The Piccadilly Murder

by Anthony Berkeley

  Mr. Chitterwick let out a deep breath and found himself at leisure, yet without missing a word of the conversation, to summarize his impressions. First with regard to the murderer’s physical appearance. Now that he was seeing him so much closer Mr. Chitterwick had to modify a few of his earlier ideas. For instance the man was not nearly so young as he had thought. More like thirty-five than twenty-five, he fancied; there was a suspicion of grey in the close-cropped red curls above the temples. The likeness to his aunt was just as strong as he had gathered, and the closer view brought out other points of resemblance besides the firm, aquiline nose. His largeness was no less than Mr. Chitterwick’s impression had been; more, if anything. Lastly, he seemed now to be bearing himself with more dignity (Looks more like a gentleman, in fact, thought Mr. Chitterwick, apologizing to himself for the phrase) than on the former occasion; his manner then toward his aunt had been casual and offhand, that toward Mr. Chitterwick downright rude. But at that time (meditated Mr. Chitterwick) he would have been feeling acutely nervous; now every atom of his being is concentrated on playing his part.

  And as for the way in which he was continuing to play his part Mr. Chitterwick, properly detest the fellow as he might, could feel nothing but admiration. Except perhaps for that one rather unsubtle remark he had not made a single false step; given nothing away at all. Mr. Chitterwick could not but realize, in spite of his appreciation of Scotland Yard, that but for his own evidence the police would have had an almost impossible task to bring the murder home to its executant. And that such evidence existed Sinclair, of course, had no idea.

  In the meantime, under cover of making the necessary arrangements, Moresby (as Mr. Chitterwick realized with interest) had been delicately pumping his man. One or two quite interesting facts had been dredged to the surface. The dead woman was evidently a person of some consequence. Sinclair spoke of Earlshaze as if it were a considerable property. He himself was her nearest relative and also, he believed (he mentioned it quite casually in answer to a direct question from Moresby, but not casually enough to prevent Mr. Chitterwick from jumping a little), his aunt’s sole heir.

  She had been staying, as she always did in London, at Aldridge’s, with her companion. Mr. Chitterwick knew Aldridge’s. Apart from anything else, the fact that Miss Sinclair had been staying there stamped her as a Personage. Nobody but Personages were allowed to stay at Aldridge’s, though the proprietor did let in now and then one or two of the more respectable foreign royal families. It was a small, dingy hotel situated just inside the borders of Mayfair and probably the least up to date and the most uncomfortable one within a mile radius. But it was simply terribly exclusive, and the air there cost several pounds an hour to breathe.

  Why his aunt had wanted to see him Major Sinclair (it had turned out by now that he had been in a Guards regiment during the war and had stayed on for some years afterward, but sent in his papers on reaching his majority) had not the faintest idea, nor why in the Piccadilly Palace lounge, of all strange places. She had written to him, however, suggesting the appointment, or rather, definitely making it, for she was an autocratic woman, and he had written back his agreement. He professed himself completely puzzled.

  “I see, sir,” said Moresby. “Well, the first thing to do is to arrange for the body to be moved. And then, perhaps, you’d like to come along with me to the Yard and put all this information into an official statement.”

  “Want me to make a statement?” said Major Sinclair. “All right; I don’t mind, if it’s any use to you. But I thought you only wanted statements from suspected murderers.” Mr. Chitterwick caught his breath at such sheer daring.

  “Oh, in a difficult case like this it sometimes helps,” said Moresby smoothly.

  “Very well. I suppose there must be an inquest, as you say, and a lot of damned publicity. Poor old lady, how she would have hated it. We were never terribly good friends, I’m afraid; both of us got too much of the family temper, as well as the family nose, for that; but I must say I’m deuced sorry to think of her going out like this. Wonder what the devil the poor old thing had on her conscience.” Again Mr. Chitterwick caught his breath.

  “Ah, well, we’ve all got things on our consciences, no doubt,” said Moresby sententiously. “Now, sir, if you’ll go along to the manager’s office and introduce yourself I’ll join you there in a minute and we’ll see what can be done toward getting her away.”

  “She really must go to the mortuary, must she? I don’t want to upset your routine, but it does seem a bit tough on her.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but she must,” said Moresby with finality, and ushered the other out of the enclosure. “Take charge, Parker,” he added, when the Major had disappeared. “I’ll be back soon.”

  Parker, who had preserved a masterly taciturnity during the whole interview, kept things up by nodding in silence.

  Moresby waited a moment, then strolled out and jerked his head toward Mr. Chitterwick. That gentleman bounded up from his seat and almost leapt the rope in his eagerness.

  “You heard all that, sir?”

  “I did indeed. God bless my soul, Chief Inspector, that man is . . . I simply could never have imagined that . . .”

  The chief inspector chuckled gently. “Thought he was going to get the old girl all to himself at his flat, did he? Monkey about with her just as he liked, I suppose? No, I don’t trust that gentleman, and that’s a fact. The sooner we’ve got him under lock and key the better.”

  “He doesn’t—suspect?”

  “That we’ve got a star witness up our sleeves, if you’ll pardon my putting it like that, sir? Not he! Just like any other murderer I’ve ever come across, major or no major. Cocksure. Hasn’t a doubt he’s got away with it. Well, we’ll see.”

  “But you’ve let him go now, haven’t you?” Mr. Chitterwick was evidently a little dubious.

  “With two of my men on his tail,” the chief inspector reassured him. “But, bless you, sir, he won’t go anywhere but to the manager’s office. He’s too fly for that. Well, I must go along and keep an eye on him. Now, sir, I don’t want you to get out of touch with me. You’re on the telephone at home, I suppose?”

  “Well, no, I’m afraid I’m not,” apologized Mr. Chitterwick. He was really apologizing for his aunt, who did not like telephones, but he did not add that.

  “Oh, well, then, if you’d go along to your club——”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t got a club,” apologized Mr. Chitterwick, again for his aunt.

  “Humph!” Moresby scratched his head. “Well, I’ll tell you what. Come along to Scotland Yard at six-thirty, will you, sir? Ask for me.”

  “Very well,” Mr. Chitterwick beamed. “Is that for the—the——?”

  “The identification parade; that’s right, sir. And I’ll arrest him as soon as you’ve picked him out. At six-thirty, then. Thank you, sir.” And Moresby was gone.

  Mr. Chitterwick walked slowly out of the lounge, meditating. The responsibility, the first thought of which had weighed on him so heavily, now sat with conscious dignity on his shoulders. Mr. Chitterwick could not but be aware that he was now a very important man indeed. He, and practically speaking he alone, was going to put a rope round the neck of a man who unmistakably and most thoroughly deserved it, and he could not feel sorry that he was. The case, with such a distinguished victim, was bound to attract considerable attention. His words in the witness box would be quoted in every newspaper in the country. Probably a good many would want to publish his photograph as well. There would certainly be reporters. . . . Yes, Mr. Chitterwick, in spite of his modesty, could not blink the fact that since half-past two that afternoon he had become—well, really one might say one of the most important men in the country.

  He glanced at the clock in the vestibule. The time was twenty minutes past four.

  One of the most important men in the country started violently and quickened hi
s pace almost to a run. He had undertaken to be back in Chiswick with the curtain patterns for his aunt by half-past three.

  IV

  IDENTIFICATION PARADE

  The house of Mr. Chitterwick’s aunt in Chiswick was an anachronism (for that matter, so was the aunt). It was early Jacobean, red brick, gables, and tiles, and had been built as the dower house of the estate on which it then stood. The estate had been Chitterwick property for a couple of centuries before the dower house was built. In the way of estates it had been gradually whittled down, successive Chitterwicks falling to enticing offers from speculative Jacobean builders onward, until now only the dower house, with its half-dozen acres of grounds, remained. But the grounds were spacious for London and quite big enough to hide from the house the fact that Chitterwick Chiswick, with its single village street, was no more; and its populous cinema-ridden, villa-infested successor was shut off by an opaque blanket of trees. Even the joyous clanging of trams was not heard. And the Chitterwicks, a prudent race, not having gambled or even frittered away the good gold paid them by the various generations of speculative builders, were still able to maintain what was left to them of their estate in more than decent comfort, even after the L.C.C. and the Government had taken what they wanted first.

  When one says “the Chitterwicks” what one means is “the Chitterwick”—Miss Chitterwick, except for her nephew the last bearer of the name. Miss Chitterwick was now seventy-nine, and there seemed no reason why she should not one day be a hundred. The Chitterwick property was hers solely, and she was in every sense of the word an aunt.

  Mr. Chitterwick entered the big lounge hall, cool and oak panelled, with the June sun on the lawns outside showing through the diamond-paned windows, conscious of guilt, but at the same time of an excuse which even his aunt could not refuse to accept. She would be sitting, he knew, in the little room on the right which she called her study, but which Mr. Chitterwick himself preferred to think of as the morning room. Except when she was instructing the gardener how to garden, Miss Chitterwick spent most of her time in this room, surrounded by her collections of dried mosses, minerals and polished stones, beetles and old periodicals, and for company (on the rare occasions when her nephew was absent) a large cage in the window containing four canaries. The keynote of the room was faded chintz, and its prevailing smell dusty and rather damp books.

  Miss Chitterwick was arranging a new specimen in her hortus siccus which had arrived by the afternoon’s post (she exchanged items from her collection with other mossy enthusiasts all over the world) and did not look up as her nephew entered the room. As if still unaware of his presence, she kept her white cap with its mauve satin ribbons bent closely over her work, her spectacles balanced as always on the very end of her nose. Mr. Chitterwick knew that she was waiting for him to explain himself.

  “I’m afraid I’m rather late, Aunt,” he began, with the extreme brightness of a guilty conscience; “but really, I’ve had the most extraordinary adventure.”

  Miss Chitterwick affected to start, and glanced first toward the cage of canaries as if, considering that she was alone in the room, it must have been one of them that had addressed her. She then, with another start, showed herself aware of the presence of her nephew.

  “Lor’, Ambrose,” she grumbled, “how you made me jump. Creeping in like that without a sound. Enough to give anyone a fit.”

  Now Mr. Chitterwick knew that his aunt had heard him come in, and he knew that she knew he knew; but he recognized the gambit and dutifully made the move expected of him. “I’m sorry I made you jump, Aunt,” said that dutiful nephew, offering himself to be snubbed. “But, I was telling you, I’ve had the most remarkable adventure.”

  “Found it in a swamp in southern Nigeria,” observed Miss Chitterwick darkly, but with incredible scorn. “So he says. I’d have said he found it in a pond on Ealing Common.” For some obscure reason Ealing Common, to most people the most blameless of respectable places, was looked upon by Miss Chitterwick as synonymous with everything that was unmentionably impossible.

  Mr. Chitterwick coughed. In the normal way he would have gone on with his part of Miss Chitterwick’s game, pleading to be allowed to explain and excuse his lateness, while Miss Chitterwick blandly pretended not to know that he was late at all, at the same time starting innumerable hares calculated to defer, head off, or chase away the explanation she was really longing to hear. But the occasion for once was not a normal one, and Mr. Chitterwick threw the game to the winds. “Aunt!” he bubbled over, “I’ve actually seen somebody murdered. Poisoned! Right in front of my eyes.”

  Miss Chitterwick looked him full in the face. “What’ve you done with my spectacle case?”

  “Your—your spectacle case, Aunt?” stammered Mr. Chitterwick, thrown out of his stride.

  “It’s lost,” accused Miss Chitterwick. “Most awkward. I’ve had to carry my spectacles about all day in my hand.” She regarded her nephew with a gloomy frown. “Something always gets lost,” she added, “when you go gallivanting about London.”

  Mr. Chitterwick forbore to point out that matching curtain patterns at the stores was scarcely gallivanting about London, for the Piccadilly Palace, he knew, would require more than a little explaining. Instead he took a fresh grip on himself. “I’m sorry, Aunt,” he said, “but I’m afraid I can’t stop to look for it now. I’ve got to go out again almost at once. I only came back to explain that I probably shan’t be in to dinner. I have to go to Scotland Yard.”

  “Stuff!” observed Miss Chitterwick briefly, and returned with some ostentation to her moss. “Be telling me next you’ve got to go to Ealing Common, I suppose,” she added into her hortus siccus.

  Mr. Chitterwick was a very, very good nephew. He might have walked out of the house there and then, leaving the oldest woman in Chiswick in such a state of raging curiosity that she could have fed her whole hortus siccus to the canaries. Instead, he sat down in a chair and told her, quickly but efficiently, the whole story.

  Miss Chitterwick of course pretended to take not the faintest interest in it; indeed, it was to be gathered that it was doubtful whether she had even heard it, for no sooner had Mr. Chitterwick finished than she reiterated, without comment, her inquiry as to the missing spectacle case; but when Mr. Chitterwick took a lingering and somewhat apologetic leave of her ten minutes later it was with the sense of duty well done and a grateful aunt left behind him—though she would rather have been bitten to death by her own white Persian cat than admit it.

  The trouble about Mr. Chitterwick, so far as his aunt was concerned (and he recognized the justice of it), was that he had not been born a girl. His three sisters, all older than himself, had each in turn acted as unpaid companion, dog’s-body, and whipping post to the old lady until their respective marriages, and after the last of these it had been perfectly clear that, as Miss Chitterwick utterly refused either to have a paid companion or to be left alone, Mr. Chitterwick must step into the vacant place. So, having been brought up in the last generation’s theory of duty toward one’s elder relatives, Mr. Chitterwick had duly stepped. That had been fourteen years ago, when Mr. Chitterwick was a bare thirty years old. It is noteworthy that for thirteen and a half of those fourteen years Mr. Chitterwick had made quite the best companion, dog’s-body, and whipping post of the four; but because he was debarred from assisting at his aunt’s morning and evening toilet, Miss Chitterwick professed to hold that the accident of her nephew’s unfortunate sex had destroyed all chance of happiness, or even moderate comfort, for her declining years.

  This model man reached Moresby’s office at Scotland Yard punctually as Big Ben was striking half-past six.

  Moresby rose to greet him with warmth, and pressed him to a chair. “They’ll be ready for us at the station in a few minutes, Mr. Chitterwick, sir, but I thought I’d like a quiet word here with you first, now we’ve had time to sort things out a bit, so to speak.”

&n
bsp; “Certainly, certainly, of course,” nodded Mr. Chitterwick with great gravity.

  Moresby leaned back in his chair and contemplated Mr. Chitterwick with the air of a paternal sea lion. “I needn’t say again, sir, what a responsible position you’re filling. You know that as well as I do. You realize that all our actions, the actions of the police, the public prosecutor, the attorney general even, all depend entirely on your evidence?”

  “I do,” sighed Mr. Chitterwick. “Only too well.”

  “So I thought I’d just ask you once more, to be quite on the safe side. There’s a lot of talk been going on lately about the police using unfair methods, but you can take it from me, sir, that we never make an arrest in a case of this importance unless we’re completely satisfied that we’ve got the right man. So are you as sure as you’ve ever been of anything that the man we interviewed, Major Sinclair, is the man you saw with the old lady an hour earlier?”

  “Positive,” said Mr. Chitterwick very firmly.

  “I see,” Moresby nodded. “Well, that’s the first point. The other one we decided before, that you certainly did see him put something in the old lady’s coffee cup. I needn’t point out to you, sir,” continued Moresby, proceeding to do so, “the importance of that, either. To put it shortly, it’ll be the whole of our case. The fact that he met her an hour earlier than the appointment he had with her and concealed it afterward may be suspicious, but it isn’t really evidence of guilt. That still left it open for the old lady to commit suicide after he’d left her, if she wanted to.”

  “Of course. But I thought,” said Mr. Chitterwick timidly, “that the way the phial was lying in her hand, and the fact that she was clearly getting ready to go, were fairly conclusive evidence against suicide?”