“Anything rash,” he repeated. “Don’t go getting a fit of repentance and sending that stuff back to the police. That’s what she meant, sir. And Harry took it that way, and she knew he knew what she meant. And this other bit about getting five quid a week all found.”
“I get that right enough,” I said. “He’d only be capable of the roughest work and the pay’s too much.”
“An agricultural worker gets three pounds five a week,” he told me. “That makes an under-gardener get three pounds ten at the most.”
“Very suggestive,” I said, and gave him the report back. “And all you’ve got to do now is wait till Monday.”
“That’s it, sir.” Then he was giving me a queer look. “Not that we haven’t a few ideas.”
“Such as what?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, sir, I was to keep them under my hat.”
“And not even tell me?”
My cynical grin might have told him that I was already in the know.
“As a matter of fact, sir, the Super mentioned you by name. He said there was no need to worry you about anything till we knew more ourselves.”
“Very considerate of him,” I said as I got to my feet·, and once more we exchanged grins. Maybe he was amused because he knew Wharton’s little tricks. I was amused because it seemed that on the Tuesday morning the laugh would be on my side. George wasn’t the only one who could palm a few aces or keep a spare pack or two up his sleeve.
When I got to the flats there was a message for me. A Mrs. Blaketon had rung me and asked if I would call her as soon as I came in. They had the number handy, but I preferred to put the call through from my own room. Five minutes later I was ringing Wharton at his house. I guessed he’d be there taking a breather.
“Something unusual has happened, George,” I said. “Mrs. Blaketon wants me to go to a party at her flat to-night.”
There was a pause and I could almost hear him thinking.
“What did you tell her?”
“I left it open,” I said. “I told her I’d make it if I could.”
He was doing some more thinking so I added that he probably remembered the party. Doris Chaddon was to be there and Mavin. Probably Mavin had spent the afternoon in town which was why I hadn’t seen him. Then as he still didn’t seem to remember I called to his mind how Mrs. Blaketon had rung Doris Chaddon that Monday afternoon especially to invite her—at least, that was what was claimed.
“I know,” he said testily. “What she wants you there for is to prove she was telling the truth.”
“Probably yes,” I said, but I hadn’t thought of that. “But what had I better do, George?”
“Go,” he said, “and keep your eyes open.” He cleared his throat rather noisily and I guessed afterwards that it was to gain time. “Oh, and if you happen to see a man there by the name of Leverton, you might let me know. To-morrow morning will do.”
“Leverton?”
“Yes, Leverton. Montague Leverton. Oily sort of cove. You can’t miss him.”
“Right,” I said, and: “Suppose you can’t tell me any more?”
But he had hung up and I was wondering if that particular concealment had anything to do with that other one that he seemed to have confided to Prider. But there wasn’t a lot of time left if I was to get to Lancaster Gate by eight o’clock. Indeed, by the time I’d bathed and changed and rung the local service for a car, I was a quarter of an hour late already.
But when I got inside the block of flats I opened my eyes. They were really in Hobart Street and, as a glance round showed me, about the last thing in ease and style. The hall alone was big enough to take a couple of tanks. A gentleman who looked like a shopwalker came across and bowed from the hips.
“Mrs. Blaketon, sir? Up the stairs and to your right. Number three, sir, first floor. Or, if you prefer it, sir, there’s the lift.”
I told him I thought I might just manage to stagger up the stairs, and proceeded to do so. A wide corridor with carpet that seemed to rise above my hocks led away to the right. From somewhere was the sound of dance music on a gramophone and there on a door was a 3.
A trim little maid took my hat and coat and showed me through the door, and there I was in the midst of the young hilarity. A dozen people were there. Two men were in uniform and two more in what I judged to be mufti, and there was a paunchy, elderly man. The women were all young or youngish, and the first who met my eyes was Doris Chaddon. She looked startled at first and then disentangled an arm to give me a wave. Then the music suddenly stopped. Mrs. Blaketon saw me and came beaming and booming across.
“So glad you could come.”
Most of the women were dressed to kill, but all I could say about her was that she was damn’ well dressed. Perfectly poised of course, and I might have been the oldest of friends.
“Turn that record over,” she called to a young Air Force man, and to me: “You dance, of course?”
“Devil a bit,” I said. “Dowagers even in my youth used to call me the Menace of Mayfair.”
She grabbed some people who stood by and made some introductions, and all I know about their names is that none of them sounded in the least like Leverton. The fat gentle-man, who might have filled the bill, turned out to be a Czech refugee. Then the dance was on again. Quite a big room it was, with the carpet rolled back, and the floor seemed good.
“Now we’re complete,” Marion Blaketon told me. “Six of each, and so you’ll simply have to dance.”
“Maybe later,” I said, and allowed her to draw me towards a couple of easy chairs in the far corner. Roger Mavin grinned sheepishly as we passed and I remember his partner had the longest finger-nails I’d seen for years.
“Tired?” she asked sympathetically as I flopped down.
“Just a bit,” I said. “Had a busy day.”
“Not arresting people!” she told me with mock horror.
“Not too many to-day,” I said. “Hoping for better luck next week. Everyone gets very peevish when you fall behind in your quota.”
“I believe you’re making fun of me,” she said, and roguish though the look was meant to be, it seemed to me to have a touch of the anxious. Then she was asking if I’d like to see the evening papers, but it was a quarter of an hour before she came back with them. Something made me wonder if she’d been doing some telephoning, and to the mysterious Leverton.
As I sat in my comer for that quarter of an hour, I couldn’t help wondering what the devil I was doing—or was meant to do—in that particular galley. Maybe Wharton was right and I was there only to confirm that Marion Blaketon had had good reasons for ringing Doris Chaddon that Monday afternoon. But I wasn’t actually bored. The first impressions of hilarity had gone and it was somewhat cynically that I could watch the dancers, vapid-eyed and monotonously moving with the same unchanging rigidity of tempo to music which now seemed a yammering cacaphony of trumpet making itself heard in an ooze of slush. Then I knew my cynicism was rather cheap. Those young people had the right to their own form of amusement—or had they? Why should Doris Chaddon be in need of relaxation? What fibres, bodily or mental, needed to be braced against the stresses of war by Doris Chaddon, or that yellow-headed flapper who was dancing with Mavin?
“Well, enjoying it?” Marion Blaketon asked breezily when she rejoined me.
“Quite a mental change for me,” I said guardedly.
That made small talk for a minute or two and then she was asking if I had no parlour tricks at all.
“Very few,” I said. “I used to be rather good once at telling fortunes with cards.”
“But how exciting!” she said, and clasped her hands in ecstasy. Then she frowned. “I don’t believe you.”
“Lady, lady,” I said reprovingly.
“You honestly can tell fortunes?”
“Finger wet, finger dry,” I said. “I know the way I do it, but I don’t know how, if you follow me. Seventh son of a seventh son, or something.”
“Do come and t
ell mine,” she said, and was literally pulling me out of the chair, and as I followed her I knew I’d made rather a fool of myself. Once in my life, I’d done a case a good turn by an exhibition of that sort of mumbo-jumbo, but now I had the feeling that I ought to go warily.
We went into what looked like a dressing-room and I wondered if the tête-à-tête would end in an attack on my none too solid virtue. She was opening up a folding card table and finding cards.
“What do I do?” she said. “Just sit and watch?”
“That’s it,” I said, and drew in a couple of chairs.
I made play, but not too much, with shuffling the cards, then asked her to divide into three piles, and choose any one of them. Then I began paying the cards out. The third was the queen of clubs and I paused to frown.
“Something ominous?” she said.
Let me explain that I had to extemporize, and at speed. I know as much about fortune-telling as Hitler does about the Pentateuch.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “Depends on what comes next.”
Next came the ten of spades. I frowned heavily.
“A dark lady of middle age,” I said. “Definitely an enemy. Someone to watch out for.”
Before she could comment I was laying out more cards.
“You don’t mind my being frank?” I asked, suddenly looking up.
“Do, please,” she told me earnestly.
“Well, here’s a tragedy,” I said. “A great tragedy in your life. This card says it happened many years ago.” I frowned even more heavily. “Something across the seas, or to do with the sea.”
“But how wonderful!” she said, and her voice was awe-struck. “That’s my husband. He was drowned at sea, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” I said, and that was only too true. Then I gave a little chuckle. “But it isn’t all tragedy. Here’s something more promising. Depends on the next card.”
By the mercy of heaven the card—and the penultimate one of that heap—was the seven of hearts.
“But this is fine!” I said. “You’re engaged on something and it’s going to bring you extraordinary good luck. Let’s see this last card of all.”
That was the six of diamonds.
“Better and better,” I said. “You’re going to make a whole lot of money. There’s a man in it. An elderly, or middle-aged man.” Again I frowned. “Yet it doesn’t look like a legacy.”
One more frown and I swept the cards together.
“Perfectly marvellous!” she said, and then puzzledly: “But is that all?”
“Yes,” I said slowly, and pulled off my glasses and blinked. “You’re not going to laugh at me?”
“My dear man, why should I?”
“Well, it’s this,” I said lamely. “People never believe me, but after I do one of these shows, however quick, I feel absolutely limp. Just as if something’s gone out of me.”
“You poor man!” she said sympathetically, and then was springing to her feet. “Do let me get you a drink.”
I had a whisky with very little soda and said we ought to be getting back. It was then about a quarter to ten, and in a matter of minutes the party was temporarily breaking up. The little maid came in and the carpet was rolled into place. A few minutes later we were having a hand-round supper, and there seemed to be plenty of drinks. I had some talk with the Czech, who spoke very good English. Then Marion Blaketon button-holed me again and asked if I liked a little flutter. In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, and said a flutter was just up my alley.
It turned out to be rather innocuous but good fun all the same. Roulette apparatus was laid out on a central table and we were each given a bag of nothing but coppers in exchange for a ten-shilling note. You could bet how you liked but there was no borrowing from friends. Once your pence were gone you became an onlooker. I was down to my last shilling when the party came to an end. Midnight was closing time, it appeared, and a quarter of an hour later we had all gone. Marion Blaketon gave my hand a warm squeeze and said I must certainly come again, and I felt as if I’d been kicked by a shire horse.
I got a lift as far as Leicester Square with Doris Chaddon and the Air Force man. I gathered he was her particular property at the moment, for she was shy of showing any friendliness to me. But she did ask me when I was getting out if I had had any news about I knew what, and I said I was still hoping. What she meant, I gathered, was finding her another cushy job.
When I got back to the flat it was too late to ring Wharton and I was far too restless to sleep, so I got myself a drink and sat in my dressing-gown before the electric fire. And I still couldn’t see just why I’d been asked to that party. Then I had the glimmerings of an idea. Two reasons perhaps. The one Wharton had suggested, and the other to make me a witness of how well conducted those parties of Marion Blaketon’s were.
The drink was soothing and the room cosy and in a minute or two I dozed off. It was only about ten minutes later that I knew I had fallen asleep, and then as I began making resolutions about going to bed, I had a queer idea. Maybe that day had been just a bit too exciting. It had produced Harry the Snoot and the absent Corporal Trigg, and had ended in that party, and that was why the sub-conscious had been so active.
You will pardon me a moment if I do a little more explaining, and, believe me that brief explanation is going to be important. When I woke it was as if I’d had a dream, but a dream which I tried vainly to recapture. That’s how vague it all was, and yet I felt the dream had been vivid. It was as if I had been flooded by the high tide of it, and now all that was left was wispy seaweed and the vague marks of receding waves. A pipe-dream was how I somehow thought of it, though nothing could have been less apt. Yet that expression remained as a kind of tag, and it’s a tag that you might remember it by.
Then like someone going deeper and deeper into a tunnel I began looking for a hopeful pin-point of light. What had I been thinking about just before I dropped into that quick sleep? Then I seemed to remember. I’d been thinking of Mavin and how Wharton had suggested that he’d intended to dope Pelle’s coffee and so facilitate the burglary. And odd and disjointed as that clue was, it made me sit up. I found myself moving on from there, and what had been a pipe-dream became the vestiges of a theory.
Then everything went again and all at once I was feeling very tired. But when I woke next morning, that pipe-dream or theory—call it what you will—was still like a queer brooding depression at the back of my mind.
Chapter XIV
NEARING THE CLIMAX
By the Monday morning that pipe-dream of mine—I still prefer to call it that—was more vague than ever, even if the uneasiness persisted, and the reason for that uneasiness lay largely in the fact of its curious persistence. Though I could tell myself that it was preposterous to worry over vague new theories when the case was well on the way to being solved, yet I couldn’t clear that depression away. That was why I was so glad when ten o’clock came and it was time to make my way to the Yard.
A Chief Inspector Cumfit was with Wharton, and Prider was there too. Cumfit, I suspected, was the one who some years before had handled that previous tentative inquiry into the activities of Marion Blaketon’s Society, and the guess proved true. And there seemed a kind of zero hour atmosphere in the room.
“Everything’s very hushed,” I told George when I’d been introduced to Cumfit. “Anything special on?”
“Harry’s due at Marion Blaketon’s place at half-past,” he told me, and gave me a quick glance at the clock. “As soon as he gets clear he’s going to ring us.”
In a matter of seconds I was learning the ins and outs and just where the mysterious Leverton came in. Cumfit spun the yarn because he had handled things.
In 1940, which was when Cumfit had last concentrated on that particular case, there had been a couple of highly successful jewel robberies, and the methods were those of a certain O’Sullivan, alias a string of names as long as my arm. The police had spread the net but O’Sullivan slipped throug
h the meshes. In fact he dropped right out and it wasn’t till the autumn that the police ran across him, and then by pure luck. And even when they’d found him they had nothing definite to pin on him, and as the hunt was on for Fifth Columnists, Cumfit was loaned shortly afterwards to the Special Branch. Nevertheless, some curious things emerged, and were docketed for reference.
O’Sullivan was actually discovered working—or passing his time—as a gardener at the Woking place of Montague Leverton, a gentleman who was ostensibly ‘something in the city.’ Nothing was done about O’Sullivan to rouse his or Leverton’s suspicions, and shortly afterwards he was seen back in town. He was a young, active chap in the late twenties and the last heard of him was that he was missing in the Middle East. He’d joined up, it appeared, under a wholly new name and had been spotted by an ex tec. from the Yard who was in the same battery.
But there was something more interesting to it all than that. Leverton was the owner of four pawnshops, and the manager of one turned out on inquiry to be a man with a record. Almost at once he disappeared and nothing further was done about him. Then another of those pawnshops, this time the one in Beresford Street, Camden Town, was under suspicion of receiving; at least a man subsequently apprehended and sentenced for a jewel robbery was seen using the back door.
“Now you see what it all adds up to,” Cumfit told me.
I said I couldn’t miss seeing, and I asked if there’d been anything since.
“Not since 1942,” he said. “That was when we had ideas about that Camden Town place of Leverton’s. And we couldn’t hook it up with the Blaketon woman, though we had ideas.”
“Well, it looks hooked up now,” I said. “Too much of a coincidence that Harry the Snoot should be offered a job as a gardener if it isn’t at Leverton’s place.” Then I wondered something. “Do you think she kept him hanging around all the week-end while she was making inquiries?”
“Leverton would do the inquiring,” George told me, and then gave a chuckle and a sideways nod of the head. “But he won’t get anything fishy out of Harry, or about him.”
The Case of the Corporal's Leave: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 17