The Dartmoor Enigma

by Basil Thomson

  The hotel porter signalled to a taxi; the publicity agent gave the address, “Arcadia Mansions, Regent’s Park.” During the drive Richardson had an opportunity for studying the demeanour of Mrs. Dearborn. She was perfectly calm and collected, even the unwelcome presence of Mr. Franklyn Jute seemed undisturbing to her; there was no sign of anxiety about the coming interview which might affect her status. He began to admire her strength of character more than ever.

  Arcadia Mansions was a rabbit warren of flats of all sizes from the costly to the modest. Mr. Jute knew his way about them. Leaving Richardson to pay the taxi he conducted Mrs. Dearborn to the gates of the lift and pushed the switch. A lift-boy slid silently down with his conveyance, and when Richardson had joined them the three were whisked up to the third floor and were directed to turn to the left for number twenty-one.

  “Don’t you worry, sonny, I knew the way to this apartment when you were still sucking a bottle in your cradle.”

  A touch on the bell brought a neatly attired maid to the flat door. She appeared to recognize Mr. Franklyn Jute, for her manner stiffened; apparently she had suffered from his jocularity on former occasions.

  “You’ll tell Miss Jane Smith that three visitors are waiting to see her, and that the sooner she comes the sooner they’ll go.”

  “What name shall I give?”

  “Why, you know mine; that’ll be enough. The other two are going to be a surprise to her.”

  “She won’t be a minute.”

  “Yes, but I know what only a minute means with Miss Jane Smith. Give her a hint to drop the lipstick and walk right in.”

  The maid tossed her head and withdrew.

  “You’d better make yourselves at home,” said Mr. Jute, indicating the extremely modern-looking chairs dotted about the room.

  For once Miss Jane Smith, otherwise Mrs. Dearborn, played no tricks with the time; she came bustling in. Richardson rose. She was a young woman with an assured manner and with what would pass for striking good looks when represented on the screen. She took in her visitors at a glance. The introductions were made by her publicity agent.

  “This is the other Mrs. Dearborn and that gentleman over there is her lawyer. So now you know where you are.”

  The lady smiled broadly, displaying a very perfect set of teeth, and begged the three to be seated. “I shan’t have to detain you long,” she said. “I have the paper here—my marriage certificate. As you’ll see, I was married to Charles Dearborn eight years ago at St. Matthew’s Church, Abbott’s Ashton, Bristol. My people lived there; so did his.”

  “How long were you together?” asked Richardson.

  She laughed shortly. “I thought one of you would ask that. It was just under two years when he took his hat and walked out on me. No reason given—just took his hat.”

  “Incompatibility of temper?” suggested Richardson gently.

  “I guess if it was, the temper was all on my side. He was a poor, snivelling kind of man, always wanting to get into a corner with some book or other when I wanted him to be up and doing something for a living. Well, we needn’t waste time over him. If he’s dead, as I hope he is, because that kind of man is sure to be in heaven, all I want is a certificate of his death which will leave me free to marry again.”

  “I see,” said Richardson, returning the marriage certificate, “that he had the same first name as this lady’s husband. You have your marriage certificate with you, Mrs. Dearborn; you might show it to this lady.”

  Jane Smith examined it. “That’s all right; it’s the same man. Married again three years ago when I was in Hollywood—just the sort of thing he would do—said nothing to you about having been married before?” Mrs. Dearborn shook her head. “I guessed as much.” She turned to Richardson. “All I want from you is a copy of his death certificate and then we can get on.”

  “I think I ought to tell you,” said Richardson, “that this lady’s husband left a good bit of money behind him.”

  For the first time the lady’s confidence seemed to wilt. “Gee! That wasn’t like my Charles.”

  “He may have won the money in the Irish Sweepstake,” observed Mr. Franklyn Jute.

  “He wouldn’t have known enough to buy a ticket,” said the lady scornfully.

  “We hoped that you might have a photograph and letters of your husband’s.”

  “Then your hopes let you down badly,” she retorted. “There were photographs and letters, but I remember tearing them all up and putting the pieces on the fire in his presence the day before he walked out on me.”

  “Would you recognize his signature if you saw it?”

  “I might.”

  “Well, here’s a specimen.” Richardson showed her Mrs. Dearborn’s cheque for £200.

  She looked keenly at the signature. “That’s his right enough, but I see that he’d started disguising it. That was to keep me from claiming any of the money—just the kind of dirty trick he’d have done.” She turned to the other woman. “You needn’t worry about the money, dearie; I make all I need by my work. All I want is that death certificate to know that I’m free to marry again. You see, it helps a girl to be married to the manager of the studio she’s working in, and that’s my case.”

  “Do you happen to know the sizes of your husband’s collars and boots and gloves?”

  “Not at this distance of time I don’t, but I can tell you what he looked like. He was just the ordinary size of a man, with dark brown hair, a pale, thin face, clean-shaven, and a let-me-get-out-of-your-way style of walking.”

  “This lady’s husband wore a moustache.”

  “That don’t surprise me; he grew it, of course, as a disguise for fear that one day I’d meet him in the street and take him home with me. You see, he was addicted to reading these detective yarns, so he’d get plenty of ideas for disguising himself.”

  Mr. Jute, who had never been condemned to so long a period of silence before, turned to Mrs. Dearborn. “How does that description kind of fit your husband? It seems pretty good to me.”

  “It’s a description that would fit half the men you meet on the London streets,” said Richardson; “we should want something better than that.”

  “I don’t see what we’re all running round in circles about,” said the film star. “It isn’t money that I’m after. Dearborn isn’t a common name and when you get Charles attached to it, belonging to a man who keeps his past to himself, what other proof do you want? If I had a death certificate of your man I could marry again right away and no questions asked. It’s not going to cost you a cent, I’ll pay all the expenses, and if it’s publicity you’re afraid of, I’ll soon stop that, won’t I, Franklyn?”

  Mr. Jute appeared pained. “I’m the man who calls the tune in the publicity music,” he reminded her.

  “I know, but I’m the girl who can dig her toes in if she doesn’t get what she wants, and you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

  It was evident that Mr. Franklyn Jute had to suffer sometimes from the shortness of his client’s temper. Richardson hastened to create a diversion. “If you don’t mind, I should like to ask whether your husband’s relations are still living in Abbott’s Ashton?”

  “Oh, yes, they’re there all right, but you won’t get a word out of them. I’ve tried myself, and all they say is that they haven’t heard from him for six years and they don’t know whether he’s alive or dead.”

  “Don’t you think that when your husband’s relations read of his death in the paper as you did yourself, they would have come down to make inquiries, or at any rate sent someone down?”

  Jane Smith looked perturbed, and turning to the widow asked, “Didn’t anyone call on you?”

  “I didn’t see anyone myself, but a neighbour told me that a young man came down and asked where my husband was living.” She turned to Richardson. “Didn’t Mr. Cosway tell you about that young man with freckles?”

  “Freckles!” screamed Jane, with real triumph in her voice. “Why, that was his
young brother, Albert. He’d more freckles on his face than skin.”

  “There you are!” exclaimed Jute. “Now you’ve got your proof and I’ll thank you for that death certificate. We can have a camera-man down here when you hand it to Jane.”

  Richardson laughed. “We haven’t yet got to that point, Mr. Jute. To-day is Saturday. I shall go down to Bristol to-night and visit Mr. Dearborn’s family.”

  “But to-morrow’s Sunday,” objected Jane; “you’re sure not going to work on Sunday.”

  “Sunday’s a good day for finding people at home.”

  “Now see here, sir,” interrupted Mr. Jute; “publicity don’t matter to you folks in the law, but to us in the picture world it’s everything. I’ve had enough of these delays. What’s to stop me writing a paragraph, ‘Freckled boy becomes key to mystery of fate of Jane Smith’s husband. Surprising developments. Lawyers beside themselves,’ and starting work with that? Then we’ll have a picture of the boy with freckles touched up, and an interview with him about his dead brother. We’ll make him have attended the funeral. What’s wrong with that for a send-off—with other startling details to follow?”

  Speaking in a quiet voice Richardson asked, “And what is to happen if your startling details turn out to be all wrong and we find that the lady’s husband is still alive?”

  “Well, we’ll have no publicity about it.”

  “Don’t go so fast, Franklyn,” said Jane. “You don’t want to step into it up to the neck. How would you look if that guy Gover Schoost, who’s running the publicity for Dora Spencer, got a hold of it and held you up as a darned liar on both sides of the herring-pond? How d’you look then?”

  The publicity agent wilted, as he always did under the lash of Jane Smith’s tongue.

  Richardson seized the opportunity of his silence to rise and make a signal to Mrs. Dearborn. “Very well, then,” he said. “That’s arranged, madam?”

  “Seems to me you did most of the fixing,” replied Jane; “and I don’t know now what we’ve fixed.”

  “That I go down to Bristol to-night and call on your husband’s family to-morrow. They may tell me what they wouldn’t tell you.”

  “And you’ll let me know. Come and see me again on Monday at the same time?”

  “I can’t quite promise that I’ll come and see you, but I’ll let you know what they say.”

  Jane’s parting words to Mrs. Dearborn were, “Don’t you worry about that money he left you, dearie. Nobody’s going to take it from you.”

  Richardson paused on his way out. “There are two small points that I should like to have cleared up, Miss Smith. The first is, what was your husband’s profession?”

  “The same as his father’s. He worked in the same big drapery store in Bristol where his father was the walker. His father got him the job as cashier, but after we married he had words with the boss and he threw him out. After that he did nothing; his plan of life was to live on me, and when I rubbed it in a bit at home he took his hat. What was your other point?”

  “Only the address of your husband’s parents?”

  “Oh, Abbott’s Ashton is only a little bit of a place. Everybody knows where they live; it’s a red brick villa called Chatsworth. But I doubt whether you’ll get anything out of them.”

  Out in the street Richardson hailed a passing taxi.

  “You won’t go back to Devonshire to-night, of course. Would you like me to choose an hotel for you?”

  “Thank you; I’ll go to the Treherne Hotel in Cromwell Road; I’ve stayed there before.”

  “I‘ll come with you, because I’d like to learn your impressions about our recent interview.”

  He followed her into the car, after giving the address. “Now,” he said, “tell me what you thought.”

  “Well, I was listening closely to all of you. I should think that Miss Jane Smith had always been a very difficult person to live with, and that would be enough to account for her husband leaving her. She said that he was a very quiet, retiring man. So was my husband. When he asked me to marry him he told me frankly that I had a soothing effect upon his nerves, and that he had learned with me what real tranquillity was.”

  “So we’ll call that a point of resemblance,” said Richardson.

  “Yes, but on the other hand I gathered from that lady that her husband was a poor sort of creature quite incapable of making money. My husband, I should say, was quite the reverse. He was a good man of business, as his bank manager must have told you.”

  “Have you any other point?”

  “Just one—a very small one. The lady said that her husband read detective novels. I never saw mine read anything but his newspaper, but yesterday, when I was putting away some of his clothes, I found two detective stories in his bedroom cupboard.”

  “Well,” said Richardson, “we don’t seem to be getting much nearer. When I was examining the two marriage certificates this afternoon I noticed that the age given of the two men corresponded pretty closely, though not the dates of birth.”

  The taxi pulled up at the Treherne Hotel. Mrs. Dearborn ran up the steps with her small suit-case, leaving Richardson to pay the driver. He found her waiting for him in the hall.

  “I still have one thing to tell you, Mr. Richardson. Why shouldn’t we have tea together here; it’s very quiet.”

  Richardson looked at his watch. “I mustn’t risk missing my train. No; it’s all right.”

  She gave the order and they went into the dining-room to await their tea.

  “What I want to tell you is this,” she said. “As you know, my husband never talked to me about his past life, and yet on one occasion he did tell me that he had no relations living. He told me this quite spontaneously and that makes me think it may have been true, for if not he would just have maintained silence as he did about everything else in his past life.”

  “I think that’s a very good point, Mrs. Dearborn.”

  At this moment a waiter entered with their tea, and their conversation was interrupted.

  When they were alone again, Richardson took out his pocket-book and laid Mrs. Dearborn’s cheque on the table. “I want you to trust me with this cheque until we meet again. I’m going to get a photograph of the marriage register at Abbott’s Ashton and the signature on this cheque brought up to the same size, and then get an expert opinion on the handwriting.” He gulped down his tea. “And now I fear that I must really take my leave.”

  “When shall I see you again?” she asked.

  “Probably on Monday at Winterton.”

  Chapter Eleven

  BEING LEFT to himself for the week-end was a depressing prospect for Sergeant Jago. He lay awake on the Friday evening wondering how he could usefully spend the two days that were to intervene before his chief’s return from London, and before he closed his eyes he had evolved a plan of action that would be highly commended by his chief inspector if it succeeded and could do no harm if it failed. He argued to himself that the man who killed Dearborn had plunged into the bogs on the south side of North Hessary Tor, where there might be tracks made by the half-wild moorland ponies, but no trodden road in the direction of Plymouth until one struck the main road from Tavistock to Winterton; that in the hollow below the Tor there were bogs impassable even to the ponies, and full of traps for the unwary unacquainted with the moor. The murderer, whoever he was, would naturally avoid any public road; the pony tracks he was following came to an end long before they reached the soft bog; having broken his stout walking-stick, he would have nothing in his hand for testing the solidity of the ground that lay before him, and he might well have had to jump from tussock to tussock until with the failing light he plunged into a quaking morass and was bogged.

  Jago had a friend in the police force, a Tavistock lad like himself; acting on his advice he might gain the ear of the Chief Constable and have a search made of the hotels and boarding-houses for some visitor who had been “bogged” on the moor, and had had to have his clothes and boots washed and brushed
before he could show himself in the streets. It might all come to nothing, but it was worth trying.

  Directly after breakfast Jago took the train to Plymouth and found on inquiry at the police station that his friend, Ned Halliday, was booked as a reserve constable that day. This was fortunate because, while he could not engage a man on point duty in conversation for perhaps a quarter of an hour, he could obtain a long interview with him in a corner of the reserve constables’ room. It was there that he found him, five minutes after the arrival of the train.

  “Good Lord!” exclaimed Halliday, when he saw Jago, “I thought you were catching burglars in London. What are you doing down here?”

  “At the moment I’m trying to catch a murderer, by request of the County Chief Constable.”

  “What! Are you on this Dearborn case that all the papers are full of?”

  “I am.”

  “They might have sent down a better man,” said Halliday, guarding himself against the punch in the ribs that he knew was coming.

  “Can’t you ever be serious for a moment?” inquired Jago. “Not even if I give you a chance of working your promotion?”

  “Now you’re talking. I could do with a bit of promotion with the pay attached to it.”

  “Well, look here. The murderer we’re looking for ran down the south side of North Hessary Tor, and you know what the bogs are like on that side.”

  “I don’t know, but I can imagine.”

  “I do know because I’ve been there. Now this blighter broke his stick over the head of the man he murdered, and to run down at dusk into those bogs without a stick is asking for it.”

  “You think he’s there still with the mud up to his chin?”

  “He may be, and it’ll save a lot of expense to the Crown if he is, but murderers are not as a rule so easily disposed of, and that’s why I’ve come to you. Couldn’t you move your Chief Constable into handing out what we call in London an All Station message, inquiring at every hotel and lodging-house for a man who came in with mud and slime all over his boots and clothes and asked to have them cleaned, on September 29, a Saturday? There can’t have been more than one man in Plymouth to have got himself into such a mess. If they run across his tracks, we’d like to know what became of him afterwards.”