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

by Christopher Bush

“As a customer—good. We’ve sold him quite a lot of things in our time.”

  “And yet you didn’t like him.”

  “Well, perhaps not,” she said. “There was always the feeling that he might be likely to let you down. I can’t explain the feeling, but . . . well, I didn’t feel happy with him.”

  “Well, let me put something to you,” I said. “It’s pure guesswork, but if I’m right I shall be very pleased. I saw Dane leaving here last Tuesday morning and his attitude struck me as peculiar, even for him. He looked, in fact, as if he were shaking his fist at this shop. I almost said, at you.”

  “He probably was,” she said, and smiled.

  “Well, my guess is this,” I said. “I think he’d asked you for an opinion on that missing ring. He’d know you knew nothing about it.”

  “Heavens, no!” she said, and laughed. “What he came here with was some extraordinary story about someone having written him, I think it was about a piece of jewellery and asking quite a big sum for it because we’d offered the same sum. I told him, of course, that even if this customer of his was telling the truth, we couldn’t divulge names. Then he accused me of sharp practice, and that’s when I virtually showed him out of the shop. I believe he even added that the whole thing was a conspiracy and we were in it to extort money from him.” She smiled. “That’s probably when you saw him shaking his fist.”

  “Well, that satisfies me,” I said, “even if it doesn’t let him out of that other business.”

  I held out my hand.

  “There’s nothing else you want to ask?” she said.

  “Not a thing,” I said. “Unless it is when you and I are going to that Exhibition.”

  As I strolled slowly towards the Yard I was far from perturbed about the badness of that guess of mine. After all I should have been considerably alarmed if it had turned out to be other than the stalking horse for which I had intended it. For if Dane knew all about the jewellery, then the knowledge might have included the fact that Kenray was in charge of the selection and valuation, and therefore to have brought that ring to Kenray’s shop would have been stark madness. What I had wanted from Grace Allbeck was anything that might throw light on Dane’s mind and actions on that morning after belle’s murder. That I had gathered little or nothing was of small consequence compared with the fact that I had been told nothing of negative importance. Dane, I could tell myself, was just as strong a suspect as when I entered the shop, whereas Grace Allbeck might have revealed, however inadvertently, something that knocked that theory endways. In fact, I was feeling that the theory had had its first test, and had survived it more than well.

  When I entered Wharton’s room he was there, and Kenray with him.

  “Been waiting for you,” George said with just a touch of accusation.

  I told him sweetly that I was five minutes ahead of time, but he was helping me off with my overcoat and generally bustling me round.

  “Now then,” he said, as soon as I’d taken a chair. “What’s all this about that ring?”

  Chapter XI

  BEARDING THE LION

  I took out that copy of Pelle’s memorandum and George and Kenray gathered round. Each agreed with my deductions, and then I hesitated before going on. George read my thoughts for once.

  “You needn’t worry about Mr. Kenray,” he told me. “You just tell us everything you know.”

  That being so I spilled all the beans.

  “We’re on to something,” George said, and pursed his lips. “That Chaddon girl told him every damned thing. He wanted that ring and he didn’t want anything else. That’s why he sent the rest back. What do you think, Kenray?”

  “You gentlemen know more than I do,” Kenray told him with a little shrug of the shoulders.

  “Do you think him capable of snatching that attaché-case?” persisted Wharton.

  “I’ve known collectors do some queer things,” said Kenray, and the answer evidently satisfied Wharton.

  “And what about the ring itself?” he said. “Assuming Travers’s deductions are correct. Would it be valuable?”

  Kenray spread his palms—the most expansive gesture I’d ever seen him make.

  “You’re asking something impossible,” he said. “Was it a single stone ring, or what? Was the stone genuine or perfect or flawed? As Sir William apparently wondered, what was the weight of the stone or stones? If the stones weren’t valuable, the gold would be only breaking-up price—if it was gold.”

  Wharton smiled sheepishly and said he hadn’t thought of all that.

  “What about historical value?” I said. “Suppose, for instance, one could trace original ownership from the incised motto. If it belonged to Catherine de Medici, for example, or the great Duc de Guise or Marguerite de Valois.”

  “I don’t think it would make all that difference,” Kenray said, “at least, not for what I might call the general market. To a collector, possibly yes, but only if the history were thoroughly established.”

  “You’ve never run across that particular motto?” asked Wharton.

  “I don’t know that I have.”

  “Would your sister be able to help?” I asked.

  Kenray shook his head.

  “Rings aren’t her particular line. I’ve always rather specialized in them.”

  “That’s a good enough answer for me,” Wharton said, and got to his feet. There were profuse thanks to Kenray and apologies beforehand for a future meeting, and then George and I were alone.

  “What was that news about the Blaketon woman,” he was wanting to know.

  I told him what I thought I’d discovered from Grace Allbeck, and at once he was pursing his lips and frowning away to himself.

  “I think you’re right,” he said, and made a note in his book. “Should I have a confidential word with Mrs. Allbeck or shouldn’t I?”

  “You can’t, George,” I said. “She didn’t give it to me as a fact, and it was in strict secrecy. Also if you did get the facts from Mrs. Allbeck it would only be on the condition that she was never called upon to witness. Blabbing about any sort of customer would do a business like hers incalculable harm. But about the jewellery,” I went on, “where is it now?”

  “In the possession of the Powers-that-Be,” he told me gloomily. Then I was learning that there had been nothing to be gleaned from the actual parcel in which it had been sent to Kalpoor.

  “This is the very devil of a business,” he said, and scowled at me over the tops of his spectacles. “Everything looks so simple. But is it? How can we go to old Dane and ask him where he was at half-past five last Monday night? At least, till we’ve a damned sight more to go on.”

  “Why not?” I said. “Who’s he that he shouldn’t be questioned?”

  “Who’s he?” He glared. “The biggest liar in Europe, for one thing. He’d swear blind he never left his house. Make out that someone was impersonating him.”

  Perhaps he saw I thought that a bit far-fetched for he went on to qualify it.

  “What we’ve got to do is find someone who actually saw him leave his house. And who saw him come back.”

  “He has some domestic staff?”

  “A man at least,” he said. “But it’s going to be a ticklish job. That old ruffian would just as soon throw you out of the house as look at you.”

  “Does that imply that you want me to inquire into his alibi?” I asked blandly.

  “Not necessarily,” he said, and shot me a look. “Alibis,” he went on bitterly, “where do they get you? Fulcher has one—not that he was ever a real suspect. And that Blaketon woman.”

  “You’ve had a go at hers already?”

  “What do you think I’m here for?” he asked me. “We had a go at her the same night, through that typist.”

  “Well, I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Somewhere or other I’ve heard about that motto that was on that ring. If it should turn out to be highly desirable from Dane’s point of view, that strengthens the case against him. And another
thing,” I went on, “I don’t prophesy for a moment that that ring is a famous one—”

  “How could it be?” he cut in. “Kenray would have known it if it was.”

  “Not necessarily,” I told him obstinately. “But what I was going to say was that if I can get information about that ring, then there might be a very full advertisement put in the Personal Columns, asking the donor to come forward in confidence. He or she might fill in the gaps. Besides,” I went on hastily again, “the Powers-that-Be will want some sort of information like that. The loss of that ring from the funds will have to be made good, and they can’t make it good till they know its probable value.”

  I admit I had been getting a bit muddled, but all the same it made a good deal of sense. George said that inquiries on those lines wouldn’t do any harm, though it seemed to me that he was sparring for time. The idea of tackling old Dane was far from attractive.

  I asked for a call to be put through to Luddly at the Victoria and Albert, and in a couple of minutes I had him on the line.

  “There we are then, George,” I said. “If anybody knows this chap, Luddly does. Inside half an hour I ought to be giving you a call.”

  My rendezvous with Luddly was at a little tea-shop near South Kensington Station, and at my own request, and by the time he’d arrived I’d finished the toast and tea that made the balance of my various lunches. He had a pot of tea too, for the good of the house.

  First I told him that what I was going to ask was desperately hush-hush and I reinforced that with a showing of my credentials. But when I did begin to describe that ring, as far as deductions allowed, I saw him at once sit up and take notice.

  “A single stone ring?” he asked, and I knew he was trying to make his tone casual.

  I said it probably was, and probably a diamond of considerable weight. Yet I knew that it wasn’t that that had interested him. It was that Par moy ton aide that had literally made him start.

  “Somewhere I’ve heard about a ring and a motto like that,” I said. “I don’t say it’s on the tip of my tongue, but it’s there if you know what I mean.”

  “A pity you couldn’t give me more information,” he said. “It might have fitted in with something I was wondering.”

  “What was that?”

  “Oh, something preposterous,” he told me off-handedly. “There probably isn’t a ha’porth of truth in it.”

  “Tell me in any case,” I said.

  “Honestly it isn’t worth while,” he insisted. “I mean, even the very yarn itself has never been definitely confirmed. The best history books wouldn’t print it.”

  “What an annoying bloke you are!” I told him with humorous exasperation. “What yarn?”

  “You’re a pertinacious bloke yourself,” he said. “Still, if you’re prepared to believe it, that’s your headache. The yarn is that ancient one about Queen Elizabeth and the ring she was supposed to have given Essex.”

  I hoped I hadn’t betrayed the fact that he had as good as told me where I’d read about that motto.

  “You know the yarn,” he said. “Fairy-tale is probably a better name for it. She was supposed to have given him a ring and if he was in trouble he was to send it back. Later on he tried to raise a rebellion in London and she clapped him in the Tower, and he was in trouble: plenty of it, right up to the neck. So he tried to smuggle that ring out to her to remind her of her promise. Gave it to a friend—I think it was the Countess of Nottingham. But this particular lady hated Elizabeth like hell and never sent the ring. In fact it was supposed to have disappeared.”

  “But isn’t the story backed up by a certain amount of truth?” I said. “Isn’t it a fact that although Essex was guilty as hell, Elizabeth wouldn’t sign the death warrant for the devil of a time? And because she was expecting him to send her that ring?”

  “That’s about the only backing it’s got,” he said. “And even that can be explained in other ways.”

  “And what about the motto? Is that a fake too?”

  “As far as I remember,” he said, “that motto was first mentioned by an Erasmus Harte, a late seventeenth-century divine, in a queer book called Vicissitudes of Favourites. What he doesn’t mention is where he had the story from.”

  “I see,” I said. “And how then do you explain the existence of the actual ring?”

  “What you mean is the existence of a ring,” he said. “But there were fakers in those days and just as opportunist as there are now. That ring might have been made after the publication of Harte’s book.”

  “And a valuable diamond used for the purpose?” I asked rather incredulously.

  “You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,” he said. “A ring was in existence already, and all the faker had to do was to cut the motto.”

  “I suppose that is so,” I had to admit. “But fake or not, would that ring be of value to a collector?”

  “Most decidedly,” he said.

  “Let me see,” I said. “Doesn’t old Bertram Dane collect rings?”

  “Does he not,” he told me enthusiastically.

  “And would he know the legend, if that’s what you call it, about that ring?”

  “I should say he certainly did.”

  I gave a Whartonian grunt and then called the waitress over and paid the bill.

  “Tell me,” Luddly said, and his voice was a seductive whisper. “Has old Dane been up to any tricks again?”

  After that we exchanged scandals. I told him the yarn Wharton had told me and he told me one about a ring missing from a museum in the Midlands. He also told me a lot about the collection. The papal rings alone were worth a fortune, he said, and added that he wouldn’t mind lifting one or two of them himself.

  It was half-past three when I managed to ring Wharton. Hard as it was to explain things over the telephone, I gave him a brief history of that ring, and told him the new approach it provided for a first attack on Dane.

  “You go and see him,” he said. “You’re the very one to handle him.”

  “Suppose he isn’t in.”

  “Of course he’ll be in,” he told me. “Haven’t got the wind up, have you? Anyone would think you were going lion taming.”

  When I’d hung up I thought of quite a few retorts I might have made, not that they’d have penetrated that hide of his. And then for the next half-hour I was busy preparing my questions for Dane and by the time I was outside St. John’s Wood Station I felt myself equal to twisting the tail of any lion. As I made my way towards Manfred Road I had only one problem, and then that was dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders. George hadn’t told me what to say or what not to say. I had, in fact, been given carte blanche and I was proposing therefore to take whatever action that circumstances might direct.

  I found the house easily enough—a large, yellow-bricked house standing in spacious grounds, and the site alone, I knew, was worth a packet. But all the property had gone down in the twenty years or so since I had last seen it. Gardens, lawns and shrubberies were hopelessly neglected and the house itself was clamouring for paint and pointing. But with an exception. The lower story looked neat, and as I neared the front a warden in uniform appeared at the door. He was calling to another warden who was digging on a piece of open ground between two shrubberies.

  I left the weedy drive and followed a path round the side of the house. It was a cold day and an east wind cut at me across the bare lawn, but I was sheltered again as I came to the back. There the door was wide open and stairs led upwards. As I mounted them I felt a curious excitement. It was like going to an interview with a ghost, but a ghost who was likely to be very much alive.

  At the head of the stairs was a passage and a neat arrow to the left had a notice beneath it about a tradesmen’s entrance. I went to the right, my feet making no sound on the strip of carpet, and then the passage ended at another door. Voices were coming through it, and they ceased at my knock.

  The door was opened by an elderly man in shirt sleeves and wearing a green baiz
e apron.

  “Is Mr. Dane in?”

  “I’ll see, sir,” he said, and took the card I handed him.

  “Who is it?” bellowed a voice, and I stepped unannounced through the open door. Glaring at me was Dane himself.

  He was evidently just about to take a walk, for he was wearing an Inverness cape and an old deerstalker, so that, but for his dishevelled whiskers, he would have looked like Sherlock Holmes in senility. I had heard about those garments, which were his suburban wear. In town he always wore a topper and a frock-coat that age had mellowed with a sheen of green.

  He fairly snatched the card. His eyes must have been good for he read the name at once.

  “Travers,” he said, “Never heard of him.”

  “May I show you my credentials, Mr. Dane,” I said.

  “Credentials? What credentials?”

  I gave them to him, and then he was waving impatiently to his man to get out.

  “Scotland Yard,” he said to himself, and then gave me a look from under those buttresses of eyebrows. “What is it you want?”

  “Just a little information,” I said, very humbly. “We think you can help us.”

  “Us? Who’s us?”

  “Scotland Yard,” I said. “It has to do with a very valuable ring.”

  “Ring? What ring?”

  But the old man’s look had become wary—infinitely wary. I tried a bit of Whartonian wheedling.

  “If you would be so good as to give me a minute or two of your valuable time, sir, I shouldn’t have to trouble you again.”

  His eyes bored into mine for a moment or two, and then he was going across the hall and opening a door. Then he drew back and waved me through with a curt hand.

  When I was a small boy it was the custom to embellish railway carriages with photographs and one that I particularly remember was an interior at Sandringham. The room I entered was its very spit. Every inch of space on the walls was crowded with pictures, photographs and china plates, and I noticed among other things two pieces of majolica that made my mouth water. As for seating space, there seemed to be none, so packed was the room with side-tables, chairs, two grandfather clocks and a piano, and to move an elbow would have meant a cascade of yet more photographs or cups and plates that stood everywhere on stands.