The Department of Dead Ends

by Roy Vickers

  Goods had accumulated during the strike, making search difficult. When he failed to find petrol, his first idea was to leave the corpse in the shed and get away. That would mean a race with time, and if he were hurried he would be likely to make mistakes.

  As soon as he spotted the packing-case, he grasped its immense possibilities. If he could get the corpse into the packing-case it would probably stay there until the strike was settled. The case was secured with wing-catches, easily opened. He had to stand astride the case to lift the metal, which he did not know to be a driving shaft. Then he went back to the car, used the reserve petrol to drive to the doors of the shed.

  So far he had escaped bloodstains. He took off his light overcoat, then his suit, and worked in his underclothes. He transferred everything from Bridstowe’s pockets to his own. The longer it took to identify the body the better, so he cut away all the clothing.

  When he had at length contrived to shut the lid of the case on the corpse, he faced the fresh problem of the driving shaft. If he were to leave that gleaming metal to catch the eye of the first man who entered the shed he might just as well have left the corpse exposed. By the time he had cleaned his hands and face in a fire bucket he had realized that he must take the shaft away with him.

  The shaft weighed less than the corpse, but was much more awkward to carry. It took him twenty minutes to carry it as many feet to the car and stow it as he had stowed the corpse. It was while he was pressing Bridstowe’s clothing under the cushion of the back seat that he kicked the red carnations out of the car without noticing.

  Having locked the goods shed and returned the key, he drove on to Sudchester village, knocked up the one garage and took on six gallons only, to avoid revealing that his tank was empty. Then four miles on to the gravel pit to dump the driving shaft where he had intended to dump Bridstowe.

  The mouth of the gravel pit, which was thickly covered with brambles and weeds, reached almost to the roadway of the lane. He had dumped the clothing, had thrown the revolver after it and was about to start work on the driving shaft when the yokel came jog-trotting down the lane.

  With almost hysterical anxiety the yokel begged to be driven to Sudchester to call the doctor to his wife. The safest course was to agree. Back in Sudchester, Wakering shrank from returning to the gravel pit. He would drive straight on and throw the shaft in the Thames at Whitchurch Bridge.

  His encounter with the constable at Whitchurch made him realize that the shaft in itself was not dangerous to him – could not be, until the body was discovered. He could take it home and get rid of it the next night from his own car – after he had rested his already aching muscles.

  From the garage near Kew Bridge, where he took another five gallons, it was but a couple of miles on to his house in Chiswick, a semi-detached building with a long narrow strip of garden in the rear, giving on to a side street; at the end of the garden was the garage. In seven minutes he had locked the driving shaft in his garage.

  As he hoped that it would be at least a week before the hue and cry started, he did not abandon Bridstowe’s car in a distant street, but drove it to the biggest garage he knew and, again giving Bridstowe’s name, said he wanted to leave the car for a week. With two changes of taxi and an interval of walking, he made his way home.

  Over breakfast he told his mother that he would have to go out after dinner that night and would be using the car. It had long been agreed between them that his comings and goings should never be questioned – for fear, he said, of betraying the confidence of clients.

  During the morning, in the intervals of doing his normal work, he gave leisurely thought to the problem of a dumping ground for the shaft – something nearer home than the gravel pit.

  He had a bad shock when the early evening papers revealed that the fact of the murder, if no more, had been discovered.

  He was home in time to hear the first broadcast – to learn that every policeman in the country, every Automobile Association patrolman – every garage man and a fair percentage of the public – would be looking for a car with a bucket seat missing, carrying the driving shaft of the Arbee Steam Roller.

  ‘I forgot to mention,’ he said to his mother, ‘that my engagement for to-night is off.’

  For the time being, the best place for the shaft was in his garage. Would it ever be safe to move it? He felt his first twinge of fear since his encounter with the Whitchurch constable.

  The second twinge of fear came in the middle of the morning, when his typist announced that Detective-Sergeant Lambert wished to see him.

  ‘Mrs Hemmelman referred us to you, Mr Wakering,’ said Karslake’s assistant. ‘She says she sent you a quire of posters for distribution. We want you to be good enough to give us the names of any applicants for the posters.’

  For a moment Wakering was puzzled. He glanced at the side table where the posters lay, and in doing so remembered he had used one as a wrapper for the carnations. He had forgotten all about the carnations – was no more alive to their clue value than Karslake himself. Anyhow, even if the shop assistant remembered about him, she could not tell the police his name and address. The twinge of fear passed.

  ‘I don’t think there have been any applicants. I’ll ask my typist to make sure.’ The typist knew of no applicants. Wakering had the wit to count the posters himself.

  ‘One short of the quire,’ he announced. ‘Unless the office cleaner has taken one, I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

  They could not, Wakering perceived, make anything out of that missing poster, because there could be no certainty that Mrs Hemmelman had not sent him one short.

  On the following Saturday afternoon he locked himself in the garage with his gardening tools. It had a thin flooring of cement, easily broken with a pick. Continuing his work over Sunday, he buried the shaft a foot deep. The following Saturday he cemented where he had dug. The work looked smeary and amateurish. The Saturday after that, he cemented the whole floor, so that no given area caught the eye.

  His assessment of his position agreed very closely with that of Superintendent Karslake. In his Appreciation for the Chief Commissioner, Karslake wrote: ‘Unexplained possession of the driving shaft would amount to proof of guilt. Any clue, however non-evidential, that would indicate the murderer, would therefore end the case. The premises of any suspected person must be searched instantly for the shaft. In the belief that the murderer was a social acquaintance, whom Bridstowe invited to enter his car, I am checking every contact with the deceased for several weeks preceding the murder. If this line fails I fear we shall have reached a dead end.’

  To Detective-Inspector Rason of the Department of Dead Ends the documents were duly passed six weeks after the murder.

  Chapter Five

  The Department would receive cases ranging from murder to lost dogs. It was a dead end case of theft from lorries that brought Rason to Fatty Spending, the man who had furtively welcomed Jeannie in the cellar bar. In the same cellar bar – but during licensed hours – Rason bought the other a pint of beer and a double gin to put in it. As Fatty was a very small scale operator, this was considerable hospitality.

  ‘Fatty, I know you gave up working the lorries years ago. All I want from you is a friendly tip from one who has watched points. We think there’s a girl in these West End jobs. Come to that, where’s your little old pal Jeannie?’

  ‘Ask me another, Mr Rason. I’ve only set eyes on her once since she came out o’ stir – and then not to speak to.’ As Rason registered unbelief, Fatty whined on: ‘She must’ve come straight here from stir, only she had a gentleman with her, so I no more than give her a quiet wink. And she left with the gent.’

  ‘Gentleman, Fatty? Are you trying to kid me Jeannie could get a gentleman?’

  ‘Well, her looks ’ve gone, but she’s still got a bit o’ style. It’s the truth I’m tellin’ you, Mr Rason. Ask Tim here, an’ he’ll tell you the same.’

  ‘That’s right, Mr Rason,’ said the potman. ‘He wa
s a gent, all right. Quiet enough to look at, but plenty o’ dough. Blimey! He’d bought her a whole large bunch o’ red carnations, and I ’appen to know they cost five bob apiece at this time o’ year. Cost enough to keep poor ole Fatty oiled for a week, them carnations did!’

  ‘She hasn’t been at her kip either, Mr Rason, not these last six weeks she hasn’t. I know, ’cause I’ve taken a stroll round there once or twice.’

  So far this promised to add up to the woman who was working with the lorry gang. Rason took the address of the ‘kip’ and presently was interviewing the landlady. From that garrulous slut came a torrent of information in which the words ‘hospital’, ‘Mrs Hemmelman’ and ‘the gentleman’ kept bobbing up. Rason, like a good detective, encouraged her while he tried to grab any relevant fact as it floated past.

  ‘An’ this Mrs Hemmelman, Jeannie says, didn’t half put the breeze up the wardresses. And the day they both came out, there was her posh car, with liveried footmen an’ all, waiting outside the stir for her.’

  ‘And this gentleman you spoke of – was he with Jeannie when she came back here?’

  ‘No, but she must ’ve come straight from him, because she had a whole lot o’ flowers, an’ if he didn’t give ’em to her, nobody else would have – lovely red carnations they was and must ’ve cost a mint o’ money at this time o’ year. What was you askin’? No, he didn’t come till the next day and as soon as I told him, he was off to the hospital – an’ I couldn’t help opening my eyes, as poor Jeannie has lost her looks – handsome feller he was too, though not my sort.’

  Rason escaped to the Metropolitan Hospital, to be told, after some delay, that Jeannie had died on February 1st.

  Before he had left the building, a messenger overtook him, with a request that he would see the almoner.

  Apparently, certain expenses had been incurred in the attempt to save Jeannie’s life and there had not been enough left of the original deposit to cover the funeral expenses. Could Detective-Inspector Rason put them in touch with Jeannie’s anonymous benefactor?

  When Rason said he would do his best if he were given a full description, the almoner took him to the matron’s office.

  ‘He is very difficult to describe,’ said the matron. ‘I should say he is rather a handsome man, but without any feature you can pick on. I don’t know what his concern was with the patient. When I told him she was dead he seemed to be stunned. He just stared at me and said “Dead! Thank you,” then stalked out of the room without even leaving the flowers he had brought for her.’

  ‘Red carnations,’ grinned Rason, who was sick of the flowers and Mrs Hemmelman and ‘the gentleman’.

  ‘Yes. They were red carnations! And very expensive they are at this time of year. Does that mean that you know him?’

  ‘No. But it means I may be able to find him for you,’ said Rason largely, and bowed himself out to a chorus of thanks.

  So that was the end of the trail of the lorry gang! All he had learnt was that red carnations were very expensive at this time of year. Funny a man should want to load them on to a woman like Jeannie! It was reasonable that a man might pay her hospital expenses if he wanted her to do some crooked work for him. But no crook would buy flowers for her – still less, before she was taken ill. Moreover, Fatty and his crowd, who at least knew a crook when they saw one, were emphatic that this man was a ‘gentleman’, by which irritating word they meant a mutt with money.

  And this funny gentleman, with his funny red carnations, knew enough about Jeannie to meet her when she came out of prison – knew enough, too, not to give his name when he was befriending her at the hospital.

  If she were blackmailing him he would not have bought her those darned red carnations!

  Red carnations, now he came to think of it, had taken up three pages of the Bridstowe murder report. Back in the office he re-read the three pages – learnt that there was no evidence that they had belonged to the deceased.

  ‘Suppose they belonged to the killer?’

  He turned up the Whitchurch constable’s original description of the man he had questioned on the bridge. It did not help much. But in the space headed ‘General Remarks’ there was that irritating word again: ‘By speech and manner I would judge him a gentleman.’

  ‘So if the carnations belonged to the killer, we have two funny gentlemen behaving in a crazy way with red carnations – and on the same day! One gentleman buys them for Jeannie, which is crazy, and the other gentleman buys ’em for the man he’s going to bump off. Phew!’

  He took a taxi to Holloway Prison, where he learnt that no friend had called at the prison to meet Jeannie Ruthen on her discharge. When he came out, there was no taxi in sight – which is what Karslake calls ‘Rason’s luck’, because on the way to the bus halt he saw the florist’s and walked in.

  Yes, the girl remembered a very odd couple who had bought a dozen red carnations. The gentleman was what you might call good looking, but the woman wasn’t; and you could see she had just come out of prison, because she had the canvas bag they always give them when they have no luggage.

  So the gentleman had met her outside the prison, not in the waiting-room! Outside the prison was Mrs Hemmelman’s chauffeur, even if there were no ‘liveried footmen’.

  ‘Well, the only man I noticed standing about,’ said the chauffeur, ‘was Mrs Hemmelman’s solicitor, Mr Wakering. And he suddenly darted away after some woman who had come out of the prison. And he didn’t come back, either. And madam didn’t half lead off when I told her he had been and gone, as she wanted him to help her pitch into the Lady Governor.’

  Rason went back to the Metropolitan Hospital. The matron refused to leave the hospital, as she was on duty. But she consented to sit in a police car outside Wakering’s office at ten the next morning. As soon as she identified him, Rason thanked her and sent the police car back with her. From a doorway, where he had been posted, emerged the constable from Whitchurch.

  ‘That was the man I saw on Whitchurch bridge, sir.’

  ‘Good! Report back right away to Superintendent Karslake and say I’ll be along in a few minutes,’ ordered Rason. He lit a cigarette and loitered long enough to allow Wakering to settle himself in his office.

  Chapter Six

  ‘There’s another of those detectives wants to see you, Mr Wakering. He says he won’t keep you more than a few minutes.’ The typist glanced at a card. ‘Detective-Inspector Rason.’

  Wakering felt a moment’s unease, but no fear. Some more about that wretched poster, he supposed. If there had been anything to link him with Bridstowe, the police would have found it weeks ago.

  He nodded and a moment later Rason came in under his customary mask of fatuous breeziness.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt you in the middle of your mail, Mr Wakering. I’ve got your name down as having helped us before over those dog posters of Mrs Hemmelman’s. I’m on the same case – same sort of check up, only it’s names this time.’ He opened a large notebook. ‘Man. Rothenstein, alias Albaz, slight foreign accent. Calls on City solicitors –’

  ‘He never called on me,’ interrupted Wakering, now wholly at ease.

  ‘Thank you!’ Rason ticked it off in the notebook. ‘Next. Woman. Jeannie Ruthen, alias Jeannie Spending, alias Jeannie Carmichael. …’

  Wakering felt the blood sing in his ears, but he kept a tight hold on his manner.

  ‘It doesn’t ring a bell, Inspector. Have a cigarette before you finish the list.’

  ‘Thanks! Half a minute, I’ll just tick this off or we shall get muddled. You have no knowledge of the woman, Jeannie Ruthen? Thank you. Don’t bother, I have a match. I’m afraid I’ve let you in for a spot o’ bother there, Mr Wakering. The fact is this woman died some weeks ago in the Metropolitan Hospital. We had traced a very thin line between her and Bridstowe, which was rather surprising, because she was a – you know! When she was dying they asked her – using other words, I suppose – who was going to pay for her funeral and she said “Mr Waker
ing”, and then conked out. When the matron told me this, I happened to remember your name was on our list as a City solicitor who had helped over that dog poster, and I told her so. I fancy she’ll be dropping in on you this morning in the hope of collecting the funeral expenses.’

  ‘Hm! Well, thank you for warning me anyhow, Inspector. I’ll tell my typist to explain, if the matron does come here.’

  ‘Right!’ Rason got up. ‘If you can leave my name out of it, I’ll be obliged, because I ought to have kept my trap shut. Good morning, Mr Wakering, and thanks very much.’

  There was fear now, but no panic. Again, Wakering assessed his position as clearly as Karslake. If that matron made it her business to see him she would identify him. That would expose his lie, but would still leave no logical connexion between himself and Bridstowe. But the police were not tied by logic. If they had any suspicion at all, logical or not, they might produce that constable from Whitchurch. And that would be dangerous – but only fatal if he were found in possession of the shaft. Without the shaft, the constable’s identification would fail with the jury, since the man had only seen him once, and in the dark.

  He rang his mother and said that he was taking the day off to do some work on the car and would be home in an hour. Then he told his typist that his mother had been taken ill and that he would not return until the morrow. As if by an afterthought, he added instructions for stalling the matron, should she call.

  Nearly seven weeks since he had killed Bridstowe! In that time the public would have forgotten about the car with the bucket seat missing, carrying a driving shaft. But would the police and the patrol men?

  There was nothing for it but to take the risk of dumping the shaft after dark – anywhere – in one of the parks, if he could think of nothing better. He would have to start digging in the garage at once. As soon as he reached home he locked himself in the garage and again set about breaking the thin cement.