‘Entirely so. I had rung up my solicitor, an old friend with whom my husband used to go rough shooting, and he suggested a fair price.’
‘I see. And that figure was–?’
‘Thirty pounds.’
‘The purchaser gave you that?’
Mrs Standage’s curiously absent eyes appeared for a moment to waver. Then she smoothed out a fold in her dress. ‘He gave me,’ she said, ‘thirty-seven pounds ten shillings. I had to bear in mind that solicitors are conservatively inclined. They don’t quite realize how everything goes up and up.’ For a moment Mrs Standage’s voice wavered as her eyes had done. ‘And they do go up and up, as I have some occasion to know.’
‘I am glad that you made a fair bargain. There might have been some danger of the gun’s being too heavy for the lad. Perhaps its being just right persuaded the purchaser not to hesitate.’
‘That was precisely the way of it. I know, as I have said, little of such things. But my husband was a small man – a very slightly built man, although full of fire and courage – and his gun was in consequence a light one. That was why the Captain bought it at once.’
‘He was an Army man?’ Cadover leant forward in his eagerness. ‘His name was–?’
‘He told me his name, of course – and his late regiment as well. But – do you know? – they have entirely slipped my memory.’
‘My dear ma’am, this, I must tell you, is a matter of the utmost gravity. It is essential that I should learn this man’s name at once. Did he not write out a cheque? Did he sign any sort of receipt?’
‘Neither, I fear.’ Mrs Standage was visibly distressed, and Cadover was convinced that it was not her intention to attempt any form of concealment. ‘He was entirely a gentleman, and no record of the transaction appeared to be necessary. He paid me in cash.’
‘I see. Now, in such a substantial sum there were no doubt Bank of England notes? Five-pound notes, for example?’
‘He had only pound notes – Treasury notes, are they called? I remember his remarking that people are so reluctant to take larger notes nowadays – because of the Germans having forged so many, I think he said – that he never carried them.’
‘That is most unfortunate.’ And Cadover heartily cursed this further example of the dead man’s circumspection. ‘It means that, almost certainly, the money cannot be traced. Will you please make some effort to recall his name?’
Mrs Standage made a nervous gesture with her hands. ‘I am ashamed to be so stupid,’ she said. ‘But it was so common-place and unmemorable a name! And, indeed, so was the young man himself – although entirely a gentleman, as I have said. Or was it because he was entirely a gentleman? There are so many ways in which a gentleman should be unnoticeable.’
‘No doubt.’ Cadover successfully concealed more than faint exasperation at this speculative social dictum. ‘Well, what about the boy? Was he called anything?’
‘Certainly. His name was Humphrey. And he addressed his companion as “sir”. I conjectured that their relationship was that of pupil and tutor.’
‘I think your conjecture was entirely accurate. But I should be better pleased to have the fellow’s surname – better pleased by a long way.’
For several seconds Mrs Standage was silent. ‘Do you know,’ she said at length, ‘that I think it had something to do with rivers or boats?’
‘That is something – indeed, it’s a great deal. He wasn’t just Captain Rivers, by any chance – Captain Peter Rivers?’
Mrs Standage shook her head. ‘Decidedly not.’
‘Or Captain Banks?’
‘Not that either.’
‘Shipton… Shipway… Seaman?’
‘None of these.’
‘Steer?’ Cadover was irrationally hopeful. ‘Captain Peter Steer?’
Mrs Standage oddly hesitated. ‘No,’ she said presently; ‘his name was not Steer either. No doubt it will recur to me in time.’
‘Well, for the moment let us take up another point. Did these two simply walk away with the gun?’
‘No. They had some engagement that would have made that course inconvenient. The Captain asked if he might use my telephone, and he rang for a messenger, who came and collected the gun shortly after they had left.’
‘I see.’ For a moment Cadover gloomily confronted the blank wall that again seemed to have raised itself between him and his quarry. It was now almost dark in Mrs Standage’s drawing-room. No doubt the lady’s reluctance to turn on the light arose from a wish to conceal from her visitor the extent to which it had recently been depleted through the agency of public advertisements. But – perhaps under the influence of disappointment – Cadover’s sense of delicacy in this matter had worn a trifle thin. He rose, switched on the light himself, and advanced upon the depressed gentlewoman before him, holding out a copy of the police photograph of the dead man. ‘Will you be so good,’ he asked, ‘as to tell me if this is the person who bought your gun?’
Mrs Standage did not move, and she appeared to ignore what was presented to her. When she spoke, it was very slowly. ‘I am afraid, sir, that I cannot be of further help to you.’
‘I realize that you have done your best. But please look at this carefully.’
‘It is useless, sir. I must bid you good night.’ And with even more dignity than she had yet shown, Mrs Standage rose and smoothed her dress about her.
‘Useless–?’ Cadover looked squarely at the lady, and the indignation that was in his tone died away upon his lips. For he saw that the woman who stood before him was blind. This was the explanation of the obstinately darkened room, and of what had seemed the absent gaze over his shoulder.
‘I gather that you now realize my disability?’ And Mrs Standage smiled faintly. ‘And you will realize that I can give no description of persons who have never been visible to me. Let me show you out. I have – just at present – no servant in the house.’
There seemed nothing to say. Cadover stuffed the useless photograph into his pocket and walked behind his entertainer. His tread, he uneasily noted, was loud upon bare wood. Somewhere in the house an Aubusson carpet might remain. But from this room any floor-covering had disappeared – inch by inch, as it were, through the attenuated digestive system of the blind owner. With the help of the personal column of The Times she would nibble her way through what remaining possessions she commanded. And after that? Well, she might end up by being badgered by just such a conscientious constable as Cadover had once been for hawking matches in the streets.
Mrs Standage’s shabby front door was opening before him. He was suddenly resolved not to let his commiseration and embarrassment stand in the way of a final effort. ‘You say that the fellow’s name calls up in your mind associations of rivers and boats. Well, what are your associations with such things?’
‘It is difficult to say. I have never had anything in particular to do with them. It is an odd thing to have come into my head.’
‘There must have been some associative process at work.’ Cadover was obstinate. ‘You sold him’ – he barely hesitated – ‘your husband’s gun. Did your husband have anything to do with rivers and boats?’
‘I don’t think he did.’ Mrs Standage’s voice was strained and weary. ‘And you make me feel it was wrong, indelicate, avaricious, to sell–’
‘Nonsense, ma’am!’ Cadover felt that to be brusque was to be kindly here. ‘You must keep going – keep your end up – as you can. I admire you for it.’
‘Thank you.’ The voice in the near-darkness beside him trembled. ‘And my husband, I say, had little to do with boats and rivers – or little since before I knew him, in his Cambridge days.’
‘He rowed at Cambridge?’
‘No. He was too light to row. But he coxed his college eight.’ Mrs Standage paused. ‘And that is it,’ she said quietly. ‘The name of the man I sold the gun to was Captain Cox.’
Captain Peter Cox. He was not in the London telephone directory. Although presumably a soldier, he w
as not, and had never been, in the Regular Army – and this, it seemed would mean an indefinite number of hours’ delay in getting anything about him out of the War Office. He had, at least in his own name, made no booking of a sleeping-berth or the like between London and Ireland. He belonged to no London club. He had not recently been in any London hospital… Cadover, doggedly intent on beating to it, if only by an insignificant interval of time, the machine which would undoubtedly now disclose the dead man’s history, found himself once more working into the night. At half past ten he was brought news that a certain Cyril Bolderwood was a substantial landowner at a place called Killyboffin in the west of Ireland. This opened a new line and what looked like a definitive one. Here was almost certainly the man whose name Captain Peter Cox, not many days before being shot in the Metrodrome Cinema, had confided to his pocket diary. And he was on the telephone… Cadover, haunted, as he had been from the start, by a feeling that in this obscure affair time was not to waste, let his hand hover over the instrument on his desk. But caution stayed him. Do that and – as he had discovered more than once – you can never tell what you may be giving away to whom. The case was beginning to move, and when that happens the first essential is that the movement should be controlled. Very obscurely, an imperfect pattern was forming itself in Cadover’s mind – and cardinal in this was a notion of the species of crime into which his investigation had started to wind. And now there was no question of his holding everything within his own hand; of his plodding round on his own ex-constable’s feet to peer at every point for himself. A whole posse was working under him. And other instruments of public order and security – robust infants merely godfathered by the venerable sage represented by Scotland Yard – must be asked if they had anything to say… At midnight Cadover went to get himself a cup of coffee.
The place never sleeps, for none would sleep securely in their beds if it did. Cadover brushed past two colleagues, their heads together over a plate of ham rolls.
‘To me,’ said one of these, ‘it sounded like hump. And the poor devil could get out nothing else.’
Memory tugged at Cadover. It brought him up with a jerk, like an actual tether. And as he thus stopped in his tracks the second of his colleagues spoke. ‘It explained itself a minute later; if you’d stopped you’d have heard. Humphrey. That’s what he was trying to say. Something nasty on his conscience, if you ask me.’
Cadover sat down abruptly. Coffee slopped in his saucer. He returned it carefully to the cup and stretched out a still trembling hand for a sandwich. ‘Would you mind,’ he asked, ‘sharing the joke?’
The first of his colleagues glanced up at him. ‘Hullo, Cadover – hard at it keeping London pure? Poor old Hudspith was the chap for that.’
‘Or solving horrid murders in ducal halls?’ The second man chuckled. ‘Appleby’s mantle must fall somewhere, one supposes. And you, my dear Cadover–’
Cadover, holding his sandwich suspended in air, stretched out his other hand in a clutch suddenly as compelling as the ancient mariner’s. ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘what was that about Humphrey and hump?’
‘Certainly nothing by way of a joke to share.’ The first man spoke soberly. ‘I expect the poor chap’s dead by now.’
‘Nasty specimen called Soapy Clodd.’ The second man put down his cup. ‘Teen-age blackmailer, of all filthy trades. But he’s got it now. Groaning in casualty. And any minute he’ll be howling in hell. I hope it’s hotter than the coffee they manage in this blasted cellar.’
Cadover, like one to whom has been granted a sudden mystical assurance of revelation, momentarily bowed his head. But, being economically disposed, he made the same motion serve for a gulp at his own coffee. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘There’s something odd here. It sounds like linking up with an affair I’m busy on now. Tell me about it.’
‘There’s very little to tell. They’d been after this fellow Clodd for a long time, and at last they had enough for a fair chance of a conviction. So they picked him up. And then he bolted, made a run for it, and found himself underneath a bus. If you go up now – and if he’s not, as I say, dead – you’ll hear him moaning away about Humphrey Somebody – one of his victims lying particularly heavy on his conscience, I suppose.’
And Cadover went up. Tiled walls, glass shelves, chromium plate, the smell of ether and iodine: it was a chamber that had seen a large number of bad ends and a few surprisingly good ones. And, clearly, there was soon to be another end now. Soapy Clodd was a grey, contorted face on a pillow; a single skinny arm over which a police surgeon bent with a hypodermic syringe. His eyes were closed. There was the sweat of agony on his forehead; it collected in the wrinkles there and ploughed tiny furrows in the dirt.
‘He’ll have another period of consciousness soon.’ The surgeon spoke impassively. ‘And then he’ll be out of it. He doesn’t look as if life had enriched him, poor devil – or he it. Give me a call.’ The surgeon went out. Cadover and an orderly were left together by the bedside.
Cadover stood motionless and absorbed. He remembered the coincidence of his driver’s having remarked this wretched creature Clodd on the previous night. Was he really a fragment of the puzzle? If so, there seemed only one place into which he could be dropped…and yet it was a place into which he would not properly fit.
A long time passed and still Cadover waited, obscurely compelled to the conviction that he was not wasting time. And at length the dying man’s eyes opened. Cadover sat down beside the bed. ‘Clodd,’ he said distinctly, ‘what about this Humphrey?’
A faint indrawn breath was the immediate answer, and Clodd moved his head uneasily on the pillow, as if straining to hear something that came to him from very far away. Words formed themselves upon his lips – they were faintly blue – but no sound came.
‘Humphrey,’ said Cadover loudly. ‘Speak up.’
‘They’re after him, the bastards.’ Clodd’s was a barely audible whisper. ‘They’re after my boy.’
‘Your boy?’ Cadover was disconcerted. ‘You have a son called Humphrey?’
‘’E was my boy – not theirs.’ Weak indignation breathed in the dying man’s voice. ‘And a fine lad, too. Couldn’t arf write you a narsty letter, ’e couldn’t – though I sez it that’s a bit of an ’and at it myself. “Beware” – that’s wot ’e wrote me. And just a kid with no proper eddikation. Couldn’t even spell. “I’ll ‘ave yer put in goal”, ’e wrote – just like that. A good one, that was. “I’ll punch yer bleeding nose”, ’e wrote. I tell yer, I didn’t arf like young ’Umphrey. But I’d ’ave got ’im in the end, same as I’ve got lots with more spunk nor ’im. Then them blurry bashtards come along. What’s their gime? That’s what I’d like to know. Two lots of them, there were, and both up to something dirty over that poor kid. Made me sick, it did.’
‘Two lots?’ Cadover bent forward eagerly. ‘You’re sure of that?’
‘I tell yer I was working that kid ’ard, and there wasn’t much I didn’t see. Two lots of crooks – narsty common crooks – up to something against that poor kid. And one lot ’ad a kid of their own. ’Opped out of a car, ’e did, and ran after the young chap was going to be a tutor or the like, and I’m blarsted if ’e didn’t ’old himself out as ’Umphrey ’imself. And me listening down an area steps. Thought it might do me a bit o’ good. “Are you my new tutor?” That’s what the common little crook said, bold as brarse. Blurry himpersonation in broad daylight, that’s what it was. I arsk you, what’s the police coming to? Sitting back on their great be’inds while we pays taxes for them through the nose.’
‘Who are these people? What is this Humphrey’s other name?’ Cadover spoke gently now, as if afraid that a vehement word might send Soapy Clodd a fatal second too soon to his last account.
And, plainly, the dying man did not hear. He lay quite motionless for a long time – only something, a sort of darkening or filming, was happening to his eyes. At last his voice came in a whisper even fainter than before. ‘Hashamed of nothing I say
or do…hashamed of nothing I say or do.’
It was, Cadover thought, a singularly strange profession for such a man. But a moment later he realized that it was quotation to which he was listening again.
‘And there’s not many as writes that, there ain’t… “Hashamed of nothing I say or do…” And then a flourish, as you might call it, at the end… ’Umphrey… ’Umphrey Hedwyn ’Onyel Paxton.’
Cadover turned from the bedside and ran. Big Ben was tolling one of the small hours as he reached the open air and tumbled into his waiting car.
18
Driving fast through deserted streets, Cadover at first asked himself the wrong question. Why should the eminent Sir Bernard Paxton wish to conceal the truth about his son’s holiday plans? Had the boy, who had been for some reason regarded as a likely victim by the blackmailer Clodd, been involved in trouble so serious that his father had judged it necessary to safeguard his imminent escape from the country by telling a pack of lies? And had the trouble, in fact, been something very serious indeed – the sort of thing that might lead to a man’s murder – and had there been an elaborate plan to baffle pursuit by creating a false Humphrey to lay a false trail? It was a hypothesis leaving a dozen questions unanswered, but it lasted Cadover through his brief dash across the West End of London and was in his mind still as he pressed the front-door bell at the top of Sir Bernard’s stately steps. All patience had for the moment left him; the little button under his thumb was entirely inadequate to his feelings; he regretted that he could not prelude the stiff questions he was about to ask by tugging vigorously at a more primitive device calculated to make a much greater row. Probably, indeed, he would by this present means rouse nobody. And he was about to make night hideous by hammering loudly on the door – it would have pleased him to make with one of his stout boots a decided impression on that too pristine paint – when the offending barrier vanished before him and he found himself confronted by the butler whom he had encountered on the previous night. The man looked at him without visible surprise, and made no demur when he marched past him into the hall.
The Journeying Boy Page 24