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

by Christopher Bush

  I think everybody was expecting Harry to be closeted with Marion Blaketon for some considerable time, and when the buzzer went at about ten to eleven, George merely reached languidly for the receiver. Then he sat up.

  “Yes . . . yes. . . .” was all that came out of him. Then came a quick, “No, no, no. You go down there. . . . No, no. No! You get pulled in down there. On the station. . . . That’s it. . . . She did, did she?” He chuckled, added a “Good luck, Harry,” and rang off. A minute, perhaps, as I’ve written it, but he had been nearer five at that receiver end.

  “There we are,” he said, and peered at us whimsically over the tops of his spectacles. “Harry’s been offered a gardening job at Woking. Due there for inspection at two o’clock.”

  Cumfit gave a little chuckle. Prider grunted.

  “Everything’s going to dovetail beautifully,” Wharton said. “If the A.C. agrees.” It was an Assistant Commissioner he meant, and a quick conference looked due.

  “Who pulls in Harry?” Cumfit wanted to know.

  “The local people,” Wharton said. “They’re supposed to spot him, and with the stuff on him. Prider will see to that.” He gazed up reflectively. “By three o’clock the raid should be over, if it materializes, and I’ll see the Blaketon woman at four.”

  He got to his feet and I picked up my hat.

  “Where are you going to be from now on?” he asked me.

  I said I’d be at the flat if he wanted to get hold of me.

  “Like to take part in the raid if it comes off?” he said. “He’ll make a good cover for you, Cumfit.”

  To you everything might not be too clear, but the way I read things was this. Harry the Snoot was to be roped in at Woking Station, and that would cause a few wonderings at Leverton’s place. If the raid came off and whether it were lucky or not, the managers concerned were to be given a chance to get through to Leverton, and that would add to the perturbation. If stolen property were found, then Leverton himself would be pulled in, and he would doubtless try to get into touch with Marion Blaketon. And from what Cumfit told me as we went downstairs, there was more than a hope of a haul. The previous week had seen no less than three big jewel robberies, and some fence or other would be handling the stuff. As for Marion Blaketon, Wharton would see her when she’d hardly had time to recover from the shock. He wasn’t stirring from the Yard. His role was a spider’s in the middle of the web, and co-ordinating the news that came through.

  I lunched at the flat and then sat nervously waiting. Then soon after two o’clock I had a call. The raids were timed for three, and I was to be in Charing Cross Road, opposite Manson’s bookshop, at twenty to.

  I’d expected a car crammed to the bonnet with men but it was an unobtrusive saloon that drew up at the kerb, where I was waiting. Cumfit was driving and I got in alongside him. When I asked about his men he said they’d gone on.

  We went north along Tottenham Court Road and Cumfit began telling me where I fitted in. I was to enter the shop and I’d probably be attended to by an assistant whose attention I was to engage by arguments about the value of the cigarette-case which I was to pawn. That was all, except that there might be some fun downstairs. And there was only one word of warning. When I heard Cumfit himself in the shop I was to ignore him.

  We made the bend by the Cobden statue and were in Camden Town. A quarter of a mile on was the shop and Cumfit drew the car in to the kerb and waited, watch in hand. Then he drew on again and my watch made it two minutes to three when we halted again.

  “The shop’s about twenty yards back,” Cumfit told me, “Go in naturally. Look a bit embarrassed if you like, but no more. Everything’ll be over before you can say knife.”

  A yard or two and the three brass balls were above my head. As I opened the door I could see an elderly man tidying a shelf at the far left and I gave a little cough. He looked round and merely peered at me. I fumbled a bit before I produced the cigarette-case.

  “I don’t know anything about this,” I began. “I mean, about pawning things, but . . .”

  His hand went out and he gave the case a contemptuous look.

  “Fifteen bob? It isn’t—”

  “The manager in?”

  That was Cumfit’s voice and he had come in so quietly that I hadn’t heard him. The assistant gave him a quick look.

  “Tell him it’s Jim,” Cumfit said. “He’ll know.”

  “About the cigarette-case,” I said, but the assistant was out of sight to the left. Then things happened so quickly that I don’t know where to begin. Cumfit nipped through behind the counter and was on the assistant’s heels. Half a dozen men were suddenly in the shop and two made their way through a door and before it slammed to I caught sight of a staircase. Cumfit was heard reassuring someone and the assistant was backing out, scared to the back teeth of him. He backed so close to me that I leaned forward and took that cigarette-case from his shaking hand.

  “No panic, chum,” one of Cumfit’s men said. “Sit down there and take it steady.”

  Cumfit came through, nodded at me as he passed and went up the stairs. I knew that for I had followed him and already I could hear noises like scurrying rats above my head. There were noises under me too, and then I saw the stairs that led down. They had been masked by a curtain which the rush had drawn partly back. Light had been switched on below and I made my way down.

  It was something of a rabbit warren down there and though I could hear noises I couldn’t locate them. Then two of Cumfit’s men appeared and with them was a furtive-looking little man, coat and hat on as if ready for the street. I drew back to the wall as they passed me and then went on. An open door, splintered at the lock, threw a beam of light across the dark passage. Cumfit was there in the far corner, gently blowing what looked like a neat pair of bellows, and he turned as I came in.

  “Nice little lay-out,” he said. “Have a look at this.”

  Everything, as he said, was fitted up to the nines; not gaudy but certainly neat. Crucibles and the tiny forge went back on a pivoting steel plate and fitted snugly into the wall. Even the bellows moved back to a hidden recess.

  “What’s it all for?” I said. “Melting down stuff?”

  “That’s it,” he said. “And re-setting. Bring a pair of ear-rings in here and before you can wink an eye, you’ve got a brooch or a ring or a ruddy tiara.”

  And that’s about all there is to tell. In the pocket of the man who’d been collared in that downstair room were the keys of a couple of safes, and according to Cumfit the staff inside looked like being just what the doctor ordered. When we got upstairs to the shop, the shutters were up and the lights on. The manager and the lad from downstairs had gone off in a police van and all that remained to do was to give the premises the thorough search.

  “One thing I don’t quite follow,” I said. “Why was Harry the Snoot to have that fake pulling-in at Woking? Why not up here?”

  “Ah!” he said, and chuckled. “That was the old General’s own idea. A bit of split timing, if you follow me. Harry’s arrested at Woking. The local police ring Leverton’s house and say they’ve arrested a man they were looking for and how he’s spinning a yarn about going to see Leverton about a job. Now if Leverton is at home, then he’s called to the ‘phone. If he isn’t, then his butler or whoever it is tells us where he can be found. That’s how we know his whereabouts.” He gave himself a little congratulatory nod of the head. “I reckon that by this time he’s been pulled in too.” He went off to telephone Wharton and I watched the men systematically going through the shelves. The noise above told me that the same process was going on there too. I wondered what had happened at those other pawnshops and when Cumfit at last came back he told me. Two had clean bills as far as could be judged. The Pimlico one had had some bales of furs hidden in a cellar and Cumfit guessed they’d come from a recent Houndsditch job.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised if I’m here for an hour or two yet,” he said, “so you might like to be getting back. If
so I’ll get you to take that bag of stuff we’ve collected from downstairs. They’ll be able to check up on it at the Yard.”

  He took me out to where a police car was waiting with a man as escort. Just as I was moving off I remembered one last thing.

  “What’s going to happen to Harry?” I said.

  “We’ll park him somewhere nice and cosy,” he said. “Harry’ll be all right. He mayn’t even have to give evidence.”

  I handed over the bag as Cumfit had directed me and then went up to Wharton’s room. I had expected to find him cock-a-hoop but somehow he wasn’t.

  “Anything worrying you, George?” I said.

  “Yes and no,” he told me. “Leverton won’t talk, but I expected that.”

  “What’s wrong then?”

  “This,” he said. “He swears blind that there was no appointment to see Sanders. Swears he never heard of him.”

  “But surely Harry’s got some written evidence?”

  “That’s just what he hasn’t got,” he said, “and that’s where we slipped up. Shows how damned cunning they are. When Harry saw the Blaketon woman this morning she made him write down Leverton’s address. Everything was done by word of mouth.”

  “Then she may deny knowledge of Leverton.”

  “Exactly. She won’t deny that he went there and that she said she’d do what she could about a job, but you bet your life she’ll swear blind she never mentioned Leverton’s name. And she’ll call in that typist of hers to prove it. That’ll mean Harry’s word against theirs, and what chance does he stand in a witness-box with that record of his?”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” I said. “Leverton will be bound to talk.”

  “And put another couple of years on his stretch?” He snorted. “Don’t you believe it. His line will be that he’s the innocent victim of crooked managers whom he trusted. Any admissions about the Blaketon woman would blow everything sky-high.”

  “I don’t know, George,” I said. “The mass of general evidence seems to me strong enough. But does this mean you’re not seeing the Blaketon woman after all?”

  “I’m just going,” he said. “I’ll have to hear what she has to say, and before a witness.”

  “If you were thinking of me, George,” I told him hastily. “I don’t think it would be good policy. One of her ideas in asking me to her place on Saturday night was to split our forces. Get me on her side, if you like. I know it’s a dam-fool idea,” I went on, “but if she thinks she’s worked that particular trick, then we oughtn’t to disillusion her. At some unguarded moment she might let something drop to me that she wouldn’t to you.”

  George said there might be something in that, but what he didn’t know was that the glib reasons I’d given him were far from my actual thoughts. In many ways I’m very much of a moral coward and somehow, after that Saturday night, I simply couldn’t face Marion Blaketon in the company of George. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was never to be so cowardly to such good purpose. Maybe if I had gone with George, that case would have ended in mid-air.

  It was at about six o’clock when he rang me at the flat. What he had anticipated had turned out dead accurate. Marion Blaketon had denied indignantly that she had given Harry any name at all. In fact, she asserted that she had distrusted him from the first and she produced a copy of a letter which she was about to send to the Society’s President, to the effect that she had an idea that some insidious forces were trying to queer the Society’s pitch!

  “The letter was written after Leverton had given her the low-down this afternoon,” I said.

  “Of course it was,” he told me with the usual snort. “But that typist swears it was written after Harry left the office this morning. A wicked little liar, that typist. Absolutely under the other one’s thumb.”

  “What did you actually say to the Blaketon woman?” I asked.

  “Oh, I kept my temper,” George said. “Butter wouldn’t have melted in my mouth. But I did leave her with something to think over. I told her Leverton was in pretty bad and we were dead sure he was going to talk. If he didn’t, I said, it didn’t matter. We had other sources of information, and some she’d never even dream of.”

  “And have you?” I asked blandly.

  “Pure bluff,” he said.

  “And did it work?”

  “I think so,” he said, and he sounded really confident. “If she sleeps to-night, then my name’s Robinson.”

  “You really think she’s scared?”

  “I’m damned sure of it. She’s got a poker face, that woman, but she couldn’t deceive the Old Gent.”

  “Good for you, George,” I said. “And what about our friend B. D.? If she doesn’t talk, won’t it hang things up with regard to him?”

  “Don’t know yet,” he said. “We’re trying to trace his movements after he left the station at Pangley that night.”

  “That reminds me,” I said. “Will you be in to-morrow morning? I rather think I’m on to something—not necessarily about B. D.—and I’ll be dropping in at about half-past nine.”

  He hesitated before he asked me what I meant, and I got in a quick, “See you in the morning, then,” and rang off.

  After the evening meal I tried to read a paper, but somehow I couldn’t concentrate, for that pipe-dream of mine began suddenly to intrude. As I said before, it was a queer feeling and just as if I was in a tunnel, with pin-points of light in some far, remote distance. And yet that was fantastic, for as far as the case was concerned I was not in a tunnel at all, but out at last in clear daylight. Dane had killed Pelle and he and Marion Blaketon had been in everything together. Everything was hastening to prove it, and whatever the immediate set-backs, it was only a matter of time before that thesis would be overwhelmingly proved. And yet there was I—setting all that aside and leaving the daylight of facts to wander and grope in a tunnel of my own ideas.

  I think I must have smiled somewhat wryly to myself when I realized just how much of a fool I was. I do know that I picked up the paper again and began to read the war news which I’d missed at six o’clock. Then a glance at my watch showed me that in ten minutes the nine o’clock bulletin was due, so I went across to switch on in case I should forget. So unforgettable was that moment to be that I can see myself now, hand going out to the knob, and I know I was humming to myself at the time. Then the telephone bell went.

  “Yes,” I said. “Travers speaking.”

  “Get round to Kenray’s shop quick.” It was George’s voice and I had never known it so urgent.

  “What’s happened?” I cut in.

  “Mrs. Allbeck’s hurt. Stabbed or something.”

  That was all. I stood with the receiver in my hand, and once again it seemed as if the world was all fantastic and awry. I was back in my tunnel and the far light was suddenly stronger, and then just as suddenly everything went, and I knew I was standing in that room at the end of a dead line.

  It took me a matter of seconds to grab overcoat and hat, and I didn’t wait for the lift. But the black-out steadied my progress. There was a faint drizzle in the air and the night, as they say in Tom Fulcher’s county, was black as black hogs. From my flat to Kenray’s shop is well under a quarter of a mile but it took me a quarter of an hour to get there. And when I did everywhere was dark.

  I rapped at the side door and it opened. Nothing faced me but more dark.

  “That you, Travers?”

  “Yes,” I said, and George’s hand went out to guide me in. Then the door was closed behind me and he switched on the light again. At the head of the stairs a woman was looking from a door to the left, and then her head went in.

  “Where is she?” I said.

  “Mrs. Allbeck?” He shook his head. “They took her away in the ambulance just before I got here.”

  Two plain-clothes men appeared from the door on the right at the landing head. One said there was nothing to report and George told him to go on trying for prints.

  “What happened, George?”
I said.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “All I do know is this. That landing up there serves two shops—Kenray’s top rooms and those of the fancy shop next door on the left. No one was there except a woman fire-watcher. She happened to come out to the landing about half an hour before I got here—that’d be about twenty past eight or so—and saw something lying at the foot of these stairs. When she saw who it was and the knife, she thinks she fainted. Only for a minute or two though. What she’d done instinctively was to open that door and a warden happened to see the light. He rang the hospital and us.”

  “Badly hurt, was she?”

  “Yes,” he said, and shook his head gloomily. “I’m waiting for the preliminary report from the hospital. The knife got her in the lower ribs, clean through the lung I guess.”

  “Struck from behind?”

  “Looks like it. Someone came down these stairs with her and stuck the knife into her and then switched off the light and bolted.”

  “Then she wasn’t dressed for going out?”

  He shook his head again.

  “It was a caller all right. What I’m beginning to think is that he rang the outside bell and she came down to let him in, which looked as if she’d expected him. Maybe he knifed her as soon as the door was shut.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly, and then thought of Kenray.

  “He’ll be here as soon as he can make it,” George said. “But it’s that man of his—Fulcher—we really want. He’s probably at a local pub playing darts, Kenray said. He ought to be here at any minute now.”

  He had hardly finished speaking before there was a rap at the outside door. There was Fulcher and one of Wharton’s men with him. Wharton nodded to the man to get upstairs.

  “You’ve heard what’s happened, Fulcher?” he asked quietly.

  Fulcher was blinking in the sudden light, and his tongue nervously licking his lips. Then he gave a quick glance up the stairs as if he expected Grace Allbeck to be there. His eyes passed over the dark stain on the lowest step and the floor. Maybe he thought it was only shadow, if he saw it at all.