Puzzle of the Silver Persian

by Stuart Palmer

  The address was written in common blue-black ink, in a roundish hand from which most of the personal characteristics of the writer had been removed. It was the same writing as the other letters edged in black, Miss Withers was quite sure of that. Yet as an intelligent, if rather elementary, student of handwriting through the treatises of such experts as the famous Gypsy Louise Rice, she knew that very little indeed can be done with so limited a sample of handwriting as the address on an envelope. This white square bore only the words “Mr. and Mrs. Tom Hammond, American Express, London.” There were also scribbled forwarding notations—to and from the Oxford-Palace—but they of course meant nothing.

  It was certain, then, that the writer of that address had been almost without emotion. Only someone impassioned and cool could have kept personality so hidden. There was nothing more, except that the black border had been hurriedly inked.

  Without a second’s hesitancy Miss Withers inserted a hairpin in the flap and opened the message.

  As she had known, it consisted of a few scraps of cream-colored paper glued upon a blacked-in background. The handwriting was, if not the same, very similar to that on the envelope, yet it seemed a bit more definite, more natural and human and intense. The writer of this message had been inflamed with passion.

  “And you, you superior self-satisfied fools, one of these days you’ll learn that the people around you aren’t just puppets to laugh at…”

  “Never end a sentence with a preposition,” Miss Withers told herself absently. She was disappointed, having hoped for something definite, something pointed, in the message. It was like all the rest, showing a very real malice which almost reached hatred, and which still did not seem quite in tune with the doom which had descended upon at least two of the recipients of these letters. It was not until months afterward, when it was all over, that she knew that Dr. Waite had been added to the list.

  She sat and stared at the black-framed message for a long time, but no further inspiration came to her. The whole affair seemed essentially childish and almost ridiculous—and yet three persons had died exceedingly unpleasant deaths, and one more had come so close to the scythe of the Grim Reaper that she would sleep ill o’ nights for many and many a month.

  “I wonder,” Miss Withers asked herself, as she put the purloined letter carefully away, “I wonder just what it was that Peter Noel was throwing into the sea that morning?” There had been the cryptic letters “osem” on the one scrap she had found. That might, of course, be part of the word “Yosemite.” It also fitted into the name “Rosemary.” Miss Withers inclined very strongly to the latter possibility. Then had Noel, also, received a warning note before his death? If so, what about his suicide?

  Supposing it wasn’t suicide? And then—how on earth could anybody make a man swallow a dose of poison, in full view of the police, against his will? Miss Withers was back where she had started.

  She ordered tea sent up to her room, and tried to put the whole affair out of her mind for the time being. But it was no use. She felt herself in the middle of the second act of a mystery melodrama, stuck in the center of the stage before a crowded house, and without the vaguest notion of what her lines and business should be.

  “For the last three years,” she scolded herself, “you’ve been wishing for a chance to tackle a murder mystery without Oscar Piper and the police to back you up. Now you’ve got it and you don’t know what to do with it.”

  On an impulse, she went downstairs to the lobby and telephoned to Scotland Yard, asking for Chief Inspector Cannon. She learned that he was not on duty. “He’ll probably ring in after the football game,” said the man at the desk. “Shall I give him a message?”

  “Never mind,” Miss Withers answered wearily. She asked for Sergeant Secker.

  “He’s not available either,” she learned. “He usually goes up to his home in Suffolk over the week-end.”

  “I only hope that the criminal world observes its holidays as carefully as the police in this fair land,” Miss Withers remarked acidly, and hung up.

  Driven by sheer necessity to the company of the Honorable Emily, Miss Withers went down to the third floor and rapped at her door. But there was no answer.

  She continued on down to the foyer and asked at the desk if the Honorable Emily had left any message.

  “Her ladyship is, I think, having a guest for tea in the lounge,” the clerk told her. “Shall I have her paged?”

  “No, thank you.” Miss Withers gave it up. She went out to the nearest newsdealer, and bought an armful of American newspapers and magazines, with which she proceeded to stupefy her intelligence through the evening and through most of the following Sunday.

  She took a long walk in the Sabbath afternoon, strolling through the Embankment Gardens. In spite of the mist in the air, and a chill wind which swept up the Thames, the place was filled with young men and women, paired off two and two, most of whom were happily courting in the English fashion, which consists of striding under a load of heavy tweeds in no particular direction but with a great deal of energy. “No doubt until they finally drop in each other’s arms of sheer exhaustion,” Miss Withers decided.

  She saw one couple who, instead of striding vigorously forward, were strolling idly along the walk above the river, and now and then stopping to toss chestnuts to the screaming gulls over the water. As she drew closer she saw that it was Leslie Reverson with the Noring girl again. They were walking very close together and laughing at nothing at all. At least, Reverson was laughing.

  Miss Withers, with an unwonted delicacy, withdrew down a side path before she met them. “Love!” she remarked softly to herself. “It goes on at the brink of a volcano, and on the deck of a sinking ship, and in the shadow of the gallows.”

  Then she caught herself short. “At my age!” she said. All unbidden the gay chorus from Patience came to her mind:

  Twenty lovesick maidens we,

  Lovesick all against our will,

  Twenty years hence we shall be

  Twenty lovesick maidens still…

  She went back to her hotel, feeling very much alone, and wrote a long and very caustic letter to Oscar Piper, back in New York—a letter which made the worthy inspector suspect that English cooking did not agree with her. Hardly had she affixed the stamp when there came a tap on her door.

  It was Leslie Reverson. “I say, is my aunt here by any chance?”

  Miss Withers shook her head and knew at once that there was something else the young man had to say to her.

  “Won’t you sit down?” she invited. Reverson entered and leaned against the dresser.

  “I say,” he began once or twice. But that was all.

  “What’s the matter?” Miss Withers prompted him. “Course of true love a bit bumpy?”

  “Eh? No, no, not at all.” He grinned pleasantly. “But what I wanted to ask you—you see, Aunt Emily thinks you’re the real stuff, all wool and a yard wide, and all that sort of rot, you know. It’s an odd thing to ask, but I wish that if you get a chance you’d put in a good word for Candy—Candy and me, you know.”

  “Why, I—”

  “Aunt isn’t the easiest person in the world to get around,” Reverson went on. “Until she dies I haven’t a penny except what she gives me, and she makes me toe the line, you know. If you’d just say a word…”

  “Of course, if the opportunity arises. But I don’t understand. I thought that your aunt approved of Miss Noring?”

  Leslie nodded emphatically. “Quite. Oh, she does. But it’s more than approval I want. And Candy is so outspoken. We all had luncheon together, and Candy got a bit under aunt’s skin. She ragged us about not having serviettes at table unless you order them specially, and about the warm cocktails and the duty on cigarettes and no central heating…”

  Miss Withers smiled. “Candida Noring is suffering from an attack of Homesickness Americana,” she informed the young man. “The best remedy would be to show her something of the real England, that lies out
side your smoky old London.”

  “Oh!” Leslie understood. “You mean the country! Never cared for it myself.” He snapped his fingers. “Wait—I’ve an idea! Marvelous idea! Aunt will be insisting on our leaving for the old ruins in Cornwall in a day or so. She’s been eating her heart out in town, mostly because she worries over silly old Tobermory. I’ll get her to invite Candy down to stay for a few weeks!”

  He hurried toward the door. “Thanks awfully for the suggestion,” he said. Miss Withers, who felt a natural desire to keep the characters in her pet mystery play together until she could at least cast them in their proper roles, was mildly protesting.

  “But I didn’t suggest—”

  Young Reverson, jubilating over the new inspiration, was gone. Miss Withers shrugged her shoulders and went back to her magazines.

  Bright and early next morning she set out for the Hay-market. There was a goodish crowd around the mail desk this morning, for the Europa had come in on Saturday. Miss Withers lurked about on the fringes of the crowd, trying to think of a dodge to secure the information she needed.

  Unfortunately the same clerk, with the same thick glasses, was at the counter. He seemed to see more through the thick lenses than one would imagine. Miss Withers saw him look toward her and his gaze fix itself for a moment before it passed on. He was talking to a young man in a gray checked topcoat, who turned suddenly and strode toward her.

  It was Tom Hammond—and a Tom Hammond that Miss Withers had never seen before. He was wearing a blue tie that went very badly indeed with his green shirt, and his eyes seemed slightly reddened around the rims. He was very angry.

  “See here!” he began. “The clerk tells me that you’ve been—” He stopped short. “Oh, it’s you, is it? Would you mind giving me some explanation…”

  “Not at all,” said Miss Withers coolly. “I’ve been trying to find you for days. But you moved out of your hotel, leaving no address but this.”

  “I’m staying at the Englamerican Club,” he said shortly. “But what that’s got to do with your trying to wangle my mail away from the desk—”

  “Young man,” said Miss Withers sternly, “be still for a few moments and I’ll enlighten you.” She drew him into a corner and produced an envelope bordered with black. Then she told him what it was necessary that he should know and very little more.

  “Now you understand,” she finished. “I felt it my duty to warn you and your wife, in case this insane chain of murders is scheduled to continue. Since I couldn’t get in touch with either of you, I took the liberty of scouting around a bit, to make sure that nothing had been sent to you in the mail which might cause another tragedy.”

  Tom Hammond was holding the black-bordered letter which she had returned to him. “This is all a lot of nonsense. I’m going to turn it over to the police.”

  “The police have one of those letters and haven’t found out anything more about it than have I. Perhaps not so much. If you take my advice, you’ll take your wife and child and pack out of England just as fast as you can. This was to have been a vacation trip, wasn’t it? Well, you can vacation somewhere else—where it’s healthier.”

  Tom Hammond gave her a queer sidewise look. “It’s easier said than done,” he remarked casually.

  “What is?”

  “Packing up my wife and child. You see, I haven’t laid eyes on either of them since the day of the Noel inquest.”

  “What?” Miss Withers had not expected this. “You mean…”

  “I mean that Loulu walked out on me,” he said stiffly. “God knows why.” His voice had raised a little, and almost against his will the words came tumbling forth. “After she left me at the inquest I came back to the hotel and found her packed and gone, Gerald, bags, and all.”

  “But didn’t she leave a note?” Miss Withers was properly sympathetic.

  “She left nothing. I don’t know what’s got into her. She ought to be examined by a lunacy commission. She’s been strange all the way over on the boat, and stranger since we got to London. If you ask me, I think she’s gone stark staring mad!”

  “Now, now,” said Miss Withers commiseratingly. “It’s not as bad as all that. Perhaps I can help you find her.” She peered at him. “You do want to find her, don’t you?”

  “I should dearly love an opportunity,” said Tom Hammond, “of being alone for ten minutes with my wife.” His voice was very intense.

  Miss Withers hoped that she understood this as it was meant. “She can’t have disappeared into thin air,” she told him. “If I’m to help you, you must tell me one thing. Did you give her any reason for going?”

  Tom Hammond glared. “No! No reason at all!” He was unnecessarily definite about this, the school teacher thought. “Though why I’m telling all this to you I haven’t the slightest idea!” he finished belligerently. “I didn’t ask you to interfere.”

  “But you want me to,” Miss Withers told him gently. “You want me to find Loulu and your son Gerald—”

  “Never mind Gerald,” said Tom Hammond. “He can stay lost.”

  “—and give you two young things a chance to make up your quarrel,” Miss Withers went on. “No doubt you have hurt her feelings in some way without knowing. I suggest that you be very sweet when you see her again. You might smooth things over with a new wrist watch or a fur coat or something…”

  “Great idea,” sneered Tom Hammond. “I did buy her a fur coat, as soon as we got here. I thought it might break the great silence. Paid sixty guineas for the best squirrel coat at Revillon’s, and got a chilly thank you. She only wore it once or twice, and left it behind when she moved out of the hotel.”

  “Dear me,” agreed Miss Withers. “This is serious—and more serious still when you realize that your wife is alone in London with a murderer very probably lying in wait for her. And we can’t even get a warning to her.”

  “If I can’t find her,” pointed out Tom Hammond sensibly, “I don’t see how the mysterious murderer can find her.”

  “It might happen, all the same,” Miss Withers insisted. She had an idea. “There’s one quick way to find her,” she said. “You have a photograph of your wife?”

  Hammond hesitated. “Had,” he said. “Tore it up.”

  “Well, what about your passport? Don’t married couples share a passport?”

  He shook his head. “We have separate ones. Loulu’s been over once or twice without me. Of course, she took it with her.”

  “Well, if her passport picture is like most of them it wouldn’t help. I was going to suggest that we have the police and newspapers search for her as a person suspected of suffering from amnesia.”

  “She’d thank you for the publicity,” Hammond said drily.

  Miss Withers bit her lip. “Perhaps she can be found without publicity. It oughtn’t to be easy for a young woman and a child to disappear. Did she take—I mean, was she in funds?”

  “Loulu has her own money,” Hammond informed her.

  “Good! Then we can trace her through her bank. Let me have, also, a list of her friends in London.”

  Hammond gave the information requested. “By the way,” he asked, “if you do find her, don’t let on that I’m looking for her. I wouldn’t give her that much satisfaction. Just tip me off to where she is, and I’ll do the rest.”

  “Naturally,” agreed Miss Withers. She glanced at her watch and realized that she had been standing in this draughty corner of the express office for more than half an hour. “I’ll get in touch with you at the Englamerican Club if I find out anything. And in the meantime, if you should receive any samples of bonbons, restrain your appetite, young man.”

  She nodded brightly and left him there. As she hurried down toward the Mall, serenely unconscious of the fact that a very dark-browed young man was staring dubiously after her, she congratulated herself. “A very neat bit of business,” said Hildegarde Withers.

  She spent the rest of the morning in a vain attempt to extract information from the impass
ive officials of the bank through which Loulu Hammond was supposed to receive funds. The affairs of its clients, she learned, were a matter of the utmost secrecy.

  “Well, would you give the information to Scotland Yard?” she demanded at last.

  “If the police can show us a proper order of the court, very possibly yes,” she was told. “And perhaps not even then.”

  Shortly before dinner time that night Miss Withers walked wearily in through the doors of the Hotel Alexandria. The Honorable Emily and Leslie Reverson were sitting at a little table in the foyer, behind two tall glasses. They waved, and she sank wearily in a chair that the young man sprang to hold for her.

  “You look a bit seedy,” the Honorable Emily told her. “Better have something to warm you up. Been sightseeing?”

  Miss Withers glared at her. “Sightseeing! I’ve been walking my legs off trying to find Loulu Hammond, who seems to have disappeared in thin air. I got nothing from her bank, and none of her friends in London have any idea where she is. I suppose that I’ll have to appeal to the Yard.”

  “That ought to be easy enough,” the Honorable Emily told her. “That young sergeant from the Yard has been here twice looking for you this afternoon. Seemed to have something on his mind, didn’t he, Leslie?” Her nephew nodded.

  “Good heavens!” Miss Withers started. “I wonder if anything has happened to Mrs. Hammond already?”

  “It’s happened very recently then,” said the Honorable Emily. “Because she had tea with me here Saturday, the afternoon when you locked yourself in your room to think, and she also rang me up a few hours ago to thank me for some advice I’d given her.”

  “Advice?” Miss Withers was incredulous. “You mean, about going back to her husband?”