Man in the Queue

by Robert Barnard

“Well, get it off your chest by coming down to Eastbourne with me this afternoon as my cousin, and being my cousin till dinner. Will you?”

  She considered him gravely. “I don’t think so. Are you on the track of some other unhappy person?”

  “Not exactly. I’m on the track of something, I think.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “If it were just fun, I’d do it like a shot. But when it means something I don’t know for some one I’ve never met—you see?”

  “I say, I can’t tell you about it, but if I give you my word that you’ll never regret it, will you believe me and come?”

  “But why should I believe you?” she said sweetly.

  The inspector was rather staggered. He had commended her lack of faith in Lamont, but her logical application of it to himself disconcerted him.

  “I don’t know why,” he admitted. “I suppose police officers are just as capable of fibbing as any one.”

  “And considerably more unscrupulous than most,” she added dryly.

  “Well, it’s just a matter for your own decision, then. You won’t regret coming. I’ll swear to that, if you like—and police officers are not given to perjury, however unscrupulous they may be.”

  She laughed. “That got you, didn’t it?” she said delightedly. And after a pause, “Yes, I’ll come and be your cousin with pleasure. None of my cousins are half as good-looking.” But the mockery in her tone was too apparent for Grant to find much pleasure in the compliment.

  They went down through the green countryside to the sea, however, in perfect amity, and when Grant looked up suddenly and saw the downs he was surprised. There they stood in possession of the landscape, like some one who has tiptoed into a room unheard, and startles the occupant by appearing in the middle of the floor. He had never known a journey to the south coast pass so quickly. They were alone in the compartment, and he proceeded to give her her bearings.

  “I am staying down at Eastbourne—no, I can’t be, I’m not dressed for the part—we’ve both come down for the afternoon, then. I am going to get into conversation with two women who know me already in my professional capacity. When the talk turns on hat brooches I want you to produce this from your bag, and say that you have just bought it for your sister. Your name, by the way, is Eleanor Raymond, and your sister’s is Mary. That is all. Just leave the brooch lying round until I arrange my tie. That will be the signal that I have had all I want.”

  “All right. What is your first name, by the way?”

  “Alan.”

  “All right, Alan. I nearly forgot to ask you that. It would have been a joke if I had not known my cousin’s name! . . . It’s a queer world, isn’t it? Look at those primroses in the sun and think of all the people in terrible trouble this minute.”

  “No, don’t. That way madness lies. Think of the pleasantly deserted beach we’re going to see in a few minutes.”

  “Do you ever go to the Old Vic?” she asked, and they were still telling each other how wonderful Miss Baylis was when they ran into the station; and Grant said, “Come on, Eleanor,” and, grabbing her by the arm, picked her from the carriage like a small boy, impatient to try a spade on the sands.

  The beach, as Grant had prophesied, was in that pleasantly deserted condition that makes the south-coast resorts so attractive out of the season. It was sunny and very warm, and a few groups lay about on the shingle, basking in the sun in an aristocratic isolation unknown to summer visitors.

  “We’ll go along the front and come back along the beach,” Grant said. “They are bound to be out on a day like this.”

  “Heaven send they aren’t on the downs,” she said. “I don’t mind walking, but it would take till tomorrow to quarter these.”

  “I think the downs are ruled out. The lady I am interested in isn’t much of a walker, I should say.”

  “What is her name?”

  “No, I won’t tell you that until I introduce you. You are supposed not to have heard of her, and it will be better if you really haven’t.”

  They walked in silence along the trim front towards Holywell. Everything was trim, with that well-ordered trimness that is so typically Eastbourne. Even the sea was trim—and slightly exclusive. And Beachy Head had the air of having been set down there as a good finish off to the front, and of being perfectly conscious of the fact. They had not been walking for more than ten minutes when Grant said, “We’ll go down to the beach now. I’m almost certain we passed the couple I want some time ago. They are down on the shingle.”

  They left the pavement and began a slow foot-slipping stroll back to the piers again. Presently they approached two women who were reclining in deck-chairs facing the sea. One, the slighter one, was curled up with her back to Miss Dinmont and the inspector, and was apparently reading. The other was snowed round with magazines, writing-pad, sunshade, and all the other recognized paraphernalia of an afternoon on the beach, but she was doing nothing and appeared to be half asleep. As they came abreast of the chairs the inspector let his glance fall casually on them and then stopped.

  “Why, Mrs. Ratcliffe!” he said. “Are you down here recuperating? What glorious weather!”

  Mrs. Ratcliffe, after one startled glance, welcomed him. “You remember my sister, Miss Lethbridge?”

  Grant shook hands and said, “I don’t think you know my cousin—”

  But the gods were good to Grant that day. Before he could commit himself, Miss Lethbridge said in her pleasant drawl:

  “Good heavens, if it isn’t Dandie Dinmont! How are you, my dear woman?”

  “Do you know each other, then?” asked Grant, feeling like a man who has opened his eyes to find that one more step would have taken him over a precipice.

  “Rather!” said Miss Lethbridge. “I had my appendicitis in a room at St. Michael’s, and Dandie Dinmont held my head and my hand alternately. And she held them very well, I will say that for her. Shake hands with Miss Dinmont, Meg. My sister, Mrs. Ratcliffe. Who’d have thought you had cousins in the force!”

  “I suppose you are recuperating too, Inspector?” Mrs. Ratcliffe said.

  “You could call it that, I suppose,” the inspector said. “My cousin is on holiday from Mike’s, and I have finished my case, so we are making a day of it.”

  “Well, it isn’t teatime yet,” said Miss Lethbridge. “Sit down and talk to us for a little. I haven’t seen Dandie for ages.”

  “You’ll be glad to have that awful case off your hands, Inspector,” her sister said as they subsided on the shingle. She spoke as though the murder had been just as much of an event in Grant’s life as it had been in hers, but the inspector let it pass, and presently the talk veered away from the murder and went via health, restaurants, hotels, and food to dress, or the lack of it.

  “I love your hat brooch,” said Miss Dinmont idly to her friend. “I can think of nothing but hat brooches this afternoon, because we’ve just been buying one for a mutual cousin who is getting married. You know—like getting a new coat and seeing people’s coats as you never saw them before. I have it here somewhere.” She reached for her bag without altering her reclining position, and rummaged in it until she produced the blue velvet box. “What do you think of it?” She opened it and extended it to them.

  “Oh, lovely!” said Miss Lethbridge, but Mrs. Ratcliffe said nothing for a little.

  “M. R.,” she said at last. “Why, the initials are the same as mine. What is your cousin’s name?”

  “Mary Raymond.”

  “Sounds like a goody-goody heroine out of a book,” remarked Miss Lethbridge. “Is she goody?”

  “No, not particularly, though she’s marrying an awful stodge. You like it, then?”

  “Rather!” said Miss Lethbridge.

  “Beautiful!” said her sister. “May I have a look at it?” She took the case in her hands, examined the brooch back and front, and handed it back. “Beautiful!” she said again. “And most uncommon. Can you get them ready-made, so to speak?”

/>   Grant’s infinitesimal shake of the head answered Miss Dinmont’s cry for help. “No, we had it made,” she said.

  “Well, she’s a lucky devil, Mary Raymond, and if she doesn’t like it, she has very poor taste.”

  “Oh, if she doesn’t like it,” said Grant, “she can just fib and say she does, and we’ll never be a bit the wiser. All women are expert fibbers.”

  “’Ark at ’im!” said Miss Lethbridge. “Poor disillusioned creature!”

  “Well, isn’t it true? Your social life is one long series of fibs. You are very sorry—You are not at home—You would have come, but—You wish some one would stay longer. If you aren’t fibbing to your friends, you are fibbing to your maids.”

  “I may fib to my friends,” said Mrs. Ratcliffe, “but I most certainly do not fib to my maids!”

  “Don’t you?” said Grant, turning idly to look at her. No one, to see him there, with his hat tilted over his eyes and his body lounging, would have said that Inspector Grant was on duty. “You were going to the United States the day after the murder, weren’t you?” She nodded calmly. “Well, why did you tell your maid that you were going to Yorkshire?”

  Mrs. Ratcliffe made a movement to sit erect and then sank back again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I most certainly never told my maid I was going to Yorkshire. I said New York.”

  That was so patently possible that Grant hastened to get in first with, “Well, she thinks you said Yorkshire,” before Mrs. Ratcliffe inevitably said, “How do you know?”

  “There isn’t anything a police inspector doesn’t know,” he said.

  “There isn’t anything he won’t do, you mean,” she said angrily. “Have you been walking out with Annie? I shouldn’t be surprised if you suspected me of having done the murder myself.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder,” said Grant. “Inspectors suspect all the world.”

  “Well, I suppose I can only give thanks that your suspicions led to nothing worse than walking out my maid.”

  Grant caught Miss Dinmont’s eyes on him under the short brim of her hat, and there was a new expression in them. The conversation had given away the fact that Mrs. Ratcliffe had some connexion with the queue murder, and Miss Dinmont was being given furiously to think. Grant smiled reassuringly at her. “They don’t think I’m nice to know,” he said. “But at least you can stick up for me. Justice is the thing I live for.” Surely she must see, if she thought about it, that his inquiries in this direction could not be very incriminating to Lamont. The chances must be the other way about.

  “Let’s go and have tea,” Miss Lethbridge said. “Come along to our hotel. Or shall we go somewhere else, Meg? I’m sick of anchovy sandwiches and currant cake.”

  Grant suggested a tea-shop which had a reputation for cakes, and began to bundle Mrs. Ratcliffe’s scattered belongings together. As he did so, he let the writing-pad drop so that it fell open on the sand, the first sheet exhibiting a half-written letter. Staring up at him in the bright sunlight were the round large letters of Mrs. Ratcliffe’s script. “Sorry!” he said, and restored the block to the pile of papers and magazines.

  Tea as a gastronomic function might have been a success, but as a social occasion Grant felt that it failed miserably. Two out of his three companions regarded him with a distrust of which he could not fail to be conscious, and the third—Miss Lethbridge—was so cheerfully determined to pretend that she was not aware of her sister’s ill humour that she tacitly confessed her own awareness of tension. When they had taken leave of each other, and Grant and his companion were on their way to the station in the fading light, he said, “You’ve been a brick, Miss Dinmont. I’ll never forget it.” But she did not answer. She was so quiet on the way home that his already discontented thoughts were further distracted. Why couldn’t the girl trust him? Did she think him an ogre to make such unscrupulous use of her as she suspected? And all the time his looker-on half was smiling sardonically and saying, “You, a police inspector, asking for trust! Why, Machiavelli was fastidious compared with a C.I.D. man.”

  When Grant was at war with himself his mouth had a slight twist in it, and tonight the twist was very marked. He had found not one definite answer to the problems that troubled him. He did not know whether Mrs. Ratcliffe had recognized the brooch or not. He did not know whether she had said New York to her maid or not. And though he had seen her writing, that helped to no conclusion; a large percentage of women wrote large and very round hands. Her pause at the sight of the brooch might have been merely the pause while she read the twined initial. Her veiled questions as to its origin might have been entirely innocent. On the other hand, they most emphatically might not. If she had anything to do with the murder, it must be recognized that she was clever and not likely to give herself away. She had already fooled him once when he dismissed her so lightly from his mind on the first day of the investigations. There was nothing to prevent her from going on fooling him unless he found a damning fact that could not be explained away.

  “What do you think of Mrs. Ratcliffe?” he asked Miss Dinmont. They were alone in the compartment except for a country yokel and his girl.

  “Why?” she asked. “Is this merely making conversation, or is it more investigation?”

  “I say, Miss Dinmont, are you sore with me?”

  “I don’t think that is the correct expression for what I feel,” she said. “It isn’t often I feel a fool, but I do tonight.” And he was dismayed at the bitterness in her voice.

  “But there’s not the slightest need,” he said, genuinely distressed. “You did the job like a professional, and there was nothing in it to make you feel like that. I’m up against something I don’t understand, and I wanted you to help me. That’s all. That’s why I asked you about Mrs. Ratcliffe just now. I want a woman’s opinion to help me—an unbiased woman’s opinion.”

  “Well, if you want my candid opinion, I think the woman is a fool.”

  “Oh? You don’t think she’s clever, deep down?”

  “I don’t think she has a deep down.”

  “You think she’s just shallow? But surely—” He considered.

  “Well, you asked me what I thought, and I’ve told you. I think she’s a shallow fool.”

  “And her sister?” Grant asked, though that had nothing to do with the investigations.

  “Oh, she is different. She has any amount of brain and personality, though you mightn’t think so.”

  “Would you say that Mrs. Ratcliffe would commit a murder?”

  “No, certainly not!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she hasn’t got the guts,” said Miss Dinmont elegantly. “She might do the thing in a fit of temper, but all the world would know it the next minute, and ever afterwards as long as she lived.”

  “Do you think she might know about one and keep the knowledge to herself?”

  “You mean the knowledge of who was guilty?”

  “Yes.”

  Miss Dinmont sat looking searchingly at the inspector’s impassive face. The lights of station lamps moved slowly over and past it as the train slid to a halt. “Eridge! Eridge!” called the porter, clumping down the deserted platform. The unexpectant voice had died into the distance, and the train had gathered itself into motion again before she spoke.

  “I wish I could read what you are thinking,” she said desperately. “Am I being your fool for the second time in one day?”

  “Miss Dinmont, believe me, so far I have never known you do a foolish thing, and I’m willing to take a large bet I never shall.”

  “That might do for Mrs. Ratcliffe,” she said. “But I’ll tell you. I think she might keep quiet about a murder, but there would have to be a reason that mattered to herself overwhelmingly. That’s all.”

  He was not sure whether the last two words meant that that was all that she could tell him, or whether it was an indication that pumping was to cease; but she had given him food for thought, and he was quiet until they ran into
Victoria. “Where are you living?” he asked. “Not at the hospital?”

  “No; I’m staying at my club in Cavendish Square.”

  He accompanied her there against her wish, and said good night on the doorstep, since she would not be persuaded to dine with him.

  “You have some days of holiday yet,” he said, with kindly intention. “How are you going to fill them in?”

  “In the first place, I’m going to see my aunt. I have come to the conclusion that the evils one knows are less dreadful than the evils one doesn’t know.”

  But the inspector caught the glint of the hall light on her teeth, and went away feeling less a martyr to injustice than he had for some hours past.

  17 SOlUTiON

  GRANT WAS DISCONSOLATE. His radiance was dimmed as the Yard had never known it dimmed. He even snapped at the faithful Williams, and only the surprised hurt on that bland pink face recalled him to himself for a little. Mrs. Field blamed it unconditionally on the Scots: their food, their ways, their climate, and their country; and said dramatically to her husband, after the manner of a childish arithmetic, “If four days in a country like that makes him like this, what would a month do?” That was on the occasion when she was exhibiting to her better half the torn and muddy tweeds that Grant had brought back with him from his foray in the hills; but she made no secret of her beliefs and her prejudices, and Grant suffered her as mildly as his worried soul would permit. Back in the everyday routine and clearing-up arrears of work he would stop and ask himself, What had he left undone? What possible avenue of exploration had he left untravelled? He tried deliberately to stop himself from further questioning, to accept the general theory that the police case was too good to be other than true, to subscribe to Barker’s opinion that he had “nerves” and needed a holiday. But it was no use. The feeling that there was something wrong somewhere always flowed back the minute he stopped bullying himself. If anything, the conviction grew as the slow, unproductive, tedious days passed, and he would go back in his mind to that first day, little more than a fortnight ago, when he had viewed an unknown body, and go over the case again from there. Had he missed a point somewhere? There was the knife that had proved so barren a clue—an individual thing to be so unproductive. Yet no one had claimed to have seen or owned one like it. All it had done was to provide the scar on the murderer’s hand—a piece of evidence conclusive only when allied with much more.