The Boathouse Riddle

by J. J. Connington

  “Who was Cincinnati Jean?” he queried.

  “About the second most dangerous woman in England, sir,” the Inspector said gravely.

  “I’ll tell you about her later on,” Sir Clinton promised. “Business before pleasure. Go on, Inspector. This case is going to make you a notorious character, whether you like it or not.”

  “You, sir, you mean,” Severn protested. “I didn’t find the body. The credit’s yours.”

  “My part comes under the head of ‘Information received’,” Sir Clinton said decisively, silencing any further discussion.

  “Well, sir, after they’d got the fingerprints settled, I produced my photographs of the body and they hunted out a portrait of Cincinnati Jean that they had. No mistake about it; they were as like as two peas.”

  “After that, it seems they couldn’t do too much for me, sir. Very decent indeed, they were. One of them stood me supper. They got me a room at an hotel. And meanwhile they set the wires buzzing, it seems, and fairly got to work. Cincinnati Jean’s been a lot of trouble to them, one way and another; and they seemed to be on to the business from the word Go.”

  He paused and and took an appreciative sip of Wendover’s whiskey.

  “This morning, they had a lot of the business cut and dried for me. This is how that part of it figures out. Cincinnati Jean slipped a cog in one of her deals: the usual thing, a nasty case, but the man stood up to her and that finished the business so far as she was concerned. She got five years, though it was her first conviction over here; and she was sent to Aylesbury. She was a model prisoner, so of course she got her remission and came out on licence after forty months. She was liberated from Aylesbury the day before the Horncastle murder.”

  Severn paused, as though to indicate the end of a chapter in his narrative. When he resumed, his tone showed that he expected to surprise his audience.

  “She was a notorious character, so naturally they took more interest in her than they would do in a common-or-garden convict. That’s made it easier to pick up information. Now at the gate at Aylesbury, she was met by a man. Who do you think it was, sir?” the Inspector asked, with a tinge of triumph in his voice.

  “Is this a report or a guessing competition?” Sir Clinton inquired testily.

  “It was a fellow in Salvation Army rig-out, sir; and from the description, there’s not a shadow of doubt that it was this Save-your-soul Sawtry man who turned up here on the night of the Horncastle murder.”

  “Do you know what’s become of him since then?” Sir Clinton demanded.

  “No, sir,” Severn admitted, with a rather crestfallen air. “He’s cut his stick while I was in London.”

  “H’m! Well, if I wanted him, I ought to have asked for him, I suppose,” the Chief Constable said curtly, taking his share of the blame. “What happened next?”

  “They seemed to be old friends, it appears. I’ve learned since then that this Save-your-soul person was one of her gang in earlier days, so there was nothing in that. It seems he talked to her a bit excitedly and she seemed a bit cold in her replies—got impatient in a very short time. Then they walked off together towards the station and took the train up to town.”

  Another pause marked the termination of a fresh section in the narrative, and Severn used it to apply himself again to his glass.

  “She’s got a flat in town, in Gray Mare Street, off Piccadilly. It’s been shut up during her holiday, of course, but the rent’s been paid regularly by some cheap lawyer she employed to attend to that sort of thing. He paid the garage rent too, for the storage of her car, and things like that. She must have known she’d get pinched—arrested sooner or later, and she had everything cut and dried, so it seems.

  “Being such a notorious character, naturally the man on the beat was curious to see her. I expect he hung about a bit. Anyhow, he had the luck to spot her going up to the door when she arrived and there was Mr. Save-your-soul Sawtry in tow still, with a little bag in his hand. And no tearful farewells on the mat, it appears; he walked right in with her and upstairs to her flat. And he didn’t come out again.”

  Sir Clinton flicked some cigarette ash from his sleeve. Wendover, completely taken aback by this fresh piece of puzzle, made no concealment of his eagerness for the rest of the Inspector’s narrative.

  “By-and-by Cincinnati Jean came out again, alone. She went straight off to the police officer in charge of her district and reported her arrival, according to the terms of her licence. That was just as it should be, of course. Then—it was easy enough to follow up her trail, they said—she took out a motor licence and a driving licence. Then she went to one or two shops and bought a few things, mostly food, soap, and affairs of that sort to start housekeeping on. And she gave standing orders for the delivery of milk and some other things. In fact, it looked as though she’d come back to settle down for a while. She made no big purchases. I gathered she was about broke when she came out of Aylesbury. Her defence had cost her a lot and she wasn’t the kind that saves money much, since it was so easy come by in her line.”

  “You’re sure of that?” Sir Clinton demanded, as though he attached some importance to the point.

  “Well, sir, I can only give you what was told me. I think they had their information, partly from the lawyer fellow and partly from putting two and two together. But they seemed fairly sure of their ground.”

  “There’s other evidence for it, as well,” Sir Clinton confirmed. “Well, go on.”

  “This morning I went down to her flat. One of the C.I.D. men came with me to make things easy with the man on the beat, in case there was trouble. We went up to the flat, and I found that the Yale key I’d picked up here fitted the lock; so we got in without any bother. There was no maid there. The place was empty. Two people had been having a scratch meal and the dishes were standing about, unwashed. A very stylish flat, sir, though some of the things in it made you think a bit. The only thing I need trouble you with is a sheet of burnt paper in the grate. The C.I.D. man didn’t make much of it, naturally; but it was as plain as print to me, all curled up as it was. I could see some lines and a cross on the ashes clear enough; and when I looked at them, plain enough there was a rough map of this district and the boathouse marked with a cross. The rest of the ash looked like burnt notepaper—a letter, most likely—but it had been crushed up so that there was nothing to be made of it.”

  “You couldn’t get even a word or two intact?” Sir Clinton asked.

  “No, sir. We did our best, but the stuff was in flinders. As we were coming away from the flat, the C.I.D. man rang the bell of the flat opposite and made some excuse to talk to the maid when she came to the door. That was a lucky shot. It seems that on the morning of the Horncastle murder, she was out on the landing when the door of Cincinnati Jean’s flat opened and that Holy Joe, the Salvationist fellow, leaned out in his pyjamas and took in a bottle of milk that was on the mat. What do you think of that for a canting humbug, sir? Goes about with his mouth full of texts and spends the night with her in her flat! I’d like to meet him again, just for the pleasure of letting him know that I know what sort of character he is.”

  This piece of information seemed to impress Wendover much more than it did Sir Clinton, so far as obvious effect went.

  “I’d no notion the Salvation Army sheltered things like that,” Wendover exclaimed. “He ought to be turned out of it at once.”

  “I shouldn’t write to headquarters about it, though, if I were you,” Sir Clinton counselled smoothly. “There’s such a thing as a law of libel, you know. The Salvation Army’s a sound concern and a huge affair like that might well have a weak brother or two in it through no fault of its own. Though what a weak brother would want to be in it for is a bit of problem. From all I’ve seen of the rank and file, they’re remarkably good people.”

  Severn took no notice of this interlude.

  “We went on to the garage where she kept her car,” he pursued, “and I made inquiries about that. It seems she took
it out on the afternoon of the Horncastle murder, got the garage people to look over it and see that it was all right, filled up with oil and petrol, and drove off. That was the last they saw of her.”

  “Friend Sawtry wasn’t with her, was he?”

  “No, she was alone, they said. After that, we went to the post office and made inquiries about any recent deliveries of letters.”

  Sir Clinton did not interrupt, but it was clear that he had given the Inspector a good mark for this precaution.

  “It was easy enough,” Severn went on, “because the flat had been shut up for so long that the postman was struck by the fact that letters were starting again. He’d delivered two: one on the morning when she got out of Aylesbury, the other one a day or so earlier. That would be the stuff we found in the grate, most likely; for the ashes were fairly fresh.”

  The Inspector paused again and took a fresh sip from his glass.

  “That covers the London side of things,” he pursued. “When I got back here again, I looked up the police surgeon at once. He’d done a P.M. on Cincinnati Jean’s body. He could find no external wounds, not even a bruise which might have been caused in a struggle. There were no signs of poisoning, either, so far as he could see. He couldn’t estimate exactly how long the body had been in the water; the indications were too rough to be any use.”

  “Her wrist watch had stopped with the hands close to twelve o’clock,” Sir Clinton commented, “but that’s not altogether a good criterion. Was there any water in the lungs?”

  “No, it seems there wasn’t; nor in the stomach, either.”

  “So she was dead before she got into the water?”

  “That’s what he believes. He laid stress on the fact that he found no mud particles or anything of that sort in the stomach. From some food that he found there, he gauged that she must have had a meal—dinner—about four hours before her death. That checks fairly well with evidence from another side, sir. I’ve ascertained that after telephoning from the A.A. box, she stopped at The Brown Stag Hotel in Lamfield and had dinner there about half-past seven. The waiter remembered her perfectly well, partly because of her looks and partly because of her clothes. That puts her death about midnight, just about the same time as Horncastle’s.”

  He took another drink and Wendover pushed the decanter across the table.

  “The only other thing that the P.M. brought out was a rather funny one and the police surgeon appears to attach some importance to it. It seems some gland or other—I have a note of it here . . . Yes, the thymus gland—was considerably enlarged.”

  Sir Clinton made no effort to conceal his interest.

  “Ah! I expected something of that sort. Status lymphaticus?”

  “That’s what he called it, I remember,” the Inspector admitted. “It was a new name to me. Well, sir, it seems this gland was what he called a persistent thymus gland and it was about two inches wide and it weighed close on two ounces. It lies at the base of the heart and according to him an enlarged gland like that would be very dangerous, although the person having it would show no symptoms of anything wrong. Is that so?”

  Sir Clinton nodded.

  “It’s a condition known as status lymphaticus,” he explained. “A man I knew was in that state, but nobody, least of all himself, had a notion that there was anything wrong with him. It doesn’t betray itself. This poor chap had to undergo a very minor operation, hardly more serious than having a tooth drawn. They put him on the operating table, started to anæsthetise him . . . and, he was dead. They hadn’t even begun to operate. Cardiac inhibition was what they called it. His heart just stopped short. Anæsthetics may have that effect in a case of status lymphaticus, or fright, or strong emotion of some sort, or even, in some cases, a very slight mechanical injury, such as a blow on the arm.”

  “And you can’t tell whether you’ve got it or not?” the Inspector inquired uneasily.

  “Apparently not, in most cases,” Sir Clinton said, with a hardly suppressed smile. “I shouldn’t worry, Inspector. You’re like the man who opens a medical book and immediately suspects that he suffers from seven fatal diseases. Cases of enlarged thymus aren’t so common as all that.”

  The Inspector grinned sheepishly at finding his thoughts read so accurately.

  “Lucky I’ve got good teeth, sir,” he admitted. “Tales like that are enough to put you off having gas when you go to the dentist’s. There’s just one thing more, sir. I hope you won’t mind, but I’m afraid the whole Cincinnati Jean business will be in the papers. Some of these reporter fellows got hold of it.”

  “All the better,” Sir Clinton said amiably, to the obvious relief of the Inspector. “No harm in that. Quite the opposite, in fact. Think what a weight it will take off the shoulders of a lot of poor devils whom she’d got into her clutches, when they read the glad tidings at breakfast time. It’ll give them an appetite. And now, have you anything more to report?”

  Severn had come to the end of his budget, it appeared; so, after finishing his glass of whiskey and soda, he took his leave.

  “You see you underrated him, Squire,” said Sir Clinton, when the Inspector had gone. “You can’t say that he isn’t a good man within his limits. He’s worked like a horse since yesterday morning; and when it’s been a case of collecting evidence, I don’t think I’d ask for anything better. That’s not where he’ll fall down in this case, at any rate.”

  Wendover had little interest in the Inspector, since that individual was obviously becoming a mere tool in the hands of the Chief Constable.

  “Who was this woman, Cincinnati Jean?” he asked. “I gather she was a bad lot, though one wouldn’t have thought so from her face.”

  “Her face was her fortune, to some extent,” Sir Clinton explained. “That particular type appeals to a certain brand of men. I suppose they think they’ve got hold of some gentle little thing. In practice, they’d be safer in kissing a wildcat.”

  He lit a fresh cigarette and put the match into his ash tray before continuing.

  “Ever hear of Chicago May, Squire?”

  “I’ve got some vague recollection about her—an American crook, wasn’t she?”

  “No, Irish by birth, really. America doesn’t produce all that it gets credit for. She’d been over there at one time, of course. When she was convicted here, the papers starred her as The Most Dangerous Woman in the World or something like that—journalistic licence, really, because she was only a nasty little specimen of our baser social vermin. Her line was simple enough. Get hold of some wealthy man; lead him on; get him photographed on the sly by some of her gang, in a compromising position; block out her own face in the print; and bleed him for all she could get, on the strength of that.”

  “And this Cincinnati Jean was the same kind, you mean?” Wendover asked, in a tone which even yet betrayed some remaining traces of incredulity. “I can hardly believe it, you know, when I think of her face, Clinton. She looked such a gentle little thing.”

  “Nice soft peach,” Sir Clinton said grimly; “but if you’d been led into nibbling at it, you’d have found a very hard stone in the middle. She was another of our home products—born in Bradford, if I remember. She went to the States before she was twenty and apparently made herself notorious over there, to judge by her nickname. She was back in London just after the War. You were talking, a while ago, about the weird mix-up in our social classes just after the Armistice. That period was Cincinnati Jean’s heyday; it gave her just the chance she wanted. The night clubs and dance halls were the very places to scrape acquaintance with people; and no one asked too many awkward questions about who you really were, then. There were plenty of old fools who had made easy money in the War—just the sort of people that Chicago May battened on. Cincinnati Jean played the same game; but she had a second line in human material as well.”

  “What were they?” Wendover inquired.

  “Youngsters with no money but good prospects, or youngsters with money who might get married later o
n. Chicago May was rather like the smash-and-grab window thief. She’d spend some time in netting her bird; but once she’d got him, she wanted quick returns. Cincinnati Jean was a more dangerous type. She looked ahead farther; and if there was a chance of bleeding a man better by waiting, she was quite prepared to do so.

  “For instance, suppose she got hold of a youngster with a certain amount of money but with bigger expectations. She ‘got him where she wanted him’, as the phrase went, procured her compromising pictures, and then . . . sat tight. He never supposed he’d been landed. But in a year or two, when he was worth perhaps ten times as much through the death of relations, then Jean presented her little bill. It paid to delay, you see, in a case like that. Or a young fellow with cash might fall into her clutches. As things were, she could have milked him for a fair sum, no doubt. But she’d get more if she postponed her demands until he got engaged. Surprise is half the battle in these affairs; and a man’s not half himself when he’s suddenly faced with the evidence of something that he thought was all over and forgotten. She did it once too often and got sent to Aylesbury; but no one except Scotland Yard is likely to guess how many of these promising transactions got nipped in the bud when her thymus gland got to work the other night. She must have had quite a number of victims still in hand, I should think.”

  “What a damnable trade!” Wendover exclaimed. “And you think young Keith-Westerton was one of her victims?”

  “I’d rather like to see the counterfoils of his checkbook,” Sir Clinton admitted. “One of the most recent of them might be highly suggestive.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The Abbé Goron Officiates

  “THESE cases of yours seem to be hanging fire in the last few days,” Wendover observed, with a faint touch of malice, as he and the Chief Constable entered the smoking room after dinner.

  “Well, don’t you think your Sleepy Hollow here has had enough sensations to keep it going?” Sir Clinton inquired lazily. “First of all, you have the Horncastle murder. Then the hurried departure of Mrs. Keith-Westerton gave them a lot to talk about. Then we fished up Cincinnati Jean—and, by the way, she got full obituaries in the press, portrait and all; more than most honest folk achieve. Then you had the inquest on Horncastle, with the usual verdict against some person or persons unknown. And after that there was the inquest on Cincinnati Jean, when they very wisely confined themselves to giving the enlarged thymus and shock as the cause of death, without committing themselves any further. It seems to me that Talgarth has supped on sensations lately, without even including the latest one.”