Callers for Dr Morelle

by Ernest Dudley

  ‘I shall always be around,’ he said softly.

  The telephone on his desk buzzed discreetly and he picked up the receiver, to listen to the voice of his clerk.

  ‘Inspector Hood?’ he said. Again he listened. ‘Tell him to wait a moment. I’ll see him.’

  He hung up, irritated by the interruption of his intriguing conversation with Greta Mercury, and a little apprehensive about the inspector’s call. He knew Inspector Hood through various police-court cases, what was he doing here? Thoughtfully he glanced at Greta Mercury. She was leaning forward tensely.

  ‘Police?’ she said, in a whisper. ‘What are they after?’

  ‘I can’t say,’ he said.

  ‘Is it about Ray?’

  ‘How could it be about Ray? The Coroner’s court returned their verdict. That’s all finished.’

  She stared at a spot over his shoulder, her gaze unseeing. Then she stood up and held out her hand, which he held for a long time. He ushered her to the door and watched her hips as she went through to the outer office. Inspector Hood, sitting comfortably in a chair, his big hands on his knees, his unlit pipe drooping from his mouth, also watched her go, not without interest.

  He came into Bellairs’ office with a somewhat chilly greeting to the lawyer, and took the chair he offered. He didn’t like Larry Bellairs, and the other knew it.

  ‘Ray Mercury’s widow wasn’t it?’ Hood said.

  ‘You saw her at the inquest, you are well aware who she is. Poor girl. It’s been a great shock to her.’

  ‘If I was her I shouldn’t be sorry to see him go.’

  ‘That is hardly the thing to say of a recently bereaved widow,’ Bellairs said.

  ‘Depends on the husband — and the wife,’ Inspector Hood said. ‘Smoke my pipe, if you don’t mind,’ as the other offered him a cigar from a box he produced out of his desk-drawer. Bellairs’ nostrils quivered as the acrid smoke drifted across to him. Still busy with his match Hood growled: ‘I’m just looking into one or two things about Ray Mercury. Routine stuff, that’s all.’

  The other looked warily at the burly police officer, whose bubbling pipe sent more smoke-clouds wreathing between them. ‘As his lawyer,’ he said, ‘you’ll realize my business with him was confidential. But if there is any matter in which I can help you I, as his lawyer, will be glad to.’

  The detective eyed him sceptically, and Bellairs wondered what he had been driving at. None knew better than he that there were plenty of disreputable facets to his late client’s career. What line was Inspector Hood following? Would it affect him? Or Greta? His thoughts lingered on the pale hair, her supple figure and her throaty voice.

  ‘Let’s get it straight,’ Inspector Hood said. ‘We know he was linked with one or two things which we don’t like. The fact that he’s out of our reach now, doesn’t mean that we’re not still interested in these things.’

  ‘What do you want to know, and why do you think I should be able to help you?’ Bellairs brought his thoughts back from his vision of Greta Mercury and settled them on the less attractive figure before him.

  ‘I was just wondering what was going to happen to the Black Moth,’ the detective-inspector said. ‘Who gets it now? You, for instance?’

  The lawyer smiled. ‘Why should I have it?’ he said. ‘I had nothing to do with running the place, I had no interest in it. I was Ray Mercury’s lawyer, that was all. Not his business-partner.’

  Inspector Hood looked at him, his pipe-bowl gurgling noisily. ‘So you were just his lawyer,’ he said. ‘You never mixed up in any of his enterprises.’ He considered this for a moment. ‘So the club belongs to who, now?’

  ‘His widow.’

  ‘And is she going to carry on the place?’

  The other shrugged. ‘She came in to see me about it,’ he said. ‘That and other matters relating to her husband’s will. But we didn’t discuss the future of the Black Moth. It’ll wait till she comes back.’

  ‘Back from where? Where’s she going?’

  ‘Abroad, I believe,’ the lawyer said. ‘But I don’t think her plans are fixed at the moment.’

  Inspector Hood nodded. He rose to his feet with a little grunt. Bellairs watched him, his expression masked by a fixed smile, a smile with little humour in it. ‘So she may decide to keep the place going, or sell out?’

  The lawyer nodded. ‘She’ll make up her mind when she returns. I can’t tell you what she’ll do.’

  ‘And you’ll be looking after her interests?’ the detective said. He moved slowly to the door. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I always wanted to put Ray Mercury where he belonged while he was alive. He’s dead now, committed suicide,’ he paused to take his pipe out of his mouth and regard the blackened bowl with careful interest, ‘so I can’t very well do much about him. But it was from the Black Moth that he operated his less respectable activities, and I was just wondering if Greta Mercury took over the place if she’d take over her late husband’s dope-running business as well.’

  Inspector Hood shot the lawyer a look from under his heavy brows. The other stood at his desk and said nothing. He watched the detective go out, leaving behind him an acrid plume of tobacco-smoke gouting from his pipe, and a vague feeling of apprehension in Larry Bellairs’ mind.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Inspector Hood turned up at 221B Harley Street that afternoon.

  Miss Frayle still frustrated by Dr. Morelle’s intriguing silence since their return from their visit to Tracy Wright, answered the door. Inspector Hood explained that he had decided to have a chat with Dr. Morelle after leaving Larry Bellairs, before going on to Scotland Yard. Inspector Hood was always pleased to call at the house in Harley Street. He remembered with warmth the quiet of the study, conducive to calm thought and reasoned recapitulation. There with the help of Dr. Morelle’s acute brain, he had resolved many a problem that had nagged him in the past.

  In his present task no great matter of deduction was involved, it called for painstaking police-work, plodding from place to place, from link to link. But, all the same, he welcomed the idea of talking things over with Dr. Morelle.

  ‘Why so interested, Inspector?’ Dr. Morelle was asking him now. ‘After all this creature Mercury is dead.’

  Hood was busy with his inevitable pipe. His keen eyes, under their heavy brows, regarded Dr. Morelle through a haze of smoke, while Miss Frayle had settled herself behind her desk. She listened with interest to the man from Scotland Yard and Dr. Morelle discussing the Black Moth business. She hoped Dr. Morelle might reveal to the detective what he had so far abstained from disclosing to her, especially the result of their visit to Tracy Wright.

  ‘I’ll go back a bit,’ said Inspector Hood presently. ‘Some time ago a girl of a very good family ended up in a nursing home as a hopeless drug-addict. Nothing special about that, maybe. But she was one of a series of similar cases. She had been a familiar figure round the night-clubs, especially the Black Moth. Like the other women, some young and some old enough to know better. The whole business was handled quietly from the publicity point of view, for the sake of the girl and her family. But it began to make us think even more closely about Ray Mercury. We’d been after the pipeline along which the distribution of drugs went on, for a long time, and everything was pointing to the Black Moth.’

  ‘A familiar and unhappy situation,’ Dr. Morelle said. ‘Yet you found nothing definite to go on, so far as this man Mercury was concerned?’

  Inspector Hood shook his head. ‘Not so far. He covered his tracks well. He worked through associates, naturally, and I haven’t been able to pin them down yet. Now Mercury is no longer with us, but what we want to know is who’s taking over from him. He must have built up a profitable business, dope isn’t bought for pennies, and somebody must have been all set to muscle in.’

  Miss Frayle shuddered as grim and macabre visions of dope-traffickeers and their victims, all she’d heard about them, came to her mind.

  ‘He had a wife,’ Dr. Morelle was
saying. ‘I saw her at the inquest, didn’t I? A beautiful and self-possessed young woman.’

  ‘Tough and as hard as nails,’ said Hood. ‘She’s got the club,’ he went on. ‘Mercury’s lawyer, a shady type called Larry Bellairs, told me. She was just leaving when I arrived there. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me if she’s going to run the joint herself.’ He paused and puffed at his pipe. ‘And also what I’m wondering,’ he said, ‘is if she’ll keep a man named Luke Roper, who went with the club, as you might say. Mercury’s right-hand hatchet-man, he was. Whether she knew about, or is interested in, her late husband’s dope-racket, is another matter.’

  ‘This man Roper, he was close to Mercury?’ Dr. Morelle said.

  Hood shrugged. ‘They were as friendly as two men can be who are watching each other all the time like cobras.’

  ‘Is he a criminal?’

  Inspector Hood nodded. ‘He’s done one or two stretches, but he’s as slippery as a snake. A dangerous baby, if ever there was one. One of these quiet, self-contained characters who never blabs around about what he’s doing. Always got a grip on himself.’

  Dr. Morelle lit a Le Sphinx, and its fragrant aroma mingled with the nostril-stinging fumes of Hood’s pipe. ‘Your surmise is that Roper may be planning to carry on with the narcotics business either on his own, or with Mercury’s widow?’

  ‘That is feasible,’ Hood said. He stood up, stretching slowly. ‘Many thanks for the chat, I’ll be on my weary way, plodding along like the poor flat-footed copper I am. If you get any bright ideas, I’d be glad to have them.’

  Miss Frayle caught the enigmatic look that flickered across Dr. Morelle’s face. She glimpsed a momentary gleam in his hooded eyes.

  ‘I’m delighted you called,’ Dr. Morelle said.

  At the hall-door, as she saw him out, Hood clutched his black trilby and whispered to Miss Frayle: ‘What’s he up to? He’s interested in this Black Moth business, I can sniff it a mile off. And when Dr. Morelle’s interested, he isn’t doing it for the hell of it.’

  Miss Frayle fluttered. ‘I really don’t know Inspector,’ she said. ‘His brain works much too fast for me.’

  Hood chuckled. ‘The old thought-processes that he’s so fond of talking about, eh?’

  After he had gone Miss Frayle went back to find Dr. Morelle smiling bleakly to himself as his gaze wandered idly round the bookshelves lining the study walls.

  ‘What did you make of that?’ she said brightly.

  ‘Inspector Hood vouchsafed me an interesting item or two,’ Dr. Morelle said. ‘I think it would prove instructive to learn more about Ray Mercury’s widow, and about this man Luke Roper.’

  ‘What I meant was, why didn’t you mention anything to him about Tracy Wright?’ she said. ‘And you never dropped a hint about what Thelma Grayson told us. I’m sure he would have been terribly thrilled to hear about all that.’

  Dr. Morelle considered her thoughtfully. The waning September sunlight, pale and a reminder of approaching autumn, shafted through the windows, and the remains of Inspector Hood’s tobacco-smoke drifted listlessly ceiling-wards. Somewhere along Harley Street a taxi hooted, the faint mutter of traffic from Marylebone Road obtruded intermittently upon the silence of the study.

  ‘What, regrettably, you have not yet learned, Miss Frayle,’ Dr. Morelle said at last, ‘is that there is a time to speak and a time to remain silent. There is no danger attached to the fact that while Thelma Grayson believes she murdered Ray Mercury, the police believe he died by his own hand. Because I happen to know the truth is of no consequence to anyone, except the woman who thinks she is a murderess, and she will know what I know all in good time.’

  ‘You — you mean you know for certain she didn’t kill him?’ Miss Frayle had leapt towards Dr. Morelle and now she stood staring up at him, her teeth chattering with excitement.

  Dr. Morelle nodded and permitted himself an indulgent smile at Miss Frayle who was clutching at his arm. ‘I am positive she did not murder him,’ she said.

  Now she was frowning and biting her lower lip as she tried to recall what it was she had missed during their visit to the penthouse overlooking Hyde Park. What had Tracy Wright said which had obviously clinched the matter for Dr. Morelle? She voiced her thoughts aloud.

  ‘I can’t think what he said which gave you a clue,’ she said. ‘Any clue at all.’

  ‘He?’ His expression struck her as being ostentatiously puzzled, and she was filled with a wave of frustration inspired by his complacency.

  ‘Tracy Wright,’ she said. ‘I never heard him utter a word which seemed to me to help us, so far as Thelma Grayson was concerned.’

  ‘I recall your mentioning the fact, Miss Frayle,’ he said.

  ‘What did he say, then? He rattled on for hours about his blessed old guns; and he admitted what we already knew, what she’d told us, that he’d lent her the gun to shoot Ray Mercury with. But what else?’

  Dr. Morelle smiled at her condescendingly. ‘You are suffering from the assumption,’ he said, ‘that it was the interview with Tracy Wright which resulted in my reaching the conclusion that Thelma Grayson had not committed murder.’

  Her eyes were round behind her horn-rimmed spectacles. ‘But isn’t that what you said?’ she said. ‘Isn’t that what you meant?’

  Slowly he shook his head. ‘I knew that she hadn’t fired the fatal shot before we called at Parkview Court,’ he said.

  ‘Then why did you —?’ she began to say, then broke off, and asked him instead: ‘How did you know?’ she said.

  ‘Thelma Grayson herself told us.’

  ‘Thelma Grayson —?’

  Again she broke off in mid-sentence and stared at him, a baffled expression spreading over her face. She shook her head, and turned away from him, to throw herself into a chair. ‘I give up,’ she said.

  ‘You were here at the time,’ he said. ‘You were listening to her.’ He moved to his desk and took a fresh Le Sphinx from the skull cigarette-box. Every line of his tall, gaunt frame infuriated her, every nuance in his voice. How could she possibly have missed hearing what Thelma Grayson had said? She had sat there listening with rapt attention.

  The flame of his lighter threw the high cheekbones of his brooding features into relief. He drew at his cigarette for a moment and then said through a cloud of smoke: ‘You also saw the deceased in his office at the night-club.’

  She sat up in her chair. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ she said. She had a vision of that inert figure lying on the floor as she had burst into Ray Mercury’s office that night in search of Dr. Morelle.

  ‘Don’t you recall the position of the body?’ Dr. Morelle said.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I remember quite well. But I don’t see —?’

  ‘Cast your mind back.’

  ‘I have,’ she said. ‘The poor thing was in a heap, lying by his desk. I remember it perfectly well. And you and Inspector Hood were there.’

  ‘And when Thelma Grayson told us so vividly how she had gone into the office and shot him,’ he said, ‘didn’t anything strike you about her description as somewhat significant?’

  She scowled to herself, her brow corrugated above her spectacles, as she tried to fathom what he was getting at. She summed up all her powers of concentration as she sought to remember, word by word, Thelma Grayson’s account of those dramatic moments. Nothing stirred in her consciousness to convey to her any hint of what Dr. Morelle was talking about.

  ‘‘He was frightened,’ was what she said,’ Dr. Morelle was saying, ‘‘and tried to come round the desk to me,’ do you remember?’ Miss Frayle nodded and he continued: ‘She went on,’ he said, ‘by saying: ‘and I fired. He fell across the desk sprawling.’’

  Miss Frayle could hear Thelma Grayson’s voice once again in her mind. Yes, that was what she had said. Then Dr. Morelle was speaking. ‘And I asked her,’ he said, ‘if, after she had shot him as she had described it, and he had fallen across the desk, had she touched him?
And what did she say?’

  ‘Say?’ Miss Frayle blinked at him, and tried to remember, biting her lower lip in her effort. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘What answer did she give?’ Dr. Morelle paused, and for a moment she had the impression, one which she had experienced on previous occasions, that he was looming before her like some giant, dark bird of prey, about to pounce.

  ‘I’m just thinking,’ Miss Frayle said.

  Dr. Morelle’s mouth tightened in a thin line, and then he said: ‘‘No,’ she said, ‘I saw what I had done, and remember putting the gun in my pocket, and I went out.’ That was what she said.’

  A great flash of revelation illuminated Miss Frayle’s mind and she jumped up. ‘And yet you’d found his body lying on the floor.’ she said, gulping in her excitement.

  ‘I am gratified to see that the light has at last dawned,’ Dr. Morelle said. ‘Precisely. She left him for dead, sprawled across his desk, but Inspector Hood and I found Ray Mercury dead on the floor. That was also how Phil Stone and the waiter had come upon him a few minutes before our arrival on the scene. What was the conclusion to be arrived at from those facts?’

  ‘That the body had moved,’ Miss Frayle said promptly.

  Dr. Morelle eyed her humourlessly. Then he gave a nod. ‘It could not have moved itself,’ he said, ‘if what Thelma Grayson said was true, and she had no possible motive for lying.’

  ‘So someone else must have moved it,’ Miss Frayle said, not without an air of triumph.

  ‘Furthermore, we know,’ Dr. Morelle said, ‘that the bullet which killed the deceased was from the automatic pistol in his hand, and not the revolver Thelma Grayson used.’ He tapped the ash off his cigarette into an ash-tray on his desk.

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ Miss Frayle said. ‘She said she shot him and he fell dead.’ She paused, while Dr. Morelle regarded her with a bleakly mocking smile. ‘And all this about a different bullet from a different gun that was in Ray Mercury’s hand —’ She found herself unable to conclude the sentence and let the words drift into a puzzled mutter.