The inspector took up some typewritten sheets from a wire basket. ‘I can give you an outline of what has been found out so far. He started speculating on a large scale about nine years ago, and at first he made a lot of money. After that he had a run of serious losses, and he appears to have got through the whole of his private fortune four years after he began; anyhow, it was then that he took his first fatal step. He was a trustee of various settlements and other funds. He started with one of £17,000, which he converted for his own use and benefit; lost that, and went on going deeper and deeper, in the hope of getting square again. All the victims received their incomes regularly, so they naturally never suspected they were being paid out of stolen capital. You can see how easy it is, when everyone has absolute confidence in a man’s integrity. First and last, nearly £200,000 had gone by the time Gayles did his disappearing act. Some of it, no doubt, he had stowed away somewhere where he could get at it under another name. The rest went down the drain. That’s the story, put short. It has taken some getting at, because he employed a number of different brokers.’
‘Thank you,’ Trent said. ‘It is just as I expected.’
‘You mean about the time when he went wrong?’
‘Yes, first we hear that he had scarlet fever five years ago. Now we hear that he began gambling nine years ago, and that ruin was staring him in the face after four years of it. You see? The Freiburg trick was staged just about the time when he had yielded to temptation, or was just going to, perhaps.’
Mr Murch looked at Trent consideringly. ‘Well, if you will tell me why,’ he said slowly. ‘I suppose you are not suggesting he could have lost his hair any other way than by having a severe illness somewhere. And why should that have had anything to do with his starting out as a wrong ’un? I agree that he had been preparing his getaway a long time. The Perfitts say it was some years ago – they don’t remember exactly – that he took to sleeping in that convenient ground-floor room. And we know now why he never took a holiday apart from weekends – a show-up might come at any time, if he wasn’t on the spot to stave it off. I must say he managed very well. He knew Sims wouldn’t have any grounds for calling us in at first, so that the trail was stone-cold by the time we started. We don’t know when he left the house, and we haven’t a clue to where he went, and the watch-out for him at home and abroad has been absolutely fruitless so far.’
‘Yes, he certainly showed good judgement. But I should keep Freiburg in mind if I were you. Did you find anything out of the way when you went through Gayles’ place?’
‘Nothing – except that in the bathroom, among the little bottles over the basin, there was one of spirit gum. And I don’t see what he could have wanted with that. He couldn’t have imagined he could get away with a false beard or moustache.’
‘Perhaps he put it there to make it more difficult. You must have been meant to find it.’
‘That’s just the kind of thing,’ the inspector said, ‘you can’t be so sure about. A criminal will often mess up the cleverest plan by some idiotic piece of carelessness – you know that as well as I do.’
‘Just so. Well, I hope the Freiburg myth seems to you worth pondering about – it does to me. Now I must be off – and, I say, if I should manage to beat you to Gayles, I will let you know at once. The word will be Snowdrop.’
‘Well, it’s nice to see you again, Phil,’ Eunice Faviell said. ‘I wish it happened oftener. What did you want to see me about? You aren’t here on account of my beautiful eyes, I know.’
She was receiving Trent in her dressing-room at the Siddons Theatre, after the first act of that vivacious comedy Beautiful Soup, and she was delicately adjusting, before her glass, the coronet she was to wear in the second act.
‘It was to get some advice about beauty treatment, at least,’ Trent said.
‘Beauty treatment!’ She stared at him. ‘My dear, do you want to have your face lifted, or your silhouette improved? I can put you on to a friend of mine who has just had ten pounds carved off below the waist-line – or perhaps I hadn’t better, as no one is supposed to know. But really, Phil, you will do as you are for a few years yet. You mustn’t lose heart about your figure’
‘I don’t. I want to know about something quite different. The question is whether a man can disguise his complexion in such a way that it will look natural by daylight and not be detected at all.’
Eunice reached to a row of small bottles on a shelf by the mirror. ‘You could do it with this wash,’ she said. ‘It will change that light ginger-bread colour of yours to an interesting paleness, and if you renew it two or three times a day it will look all right to anyone who doesn’t know you. But with anyone who does, it would be very hard to change your complexion so that he couldn’t tell it was faked. And now will you tell me why you should be thinking of trying to look like a turnip?’
‘But I wasn’t thinking of myself at all. I never do – you know that. The man I have in mind is a white-faced man.’
‘If that’s his type,’ Eunice said, ‘you can get lotions which claim to give you a healthy tan that you haven’t deserved. But it never looks as good as the real thing, and, like the other, it wouldn’t deceive his friends. The only convincing way for a pale man to get brown is nature’s way.’
‘I see. Well, that clears up my uncertainties, Eunice; and you have given me something to think about.’
‘Miss Faviell, please,’ came a yelp and a knock at the door.
One evening a week later Inspector Murch was much moved on receiving a telegram in these words:
SNOWDROP WHAT TRAIN SHALL I MEET TOMORROW PRINCES STREET REPLY TRENT NORFOLK HOTEL MEWSTONE.
Mr Murch, knowing Trent well enough to be sure that this meant business, consulted a time-table and replied at once. Next morning at 10.45, on the platform of the Princes Street Station at Mewstone, he was greeted by Trent.
‘I can see by the look in your eye that you have got something,’ the inspector said as they went through the barrier.
‘When I say Snowdrop, I mean Snowdrop.’
‘All right. Where do we go from here? And why Mewstone?’
‘We go to the Botanic Gardens,’ Trent said as they went briskly up the station approach. ‘They are said to be among the finest in the country – and Gayles, you know, loved flowers. You may not know that he had among his tulips one named after this place. It’s famous for them, I find. Then there is the immortal question, “Where does a wise man hide a leaf?” Answer, “In the forest.” And where does a retired – or retiring – professional man hide himself? In Mewstone, of course – it’s swarming with them. Above all, Mewstone is not very far from Preakness, and you take the same train from Victoria for both of them. So I decided to pay a visit to Mewstone; and yesterday I saw Gayles in the Botanic Gardens. When he went off to his hotel for lunch, I went there too, and took a room. I have made a few discreet inquiries there; also at Preakness.
‘Now I will tell you a few things I guessed about Gayles. The first is that, during that long holiday five years ago, wherever he spent it, he employed his time learning to drive a car.’
‘Ha!’ Mr Murch ejaculated.
‘Anyhow, he drives quite well now. He went on improving, I dare say, during those solitary weekends of his, most of which be did not spend at Preakness, as you’ll find if you look up the register at the Pitt’s Head Inn there, where he was supposed to stay. It’s true he went there fairly often; but Mewstone is the place for hiring cars.
‘In other ways he got ready for the smash, if it should become inevitable. For five years he wore his wig and his conspicuous glasses. He took to sleeping on the ground floor.
‘In time things went from bad to worse, and at last exposure was very near. So Gayles took his final measures. He developed neuralgia, and bought an ultra-violet sun-ray amp to cure it. It is true that the deep infra-red is what they use for neuralgia; but the ultra-violet is excellent for another thing – it cures you of being pale. Gayles used it, I imagine, each mo
rning before breakfast. In a fortnight, say, he had a fine natural brown-red colour. As soon as it began to appear, he took to whitening his face with liquid powder or some such stuff and he kept it on till bedtime.
‘Then he went for his last long weekend. Early on the Friday evening he took a taxi from the office, with his suitcase, to Victoria. We know that; what follows is guesswork. At the station he took a dressing-room, perhaps, washed his face, shed his wig and glasses, and changed into different – very different – clothes. Also he trimmed his eyebrows close, and put the loose hair in an envelope. Then he left Victoria when the rush-period was on, and nobody paid any attention to him. He proceeded to make a call on Mr H T Wyman, of 37 Yarborough Place, who performed on him the simple and swift operation of lifting his face.’
‘What!’ shouted Mr Murch, exploding in a laugh; then added soberly, ‘Well, go on.’
‘I got the idea of it,’ Trent said, ‘from a chance remark made by a friend whom I was consulting about changing one’s complexion. Then I inquired for the names of the principal experts who do that operation, and started to look them up; and at the second shot I found Wyman. He will tell you that at 5.30 that day he did the job for a man named Davies, who had made the appointment by phone some days before – an elderly sportsman with a very brown face, in light grey tweeds and a rather larky striped tie.
‘Gayles returned to the station and took the dining-car express, not to Preakness, but to Mewstone. He had nothing to show on him but some stitches behind his ears, and he looked about half his age. On arriving, he went to the Norfolk hotel and took a room in the name of E G Fairhurst, saying that he would probably be staying some months if he liked the place. He has stayed there ever since.’
‘That’s wrong, anyhow,’ snapped the inspector. ‘On the following Tuesday – ’
‘Let me tell you what he did on the following Tuesday. He left for London by the 7.35 a.m., on which he had booked a compartment for himself. He said he was going to bring his car down to Mewstone, and took a place for it in the hotel garage. In the compartment he changed into the Gayles outfit, whitened his face, and resumed his wig; also he stuck on his eyebrows the clippings he had kept, using that spirit gum which he afterwards left about to keep you guessing. Before reaching London he tied up his jaws in a scarf because of his neuralgia, which had taken the unusual form of much improving the shape of his face. Then he was ready for what was to be positively the last appearance of J C Gayles. After his day at the office he went home, and retired at 9.30. As soon as he was in the room, he floundered about in the bed for a little, then changed back into the personality of E G Fairhurst, washed and shaved, put the Gayles clothes into his suitcase, walked out with it through the garden, and went off to some garage where he had been keeping a car for some time – under his new name, no doubt.
‘And so, you see, he drove straight down to Mewstone, arriving, according to the night porter, about 1.30, saying he had had a breakdown; garaged the car, went up to bed, and had six or seven hours of refreshing slumber after a busy day. He had been in regular residence at the hotel for five days before Gayles was missed from his home, and a week before his disappearance was reported in the papers. Looking as if he had never put his nose inside an office in his life, too. He must have thought the position fairly safe.’
‘Devil doubt it,’ agreed Mr Murch. ‘He had worked hard enough.’
By this time they had arrived at the Botanic Gardens, and Trent led the way to a seat in that well-wooded, smooth-turfed, and gorgeous-bedded park. ‘That is how the fake was managed, I believe,’ he said. ‘Some of it is conjecture, of course; but does it seem to you to hang together?’
The inspector lay back with his arms along the top of the seat, and reflected. ‘If you have really got Gayles, it would account for everything. If you have got him, it’s a fine piece of work, and you can say I said so.’
‘I said Snowdrop,’ Trent reminded him. ‘Take a look at the man over there.’ His glance indicated a typical Mewstone resident, brown-red of face, leisurely of mien, rather gaily plus-foured and stockinged, on a seat about twenty yards from them on the opposite side of the walk. This person had bared his head to the gentle breeze, and was contentedly eyeing the great bank of tulips that faced him beyond the path. Mr Murch stared, then turned to Trent.
‘I don’t see it,’ he said curtly. ‘Why, that man’s hair is as genuine as your own. Dammit, look at it! And he isn’t more than forty at the outside – I’d say thirty if he wasn’t going grey.’
‘That,’ Trent said, ‘is what Wyman does for you. As for his hair, of course it’s genuine, because he never lost it. He wore a wig on top of it for those five years.’
The inspector snorted. ‘Then you haven’t heard that Gayles has been seen without his wig, and that he is as bald as a coot.’
‘Oh yes; Sims told me that. But on those occasions, you see, Gayles was wearing a sham bald head, such as you’ve often seen on the stage. Now and then, when he meant to be caught that way, he would wear his bald pate and the wig over that. He was seen with the wig off only for a moment, with the light behind him, and the effect was quite convincing. All the same, it was just that that gave me my first idea about the whole fraud. He was always seen by people whose duty it was to come into his room at that precise moment. You know that he insisted on the strictest punctuality. When I realised that he would naturally be most careful to have his wig in place at those times, the great idea began to dawn on me. At last I saw that he had planned to disappear by shedding a few things that were not genuine, and giving himself an entirely new appearance that anyone could see was genuine. Quite a good notion, I thought.’
The inspector sighed. ‘All right; you win. But how am I going to arrest a man I can’t identify? I have only known him as he was before he absconded. The real hair, and the eyebrows, and the shape of the face – they make all the difference.’
Trent took from his pocket an envelope, and drew out two slips of paper. ‘Here are two portraits cut from unmounted group-photographs of the Committee of the Cambridge Union Society, taken in Gayles’ third year, before his eyebrows began to thicken. I had them sent to me by Hurst & Bingham, the firm who took them; they keep negatives of that kind in case they’re wanted for memoirs or biographies. The serious-looking person in this print is the Librarian of the Union. In the other, taken six months later, you see him again as President. Pretty good likenesses, don’t you think?’
Mr Murch gazed at the young-old face in the two prints, then at the old-young face of the man on the neighbouring seat. He shook hands with Trent in silence, then rose, walked over to his unsuspecting victim, and touched him lightly on the shoulder.
Two months later John Charlton Gayles, found guilty on all counts of the indictment, was sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude.
V
The Inoffensive Captain
‘Inspector Charles B Muirhead. Introduced by Chief Inspector W Murch.’ Trent was reading from a card brought to him as he sat at breakfast. ‘I had no idea,’ he remarked to his servant, ‘that Mr Murch was introducing a new kind of policeman. What does he look like, Dennis?’
‘He might be anything, sir. A very ordinary-looking man, I should say.’
‘Well, that’s the highest compliment you could pay a plain-clothes officer, I suppose.’
Trent finished his coffee and stood up. ‘Show him into the studio. And if he should happen to arrest me, telephone to Mr Ward that I am unfortunately detained and cannot join him this evening.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
The two men who came together in Philip Trent’s studio looked keenly at each other. The police officer, who did not much approve of the mission on which he had been sent, was not reassured by what he saw. Trent was at this time – it was a few years before the unravelling of the Manderson affair came to change his life – a man not yet thirty, with an air of rather irresponsible good humour and an easy, unceremonious carriage of his loose-knit figure that
struck his visitor as pleasing in general, but not in keeping with great mental gifts. His features were regular; his short, curling hair and moustache, and, indeed, his whole appearance, suggested a slight but not defiant carelessness about externals.
Mr Muirhead, knowing nothing of modern painters, thought this quite right in an artist, but he wondered what could have led such a man to interest himself in police problems.
As for Inspector Muirhead, he was a lean, light-haired, upstanding man with a scanty yellow moustache, dressed in an ill-fitting dark suit, with a low collar much too large for his neck. The only noticeable things about him were an air of athletic hardness and a pair of blue eyes like swords. He looked like a Cumberland shepherd who had changed clothes with a rent collector.
‘I am very glad,’ said Trent, ‘to meet any friend of Inspector Murch’s. Sit down and have a cigar. Not a smoker? So much the worse for the criminal class – you look as if your nerves were made of steel wire. Now, let me hear what it is you want of me.’
The hard-featured officer squared his shoulders and put his hands on his knees. ‘Inspector Murch thought you might be willing to help us unofficially, Mr Trent, in a little difficulty we are in. It concerns the escape of James Rudmore from Dartmoor yesterday afternoon.’
‘I hadn’t heard of it.’
‘It’s in the papers today – the bare fact. But the details are unusual. For one thing, he’s got clear away, which has happened only in a very few cases at Dartmoor. Rudmore did what others have done – made a bolt from one of the gangs doing outdoor labour, taking advantage of a mist coming on suddenly. But instead of wandering on the moor till he was taken again, as they mostly do, he got on a road some miles from the prison, where he had the luck to meet a motor car going slowly in the mist. He jumped out in front of the car, and when the chauffeur stopped it Rudmore sprang at him and gave him a knock on the head with a stone that stunned him. The car belongs to an American gentleman and his wife, by name Van Sommeren, who were touring about the country.’
Trent Intervenes and Other Stories Page 8