Death of a Frightened Editor: A Golden Age Mystery

by E.

  The envelopes contained a large collection of letters, some 50 in number. Manson extracted two of them. Each was in an envelope, with an initial in the top left-hand corner. The Doctor slipped the first one out of its envelope, and opening it, read the contents.

  He nodded his head, gravely, and passed it over to the superintendent. Then:

  “I’d like to examine these somewhere private,” he said.

  “Better come to my office, then,” the manager invited.

  In the room the officers borrowed a couple of wire letter-trays and placed them on the desk. Into one of them went the letter which had been read.

  For half-an-hour the two men read steadily through the letters, dropping them, as though they had been sorted, into one or other of the trays.

  At the end of that time nine letters constituted the contents of one tray; the remainder filled the other. Manson borrowed a supply of typewriting paper, and on separate sheets made a true copy of each of the nine separate letters. Jones, at the same time, made a list of addresses, where there was such identification, from the remainder.

  The task concluded, both went through the copied statements prepared by Manson. The two men looked at each other.

  “Goddlemighty!” said Jones.

  He did not bellow, as was his usual way. The word came almost in a whisper. It was a graphic revelation of the fat man’s feelings.

  “Goddlemighty!” he said again. “What is it, Doctor. A ruddy conspiracy?”

  “I don’t know, Old Fat Man,” Manson replied. He was putting the letters back into their linen envelopes. The manager of the Safe Deposit looked on. He had said nothing, but anxious inquiry was written all over his face, and showed itself in his nervous fidgetting. Manson made no response.

  “What . . . goin’ . . . do with these?” asked Jones, and indicated the envelopes.

  “Put them back in the safe.”

  “What!” Jones roared. “Put ’em back?”

  “At the moment we cannot do anything else, Jones.” He turned to the manager.

  “But I’ll ask you to help us,” he said. “If Mrs. Redwood visits the safe, or if she wants to clear the safe, either personally or by deputy, will you telephone the superintendent or me at once, at Scotland Yard and keep her waiting on any excuse until I can arrive to interview her?”

  The manager nodded. “I don’t like it, sir,” he said. “But if you give me a police order to that effect—”

  “It’s an order,” Jones said.

  21

  “We now know,” said Doctor Manson, “the motive for the murder of Mortensen.”

  The Assistant Commissioner jerked from his armchair slouch to an upright position in his seat. The monocle dropped out of his good eye and fell with a tinkle on the desk, as it invariably did.

  “What!” he ejaculated.

  “We also know the story of Mr. Arthur Moore and his £25,000 bank balance.

  “Furthermore, I know who it was that cleared Mr. Moore’s safe deposit, and what was taken away. I also know that we are in a devil of a jam.”

  “What kind of a jam?” the A.C. asked.

  “I’ll come to that later. It’s nothing that can lose you your coat,” he added with a grin.

  “Let’s hear all about it,” the A.C. invited.

  “I’ll have to take you back to the Pullman car to start it,” the Doctor began. “And it’s a matter of reading between the lines of the story the seven passengers told.”

  “For instance, Crispin explained that following the bangs in the corridor which they heard (they were, of course, Mortensen in strychnine convulsions), he went to find out what the commotion was about. He came back and reported that someone was ill in the lavatory which was fastened from the inside. And the company settled down to their talking again. They were not the least interested in who was the person in the lavatory. Then, a minute or so later, someone noticed that Mortensen was missing, and the seven in the Pullman made a concerted dash out there—to see if the person was Mortensen. When I realised that fact, and its logical conclusions, I began to have curious ideas.”

  “But they were all friends,” said Kenway. “You would expect them to show some anxiety.”

  “The point is they were not friends. If you will read through the dossier carefully, you will see that they were quite emphatic about that—all of them. Although the other seven met, socially, in Brighton and in London, not one of them mixed with Mortensen in either of those places. The two points struck me as very odd. But not, at that time as definitely suspicious.

  “Then, two curious instances occurred. One came from Betterton.” The Doctor flipped back the pages of the dossier until he came to the transcript of the interviews with the passengers while they were still in the Pullman. He looked up. “I was questioning whether Mortensen had had his usual meal in the car that evening. This is Betterton’s reply:

  “I expect he did. But we wouldn’t know. You see Mortensen was always first in the coach. He was his own master and left his office when he chose. He closed the place early. Nobody could see him after 4 o’clock.”

  Manson put down the dossier, and looked round the table. “Now, Betterton stated quite definitely on another occasion that he knew nothing of Mortensen other than in the Pullman each evening, and had no social acquaintance with him. They had, he insisted, never met outside the journey. I now asked myself: how did he know that nobody could see Mortensen at his office after 4 o’clock?” There was a pregnant silence. Then:

  “The other curious instance?” asked the A.C.

  “It came after we had discovered the mysterious Mr. Moore. I visited each of the seven in their offices or rooms. After some innocuous questions I loosed on them suddenly a demand: did they know a Mr. Arthur Moore. All of them were, I am certain, genuine in their denials. But one, Mr. Phillips, the stockbroker, added to his denial the words ‘Another one?’

  “‘Another what?’ I asked; but he passed it off. He said he was thinking aloud and meant another mysterious personage the police could not trace. He meant nothing of the kind, of course. But I had no idea at the time what he did mean.

  “I have a very suspicious mind, and these three things caused me furiously to think. Taken in conjunction with the fact that Mortensen’s keys had been taken from his pocket, and his office entered the same night by means of the keys they presented me with an apparently insoluble problem. Because none of the passengers had been up to London that night—so far as we were able to ascertain. Yet someone in the Pullman had stolen the keys.

  “If I may jump a stage ahead here I would refer to the clearing of the safe deposit which Arthur Moore had. There, again, each member of the Pullman was cleared of any connection with the raid. When, later, I came to look into the matter I realised that I need not have worried about them for none of them knew Arthur Moore, and the person clearing out the safe did know Moore. The safe was cleared by the manager at the request of ‘Arthur Moore’. Anybody who knew Mortensen and suspected where the thing they were looking for was, would have gone there in the name of Mortensen. It had to be someone who knew both Mortensen and his twin self as one and the same person.

  “Now, a little before this Miss Ross came on the scene. I was not particularly interested in her until Jones told us what he had found in her flat—the elegant and the cheap. You know what we discovered from that.” He looked at the Assistant Commissioner.

  “That she was a servant when Mortensen met her, not a guest, and that on occasions she went back to country houses as a servant despite the fact that Mortensen was keeping her in luxury?” the A.C. said.

  Merry chuckled. “And we worked out,” he said, “that the £2,000 in notes paid into Arthur Moore’s account was most likely the proceeds of country house jewel robberies which we had never solved. The modus operandi was that Mary Ross had worked inside for the jewel thieves. Only, you see, Mary Ross had only been in one house where the robberies had occurred, and the dozen or more houses to which we traced her under a
dozen aliases, had never had a robbery. And her employers gave her a dozen good references.”

  Manson nodded his agreement. “But we knew that she had been working as a maid since she had been taken up by Mortensen, and while she was still occupying her luxury flat. It intrigued me because so soon as Mortensen was dead there was my lady trying to open the safe in his flat. Mary Ross knew Mortensen had something of value which, because he feared it would be stolen, he had gone to great trouble to protect. So on his death she began to look for it.

  “One or more of the Pullman passengers had also begun to look for something on the death of Mortensen. It would have been stretching coincidence too far had the two people been looking for two entirely different things, and things so important that burglary was accounted a slight risk. I said to myself, the something for which search was being made had some connection with Mortensen and his sudden end. There was a third person also looking; but who he was I have not the slightest idea, nor do I think he matters.

  “What does matter is that the Pullman passenger looked once, and then appears to have given up, either in fear or hopelessness. But Mary Ross continued looking and searching. How did she know that Mortensen possessed it? The only reason I could think of,” he said, “was that she knew he possessed it because she had helped him to get it. Could that be what she was doing as a servant?

  “It was about this time that I looked for the first time carefully at the contents of Society. I came to the conclusion that three parts of the paper was mere camouflage, and that the only parts that really mattered were the middle pages which printed scandal and veiled innuendo under the heading ‘We Would Like to Know’ and the pages of advertisements of jobs vacant and wanted. I recalled that Mortensen, according to Miss Ross was a very kindly man and inserted the advertisements for jobs wanted free of charge if the domestic servants were hard up. It didn’t tally with the Mortensen we knew of in Covent Garden, who paid starvation wages to his clerk and to his flat servant, each of whom had a police record.

  “Then I remembered a letter which had been on Mortensen’s desk when we visited the office. It was from a woman named Playfield, and read: ‘In reply to your letter, the story is quite true. I shall be glad to give you suitable details if you are still interested, subject to suitable payment.’

  “The woman Playfield was a chamber-maid. She admitted under questioning that the story was about immoral behaviour and an insurance fraud on the part of guests in a house in which she was employed. She said it was a good article for Society—she meant, of course, for the scandal pages. She told me that she wanted £50 for the information. I questioned her closely on this figure. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, she knew people who had received sums like that from the paper for a spicy story, and that she herself had received considerable amounts, though not quite as big as £50.

  “She said it was well-known among servants that Society paid very well for information like she had given, if it could be authenticated. And the better-known the people the higher was the remuneration for information.

  “I saw what could be an explanation of the presence of Mary Ross in the story. I visualised a set-up. One which could explain both Mary Ross’s servant pose and the kindness of Mortensen to the servants for whom he found jobs.”

  “A set-up?” the A.C. queried.

  “The servants for whom he found jobs, and who sent him bits of information could be, in effect, the outside staff of Society. Their jobs were obtained through him: he told them that if they kept their eyes open, and their ears as well, they could earn nice little extras for information turned in to him.”

  “And Miss Ross?”

  “Could be the chief reporter for special occasions in houses to which he wanted entrance for an informative search.

  “Mary Ross herself confirmed this suspicion. I had asked her in the Brighton flat why Mortensen, obviously attracted to her had not made her his wife. She replied, as you will see in the dossier:

  “There were circumstances on both sides which made a less public association than marriage an advantage.”

  “There you have it! Mary Ross, the servant in her special capacity as a lady’s maid could snoop successfully, and copy letters, and eavesdrop. As Mrs. Mortensen her activities would be very much curtailed. Any references to people which appeared in the scandal pages of Society would be very quickly put down to her—and so would any other kind of thing affecting the same people.” Doctor Manson emphasised slightly the latter part of his sentence.

  “Crispin’s comment on the payment by Society of sums of £50 for items in the page was candid: ‘Poppycock, Doctor. Damn it all, even the Mirror and Express couldn’t stand contributions at that rate, let alone this two-penny-halfpenny concern.’ He meant that those papers with their huge circulations and their enormous revenues couldn’t make individual payments of £50 for each item in two pages in Society.

  “But I was certain that the woman Playfield was accurate in her statements that such payments had been made. Then I saw it. I knew what was happening. That was when in this room I told you that I had a very good idea what was the motive for Mortensen’s death.”

  The A.C. held up a hand. “Just a moment,” he said. “I don’t follow you in the last bit. What was happening with the information?”

  “If the large sums of money were not being paid by Society—and I should add here that there is no mention of any such sums going out in the books of the paper, nor in the accounts—then there could be only one explanation.

  “The money was being paid by Mortensen himself. Why?

  “I pondered over this, and saw no light until I associated Mr. Arthur Moore in the pattern—Moore and his bank account. Then I was pretty certain that I knew the answer. I thought I would find evidence of it in a certain flat; and armed with a warrant, we searched the flat. We found nothing at all—not a vestige of evidence.

  “But yesterday we took a warrant to a Regent Street safe deposit, and there we caused to be opened a safe deposit rented by a Mrs. Marie Redwood. She was not present, by the way.”

  “What!” the A.C. said and frowned. “Did she know of the raid?”

  “She didn’t, no. We’ll tell her at some later time. It was essential for our purpose that she shouldn’t know.” From an inside pocket the Doctor took an envelope, and drew from it a number of sheets of paper. He placed them on the table; and drew one from the bunch.

  “This,” he said, “is a copy of one of some 50 or more letters we found in that safe. It comes from a Miss Cissie Andrews, and is signed by her. She was the Operating Theatre Sister at the County Hospital when Betterton was a young surgeon there. Listen to the wording:

  “Before I meet my Creator I must clear my conscience. I swore on oath not to breathe a word. But I cannot go with a lie on my lips. Doctor Betterton killed a patient in the operating theatre . . .”

  “You already know how Betterton killed the patient,” he said. “There is a full account in this document, but I need not read any more.”

  “Blackmail!” said the A.C. He exploded rather than just spoke the word. “Betterton was being blackmailed. But—”

  The Doctor went on as though there had been no interruption.

  He picked up another of the sheets. “This one relates the race-course trick of Sam Mackie, of which, also, we already know. Of one concerning Mrs. Harrison there is an allegation that she gave birth to an illegitimate child. She is now a prominent executive of the Unmarried Mothers’ Association. You can guess what would happen to her if this episode in her past life came out.

  “Starmer, the bank manager, according to a letter written to him by a junior clerk of the time, seems to have acquired some £1,500 to clear him of betting difficulties by adding a cypher to a cheque. He was not found out because the client died, and the cheque was not disputed by the estate. But a clerk found out what he had done and put it on record.

  “Edgar, the insurance general manager, made out a £1,000 insurance policy on the life of a fictitious
person, and collected the money. Phillips—he is the stockbroker was with a firm which promoted a share issue. He and his partner seem to have duplicated the numbers of share certificates and deposited them with their bank as security for a heavy overdraft which saved their firm—”

  “The duplicates being destroyed as the overdraft was paid off, I suppose?” said the A.C. “It’s an old City trick. Who else?”

  “No other,” Manson replied. “The only other passenger is Crispin, and there is no letter or document about him.” He ceased talking and lay back in his chair.

  The A.C. sat pondering, playing with his monocle at the end of its cord. “I see the blackmail, Doctor. It is pretty obvious that each of these men was paying out money for secrecy. But I do not see your link with Mortensen or Moore. The safe you raided was rented by a Mrs. Marie Redwood. This is the first time I have heard her mentioned. Who is Mrs. Redwood, and what is her connection with Mortensen and Arthur Moore?”

  “Mrs. Marie Redwood,” Manson said, “is Miss Mary Ross. She was the Messenger who turned up with a letter from Mr. Moore, three days after his death and cleared the safe deposit.”

  “But you yourself said, I remember, that you were certain the girl Ross did not know who Arthur Moore was,” the A.C. protested.

  Manson smiled. It was a wry smile.

  “She didn’t,” he said. “Not then. Sometimes I talk too much. In reply to Mary Ross’s ‘Who is Mr. Moore?’ I answered that if she didn’t recognise the name it did not matter who he was, and added that his name had crept up in connection with Mortensen’s death.

  “Mary Ross had been searching in the Brighton safe, and in the Covent Garden office for these packets of letters. She knew they existed because she was Mortensen’s partner in acquiring them, or some of them. She could not find them concealed under Mortensen’s name. But she jumped instantly to the implication in my question about Arthur Moore. She began a new search for the hidden letters under the alias of Moore. That was how she came to clear Arthur Moore’s safe deposit.”