“After all, guvnor, a quid’s not much to save yer neck.”
He started. His neck? His neck wasn’t in danger. No one thought he’d murdered Isobel Baldry. But the protest died even in his heart within a second. Not his neck but his life—that was what he was paying a pound to save.
Now that the car was on its way he knew a pang of security. He was always nervous about journeys, thought he might miss the train, get into the wrong one, find there wasn’t a seat. Once the journey started he could relax. He thought about the coming interview; he was pinning all his faith on Arthur Crook. He wouldn’t be scared; the situation didn’t exist that could scare such a man. And perhaps, he reflected, lulling himself into a false security,
Mr. Crook would laugh at his visitor’s fears. That’s just what I wanted, he’d say. You’ve solved the whole case for me, provided the missing link. Justice should be grateful to you, Mr. Smyth.... He lost himself in a maze of prefabricated dreams.
Suddenly he realized that the cab, which had been crawling for some time, had now drawn to a complete standstill. The driver got down and opened the door.
“Sorry, sir, this perishin’ fog. Can’t make it, after all.”
“You mean, you can’t get there?” He sounded incredulous.
“It’s my neck as well as yours,” the driver reminded him.
“But—I must—I mean arc you sure it’s impossible? If we go very slowly ...”
“If we go much slower we’ll be proceedin’ backwards. Sorry, guvnor, but there’s only one place we’ll make to-night if we go any farther and that’s Kensal Green. Even Mr. Crook can’t ’elp you once you’re there.”
“Then—where are we now?”
“We ain’t a ’undred miles from Charing Cross,” returned the driver cautiously. “More than that I wouldn’t like to say. But I’m not taking the cab no farther in this. If any mug likes to try pinchin’ it ’e’s welcome. Most likely wrap ’imself round a lamppost if he does!”
Reluctantly, Mr. Smyth crawled out into the bleak street; it was bitterly cold and he shivered.
“I’ll ’ave to give you that quid back,” said the driver, wistfully.
“Well, you didn’t get me to Bloomsbury Street, did you?” He supposed he’d have to give the fellow something for his trouble. He put out one hand to take the note and shoved the other into the pocket where he kept his change. Then it happened, with the same shocking suddenness as Isobel Baldry’s death. His fingers had just closed on the note when something struck him with appalling brutality. Automatically he grabbed harder, but it wasn’t any use; he couldn’t hold it. Besides, other blows followed the first.
A very hail of blows in fact, accompanied by shock and sickening pain and a sense of the world ebbing away. He didn’t really appreciate what had happened; there was too little time. Only as he staggered and his feet slipped on the wet leaves of the gutter, so that he went down for good, he thought, the darkness closing on his mind forever, “I thought it was damned comfortable for a taxi.”
* * *
It was shortly after this that Arthur Crook’s telephone rang for the second time, and a nervous voice said, “This is Mr. Smyth speaking. Mr. Crook, I’m sorry I can’t make it. I—this fog’s too thick. I’ll get lost. I’m going right back.”
“That’s all right,” said Crook heartily. “Don’t mind me. Don’t mind Tom Merlin. We don’t matter.”
“If I get knocked down in the fog and killed it won’t help either of you,” protested the voice.
“Come to that, I dare say I won’t be any worse off if you are.”
“But—you can’t do anything to-night.”
“If I’m goin’ to wait for you I shan’t do anything till Kingdom Come.”
“I—I’ll c o m e to-morrow. It won’t make any difference really.”
“We’ve had all this out before,” said Crook. “I was brought up strict. Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.”
“But I can’t—that’s what I’m telling you. I’ll come—I’ll come at nine o’clock to-morrow.”
“If he lets you,” said Crook darkly.
“He?”
He might be waiting for you on the doorstep. You never know. Where are you, by the way?”
“In a call box.”
“I know that. I heard the pennies drop. But where?”
“On the Embankment.”
“What’s the number?”
“It’s a call box, I tell you.”
“Even call boxes have numbers.”
“I don’t see ...”
“Not trying to hide anything from me, Smyth, are you?”
“Of course not. It’s Fragonard 1511.”
“That’s the new Temple exchange. You must have overshot your mark.”
“Oh? Yes. I mean, have I?”
“You were coming from Charing Cross. You’ve walked a station too far.”
“It’s this fog. I thought—I thought it was Charing Cross just over the road.”
“No bump of locality,” suggested Crook kindly.
“I can’t lose my way if I stick to the Embankment. I’m going straight back to Westminster and let myself into my flat, and I’ll be with you without fail at nine sharp to-morrow.”
“Maybe,” said Crook pleasantly. “Happy dreams.” He rang off. “Picture of a gentleman chatting to a murderer,” he announced. “Must be a dog’s life, a murderer’s. So damned lonely. And dangerous. You can’t trust anyone, can’t confide in anyone, can’t even be sure of yourself. One slip and you’re finished. One admission of something only the murderer can know and it’s the little covered shed for you one of these cold mornings. Besides, you can’t guard from all directions at once, and how was the chap who’s just rung me to know that Smyth o n l y had two coppers on him when he left his flat tonight, and so he couldn’t have put through a second call?”
The inference was obvious. Someone wanted Mr. Crook to believe that Smyth had gone yellow and that was why he hadn’t kept his date. Otherwise—who knew?—if the mouse wouldn’t come to Mahomet, Mahomet might go looking for the mouse. And later, when the fog had dispersed, some early workman or street cleaner, perhaps even a bobby, would stumble over a body on the Embankment, and he—Crook—would come forward with his story and it would be presumed that the chap had been bowled over in the dark—or even manhandled for the sake of any valuables he might carry. Crook remembered his earlier thought—work for the doctor, for the ambulance driver, for the mortician—and for Arthur Crook. Somewhere at this instant Smyth lay, deprived forever of the power of passing on information, rescuing an innocent man, helping to bring a guilty one to justice, somewhere between Temple Station and Westminster Bridge.
“And my bet ’ud be Temple Station,” Crook told himself.
It was a fantastic situation. He considered for a moment ringing the police and telling them the story, but the police are only interested in crimes after they’ve been committed, and a murder without a corpse just doesn’t make sense to them at all. So, decided Mr. Crook, he’d do all their spadework for them, find the body and then sit back and see how they reacted to that. He locked his office, switched off the lights and came tumbling down the stairs like a sack of coals. It was his boast that he was like a cat and could see in the dark, but even he took his time getting to Temple Station. Purely as a precaution, he pulled open the door of the telephone booth nearby and checked the number. As he had supposed, it was Fragonard 1511.
There was a chance, of course, that X had heaved the body over the Embankment, but Crook was inclined to think not. To begin with, you couldn’t go dropping bodies into the Thames without making a splash of some sort, and you could never be sure that the Thames police wouldn’t be passing just then. Besides, even small bodies are heavy, and there might be blood. Better on all counts to give the impression of a street accident.
Crook had known of cases where men had deliberately knocked out their victims and then ridden over them in cars. Taking his little
sure-fire pencil torch from his pocket, Crook began his search. His main fear wasn’t that he wouldn’t find the body, but that some interfering constable would find him before that happened. And though he had stood up to bullets and blunt instruments in his time, he knew that no career can stand against ridicule.
He was working slowly along the Embankment, wondering if the fog would ever lift, when the beam of his torch fell on something white a short distance above the ground. This proved to be a handkerchief tied to the arm of one of the Embankment benches. It was tied hard in a double knot, with the ends spread out, as though whoever put it there wanted to be sure of finding it again. He looked at it for a minute before its obvious significance occurred to him. Why did you tie a white cloth to something in the dark? Obviously to mark a place. If you didn’t, on such a night, you’d never find your way back. What he still didn’t know was why whoever had put out Smyth’s light should want to come back to the scene of the crime. For it was Smyth’s handkerchief. He realized that as soon as he had untied it and seen the sprawling letters “Smyth” in one corner. There was something peculiarly grim about a murderer taking his victim’s handkerchief to mark the spot of the crime. After that it didn’t take him long to find the body. It lay in the gutter, the blood on the crushed forehead black in the bright torchlight, the face dreadful in its disfigurement and dread. Those who talked of the peace of death ought to see a face like that; it might quiet them a bit, thought Mr. Crook grimly. He’d seen death so often you’d not have expected him to be squeamish, but he could wish that someone else had found Mr. Smyth.
Squatting beside the body like a busy little brown elephant, he went through the pockets. He’d got to find out what the murderer had taken that he had to return. Of course, someone else might have found the body and left the handkerchief, but an innocent man, argued Crook, would have left his own. You’d have to be callous to take things off the body of a corpse. There wasn’t much in the dead man’s pockets, a notecase with some ten-shilling notes in it, a season ticket, some loose cash, an old-fashioned turnip watch—that was all. No matches, no cigarettes, of course, no handkerchief.
“What’s missing?” wondered Mr. Crook, delving his hands into his own pockets and finding there watch, coin, purse notecase, identity card, tobacco pouch, latchkey.... “That’s it,” said Mr. Crook. “He hasn’t got a key. But he talked of going back and letting himself in, so he had a key....” There was the chance that it might have fallen out of his pocket, but though Crook sifted through the damp sooty leaves he found nothing; he hadn’t expected to, anyhow. There were only two reasons why X should have wanted to get into the flat. One was that he believed Smyth had some evidence against him and he meant to lay hands on it; the other was to fix an alibi showing that the dead man was alive at, say, 10.30, at which hour, decided Mr. Crook, the murderer would have fixed an alibi for himself. He instantly cheered up. The cleverest criminal couldn’t invent an alibi that an even cleverer man couldn’t disprove.
He straightened himself, as he did so he realized that the corpse had one of its hands folded into a fist; it was a job to open the fingers, but when he had done so he found a morsel of tough white paper with a greenish blur on the torn edge. He recognized that all right, and in defiance of anything the police might say he put the paper into his pocketbook. The whole world by this time seemed absolutely deserted; every now and again a long melancholy hoot came up from the river from some benighted tug or the sirens at the mouth of the estuary echoed faintly through the murk; but these were other-worldly sounds that increased rather than dispelled the deathlike atmosphere. As to cause of death, his guess would be a spanner. A spanner is a nice anonymous weapon, not too difficult to procure, extraordinarily difficult to identify. Only fools went in for fancy weapons like swordsticks and Italian knives and loaded riding crops, all of which could be traced pretty easily to the owners. In a critical matter like murder it’s safer to leave these to the back-room boys and stick to something as common as dirt. Crook was pretty common himself, and, like dirt, he stuck.
“The police are going to have a treat to-night,” he told himself, making a beeline for the telephone. His first call was to the dead man’s flat, and at first he thought his luck was out. But just when he was giving up hope he could hear the receiver being snatched off and a breathless voice said, “Yes?”
“Mr. Smyth? Arthur Crook here. Just wanted to be sure you got back safely.”
“Yes. Yes. But only just. I decided to walk after all.”
“Attaboy!” said Mr. Crook. “Don’t forget about our date tomorrow.”
“Nine o’clock,” said the voice. “I will be there.”
Mr. Crook hung up the receiver. What a liar you are, he said, and then at long last he dialled 999.
* * *
The murderer had resolved to leave nothing to chance. After his call to Mr. Crook’s office he came back to the waiting car and drove as fast as he dared back to the block of flats where he lived. At this hour the man in charge of the car park would have gone off duty, and on such a night there was little likelihood of his encountering anyone else. Carefully he ran the car into an empty space and went over it carefully with a torch. He hunted inside in case there should be any trace there of the dead man, but there was none. He had been careful to do all the opening and closing of doors, so there was no fear of fingerprints, but when he went over the outside of the car his heart jumped into his mouth when he discovered blood-marks on the right-hand passenger door. He found an old rag and carefully polished them off, depositing the rag in a corner at the further end of the car park. This unfortunately showed up the stains of mud and rain on the rest of the body, but he hadn’t time to clean all the paintwork; there was still a lot to be done and, as he knew, there is a limit to what a man’s nervous system can endure. Locking the car, he made his way round to the entrance of the flats. The porter was just going off; there wasn’t a night porter, labour was still scarce, and after 10.30 the tenants looked after themselves.
“Hell of a night, Meadows,” he observed, drawing a long breath. “I was beginning to wonder if I’d be brought in feet first.”
The porter, a lugubrious creature, nodded with a sort of morbid zest. “There’ll be a lot of men meeting the Recording Angel in the morning that never thought of such a thing when they went out to-night,” he said.
His companion preserved a poker face. “I suppose a fog always means deaths. Still, one man’s meat. It means work for doctors and undertakers and ambulance-men... .” He didn’t say anything about Arthur Crook. He wasn’t thinking of Arthur Crook. Still under the man’s eye he went upstairs, unlocked the door of his flat, slammed it and, having heard the man depart, came stealing down again, still meeting no one, and gained the street. So far everything had gone according to plan It took longer to get to Westminster than he had anticipated, because in the fog he lost his way once, and began to panic, which wasted still more time. His idea was to establish Smyth alive and talking on his own telephone at, say, 10.30 p.m. Then, if questions should be asked, Meadows could testify
to his own return at 10.30. On his way back, he would return the key to the dead man’s pocket, replace the handkerchief, slip home under cover of darkness... . He had it worked out like a B.B.C. exercise.
Luck seemed to be with him. As he entered the flats the hall was in comparative darkness. It was one of those houses where you pushed a button as you came in and the light lasted long enough for you to get up two floors; then you pushed another button and that took you up to the top.
There wasn’t any lift. As he unlocked the door of the flat the telephone was ringing and when he unshipped the receiver there was Arthur Crook, of all the men on earth, calling up the dead man. He shivered to think how nearly he’d missed that call. He didn’t stay very long; there was still plenty to do and the sooner he got back to his own flat the more comfortable he’d feel. And how was he to guess that he would never walk inside that flat again?
He congratulated
himself on his foresight in tying the handkerchief to the arm of the bench; in this weather he might have gone blundering about for an hour before he found the spot where Smyth lay in the gutter, his feet scuffing up the drenched fallen leaves. As it was he saw his landmark, by torchlight, without any trouble. It was then that things started to go wrong. He was level with the seat when he heard the voice of an invisible man exclaim,
“Hey there!” and he jumped back, automatically switching off his torch, and muttering, “Who the devil are you?”
“Sorry if I startled you,” said the same voice, “but there’s a chap here seems to have come to grief. I wish you’d take a look at him.”
This was the one contingency for which he had not prepared himself, but he knew he dared not refuse. He couldn’t afford at this stage to arouse suspicion. Besides, he could offer to call the police, make for the call box and just melt into the fog. Come what might, he had to return the dead man’s key. He approached the kerb and dropped down beside the body. Crook watched him like a lynx. This was the trickiest time of all; if they weren’t careful he might give them the slip yet.
“Have you called the police?” inquired the newcomer, getting to his feet. “If not, I ...” But at that moment both men heard the familiar sound of a door slamming and an inspector with two men hovering in the background came forward saying, “Now then, what’s going on here.”
“Chap’s got himself killed,” said Crook.
X thought like lightning. He made a slight staggering movement, and as Crook put out his hand to hold him he said, “Silly—slipped on something—don’t know what it was.” He snapped on his torch again, and stooping, picked up a key. “Must have dropped out of his pocket,” he suggested.
Sequel to Murder: The Cases of Arthur Crook and Other Mysteries Page 3