The Milliner's Hat Mystery
Page 19
“You think that she cannot recover?”
“Yes, I doubt whether she will last out the day; she is beyond all medical help. If you will follow me into the ward I’ll introduce you to the nursing Sister.”
Vincent would have found it difficult to recognize the patient if she had not been pointed out to him.
He shook hands with the Sister, who warned him not to say anything to excite the patient if he could help it.
“She keeps asking for a person named Arthur Green,” said the Sister, “but she is unable to indicate where he can be found.”
“I can soon find Arthur Green,” said Vincent. “Has she said why she is so anxious to see him?”
“She is quite conscious that she is dying and she wants to give him something—some paper I gather that it is.”
“It is important that I should be present when she hands over this paper. I suppose that this can be arranged.”
The Sister looked round the ward. “I could put you behind that screen so that you could hear what passes between them.”
“Very well, then I will ask the matron superintendent to allow me to use her telephone before I see Alice Dodds.”
He asked the matron to put through a call to the police station at Alton, and in a very few minutes the connection was made.
“Is that the superintendent at Alton?”
“Who is speaking?”
“Chief Inspector Vincent from Scotland Yard. I want to speak to Sergeant Walker from the Yard if you know where to find him.”
“He’s in the office at this moment. If you’ll hold on I’ll call him to the phone.”
Vincent felt immensely relieved when he heard the voice he knew. He asked: “Have you located Arthur Green yet?”
“Yes, I have; but I haven’t had time to see him yet; I’ve only just arrived. Luckily the local police knew where to find him.”
“I want you to bring him back to London as soon as you can. You can tell him that Alice Dodds is dying in hospital and keeps asking for him. That ought to make him come willingly.”
“Very good. I’ll get hold of him at once. Where shall I bring him to?”
“To the Cottage Hospital at Hampstead. I shall be there.”
“Very good, but I can’t be up in Town in much under two hours.”
“That will bring us to about seven o’clock. That will do all right. You can be as lavish as you like in taking taxis because every minute counts.”
“Very good. I’ll start off at once.”
Vincent returned to the ward and approached the Sister.
“Is the woman still conscious?”
“Yes.”
“Then I can speak to her now.”
The Sister surrendered her chair by the bedside to Vincent and took her stand behind him to watch the patient.
Vincent bent over the pillow and asked softly: “You wish to see Arthur Green?”
“Yes,” she said faintly.
“I’ve sent for him. He will be here in an hour or so. You know Arthur Green well?”
“Yes, very well,” she murmured with the ghost of a smile.
“In fact he wanted to take you out of the country and make you well.”
“But there was his mother; he had to get her settled first.”
The Sister looked warningly at Vincent.
“I’ve only one more question to ask,” he said. “Arthur Green gave you a ten-pound note not long ago.”
“Yes.”
Vincent rose and patted the wasted hand of the patient. “That’s all I wanted to ask, Sister.”
On leaving the hospital he told the Matron that he would return in time to meet his sergeant and Arthur Green. He had nearly two hours to dispose of—time to go back to the Yard and put through a call to Newquay and exchange news with his friend Goron. It took some little time to put the call through but in the end he learned that Goron was actually in the police office and would be summoned to the telephone.
After the usual greetings that French officials consider essential, Goron came to business.
“I have brought those two women to reason. They will cross to France tomorrow.”
“Then shall I not see you again?” asked Vincent. “Oh yes. I shall bring them with their female escort up to London by the nine o’clock train which gets in early tomorrow morning. Then I can spend a short time with you before taking them across; we shall have quite a lot to discuss. How are you getting on with your end of the case?”
“I am on the right trail, I feel sure, but my difficulty is to get proof of what I know to be the truth. I will meet your train tomorrow morning and you will come back to breakfast with me.”
Vincent had plenty of occupation in writing up his report of the case while he was waiting. He left again for the hospital in good time.
It was seven o’clock when Walker arrived with his man—more than an hour after the hour when visitors are turned out. As Vincent had expected, Green was in a sullen mood. He had been persuaded to come against his will. By arrangement with the lady superintendent he was taken straight to the bedside of Alice Dodds.
Vincent was already in his place behind the screen. The nurse had told him that Alice Dodds refused to be parted from her handbag. Her voice was so weak that from his listening post he could not catch her words, but he was in a position to see what passed. Her lips moved and Green leaned forward to listen. She handed her bag to him; he opened it and took out from it an envelope which he put in his breast pocket.
After a very short exchange of whispered words between the two the Sister intervened and turned both Green and Vincent out of the ward, arranging screens round the bed.
The two men met in the corridor.
“I want that envelope that Alice Dodds has just given to you,” said Vincent firmly.
“I’ve no doubt you do,” was the surly reply. “You police can’t even respect the wishes of a dying woman.”
“Unless you hand over that envelope it will be my duty to arrest you as an accessory to a felony.”
“All very pretty and nice, but you can’t scare me with your legal police terms.”
“You refuse then to hand over that envelope?”
“I invite you to come and take it.”
“Very well, then I arrest you as an accessory to a crime. You’ll come quietly to the station, or would you prefer me to call a uniformed constable to help me take you there?”
Vincent could see that the other was measuring his chances of using violence and making his escape after delivering a smashing blow in the face. Prudence prevailed, however. “We don’t want a row in a hospital,” the man said. “I’ll come quietly with you to the station.”
Vincent was taking no chances. Walker was at the other end of the corridor and he signed to him to approach.
“Slip down to the telephone and ask the superintendent to send up a couple of reserve patrols to lend us a hand.”
The show of force had apparently led Green to drop his intention of resistance or escape, for he fell into a sullen silence and accompanied them to the police station. There he was charged with having been in possession of the stolen banknote which he had given to Alice Dodds.
“You think yourselves very clever,” he said; “but Mr Pitt gave me that banknote on the day before he went away.”
The reply was taken down and Vincent proceeded to search him. In the envelope taken from his breast pocket he found a safe deposit receipt for a box deposited with Messrs Wrench and Company.
“Keep this man in custody until we return from Wrench and Co.,” said Vincent. “We shall bring back the box with us.”
Green broke out into noisy protests against what he called interference with his private property, but Vincent replied courteously that provided that all the property in the box proved to be his he had nothing at all to fear.
Walker accompanied Vincent to Wrench’s emporium and there, after some delay in convincing the managing director that he must hand over the box in return for an of
ficial receipt from the police, they were allowed to take it away. It was a white wood box fortified with iron angle plates.
On arriving back at the police station, Green was asked for the key. He said that he had left it at his home in Hampshire and that in any case the police had no right to open it.
“It will be opened in your presence,” said Vincent; “and you can see that everything taken out of it is replaced provided that there is nothing in it to which you have no right. Get a hammer and chisel, Walker.”
The tools were brought and at the second blow of the hammer the lock gave way. The box contained nothing but a leather cash bag such as bank messengers use. That, too, had to be opened forcibly, since Green declined to supply a key. It was packed with Bank of England notes of varying denominations and at the bottom lay a passbook of the National Insurance Bank in the name of Bernard Pitt.
Vincent turned towards Green, from whom all truculence had now disappeared. “Arthur Green, I arrest you for the murder of Bernard Pitt by shooting him through the head. You are not obliged to make any statement.”
Goron and Vincent breakfasted together half an hour after the arrival of the train from Newquay.
“So you have arrested the man you believe to be the murderer of Pitt,” said Goron; “and that fantastic story told by those Americans is true after all.”
“Yes.”
“What interests me keenly is the difference between criminal procedure in England and its counterpart in my own country. There is a refreshing finality about your English procedure. With us a lawyer would be briefed; there would be interminable delays; the case would be carried to the Cours de Cassation and thence to I know not what legal authorities until it reached the President of the Republic. By that time the wretched prisoner would have been languishing in jail for perhaps two years. With you there is only one appeal.”
“Yes, when the Court of Criminal Appeal has pronounced its decision the matter is ended except for private petitions to the Home Secretary for a respite of the sentence; such respites are very rarely given.”
“That is why violent crime is less common in England than it is in France. Your justice is not only sure but swift and that is the secret of judicial administration. But now tell me, confidentially, has your man made a confession?”
“No, we do not press our prisoners to confess, but we do not bring him to justice until the case against him is watertight enough to satisfy the Director of Public Prosecutions.”
Goron heaved a sigh. “Ah! If only politics were not involved in criminal cases, it might be the same with us. People are apt to say that the democratic institutions of our two countries are the same. Alas! There is a wide difference. No political party would dare to interfere with judicial punishments in England; whereas with us…But tell me, how do you regard your case as watertight?”
“Well, the story that Blake and Lewis told was that their car was held up in the road by a masked bandit who killed Pitt and made off with a bag of money. That money, consisting of notes that could be identified, was found in Green’s possession, and, what is more, a search of his room revealed a black mask hidden in a drawer.”
“How strange that criminals should so often preserve objects that bring the crime home to them! Was his motive only robbery?”
“Partly revenge, I think. It appears that at one time he was a fellow employee of a woman named Alice Dodds; they were in the service of Mrs Pearson, Laurillard’s daughter. She employed Dodds over the drug traffic, with the inevitable result that Dodds herself took to drugs. After that Green took service with Pitt and blackmailed him. Pitt promised to give him two thousand pounds to clear out of the country with his young woman, Dodds, but Green discovered that Pitt was on the point of leaving England himself without redeeming his promise. That, in my opinion, supplied the motive. From enquiries I have made, Green found out the make of car that Pitt was hiring and his time of departure. He lay in wait for him in the open road and shot him.”
“And so while you were hunting for the murderer in France he was here under your very nose.”
“Had Pitt’s companions been just ordinary law-abiding passengers they would have denounced the murderer and he would have been run to ground sooner, but they were criminals with much to hide and Pitt himself was no flower; he was bolting with money stolen from his employers.”
“A pretty nest of rascals. But why didn’t Arthur Green make his escape while there was time?”
“To do him justice I think he was trying to persuade the woman to go with him and she was in such an advanced state of addiction to drugs that she hung back. Then, apparently, he was afraid to use the money because the numbers of the notes were known.”
“It seems to me,” said Goron, “that the person who deserves the heaviest punishment is Laurillard’s daughter, Mrs Pearson.”
“Yes, the sinister part of it is that she will escape scot free.”
“Never mind, my friend, in hunting down your murderer, you have rendered a signal service to us in France. You have enabled us to close down another of these poison factories which were sapping the strength of our youth. These young people began poisoning themselves from a sense of adventure, the sense that assails most young people at some time of wishing to defy the law.”
“Yes, if the sacrifice of Alice Dodds and of this young fool, Green, could be a warning to others, their deaths will expiate their follies.”
THE END
About The Author
SIR BASIL HOME THOMSON (1861-1939) was educated at Eton and New College Oxford. After spending a year farming in Iowa, he married in 1889 and worked for the Foreign Service. This included a stint working alongside the Prime Minister of Tonga (according to some accounts, he was the Prime Minister of Tonga) in the 1890s followed by a return to the Civil Service and a period as Governor of Dartmoor Prison. He was Assistant Commissioner to the Metropolitan Police from 1913 to 1919, after which he moved into Intelligence. He was knighted in 1919 and received other honours from Europe and Japan, but his public career came to an end when he was arrested for committing an act of indecency in Hyde Park in 1925 – an incident much debated and disputed.
His eight crime novels featuring series character Inspector Richardson were written in the 1930’s and received great praise from Dorothy L. Sayers among others. He also wrote biographical and criminological works.
Also by Basil Thomson
Richardson’s First Case
Richardson Scores Again
The Case of Naomi Clynes
The Case of the Dead Diplomat
The Dartmoor Enigma
Who Killed Stella Pomeroy?
A Murder is Arranged
Basil Thomson
A Murder is Arranged
None of the other guests could explain what she was doing in Crooked Lane during the night…
Beautiful Margaret Gask, guest at Scudamore Hall, was shot to death on the driveway of the estate. The mink coat that she should have been wearing turned out to be the first clue Scotland Yard had to work on. Then a man she knew, a receiver of stolen goods, turns up dead. Soon more shady characters are drawn into the story: receivers, jewel thieves, confidence men and convicted felons on both sides of the Channel.
Richardson, now Chief Constable, orchestrates the clues concerning a murdered French senator, the theft of a famous emerald, a fake Italian prince and a mysterious priest who sought sanctuary after perpetrating thefts and felonies all over France. The case ends back in Scudamore Hall, where an ecclesiastical robe replaces a mink coat as Exhibit A.
The last and arguably most entertaining of all the Richardson novels, A Murder is Arranged (1937) has action, humour and a brilliant cast of major and minor characters. This new edition, the first in many decades, includes a new introduction by crime novelist Martin Edwards, acclaimed author of genre history The Golden Age of Murder.
“Few authors can claim such an intimate knowledge of Scotland Yard and criminals as Sir Basil Thomson, one-time Assistant Comm
issioner at the Yard. He provides subtle intrigue, clever deduction, and bright dialogue.” Referee
A Murder is Arranged
Chapter One
IT WAS the duty of Chief Constable Richardson’s clerk to run through the morning papers and call his chief’s attention to any case in which the help of New Scotland Yard (C.I.D. Central) might be invoked. The clerk, a patrol named Walter Goodwin, brought in a number of newspaper cuttings one morning in December.
“Anything special?” asked Richardson.
“Not in the metropolitan area, sir, but there’s a case at Marplesdon in Surrey that I think you ought to read.” Richardson took up the cutting from a popular paper and read:
“MYSTERIOUS SHOOTING CASE NEAR MARPLESDON, SURREY.
“In the early hours of yesterday morning the body of a young woman in evening dress was found lying in Crooked Lane, which traverses Marplesdon Common. She has been identified as Miss Margaret Gask, one of the guests at Scudamore Hall where Mr Forge is entertaining a house party for Christmas. She had been shot through the head. None of the other guests was able to explain why she should have been in Crooked Lane during the night. Apparently she had said good night and retired to her room just before midnight. Her bed had not been slept in.”
“This is just the sort of case in which the chief constable of Surrey may ask for help from Central,” said Richardson. “Who have we got available?”
His clerk reflected. “I believe that Detective Inspector Dallas has about cleared up that case in Chelsea. His report is coming in to you, sir.”
“Very well; we must sit tight until we have an application from the Surrey chief constable.”
“Very good, sir.”
“You might tell Mr Dallas that probably he will be wanted and he must not undertake any fresh case until he has seen me.”