by Mark Place
‘Wasn’t he ever prosecuted?’
‘No—we’ve made inquiries but it isn’t easy to get much information. He changed his name fairly often. And although they think at the Yard that Harry Castleton, Raymond Blair, Lawrence Dalton, Roger Byron were all one and the same person, they never could prove it. The women, you see, wouldn’t tell. They preferred to lose their money. The man was really more of a name than anything—cropping up here and there—always the same pattern—but incredibly elusive. Roger Byron, say, would disappear from Southend, and a man called Lawrence Dalton would commence operations in Newcastle on Tyne. He was shy of being photographed—eluded his lady friends’ desire to snapshot him. All this goes quite a long time back—fifteen to twenty years. About that time he seemed really to disappear. The rumour spread about that he was dead—but some people said he had gone abroad—’
‘Anyway, nothing was heard of him until he turned up, dead, on Miss Pebmarsh’s sitting-room carpet?’
I said.
‘Exactly.’
‘It certainly opens up possibilities.’
‘It certainly does.’
‘A woman scorned who never forgot?’ I suggested.
‘It does happen, you know. There are women with long memories who don’t forget—’
‘And if such a woman were to go blind—a second affliction on top of the other—’
‘That’s only conjecture. Nothing to substantiate it as yet.’
‘What was the wife like—Mrs—what was it?—Merlina Rival? What a name! It can’t be her own.’
‘Her real name is Flossie Gapp. The other she invented. More suitable for her way of life.’
‘What is she? A tart?’
‘Not a professional.’
‘What used to be called, tactfully, a lady of easy virtue?’
‘I should say she was a good-natured woman, and one willing to oblige her friends. Described herself as an ex-actress. Occasionally did “hostess” work. Quite likeable.’
‘Reliable?’
‘As reliable as most. Her recognition was quite positive. No hesitation.’
‘That’s a blessing.’
‘Yes. I was beginning to despair. The amount of wives I’ve had here! I’d begun to think it’s a wise woman who knows her own husband. Mind you, I think Mrs Rival might have known a little more about her husband than she lets on.’
‘Has she herself ever been mixed up in criminal activities?’
‘Not for the record. I think she may have had, perhaps still has, some shady friends. Nothing serious—just fiddles—that kind of thing.’
‘What about the clocks?’
‘Didn’t mean a thing to her. I think she was speaking the truth. We’ve traced where they came from—Portobello Market. That’s the ormolu and the Dresden china. And very little help that is! You know what it’s like on a Saturday there. Bought by an American lady, the stall keeper thinks —but I’d say that’s just a guess. Portobello Market is full of American tourists. His wife says it was a man bought them. She can’t remember what he looked like. The silver one came from a silversmith in Bournemouth.
A tall lady who wanted a present for her little girl! All she can remember about her is she wore a green hat.’
‘And the fourth clock? The one that disappeared?’
‘No comment,’ said Hardcastle.
I knew just what he meant by that.
Chapter 23
Colin Lamb’s Narrative
The hotel I was staying in was a poky little place by the station. It served a decent grill but that was all that could be said for it. Except, of course, that it was cheap. At ten o’clock the following morning I rang the Cavendish Secretarial Bureau and said that I wanted a shorthand typist to take down some letters and retype a business agreement. My name was Douglas Weatherby and I was staying at the Clarendon Hotel (extraordinarily tatty hotels always have grand names). Was Miss Sheila Webb available? A friend of mine had found her very efficient. I was in luck. Sheila could come straight away. She had, however, an appointment at twelve o’clock. I said that I would have finished with her well before that as I had an appointment myself. I was outside the swing doors of the Clarendon when Sheila appeared. I stepped forward.
‘Mr Douglas Weatherby at your service,’ I said.
‘Was it you rang up?’
‘It was.’
‘But you can’t do things like that.’ She looked scandalized.
‘Why not? I’m prepared to pay the Cavendish Bureau for your services. What does it matter to them if we spend your valuable and expensive time in the Buttercup Café just across the street instead of dictating dull letters beginning “Yours of the 3rd prontissimo to hand,” etc. Come on, let’s go and drink indifferent coffee in peaceful surroundings.’
The Buttercup Café lived up to its name by being violently and aggressively yellow. Formica table tops, plastic cushions and cups and saucers were all canary colour. I ordered coffee and scones for two. It was early enough for us to have the place practically to ourselves. When the waitress had taken the order and gone away, we looked across the table at each other. ‘Are you all right, Sheila?’
‘What do you mean—am I all right?’
Her eyes had such dark circles under them that they looked violet rather than blue. ‘Have you been having a bad time?’
‘Yes—no—I don’t know. I thought you had gone away?’
‘I had. I’ve come back.’
‘Why?’
‘You know why.’
Her eyes dropped.
‘I’m afraid of him,’ she said after a pause of at least a minute, which is a long time.
‘Who are you afraid of?’
‘That friend of yours—that inspector. He thinks…he thinks I killed that man, and that I killed Edna too…’
‘Oh, that’s just his manner,’ I said reassuringly. ‘He always goes about looking as though he suspected everybody.’
‘No, Colin, it’s not like that at all. It’s no good saying things just to cheer me up. He’s thought that I had something to do with it right from the beginning.’
‘My dear girl, there’s no evidence against you. Just because you were there on the spot that day, because someone put you on the spot…’
She interrupted. ‘He thinks I put myself on the spot. He thinks it’s all a trumped-up story. He thinks that Edna in some way knew about it. He thinks that Edna recognized my voice on the telephone pretending to be Miss Pebmarsh.’
‘Was it your voice?’ I asked.
‘No, of course it wasn’t. I never made that telephone call. I’ve always told you so.’
‘Look here, Sheila,’ I said. ‘Whatever you tell anyone else, you’ve got to tell me the truth.’
‘So you don’t believe a word I say!’
‘Yes, I do. You might have made that telephone call that day for some quite innocent reason. Someone may have asked you to make it, perhaps told you it was part of a joke, and then you got scared and once you’d lied about it, you had to go on lying. Was it like that?’
‘No, no, no! How often have I got to tell you?’
‘It’s all very well, Sheila, but there’s something you’re not telling me. I want you to trust me. If Hardcastle has got something against you, something that he hasn’t told me about—’
She interrupted again. ‘Do you expect him to tell you everything?’
‘Well, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t. We’re roughly members of the same profession.’ The waitress brought our order at this point. The coffee was as pale as the latest fashionable shade of mink.
‘I didn’t know you had anything to do with the police,’ Sheila said, slowly stirring her coffee round and round.
‘It’s not exactly the police. It’s an entirely different branch. But what I was getting at was, that if Dick doesn’t tell me things he knows about you, it’s for a special reason. It’s because he thinks I’m interested in you. Well, I am interested in you. I’m more than that. I’m for y
ou, Sheila, whatever you’ve done. You came out of that house that day scared to death. You were really scared. You weren’t pretending. You couldn’t have acted a part the way you did.’
‘Of course I was scared. I was terrified.’
‘Was it only finding the dead body that scared you? Or was there something else?’
‘What else should there be?’
I braced myself.
‘Why did you pinch that clock with Rosemary written across it?’
‘What do you mean? Why should I pinch it?’
‘I’m asking you why you did.’
‘I never touched it.’
‘You went back into that room because you’d left your gloves there, you said. You weren’t wearing any gloves that day. A fine September day. I’ve never seen you wear gloves. All right then, you went back into that room and you picked up that clock. Don’t lie to me about that. That’s what you did, isn’t it?’ She was silent for a moment or two, crumbling up the scones on her plate.
‘All right,’ she said in a voice that was almost a whisper. ‘All right. I did. I picked up the clock and I shoved it into my bag and I came out again.’
‘But why did you do it?’
‘Because of the name—Rosemary. It’s my name.’
‘Your name is Rosemary, not Sheila?’
‘It’s both. Rosemary Sheila.’
‘And that was enough, just that? The fact that you’d the same name as was written on one of those clocks?’
She heard my disbelief, but she stuck to it. ‘I was scared, I tell you.’ I looked at her. Sheila was my girl—the girl I wanted—and wanted for keeps. But it wasn’t any use having illusions about her. Sheila was a liar and probably always would be a liar. It was her way of fighting for survival—the quick easy glib denial. It was a child’s weapon—and she’d probably never got out of using it. If I wanted Sheila I must accept her as she was—be at hand to prop up the weak places. We’ve all got our weak places. Mine were different from Sheila’s but they were there. I made up my mind and attacked. It was the only way. ‘It was your clock, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘It belonged to you?’
She gasped. ‘How did you know?’
‘Tell me about it.’
The story tumbled out then in a helter-skelter of words. She’d had the clock nearly all her life. Until she was about six years old she’d always gone by the name of Rosemary—but she hated it and had insisted on being called Sheila. Lately the clock had been giving trouble. She’d taken it with her to leave at a clock-repairing shop not far from the Bureau. But she’d left it somewhere—in the bus, perhaps, or in the milk bar where she went for a sandwich at lunch time.
‘How long was this before the murder at 19, Wilbraham Crescent?’ About a week, she thought. She hadn’t bothered much, because the clock was old and always going wrong and it would really be better to get a new one. And then:
‘I didn’t notice it at first,’ she said. ‘Not when I went into the room. And then I—found the dead man. I was paralysed. I straightened up after touching him and I just stood there staring and my clock was facing me on a table by the fire—my clock—and there was blood on my hand—and then she came in and I forgot everything because she was going to tread on him. And—and so—I bolted. To get away—that’s all I wanted.’
I nodded. ‘And later?’
‘I began to think. She said she hadn’t telephoned for me—then who had—who’d got me there and put my clock there? I—I said that about leaving gloves and—and stuffed it into my bag. I suppose it was—stupid of me.’
‘You couldn’t have done anything sillier,’ I told her. ‘In some ways, Sheila, you’ve got no sense at all.’
‘But someone is trying to involve me. That postcard. It must have been sent by someone who knows I took that clock. And the postcard itself—the Old Bailey. If my father was a criminal—’
‘What do you know about your father and mother?’
‘My father and mother died in an accident when I was a baby. That’s what my aunt told me, what I’ve always been told. But she never speaks about them, she never tells me anything about them. Sometimes, once or twice when I asked, she’s told me things about them that aren’t the same as what she’s told me before. So I’ve always known, you see, that there’s something wrong.’
‘Go on.’
‘So I think that perhaps my father was some kind of criminal—perhaps even, a murderer. Or perhaps it was my mother. People don’t say your parents are dead and can’t or won’t tell you anything about those parents, unless the real reason is something—something that they think would be too awful for you to know.’
‘So you got yourself all worked up. It’s probably quite simple. You may just have been an illegitimate child.’
‘I thought of that, too. People do sometimes try and hide that kind of thing from children. It’s very stupid. They’d much better just tell them the real truth. It doesn’t matter as much nowadays. But the whole point is, you see, that I don’t know. I don’t know what’s behind all this. Why was I called Rosemary? It’s not a family name. It means remembrance, doesn’t it?’
‘Which could be a nice meaning,’ I pointed out.
‘Yes, it could…But I don’t feel it was. Anyway, after the inspector had asked me questions that day, I began to think. Why had someone wanted to get me there? To get me there with a strange man who was dead? Or was it the dead man who had wanted me to meet him there? Was he, perhaps—my father, and he wanted me to do something for him? And then someone had come along and killed him instead. Or did someone want to make out from the beginning that it was I who had killed him? Oh, I was all mixed up, frightened. It seemed somehow as if everything was being made to point at me. Getting me there, and a dead man and my name—Rosemary—on my own clock that didn’t belong there. So I got in a panic and did something that was stupid, as you say.’
I shook my head at her.
‘You’ve been reading or typing too many thrillers and mystery stories,’ I said accusingly. ‘What about Edna? Haven’t you any idea at all what she’d got into her head about you? Why did she come all the way to your house to talk to you when she saw you every day at the office?’
‘I’ve no idea. She couldn’t have thought I had anything to do with the murder. She couldn’t.’
‘Could it have been something she overheard and made a mistake about?’
‘There was nothing, I tell you. Nothing!’
I wondered. I couldn’t help wondering…Even now, I didn’t trust Sheila to tell the truth.
‘Have you got any personal enemies? Disgruntled young men, jealous girls, someone or other a bit unbalanced who might have it in for you?’ It sounded most unconvincing as I said it.
‘Of course not.’
So there it was. Even now I wasn’t sure about that clock. It was a fantastic story. 413. What did those figures mean? Why write them on a postcard with the word: REMEMBER unless they would mean something to the person to whom the postcard was sent?
I sighed, paid the bill and got up.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. (Surely the most fatuous words in the English or any other language.) ‘The Colin Lamb Personal Service is on the job. You’re going to be all right, and we’re going to be married and live happily ever after on practically nothing a year. By the way,’ I said, unable to stop myself, though I knew it would have been better to end on the romantic note, but the Colin Lamb Personal Curiosity drove me on. ‘What have you actually done with that clock? Hidden it in your stocking drawer?’
She waited just a moment before she said:
‘I put it in the dustbin of the house next door.’
I was quite impressed. It was simple and probably effective. To think of that had been clever of her.
Perhaps I had under-estimated Sheila.
Chapter 24
Colin Lamb’s Narrative
I
When Sheila had gone, I went across to the Clarendon, packed my bag and left it ready with th
e porter. It was the kind of hotel where they are particular about your checking out before noon. Then I set out. My route took me past the police station, and after hesitating a moment, I went in. I asked for Hardcastle and he was there. I found him frowning down at a letter in his hand. ‘I’m off again this evening, Dick,’ I said. ‘Back to London.’ He looked up at me with a thoughtful expression. ‘Will you take a piece of advice from me?’
‘No,’ I said immediately. He paid no attention. People never do when they want to give you advice.
‘I should get away—and stay away—if you know what’s best for you.’
‘Nobody can judge what’s best for anyone else.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘I’ll tell you something, Dick. When I’ve tidied up my present assignment, I’m quitting. At least—I think I am.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m like an old-fashioned Victorian clergyman. I have Doubts.’
‘Give yourself time.’
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. I asked him what he himself was looking so worried about. ‘Read that.’ He passed me the letter he had been studying.
Dear Sir,
I’ve just thought of something. You asked me if my husband had any identifying marks and I said he hadn’t. But I was wrong. Actually he has a kind of scar behind his left ear. He cut himself with a razor when a dog we had jumped up at him, and he had to have it stitched up. It was so small and unimportant I never thought of it the other day.
Yours truly,
Merlina Rival
‘She writes a nice dashing hand,’ I said, ‘though I’ve never really fancied purple ink. Did the deceased have a scar?’
‘He had a scar all right. Just where she says.’
‘Didn’t she see it when she was shown the body?’
Hardcastle shook his head.
‘The ear covers it. You have to bend the ear forward before you can see it.’
‘Then that’s all right. Nice piece of corroboration. What’s eating you?’ Hardcastle said gloomily that this case was the devil! He asked if I would be seeing my French or Belgian friend in London.
‘Probably. Why?’