Murder in the Museum, A British Library Crime Classic

by John Rowland

  “No,” he answered. “Why the hell we keep a squad of men here, with the special job of looking after missing people, I can’t think. They don’t know their job, Cunningham, that’s what’s the matter.” Savagely he pressed a bell-push which was on his desk, and a sleepy-looking policeman appeared. His sleepiness annoyed Shelley even more, though the fact that it was now 1 a.m. should have been enough to account for the matter.

  “Send Sergeant Owens to me at once,” Shelley ordered.

  “I don’t know if he’s gone home or not, sir,” replied the constable.

  Shelley grinned. But there was no humour in his grin, merely an angry satisfaction that his tangled mind was involving others. Cunningham was surprised. Not for years had he known the chief to be so worried and upset. This case, he told himself, had “got Shelley’s goat,” and got it with a vengeance!

  He listened. Shelley was speaking. “He must be here,” he said, with some satisfaction. “He has my orders not to go home until some information comes through—and if it had come through he would have brought it to me without delay.”

  “Very good, sir,” said the constable, with the air of a sleepy butler, and retired.

  Soon Sergeant Owens came in. He too was worried and upset. He realised that the disappearance of a noted Oxford don (and a don with a cousin in the Cabinet!) was something that simply cried out for investigation. And he was only too well aware that as yet his investigations had not brought in the results which those in authority would be certain, ere long, to demand.

  “Now, Owens,” said Shelley briskly, “how is the search going?”

  “Not too well, I’m afraid, sir,” answered Owens apologetically.

  “Huh!” Shelley’s exclamation was a wordless grunt, but it was far more expressive of his annoyance and disgust than a long and sarcastic sentence would have been.

  “We’ve traced the hotel where he usually stays in London, sir,” he said. “It’s the Prince’s, in Bayswater. He hasn’t been there for three months or more.”

  “Go on.”

  “He has various friends in London. Mr. Lucas, the scientist, who lives at Hampstead, is one. He’s not seen him, but he had a letter yesterday saying that Crocker would be in town within the next week or two, and would be calling. He said he’d drop him a line later, and let him know day and time and so on.”

  “That’s a point that would be worth following up,” Shelley remarked. “Did he give any reason for this visit to London?”

  “None. But then that’s nothing unusual, for Lucas was quite accustomed to receiving such letters from Crocker. He said that Crocker was often in town to do some work at the British Museum. He did a lot of reading and research there, and…”

  Shelley interrupted him. “I’ve a ‘hunch,’ Owens,” he said. “Cunningham!”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Cunningham, prompt as ever.

  “Do you happen to know if there’s anyone on duty at the British Museum now?”

  “Sure to be some caretakers or something, I should think,” said Cunningham.

  “I didn’t ask what you think,” Shelley snapped. “I asked if you knew.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, ring up, and find out. If there’s a caretaker, get him to let us in, and tell him to get the keys of the Reading Room if he can. We shall be around there in a few minutes, and then we shall see what we shall see.”

  The Reading Room was a strangely deserted place when they entered it. The caretaker had switched on the lights, but the tall, domed room, its shadows fading off into the mysterious darknesses of the roof, was curiously eerie and weird. Cunningham, hard-boiled materialist though he was, found himself shuddering and glancing behind him as if he feared that some unseen assassin was on his track.

  But, in spite of Shelley’s insistent “hunch,” they found no trace of Dr. Crocker. There was not a soul in the room except themselves. They peered behind desks and under tables. Shelley even insisted on going up to the metal galleries which run around the room, but the place was deserted and still as the grave.

  Shelley’s temper, which had been bad enough before, was now in the vilest mood that Cunningham had ever seen it. The inspector was hungry, thirsty, tired, and sleepy. He had worked very hard for several hours, and he felt that he had nothing to show for it.

  “Back to the Yard,” he said shortly, and they made their way to the door, the caretaker locking the doors behind them, and escorting them down to the big iron gates which led to Great Russell Street.

  As they approached the gates Shelley looked around him with sudden interest.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “What’s what?” asked Cunningham in his turn.

  “That…over there,” said Shelley, pointing.

  Cunningham looked in the direction indicated, but could see nothing at all.

  “Has it been raining at all today?” asked Shelley.

  “Why, no,” said Cunningham.

  “Well, there’s a pool of something on the concrete path over there,” said Shelley. “I caught a flash as the light of the street lamp was reflected in it.”

  “Expect that they’ve been washing the path,” Cunningham suggested, but Shelley laughed the idea to scorn.

  “Do you really think so?” he asked. “Well, let’s have a look at it. Have you got a torch with you?” Cunningham nodded. “Well, get it out, and then we can see.”

  They strode towards the spot that Shelley had indicated, and Cunningham produced his electric torch, shining it at his chief’s directions. There was certainly a pool of liquid there. But the liquid was not water.

  “What the devil?” Cunningham muttered.

  “Not the devil,” Shelley corrected him, with an eerie chuckle. “The murderer.”

  “What do you mean, sir?” Cunningham asked.

  Shelley stooped and touched the little pool of liquid. It was unpleasantly sticky.

  “Blood, Cunningham,” he said. “There’s been something very queer going on whilst we were inside that building.”

  Cunningham was flashing the light around him, trying to pierce the gloom and to see whether there was any sensible explanation of this strange affair.

  “Look!” he suddenly exclaimed, and Shelley looked at the torch-beam, cutting the darkness like a knife.

  There were a series of drops of blood, leading from the pool which had first attracted their attention, off into the dim distance at the side of the mighty building of the British Museum, which towered above them, like the ghost of some eastern castle.

  “Follow this trail, Cunningham,” said Shelley; “though I haven’t much doubt of what we shall find at the end of it.”

  “What do you mean, sir?” asked Cunningham in awestruck tones.

  “Use your imagination, man,” snapped Shelley. “Anyhow, you’ll find out soon enough.”

  The drops of blood grew scarcer as they walked along. But Shelley, stooping at intervals, found that they also grew definitely fresher, as if they had been dropped more recently. At one point there was again a little pool of blood. Someone had been badly wounded, that was obvious enough, and at this point he had doubtless paused to rest. The gruesome trail continued, however, and before long they arrived at the end of the road.

  A man lay on his face before them. Sticking from his back was the hilt of a nasty-looking knife. Here was the source of the blood all right. Here was the man whose dreadful tracks they had been following around the forecourt of the British Museum. He was a tall man—over six feet in height—and his hair was iron-grey.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” asked Cunningham in puzzled tones. He was, he admitted to himself, both perturbed and scared.

  Shelley grinned. Again it was not a pleasant grin, but this time it spoke volumes of relief. Cunningham thought it curious that his chief should be almost pleased that yet another
murder had been committed.

  “Has this got anything to do with our case?” he asked.

  Again Shelley grinned. “That, my dear Cunningham,” he said, indicating the body, “is our case.”

  “You mean…?” Cunningham paused.

  “I mean,” said Shelley, “that we have found the missing Dr. Crocker.”

  It was almost with relief that Cunningham set about the details of practical work which the preliminary stages of any murder case involve. He telephoned to Scotland Yard for a doctor, for finger-print experts, and for photographers. He assisted Shelley in a rapid examination of the body. It was still warm. The man had been dead only for a few minutes at most—which was clear enough, in any case, from the fact that the blood had still been in a semi-liquid condition when they had found it.

  Soon the police cars came swinging up, and the astonished caretaker had to open wide the main gates of the British Museum to admit them—the first time for many years that they had been opened at such an incredible hour. The forecourt filled with activity, and the body of Dr. Crocker was taken into the main museum building for the doctor to make his examination.

  “Not much need for me this time, Shelley,” he said, when he had glanced at it.

  “None at all, I imagine,” answered Shelley. “Still, it’s a formality that we have to go through. Some damned fool of a coroner would kick up a fuss if we didn’t, anyway, and we have to observe all the rules.”

  “Well,” said the doctor, after quite a perfunctory examination, “there’s no doubt about how the poor devil died, anyhow. That stab penetrated right through, just grazing the heart.”

  “He would have lived for a short time afterwards, I suppose?” said Shelley.

  “Oh, yes. He would be unconscious in three or four minutes,” replied the doctor. “But before unconsciousness came on he’d probably be able to be quite active, able to walk and all that sort of thing, you know.”

  “He walked quite a considerable distance,” said Shelley, and explained the way in which, together with Sergeant Cunningham, he had tracked the man across the forecourt.

  The doctor nodded thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said. “He’d bleed a good deal, of course. Still,” he added in more cheerful tones, “this is one of the few cases in which there’s none of that damned argument about rigor mortis. Why, the fellow’s not been dead half an hour yet.”

  “No,” said Shelley. “I can’t think how the murderer got out.”

  There was a scurrying outside the door of the room in which they were talking, and Shelley hurriedly strode over to it.

  “What the devil’s all the row about?” he asked, and Cunningham hurried up to him.

  “A most amazing thing, sir,” he said.

  “What is it?” asked Shelley.

  “I’ve just seen someone in Great Russell Street, outside the railings, sir,” he replied.

  “That’s not surprising,” said Shelley. “After all, with all this activity going on, I expect we’ve got about half London walking about looking at us. It isn’t every day that the curious-minded Cockney gets a chance of seeing Scotland Yard at work.”

  “Oh, but that isn’t what I mean, sir,” said Cunningham. “I saw a man connected with the case. He ran, and managed to get away before I was able to lay hands on him.”

  “Explain yourself,” roared Shelley, quite losing patience at last. “Who is it that you saw in Great Russell Street, and allowed to get away from you?”

  Cunningham lowered his voice to a suitable pitch of impressiveness. “Mr. Henry Baker,” he said.

  Chapter VIII

  The Question of the Will

  Shelley managed to snatch a few hours’ sleep, and was up betimes the next morning. He splashed about in a cold bath, and then had a rub-down with a rough towel, this procedure being the best remedy he knew for making up for lack of sleep.

  Then he went around to Scotland Yard, to face an equally tired and sleepy Cunningham.

  “Look here, Cunningham,” he said, “there’s only one thing that strikes me about this case.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Cunningham obediently, and waited for further instructions.

  “There are so many threads that have to be followed up that I think we shall have to continue to work separately, and compare notes at the end of each day. How does that strike you?”

  “Well,” said Cunningham doubtfully, “if you think that I can tackle things on my own…”

  “Of course you can,” said Shelley, with a kindly smile. “You can question Mr. Moses Moss every bit as efficiently as I can myself.”

  “You think so, sir?” Cunningham still sounded a trifle doubtful, but felt none the less grateful for this praise from a quarter where praise was rare.

  “And in the meantime,” Shelley went on, considering that any reply to this question was unnecessary, “I think that I shall investigate the little question of the will of the late Professor Arnell.”

  “That certainly seems to be something that demands looking into, sir,” Cunningham admitted.

  “It certainly does,” said Shelley. “If I am not sadly mistaken, that is going to provide the crux of the whole matter. Money is usually at the bottom of a murder case of this sort, and, if one finds the money motive, one can tell where to look for suspects.”

  “Good luck, anyhow, sir,” said Cunningham with a smile.

  “Same to you, Cunningham,” said Shelley, “and I’m thinking that we shall need all the luck that’s going, if we’re to pull this thing off.”

  The office of Messrs. Samuel, Grant, and Samuel was high up in an office building in Chancery Lane—only a door or two away from an office which Shelley had frequently visited in connection with another murder case that he was investigating a year or two previously.

  Mr. Samuel was a pleasant-looking young man, who swivelled around his revolving chair, and held out his hand frankly to Shelley.

  “What can I do for you, Inspector?” he asked, a note of curiosity creeping into his voice.

  “I want some information, sir,” said Shelley, “which I think you can give me.”

  “If it’s at all possible, Inspector, I will,” replied the solicitor. “Always ready to assist in the work of you limbs of the law, you know.”

  He laughed, and Shelley felt more at home with him. The detective had a theory, which had up to the present invariably proved right, that a man’s laugh was the most characteristic thing about him, and that it was possible to judge, according as to whether a man frankly guffawed or secretively sniggered, whether that man was of a good, dependable character or the direct opposite. As soon as he had heard the pleasant, deep-throated laugh of Mr. Samuel, he felt dead certain that this was a man to be trusted, a man in whose word one could place the most implicit confidence. And he proceeded accordingly, being sure that his instinct in this matter could not be at fault.

  “It’s about the death of Professor Arnell,” he explained.

  Samuel nodded. “I was expecting someone to come around about that matter, Inspector,” he said.

  “You knew he was dead?”

  Samuel smiled. “I have my human weaknesses, Inspector,” he said, “and one of them is that I like to read my morning paper at breakfast. I saw the professor’s death reported in it, and guessed that there would be some sort of enquiry about it, since apparently he died suddenly.”

  “Not only,” said Shelley, “did he die suddenly, Mr. Samuel—he died mysteriously.”

  “Mysteriously?” Samuel looked completely baffled, and then his face cleared up. “You mean suicide?”

  Shelley shook his head solemnly. “No, sir,” he said. “I mean—murder!”

  “Good God!” Samuel bounced in his chair, sitting bolt upright in amazement, and staring at Shelley as if he were a ghost. “Who on earth would want to murder that poor harmless old fellow?”


  “That,” said Shelley somewhat sententiously, “is what I have to find out, if I can, and I am relying on you, Mr. Samuel, to help me.”

  “Of course I’ll help you all I can,” replied the solicitor, “though I don’t see precisely what I can do.”

  “Well,” Shelley explained, “first of all, have you any papers belonging to the old man here? If so, we might get a line on the motive and so on from them.”

  Samuel pressed a button on his desk, and a neat, businesslike typist appeared.

  “Get out the box of documents belonging to Professor Arnell, will you, Miss Watkins?” directed the solicitor. “And bring them along here without delay.”

  “Yes, Mr. Samuel,” said the girl, and retired once more to some inner sanctum where apparently she worked.

  “Dreadful business,” Samuel commented while she was away. “How did it happen?”

  Shelley gave him a brief resumé of the circumstances of the crime, but without giving any indication of the general situation, or of the few facts which they had unearthed with regard to the possible identity of the murderer.

  Soon, however, Miss Watkins had produced a steel box of documents, had placed it on the desk, together with a fearsome-looking heavy key, and had once more retired to her private office.

  “You have the key as well as the box?” asked Shelley in some surprise.

  “A duplicate,” the solicitor explained, applying the key to the lock. “The Professor did not like the idea that it might be necessary to get a locksmith to break open the box. He was a very absent-minded old gentleman, and he thought that he might easily lose the key. So he had a duplicate one made, which we kept in the office here.”

  “Where was it kept?” asked Shelley, making a note of this state of affairs—for, he told himself, it might afterwards turn out to be important to know who had access to this box of documents.

  “In the safe,” replied the other, throwing back the lid of the box, and disclosing a mass of papers.

  “Any possibility of anyone getting access to your safe?” pursued Shelley.