by Frank Froest
Jimmie was struggling with a tangle of thoughts.
‘Who is Ling?’ he demanded.
‘A crook of the crookedest. He ran a wholesale factory for forged currency notes in the United States ten years ago. That was broken up, and he did five years in Sing Sing. He has been at the back of a lottery swindle since he came out, and Lord knows what else. We’d lost sight of him till I happened to get hold of this copy. That’s the kind of man who’s the husband of Miss Greye-Stratton.’
‘How did you find out?’
Menzies puffed reflectively. He had no intention of completely exposing his hand. He was certain that Peggy Greye-Stratton was the woman who had given Hallett the cheques, and that the latter had deliberately refrained from identifying her. Moreover, he was also convinced that she had told the young man something at lunch, though whether she was, as he affected to believe, using him as a tool, he was not in his own mind certain. The more he considered, the more he felt that she held the key to the mystery, if only she could be induced to speak. With him—with any official of police—she would be on her guard. Hallett, if he could be persuaded, was the one man who might win her confidence without exciting suspicion. So long as his sympathies remained with her, he was unlikely to be persauded. Therefore, if possible, his sympathies had to be alienated.
‘Just common sense,’ growled Menzies—‘ordinary common sense. I learned that she had a wedding ring—though she didn’t wear it. Sent up to Somerset House to inspect the registry of marriages, and got this half an hour ago.’ He laid a hand gently on the the young man’s shoulder. ‘Better do as I advise. Anyway, take care of yourself.’
He did not wait for an answer, but moved softly out of the room. He was wise enough to know when to stop. To say more might be to spoil things. Hallett might safely be left to his own reflections.
Hallett was a man whose brain, as a rule, worked very clearly. But now he was confused, and he strove vainly to reconcile reason with inclination. It seemed ages since the episode of the fog—years since he had looked into the pale, oval face of Peggy Greye-Stratton at lunch. Despite the convincing proof of the marriage certificate, he could not think of her as a married woman. Anyway, he told himself, if Menzies was right in that, it did not follow that all his inferences were right. He had left the ring of honesty in the story she had told him. And yet the idea of the detective was plausible enough. He could see where things dove-tailed. If she were deceiving him, she had been acute enough to tell him a series of half-truths. If she were a willing accomplice, as Menzies supposed, there was reason enough why she should mislead him. He had met female adventuresses before—pretty, cultivated women, some of them—but he had not been impressed by them as he had been by her. But then the circumstances were different.
He pondered the matter as he drove back to his hotel. Suppose he did accept Menzies’ version?—and he admitted to himself that there was a considerable weight of probability on that point of view—he could not see why, in that event, he should become an unpaid amateur detective. The thought of spying on Peggy Greye-Stratton—adventuress or not—was entirely distasteful to him. He had no interest in the investigation. He had been dragged into the affair entirely by accident. Let the police do their work themselves.
It was in this mood that he arrived at his hotel and repulsed the newspaper men who were still blockading the entrance. He avoided the public rooms. He wanted to be alone. He went up to his private sitting-room.
There it was that a note was brought to him. He tore it open absently and glanced at it mechanically. But at once his interest was aroused. It had been scribbled in pencil, apparently in haste:
‘I am in trouble. For mercy’s sake come and help me. I don’t know to whom else to appeal. Call at 140a, Ludford Road, Brixton, as soon as you can, but alone. Ask for me.’
There was no signature, but Hallett needed none. He had never seen Peggy Greye-Stratton’s writing, but the small, neat characters were hers, beyond doubt. His resolution to stand aside was already being put to the test. He held the note in his hand while he recalled Menzies’ warnings. He was an important witness. Already one attempt had been made to secure his silence. Was this a trap?
Yet, on the other hand, if the girl were being used to secure his silence, she could not know that he had changed his decision to stand by her. She must suppose—the conversation at lunch would have made her believe—that he had allied himself on her side. No, the letter was certainly genuine.
He impressed the address on his memory and tearing the letter into little bits, dropped them into the fireplace. Then he searched in his kit-bag till he found, at the bottom, a small automatic revolver and a packet of cartridges. He loaded the weapon carefully and dropped it into his jacket pocket.
He had no idea where Brixton was, but a study of the street map gave him its location. He did not want to have to ask questions. He had come to have too much respect for Menzies’ methods in following up a trail for that. For the same reason, when he went out into the Strand, he turned abruptly in his walk once or twice.
The useful little book of maps issued by the underground railways helped him on his next course. He went into a tube station and booked for Hampstead. At Leicester Square he changed for Piccadilly Circus. There he changed for Kennington Oval. By the time he emerged into the sunlight he was satisfied that, if there had been any shadowers on his trail, he had thrown them off.
He had selected the Oval station because the map had shown him that the district lay on the verge of Brixton. He was about to hail a taxi, when his eye caught the label on one of the big electric cars swinging by. He jumped aboard.
Ludford Road proved to be a quiet road of small houses buried away at the back of Brixton Town Hall. It was a street that might very well have been inhabited solely by moderate-salaried City clerks—retired, unobtrusive, and respectable semi-detached villas, with neat squares of gardens behind iron railings. It was no street of mystery.
Hallett walked to the door of No. 140a, and pressed the bell. It opened promptly, revealing a plump, pleasant-faced little woman with shrewd eyes and a strong mouth. Jimmie, whose right hand had been gripped round the automatic in his jacket pocket, removed it hurriedly, and lifted his hat.
‘I wish to see Miss Olney, if I may,’ he said.
The woman shook her head.
‘You have made a mistake. There’s no one of that name lives here,’ she said; and Jimmie’s last shred of suspicion vanished.
If the note had been sent for a trap, there was evidently no anxiety for him to walk into it.
‘Pardon me. Miss Greye-Stratton, I should have said. My name is Hallett.
She smiled and flung the door wide.
‘Oh, yes. She is expecting you. Will you come in?’
Jimmie passed into the narrow little hall, and the door shut.
CHAPTER X
WITH the satisfied feeling of a man who knew he had earned his salary, Weir Menzies betook himself homewards. As he boarded the Tooting electric car at the corner of Westminster Bridge, he automatically shut out from his mind all thought of Greye-Stratton. He had ceased to be Weir Menzies, Chief-Inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department. He was Weir Menzies, Esq., of Magersfontein Road, Upper Tooting, who, like other gentlemen of business, left his business worries behind him at the office.
He ate his dinner while Mrs Menzies, a motherly little woman, who never asked questions, retailed the latest domestic gossip. He added his own quota. He was afraid that Browns, the new butchers in the High Street, were not doing too well. As he pushed his chair back and lit a cigar, Mrs Menzies seized the opportunity to tell of a calamity.
‘Bruin’s been in mischief. He dug a big hole under that Captain Hayward rose today.’
This news roused Menzies. He kicked off his slippers and began re-lacing his boots.
‘That dashed dog. I’ll bet he’s ruined it. We’ll have to chain him up. Ring the bell and ask Nellie for a candle, will you, dear?’
Cand
le in hand, he led the way to the garden, muttering discontentedly as he cast its glow on the damage. He raised his voice.
‘Bruin—here, Bruin!’ And a heavy, bob-tailed sheep dog came lumbering over the lawn. Weir Menzies regarded him sternly, and pointed an accusing finger at the hole. ‘What do you mean by that?’ he demanded. ‘You wicked, wicked dog!’ Bruin sprawled, with downcast head, his whole attitude one of penitence and shame.
‘Where’s the whip?’ asked Menzies. ‘Go and fetch it.’
Reluctantly, with slow step, like a boy sent by his schoolmaster for a cane, Bruin re-crossed the lawn, returning in a few seconds with a dog-whip between his teeth. He cowered while Menzies administered a couple of light blows—blows so light that they were rather symbolic of disgrace than actual punishment. His master slipped the whip into his pocket.
‘Now go and see that the house is safe.’
The dog, now that retribution was over, slipped away. Detectives, for all their profession, are no more immune from burglary than ordinary mortals; but Menzies had little fear of his house being looted while Bruin was abroad. To and fro over the house he trotted, pushing open doors, or whining till they were opened by the maid, and inspecting windows and fastenings with an intelligence almost uncanny. By the time he had finished his inspection, Menzies was in his own room. The dog trotted in, sat on his haunches, and made a low, crooning noise in his throat.
‘All correct, eh?’ said Menzies. ‘Good dog. Go to bed.’
He himself was asleep almost as soon as his head touched the pillow. Yet it seemed to him that he had not been asleep five minutes when the deep boom of the dog’s bark and a persistent ringing of the bell aroused him. He looked at his watch as he slipped out of bed. It was four o’clock. He had slept seven hours.
He shivered as he shuffled downstairs in his slippers and opened the door.
‘Why, it’s you, Congreve!’ he exclaimed. ‘What the deuce is the matter? Come in.’
Detective-sergeant Congreve—graded first class at headquarters—was too wise a man to say anything at an open door with a taxi-driver within earshot. He followed his chief into the dining-room, and Menzies switched on the light.
‘The lady’s come back?’ he interrogated.
‘No, sir. I wouldn’t have worried you for that. It’s Hallett. He’s gone, too.’
Menzies muttered a little comminatory service in a low voice, because Mrs Menzies was probably awake. ‘That’s awkward,’ he said at last. I ought to have had him kept under observation, but I guessed I could rely on the hotel people to let us know. I didn’t want to have to arrest him for putting any more of our men on the sick list, but I wish I’d nabbed him now. He’d have been safer for us and safer for himself under lock and key. What’s the point?’
‘He came back yesterday afternoon, went to his room, where there was a note awaiting him, and went out without saying anything. He has not come back. The hotel people rang me up an hour ago, and I went round there. I found the note.’ He shook an envelope on to the table and a shower of torn fragments dropped. ‘I didn’t wait to put it together. I came straight on here.’
The chief-inspector became unpleasantly conscious that his pyjamas were an inadequate protection against the bite of the cold.
‘I suppose this means that I’ve got to turn out,’ he grumbled. ‘I seem to get all the jobs where there’s no rest. It’s enough to make a man turn it up and take a cottage in the country. Have a go at that note, Congreve, like a good chap, while I go and get some clothes on. Wait a minute, and I’ll get you a drawingboard and a packet of pins.
There is method in piecing together a torn letter as in other things. Congreve worked quickly on rules of common sense, finding first the fragments which the square edges told him were the corners, and pinning them down on the board. With these fixed points he was easily able to reconstruct the note, and he had it ready and a copy written out for Menzies by the time he was dressed.
‘It looks as if the girl had got him,’ he commented, as he passed the copy over to the chief-inspector. ‘Anyway, there’s an address.’
Menzies laid the copy down on the table.
‘That’s something,’ he agreed cautiously. ‘But it looks to me as though we’re right up against it, old man. Somebody’ll have to stand the racket when the trouble comes. What do you make of it?’
‘Empty house likely,’ said Congreve laconically. ‘They’ve shut Hallett’s mouth. If you’re right about Errol, Ling and Co., sir, they’ll not stand on ceremony. They’re up to their necks already. We’ll find a dead man in Ludford Road. They won’t let Hallett do any talking.’
He spoke in the matter-of-fact way in which a surgeon might contemplate the result of a dangerous operation—not with the shudder with which the average man would speak of a cold-blooded murder. The case with which they were dealing concerned men who, he believed, would be desperate now that one life had been sacrificed in their efforts to cover their trail.
‘I don’t know,’ said Menzies, thoughtfully. ‘They might go to extremes if they were forced, but they won’t make the pace too hot. We’ve got nothing concrete against ’em yet—nothing even to suggest that one of them was near Linstone Terrace Gardens when the old man was killed. You bet they’ll have alibis all right. If we could lay our fingers on ’em this minute they’d brazen it out.’
Congreve nodded acquiescence. It is an elementary principle of detection that a moral certainty is a delusion when it is tested by the stringent laws of evidence before a jury. One may do a complicated sum by unorthodox methods, and be perfectly clear that the result is right, and yet be unable to demonstrate it. It is the demonstration of guilt in court that counts. At the moment, however, Weir Menzies was more concerned with the prospect of retrieving Hallett.
‘You see,’ he went on, ‘unless we prove these other people accessories, there is only one person whose neck is in jeopardy. That’s the actual murderer. He probably wouldn’t object to save himself by another murder. But the others are not going to that length, if they can help it. They intend, I imagine, to try and bottle him up till Smith is discharged and the whole gang of them will make a bolt for it.’
‘But,’ objected Congreve. ‘Royal’s evidence alone will convict the man.’
‘Maybe they don’t understand that,’ retorted Menzies. ‘Anyway, we won’t worry yet. I’m going on to Ludford Road. I shall want you to go back and swear out a search-warrant, in case it’s wanted. Also have that note properly done up and photographed. You might get a paper expert to examine a piece of the paper. There’s just a chance we might find out where it was bought and who bought it. You can get an all-night tramcar at the end of the road. Leave the taxi for me. I’ll have to change again.’
An hour later a plump, ruddy-faced man, smoking a clay pipe, and with his hand thrust deep in his trouser pockets, slouched along Ludford Road. The loosened shoulders, the shambling gait, the unpolished down-at-heels boots—one of them laced with string—all told of the practical vagrant. Yet Weir Menzies had not disguised himself in the sense that disguise would be understood by those whose knowledge of Scotland Yard is derived from books and newspapers.
His face was untouched by grease-paint, he wore no wig or false beard. He was just Weir Menzies as he might have been if fortune had made him a tramp. Yet he bore little superficial resemblance to the Weir Menzies, Esq., churchwarden of All Saints, Upper Tooting, or the Mr Weir Menzies, Chief-Inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department. His hair had been rubbed up until it looked as if it had not seen brush or comb for a month, and was surmounted by a battered Trilby hat. He had rubbed his hands on a doormat and then on his face, to prevent any suspicion of unnatural cleanliness. His neat moustache had been combed out till it hung down ragged and bristly. His clothes were shabby, and no two garments matched. They might have been given him at different times by charitable householders.
There was nothing which could go astray and betray that he had assumed a character. Indeed, any a
ccident to clothes or person would but increase the disreputability of his appearance.
Twice he shuffled up and down the street, the second time meeting a policeman, who paused and, without saying anything, watched him out of sight. The two met again a quarter of an hour later, and this time the constable was not so forbearing. He turned his bull’s eye full on the tramp and surveyed him up and down. It was at the back of his mind that he might have a charge of ‘loitering with intent to commit a felony’.
‘What’s the game, Isaacstein? What are you hanging around for?’ he demanded.
And, because he had been trained not to take risks, his hand gripped the greasy collar of the nondescript and administered a slight, warning shake.
One hundred and eighty pounds of trained policeman took the pavement with a thud. He sat up ruefully and with wrath. One does not expect a rickety, middle-aged tramp to have a working knowledge of ju-jitsu. And it astonished him still more that his assailant remained instead of taking advantage of the opportunity of making a dash for freedom.
‘All right,’ he growled; and advanced cautiously.
‘Don’t make a fool of yourself, my man,’ said the tramp, authoritatively. ‘I’m C.I. Walk on quietly to the corner, and I’ll show you my warrant card.’
The constable hesitated. He was young, and this was beyond his experience. But the authority of the voice shook him, and he obeyed the order. Within five minutes he learned how near he had been to committing a bad mistake.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he apologised. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Menzies. ‘Of course, you didn’t; I’m not blaming you. Now, you hang on to this corner for half an hour; I’ll be responsible to your superiors. Just stand here and keep your eyes and ears open, in case I should want you.’
He had straightened up during the conversation, but now he became again the shambling vagrant. A clock somewhere had just chimed six, and he judged that there might be a chance to commence operations. He moved furtively up to the door of No. 140a and rang the bell. Twice he had to repeat the summons before there was any movement within. Then a window was flung up above, and a woman’s voice demanded the business of the intruder.