“This place is shut up at night, isn’t it? I mean, you don’t keep a porter or a watchman on the premises?”
“No. But each of the seniors has a private key, of course. I can get in any time I wish. It’s the same at the Research Station.”
The Inspector seemed to be struck by an idea.
“Any valuable stuff on the premises, by any chance?”
“Nothing a thief could make much out of. There’s a thousand or fifteen hundred pounds worth of platinum, dishes, electrodes, and so forth, in the safe. I believe the man on the beat is supposed to give special attention to the place and notify anything suspicious immediately; but I’ve never known anything of the sort to happen.”
“Rather a difficult position for our men if the staff can come and go freely at night,” the Inspector pointed out. “If a constable sees a light in the window, what’s he to make of it? Does Dr. Silverdale work late often?”
“I really couldn’t tell you.”
“You don’t see much of him privately, sir?”
“Very little,” Markfield answered. “Only when I run across him by accident down town, like last night.”
“You met him, did you?”
“Hardly even that. I happened to drop into the Grosvenor for dinner after I left here. I can’t get meals at home just now unless I cook ’em myself. As I was finishing my coffee, Silverdale came into the dining-room with Miss Deepcar and took a table in the window recess. I didn’t disturb them, and I don’t think they noticed me.”
“Then they were just beginning dinner when you left the place? What time was that, can you tell me?”
Markfield looked suspiciously at the Inspector.
“You’re trying to get me to say something that you want to use against—well, someone else, shall we say? I don’t care about it, frankly. But since you could get the information from the waiter who served them, there’s no harm done. I went to the Grosvenor at 6.35 or thereabouts. I was going down to the Research Station afterwards to pick up some notes, so I dined early that night. Silverdale and Miss Deepcar came in just as I was finishing dinner—that would be about a quarter past seven or thereby. I expect they were going on to some show afterwards.”
“Was she in evening dress?”
“Ask me another. I never can tell whether a girl’s in evening dress or not, nowadays, with these new fashions.”
Inspector Flamborough closed his notebook and took his leave, followed by Sir Clinton. When they reached the street again and had got into the waiting car, the Chief Constable turned to his subordinate.
“You collected a lot of interesting information that time.”
“I noticed you left it all to me, sir; but I think I got one or two things worth having. It’s a bit disconnected; and it’ll take some thinking before it’s straightened out.”
“What’s your main inference, as things stand?” Sir Clinton inquired.
“Well, sir, it’s a bit early yet. But I’ve been wondering about one thing, certainly.”
“And that is?”
“And that is whether Peeping Tom’s name wasn’t Thomasina,” Flamborough announced gravely.
“There are two sexes, of course,” Sir Clinton admitted with equal gravity. “And inquisitiveness is supposed to be more strongly developed in the female than in the male. The next thing will be to consider whether Mr. Justice shouldn’t be rechristened Justitia. One ought to take all possibilities into account.”
Chapter Eight
THE HASSENDEAN JOURNAL
When Ronald Hassendean’s journal was found to consist of four bulky volumes of manuscript, Sir Clinton hastily disclaimed any desire to make its acquaintance in extenso and passed over to Inspector Flamborough the task of ploughing through it in detail and selecting those passages which seemed to have direct bearing on the case. The Inspector took the diary home with him and spent a laborious evening, lightened at times by flashes of cynical enjoyment when the writer laid bare certain aspects of his soul. Next day Flamborough presented himself at Sir Clinton’s office with the books under his arm; and the paper slips which he had used as markers made a formidable array as they projected from the edges of the volumes.
“Good Lord!” exclaimed the Chief Constable in consternation. “Do you mean to say I ought to read through about a hundred and fifty passages in inferior handwriting? Life’s too short for that. Take ’em away, Inspector, and get someone to write me a précis.”
Flamborough’s lips opened into a broad smile under his toothbrush moustache.
“It’s not really so bad as it looks, sir,” he explained. “The white slips were put in to mark anything that seemed to bear remotely on the business; but the passages directly relevant to the affair are indicated by red slips. I think you ought to glance through that last lot. There aren’t really very many of them.”
He deposited the volumes on Sir Clinton’s desk so that the marking-tabs projected towards his superior. Sir Clinton eyed them without any enthusiasm.
“Well, I suppose duty calls, Inspector. I’ll go over them with you, just in case you want to give me any special points drawn from your general reading in the Works of Hassendean. If you’ve got a morbid craving for voluminous writers, you’d better start on the Faerie Queene. It, also, leads up to the death of a Blatant Beast.”
“I read a bit of it at school, sir. I’m keeping the rest for a rainy day.”
Sir Clinton again eyed the four stout volumes with unconcealed aversion. Quite obviously he was ready to catch at anything in order to postpone the examination of them, even now that he had decided to submit to the Inspector’s ruling.
“Before I start on this stuff, there are one or two points I want to get cleared up. First of all, did you get any reports in reply to our inquiries about young Hassendean’s car being seen on the roads that night?”
“No, sir. The only motor information we got was about one car that was stolen under cover of the fog. It’s being looked into. Oh, yes, and there was an inquiry for the name and address of the owner of a car. It seems somebody got hit by a motor and managed to take its number. I don’t think any real damage was done. It’s just one of these try-on cases.”
“Something more important now. Did you find out from the man on the beat whether there was a light in Silverdale’s room at the Croft-Thornton on the night of the murders?”
“How did you come to think of that, sir? I didn’t mention it to you.”
“It was just a long shot, Inspector. As soon as Silverdale stated that he had been working all that night at the Croft-Thornton, I was pretty sure he was lying. So were you, I guessed. Then you walked across to the window and looked down. As I was wondering myself whether the window was visible from the street, it didn’t take much mind-reading to see what you were driving at. And from your questions to Markfield later on, I couldn’t help inferring that you had the constable on the beat at the back of your thoughts. Obviously you meant to check Silverdale’s story by asking the constable on duty if he’d noticed a light in Silverdale’s room that night. There was no light, of course?”
“No, sir. There wasn’t a light anywhere in the building, that night. I made the constable look up his notebook.”
“Then you’ve caught Master Silverdale in a very bad lie. By the way, I suppose you noticed that girl who came into his room while we were talking to him: the Miss Deepcar who dined with him down town that night. What did you make of her?”
“Pretty girl, sir, very pretty indeed. The quiet sort, I’d judge. One of the kind that a man might do a good deal to get hold of, if he was keen on her.”
Sir Clinton’s expression showed that he did not disagree with the Inspector’s summing up.
“By the way,” he continued, “did you take any note of what she said to Silverdale at that time?”
“Not particularly, sir. It was all Greek to me—too technical.”
“It interested me, though,” Sir Clinton confessed. “I’ve a chemical friend—the London man who’s
going to act as a check on Markfield for us in the search for the poison, as a matter of fact—and he talks to me occasionally about chemistry. You don’t know what a ‘mixed melting-point’ is, I suppose?”
“No, sir. It sounds confused,” said the Inspector mischievously.
The Chief Constable treated this as beneath contempt.
“I’ll explain the point,” he pursued, “and then you’ll know as much as I do. A pure substance melts at a higher temperature than it does when it’s contaminated by even a trace of some foreign material. Suppose that you had been given a stuff which you thought was pure quinine and you had no chemicals handy to do the ordinary tests for quinine. What you’d do would be this. You’d take the melting-point of your sample first of all. Then to the sample you’d add a trace of something which you knew definitely was quinine—a specimen from your laboratory stock, say. Then you’d take the melting-point of this mixture. Suppose the second melting-point is lower than the first, then obviously you’ve been adding an impurity to your original sample. And since something, that you know definitely to be quinine, has acted as an impurity, then clearly the original stuff isn’t quinine. On the other hand, if the addition of your trace of quinine to the sample doesn’t lower the melting-point, then your original sample is proved to be quinine also. That mixing of the two stuffs and taking the melting-point is what they call ‘taking a mixed melting-point.’ Does that convey anything to you?”
“Not a damn, sir,” Flamborough admitted crudely, in a tone of despair. “Could you say it all over again slowly?”
“It’s hardly worth while at this stage,” Sir Clinton answered, dismissing the subject. “I’ll take it up again with you later on, perhaps, after we get the P.M. results. It was an illuminating conversation, though, Inspector, if my guess turns out to be right. Now there’s another matter. Have you any idea when the morning papers get into the hands of the public—I mean the earliest hour that’s likely in the normal course?”
“It happens that I do know that, sir. The local delivery starts at 7 a.m. In the suburbs, it’s a bit later, naturally.”
“Just make sure about it, please. Ring up the publishing departments of the Courier and the Gazette. You needn’t worry about the imported London papers.”
“Very good, sir. And now about this journal, sir?” the Inspector added with a touch of genial impishness in his voice.
“Evidently you won’t be happy till I look at it,” Sir Clinton grumbled with obvious distaste for the task. “Let’s get it over, then, since you’re set on the matter.”
“So far as I can see, sir,” Flamborough explained, “there are only three threads in it that concern us: the affair he had with that girl Hailsham; his association with Mrs. Silverdale; and his financial affairs—which came as a surprise to me, I must admit.”
Sir Clinton glanced up at the Inspector’s words; but without replying, he drew the fat volumes of the journal towards him and began his examination of the passages to which Flamborough’s red markers drew attention.
“He didn’t model his style on Pepys, evidently,” he said as he turned the leaves rapidly, “There seems to be about ten per cent, of ‘I’s’ on every page. Ah! Here’s your first red marker.”
He read the indicated passage carefully.
“This is the description of his feelings on getting engaged to Norma Hailsham,” he commented aloud. “It sounds rather superior, as if he felt he’d conferred a distinct favour on her in the matter. Apparently, even in the first flush of young love, he thought that he wasn’t getting all that his merits deserved. I don’t think Miss Hailsham would have been flattered if she’d been able to read this at the time.”
He passed rapidly over some other passages without audible comment, and then halted for a few moments at an entry.
“Now we come to his meeting with Mrs. Silverdale, and his first impressions of her. It seems that she attracted him by her physique rather than by her brains. Of course, as he observes: ‘What single woman could fully satisfy all the sides of a complex nature like mine?’ However, he catalogues Mrs. Silverdale’s attractions lavishly enough.”
Flamborough, with a recollection of the passage in his mind, smiled cynically.
“That side of his complex nature was highly developed, I should judge,” he affirmed. “It runs through the stuff from start to finish.”
Sir Clinton turned over a few more pages.
“It seems as though Miss Hailsham began to have some inklings of his troubles,” he said, looking up from the book. “This is the bit where he’s complaining about the limitations in women’s outlooks, you remember. Apparently he’d made his fiancée feel that his vision took a wider sweep than she imagined, and she seems to have suggested that he needn’t spend so much time in staring at Mrs. Silverdale. It’s quite characteristic that in this entry he’s suddenly discovered that the Hailsham girl’s hands fail to reach the standard of beauty which he thinks essential in a life-companion. He has visions of sitting in suppressed irritation while these hands pour out his breakfast coffee every day through all the years of marriage. It seems to worry him quite a lot.”
“You’ll find that kind of thing developing as you go on, sir. The plain truth is that he was tiring of the girl and he simply jotted down everything he could see in her that he didn’t find good enough for him.”
Sir Clinton glanced over the next few entries.
“So I see, Inspector. Now it seems her dancing isn’t so good as he used to think it was.”
“Any stick to beat a dog with,” the Inspector surmised.
“Now they seem to have got the length of a distinct tiff, and he rushes at once to jot down a few bright thoughts on jealousy with a quotation from Mr. Wells in support of his thesis. It appears that this ‘entanglement,’ as he calls it, is cramping his individuality and preventing the full self-expression of his complex nature. I can’t imagine how we got along without that word ‘self-expression’ when we were young. It’s a godsend. I trust the inventor got a medal.”
“The next entry’s rather important, sir,” Flamborough warned him.
“Ah! Here we are. We come to action for a change instead of all this wash of talk. This is the final burst-up, eh? H’m!”
He read over the entry thoughtfully.
“Well, the Hailsham girl seems to have astonished him when it came to the pinch. Even deducting everything for his way of looking at things, she must have been fairly furious. And Yvonne Silverdale’s name seems to have entered pretty deeply into the discussion. ‘She warned me she knew more than I thought she did; and that she’d make me pay for what I was doing.’ And again: ‘She said she’d stick at nothing to get even with me.’ It seems to have been rather a vulgar scene, altogether. ‘She wasn’t going to be thrown over for that woman without having her turn when it came.’ You know, Inspector, it sounds a bit vindictive, even when it’s filtered through him into his journal. The woman scorned, and hell let loose, eh? I’m not greatly taken with the picture of Miss Hailsham.”
“A bit of a virago,” the Inspector agreed. “What I was wondering when I read that stuff was whether she’d keep up to that standard permanently or whether this was just a flash in the pan. If she’s the kind that treasures grievances. . . .”
“She might be an important piece in the jigsaw, you mean? In any case, I suppose we’ll have to get her sized up somehow, since she plays a part in the story.”
The Chief Constable turned back to the journal and skimmed over a number of the entries.
“Do you know,” he pointed out after a time, “that young fellow had an unpleasant mind.”
“You surprise me,” the Inspector retorted ironically. “I suppose you’ve come to the place where he gets really smitten with Mrs. Silverdale’s charms?”
“Yes. There’s a curious rising irritation through it all. It’s evident that she led him on, and then let him down, time after time.”
“For all his fluff about his complex character and so forth,
he really seems to have been very simple,” was Flamborough’s verdict. “She led him a dance for months; and anyone with half an eye could see all along that she was only playing with him. It’s as plain as print, even in his own account of the business.”
“Quite, I admit. But you must remember that he imagined he was out of the common—irresistible. He couldn’t bring himself to believe things were as they were.”
“Turn to the later entries,” the Inspector advised; and Sir Clinton did so.
“This is the one you mean? Where she turned him down quite bluntly, so that even he got an inkling of how matters really stood?”
“Yes. Now go on from there,” Flamborough directed.
Sir Clinton passed from one red marker to the other, reading the entries indicted at each of the points.
“The tune changes a bit; and his irritation seems to be on the up-grade. One gets the impression that he’s casting round for a fresh method of getting his way and that he hasn’t found one that will do? Is that your reading of it?”
“Yes,” Flamborough confirmed. “He talks about getting his way ‘by hook or by crook,’ and one or two other phrases that come to the same thing.”
“Well, that brings us up to a week ago. There seems to be a change in his tone, now. More expectation and less exasperation, if one can put it that way.”
“I read it that by that time he’d hit on his plan. He was sure of its success, sir. Just go on to the next entry please. There’s something there about his triumph, as he calls it.”
Sir Clinton glanced down the page and as he did so his face lit up for a moment as though he had seen one of his inferences confirmed.
“This what you mean?” he asked. “‘And only I shall know of my triumph’?”
“That’s it, sir. High-falutin and all that; but it points to his thinking he had the game in his hands. I’ve puzzled my brains a bit over what he really meant by it, though. One might read it that he meant to murder the girl in the end. That would leave him as the only living person who knew what had happened, you see?”
The Case With Nine Solutions (A Clinton Driffield Mystery) Page 11