“Do you think that the man was deliberately trying to hide his identity, or that his assailants were doing that for him and for themselves?”
“So far there has been nothing to give the answer to that question. Until we know his identity it is useless to speculate about the motive for the murder.”
“May I ask what steps you have already taken for establishing his identity?”
“The usual steps—searching the list of missing persons in the police publications. I have a mass of papers at the office, which of course are at your service. My car is here.” He made a signal to the uniformed driver of his car and, though the distance to police headquarters was barely half a mile, they jumped in.
“I brought a sergeant down with me,” said Vincent. “We shall find him at your office.”
“Is he the man who usually works with you?”
“Yes. Detective-Sergeant Walker.”
“Then I feel sure that he is a live wire.”
Miller had been taking stock of his companion and had decided that he belonged to a type of detective that was new to him. To begin with, his accent was not that of the ordinary police officer. It was what, for want of a better adjective, was described as an educated accent. Miller was curious to know what had brought a man of university education into the police, but of course he could not put so personal a question to an officer of this rank. He did go so far as to ask him whether he knew Superintendent Richardson. Vincent at once rose to the bait.
“You have deprived him of a step in rank. He is now my chief constable, and he is one of the few promoted from the ranks whose promotion has given lively satisfaction throughout the whole service. I, myself, am proud to be working under him.”
They had reached the police station. Inspector Miller invited Vincent into his room where they found Sergeant Walker awaiting them.
“There, Chief Inspector, that pile of papers is for you to look through. You will find reports from a number of my officers about missing persons, but so far they have produced nothing.”
“When was the body found?”
“Only the day before yesterday—Saturday. You will see that we have wasted no time.”
“The persons I should like to see first are those two young men who found the body. Where are they to be found?”
Miller looked a little crestfallen. “The fact is, Chief Inspector, that I allowed them to continue their journey to Cornwall, after taking their addresses, of course. They promised to return on receipt of a telegram if they were wanted. You will find their statements on the top of those papers and I don’t think that they are able to give any further information. That is why I let them go.”
“Have you found any further trace of the big car which the deaf gardener thought he had seen during the thunderstorm?”
“No. He appears to have been the only man in the village who saw it and I doubt whether his evidence can be relied upon. You know the type of witness who comes forward with a story, and then when he finds that the police attach importance to it he embroiders it with all kinds of detail drawn from his imagination.”
“I know the type, but I think that he must be the first witness that I interview. The question is whether I should see him here or, less formally, on his own ground at Hatch Court. I think that Hatch Court would be best because I could make an inspection of the barn at the same time.”
“It’ll take us no time at all to get to Hatch Court if you will jump into the car again, Mr Vincent. Would you like your sergeant to come with us?”
“Yes, because he’s accustomed to taking down notes as we go. What has the owner of Hatch Court to say to the irruption of police on to his premises?”
“Mr Howard? Oh, he’s given us a free hand. We needn’t even trouble to ask for him. As long as he knows in due course what conclusion we come to, he’ll ask no questions.”
“So much the better. The only member of the staff we want to see is that deaf gardener and we can see him in the barn itself.”
They had no difficulty in finding Peter Bury— indeed, since the thunderstorm and his supposed hallucination he seemed to have been doing little more than watch the barn from some secret hiding place for some other strange occurrence. Miller beckoned to him to approach. He shambled towards the two police officers with a hesitating gait.
Vincent called him into the barn and, using his two hands as a megaphone, shouted: “I want you to take us to where you were standing when you saw that car outside the barn.” He had to repeat the question in a louder tone before intelligence dawned in the old man’s face. He touched Vincent on the arm, making a gesture towards the garden. Vincent followed him.
Arrived outside a little tool shed, the old gardener conducted his part of the conversation in dumb show, intimating that they were standing on the very spot from which he saw the car swing round into the barnyard. Then he found his voice.
“An old friend of mine once got struck by lightning and had to go all doubled up for the rest of his life. I’ve been shy of lightning ever since. That’s why I was sheltering.”
Vincent’s voice rang out: “Did—you—see—the car—go—into—the barn?”
“I saw it swing round from the lane into the yard and I said to meself: ‘You’ll never get a car as big as that into the barn, if that’s what you’re after.’ And then the lightning flashed again and I took cover.”
“And when you came out from your cover you found a little car in the barn.”
“That’s right, though how I could have made such a mistake beats me—taking a little car for a big one.”
“Thank you, Peter. If we want you again we’ll come and find you.” Turning to Miller, Vincent said: “Now let us go to the barn.”
The floor of the barn was covered deep in dust. It showed clearly the wheel marks of a small car, and Miller pointed out a shallow depression in the dust which he said had been made by the dead body and a medley of footprints all round it.
“As you see, there are no marks here of any big car having entered. These wheel marks were made by the car belonging to those two young men.”
“Yes, and of course the footprints explain themselves. Now, assuming that Peter Bury did see a big car stop outside the barn, let us reconstruct the scene. The car drew up here, but in that heavy storm all wheel marks would naturally be washed away. Peter Bury would not have seen what happened when the car stopped, but obviously two men must have been required to carry the dead body into the barn; their proceedings were masked by the car. Then what happened? The men returned to their seats, the car swung round in this direction in the act of turning to leave the yard. It was rather a sharp turn for a big car to get round without manoeuvring.” Vincent appeared to be talking to himself rather than to his companion, whom he left and walked rapidly over to the low wall of the yard. Miller could not help admiring the quickness and agility of his movements. It was as if he was on wires. He stopped at the low wall and stooped. “Yes, here we are,” he said over his shoulder; “it was too sharp a turn for a big car. Look at this streak of black. That is car varnish from one of the wings. The driver was in a hurry—he didn’t stop to back—stripped the wing clean of varnish and, no doubt, made a biggish dent in it. That will be something to go by in hunting for the car.”
“None of the servants saw a big car,” objected Miller, “and, as you see, their windows look out this way.”
“They do, but have you ever seen a house full of maids in a thunderstorm? They run to cover, preferably under a bed or in a linen closet. The storm was a stroke of luck for our murderers.”
Vincent was silent as they walked back to Miller’s car. When they had taken their seats he asked: “Have you made any enquiries at garages down the Bath Road about a car with a dinted offside wing? Garage hands notice these things.”
“Not yet,” replied Miller half apologetically. “We had so little to go upon.”
Vincent relapsed into another silence and then he said: “If the man was shot in the car there must
be a bullet mark somewhere at the level of a man’s head. That theory might be worth pursuing.”
Miller was spared from answering this remark by the sight of a small car drawn up before the police headquarters.
“Hallo!” he said. “What’s this?”
He was not long left in doubt. A young man, whom Vincent recognized as having been one of the witnesses at the inquest, jumped out of the car and made a sign to Miller to pull up.
“We have something that will interest you, Inspector, and we brought it back from a garage a few miles down the road for you to see.”
“What is it?”
“A car window with what looks like a bullet hole clean through it.”
Chapter Two
THE THREE police officers jumped out of their car.
“Where is this window?” asked Miller.
“We took it into the police station and left it with your station sergeant.”
Miller hurried into the building, followed by the others. Griffith constituted himself showman. The window was standing propped again the wall.
“Now you can see what a car window looks like when it’s had a bullet through it.”
“Yes,” said Vincent; “there’s been dirty work at the crossroads. Do you see what started the fracture—that round hole with little cracks radiating from it in every direction. This is no ordinary break: that window was broken by a pistol shot. Where did you find it?”
“At a garage about four miles down the Bath Road. Here is their card. They told us that the window came out of a sixteen-horse Daimler. Here’s its number. It was quite by chance that we went into the garage at all; one of our plugs was missing fire badly and it was a case of any port in a storm. While they were changing the plug, Powell began poking about and saw this window propped up against the wall. He spotted at once that it was no ordinary break and after a little difficulty we got the garage people to let us have it for a bob.”
“Did they give you a description of the driver?” asked Vincent.
“No, because we thought that if we started questioning they might take us for detectives and shut up like oysters. We did find out that the car came in on Saturday. I would offer you a seat in our little bus if there was room and run you down to the garage.”
“Thank you very much, but I weigh over twelve stone and I should prove to be the last straw for your little car. Happily Inspector Miller has a car, and if you will wait until I’ve sent my sergeant back to London with this broken window we can start whenever you like.”
“If you like to give me a seat in Inspector Miller’s car I can act as your guide to the garage and let my friend follow us. It’ll save time.”
“It’s very kind of you,” said Vincent; “I’ll be ready in three minutes.”
He was as good as his word; in three minutes he was at the wheel and had started up the engine. As soon as they were clear of the traffic, Griffith began to talk: he was prone to conversation.
“You’ll excuse my curiosity, but I don’t think you can belong to the county constabulary.”
“No, I come from further afield.”
“I felt sure you did: you must be from Scotland Yard. They’ve sent you down to take charge of the case. You must be one of the big four.”
“You mean the big four of newspaper notoriety? I’m Chief Inspector Vincent.”
“You’re starting in this case with practically no clue at all, I gathered from the evidence at the inquest —not even the man’s identity.”
“That is so.”
“I’ve often envied you your job when I read of criminal cases in the papers; it must be an exciting kind of life.”
Vincent smiled. “It’s all right when there are exciting episodes, but much of the work is the dreary business of elimination.”
“Elimination?”
“Yes, because we suffer from too much rather than too little help from the public. In any sensational crime letters pour in from well-meaning people, not only in this country but abroad, and one cannot afford to neglect any of them for fear that there may be a grain of wheat among the chaff. The discouraging part of the job lies in the sifting of this mass of information.”
“It must require a lot of patience.”
“Yes, it does. Sometimes one gets so discouraged that it is all one can do to carry on.”
“The garage is only about a couple of hundred yards from here. I suppose you’d like to conduct your enquiry alone?”
“Not at all, but you will want to stop your friend when he arrives and you might look after my car while waiting for him.”
Griffith assented with a sigh and watched the lithe figure enter the garage.
Vincent asked for the foreman, who was found in a pit under a car, busily engaged in examining the pinions in the gear box.
“You’re wanted, Harry,” a mechanic called down to him.
“Who wants me?”
“The police.” And then in a hoarse whisper the youth added: “It’s a blooming ’tec from Scotland Yard, so he says.”
The foreman, a youth little older than his own mechanics, crawled out of his lair and faced Vincent, wiping a smear of oil from his countenance with a swab of cotton waste.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you in your work, foreman, but I want some information about that car that came in with a broken window two days ago. How many men were there in the car?”
“Two, I think it was. It was two, wasn’t it, Charlie?”
“Yes; there was the fellow with his arm in a sling and the other bloke that kept looking at his watch.”
“Did they say where they were going?”
“Oh, they made no secret about that. They said that they were going to Cornwall.”
As the foreman turned back to his work the young mechanic became confidential. “If you are wanting information about those two men I can tell you something. When I was tuning up their car and they didn’t know I could hear them I heard them talking about a motorboat that they were to catch at Newquay. I could see that the feller that kept looking at his watch was in a great stew about being late. ‘God knows,’ he said, ‘what we’ll do if he’s gone off without us,’ and the other one said: ‘He’s swine enough to do anything.’ Then one of them caught sight of me and nudged the other, and they dried up.”
Having gleaned all possible information from the garage, Vincent returned to his car. He found that Griffith’s companion had arrived in his tiny overloaded conveyance and the two young men were talking.
“Ah, here comes the chief inspector,” said Griffith. “Now we shall be free to go on.”
“Your discovery is going to prove very useful to me,” said Vincent. “I found out that those two men were bound for Newquay to meet a motorboat and I must go on there, although they’ve had two days’ start of me.”
“We are bound for the west coast, too: we are going to Bude, which is not so very far away from Newquay, but you will travel much faster than we do and I suppose we must say good-bye.”
“I’m afraid so. You will understand that I’ve no time to lose. Thank you once more for your help.”
He started up the engine and slid away. As soon as he had cleared the built-up area and could let his car out, he began to think of what lay before him. He had the number of the car, that was something. He had Newquay as its destination; it might prove to be a difficult case if motorboats took part in it, but Vincent was not the man to welcome easy cases; the more difficult a case was, the better he liked it.
His first concern on arriving at Newquay was to make a round of the hotel garages in search of the car which had changed its broken window. He tried every hotel garage without success and then visited those which advertised the fact that they carried out repairs. In one of these, inconveniently situated in a narrow side street, he found what he was looking for—a sixteen-horse Daimler, with the number given by the garage in the Bath Road. It had a deep dint and scrape on the offside wing, exposing the metal. Vincent called the foreman.
; “Who left this car here?” he asked.
The man was inclined to be jocular. “That would be telling,” he said. “You’ve heard of the proverb: ‘Ask no questions and they’ll tell you no lies.’”
“Come,” said Vincent, “I can’t waste time bandying proverbs. I’m here to ask questions and you’re here to answer them truthfully.” He produced his official card and the young foreman stiffened with apprehension. “Now, perhaps you’ll answer. Who left this car here?”
“Two gents who said they were leaving on a sea trip and would call for it when they came back. Is there anything wrong about them?”
“You can ask that question again when I’ve looked over the car.”
The man stood back while Vincent made an examination of the seats and cushions of the interior. He was using a small square of damp blotting paper to soak up what he thought might be bloodstains, when the foreman, who was watching him keenly, interposed with a question:
“What are you looking for, sir?” he said.
“For bloodstains.”
“Funny you should say that. The gent who left the car was fussing about the same thing. Very fussy he was, using a sponge and cotton waste to get it all off. He said there was nothing that damaged the fabric of the leather more than blood if it was allowed to dry on. It was his own blood, he said, from his elbow when he banged it through the window. It must have been a mighty bang to break triplex glass. He said that that was why he had his arm in a sling.”
“Which arm was it?”
“Lord! To tell you the truth I couldn’t say which. I remember thinking that it was funny that he should break one of the windows at the back of the car if he was at the wheel, as he was when he brought her in. He said that he had to drive in spite of his injured arm because the other chap couldn’t.”
“What did they look like?” asked Vincent.
“Oh, one was a big, heavy man, between thirty and forty, and the other a tall thin chap, a bit older.”
The Milliner's Hat Mystery Page 2