“I couldn’t imagine what had happened to you,” she said. “I rang the station. They said your train was on time, and they’d seen you on it. I put your dinner in the oven, but it’ll be all dried up.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Preece. “Serve it up in five minutes.”
Then he pushed past the astonished Mrs. Biddlecombe, went into the library, and poured himself out a large whisky.
“It’s quite clear,” said Mr. Sexton, “that you can’t stop now. You’ve got to let them have the whole story.”
“That’s quite impossible,” said Mr. Preece. He had not slept well, but the coming of morning had restored some of his self-possession. The familiar surroundings of his office had gone a long way to complete the cure.
“Why is it impossible?”
“Because they’ll go straight down to the hospital and start questioning Colonel Spender. He’s a sick man. If that superintendent starts on him, it’ll probably kill him.”
“It’s his own fault. He’s brought the whole thing on himself by writing that damn silly note.”
“And how are we going to explain to the colonel about opening it?”
Mr. Sexton said, with a touch of impatience, “Tell him the truth. It was a mistake. And a perfectly natural one—”
“I know—but—”
“Have you considered what may happen if you don’t come clean?”
“What do you mean? What could happen? They can pester me with a lot of damn silly questions, but they can’t arrest me.”
“Can’t they?”
“What for?”
“For the murder of Theresa Slane.”
Mr. Preece stared at him as though he had gone mad.
Mr. Sexton said, “Do you know what you were doing on the evening of March 22nd, two years ago?”
“Of course I don’t. But I can soon find out.”
Mr. Preece was a methodical man. His working diaries for the last six years were stacked on a shelf behind his desk. “March 22nd? That was a Friday. I’m usually at home on a Friday. On the Thursday, I see I went to the local Law Society dinner. And on the Saturday I was playing bridge. I assume that on the Friday I was at home.”
“Alone?”
“Naturally. As soon as Mrs. Biddlecombe has cleared and washed the dinner things and laid my breakfast, she goes home.”
“Which would be about what time?”
“She’s usually away by nine. Why?”
“I’ve been reading up the case. The medical evidence was that Mrs. Slane died shortly before or shortly after midnight. Her house is about fifteen minutes’ walk from yours, through Knap Woods.”
“But—you’re joking, aren’t you? This is a piece of your nonsense, Andrew. What possible motive could I have for killing the woman? I knew her by sight it’s true, but I don’t think I’d ever spoken to her.”
“It was strongly hinted at the inquest that Mrs. Slane was a high-class prostitute. Appointments by telephone. It was also hinted that a lot of her customers were respectable citizens in the neighbourhood, and that she was making quite a bit of money on the side by gentle blackmail. The police were pretty certain that she was killed by one of the customers she’d squeezed too hard, or too often.”
“But good heavens, you’re not suggesting—”
“I’m not suggesting anything. But the police don’t know you as well as I do.”
“But,” said Mr. Preece, “even if—I mean—if there was the slightest simulacrum of truth in this fantastic suggestion, why should I have gone out of my way to call the attention of the police to myself—”
“Their minds work in a peculiar way,” said Mr. Sexton. “I’m afraid that the sequence of ideas which may occur to them is this. You read in The Times of the death of your neighbour and client, Colonel Spender. He was an obvious candidate for Mrs. Slane’s favours. He was a great womaniser and he lived in the neighbourhood, alone, since his wife died, probably no alibi for the night in question. So you – the real murderer – decide to foist it on to him and close the case for ever. You arrive first at the office – which you did, incidentally – type out this confession, on office paper, with an office machine – they’ll be able to prove all that easily enough – then go down to the strong-room, and put the ‘confession’ with the will. Knowing, of course, that we’ll have to have it up at once since you’re the executor. I mean – it’s plausible.”
Mr. Preece, whose face had been growing redder and redder, said in a stifled voice, “I think you’re right. I’ll go round this evening.”
“I see,” said Superintendent Marker. He said it in a voice so neutral that the words were devoid of meaning. “Was it you, or your partner, who opened this – what did you call it – deed wallet?”
“I think I opened it myself.”
“Could you describe it?”
“It’s a stout manilla folder.” Mr. Preece demonstrated the size with his hands. “We have one for each client. It would have deeds and documents in it, and any will or codicil – important documents we keep under lock and key.”
“And when do you suppose this – this other envelope – was put in it?”
“The will was dated almost exactly a year ago. I assume the envelope was put away with it. Clients often put a letter of wishes with their will.”
“You assume? You don’t remember?”
“I can’t say that I definitely remember it. I’m putting documents away every day. The person who certainly will remember it is Colonel Spender.”
“Yes,” said the superintendent. “I expect he might have done. He died this morning.”
Whilst Mr. Preece was still gaping at him, he added, “I’ll have to take instructions on this. I’d like to ask you not to go away in the meantime.”
“What do you mean, go away?”
“Go abroad.”
“I’ve no intention of going abroad,” said Mr. Preece, with dignity. “I shall be going up to my office at precisely the usual hour tomorrow.”
“That’ll be very convenient, sir. For I shall probably be calling on you.” The superintendent was as good as his word. He called the next morning, at ten o’clock, bringing the sergeant with him. They faced Mr. Preece and Mr. Sexton across the table on which lay the famous deed wallet.
“So this is the one, is it?” said the superintendent. “Name on the outside. I see. And a number. You keep things in good order in your office, Mr. Preece.”
“We have a considerable number of papers to look after.”
“Only the important ones, like this, you keep locked up?”
“That is so.”
“Where do you keep them?”
“In the strong-room, in the basement.”
“And who has the keys?”
“My partner, Mr. Sexton. And myself.”
“I see,” said the superintendent. He had been fiddling with the string, and now the wallet fell open, and the will in its long legal envelope, and the smaller white envelope both slid out on to the table. The superintendent, who was holding the wallet, gave it a shake. “There’s more inside,” he said. “What would they be?”
“The deeds of his house at Bramhill, I imagine,” said Mr. Sexton. “And there are a couple of Deeds of Covenant in favour of the local hospital, I fancy. Why don’t we have a look?”
The superintendent gave the wallet a shake. The first thing which came out with some difficulty was a packet of deeds. Then two separate deeds. Finally, two white envelopes.
“Hello,” said Mr. Preece, “What are those?”
Each one had, typed on it, the words, To be placed with my will and opened only at my death.
“Good heavens!” said Mr. Preece. “What on earth—?”
“They must have got stuck behind the deeds,” said Mr. Sexton. “Shall I . . .?”
He looked at Mr. Preece, who looked at the superintendent who was watching impassively.
“We might as well,” the superintendent said. “Maybe they say he changed his mind and did
n’t do it, after all.”
The first note was short. It said, I should like my Executors to inform the American Ambassador that I shot the President.
The second was shorter still. It said, I am Jack the Ripper.
“Well,” said the superintendent. “That’s two more mysteries solved, isn’t it.” The atmosphere seemed suddenly to have got lighter. “I’ve been making a few enquiries about Colonel Spender. I understand he was a rare old leg-puller. As a matter of fact, we shouldn’t have taken a lot of notice of the first note, if it hadn’t been for mentioning the glove. That was odd. Because we did find a glove, a single one, under the body. We kept it up our sleeve, as you might say.”
“But,” said Mr. Sexton, “if you didn’t tell anyone – how did Colonel Spender find out about it?”
“We had to institute a lot of enquiries. It was a foreign glove – artificial pigskin, made in Belgium. What happened, I’ve no doubt, was that someone told someone else – in confidence, of course – and they passed it on. These things get about. You know how it is.”
Mr. Preece nodded.
“I’m sorry it’s all come to nothing,” said the superintendent. “But that’s the way with these enquiries. We have to follow up each line until it runs out. Come on, son.”
The sergeant got to his feet.
“I’ll show you out,” said Mr. Sexton.
When they had gone, Mr. Preece sat staring at the little pile of documents on the table in front of him, a frown on his face. He wasn’t thinking about the glove. As the superintendent said, these things got out. Women in railway carriages who had aunts who had cooks who were walking out with policemen . . . What was bothering him was the other envelopes. He himself had emptied the deed wallet, right out, and he was perfectly certain that there had been nothing else in it.
However, as he had sometimes remarked to his clients, “If there’s a theoretical solution, I can usually work it out. If I’m stuck, Andrew Sexton can often find a practical answer.”
Mr. Portway’s Practice
I qualified as a solicitor before the war, and in 1937 I bought a share in a small partnership in the City. Then the war came along, and I joined the infantry. I was already thirty-five and it didn’t look as if I was going to see much active service, so I cashed in on my knowledge of German and joined the Intelligence Corps. That was fun, too.
When the war finished I got back to London and found our old office bombed and the other partner dead. As far as a legal practice can do, it had disappeared. I got a job without any difficulty in a firm in Bedford Row, but I didn’t enjoy it. The work was easy enough but there was no real future in it. So I quit and joined the Legal Branch of Inland Revenue.
This may seem even duller than private practice, but in fact it wasn’t. As soon as I had finished the subsidiary training in accountancy that all Revenue Officials have to take, I was invited to join a very select outfit known as I.B.A. or Investigation Branch (Active).
If you ask a Revenue official about I.B.A. he’ll tell you it doesn’t exist. This may simply mean that he hasn’t heard of it. Most ordinary Revenue investigation is done by accountants who examine balance sheets and profit and loss accounts and vouchers and receipts and ask questions and go on asking questions until the truth emerges.
Some cases can’t be treated like that. They need active investigation. Someone has got to go and find out the facts. That’s where I.B.A. comes in.
It isn’t all big cases involving millions of pounds. The Revenue reckons to achieve the best results by making a few shrewd examples in the right places. One of our most spectacular coups was achieved when a member of the department opened a greengrocer’s shop in Crouch End – but that’s by the way.
When the name of Mr. Portway cropped up in I.B.A. records it was natural that the dossier should get pushed across to me. For Mr. Portway was a solicitor. I can’t remember precisely how he first came to our notice. You’d be surprised what casual items can set I.B.A. in motion. A conversation in a railway carriage; a hint from an insurance assessor; a bit of loud-voiced boasting in a pub. We don’t go in for phone tapping. It’s inefficient, and, from our point of view, quite unnecessary.
The thing about Mr. Portway was simply this. That he seemed to make a very substantial amount of money without working for it.
The first real confirmation came from a disgruntled girl who had been hired to look after his books and fired for inefficiency. Mr. Portway ran a good car, she said. Dressed well. Spent hundreds of pounds at the wine merchant (she’d seen one of his bills) and conducted an old-fashioned one-man practice which, by every law of economics, should have left him broke.
Some days he had no clients at all, she said, and spent the morning in his room reading a book (detective stories chiefly); then took two hours off for lunch, snoozed a little on his return, had a cup of tea, and went home. Other days, a client or two would trickle in. The business was almost entirely buying and selling of houses and leases and mortgages and sale agreements. Mr. Portway did it all himself. He had one girl to do the typing and look after the outer office, and another (our information) to keep the books.
I don’t suppose you know anything about solicitors’ accounting, and I’m not proposing to give you a dissertation on it, but the fact is that solicitors are bound by very strict rules indeed. Rules imposed by Act of Parliament and jealously enforced by the Law Society. And quite right, too. Solicitors handle a lot of other people’s money.
When we’d made a quiet check to see if Mr. Portway had any private means of his own (he hadn’t), we decided that this was the sort of case we ought to have a look at. It wasn’t difficult. Mr. Portway knew nothing about figures. However small his staff he had to have someone with the rudiments of accountancy, or he couldn’t have got through his annual audit. We watched the periodicals until we saw his advertisement, and I applied for the job.
I don’t know if there were any other applicants, but I’m sure I was the only one who professed both law and bookkeeping and who was prepared to accept the mouse-like salary that he was offering.
Mr. Portway was a small, round, pink-cheeked, white-haired man. One would have said Pickwickian, except that he didn’t wear glasses, nor was there anything in the least owl-like about his face. So far as any comparison suggested itself he looked like a tortoise. It was a sardonic, leathery, indestructible face, with the long upper lip of a philosopher.
He greeted me warmly and showed me my room. The office occupied the ground floor and basement of the house. On the right as you came in, and overlooking the paved courtyard and fountain which is all that remains of the old Lombards Inn, was Mr. Portway’s sanctum, a very nice room, on the small side, and made smaller by the rows of bookcases full of bound reports. In fact, the whole suite of offices was tiny, a box-like affair.
I have given you some idea of the scale of things so that you can gather how easy I thought my job was going to be. My guess was that a week would be quite enough for me to detect any funny business that was going on.
I was quite wrong.
A week was enough to convince me that something was wrong. But by the end of a month I hadn’t got a step nearer to finding out what it was.
My predecessor hadn’t kept the books awfully well, but that was inefficiency, not dishonesty.
I reported my findings to my superiors.
“Mr. Portway,” I said, “has a business which appears to produce, in costs, just about enough to pay the salaries of his two assistants, the rent, rates, lighting and other outgoings, and to leave him no personal profit at all. Indeed, in some instances, he has had to make up, from his own pocket, small deficiencies in the office account. Nor does this money come from private means. It is part of my duty as accountant to make Mr. Portway’s own private tax returns” —(this, it is fair to him to say, was at his own suggestion)— “and apart from a very small holding in War Stock and occasional casual earnings for articles on wine, on which he is an acknowledged expert, he has – or
at least declares – no outside resources at all. Nevertheless, enjoying as he does a ‘minus’ income, he lives well, appears to deny himself little in the way of comfort. He is not extravagant, but I could not estimate his expenditure on himself at less than two thousand pounds per annum.”
My masters found this report so unsatisfactory that I was summoned to an interview. The head of the department at that time, Dai Evans, was a tubby and mercurial Welshman, like Lloyd George without the moustache. He was on Christian name terms with all his staff; but he wasn’t a good man to cross.
“Are you asking me to believe in miracles, Michael?” he said. “How can a man have a wallet full of notes to spend on himself each week if he doesn’t earn them from somewhere?”
“Perhaps he makes them,” I suggested.
Dai elected to take this seriously. “A forger you mean. I wouldn’t have thought it likely.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t quite mean that.” (I knew as well as anyone that the skill and organisation, to say nothing of the supplies of special paper, necessary for bank note forgery were far beyond the resources of an ordinary citizen.) “I thought he might have a hoard. Some people do, you know. There’s nothing intrinsically illegal in it.”
Dai grunted. “Why should he trouble to keep up an office? You say it costs him money. Why wouldn’t he shift his hoard to a safe deposit? That way he’d save himself money and work. I don’t like it, Michael. We’re on to something here, boy. Don’t let it go.”
So I returned to Lombards Inn, and kept my eyes and ears open. And as the weeks passed the mystery grew more irritating and more insoluble.
I made a careful calculation during the month which ensued. In the course of it Mr. Portway acted in the purchase of one house for £8,000, and the sale of another at about the same price. He drafted a lease of an office in the City. And fixed up a mortgage for an old lady with a Building Society. The costs he received for these transactions totalled £185. And that was around five pounds less than he paid out, to keep the office going for the same period.
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