Crime in Kensington

by Christopher St. John Sprigg

  Viola had two passions in life, her art and her bridge. Charles had hoped to be a third, but he was beginning to abandon hope. He felt that while he might make her a satisfactory partner in life, he would certainly let her down at bridge, and Viola appeared to agree.

  None the less Viola charmed him as much as ever. Her tidy brain and efficient manner which in so many girls become gritty, thought Charles, and irritate one like breadcrumbs in the bed, gave her classic and clear-cut features a piquancy, as if the Venus de Milo should, in spite of her appearance, prove to be intelligent.

  The smoke from his cigar rose perpendicularly, and the coffee was really excellent...

  “I made a fatal mistake in coming here,” he said gravely. “First of all, the sinister conversation of the Budges, then the sinister encounter on the stairs, and now, most sinister of all, the love interest. If you are really serious about not marrying me, which I find difficult to believe, I can only advise you to leave the place at once...”

  V

  The Rev. Septimus Blood was surprised. “A Coptic rite,” he pressed; “have the Egyptians got a rite of their own?”

  “Oh, yes,” answered Eppoliki, the little Egyptian medical student. “The oldest rite in Christendom, what?”

  The Rev. Septimus Blood was justifiably irritated. Last spring he had given up the Latin rite in favour of the rite of Sarum, and this in turn he had abandoned for the Mozarabic rite, with its Eastern influences. Now these Egyptians apparently had an even older rite.

  “Tell me about the vestments,” asked Blood. “Is the cope worn for ordinary low mass?”

  “Yes, cope and tall hat,” answered the Egyptian. “Very impressive indeed, and two thurifers.” He was drawing somewhat lavishly and inaccurately on his childhood memories, but he said enough to inflame Blood’s curiosity.

  “I must learn more of this,” said Blood. Short, dark, and with the faint sing-song of a Welsh accent, he was by profession a bacteriologist and a very expert one. On the day he had been ordained, he had become an Anglo-Catholic of such extreme views that any hope of becoming an incumbent of even the most tolerant parish was out of the question, even if he had been prepared to sacrifice the more lucrative profession in which he had carved a niche for himself. He was, however, an unpaid curate at a little church in Houndsditch which the Bishop had given up in despair, and his introduction of the Mozarabic rite had been the cause of much local pride. The Coptic rite sounded distinctly interesting. The tall hat was particularly good. Blood realized that his shortness was a handicap when it came to making an impressive figure on the altar. A tall hat now…

  Eppoliki changed the subject abruptly. “The police are on track of this place,” he said.

  The Rev. Septimus Blood turned pale. “H-how do you know?” he quavered.

  “Saw familiar face on the stairs,” Eppoliki answered cheerfully. “May be mistaken, of course, what?”

  “Good God, I wonder what I ought to do,” exclaimed Blood anxiously.

  “If you turn round now carefully you will see the detective,” remarked Eppoliki, pointing cautiously to Charles. “His name apparently is Charles Venables, or such like.”

  Blood stared at Charles for a moment. “Why, that’s the Charles Venables who is Lady Viola’s friend and a journalist—a gossip-writer,” he said at last. “He’s no more a detective than I am. I should have thought you would have seen that from one glance at the fellow. Anyone less like a detective—and more like an ass,” added the parson, for his nerves had been rattled, “I’ve never seen.”

  Eppoliki fluttered his arms with the ready admission of a mistake.

  “Sorry,” he said. “You look a little pale, what? Come to my room and have a drink.”

  VI

  The door of the lounge was flung open. An elderly woman was silhouetted in the doorway. Her grey hair was ragged and tousled, and a huge shawl draped her, falling to her feet. Her yellow skin was seamed and lined with innumerable crow’s-feet, and her eyes were blank and staring.

  “My God, Miss Geranium!” whispered Viola to Charles. “She’s seen something again.”

  “The prophet Ezekiel has just been with me,” she announced in tones which were patently modelled on those of a B.B.C. announcer. “He came on a wheel of fire,” she added, as if feeling that some further explanation was needed. “He told me that the wrath of the Lord would visit this evil and adulterous generation, and in particular this hotel! ‘You are a sinner, Miss Geranium,’ he said to me. ‘So are we all. But there are sinners in this place who lead others into sin, and on them the vengeance of the Lord will fall.’”

  Miss Geranium looked round the ring of embarrassed or mocking eyes. Her assurance seemed to go. “I am sorry if you are not interested,” she said pathetically. She paused. “I felt it was a message you all ought to know,” she concluded lamely.

  Miss Hectoring went to her side. “It’s lovely out now, dear,” she said. “I think we will go for a walk.”

  Chapter Two

  Puzzle—Find the Body

  IN the best bedroom of the Budges’ suite, which formed an exiguous top floor—almost an attic—to the Garden Hotel, Mrs. Budge was lying with flushed face and open mouth. She stared at the wall with vacant eyes while the daily routine of the sick-room went on oiled gears under the oversight of the efficient Nurse Evans.

  There was a knock on the door, and the nurse went out to the sitting-room to speak to Miss Sanctuary. Miss Sanctuary had come to give the nurse half an hour’s rest while she sat with Mrs. Budge.

  She knew something about nursing—during the war she had been a V.A.D.—and the nurse was glad to snatch what she invariably described as forty winks while the old lady sat by her patient over a book.

  Nurse Evans went into the sitting-room and looked at her watch. It was close on nine. The watch was a repeater, and she set it for nine-thirty. Then, dropping into a chair, she closed her eyes.

  Ten minutes later Miss Sanctuary put her head round the door.

  “Where can I get a clean teaspoon?” she asked.

  There was no reply, except for a rhythmic hissing from Nurse Evans’s open lips.

  Miss Sanctuary smiled and shut the door.

  The hand on Nurse Evans’s gold watch, the gift of a grateful patient, crept slowly round the dial. At half-past nine a small tooth geared to the hands released the trigger of the striking mechanism. There was a tinkling sound. Nurse Evans, trained by habit, heard it through the mists of sleep and was wide awake.

  She looked up, and as she did so saw Miss Sanctuary’s smiling face round the door.

  “The patient’s sleeping nicely,” she said.

  At that moment occurred the event which even then made Nurse Evans think that she was still dreaming, that still comes back to her in sleep and drowsiness with the compelling reality of nightmare.

  Even while Miss Sanctuary leant round the door, smiling rosily at her, a gloved hand emerged round the edge of the door and fastened about her throat. The woman’s expression changed with the rapidity of a lightning flash. She gave one long-drawn scream closed by a gurgle, and then she was dragged back behind the door, out of sight. The door slammed to, and Nurse Evans, who had risen to her feet, met only the blank wood of the door. With a queer chill feeling and trembling legs, she tried the handle. It was locked.

  She beat violently at the door, and she heard a strange voice crying, “Who’s there?” Dully she realized it was her own voice…

  Nurse Evans was frightened but still cool-headed. Next to the sitting-room, although not forming part of the suite, was a smaller bedroom, in which Budge was sleeping during the illness of his wife. The outer wall of this room, with its big french windows and verandah, was at right angles to the outer wall (also with its window and verandah) of the bedroom in which Mrs. Budge was lying. Mrs. Budge’s bed was near the window, and in changing the invalid’s sheets she had noticed that it was possible to see right into the other bedroom. It now occurred to her that the reverse should hold
good, and that she should be able to see into Mrs. Budge’s room. It took her a matter of seconds to decide this and go out into the main corridor into which opened both Mrs. Budge’s suite and this neighbouring bedroom.

  As she opened the sitting-room door she heard a door close and saw moving down the corridor the retreating figure of Mr. Budge.

  “Quick,” she screamed, “something terrible has happened in Mrs. Budge’s room!”

  Without waiting for a reply, she dashed into the smaller bedroom, and looked out.

  It was dark outside. But through the window which she had opened a light streamed into the darkness. The window of Mrs. Budge’s bedroom was open too, she could see, and the curtains bellied out, fluttering in the reflected light. But Mrs. Budge’s room was in darkness.

  “What in heaven’s name is the matter?” exclaimed Budge, who had joined her at the window.

  The nurse pointed dramatically at the darkened bedroom. “There’s someone in there who has just attacked Miss Sanctuary,” she said. “I tried to go to her help but the door was locked, and I can’t get any answer.” Frightened though she was, she couldn’t resist the melodramatic touch now that she had an audience. Her pale, discreetly powdered face took on an expression of morbid sympathy. “Something terrible has happened, I’m certain,” she stated in a low tone.

  Budge’s face turned the colour of his deep upstanding collar. “Good God, they’ve got her,” he exclaimed and shambled into the sitting-room.

  Though his frame was lanky, with spindly legs and long arms, Budge’s chest and shoulders told of not inconsiderable strength. He shook the door with sullen fury, and for a moment it looked as if he would hurl himself bodily at it, or batter it down with a chair.

  Then he flung himself at the bureau and pulled a revolver out of the top drawer. Shades of Hollywood—Nurse Evans’s eyes protruded slightly and her legs trembled.

  Budge flung out of the sitting-room door. Nurse Evans eagerly followed him. He hurriedly locked the neighbouring bedroom door and returned with the key.

  “That’ll hold them for a little,” he muttered. He went to the inner door. “Now then,” he admonished through the chink, “I’m going to blast this lock off.” In the little room the sound was deafening. Twice Budge fired and the acrid smoke made Nurse Evans cough.

  The lock was half splintered out of the door and the handle was ludicrously twisted. Budge kicked it open, at the same time falling back, revolver in hand. The light from the sitting-room shone into the bedroom, gleaming on polished mahogany, illuminating the mirror of the huge wardrobe, whitening the pages of the book which lay open on the chair beside the bed. The pages of the book blew over one by one with a faint ruffling noise as the curtains fluttered in a gust of wind.

  But the chair was empty, and so was the bed, its clothes turned down. And even in the shadows of the room there was no assailant concealed and no invalid, and no Miss Sanctuary.

  Wildly, in that anti-climax, Nurse Evans thought of a nursery rhyme of her youth:

  But when she got there the cupboard was bare.

  “They’ve got her all right,” mumbled Mr. Budge. His sudden energy had spent itself. “Which one of them is it?”

  II

  “I wonder how Mrs. Budge is?” said Mrs. Walton, shuffling the cards meditatively.

  “Probably sleeping peaceful,” answered her opponent, Eppoliki. “I spoke to Dr. Clout—prognosis on the whole favourable.” His tone was authoritative, with a tincture of condescension, as became a medical student who had already failed three times to obtain from King’s College the right to add the letters M.B. to his name. “There is, of course,” he added, “always a distinct possibility of pyæmia, what?”

  “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Walton; “is that dangerous?”

  Charles had intuitions. Perhaps, as he afterwards claimed, he was en rapport with his partner; although the state of the score hardly confirmed this. But he had a sudden suspicion that Mrs. Walton’s idle enough remark was prompted not by sympathy, but by hope. This was by no means to be read crudely in her face. That face, with the swimming eyes and candid curves of a Greuze beauty, was more naturally accessible to sympathy than vindictiveness. But as there suddenly might flash into the liquid eyes of a deer a red spark of defiance, Charles saw in Mrs. Walton’s eyes a flicker of something akin to hate—fear cornered and with its back to the wall.

  Charles’s intuitions had cost him so much at bridge that he did not greatly trust them in life. But he filed the idea away in his mind for future reference and picked up his hand.

  “Pyæmia,” explained Eppoliki. He licked his lips, and his glass eye, which dirt or age had caused to become slightly filmed, stared into space, while the other swivelled rapidly round the company at the bridge table. By a fortunate chance he had done some clinical work on pyæmia that very day. He embarked joyously into the details. “And so you get all this pus,” he wound up.

  “Two spades,” remarked the dealer, Colonel Cantrip, in a firm voice, and with such a depth of meaning in his intonation that Eppoliki realized at once that the call had some esoteric significance.

  “A forcing bid,” he sighed to himself and re-examined his hand. Forcing bids worried him. The East does not like to be forced, and Eppoliki had already indicated this by one or two calls of such a nature that at the end of the hand his opponents had watched anxiously the struggle between good manners and apoplexy flaming in the Colonel’s face.

  Viola lay back in her chair, waiting to cut in. Meanwhile she amused herself by watching the play and attempting to gauge the players’ characters from their hands.

  The twinkle in Eppoliki’s eye showed that he refused to regard any game in which skill, however mingled with chance, played a part, as anything more than a game. Not so his partner. Colonel Cantrip’s play was devoid of insight but inevitably correct. He counted his honour tricks with the same rigid exactitude as he had calculated elevation and direction when he was a young gunnery officer. Nothing in heaven or earth would, Viola was sure, have induced him to overstep the permitted bounds.

  Charles was capable of anything. At the moment, for instance, he was two down on his contract as the result of an unnecessary finesse; but his finesses were less exasperating than his psychic bids. Where he knew his opponents well he occasionally showed flashes of diabolical intuition, but when he didn’t, as in the present case, he went down with monotonous regularity.

  “I am sorry,” Charles was explaining. “I thought that as Eppoliki raised his partner to three diamonds he must have had the queen, and raised his partner thinking he had the ace and king.”

  Following her train of thought, Viola toyed with the idea of a detective who reduced his suspects to three and invited them to a game of bridge. The cards would be stacked to test certain qualities whose possession would identify the criminal.

  “Of course people like Mrs. Walton are hopeless,” she decided. “She plays absolutely by rule of thumb, invariably leading through strength and up to weakness regardless of——”

  A loud report startled them. It was followed in a moment by another. The noise seemed to come from overhead.

  Charles put down his hand disgustedly. “A loud shot rang out! This is too bad,” he said. “In another moment or two a masked man will walk in.”

  Mrs. Walton laughed, but not altogether naturally. “Surely that was a burst tyre or an engine back-firing or something.”

  “You’re right m’boy,” exclaimed the Colonel, laying down his cards also. He pulled at his moustache. “You can’t tell me much about gun-fire. That was a firearm—revolver or small bore rifle—and it was in this house...”

  The door was flung open. Budge walked in.

  “My wife!” he exclaimed. The first glance showed Charles that this was a badly scared man. “Something terrible has happened to her.” His gaze wandered round the room, falling for a moment on each member of the company in turn.

  He addressed Cantrip. “Will you come upstairs with me?” he sa
id.

  The Colonel rose to his feet.

  The same thought was in everyone’s eyes. The pleurisy, in spite of Dr. Clout’s assurances, had taken a fatal turn. The Colonel, however, it was to be assumed, had looked on death unshaken. “Right, Budge,” he said. “Keep calm. I’ll come.”

  Eppoliki followed him. “Pyæmia,” he muttered to himself. “Very interesting.”

  Charles, however, realized that no ordinary visit of death could have induced Budge to rush in this way into a room full of his guests and call for aid. The correct thing to do was to ring up the doctor and eventually the undertaker and let the whole thing run on the oiled wheels of custom. Budge could be relied upon to do the correct thing.

  Mrs. Walton said nothing. As he closed the door he saw her, eyes fixed on vacancy, steadily shuffling the cards, over and over again.

  III

  “There’s something terrible happened, Colonel, of that I’m sure,” said Budge for the second time, as he concluded the story, corroborated and supplemented by Evans, of the disappearance of Mrs. Budge and Miss Sanctuary from behind locked doors.

  The ruffled bed-clothes and the spread-eagled novel were the only signs of a struggle. Not that the furniture was of the light kind that would have suffered from any but the fiercest of affrays. The huge mahogany wardrobe which dominated the room would have completely filled the drawing-room of an ordinary flat. The now empty bed was of the deep Victorian variety whose depths of mattress promised a comfort not always fulfilled. Two high chairs, with much-carven backs, faced the fire, whose leaping flames were reflected in the varnished gloom of the lincrusta’d walls.