The Piccadilly Murder

by Anthony Berkeley

  Mr. Chitterwick was in luck. From her lurking place afar the waitress spied him and recognized him as a (technical) friend. Their police-station companionship caused her to do for Mr. Chitterwick what she would never have done for any ordinary patron. She came forth to serve him.

  She even set the seal on her action by accosting him by name. It is only the most favoured of mortals whom a waitress at the Piccadilly Palace will accost at all, let alone by name. “Good afternoon, Mr. Chitterwick,” she said, in sombre, conspirator-like tones. “Can I get you anything?” From her voice one would have gathered that she and Mr. Chitterwick were the principals in the perpetration of a murder instead of in its discovery; the secret understanding between them was so evidently a guilty one.

  Mr. Chitterwick intimated a craving for coffee. The waitress nodded portentously, as if a cup of funereal coffee were the only thing that would adequately meet the occasion, and retired with solemnity to obtain it, regardless of the becks and calls and wreathed smiles that were showered on her from all sides by other thirsty inhabitants of her tables.

  Mr. Chitterwick had taken the opportunity to commit her to memory. Though he had seen her, and even exchanged a word or two with her, in the police station, his state of agitation at that time had been such that he could not have remembered a minute afterward whether her hair was gold, or brown, or bright pea green, while his impression of her at the inquest and before the magistrate was of the vaguest. He had recognized her this time as she approached him, but only just. Now he noted meticulously that she was not very young, thirty-two or three at the least, with a very plain face, pale frizzy hair, a thin mouth, and watery blue eyes.

  With surprising alacrity the coffee arrived, and the waitress lingered. “Come to have another look at the place, Mr. Chitterwick?” she asked with due gravity, oblivious of the clicking fingers all round her.

  “Well, as a matter of fact,” said Mr. Chitterwick, “I came to see you. Is there anywhere—er—fairly private where I could have a word with you?”

  “We ought to have a word together,” approved the waitress, “and that’s a fact. Yes, there’s plenty of places. Will you finish your coffee first, Mr. Chitterwick?”

  “Whatever is most convenient to you,” accommodated Mr. Chitterwick.

  The waitress looked round with distaste at the wielders of the clicking fingers. “I suppose I’d better see to some of these folks first,” she sighed. “Hark at ’em! Never give a girl a minute’s peace, some people wouldn’t. All right, all right,” she added to a white-haired country clergyman who was clicking with particular frenzy. “I’m here, aren’t I? Well, what is it?”

  She departed with dignity, under a shower of orders. Mr. Chitterwick was conscious of a sense of superiority, as a royal favourite among a host of lesser courtiers. In the course of time Mr. Chitterwick drank his coffee, the owners of a selected number of the clicking fingers were appeased, and Mr. Chitterwick followed the waitress out of the lounge, down a number of passages, and into a very large room, which was explained to him as a private dining room not in use for the day where they could rely on being undisturbed. The waitress sank into a chair and kindly waved Mr. Chitterwick into another, remarking that they need not hurry themselves, as one of the other girls had undertaken to keep an eye on her tables for a few minutes; the air of conscious importance with which she spoke was evidently the measure of the rise she had made in her confreres’ estimation through her participation in the tragedy.

  “Thank you, thank you,” murmured Mr. Chitterwick, lowering himself into the chair indicated. “Now, let me see. Oh, yes. What I wanted to ask you was this: do you remember whether Miss Sinclair, the unfortunate lady who was poisoned, or the man with her, ordered anything at all besides the two cups of coffee?”

  “Anything else? No, that they didn’t. Oh, Mr. Chitterwick, it is terrible, isn’t it? To think of that man, sitting there as innocent as you like, and then putting poison in her cup that way. I can tell you I hardly got a wink of sleep for nights after, thinking of it. And how I’m going to get through giving evidence in court—well! Before the magistrates was bad enough, didn’t you think? But—–”

  “You’re quite sure,” persisted Mr. Chitterwick, “that neither of them ordered anything in the nature, let us say, of a liqueur?”

  “Not a thing. I should know quick enough if they had. Deary me, if I could ’a’ known as they sat there what—–”

  “They couldn’t have ordered anything from one of the other waitresses, perhaps?”

  “If any of the other girls had served them, I should have heard about it quick enough, I can tell you, after we knew what’d happened. No, Mr. Chitterwick, you can take it from me they ordered nothing but that coffee he put the poison in. Goodness gracious me, if I’d thought I’d ever be mixed up in . . .” She detailed the thoughts she had not had at considerable length.

  Mr. Chitterwick waited for the first pause to proceed to his next question. “Well, if they didn’t order anything, do you remember whether you cleared anything away from the table besides the man’s coffee cup? Did he give you anything with that?”

  “No, there was just the cup; that’s all. Beckoned me over, he did, and—–”

  “You didn’t remove anything from the table a few minutes later, after he’d gone? An empty medicine bottle, perhaps, or something of that nature? A piece of paper, even?”

  “And why should you think I did?” asked the waitress, with evident suspicion. “I’ve told the police all I did, times enough, and I’m sure I don’t understand why you should think I haven’t.”

  “I don’t think anything of the sort,” said Mr. Chitterwick hastily. “Dear me, no. Quite the reverse. I’m quite certain you told them everything you remembered doing, just as I did myself. All I want to find out is whether perhaps some quite trifling thing, like picking a piece of waste paper off the table or the floor as you passed, may have escaped your memory. I can assure you, I have remembered several trivial incidents of that nature from time to time since I gave my first report to the police, so it would be quite natural—–”

  “Well, what do you want to know for, anyway?” asked the waitress, her suspicion allayed but not altogether dispelled.

  Mr. Chitterwick adopted a confidential air. “Well, you see, it’s like this. Some doubt has arisen whether the poison was actually given to Miss Sinclair in the cup at all.”

  “But it smelt of poison, the doctor said. I heard him, at the inquest.”

  “Oh, yes. But that’s just the point. It isn’t certain that that cup isn’t a clever trap, laid by the murderer to put us off his track and make everyone think Miss Sinclair had committed suicide. It’s a question of—er —the action of prussic acid, you see.”

  “Well, there, now, he’s a cunning one all right,” said the waitress admiringly, now quite mollified. “Upon my word, I could quite believe it, I could. And if they can’t find out what the poison was really in he may get off, after all?”

  “Something like that,” agreed Mr. Chitterwick.

  “Well, I’d tell you if I could, I’m sure, because though I’m not much of a one for bloodthirstiness meself, I do think hanging’s too good for him, and that I will say, major or no major. Poisoning his poor old auntie like that! But there, what’s the use? I never went near the table, not after I’d taken his cup just as he was getting his things together to go out, and that I know as well as I know I’m sitting here. No, Mr. Chitterwick, I’m sorry I can’t help you, but whatever there was on that table was still there when the police and you were there afterward.”

  “And as far as you know, no one else went near the table either, after he’d gone out?”

  “The police asked me that, and I told ’em I couldn’t swear to it, not wishing to take my Bible oath on anything I couldn’t say for positive certain; but I’ll tell you what I told them, and that is that no one went near it while I was look
ing, at any rate.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Chitterwick, and felt thoroughly disappointed. On neither of the two major points he had noted down for inquiry had he been able to obtain any helpful enlightenment at all.

  There was a pause, while he wondered if there were anything else on which he ought to question her.

  “It’s funny you should have mentioned a lickure just now, though,” said the waitress slowly.

  “Eh?” ejaculated Mr. Chitterwick.

  “I said, it’s funny you mentioned that about a lickure, because—well, ’sa matter of fact that has reminded me of something.”

  “It has? What?”

  “Well, reely,” said the waitress coyly, “I don’t know that it’s worth telling you, I’m sure.”

  Mr. Chitterwick’s reply was calculated to leave her in no doubt that it was very well worth telling.

  “Well, then I didn’t say anything about it to the police because for one thing I wouldn’t have thought it worth the while, and for another it’d quite slipped my memory; but I do remember now thinking at one time that I’d seen a lickure glass on her table. It was your mentioning that about a lickure that brought it back to me.”

  “You — you did see a liqueur glass on Miss Sinclair’s table?” clucked Mr. Chitterwick, puce with excitement.

  “Well, that’s what’s so funny. I couldn’t have reely, because when I went to look for it only a minute afterward it wasn’t there, so of course I must have been dreaming. But it was funny, you mentioning that about a lickure, wasn’t it?”

  Disregarding the humour of the situation, Mr. Chitterwick set about obtaining the facts. It was a delicate task, because he was unwilling to let his companion guess the supreme importance he attached to her story. As she evidently thought herself to have suffered from a minor hallucination, it was a good deal better to leave her under that impression; Mr. Chitterwick did not want a report of this interview to reach Scotland Yard just yet. To dig the facts, however, out of the mass of irrelevance and anecdote with which the woman chose to embroider them required all the tact and patience Mr. Chitterwick possessed.

  He succeeded at last, and the story of which he then found himself in possession was as follows:

  Not long after Miss Sinclair’s companion had left her the waitress was passing fairly close to the table to receive an order from somebody a few yards away and, knowing there was still a coffee cup to be collected, glanced casually at the table as she went by to see if the cup were empty, in which case she would have picked it up on her return a moment later; it was not quite empty, so she did not pass the table again on her return journey, as it was some little distance out of her direct way. She vaguely fancied afterward that she had seen a full glass of some white-looking liqueur standing by the cup. On repeating the journey to fulfil the other customer’s order about five minutes later she had taken the short route each way and had therefore not passed close enough to Miss Sinclair’s table to be able to see whether the cup was then empty or not; she had, however, looked at the table itself and noticed that there was no liqueur glass on it, as she had imagined. The incident had then faded from her mind.

  Those were the bare facts. By his cautious questioning Mr. Chitterwick was able to add something to them.

  She was sure it had happened after the man had gone, because he was evidently on the point of leaving when he had beckoned her over to take his own cup, and this must have been a good five minutes afterward, if not more; besides, she had noticed that the old lady was then alone. The presence of the liqueur glass on the table had not really struck her till she was back in the service quarters; she had then realized that it was odd, because she knew that she herself had not taken an order for a liqueur at that particular table, or delivered one; it was not, however, as odd as it might have been, for some of the more good-natured waitresses did occasionally take and fulfil orders at tables not their own if the customer seemed particularly pressing or the correct waitress particularly busy; and lastly her impression that there was a glass on the table had been so vague that she was really not at all surprised to find that there was nothing of the sort and that she must have been completely mistaken.

  Mr. Chitterwick contrived to hide his elation and, as there was nothing more to be learned from this particular witness, proceeded to his next objective.

  “Thank you, thank you. Now there is just one other thing. It is not particularly important if there is any difficulty about it, but I should rather like to have a word with the waitress who called me to the telephone. Do you think that could be managed?”

  “Well, I don’t see why not, I’m sure,” said the waitress amiably (the more so as Mr. Chitterwick was now fumbling, rather diffidently, with his note-case). “Now which one would that be, I wonder. She hasn’t been called as a witness, that I know. I’m the only one here they want for that. Could you describe her, Mr. Chitterwick?

  But that was just what Mr. Chitterwick could not do. So far as her face was concerned his mind was a complete blank. For the first time he realized that one very seldom does look a waiter or waitress directly in the face, unless with the object of learning whom to summon later. He had not the faintest idea what she looked like. The nearest he could get to a description was that, so far as he remembered, she was tall rather than short, perhaps dark rather than fair, and on the whole, he was inclined to think, not bad-looking. As a working description of an unknown young woman, this did not take them very far.

  But that was as far as they did get. The waitress herself went off to make inquiries in the service quarters, but had to return empty-handed; Mr. Chitterwick was posted in a seat near the service door where he could see every girl as she passed in or out, but though one or two struck him as possible, on being interrogated by his assistant these all proved blanks. In the end it was left that the waitress, now fortified with a ten-shilling note, would make further inquiries, not only among the girls still in the hotel’s employment, but also of any who might have left it since that date, and let Mr. Chitterwick know the result.

  As he walked slowly to the entrance lobby Mr. Chitterwick reflected how very unobservant he must be, for he had seen the girl not once only but twice, in the lounge and later in the vestibule, yet on neither occasion had he really taken her in.

  Suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks, and turned quite old-red-brick-coloured.

  “God bless my soul!” breathed Mr. Chitterwick.

  A blinding flash of thought had just struck him. It was impossible, of course. Oh, quite impossible. Out of the question. Ridiculous. Oh, why bother?

  Still . . .

  “Now, what was that number?” murmured Mr. Chitterwick distractedly. “I shall never remember it, of course. Never. Never. How could one hope to? Dear me, dear me.”

  But memory is a peculiar affair. It will refuse to record a perfectly good face with which one has actually talked; it will take careful note of the most unimportant thing in the world, a number casually mentioned in a hurriedly spoken sentence.

  “473!” almost crowed Mr. Chitterwick in triumph. “God bless my soul, 473.” And he dived for the office, on the counter of which squatted the enormous hotel register.

  Flicking feverishly back through the weeks, none saying him nay, Mr. Chitterwick found that which he sought. He grabbed an old envelope from his pocket and made the following note :

  12 June. No. 473. Jas. Hall Ings, 47, Southowram Villas, Ashton-under-Lyne.

  “Dear me,” murmured Mr. Chitterwick distractedly. “Ashton-under-Lyne. What a very long way to have to go. But I must. I must. Er—have you a timetable showing the trains to Ashton-under-Lyne, if you please?” he added with humility to the young woman behind the counter.

  “Time-table, apply to the hall porter,” replied the young woman severely.

  Chastened, Mr. Chitterwick betook himself to the hall porter.

  That evening at dinner, by
way of setting the seal on his new independence, Mr. Chitterwick announced to his aunt his intention for the morrow, simply, and without vouchsafing a single reason. Miss Chitterwick did become a little restive at that, pointing out with justice that people, real People, simply do not go to Ashton-under-Lyne; but a single reference to the Duke quietened her. Mr. Chitterwick’s emancipation was complete.

  It cannot be said that Mr. Chitterwick really enjoyed his visit to Ashton-under-Lyne. To some individuals Ashton-under-Lyne may represent everything that is gayest, most beautiful and most desirable in the human cosmogony; and who shall say that they are wrong? These things are a matter of comparison, and one whose outlook had hitherto been limited to Sheffield might well think all this and more of Ashton. But if there are such persons, Mr. Chitterwick very soon discovered that he was not one of them. To him Ashton-under-Lyne explained in three minutes more of our prevailing industrial discontent than he had been able to understand from other sources in thirty years.

  We will pass briefly over his visit. Catching an early-morning train, he had been decanted just before lunch into the smoky haze that sits upon Ashton and its neighbours like a mute on a hearse. He had eaten that meal at what was reputed to be one of the best hotels in the town, where he was served worse and charged more exorbitantly than ever in his life before; he had then taken a taxi to the depressing street in which Southowram Villas, a long and murky row of semidetached houses, each separated from the sidewalk by a six-foot strip of moribund vegetation, was distressingly situated. Knocking at the door of No. 47 he was informed that Mr. Ings was not at home. Where was he? Probably at the Mission Hall. Where was the Mission Hall? First on the left, second on the right, third on the left, and that brought you out straight opposite it.