by John Bude
III
Although it was getting late, Inspector Duffy was still at his desk dealing with arrears of routine work when the sergeant-on-duty came briskly into his office.
“Well, sergeant?”
“There’s a young woman just showed up. Some story about a shooting affair up Mayblossom Cut. Thought you’d like to be informed, sir.”
Duffy got instantly to his feet.
“A shooting affair, eh? All right. I’ll see her at once.”
Followed by the sergeant, he went through to the main office where an agitated and tearful Violet was seated in a chair by the fireplace. Her open coat revealed a sadly rumpled pierrette costume and in her left hand she still clutched the diamond bracelet that Sid had handed her just before he collapsed. Having run the whole way to the police-station she was still struggling to regain her breath.
“Well, young lady, what’s all this I hear?” asked the inspector quietly. “Just take your time and tell me all about it.”
“But I can’t!” gasped Violet. “You gotta come at once. Sid’s been hit. He may be dead for all I know.”
“Sid?”
“Yes—my friend Sid Arkwright, what chauffeurs for that queer Mr. Mildmann. We was coming home from the Rollup Corset Dance.”
“I see.” Duffy turned to the sergeant. “You’d better get the ambulance and follow us up. Come along, young woman. You can give me the details on the way.”
By the time Violet and the inspector reached Mayblossom Cut, Duffy was more or less cognisant with the complete layout of events. But like a sensible man he refused to advance any theories until he had learned the full import of the incident. A great deal would depend on whether Sid Arkwright were dead or alive.
On this point he was soon able to satisfy himself. As they approached the middle lamp-post in the Cut, a figure came limping towards them out of the gloom.
“Sid!” cried Violet, suddenly running forward. “Coo! You did give me a fright. I thought you was a gonner—honest I did!”
She slid an arm round his waist, whilst he leaned heavily on her shoulder to take the weight off his right leg.
“Sorry, kid,” he muttered, obviously still in pain. “Winged in the back of the leg. Fainted, I guess.” Then as Duffy drew level, he asked: “Hullo—who’s this?”
“I’m a police inspector. Your young lady came along to the station. Here, put your other arm over my shoulder. We’ll get you along to the end of the Cut. The ambulance should be there any minute.”
In this estimate the inspector was right, for no sooner had they reached the road into which the narrow track debouched, when the police ambulance drew into the kerb. Once Sid had been helped into the interior of the vehicle, Duffy drew up his trouser leg to examine the wound. A single glance told him that it was not serious. A bullet had passed through the fleshy part of the calf and, though the wound was bleeding fairly profusely, the inspector had soon checked the flow with a workmanlike bandage. Leaving Violet to sit with him and hold his hand, Duffy jumped up beside the driver and told the sergeant to follow on foot.
A cup of hot sweet tea laced with a spot of brandy soon put Sid in a more comfortable frame-of-mind, and Duffy felt justified in putting him through a brief cross-examination. As his story matched in every detail the one already told him by Violet Brett, the inspector realised that the facts of the case were unquestionably true.
“So you were coming home from a fancy-dress dance, eh?” He nodded towards the fez that Sid still gripped in his hand. “What were you supposed to represent? The Caliph of Baghdad? The Sultan of Turkey? Or what?”
Sid displayed a momentary embarrassment and fingered his false beard which, in the stress of events, had come partly adrift. Then, with a glance at Violet, he said sheepishly:
“As a matter of fact, Inspector, I was putting over a bit of a leg-pull. You know that chap that walks about in a fez and a long black coat affair—one of the big-shots up at the Osiris temple?”
“Mr. Penpeti, eh?”
“That’s him. Well, I thought it ’ud be a bit of a joke to get myself up to look like him. Everybody in Welworth knows the chap. Got a good laugh, too, didn’t it, Vi?”
“Sid ran away with the first prize,” said Violet with an admiring look. “It was ever so funny, Inspector. A real scream.”
“Umph—that’s rather interesting,” reflected Duffy, his mind suddenly reaching out to new possibilities. “You say you got no glimpse of your assailant?”
“No. Took us so sudden that we hadn’t time to gather our wits. He was off up the Cut before we really knew what had happened.”
“He?” snapped the inspector.
“Sorry—that was only a manner of speech. Might have been a woman for all I know.”
“Do you think your assailant could have seen the bracelet you had just given this young lady?”
“I should think so. We were slap under the lamp-post.”
“So the motive was evidently not robbery,” commented Duffy.
“Strikes me,” said Sid in injured tones, “there just wasn’t any motive. Some loony, I daresay, out for a quiet evening’s gunning.”
“I suppose you’ve no rivals for the hand of this young lady?”
Violet blushed scarlet, but Sid merely chuckled.
“Oh there’s one or two other chaps who’d like to cut me out, I daresay. Vi’s a good-looker as you can see for yourself. But there’s none of them that crazy about her. Damn it all, if I’d have been hit in a fatal spot, Inspector, it would have been murder. Can’t get around that.”
Violet shuddered and slipped her arm more tightly through Sid’s, looking down on him fondly. The inspector nodded.
“Well, your explanation may be the right one—a homicidal maniac. On the other hand…”
“Well?”
“Suppose somebody really mistook you for Mr. Penpeti?” said Duffy. “It’s a line of argument we shall have to follow up.” The inspector rose. “And now if you’re feeling better, I’ll get the constable to run you home in the ambulance. Where do you live?”
“Over the garage at Mr. Mildmann’s—‘Tranquilla’ in Almond Avenue. I have my meals over in the kitchen with the rest of the staff.”
“I see. Well, we’d better let Mr. Mildmann know what’s happened. You won’t be fit to drive for a week or two. You’ll have to get a doctor to look at that leg of yours. It’s nothing serious, but wants watching. I’ll come up and have chat with your employer to-morrow.”
Sid enquired with a hang-dog look:
“I suppose you’ll have to give him the low-down on my little leg-pull at the dance to-night?”
“Sorry—yes.”
“The boss won’t like it,” said Sid slowly. “He won’t like it at all. He’s a damn decent old buffer but he’s touchy when it comes to religious matters. It may mean the sack. Just bloomin’ bad luck that we decided to come home through the Cut, I reckon. Otherwise I shouldn’t have run into this spot of bother.”
IV
But to Sid’s lasting gratitude Mr. Mildmann made no mention of the matter. His anxiety for Sid’s comfort was touching. It made Sid feel a little cheap and ashamed of himself. It struck him that in guying Mr. Penpeti he had been perilously near to guying Mr. Mildmann himself. From that moment onwards Sid was determined to make amends for his previous behaviour and was prepared to champion his employer against the slightest criticism.
Eustace himself, after a long talk with Inspector Duffy, felt curiously uneasy. He had a feeling that things, dark, unpleasant things were happening about him that he was powerless to diagnose or check. He was convinced that Duffy’s theory was correct. The shots had been aimed, not at his chauffeur, but at a clearly recognisable simulacrum of Peta Penpeti, and, for one horrid instant, he recalled Hansford’s words to him in the temple—“Time ripe for action! Strong action!” Then he dismissed such wild su
spicions as absurd. Hadn’t Hansford in these last few days suffered a complete change of heart towards his Prophet-in-Waiting? Hansford no longer suspected Penpeti of serving his own ends in the Movement. Hansford seemed to think that the threatened split had now receded. He was even apologising for his own previous suspicions.
Yes—it was all very queer and disturbing. And on top of all this stealthy unrest which seemed to surround him, Eustace had his own personal troubles to combat. Before leaving for Sussex, Alicia, as variable as a weather-vane, had suddenly turned nasty about a play she had written and was desirous of staging at the Summer Convention. This wretched play was an old bone of contention between them. Alicia had written it in a trance—or, in the parlance of Cooism, “the Divine Forces had used her as a medium through which to disseminate the Great Truths incorporate in the Ancient Wisdom of the Predynastic Gods”. It was called The Nine Gods of Heliopolis. And it was a bad play. A very bad play. Even worse, it was a very bad play in blank verse. Ever since Alicia had swept like a whirlwind into the tranquil harbourage of Cooism, she had moved heaven and earth to get this play produced. Eustace had naturally submitted the MS. to the Cultural Committee of Coo—a panel of advisers with considerable artistic sense and ability. They had taken one look at the manuscript and turned pale. They told Eustace that if he wanted to inflict mortal injury on the fortunes of his order he had only to produce The Nine Gods of Heliopolis. Naturally Eustace bowed to their superior knowledge and told Alicia that there was, so to speak, nothing doing. Alicia was furious. Like all fond amateurs who think they can write a play without (a) any knowledge of writing and (b) any knowledge of the theatre, she was abnormally sensitive to criticism. Her pride was severely wounded; and it came naturally to her to blame the mild and apologetic Eustace.
For a time she had let the play, like the sleeping dog, lie—but now, with the Summer Convention looming ahead, the wretched thing had taken on a new lease of life. It was yapping and snarling and scrabbling at the door, demanding attention. Eustace sighed. It was going to take a lot of energy to keep that play off the suggested programme of events for the June rally at Old Cowdene. He knew that Alicia was working hard on Penpeti and Penelope to have the thing performed, baiting her hook by offering them the two fattest rôles in the cast. And he had an idea that Penelope rather fancied herself as an actress. It would cost him much to go against her evident wishes.
Eustace sighed again. It was not much fun being a High Prophet. In the old days, before Alicia Hagge-Smith had got her teeth into the Movement, it had not been so bad. Now his office bristled with difficulties.
But being a father was, he claimed, even more unpalatable. Terence grew daily more sulky and unapproachable. Eustace tried to jolly him out of his moodiness. The effort was a dismal failure. Terence looked at him with the repugnant expression of a vegetarian who finds a slug in his salad. Eustace tried to reason with him. The result was even more disheartening. Terence had suddenly jumped up from the dinner-table and shouted at the top of his basso-profundo voice:
“I’m sick of all these pi-jaws! I’m sick of Cooism, rational clothing, rabbit’s food and all this High Life bunkum! I want to live as a normal low-minded, carnivorous, lounge-suited sort of chap. Damn it all, father, can’t you realise that I’m old enough to decide things for myself? I tell you straight, if I have to knuckle under to this sort of goody-goody business much longer, I shall go crackers! Haywire! Stark, staring crazy!”
Eustace was shaken to the very core of his paternal soul.
V
But there was one bright spot amidst all this gloom. Quite unexpectedly the Crux Ansata turned up again in its niche above the altar-piece of the temple. It had apparently suffered no damage. So Eustace promptly informed the police and the queer incident of the missing Crux Ansata was quickly forgotten.
That is to say, by all save the man or woman who, for some mysterious reason, had stolen it.
Chapter VII
The Man in the Teddy-Bear Coat
I
Inspector Duffy’s investigations of the shooting affair in Mayblossom Cut were slow and tedious. The evidence upon which to base any satisfactory theory was extremely slender. Two shots fired out of the night, the sound of running feet—beyond that, nothing! No description of Sid Arkwright’s assailant. No apparent motive. Not even the certainty that the would-be murderer had intended to kill Arkwright; for always at the back of his mind Duffy entertained the belief that the shots were meant for Penpeti.
A careful examination of the locale surrendered some information. At a point not far from the middle lamp-post, where Arkwright and the girl had been standing, Duffy discovered that a patch of grass on the verge of the lane had been muddied and trampled flat, suggesting that the wanted person had been lurking in the gloom beyond the lamplight. Several Swan Vestas littered this little patch of ground. A fact which led Duffy to assume that Arkwright’s assailant was of the male sex. For, since no cigarette-stubs were visible, it was reasonable to suppose that the matches had been used by a pipe-smoker. Doubtless in his keyed-up state of mind, he had allowed his pipe to go out more than once, though it was impossible to assess the time that the assailant had waited there from the number of expended matches.
The next point that puzzled Duffy was this. If the shots were directed specifically at Arkwright (or Arkwright in the guise of Penpeti) and were not fired at random by some homicidal maniac, how had the assailant known that Arkwright would be coming along Mayblossom Cut? This route had only been decided on as he and the young lady left the factory gates. It rather suggested that the man who had fired the shots had been present at the dance and had chanced to overhear Sid’s conversation with Violet. The couple, at a further cross-examination in Sid’s room over the garage, reckoned that they had taken about twenty-five minutes to cover the ground between the factory gates and the middle lamp-post. As Sid explained, with a wink, they had naturally lingered a little on the way—a point that Duffy was quick to appreciate. So if the assailant had overheard their conversation outside the factory, he would have had ample time to race ahead and take up his position in the Cut.
It was then that Duffy harvested a clue which he was inclined to rate as highly significant. Both Arkwright and the girl admitted that there were several people within a few yards of them when they had made their decision to go home via the Cut. Any of these persons might have overheard them making this arrangement. But it was Violet who recalled a somewhat curious fact that seemed to isolate one particular figure from the rest of the group. All the other dancers like themselves had been in fancy-dress and, although many had put on their overcoats, all the men in their immediate vicinity were wearing some kind of fancy head-gear. All, that is, save this one man. Both Violet and Sid had remembered noticing him for three very good reasons: (a) He was dressed in a well-fitting teddy-bear coat and tweed cap. (b) He was abnormally tall and broad-shouldered. (c) He was middle-aged and, as Violet graphically put it, “a wah-wah sort of chap”. They further recalled that this unusual fellow had suddenly slipped away and jumped into a small car that Sid recognised as a Stanmobile Eight. They both felt sure that this man had not been attending the dance. He was of a different type and generation from the rest of the crowd. He appeared, in fact, to be a complete stranger.
Duffy was deeply interested. Suppose this man were the assailant. Wasn’t it possible that he had driven his car all out to the far end of the Cut, making a small detour through the neighbouring streets, parked his Stanmobile at some inconspicuous spot, and gone on foot down the lane to the point where Duffy had discovered the trampled patch of grass? This would have given him plenty of time to intercept the couple. Plenty of time, in fact, to light and relight his pipe as he crouched there, waiting, with the revolver in his hand.
Revolver? Well, that, as the inspector was prepared to admit, was mere guesswork. Revolver, automatic, rifle—the exact nature of the weapon was uncertain. He had made a cl
ose search for the spent bullets, but the result was nil. In the circumstances he was inclined to suspect a revolver, but he was taking no bets on the matter.
But this tall figure in the teddy-bear coat had captured his imagination. Was he a citizen of Welworth or a mere visitor? Had anybody seen the man about the place either prior to or since the shooting incident in the Cut? Was he really connected with the crime?
That week Duffy had a small paragraph inserted at the foot of the column in the Welworth Echo which dealt with the incident. It ran:
The police are anxious to get in touch with a tall, broad-shouldered, middle-aged man, wearing a teddy-bear overcoat and tweed cap, speaking with an educated accent. It is thought that this person may be able to throw some light on the mystery surrounding the shooting. If any person has seen this man recently in Welworth or knows of his present whereabouts, they are asked to get in touch immediately with the local police.
It was two days after the insertion of this notice, that a rotund, bald, benign little man looked—or rather, peeped—into the main office. He claimed to have some information about the man the police were anxious to interview. The sergeant showed him through to Inspector Duffy.
Once seated, the little fellow placed his hat carefully on the inspector’s desk, puffed out his cheeks, wriggled like a small child on his chair and chuckled:
“Dear, dear, to think of me in a police-station. My name’s Pillick, by the way. Strange indeed are the quips and quirks of…Now, where was I? What did I…? But, of course. That paragraph in the Welworth Echo. It was the Echo, wasn’t it? Not that nasty cheap mid-weekly Gazette, which my wife and I…My wife—yes! It amused her enormously when she knew I was coming here to…tut-tut! But my domestic life can’t possibly…Now what was it I came here to give you?”
“Information,” suggested Duffy, curbing his impatience with difficulty. “Concerning the—”
“Ah yes!—that’s it. Information. But I can’t for the life of me…But how ridiculous. It was in connection with your notice in the Gazette.”