by E.
“And now we have to find the murderer,” he said. “And we do not seem to have made progress.”
Doctor Manson waved a hand in protest. “I did not say that, A.C. We have made some progress. If anyone incorporates this case into crime publication I will present them with a title. I would call it ‘The Case of the Frightened Editor’.”
“How come?” Sir Edward asked. “It’s all in the fat dossier in front of you. Out of that mass of information there are eight points which interest me. The solution of the case lies in those points.” He went on to enumerate them, marking each one off on his fingers.
1—Mortensen drew about £7,000 a year from Society, probably a bit less—less, of course, income tax.
2—He was living at something over double that rate.
3—He had another, and secret, existence as Arthur Moore.
4—Arthur Moore paid the balance of Mortensen’s rate of living.
5—Arthur Moore had a bank balance of more than £25,000, in spite of financing Mortensen.
6—He had no business connections with Society, but had a business connection with Mortensen.
7—Mortensen became frightened of something, or perhaps somebody.
8—He had become more and more frightened.
The officers digested the points in silence. The A.C. frowned.
“This frightened business,” he said. “That would come from the bars on the Brighton flat windows, of course. But I don’t get the more and more frightened.”
“Work it out. Firstly, Mortensen had a perfectly ordinary flat at Brighton. It was the same as any other flat in the building. He has a large safe in his office in Covent Garden. Presently we find a safe is introduced into the Brighton flat, and concealed in a cupboard. In the name of heaven, why? I have a safe in my flat, and so have you, A.C. But not in a cupboard. And this safe has no keys, but a combination lock. When you consider that the office safe when opened contained only a few unimportant documents the reason is obvious. He had become frightened for the safety of something in the office safe, and had removed it to Brighton.”
“Presently he becomes scared even of the ability of the Brighton safe to hold his secret against intruders; he has the bars put up at the windows, and the doors double-locked. He gets as a servant a woman with a police record. I checked on her. If anything went from the flat, she’s in for another ‘stretch’. That is why he would not have any of the flats’ servants in the place. Remember what the woman said to me when I asked her why Mortensen had her in the place if he didn’t like people messing about in the flat? She said, ‘He knew he could trust me.’ He had, you know, gone to the same expedient in his office—”
“You mean that Silverman is a convicted man?” asked Kenway.
“Yes. Two convictions for theft. Now we go a stage further. He became more and more scared. When we opened the Brighton safe, all we found, you remember, were a few papers, bills, and other articles of no value. There was no need for barred windows, double locks, to protect them. The fact caused me to do a little hard thinking. What, I asked myself, was he protecting?”
“Himself, I should think,” volunteered the A.C. “Somebody did, eventually, you say, bump him off.”
Manson snorted. “For heaven’s sake! He didn’t want the safe to sit himself in, did he? He put it there to keep something in. And that something wasn’t there when he died. It puzzled me. I thought that it must have been burgled. But it hadn’t.
“Then Jones, here, solved my problem for us, and showed how much more frightened for the safety of the something Mortensen had become.”
“Cor lumme!” said Jones. “Cor lumme.”
They stared at him. He sat silent for a few seconds, ruffling his hands across his big bald head.
“Blister me,” he said at last. “Simple, that’s what it is. Lor luvva duck! He put . . . everythin’ . . . into safe deposit . . . under name . . . Arthur Moore. That it, Doctor?”
“That’s it, Jones.”
“I see,” said the A.C. “And somebody killed him and then cleared the safe deposit of what they wanted.”
“Oh no they didn’t!” Manson said. “I wish to heaven they had. We’d have a much more easy task catching him were that the case. The person who killed Mortensen went the same night to the Covent Garden office. But he was not the person who got away with the contents of the safe deposit.”
“Why not?” The A.C. leaned forward.
“Because he didn’t know about the safe deposit.” Manson laughed, and paused to light another cigarette. “He must be one of the most worried people in the country today. He committed murder in order to get hold of something. He hasn’t found it, and he must know by now that either the police or somebody else has it. He’s in trouble whichever way it is. I have no doubt whatever that he didn’t know of the safe deposit.”
“Evidence!” demanded Jones. “Gimme hard facts.”
Doctor Manson held the superintendent’s gaze in maliciously-friendly rivalry, before he answered.
“Because had he known of the safe deposit he would have kept the key which, as you know, was on the ring thrown in the doorway in Covent Garden. He would have taken the key in his disguise as a messenger as added identity of the writer of the note asking for the contents of the safe to be handed over.”
“Touché,” the A.C. conceded. Manson chuckled.
“There is an even simpler explanation of why it was not the murderer who opened the safe deposit,” he said.
“I’ll buy it!” The offer came disconsolately from Jones.
“He’d have asked for the safe deposit contents in the name of Mortensen. The keys on the ring were Mortensen’s, and he knew his fellow passenger as Mortensen. I have asked the seven Pullman passengers if they knew or had heard of Arthur Moore. Only one had—and that Arthur Moore had been dead for years.”
All the company remained quiet in the big room. The A.C. let his monocle drop once more from that perfectly good eye. It fell with a tinkle on the desk. He looked across at the Doctor.
“The death of a frightened editor, you call it,” he said. “Frightened—of what?”
“That’s was we have to find out, A.C.” said Kenway. “When we do we’ve got the motive. That’s so, isn’t it, Doctor?”
“Yes, Kenway. But I have an idea of what the motive is,” he said, “I’m not telling you what I think it is, because I am not at all certain. It’s only an idea. When I am certain, then you can get out the handcuffs.”
The conference broke up. Manson walked to his room.
There for a time he sat looking at his desk on which all there was to see was a virginal white blotter, and a writing pad equally unsullied. The corners of his mouth were puckered as though he were smelling a bad breakfast egg. He reached for his cigarette box, took out a Sullivan.
Inspector Kenway visualised in the doorway. “There’s nothing doing,” he said. “All seven can be accounted for during the period it would have taken anybody to get to the safe deposit and back to their homes or places of employment.” He enumerated.
“Betterton had a client in his consulting room for a quarter-of-an-hour each side of the time. Vouched for independently by his receptionist. Starmer was at his bank. Phillips was in the House—the Stock Exchange, I mean. He bought a packet of Kaffirs at the exact time the messenger was at the deposit—the firm which sold them to him gave me the exact time he was on the floor of the House.
“Crispin was in the Sun office writing a report; it was turned in at 11.10 a.m. Edgar was having coffee with a party of four, and playing draughts in the café next door to his office. Sam Mackie was up north on a racecourse, but was in touch with his office in Piccadilly at 10, laying off bets. He couldn’t have got down here in half-an-hour not even if he were a Dadalus. Mrs. Harrison was attending a conference about unmarried mothers and what to do with them. That’s the lot.”
He shut his notebook, and indulged in the apologetic motion of ‘clearing the throat’. He looked embarrassed.
>
“Well,” said Manson, quizzingly. “Out with it, Kenway.”
“I wondered whether you really knew it was the uniform of the Provincial Messengers Association that the messenger wore,” he said.
“It was!” a voice boomed from the doorway. Superintendent Jones stood there, panting. “Asked Sergeant Rogers at safe deposit,” he said. “It occurred to me.”
Manson pulled over the telephone, and dialled. “What happens to your old uniforms?” he asked the answering voice. A strangled explanation came over the air.
“Hey!” roared Jones, and took the receiver from Manson’s hand. He roared into the mouthpiece. “How come . . . uniforms . . . in hands of Stage Costumiers, Ltd.,” he demanded, and listened.
“Good advertisement!” he exploded. “Future . . . you be bloody careful . . . burn old uniforms. Save ’em . . . get in hands . . . wrong people . . . and hire out good uns for quid a night . . . Cor stone the crows,” he concluded, and banged the receiver down.
“Uniform hired,” he explained, and leered at Manson.
The Doctor clapped him on the shoulders. “So it was hired,” he said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Getting nowhere,” Jones bellowed. He swallowed. “Gordammit, thought we were in clover when traced uniforms . . . Boy turns up . . . had they got messenger’s uniform . . . stock size. They had . . . hired it out for day.”
“What for?” asked Manson.
“Shootin’ film . . . that was story . . . Majestic Film Productions. Paid deposit £5 . . . guinea for hire . . . took away . . . Came back two hours later . . . bunged uniform in . . . picked up the five quid . . . hopped it.”
“Majestic Productions? What do they say?”
“Dunno anythin’ about it. Producer said . . .” Jones breathed heavily. “Said any bloody fool of a copper ought . . . know they had wardrobes of their own . . . didn’t send boys out hiring with quid notes.”
The superintendent snorted. “Told him if ruddy film came cinema . . . my way . . . wouldn’t spend weekly five bob . . . seeing it.”
“Have a heart!” Manson chuckled. “You don’t want to throw two or three thousand people out of work, do you. Well, anyway, that’s that.”
He rummaged in a cupboard and brought out a canvas case. From it he drew out a two-piece slender fishing rod of split cane which he scrutinised carefully, paying special attention to the whipping round the rings. Another rummage in the cupboard produced a canvas bag. Peering into the depths Doctor Manson brought out a couple of spinning ‘spoons’, and a ‘wagtail’ artificial bait.
Jones stood staring.
“I reckon the wagtail will be best, Harry,” Merry said. He gave the matter very careful additional consideration. “It’s better than the spoon on a day like this. Especially if we get a bit of sun.”
“Goin’ fishin’, I suppose,” said Jones. He meant it sarcastically, and was staggered at the reply.
“Yes,” Manson jerked out. “Just for a day or two.”
“What!”
Manson held the spoon bait and the wagtail one in each hand. He seemed to be weighing up their advantages. He stepped up to Jones, tapped the wagtail against the superintendent’s chest and lowered his voice.
“You see, Old Fat Man,” he said, his eyes on the baits to disguise the mischief in them, “we’re fishing in very deep waters—very deep. We mustn’t make a mistake in the bait, or we catch no fish.”
He dabbed the wagtail at Jones’s stomach again.
“Take that bloody hook away from me!” Jones howled. “Fiddling,” he commented.
“What?” Manson looked deliciously puzzled.
“Fiddlin’ I said. Fiddling while Rome burns.”
“No.” Manson shook his head emphatically. “Wrong instrument, Jones. Fishing. I can’t play a fiddle.”
He grinned as Jones stalked, ponderously, through the door in high dudgeon.
While Merry carried rods and bags to Manson’s slinky, powerful black Oldsmobile car waiting in the yard, the scientist was talking to Sergeant Barrett.
“It’s a job right up your street, Barrett,” he said. “Find out all you can about him.”
“Can you give me a clue, Doctor?”
“No, I can’t. I don’t know that there is anything to be found out. But I must be sure. Start a few years back, probably long before he became successful.”
Four hours later the car glided softly into Christchurch, and came to a halt outside the King’s Arms.
18
Thomas Betterton stared out of the window of his library. Stared, but did not see the sunshine glinting on the duckpond that mirrors the sky in the centre of the old village of Rottingdean. (Not the Rottingdean of the summer visitors’ paradise; which edges the sea and looks upwards at a block of modern flats that is an eyesore to the Rottingdean which lives at the other end of the narrow High Street). Nor did he see the house on the corner opposite, where Kipling wrote for years, or the other great white residence in which Burnes-Jones stayed and used his brush to delight the eyes of art lovers the world over. All Betterton saw through his window was the body of Mortensen as it had laid, arched in the Pullman. And what he saw worried him. His face puckered in lines which creased his forehead and ran down from the corners of his eyes.
Presently a bell rang in the hall and a moment or two later his housekeeper knocked at the door and threw it open.
“The gentlemen, sir,” she announced.
The surgeon turned. “Come in, all of you,” he invited, and pulled forward chairs in front of the fire burning cheerfully in the wide ingle-nooked fireplace.
“What will you have, Sam?”
“Whisky, if it’s all the same to you, Doc.”
“Phillips?”
“Sherry, please.”
“Same for me—” from Starmer.
“Edgar?”
“Whisky, thank you.”
The surgeon filled the glasses and distributed them. He poured a fair allowance of whisky into his own glass and raised it.
“Luck,” he said.
A momentary silence was followed by a gruff remark from Mackie. “Reckon we need it, Doc.”
“Cheese straws?” Betterton asked, and passed a silver dish round.
The men sipped their drinks in an atmosphere of uncomfortable strain which went ill with the noble room in which they sat. A weak sun coming through the full-length windows cut a shaft of blood-red colour across the dark crimson carpet and brought glints from the silver furnishings of the walnut sideboard. Books lined one wall of the library; a blade from an Oxford boat was suspended horizontally above the mantelpiece. There was an air of quiet luxury around the room. Betterton was a bachelor with an elderly housekeeper and her husband—the gardener and chauffeur—as his staff, together with a daily woman who came in for the rough work. But the restfulness which should have gone with the home was marred at the moment by the constraint among the company. Alfred Starmer broke, but did not dispel it. On the contrary he only added further fuel.
“Let’s come to the point, Betterton,” he said. “We asked if we could meet you here because we’ve got to talk this matter over, and decide what we ought to do about it. Detectives searched my house while I was in the city yesterday. I don’t know about you others”—he looked from one to the other—“but it’s a damned serious business to me. I’m a banker. If there’s going to be any trouble with the police I’ll be in a bad spot. Can’t afford to have police investigating me.”
“My place has been searched, too,” Edgar said.
“And mine”—simultaneously from the stock-broker Phillips and Mackie.
“I can appreciate your feelings.” Betterton smiled grimly. “I, also, have had visitors.”
“What are they after, Doc?”
“Strychnine, Sam. Mortensen, as you know, died from strychnine poisoning.”
“But why? Mortensen killed himself.”
“What’s the idea?”
“The police don’t think M
ortensen killed himself, Sam,” Betterton corrected. “Scotland Yard doesn’t make widespread inquiries with the forensic head of the Yard in charge if they are thinking only of suicide. They’ve something which has disposed of any suggestion of suicide.”
“What?” Edgar asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You mean they think one of us poisoned him?” Betterton nodded.
He passed his eyes over each of the men in front of him watching him in silence. He appeared to be making up his mind whether to speak or not. At last:
“Were either of you with Mortensen that evening before he came into the train?” he asked.
“No.” Denials came from all the four. “Why?” Mackie demanded.
“Nothing. It just occurred to me thinking things over. You were earliest with him, were you not, Edgar?”
The insurance chief gulped. “What’s that got to do with his death?” he demanded. “We were alone for a few minutes after I boarded the coach. Do you think I gave him poison?”
“Don’t be daft,” Mackie said. “Even supposing you did, Mortensen would have been dead before the rest of us got on the train. Strychnine attacks in a few minutes. Isn’t that so Doc?”
“Look here,” Starmer burst out. “Betterton thinks they think Mortensen was poisoned on the train. Then we are all suspects. I think we should club together and have a damned good lawyer to watch our interests. Damn it, this is serious. That’s what I really wanted to see you all about. What do you say to that?”
Betterton’s eyes flickered over them. His fingers beat a slow tattoo on his chair. “Speaking for myself I don’t want any lawyers around me at this stage,” he said. He paused, and again there seemed to be a constraint, an embarrassment around him. “Look here. It’s a funny question, I know, but had any of you had any dealings with Mortensen?”
Starmer flamed into anger. He went red in the face. “I tell you I never knew the man outside the train. I couldn’t stand him, anyway.”
“Nor I—Nor I—Nor I,” came from the other three.
“What’s the point, Doc?”