was not her line, even if she had not remembered Kephim; timid and affectionate, one of those weak men that some women naturally like and despise at the same time.
‘Has he no alibi?’
Devenish did not say yes or no. He simply told her one of the bits of stock knowledge a detective-officer is bound to pick up.
‘Ah, that’s one of the layman’s ideas,’ he said lightly. ‘We generally find that only a lunatic fails to provide an alibi of some sort.’
She smiled. ‘He is a well-known rifle shot, but, if you will forgive me saying so, the idea of a rifle is absurd. Where’s the bullet? Why use a rifle at all? Why use a knife, and then a rifle? And where is the rifle? Can’t you fire a high-velocity bullet from an automatic?’
‘A certain length of barrel is necessary for high velocity, I believe,’ he replied; ‘the Mauser pistol is one of the few automatics sighted to a fairly long range. For that reason, you can have a skeleton shoulder-stock fitted to it. But there are technical reasons why we don’t think the bullet was fired by a Mauser.’
‘Then why the Mauser?’
‘Because, perhaps, it is long-ranged, and sighted to a thousand yards. To give an impression that it had been used, you see. But I must get away soon, and that question doesn’t come up here. It is one for experts. I wonder if you would be good enough to tell me—out of your journalistic knowledge—anything you know about Mrs Peden-Hythe?’
Mrs Hoe crushed out her cigarette on an ashtray, and screwed up her eyes again.
‘I’ve seen her at crushes where I went to pick up pars, inspector. Fifty, dressed thirty, a woman who looks greedy for sensations. That is what I thought. Of course it was whispered that she was the power behind the Stores,’ she smiled whimsically. ‘I think she was. Mr Mander went up like a rocket, and she had the powder, hadn’t she?’
‘If so, I shall be hearing soon from her, or her lawyers,’ he replied. ‘Do you know anything about the son?’
‘Guesswork only. He lives in the country; it is said because his mother thinks he isn’t safe in town. But I suppose his wine merchant has means of transport! But that’s libellous. Shall I say he looks a weed who survives by stimulation?’
Devenish nodded. ‘We’ll take it at that. He’s mostly at the country place; she mostly in town. I suppose he is the heir. Must be as the only son. And one couldn’t imagine him quarrelling with an investment in the Stores. He wouldn’t lose anything in the end.’
Mrs Hoe pondered. ‘Ah, that’s just the question! All of us on the Press are supposed to know a bit of everything. I don’t; but I have a man pal who is on the financial side of the Argus. He seems to think Mander has been cutting it too fat—that is how he put it. The idea that a shop that sells a lot makes immense profits, isn’t always safe. You may over-advertise, or pay too much in salaries, or too much for the site, and too much for the building. Then there is the question of Jameson Peden-Hythe’s father.’
‘I thought he was dead.’
‘So he is, but Jameson is his father gone to seed. He’s a gentlemanly wastrel. Peden-Hythe came of a good family, and married beneath him. His son has all the qualities atrophied, but a real prejudice against the commoner left a born snob.’
This fitted in with what the chauffeur had said, and Devenish mentally marked down the young man for inquiry.
‘The stock, of course, one buys on credit,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘There is no difficulty about that. But I should say there was more than a million to be got. If she gave it to him, and pulled him up out of a country solicitor’s office, it suggests an infatuation. And an infatuation where a middle-aged woman is concerned is likely to be indiscreet. Did you ever hear any rumour of a possible marriage between Mander and the lady?’
‘Heaps of times. Gossips’s slanderous throat, of course. It did strike me once or twice that, if I were a young man, and saw my mother making a fool of herself about a Mander, I might feel nasty about it. And with his prejudices he was bound to.’
Devenish thought he had never met a witness who had given him so much food for thought in such a short time. He got up, thanked her warmly for her help, and went home. People with whom he came in contact officially often put glosses on their evidence, but none saw his points before he made them.
‘She’s put a couple more in the pot though; worse luck!’ he said to himself, as he put on a pipe, and sat down with a pad before a fire to make a few notes. ‘It’s going to be fine confused feeding unless I am careful.’
He scribbled at once: ‘—Kephim, fiancé, and rifle shot. Possibly jealous.—Miss Tumour, calculating, ambitious. Not always liable to give value for value received.—Mr Cane, frank, perhaps too frank, and with some little game on.—Wembley, my greatest paradox so far. Looks like a fool, but talks like a mechanical angel. Wonder if he is really the inventor of the “Mander Hopper”?—Mrs Peden-Hythe, infatuated, and may have got wind of a Mander-Tumour complication.—Mr Jameson Peden-Hythe, who hated Mander, and all “upstarts”; inhibitions perhap
s weakened by drink. Must have seen the way the wind blew.’
Devenish next planned out the following day’s work, and that of his subordinates. He felt that he was going to do best on the human side, leaving the mechanical details to the others under him. Even a detective-sergeant at the Yard is a highly skilled expert, and for the business of taking finger-prints, examining clues and making inquiries can hardly be improved on.
‘I should like to tackle Mrs Peden-Hythe herself first,’ he thought, as he got ready for bed, ‘but, if she should approach me, it would be better. People seem naturally hostile when you have to start the questions.’
Cane he must certainly see, though it would be unlike an aeroplane expert to fake a landing on that roof without suggesting that the gyroplane had come to rest against the sandbanks piled at both sides of the roof to slow up a machine on landing, or at worst, prevent it from diving over the edge.
A real or a fake landing would have been set for darkness. It is one thing, even for an expert with a marvellous gyrocopter, to land on a confined space during the day; but at night, with no flares on the roof to outline the extent of the space, he would be a lucky pilot who could calculate on landing in the middle.
On the whole Devenish decided that if Cane had faked a landing, he would have shown the wheel-tracks in the sand as well as on the bare roof. If the thing was a fake, then there was the presumption that the man who had staged it was not an expert.
CHAPTER VII
WHEN Devenish reached Scotland Yard next morning, he found some rather surprising news awaiting him. Sergeant Davis had been very busy at the Stores during the previous afternoon, and one of his jobs had been a thorough and minute inspection of all the goods and passenger-lifts, including that which gave access to Mr Mander’s flat.
Each of the passenger lifts was fitted with a square of fine deep-pile carpet, laid upon a square of thick cork lino. In one lift, when the carpet was removed, there were traces of blood. Curiously enough, though the cork lino was deeply stained, only the underside of the carpet bore stains, and those of no considerable kind.
It was impossible to believe that anyone could have used a rifle in the lift, and there was no trace of a rifle-bullet having struck the framework, or the lino, or embedded itself anywhere either in the lift or in the shaft. In these circumstances, the puzzle was made the subject of a police conference, attended by the superintendent, the police-surgeon and the sergeant.
The view of the surgeon was that Miss Tumour had been killed in the lift. The hæmorrhage in her case had been slight; which he explained technically, demonstrating the nature of the wound and the species of slender-bladed weapon used.
‘Then it makes us more muddled than ever,’ said Devenish, when he had heard this. ‘If she was killed in the passenger lift, the man must have gone up in the goods lift. But why did he take the knife up with him, and then throw it down in the goods-lift? Did he go up and kill Mander in the flat, and bring him down by the goods lift? I suppose you have examined all the walls of the rooms in the flat?’
‘Every one, sir, and there was no sign of a bullet. And I examined the servants closely, and don’t think any of them had a hand in it. The bullet beats me. It must have gone somewhere.’
‘Quite,’ replied the inspector dryly. ‘Now, let me see, is there a possibility—it can be no more—that some windows or ventilators were open, and that the bullet chanced to fly out that way?’
‘I examined every opening, sir. As for the windows, none were left open, except one in the flat. That was the window of Mr Mander’s drawing-room.’
Devenish smiled faintly. ‘The prosaic fact is that the bullet either flew out of that window or was stopped by something. So far as the investigations go, it was not stopped by any of the walls of this building, but we shall have to go over them from top to bottom before we can decide that finally. We’ll put more men on that job at once. There is a third possibility, and it’s remote, but we must consider it. It would require two men to be in the case, I think, and I imagine Mr Mander would have been gagged, if it was done that way. I mean a metal plate held behind the victim might stop the bullet, though very likely there would be a richochet and the bullet glance off.’
‘But why take all that trouble, sir?’
‘I don’t say there is anything in it,’ remarked Devenish, ‘but that faked landing might be intended to convey the idea that Mr Mander was not shot in this building at all.’
‘But he returned here, and dined—I mean to his flat, sir.’
‘Yes, but the faking intended to prove that a machine landed on the roof and that the man from the machine did the murder. If that man was supposed to be the mechanic and gyrocopter pilot, Webley, it might be assumed that he had seen his employer, and perhaps taken him for a short flight, then shot him while in the air, descended with the body, and disposed of it. That would seem to account for there being no bullet visible.’
‘But what could be his motive, sir?’
Devenish shrugged. ‘At a venture, we could find a motive. I have a strong idea that Webley is the inventor of the gyrocopter, and I know from him that Mander said it wasn’t profitable to sell; though I think that suggests the financier cheating the humble inventor, as has often been done before. Webley, outside his speciality, is an ignorant sort of fellow. He might have been very glad to get someone to finance his pet toy. Then, as I know, Mr Cane in the Stores went down to see Webley on Sunday evening.’
‘And perhaps said they were making a good thing out of it?’ said the sergeant. ‘He might get wild if he found that out.’
Devenish nodded. ‘In any case I am not building on that theory. I merely make sure that we neglect no alternative. Did you get all the rifles out of the sports department?’
‘Yes, sir. There were three sporting rifles firing a .303 cartridge. But these were all clean and unfouled.’
‘There can’t have been continuous processions up and down in the lifts,’ said Devenish, ‘but the night watchman ought to have heard a shot, even if his microphone device was out of order.’
‘As regards that, sir,’ said the sergeant, ‘I had one of our experts in, as you suggested. He says the connection must have been cut by someone with a little knowledge only. The thing could have been put out of order much more simply.’
The desk-telephone rang as he spoke. Devenish lifted the receiver and listened, then said: ‘I’ll go round at once,’ and replaced the instrument. ‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘Mrs Peden-Hythe’s butler had just rung up from Curzon Street, asking me to come round to see his mistress. Well, get back to the Stores, see that the walls are most carefully examined—everywhere. If Mr Kephim turns up, tell him that I hope to see him there at two today.’
The sergeant saluted, and went. Devenish put on his hat and coat, and started for Curzon Street.
Mrs Peden-Hythe’s town house was not very large, but it was most luxuriously and expensively furnished. The walls of the room into which Devenish was shown were hung with pictures that could not be bought for a song; Courbets, two pictures by Maris, some by Anton Mauve, and others by the now costly French impressionists. And this was only a little room that was rarely used. Mrs Peden-Hythe collected pictures, and was said to buy simply by price; so that you did not see the Coopers or Goodalls that might be expected to shine in the collection of a woman who had no artistic standards. But she had bought lately, when all the ‘picture-tells-a-story’ school had fallen into the price doldrums.
Every man who rises to inspector’s rank in the detective force is something of an elementary psychologist and accustomed to judge character from the faces of witnesses. But when Mrs Peden-Hythe came into the room, he found himself rather at a loss to decide the category into which she fell.
She was obviously lacking in distinction, in spite of her fine clothes. She did not look an amorous type, though she was obviously endeavouring to hold her fugitive youth by the skirts. She was very pale, rather handsome. Her mouth was large, and her lips f
ull. She bit her lips constantly as she talked, and made them look fuller and redder than ever.
She bowed, then bit her underlip viciously. ‘I suppose you wonder why I asked you to come, inspector? The fact is, I financed Mr Mander. Had you heard that?’
He nodded. ‘I thought it was so, madam.’
‘I was horrified to hear of his death,’ she went on rapidly, ‘and of that—that woman’s death.’
‘It must have been rather startling to you, since he had been lunching with you that day,’ said Devenish.
She gave him a quick glance. ‘Who told you that?’
‘His chauffeur.’
‘I see. Well, of course, I have nothing to hide. I may as well tell you that he came down at my request,’ she remarked coolly. ‘My solicitors had heard some disturbing rumours, and as so much money was concerned it was up to me to look into it.’
‘Rumours of what, madam?’
‘Well, a suggestion that the business was not paying as it should. There was a great deal coming in, of course, but too much had gone and was going out. I asked Mr Mander down to give me his views.’
‘Why did your son not see him, and save you the trouble?’
She bit her lip again, and seemed slightly resentful. ‘My son has no knowledge of business.’
‘But I presume he can confirm your account of what passed between you and Mr Mander that day, madam?’
‘No, he went off for the day. He went to stay the night with some friend in town.’
Devenish nodded. ‘And what did Mr Mander say?’
‘He reassured me. He admitted that we were not making profits, but he said that we mustn’t take the first year’s expenses as an annual “overhead”. When the Stores were established finally, the various appropriations could be cut down greatly.’
Devenish was struck by her knowledge of business terms, and the fact that she spoke as if she understood them. ‘That was the last time you saw Mr Mander? When he left Parston Court?’