Crime in Kensington

by Christopher St. John Sprigg

  “Stylistic evidence!” exclaimed the detective. “My hat!”

  “Yes, of course, it seems funny to you,” retorted Charles disgustedly. “How typical of the police attitude to evidence! You will recognize a science of graphology, but not one of literary criticism. You accept physical alibis that are based on the evidences of witnesses, and therefore whose truth is dependent entirely on the psychological make-up of your witnesses, but you will not accept moral alibis that are based on a first-hand study by psychiatrists of the psychological make-up of the accused. All right! If you won’t accept my expert evidence as a literary critic, go to your pet graphologist. I don’t know a thing about that particular quackery, but if this is anything more than a passable imitation of the handwriting of Budge, I’ll eat my hat.”

  “We should give the letter to a graphologist as a matter of course,” replied Bray, who had not, in fact, intended to do anything of the sort. “How and why do you suggest Budge was murdered—or perhaps you think it was an accident?”

  “I believe Budge was murdered by whomever he was so afraid of that he locked his door and carried a revolver,” was the answer. “The suicide is a very clumsily planned one, because if, as I am certain, that confession is a forgery, a moment’s thought should have shown the murderer that there was a distinct danger of its being discovered.”

  “Why kill him, anyway?” asked the detective. “Is there any need to anticipate the hangman?”

  “Presumably there is, and such a possibility squares with the theory I have in mind. The whole murder was very hastily planned, and I should imagine the murderer met Budge going out of the toolshed. Either he could not stop him escaping, or else he was afraid that Budge would ultimately fall into your hands. I suspect the latter was the case, and that the murderer was afraid that when Budge was faced with the capital charge, he would release information which would implicate the real murderer. Budge may even have known the murderer all the time. In that case Budge’s doom was sealed directly his arrest was decided upon, and Miss Sanctuary’s intervention only altered the scene of the murder without precipitating it.

  “As I visualize it, the murderer hastily decided on his plan of action and prepared the forged confession. Then he tracked his victim down, following him to the toolshed, a most convenient place for his purpose. Here he murdered him and staged the scene well enough to take in Scotland Yard.”

  Bray looked sceptical. “If he is as enterprising as you say, he almost deserves his freedom. At any rate it looks as if he has finished up my case nicely with no loose ends. I must point out that before you expect me to believe this story you might be a little clearer yourself on the motive that made Budge’s death so urgent a matter that it could not be left to the professional attention of the common hangman.”

  Charles shrugged his shoulders. “Have you found the pencil with which this letter was written?” he asked.

  Bray opened a felt-padded box, and grinned maliciously. “Yes, here it is—a perfect thumb and forefinger print of the deceased,” he said. “Sorry!”

  Charles’s eye brightened. Jamming in his monocle he bent over the pencil and examined it closely. “Excellent,” he murmured, “excellent! If the unknown genius who planned this affair had ever seen Budge writing he wouldn’t have made this error.”

  “Why? Was he left-handed? I’ve never come across such a case.”

  “No, but he held a pencil or pen so that the shaft, instead of passing between the forefinger and thumb, passes between the forefinger and the second finger. In this position the pencil is guided by both these fingers and the thumb, but it is mainly the second finger and the thumb that do the work, and it is their prints which you would expect to predominate. I should say that on a thick pencil like this it would be impossible for anyone who writes like Budge to leave a print like this.

  “I noticed that Budge wrote like this more than another person would have done,” he went on, “because I do so myself. It is not an uncommon habit, and my own theory is that it is less tiring to the hand. It is possible for anyone who holds a pencil in the normal way to write in this unorthodox way, but on the other hand, if you are used to holding it between the forefinger and the second finger, one can make no sort of progress at all with the orthodox grip.”

  Bray was plainly impressed after Charles had demonstrated what he meant. It was the sort of minor detail which by its very unimportance appealed to his trained brain. A few more of these and he admitted that he would begin to attach some weight to Charles’s fantastic theory.

  “Anyway, get your graphologist busy,” Charles went on, “and keep your mind open, that’s all I ask. For the moment, and from the journalistic standpoint, this is going to be made to look like a suicide. It’s a lovely story and all the better when it comes out at the inquest that the police suspect foul play, thanks to the brilliance and brains of the (now) star crime expert of the Mercury, one Charles Venables.”

  Bray smiled unenthusiastically.

  Charles, however, did not wait for any comment, but peered round the toolshed. “There’s one thing I can’t understand,” he remarked when he returned to Bray’s side. “I can’t quite see how Budge allowed himself to be hanged without some sort of a struggle, and there’s no sign of one here. I can only suggest that he was surprised and stunned. It must have needed a fairly hefty blow to make him unconscious for long enough to stage this scene.”

  Bray’s answer was interrupted by the police doctor who pulled the detective aside.

  “The cause of death is undoubtedly strangulation due to hanging. There is one point I cannot quite account for.” The doctor removed his pince-nez and stared at Bray as if he would see the answer to the problem written across his chest. “Yes, it’s rather puzzling,” he repeated. “There is a definite contusion on the cranium, with severe extravasion. It looks as if the fellow had either bumped his head violently or was hit there not long before he died. Unless his skull is exceptionally thick, I should have expected it to lay him out.”

  Bray looked at Venables wordlessly. He grinned. “I hate to admit it, Charles, but it looks as if you’re right.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Secret of the Garden Hotel

  I

  “THE honours of the day are with you, Charles,” admitted Bray, as they drank a coffee the next morning and reviewed the case. “Our graphologist reports that the confession is a fairly clumsy forgery of Budge’s handwriting. That, together with the medical evidence and your own observation about the finger-prints on the pencil, will certainly give us a verdict of ‘Wilful Murder’ at the inquest.”

  Bray’s cordiality had survived even the strain of Charles’s splash in the Mercury. Charles had crept from the position of “Special Correspondent” to that of initials, but to-day the Mercury had blossomed out with his full name and portrait inset in his “story.” Charles was at the peak of his professional career, one might say, without undue sarcasm, while Bray was distinctly on the down-grade.

  There had been a certain tinge of frost in Olympian voices that morning, and Bray, who was scrupulously honest in certain matters, had not improved his position by giving Charles—an outsider—the fullest credit for a true appreciation of Budge’s apparent suicide.

  “There’s a murderer walking loose in that hotel,” his Chief had said. “Good heavens, Bray, you must have some suspicion. In all my professional career I have never known a case of an inside job where the detective in charge did not at least have a pretty shrewd guess as to where the trouble lay. This fellow, Blood, now! His actions positively reek with suspicion. He’s confessed to one felony. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, neglect the obvious. God help us when Scotland Yard tries to reason like Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Unfortunately,” Bray had replied, “Blood had been sitting with Lady Viola for the whole of the time during which the second murder could possibly have been committed.” Viola, who knew Blood’s part in the tragedy and felt quite ill, she said, when she spoke to him, had been forc
ed to hear the parson meander on about the Coptic rite with Eppoliki, and had only endured it because he had started out by giving her studio a useful order for copying and adapting some vestments from an old illuminated missal. Her professional conscience had made her listen to the subsequent discussion, and there was Blood, reflected Bray gloomily, with a first-class alibi. It was so good and so artificial that it was in itself suspicious, but heavens, thought the detective, he was falling into the very subtlety that his Chief had condemned.

  “Let’s start at the beginning, Charles,” he groaned at last. “Motive—blackmail. We know the people who are being blackmailed. Who had the means? and in which case was the secret such that they dare not let the blackmailer fall into the hands of the police?”

  The journalist was silent for a moment. “Can you stand a sudden shock?” he remarked solicitously at last.

  “I think so,” said Bray wonderingly. “I could stand almost anything after the Commissioner’s few terse words this morning. I suppose you are going to confide in me as to how you frightened Winterton and Miss Mumby into telling the truth. Well, if it will help my case, for the Lord’s sake tell me.”

  “Well, the surprise is this. Your select little list of people who are being blackmailed is, I am afraid, quite useless. Winterton, Miss Mumby, Mrs. Salterton-Deeley, Twing, Cantrip, Mrs. Walton and Miss Geranium are all as innocent of paying hush-money as I am. They have never paid a cent of blackmail in their lives.”

  “Oh, my God,” groaned the detective. “I’ve passed the stage where your most astounding assertions can leave me incredulous. I feel like Alice must have felt after the first two or three hours in Wonderland. I should like to venture one or two humble observations, all the same. If they are not being blackmailed, why did the good people you mentioned subsidize the Budges to the tune of several thousands a year?”

  Charles smiled. Settling himself in his chair, he stirred his coffee. “The Garden Hotel is one of the most amazing institutions I have ever heard of. It is only by chance that I have just discovered its secret.” He paused, and then went on slowly: “Those people who paid so heavily for the privilege of living in the Garden Hotel got their money’s worth. They are dope addicts, and they paid for a regular supply of heroin and other narcotics—£2,000 a year, dope found.”

  Bray stared at him incredulously. “Surely you are not telling me that people like Winterton and Mrs. Salterton-Deeley are addicts. Good heavens, I have had some experience of the tribe and they have none of the stigmata.”

  “You policemen are incurably romantic,” sighed Charles. “The novels of Edgar Wallace should really have been forbidden to anyone below the rank of Commissioner. You are as bad as the temperance cranks who think of everyone who drinks as a beery-breathing, red-nosed, reeling old reprobate. Do you think every drug addict creeps round with staring eyes, pallid face and twitching fingers, in a sort of perpetual delirium tremens?”

  Bray grinned. “Most of those who fall into our hands are not unlike your description, allowing for a little journalistic exaggeration.”

  “That fall into your hands, yes,” agreed Charles. “Most drunkards who fall into the hands of the police are of the vicious d.t. type. But just as there are heavy drinkers who can carry their drink like gentlemen, there are addicts who can sniff their dope and still retain a semblance of common humanity.”

  “Go on,” said the detective, weakening. “I’m getting interested. But how do you know so much about this?”

  Charles grinned. “When I said recently that I had some previous experience of detective work, I was not pulling your leg. Just after I left Cambridge, a friend of mine there—Xavier Cunningham—you probably know his name—persuaded me to assist him at the International Narcotics Bureau of the League of Nations at Geneva. I was there for two years, and would be there still, only, unfortunately, the job was honorary, and it became necessary for me to earn my living.”

  The detective regarded his friend with a new respect. He could have sworn that Charles’s part in certain phases of the investigation had shown more familiarity with the procedure of criminal investigation than any outsider should have had. It had unsettled him, and now he realized that he had had the assistance of a youngster versed in the most delicate and intricate form of criminal investigation (taking it all in all) that could be found. The lad whom Xavier Cunningham had plucked from Oxford to help him in combating a traffic that ramified from China to Peru must have had a nose for the game. And, of course, Charles’s casual manner, the slightly vapid and idiotic grin, formed a perfect “cover” for a job in which the investigator, unlike the police detective, does not work with the power of the law behind it, but often only under sufferance, and sometimes, where the law itself is venal and corrupt, in active opposition to it.

  “Story-book amateurs” had been the initial verdict of the Yard on first coming into contact with the slim-waisted, meek-eyed young preciosities with which Xavier Cunningham had surrounded himself. Their verdict had been considerably modified after a little experience of the steel determination beneath the velvet glove, the relentlessness with which a quarry who was started in the bazaars of Calcutta was followed to the Bowery, run close at Stockholm, and finally cornered in Buenos Aires. After a little experience of this, Sûreté and Yard had been glad to co-operate with a “Cunningham’s Chick” when it was reasonably possible, and Bray realized that this would take the sting out of the Commissioner’s soreness with him for the part Charles had played in the case.

  “In the Narcotics Bureau one soon learned there were two types of drug addict. There is the type who has to increase continually the dose in order to extract a fresh sensation from it. The dose required to give him a kick gets bigger and bigger, till he can afford it no longer. Then he ‘reforms.’ He goes to a nursing-home or special institution, and the dose is whittled down, day by day. It’s a mental strain: infinite precautions, and perhaps brute force, are needed to prevent the addict getting hold of supplies while he is being ‘cured.’ But at last his reformation is complete. The drug has been eliminated from his system.

  “He can then start all over again, and gratify his craving at a reasonable cost until the time comes when the dose he must have to satisfy his craving is beyond his means. Then, of course, he reforms again. So the vicious circle goes on till his system cracks, as sooner or later it must.”

  “Are none of these cures genuine?” asked the detective in surprise.

  “Bless your innocence, no!” replied the other. “Not in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. The desire for the drug never dies. In the Bureau one became fairly familiar with that type of addict. He is the type who falls into your hands when he is in a station of life where he can afford neither a sufficient supply of the drug nor a cure.

  “This was where the Budges were so diabolically clever. They chose the second type of addict—the addict that never needs to increase his dose—to all outward appearance normal, law-abiding citizens but rotten to the core inside, with every spark of enterprise and humanity frozen with the drug.

  “To these people the Garden Hotel offered a paradise. A comfortable home where their needs were understood and a regular supply of the drug round which their whole lives revolved! Oh, the Budges had picked their clients with care and discrimination! All had a sufficient income to pay the heavy tribute exacted without feeling it. All—while slaves of the drug habit—were of the type whom a constant dose sufficed, and who would show little traces of its ravages in ordinary life. Though the soul was rotten, the facade remained good. There is no task so difficult as to ‘spot’ such an addict if he is sufficiently careful. Many a pillar of respectability and man of influence and intelligence is secretly dependent for his peace of mind and equanimity on his regular sniff of dope. And here I was, an ex-assistant of Cunningham’s, in a den of them for three days before I caught one of them out—Miss Mumby it was—in a surreptitious sniff.”

  “It certainly makes things clearer,” admitted the detective, “
but I still find it difficult to reconcile the abnormality with such comparatively normal people.”

  “I think one could have detected it sooner,” replied Charles, “if it had not been for the murder, which produced such a tension in the atmosphere that it was sufficient cause for anyone’s odd behaviour. Miss Geranium is a clear case of religious melancholia, aggravated by doping, and all of them have the bright eyes and the small appetite of the ‘coke’-sodden physique. Put them in ordinary surroundings, in an ordinary atmosphere, and their strangeness would stick out a mile.”

  “When did you really become certain?” asked Bray.

  “The night before last, when I slipped into Miss Mumby’s room and Winterton’s and found the little hiding-place where they kept their dope. I saw then how Budge had constructed his alibi. He had gone to them and told them that if he were arrested their supply would dry up. That was enough—he had touched the springs of their existence, and they were prepared to perjure themselves black to keep Budge free. The next day they heard that Budge had been arrested, and when they found that their week’s supply of dope had been stolen, they simply caved in. To get it back they would have admitted anything, and so I forced them to admit the truth.” Charles grinned brazenly.

  “May heaven forgive you,” exclaimed the detective. “Larceny, blackmail, and aiding and abetting. It’s just as well you refused to tell me anything about it!”

  “Yes, isn’t it?” agreed Charles. “Of course, the point that interested me as an ex-member of the Narcotics Bureau was where the stuff was coming from. It is the most difficult thing in the world to get a regular illicit supply of narcotics so that you can rely absolutely upon your shipments, yet this was being done in this case. Week after week the residents of the hotel got their week’s supply, neatly boxed, and with no incriminating messages or exchange of money. Finally, I picked on Blood. Your revelation of his past gave me the clue. If the Budges had a hold on Blood, they might well keep him at the hotel and blackmail him, not for money, but as a regular source of supply. As a medical man he might not have much difficulty in getting it, but it seemed to me that bacteriology was not a very good cover for a regular order for dope.