Miss Lane flushed scarlet, but she only said meekly and quietly:
“Yes, I’ve quite a lot to thank Roddy for.”
There was, besides, a question at the back of Conroy’s mind, but subdued by the magic of that summer day and the wealth of gold and green through which they passed, he forgot it until they were once more in the hall of the hotel. Then he said:
“Oh, yes. I wanted to ask you. What is Tasmanian Jim’s second speciality?”
Audrey Lane was startled.
“Yes...Yes...” she said. “That reminds me,” and she walked straight to the Visitors’ Book on the counter. She examined it and nodded her head in relief.
“It’s all right so far, as the man who fell off the roof was heard to say at the sixth storey,” she said, but from that moment in the intervals of revealing to the young American at Mr. Giscombe’s expense the beauties of West Sussex, she kept an eye on the Visitors’ Book.
“You are expecting someone,” said Mr. Conroy, accusing her.
“No, something,” Audrey answered; and on the afternoon of Thursday it had happened. Tasmanian Jim had changed his room. He had moved down, but not to the third floor where Conroy was lodged as she had expected, but to the fourth on which she slept herself.
For a foolish second Audrey went cold.
“You’re shivering,” said Harry Conroy, who stood close to her. He was Harry now and usually close to her.
Audrey lifted her head and laughed. The big motives, revenge for instance, and the big crimes, for instance murder, were not for Tasmanian Jim and his crew of sneak-thieves. They were after the money for the Saturday bill. Harry Conroy had failed them. Well, then, Tasmanian Jim’s second gift must be called upon.
Audrey looked carefully for the names of the visitors upon the fourth floor and an obvious name flashed out at her.
“Mr. Joseph Amersheim.”
Yes, that was the stout and prosperous man whom she had noticed in the lounge on her first night in the hotel. She had met him once or twice in the corridor. His room was near to hers, but on the opposite and more expensive side.
“I suppose Mr. Amersheim is a regular visitor?” she said to the clerk.
The clerk smiled. He was for the moment free.
“Every summer, Miss, and every Christmas. He calls the hotel his little grey home in the west. Witty, I call it, though it isn’t really in the west, if you understand me.”
“Nor is it grey,” said Audrey, thinking of the red bricks.
“Nor is it little,” added the clerk. “But it’s witty, isn’t it?
“It’s rich,” said Audrey, “like Mr. Amersheim.”
The clerk spread out his hands to indicate Mr. Amersheim’s wealth. Then he added: “It’s funny you should ask about him. Someone else was doing the same yesterday.”
“Ah?” said Audrey, quite carelessly.
“A gentleman who has left, I think.”
“Mr. Carstairs,” Audrey suggested. Mr. Carstairs had left on the day before.
“I believe it was, Miss. Funny, isn’t it?”
“Funny but not witty,” said Audrey as she turned away.
So Mr. Amersheim was to be the victim of Tasmanian Jim’s second gift, and either to-night or to-morrow night. For the Saturday bill was imminent.
At this point Miss Lane undoubtedly misbehaved. She should have warned the manager of the hotel and there is not very much to be said for her. This, perhaps. Tasmanian Jim never carried firearms and never fought. If they were caught they submitted and took their little sentences as the order of the day. The worst that could happen in Miss Lane’s opinion was that Mr. Amersheim should have a fright. Against that she set the overwhelming pleasure which she herself would enjoy. There were three lovely Latin words which were so much in her mind that evening that she was afraid that unconsciously that she would speak them aloud. In flagrante delicto.
To-night or to-morrow night! Think of it! Miss Lane could think of nothing else, not even of Harry Conroy. At some time after eleven Tasmanian Jim, followed by Roddy, walked towards the lift. As the door was thrown open, he said to Roddy:
“You might have a drink in my room and we’ll discuss that plan for next week.”
He spoke loudly enough for the lift man and anyone near to hear him. Audrey heard him and Audrey was thrilled. Here was the prepared excuse if the pair were found late at night in the corridor. Mr. Kershaw, the conversation finished, was conducting his friend to the lift. It was to be for to-night, then. Audrey rubbed her hands together. She looked about the lounge. Mr. Amersheim was early to bed and late to rise. He had gone up to his room an hour ago. Audrey waited for another ten minutes. Then she ascended to her floor. She did not undress. She placed a chair in position, set her door slightly ajar, arranged the telephone instrument so that it would be by her hand, switched off her light and sat down in the darkness to wait. Through the chink she looked obliquely across the passage to the door of Amersheim’s room. There was only one light left burning and that at a distance. Here all was silence and shadows.
It was in the natural contrariety of things that after an hour’s vigil during which nothing had happened an intense desire to sleep should steal over Audrey. Her head would fall forward, her eyelids would close and her bed called to her like a church bell. Certainly she dozed in her chair — and then was suddenly awake, wide awake. Someone was moving very quietly in the corridor. Two people. She saw their shadows on the wall and with a heart beating so noisily that she feared it would warn them, she recognized them. She heard a whisper.
“Watch!”
Then in a second Tasmanian Jim, in a dressing-gown over his pyjamas, was exercising his second gift. He was stooping at the door of Amersheim’s room with his ear against the panel, holding his breath. The gift by which he had profited a score of times was that of knowing from the sound of the breathing whether the sleeper slept heavily or slept light. Snoring, according to the experience of Tasmanian Jim, meant nothing at all. Some of the noisiest snorers awoke at the creak of a wardrobe or the flutter of a blind against the frame of an open window. It was obvious in a moment or two that Tasmanian Jim was not satisfied to-night. He stood up, straightening his shoulders to relieve his back, and stooped again. He was puzzled rather than disappointed. It looked to Audrey as if he had come across some kind of respiration which he could not understand or classify. Roddy crept to his side and his movement decided Tasmanian Jim.
“We’ve got to,” Roddy whispered.
Kershaw nodded. He took a little shining forceps of steel from the pocket of his dressing-gown and inserted it into the lock of the door. The key turned, the door swung slowly inwards. A dim light was burning within the room and shone on the side wall. For a couple of tense seconds the two men stood one behind the other ready for flight. But no sound reached Audrey at all and none reached the watchers beyond the breathing of their quarry. They slipped like shadows into the room and noiselessly closed the door behind them.
Audrey closed her door too and got busy. She telephoned to the night porter. Two men had managed to unlock Mr. Amersheim’s door. She knew them as thieves. Would the porter get the manager and the police and be very quick and very silent? Audrey slipped out of her room and past Mr. Amersheim’s door. A few paces beyond it a broad hall branched off and from the hall the staircase and the lift descended. Audrey planted herself at the junction of corridor and hall. “Only over my dead body,” she said to herself with a little giggle of excitement. It seemed to her that hours passed before the lift door opened, but when it did there emerged the night porter, a half-dressed manager, and a calm and hefty policeman. Audrey vamped him with a smile, laid her forefinger on her lips and led the little party on tiptoe to Mr. Amersheim’s door. As they reached it, it opened. Tasmanian Jim peeped out. Audrey had a glimpse of a face convulsed with terror. For a moment, though his eyes wandered from the manager’s face to the policeman and from the policeman to Audrey, he was not aware of them. Then with a little squeal he tried to cl
ose the door again. But he did not succeed.
“Now then! Now then! What’s up here?” said the policeman, and suddenly they were all in the room and all silent. Most silent of all was Mr. Amersheim. For he lay in his bed with his eyes staring at the ceiling and his chin dropped.
“We never touched him, I swear,” Kershaw stammered. “I knew there was something wrong when I listened outside. You can’t fix it on us.”
“He didn’t wake up,” Roddy explained in a shaking voice. Audrey had never seen terror in the raw before, and she did not like it. “I was watching him. We didn’t frighten him. He never knew we were in the room. He stopped breathing and his eyes opened — oh,” and his face was contorted and a spasm of sickness shook his body. “He never woke up.”
That was the question. Mr. Amersheim’s doctor refused to commit himself. Mr. Amersheim’s heart? Yes, he might have died naturally and peacefully in his sleep. On the other hand, the shock of finding thieves in his room might very well have killed him. And in that case Roddy and Tasmanian Jim would have been guilty of manslaughter certainly and murder perhaps. The magistrates sent the prisoners to the Assizes and so Roddy and his friend came before a red Judge at last. They were acquitted on the graver charge. Audrey, who was in Court, saw the colour return to their faces as the verdict was given. They had pleaded guilty to burglary, however, and the tale of their squalid little villainies, recited by an officer of the C.I.D., bleached them again.
“Ten years’ penal servitude,” said the red Judge, and Roddy clutched at the rail of the dock. If he had not committed the big crime, he had got the big punishment.
“Ten years!” he repeated with a slobbering mouth. “Ten years!” Suddenly he stopped and the slobbering mouth hung open. For looking straight at him from the seat occupied a second ago by the bird who had tried to pick him up in the lounge of the hotel, was the little grub of a secretary with the eyeshade and the hornrimmed spectacles.
“Well, I’m jiggered!” said Roddy as the warder tapped him on the shoulder. Even in the minor matters of expressing himself Roddy was a poor creature.
THE ITALIAN
“I AM SORRY, Mrs. Quintash,” said Police-Inspector Grant. “Our presence is, of course, very distressing, but your parlourmaid, Martha, acted very sensibly when she called us in. You will be free of us all the sooner.”
“I don’t blame her at all,” answered Doria Quintash.
Grant was a large, kindly, middle-aged man, with a dread of emotional scenes which not even his long experience had been able to remove. He was very grateful to Mrs. Quintash for the steadiness of her voice and the quietude of her manner. She was a young woman, trim and complete even at this moment. She might be beautiful, the inspector conjectured, to those who liked something a bit foreign. For himself he preferred the English type, fair, and a trifle buxom perhaps. Doria Quintash had a clear pale face, which at this hour seemed to be owned and occupied by a big, clear pair of eyes black as night, rather full, red lips, and black, shining hair most neatly parted in the middle and sweeping down in great curves to hide all but the lobes of the ears. She was seated at a gilt table covered with a red silk cloth fringed with little red balls; and in front of her was a cup of tea and a plate of buttered toast.
“Whilst you go on with your breakfast, Mrs. Quintash,” said the inspector, “I’ll read out to you the report I’m making, and by the time I’ve finished I expect our surgeon will have done.”
“Certainly — whatever is usual,” Doria Quintash answered. It was quite a surprise to the inspector that there was no trace of a strange accent in her voice. Foreign she looked but English she spoke. “Won’t you sit down, Inspector, before you begin?”
“Oh, thank you.”
The inspector looked uneasily about the room for a piece of furniture which would bear his weight. It was a drawing-room as he thought a drawing-room ought to be — at once florid and musty, a place with a suite of ebony and gold furniture upholstered in blue satin, a cabinet of ebony and gold painted with staring posies of flowers, little gimcracky tables, a thick Axminster carpet, and a big marble vase in one of the front windows. It was to the inspector nice, a room which a self-respecting person had but didn’t use. Only there was not much for a self-respecting person of sixteen stone to sit upon. However, the inspector drew forward a spindle-legged cane chair and lowered himself gingerly on to the edge of it.
“At five minutes past eight a.m.,” he read from his notebook, “Martha Green, house-parlourmaid to Mr. Anthony Quintash, the famous explorer, rang up the police station and said that on taking, as per usual, a cup of tea into her employer’s bedroom, at eight o’clock, she found him dead, and a book which he had been reading and the bedclothes spattered with blood. The bedside lamp was still burning. Martha Green at once proceeded to the hall where a fixed telephone is installed, and called up the district police-station. I had just come on duty, and instructing Martha Green to see that the room was not entered or touched, I warned the police surgeon, Mr. Graham Buckland, and in company with him repaired to 15A, Ryde Street, Queen’s Gate, where the tragedy had occurred. On arriving I found that Martha Green had waked up Mrs. Quintash, who had been sleeping in a room divided from her husband’s by a bathroom, and up to that moment was unaware of the catastrophe.
“Anthony Quintash’s room was in the front of the house upon the third floor, and his bed stood with its head against the outer wall in the angle of the room. Quintash was lying upon his left side with his face to the wall. A thin, sharp stiletto was driven into his heart, and a book was lying tumbled upon the bedclothes. There was very little blood, and that already dry, both upon the sheets and the page of the book. Upon examination some writing in pencil was found upon the border of the last page of the book, which had been cut. The writing was without doubt in Quintash’s hand, although it was weak and faltering and a trifle blurred. But it was easily decipherable. It ran:
“‘No one is to blame. I fell asleep and tossed over on to my side. My fault. Tony.’”
At this point Inspector Grant interrupted his report to ask:
“You heard no cry, Mrs. Quintash?”
“None,” Doria answered. “I don’t think I could have heard if Tony had cried out. There’s always a certain amount of noise from cars and lorries on the Knightsbridge road at night.”
Grant nodded.
“This Street runs up to Knightsbridge, doesn’t it? Yes. And there’s all the Covent Garden traffic. Besides, I expect Mr. Quintash realized that his injury was fatal and preserved his strength to write those sentences.”
He looked again at his report.
“Mr. Quintash, I understand, used that stiletto as a paper-knife regularly, in spite of remonstrances from both you and Martha,” he continued.
“Yes, we both thought it dangerous,” replied Doria. “I used to put it away the moment Tony went off upon his travels, but it was always lying upon his writing-table the day after he had returned. He had a reason, of course.”
Grant looked up.
“Oh! Might I hear it?”
“He read a good many foreign scientific books. I don’t know whether you’re familiar with the look of them, Mr. Grant. They are heavy books with paper covers and thick uncut pages which do want a lot of cutting.”
“Yes, I see. I was puzzled about that paper-knife, Mrs. Quintash, and I was afraid that the coroner might be so too—”
“The coroner?”
Doria Quintash was the puzzled one of the two now. Her forehead set in a frown.
“Do you mean to say that I must have all the publicity of an inquest?” she asked, and there was just a shade of resentment in her voice.
“I don’t say that,” the inspector hurried to say. “The coroner may issue a certificate right away, as soon as he gets our surgeon’s report. I don’t see why he shouldn’t. But he has to be informed.”
“It depends on the surgeon?”
“A good deal. But I hear him coming, Mrs. Quintash.”
T
he police surgeon was a long, thin, shambling man with a grizzled moustache and an aquiline face. He stared for a few moments at Doria Quintash, at a loss to reconcile this young widow who seemed to have stepped straight out from the canvas of an old Italian master with the characterless jumble of tawdry, expensive furniture which cluttered up her drawing-room. If the room had a distinctive feature at all, it was a complete absence of taste, and here she sat at her ease in it.
“Mr. Graham Buckland,” said the inspector, introducing him. The surgeon bowed. He carried a parcel under his arm. He spoke with sympathy.
“I think if we could get hold of your doctor now, Mrs. Quintash, we could between us simplify matters for you.”
Doria Quintash shook her head, she glanced at him aslant and a little wistful smile glimmered for a second at the corners of her lips.
“We haven’t got a doctor,” she answered. She was still saying “We” as if her husband was alive. “I moved into this house whilst Tony was away in Brazil, not a year ago, and we were both of us never ill.”
The answer disturbed Graham Buckland. He edged away on his long, loose legs to the window which was not covered by the marble vase, and stood with his back to the room. It was somehow outrageous and futile that the man who had burst out of the jungle into Bahia with the remnants of his expedition after a two years’ successful search for a lost city of the fourteenth century should come so soon to so unnecessary an end in a dull, flat row of houses, with great porticoes much too big for them, in a side-street of Queen’s Gate.
“Then I must put my one question directly to you, Mrs. Quintash.”
“Yes?”
“Quintash’s death is perfectly explained by the words he wrote in the book,” Graham Buckland said bluntly. He had got to get his point clear, and though bluntness sounded cruel, it was, like the surgeon’s knife, the kinder on that account. “That stiletto might certainly have caused his death just in that way, and probably did. The smallness of the wound, and the slight loss of blood, would have given him the time to scrawl his message, and probably did. But I was at the great reception last night.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 825