The chief inspector regarded him genially. “Well, sir, just you take a walk outside these screens for a minute. Bear round to the left, and have a look at the fourth table past the second pillar.”
Mr. Chitterwick looked at him for a moment and then went. He was back in a couple of minutes.
“God bless my soul!” he ejaculated in stifled tones.
“See anyone you know?” queried Moresby.
Mr. Chitterwick could only nod.
“Funny blokes, these murderers,” commented the chief inspector tolerantly.
III
OBSERVATIONS OF A CRIMINOLOGIST
The next half-hour passed to Mr. Chitterwick in a species of daze, occupied chiefly in getting out of other people’s way. The little space inside the screens seemed to be crowded with men.
There was a police photographer, taking pictures of the body; there was the fingerprint expert examining everything, including the phial, within reach of the old lady, and packing various articles away with infinite care for closer scrutiny at Scotland Yard—taking the fingerprints too of the old lady herself in a perfectly efficient and cold-blooded way, which Mr. Chitterwick thought a particularly gruesome proceeding; there was Moresby, going through the contents of her handbag and issuing orders from time to time, such as that a plain-clothes officer should put the red-haired man in the lounge under close observation and follow him if he left; there were Detective-Inspector Parker and one or two of his subordinates, busy under Moresby’s direction with the usual routine work; and finally there was Mr. Chitterwick himself, bumped and jostled and eternally, it appeared, in the way of people who had real work to do and very conscious that nobody loved him. But he stayed on, intensely interested if bewildered, knowing very well that this was the chance of a lifetime for a hitherto academic criminologist, and that never again would he be likely to see Scotland Yard actually at work on a murder case.
During this half-hour certain facts impressed themselves, in a disjointed way, on Mr. Chitterwick’s mind. Moresby, he knew, had found a minute to go to the telephone and make a hasty preliminary report to the assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, with the result that he was put in official charge of the case. Then there was a letter in the dead woman’s handbag which seemed to interest Moresby more than a little, causing him to rub his chin with satisfaction, and Mr. Chitterwick caught glimpses, through the bustling hurly-burly, of extracts from it being copied into the chief inspector’s big black notebook. The fingerprint man, too, had seemed to regard the phial, after Moresby had helped him extract it with infinite care from the dead woman’s loose clasp, with a sober pleasure which he shared in a short undertone or two with the chief inspector; something clearly looked hopeful.
It was not until the full half-hour had elapsed that anyone took notice of Mr. Chitterwick beyond Moresby’s occasional preoccupied nods, and then it was the district inspector. Mr. Chitterwick, bursting with questions, welcomed him eagerly.
Parker was a tall, spare man with a clipped moustache and looked exactly like an ex-sergeant of a line regiment. He accosted Mr. Chitterwick with the conscious kindliness of the expert toward the visiting ignoramus. “Well, sir, I daresay this all seems very strange to you?”
This was hardly less than the truth, but Mr. Chitterwick had other aspects of the affair to discuss than its strangeness. “Tell me,” he asked artlessly, “has any further evidence come to light?”
“Oh, I daresay we’ll find something or other,” Parker answered guardedly. “Mr. Moresby, he’s a rare hand at that.”
“Is there anything of importance connected with the phial?” pursued Mr. Chitterwick.
But Parker was evidently a reticent man concerning phials. Concerning everything else in the way of discoveries, too, Mr. Chitterwick soon realized, even letters in handbags. In fact, it very quickly became evident that Parker’s object in seeking him out was not to impart information, but to speak an encouraging word or two to an insignificant object who had been elevated by circumstances into a position of considerable importance; much as a perfectly ordinary black kitten, at which no one would look twice, is able to fill half the picture pages and three-quarters of the news columns of our obliging popular Press if it happens to have had a blue ribbon tied round its neck and been worn in the Magnifico restaurant on her left shoulder instead of a fur by a pretty young actress hopeful of a little free publicity. In fact, Mr. Chitterwick gathered that he was now regarded by the police rather as a prize pet who would stand up in the witness-box for them and perform his tricks in an altogether charming and gratifying manner.
“In fact, sir,” handsomely concluded Parker his kind word or two, “We Owe a Great Deal to you, I’m sure.”
Mr. Chitterwick hesitated. To say “Oh, that’s all right,” would strike quite the wrong note; to say: “I only did my duty,” would be undeniably pompous. He evaded the problem by smiling in the gratified way of a prize pet that has been duly patted.
“You’ve no doubt about that being the party in question, I suppose?” pursued Parker, testing the pet’s capabilities, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder roughly in the direction of the second pillar to the left.
The pet had no doubts.
“That’s good, that’s good.” Parker administered two more pats.
“Why—why do you imagine he’s there?” Mr. Chitterwick ventured to ask. “I should have thought——”
“We’ve got a pretty good idea why he’s there,” said Parker darkly, but did not explain the pretty good idea.
Moresby, who strolled up at that moment, was more communicative. “If he’s the person we think he is, there’s a letter from him in the lady’s handbag acknowledging an appointment with her here at half-past three,” he explained. “He knew that letter’d turn up, so along he comes at half-past three, as innocent as you like.”
“Oh, I see,” said Mr. Chitterwick, grateful for the information. “And of course nobody was to know that—that——”
“That he turned up at half-past two first,” Parker amplified kindly, seeing that information was in order. “You’ve got it, sir.” He registered gentle approval of the pet’s intelligence.
“He must be a wonderful actor, to trust himself to such a situation,” said Mr. Chitterwick, more than doubtful whether any acting could rise to such an occasion.
“Well, we’re going to give him a chance of showing what his acting’s like,” said Moresby, with the utmost cheerfulness. Mr. Chitterwick gathered that the situation rather appealed to Moresby, as indeed it did.
“You’re—you’re going to arrest him at once?”
“Good gracious me, no, sir,” the chief inspector exclaimed, and Parker looked pained at his pet’s foolishness. “Why, we don’t even know who he is yet.”
“No, of course; of course,” muttered Mr. Chitterwick, confused, and made a mental memorandum that you must always know who a person is before arresting him. “Then how——?”
“Why, the name of the man making the appointment—or agreeing to the appointment, more correctly (he’s the old lady’s nephew, it seems), is Lynn. His Christian name, that is. At least, that’s all the letter’s signed: ‘Yours affectionately, Lynn.’ What his surname may be we can’t say for certain. But the old lady’s name is Sinclair—Miss Sinclair. So we can back an even chance and plumb for ‘Lynn Sinclair.’ Anyhow, that’s the name one of those page boys is crying round this place at this very minute. Hear him?”
Mr. Chitterwick listened. Faintly above the hum and clatter rose a shrill, moaning yowl, the cry of a page boy in search of a client. “Mist’ Lynn Sincler, pleece! Mist’ Lynn Sincl’, pleece!”
“You’re going to—to question him, Chief Inspector?” Mr. Chitterwick was correctly impressed.
“We’re going to break the sad news to him,” amended the chief inspector, with a quite uncalled-for wink. “So I’m afraid I must ask you to go out of her
e now, sir. You’ll have to pick him out of the identification parade later on, you see, and it’d look bad if it came out that you’d been present when we were interviewing him here. His solicitor could make a lot of trouble over that.”
“Yes, of course; I quite see that.” But Mr. Chitterwick was disappointed, all the same. He swept a wistful eye over the little enclosure. The various experts had now departed, and their underlings. Only Moresby, Parker, and himself remained. And he would have liked to hear the interview in progress.
“But, of course, sir,” twinkled Moresby, “if you took a chair into that space we’ve had cleared round the screens and sat with your ear right up against them, as you might say, or even found a little chink to look through and told anyone who tried to stop you that you’re with Chief Inspector Moresby—why, I don’t see that anyone could very well say you’re not, could they?”
“Couldn’t they?” beamed Mr. Chitterwick. “Really, Chief Inspector, that’s very . . . I shall take advantage of your . . . Indeed, thank you very much.” And Mr. Chitterwick, twittering gratitude, bustled himself out of the little enclosure and boldly sat down inside the roped-off space round it. It is perhaps worth remarking that though this space was guarded by no less than four of the Piccadilly Palace’s staff, besides a plain-clothes man, with the strictest injunctions to let nobody inside, and of these only the last knew that Mr. Chitterwick was there under Moresby’s wing or had seen him come out of the enclosure, yet such was the air of confidence with which Mr. Chitterwick stepped over the ropes that none of the four thought of remonstrating with him. Which points so many morals, and might be the source of so many aphorisms, that the reader may here save three or four pages by taking them all as pointed and as coined.
The enclosure backed upon the pillar in front of which the old lady had been seated (and for that matter, still was). Mr. Chitterwick was therefore able, by ensconcing himself in its lee, to remain sheltered from most of the lounge’s clientele while conducting his eavesdropping experiment, and those who could have seen him had they wished, very properly took no notice of him at all. He applied his ear as close as he decently could to the small gap between two screens and waited.
Mr. Chitterwick’s feelings at this stage might repay a cursory scrutiny. He was still horrified, of course, by the terrible and lonely death, and still more at the thought of having himself witnessed its actual occurrence, and yet more still at the idea that he had witnessed also that death being dealt out and the very hand as it dealt it; and this threefold horror was quite enough to swamp his normal pity for a criminal with the law’s noose poised ready for his neck; as a cold-blooded, utterly heartless murderer he felt that the red-haired man deserved nothing less than hanging, and was perfectly ready (at least, whenever he thought of that pathetic figure lolling so unnaturally in her green wicker chair) to do his own share toward bringing about that conclusion. But over and above everything else—his horror, his pity for the victim, the shock to himself—was a great excitement.
Mr. Chitterwick, to put it frankly, was beside himself with excitement as he had not been since the day when, at the age of seven, his parents had taken him to his first circus. Not since then had he experienced this breathless, sick emptiness that felt as if it might turn at any moment into sheer nervous nausea, this wild drumming of the heart, this inability to hold his hands in any other way except with fingertips pressed tightly into hot, moist palms.
He, Ambrose Chitterwick, whose devotion to criminology had been his ruling hobby ever since his first visit to the Chamber of Horrors (just two years after the circus); who knew the names, dates, stories, psychology, and almost the number of their teeth, certainly the colour of their eyes, of every murderer of even minor importance since Alice Arden of Faversham in 1551; to whom murderers were as pearls to women and women to men; who collected murderers as lesser souls collect moths, sticking his psychological pins through their inmost recesses and spreading them out in all their black beauty on card indexes and cross files—he, Ambrose Chitterwick, no less, was actually himself concerned—concerned? the very pit and pivot! —of as bizarre and absorbing a murder as any he had ever pored over in academic seclusion.
No wonder Mr. Chitterwick was excited.
Fortunately for his nervous system he had not long to wait. The sound of muffled voices reached his ears within a few minutes, among which he could distinguish the hearty tones of Moresby, but not his words. Desperate with fear that he might miss something vital Mr. Chitterwick shamelessly edged the two screens still farther apart, so that he could both hear and see.
In the opening to the enclosure Moresby was standing, faced by a superior member of the hotel staff, and even over the former’s burly height Mr. Chitterwick could see the top of a red head; a little extra thrill went through him at the sight. Then Moresby shifted his position slightly to address the red head, and Mr. Chitterwick could hear what he said.
“You are Mr. Lynn Sinclair, sir?”
“That is my name.”
Mr. Chitterwick could not see the red-haired man’s face, but his somewhat stiff tones expressed nothing but a normal surprise.
“You came here to meet your aunt, Miss Sinclair, of Earlshaze, Dorset?” Mr. Chitterwick was not so absorbed that a little flutter of congratulation did not shake him for a moment for having diagnosed so correctly the relations of the pair as they sat over their coffee.
“I did, yes.” Again the red-haired man’s voice indicated only surprise, mingled perhaps with a little impatient resentment. Evidently he was not accustomed to having his comings and goings questioned by anyone.
Moresby spoke with quite unctuous sympathy. “Then I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you, sir.” Mr. Chitterwick reflected that if the red-haired man could act, so certainly could Moresby.
And there was no doubt that the red-haired man could act. Moresby had stepped back a little, to shield the body from the other’s gaze, so that Mr. Chitterwick was now looking once more directly at the red-haired man’s face; and of apprehension, or anything like that, he could not see the faintest sign, however hard he looked.
“Bad news?” he repeated, in tones of nothing but bewilderment. “I don’t understand. Who are you?”
“I’m a police officer, sir,” Moresby said glibly, “and I regret to have to tell you that you must prepare yourself for a shock. A very great shock. Your aunt passed away suddenly, in here, not an hour ago.”
“You mean—she’s dead?”
Mr. Chitterwick sighed with admiration. Sinclair the red-haired man, might be an abominable villain, but so far as acting went he was superb, and Mr. Chitterwick could recognize artistry when he saw it. Not a hint of a tone was wrong, not a hundredth of an inch of expression. Sinclair presented a perfect picture, of a large man learning of the death of a favourite aunt.
“I’m sorry to say she is, sir.”
Moresby moved aside with a sudden movement, so that Sinclair was confronted, with brutal unexpectedness, with the spectacle of the old lady. He started slightly, and Mr. Chitterwick nodded breathless approval; an innocent man would start; only a guilty one, with knowledge of what Moresby had been shielding, would have received no shock. The man must have studied every tiny detail in advance.
“Good Lord!” he ejaculated now. “How awful! Was it—very sudden?”
“Very sudden, sir,” Moresby agreed drily.
Sinclair remained silent for a moment, gazing at the body. “Then she must have had a dicky heart after all,” he muttered, almost to himself. “Well, I suppose we’d better——” He broke off and looked hard at Moresby. “You said you were a police officer. Do you mean attached for duty at the hotel?”
“No, sir,” Moresby answered benevolently. “I’m from the Criminal Investigation Department, at Scotland Yard.” In spite of his benevolence Moresby spoke with what seemed to Mr. Chitterwick a world of meaning.
But the red-haired m
an did not appear in the least taken aback, only annoyed. He spoke curtly. “Then may I ask what you are doing here? What has my aunt’s death got to do with Scotland Yard?”
Moresby resumed his unctuous tone. “I told you to prepare yourself for a shock, sir. The management here reported your aunt’s death to us following the doctor’s examination. I’m sorry to have to tell you, sir, that it seems as if your aunt had done away with herself.”
Sinclair’s reaction to this piece of artfulness was to Mr. Chitterwick, at any rate, unexpected. “Killed herself?” he positively snorted. “Nonsense! Last person in the world to do such a thing.”
From his expression one gathered that Moresby’s confidence in the suicide theory had been severely shaken by the red-haired man’s words. “Is that so, sir!” he said, rubbing his chin. “Well, but things certainly look that way.”
“How do you mean?”
“You see, she died of poisoning. Prussic-acid poisoning, to be exact.”
This time Sinclair gave full rein to his powers. In fact Mr. Chitterwick even thought he overdid it a trifle. Amazement, incredulity, horror, anger, a dozen emotions chased each other across his face. “P-prussic acid?” he stammered at last. “Good heavens, you can’t mean——”
“The doctor found prussic acid in the dregs of her coffee,” Moresby said in an expressionless voice, “and there was a phial in her hand.”
There was silence for an instant. A silence, Mr. Chitterwick felt, that marked a more pregnant moment than any yet; a silence bursting with caution and cunning on one side and stern determination on the other. Mr. Chitterwick could hardly breathe, and he felt his nausea rising in him like a spring tide.
The two protagonists faced each other. Then the red-haired man spoke. “Good Lord!” he said in a low voice. “Then it looks as if she must have done it.”
Mr. Chitterwick was faintly disappointed. He thought that a trifle obvious.
The two went on to discuss arrangements. Sinclair wished to have the body removed at once to his flat in Queen Anne’s Gate; Moresby pointed out that an inquest would have to be held and suggested the mortuary. Sinclair was strongly opposed to the mortuary; Moresby genially but officially insisted. The discussion proceeded in the most ordinary way.
The Piccadilly Murder Page 4