Death in Albert Park

by Bruce, Leo

  “Say next Wednesday? If you and Withers would care to dine?”

  “I shall have to consult Sir Boxley on his engagements. For my own part I am fortunately free on that evening.”

  “I shall feel like Scheherazade,” said Carolus. “Yarning to avert the ax.”

  Mr. Gorringer did not permit himself to smile.

  “I think my ears caught the sound of the school bell,” he said severely. “Our third period has begun.”

  On returning to his house at lunch-time Carolus found his troubles multiplying.

  “They’ve been coming here all the morning,” stated Mrs. Stick crisply. “Nor they won’t take no for an answer though I threatened to call the police if this went on. One of them went so far as to put his foot in the door.”

  “Who has been annoying you, Mrs. Stick?”

  “Reporters, they said they was. I’ve scarcely had time to turn round and lunch won’t be ready till I don’t know when. I wonder they haven’t broken into the school after you.”

  “As they haven’t I don’t think you need worry any more. It’s nearly twenty-four hours since the Inquest so I’m quite pass£ as news. These must have been strays.”

  “Whatever they was they upset my cooking. I was going to do you a sole mew nair.”

  “Do by all means, Mrs. Stick,” said Carolus abstractedly.

  Somehow he had to persuade Dyke to listen to him. It was the only hope of clearing his own conscience and winding up this whole lamentable case. He had certain information which the police had not, but it was of a kind, in itself, that would make very little appeal to them. If he merely catalogued this and handed it over, Dyke would probably ignore it and think him impertinent and interfering. He had to go farther and persuade Dyke to hear what conclusions he had drawn from it.

  Perhaps it would be best to return once more to Albert Park and take the bull by the horns. Dyke had had his pound of flesh and heard the Coroner’s scathing remarks to Carolus. He might relent sufficiently to listen to him. After all, in what Carolus guessed to be Dyke’s point of view, even the murder or suicide of Slatter was irrelevant to the main problem and the continuing danger. A maniacal killer had stabbed three women and was still unidentified. Jack the Ripper, who provided the only known precedent in English criminal history for a series of murders of this kind, had twice waited five months or more between two of his murders and there seemed no reason why the Stabber should not do the same. Could Dyke afford to ignore someone who claimed he had a theory to identify him?

  After school that afternoon Carolus drove back to Albert Park and was relieved to find that Dyke agreed to see him at once.

  “You see what comes of meddling, Mr. Deene?” the Superintendent greeted him.

  “I see what comes otnot meddling. All I wanted was that the police should seemingly make that discovery for themselves. That’s why I waited for the morning to see you. However, I shan’t lose any sleep over the Coroner’s remarks.”

  “What do you want to see me about this time? Found any more corpses?”

  “Not yet. I came to invite you to dinner on Wednesday.”

  Dyke stared at him.

  “Now what’s this?” he said. “You ought to know by now that if there’s one thing I hate it is a practical joke.”

  “So do I. Detest them,” said Carolus. “I’ll be perfectly frank, Superintendent. I have got a theory in this wretched business which I very much want you to consider. I understand that in your official capacity you cannot listen to the lucubrations of amateur detectives, but as a private individual after a dinner party you could surely do so.”

  “I could, if I thought it would help me. Are you suggesting that you have identified this Stabber?”

  “Provisionally, yes.”

  “What do you mean by provisionally, Mr. Deene?”

  “Unless I can persuade you to consider my theory at least as a possibility it will die stillborn. I have not a scrap of proof—only a lot of circumstantial evidence. But if I am right the hard proof is there for you and your forensic experts to uncover.”

  Dyke smiled.

  “You speak as though I had formed no opinions of my own,” he said. “All right, Mr. Deene. I accept your invitation and am grateful for it.”

  Carolus arranged to come over in the car and pick him up.

  Back once again in Newminster he was amazed to find a faint smile on the lips of Mrs. Stick.

  “I’ve had a letter from my sister, sir,” she said almost amicably. “I was never more surprised in my life. She says her husband says you were quite right and it was a wicked thing for that Coroner to start on you like that, when all you was doing was your duty as a citizen. You could have bowled me over when I read it. You never can tell with people, can you, sir?”

  “Indeed you can’t, Mrs. Stick.”

  “So all things considered and Stick not liking to give up his garden, I thought…”

  “Just so. I quite understand and am delighted. Now I want to give a small dinner-party on Wednesday. Only six of us, a stag party. Can you manage that?”

  A shadow of repressed doubt crossed Mrs. Stick’s face.

  “Well,” she began.

  “The headmaster and one of the school Governors, Sir Boxley Withers, will be among them,” said Carolus hurriedly.

  “Then I must see what I can do. We could start with a nice print an year soup …”

  Carolus left Mrs. Stick happily planning her menu.

  Nineteen

  AT dinner on the following Wednesday Mr. Gorringer was jovial. It was impossible for him to be in any gathering without in some sense taking the chair and in spite of the presence of Sir Boxley Withers he did so now.

  “Ah Deene,” he congratulated. “Your enviable Mrs. Stick is excelling herself. She is indeed a treasure. When I told my wife that I was dining here tonight she made one of her happier witticisms. ‘Screw your courage to the sticking-place’, she said. I must say I laughed heartily.”

  There was a somewhat puzzled look on the puckered face of Withers, a small neat man in his sixties. He was not the first to be perplexed by Mr. Gorringer’s humour. Dyke, though he said little, seemed perfectly at home. Priggley was of course irrepressible.

  “You may well wonder,” Mr. Gorringer said later in private to Withers, “that I should lend my presence to a gathering of this kind when one of my pupils has been invited. But this, Sir Boxley, is a somewhat unusual case. Unfortunate home life. Lack of parental control. Deene assures me that if he did not exercise some influence in the holidays, this boy would be completely unbridled. So I find it wise to disregard the impropriety of allowing a boy to dine at the same table as his headmaster.”

  Again Withers gave him his incredulous stare as though wondering whether Gorringer could possibly be true.

  Priggley brought over a box of cigars.

  “No, don’t take those,” he advised the headmaster. “They’re on the dry side. I recommend the Ramon Allones.” He turned to Withers. “Brandy, sir?” he suggested. “Carolus has got some very decent Otard VVSOP, or there’s some Armagnac which I find just a shade too old.”

  “Priggley,” said Mr. Gorringer severely. “I don’t think Sir Boxley wishes to be lectured on the comparative merits of brandies.”

  “I’ll have the Otard,” put in Withers.

  “You see what I mean?” said Mr. Gorringer when Priggley had left them. “The boy is sadly out of hand.”

  “He was quite right about the cigars,” was all that Withers said.

  Presently there was a general move towards comfortable chairs and an atmosphere of expectancy began to grow. Lance Thomas, the school doctor and an intimate friend of Carolus, made the sixth, and seemed as interested as everyone else, though he knew no more of the case than newspaper readers all over the country.

  When Carolus began talking it was quietly, almost casually.

  “More than once in this case the name of Jack the Ripper has turned up and in a way it is the key to the whole thi
ng. There can’t be many people alive today who can remember the fear and horror which passed over the East End of London in the years 1888 to 1889 when no less than ten women, all prostitutes, were murdered by a killer who remained, and has since remained, unidentified. The case has tempted several criminologists to speculate but nothing is known certainly except that all the women were killed by one blood-lustful man. I say this is the key to the present case because I believe that the Stabber we have to find deliberately imitated the Ripper of history.

  “When I started to enquire into this I found myself believing, as everyone else did, that a homicidal maniac was at work. I do not like believing what everyone else does and began asking myself why I did so. Because these were obviously the murders of a homicidal maniac. Because anything else would be too horrible to contemplate. But I distrust the obvious and nothing, in human nature, is too horrible to contemplate.

  “By this way I began to make suppositions. Suppose these were not the murders of a maniac but the very carefully planned murders of someone with a logical motive. Motive? How could anyone have a motive for killing each one of these three women? A madman’s motive there might be, to kill all women, or to kill all small women, or to kill all the women in Albert Park. But I was looking for saner motives than these.

  “You see, I don’t like the literary idea of a schizophrenic. I absolutely reject Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I believe in a split mind but not in dual personality. Certainly each side of a split mind will influence the other. It is impossible to have two souls inhabiting one body and taking over the controls in turn. So if my murderer was sane and had a motive it was a consistent one.

  “This led me to a line of speculation which at first rather appalled me. Since there could only be a sane motive in one of these cases, were the others motiveless? Or were two victims chosen haphazardly to conceal one victim for whose death there was a very distinct motive?

  “I began then to suppose that someone wanted to kill one of these three women and, of course, to remain undetected. He decides to create a mysterious killer, a Jack the Ripper, a Stabber, who kills without purpose any woman he sees at night in the Albert Park region. The more publicity this receives the better. It will divert all the attention from him or her, the person with a motive for one murder, to the Stabber, an insane killer who has no motive at all.

  “But even if I accepted this idea it did not tell me which of the three murders was, as it were, the real one. The killer might make it his first murder and cover it by the subsequent ones. Or he might sandwich the murder he wanted to commit between two done to mislead. Or he might make the ‘real’ murder the third of three.

  “My supposition, gruesome though it was, began to take possession of me, and as most people formed some sort of image of the Stabber, (so that Viola Whitehill really believed she had seen his glaring eyes,) so I formed a conception of the killer.

  “I could not decide whether he was a resident of Albert Park; he certainly knew the suburb well and the movements of the residents. Only one of the three women actually lived in the district but the other two visited it, one at weekly and the other at daily intervals. He might himself live in Crabtree Avenue or he might be someone who had lived in the suburb and had moved away. Or someone with copious information. Or a regular visitor.

  “He created a physical image of the killer by adopting a costume which could be changed in a moment, which had no element of the exotic, yet which was enough to distinguish him—the raincoat, cloth cap, and glasses which Miss Pilkin observed before the third murder. The raincoat was a little too large for him because he did not wear his own and had probably acquired the other by theft, just as warehouse breakers always use a stolen car for their getaway. In fact, the first piece of evidence which might be acquired by the police, who have the facilities, is news of a raincoat lost in some public place in the last months …”

  Dyke, though determined not to be drawn, could not resist this.

  “We’ve been working on that for days and have reduced our number down to a hundred and thirty-seven. In due course we shall know who was the original owner of the raincoat found in the lodge and perhaps know how he lost it.”

  “Of course,” said Carolus. “You would not miss that. Indeed I have believed all along that that raincoat and the cap, glasses, muffler and knife will convict. However to return to my supposititious murderer.

  “On the night he has chosen he waits among the trees at the top of Crabtree Avenue for the last woman or girl to emerge alone from the school. That is, unless Hester Starkey is his ‘real’ victim. At a propitious moment, when no one is in sight, Hester comes out and starts walking down the avenue towards the more brilliantly lighted Inverness Road at its foot. She walks firmly and fairly fast, but with long strides he keeps behind her till she passes Perth Avenue and reaches number 46, the empty house. Here, with a skilled downward blow between the shoulder blades he strikes and in almost complete silence Hester collapses and dies. He picks up the body, puts it in the garden of the empty house, and…

  “But this is the interesting thing. He does not go home, wherever that is. He has been exhilarated by his grim success and feels a sudden reaction to it. He wants to be among other people. He takes off his raincoat, cap and glasses and with them leaves his identity as the Stabber. But before he can go among people he must make sure that he carries no blood stains. So he goes, logically enough, to the public convenience at the foot of Salisbury Gardens and calmly has a wash and brush up. The lavatory attendant described his behaviour. ‘You should have seen the way he washed. Taking his time over it. Then when he’s not washing any more he’s standing looking at himself in the glass … this way that way, looking at his sleeves and his trousers.’ He has no idea that he has attracted the attention of the attendant, or that use of a wash-basin at this time of the evening is a not very common occurrence. He thinks he is one of an uncounted string of men using the lavatory. He comes out, and unless I am mistaken goes along to the Mitre. He thus picks up the threads of his normal life without the slightest suspicion attaching to him.

  “The second murder is even easier. With each of these we are assuming, illogically, that it is not the ‘real’ one, not the one the murderer had in mind from the start. In this case, though it sounds a callous expression to use, the murderer had practice. He carries it out with more confidence and once again goes to the public convenience afterwards to wash.

  “But when he comes to the third he is faced with various problems. He exists now, the Stabber has become a real person in the minds of many frightened people. Crabtree Avenue is being watched by the police and householders. It is essential that he shows this murder to have been done by the same hand as the others so he decides to keep to Albert Park while moving to another street. He is fortunate in having in Salisbury Gardens another gloomy, ill-lit residential street on the far side of the park, but this time there is a very keen observer of a certain portion of the street at least for the eccentric Miss Pilkin allows nothing to escape her in her malicious watch on the Pressley household. From what she sees the Stabber emerges as a man in a raincoat a little too large for him, with a cloth cap and glasses. But this does nothing to identify him for even if Miss Pilkin knew the man concerned, this simple disguise would be enough to confuse her.

  “This time he does not go down to the public convenience or to the Mitre. But he has achieved his third murder without being caught in the only way he believes it is possible to be caught, that is in the very act. Three women have been killed by an unknown Stabber and among them is the woman he meant to kill.

  “Mad? Oh yes. In a certain sense raving mad. It would take a madman, fortunately, to be so far beyond all scruple, all respect for human life, all morality, that he could conceive such a plan. Yet there was a macabre logic in this madness. If one is prepared to arrogate to oneself the power of God to take one life, why not three? It is no more presumptuous. The appalling thing is that one human being can contemplate the killing of another
.

  “At this point, I believe, he was prepared to stop, not because he had any scruple about killing again if it was necessary but simply because it wasn’t necessary. There would be no point in it He had all England and the CID looking for a maniacal homicide who had slain three women in the same way and in the same suburb. No one suspected him. His achievement was complete.

  “If he had stopped there I do not think he would ever have been discovered, but like Jack the Ripper before him have remained a teasing mystery for criminologists thereafter. But he could not stop there. Perhaps he feared that he might be discovered. Or perhaps he was one of those people—and how many there are—who cannot leave their achievements alone, who have to embellish and add till they ruin their own handiwork.

  “At all events he decided to divert all suspicion from himself by arranging a suicide. Someone who could have been responsible for all three murders must die, leaving what appeared to be a confession of his guilt beside him in the shape of the raincoat, which would have traces of bloodstains however it had been cleaned at home, the cap, the glasses, the muffler and the knife, none of which for one reason or another could be connected with the real murderer, though all would be assumed to have belonged to the Stabber.

  “This was a clumsy idea which went beyond the original probably long-contemplated plan. Intended to crown this, it in fact undermined it. At first the murderer seemed fortunate for he discovered that a man called Heatherwell, something ofa psychotic, was living alone in Crabtree Avenue and had been alone since his wife left him before the first murder. He met him on several occasions in the Mitre and I think acquired a certain ascendancy over him. He may also have discovered that Heatherwell was a transvestist which would make his guilt and suicide more credible. He planned to kill Heatherwell by using HeatherweU’s trust in him to administer an overdose of sleeping pills. He actually came to the house with this purpose but to his alarm heard from Heatherwell that he was not alone, for I had taken the precaution of becoming his guest. When he heard at the door that Heatherwell had someone in the house he hastily obtained a promise from Heatherwell that his visit should not be revealed and disappeared. Heatherwell was a man who kept his promises, or perhaps feared the murderer for the reason I have suggested. Heatherwell preferred to tell me a foolish lie rather than state who had called on him. If he had not done this and thereupon rushed down to Hastings to join his wife, I should have insisted on seeing Dyke at this point, telling him my suspicions and perhaps have saved Slatter’s life.