The Silk Stocking Murders

by Anthony Berkeley

  On the landing the Superintendent bent down and examined the bell-push through his magnifying-glass. “Humph!” he grunted, and produced a little tin of black powder. Pouring some of the powder into the palm of his hand; he blew it very gently at the-bell-push, then blew away the superfluous powder. On the white porcelain stood out in clear, black relief the imprint of the middle portion of the ball of a thumb, the important papillary ridges standing out distinctly. He bent again and scrutinised it for a long minute.

  “Not either of the girls’,” he announced at last, with no sign of emotion. “This may be one to you, Mr. Sheringham. Moresby, see that this isn’t disturbed and have a photograph taken of it as soon as possible, will you?”

  Roger looked as demure as he could and said nothing.

  CHAPTER XV

  MR. SHERINGHAM DIVERGES

  THAT evening Roger suffered badly from reaction.

  It seemed inexpressibly tame to remain at home alone, thinking over the events of that momentous day; and yet to go out for mere amusement, to a theatre or a concert, would be sheer anticlimax. He badly wanted to talk over the case with somebody, but had not the face to inflict himself further on Moresby or anybody else at Scotland Yard; especially since, from being something like a joint-partner on equal terms, he had now shrunk to a mere excrescence on the great organisation which had at last taken the affair definitely in hand. Roger rather resented being looked upon as an excrescence.

  He toyed with the idea of a visit to the little creature who had shared Janet’s flat, Moira Carruthers. It was some days now since he had seen her, and after what she had done for him in the early stages of the case he did not wish to appear neglectful of her now that it had passed out of her orbit. Then he remembered that she would be at the theatre and gave up that idea, not without relief. Was there nobody else with whom he could discuss things, and not have to be too guarded in what he said?

  Of course there was! He jumped out of his chair grabbed the telephone-book and looked up Pleydell’s number.

  Luckily Pleydell was at home. To Roger’s carefully worded query as to whether he would care to come round to the Albany and talk over a matter of some importance which had arisen since they lunched together, Pleydell replied with some emphasis in the affirmative, adding that he would be round within twenty minutes. Roger understood the emphasis. The evening papers had been discreet, but one and all they had reported the new tragedy, though Scotland Yard’s interest in it had not, of course, been mentioned.

  Roger filled in the time till Pleydell’s arrival by adding the developments of the day to the rough diary he had been keeping of the case, with everything that had been learned from the porter and Miss Deeping in such detail as there was. He also chronicled the discovery of one finger-print, and by whom.

  Pleydell arrived punctually during the twentieth minute and at once began to question Roger as to the latest development. His perturbation, for so imperturbable a man, was obvious. He repeated his threats to call in the best private detectives that money could hire; he even talked of sending over to America for some of Pinkerton’s men, reputed to be the best private detectives in the world. The account of the porter’s evidence and the finding of the finger-print (on which he congratulated Roger with a warmth which was in strong contrast with Superintendent Green’s official coolness) did something to soothe him, and Roger set himself to do the rest.

  “Don’t spoil the broth, Pleydell!” he urged. “You promised you’d do nothing if I kept you in touch, and I’m doing that. We’ll get to the bottom of it all right. Why, Moresby told me straight out that he’s got a pretty shrewd notion already about the identity of the finger-print maker.”

  “He has?” Pleydell said eagerly, pausing in the restless perambulations he was making up and down the room. “Who does he think it is?”

  “Well, he wouldn’t actually tell me the name,” Roger said, not without a little embarrassment. It is difficult, after pointing out that you are hand-in-glove with Scotland Yard, to have to explain that the hand is not always in the glove. “Wouldn’t commit himself till he’d verified it, or some nonsense. I believe the Superintendent must have been at him about me. It’s quite evident that he doesn’t like the idea of me being mixed up officially with Scotland Yard.” Roger managed to convey the idea that there existed a good deal of jealousy at Scotland Yard of gifted amateurs.

  “But he thinks he knows, eh?” said Pleydell, disregarding the gifted amateurs and the professional jealousy they have to suffer. “Well, that’s something. Good God, Sheringham, I wish they’d hurry up and get this man. I shan’t have any peace till they do. This wretched girl this afternoon—I couldn’t help feeling when I read about it in the paper that somehow I was responsible. I ought to have prevented it somehow; I knew this brute was loose and I hadn’t managed to catch him.”

  Roger nodded. “I know. That’s exactly how I felt. It’s absurd, of course, but it seemed to me horribly callous to think that you and I must just have been tackling our jam omelettes when the poor girl was being killed. I remember saying as much to the Assistant Commissioner.” Roger was not actually hinting that though unlettered Superintendents might be cool with him, Assistant Commissioners fed eagerly out of his hand; but the words rolled smoothly off his tongue.

  “The Assistant Commissioner? Oh, Sir Paul Graham, yes; he’s the Assistant Commissoner now, isn’t he? I know him slightly.”

  “Yes, he said he’d met you. Now look here, Pleydell,” Roger said firmly, “stop pacing up and down like a lion in a cage, help yourself to a whisky and soda, and sit down here by the fire. I want to talk to you, and I can’t while you’re rampaging up and down.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “This case, of course. I always have to talk about these things to somebody,” Roger said frankly. “It’s a dreadful nuisance for my victims, of course, but it helps me a lot; it clarifies what ideas I may have as no amount of silent thinking can do.”

  “Well, you can have the use of my vile body for your talking-stool till the small hours,” Pleydell said, with a faint smile, “and the more you talk, the better I’ll be pleased. I’ll help myself to that whisky and soda and sit down at once, to show I’m in earnest.” He did so.

  Roger refilled his pipe and lit it with some deliberation. He wanted to collect his ideas.

  “This is what I want to get off my chest,” he began, “and you can see why the police, not excepting my excellent friend Chief Inspector Moresby, can’t qualify for the role of confidant in this particular matter. I’ve got a feeling in my bones that Scotland Yard’s working on the wrong lines!”

  “You have?” said Pleydell, with the interest proper to a Watson.

  “Yes. I’ve been saying so all the time about that notepaper clue they’ve been pinning their faith to, and I feel it in this new case just as strongly. In my opinion this is not the kind of crime that’s going to be solved by the ordinary police methods of this country. It has a psychological basis which, I’m quite convinced, can only be uncovered by the application of imaginative psychological methods.”

  “I’m inclined to agree with you there,” said Pleydell.

  Roger thought for a moment. “Take this finger-print, for instance. What’s the good even of a finger-print if they can’t find the finger that fits it? There’ll be no specimen of that print in their records, as there probably would be if it was a case of burglary that we were considering. The only use of it is to check their conclusions when they’ve found their man; it isn’t going to help them to find him. And the porter’s description of the fellow with the blue overcoat and the wash-leather gloves might apply to several thousand young men in London alone. No, the more I think of it, the more sure I am that this latest crime isn’t going to help us in the least towards finding our man. Which means that the police will be thrown back more or less into the state they were before, and will go on concentrating on that notepaper clue for their results. And they may get them that way, of cour
se,” Roger was ready to admit, “but I very much doubt it.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, if that’s the case, it seems to me that Scotland Yard and I are going to diverge henceforward in our lines of investigation. I don’t consider myself bound to follow them in the least. If I think they’re on the wrong track, I shall break off it into one of my own making.”

  “Quite right.”

  “And,” said Roger, “I want you to help me.” He shot a glance at the other.

  “With pleasure,” Pleydell said quietly. “It’s very good of you, and I welcome the opportunity. You know I’m as anxious as you to lay this devil by the heels. And,” he added soberly, “I’ve a good deal more personal interest in doing so.”

  Roger nodded. This had not been an impulsive offer. He had considered its feasibility before ever telephoning to Pleydell. What was in his mind was that no harm could possibly come of its acceptance (he never doubted that it would be accepted) and the probabilities were that it would lead to a great deal of good. Pleydell was a very clever man, and no doubt a shrewd judge of the human animal, and his co-operation could not fail to be helpful on these counts alone. But above that, by being drawn into the official net he would be effectually prevented from acting as a possibly disturbing free-lance; and Roger was very anxious that a superfluity of cooks should not spoil this particular broth.

  “It’s this way, too,” he added, smoking thoughtfully “The Scotland Yard machine is excellent as a criminal-hunting organisation; none better. But it’s just this very kind of case that puts grit in its bearings. The ordinary murderer, you see, isn’t a criminal at all in one sense; I mean, he very often hasn’t got a criminal mind. I’m not referring to the burglar who loses his head when trapped and shoots in panic; I just mean the usual, unpremeditating murderer—for of course the great majority of murders are unpremeditated.”

  “So I suppose,” Pleydell murmured.

  “Well, if you examine the records of successfully detected murders in this country,” Roger continued, now firmly mounted on his hobbyhorse, “you will see that the criminal already known to the police who turns murderer, is nearly always caught; once he gets on the records of Scotland Yard his chances of getting away with a murder are almost nil. In murders of that type our detective service probably has a better record than any other. The thoroughness of the entries are astonishing; not merely the physical characteristics but the psychological idiosyncrasies as well—Bill Jones likes a bit of raspberry jam out of the larder when he’s finished a burglary;Alf Smith always enters a house through a trap-door in the roof; Joe Robinson kisses the maidservant whom he’s held up with his revolver; that sort of thing. No wonder the criminal-murderer leaves half a dozen characteristic signs, quite apart from definite clues, by which the police can tell his identity at once.”

  “Really?” said Pleydell, much interested. “I had no idea the records were as thorough as that.”

  “Yes,” said Roger, “but when the police have to deal with the other sort of murderer, the man about whom they know nothing in advance, you’ll find that, unless he’s left some very definite clue or there crops up some quite direct evidence, he simply isn’t caught. That he nearly always is caught, by the way, simply means that he nearly always does leave such a clue or such evidence.”

  “I suppose the average murderer is a bit of a fool,” nodded Pleydell. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be a murderer at all.”

  “Quite so. In a word, if you examine the unsolved murder mysteries of the last fifty years, you’ll find they are all in this last category; there was no direct evidence and no clue, or the one clue on which the police seized didn’t lead to anything. Well, I ask you—if that notepaper clue doesn’t turn up trumps, doesn’t this case fall quite definitely into this category?”

  “I should say so, decidedly.”

  “Exactly. And the police are going to fall to the ground over it. In a word, if we want this man caught we’ve got to catch him ourselves.” Having, reached his climax Roger relighted his pipe, which had gone out during this harangue, and proceeded to smoke in impressive silence.

  They sat looking into the fire for a few minutes.

  “I’m glad you’ve invited my co-operation, Sheringham,” Pleydell observed at last, “because I’ve got an idea which I think is really worth considering. I wouldn’t have bothered you with it otherwise; I should probably have followed it up myself. But now I’d like to hear what you think about it, though most probably there’s nothing in it at all.”

  “I’d very much like to hear it,” said Roger, with truth; any idea of Pleydell’s was bound to be worth consideration.

  “Well,” Pleydell said slowly, “has it ever occurred to you that we might get at this man through his profession? If we could narrow him down to a doctor, for instance, and then look up the visitors’ lists to the Riviera last February and pick out the doctors, we should have gone a very long way towards identifying our man.”

  “We certainly should,” Roger agreed warmly. “Why, do you mean that you know what he is?”

  “Oh, no; nothing as definite as that. It has only suggested itself to me that he might possibly belong to a certain profession. I wonder if you’ll see it if I put the facts to you in this way. Leaving the woman at Monte Carlo out of it, Unity Ransome was an actress, Dorothy Fielder was an actress, the night-club woman had been on the stage, I gathered; at any rate, she probably mixed with the shadier elements of the profession. Add to this that it seems most likely that the murderer was personally known to his victims—and doesn’t it occur to you what he might have been?”

  “An actor!” Roger cried promptly.

  “Precisely.”

  They smoked again in silence for a minute or two.

  “This,” said Roger, “is interesting.”

  “So I thought,” Pleydell agreed modestly.

  “We must follow this up.”

  “I’m glad you say so. I was going to myself in any case. And as it happens, I’m in rather a good position to do so.”

  “That’s more than I am,” said Roger, thinking of Miss Carruthers, one of his few links with the theatrical world.

  “Yes,” Pleydell explained, “I’m financially interested in one or two productions, and so is my father. I could certainly get any introductions we might want, and possibly some useful inside information as well.”

  “That’s excellent. Well, the first thing to do is to get hold of the list of English visitors on the Riviera. I can get a copy of that from Moresby; but till it comes I don’t see what we can do on these lines.”

  “No, I’m afraid nothing, except perhaps make a few inquiries about the actor friends of these girls.”

  “I’ll mention that to Moresby. The police can do that sort of thing far better than we ever could. Their inquiries cover all the possible ground, you know, and without missing a single person who might have information to give. They’ll begin that in earnest now, I expect. Every single intimate friend of the murdered girls will be examined, and every single person as well whom they happen to mention, and then everyone whom they mention, and so on and so on till something does turn up. The patience of the police is amazing. Moresby tells me that sometimes they examine dozens of people, in a big and particularly difficult case, perhaps even a hundred, before any vital information is elicited; but when they do get hold of a bit they’re on to it like bulldogs.”

  “You make it unpleasantly graphic,” Pleydell said, with a little smile. “I hope I never murder anyone and have the pack of bulldogs on to me.”

  “I’ve often thought that,” Roger concurred. “It must be most disturbing to one’s night’s rest. The description of that man whom the porter saw, by the way, will be in the hands of every station in London and the country by now, I expect, sent out over the telephones, as soon as the Superintendent got back to Scotland Yard. The London railway termini are being watched for him; at every port they’re on the qui vive for him, every policeman on every beat is keeping a
sharp look-out for yellow wash-leather gloves and the rest the hue and cry is in full throat. By Jove, I wouldn’t like to be in that man’s wash-leather gloves.”

  “And you think he’ll be caught?”

  “That’s different. I’m not at all sure about that. If he’s got any sense at all, he won’t be. The description’s too vague; it applies to too many people. Alter one or two details, and you’ve got an entirely different man. No,” said Roger weightily, “I do not think he’ll be caught, on that description. But I wouldn’t like to be in his gloves for all that!”

  “And we’ve got his finger-prints,” Pleydell pointed out, with grim satisfaction, “thanks to you.”

  “That,” Roger agreed, “is perfectly true.”

  They sat on talking into the small hours, but the case remained unadvanced.

  CHAPTER XVI

  ANNE INTERVENES

  INDEED, so far as Roger was concerned, the case remained unadvanced for some days. In response to questions about his researches, Moresby became more and more reticent. From being amused Roger became hurt, from being hurt, angry, and from being angry, resigned, but in none of these states of mind could he induce Moresby to discuss the affair frankly with him as in the early stages. Roger thought he knew the reason, and blamed Superintendent Green with a good deal of bitterness. The divergence he had anticipated became a fact.

  He was allowed to take a copy of the list of English visitors staying on the Riviera at the crucial date, however, when in due course this arrived, and he handed it over to Pleydell, who undertook to have the actors on it picked out by a competent authority. The latter, informed him moreover, that no friends of Lady Ursula seemed to figure in it who were not already on his own lists. Roger was also allowed to see the report from the French police on the Monte Carlo death, though he was subtly given to understand that this was no longer a right so much as a favour. In any case it did not help him in the least. The French police had had no doubt at the time of its being suicide, and apparently they thought so still; all the facts pointed to suicide, and they could see no cause to suspect anything else.