Crime in Kensington

by Christopher St. John Sprigg

  “Of course,” he went on, “the case would be taken out of my hands, but I should probably work with the Inspector who was put in charge of the case, and I would get the credit for the preliminary work—or discredit, it might be,” he qualified.

  Miss Sanctuary affected to shudder. “I hope it isn’t murder,” she said. “I don’t like the enthusiastic way you talk about it, and I don’t like the way you talk about pulling us to pieces.”

  She paused a moment. “I think I can help you a little,” she added, “if in return you’ll help me.”

  The Sergeant looked puzzled. “Certainly, I’ll help you,” he answered.

  “Hold out your hands then!”

  Mystified, he did so. She deftly placed a skein of wool round them and started rolling it into a ball.

  “These are the only times I regret being a spinster,” she said. “I haven’t even a brother or nephew. It’s a perpetual source of astonishment to me that wool manufacturers still sell their wool in skeins. Well, Sergeant, now that you are helpless, I’ll tell you something. I’ve been trying to think of some little point that might help you to identify the person who attacked me. Last night, just as I was going to sleep, I suddenly remembered quite vividly that the hand that was pressed over my mouth had a ring on it. You know how sensitive the skin round one’s mouth is, and I remember how painful this ring was, and that it felt as if instead of being a smooth band it was serrated or ornamented in some way, because as the hand was dragged across my face I felt it pull at the skin.”

  “Which side of your face was the hand?” asked the Sergeant.

  “The left,” she answered.

  “Do you recall what finger the ring would have been on?”

  She thought for a moment. “Not the little finger and not the forefinger,” she said at last; “either the second or third.”

  Released from the wool at last, the Sergeant made a note in his book. “Ring with ornamented band on second or third finger,” he wrote. “That should help us a little,” he said. “If only you can think of some other distinctive feature, do. Remember these small clues are useless except cumulatively.”

  Miss Sanctuary smiled. “It was all so sudden,” she remarked. “I am afraid you must be very annoyed with me for not being able to tell you more.”

  “Nonsense,” he replied. “Far rather you knew nothing than like so many other witnesses, recalled what didn’t happen. I must be going now. If my wife had her way, I should be digging up the yard, but as it is, I’m going to see if I can extract some information from Budge—a difficult job, that.”

  “The man must have made some enemies and so must the woman,” the Sergeant thought as he went into Budge’s room. “Just the type that does, I should say.”

  III

  “So there you are, Sergeant,” concluded Budge. “I am afraid I can give you no useful information at all. Have a cigarette?”

  He extended his case. The Sergeant, hand in mid-air, paused. On the second finger of the hand holding the case was a golden ring with a band in the form of two plaited serpents interlocked like a chain.

  “A pretty ring that,” he commented, “and unusual.”

  “Yes,” replied Budge. “I got it——”

  But the Sergeant never heard the end of the sentence. “Good heavens!” he exclaimed. “Who is that screaming like a maniac?”

  IV

  Miss Mumby’s scream certainly penetrated to every part of the hotel and probably reached the crowd of sightseers who still lingered round the railings. If it did, however, their attention was already too engrossed by the little drama which was being enacted in front of them, and which was to make the Garden Hotel a name of sinister import all over the world.

  Mrs. Salterton-Deeley, in order to face the crowd with equanimity, had made efforts to look her best. One of her own hats was perched like a bird of passage on the front left-hand quarter of her red hair. She carried a leather hat-box. She had placed in it the previous evening a hat which she had brought back to the hotel for the purpose of trimming.

  With much murmuring and personal comment the crowd made way for her, until some blithe spirit at the back called out to her in fruity cockney, “Hi, miss, are you carrying away the body in that there box?”

  This seemed to tickle the crowd, and somebody else shouted, “Show us the body, miss. Be a sport.”

  Mrs. Salterton-Deeley prided herself on the good-humoured savoir-faire with which she managed the lower classes. Smiling, she snapped up the catch of the hat-box and opened the lid.

  “There you are,” she said.

  Inside was a severed human head; the head, in fact, of Mrs. Budge.

  Chapter Seven

  Disjecta Membra

  I

  MRS. SALTERTON-DEELEY swooned—there was no other word to describe her immediate prostration upon the pavement. During a shocked second the crowd was silent. For the first time they had had a sudden close-up of the horrors about which they read so eagerly in the papers, which they discussed so absorbedly in restaurants and in trains, and which made them flock, with the sure and swift instinct of carrion-eating birds, to the scene of a crime of violence. The old lady with a bonnet, whose invasion had been successfully repelled by the boot-boy earlier that morning, dissolved in a cackle of metallic laughter, punctuated by great wheezing sobs. Two people went away and were silently and painfully ill.

  It seemed hours before anyone made a decisive move. In actual fact it was only three minutes before the policeman, on duty forty yards away, had reached Mrs. Salterton-Deeley’s side and, aided by the hall-porter, had removed her and her ghastly burden into the hotel. Five minutes later he had found Sergeant Noakes, who was searching for the source of the scream. That officer, shaken out of his habitual calm, had rushed down the stairs two at a time.

  The Sergeant’s face was grave when he was shown the gruesome relic in the hat-box. It grew even graver when he was shown the severed right hand, which had come to light in such an extraordinary way during the séance in the lounge.

  “This ends our period of doubt, at any rate,” he said. “Here’s murder as plainly as can be. I’ll get on to Bray, and have him over as soon as possible. And while Bray was listening to Noakes’s story with surprise and interest intermingled, Charles was on the line to the Post, the Mercury’s evening paper, giving them a story beside which the morning’s “splash” hid its diminished headlines. The Post was an hour ahead of its rivals on that historic day, and had the only eyewitness’s story of the incredible séance in the lounge of the Garden Hotel, and the effect of the Mercury’s follow-up on the British public has already been described.

  II

  There could be little, if any, doubt as to what might be expected after the almost simultaneous appearance of the head and the hand. The hotel was searched and it was found that with almost fiendish ingenuity the body of the proprietress of the hotel had been severed into handy sizes and disposed in different parts of the hotel, all in hiding-places where immediate discovery was not likely, but where, on the other hand, it would be only a matter of time before at least one of the gruesome relics came to light.

  The time of discovery, the place and the receptacle of each portion was carefully noted and the complete remains placed in a small box-room which was turned into a temporary mortuary.

  A special late edition of the Post was rushed out in honour of the new developments, and Charles spent most of his time visiting the ’phone to add fresh paragraphs to his story. He was just walking across the hall after giving a last sensational item to be “fudged” in the final edition, when he ran into Bray.

  Charles jumped. “Good heavens,” he said, “are you the sleuth-hound on this job?”

  Detective Inspector Bernard Bray, C.I.D., and Charles Venables were friends, with a friendship dating from the day when Bray, son of the Rev. Timothy Bray in whose parish of Better Gaming the Venables’s fast-dwindling estate of Tankards was situated, had been (as a rowing Blue and runner-up for the All-
England Pole Jumping Championship) fit object of respect for a youth some five years his junior. Bray was even more surprised to see Venables than Charles was to see him.

  “Hello, Charles,” he said. “This is a funny place for a society journalist to be in. I’m surprised at Noakes allowing you to wander round here anyway.”

  “As I happen to be a resident here, you needn’t be surprised,” answered Charles, “and in addition I happen at the moment to be the Mercury’s star crime reporter.”

  Bray laughed. “You scoffed somewhat when I became a bobby five years ago,” he said. “Now you will have to treat me with proper respect as your main source of information.”

  “You may even have to arrest me,” replied Charles. “I have a watertight alibi which is alone enough to fasten suspicion on to me. Add the fact that I only arrived at the hotel yesterday, and I am almost prepared to give myself in charge.”

  “I’m rather sorry you are on the Mercury,” said Bray, with an abstracted air, and abruptly changing the subject. “It will somewhat limit your use to me. At any rate do you mind keeping anything interesting you have noticed—and you are a reasonably observant beggar—until my preliminary investigation is complete? Then I’d like a word with you. Cheerio.”

  “Cheerio,” said Charles, and returned to Viola, who looked uncommonly pallid.

  III

  Because there is nothing to the run of humanity more sacred than life, the lex talionis, which is still a motivation of penal systems, gives the policeman even in England unique power and authority in a case of murder. After Mrs. Budge had disappeared, the fact, even taken in conjunction with the assault on Miss Sanctuary, only brought in the police as little more than servants in the Garden Hotel, invited by the aggrieved parties to defend and protect them.

  Now a blow had been aimed at the safety of society itself. Each uniformed figure, each plain-clothes detective, was now, under heaven’s and the Judge’s rules, accountable only to society. All the secrets of the lives of the residents of the Garden Hotel would, if necessary, be dragged to light, and no one at that time had any conception of how tangled and tortuous a story there would be to tell…

  In the lounge where Charles and Viola were sitting, there was dead silence. It was shattered by the entrance of Miss Geranium, with flushed face and straggling hair.

  “I have seen the warning of the Most High,” she cried, glaring menacingly at Colonel Cantrip, who was fidgeting in a chair reading a paper, “and the message was woe to this sinful generation. Vengeance is the Lord’s and the Lord will repay. The finger of the Lord is on us all. First, the tempter then the tempted.” She advanced abruptly to the Colonel. It will be your turn next,” she said, pointing with a steady finger at him, “and yours too,” she shouted, wheeling round on Miss Mumby, who had just come in, attracted by the noise, “you trifler with the spirits of darkness and evil. And then it will be my turn,” she moaned, in a voice thick with despair. “The Lord have mercy on us sinners.”

  The Colonel jumped to his feet. “How dare you address me in that offensive manner!” he said. “By God, I won’t stand it on top of all I’ve been through. I won’t. I won’t.” And to the amazement of Viola and Charles the military gentleman burst into tears, which he made no attempt to restrain.

  Miss Mumby, however, was quite undisturbed by this outburst. She beamed placidly on Miss Geranium, standing like a Hebrew prophet in the full fire of her denunciation, and at Colonel Cantrip, looking like a naughty boy with the tears streaming down his rubicund cheeks.

  “Well, well,” she said, “we all seem to be a bit under the weather, don’t we? Never mind, there’s a letter for each of you in your rooms,” and she made the last commonplace remark in a voice full of meaning.

  It meant something to both her hearers apparently. They went out of the room without any further preamble, Miss Geranium forgetting her denunciation and the Colonel his sorrows.

  “I can’t stand much more of this, really I can’t,” said Viola. “I almost sympathize with the Colonel. I said this hotel was weird, and I feel now as if all the weirdness was boiling and working and getting more and more restive. It’s like one of those dreadful fireworks that explode once but which go on smoking and fizzing afterwards as if they were going to give a much bigger bang any moment. Now that the police are on the scene one ought to feel that everything is going to be cleared up tidily, but actually I feel as if things are only going to get a good deal more tangled.”

  “Yes, there is something in the atmosphere like that,” said Charles. He went to the door, looked out, and returned. “It affects me, so that I have a creepy feeling every time I speak to anyone alone. I think that’s partly the effect of all that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours—sudden death, hysterics, goodness knows what. Deep down in me I feel I must get to the bottom of it, and I wouldn’t leave here till it is cleared up for a thousand pounds.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t stay for a thousand,” replied Viola, “if you weren’t here.”

  Charles sat up and endeavoured to look protective.

  “I do know, then,” Viola went on seriously, “that with Mrs. Walton and Eppoliki we shall have a reasonably sane four for contract, and that’s more than can be said of any of the others at the moment.

  Charles leaned back again. “Bridge!” he said bitterly.

  IV

  Bray never formed any conclusion, or ventured any opinion, until every fact that seemed to have a superficial bearing on the case had been assimilated. His passion for facts had been entirely responsible for his brilliant handling of the three cases by which he had made his name. It is doubtful if anyone but Bray could have secured the conviction of Twemling, whose subtle method of bacilli poisoning defeated direct evidence. The sheer weight of details amassed by Bray, each in themselves unconvincing, but damning in the aggregate, had given Sir Lawrence Foederer the ammunition which his clear logic could aim with invincible accuracy.

  Now Bray strolled over the Garden Hotel, crawled about the roofs, and committed its general lay-out to mind. He was fond of expounding his technique of investigation with a certain donnish pedantry.

  He would explain that criminal investigation was in essence a reconstruction of the crime, and it was a reconstruction in four dimensions—in the space-time continuum. Position in time could be as fatal to a criminal as position in space.

  When he had satisfied himself perfectly as to the space-frame of the Garden Hotel murder, then he proceeded to extend it into the fourth dimension. Everyone inside the hotel was interrogated. Sparing of comment, keen of eye, the young detective gradually filled a notebook with the times of the individuals whose geodesics might have crossed the world line of Mrs. Budge (so abruptly cut off) at the hour of nine-thirty.

  V

  White-coated and rubber-gloved, Dr. Wuthering straightened himself and turned from the autopsy table.

  “Killed round about nine-thirty, but of course after this lapse of time and in this state, I may be four hours out either way. Cause of death due to strangulation. The line of decapitation is below the line of strangulation, and I should say the latter was done with a thin cord, placed round and drawn tight. The body was dissected at least twelve hours after death. It is a good, workmanlike job by someone with anatomical knowledge but not a surgeon. Looks more like a G.P. or medical student.”

  VI

  “Revolting, absolutely revolting,” snorted Colonel Cantrip to Miss Mumby. “By gad, I’ve seen some horrors in India, but I tell you I felt absolutely white about the gills. I don’t blame you for screaming.” He dragged at his grey moustaches. “I nearly screamed myself.”

  “What’s this, Colonel? Don’t scream; please don’t scream,” implored Mr. Nicholas Twing.

  Twing was manager of an issuing house in the City. Money seems to have two effects on those who come most intimately into contact with it. Either it plumps their bodies and reddens their cheeks, or it dries them up like parchment. In Mr. Twing desiccation had been carried
past all reason. He looked like one of those withered heads of Papua, in which the features are perfect, but which some secret process of curing has reduced to only a fraction of full scale. His delicate little hands, with their perfect nails, were like buzzards’ talons, and his black, beady eyes looked out of a face seared with the innumerable scorings of a palimpsest half as old as time.

  He laid one of his talons on the Colonel’s arm now, and his beady eyes probed the Colonel’s face. “It wouldn’t take much to make you scream after all,” he said at length. “Your nerves are in a shocking state, Cantrip.”

  Cantrip’s bloodshot eyes roamed round the room. “Well, can you wonder at it?” he said testily. “It’s all very upsetting not knowing from one minute to the next whether one isn’t going to disappear and be found in pieces scattered about the place.”

  Mr. Twing laughed shrilly. “It is unsettling, certainly. The way I look at it is this. One of the residents in this place must have done it—oh, don’t look so startled; surely that much is obvious even to you! Now, as we meet you in everyday life, not one of you good people seems capable of it. Even our superannuated military friend here”—he indicated Cantrip with a wave of his claws—“has long ago lost the guts for such a deed, if he ever had them. So what does it amount to? One of us here is a maniac, neither more nor less, and probably isn’t even aware that he has committed the murder.”