Who Killed Stella Pomeroy?

by Basil Thomson

  “I shall open this letter at the police station in the presence of Inspector Aitkin. Do you wish to be present?”

  “No, but I’ll ask you to take me home. I am not so sure of my legs as I was before my accident.”

  Richardson directed Huggins to the door of Casey’s lodgings and dropped him there.

  Returning to the police station he mounted the stairs and entered Aitkin’s room flourishing the sealed envelope.

  “What have you got there, Superintendent?”

  “I don’t know until we’ve opened it. It’s a sealed letter from Stella Pomeroy addressed to Casey.”

  “You mean that he’s never read it?”

  “No, the dog was too cunning for that; he held this; sealed letter as a proof to clear himself. He was going to pretend that he knew nothing of its contents.”

  While he was speaking he slit the letter open and pulled out of it three separate, folded papers. One was the jeweller’s bill that Mrs Esther was so anxious to recover; the second was the incriminating note that she need have no fear that her husband would ever find out the deception; the third Richardson read aloud.

  “Listen to this with both your ears, Aitkin:

  “I shall call at your bungalow tomorrow morning, September 13th, at the hour you mention, 8:30. Kindly have the articles ready so that you do not keep me waiting. I shall bring the necessary with me.

  R.B.”

  “Who on earth is R.B.?” asked Aitkin, mystified.

  “They are initials that will be familiar to you before you are much older. They stand for Richard Burton, the man that we’ve been hunting down since September thirteenth.” Richardson proceeded to take the inspector into his confidence about all his movements during the last two days.

  “Well, it’s the unexpected that happens. When did you first begin to suspect him?”

  “As soon as I learned that he was acting as intermediary between Mrs Esther and Stella Pomeroy. He was squeezing Mrs Esther for two thousand pounds and trying to get the papers from Stella Pomeroy for two hundred. I suppose he found her stubborn and so he laid her out, but I’m going off now to see Casey again and get from him a few more details.”

  “But that won’t be enough evidence to arrest Burton for murder.”

  “No, it won’t, but I shan’t rest until I’ve got enough.”

  He ran down the stairs, jumped into the car and directed Huggins once more to drive to Casey’s lodgings. He told Mrs Coxon that he had urgent business with her lodger, and she showed him up to the bed-sitting-room on the first floor, where he found the Irish journalist sitting in an armchair reading a newspaper. He started to his feet.

  “Can’t a man have a corner to himself in any part of England?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr Casey, but we can’t very well leave things unfinished. I want you to tell me when Mrs Pomeroy handed you that letter—the sealed letter which you gave to me just now.”

  “On the evening before her death. She met me at the station and asked me to take care of it.”

  “Did she tell you that someone was to call for it on the following morning?”

  “She said the next day, and that she meant to give them a run for their money, or words to that effect.”

  “Then you knew that a stranger had called on Mrs Pomeroy. Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “Because it would have led to a lot of complications and stirred up a lot of dirty water unnecessarily. I told you that I was trying to hunt down the murderer by myself.”

  “He tried to hunt you down in his car yesterday morning; you had a narrow escape. Have you ever had an interview with this man?”

  “Never.”

  “Nor any correspondence?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, I don’t think I shall have to disturb you again tonight, Mr Casey.”

  “You are welcome to all the help I’ve given you. By the way, Superintendent, did you discover who committed the burglary at the bungalow the other evening?”

  “Yes; Richard Burton, but I shan’t call you to identify him, although I know that you were watching his proceedings from a safe distance.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ON LEAVING Ealing Richardson drove to the garage indicated by Otway—Hosking’s in Oxford Street. He knew that the evidence he had against Burton was insufficient even to insure his committal for trial, and he was praying that he might light upon something at the garage that would be a strong connecting link in the case.

  He found a middle-aged lady installed in the little glass cubbyhole which served as an office. Taking him for a promising-looking customer she removed her glasses and smiled upon him; learning that he was a police officer seeking information against one of her customers, she resumed them and gazed at him with a touch-me-if-you-dare scrutiny.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you, madam, but you have a customer, a Mr Burton, who, we understand, occasionally hires cars from you.” The lady inclined her head without speaking. “I want you to look up the dates since the beginning of September when he has hired from you.”

  With a perfunctory movement she turned over the pages of her diary. “He took out a car yesterday morning at eight and returned it at ten.”

  “And before yesterday?”

  She flipped back the pages. “Oh, here, in the evening of Wednesday, from eight-thirty to ten-thirty.”

  “And before that?”

  She flipped back a few more pages.

  “Try September thirteenth,” suggested Richardson. “Yes, here it is; from 8 A.M. to 10.30 A.M.”

  “Was it an open car?”

  “You’d better ask the foreman about that: he knows what car he gave him better than I do.”

  The foreman was quite cheerful and explicit. “Know Mr Burton? Of course I do. He’s one of our regular customers. Is he going to be pinched for exceeding the speed limit? I know he must go at a pace sometimes. Once he lost the toolbox out of the car with all the tools in it.”

  Richardson began to revile himself for lack of thoroughness in his investigations. “Was there a hammer among the lost tools?” he asked.

  “Yes, and it was my own favourite hammer.”

  “Had you any means of knowing it from other hammers?”

  “Yes, my name’s Phillips, and I’d scratched a P on the handle. If I saw it I’d know it from a thousand other hammers.”

  “When Mr Burton took out that car yesterday did you lend him a rug?”

  “Yes. He asked for one because it was such a cold morning, so I lent him one.”

  Richardson thanked him and directed Huggins to drive him back to Ealing. He dashed upstairs to Aitkin, who was waiting for him.

  “Before we do anything else, D.D. Inspector, tell me, where is the hammer with which we thought Stella Pomeroy was killed?”

  “I have it here in the safe.” Aitkin took it out and land it on the table. “That’s the one with Pomeroy’s own initial on the handle.”

  “I believe we’ve made a mistake here. There are other names beginning with a P. This hammer may have done the murder, but it belongs to a garage foreman named Phillips and was lost by a man named Burton, who hired a car from him.”

  “Good God!”

  “Yes. Burton, having left the hammer on the scene of the crime, was artful enough to lose the toolbox and all its contents.”

  “But Pomeroy admitted that it was his.”

  “I don’t think Pomeroy was in a state to deny anything that was put to him that morning, but his hammer must be found. Send every available man to move the coal in the bungalow outhouse as early as possible tomorrow morning to see whether they can find it.”

  “Very good, sir. Are you doing any more tonight?”

  “No, but I shall be up early in the morning.”

  Early as Richardson’s arrival in Ealing was on the following morning, the local police were ready for him. They had discovered Pomeroy’s hammer buried under one ton of coal. That hammer, too, was marked P, but the letter had be
en branded more deeply than it had on the hammer found in the ornamental pond.

  As soon as he thought that his chief would be in his office, Richardson called on Mr Morden with the two hammers and the correspondence he had collected during his investigation.

  Morden listened patiently to his narration of the facts and examined the correspondence.

  “You have done well, Mr. Richardson. I think that we now have a watertight case for the director of public prosecutions. I’ll mark the papers over to him, and you can take them across by hand, together with such exhibits as are necessary. See that everything is properly labelled before you leave it. Of course if you had sifted the matter of the hammer earlier in the case you might have arrived sooner at the result, but I doubt whether you would have had the same amount of evidence as you have now got.”

  Richardson went off with his report and exhibits to the barrister in the office of the director of public prosecutions with whom he was wont to deal.

  On leaving that office he felt that he owed it to Jim Milsom to pay him an impromptu visit and thank him for all the assistance he had given.

  “I feel that it must be some compensation to you, Mr Milsom, to know that we have arrived at a result. It is practically certain now that the murderer of Stella Pomeroy will be brought to trial, and that is largely due to the help you have given me. If you had not spotted the secret undemanding that existed between Otway and that unknown man in the gambling den, we might have taken much longer.”

  Jim Milsom regarded him with a whimsical eye. “I don’t quite remember the formula on these occasions, but I think that historically speaking the sleuths fill their glasses and drink to the common hangman. So here goes.”

  “Nothing stronger than sherry, thank you, Mr Milsom. Now, to return to the man whose name we now know as Burton: did you notice whether on that evening he left the gambling room some time before your party did?”

  “Yes, we hadn’t been there long when he left.”

  “Then he would have had time to break into the bungalow that evening.”

  “What will be done to Maddox and Otway?”

  “I fancy that they’ll get off rather lightly, because they will be useful to us as witnesses when Burton is brought to trial. I understand from Mr Jackson that Maddox has not cheated him at present out of more than his own share of Colter’s estate would come to. The solicitor can, if he likes, deduct the money when he pays over cash to the legatees.”

  “The person who interests me in all this,” said Milsom, “is that Mrs Esther. Granted that she was a fool, she’s had a rotten time, and when her husband comes home she may have a worse time still.”

  “We shall have to use her, of course, but she will be a mystery woman as far as the newspapers are concerned—a Mrs X who was being blackmailed by Pomeroy. As for her husband, if he gets to know of it he must settle that with his wife.”

  Richardson had one more helper to thank before he could consider the case as closed as far as he was concerned. This was Ann Pomeroy. With that more pressing business in prospect he declined Jim Milsom’s invitation to lunch with him. He hoped to surprise Ann in that little den which opened out of the hall in her uncle’s house in the act of taking her coffee after lunch. So he contented himself with a sandwich before driving down to Ealing.

  His plans worked perfectly. Ann invited him in and offered him coffee, as he had hoped.

  “I’ve had to break it to myself that this may be my last visit to this house.”

  “Do you mean that the mystery is all cleared up?”

  “Yes. By this time the murderer of Stella Pomeroy has been arrested.”

  “Not Casey?”

  “No, a man named Burton. But you were right up to a point. Casey had more to do with the case than I thought in the beginning. As a matter of fact, he could have helped us long before this if he had told us all he knew.”

  Ann listened with wide-open eyes while he related to her the last phases of his investigations.

  “How pleased you must be! This solution never occurred to me in my wildest flights. I’m glad that I wasn’t entirely wrong about Casey, but I think that Scotland Yard has well earned the reputation it enjoys if all its superintendents are like you.”

  “Oh, I made mistakes at the beginning just as we all do. The question of the hammer, for instance.”

  “That was Miles’ fault entirely: he practically owned that it was his hammer.”

  “But we must remember that he wasn’t normal that day,” said Richardson. “You are glad to have his name entirely cleared, I expect.”

  “I should think I am, and so will his father and mother be. Won’t you come in this evening and let him thank you personally?”

  “Thank I will,” said Richardson, but his tone was a little flat. Having no further excuse for lingering he took his leave.

  His thoughts as he drove back to the police station were not on his recent success. He was recalling some gossip that Mrs Coxon had related to him at their first meeting—gossip which concerned Ann Pomeroy and her cousin. She had told him that Miles Pomeroy’s mother had hoped that he would marry Ann, and she had insinuated that Ann herself would not have said no. This, thought Richardson gloomily, is probably what will happen now. They will wait for a decent interval and then…Richardson found this thought more than he could bear.

  Of course Ann, with her intelligence and her intuition, was too good for the wife of a bank clerk; too good, also, he owned, for the wife of a detective superintendent. Besides, she had a career before her: she had talked to him about it sometimes over their coffee. No, she would never give up everything to become the wife of an officer in the C.I.D. But Ann did.

  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

  The Milliner’s Hat Mystery

  A Murder is Arranged

  Basil Thomson

  The Milliner’s Hat Mystery

  “What are you looking for, sir?” he said.

  “Bloodstains.”

  Scotland Yard is concerned with the murderer, or murderers, of the mysterious Bernard Pitt. The dead man is discovered with a false identity, courtesy of the many forged papers and documents found with him.

  The trail leads to France, where we discover why a French milliner chose to ride in a laundry basket, why the two American men are so interested in their wives’ hat trimmings, and why it is so difficult for the French police to touch a criminal with high political connections. But the murder of Bernard Pitt was only an incident in the diabolical plot linking a network of criminals on both sides of the Channel.

  The Milliner’s Hat Mystery was first published in 1937. This new edition, the first for many decades, includes an introduction by crime novelist Martin Edwards, acclaimed author of genre history The Golden Age of Murder.

  “Sir Basil Thomson is a past-master in the mysteries of Scotland Yard.” Times
Literary Supplement

  The Milliner’s Hat Mystery

  Chapter One

  THE CORONER’S COURT at Oldbury was crowded, for the news had spread that the inquest about to be held was concerned with a death that was likely to prove more mysterious than any that the police had had to deal with within the memory of man. The coroner took his seat at his table and the hum of conversation was hushed. He called Leslie Griffith. A young man stood up and came forward.

  “You are a clerk in the Local Government Board in London?”

  “I am.”

  “And on July 31st you drove your car into a barn for shelter from a violent thunderstorm.”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you alone in the car?”

  “No, my friend Douglas Powell was with me.”

  “What did you find in that barn?”

  “We found the body of a man.”

  “How was it lying?”

  “Parallel with the left wall. I stumbled over it in getting out; in fact I fell over it. Owing to the thunderstorm it was as dark as night.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I picked myself up and called to my friend, and we went over together to the house opposite and explained to the owner what had happened and asked leave to use the telephone.”

  “Did you telephone to the police?”

  “No; Mr Howard, the owner of the house, telephoned to Dr Travers. He was afraid that in entering the barn we had knocked over his deaf gardener.”

  “While you were waiting for the doctor did anyone touch the body?”

  “We waited in the house until the doctor arrived and then we went back to the barn with him; we found the body lying just as we had left it.”

  The coroner called Douglas Powell.