by Frank Froest
Within half an hour he had been promised reinforcements of two hundred constables—more than sufficient to maintain clear the area in which the search was to take place. More than that, every detective in London who could be spared at short notice was already hurrying to the spot, and he calculated that they could not be less than one hundred.
He told himself that all that was possible had been done, yet he could not disguise from himself that in spite of all the resources of intricate organisation, the odds were against him.
The double row of police at the end of the street opened, and a motor-car pushed through, and ran silently to a standstill. He recognised Helden Foyle and one or two of the high administrative officials at Scotland Yard. To them he briefly outlined what had occurred.
‘There were plenty of men who’d have volunteered to fetch Errol out,’ he added, ‘but I didn’t feel justified in letting ’em take the risk.’
‘You were right, Menzies,’ agreed the superintendent. ‘There’d have been the deuce of a howl if any lives had been thrown away like that. Nothing can be done, but let the fire burn out. You’ve lost Errol anyway. I guess you did right in having the streets blocked.’
‘No need for secrecy now so far as Ling is concerned,’ commented Menzies. ‘Instead of making a quiet house-to-house search, it will have to be done pretty publicly. That’s why I wanted more men. As soon as the fire’s over, and the excitement died down a bit, I’m going through this district with a toothcomb.’
‘Miss Greye-Stratton?’ said Foyle, interrogatively.
‘Yes, I’ve thought of her. She’s in the “Three Kings” at the corner there’—he indicated the public-house—‘for the time being. Half off her head. We may surprise something out of her presently, or she may talk of her own accord. Errol being out of it may make a difference, but I’ve sent to Royal to bring up Jimmie Hallett.’
Foyle blinked. ‘Can’t seem to keep him out of it,’ he laughed. He dug one forefinger into the chief-inspector’s rotund waist. ‘You infernal old matchmaker,’ he said.
A sharp cry and a confusion of orders came from the firemen. Brass helmets clanked and dodged ludicrously away from the burning house. The roof collapsed like cardboard, and a shower of sparks flew upwards.
‘Exit Errol,’ said Helden Foyle, calmly.
CHAPTER XXVI
LIKE most detectives of experience Weir Menzies had a certain cynical outlook on life. In carrying out what he conceived to be his duty he was hard as chilled steel, ruthless as the law would allow him to be. Yet at heart he had most of the domestic virtues. As a churchwarden, as a private resident of Magersfontein Road, Upper Tooting, he would not have harmed a cat—unless it interfered with his cherished garden. But as an officer of police it was part of his code of duty to use every possible means—which included every possible person—to achieve his ends.
He slipped his arm in friendly fashion through that of Jimmie Hallett, when that young man turned up in a taxi-cab, accompanied by the watchful Royal.
‘We’re on the same side of the game at last my boy,’ he said, genially. ‘I knew you’d hate to be out of this show, and so I sent for you. Errol’s done for.’
‘So Royal told me,’ said Jimmie coldly. ‘You’ve got a knack of mucking things up, Menzies.’
The chief-inspector accepted the jibe. ‘I’m not one of those omniscient amateur detectives,’ he said, placidly. ‘Don’t bear malice, Hallett. You’ll own you played me up a bit before I started to get my own back. But that isn’t what I wanted to talk about. Tell me now, Errol was in this bad somewhere. Was it only to protect him that Miss Greye-Stratton was keeping her mouth—and yours—shut?’
Jimmie lifted his shoulders. ‘You remind me of a newspaper man I used to know. He once went to interview a jeweller, who after heavily insuring his stock, was found bound and gagged beside an empty safe. The newspaper man being a tactful person anxious for a story opened his interview with, “Tell me now, mister, did it really ’appen?”’
Menzies laughed in delighted appreciation. ‘I’ve no tact,’ he said. ‘I’ll own it freely. Honestly though now, aren’t I right?’
Jimmie frowned thoughtfully and withdrew his arm. ‘Yes,’ he said, in a burst of confidence. ‘I don’t see any harm in saying that’s how I figure it.’
‘She doesn’t much care what happens to Ling?’
A flush mounted to Jimmie’s temples, but the darkness of the night hid it from the detective. ‘I won’t say that. I don’t know. I’ve no right to speak for her.’
They were opposite the ‘Three Kings’. Menzies dropped a hand on his companion’s shoulder, and gently piloted him to a private door. ‘We’ll get in and see the poor girl,’ he said. ‘Should I be wrong in thinking that it was Ling who brought Errol into this affair? If that is so she won’t have much love for him, eh?’
The young man came to an abrupt halt. ‘See here, Menzies. How much do you know—or rather how much don’t you know? If, as you say, we’re both on the same side of the game now, you’ve got to cough it up.’
‘I’ll trust you,’ said Menzies, with lowered voice and a confidential air. ‘Gwennie Lyne and Ling, with some of their confederates are, I believe, within half a mile of where we stand. The round up will begin presently, and we’ll probably get them. I don’t want—I’ll admit it—to have to rope this girl in as well, because, I believe, if she’s done anything to bring her within the law at all it was under a sort of compulsion. If she still keeps silence she’ll force my hand. I don’t only want to get Ling, I want more direct evidence against him.’
He had told Jimmie Hallett nothing that he did not know, but he had adroitly side-tracked the demand for information. They passed into the house. Peggy was reclining in an armchair by the fire, in a sort of shop-parlour, parted from the saloon bar by a glass partition, shrouded by lace curtains. The landlady of the public-house was sitting with her, and now, with a muttered excuse, rose and departed.
The girl was pale, and an infinite weariness was in her face. A flicker of interest was in her eyes, as she nodded to Jimmie, without rising. ‘You know, it was good of you to come.’
Jimmie crossed over to her and caught her hand. ‘You are all right?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Not hurt?’
She smiled weakly as she shook her head. ‘Only tired,’ she said.
‘We have had a doctor to her,’ explained Menzies, who had taken another armchair, and was extending his feet to the cheerful blaze. ‘She’s perfectly normal, but the shock has been rather trying. We shall soon have you as bright as ever, Miss Greye-Stratton. There’s one or two things I’m going to tell you now that may cheer you up.’
‘I thought you were going to round up Ling?’ interrupted Jimmie.
From the dissenting gesture which Weir Menzies made one would have imagined that the capture of Ling was a matter of trivial importance. His eyes twinkled. ‘In a hurry to turn me out—eh? There’s plenty of time for that. We don’t want a big audience for that sort of thing. We’ll let the crowd get to bed. Now’—he became serious, and placing his elbows on his knees, leaned forward towards the girl—‘I’ve talked to Mr Hallett here, and I’ve come to a conclusion.’
Jimmie again interrupted. He was not going to sit idly by and see advantage taken of the shock the girl had undergone to entrap or intimidate her. If Menzies thought he was going to aid or even be a cold spectator of a brutal inquisition he was mistaken. ‘Hadn’t you better leave that over?’ he said.
Menzies ruddy face glowed benevolently. ‘Don’t you chip in for a moment, Mr Hallett. I know exactly how Miss Greye-Stratton feels. If you only knew it, I’m her fairy godfather. Now, listen, I’m going right through this case with you, and you will see where we all stand. I’m going to show you my hand.’
He paused for a moment, waiting as if for Hallett to say something. Jimmie remained silent. He was half suspicious of this new move, for he had learned that Menzies’ candour was usually in the nature of a bait. In that he was right
. A detective has often to employ the weapons of the confidence man.
‘We’ll begin at the beginning,’ said the chief-inspector, laying the stubby forefinger of his right hand into the palm of his left. ‘Let’s make it supposition, shall we? Suppose now, Miss Greye-Stratton, you were to come into a big fortune on the death of your father. There’s the starting point of the whole thing. Suppose your brother to have fallen into the hands of a gang of American crooks. Now I want to say nothing against your brother, Miss Greye-Stratton—whatever he was he has paid the penalty, but he was a weak man. We can agree on that.
‘Very well. Still supposing, we will agree that he bragged a bit about his rich relatives. It is the kind of thing he would do. The whole story would have been twisted out of him in five minutes. Then the thing became absurdly simple. There was little risk about it. All that had to be done was to seek you out, marry you to one of the gang, and wait for nature to take its course with the old gentleman.’
Peggy, who had been listening apathetically, roused herself to life. Her eyes were like stars.
‘You, my girl’—he spoke with a kind of paternal patronage—‘can have little idea of the infinite pains which really great criminals go to in organising their projects—how they plan point by point, slowly, carefully, sometimes for months. Their first business was to get Errol irrevocably into their clutches. That was easy enough. He is wanted by the American police for uttering forged Treasury bonds—’
‘That is a lie,’ broke in the girl impulsively. ‘He assured me—’ She cut off the sentence shortly.
‘He assured you,’ finished the chief-inspector placidly, ‘that he had not committed any crime before he forged your father’s name to the cheque, which you passed to Mr Hallett in the fog.’
Hallett jumped to his feet. Peggy’s gaze had deserted Menzies, and, reproachful and accusing, was fixed on him. ‘You—’ she choked.
Menzies waited with the resigned air of a man who has been interrupted in a story. He gave no sign that he had deliberately seized the opportunity to surprise one or both of them into an admission.
‘I never told you,’ denied Jimmie, vehemently. The protestation was meant for the girl. ‘How did you know?’
‘It’s of small importance,’ said Menzies. ‘You’ve only confirmed that of which I am certain. I knew because it was an irresistible inference—an inference you couldn’t get away from in a court of law. I’ll come to that in a minute. I knew about Errol in America without any magic. I asked Pinkerton’s to rake him up for me, that’s all. He had used another name, but they got on to one or two episodes … He came to England a year ago, near enough—and curiously enough Ling, Gwennie Lyne, and Dago Sam, and probably some others arrived about the same time by separate boats.’
‘How do you know that?’ asked Hallett.
‘How do you get at ancient history?’ retorted Menzies, scornfully. ‘By research. I didn’t find Ling’s collar stud nor Gwennie Lyne’s shoe buckle in a state-room. They were over here, and they had been in New York. They couldn’t fly, and they must have come by boat. The Central Office in New York lost sight of them at a certain date. I got from Miss Greye-Stratton—she will remember that I went into the matter closely—the approximate date of her brother’s reappearance in England, and then it was only a question of patience.’
He had abandoned the hypothetical method of stating his case, and went on like a patient schoolteacher demonstrating a subject to a class of schoolchildren.
‘You see, the great difficulty of investigation work is that you don’t get all your facts at once. You pick ’em up one at a time with very often some lies thrown in. You can never be sure which are the lies and which the facts until the facts begin to fit into a probability—until you get something more than a hypothetical inference—you must have a definite inference that will be accepted by reasonable people—in other words circumstantial evidence from which a conclusion must be almost inevitable.
‘Now at various times we picked up our facts and corroborative details. Mainly they were the cheques passed over to Mr Hallett, the visit of Stewart Reader Ling to Miss Greye-Stratton’s flat, and particularly the one he paid the night the murder was committed. Ling dropped a wedding ring, which was found by the lift attendant. Miss Greye-Stratton followed him out hatless and in a hurry a few minutes later.
‘Don’t imagine that I jumped to an irrevocable conclusion, then. I found—it was merely a matter of having marriage registers at Somerset House searched—that she had gone through a form of marriage with Stewart Reader Ling. Then I had more than a suspicion of Errol. You were certainly uneasy when you came to see me, Miss Greye-Stratton, though I’ll do you the justice to say you controlled your feelings well. But the biggest fool that ever stepped could see that you were holding something back.
‘I confronted the pair of you by as near surprise as I could work it, but you did me down. I had to let it go at that. But the main thing began to stick out as plain as a pike-staff. Ling an adventurer. Dago Sam—whom I then only knew as William Smith—a tough from Toughville, Errol a wastrel, and you an heiress. The combination worked itself out. Why should you deny that you had passed the cheque over? Why should you have held back anything when we had a chat? You were either in the game yourself, or you were doing it for someone else. Clearly you were afraid of Ling, and you had quarrelled in the flat. It was clear, too, that you were not in love with him. Why had you married? There had been compulsion of some kind, and the cheques were concerned, or you wouldn’t have been so eager to get them away. They were proof of someone’s guilt. I should say that when we searched Greye-Stratton’s house we did not come across a single thing that had reference to even the smallest banking transaction. Clearly all bank-books, pass books, and so on had been taken away or destroyed.
‘I thought I saw the outlines of the scheme. Errol had forged his father’s name, and that had been used as a lever to induce you to consent to the marriage. The part not according to the programme was that Ling wanted you to live with him, either because he had fallen in love with you or because he thought that it would be easier to lift the fortune if he was your acknowledged husband.’
‘The murder?’ she said, eagerly. ‘You have not spoken of that?’
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he asked. ‘I can think better with a pipe. Thank you. No, I haven’t dealt with the murder yet. I was just coming to that. Here’s a point I haven’t spoken about. Perhaps you can help me, though I don’t attach much importance to it. A woman had visited him twice during the last year. Was that you?’
‘You asked me that when I saw you at Scotland Yard.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Menzies, placidly. ‘You denied it then.’ His tone was level, his face impassive, but he regarded her steadily.
‘You are right,’ she admitted. ‘It was I.’
He remained silent. She was twisting her slim, delicate fingers into knots, and went on. ‘I did right asking him to see me. It wasn’t pleasant. I asked him to do something for my brother. It was after I had made my final appeal to him that he promised to think over it. It was a week or two before his death that he sent, under cover to me, a packet addressed to my brother. It contained the forged cheques, and a curt note that was all he might ever expect.’
‘I thought so,’ said Menzies. ‘That explains how Ling got those dead cheques. There was an abusive letter written by Errol to your father of which we found the charred remains in the grate. Whether through that letter or some other letter or threats made in person the old man went in fear of his life.’
Peggy shivered.
‘By all the laws of probability Errol was the murderer . Even on the line of reasoning I have indicated he was the most likely man. Mind you, even yet I am not sure. The motive of the crime is clear enough, and any one of the gang may have tired of waiting. It is possible—and a likely thing considering the characters of the persons concerned—that his sense of grievance was deliberately worked upon to fan into flame the fierce hatred
he nourished against his father. I’ll own I held that theory strongly for a while. Later I abandoned it. He may have been an accessory, he may even have been in the house at the time that the murder took place, he certainly knew who was the murderer.’
The tense look on Peggy’s features was relaxed. She drew a long breath of relief. Menzies paused to refill his pipe.
‘That is my opinion,’ resumed the detective, ‘and I’ll tell you why. Mr Hallett’s call at Linstone Terrace Gardens could not have been foreseen. He was admitted and knocked out. Likely enough if the man who had hit him had had all his wits about him he would have finished the job. Anyway, subsequent events showed that the gang believed that he had caught a glimpse of the murderer’s features, and that as an awkward witness, he must be intimidated, or kept out of the way.
‘Remember that Errol was only a tool in this conspiracy—a stool pigeon. The rest of the gang would have been pleased to see him out of the way so long as they were safe themselves. If I know anything of Gwennie Lyne and Ling they would easily have arranged that if he had killed Greye-Stratton he should have been the scapegoat.’
‘That is to say,’ put in Hallett, who had been listening with an eagerness no less intense than the girl, ‘that if it had been Errol who opened the door to me they would not have worried whether I should recognise him again or not. They would have let him take his own risk?’
‘You get it,’ said Menzies. ‘One of the master brains was concerned. It certainly wasn’t Gwennie Lyne—the person you saw was a man. Of the known folk mixed up in this business that leaves Ling and Dago Sam. Sam we’ll put aside for the moment. Who was the person who was most concerned in the successful carrying out of the original coup—whose safety or danger affected the pockets of the rest?’ He half closed his eyes as though he were weary of laying down the course of the case, and went on drowsily. ‘That singles out the man who had married Miss Greye-Stratton—Stewart Reader Ling. If he was arrested for the killing where do the rest of ’em stand?’ He answered his own question. ‘The show was busted.’