Macready was like someone in a dream. He was stunned by what he’d heard. He’d had no idea that justice had been walking so closely on his heels. He just gave up.
‘It was disposed of to jewellers and small dealers in precious stones.’
‘Fences?’
‘No. The trade itself.’
‘Who did it for you?’
‘I suppose you’ll find out. It was Barnes. He had friends in Clerkenwell and elsewhere, where such things change hands. I liked the skilled work. I wanted no part in selling the results. Barnes did that.’
He was utterly defeated. At the end of his tether.
‘I suppose this puts paid to me.’
‘We shall have to see about that. Who killed Jourin?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve told you the truth already. He was dead when I found him in July Street that morning. He was badly wounded when I first saw him in the garage. I don’t know who stabbed him.’
‘When did you first meet Jourin?’
‘In France during the war. You may not think it to look at me, Littlejohn, but I was dropped among the French Underground as a doctor. Jourin was a prominent man in it. He was wounded and I attended to him. We kept in touch afterwards.’
‘And after he came from gaol for the last time, did he visit you and put a proposition to you?’
‘Has Grace been telling you all about me?’
‘No. Answer the question.’
‘Yes. In course of time he fell for Grace. I couldn’t do anything about it. She was as bad as he was. They got married. I had to agree. Otherwise, she’d only have become his mistress. It was that way. I knew his weakness for women, but what’s the use of taking that line with a woman. She always thinks she’ll be the one it won’t happen to.’
‘Let’s go downstairs. They’ll be waiting for us.’
They returned to the room below.
Barnes and Trodd were sitting about the room on two contemporary chairs looking very uncomfortable. Barnes’s huge bulk oozed over the sides of his seat, concealing the legs and frame. He looked to be levitated in thin air.
Peeples was half reclining on the modernist couch under a painting of still life embodying sunflowers, tomatoes, lobsters and red capsicums, which made him look a more ghastly colour than ever in contrast.
Grace Macready was sitting on a wrought iron stool, as though ready to give a recital, only the audience didn’t look the chamber music style.
Cromwell was standing in the alcove of the window, the curtains of which had been drawn, with the palms, ferns and general undergrowth forming a sylvan background. He looked bewildered.
Littlejohn smiled grimly to himself as he looked at them all. His friends Luc and Dorange, of the French police, would probably have lined the lot of them up along the wall and made them stand there, perhaps after handcuffing a couple of them to impress the rest and take the fizz out of them.
The doctor loitered by the door, as though ashamed to mix with such a motley crew.
‘Why don’t you put us all in handcuffs?’ said Sammy Barnes, showing-off for the benefit of Grace. She was wearing a kind of tea-gown with her arms bare and her bosom almost as naked, and Barnes couldn’t take his eyes off her. He was trying to prove that he didn’t care a damn about the police.
‘Sergeant Cromwell will oblige if it will make you happy, Barnes. I wouldn’t try his patience too much.’
Trodd didn’t appear to be much impressed by the police; neither did Barnes, for that matter.
As for Grace, she seemed to regard Littlejohn as an accomplice. The doctor had gone to pieces and the rest were a lot of riff-raff. She and Littlejohn were in a class apart.
‘You all look very comfortable and happy,’ said Littlejohn. ‘You seem to forget that one of you might hang for murder.’
He looked from one to another of them.
Peeples was ready to collapse again. He shouted that he didn’t do it and began to snivel. The rest were deflated, too. They were trying to hang together, but hating one another all the time and finding it difficult to keep in countenance in the circumstances.
Littlejohn lit his pipe. The smell of incense and Grace’s perfume were a bit too much.
‘About three years ago, Miss Macready met Etienne Jourin here. They fell in love and later were married. The reason for Jourin’s visit was that he was a wartime friend of Dr. Macready. He and the doctor were already accomplices.’
Grace gave the doctor a malevolent look, as though he’d supplied all the information.
‘The doctor had been a proud man, proud of his position and the esteem in which he was held by the neighbourhood. Then, in a single night, he lost his self-respect. He thought he’d killed a child on a bicycle with his car. He made the mistake of asking Sammy Barnes to repair the incriminating damage to his wing and mudguard, probably inflicted by someone in a car-park. A witness testified to having seen the doctor in the vicinity at the time of the accident. Imagine the disgrace of killing a child and, in a fit of panic, driving on. Barnes obtained him an alibi, put his car right, and saved him. Saved him from the public, but not from blackmail. …’
‘Hey! What are you up to? Who told you that? It’s a lie!’
‘Peeples, who did the rapid renovating job so well, will agree with me, I know.’
‘Don’t you be led into. …’
Peeples almost squeaked with fear.
‘I did it. I don’t care now what happens to you, Mr. Barnes. I’m through. I did the job. It looked to me like a parking accident. There was nothing about it like the doctor had hit a bicycle. I’m not goin’ to prison. I’m tellin’ the truth.’
‘You little rat, Peeples. You little lyin’ rat. …’
‘Be quiet, Barnes. We’re going to get to the bottom of this before we leave here. You blackmailed the doctor. … That is so, doctor?’
‘Yes. Until. …’
‘Until you bought him off by letting him share your racket with Jourin?’
‘How did you find that out?’
‘There was no other answer to the problem. Now, let me tell you something, doctor. Did you know that you didn’t kill the boy, at all?’
Macready suddenly grew alive again. He came to the middle of the room and thrust his face in Littlejohn’s.
‘How do you know that?’
‘The police reports say that about a year later, a man who met with an accident, confessed before he died that he’d killed the boy on the Willesden road. It wasn’t you. It was someone else who died almost the same way as the boy.’
Macready didn’t wait. He turned and flung himself upon Barnes and clawed at his throat. It was an outrage the extraordinary little wrought iron chair could not tolerate. It overbalanced and pitched the two men rolling, plunging, panting on the carpet. Macready in his fury sat on top of Barnes’s huge paunch, beating his head on the floor.
Littlejohn and Cromwell tore them apart.
‘Sit down, the pair of you. I haven’t finished yet and you’re going to behave yourselves until I have. You can claw one another to pieces when I’ve said my say.’
He righted the chair and thrust Barnes back on it, and miraculously the hideous thing remained in one piece and sustained him. The doctor swept the big feet of Peeples from the couch and sat himself there. You could hear the pair of them panting and snorting to recover their breath.
Barnes was all-in.
‘What about a drink?’
‘No. As I told you before, Barnes, if you wish, we’ll all go to police headquarters and talk it over one at a time there, instead of here having a noisy party. You can all choose.’
‘What you said is true.’
Grace looked with disgust at Barnes as she quietly said it. She seemed to have agreed either from spite or contempt of the whole business.
Littlejohn continued.
‘Jourin had teamed-up with the doctor in the jewellery business. Jourin stole the stones, fled at once to England with them – sometimes disguised and with a false
passport to match – and brought them here. At first, he broke them up for sale himself. Then, he taught his brother-in-law, the doctor. They fitted-up a cosy little workroom upstairs. Sick with himself, for he thought he’d killed someone, and Barnes wasn’t the type he’d been used to kowtowing to, but he had to do so on account of what Barnes knew. … Now, keep quiet Barnes. You’ll get your turn. … Dr. Macready had lost his self-respect, turned to drink, and ruined himself as a physician. He had to retire. He chose this house because he’d not enough money to go anywhere else. Besides, he’d his sister to keep and look after. Added to that, Barnes was levying increasing toll. Then Jourin turned up. That solved everything. The doctor was in the money and could live as he liked and this place was the last one anybody would think of searching for a jewel thief on the run or a nice little workshop for dealing with the loot. Am I right, doctor?’
Macready somehow seemed a different man.
‘Yes. It will all come out. I may as well tell the truth. It’s true.’
‘There remained one difficulty. Where to dispose of the spoils in their new disguise after treatment upstairs. To deal with a fence is costly. It takes all the jam from the cake. Far better get rid of the stones to the trade, the unsuspecting, or supposedly honest little jewellers all over the place. Jourin couldn’t do it. He was a foreigner and would arouse suspicions right away. The doctor wouldn’t. He would do delicate work, but hawking the results was infra dig. He thought of Barnes. They made a bargain. Barnes called-off the blackmail for a share in the game.’
‘I’m sayin’ nothing. You don’t get me that way.’
The doctor roused himself again.
‘But I do. It’s true. Barnes was in it with us.’
‘I’ll deny that, you swine.’
‘Try it.’
‘Stop it, the pair of you. You can argue this out later during recreation time in gaol. …’
Everybody sat up straight. They hadn’t thought of that and they gave each other queer looks as though trying to assess one anothers’ sentences.
‘Barnes was, therefore, cut-in. He’d been a broker. Old iron and the like. …’
‘Not so much of your old iron. I never sunk to that. I was. …’
‘Never mind what you were, Barnes. You knew how to dispose of things, including precious stones. Your garage wasn’t doing so well. …’
‘Hey!’
‘Don’t hey me, Barnes. You’ve only to look at the place to see that it’s on its last legs. No stock, no proper supervision, no anything. You don’t depend on repairs and the pumps for your living. Nor do you buy rows of houses in July Street neighbourhood from your profits on petrol. You looked after the selling side.’
The lot of them wondered what was coming next. Trodd who hadn’t said a word, was actually squinting with anxiety and large beads of sweat formed on his forehead and ran down the sides of his face.
‘You were all in it. If you didn’t actually know what was going on, you were eager to assist because Barnes paid you well and you were in the gang.’
Peeples groaned and sat up.
‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘Got the whooping-cough?’ said Cromwell. He couldn’t help it!
‘And that’s how the set-up stood when Jourin arrived here again last Tuesday. He’d pulled-off the biggest coup in his career. He’d got the du Pan diamonds with him. Some of the finest stones in the world. Worth perhaps a quarter of a million, perhaps more. When this became known among the gang. …’
‘I didn’t know. …’
Trodd couldn’t stand any more of it.
‘For God’s sake, Peeples, shut-up or I’ll murder you.’
‘Yes; that’s what Jourin brought with him as well as the stones. Murder.’
You could have heard a pin drop.
Chapter 14
The Last Straw
Littlejohn was watching the Macreadys carefully. They somehow seemed relieved by the course matters were taking. As though, as far as they were concerned, everything had ended satisfactorily. The Superintendent stood silent for a minute, slowly puffing his pipe.
‘Excuse me. I’d like to use your ’phone, doctor. A personal matter.’
Barnes looked hard at Littlejohn, and then smiled.
‘Not sure of yourself, are you, Super? You’ve got us all here, and you can’t prove a thing. I think it’s time for us to go home, now, and when I lodge a complaint about the conduct of the police through my lawyer, there’ll be some fun and games. …’
Littlejohn wasn’t there. He’d gone in the hall and closed the door of the room behind him. Cromwell was left, like a faithful sheep-dog, to keep the motley crew in order.
‘Give me the Perth police please. This is an urgent matter. Police.’
The call came through almost at once and, judging from the accent on the line, it was the right place, too.
‘Is Superintendent Donaldson there? Superintendent Littlejohn, Scotland Yard.’
‘No, sir. It’s his Sunday off. This is Inspector Campbell. Would ye like me to try to get in touch with the Superintendent for ye?’
‘Don’t bother, Inspector. You’ll be able to help. According to his passport, a certain William Wallace Macready was born in Perth in 1898. I know it’s rather asking a lot, but could you contact the registrar of births and ask if Macready had any brothers or sisters. It may be quite a nuisance on a Sunday evening, but this is vital in a case I’m on and I’d be very grateful. …’
‘I’ll do it right away, sir. I’ll ring ye back.’
Littlejohn returned to the party in Grace’s room. They all seemed more comfortable and relaxed. After turning things over in their minds in Littlejohn’s absence, they’d all decided they hadn’t done much wrong. Nothing a good lawyer couldn’t put right.
Littlejohn set about them right away.
‘Barnes; who found the body of Jourin outside your garage?’
‘Startin’ a third-degree, are you? It won’t do you much good, you know.’
‘Who found the body?’
‘Trodd, I think.’
‘Is that right, Trodd?’
Trodd looked shocking. His hair was rough now and his beard seemed to have grown scruffy since his arrival.
‘Yes. What of it?’
‘Where exactly was it?’
‘Between the pavement and one of the pumps. He looked to have crawled towards the light and then passed-out.’
‘With everybody passing by? Why didn’t somebody interfere or intrude with offers of help? Call an ambulance or a doctor?’
‘Don’t ask me. It was a bad night and about ten o’clock. I was working overtime on a job.’
‘What made you go outside, if you were concentrating on your work?’
‘However hard he’s workin’, a chap’s a right to a breather now and then. I went out for a smoke.’
‘Were you there alone?’
‘No. Peeples was with me, paintin’ some wings we’d hammered out for a rush job.’
Peeples sat up again.
‘That right. We had nothin to do with it. I just went for Mr. Barnes and when he got to the garage, he sent me for the doctor. When I’d told the doctor, I went home.’
‘The doctor was in?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not in bed?’
‘How should I know? He had his dressing-gown on. …’
Macready interfered excitedly.
‘Where’s all this leading to? I was in and half-dressed when Peeples called. I put on my coat and went with him. A man can sit about his own house partly dressed if he likes, can’t he?’
‘Right, thank you. You can take them all in the next room, Cromwell. Telephone for the police-van and a couple of constables to help you. They’re all going down to divisional headquarters. They’ll be charged with receiving stolen property, to start with …’
Barnes began to roar and flail the air.
‘I want my lawyer.’
‘You’ll get him. You an
d your men might turn out to be accessories to murder, too. They know who killed Jourin and won’t divulge it.’
Pandemonium broke out. Peebles protested his innocence in tears again. Trodd blasphemed and shouted. The chorus amounted to a concerted denial of everything.
‘… Harbouring a wanted criminal; impeding the police in the discharge of their duties … You can take your choice, Barnes. Take them away, Cromwell, except Dr. Macready and his sister.’
The telephone was ringing.
Littlejohn gave Cromwell time to drive his flock in another room and shut the door. They were still shouting abuse and protesting.
Perth was back on the line.
‘You’ve been very quick about it, Inspector.’
‘I was lucky. The registrar was at home. It seems he was at school with Dr. Macready. He is a doctor, isn’t he?’
‘Yes. That’s the man.’
‘He knew the family well. Macready never had any brothers and sisters.’
‘Quite sure?’
‘Dead sure. The registrar knew the doctor right up to his going to St. Andrew’s medical school. The doctor was the only one.’
‘Thank you very much indeed, Campbell. If ever I can help you, don’t fail to let me know.’
Cromwell was having a rough time with his suspects in the front room, judging from the sound of things. Sammy Barnes was trying to persuade them all to resist arrest, but Trodd and Peeples weren’t of the stuff to put up a fight. Resistance collapsed and Barnes grew morose and docile, contenting himself with reciting what would happen to the police when his lawyer got to work. The local police ended the pantomime by arriving with the van. Littlejohn told them all to wait where they were and took Cromwell in the back room with him.
The Macreadys were waiting in Grace’s room, looking very placid and domesticated again.
The doctor spoke first.
‘I suppose I’ll have to answer a charge, too, in connection with my co-operation with Jourin. I guess I can’t complain. I’ve had a good run and might have expected that one day it would catch up with me.’
Grace was sitting at the piano. She sneemed resigned to the separation envisaged by Macready. After all, she could continue to live in comfort in July Street and visit the doctor in prison!
Death Before Breakfast Page 16