A vast mahogany roll-top desk stood in the corner, and the wall opposite the window was obstructed, for the greater part of its length, by a fine specimen of the now extinct horsehair sofa. The contrast to the chromium-plated and unpolished-wood style of decoration of the rest of the house was patent, and suggested a sort of “lost plateau” of Victorianism, surviving in the proprietorial fastnesses of the Garden Hotel.
“Well, people can’t vanish like smoke,” snorted Cantrip. “Now if the door was really locked they must have got through the window. If she was well enough to walk she got out herself, probably followed by Miss Sanctuary. If not, she must have got out with Miss Sanctuary.”
“Or,” said Eppoliki pleasantly, “they were both knocked on the head and their bodies flung out of the window.”
With a common movement the five went out on to the verandah.
The storey which formed the private suite of the Budges in the Garden Hotel was really a sort of minor gabled projection in the roof. Although the two verandahs were almost contiguous, and one could easily leap from one to the other, there were no other projections for two storeys down, where, from the first floor, emerged an outer iron staircase leading into the paved yard.
It was plain that whoever tried to escape from the verandah of either room into the yard would, unless he were an acrobat, have the greatest difficulty in getting down safely. It was even more difficult to imagine a middle-aged invalid and an elderly spinster clambering down into the garden, even with the strongest of motives.
“What’s that?” exclaimed Nurse Evans excitedly.
They stared down into the gloom beneath. Here and there a light shone in the rooms of the hotel. The rays from the window, aided by the moonlight, feebly illuminated the paved yard below.
“Look there!” she said, pointing. “Huddled over in the corner.”
Charles inspected it with his monocle. “It does look rather like an old lady,” he admitted, “but I’m afraid it’s only a motor-cycle covered by a tarpaulin. Those sinister-looking figures on the opposite side are also bogus, I am afraid. Closer inspection would only prove them to be dust-bins.”
“Well, it’s very extraordinary,” remarked the Colonel, harping on the point. “The door was locked. They’ve gone. Where? Through the window, of course, but where?” It was obvious, although he was too much of a gentleman to put it into words, that it was very reprehensible of two ladies of mature years to vanish into thin air while he was playing bridge. “And again why?” he went on. “But of course they were attacked,” he admitted generously, “forced to do it—that’s about the size of it.”
No one disagreed with the Colonel. “Whatever the purpose of their little jaunt,” remarked Charles, “their most obvious route is to pop into this next verandah—a little jump would clear the gap—through the open window and so back into the corridor. Though why that should really help them, I don’t know.”
Nurse Evans remembered the closing door and the retreating figure of Mr. Budge.
“Mr. Budge is using that room now,” she remarked. “He was in there at the time Miss Sanctuary was attacked, I think.”
The eyes of the company focussed on Mr. Budge. He did not look happy under the scrutiny.
“No,” he protested. “Oh, no.”
Nurse Evans persisted. Professional discretion was all very well, but drama was in the air.
“When I was coming out of the room I heard the door close,” she stated, “and when I looked out you were going downstairs.”
Budge looked annoyed. He glared sullenly at the nurse.
“I was coming up,” he asserted.
“Well, all I can say is it must have been very awkward,” she muttered.
“Awkward,” trumpeted the Colonel, “what do you mean—awkward?”
“Coming upstairs backwards,” she said triumphantly. “Anyway, it looks as if my job here is ended,” she thought to herself. “Coming upstairs indeed!”
Budge appeared discomfited. He hesitated for a moment, and then laughed nervously. “I think you are mistaken. However, I went into my bedroom a little earlier to fetch a newspaper I left there. I did not stay long and I noticed nothing out of the way while I was in there. I was coming back about ten minutes later when Nurse Evans rushed out.”
“How long were you in the room altogether?” asked Charles.
“About two minutes,” he answered. There was a wary gleam in his eye.
Charles turned to the nurse. “How long was it after hearing Miss Sanctuary scream that you saw Mr. Budge?”
The nurse thought. “About five minutes. I was a long time trying to get the door opened.”
The fact that Budge was under suspicion slowly seemed to sink into the Colonel’s understanding. He looked sternly at Budge.
“Come now, Budge,” he pressed. “Didn’t you hear anything when you were coming upstairs?”
“No, I didn’t,” snapped the other, “and I resent your manner, Colonel. Are you suggesting that I have made away with my wife and Miss Sanctuary? If so, can you tell me how I made them vanish into thin air?”
“That’s true, Budge, very true.” The Colonel wagged his head. “Where could they——”
His sentence was interrupted by a cry from the nurse, who had returned into the bedroom.
“There’s something moving in here!”
Charles leaped into the room.
A sigh and a muffled groan, like the despairing cry of a vanished ghost, hung in the air.
Charles leaped to the huge wardrobe. The door was locked, but the key was in it. He turned it and swung open the door.
He was looking straight into a face—the flushed, gagged face of Miss Sanctuary. As he opened the door, against which her knees had been braced, she shot out of the wardrobe and dropped into Charles’s arms, panting but inert. She was bound hand and foot.
Chapter Three
Enter the Police
I
WILLING hands helped the old lady on to the bed; and while Charles loosened the scientifically tied rope, the nurse chafed her feet and hands, which were numb from the arrested circulation.
“God bless my soul,” remarked the Colonel, “they tied her up and put her in the cupboard!”
For a moment it looked as if Miss Sanctuary was going to faint. Eppoliki dashed some water in her face and she sat up. Her eyes were dazed and for a moment she did not seem to recognize where she was.
“Now, Miss Sanctuary,” said the Colonel, “if you are better will you please tell us what happened?”
She passed her hand over her eyes and smiled weakly. “I am afraid I am not going to be very helpful,” she said. “While I was sitting with Mrs. Budge I thought I heard a noise in the room, but decided it was only the furniture creaking. Then when I went to speak to Nurse Evans I was seized from behind and, at the same time, the lights were put out.”
She smiled reminiscently. “I struggled quite hard, but I am afraid I did not last long. I fell down and struck my head, and while I was being tied up I must have fainted. The next thing I knew was that I was in the cupboard, terribly cramped, and wondering where on earth I was.”
She looked round the room. “Did they attack Mrs. Budge too?” she asked. “Where is she?”
“We don’t know what has happened to Mrs. Budge,” answered the Colonel portentously. “She has disappeared.”
“Disappeared? Good heavens, where?”
Miss Sanctuary was badly shaken by the news. She lay back, pallid, her eyes closed.
“We must act,” said the Colonel decisively. “Budge, you must go all over the hotel and find out whether there is any trace of your wife or whether anybody has seen or heard anything.” He paused impressively. “A dangerous man is at large. The guests will have to be warned, and gathered together in the lounge until the police arrive.”
He turned to Eppoliki. “Eppoliki, see that no one is allowed in or out of the building. Get the staff to guard the doors.”
“Venables! Where’s
Venables got to? Oh, there you are!” Charles had just returned after slipping downstairs to ’phone his news editor to hold the front page for a big story. “Venables, ’phone the police and tell them to come round at once. I shall stay here with Miss Sanctuary,” he declared. “Send the police up the moment they arrive.”
II
Charles had collected Viola on his way back. Mrs. Walton had disappeared.
“What a fantastic story,” Viola exclaimed. “It seems almost too incredible. There we were playing bridge while Mrs. Budge is whisked away.”
She reflected for a moment. “I suppose the obvious deduction is that something pretty terrible has happened to Mrs. Budge.”
Charles dropped for a moment his air of levity. “I don’t like it. It is just conceivable that Mrs. Budge is all right. On the other hand, the mise en scene has the romantic air of a ‘crook’ thriller, and one’s police-court experience has taught one that the really dangerous crook is inclined to model himself on fiction.”
He paused a moment. “The most obvious explanation of the whole thing is that Mrs. Budge attacked Miss Sanctuary, tied her up, and then escaped.” He paused regretfully. “It is a pity there are certain flaws in the theory. The alternative theory is, of course, that somebody was hiding in the cupboard, and carried away Mrs. Budge dead or persuaded her to come away with them alive.”
He sighed. “I have a strong feeling that the police are not going to have an easy task. It is a safe bet that Budge and his party won’t find anything. The man must have foreseen the need for escape.”
“What a cold-blooded way you talk about it,” commented Viola. “I suppose that’s the result of being a journalist.”
“Of course, the alternative is that the man’s a maniac. If Mrs. Budge has intruded into the world of fantasy of some homicidal lunatic, the trail is going to be more difficult still.”
III
Breathing heavily, the Colonel was seated at the sitting-room table, making notes for the benefit of the police. The death-or-glory soldiers of Waterloo were followed by another and alien generation who fought principally on paper. Each bullet that went pinging on the enemy parapet, each sandbag which shielded the heads of the infantrymen, and the life and death of every living unit in the army, was guided to its appointed destiny by the pen wielded by some red-tabbed staff officer or the typewriter strummed by some perspiring N.C.O. True to this great military tradition, the Colonel was getting things down on paper.
Charles leaned over his shoulder. “The real military touch,” he said. “One spinster cased and corded, for the use of, damaged. Now wait until you see my version in to-morrow’s Mercury. The most astounding disappearance ever recorded in the annals of London crime took place yesterday in the suite of a Kensington hotel, when Mrs. Budge, the proprietress...”
The Colonel had treated Charles with the good-humoured kindness one accords to the mentally deficient or the very young ever since he had remarked brightly, “Kiss the dealer,” when the two, three, and four of hearts had fallen to the Colonel’s ace in the course of their game of bridge.
“Did you telephone the police?” he asked coldly.
“O.K Chief,” replied Charles, springing smartly to attention. “They are sending round two of the best brains of Lancaster Gate.”
“We will need them,” replied the Colonel seriously. “D’ye know, Venables, I should be extremely surprised if Budge and his party found anything. But it will narrow down times and so forth for the police when they arrive.”
Charles looked at him with a new respect.
IV
The atmosphere of the Garden Hotel had become extremely tense. As Budge and his assistants went round from room to room and warned everyone they met, the lounge grew crowded with people almost inarticulate with excitement. Practically everyone had remembered a different version of the story told them, and as these accounts were collated, embellished and repeated, the story of the day’s happenings grew more unrecognizable and terrifying with every passing minute.
Mr. Nicholas Twing, the manager of a big financial house in the City, stood with his back to the wall and a breast-pocket stuffed with papers, swinging a poker menacingly in one hand. The Rev. Septimus Blood also carried valuables in the shape of a pyx, two chalices, a richly ornamented burse, and a golden offertory plate which he had wrapped in his underclothes and packed in a large sponge bag.
If the six masked intruders (for this was the number on which the majority of stories agreed) had penetrated to the lounge, they would probably have found little difficulty in overcoming the resistance of both these gentlemen. They might have hesitated, however, at the sight of Miss Hectoring who, with Miss Geranium clinging to her left arm, brandished in her sword-arm a foil from which the button had been torn. Her moustache bristled with pugnacity and her frontal development bore witness to her expertness and assiduity in the use of the weapon she was wielding.
On the sofa sat Mrs. Walton and Mrs. Salterton-Deeley under the protection of Mr. Winterton, a bald and whiskered old gentleman who, as the father-in-law of Sir Henry Claygate, the poet laureate, might have been one of the lions of the hotel were it not for his deafening table manners. Now, however, he was affording protection to the two ladies by his side while Mrs. Salterton-Deeley, as a second line of defence, was busily making up her face.
In spite of the instructions to residents to assemble in the lounge, the panic had spread in a small measure to the Budges’ suite where Cantrip, Venables and Viola waited for the police, while Eppoliki and Nurse Evans looked after the prostrate Miss Sanctuary.
The panic took the form of Miss Mumby, who burst into the room followed by five cats, and with three kittens in her arms. These she deposited on the table where, after a preliminary canter, they seized the Colonel’s pen and dribbled it smartly round the table. It left an inky smear across the Colonel’s carefully drafted report.
“My children must be protected from this monster, Colonel,” she announced. “So I have brought them here.”
“Your children,” echoed the Colonel, somewhat taken aback.
“Yes, my little family,” replied Miss Mumby. “Now then, Snowball and Susie, leave the Colonel’s pen alone! Walter, I’m surprised at you! Where are your table manners?”
“The villains who have spirited away Mrs. Budge,” she went on, having reduced the three kittens to mewling quiescence, “might not hesitate to hurt my cats.”
“At the present moment, madam,” replied Cantrip with justifiable annoyance, “we would be only too glad to come across the man or men responsible for the assault on Miss Sanctuary and the disappearance of Mrs. Budge. So far no trace of them or of Mrs. Budge has been discovered in the hotel. The scent is cold now, I’m afraid.”
“How can you expect to find them?” said Miss Mumby warmly, forgetting her fright for the moment. “Have you the instincts with which an animal is gifted by nature?”
“No,” snapped the Colonel. “I’m not a blood-hound, if that’s what you mean.”
“Of course not. Now if Mrs. Budge is in this building, Socrates will be able to trace her. Come here, Socrates.”
“During the conversation Miss Mumby’s five cats had leaped on to the sofa between Viola and Charles, and lay there without any further sign of movement than an occasional twitch of the ear or icy glare of disapproval at the misbehaving Walter, who had resumed possession of the Colonel’s pen and was meditatively chewing the end. Socrates, a large black tom-cat with a torn ear, sprang from the sofa and went to his mistress’s side.
“Socrates has been trained to be a tracker,” explained Miss Mumby proudly. “If you give him some belonging of Mrs. Budge’s to sniff, Socrates will track her down.”
Charles was immensely tickled by the idea and persuaded Eppoliki, who had left Miss Sanctuary to the care of Nurse Evans, to fetch some article of clothing belonging to the vanished proprietress. Miss Mumby watched with approval. She had a tremendous respect for Egyptians, whom she vaguely believed still worsh
iped cats. She also knew a medium whose “control” was a Pharaoh, who showed himself possessed of a penetrating insight into her affairs.
Eppoliki returned with a pair of gloves. Miss Mumby explained the situation briefly to Socrates, who watched her with unwinking eyes, and appeared to understand every word, and then she gave him the gloves to sniff. Socrates danced round the room on the tips of his toes, twitching his tail and snuffling loudly, and then dashed into the bedroom. Miss Sanctuary, apparently slightly better, was still lying on Mrs. Budge’s bed with her head up. Socrates dashed wildly round the room twice, and then leapt with a throaty cry of triumph on to Miss Sanctuary’s chest.
“Damn the animal,” exclaimed this overwrought lady, and Socrates immediately leapt off again and retired under the wardrobe.
Miss Sanctuary apparently belonged to the type of old maid who intensely dislikes cats, and she insisted on Socrates being taken away, even after his bloodhound propensities had been explained to her. Cantrip retired in disgust, but Charles refused to be discouraged and, accompanied by Miss Mumby and Viola, carried Socrates out on to the verandah, shutting the french windows behind them.
“Mrs. Budge must have gone through the window,” he explained, “and we should be able to pick up the trail here.”
Socrates, with waving tail, encouraged by his mistress, walked all round the balustrade and leapt lightly into the balcony leading into the other bedroom. From here he leapt on to a cornice on the story below, and from there dropped ten feet on to a drain-pipe cover. He did not stop there, but scrambled down the drain-pipe and jumped on to the edge of the outer iron staircase which ran from the first floor to the yard. The three on the balcony leaned over the edge, until he went outside the rays from the two windows and was lost to sight.
Crime in Kensington Page 3