Puzzle of the Silver Persian

by Stuart Palmer

  “Good hunting,” Miss Withers wished him.

  She spent the rest of the day at the British Museum, buried in a heap of voluminous tomes in the reading room. When she came out she knew a great deal about the properties and effects of cyanide of potassium in its many forms, but nothing more about the series of mysteries and suicides which was beginning to prey upon her mind to an uncomfortable degree. “And I took this trip for a rest!” she said sadly to herself.

  Returning to the hotel, she met Candida and Leslie Reverson, dressed for the evening and headed for a taxi.

  “You children seemed undaunted,” she remarked.

  “Oh, quite,” said Leslie Reverson.

  Candida drew closer. “We’re going out because I’m too nervous to stay in my room,” she confessed.

  She seemed paler than ever. Miss Withers wondered again at the way in which she had lost the tanned look of out-of-doors healthiness which had been hers on the boat.

  “How do you feel after your narrow escape?” she inquired.

  “Shaky,” Candida confessed. “But Leslie thought I’d feel better if we went out to dinner and a variety show. And I feel safe with him.”

  “Safe as a vault,” said Leslie gallantly. Miss Withers thought of some vaults that she had seen, and smiled wryly.

  She touched Leslie’s sleeve, drawing him aside. “Watch over her,” she whispered.

  “Nothing else but,” said Leslie Reverson. It was a phrase that he had learned in Chicago, and he was proud of it.

  The young couple rolled away in a taxi, with Miss Withers staring after them. They made a good pair—the new Leslie and the new Candida. After all, their ages couldn’t be so very unlike. Candida, who had had no youth, and Leslie, who had had too much… “She has strength enough for both of them,” said Miss Withers to herself.

  She dined in solitary splendor in the hotel dining room, and then, feeling very much at a loose end, decided to forget the problems which beset her and follow the example of the younger set. A vaudeville show, she thought, might be just the thing. It was true that her old friend and one-time fiancé, Oscar Piper of the New York police, had dragged her against her will to the Palace on several occasions, but this was England, and besides, she did not feel up to a play or concert.

  She bought a ticket at the hotel desk for the Palladium, and then walked northward through the bewildering little streets of London. After a certain amount of wandering, she found the theater and sat through a show comprising most of the best vaudeville acts she had seen in New York at the Palace in the past two years. She came out onto Oxford Street, hurried along by the crowd, and sought for a bobby to ask how to get back to Trafalgar Square. Strangely enough, there was no stalwart figure in black rubber cape on the corner—but she did glimpse a familiar form which made her start.

  She saw Tom Hammond aiding a rather garishly dressed young woman to board a bus marked “Marble Arch-Edgware Road.” He stood back as the vehicle rolled away, waved his hand rather casually, and then started back across the street.

  It had not been Loulu Hammond, that girl. Miss Withers was positive of that. There were many questions she would have liked to ask Tom Hammond. For lack of anything better to do, she followed him down Oxford Street, keeping a discreet distance behind.

  He rounded a corner, and when she came after him he was out of sight. Miss Withers found herself standing beneath a canopy marked Oxford-Palace. Peering inside, she saw Hammond at a hotel desk. He accepted a key and moved toward the elevator. She would have liked to follow, but she noted that the time was nearing midnight. “At least I know where the Hammonds are staying,” she told herself “Tomorrow will do just as well.”

  But tomorrow was Friday, the day set for the inquest into the death of Andy Todd. She had forgotten that, until she was reminded by a telephone call in the morning from Sergeant Secker.

  “There may not be anything to it,” he said. “But you’d better be there. At any rate, you won’t have to go away out to the East End. It’s being held just off Drury Lane.”

  She found the place without difficulty, but was disappointed in the ceremony. Here was not even the modest drama of the other inquest, though many of the same people sat on the wooden benches.

  Chief Inspector Cannon sat at the table behind the coroner, and evidently the sergeant was telling the truth about his being handed over the whole case, for there was no sign of the heavy-handed Filsom. There was a sketchy identification of the body, mostly from Todd’s passport photograph, and testimony from a police surgeon who seemed to have been poured out of the same mold as his fellow medico at the other inquest. He told the jury that the deceased had met his death as the result of a fall of four stories—three floors and a basement—and that the autopsy showed an excessive amount of alcohol in the brain.

  “The body was badly injured in the fall,” finished the surgeon.

  “Would you say unusually damaged?” inquired the coroner.

  The doctor wouldn’t say that. He had seen worse. But not from a fall of that distance. If the man hadn’t been drunk he might have got off with only some broken bones, but as it was he had been unable to catch hold of anything or to land on his feet and had struck head first, with the natural result.

  “Were the circumstances such as to impel you to a belief that death was by suicide?” inquired the coroner.

  The police surgeon nodded, but before he could speak Chief Inspector Cannon had risen to his feet.

  “I should like to request that this hearing be postponed, sir,” he said. “For reasons satisfactory to the police.”

  This remark did not seem to surprise the coroner in the slightest. He was of a somewhat milder temperament than Maggers, Miss Withers decided.

  “Very well,” he decided. “I shall adjourn this hearing until Monday week, at the request of Scotland Yard.”

  “And that’s that,” Sergeant Secker greeted Miss Withers as she hurried out of the place.

  “It certainly is,” she told him cryptically. She did not care to linger, for she had something on her mind.

  It was shortly before twelve o’clock, and she hoped to catch the Hammonds before they went out for the day’s sightseeing, or whatever it was that they had come to London for. She took a taxi and was whisked away to the Oxford-Palace.

  She marched up to the desk, across a foyer all in glass and silver—a modernistic scheme of decoration which reminded her, by contrast, of her own hotel. She asked the clerk for Mr. or Mrs. Hammond.

  “I’ll see if they’re in,” he promised. He reached for a desk phone and dialed a number.

  “No answer.” But he was anxious to oblige. “If you’ll wait a moment I’ll find out if they left a message.”

  He darted away and was gone for some minutes. Then he came back, shaking his head.

  “That’s odd,” he remarked. “They’ve gone.”

  “Gone?” Miss Withers looked puzzled.

  “Yes, madam. I was off duty yesterday. But it seems that Mrs. Hammond left yesterday morning, and Mr. Hammond very late last night. I was sure that they were here, because there’s some mail in their box.”

  “Oh?” Miss Withers concocted an artifice. “I’m a close relative. Can you give me their address?”

  The clerk shook his head. “Only that their mail was sent here from the American Express, and I suppose that we shall have to send it back there.”

  Miss Withers nodded. “And Master Hammond?” she asked.

  By the expression of distaste on the clerk’s face she knew that he had had experiences with the terrible Gerald. “Master Hammond left with his mother,” he said.

  Miss Withers thanked him and then displayed a half crown. “It’s a little unusual,” she explained. “But I wonder if you would mind looking in the Hammonds’ mail to see if they received a letter I sent them yesterday. It’s quite important.”

  The young man declined the half crown magnificently. “I understand,” he said. He reached behind him and took from an upper box
a little sheaf of letters. “All from the States,” he said. “Except this.” He showed her a letter with a border inked with black. It bore the brick-colored penny-ha’penny stamp of the Royal Mail.

  His voice took on a note of polite respect. “A death in the family?” he said. “Unfortunately, they left before this arrived.”

  Miss Withers had also left, leaving the half crown behind her. She ordered lunch at a near-by restaurant, but had little appetite for it. She could not help thinking of another table at which she had lunched—a round table in the dining saloon of the American Diplomat. There had been Rosemary Fraser—she was gone. Andy Todd had likewise departed, willingly or unwillingly… after the receipt of a black-bordered letter. Such a letter had come to Candida Noring, and she had escaped death by the skin of her teeth, as Miss Withers would have put it.

  That left the Honorable Emily, Leslie, the Hammonds, and herself of the group who had sat at the doctor’s table.

  “I ought to do something,” Miss Withers told herself. But she wasn’t sure just what she must do. There was no use warning the Honorable Emily or Leslie: they had had warning enough. The Hammonds, in spite of the black-bordered note, were out of reach—both of the murderer and of herself. If she could not warn them, it seemed likely that the murderer could not reach them.

  Just to calm heir conscience, Miss Withers dispatched a telegram to Tom Hammond, care of the American Express, and telling him to take his wife and child as far from London as he could possibly manage. “Though he’ll only think I’m crazy,” she admitted to herself.

  Then she stopped short. She had forgotten one person who had been at the table—the doctor himself!

  The ship sailed on its return journey to the States today, she knew. But there was still time and to spare before half-past two. She paid her bill in the restaurant and hailed a taxi outside. “Pier seven at George the Fifth dock,” she told the driver. “And try to hurry.”

  He did his best, and better. They wound through the interminable streets of eastern London and drew up at the waterfront shortly before two o’clock.

  Miss Withers gave the man a generous tip and then bustled through long and strangely vacant piers until she came out on the open dock.

  There were a few broken bits of paper ribbon at her feet, but the slip was vacant.

  “Isn’t this where the American Diplomat sails from?” she demanded of a solitary person in a blue coat who was sweeping up.

  He stared at her dully. “She’ll be back again three weeks from Monday,” he informed her. “Went out hours ago.”

  “But I thought she sailed at two-thirty…”

  “Eleven in the mornin’, mum. They has to go out with the tide, y’see.”

  Miss Withers noticed a strip of glistening wet along the bottom of the cement pierhead. The tide was going out—and the American Diplomat was somewhere off Gravesend.

  On board that trim little cabin-class vessel, Dr. Waite was just rising from the table over which he presided. There was a pleasant crowd on board, mostly American students driven home by the fall in the dollar, and the genial doctor anticipated a pleasant cruise. This would not, he was sure, turn out like the last trip over, with suicides and investigations and such. But he mentioned only pleasant topics.

  “What a crowd and a voyage that one was,” finished Dr. Waite. “Dancing until eleven or twelve every night.”

  There was no Loulu Hammond to be sweet and sarcastic about the pace that kills. Feeling a tremendous sense of relief, Waite walked back to his sick bay and seated himself at the desk.

  The vessel was beginning to roll in the Channel swell, a comforting rocking motion. The doctor rubbed his bald head with the palm of his hand, loosened his vest, and leaned back in his chair. The world wasn’t so bad, after all. What if he had come off rather badly with the not-too-married lady who lived in Maida Vale? There would be other weeks in London, and in the meantime he had one faithful mistress.

  He reached in the drawer of his desk and took out a glass and a tall bottle. He poured himself out six fingers of the brandy and then held up the rich dose to the light which streamed in his port.

  “Here’s to a smooth voyage,” said Dr. Waite to himself. He stopped suddenly and squinted at the glass. There was, instead of the fine clear glow of the brandy, an oily cloud of something heavy and dark at the bottom of his glass.

  “Now what in the devil’s got into that?” he asked himself. He sniffed, almost tasted, and then set it down with shaking fingers. Hastily he fumbled in his medicine cabinet and made a laboratory test that he remembered from dim distant days at Rush Medical.

  When he had his result, he was shaking all over. “Good God!” said Dr. Waite. “It’s loaded with cyanide!”

  He took the bottle, holding it at arm’s length, and dropped it out the porthole. Then he went to his medicine cabinet, found a small bottle of whisky, and though it smelled perfectly as it should, he put it away again.

  “I’ll be damned!” he assured himself. “Completely damned!”

  There was a knock on his door, and fat, cheerful Sparks entered, smoking a new curving calabash which he had bought in London to add to his growing collection. The wireless operator took the pipe from his mouth. “Message for you,” he said. “Figure it out if you can.”

  He handed over a yellow sheet of paper upon which he had typed out the words:

  SUSPECT WHOLESALE MURDER PLOT TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. HILDEGARDE WITHERS.

  For the first time the bald and sniggering doctor realized that the black-bordered note which had awaited him when he came back on board was not simply a bad joke.

  “I’ll be thoroughly and completely damned,” he said.

  Chapter IX

  Whom God Hath Put Asunder

  “I MAY NEED YOUR SUPPORT,” said Hildegarde Withers. “Come on in with me, and be surprised at nothing.”

  The Honorable Emily and Miss Withers had been taking a pleasant stroll on this bright and windy Saturday morning, and now they stood outside that Mecca of tourists, the offices of the American Express. Around them the busy Hay-market roared and boomed.

  “But for what?” demanded the Englishwoman.

  “Never you mind,” Miss Withers told her. “Just look like the daughter of a hundred earls and say nothing.”

  They went inside, and after standing in line for a few minutes, stood before the mail desk. The young man at the counter wore very thick eyeglasses and peered through them dubiously.

  “Anything for Mr. or Mrs. Thomas Hammond?” inquired Miss Withers. She spoke firmly, with an air of uprightness and authority, in spite of the fact that she was planning a bare-faced robbery of the Royal Mail.

  It was all too easy. The young man at the counter reached behind him and then handed her a sheaf of letters. Most of them were from New York, and one was forwarded, with the old address, “T. H. Hammond, Advtg. Mgr. Pyren Extinguisher Co., N. Y. C.” The women turned to go.

  “Just a moment,” said the clerk, staring over his eyeglasses with a cold appraisal. “Are you Mrs. Hammond?”

  “Er—no,” Miss Withers admitted.

  “Well, I can’t let you have mail addressed to anyone else unless they identify you and you register here,” he told her. “I have Mr. Hammond’s signature in the book, and on a written order from him I’ll be glad to—”

  “Go jump in the Thames,” Miss Withers remarked in a very low voice. She smiled brightly. “I’m sorry—I didn’t know the rules,” she said.

  She handed back the sheaf of letters and then stalked out of the place, with the Honorable Emily in tow.

  “Well, whatever you were trying to do, you didn’t do it,” said that lady drily.

  “Didn’t I!” Miss Withers well concealed any feeling of chagrin that might have filled her maidenly bosom. “At least I’ve discovered that no package of poisoned cigarettes or gumdrops or bath salts is waiting for the Hammonds. There was nothing but letters and postcards.”

  “Was that what you had in mind?
” The Honorable Emily looked incredulous.

  Miss Withers smiled and patted the crinkling envelope—with a narrow inked border of black—which reposed snugly in her sleeve.

  “Of course!” she answered, and they walked back toward their hotel in silence. They parted in the elevator.

  “I’m alone a great deal now that Leslie has set about paying court to Candida Noring,” said the Honorable Emily a bit wistfully. “Would you care to have tea with me around five?”

  “I should love to,” Miss Withers told her. “But I’m afraid I shall be very, very busy around five o’clock.”

  As soon as she was in her room she got down to business. From her sleeve she took the black-bordered letter which she had first seen at the mail desk of the Oxford-Palace and which she had chased all the way down to the express office. For a long time she studied it. No doubt there were fingerprints on it—prints which might solve the whole mystery of this wholesale chain of murders—or what she was beginning to suspect must certainly be murder on a wholesale scale.

  Yet heaven only knew how many other persons beside the sender had touched the envelope. There was certainly herself, the man at the desk in the American Express and the hotel clerks at the Oxford-Palace, together with whoever had sorted and handled the mail in the post office. Besides, the police had one of these fantastic messages intact, taken from the pocket of dead Andy Todd. They would find whatever was to be found in the line of fingerprints. Miss Withers had no facilities for such work, and, moreover, she had learned from her friend Inspector Piper that few juries on either side of the Atlantic will accept fingerprint evidence even in this advanced day and age.

  “Bother the prints,” she decided. She turned her attention to the envelope itself. It told her very little at first glance.

  It was squarish and white—of a rather cheap grade. The stamp was affixed on a slight angle, and the postmark read, “London—8 A.M.—26 SEP—1933.” Beneath the date was a single letter “C” which she took to represent the post office at which the stamp had been canceled. That would mean more to Scotland Yard than to her, and probably very little even to them. Yet, after all, it meant something to know that this was the first of the murder messages that had gone through the mails.