by Cyril Hare
“Thank you,” he said when he had done. “I have only a few more questions to ask you. When did you last see Mr. Ballantine?”
“A few days before—before he was found.”
“Can’t you be more definite? What day of the week was it, do you remember?”
“A Tuesday or Wednesday. I think—Wednesday, I’m almost sure.”
“We know that he was alive on the Thursday and Friday of that week. You didn’t see him on either of those days?”
“No—I had seen very little of him all that month.”
“Or hear from him?”
“No.”
“Thank you. Now would you mind telling me, please, what Mr. Du Pine was doing here this morning?”
“Mr. Du Pine?”
“That was what I said.”
“I—I really don’t know.” Her voice faltered. “He came to see my husband. They went away together.”
“I know that,” said Mallett sternly. “But that isn’t an answer to my question. What were they doing together?”
“I don’t know,” she repeated in a despairing tone. “Honestly I don’t. I—I wish I did. He never would tell me.”
“You do know, at any rate, that Captain Eales has been in some sort of connection with Mr. Du Pine, then?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Oh, several months, I should think—since last summer, anyway.”
“You didn’t mention it just now, when I was asking you.” Mallett reminded her.
“No—I’m sorry—I didn’t think it mattered,” was the lame reply.
“But it was some sort of business connection, apparently.”
“Yes—but it’s no good asking me what it was, because I simply can’t tell you. He was always frightfully mysterious about it. It—it rather frightened me.”
“What was there to be frightened about?”
She shuddered slightly. “Du Pine,” she muttered. “There’s something horrible about him. He frightens me badly.”
A few minutes later, Mallett took his leave, his mind stored with fresh facts and impressions, and a slip of typed paper in his pocket. Further questioning had wholly failed to elicit anything more from Mrs. Eales as to the nature of her husband’s business with Du Pine and the way in which she protested her ignorance convinced the detective that she was being sincere. Only one thing he was able to discover—that the business, whatever it was, had involved some kind of travelling abroad, but whither or when the journeys had been made she could not, or would not, say.
Mallett let himself out of the little study into the passage which led to the front door. As he did so, a flutter of skirts round the corner told him that the sulky maidservant had not been altogether so incurious in her mistress’s affairs as she had appeared. He caught up with her in the hall. “You were listening at the door, I suppose?” he said quietly.
“Yes,” she answered defiantly. “And what’s more, I can tell you something.”
“Well?”
“I know when the captain went abroad—and so does she, no matter what she says.”
“Never mind about your mistress. How do you know?”
“I heard him say it—same as I heard you just now—see? ‘I’m making a little trip abroad tonight,’ he said, plain as I’m saying it now.”
“When was that?”
“In the morning, when he’d come in to see her.”
“But what morning?” asked Mallett, exasperated.
“Friday the 13th,” answered the maid with gloomy conviction. “You don’t forget a date like that in a hurry. And as for starting a journey—I could have told him it would come to no good.”
Mallett’s face showed no trace of emotion, and the girl, looking eagerly to see the effect of her disclosure, was plainly disappointed.
“It’s true, what I’m telling you!” she insisted.
By way of reply, the inspector merely said: “What is your name?”
“Dawes—Florence Dawes, I am, and I——”
“Your evidence may be wanted by us. Where can you be found?”
“Not here, I can’t—not after the end of this week, I can tell you that!” she spat out angrily.
Still impassive, Mallett took down the address she gave him and found his way out into the wet and windy street.
“If Mrs. Eales had sold a few more things to pay her servant’s wages,” he murmured to himself as he strode along the streaming pavement, “she would have saved herself and her husband a lot of trouble.”
19
RESULTS OF A LITTLE QUIET THINKING
* * *
* * *
Monday, November 23rd
“That’s the machine, all right,” said Frant.
Mallett and he stood at a table looking down at two typewritten letters on the office paper of the London and Imperial Estates Ltd. The inspector took a magnifying glass and pored for some time over the documents.
“Yes,” he said at last, straightening himself. “This letter”, he pointed to the one signed by Lord Henry Gaveston, “was typed by the machine I handled this morning. Do you notice that ‘c’ a little out of alignment? And if you look through the glass you will see a tiny fault in the crossbar of the capital ‘J’. We’ll get an expert to check it, but that’s good enough for our purposes.”
Frant was beaming. He rubbed his hands and twittered with excitement.
“By Jove, we’ve got him!” he exclaimed. Then he looked up into his superior’s face. What he saw there prompted him to add more doubtfully: “Haven’t we, sir?”
Mallett’s forehead was furrowed with thought. He pulled his moustache until it seemed that the hairs must come out by the roots. For some time he stood in silence as though he had not heard the sergeant’s exclamation. At last he turned slowly and said in a restrained voice:
“Have we? Let’s sit down and think this over quietly.”
He seated himself at his desk and drew a piece of paper from a drawer. Frant sat down opposite him, his effervescence suddenly subsiding to an uncomfortable flatness.
“In the first place,” said Mallett, unscrewing the cap of his fountain-pen, “who is ‘he’?”
“Well, Eales, I suppose,” said the sergeant.
“Eales,” repeated the inspector gravely. He wrote the name down at the head of the sheet. “Motive?” he went on.
“Money,” said Frant promptly. “Money and jealousy—and perhaps the fear of exposure as a bigamist.”
Mallett wrote down: “Money, jealousy, exposure” under the heading “Motive”.
“Evidence?” was his next question.
“The letter to the bank,” was the ready answer.
“You mean that he could have written it,” Mallett pointed out.
“Yes—of course, it doesn’t go further than that.”
“Access to typewriter,” wrote Mallett.
“He could have put it among Ballantine’s papers and got it taken to the office that way,” Frant went on.
“M’m. Could he? Ballantine kept his attaché case well locked, remember——”
“If Mrs. Eales is telling the truth——”
“Agreed. And so far as we know, he never was in the flat at the same time as Ballantine, and Ballantine was never separated from the case. The first proposition doesn’t depend only on Mrs. Eales. It’s plain common sense. The second does, though, and she may be wrong there.” He wrote a few words and then read: “Query, access to Ballantine’s papers?”
“He may have had access to Du Pine’s papers, too,” put in Frant.
“Yes,” Mallett admitted. “We know he was on close terms with Du Pine. But there are some difficulties there. First—why should he have typed the letter at his wife’s flat and not at Du Pine’s house? Second—isn’t that theory equally consistent with Du Pine being his accomplice?”
“That is a possibility—yes,” Frant agreed, reluctantly.
“It doesn’t look quite so simple, when you come to look
into it, does it?” the inspector went on. “Now what else have we to put down under ‘Evidence’?”
“His trip abroad on the night of the murder.”
Mallett noted the point. “Has it occurred to you”, he added when he had finished writing, “that this all turns on our theory that Ballantine was killed by Colin James?”
“Of course.”
“Then you think that Eales was James—on the evidence of this letter?”
“Not on that only,” Frant objected. “Here’s a man who for a long time has had no fixed abode. That would give him plenty of opportunity to live in Daylesford Gardens as Colin James for a few weeks without attracting suspicion. Then you have the mysterious journey abroad on the night of the 13th. I agree that he may be able to explain it away. But until he does—and I’ve a feeling that he won’t be able to—I maintain that we’ve a strong case against him. All the facts fit him in a way they fit nobody else.”
While his subordinate was speaking, Mallett jotted down the salient points. Then he said: “There’s one fact that doesn’t fit him very well, you know.”
“What fact?”
“The beard. Eales has a moustache, as I think you know—a reddish toothbrush affair. I know what you’re going to say, Frant. He could have covered it up with a false one which would go with the beard. But James—the real James, I mean—had his upper lip clean-shaven. Why go to the trouble of stealing a passport and making yourself up as the man it belongs to, if you won’t even take the trouble to shave?”
“Murderers aren’t necessarily logical,” protested Frant. “It’s absurd to be prepared to murder and to boggle at shaving off your moustache, but people do absurd things. I don’t find anything impossible in the idea.”
“Very well, then. We keep Eales in the running. By the way, how does that square with your theory of yesterday—that the murder was done by James and Fanshawe in collaboration?”
Frant pondered.
“It doesn’t,” he admitted. “That is, we have no clue as yet to any connection between Eales and Fanshawe—except just this, that they both went abroad on the same night.”
“And that is something,” the inspector agreed. “It would be asking rather a lot from coincidence to expect that three people mixed up this case happened to choose the same night to travel. Apart from that, though, there is no connection between them. Moreover there is a connection, and a close one, between Eales and Du Pine, which doesn’t seem to square with his having anything to do with Fanshawe, Du Pine’s mortal enemy. To all appearances, they are two quite independent people who happen to have reason to hate the same man. At the moment I’m inclined to think that if Eales goes in, Fanshawe comes out.”
He wrote a few more words on his paper.
“May be James,” he murmured. He underlined the word “may”. “It doesn’t seem to me to make sense,” he complained. “That moustache still bothers me. What you say may be right enough as a general proposition, but it doesn’t seem to me to fit this case. James, whoever he was, laid his plans with the greatest care, took every precaution. Why should he omit this obvious and simple one? And then why did Eales tell his wife that he was going to France? It was quite unnecessary. As James, he advertised the fact, naturally. But doesn’t it seem to follow that as Eales, he would keep it as dark as possible?”
Frant groaned. “I give it up,” he said. “You seem to have an answer to everything. I was a fool to jump to conclusions. We’re not an inch farther on than we were.”
“Don’t let’s be in too much of a hurry,” said Mallett. “We needn’t go to the other extreme all at once. All these objections may be explained away. I’m only saying that at present we haven’t the evidence to arrest Eales for murder.” He drew out another sheet of paper and went on: “After all, Eales isn’t the only pebble on our particular beach. We’ve got quite a number of facts accumulated here now, pointing different ways, and to different people. I propose that we take each one in turn, and treat him just as we did Eales and see what it amounts to. Who comes next?”
“Du Pine?” suggested the sergeant.
“Yes, he seems to follow logically. Motive?”
“He wanted to get his share of the boodle which he knew Ballantine was making off with.”
“Good enough. Evidence?”
“He could have introduced the letter to the bank among Lord Henry’s papers.”
“Certainly. Anything more?”
“He was doing something shady in association with Eales, so the arguments against Eales apply to him to some extent.”
“Yes. . . . Du Pine could not have been James, I take it?”
“No. I’ve checked him up, and he was in London on the Saturday and Sunday following the murder.”
“Not James,” wrote Mallett. “Must therefore have had assistance.”
“That seems to follow,” Frant agreed. “The only other point against him I can suggest is his general behaviour.”
“It was certainly uncouth enough to frighten Mrs. Eales fairly considerably,” said Mallett.
“And he himself is frightened very badly of something.”
“To judge from what I saw at the inquest, the something was a someone, and his name was Fanshawe.” Mallett finished Du Pine’s meagre dossier, and went on: “Fanshawe! I think he deserves a sheet to himself.”
“No difficulty about a motive there.”
“Motive overwhelming,” went on to the paper. Then followed briefly: “Evidence—(a) Threats; (b) Opportunity; (c) Travel.”
“That looks fairly impressive,” remarked Frant.
“Yes. How much more impressive it would be if we didn’t have to add something.” And Mallett wrote: “Not Colin James.”
“How lucky for Fanshawe,” he observed, “that James and Ballantine were seen going into Daylesford Gardens, and James was seen coming out.”
“There’s no doubt about the bona fides of the witness Roach, is there?” asked Frant.
“None at all. I’ve had him looked up. He seems to be a most reliable little man. By the way, is there any evidence that Fanshawe has profited by the crime—financially, I mean?”
“No. He is living very quietly with his sister in Daylesford Court Mansions. I should say he was decidedly badly off.”
“Did you go to Rawson’s in Cornhill to see whether he got his ticket to Paris from there?”
“Yes. It was quite correct and in order.”
Mallett sighed and placed the paper neatly on the others.
“Harper comes next, I think,” he said. “His motive is the same as Fanshawe’s, only at one remove, so to speak, plus money, perhaps. And unlike Fanshawe, he has got suddenly richer since the murder. Like Du Pine, he has something to hide, and something frightens him. Unlike Eales or Du Pine, he does not appear to have had any previous connection with Ballantine, or knowledge of his transactions. Unlike anybody else on the list, he professes actually to have seen James—and, incidentally, either accidentally or on purpose, he has contrived to cover James’s tracks very thoroughly. An odd person, Harper, and in an odd position too. He seems to link up so many different parts of the puzzle.”
“You don’t think he did the murder, do you?” said Frant.
“Did it? No. . . .”
“Or helped to do it in any way?”
“He certainly helped to do it, by letting James the house in Daylesford Gardens. That may be just coincidence, of course. But if you could have seen him on the day we discovered the body—I tell you, Frant, that boy knows something! The question that’s worrying me is—does he know that he knows it?”
There was silence for a space, broken only by the faint scratch of the inspector’s pen travelling over the paper. Another sheet was added to the pile, and then the two men sat without speaking, each absorbed in his thoughts.
“Then there’s Crabtree,” said Frant at last.
“Crabtree? Yes, of course, the servant. We mustn’t forget him. Let’s see, his motive is Harper’s—at one remove f
urther this time. He was at Daylesford Gardens, and we only have his word for it that he left on Friday morning. He might have stayed there all day and finished Ballantine off when he came in with James.”
“That makes him an accomplice of James,” said the sergeant.
“Not necessarily, though it looks like it. But James might have left Ballantine behind him alive and well, and then Crabtree took the opportunity to kill him and fill his pockets with whatever cash Ballantine had on him. With some of the money he goes to Spellsborough races, and the rest he gives to Harper who, in return, promises him a good job, in Kenya probably. How does that strike you?”
“Not very favourably, I must say.”
Mallett laughed. “Nor does it me,” he admitted. “But you see that, given the right assumptions, there’s not one of them we can’t make a case of sorts against. And we know perfectly well that they’re assumptions no jury in the world would be prepared to make. And all the time we’re no nearer than we were at the start to answering the two questions we’ve got to answer before we have the full history of this crime—who was Colin James, and why did Ballantine go to Daylesford Gardens?”
“They’re a mixed bag of suspects,” said Frant, stirring the little sheaf of papers with his finger.
“Yes, but they’re all connected in one way or another. Beginning with James, you have Crabtree who kept house for James, Harper who got the job for Crabtree, Fanshawe who was Harper’s father’s friend, Du Pine who is afraid of Fanshawe, and Eales who does some dirty work for Du Pine. Add Mrs. Eales to the chain and you bring it back to Ballantine.”
“Well, we wanted to find the connection between James and Ballantine,” said the sergeant with a grin, “and here it is. But it is a desperately roundabout one.”
“Yes, it’s rather like the old woman and the pig who wouldn’t get over the stile. But we’ve still got another suspect to put on the list.”
“You mean Mrs. Eales?”
“No; though there are still some things about that lady I don’t understand. I don’t expect any man could understand her altogether, for the matter of that.”