Crime in Kensington

by Christopher St. John Sprigg

  “Perhaps he did the murder,” suggested the Commissioner, “and then got rid of the body somewhere—perhaps planted it on Budge. Budge, we will say, returns the gift with thanks. Tableau—Blood’s horror when he finds the body’s back again and he’s got to find some other means of disposing of it.”

  “Yes, sir, that hangs together,” admitted Bray grudgingly. “It’s rather like hunt the slipper,” he said, unconsciously borrowing Charles’s simile, “and the policeman is the mug while the residents of the Garden Hotel pass the body to each other behind their backs. If only they played according to the rules and we could hang the fellow who was caught with it.”

  “Cheer up,” said the Commissioner, “you may do so yet.” He looked at Bray keenly. “You have an excellent record. I regard this case as more important, however, than any that you have handled before. You understand?”

  Bray understood perfectly.

  Chapter Eleven

  Budge Versus Bray: Second Round

  I

  “MRS. BUDGE was in no way an hysterical woman,” said her solicitor to Bray, surprised to hear that his client’s dramatic document had proved useless. “In my considered opinion she wrote that letter in very real fear of her life. It is strange that her fear should have been so rapidly justified, and yet her ante-mortem accusation should prove false.”

  “It is curious,” replied Bray, “but you will realize that Budge’s alibi is absolutely unassailable in a court of law. The bill would be thrown out by the Grand Jury. I’ve put that line of investigation behind me and I am concentrating on motive now. I hope to get something useful out of tracing Mrs. Budge’s income.”

  “I gathered, when I saw your man Samuels yesterday,” remarked Tarr, “that he was well on the way to solving that particular mystery. He seemed intensely amused, but refused to tell me why.”

  “Another disappointment, I suppose,” growled Bray. “In the light of what I have told you, can you suggest any lines that would be worth following?”

  Tarr thought for a moment. “I have certain documents which my client gave me. She said they were not intrinsically valuable, but had an intense sentimental interest, and would I look after them for her. I will get you the documents in question.”

  While the deed-box was being searched for, Tarr dropped for a moment his pose of a successful company promoter and became a little more the professional man.

  “I’m rather distressed about this business,” he confided. “My firm has never had—or wanted—a criminal practice, and while the good lady has done nothing illegal in being killed, one naturally feels a certain stigma when one of one’s clients is murdered in such a very butcherly fashion.”

  Bray smiled. The attorney’s distress was rather comical. “Most disturbing,” he agreed.

  The solicitor’s explanation was cut short by the arrival of the deed-box. Tarr handed Bray two envelopes each marked “confidential” and heavily sealed, but contained in cheap manilla envelopes: one was blue-pencilled with an X and the other with a Y.

  The lawyer watched the detective open them with some distaste and an air of acute apprehension.

  “X” contained a collection of cuttings from papers all bearing a date of some five years ago. Some of them were provincial papers, others were London dailies. Each cutting dealt with a series of frauds which had been committed by a young man. The frauds were all identical in character—the young man had invented a chemical preparation which removed spots from clothes. Practical demonstration of this cleanser convinced credulous people that here was a magnificent patent preparation which had only to be exploited to bring in a fortune to its lucky backer. Sums ranging from £500 to £5,000 were advanced to float the company, but directly the money was forthcoming the persuasive young genius vanished, and his victim found that the cleanser worked so magically by virtue of a powerful acid which, two days after its application, left a corroded hole where the original stain had been. Finally, one mug had complained to the police, and although the trickster was never caught, sufficient publicity was given to his subtle idea to prevent anyone else falling a victim to his ingenuity.

  There was no writing of any sort with the cuttings, and no clue to the identity of any of the persons referred to.

  In the other envelope was a copy of a marriage certificate. The marriage was between Giovanni Sarto (30) and Mary Church (18) at a registry office in Coventry. This also was for a date some five years ago, and Bray noted that neither party had any permanent address.

  Tarr looked at the documents in some surprise. “What do you make of these?” he asked innocently.

  Bray chuckled. “They have a strong smell of blackmail.”

  The lawyer’s face was a study. If the smell had been brimstone he could not have handed the document back to Bray more gingerly.

  “Cheer up,” said the detective, laughing. “Your client is beyond the reach of legal proceedings. If I might make a suggestion, it is that you would be safer in sticking to our impoverished but still reasonably law-abiding gentry. Good-bye.”

  II

  “Who was married five years ago in a Coventry registry office? Who was guilty of a series of frauds five years ago?” Bray, posing these questions to himself for the umpteenth time, felt that if he could find the answer to them he would at last be at grips with that elusive motive. Meanwhile, he awaited the report of Samuels in his little room at Scotland Yard with real impatience.

  Punctual to the minute Samuels appeared. He greeted Bray coolly. Unfastening his valise with exasperating slowness, he extracted and arranged a multitude of papers. Samuels never failed to irritate Bray. Tall, weedy, with a tiny moustache, white pasty face and a thin, cylindrical, out-jutting nose that looked as if it were made of putty, he seemed to cultivate an aloofness to mark him out as something more than merely a policeman. His black coat and vest and wing collar were definitely professional, and he adopted the attitude not of a staff man, but of an outside professional adviser.

  Nothing irritated Bray more than to be fixed with Samuels’s cold, squinting eye and favoured with his slow, sly grin when he was explaining to him the progress of an investigation. The look and smile seemed to say, “Don’t drag me into that side of it, please. I am an accountant, not a copper.” Bray, in his turn, retaliated by treating him as a captain of industry would treat his auditor when the latter was a member of a respectable but smallish firm. Relations would have been difficult between them had not each party a secret recognition of the efficiency of the other in his own particular sphere.

  “Mrs. Budge’s books were in excellent order,” said Samuels. “I have traced through all the income and expenditure responsible for the very considerable profit she made over a period of years, and with the help of the banks concerned have been able to vouch each transaction satisfactorily. You will be surprised to hear that there were very few cash receipts—they were nearly all in the form of drafts and therefore very easily traceable.”

  “Well, where did the money emanate from?” asked Bray impatiently.

  “Mrs. Budge appears to have been an extremely good business woman,” said Samuels. “At any rate, she appears to have made her little hotel show a profit of many thousands a year.”

  The detective looked as discomfited as he felt. “It is impossible,” he commented. “You must be mistaken, Samuels.”

  The other grinned deprecatingly. “I can assure you there can be no mistake. The majority of her guests paid, by monthly cheque, about £12,000 a year for the privilege of staying at the Garden Hotel.”

  An extraordinary possibility took shape in Bray’s mind. “Blackmail,” he murmured, “it must be! Mass blackmail!”

  For a moment he was flabbergasted by the ingenuity—the amazing audacity—of the woman whose death had awakened the forces of the law. “What a mind!” he exclaimed. “It looks as if this priceless character ran an hotel for the sole purpose of blackmail—the hush-money charges being included in the bill.”

  The ludicrous side of th
e situation appealed to him. Samuels did not seem amused.

  “That’s your theory, is it, Inspector? Well, that’s not my worry luckily. Here is an extract of the relevant books—with a schedule of the payments making up the Receipts from Guests items in the profit and loss accounts. There is also a schedule of the amounts paid by each guest.

  “I don’t think there will be any further queries, but in case there are, I am keeping the books in my office until your investigation is completed”—he paused a moment and added—“or abandoned.”

  Bray’s first feeling of triumph gradually evaporated as he thought over the amazing turn his investigation had taken. Blackmail was an excellent motive to unearth for a crime, but blackmail on this gargantuan scale only made confusion twice confounded. Instead of eliminating the possible suspects, it multiplied them. Half the residents in the hotel were potential suspects, and what was worse, the sinister conjuration of blackmail evoked the possibilities of perjury, false evidence, and faked alibis. He felt as if the edifice of fact which during the last few days he had erected at any rate as far as the first story was already crumbling, its foundations sapped.

  He pulled himself together and went again over the material facts. He felt that the only thing that was established was (a) that Budge had the motive to commit the murder but had had a perfect alibi, (b) that Blood, if he were blackmailed, had the motive for the crime, and was almost certainly responsible for the disposal of the corpse.

  It was true that Charles felt certain that Blood was genuinely astonished at finding the body in his room. But if the murderer really had been playing hunt the slipper with the corpse, it might well have been that Blood might have bestowed the unwelcome cadaver in Budge’s room, and that Budge found it and very astutely returned it to his own. Blood would then have been unpleasantly surprised enough at finding that the responsibility had been again thrown on him and, faced with the situation, he would have chosen the dissection and dispersal of the remains as the speediest and most certain means of eliminating danger. He would probably have returned the laundry basket to Budge’s room with its evidence in the shape of a human hair and a shred of cloth and exchanged it for Budge’s own innocent basket. This would account for his equanimity when Bray inspected the basket in his room.

  This possibility, suggested by the Commissioner, had not struck Bray before as very attractive because then the essential motive was absent. Now, however, it was clear that Blood was paying a heavy yearly tribute to Mrs. Budge as the price of silence. Bray, who knew a little of Blood’s type, the enthusiastic revivalist who was still the ordinary sensual man with all the implacable drive and cunning fury of the Celt, could well imagine Blood choosing to end an arrangement which might eventually become intolerably irksome.

  Bray had the feeling that comes to the inexperienced swimmer who has ventured out of his depth and after much exertion but little forward progress feels at last firm ground beneath his toes. As he revolved the situation in his mind and leaned back in his chair, he reached for his tobacco—sure sign to those who knew him that he was seeing light.

  Bray, with his pipe going well, decided to tackle Blood again next day. First, however, he would ascertain how much hush-money Blood had paid over in the course of his stay in the clutches of the proprietress of the Garden Hotel. He routed out the schedule to which Samuels had referred and looked at it.

  Mingled wonder, disgust and irritation were in the snort with which he put down his pipe and stared unbelievingly at the figures.

  The schedule was divided into two tables. In the first were the people who were paying £2,000 a year for the privilege of a room in this little Kensington hotel. In the second were those who were paying a reasonable figure, varying from three guineas to six guineas a week according to the suite.

  In the second division were Charles, Lady Viola, Miss Arrow, Miss Sanctuary and the Rev. Septimus Blood!

  For the second time in the case Bray saw his carefully reared house of cards collapse. For the second time he faced defeat philosophically and turned back again to fundamentals.

  He ran his eye down the people in Table A—all people whom, if his theory was correct, had been ransoming their freedoms and their reputations to support one of the most ingenious blackmailing schemes ever devised.

  The list was as follows:

  Mr. Nicholas Twing.

  Miss Mumby.

  Samuel Eggfeldt (deceased).

  Mr. Winterton.

  Colonel Cantrip.

  The Misses Geranium and Hectoring.

  Mrs. Walton.

  Mrs. Salterton-Deeley.

  For a moment Bray was staggered at the implications of his theory. Admittedly, the guests at the Garden Hotel were a queer bunch with eccentricity sticking out all over them, but he felt it difficult to believe that one and all had pasts sufficiently murky to place them at the mercy of the parasite who battens on the rotten wood of society.

  Yet what other conceivable alternative was there? And did it not seem that Budge had succeeded his wife in that revolting trade, and that still the guests of the Garden Hotel were immured in a moral prison, and paying richly for the privilege of their confinement? The repulsion which the blackmailer always roused in him filled Bray’s mind almost to the exclusion of his task of investigation, and he determined to put an end to that tyranny without delay.

  Suddenly a thought struck him. If Budge had Miss Mumby and Winterton in his power, nothing would be easier than to concoct an alibi and force them to support it. Of course! The cool audacity with which Budge had walked out of the room when in danger of imminent arrest and invented an alibi while the detective and Charles kicked their heels and waited, filled him with unwilling admiration. It was of a piece with the whole grandiose scheme. The Budges, if his theories were correct, belonged to the first flight of criminal brain. Although he could probably put a term to the extortions from the hapless residents of the Garden Hotel, it might not be easy to get a conviction for blackmail. But if he could break down Budge’s alibi, the blackmailer would be forced to face the capital charge, and his victims would be rid for ever of their tormentor.

  The detective realized he would have to play his cards carefully. He had looked on the residents of the hotel hitherto as ordinary law-abiding citizens, ready to help the cause of justice so far as they could without inconveniencing themselves. Now, goodness knows what dark distrust of the law might be seething in their minds. He might look for double dealing everywhere, and could only be thankful that he was forewarned of the situation and could separate the sheep from the goats.

  III

  Charles accosted Bray with a start of exaggerated surprise.

  “You’re on the warpath, Bray,” he exclaimed. “Who are you arresting to-day? Remember Punch’s advice and don’t.”

  Charles was full of spirits. The exclusive story of the finding of Mrs. Budge’s shawl and the scalpels had appeared in the Mercury, though naturally with no allusion to the way in which they were found. On the top of that he felt that he had in his hand a thread which, if he followed it aright, would conduct him to the centre of the maze. For the moment he preferred not to trust it to the clumsy tugging of the police, at any rate till he was a bit surer of where it was leading to.

  Bray was preoccupied. He told briefly of his remarkable discovery. Charles, at first incredulous, was later delighted by the idea.

  “Bray, I did not think you had it in you! You have the imagination of an Edgar Wallace. Fancy seven people all being peacefully and steadily blackmailed, as one of the extras in their en pension hotel bills.”

  Bray looked stubborn. “Can you suggest any other explanation?”

  “Lots,” said Charles. “This won’t be the first hotel that’s overcharged its guests. But after all—blackmail isn’t a profession. It is easy for a blackmailer to get one victim; two is quite possible; three is improbable; four is impossible; seven is beyond the bounds of fantasy! Don’t you see that the risks are immense! Sooner or later one of
them is bound to squeak—or is it squeal? No seven people would stand a permanent arrangement of this kind. It is the whole strength of the blackmailer that his victim thinks each time is the last.”

  “You are not correct there, Charles,” countered Bray. “I have had the status of these people investigated and they all could find the sum demanded without trouble, except possibly Mrs. Walton, whose sources of income are rather mysterious. All the others would find no difficulty in the annual sum with which they purchased immunity.”

  “That’s a good point,” admitted Charles. “Still, it seems to me ridiculously unnecessary to make your victims reside in your own establishment.” He paused. “Still, you are evidently unconvinced, so I will not favour you with my own poor suspicions.”

  “I should know fairly certainly in the next hour or so if my theory’s right,” was the detective’s parting remark. “I’m going to see if I can smash that alibi of Budge’s.”

  IV

  Winterton was plainly not altogether surprised to see the detective. He sucked his teeth with a despairing sigh and offered him the hospitality of a deep leather armchair. The cordiality with which he plied him with drinks was insincere.

  Bray had a delicate situation. He took his time. A little judicious silence did more to intimidate a witness than any amount of blustering.

  Winterton reconnoitred Bray warily. He didn’t quite know where to place him—the Force had changed a lot in his day. This fellow in his well-cut lounge suit with the plastered-back hair and the pale, clear-cut profile—in his, Winterton’s time, if a fellow of that stamp had had any truck with the law, he would have been wearing the wig and gown of advocacy rather than the elegant mufti of the gentleman sleuth-hound.