Death Sends for the Doctor (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery)

by George Bellairs

  “We both seem to owe one another apologies, Mr. Hope. But I’ll hear yours first. I believe your story about the doctor now. It’s up to you to believe mine, too, and say so.”

  And with that, she left the room and went upstairs.

  “Well, if that don’t beat the band! Just like a woman. When they’re proved in the wrong, they always try to make out it was you did it and they’re in the right all the time.”

  Smiling to himself, Hope went in the bar, returned with a bottle of whisky and glasses, and poured out three stiff drinks.

  “Care to join me, gents, just to celebrate my innocence?”

  “No, thanks.”

  St. Hilary’s struck two.

  16

  THE MOONLIT SQUARE

  LITTLEJOHN didn’t feel like getting up. They had retired to bed, after a long evening full of excitement, at well after two o’clock, and now here was another day, which, in his present lazy mood, seemed almost too full to be borne.

  He lay with his eyes closed, listening to the pigeons cooing on the cornices of the Guildhall, and then two or three clocks of the town struck eight and St. Hilary’s made up the rear, to be followed five minutes later by the one at the Guildhall.

  The curtains were drawn to and he could hear the sounds of Upper Square coming through the open windows. The noise of a broom sweeping the pavements, footsteps passing, a horse and cart, a car or two. There would be no tradesmen about, of course. They entered the houses by the back ways. And there was an old sign at the Sheep Street entrance, No Hawkers, Street Cries or Musicians, which, even in these changed days, was respected by all except Madame Alcardi.

  At Hampstead, Mrs. Littlejohn would be getting up, opening the windows of the dining-room, taking the dog for a call round the back of the flats. “Are the beds properly aired and is the food good?” she had asked him when he rang her up early last night. He rubbed the sheet between his finger and thumb in a comic effort to find if it was quite dry.

  A knock on the door. The maid entered, drew back the curtains, which made him screw up his eyes, and gave him his cup of morning tea.

  “What would you like for breakfast this nice morning, sir?”

  She was quite a gay one and playfully rebuked him when she saw him stretch out his hand for his pipe.

  “You shouldn’t smoke before breakfast, sir. And here are your letters.”

  There were two of them, one re-addressed from Scotland Yard. An advertisement for a book of reference. If he subscribed five guineas for a copy of the next issue, they would put his name among a lot of other famous people, and they enclosed an order form and a list of about a hundred questions from details of his birth and his father and mother to his hobbies and clubs.

  The other was official. It gave particulars of the old R.A.F. unit at Mareham-le-Fen when Lydia Horninglow was there. Somebody must have worked hard in the files. A complete schedule of all the officers. Only one name interested the Superintendent. Gilbert Cranage, Flight Lieutenant.

  It looked as if Cranage had been a man with a fickle fancy. Grace Beharrell, Lydia Horninglow … And a married man all the time. Well, he’d ended like the proverbial pussy … in the well.

  Littlejohn slid out of bed and opened the windows wide. He slipped on his dressing-gown for the morning air was a bit keen. He took a cold shower to wake him up and then shaved and felt himself again.

  It was past nine when he and Cromwell finished breakfast. The sergeant had got up early and been for a three-mile walk across the fen behind the church. Mrs. Hope, looking brighter, met them in the hall as they made their way out.

  “The Dofford police have been on the ’phone for you twice already, sir. Will you kindly ring them back?”

  Plumtree had worked quickly with the lead pipe from Tommy Drop’s workshop and so had the police laboratory.

  Early birds!

  “How are you this morning, Mrs. Hope?”

  “I feel better, Superintendent, and I’m grateful for all you’ve done for Mr. Hope and me. The air has cleared, even if we haven’t yet patched up our personal affairs.”

  Littlejohn rang through to Dofford. A smart young technician, by the sound of him, answered.

  “The hair was Dr. Beharell’s, sir. We kept a small sample from his body when we cut it away to examine the wound. It looks as though you’ve laid your hands on the lethal weapon.”

  “Does it? Any prints on the pipe?”

  “Yes, sir. Plumtree called early in person with the exhibit and told us how you came by it. We took the prints of Watson from his body in the morgue here and there were several of his own on the pipe. One or two others, too, which we can’t identify as yet.”

  “Thanks. Very prompt work. I congratulate you …”

  A nervous laugh.

  “Only too glad to help, sir.”

  Cromwell was waiting in the hall, reading for the third time, a letter from his eldest daughter. His sweetheart, as he called her, wrote to him every day when he was away on a case.

  “Let’s go and take a look at the lower town, Cromwell. I need some tobacco. We haven’t even seen the place, yet.”

  Cromwell had passed through it to and from the football match, but hadn’t noticed much of it, coming or going.

  They went down Sheep Street. A long row of old property on either side, mainly used as shops. In some cases, the original windows remained, bow-fronted and with old glazing. But, for the most part, hideous modern chromium structures had replaced the antique frontages and there were enough shoe shops and outfitters to cater for a city instead of a small market town.

  Littlejohn entered a shop full of the mingled scents of tobacco and sugary confections. He was able to get his favourite tobacco. The shopman greeted him by name.

  “Good morning, Mr. Littlejohn. I hear there’s been another murder. Good job you’re here on the spot.”

  It was the same everywhere now. People on the pavements turned to stare at him and there was something amiable in their looks and nods. The man from London on whom they were counting. As Macfarlane had said, when it came to the occupants of Upper Square, the average townsfolk couldn’t care less. But now, one of themselves had been killed in cold blood. True, it was only poor Tommy Drop, a figure of fun, but he was a part of the daily ordinary life of Caldicott. In the market square, too, people nodded and greeted him.

  “Good morning, Superintendent.” “Good morning, Mr. Cromwell.” In a frame in the window of the Caldicott office of the Dofford Daily Advertiser, the morning edition showed a distorted flashlight photograph of Littlejohn and Cromwell—recognisable only by their shapes and sizes—standing over the body of Tommy Drop. Superintendent Littlejohn on the Second Upper Square Murder. And three columns of a story.

  An old lady leading a dog passed and spoke to them.

  “You’ll catch who did it, won’t you, sir?”

  Two small boys ran beside them to keep pace with them, and a crowd of people overflowing from the auction of a shop, made way for them and gave them cheerful, sympathetic looks.

  The two detectives returned to Bank House. It was like going back to another world at least a century older than the town below. You almost expected to see hansom-cabs jingling and clopping about.

  Mrs. Trott answered the knocker.

  “It’s you again, sir. Isn’t it awful about Tommy Drop? We’re all gettin’ scared out of our wits. We never know who’ll be the next. Will you come in?”

  “It’s you I want to speak to again, Mrs. Trott.”

  She led them into the large drawing-room.

  “Did you see much of Watson … Tommy Drop, Mrs. Trott?”

  “Yes, sir. He was round here once or twice a week. I never liked him. Too light-fingered. He’d pick up anything lying loose. He wasn’t supposed to bring his donkey and cart in the square, but that didn’t seem to matter. All the same, he was mostly round the back where odds and ends lie about and can easily be stolen. Bottles, jars, old iron … He’d put them in his cart and go off withou
t so much as a by-your-leave.”

  “Has he been here lately?”

  “Yesterday. He led his cart through the square and to the back. I saw him snooping around the yards seeing what he could find.”

  “Was he here the day Dr. Beharrell died?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir. It was my day off.”

  “Have you had the plumber lately?”

  Mrs. Trott’s eyes opened wide.

  “Yes. We’re quite good customers of his. The plumbing’s old, you see.”

  “When did he last call?”

  “A week or so ago. We’d a burst pipe in the cellar.”

  “May we go down and see the repairs.”

  She looked more amazed, quite bewildered, in fact, but she asked them to follow her down the stone steps behind the door under the main staircase.

  The place sounded quiet. Now and then, a patient climbed the steps of next door and entered the waiting-room. But the house itself was silent.

  “Where’s Dr. Macfarlane?”

  “At a confinement. It’s takin’ a long time, too. He’s been out since seven. They’ll have to wait in the surgery today.”

  They passed the strong-room which remained as it was when they had first seen it, the door forced and bricks broken away in the doorway. In a corner nearby, a thick pipe rose from a long horizontal run to mount through the ceiling.

  “There’s where the break happened. It was an old pipe and the plumber said he couldn’t mend it. He had to put a new piece in. The pipe runs up the back of the inside wall to the tank in the loft.”

  Littlejohn measured with his eye the length of new piping inserted. It tallied roughly with the piece he had found in Watson’s shed.

  “Where’s the piece he took out?”

  “He usually takes the bits and pieces away with him, but he forgot this in his hurry. I was giving him a good telling off for coming half-drunk. It’s just round here.”

  She led the way to the cavity under the secret staircase.

  “Have you a match, sir? It’s dark just here, as I told you before.”

  Cromwell struck a light. She looked under the stairs and recoiled with a sharp hiss and a click of her tongue against her teeth.

  “Why, it’s gone! And a lot of other things, as well. There was some old gas fittings here and some electric stuff that wasn’t used …”

  “Sounds as if Tommy Drop had been about.”

  “But how could he get in? The place is locked.”

  “Are you sure?”

  They followed her down a short passage to a door which gave on the back yard. She tried it and it opened.

  “Well! I’ve never done that before. I never come down here much, so I didn’t find I’d left it. I remember unlocking it to let in the plumber nearly a fortnight ago when he mended that pipe. As I told you, the plumber had had some drink and got cheeky. I told him what I thought of him as he was packing his things to go, and I saw him off the premises. I must have been so upset that I forgot the door. Then, Tommy Drop hanging about the back, must have found it undone and took all he could lay his hands on in the cellar.”

  The irony of it! Vincent Pochin, with all his complications of getting in the house, and here was the door, a few yards from the strong-room, unlocked all the time!

  They went upstairs again.

  “Do you like Dr. Macfarlane, Mrs. Trott?”

  She hesitated.

  “Yes … I do. He’s asked me to stay on and I think I will. He needs a bit of understanding. He’s a bit moody at times. But we get on all right.”

  “Did he and Dr. Beharrell hit it off well, too?”

  “Yes. He got a bit free with the old doctor and disrespectful now and then, to my way of thinkin’, but then I’m old-fashioned. We knew our places in my day. They’re not made that way now, are they, sir?”

  “What do you mean by ‘a bit free’, Mrs. Trott?”

  “He’d argue and back-answer a lot and he always seemed to want his own way about things. He’d his own room here, but he’d often go and join Dr. Beharrell, even without bein’ asked, as far as I know. The old doctor was a quiet man and liked bein’ by himself, but Dr. Macfarlane used to come and go in the drawing-room as he wished and help himself to smokes and drinks as if they were his own.”

  “Like a son to the old man?”

  “Hardly. Dr. Beharrell wasn’t all that fond of him. Sometimes, I think the old doctor got a bit tired of him. I’ve overheard him say as much to Dr. Macfarlane, but he’s not taken much heed and just gone on as before. But that’s all dead and done with now, and I shouldn’t be talkin’ about my new master that way. Two men livin’ together on their own is bound to get fed up with one another now and then.”

  “Has Dr. Macfarlane plenty of money of his own?”

  “He’s not without. He lives well. Better than most. Have you seen his car? It’s what’s called a Mercedes. Not that I’d know one car from another, but I’ve heard patients talk and say it’s cost him a pretty penny. He bought it last year. He’s mad on good things. Motor cars, good clothes, hand-made shoes, expensive pipes.”

  “He must have private means to carry on at that rate.”

  “He inherited it then. When he first came here thirteen years ago, he was thin and threadbare and didn’t seem to have two sixpences to rub together. He even borrowed from me till his salary was due. He’d only one suit and one pair of shoes.”

  “Has he any relations?”

  “Not that I’d know.”

  “The old doctor must have been fond of him. He left him this practice.”

  “I must say I’m surprised. Dr. Beharrell wasn’t a generous man. What he had, he liked to keep. All the same, he couldn’t take his practice with him, could he?”

  Littlejohn left Cromwell and Mrs. Trott exchanging pleasantries. She seemed to have taken a fancy to the sergeant. Elderly ladies usually did.

  The Superintendent casually strolled into Macfarlane’s room. It was just as he had left it the night before. The air was still heavy with tobacco smoke and a cigar had recently been smoked. He looked round, bent and took an empty two-ounce tobacco tin from the waste-paper basket, and gently placed it in his pocket.

  They said goodbye to Mrs. Trott and crossed to the police station. Littlejohn took out the empty tin and handed it to Plumtree.

  “You might send that to the lab at Dofford, Plumtree. Handle it very gently, and keep your fingerprints off it. Tell them to compare any prints they find on it with those on the piece of lead piping you so kindly delivered early this morning.”

  Plumtree holding the tin as though it were a stick of dynamite, put it carefully in a small box, gingerly parcelled it up, and went into the back room to give instructions.

  “Take that to the lab at Dofford. ’And it over to Sergeant Ross, and tell ’im to act as I’m now goin’ to tell ’im over the telephone. Take the little car and get crackin’ and don’t ’andle it rough … Go on, now.”

  Lydia Horninglow was passing the window and Littlejohn left Cromwell to entertain Plumtree whilst he went to speak with her.

  “Good morning, Miss Horninglow. May I have a brief word with you? May I suggest a cup of coffee together at my hotel?”

  She looked taken aback and hesitated. Her face was grim, as usual. Then she broke into a smile and looked resigned.

  “This is an unusual honour, Superintendent. It’s very kind of you, although I don’t understand what it’s all about.”

  They found a quiet place in one corner of Mrs. Hope’s small tea-room, which held a large palm in the centre surrounded by coloured cane chairs and tables, nostalgic reminders of certain French hotels.

  “There are one or two matters on which you can help me very much in this enquiry and I hope you won’t mind if they prove to be very personal. You can trust me to be discreet about them and refuse to answer if you find it embarrassing.”

  She gave him a solemn fixed look, wondering what was coming.

  “You were once engaged to
Mr. Vincent Pochin?”

  She blushed, and then she pulled herself together and looked Littlejohn in the eyes.

  “Yes. All that is, of course, almost forgotten. It was a long time ago.”

  “He broke the engagement?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you sorry or relieved?”

  “Very relieved.”

  She said it with emphasis.

  “May I ask why?”

  She nervously cleared her throat. The waitress came for their order and went.

  “In the first place, Mr. Pochin was years older than I was. It could hardly be called a love match. We were both lonely people, thrown in each other’s social paths, rather similar in tastes, convinced at first that we might get on well together. Mr. Pochin was a man of means. I’ll be quite candid about it. We, on our side, were very poor. The living isn’t a very good one nowadays, and mother and daddy had a very thin time during the war and just after. I thought if I married, I could help them.”

  “Very true. And then …”

  “I was accepted in the Pochin family. Vincent’s mother was very kind to me, although the idea of his marrying didn’t fill her with much enthusiasm. Sam and Irene, his brother and sister, were quite pleased.”

  “You found out a lot about the Pochin family? Their eccentricities, for example.”

  “That was why I was relieved when the marriage was abandoned.”

  “The family history isn’t a good one, is it? There is a hint of instability about them?”

  “That is putting it rather mildly. I shouldn’t be talking like this, but if, as you say, it will help you and be treated in the strictest confidence …”

  “I assure you of that, Miss Horninglow. Tell me, what in particular struck you about the family, their relationships with each other?”

  “I found when I got in their circle, that the old lady, their mother, was a very fine character. She still treated her family like children and she didn’t really want the men to marry … No … It’s not as you think. She doesn’t strike one as the possessive clinging mother type. In my opinion, she wanted no repetition of her own tragedy. Her husband committed suicide and there was a brother, William, who was quietly ‘put away’. She didn’t want any more children in the family. As though she feared the taint.”