by Frank Froest
There are certain aspects that must be settled by specialists; there may be a thousand and one inquiries to make in rapid succession. Menzies had no idea of playing a lone hand.
For a couple of hours a steady stream of officials and others descended on the house, and Linstone Terrace Gardens became the centre of such police activity as it had never dreamed would affect its respectability and retirement.
Men worked from house to house, interviewing servants, masters, mistresses, gleaning such facts as could be obtained of the lonely, eccentric old man, his habits, his visitors, friends, and relations. Inside the house the divisional surgeon had attended to Hallett—‘No serious injury; may come round at any moment’—and once certain the other was dead waited till flash-light photographs of the room had been taken from various angles examining the body. Draughtsmen made plans to scale of the room and every article in it. A finger-print expert peered round searchingly, scattering black or grey powder on things which the murderer might have touched. In the topmost rooms, Congreve, Menzies’ right-hand man, had begun a hasty search of the house, that would become more minute the next day.
Menzies had occupied a morning-room at the back of the house, and was deep in consultation with Sir Hilary Thornton, the grizzled assistant-commissioner, and Heldon Foyle, the square-shouldered, well-groomed Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department. There was little likeness between the three men, unless it lay in a certain hint of humour in the eyes and a firmness of the mouth. A detective without a sense of humour is lost.
Now and again Menzies broke off the conversation to issue an order or receive a report. Thornton observed for the first time the characters in which he made a few notes on the back of an envelope.
‘I didn’t know you knew Greek, Menzies,’ he remarked.
The chief-inspector twiddled his pencil awkwardly.
‘I use it now and again, Sir Hilary. You see, if I should lose my notes by any chance, it’s odds against the finder reading them. I used to do them in shorthand, but I gave it up. There are too many people who understand it. Yes, what is it, Johnson?’
The man who had entered held out a paper.
‘Addresses of the cook and housemaid, sir. One lives at Potter’s Bar, the other at Walthamstow.’
‘Have them fetched by taxi,’ ordered Menzies curtly.
‘Couldn’t you have statements taken from them?’ asked Sir Hilary, mildly. ‘It’s rather a drag for women in the middle of the night.’
Menzies smoothed his moustache.
‘We don’t know what may develop here, sir. We may want to put some questions quickly.’
While Menzies was thus straining every resource which a great organisation possessed to gather together into his hands the ends of the case, Jimmie Hallett awoke once more. The throbbing in his head had gone, and he lay for a while with closed eyes, listlessly conscious of the mutter of low voices in the room.
He sat up, and at once a dapper little man was by his side.
‘Ah, you’ve woke up. Feeling better? That’s right. Drink this. We want you to pull yourself together for a little while.’
‘Thanks. I’m all right,’ returned Hallett, mechanically. He drank something which the other held out to him in a tumbler, and a rush of new life thrilled through him. ‘Are you Mr Menzies?’
‘No; I’m the police divisional surgeon. Mr Menzies is in the next room. Think you’re up to telling him what has happened? He’s anxious to know the meaning of all this.’
‘So am I,’ said Hallett grimly, and staggered to his feet. ‘Just a trifle groggy,’ he added, as he swayed, and the little doctor thrust a supporting shoulder under his arm.
The three in the next room rose as Hallett was ushered in. It was Foyle who sprang to assist Hallett, and lifted him bodily on to the settee, which Menzies pushed under the chandelier. The doctor went out.
‘Quite comfortable, eh?’ asked Foyle. ‘Let me make that cushion a bit easier for you. Now you’re better. We won’t worry you at present more than we can help, will we, Menzies?’
The three officials, for all that their solicitude seemed solely for the comfort of the young man, were studying him keenly and unobtrusively. Already they had talked him over, but any suspicions that they might have held were quite indefinite. At the opening stage of a murder investigation everyone is suspected. In that lies the difference between murder and professional crime. A burglary, a forgery, is usually committed for one fixed motive, by a fixed class of criminal, and the search is narrowed from the start. A millionaire does not pick pockets, but he is quite as likely as anyone else to kill an enemy. In a murder case no detective would say positively that any person is innocent until he is absolutely certain of the guilt of the real murderer.
Hallett, whose brain was beginning to work swiftly, held out his hand to the chief-inspector.
‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Menzies. I’ve got a letter of introduction to you from Pinkerton. That’s how I came to ring you up. My name’s Hallett.’
Menzies shook hands.
‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Hallett. This is Sir Hilary Thornton—Mr Heldon Foyle.’
‘And now,’ said Jimmie decisively, when the introductions were done, ‘do you people think I killed this man, Greye-Stratton?’
The possibility had been in the minds of everyone in the room, but they were taken aback by the abruptness of the question. Weir Menzies laughed as though the idea were preposterous.
‘Not unless you’ve swallowed the pistol, Mr Hallett. We’ve found no weapon of any kind. You were locked in, you know. Now tell us all about it. I couldn’t hear a word you said on the telephone.’
They all listened thoughtfully until he had finished. Thornton elevated his eyebrows in question at his two companions as the recital closed.
‘Where are those cheques?’ asked Foyle. ‘They may help us.’
Hallett patted his pockets in rapid succession.
‘They’re gone!’ he exclaimed. ‘They must have been taken off me when I was knocked out.’
‘H’m!’ said Foyle reflectively. ‘Can you make anything of it, Menzies?’
The chief-inspector was gnawing his moustache—a sure sign of bewilderment with him. He shrugged his shoulders.
‘There’s little enough to take hold of,’ he returned. ‘Could you recognise any of the people you saw again, Mr Hallett—the girl, the man who was running after her, or the chap in the house?’
‘I haven’t the vaguest idea of what the face of either of the men was like,’ said Hallett.
‘But the woman—the girl?’ persisted Menzies.
Hallett hesitated.
‘I—I think it possible that I might,’ he admitted. Then an impulse took him. ‘But I’m sure she’s not the sort of person to be mixed up in—in—’
The three detectives smiled openly.
‘In this kind of shemozzle, you were going to say,’ finished Menzies, ‘There’s only one flaw in your reasoning. She is.’
Wrung as dry of information as a squeezed sponge of water, Hallett was permitted to depart. The courtesy of Sir Hilary Thornton supplied him with a motor-car back to his hotel; the forethought of Menzies provided him with an escort in the shape of a detective-sergeant. Hallett would have been less pleased had he known that the before-mentioned detective-sergeant was to be relieved from all other duties for the specific purpose of keeping an eye upon him. Weir Menzies was always cautious, and, though his own impression of the young man had been favourable enough, he was taking no chances.
All through that night Weir Menzies drove his allies hither and thither in the attempt to bring the end of the ravelled threads of the mystery into his hand. No one knew better than he the importance of the first hot burst of pursuit. An hour in the initial stages of an investigation is worth a week later on. The irritation at being kept out of bed had vanished now that he was on the warpath. He could think without regret of a committee meeting of the church restoration fund the following day, from which he
would be forced to absent himself.
Scores of messages had been sent over the private telegraph and telephone system of the Metropolitan Police before, at seven o’clock in the morning, he took a respite. It was to an all-night Turkish bath in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly Circus that he made his way.
At nine o’clock, spruce and ruddy, showing no trace of his all-night work beyond a slight tightening of the brows, he was in Heldon Foyle’s office. The superintendent nodded as he came in.
‘You look fine, Menzies. Got your man?’
The other made a motion of his hand deprecatory of badinage.
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got a line on him.’
Foyle sat up and adjusted his pince-nez.
‘The deuce you have! Who is he?’
‘His name is Errol,’ said Menzies. ‘He’s a prodigal stepson of Greye-Stratton, and was pushed out of the country seven years ago.’
‘Menzies,’ said Foyle, laying down his pince-nez, ‘you ought to be in a book.’
CHAPTER IV
WEIR MENZIES fitted his form to the big armchair that flanked Foyle’s desk, and dragged a handful of reports, secured by an elastic band, from his breast-pocket. Foyle snipped the end off a cigar, and, leaning back, puffed out a blue cloud of smoke.
‘It’s been quick work, though I say it myself,’ observed Menzies complacently, ‘especially considering it’s a night job. This night work is poisonous—no way of getting about, no certainty of finding the witnesses you want, everyone angry at being dragged out of bed, and all your people knocked up the next day when they ought to be fresh.’
Foyle flicked the ash from his cigar, and a mischievous glimmer shone in his blue eyes.
‘It’s tough luck, Menzies. I know you hate this kind of thing. Now, there’s Forrester—he’s got nothing in particular on. If you like—’
Menzies’ heavy eyebrows contracted as he scrutinised his chief suspiciously. Untold gold would not have induced him to relax willingly his hold of a case that interested him.
‘I’m not shifting any job of mine on to anyone else’s shoulders, Mr Foyle,’ he said acidly.
‘That’s all right,’ said Foyle imperturbably. ‘Go ahead.’
Menzies tapped his pile of statements.
‘As far as I can boil down what we’ve got, this is how it stands. Old Greye-Stratton was a retired West Indian merchant—dropped out of harness fifteen years ago, and has lived like a hermit by himself in Linstone Terrace Gardens ever since. It seems there was some trouble about his wife—she was a widow named Errol when he married her, and she had one son. Five years before the crash there was a daughter born. Anyway, as I was saying, trouble arose, and he kicked his wife out, sent the baby girl abroad to be educated, and the boy—he would then be about twenty—with his mother. Well, the woman died a few years after. Young Errol came down to Greye-Stratton, kicked up a bit of a shindy, and was given an allowance on condition that he left the country. He went to Canada, and thence on to the States, and must have been a bit of a waster. A year ago he returned to England, and turned up at Linstone Terrace Gardens. There was a row, and he went away swearing revenge. Old Greye-Stratton stopped supplies, and neither the lawyers nor anyone else have seen anything of Errol since.’
Foyle rolled a pencil to and fro across his blotting-pad with the palm of his hand. He interrupted with no question. What Menzies stated as facts he knew the chief-inspector would be able to prove by sworn evidence if necessary. He was merely summarising evidence. The inference he allowed to be drawn, and so far it seemed an inference that bade fair to place a noose round young Errol’s neck.
‘We have got this,’ went on Menzies, ‘from people in Linstone Terrace Gardens, from Greye-Stratton’s old servants, from the house-agents from whom he rented his house, and from Pembroke, of Pembroke and Stephens, who used to be his solicitors. Greye-Stratton was seventy years old, as deaf as a beetle and as eccentric as a monkey. I don’t believe he has kept any servant for more than three months at a stretch; we have traced out a dozen, and there must be scores more. But it is only lately that he has taken to accusing them of being in a plot to murder him. The last cook he had he made taste everything she prepared in his presence.
He had no friends in the ordinary way, and few visitors. Twice within the last year he has been visited by a woman, but whom or what she was, no one knows. She came evidently by appointment, and was let in by the old man himself, remained half an hour, and went away. Practically all his business affairs had been carried on by correspondence, and he was never known to destroy a letter. Yet we have found few documents in the house that can have any bearing on the case, except possibly this, which was found in the fire-grate of the little bedroom he habitually used.’
He extracted from the pile of statements a square of doubled glass, which he passed to Foyle. It contained several charred fragments of writing-paper, with a few detached words and letters discernible.
‘J. E. Gre … will see … ld you … ues … mother to her death … ous swine … let me hea …’
‘Errol’s writing?’ queried Foyle.
‘I haven’t got a sample yet, but I’ve little doubt of it. Now, here’s another thing. It was Greye-Stratton’s custom to lock up the house every night at dusk himself. He would go round with a revolver and see to every one of the bolts and fastenings, and no one was alowed in or out afterwards. It was one of the grievances of the servants that they were prisoners soon after four o’clock each day in winter. And though he always slept with that revolver under his pillow, we can’t find it.
‘There’s another thing. Greye-Stratton had a little study where he spent most of the day, and there was a safe built into the wall. It may mean nothing, or anything, but the safe was open and there was not a thing in it. Now, we have been able to discover no one who has ever seen that safe open before. It’s curious, too, in view of Hallett’s story about the cheques, that we have not been able to lay our hands on a single thing that refers to a banking transaction—not so much as a paying-in book or a bunch of counterfoils.
‘The doctors say the old man was shot about three hours before we got there; that would be about half-past nine. I don’t know how Hallett struck you, Mr Foyle, but, according to his own account, he must have arrived at Linstone Terrace Gardens at nine.’
Foyle rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
‘You mean, he may have been there when the shot was fired?’
Menzies made an impatient gesture.
‘I don’t know. I own freely I don’t quite take in this yarn, and yet the man struck me as genuine. He’s got good credentials, and if he’s mixed up with the murder, why did he ’phone to me?’
‘Search me,’ said Foyle. ‘What about the daughter? You said there was a girl.’
Menzies stuck his thumbs in the sleeve holes of his waistcoat.
‘That’s another queer point. She was brought up abroad, and scarcely ever saw the old man. Pembroke says she spent her holidays with an old couple down in Sussex, to whom he had instructions to pay three hundred pounds a year. When she left school, he paid the allowance to her direct, but for two years she has not called or given any instructions about it. He wrote to Grey-Stratton, who retorted that it was none of his business—that the allowance would be paid over to his firm, and that if the girl did not choose to ask for it, it could accumulate. He did not seem at all concerned at her disappearance. Take it from me, Mr Foyle, we shall run across some more deuced funny business before we get to the bottom of this. There’s not even a ghost of a finger-print. If only we can find Errol—’
Foyle was too old a hand to offer conjecture at so early a stage of the case; nor did Menzies seem to expect any advice. Hard as he had driven the investigation during the night, the ground was not yet cleared. Until he had all the facts in his possession, it was useless to absolutely pin himself to any one line of reasoning. There was now one man who, on known facts, might have committed the murder; but, plausible as was the supposition
that Errol was the man, the detectives knew that at best it was only a suspicion. And suspicion, nowadays, does not commit a man; it does not always justify an arrest. There must be evidence, and so far there was not a scrap of proof that Errol had been within a thousand miles of Linstone Terrace Gardens on the night of the murder.
Menzies went away with his bundle of documents to have them typed, indexed, and put in order, so that he could lay his hand on any one needed at a moment’s notice. He was in for a busy day.
Two advertisements he drafted in the sanctuary of his own office. One was to check Hallett’s own account of the evening before, and to identify, if possible, the street in which the cheques had been forced on him.
‘£1 REWARD. The taxi-cab driver who, on the evening of —, drove a fare from the West End to 34, Linstone Terrace Gardens, Kensington, will receive the above reward on communicating with the Public Carriage Office, New Scotland Yard, S.W.’
The other ran differently, and seemed to give him more trouble. Several sheets of notepaper he wasted, and discontentedly surveyed his final effort.
‘If James Errol, last heard of at Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A., will communicate—’
He crushed the sheet up, flung it in the waste-paper basket, and lifted a speaking-tube.
‘Any newspaper men there, Green? Right! Tell ’em I’ll see ’em in half an hour. Send me up a typist.’
The newspaper Press, if deftly handled, may be a potent factor in the detection of crime. Moreover, the ubiquitous reporter is not to be evaded for long by the cleverest detective living. The wisest course is to meet him with fair words—to guide his pen where there is a danger of his writing too much, and put him on his honour on occasion. Many a promising case has been spoilt by tactless treatment of a pressman at a wrong moment.