by Carola Dunn
“You know how to find all their houses?”
“Course, Chief.”
“Y’ought to be a taxi-driver,” Ross said admiringly.
“Very efficient, but I’m afraid it’s going to be a long evening anyway,” said Alec, glad that he seemed to have got his second wind. “We’ll stop for a quick bite later. How’s the cold, Tom?”
“None so bad, Chief. Just a bit of a cough now and then. I’ll leave tearing up floorboards and crawling through attics to the young uns.”
“You wouldn’t fit in an attic anyways, Sarge,” said Piper.
“You watch your lip, young fella-me-lad, or I’ll have you climbing chimneys,” Tom threatened mildly. “And don’t neither of you go tearing up any floorboards till I’ve had a dekko and said they look suspicious, or the repairs’ll come out of your pay. Nor I don’t want anyone to be able to see that we’ve been through their things.”
Though addressed to both constables, the words were directed at Ross. Young Piper had worked with Tom Tring often enough to know what the sergeant expected. Tom had picked Ross to help tonight, saying he seemed a quick learner.
Alec was sure one of the things Ross had learnt quickly was to keep quiet about Daisy’s presence at several interviews. Her notes made it plain she knew exactly who the murder suspects were, and Alec had not told her. He only wished he could believe for a moment that the knowledge would make her steer clear of them.
11
In the dusk, Alec drew up in the street outside Septimus Mummery’s abode. It was not one of the mansions with acres of gardens backing onto Wimbledon Common, once a favourite haunt of highwaymen. Nonetheless it was sizable, built of red brick, with an air of solid worth. Judging from the extent of the front garden, separated from the street by a neat beech hedge, the house probably stood on a good half acre.
“Cor,” said Ross in dismay, disengaging long legs from the Austin Seven’s less than spacious back seat, “a house that big’s going to take forever to search.”
“Not too bad,” Piper disagreed from the vantage point of experience. “There’ll be servants, and where there’s servants there’s not many places they don’t stick their noses in. Right, Sarge?”
“Right, laddie. Doesn’t look as if Mr. Mummery’s short of a penny, Chief.”
Though Alec had not yet seen the numbers, he doubted a Natural History Museum curator earned much more than a Met Detective Chief Inspector. He himself had inherited his house from his father, a bank manager. It looked as if Mummery had money in the family, which meant there was a chance he was living beyond his income in an effort to keep up appearances.
The garden appeared well kept, the visible part all trees and shrubs rather than labour-exacting flowerbeds. The house was in good condition too, with no sign of peeling or flaking paint on window frames or doors.
At one of the ground floor windows, a light shone behind drawn curtains. A cheerful-looking middle-aged parlourmaid answered the door—just the sort Tom Tring got on with best. While remaining devoted to his wife, Tom had a way with female servants that often provided useful information.
The maid’s eyes widened when Alec showed his warrant card. “You’ve not come to arrest the master?” she gasped.
“No, I’d like to speak to him.”
Leaving the others in the hall, he followed close on her heels as she headed towards a door at the rear. He wanted to see Mummery’s reaction to his arrival.
Unfortunately, the Curator of Fossil Reptiles was facing the other way, only his untamable mop of hair visible above his chair’s back. He was seated by a cheerful fire, with a chess board on a small table in front of him. His opponent was a young man in a wheelchair.
In spite of the scars, the black patch over one eye, and the pallor of ill-health, the round facial bone structure and mismatched hook nose revealed the relationship. Mummery’s son had no right arm. When he turned the wheelchair to look towards the door, Alec saw his legs ended above the knee. He had to pivot the wheelchair to see, because his head was immovably tilted towards his right shoulder.
Unfortunately, young Mummery’s condition did not alter Alec’s duty to search the house. It just made him feel like an absolute rotter.
He hoped he had at least succeeded in hiding his shock.
Mummery jumped up. He looked anxious, but no more so than any householder unexpectedly called upon by the police. He still had on the dark suit with sagging pockets which he wore at work when he was not in a laboratory coat. No money for evening clothes? Alec wondered. Or did he not change for dinner in deference to his son’s difficulty in doing likewise?
“How can I help you, Chief Inspector?” he asked, surprisingly civilly.
“May I have a private word with you, sir?”
“Oh, no secrets here! This is my son, Andrew. Andy, Detective Chief Inspector Fletcher of Scotland Yard.”
“How do you do, Mr. Fletcher.” His voice was a hoarse, breathless gasp. Mustard gas, Alec guessed—a bad hit, attacking the tissues and followed by gangrene, but he must have managed not to breathe too deeply or he would be dead.
Not that he was likely to live long anyway, when a simple cold would inevitably lead to deadly pneumonia in those corroded lungs. Five years since the War ended—he must have very good care. Expensive care.
He gave Alec a crooked grin and wheezed, “My father may not look it, but he’s delighted at the interruption. I have him in check.”
Alec crossed to the board and studied it. He didn’t have time to play often or seriously, though he had taught Bel the moves, but he could see Mummery was in trouble. “So you do, sir,” he said.
“Andy had a good teacher,” Mummery observed affectionately, “though I say it as shouldn’t.”
“I shan’t keep you from your game, sir. I’m afraid I have a search warrant and I must ask you not to hinder my men in the execution of their duty.”
Mummery’s lips tightened, but instead of the expected outburst he said mildly, “Go ahead. My daughter’s upstairs but she’s not likely to take fright.”
Tom was at the hall door. Alec nodded to him, and turned back to the sitting room as Mummery asked the obvious question: “Looking for those damned gemstones, eh?—Sorry, dear. My wife, Chief Inspector.”
A woman stood in the doorway connecting with the front room. Tall—nearly a head taller than her husband, Alec estimated—and fine-drawn, she wore a well-cut but plain navy wool dress and pearls, a circlet at her throat, not a fashionable knee-length rope. She gave Alec a rather remote nod, her gaze going past him to her son.
Her tense shoulders relaxed a little as Andrew produced that heartbreaking, lopsided grin and said, “Excitement upon excitement, Mother. I’m beating Dad hollow, and now, to top it, a police raid!”
“Excitement upon excitement,” she echoed dryly. “Darling, perhaps the Chief Inspector would like a sherry. I know I should.”
Mummery cocked his dishevelled head at Alec, who said, “Not for me, thank you.”
“No booze in the course of duty,” said Andrew. “I don’t know that you ought, Mother. Goodness knows what effect it will have on those lectures you’re working on. Mother’s preparing for the Michaelmas term, Mr. Fletcher. She’s a prof at Bedford College, if you haven’t ferreted out that tidbit for yourself.”
“I hadn’t,” Alec admitted. Two incomes, then. “Have you a desk in there, sir?” he asked as Mummery took his wife a glass of sherry. They deliberately touched hands, Alec noticed, inferring a close relationship. “Do you mind … ?”
Mummery’s shaggy eyebrows twitched in exasperation. “Do I have a choice? Here’s the key.” He turned away. “Just you wait, Andy, I’ll escape and checkmate you yet.”
“Nothing, Chief,” Tom Tring reported when they all returned to the car. “Leastways, if he split ‘em up and hid them all separately, we could’ve missed them, but I’d’ve thought we’d find at least one, and there’d be a big risk of someone else finding them.”
“You
looked at the daughter’s room?”
“Yes. There wasn’t any place she or the maids wouldn’t get into. Nice young lady, dolling herself up to go out with college friends, she being a student. She was worried her brother’d be upset about us. I told her he didn’t seem like it to me.”
“Turn left here, Chief,” said Ernie Piper from the back seat.
It was dark now, and out here in the suburbs lamp-posts were few and far between. For a few minutes, until Piper had extricated them from the winding streets around the common, Alec concentrated on driving. Then his mind returned to the Mummerys.
The curator’s desk was covered with books and journals on fossil reptiles, and a monograph in progress. Papers in the drawers, however, revealed an adequate income, from earnings and a few minor investments, with no evidence of debts. The house was freehold, unmortgaged. The latest quarterly bank statement had no extraordinary payments in or out.
The only unusual expenditures were for Miss Mummery’s college fees and a nurse to care for Andrew part-time during the university terms. Neither apparently strained the family budget.
But Alec had found a file of brochures and letters describing a cure for gas-injured lungs. They came from America, land of medical miracles and quacks, and the price quoted was enormous. At the bottom of the file was a letter from a Harley Street doctor and professor at Guy’s medical school, which mercilessly unmasked the “cure” as sheer fraud. The sheet had been screwed up, and then smoothed out again. Alec could not begin to guess at the emotions consequent on its receipt.
Yet Mummery had kept the papers. Did hope linger? If so, the jewels lying in their cases in the Mineralogy Gallery might have presented an irresistible temptation, and one difficult to condemn.
The last thing Alec had expected was to come away from Wimbledon full of sympathy for the choleric reptile curator. Now he saw the man’s bad temper at work as a respite from the tight hold he must keep on his emotions at home. And his focus on the complex details of his profession could be seen as a temporary refuge from the inescapable horror of his son’s condition.
“D’you reckon,” said Tom Tring, who had been meditating in silence while the two in the back talked quietly, “they could all be in it together, Chief? The family, that is, if it was for the young chap’s sake.” He pitched his voice too low for the constables to hear.
“It’s possible. Would you have searched differently if you had thought of that before?”
“Mebbe,” Tom admitted reluctantly.
“Forget it,” said Alec, “unless we find evidence tying Mummery to the murder.”
He drove over Richmond Bridge, and Piper directed him to Ruddlestone’s house.
Ruddlestone lived at the end of a narrow street leading down to the river. The houses were also narrow but tall, quite substantial though joined in terrace rows of five or six. The last three, at the lower end of the street, had low, gateless walls in front which had to be surmounted by steps—a reminder that after centuries of effort, the Thames was only partly tamed. The coincidence of spring tides with heavy rains upstream still brought flooding.
One by one, the detectives tramped up the steps and down the other side, crowding the small paved forecourt already occupied by a tub of scarlet geraniums as yet untouched by frost. Alec rapped with the shell-shaped iron knocker.
No one answered, but lights glowed in windows and the sound of voices came to them. He banged again, more vigorously.
A boy in grey flannels and a Fair Isle jersey opened the door. There was no question of his welcome—he was thrilled to death to have four Scotland Yard ’tecs requesting admittance. As he invited them in, a small girl peered at them from behind him, then dashed off crying, “Daddy, it’s the police. There’s lots of them. Come and see.”
Through an open door on the right, Alec saw a dining table with school books spread across it. The mantelpiece beyond was crammed with shells and bits of coral—the tools of Ruddlestone’s trade, so to speak—varied by a doll and two toy motor-cars.
The boy said dismissively, “I’ll finish my homework later. Have you come to talk to my father about the museum murder?”
Alec left Tom to answer or evade the lad’s questions. As Ruddlestone did not appear, he went after the girl, towards the rear of the hall.
She popped back into sight. “Daddy says he can’t leave the jam just now or Mummy will have his guts for garters, so will you please come in here.”
The fossil invertebrate curator was in his shirtsleeves, standing at the stove in a large kitchen. Face and bald dome red from the heat, wooden spoon in massive hand, he stirred a huge pan from which rose steam scented with cooking blackberries. Empty jam jars waited on the nearby table. A girl of twelve or so was washing up at the sink, with a younger boy drying.
Ruddlestone grinned at Alec. “Good evening, Fletcher. Sorry, but if I take my eyes off this for more than ten seconds, it will infallibly boil over.”
“Undoubtedly,” Alec agreed.
“It’s a sort of corollary to Boyle’s Second Law. You know the one? Watt’s pots never Boyle.” He laughed. “My wife’s upstairs putting the little ones to bed, and this stuff gets too hot for children to handle safely. What can I do for you?”
Ruddlestone kept stirring, his eyes on the bubbling, deep red contents of his pan, as Alec explained about the search warrant. The small girl, busy cutting lengths of string and squares of waxed paper to top the pots, interrupted.
“Daddy, you’re s’posed to keep checking if it’s ready to set, or it’ll cook too much and waste all the berries we picked.”
“Quite right,” Ruddlestone said cheerfully, and dropped a splodge of jam onto a saucer. “No, still runny. All right, Fletcher, you’d better get on with it, but please try not to upset the children upstairs. James, run up and warn your mother that they’re coming, please.”
“How many more?” Alec asked.
“Let’s see, three in here; Roger doing his homework, I hope; that leaves three, if I’m not mistaken.”
“You know you’re not, Daddy,” said the dish-drying boy severely, departing with the damp tea-towel slung rakishly around his neck.
Seven children, Alec thought, as he went out to the hall to set his waiting men to work. Jovial as Ruddlestone appeared, providing decently for so large a family was no joke. A small fortune in gems would come in very handy.
When Alec returned to the kitchen, the jam had reached setting point. He was pressed into service to help fill and cover the pots.
“You must take some with you,” said Ruddlestone, “unless it would get you into trouble.”
“Bribery and corruption? I think a jar of jam would pass.”
“You might find a ruby in the bottom.”
“Fortunately, I’ve seen these filled. But since you mention it, if you have any more home-made jam in the larder, perhaps I’d better have a look.”
Ruddlestone chortled. Alec felt an utter idiot holding jars of jam up to the electric light and stirring up the contents of one or two. He found no jewels.
Nor did the others. Tom Tring had been through the curator’s papers, the few deemed worthy of keeping, chucked in an unlocked drawer along with more fossil shells and corals, because there was no room in the house for a desk. “Nothing suspicious there, Chief,” he reported, steadying the jar of hot jam on the car’s floor, between his feet. “Frankly, I can’t see how he’d ever have saved enough to pay for the copies.”
“Nor can I,” Alec gladly admitted. Another suspect he didn’t want to have to arrest. “But he could have borrowed it.” Ruddlestone was still on his list.
They headed north to Ealing.
Steadman lived in a newish semi-detached, in a featureless street full of indistinguishable newish semi-detacheds. The front garden was too small for any trees. The patch of lawn was shaved to near baldness, but by the nearby lamp-post Alec, who always wished he had more time for gardening, picked out the leaf-rosettes of dandelions and daisies. In the strip of fl
owerbed along the shared path, a few straggling pansies struggled through the smothering yellowed foliage of long dormant daffodils.
The front door was heliotrope, as (very much) opposed to its neighbour’s canary. No knocker. Alec pressed the electric door-bell and heard it shrilling inside.
The man who came to the door looked like Steadman gone to seed. He was as tall and narrow-shouldered, his faded hair similarly thinning, but his face was jowled, his eyeballs red-tinged, his belly straining at the braces beneath his royal blue blazer.
“Mr. Steadman?” Alec said.
“That’s me. What can I do you for, gentlemen?” Taking a closer look at Alec’s companions, he exclaimed, “Uh-oh, it’s the rozzers, right? It’s my brother you want, I expect—I hope, ha ha! He’s not here.”
“Mr. James Steadman does reside at this address?” Usually Alec would have said “live here,” but the officialese sprang to his lips in reaction to the other’s loud heartiness.
“Oh yes, Jim-boy lives here all right, when he’s at home. The old man left the house to both of us, see, and I wasn’t going to sell a nice place like this, nice bit of freehold property, not with house prices …”
“Who is it, Teddy?”
A buxom blonde came up behind him. Her hair was marcelled and all too clearly peroxided. Her fringed, heavily beaded dress was in the height of fashion, yet somehow missed elegance, at least to Alec’s inexpert eye. He knew only as much of women’s clothes as any observant detective experienced in judging their wearers. In this case it was as much the wearer as the lime-green cloth that made him suspect artificial silk rather than the real thing.
“It’s the busies, sweetie.”
“Well, don’t leave them on the doorstep for all the neighbours to see! Oh, plain clothes. All right, then. Are you after Jimmy, over that museum business? He’s out, so you can just go away again.”
“I’m afraid not, ma’am.” Alec introduced himself and explained about the search warrant.