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

by Christopher Bush

  George handed me a booklet. A quick look through showed me a score of cases, labelled A. and B. and so on, who had been set on the straight and narrow path after careers of crime. It read very impressively.

  “You bet it does,” George said. “I believe that damned Society was actually congratulated in the House not so long ago.”

  Ten minutes later we had made our plans of attack. One excellent aspect was that she had never come into contact with George, and so suspicion shouldn’t be aroused. The office of the Society was in Southampton Row.

  “We don’t want a trip there for nothing,” George said, and rang for a call to be put through. “Hang up as soon as you get a Mrs. Blaketon,” he said, and gave a me wink.

  In a couple of minutes the buzzer went. George picked up the ’phone and grunted.

  “It’s all right,” he told me. “She’s there.”

  Chapter VII

  MARION BLAKETON

  As our car turned into the Strand I suddenly thought of something. Mightn’t Mrs. Blaketon be alarmed at the very mention of Wharton’s name.

  “She’s never heard of me,” he assured me. “I’ve had nothing to do with her, or her Society.”

  From his tone I gathered again that if he had been in charge, things might have gone differently.

  “It seems rather a pity that that kind of racket should be carried on with impunity,” I said.

  “It’s a slow job uncovering a thing like that,” he said. “Remember that philanthropic parson business and how it took us years to put him out of action? And there’s even less to go on with this Blaketon woman. And she has pals in high quarters. Remember that list of patrons or whatever they call themselves?”

  We turned out of Holborn and across into Southampton Row. At Russell Square the car was parked and we walked the few yards back. The office was on the first floor and facing us at the head of the stairs was a door marked ‘ENQUIRIES’. George gave me a look, then knocked.

  A moment or two and it was opened by a girl of about seventeen.

  “Mrs. Blaketon in?” asked George.

  “I’ll see,” she said. “What did you want to see her for?”

  She was evidently a new hand.

  “Give her this card,” George said, “and tell her it’s urgent.”

  She let us into a tiny waiting-room. George’s eyebrows lifted at the sight of the wall prints—Dartmoor, Pentonville, Portland and Holloway.

  “Regular home from home,” he whispered to me, and then was cocking an ear. A voice from the next room said, “You oughtn’t to have . . .” and then suddenly it was only a murmur. Then came a silence and a couple of minutes must have gone by before the door opened.

  “Will you come in?”

  That was Marion Blaketon. Her voice was the mannish kind, but there was no doubt about her having what Wharton called class. A striking-looking woman too, though a bit on the horsy side, but what struck me most at that first sight of her was her perfect self-possession.

  “Always glad to see the police,” she was telling Wharton heartily, and I had another quick look at her as I followed them into her office. Her clothes were good, I noticed that, and how wiry-looking she was. Five foot eight probably and just about looking her fifty years.

  “Won’t you sit down?” she said to Wharton, and was giving me a look of pleasant inquiry.

  Wharton introduced me as a colleague and we took two of the hard-seated chairs. She was in a swivel chair at the roll-top desk.

  “As I was saying,” she resumed, “we’re always glad to see the police. In our small way we do our best to cooperate. Prevention’s always better than cure, don’t you think?”

  Before George could give an opinion she was off again. That woman, as my old nurse used to say, could jaw the hind legs off a donkey. A good half minute of the Society’s aims and George simply had to come to the top to get breath.

  “Pardon me, Mrs. Blaketon, but I don’t think you know just what we’re here for.”

  “How foolish of me!” She laughed, if the laugh was more of a neigh. “And what are you here for?”

  There was a door beyond and through it came the tapping of a typewriter. That, I thought, would be the door-opener at work.

  “On rather distressing business,” Wharton told her. “To do with the death of your brother-in-law.”

  “Oh, that,” she said, but apparently puzzled. She was frowning as she nibbled the end of the pencil.

  “You knew, of course, that he was dead?”

  “I saw the notice in the paper,” she said, as matter-of-fact as they make ‘em.

  Things weren’t going as anticipated and Wharton was already finding himself in the wrong gear.

  “You don’t consider it a distressing occasion?” asked Wharton with an unusual malice.

  “Heavens no!” she said. “Why should I?”

  Wharton shrugged his shoulders.

  “It isn’t as if we were friends. A ridiculous term but the best I can think of.”

  “But you weren’t what I might call actively hostile?”

  “One doesn’t quarrel with a fool,” she told him amusedly. “The man was a fool. And my sister was a fool to have married him.”

  “If it isn’t too personal, then why did she marry him?” asked Wharton, just a bit nettled.

  “My dear man, she didn’t. He married her.” She gave a shrug of the shoulders that in its amplitude was almost foreign. “Just to get in with our precious family. Pure opportunism.” Another shrug of the shoulders and her head went sideways with a look that was Wharton’s own. “But surely you haven’t come here to ask me about Piggie Pelle? That,” she said charmingly, “was always his nickname. So expressive, if you knew him. Indian pigs, of course; the kind that one sticks.”

  “And what if I told you that his death wasn’t all it appeared on the surface?”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Strictly between ourselves,” went on Wharton, and hesitated a fraction too long.

  “Don’t tell me he was murdered!”

  The case had slipped so far out of Wharton’s fingers that he had had to put on those ancient spectacles of his as a kind of sheet-anchor. Now he peered at her over their tops.

  “What made you think of that?”

  “But why shouldn’t I? You were mysterious. You implied he didn’t die naturally. Well, what else was I to think?”

  “You thought right,” George said bluntly. “It isn’t public and it mayn’t be made so, but murdered he was. And that’s a serious business.”

  “I quite agree,” she said. “What I don’t see is how it concerns me.”

  “It concerns you in this way,” George said, and his attempt at impressiveness was none too successful. “We have reason to believe that you were the last person to see him alive!”

  “I?” The surprise seemed genuine enough to me. Then her eyes narrowed. “I haven’t seen him or spoken to him for at least a year, and then the interview was none of my seeking.” That must have slipped out, for she was qualifying it at once. “Not that that has anything to do with it.”

  “Well, our information is that he was seen entering this building at about four o’clock on Monday afternoon,” Wharton told her. “An hour and a half later, he was killed.”

  “Entering here!” The frown went. “My dear sirs, it’s absurd. You surely can’t be serious.”

  “Only too serious,” Wharton told her, and gave me a look. “Smith’s statement was explicit, wasn’t it?”

  “It seemed so to me,” I said unblushingly.

  “If you are being serious,” she said, and now she was including me for the first time, “then you have only to question my secretary. She was here till after five o’clock on Monday. No one could have come here without her knowing.”

  “Oh, no,” Wharton said. “Your word’s good enough for us.”

  “Pardon me,” she said, and a nasty look was on her face as she got to her feet. “Now we’ve gone so far I insist on it.”


  A couple of minutes later her Miss Mortimer had duly confirmed. Wharton could only say he was extraordinarily sorry she’d been troubled.

  “Misunderstandings will happen!” Marion Blaketon told him with what sounded to me like sweet malice. “But was that all you wished to see me about?”

  “Yes,” said Wharton, and got to his feet.

  “Don’t hurry,” she said. “Do let me give you a cup of tea. We always have one about this time.”

  “Very good of you,” Wharton said, “but we’re rather pressed for time.”

  “Then perhaps you’d like to take these with you,” she said, and was offering both of us a small wad of pamphlets. “We’re always glad to add to our list of subscribers.”

  Wharton took his wad as if it was a slab of horse-dung.

  “Thank you so much,” was what I said, trying to give George a hint about tactfulness. “One does hear your Society so well spoken of.”

  “How perfectly sweet of you!”

  We were then at the outer door. George mumbled some-thing about being sorry but she and I parted with the most delightful interchange of smiles, and the door closed behind us.

  Half-way down the stairs George was still speechless as I grasped his arm.

  “Left my gloves,” I whispered. “Just slipping back for them.”

  They had been left by design and well concealed by the leg of the chair. There had been no click of that outer door and it opened when I turned the knob. Then I tiptoed across the waiting-room, paused to gain confidence and applied my ear to the crack.

  “Yes, Superintendent Wharton and another man—a Mr. Tracey or something like that,” Marion Blaketon’s voice was saying. “A tall thin man with heavy glasses. . . . Oh, just a stooge probably. . . . I see. . . . And you’re sure you wouldn’t like to tell me any more?”

  And that’s where I made a mistake, though the fault was not really my own, but that of my subconscious self. There was I, polishing my glasses, and as I knew that, I knew too that my foot had somehow kicked against the door. In a moment the glasses were on again and I was looking into that office. My smile must have been worse than fatuous.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but I left my gloves behind. There they are. . . . So sorry to have troubled you.”

  She had the receiver close against her chest. I had been scared somehow of meeting her eyes but I heard that receiver slammed down.

  “Isn’t it usual to knock at a door?” she was asking me. “Or don’t the police ever knock?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I did knock.”

  The look had been definitely venomous and now she was trying to pass things off.

  “Sorry I bit your head off.”

  “But you didn’t,” I said.

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll leave it like that. Just one of life’s little jokes.”

  She had followed me to the door and before I could utter a final word of parting, it closed behind me, and I heard the click of the catch. At the foot of the stairs Wharton was waiting impatiently. Two doors on was a tea-shop and I suggested a cup might do us good.

  “What was the idea of that glove business?” he asked me as soon as I ordered the tea, and when I’d told him he was saying he’d give a fiver to know to whom she’d been ’phoning.

  “What a woman!” he said, and let out a breath. “No wonder poor old Prider didn’t get far.”

  “You believed what she said about seeing Pelle?”

  “Can’t do anything else,” he said. “Even if she’s nobbled that secretary, as she calls her, we can’t do a thing.”

  “And that secretary will swear to what she told us, that they both left that office together at about a quarter-past five.”

  “All right. All right,” George told me testily. “You needn’t rub it in.”

  Then he felt that wad of pamphlets he had rammed into his overcoat pocket and with a kind of subdued roar he wrenched it out with his fist, glared at it and smacked it down on the floor behind him. That seemed to ease his mind for when he next spoke his tone was quite mild.

  “Yes,” he said. “A pity about that alibi. All bone and gristle, that woman. A smack from her and Pelle’s skull would have cracked like an egg-shell.”

  The pot of tea came and he told me generously I could have the sugar. Saccharins were good enough for him.

  “She’s in it in some way,” he told me, still harping on Marion Blaketon. “In it up to the neck, or my name’s Robinson. Who could she have been ’phoning to?”

  “Art thou come hither to destroy me?” I quoted at him.

  George is pretty apt at Biblical allusion, but he chose not to understand.

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “How should I know?” I said.

  “A pity.” He gazed at his cup, then took a drink. “Wonder if it would be worth while getting in touch with that secretary.”

  “A bit dangerous,” I said. “But why not have someone on the other one’s tail?”

  “Yes,” he said, and gulped down the rest of the cup and got to his feet as if no moment could be too soon.

  “A hell of a tea interval that, George,” I said reproachfully, as I joined him on the pavement. “And where do we go now?”

  He was going back to the Yard, he said. Something might have come in, and he had an idea or two himself. Then at five o’clock he was seeing Kenray by appointment, and he’d like me to meet him there.

  “What to do?” I said.

  “Having a final look at that alibi of his.”

  “But won’t he rather resent that?” I said.

  “Not if we handle it the right way,” he told me, and the plural pronoun was a sign that things weren’t going to be too easy.

  George had me set down at the flat, but long before that I had been in a state of alarm. It was Grace Allbeck who was worrying me, and what she would think when she saw me arrive with Wharton. Why I should be squeamish about Grace Allbeck I didn’t know, at least, so I told myself. And then I had to tell myself that I did know.

  No sooner was I in my room than I was heroically picking up the receiver and dialling the number of the shop. A man’s voice that I recognized as Kenray’s spoke to me. I asked if I might speak to the particular lady who was generally in the shop.

  “You mean Mrs. Allbeck?”

  I said that was probably right. Then I gave my name and mentioned my visit.

  “I remember, Mr. Travers,” he said. “My sister mentioned it to me. She was very interested.”

  It was easy after that. Life was all coincidence, I said, and told him about seeing him later with Wharton, and how I’d hate to have Mrs. Allbeck think that visit with the piece of jewellery some sort of subterfuge.

  “I’m sure she’d never think anything of the sort,” he assured me. “But I’ll give her your message.”

  “I couldn’t tell her personally?”

  “I’m sorry, but she’s lying down with a severe headache,” he said. “She’s had them very badly this last year.”

  I said lamely that I was sorry, and then when I had hung up I wondered if I ought to have made any reference to the tragic death of her son. Then again I knew I had been fortunate in saying nothing. After all I was supposed not to have seen or spoken to Kenray in my life, and it hadn’t been Grace Allbeck herself but Tom Fulcher who’d told me about Hugh.

  After all that I had a clean up and then lighted my pipe and settled down for a half-hour to something that I’d been looking forward to—a quick study of Pelle’s unfinished autobiography.

  Somehow I couldn’t get going with that book. The opening struck me as pompous and uncommonly dull, and I just couldn’t get interested. And yet I had to read it.

  That was a vital change of view. When Wharton first handed me that manuscript and I took it over, I’m sure neither of us regarded its study as other than a kind of routine. It could scarcely throw light on the killing of Pelle. He had not been killed by an Indian fanatic, for example, and in reveng
e for some injustice, shall we say, rankling from the days when Pelle had been an administration official.

  Pelle had been killed for one reason only—that attaché-case of jewellery. Of that neither Wharton nor I had the slightest doubt, and how then could a reading of the manuscript throw light on the crime? All it might conceivably have thrown light on was Mavin—his editing, for instance, and literary ability—though how that might have connected him with the actual crime was something with which we had never come to grips.

  Now, as I laid that manuscript aside and leaned back in my chair, I knew that things had vastly changed. That manuscript might throw a damning light on the killer provided that Marion Blaketon had been that killer or had engineered the crime. It was true that she had what looked like a perfect alibi, but alibis even more perfect had been broken before.

  With long legs well out and eyes closed I tried to add fact to fact. In about three weeks—and the emphasis seemed essential—Marion Blaketon had made the acquaintance of and ingratiated herself with Doris Chaddon and Mavin. That clipping from the Clarion had announced—though doubtless the fact had long been public property—that Pelle was in charge of the jewellery, and the Blaketon woman had in the course of three weeks learned all there was to know. As for the fatal afternoon, that she had planned to make Pelle travel by that later train seemed an unquestioned fact. And then suddenly I thought of something—a question that should have been put to Marion Blaketon, but which Wharton and I had forgotten.

  I grabbed the receiver and dialled before I should change my mind.

  “That you, Mrs. Blaketon?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “This is Travers. The man who left his gloves behind.”

  “Oh, yes.” The tone was distinctly unfriendly.

  “I wonder if you’d be good enough to tell me something. Sir William had a telephone call at about a quarter-past three that certain afternoon. It wasn’t you ringing him up, was it?”

  “My dear man, what is this?” she was asking me, and the tone was more unfriendly still. “If I ran this office as you run yours I’d be thrown out on my neck.”