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

by Christopher Bush

  But they kept me busy till I reached Charing Cross. It was then only ten past nine and I rang Wharton from the station to see if he was in, and five minutes later I was in his room. But there wasn’t time to tell my story. What I was just in time for was to hear a piece of new evidence that muddled up the case still more.

  Wharton had had a report which had made him decide to send for the particular constable concerned, and he had arrived at the same time as myself. Sandley was his name: a youngish fellow who looked pretty smart.

  “You tell us all about it,” Wharton told him when he had him comfortably seated. “Not witness-box stuff, but just your own words.”

  “Well then, it was about twenty past four last Monday afternoon, sir,” Sandley began. “I was on the south comer of Faversham Square, waiting for my sergeant, when a gentleman came up to me all excited. Officer,’ he says, ‘will you tell me where Number 54 is, I’ve been looking and I can’t find it.’ ‘Number 54, sir,’ I says, and I had to do a bit of a grin inside, sir, because there isn’t a fifty-four, and that’s what I told him. ‘Are you sure?’ he says. I told him I knew every house and number in that Square and the last one was forty-eight. Then he didn’t half let out. Reckoned someone had made an appointment with him for four o’clock at this Number 54, and how he’d wasted his time looking for it and how he had a train to catch.”

  “‘Sure you didn’t take the number down wrong, sir?’ I asked him. ‘Maybe it was forty-five and not fifty-four.’ ‘God dammit, officer,’ he says, ‘do you think I’m deaf? I tell you it was fifty-four.’ and then he whips out a piece of paper and shows me it all written down. ‘Sorry then, sir, but I can’t help you,’ I says, and then I wondered if someone had been pulling his leg. He gave me a regular glare at that, sir. Looked as if he was going to burst, and then off he went.”

  “And why did you connect him with Sir William Pelle?”

  Sandley took out a wallet and handed Wharton a newspaper-cutting. It was a photograph of Pelle from the Daily Record.

  “I recognized him by that, sir. And there was a bit of talk at the station about something fishy about his death, so I thought I’d better send in a report.”

  “And very sensible too,” Wharton said. “But what did he look like?”

  “A smallish gentleman,” Sandley said. “Looked a regular little fighting cock, sir, if you know what I mean. Talked like a machine-gun, sir, all explosive like.”

  “And his clothes?”

  Sandley described them and there wasn’t a shadow of doubt in Wharton’s mind or my own. Sandley had a warning to keep that report to himself, and then went out with his tail wagging at Wharton’s word or two of praise and pat on the back.

  “And now what?” Wharton asked me with something of a glare.

  “Lord knows!” I said. “Pelle’s the only one who could have given us details about that telephone call, and he’ll never tell us now. All the same, we are a bit further. We’ve verified the call and know what it was about.”

  He grunted.

  “No wonder that Blaketon woman could swear blind he’d never set foot in her office that afternoon. You can bet your life it was she who sent him on that fool’s errand. And where’s that get us? Nowhere. Back where we started from.”

  Then he was asking what I’d found out at Pangley, and I told him everything, except about Kenray. His eyes fairly popped when he heard of that attempted burglary but by the time I’d finished he’d changed his mind.

  “You can say what you like,” he said, “but my idea is that Mavin faked those marks himself. He’d do it on the Monday before Pelle got home. In the morning the jewellery would have been missing. And why? Because he’d have rifled the safe. He’d every chance to get a key.”

  “But the safe was in Pelle’s bedroom.”

  “Why not?” he told me with a glare. “They always had coffee after dinner, didn’t they? What was to stop Mavin slipping something into his cup? Or into his night-cap, for that matter. I’ll wager the old boy always had a whisky the last thing.”

  The buzzer happened to go just then and George picked up the receiver with something of resignation. A moment or two and his look altered.

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Mavin? . . . I see. Nothing at all. . . . Yes, a pity. . . . Just a minute. Something I want to know. Was Sir William accustomed to having a night-cap before he went to bed? . . . He was? . . . Oh, just getting a few personal details. Nothing more than that. Good-bye, and thank you very much.”

  “There you are,” he told me. “He did have a night-cap. And there wasn’t a print of any kind on the french window.”

  “All hypothesis,” I said, “and one-sided at that. No self-respecting burglar would have left a print. And the fact remains that Mavin didn’t dope the coffee or the night-cap, and for the simple reason that Pelle never came home.”

  “That’s no reason why we shouldn’t try to find out if Mavin bought any sleeping tablets in preparation,” he said, and made a note in his book. “The trouble with you,” he went on, “is that you have your likes and dislikes.”

  “I can only give you an opinion,” I told him. “That opinion is that Mavin had nothing to do with that crime, no I admit I can’t prove it, but as an opinion it’s a very strong one.”

  “All right, then. Say he’s out. And Kenray’s out. All that leaves us is the Blaketon woman.”

  He grabbed a piece of paper.

  “What’ve you got against her? Facts, mind, not theories.”

  “If you mean what would convince a jury, then I don’t think it would be hard to prove that she began making a dead set at both Doris Chaddon and Roger Mavin three weeks ago.”

  “Yes?”

  “We could prove she questioned him about the autobiography,” I said. “What we couldn’t prove, unless we can get the Chaddon girl to talk, is that she questioned her about the jewellery.”

  George wrote down something about the autobiography.

  “And there the facts seem to end,” I said, “and we come to suggestion. We could suggest to the jury that her visit to Pangley was for the purpose of reconnoitring the ground. To do that we’d have to prove she hadn’t any friends at that Bewford place where she told Mavin she was going.”

  Wharton made a note of that last.

  “The only other thing is also suggestion,” I said. “We can prove she rang Doris Chaddon and suggest it was to find out when Sir William would be back in the office. From that we might go on to suggest it was she who lured him to Faversham Square and made him miss his train. I admit she’d have had to do some skilful disguising of her voice.”

  “Well, we’ll put down a barrage on that Blaketon woman,” George said. “Do some Montgomery stuff. Go at her from all angles, particularly that alibi.”

  That seemed to be all so I rose to go.

  “Tell me, George,” I suddenly said. “I take it even Montgomery has a plan of campaign.”

  George chuckled. I didn’t say anything. If George thinks me funny, who am I to dispel the delusion.

  “Your plan of campaign is eliminating suspects. Is that it?”

  “Didn’t I say so?” he told me. “Kenray’s out and your pal Mavin’s out.”

  “There’s one person we haven’t considered,” I said, and switched to a question. “What’s happened about that sugar inquiry?”

  “Never a thing,” he said. “Not a tradesman’s van in all Pangley or the district was that way that night.” What his men were now employed on was tracing ration lorries.

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “There might have been sugar spilled on the floor of a ration truck. But there’s another suspect, George. The one who put the body into that truck. It’ll be interesting to know just why he put it there and carried it off. And why and how it found itself in that goods wagon.”

  It was after ten o’clock when I got to my flat, but somehow I wasn’t feeling too tired. I’m a night bird for one thing, and for another I was rather pleased at George’s suggestion that I’d better
take things easy in the morning. He’d ring me, he said, if anything important turned up.

  I got into a dressing-gown, poured myself a drink and then settled down to a reading of that autobiography. There were two hundred and forty pages of manuscript, double spacing, and I told myself that I’d read the lot or succumb in the attempt. It turned out that I was reckoning without the author.

  I’m not going to bore you with even the briefest resume of that book, but since certain facts and conclusions were to have a vital bearing on the case, I will confine myself to them, and no more. Generally speaking then—and that fact is comparatively unimportant—the book had a stodginess, a dullness and a pomposity that seemed to me incredible. Unless Pelle’s son was prepared to finance its publication, I couldn’t see a publisher even beginning to take an interest. There was also an utter absence of humour. A few good stories sprinkled here and there would have carried a reader along through the aridities, but the whole book had no more than two and they were spoiled in the telling. Not that Mavin was to blame for the quality of the book. He, I imagine, had learned only too well the lesson that Gil Blas failed to learn in time—that it doesn’t pay to offer criticism, however constructive, to a self-satisfied and pig-headed employer.

  The descriptions of Indian landscape were monotonously done, and with too great an intrusion of the speaker. Accounts of this and that commission were interminable and I don’t mind owning that I was soon skipping most of them. Of little human touches there were few. One—and much overwritten—was his meeting with Laura Frame, whom he subsequently married, and another—coloured by the passing years—was the birth of his son. And so to facts.

  My brain works best at night, and it was after midnight when I began collating various facts that seemed to me to stand out. The first was that there was never a mention of the name of Marion Frame. There was a too glowing tribute to the character and work of Sir Leyland, and mentions of various receptions, balls and conferences, but that his other daughter should not be mentioned seemed to me very deliberate. And yet there was one reference—the one that Mavin had mentioned. Laura Pelle caught a feverish cold and pneumonia supervened, and she died with tragic suddenness.

  Hers was a gallant spirit but she never had been over-strong. I had long been urging her to spend the summers in England, but she had always refused. Her place, she said, was by my side. An unfortunate family affair over which she worried a good deal, helped also to hasten the end.

  Those were the exact words, and the sole reference to Marion Blaketon, and in reading it no one could say that a labouring man, though a fool, could not err therein. Few people would identify Marion Blaketon with that family affair, and since Mavin had told her that wording, why should she worry about the publication of the book? And worry sufficiently to have taken action so drastic.

  As to the oases of interest in the book generally, I did read with something of pleasure the accounts of the young Pelle’s holidays in Paris, and I envied him the opportunities he had missed. His father had been an art dealer of international reputation, and all the great figures of what I might call the late Victorian and early Edwardian schools of France had frequented that shop in the Rue de Rivoli. I admit that a long chapter was devoted to Paris but those giants of the age were catalogued rather than described.

  After he went to India he returned to Paris on leave, and that was in 1911. There again was a chance to give a first-class insight into the mentality of France before the last war, but there the opportunity was not so much missed as utterly ignored. One chapter ended . . .

  and in June of that year I was once more in Paris.

  As for the next chapter, that began

  when I returned to Mysore in the late winter of that year . . .

  You see what I mean? Perhaps the failure to mention Paris at all was artistic, I thought. An attempt, that had badly missed fire, to show the reader how India was to such an extent in the blood of a young administrator as to exclude everything else.

  When I put that manuscript away for good, it was about one in the morning. And in case you should think that what I have told you about that manuscript is unnecessary digression or mere padding, let me hasten to add that you are a considerable way out. When I got into bed that early morning, I was making the same mistake. Except as purely negatively—and in the express case of Marion Blaketon— I was regarding the long night hours as completely wasted. Days and days afterwards, and at a very strange moment, I was to find myself much mistaken.

  Chapter X

  CONFIRMATION OF A THEORY

  Have you ever gone to bed with, say, an unsolved crossword clue on your mind and then woke next morning with the answer pat on your tongue? Doubtless you have, and doubtless you know far more about the reasons, subconscious or otherwise, than I happen to do. But I woke the following morning, not with the knowledge that I needn’t get up, but with something on my mind that I’d completely forgotten.

  This was it—a fragment of conversation and no more.

  “Chaddon will probably get a packet when he dies. He or his daughter.”

  My conscious brain went into action. A morning at the club. Whom was I with? Then I remembered, and how we’d been talking about Bertram Dane. Colley had said that when Dane died, old Chaddon would come into a packet, or else his daughter would.

  I scowled in thought and then had the connection. Dane was Chaddon’s uncle. Chaddon was the only nephew, and since Doris was Chaddon’s only child, she was Dane’s only great-niece. Doris Chaddon and Dane, my mind went on. She in the case from the beginning and I’d seen him making that queer exit from Kenray’s shop on the morning after Pelle’s death.

  There are moments in a case when a new suspect is a gift from heaven, but this wasn’t one. What Dane could have had to do with the killing of Pelle was utterly beyond me, and even beyond surmise, and if I hadn’t been indulging in wishful thinking I’d have thought the same about the theft of the jewellery. That theft, even if it involved a comparatively harmless bludgeoning of Pelle, wasn’t beyond the scope and inclination of Bertram Dane, provided there was something in that attaché-case that was coveted for his collection of rings. And Doris Chaddon would have been his source of information. With an eye on the old man’s money, she’d have blabbed for all she was worth.

  But there again was something that I had no intention whatever of putting up to Wharton, and, as I told myself within a matter of seconds, no intention of proceeding with myself. Except perhaps for satisfying one small curiosity. Now I was on friendly terms with Grace Allbeck, mightn’t I induce her to tell me just why old Dane had shaken his fist at her that morning on the pavement. Grace Allbeck struck me as the last person at whom one would want to shake a fist, and Dane’s hadn’t struck me as playful but distinctly minatory.

  By that time I found myself out of bed. It was about half-past eight, so I dressed and then rang down for breakfast to be brought up. Then I remembered letters, and found two for me on the mat. One was from my wife and I read it over my meal. There was a postcript:

  Yours just come. Think I should sell the brooch thing.

  Out of that came a quick warmth of anticipation. Some time that morning, if Wharton didn’t want me, I’d take that piece of jewellery to Grace Allbeck. Then I had an afterthought, not so pleasant. Doris Chaddon might think it strange that I had not looked her up again after that lunch. Maybe I might drop in on her too, and there mightn’t be any harm in bringing the conversation round to old Bertram Dane and trying to ferret out what the relations were between great-uncle and great-niece.

  After breakfast I went through my paper leisurely for once, but when I’d finished I thought I still a bit early to call on Grace Allbeck, and that was why I began thinking about the case again. Then among the notes in my pocket, what should I find but a copy of that memorandum that Pelle had had in his wallet. Somehow I had had no time to have a real good look at it, but now began an attempt to discover just what it meant.

  Par moy ton aide
/>   Late-middle French, perhaps, as Mavin has said, and “I will be your help.” A perfectly good translation.

  B.M. or K?

  That conveyed nothing, unless it was the title of reference books that Pelle had intended to consult.

  And cts.

  Cts. was surely an abbreviation, and, if I remembered rightly, was short for carats. The thought brought a little thrill. Then suddenly I found myself fumbling at my glasses, and then I was making for a dictionary. And there it was. Ct.—Cent. Carat. Carat seemed the more likely of the two. What Pelle had written down was virtually, “How many carats?” And obviously in connection with the stone or stones in one of those gifts that had reached his office. And then, before I hardly knew it, everything was clear as daylight.

  B.M. would be British Museum, and it was the authorities there whom he was proposing to consult. K was Kenray, and he was undecided which was the better authority. Then what of that French motto?

  That came easily too, or at least I thought the solution I found must be correct. That piece of jewellery was a ring, and a posy ring at that. The French was a motto incised inside the gold of the stone mounting. Common enough those posy rings. Names of betrothed parties were their simplest form, and when I looked up the encyclopaedia I found half a score, and some in the most native of English. “My Deere, Love me and Mine”, “Harte to Harte, Both I Binde”, and “My Love True Love”, were the quaintest. But the French motto seemed to me to be early seventeenth century at the latest, and that particular ring would therefore be more rare.