The Milliner's Hat Mystery

by Basil Thomson

  “You knew the late Mr Bernard Pitt.”

  The man hesitated a second before replying: “I did.”

  “You had certain monetary transactions with him.”

  “We played cards together sometimes.”

  “Did Mr Pitt lose heavily to you?”

  “No, sometimes he won and sometimes he lost a bit, as always happens with cards.”

  “But the money transactions that I’m thinking of were for large sums and always from Mr Pitt to you.”

  “That’s quite possible. We transacted business together. I sold him goods and he always settled on the nail.”

  “What kind of goods?”

  “Fancy soap, principally. I import this soap from France and retailed it to Pitt and others.”

  “Can you tell me what Mr Pitt did with the large quantity of soap you supplied to him?”

  “I always understood that he retailed it to other people.”

  “I suppose you’ve no objection to my looking through your books?”

  “Not at all, but they are not here. You would have to come to my place of business.”

  “It must be nearly time for you to be starting. Couldn’t we go together?”

  “If you like.” The tone was not cordial, but Vincent thought it better to appear as if he were accepting an invitation. Thelusson refused a lift in Vincent’s car on the ground that his own was waiting for him.

  “Then,” said Vincent blandly, “perhaps you’ll give me a lift in your car and I’ll leave mine in the car park here and come back for it.” He was not going to allow Thelusson to escape from his sight.

  The car set them down at the beauty parlour, which was as sumptuously furnished as its owner’s flat. Evidently business was in full swing; every little room was occupied by ladies who were in the hands of hairdressers, manicurists and the like. It didn’t take Vincent long to decide that if Thelusson were engaged in the drug traffic it was a side line which had nothing to do with his customers.

  Thelusson conducted him into the office and laid a pile of books before him with an air of polite boredom.

  Before opening any of the books Vincent asked: “Where is your store-room?”

  Thelusson pointed to a door leading out of the office. Vincent opened the day book and ran through the names; there was nothing suspicious about the entries in this book or in the others that he examined. There were names of well-known hairdressers with invoices of goods, but the name of Pitt was not among them.

  “Where did you keep Mr Pitt’s account?” asked Vincent.

  “I destroyed his invoices when he died to avoid the risk of my clerk sending an account to a dead man.”

  Vincent turned over the pages of the ledger. “I don’t see that any pages have been taken out of this book. Did you keep a special ledger for Mr Pitt?”

  “I did. He was my most important customer.”

  Vincent made notes of the names and addresses of the firms who had been supplied with soap and other requisites. Thelusson watched him contemptuously, as who should say, “this is how public money is wasted.” But when Vincent turned to him for permission to enter the storeroom he observed that the expression changed to one of concern. The permission was given, however, and Vincent found himself in the presence of dozens of boxes of soap. There were a few packing cases nailed down and addressed ready to be delivered. One case was not addressed nor was it fully filled. Vincent dived his hand into it and took out a cake of soap.

  “I’ll take this away if you don’t mind,” he said, as he put it into his pocket. Thelusson gave an inarticulate grunt. It was clear from his expression that he minded very much indeed.

  Vincent hailed a taxi and drove to the park where he had left his car; thence he made a beeline for police headquarters and ran up the stone staircase that led to the laboratory. He explained to the white-coated officer in charge what he wanted. The man shook the cake of soap close to his ear.

  “It seems all right in weight, Mr Vincent,” he said. “What do you think is wrong with it?”

  “I can’t say until you have got to work on it with your dissecting knife or whatever surgical instrument you use.”

  The laboratory assistant smiled. “That’s soon done, Mr Vincent.” He took the soap to a table which he covered with white paper and used a boring tool. At first flakes of soap were detached, but presently the tool encountered something less solid. A few grains of white powder escaped from the orifice and were lost among the soap flakes.

  “Why, the cake’s hollow!” exclaimed the assistant. “You didn’t warn me of that.”

  “I did not, because I didn’t know it until you made that hole in it.”

  Chapter Twenty

  ON HIS WAY down from the laboratory a detective patrol stopped Vincent as he was stepping out of the lift.

  “Sergeant Walker has been looking for you and instructed me to let him know as soon as I found you. I think he has something important to tell you.”

  “Very good. Tell him to come to my room.”

  A few minutes later there was a tap on the door and Walker came in, shutting the door carefully behind him.

  “You’ve something fresh to tell me?”

  “Yes sir. When I got out to Palmer’s Green last night I found a notice ‘To Let’ on the gate of Green’s house. The next-door people told me that the Greens left the day before and they did not know where they had gone. So I dropped into the local pub and got into conversation with the barman over my beer. He was a forthcoming kind of man. He said that he knew Arthur Green well. ‘Often in here?’ I asked. ‘That’s right; he’s been one of my best customers. If he carries on the same way in the place he’s gone to, all his profits will go down his throat. I never knew such a chap for putting it away.’ ‘Got his own place now, has he?’ I asked. ‘Yes, a motor garage down at Alton, in Hampshire. He bought it from me and paid a good price for it.’ I asked him whether he’d paid for it in cash. ‘Lor’ bless you, no. He paid for it with a cheque.’ ‘Oh, then Arthur Green has gone up in the world—runs to a banking account of his own,’ I said. ‘No, the cheque was signed by the gentleman who’s financing him.’ ‘An old employer, I suppose,’ I said. ‘I think so.’ ‘Was the name Pitt?’ I asked. ‘Oh no,’ he said; ‘it was a long name and I can’t pronounce it, but I’ll spell it for you.’ And then he spelt the name of Thelusson,” said Walker.

  “You did very well in getting all that information out of the barman,” said Vincent. “Of course, you got the address of the garage that the man’s gone to.”

  “Oh yes, I’ve got that all right.”

  “Well, if he’s just taken a garage of his own, he’s not likely to give us the slip. I must see Thelusson again and hear his version of how Green came by that cheque.”

  “Do you want me to go down to Hampshire and look him up?”

  “Not yet. Have you dug out those statements of Pitt’s servants that we took from them in the beginning?”

  “Yes. I have them here.”

  Vincent read the statements and then gave a satisfied click of his tongue.

  “Ah! Perhaps you’ve noticed the discrepancy between the statements of Anton and the chauffeur as to what happened. The chauffeur said he was given special leave on that Saturday and Anton said that the chauffeur always had Saturdays off. The chauffeur said that Pitt often dined out on Saturdays and Anton said that he always gave a dinner party at home. You know the lie of the land. It would have been quite possible for the chauffeur to take the car out without the other servants’ knowledge. While I’m visiting Thelusson I’d like you to slip round to the garage and make a note of the last day’s run of the speedometer. Green may have forgotten to change it to zero. There was a heavy thunderstorm that morning; you might see whether the wheels are muddy.”

  Vincent wondered whether Thelusson had already taken to his heels in consequence of the cake of soap that had been taken from his storeroom, but to his relief he found him sitting in his little office apparently without a care o
n his mind.

  “You import a remarkable kind of soap, Mr Thelusson.”

  “You think so? It is very much in request on account of its nutritive properties for the hair.”

  “I can well believe that there is a sale for it, but I haven’t come to see you about that now. That will be gone into by the proper authorities. What I have come for is to know how you came to give a cheque for a fairly large sum to the chauffeur of the late Mr Pitt?”

  “Well, Pitt was a friend of mine and the chauffeur came to me with a hard-luck story about not being able to get a job and said that a small outlay in capital would put him in possession of a valuable motor garage and so I advanced him the money.”

  “I see,” said Vincent dryly. “It would be quite incorrect for anyone to say that you paid him that as hush money?”

  “Hush money? What do you mean?”

  “Perhaps my next question will make my meaning clearer. Did you sign or did he sign any agreement for repaying this loan?”

  “No. It was a verbal agreement between us that he would repay it at some future time.”

  “A rather curious way of doing business, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, of course, I knew the man and that makes all the difference.”

  “You knew the man and that made all the difference? And you knew of course that a man in that position might talk and so you thought that you would put him under an obligation. Evidently you do not know the ways of blackmailers as well as I do.”

  “Blackmailers!”

  “Yes, that is the word I used, because Green was blackmailing you. He knew something about you that might be very compromising if it came out.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Well, let me put it a little more plainly. You know, of course, that Pitt was murdered. The car in which he was travelling was stopped by a man who entered it and shot him through the head. This man may have been someone who wished to get rid of Pitt, or he may have been hired by someone else.”

  Thelusson sprang to his feet. “This is outrageous. Do you dare to suggest that I hired Green as an assassin to shoot Pitt?”

  “That theory had crossed my mind,” said Vincent calmly. “Of course, if you can suggest any other reason why he should be blackmailing you, I shall be glad to listen to it.”

  Thelusson took two turns up and down the room and then stopped opposite Vincent. “I suppose the game’s up. You have that cake of soap and you’ll have it analyzed, and so I may as well own up.”

  “I must caution you that I shall take down what you say in writing.”

  “Never mind that. It’s better to come before a court for drug trafficking than for murder. Green was demanding hush money because he knew that I was importing drugs. He had been blackmailing Pitt also.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Quite sure, and Green himself told me that Pitt had promised him two thousand pounds to clear out of the country, but it was Pitt who was trying to clear out without keeping his promise.”

  “Did Green tell you that he knew that Pitt was going to leave the country?”

  “I gathered that he knew because he said that instead of helping him to leave the country, Pitt was clearing out abroad himself.”

  “You are quite sure that he put it in that way?”

  “Yes, quite, and he talked a lot about Pitt’s meanness as he (Green) was anxious to leave the country and Pitt knew it.”

  “Did he say why he wished to get out of the country?”

  “He told me that there was a woman who had taken to drugs and he wanted to get her abroad to lead a new life. I don’t know if the woman was a relation. I didn’t ask him any more details but he blamed Pitt and his associates for her downfall.”

  Vincent sprang an apparently irrelevant question upon him. “Do you know a Mrs Pearson?”

  “I do, and as I’m making a statement I may as well tell you that it is through her agents that I imported that stuff for Pitt. All the other soap and cosmetics that I import are pure. The special soap of which you were able to secure a sample was imported for Pitt. I have no personal customers for it and I don’t know who his customers were.”

  “Wasn’t it risky leaving the case open in your storeroom?”

  “Not at all. I give out all goods from the storeroom and none of my assistants is allowed to help herself.”

  “Did Arthur Green mention Mrs Pearson as one of the people who had helped to ruin this woman?”

  “As a matter of fact he did.”

  “Now, Mr Thelusson, you are in the unauthorized possession of dangerous drugs and are liable to prosecution, but if you show yourself ready to help the authorities a prosecution need not necessarily follow. I need not disguise from you that the people we want to get at are Mrs Pearson and her little gang. I shall recommend you to my colleagues as a useful informant. Personally, I am engaged in hunting down the murderer of Pitt. Do you know of anyone in this band of drug traffickers who had a motive for getting rid of Pitt?”

  “Frankly, I can’t say I do. You know, of course, of the case of Miss Hellier. I believe that Mrs Pearson was badly frightened over that case, thinking that she would be dragged into it as purveyor of the drugs, but I don’t think that Pitt’s share in the drug traffic was known to many people. He was so clever.”

  “Well, thank you, Mr Thelusson. That’s all that I have to ask you now.”

  “So I have to sit here wondering when the axe will fall on me. It’s not a pleasant position for a businessman to be in.”

  “I can well understand that, and I’m afraid I can say nothing at this juncture to relieve your anxiety. I must leave you now to get on with other pressing work.”

  On reaching the Yard, Vincent found that Sergeant Walker had already returned from his visit to the garage in Hampstead.

  “Well, what about that speedometer?”

  “It’s all right; the record of the last run had been left untouched; it would just have accounted for a run to Oldbury and back, but the car had no mud on it except a little on the underside of the wings.”

  “Of course, he would have cleaned off the mud. Now I’ve discovered that Pitt had promised that chauffeur two thousand pounds and was leaving the country without paying it. That gives us a motive for the crime.”

  “But if the chauffeur waylaid Pitt and killed and robbed him, what can he have done with the money, because he got the cheque out of Thelusson to pay for that garage?”

  “Oh, I think that he’s taking no risks, he’s afraid to change any of the notes for fear that they may be traced. Besides establishing a motive for the crime I think I’ve found a closer connection between Alice Dodds and Green; the only note that has come to light out of the sum which Pitt withdrew from his bank was changed by Alice Dodds. I wish to heaven that woman would get well enough to be questioned.”

  “Have you seen the doctor’s report upon her this morning? It was pretty bad.”

  “Yes, it was; there’s some doubt as to whether she’ll recover. I’m wondering if that accounts for the purchase of that garage by Arthur Green.”

  “You mean that he doesn’t intend to bolt out of the country?”

  “According to Thelusson’s story he had some young woman who had taken to drugs and whom he wanted to rescue by taking her abroad. I think you’d better slip down to Hampshire and find out what you can on the spot. We are going to have difficulty in bringing this crime home if he is the guilty person. There comes a moment in every case when one has to rely upon luck and I think that that moment has come. I feel quite sure that Green knew that his master intended to leave the country on that Saturday morning. You get off to Hampshire as quick as you can. I’m going round again to that garage where Pitt hired the car.”

  On arriving at the garage in Bloomsbury, Vincent sought out the proprietor.

  “Have you got your car back from Newquay yet?” he asked.

  “No, not yet, but I know it’s safe down there so I’m not worrying.”
>
  “You told me when I was here before that after you had let out that car another garagist came in and told you that they had been to him first. What was he like?”

  “He was a youngish man, pretty ordinary looking, of about my height but stouter built than I am. He had a very gruff sort of voice and was what I should call a grouser.”

  “Can you remember what questions he asked you?”

  “He asked me very particularly what car I was lending them.”

  “Did you show it to him?”

  “I did and he looked it well over. Then he said: ‘Oh well, that’s a smarter car than I could have lent them.’”

  “Can you remember whether he asked you at what time they wanted to take the car?”

  “Yes, he asked me that, and though I didn’t see what business it was of his, I told him that they wanted it at eight o’clock. He made some excuse about being so inquisitive and said: ‘Oh, I couldn’t have got them the kind they wanted in time.’ I can’t remember any more that he said.”

  “I may want you to pick him out from a dozen men a little later,” said Vincent. “I hope you’ve got a good memory for faces.”

  “Pretty good, I fancy.”

  When Vincent got back to his office table he found cause to remember what he had said to Walker—that there comes a time in every case when one has to rely upon luck. Lying on his table was a note from the telephone room.

  “For Chief Inspector Vincent from Inspector Collins of Hampstead. The woman Alice Dodds is now lucid, though still very ill. The doctor certifies that she is fit to reply to questions.”

  Carrying the message with him, Vincent set out for the hospital.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  WHEN VINCENT ARRIVED at the Cottage Hospital the police doctor from Hampstead met him in the corridor.

  “I must explain why you find me here. The woman Alice Dodds is extremely ill and not likely to recover. Besides being a drug addict she is in an advanced stage of cardiac disease, and knowing that you had important questions to put to her, I thought that I had better be within call. She is now conscious and her mind seems to be clearer than it has been at any time since she was brought here, so now is your moment for putting questions to her.”