The Case of the Corporal's Leave: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  “Miss Grace was tellin’ you about me, was she, sir?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “An East Anglian never drops all his lingo, or his accent.”

  “Well, you weren’t far out, sir,” he told me. “Cromer’s my home, though I’ve been up here for thirty year or more.”

  “Then you now call yourself a Cockney?”

  “What me, sir?” He shook his grizzled head. “I’m Norfolk, I am, sir, and I don’t care who know it. A Norfolk Dumplin’, that’s me. And them lot out there knew it what you see me with. Tellin’ me about shallots! I grew shallots afore half o’ them knew what shallots was.”

  “I’ll bet you did,” I said. “Got an allotment in the suburbs have you.”

  “Well, not exactly,” he said. “My brother-in-law has though. Him that married my sister. She live near Woolwich and I sorta keep an eye on his allotment. Matter of fact I was over there only yesterday.”

  “Good,” I said. “What’s your name, by the way?”

  “Fulcher,” he said. “Tom Fulcher.”

  “A good Norfolk name,” I told him, and added that his employers must think a lot of him. And that started him off. I think it was only rarely that he had a listener as good —or as eminently apt, if I may say so—as myself, but he certainly told me all I wanted to know. And it wasn’t altogether that he was merely garrulous. There were far more things to it than that: a nostalgia, for instance; a pride in Cromer’s achievements during the war, and that old pathetic attempt we all make to recapture the days so irrecoverably gone,

  I’m not going to allow you to be bored by Tom Fulcher, but I’d like to make something perfectly clear. After the first ten minutes of the Kenray family I began to be bored myself and then I had an idea which tickled me immensely. All that Tom was telling me had no bearing on Pelle, but it had a decided bearing on the assignment which Wharton had given me, which was to find out—or so I read it—all I could about Francis Kenray. What I could do then, and with a cynical satisfaction, was to present him with a perfect genealogy of the Kenrays as the result of the morning’s work. “Here you are, George,” I would say. “You wanted facts and here they are. Family tree included free. All the latest. All part of the Travers service.”

  A fine old family, the Kenrays, according to Tom. The one for whom he first worked was an auctioneer, and there were two sons, Francis and Harry. Old Mr. Kenray was an antique collector and all the family had it in their blood. Tom modestly said he had it in his own.

  When that Mr. Kenray was still young and the two boys only boys, Mrs. Kenray was left a widow. A handsome woman, Tom said, and within two years she married the Rev. John Crowner, rector of Great Pentry, about five miles from Cromer. A year later she gave birth to Grace.

  There was a manager for the auctioneer’s business and later Harry took it over. Much later Harry died after a motoring accident and the business was sold. Francis, who had gone to school at Norwich, later joined a London firm of antique dealers. He had inherited money in trust from his father and later on he bought the business he now had. And since it was at that same time that the Cromer business was sold, Tom Fulcher was induced to join Francis in London, a step he had never regretted, for a finer man to work with just didn’t exist.

  “What about Mrs. Allbeck?” I said. “She seems a very charming lady?”

  “Lady’s right, sir,” he told me with an asseverating sideways nod or two of the head. “A real lady she is, sir.” He smiled to himself. “Not that she don’t snap my head off sometimes, but that don’t amount to nothin’. A lady, sir, that’s what she is.”

  Then he began to tell me for why, as the Norfolk phrase has it. She was the apple of her father’s eye and no money was spared on her education. The handsomest girl you ever saw, and I didn’t need Tom’s evidence to assure me of that. A bit of an adventurous one too, though you wouldn’t think it to look at her now. Had a will of her own and you just couldn’t drive her or lead her either, for that matter, if she wasn’t so willed. Went to a slap-up school in Norwich and then to a finishing school abroad. Only eighteen when she wrote home that she might be getting married.

  “And why not?” Tom asked me. “They used to marry young in them days, and a good thing too. Scared the life out o’ the old rector though. Then we heard as how she was goin’ to study paintin’ out there, or somethin’ and the next thing I heard was that she was home. Shocking ill she was with one o’ them breakdowns. Howsomever she got over it and then she married Mr. Allbeck. A painter, he was, and then damned if he didn’t join up when the last war broke out and if he didn’t get killed, right at the end of it. In what they called the Artists’ Rifles, he was, and there she was left. Then young Master Hugh was born. You’ve heard about him, sir?” he asked me.

  I said I’d heard somewhere that he’d been killed.

  “Shot down over Dieppe,” he told me. “Got the D.F.C. afore that. A squadron-leader, he was.” He shook his old head again. “One o’ the nicest young gentlemen you’d ever want to meet, sir. Always ready for a joke, too, like his mother used to be. A bad day for us all when he went.”

  “Must have broken his mother’s heart.”

  “It did that, sir. She didn’t show it much but you could see, if you know what I mean. Changed her a bit, even when she began to get used to it. Never used to get out of patience with me till that happened. Not that she do now . . . not much.”

  And that was that. I’ve told it in five minutes but he took half an hour. I sat on after he’d gone, jotting down relevant facts and dates for George’s benefit, but I knew from that half-hour that my own first impressions of Francis Kenray had been right. Whatever jiggery-pokery there had been about the disappearance of Pelle—to use a pet phrase of Wharton’s—Francis Kenray had had no hand in it.

  I stood for a moment or two on the pavement outside that pub before I made up my mind what to do. Then I walked to Piccadilly Station and rang up George. He said nothing had happened at his end except annoying inquiries from the Big Bugs, and I told him I had nothing either, or nothing rather that wouldn’t keep. Just before I rang off I said I was just off to Pelle’s office in Cunningham Street, after which I’d ring him again.

  Kenray’s description of that office was pretty exact. It consisted of a couple of rooms, the smaller of which had been fitted up as a cloakroom for the use of the lady secretary. The larger room wasn’t much more than a cubbyhole though it had a desk, a side-table and a filing cabinet.

  I want you to have a good look at Doris Chaddon. I wasn’t too far out when at my first sight of her I placed her as a Mayfair young thing who’d secured a cushy job. Her father turned out to be one of the most eminent bores of my acquaintance, though I didn’t tell her that, and her family tree was stiff with Blimps and those who are said to be at such and such a Ministry.

  Her clothes had that quality about them that I had noticed in Grace Allbeck’s. A fine-looking girl too, about twenty or so, and poised to the point of cool aggressiveness.

  “Yes?” she said, pert as you please, when I stepped inside.

  I pulled out my credentials and laid them on that side-table in front of her. If Pelle’s desk hadn’t been locked I knew she’d have posed at that.

  “But we’ve already seen the police,” she said.

  “Who’s we?” I asked her amusedly.

  “Well, I have,” she told me, just a little bit knocked off her perch.

  I gave her my most delightful smile.

  “Then I’m frightfully sorry but you’ll have to go through it all again.”

  “But I told them everything!”

  “Including your name?”

  “I’m Doris Chaddon,” she said, the least bit annoyed.

  “Then I’m just as bored with all this as you are, Miss Chaddon,” I said.

  She smiled faintly at that, then decided not to be amused.

  “I’m not bored,” she said. “I’m very worried.”

  “I know,” I said, and helped myself to a seat. Then
I asked her if she was any relation of old Hackford Chaddon, and that broke the ice as I’ve indicated.

  “What was it like being here with Sir William?” I asked; and roguishly, “Pretty good job, what?”

  “Well, I didn’t tell that to the police,” she said, “but it wasn’t a bad job.”

  “What on earth did you find to do with yourself?”

  “Oh, sometimes there’d be a letter of acknowledgment to write if a gift came in,” she told me airily. “Or a bit of filing. Or sometimes Sir William would have a letter of his own.”

  “A regular racket,” I said, and added quickly that I was in it too. Then I asked what Sir William did with himself and it appeared that he used to drop in every morning—except Saturdays—at about ten-thirty; do what there was to do and then brisk off to his club. Later he’d look in again or simply ring up. The really hectic days were when jewellery came in. That was great fun, she said. Letters of thanks, entries in the files, and Sir William bustling off to the bank’s strong-room. Terrific excitement.”

  “But over in time for lunch?”

  She laughed. We were getting on fine.

  “Oh, rather. Always over by lunch.”

  “Didn’t he ever take you out with him?”

  Her face clouded momentarily at that and she gave me a quick look. She saw I hadn’t meant what I might have meant.

  “Only about once,” she said, “and that was very formal. A sort of present for typing some letters for him.”

  “Easy to get on with, was he?”

  “At first I thought I couldn’t possibly stay,” she said. “He was so fussy and overbearing.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Then I got used to him. And, of course, he knew a lot of my people, and that made things different.”

  “Well, well,” I said, and heaved a sigh. “It’s a job I’d like to have had. You had lunch, by the way?”

  “Working rather quickly, aren’t you?” she told me and not altogether reprovingly.

  “My dear young lady, I’m old enough to be your father.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s always the opening gambit.”

  “A pity,” I said, and added that I meant the lunch. “But since I’m here and have to show something for my time, what about telling me, in strict confidence, anything that you didn’t tell the police.”

  “But you are the police!”

  “Don’t you believe it,” I said. “That was all eyewash. You know how it is. Anything that’s done nowadays has to go through about fifty various ministries.”

  “I know. Dreadful, isn’t it. Such a waste of money and time.”

  She took one of my excellent cigarettes and as soon as I’d flicked off the lighter, asked what I wanted to know. “Tell me about yesterday,” I said, and added that I’d bet her a new hat that Sir William had been as fussy as a hen with a brood of ducks.

  “You’d win,” she said. “He was absolutely priceless.”

  I won’t trouble you with her rather funny account of the afternoon. One thing, however, that I did gather was that she knew all about taking the jewellery in the attaché-case, and that she’d known his intentions well before that afternoon. So there was another pretty problem. To whom might she have chattered?

  “What was his reason for doing anything so risky?” I asked her.

  “He said it was like that Purloined Letter story of Edgar Allan Poe,” she told me. “Nobody could suspect he had all that jewellery in that ordinary little case.”

  “Well, there’s something in that,” I said. “You got a list handy, by the way?”

  She said the police had the only copy retained in the office. Sir William had taken two copies with him, and I guessed that one of them had been intended for Kenray.

  “What did he actually do himself during the afternoon?” I wanted to know.

  “Well, first he went to the bank,” she said. “It’s quite close, just in Tabard Street, and he collected the jewellery. That had to be before the bank closed at three. I said I’d make the usual cup of tea. There’s a gas-ring in there and we often have a cup about that time when he’s in. Then while I was making the tea there was a telephone call.”

  “Pardon me, but that would be just after three?”

  “Yes, just after three. I was inside there and couldn’t hear much but he seemed to be rather angry at first. Then he calmed down, I actually heard him say, ‘Well, if that’s the case I’ll be delighted to come.’ Then when I came in with the tea he said he wasn’t going home by his usual train, but the four-fifty, and would I go out and get some cakes and we’d have a regular tea. There wasn’t any real hurry so I took a bus to Fuller’s.”

  “And that was all?”

  “Well, yes. We had tea here and he left at about five to four. I did ask him if he’d care to leave the case here and call back for it later, but he said certainly not. Almost snapped my head off.”

  “You left with him?”

  “Oh, yes. I always did when he came here in the afternoons. I would go down first and he would lock up after me. I had my own key, of course, for the mornings.”

  “But you didn’t have to get here very early?” I suggested with a knowing smile.

  “Not too early,” she told me with a smile that was equally knowing.

  “And do you have a charwoman?”

  “Oh, no. There’s nothing to do, actually. I usually have a quick clean-up myself.”

  “I suppose you haven’t the foggiest notion who it was that ’phoned Sir William?”

  “Not the foggiest,” she told me, but the rather hard look in her eyes told me that there was something behind the prompt answer.

  “Not even if it was a man or a woman?”

  “No idea whatever,” she said, and got to her feet as if to avoid that particular questioning. I rose too.

  “Well, I must be getting along,” I said. “But what’s your own idea about this disappearance? Had the old boy anything on his mind?”

  “Not he,” she said, and laughed. “He was always most frightfully pleased with himself.”

  “Might his memory have gone?”

  “That’s really too priceless,” she said. “The poor dear hadn’t any memory. He always had to write everything down, and then he’d lose the paper he’d written it on. You won’t repeat any of this?”

  “God forbid,” I said hastily, and then heaved a sigh. “Well, I’ll be pushing along. May see you again some time. Any new ideas about lunch in the near future?”

  “We’ll see,” she told me flirtatiously.

  “I might have some inside dope to pass on,” I said as I jotted down the telephone number. “Sorry to bribe you like that, but we old men have to do something about things.”

  “But you’re not a bit old,” she told me hopefully. “I mean, as some. If you’d take those glasses off I think you’d be frightfully good-looking.”

  “I may give you a ring in the morning,” I said blushingly as I opened the door.

  “Don’t make it too early,” she warned me, and on that note of mutual understanding we parted.

  What was the actual beginning of my change of view I do not know, but before I’d reached my flat I was feeling vastly different about the curious disappearance of Sir William Pelle. What my feelings actually were would be hard to say, but they were a mixture of alarm, cynicism, amusement and wrath. Things as I now saw them were like this.

  Some dear old pal of Sir William had suggested him for that sinecure—and admittedly unpaid—job of handling the gift side of a charity appeal. Sir William himself had probably rejoiced to be a man of affairs once more, and in a contact, however vague, with India. The same or some other dear old pal had provided him with Hackford Chaddon’s daughter, and the daughter herself with a job that was more of a rest cure. Funds were available for office expenses and office furniture was loaned, and after that a nice unhurried time was had by all.

  As for the business side of things, that made me shiver. The Chaddon girl certainly saw each piece o
f jewellery and broadcast details among her friends, and whatever the possible warnings Sir William might have uttered, she would also have spread the news about taking that jewellery to Pangley in an attaché-case. Thirty thousand pounds’ worth at least, and the only thing needed for a change of ownership was to give the old boy a jab in the belly in the dark and grab the bag.

  It is a nervous trick of mine when at a mental loss or at a moment of discovery to fumble at my glasses or even unhook them and unconsciously begin a careful wiping. I did that then, and on the steps of St. Martin’s. By the time I knew what I was doing, I definitely had an idea, and it was one that made me more alarmed than ever. A punch in the belly, I had been thinking, and in the dark, and then a clutch at the attaché-case and Bob’s your uncle, as the comedians say. And there was the key phrase that set me thinking. In the dark. I said it to myself again, and it was a kind of Open Sesame, with a door swinging back and ideas flowing in. And was I glad that Doris Chaddon had seemed not averse to the idea of a free lunch!

  I expect you’ve seen the lines my thoughts must have taken, and if you have, then you’ll have seen something else. I have said I was alarmed, and so I was, and it was that alarm that washed out completely such flippancies as presenting George with the family tree of the Kenrays. The less I told George, in fact, the better. If I said I thought I was on to something, and progress could only be made by taking some fair nitwit to lunch, then George would contrive to handle that side of the inquiry himself. One of his main boasts is that women are like putty in his hands, though I prefer to call them fists. Besides, why should I tell George anything till I was dead plumb sure?