by Bruce, Leo
He was faced again with the dilemma which troubled him in most of his cases—was he justified in going his solitary way, making his exhaustive personal enquiries, sometimes doing no more than absorb the atmosphere of a crime, while the murderer was still at large and liable to strike again? It seemed pedantic, almost heartless. Yet what else could he do? He was no policeman with the forces of order at his command. He was no Holmes, who would arm himself with a stout cudgel or even a pistol on occasion and go flying, as it were, at the throat of the enemy. He was—outwardly at least—a mild history master whose private passion was the investigation of crime by his own methods, in his own time, through what talents of perspicacity he possessed. He could not change his character or procedure because he believed that another blow might fall before he had reached any useful conclusion. He could only peg away, question after question, encouraging confidences, noting demeanour, drawing makeshift conclusions, until the big conclusion was drawn. Sometimes, as in his advice to Heatherwell, he might do something to check one dangerous possibility. But on the whole his part was rarely an active one and he did not aspire to those feats of agility, heroism, and unarmed combat which made the exploits of his rivals, particularly in America, so exciting.
Back to the grindstone, he thought at last, and set out to see Joyce Ribbing’s sister in Sevenoaks.
Beryl, more frequently and considerately known as Bee, was a hardy, dog-owning, golf-playing woman, married to a company director named Knapstick. Carolus found her at home in a breezy little house surrounded with flourishing spring bulbs, an MG car at her gate and a poodle in the hall.
“About Joyce?” she said loudly. “All right. I suppose so. Come in. They haven’t caught the creature, have they?”
“Not so far as I know,” said Carolus. “But I’m not the police. Just a private individual deeply interested.”
“Fair enough,” said Bee. “Have a drink? Good. I feel like a snifter at this time of day. What kind of madman was it who killed my sister?”
“A very clever madman. Three murders in one area within a few weeks and no arrest as yet argues considerable intelligence.”
“Or luck,” said Bee. “More soda? Yes, it could be luck, couldn’t it? Jack the Ripper did two in one night. Cigarette?”
“Jack the Ripper’s murders were in 1888 and 1889 when the police force had very little knowledge of forensic psychology.”
“How many were there?” asked Bee.
“Nine occasions. Ten women. But they were all prostitutes. And all in the East End.”
“I daresay. But how do you know there won’t be ten of these? The only difference I see is that the district and the victims are more respectable.”
“The original Ripper was never identified,” reflected Carolus. “There have been some interesting theories about that, but nothing very convincing.”
“You think this one will be caught?”
“I hope so. I hope very soon, before …”
“Exactly,” said Bee. “Before there’s another. But how? How can one of these mass murderers be caught unless in the act?”
“I don’t know,” said Carolus. “But tell me about your sister.”
“Joyce? Very much a mother. Devoted to the kids. But seemed afraid she was missing something. The doctor’s a bit of a stick. Conscientious and sound but not exactly sparkling. Poor old Joyce wanted a break now and again. Sometimes she would come over here. Seemed to think we knew how to live. Well, we try.”
“You’ve said a great deal, Mrs. Knapstick. You and she were great friends?”
“I shouldn’t say that, really. Oh, I know the line—’there is no friend like a sister’ and that. But I don’t think we were so intimate. It was months before she told me about her young man.”
“But she did tell you?”
“Eventually, yes. And pretty ghastly he sounded.”
“You never met him?”
“No, I doubt if he ever came down to this part of the world. One of these metropolitan types who never go anywhere out of the sound of Bow bells except to Cannes for a month.”
“Wealthy?”
“That I don’t know. Joyce never discussed it. She and I both have a little money of our own but can’t touch the capital. Its not much use nowadays—about five hundred a year each.”
“Will that go to Dr. Ribbing now?”
“No. The will was made before either of us were married. Hers will come to me. Hardly an inducement for murder, though. Have another drink?”
“May I ask something that will seem rather impertinent?”
“Go ahead.”
“Was this man Turrell the first… I mean since your sister’s marriage?”
“I should say undoubtedly. For one thing I would have known. For another she wasn’t at all the type for these fashionable infidelities. I think she was carried off her feet by Turrell. He was completely out of character.”
“When did it start?”
“Some time last winter. A bit more than a year ago.”
“And was either of them … getting tired of it?”
“I don’t think so. It had become rather prosaic, I gathered. Joyce never dreamt of breaking up her marriage for it and Turrell—well, you can imagine TurrelFs attitude when I tell you that they met once a week as regularly as clockwork.”
“Yes. I see.”
“There was absolutely nothing of a grande passion about it, if that’s what you think. When I say Joyce was carried off her feet at first, I mean by the whole thing. She’d become stale, down in that dreary suburb, and this meant quite simply, a nice change.”
“Yet Dr. Ribbing knew?”
“Joyce thought so, but they never discussed it.”
“She wasn’t quite as frank as you are, perhaps?”
“Am I frank? I think I just take a very ordinary view of things. I should have thought Joyce was rather frank, but it needs more than frankness to tell your husband you’re having an affair for the first time since you married him. Especially with two children. You haven’t met the doctor yet?”
“No. I haven’t met Turrell, either. I intend to, of course.”
“You don’t suspect them, do you? That would be too absurd.”
“Suspect. Suspect. I don’t know what to make of the word in this case. I don’t think that even Jack the Ripper’s victims were chosen quite by chance. Christie’s certainly weren’t. Nor were Heath’s.”
“You mean you suspect that this Stabber character had something to do with Joyce?”
“Something to do with Albert Park, anyway.”
“That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it. But if you’re thinking in terms of motive Joyce is out. Who in the world had any reason to kill her?”
“Yet someone did kill her. Person or Persons Unknown.”
“I don’t dispute that. Though you sleuths look so much round everything that had death come in any other way I honestly believe you’d have talked of the chances of suicide. Or a wave of suicides. One for the road?”
Carolus came away from Bee Knapstick’s cheerful home with a new resolution. He would stick to his line of enquiry but intensify it by moving right into the pious gloom of Albert Park. If it could be arranged— and he thought he saw a way—he would stay in Grab-tree Avenue itself and wake and pass his days among the villas and avenues and basements and railings and television sets of that forbiddingly respectable suburb. Though he did not want to admit it, he was reduced now to hoping for a piece of luck, something to occur which might give him a firmer lead than the vaporous theory with which he had been playing.
It was not to facilitate his enquiries. He could make those while still sleeping at night in his comfortable home in Newminster. It was to try to see the place as its people saw it, to take his evening wallop in the doubtless exclusive saloon bar of the Mitre, to hear and see and perhaps sense what was going on.
Somewhere here, just out of reach, perhaps, was that elusive thing he was not ashamed to call a clue. Something, sooner or l
ater, must break. Dyke, no doubt, had people doing what he was about to do, drinking it all in. For him, Carolus, there was no other way. However distasteful it might be he would become a temporary resident of Albert Park.
Besides, he had not merely been frightening poor Heatherwell last night in an attempt to discourage his unfortunate mania. There really was danger for that man and perhaps for others and Carolus could do something to lessen that danger.
He rang the bell of number 32.
A lean weak-faced man opened the door, easily recognizable as ‘the tall woman’ in normal clothes.
“Oh it’s you,” he said, seeming relieved rather than ashamed or reproachful. “Come in.”
“Look here, Heatherwell. I want to make a suggestion. Your wife’s away indefinitely, you say, and you’re quite alone. Would it be possible for me to be your paying guest for a week or two?”
The man’s startled weak eyes watched him closely.
“I really meant what I said last night,” went on Carolus. “You are in danger, in more ways than one. I think it would be safer for you, and perhaps others, if I stayed with you.”
“To spy on me,” Heatherwell said, almost in a whisper.
“No. But, if you like, to spy on the whole district. I’m not moving fast enough. I’m getting worried and want to be on the spot.”
“There’s no one” to look after this house,” said Heatherwell. “Not even a char. I do what I can but I’m in town all day.”
“It certainly doesn’t look neglected. And there being no one here suits me excellently. I don’t want it known that I’m here.”
A faint smile came to HeatherwelFs face.
“You’ve got some hopes. It would be known at once.”
“I don’t think so. I’m gambling on that. Eventually, but not at once, if both of us are cautious. You, at any-rate, could be relied on not to say anything?”
“I could, I suppose, so long as I’m … all right. But you’d better face it, Deene, I’m a case for a psychiatrist, as you saw last night.”
“I’ll chance that, too. At least you would not advertize the fact that I’m staying with you.”
Heatherwell looked up furtively.
“I haven’t agreed yet,” he said. “And what could advertize it more than that bloody great car of yours?”
“Oh don’t be silly. I shall leave that in a garage. It isn’t outside now.”
Heatherwell was still thoughtful. Then he made an effort to speak bluntly.
“Look here,” he said, “do you suspect me of these murders?”
“I suspect no one person at present,” said Carolus steadily.
“But you think I may have done them?”
“You or one of several hundred people.”
“I can prove …”
“You don’t need to. Will you agree to my proposal?”
“I suppose so. I’ve been too much alone, anyway, since my wife left. There’s quite a decent spare bedroom. It hasn’t been used for a long time but I could soon get it straight. Only…”
“Well?”
“Will you mind if I talk to you? There’s a lot I want to get off my mind.”
Carolus reflected on the irony of this. So often, in investigations, he had longed to hear those very words and never, till now when it probably would serve no purpose, had he heard them.
“Certainly. Talk as much as you like. Haven’t you any friends in the neighbourhood?”
“Friends? No. I’ve a few acquaintances in this avenue, I suppose. I haven’t had a friend for years.”
“You mustn’t mistake me for one,” said Carolus warningly. “I’m an investigator of a kind and can’t afford to have friends connected with a case. I’ll listen. If I can be of any help I will. But don’t count on my confidence if something you tell me has to be repeated.”
“Oh, I don’t think that. It’s not about these ghastly murders. It’s about my own state of mind. You see…”
Carolus settled down with resignation to listen. And Heatherwell was right. Carolus heard nothing that evening that was of any use to him in establishing the identity of the Stabber.
It was eleven o’clock when he went to a clean and pleasant room at the back of the house. Before undressing, however, he did a most uncharacteristic thing—he locked the door.
He had been asleep some time when he was curtly awakened, not by anything in the house but by a series of sounds in Crabtree Avenue. He thought afterwards that he must have had Priggley on his unconscious mind to be so sensitive to these particular noises, for they were of someone starting a motor-bike nearby and riding away.
Who, he wondered sleepily, who connected with the case had motor-bikes? Before returning to sleep he could remember only the motor-scooters of Grace Buller and Eamon Starkey. Unfortunately, from where he was at the back of the house the sounds, though sufficient to wake a light sleeper like Carolus, were too confused for him to distinguish between engines.
Twelve
VIOLA WHITEHILL opened the door.
“Oh yes,” she said without enthusiasm when Carolus had explained himself. “We heard you were coming. You’ve been round to Goggins, haven’t you? I suppose you want to hear about that ghastly experience of mine.”
She looked and sounded sulky, not less so when Carolus said shordy—“It’s your aunt I wanted to see.”
“Well, you’d better come in then; she’s in the drawing-room.”
Stella Whitehill, rather heavily dressed, was playing Patience in a room that looked like a setting for a Victorian melodrama. Carolus would have liked—out of sheer human curiosity—to have made his first question one about this and expected to hear that the house with everything in it had been inherited from grandparents and unchanged.
He ventured to say that it was a charming period room.
“I don’t know about period,” said Stella. “It has been in the Whitehill family since it was built. My husband’s grandfather, Dr. Frederick Whitehili, was its first tenant.”
“Indeed? That’s interesting,” said Carolus. And it was. That anyone should talk of one of these grey horrors remaining ‘in the family’ was fascinating.
“You’ve come to ask Viola about the attack on her, I suppose,” said Stella resuming her patience.
“Attack?”
“You know what I mean. It was nearly an attack.”
“Are you sure about that, Mrs. Whitehili?”
Stella looked up sharply.
“Sure? What else could it have been?”
“It could have been someone waiting in a car who realized he was causing anxiety to Miss Whitehill and wanted to reassure her.”
“It could have been the Emperor of Ethiopia,” retorted Stella tartly. “But it wasn’t. It was the Stabber. There’s not the slightest question about that.”
Carolus looked at the bony, muscular-looking and rather unattractive woman. He could believe her capable of methodical charity if not spontaneous kindness but he found that he could not like her.
“Let’s use our commonsense,” she went on. “What ordinary man would be sitting in a car alone in Crab-tree Avenue at that time in the evening, wearing a cloth cap, glasses and a raincoat? He would be asking for trouble, whoever he was. You don’t seem to realize how people feel in this district. If a few of them had caught this man they would have been capable of…”
“Hanging him from a lamp-post?”
“Very nearly, I believe. Then, if he was the innocent you suppose…”
“Pardon me, 1 supposed nothing of the sort. I said he could have been someone waiting in a car.”
“He wasn’t. If you mean someone on legitimate business. As I was just going to say, if he was, why did he make off like that when Viola screamed?”
“You have answered that, Mrs. Whitehill. There was strong feeling among your neighbours. He could have suddenly realized what might be thought about him and done the wisest thing—decamped. That’s exactly what I should have done in the circumstances.”
This altercation was interrupted by Viola.
“You should have seen his eyes!” she said dramatically.
“What about them?” asked Carolus.
Viola seemed somewhat confused.
“They were glaring,” she said, “red and glaring. The eyes of a murderer.”
“Didn’t you say he was wearing glasses?” asked Carolus mildly.
“Of course. And a cloth cap.”
Carolus decided to leave it at that and turned again to Mrs. Whitehill. But before he could speak Viola said—“Don’t forget I saw the knife, too.”
Guessing that the knife would have become both vivid and circumstantial by this time Carolus again tried to leave the subject, but Mrs. Whitehill herself intervened.
“Yes, what about that?” she asked.
Carolus, driven into a corner, said—“It was very natural in the circumstances that Miss Whitehill should see something of the sort.”
“You mean, I’m making it up?” cried Viola angrily.
“No. No. I mean it made itself up. You saw it all right, Miss Whitehill, but if the murders had been done by shooting you’d have seen a pistol, or if by strangling a noose.”
“I’m not a complete fool,” claimed Viola. “I saw the knife. I didn’t imagine it.”
“Whatever you saw won’t help us much now,” said Carolus pacifically. “What I wanted to ask you about, Mrs. Whitehill, was the night when Joyce Ribbing was murdered. The night of your Bridge party.”
“Oh, that. There’s nothing much to be said about that,” said Stella Whitehill. “You know who was playing.”
“Your husband was not at home?”
“My husband? What on earth’s he got to do with it?”
“He wasn’t in, anyway?”
“Certainly not. It was a Bridge four.”
Carolus had to be satisfied with this somewhat ambiguous answer and said “Quite” in an encouraging voice.
“He came in about half an hour after Joyce had gone, as a matter of fact. In time for supper. Been down at the Mitre, of course. Where he is now.”
Carolus felt it wiser to leave this aspect of the matter.