Cecily smiled, a little grimly. “You’d be amazed at some of the duties of a private secretary, Mr. Tibbett. However, that all came later, when Mr. Alexander grew really rich. In Marjorie’s case, it was a young man’s passing affair. He grew tired of her, as I knew he would. He found her a very good job up in the Midlands—not with his own company, of course—and that was that. He never knew that she was pregnant, and it would have been as much as my job was worth to tell him.”
“It’s ironic,” said Henry, “to think that he was searching for his nephew, when all the time his own natural son was—”
Cecily seemed not to have heard. She went on. “After Marjorie died, I brought the boy to London. I was determined that his father should do something to help him, whether he was aware of it or not”
“It didn’t occur to you to tell him then, after the boy was grown up?”
Cecily gave Henry a pitying look. “Of course it occurred to me,” she said, “until I found out what Denton had become. Can you imagine Mr. Alexander turning control of Warwick Industries over to a homosexual interior decorator? Don’t be silly. If the boy had been different . . . more of Mr. Alexander’s idea of a son . . . I might have risked it. As it was, I decided to play it the other way. We invented the name Denton Westbury—I didn’t want Denton to have any apparent family connection with me—and I persuaded Mr. Alexander to let him do the Belgrave Terrace house. But I’m afraid he wasn’t really very good. Mr. Alexander had it redone the following year. Still, it had given Denton a good introduction to London society, so we got started on charity fund raising, and that went much better. And with the job at the Charlton Foundation, he would have been set up for life. In fact, he will be set up for life, unless the real Simon Warwick turns up. Oh, the idiot! Now I suppose you’ll arrest him and—”
Henry held up his hand. “Miss Smeed, why do you think I came to see you, instead of going to Westbury? I told you, I have no evidence that would convince a jury. No harm has been done, and I don’t intend to take any further action. I just wanted to be sure in my own mind. It’s another piece of a very complicated jigsaw puzzle falling into place.”
Very quietly, Cecily said, “You are very kind.”
Henry stood up. “I must warn you about one thing, though, Miss Smeed.”
“Warn me?”
“Benson hasn’t yet been proved guilty of the murder of Goodman. If it should turn out that he is innocent after all, and if either you or Westbury had anything to do with it—well, further action will certainly be taken.”
At 11:15 the following Tuesday morning, Henry Tibbett was in his office, dealing with preliminary evidence on a new case and thinking about Harold Benson and Simon Warwick. And Emmy Tibbett was at the terminal at Heathrow Airport that welcomes—if that is the word—transatlantic visitors. She had parked her small car in a distant and inconvenient garage, and was now searching among the arrivals for a lady in a navy-blue suit with a yellow flower in her buttonhole.
As a matter of fact, Emmy saw her almost immediately. Sally Benson, tall and graceful, with a drift of blonde hair, light makeup, and huge dark glasses, was conspicuous among the somewhat frazzled passengers making their way through customs and immigration toward the freedom of England’s green and pleasant land. The trouble was that too many other people were meeting too many other people. Among the throng of friends and relatives were uniformed chauffeurs of hired cars, holding up sheets of paper on which the names of their passengers were written in bold letters; suddenly, Emmy noticed that one of them read MRS. HAROLD BENSON.
There was a barrier between arriving passengers and welcoming friends, and Emmy fought her way through the crowd toward it, calling out, “Mrs. Benson! Mrs. Benson!” She had nearly reached the barrier when Sally Benson came through it, stopped and looked around her, obviously trying to locate someone. It occurred to Emmy that it was very silly to wear dark glasses on a February morning in London, and at the same moment the identical idea seemed to occur to Sally Benson. She put her hand to her forehead and momentarily took off her dark glasses; and in that short moment, Emmy saw quite clearly that one of her eyes was blue, and the other a pale hazel green.
Then as a wall of struggling humanity pushed itself between Emmy and Mrs. Benson, Emmy glimpsed the back of the uniformed chauffeur. Weaving deftly among the crowd, he reached Mrs. Benson, saluted, and said something that Emmy could not catch. Sally smiled brilliantly and replaced her dark glasses, and the next moment the chauffeur had relieved her of her hand baggage and was escorting her to the far exit. As she tried frantically to follow, Emmy cannoned into a massive lady in tweeds, who said icily, “There’s no need to push, you know.”
“Excuse me. I’m sorry. I’m in a great hurry.”
“I’m sure we’re all in a hurry,” remarked the large lady, as she sailed past Emmy in the opposite direction. Emmy reached the exit just in time to see the chauffeur climb into the driving seat of a big black limousine. Sally Benson’s blonde head was visible through the rear window. All that Emmy could do was to make a note of the car’s registration number before it pulled smoothly away from the curb and disappeared down the exit road from the airport.
“Mrs. Tibbett is on the line, Chief Superintendent,” announced the telephone operator at Scotland Yard. “She would like to speak to you.”
Henry, his thread of thought broken by the ringing telephone, said irritably, “Tell her I’m busy. I’ll see her at lunchtime.”
“Very good, Chief Superintendent.”
Henry went back to his papers, annoyed. Emmy knew very well that he did not like her calling him in his office, and in any case he would be seeing her in just over an hour.
The telephone rang again. “Excuse me, Chief Superintendent, but Mrs. Tibbett says it’s very urgent. She must speak to you.”
“Oh, very well. Put her through. Emmy? What’s all this about? . . . You’re where? . . . What are you doing there, for God’s sake? . . . Well, you had no business to. I told you the other day that it would be most improper . . . What? . . . Say that again . . . Have you taken leave of your senses, woman? How could she possibly be? . . . You mean, you think she’s his daughter, or something . . .?”
“Henry,” said Emmy, uncomfortably aware of the lack of privacy in the airport telephone kiosk, “I’m trying to tell you. Harold Benson didn’t kill Simon Warwick. He married him.”
“Are you crazy?”
“No, I—my God, Henry, she’s come back into the terminal. . . must have forgotten a piece of luggage, or something . . .Have you got the car number? PJ8745X. Big black hire car, by the look of it. There she goes. I’m going after her . . .”
The line went dead.
13
For a moment, Henry sat looking at the telephone in his hand. Then he hung up, and called Inspector Reynolds on the intercom.
“I want a car traced, Reynolds. Large black limousine, number PJ8745X. Get someone onto identifying the owner, and put out a call to all squad cars in the vicinity of Heathrow Airport. If anybody spots the car—it just left the airport—report back here, and tail it. No, I don’t want it stopped, not at this stage. Driver is a uniformed chauffeur, passenger a blonde woman. Possibly there may be a dark woman in the car as well. Got that? Good. Then come in here, will you? I want to talk to you.”
Five minutes later, Inspector Reynolds was facing Henry across the desk, his square, honest face displaying bafflement and incredulity.
“I can’t believe it, sir.”
“I couldn’t for about a minute,” Henry said, grinning. “Then, as I thought about it, everything fell into place. Sex-change operations aren’t all that usual, of course, but they’ve been going on quietly for a long time, and there are more of them every year. I remember reading somewhere that a hospital in Baltimore, is especially famous for them. Harold Benson went to college in Washington, D.C., which isn’t far from Baltimore.”
“But, sir—” Reynolds was still struggling with disbelief. “The Bensons have a son
.”
“So did the Finches,” Henry pointed out.
“Oh—yes, I see what you mean. The boy may be adopted.”
“Must be, if we’re right,” Henry said. “Doctors can turn a man into a woman physiologically, but not even the greatest surgeons have been able to transplant reproductive organs—so far.”
“So when Benson said that Simon Finch didn’t exist—”
“He was telling the exact truth,” said Henry. “After the operation, the woman—as she now is—is issued with a complete new set of documents, including birth certificate, in her new name and with her new sex. I wonder what the lawyers will make of it. Simon Warwick is alive—yet Simon Warwick no longer exists. Nor does Simon Finch. He became Sally Finch sometime in the 1960s.” He paused. “Simon Finch never ran away from home, of course. He went to start a new life as a girl—to his father’s shame and fury, but, I imagine, with his mother’s sympathy. And then—”
He was interrupted by the telephone. Reynolds answered it. “You have? Good.” He began making jottings on a notepad. “Yes . . . that’s what we thought . . . Yes, I’ve got that . . . He did? Where? I see . . . What’s that? . . . Nobody? . . . Hold on a moment . . .” He put his hand over the telephone and said to Henry, “Hawthorn’s traced the car, sir. Belongs to a big hire firm in Hammersmith—Limitless Limousines. And a squad car has just called in that it’s following it now, proceeding along Great West Road in the direction of London . . . not the M4, the old road . . . but there are no passengers, only the driver.”
“No passengers?”
“That’s what he says, sir.”
“Then tell him to flag it down and get information from the driver. Name of hirer, destination, what happened to the passenger . . . he can say it’s in connection with a missing person . . .” Inspector Reynolds gave his instructions, rang off, and then said, “Mrs. Tibbett. . . that is, you said she was going to follow the Benson woman . . . I wonder where she is, sir?” Reynolds and Emmy were old friends.
“So do I,” said Henry.
“Maybe she’ll call again and tell us,” said Reynolds hopefully. But when the telephone rang again, it was Detective Sergeant Hawthorn with the squad-car report. The car had been hired in the name of Reginald Colby, with instructions to meet a Mrs. Benson arriving at Heathrow Airport from Washington at 11:15 A.M. The driver, one Herbert Carter, had located his passenger by the usual method of holding up a card with her name on it. She was a blonde lady wearing a dark blue suit. His instructions were to drop the lady at Mr. Colby’s office in Hounslow—only a few miles from the airport. Sixty-one, High Street, Hounslow, to be exact.
The driver had met Mrs. Benson all right, and taken her out to the car, but before they’d gone more than a few yards she found she was missing a piece of hand baggage—one of those airline canvas bags—and she made him go back. Well, of course, it’s all one-way at the airport, so it took a little time, but he got her back to the terminal and she wasn’t gone more than a couple of minutes. Came back carrying the bag, and just as she was getting into the car, another lady came running out of the building—yes, a dark-haired lady, round about forty, he’d guess. He didn’t catch what the dark lady said, but he heard Mrs. Benson say something like, “Oh, that is kind, but my husband’s lawyer has sent a car for me”—and then, “Why, of course, I’d be delighted. Do get in.” So both ladies got into the car and he drove them to Hounslow. No, they hadn’t talked much. The dark lady said Mrs. Benson must be terribly worried, and Mrs. Benson said yes, she was, but she had always heard that British justice was wonderfully fair, and she knew her husband was innocent. In fact, she said, she had come over to prove it. The dark lady asked Mrs. Benson who was her husband’s lawyer, and Mrs. Benson said it was a Mr. Reginald Colby.
By that time, they’d arrived in High Street, and as they pulled up outside Number 61, there was a small green Morris parked at the curb. No, he had no idea of the number, never thought to look. And a girl got out of it—hard to describe, really—fairish hair, round about between twenty and thirty probably, Mr. Carter hadn’t really noticed. She’d seemed a bit surprised to see two ladies instead of one. The ladies had got out of the car, and Herbert Carter was driving it back to the garage in Hammersmith, when the squad car flagged him down. No, he didn’t know whether the three ladies had gone into the building or got into the green Morris. They were standing talking on the pavement when he drove off.
Henry said,“Find out what goes on at 61, High Street, Hounslow.”
“Very good, sir.”
Five minutes later, Hawthorn reported back. Number 61 was a grocer’s shop.
“With offices above it?”
“No, sir. Dwellinghouse, occupied by the grocer, a Mr. Hunt. It’s one of the few family businesses left in the neighborhood. Mrs. Hunt has been in all morning, and had no visitors.”
Henry relayed this information to Derek Reynolds, and for a moment they looked at each other in silence. Then Henry said,“Goddammit.”
“Yes, sir,” said Reynolds.
“My bloody fool of a wife,” said Henry.
Reynolds cleared his throat. “I think she’s done very well, sir, and she’s certainly got guts.”
Henry said, “She and Simon-Sally Benson and a blonde who may or may not have some connection with Reginald Colby have disappeared into thin air in an anonymous green Morris. She must be out of her mind.”
Reynolds said, “Whoever hired that limousine—and it probably wasn’t Mr. Colby, but someone giving his name—whoever did that must have intended to kidnap Mrs. Benson, sir. It seems Benson was right to be worried.”
Angrily, Henry said, “Of course he was right. He knew his wife was Simon Warwick, and he knew his son was adopted and so couldn’t inherit. He knew somebody was out to kill Simon Warwick.”
“Well.” Reynolds cleared his throat again. “That may be more difficult with Mrs. Tibbett along, mayn’t it sir?”
“Somebody,” Henry said, “killed Ronald Goodman. Somebody tried to kill Harold Benson—or at least to give him a severe fright.”
“The same person, sir?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. The fact remains that somebody is also prepared to dispose of Sally Benson. What difference would one more make?”
“Mrs. Tibbett,” said Reynolds carefully, “would be missed. She’s . . . she’s your wife, sir. She’s conspicuous.”
Abruptly, Henry stood up and smiled at the inspector. “You’re a great comfort, Reynolds.”
Mr. Reginald Colby, whose offices were, of course, not in Hounslow but in Gray’s Inn Road, denied emphatically over the telephone that he had ordered a hired car to meet Mrs. Benson at the airport. He had wished to do so, he told Henry, but his client had been adamant on the subject, and he hardly felt he could fly in the face of definite instructions. In any case, he explained, Benson had told him that it was unlikely that his wife would come to England after all, in view of a letter that he had written her.
However, when Mrs. Benson showed no signs of canceling her trip, he had taken the liberty of booking a room for her at the London Metropole Hotel, and had cabled her to that effect. Benson had not specifically forbidden him to do so, and it seemed only civil. He was planning to visit her at the hotel later in the day, when he could get away, and he admitted he was not looking forward to meeting her. Why? Well, he would have to tell the poor woman that her husband refused to see her, and wished her to return to the United States on the next available flight.
Henry said, “Did anybody besides you know that Mrs. Benson was booked at the Metropole, but wasn’t being met at the airport?”
“Well—my secretary, of course. She made the booking. And . . . yes, now I come to think of it, several other people. I ran into Percy Crumble at Rule’s yesterday—he was lunching with Ambrose Quince and Bertie Hamstone and that Westbury fellow. Something to do with the Charlton estate, I suppose. I stopped at their table for a chat, and naturally the subject of Benson
came up, and . . . well, yes, I did mention the arrangements I’d made for his wife.”
Limitless Limousines came up with the information that the car had been ordered by telephone at 9:48 P.M. the previous evening. No, the office was not open at that hour, but there was a telephone operator on duty at nights who took messages and left them on the booking clerk’s desk for the morning. The message had recorded the booking in the name of Mr. Reginald Colby, and a note was added that Mr. Colby’s secretary would call at the office before 10 A.M. in the morning, and prepay in cash. The cashier confirmed that this had been done. No, he couldn’t possibly identify the person who had paid. Clients paying cash simply pushed the money and their invoice through a grille; he checked that the amount was right, receipted the bill, and pushed it back again, keeping one copy for office use. He never even looked at the person paying. All he knew was that the account had been settled, and the garage told to go ahead and send the car.
Henry hung up and turned to Reynolds. “It has to be one of them. One of the people who stand to gain by the old will being reinstated.”
“The person who killed Ronald Goodman,” said Reynolds.
“I’m not assuming that yet,” Henry said. “What I’m going to do now is to check on every member of that group. At the very least, there should be a break in normal behavior patterns somewhere. Get tails put on all of them, will you? Now, give me that phone . .
Sir Percy Crumble was in his office, about to leave for an important business luncheon, Henry was informed by a crisp secretarial voice. When asked if she were Sir Percy’s secretary, the voice replied brusquely that she was one of Sir Percy’s secretaries. Finally convinced by the magic invocation of Scotland Yard, the voice connected Henry with Sir Percy Crumble, who was predictably affable and ignorant.
“What? Me send a car to meet Mrs. Ruddy Benson at Loondon Airport? Are you crazy, Mr. Tibbett? . . . Yes, I remember meeting Reggie Colby at Rule’s . . . Did ’e? Well, if’e did, I don’t recall . . . Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve an appointment. . .”
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