Callers for Dr Morelle

by Ernest Dudley

  The place suited Aces. He liked to have a dump right in the heart of London, in the centre of things, among the teeming streets he knew so well, close to the theatres and clubs and night-cellars and dives; and it was nice when he was playing dates in the provinces to know it was waiting for him when he came back.

  Sometimes he had to admit to himself it looked a crummy joint, but it suited him. Of course, there were times when he considered that the activities of the tenants who occupied rooms on the two floors beneath his rather lowered the tone of the place: the sound of clumping feet on the bare stair-boards which ran up from the street-entrance beside the Continental provisions store was sometimes a source of considerable irritation.

  However, live and let live had always been Aces’ motto, and as long as people let him alone, he was prepared to let them get along with their business. He wanted no part of anybody else’s business. He was strictly on his ownsome.

  Yawning loudly, it had been a very late night with that funny business at the Black Moth, Aces rose and strolled to the window. The usual swarm of cars, swerving taxis, and people. The smell of coffee and cooking from nearby cafés and restaurants drifted up to him with the odour of petrol on the warm air. The usual gossiping group of men of various nationalities, creeds and colours, in their gaudy suits and ties, hanging about, gossiping about every subject under the sun, from girls to the racing-form.

  Aces’ mind switched back to last night at the Black Moth. For a moment, Aces sweated gently, he didn’t like that sort of thing going on around him. People letting guns off and killing themselves, it made him feel uncomfortable. Death was pretty inevitable anyway, he couldn’t understand why people wanted to take a short cut to it.

  Funny coincidence, he mused, it happening the very same night when old Inspector Hood had looked in, and brought Dr. Morelle with him, too. Though Mercury’s suicide had taken the attention off his performance and their interest in him, and he hadn’t had a chance of a word with either of them afterwards. He wondered if Dr. Morelle, who must have recognized him, of course, had mentioned that business on board the liner to the Scotland Yard man. Aces decided that he hadn’t, that Dr. Morelle wasn’t the sort to open his trap about something like that.

  Aces was a respectable citizen now, engaged in a legitimate profession for whatever fee he, or his agent, could screw out of who booked the act. Come to think of it, he’d have to look for a new spot in London now that Mercury was a goner, the club was certain to be closed for a spell, longer than he could afford to be out of work.

  He saw the groups shifting below as a newspaper-van dropped off a bundle of the early edition of the evening papers to the old chap who sold them on the corner.

  There would be something about Ray Mercury, Aces thought.

  He went out of the flat, down the bare stairs, and out into the street. He was back in his sitting-room within a few minutes, sitting smoking a cheap cheroot and reading the story on the front page.

  Ray Mercury had made the front page this time, all right. Aces had read a stop press reference in his morning paper to the happenings at the Black Moth; now, here was a couple of columns devoted to the night-club owner’s death.

  ‘SOHO NIGHT-CLUB DEATH,’ the headlines ran. ‘Ray Mercury, owner of the Black Moth, well-known night-club, died in the early hours of this morning while the band played and the patrons danced, joked and drank their champagne. He had been shot dead, a pistol was found in his hand. The police have taken possession of a note in the dead man’s handwriting, they say there appears to be no evidence of foul play.’

  Aces took a deep drag at his cheroot and then read on: ‘Ray Mercury recently gave evidence at the inquest on Julie Grayson, a former dancer at his club. According to the verdict at the inquest she had committed suicide.’

  Reading between the lines, Aces decided, it looks like they’re linking the two things. ‘It was revealed at the inquest on Julie Grayson,’ he read, ‘that she had been in love with Mercury and that he had broken off their association.’

  Aces put the paper down, staring through the window at the upper floors of the houses across the street. It looked like Ray Mercury was upset about the girl, it had preyed on his mind, so he had gone and shot himself, that was what the paper was making it look like. Only the thing was, he thought, the idea of Ray Mercury shooting himself over a girl was a bit out of character. He didn’t know him well, he’d played at his club for about four months, and hardly ever met him around, but he’d heard tales about Ray Mercury. Not particularly nice stories. And then wasn’t there some beautiful blonde who was his wife in the background? A foreign piece, people said, who no one saw at the club.

  Aces La Rue shrugged to himself. How could you tell what people in Ray Mercury’s racket would do next? He could be half-filled with dope at the time, or ginned up to the ears. You couldn’t tell with people like that. They were a nutty crowd and no mistake. He recalled that henchman of his, Luke Roper, he called himself. He looked as if he was a dope-addict, if anyone did.

  ‘Always give me the creeps, he did,’ Aces said to himself. He had long got into the habit of talking to himself. ‘I’d sooner shake hands with a snake than with Luke.’

  He threw his paper on a rickety chair and glanced at his wrist-watch on its imitation gold bracelet. Time he took a stroll down Charing Cross Road and met a few music-hall pals, listened to show-business gossip and looked in on his agent, to remind him Aces La Rue was now swelling the ranks of the unemployed.

  He went into the kitchen with the object of making himself a cup of coffee, in order to buck up his spirits preparatory to going out, when he heard a knock on the door of the flat.

  Aces began to sweat. Don’t tell me it’s the cops, he thought, wanting to ask him questions about last night’s goings-on. He didn’t like the idea of that at all. He had nothing to fear from a visit from the gendarmes, he had nothing on his conscience, but the idea of meeting the cops just made him sweat, that was all.

  ‘Can’t be a flattie,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I’d have heard his big boots clumping up the stairs. I’ll go.’

  He went and opened the door.

  The woman who stood there, hesitantly, was deathly pale and Aces was shocked by the haunted stare in her long grey eyes. He saw that she clutched a crumpled newspaper.

  ‘Why, Thelma,’ he said. ‘This is a surprise, and a pleasant surprise at that.’

  He held the door open for her. She didn’t smile as he took her hand, and he found it cold and unresponsive.

  ‘I hoped you’d be here,’ she said. She spoke as if she was shivering. ‘I’m so glad.’

  ‘You wanted to see me?’ Aces’ expression was baffled. ‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘Fine. Come on in and park your chassis.’

  To Thelma, as she sat in a sagging arm-chair, it was as if she had come to this place instinctively. Her mind a maelstrom, all she knew was that she must seek help and this strange little grey-haired man, it seemed to her, was her only hope, there was no one else she could turn to.

  Since she had left the Black Moth there had been no sleep for her. Time had meant nothing. Where she had wandered, where she had sat, brooding alone in all-night cafés, she could not have remembered, before eventually she had returned to the Charlotte Street flat. The past hours had been like a nightmare, pacing up and down her flat through the grey dawn, racked and tormented by the enormity of the thing she had done, she had at last forced her will to take command of her shattered nerves. She had begun to think and reason coldly. She had left the flat again to walk and try and reach a decision, to find an answer to the dread question: what should she, a murderess do, with her life now?

  Then, an hour ago, she had bought an early edition of an evening newspaper and experienced a shock that had numbed every fibre of her being.

  She assented automatically when Aces asked her to have a cup of coffee with him, and he had started to bustle around the kitchen.

  ‘This is great seeing you again, Thelma,’ he cal
led through the open door. ‘Though I’m not used to entertaining classy dames like you, so you must excuse this little nest of mine, I’m afraid the joint is a bit of a shambles.’

  While he busied himself preparing the coffee, he contrived to study the girl covertly. A skilled student of human nature, he tried to guess at the state of mind of his visitor. Was she still, he wondered, grieving over the death of her sister? A darned shame about that kid. He’d liked both of them when he had got to know them at the club.

  ‘You said you wanted to see me,’ he said, at last, as she took a cup of coffee from him. ‘If there’s any way I can help?’

  She looked at him with strange intentness. A sense of uneasiness filled him, a feeling of disquiet. Something was going to break, he thought, that he wasn’t going to want much of a part of. He sighed inwardly. He wished she’d taken whatever it was on her mind to unload somewhere else.

  ‘You may not want to help me,’ she said, ‘when I tell you what it is.’

  ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ he said. ‘Just go ahead and make with the talk.’

  She leaned forward, watching him, her face pale and drawn.

  ‘Would you help me,’ she asked, ‘even if you knew I’d killed someone?’

  Aces’ jaw dropped as he stared at the girl. Then he forced a sympathetic expression to his face. ‘You mean you ran over someone in a car?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve killed a man,’ she said, her voice low and harsh. ‘Murdered him.’

  ‘You — you murdered a man?’ He chuckled shakily. ‘You kidding?’

  ‘This is no joke. I’m deadly serious and I’m frightened, but I killed him.’

  ‘You’ve been letting things get on top of you,’ Aces said. ‘It’s the shock of your sister’s death, poor kid. Delayed shock that’s what. Now you just get these ideas out of your head. You need to relax, take things easy for a while.’

  ‘I must tell you,’ she said. ‘I must tell somebody. I shot Ray Mercury.’

  He lowered the cheroot he had just lit and was about to take a pull at. ‘Now I know you’re living in some kind of nightmare,’ he said. ‘Why, I was just reading the paper. It practically says he committed suicide.’

  ‘I went there last night,’ she said, then she opened the newspaper with trembling hands and showed him the story similar to the one he had already read for himself in his paper. ‘That’s what I can’t understand. I know I was there. I fired at him and saw him fall — and yet this morning I bought this paper, and they say he was found lying with a gun in his hand. I don’t know what’s happened. You must help me. Tell me what to do. I’m going crazy thinking of it.’

  ‘You’ll have to let this sink in,’ Aces said. Privately, he was concluding that the tragedy of her sister’s death followed by this shock of Ray Mercury had been too much for her. ‘You really believe what you’re telling me?’

  ‘I tell you,’ Thelma Grayson said passionately, ‘I meant to kill him for what he did to Julie.’

  ‘You’d better go through this right from the start,’ Aces said, thinking that he might as well let her rattle away at him if it would do her any good. He’d got time to spare anyway, and she was a nice-looking girl and sweet all right, and he liked her and he’d liked her poor kid of a sister.

  ‘I couldn’t bottle it up any longer,’ she said, her voice throaty and low-toned. ‘I had to tell somebody and ask their help.’

  Yes, he was the only one she could come to in her hours of anguish. She had thought of telling Phil Stone everything, once or twice at her flat she had picked up the telephone to speak to him. But she had been afraid that he would not understand, she was afraid, she had admitted to herself, that he would say she should go to the police. She wanted to hear something different, in her agony of mind she wanted to hear that there was an easy way out, a simple way.

  And then she had read in the newspaper story the reference to the young man, Phil Stone, who had discovered Ray Mercury dead, and she had guessed that he had gone to see the man who had been responsible for the death of the girl he loved, no doubt to tell him what he thought of him, to thrash him with his bare hands. It was like Phil to have planned to do just that.

  So she had kept away from him, she had, at last, come to Aces La Rue, with his worldly-wide experience, for help.

  ‘You see,’ she said to him, ‘this newspaper story has altered everything. If he committed suicide, then I didn’t murder him, after all. It’s all so strange, and mad — and yet I know I was there, and I did shoot him . . .’

  She paused to gulp down some coffee from a cup that trembled in her hand. Then she spoke slowly, and carefully, with cold emphasis.

  ‘I went there late last night,’ she said. ‘I don’t know the exact time. Nobody saw me. I got a key to the door at the back of the place a week or two ago. It was lost by the commissionaire and I happened to find it, and, I don’t know why, I hung onto it. There was nobody about. I found him alone in his office, and there was only one thing I wanted to do. It had been in my mind all the time since Julie died.’

  Aces took a drag at his cheroot, but it was cold in his mouth. He was staring at her, incredulity slowly receding from his face, as she went on, her eyes wide and staring as she pictured the grim scene.

  ‘He began to get frightened,’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘As he stood up behind his desk I fired at him, and fell forwards across the desk. I went out, still no one saw me. Afterwards I was panic-stricken, horrified at what I had done.’

  There was a few moments’ silence. Aces pushed a hand through his silver-grey hair. Then he said: ‘Far as I can see I’d forget the whole thing. You’ll only lay up trouble for yourself if you start talking now. The police seem to think by what the papers say, that it’s an open and closed case. So why not let sleeping dogs lie, why stir up trouble for yourself?’

  ‘But don’t you see,’ she said desperately. ‘It’ll be preying on my mind forever if I thought I really had killed him. If this is right, and he committed suicide, then I didn’t murder him, I couldn’t have done. It’s all so crazy and mixed up — but if I can only find out the truth.’

  ‘I get it, I get it all,’ Aces said, sorry for the girl, yet wishing fervently she hadn’t pushed this problem on him. ‘According to you, you left him for dead, then he gets up and shoots himself.’ He thought for a moment, eyeing her. ‘Where did you get the gun?’

  ‘I borrowed it. From someone I know.’

  ‘What did you do with it afterwards?’

  ‘I just put it in my coat-pocket.’

  ‘You still got it?’

  She shook her head. ‘I threw it away,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember where exactly. I was so muddled in my head. But I threw it into some rubbish dump, on a bombsite, somewhere. I just threw it away.’

  ‘I see,’ he said. Then he shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose it makes any difference. If it turns up no one need trace it to you or what happened at the club. And it may never turn up at that.’ He broke off. ‘But why did you think I could straighten this out for you?’

  She looked at him appealingly. ‘Julie and I always liked you, we always felt you’d been around, you knew the world. I thought you might know about these things, the way the police work on a case like this. I’m sorry to have loaded my trouble on you, but —’

  ‘I don’t want to get mixed up with the police, and that’s flat,’ Aces said. ‘Already, if what you’ve told me is true, I’m an accessory after the fact.’ He shifted uncomfortably and re-lit the cold cheroot.

  ‘I’d no idea of getting you in trouble,’ Thelma Grayson said. ‘And if you feel you ought to go to them —’

  ‘Give away a pal?’ he said, grinning at her. ‘Not likely. I’ll keep my trap shut. And you should do the same. That’s my advice to you, Thelma. Let it blow over.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, quietly. ‘If I can’t find out, I’m afraid I’ll have to go to the police in the end. I just don’t know what to do, what to think
. I’m scared and yet I want to know the worst.’

  Aces got up and paced the room. ‘I want to help you.’ He stopped pacing suddenly, a gleam in his narrowed eyes. ‘I’ve got it, I’ve got an idea. There’s someone who can help you, who’ll give you the best advice available.’

  She stared at him eagerly. He swung round to her. She stood up and moved towards him.

  ‘He was a good friend to me once,’ he said. ‘Come to think of it,’ he added, a note of excitement creeping into his voice, ‘he was there last night. Dr. Morelle, you go and see him. He lives in Harley Street.’

  ‘Dr. Morelle?’ she said.

  He nodded and took her hands in his. They were still ice-cold and trembling. ‘Listen, Thelma, he’s the one man in the world who can fix this for you. Tell him I sent you, if you like, though I don’t want to get mixed up too much in this. But tell Dr. Morelle what you’ve told me and leave the rest to him.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Thelma Grayson flipped through the pages of the Medical Directory for the current year, until she came to what she wanted to read: MORELLE, she read, 221B. Harley Street, W.1 (Tel. Langham 05011) — M.D. Berne (Univ. Berne Prize & Gold Medallist) 1942: F.R.C.P. Lond. 1932 (Univ. Vienna, Salzburg, Carfax, U.S.A.); Phys. Dept. Nerv. Dis. & Lect. in Neurol. Rome Academy, 1929; Lect. & Research Fell. Sorbonne, 1928; Carfax, U.S.A. Fell. Med. Research Council 1930; Research Fell., Salzburg Hosp. 1931; Pathol. Rudolfa Clin. Berne; Medico-Psychol. Trafalgar Hosp. & Clin. Lond; Hon. Cons. Psychiat. Welbeck Hosp. Lond. Author ‘Psychol. aspects of prevent, treat. of drug addiction,’ Amer. Med. Wkly., 1932; ‘Study of analysis in ment. treat.,’ Ib., 1930; ‘Nervous and mental aspect of drug addict,’ J1. of Res. in Psychopathol, 1931; ‘Hypnot. treat. in nerve & ment. disorder,’ Amer. Med. Jnl., 1930; and a list of further publications up to the current year on similar themes; etc., etc.