“Exactly.” Luke’s grin was savage. “However, don’t forget first how long he’s been missing, and then that if the forensic boys had waited until the end of the week to do their homework in the Haigh case even they admit there wouldn’t have been any evidence to convict on. I should feel happier if you’d found nothing to indicate that the owner of this shed had ever heard of sulphuric.”
“I see, sir.”
“Of course, we’re not chemists,” murmured the optimistic May in the background. “Give those chaps half an hour in here with their bits and bobs and there’s no telling what they might be able to find.”
Luke turned to Mr. Campion as they stepped back into the shed proper.
“Have you ever heard Yeo on the subject of chemists?” he observed wryly. “He says they’re like war weapons. There never was a prosecution chemist born who didn’t get close at hand a defence chemist to cancel him out, and in his opinion the same thing goes for pathologists and trick-cyclists. What else have you rooted up, Samuel?”
“Not a lot yet.” Constable May, who had followed him out, was regretful. “We’ve only just scraped the surface. But there’s one or two hopeful things about. Take a look at this little fitment on the bench, sir.”
He pointed to a block of small drawers in rough oilstained wood.
“It’s a repairing watchmaker’s cabinet I should say. But look what’s in it.”
He pulled the drawers out one after another and Mr. Campion, who was watching, felt a trickle of cold creep down his spine. Yet there was nothing so very extraordinary to be seen in the dusty six-inch-square containers. It was only that in one particular drawer, instead of the usual gritty miscellany of nuts, staples, rings, washers, screw-hooks and eyelets which filled the rest, there was a collection of other less typical items: a new cheap lipstick in a pale colour, a complete set of studs of ordinary quality, a quantity of steel hairgrips for use on grey hair, a nail file and a pair of tweezers combined, a cheap butterfly brooch with the enamel chipped on one wing, a plastic cigarette holder, a key ring with a medallion attached, a pen knife with a Masonic emblem etched on it, and a dozen or so other worthless trifles, none of which possessed any individuality but which taken together struck a chord in the memory of every man present. As detectives they were all familiar with that most usual of exhibits, the contents of the deceased’s pockets or handbag. The pathetic collections are always strangely similar. They consist of little personal items of no interest to anyone but their owners, and, by the time they reach police notice, to no one at all.
Luke stood looking at the drawer, his shoulders drooping. He was moved and angry and also, they saw when at last he looked up, frustrated.
“Horribly suggestive, but what does any of it prove?” he said savagely. “Damn all.”
“There’s this, sir.” With some of the placid pride of a retriever Sam May produced the remnants of the plastic handbag which Richard had first discovered, and, holding it with a pair of metal tongs, laid it before his boss. Luke shook his dark head regretfully.
“Good multiple store stuff, son,” he said. “Made and sold by the million. Besides, all this is old. It’s been sorted and scattered. The chap has had time. What we need now …” He broke off abruptly.
Chief Inspector Henry Donne of Tailor Street, the Division which includes the West End of London and is one of the most important, came quietly into the room. Mr. Campion, regarding him with interest through his spectacles, saw with a start what Luke had meant. Donne was one of those loose-boned fair men who in youth look older than their years and in middle age look younger. His face was concave, with a strong chin and a lumpy forehead, but his eyes were smiling and slightly shy between very thick light lashes. He had a record of remarkable successes achieved through sheer application and was reputed to be without nerves of any kind.
He looked at the Superintendent, who as far as this particular investigation was concerned was his immediate superior, and smiled faintly.
“Nice little place you’ve got here, but unaired,” he murmured, but slyly, as if the habit of joke-making was an affectation with him which he hoped would be forgiven. “I hear two witnesses have already identified the ’bus.”
“Two?” Luke was pleased. “I can uncross my fingers. I’ll get you to take a look at what we’ve got, Henry, and then, if you agree, we’ll get Pong Wallis down from the labs with a full turn-out and let them take the place to pieces. Meanwhile we can concentrate on the man who rents it. I’ve got a chap waiting for him at his home address now and I see no reason why he shouldn’t bring him quietly in. The bloke has no idea that we’re on to him.”
Donne glanced round the shed again. “What connects the man who owns this outfit with the ’bus?” he enquired.
“The two figures. They were found here. Oh, I was forgetting, Henry. You don’t know Mr. Campion, do you?”
He performed the introduction and the two men shook hands. Campion was faintly dismayed to notice that he was being appraised in the light of a legend and an example encountered in the flesh for the first time.
“What happens if the chemists find nothing conclusive here, Charles?” he demanded in a somewhat hasty attempt to give his new acquaintance something other to think about.
“Then we’ll have to do some more homework.” Luke was returning to form in a splendid way. The old energy and fierce good humour was pouring back into him. “We’ve got a very interesting statement from the youngster, who spent most of today with the man we’re interested in. This boy is under the impression that he was being used as an alibi for a period somewhere between five-twenty-five and six this evening. If he’s right, the man was up to something about that time in your manor, Henry.”
“Mine?”
“Probably. He was based on the Tenniel Hotel and appeared to expect to get there and back in something over fifteen minutes. Can you let us have a full list of likely incidents before the night’s out?”
Chief Inspector Donne opened his mouth and closed it again.
“About that time there was a fine drop of homicide going on some four minutes’ walk from the Tenniel,” he said at last. “On the face of it it doesn’t seem very likely that it can connect, but you never know. A van deliveryman walked into a basement office in Minton Terrace, shot dead the old solicitor who opened the door to him, lifted his wallet, and walked back up a flight of stairs to the entrance again. The commissionaire heard the shot but assumed it was the noise made by the box the van man carried falling on to the marble floor. The bloke dropped this box in the front hall as he came in and it went through the old boy’s mind then that the noise was unusual and like a shot. My chaps are down there experimenting now. What could one put in a wooden wine case so that the row when it hits a marble floor sounds like a gun?”
The idle question died away in the silent outhouse and his audience, who were looking at him as if he were something out of science fiction, turned as one man and their glances bent towards the wash-stand top embedded in the sand and the wooden boxes and the bricks beside it.
Chapter 16
FAREWELL, MY PRETTY ONE
INSPECTOR KINDER OF the Canal Road Station was almost as energetic as he was obstinate. He made up his mind that it would be safer not to hold Richard and, having extracted from Luke the permission to release him, he rushed the matter through with the result that the young man was set down at his Chelsea lodgings by an auxiliary police car not equipped with wireless a good fifteen minutes before word came up from the shed that he was needed again. Unfortunately for Kinder, by the time a detective from the Chelsea Division got round to the address young Mr. Waterfield had left the house once more.
It happened very simply. When Richard stepped out of the car it waited at the kerb until he had let himself in with his latchkey and shut the door. He waited on the mat inside until he heard the vehicle move on, and then went down the hall to the alcove where the telephone was kept. The lights were dim down the narrow way and there was no sign of l
ife in the landlady’s quarters in the basement, which prepared him for the fact that the instrument proved to be dead. There was a notice on the wall above it, written in a firm feminine hand, explaining the position.
“This telephone, which is for the use of Residents Only, will be disconnected at ten-thirty every evening. The service will be resumed at 7.30 a.m. Residents are requested to note that incoming messages can NOT be accepted by the caretaker.”
Experience had taught Richard that there was no relaxation from this rule and so, after waiting a discreet five minutes to let the police get well on their way, he went quietly out into the street again and walked across the road to the telephone kiosk on the corner. There was no answer from the number he called, but he was not particularly surprised. Annabelle had said specifically that she and her hostess were to eat out after the movie. His aim was to catch her immediately she came in and before she went to bed.
So he strolled on towards the city centre, calling the number from each group of telephone boxes as he met with them.
A coffee stall keeper obliged him with a pocketful of coppers in anticipation of success, and he spent the whole of the next hour, while the police of two divisions were looking for him, telephoning from kiosk after kiosk and getting his money back every time on the no-reply signal.
It was a long stroll through the deserted late night streets but he was deeply preoccupied and did not notice it. He was aware he had no hope of persuading Annabelle to do anything she didn’t want to do over the telephone, but he fancied that if he could get her to meet him out on the Green again early in the morning he could put up a very convincing argument and get to his office in reasonable time as well.
It had not been easy to keep all mention of Garden Green out of his statement to the police. They had asked him more than once how he had come to choose Mr. Vick’s barber shop when it was so far from either his lodgings or his work, and he had known at the time that his replies were unconvincing. All the same he had stuck grimly by his story and was rewarded by the knowledge that so far, at any rate, Annabelle had not been dragged into anything “unpleasant”.
Richard used the word to himself with a nuance worthy of his own great-grandfather, masculine chivalry, protecting and romantic, out of fashion for forty violent years, was returning in his generation. He was still not connecting Gerry with any crime more serious than theft, for the police had been very reticent, but this to his mind was quite unattractive enough and he felt very strongly that Annabelle should be taken right away from it all and be safely down in the country before this friend of her relative reaped the trouble which was coming to him.
As the moon sank the clouds thickened and there was a promise of rain in the air by the time he reached the corner of the park. By now he was used to hearing the telephone bell ringing out in the gay little house which he recollected so vividly from his glimpse of it in the morning. The sound of it was a distinctive hollow trill and he could see in imagination dim quiet rooms and silent furniture waiting for the newly radiant Annabelle as she came up the path. He saw her standing aside for a blurred but vaguely unattractive old lady to fit her key in the lock, and then, hurrying forward as the telephone summons greeted her.
The only fault with this picture was that it did not materialise. When he reached Park Lane and turned into the first telephone kiosk the signal he received after dialling the familiar number was not the unanswered ringing tone but the continuous whine which indicates that the line is out of order. This was so unexpected that he dialled it again and finally got hold of the operator.
The impersonal voice was courteous but firm. It did not care how often he had rung or how recently, it explained with patient coldness: the number was now unobtainable, not because the line was engaged nor yet because someone had wedged the receiver to prevent the bell ringing, but because some definite fault had developed since he last called and the address could no longer be reached by telephone.
The news was irrevocable and worrying. Richard came out of the box frowning. Before him the wide road ran on beside the Park towards Marble Arch, Edgware Road, Edge Street and finally the Barrow Road. He scarcely hesitated but set off grimly down the pavement.
About the same time, on the other side of central London, Madame Dominique and her son Peter were saying goodnight to Polly on the steps of their private entrance to The Grotto, a few yards down the small alley which bounded the back of the building. Annabelle had already reached the main street and was waiting on the corner with Florian, who was still in attendance. They were both delighted with themselves and their laughter was softly audible to the little group in the doorway.
Sybylle Dominique was holding Polly’s sleeve. She looked minute standing between her tall son and the other more motherly figure.
“Don’t worry more than you can help. Take something rather than lie awake,” she was murmuring urgently, her feather-weight strength concentrated in an effort to comfort her old friend. “That housekeeper of Matt’s didn’t know a thing. The police hadn’t told her; they don’t.”
Polly looked down at her. Her face was only just visible in the grey light and the skin showed taut over the fine bold bones.
“They’d have let her know if it had been suicide or accident,” she said bluntly.
Sybylle Dominique drew a long uneven breath.
“Oh, Polly,” she said softly, “oh, Polly.”
“Goodnight.”
The two elderly faces met and the soft cheeks touched.
“I don’t know anything, Sybylle.” Polly’s words came painfully. “You understand, dear, don’t you? I’m upset, but it’s really only because I’m thinking about poor old Matt. Don’t let me put … anything else into your head, will you?”
“Of course not, my girl, of course not.” The tiny crackling voice was full of pity. “Gerry …”
“What about Gerry?” Terror flared in Polly’s tone, but the whisper was very low.
Sybylle’s grip on her sleeve tightened.
“There’s some good in that boy or you couldn’t love him, dearest,” she said. “That’s a law of God and Nature and none of us here will forget it. I’ll give you a ring in the morning, my dear. Now off you go with that staggeringly beautiful child of yours, before my poor little Flo drops on his knees in the gutter. Poor little beasts, isn’t it frightful what they’ve got to find out before they come to the end of that story?”
She was talking to ease the tension and Polly put her arms round her, big handbag and all.
“You’re a dear, Sybbie, you always were. Goodnight, Love. God bless.”
Annabelle and Polly caught the last Number Fifteen ’bus of the evening from the bottom of Regent Street. Florian escorted them to the stopping place and stood looking after the vanishing red monster bearing them away. The old woman led the girl up the stairs to the deserted top deck and along to the front seat, but Annabelle paused to wave to him, sending him home ecstatically happy.
The girl was shiny eyed and delighted with herself. It had been a honey of an evening. Alone, grown up at last, and with someone new and city bred to impress. She turned to Polly as soon as she sat down, concentrating on her for the first time since the meal, eager to thank her and to confide.
“Aunt Polly,” she said seriously, “do you know this has been probably the most wonderful evening of my whole life.”
Polly, who had been staring down the curving street picked out in lights, heard the words as if they were far off and utterly meaningless. Her bleak eyes took in the glow on the young face and closed before its unbearable fatuousness.
“Oh, darling, aren’t you well?” There was disappointment in the girl’s cry as well as compassion, and Polly was stung to life by it.
“I’m tired, that’s all. You had a good evening, did you?” She settled herself on the jolting seat, tucking her heavy black skirts about her, folding her hands over her bag, and raising her elbows so that the girl could slip her hand through the crook in her arm to steady he
rself. “Flo seems to have turned out well,” she ploughed on. “He was pompous as a small boy.”
“Was he? That’s all gone now. I liked him. He’s awfully sensible but terribly young in years.” Annabelle was inclined to sigh over it. “Richard really is more the right age, against mine I mean.”
“Richard.” Polly remembered the name with a sigh of relief. “That’s the pocket-sized tough with the red hair?”
“Did I say tough?” Annabelle was dubious. “He is, of course, but there’s nothing rough about him. He’s formal, if anything. You’ll approve, I think. But look, Auntie, what’s interesting me at the moment is this. Florian says he can get Fellows tickets to the Zoo on Sundays and he knows all the keepers. I could go with him one day, couldn’t I? Apparently there’s a ginger pig there who’s exactly like Robinson Tariat the playwright. Florian says it’s rather the thing at the moment to go and see it and give it …”
“Annabelle, I want to talk to you.” Polly was aware of being brutal. “That is why we’ve come back by ’bus. I’m sorry, my dear, but you’ve got to go home.”
There was complete silence for a while and then the girl said, “Oh. Oh, I see.”
It was only too obvious that she did no such thing. Her lovely face wore a mask of blank dismay and her round eyes were full of tears already. Polly regarded her helplessly.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated.
“Oh, it’s all right…. Is it because I’m too young, or have I done something?”
“Neither. Circumstances have altered, that’s all.”
“Oh.” There was another long pause and the girl sat up, drawing her hand away and stiffening. “I only enjoyed the good time because it was given to me,” she remarked presently. “I didn’t need it. I mean I hope you’ll let me come and see you anyhow—sometimes.”
“No.” Polly winced at the stare of bewilderment and took hold of herself irritably. “No, dear, I don’t want you to. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I want you to go home first thing tomorrow morning and to put your whole trip up here right out of your mind. I want you to forget that I ever wrote to your mother or that you ever came to see me. I shall give you a note to take to your sister. I don’t want her or you to answer it, or ever to try to see me again. I don’t suppose you’ll want to, but anyway I’d rather you didn’t. Is that absolutely clear?”
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