by Molly Thynne
“It ought to be easy enough to find out if he did. By the way, he’s setting up as a tobacconist, so I’m told.”
Gilroy grinned.
“‘So I’m told’ means that it’s not official. Therefore, source of information probably Miss Webb,” he deduced.
“Of course. That woman ought to be in the force. She’s wasted here.”
The front door bell pealed loudly.
“Talk of the devil!” ejaculated Gilroy.
However, when Fenn opened the door, it was not Miss Webb who stood outside, but Ling, the proprietor of the newspaper shop.
“There’s a phone call for you, inspector,” he said. “It’s from Scotland Yard, I think. They told me I should find you here.”
Fenn thanked him.
“I gave your number in case they wanted to get me,” he explained, ignoring an audible chuckle from Gilroy, who was aware that the Webbs were on the telephone. “You might come along, Robert, then I can have a few words with you when I’m through with them. I probably shan’t have time to come back here.”
They followed Ling back to his shop. The telephone stood at the end of the counter, the receiver lying by its side.
Fenn picked it up.
“Yes,” he said. “Oh, he has, has he? A steward on a liner? What name? Macnab. No wonder they called him ‘Scotty’! When? Thanks.”
He rang off and turned to Gilroy.
“That was Whitaker,” he said. “Stephens’ witness has materialized. The S.O.S. reached him. He’s a steward on a liner, and Whitaker has had a wireless message from the captain. They are due at Southampton on the morning of the twenty-fourth, and the man will be in London that evening.”
The eyes of the two men met for a moment, then they both looked away. They had but one thought: Jill Braid.
CHAPTER VIII
Disconcerting as the telephone message from the Yard had been, it contained no demand for Fenn’s presence, and he decided to go back with Gilroy to Romney Chambers and look into the matter of Mr. Smith’s mysterious visitor.
“By the way,” he said, as he was parting with Gilroy at the door of his flat, “this charwoman of yours, is she a Chelsea woman?”
“Mrs. Cotswold? Born and bred in ‘the village,’ I believe. Why?”
“If she’s inclined to gossip, and I never knew a ‘char’ yet who wasn’t, you might encourage her. It’s amazing the amount these old women manage to pick up, and they won’t open their mouths to the police. You can get more out of her in five minutes than we should in a month. See if she knows anything more about the Smiths, or Johnson, for instance. For all we know, she may have a husband who is a regular customer at ‘The Nag’s Head.’ Local gossip isn’t to be despised.”
Gilroy did not look over-pleased.
“She’ll gossip all right! I’ve only just managed to stem the flow sufficiently to get my breakfast in peace, and now I’ve got to undo the good work of months! She’s a nice old body, but, lord, how she talks!”
“Let her!” was Fenn’s unsympathetic injunction as he disappeared up the stairs.
He found both the Smiths at home, and though Smith accorded him a friendly, if sardonic, welcome, Mrs. Smith seemed to him nervous and ill at ease.
“It struck me that I might as well have Mrs. Smith’s corroboration of your account of your movements on the night of November the sixth,” he said briskly. “She was at home when you got back, I understand?”
Mrs. Smith’s rather sallow face flushed a bright scarlet.
“You won’t get anything of the sort out of me!” she exclaimed surprisingly. “Ned didn’t set foot inside this flat till half-past seven that night, and I’m ready to swear to it!”
Smith crossed the room and put his arm round her shoulders.
“Steady, old girl!” he said soothingly. “The truth is, she’s a bit worked up, Mr. Fenn, and doesn’t rightly know what she’s saying. That business downstairs has upset her.”
“It hasn’t upset me so much that I don’t know what time you got in last Tuesday night. Considering I’d kept your supper hot and waited for you and then was told you’d had it at the station! Where he’d been or what he’d been doing, I don’t know, but he wasn’t in this flat, Mr. Fenn!”
Her husband shot a glance, half anxious, half deprecating, at Fenn.
“I’ve told Mr. Fenn where I was, and he can judge for himself whether I’m speaking the truth or not. If he can prove that I didn’t come up by the earlier train, or that I was the man that stung that poor can of an American, let him. There’s no need for you to butt in.”
“Let’s get this straight,” interjected Fenn. “Mrs. Smith, here, was ready enough to speak for you when you were charged the other day. She said then that you were with her in this flat at the time you were supposed to be taking that money off the American.”
“I did, and I lied!” snapped Mrs. Smith. “I knew he hadn’t anything to do with any American, but a lot of good it would have done to tell the police that! If he’d taken the money off him I should have seen it, shouldn’t I? Goodness knows, we’ve wanted it badly enough lately, and I can testify there hasn’t been a dollar bill inside this place. Knowing what I did, there wasn’t anything for it but to say he was here with me. And I said it!”
“And now you propose to go back on it! You’re a nice couple, I must say,” was Fenn’s exasperated comment. “I’ve had two conflicting accounts from your husband already, and now I find you contradicting your own statement to the police! I’m a patient man, Mrs. Smith, but you can’t play fast and loose with us like that. It’s time I got the facts from both of you.”
“You’ve had them from me,” stated Smith sullenly. “I came up from Luton by the three-fifty and went straight to this flat. That’s what I told the sergeant when he charged me, and it’s what I’m telling you now.”
“But it’s not what you told me three days ago,” remarked Fenn. “Now, Mrs. Smith, let’s have your version.”
“Ned got back to this flat at seven-thirty, not a minute earlier. Where he’d been, I don’t know.”
Fenn struck swiftly.
“Sure he wasn’t in the flat downstairs?” he suggested.
Her face whitened as she realized the trap into which she had fallen. Smith gave a long, low whistle.
“See what you’ve done now, old lady,” he murmured. “Better to have let things lie.”
Fenn noticed that, though he was obviously nervous as to the lengths to which his wife’s tongue might lead her, he was not seriously disconcerted. Mrs. Smith, on the contrary, was fast losing her head.
“He wasn’t anywhere inside this building,” she cried, her voice shrill with alarm. “I can prove it—”
“None of that!”
Smith’s exclamation cut like a knife across the sentence, and with a frightened look at him Mrs. Smith relapsed into silence.
There was a short pause, broken by Smith.
“So that’s how it stands, Mr. Fenn,” he said, in his silkiest voice. “You’ll have to choose between us. But if you knew women as I do—”
The words died on his lips.
With a quickness few would have given him credit for, Fenn had crossed the room and thrown open a door leading, presumably, into the little dining-room of the flat.
“I thought so,” he said quietly, standing aside so as to leave the doorway clear. “I think I’ll have to ask you to join our little party.”
Smith, with a shrug of his shoulders, strolled over to the table and helped himself to a cigarette.
“Sorry, Gertie,” he said. “It wasn’t any fault of mine.”
The new-comer, a big, handsome woman whose clothes, in their expensive but quiet good taste, were in marked contrast to her surroundings, laughed good-naturedly.
“It was my own darned bad luck,” she said. “If I hadn’t fallen over my own feet coming out of the bedroom it wouldn’t have happened. What can I do for you, Mr. Fenn?”
“Save me and yourself a lot of trou
ble by coming along quietly, for one thing,” said Fenn. “In the meanwhile, if you’ve anything to say about this business here, I shall be glad to hear it. Subject to the usual warning, of course.”
Gertie Anderson, “wanted” in Liverpool for shop-lifting, was an old acquaintance of Fenn’s. Oddly enough, when reviewing the list of any possible fugitives Smith might be suspected of sheltering, he had omitted to take her into account, possibly because it was several years since she had operated in London.
There was no malice in her eyes as she looked across at the detective. Gertie was a philosophical creature when her temper was not roused.
“I’ll come,” she said shortly. “I’m tired of lying low, anyway. I’ve had a pretty thick time of it, I may tell you. But I don’t know anything about the job downstairs. I only came up from Liverpool three nights ago.”
Fenn grunted.
“Then it’s a pity, for your sake, that you weren’t spotted at the station,” he remarked.
“But I wasn’t. And for why? Because I was motored up by a friend. And if you ask me who the friend was, I’m not telling. So you can whistle for an alibi.”
“I fancy it’s you who’ll do the whistling when the time comes,” said Fenn dryly. “However, that’s your affair. Anybody see you off at Liverpool?”
She shook her head.
“Not a soul! I just faded out, in a manner of speaking. Matter of fact, I couldn’t stand it any longer. As soon as I knew the splits were after me I went to May Heally. I don’t mind telling you that, because she’s out of the country now for good. It was all right there till her Phil came out of stir. That’s what she’d been waiting for, and, as soon as she could, she went off with him. Fed up with England, both of them, and I don’t blame them. And there was I on my little lonesome, sneaking out at night to get a tin of sardines and polishing the oil-cloth in May’s flat in the daytime for want of something to do. It was a proper picnic, I can tell you! Then, three nights ago, I got the chance of a lift up to town, and came to Ned and Carrie here. That’s the story of my sad life up to date. Sorry I can’t do more for you.”
“That’s right,” agreed Smith. “The missis found her waiting outside the door on Saturday night. She doesn’t know anything.”
Fenn sighed. Accustomed as he was to this kind of interrogation, he had seldom had to face so many wilfully contradictory statements. That the Smiths were trying to shield each other and making a nice muddle of it in the process was evident. The one story he saw no reason to doubt was that of Gertie Anderson, and of the three people before him, she was the one most likely to have been involved in the murder of Sir Adam Braid. For Gertie, in spite of her robust good-humour, had a reputation for violence, and in her far-away youth had been convicted of house-breaking, in company with a man who had since done more than one stretch for burglary. In any case, she was the least of his problems. A warrant was out for her arrest, and for the next few weeks she would be where he could place his hand on her. The Smiths were a more difficult proposition. He could hardly arrest them on suspicion at this stage of the inquiry.
He turned to Mrs. Smith.
“Assuming, then, that you were alone in the flat on the evening of November the sixth—” he began.
“She wasn’t,” cut in Smith at once. “I was with her, and you can take it from me that neither of us know anything about this ruddy murder!”
His temper had got the better of him at last, and at any other time Fenn would have taken swift advantage of the fact. But he was not attending to Smith. The words had hardly left his lips when the detective intercepted a glance full of meaning between the two women, and was seized with a sudden conviction that they shared some secret which Mrs. Smith had not chosen to communicate to her husband.
Acting on impulse, he rose, picked up his chair, and planted it opposite to that of Mrs. Smith. As he sat down, he saw her eyes widen with fear and then dart helplessly from the other woman to her husband, and he knew that he had not been mistaken.
“We’ve had enough of this fooling,” he said, with a note in his voice that made her shrink. “Something happened here on the night of the sixth. What was it?”
All expression faded from Mrs. Smith’s face.
“Nothing,” she muttered.
“Think again,” pursued Fenn. “Any statement you make now is voluntary and I can’t force you to speak, but you may as well make a clean breast of it now as wait till you find yourself under oath in the witness-box. You’re not doing yourself or Smith any good by keeping things back.”
“Aw, let him have it, Carrie,” broke in the other woman unexpectedly. “What’s the good of holding out now?”
“There’s nothing to tell,” said Mrs. Smith stubbornly. “I was here by myself, as I said, and I never went out of the flat.”
“Then you heard or saw something,” countered Fenn sharply. “What was it?”
“If you ask me,” remarked the irrepressible Gertie, “she heard the old man downstairs bumped off. I’ve been telling her all along to go to the station and say so; but she got the wind up about Ned, though she knows he wasn’t within a mile of the place at the time. Spit it out, Carrie; you’re only getting us all in wrong with the police. Ned and I can look out for ourselves.”
“What did you hear, Mrs. Smith?” asked Fenn patiently.
Under this combined attack Mrs. Smith’s nerve began to desert her. Her voice rose hysterically as she replied—
“She means a noise I heard in the flat downstairs. I didn’t think anything of it then, and I don’t now. If it hadn’t been for the way she’s been bothering me about it I shouldn’t even have remembered it.”
“She never said anything to me about it,” exclaimed Smith.
He was evidently genuinely taken aback at the turn the conversation was taking.
“I take it that, by ‘the flat downstairs,’ you mean Sir Adam Braid’s flat?” said Fenn.
She nodded.
“I suppose his window was open, just as mine was,” she volunteered reluctantly. “If I hadn’t been leaning out I shouldn’t have heard it.”
“What did you hear?”
“Only a bump that might have been a chair falling. And then a sort of cry.”
“What do you mean by ‘a sort of cry’?”
“It sounded like ‘My God!’ but I couldn’t be sure. It was a man’s voice—that I do know. I thought Johnson had probably dropped something. I know he told Ned once it was as much as his life was worth to break anything in that flat.”
“Where were you when you heard this?”
“In my bedroom. I was getting ready the dinner in the kitchen when I remembered some gloves I’d hung outside the bedroom window. I’ve got a line there I use for drying things. I didn’t want to leave them out all night, and I thought I’d better take them in while I remembered it. I opened the window wide, and leaned well out to reach them. It was then that I heard the noise below.”
“What time was it?”
“Just on a quarter to seven,” stated Mrs. Smith definitely.
Fenn stared at her, his disbelief plainly written on his countenance. Up till now, it had seemed more than probable that it was Sir Adam she had heard. But Sir Adam, according to three independent witnesses, was alive and entertaining a visitor in his study up till seven o’clock.
“What makes you so sure of the time?” he asked.
“Because when I remembered the gloves I looked at the clock in the kitchen, to see whether I’d time to bring them in then. It was just on a quarter to seven, and I decided I had, and went straight into the bedroom.”
“Is your clock reliable?”
“Quite. It’s set every morning by the church clock and it’s never more than a minute out. You can see the church clock from this window.”
“You’re sure you didn’t make a mistake? I don’t mind telling you that we’ve established the fact that Sir Adam was alive after a quarter to seven.”
Mrs. Smith cast a triumphant glance at G
ertie Anderson.
“It’s what I’ve said all along. What I heard had nothing to do with the murder. The time’s all right, I know, because I was expecting Ned home at seven-thirty and I wanted him to find his supper ready when he got back. And then he went and had it at the station.”
Evidently she could not get over this matter of the supper. In her mind it seemed to rank above the murder in importance. Her indignation served to convince Fenn that whatever Smith’s movements may have been that evening, he did not get back to the flat till seven-thirty.
“Why didn’t you come forward with this information at the time?” he demanded.
“I tell you, I didn’t think anything of it.”
Fenn’s temper failed him at last.
“Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “You don’t tell me that you’re not aware that information of that sort is important. I’ve seen your statement to the officer who called on you after the murder. In it you declared quite definitely that you had neither heard nor seen anything suspicious.”
It was Gertie Anderson who answered.
“Put two and two together, Mr. Fenn,” she said, “and if you’re lucky it makes four. The constable saw Ned first, before he saw Carrie, and Ned didn’t say anything about any cries, or chairs falling, for the simple reason that he hadn’t heard them and Carrie hadn’t thought of telling him about them. A couple of hours later Carrie was up at the station, swearing till all was blue that Ned had been in the flat here with her all the evening. She wasn’t likely to take the risk of having him questioned about a thing he hadn’t heard, was she? She’s been all kinds of a fool this evening, but she’s not such a soft fool as that!”
“Then I may take it that Smith did not get in till half-past seven on the night in question?” said Fenn blandly.
“Take it any way you like,” agreed Miss Anderson cheerfully.
Smith swung round, muttering something under his breath which sounded suspiciously like “Damn all women!” and walked over to the window, where he remained during the rest of the proceedings. Evidently he had washed his hands of the affair.