‘I returned the back way after I’d left the front way. I found him recovering from a shock. He was deathly white. Perhaps somebody had come in and told him what he really was. I don’t know. But I walked up to him and he didn’t move, just stared at me, thinking I was going to plead with him, I suppose. I shot him from close up. I was wearing my evening gloves, and I put the gun in his hand and wrote that note. I went out the way I came, and nobody was any the wiser.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’
‘Why? I could kill you, too, like stamping on a spider.’
Luke moved only slightly, but there was a metallic snick and the knife gleamed in his hand.
‘You could kill me?’ he said silkily. ‘Not so easily as you killed him.’
She was staring at him, her slanting eyes narrowed green slits.
‘I’d carve you to ribbons,’ he said. ‘Or maybe you’d like it the way the girl did? The Grayson kid. A nice little cyanide pill, as prescribed by your late hubby?’
She started as if he had struck her across her beautiful mask-like face.
‘You did — that?’
Luke laughed. ‘He didn’t like to do the dirty work,’ he said. ‘And she’d got to know too much. She was always hanging around him, and somehow, we never knew how, she caught on about the dope-racket. Or maybe you didn’t know about that side of the business?’
‘I knew,’ she said, and her tone was tinged with weariness.
‘I’d have killed her then,’ he said. ‘But he thought he could talk her out of it. She was sweet on him, you see. But it opened her eyes, that little discovery. He didn’t know which way she’d jump, and he got frightened. Shake her off and silence her with one move, that was his idea. And I had to do it.’
He paused as if waiting for her to speak. But she didn’t say anything. Something about her expression, her attitude started a thin snake of fear crawling down his spine. He started talking again.
‘So now we know something about each other,’ he said. ‘I fixed her and made it look like she’d fixed herself, you killed him and they tagged it the same way. We should be partners, we’re so smart.’
His quiet laugh died on his lips as the gun suddenly appeared in her hand. It was a black Smith and Wesson .38. A man-stopper all right, and her finger was squeezing on the trigger.
‘That’s right,’ she was saying. ‘That girl; then Ray; and now it’s your turn.’
Dr. Morelle, Inspector Hood and Miss Frayle, together with two plainclothes men, who were crouched amongst the dusty furniture in the next-door room, tensed.
Through the microphone hidden under Ray Mercury’s desk, every word between his widow and Luke Roper had been coming over the headphones worn by Hood and Dr. Morelle, at the same time it was also being recorded as damning evidence on the spinning spools of the portable tape-recording machine which was being operated by one of the plainclothes men.
Miss Frayle, taut and quivering with excitement, beside Dr. Morelle, could hear the words only faintly through his ear-phones.
‘What are they saying?’ she was whispering excitedly. ‘I can’t hear.’
Dr. Morelle silenced her with a glowering look.
‘She’s pulled a gun,’ Inspector Hood said hoarsely, as Dr. Morelle was already leaping to the door, his head-phones flung off.
‘Come on,’ he rapped.
But even as Dr. Morelle, followed by Hood and the two plainclothes detectives raced out into the passage towards the office, Miss Frayle heard the crashing report of the shot over the discarded earphones. She was running herself now, after Dr. Morelle and Inspector Hood.
Dr. Morelle and the others burst into the office to find Luke Roper lying sprawled, his gaze turned sightlessly at the ceiling, a bullet-hole in his forehead. Greta Mercury leaned against the desk, smoke wisping from the muzzle of her pocket revolver.
‘Drop that,’ Inspector Hood barked, lunging forward. The blonde woman jerked to life, like some marionette. Her lips drew back from her teeth as, mouthing some incoherent words, she raised the gun.
Hood closed with her, wrenching the revolver from her hand. She fought furiously, her nails clawing down his face, and tore herself free. Before Dr. Morelle, or the other two detectives, impeded by the staggering inspector could reach her, she had twisted her way out of the office. She flung open the door at the end of the passage, stood framed for a fraction of a second against the darkness of the yard beyond, and then her heels went clacking down the iron stairs.
Inspector Hood and the detective charged after her. But Dr. Morelle, shrugging, stood aside and indicated to Miss Frayle who was about to rush after the others, to remain where she was.
‘It is now a matter for the police,’ he said.
Miss Frayle adjusted her spectacles which inevitably had slipped half-way down her nose.
Inspector Hood and the detectives had run out of the alley into the street beside the Black Moth in time to hear the roar of a car-engine. It raced away furiously, swinging recklessly out into Frith Street.
As the police-officers ran towards the dark, gleaming police-car parked inconspicuously on the other side of Frith Street, Greta Mercury hurled her car furiously round a corner. Inspector Hood and the others in the police-car gave chase. Taxis and cars pulled aside, staring pedestrians showed them the direction the fugitive had wildly taken.
There came a distant crash, the rending of metal and the tinkling of glass. The swiftly-milling crowd parted as the police-car reached the lights of Cambridge Circus. Hurtling round the curve, Greta Mercury’s car had mounted the pavement, struck a corner of the Palace Theatre and turned completely over.
Greta Mercury was behind the wheel, slumped like a rag-doll. Her neck was broken.
Back at the Black Moth, a young uniformed policeman had appeared on the scene, and Dr. Morelle, leaving him in charge of Luke Roper’s body and the tape-recording machine made his way, accompanied by Miss Frayle, down the iron staircase into the yard. Dr. Morelle’s pencil electric-torch illuminated their path and Miss Frayle clutched on to his arm, they went through the alley into the street.
Miss Frayle still hung on to Dr. Morelle as they reached the street corner, and they turned back to look at the darkened sign of the Black Moth. Dr. Morelle had given the policeman who had remained behind a message for Inspector Hood to the effect that since there was nothing more for him that he could usefully do at the club he was returning to Harley Street.
‘Here’s a taxi,’ Miss Frayle said, as a taxi with its disengaged sign shining out against the darkness of the street appeared. ‘Let’s get back and I’ll make a nice cup of tea.’
But Dr. Morelle did not raise his sword-stick to hail the oncoming taxi. Instead he turned to her with a sardonic expression. ‘We will walk, Miss Frayle; there is nothing more conducive to thirst for a cup of tea than a stroll through London at night.’
Miss Frayle sighed, what with one thing and another it had been a pretty trying day. She was about to suggest that although he, being the human dynamo he was, might not be feeling the effects of the long, tiring day, she was only human after all, when she realized he had already made off with his long, raking stride, and she stood alone on the shadowy street corner. A man’s olive-skinned face stared boldly into hers, and with a stifled cry, Miss Frayle shot forward at a run and caught up with Dr. Morelle’s tall figure.
He did not turn as she breathlessly half-trotted alongside him. In an effort to slow his pace to hers she slipped her arm through his once more. But he did not notice her even then, nor did he slacken his speed perceptibly. She looked up at the lean saturnine features and sighed to herself. His thoughts were obviously miles away, no doubt ruminating on the strange case which had reached its dramatic climax only a little while ago.
Together, Dr. Morelle, his sword-stick rapping on the pavement and Miss Frayle, made their way through Soho towards Harley Street.
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Callers for Dr Morelle Page 17