Viola thought best with a pencil in her hand, and the paper before her rapidly darkened with scribbling. Miss Mumby’s face loomed with a sinister emphasis out of the facade of the hotel, and an elvish Budge dangled helplessly from a telephone receiver. Free association lent her pencil inspiration, and Mrs. Walton’s classic profile emerged from a sea of trouble. Viola’s flying pencil stopped, then started again. This time it was a clown’s pointed hat, and free association ended when she had to make an intellectual decision as to the number and position of the pom-poms on it.
“Now why a clown’s hat?” her brain demanded wonderingly. Something in the mist clicked, and she was five years back, at the circus at Olympia. There was the light, the noise and the dust and trampling of the ring. In her recollection a clown or two were lounging on the barrier, but her thought, the thoughts of the multitude which packed the stands, magnified by memory, were concentrated upwards. There in the brilliance of arc-lights a slip of a girl darted like a rosy-breasted bird through a gossamer web of wires. The trapeze described its glittering arc, and she swung from it, one wrist carelessly linking it to the taut spring of her body. Then she fell, like a rose-petal, through sheer space. Viola heard again that sigh of fear as she dropped, mellowing into relief as her partner below, at the zenith of his trapeze’s swing, stretched outwards, wrists extended and, hanging only by the friction of his ankles, linked hands with her as she passed.
Mary Church, the “Human Swallow,” was the star turn at the circus that year, and Viola had spent hours endeavouring to fix on paper those matchless curves of the flying, straining human body, and when, night after night, the Human Swallow had come near the seat where Viola sat to take her call, Viola had been able to pin her lovely features to the paper. And definitely—oh, indisputably—those features were the features of Mrs. Walton.
“Can I see—or are you one of those artists who hate to have their work viewed in its preliminary rawness?” It was Miss Sanctuary’s voice, and Viola made room for her on the sofa on which she was sitting.
“It isn’t work,” she said. “Just idling. But it is idling that has brought me some reward. I have stumbled on a discovery which may help to solve our mystery.”
The grey-haired woman shuddered. “How I regret the part I played in that. Inspector Bray was extraordinarily nice about it, possibly because, as his manner plainly showed, he thought I wasn’t in full possession of my wits. I acted madly on the spur of the moment, and, you see, my action involved the man I wanted to help in speedier ruin than if I had let things take their course. It makes one a fatalist, but even the comforting reflection of Kismet cannot prevent one feeling some of the guilt.”
“Nonsense,” said Viola reassuringly. “Yours was a kindly action, and, if what the Inspector says is true, the man was doomed by whoever killed him from the moment of his arrest.”
“Thank you,” smiled Miss Sanctuary. “It has taught me never to interfere again.” She seemed to shake the memory from her, and went on in a more normal voice. “Tell me, what is this discovery of yours?”
“I’ll show you,” said Viola mysteriously. She tore the top sheet off the pad. Her pencil travelled deftly, guided by the remembering brain. A thistledown figure, a miracle of suppleness, lay arched across the bar of a trapeze, the body foreshortened to exaggerate the feline tension of the limbs. The figure looked out of the paper, and the face was the face of the Human Swallow, of Mrs. Walton.
Miss Sanctuary stared at it. “Good heavens, child,” she said at last, blank astonishment in her face, “what put this into your head?”
“That’s a circus girl I saw four or five years ago. She was the turn at Olympia, and I remember her well because I sketched her at the time. She is Mrs. Walton. I am as certain of that as I am certain that I’m Viola Merritt.”
“Amazing,” murmured Miss Sanctuary, “amazing! You’ve told Bray, I suppose?”
“I think I shall tell Charles and together we’ll see if we can’t get a beat on Bray,” answered Viola. “It’ll be much more fun to do it unprofessionally, and he will get tremendous kudos if this thing has any bearing on the case.”
“What makes you think it has?” asked the old lady.
“I heard Bray telling Charles that there was something mysterious about Mrs. Walton, and that if they could only get on to that, he felt sure they might come across the loose thread that would bring them to the solution. I don’t think Mrs. Walton is personally implicated—I’m sure she isn’t—but they believe she has the key of the mystery, and she’s so very secretive.”
Miss Sanctuary smiled at her eagerness, the eternal appetite for the hunt, for the hue and cry, which is an instinct as old as humanity.
“Why not investigate it yourself? Think how surprised Mr. Venables would be if you had done a little detective work on your own and got ahead of him.”
Viola’s eyes brightened. “I say, that would be rather fun,” she exclaimed. “Where should one start, now?”
“There is a very old friend of mine, Mrs. Mortimer, who knows almost all there is to know about circuses. She followed one in a caravan for five years, and I think she has friends in every circus in Europe. You may know her book ‘White Sand.’ No? Well, it was a little too true to circus life, I think, to be a best-seller, but she will be able to tell you more about the Human Swallow than anyone else in England.”
Miss Sanctuary smiled ironically. “You mustn’t blame me if you are disappointed. Life isn’t quite what we expect, and the more mysterious a thing looks, the more prosaic it is as a rule in essence. It is the ordinary happenings that can have the most sinister causes. You may feel rather sorry you troubled to track down Mrs. Walton’s secret.”
She fished in her large grey bag and produced a tiny pencil and a scrap of paper. “Here you are,” she said, writing “Mrs. Mortimer, Pentecost, Lima Road, Tooting.”
Meanwhile Bray followed a scent five years old in Coventry registry office, hotel and theatre... Endless questions… the vagueness of the human mind… But the link between Mary Church and Mrs. Walton shaped itself and strengthened.
IV
“Have you a photograph of yourself, Mrs. Walton?” said Charles. “All right, Addington, don’t glare. I only want it to adorn one of those charming little paragraphs I write, you know. Now that our little mystery is dying away, I am returning to the gossip column.”
Addington’s blue eyes blazed. “For God’s sake don’t associate her with this wretched business here. I’ve tried to persuade her to move, but she insists that it is not worth while with so short a time to go to the wedding.”
“That’s all right,” answered the journalist. “I’ll be admirably discreet. By the way, if it isn’t impertinent, and don’t answer it if it is, where did you meet?”
Two pairs of eyes met. Two faces softened with memories shared and treasured. “On a cruise,” Mrs. Walton said. “The West Indies. Those stars! I sometimes think I must have imagined them.”
“And that moon! I loved you from the first moment you came into the dining-room, with your dreamy stare round.”
“Short-sightedness, dear,” smiled the other.
“…and, by Jove, weren’t you standoffish? At the end of the voyage I came to the conclusion you thoroughly disliked me.”
“Well, you see it was just after losing my husband.” Her face clouded. “You know... I’ve told you… that wasn’t a success, and I felt that I wanted to be by myself, and never, never be dependent on anyone again. I said to myself that never would I put myself in a position where my privacy and my loneliness would be at the mercy of anyone. And no sooner had I made this resolution than I found myself wanting to spend my time with a man I’d never seen before until I walked into the ship’s dining-room and saw you at the Captain’s table.”
“So you did see me, in spite of your short-sightedness!” laughed Addington. “And then after that cruise we never saw each other for two years until I saw you walking down Bond Street, and you remembered me, and we
went to Ranelagh——”
“And just as you were saying good-bye, you asked me to marry you!”
“Shall I slink off or crawl away on all fours?” Charles asked himself. This was unbearable. “I must pop off now,” he mumbled. “About that photo?”
“Oh, I’ve got two,” said Addington. He fished in his wallet. “I think we can spare you one. Here you are!”
Addington’s eyes lingered as he gazed at it before handing it over.
It was a good photograph—that is to say, it was a snapshot, and had not been touched up into a professionally misty caricature. Mrs. Walton’s looks survived even ordeal by camera.
“Anyway,” he consoled himself, “she has a perfect alibi for the murder, and whatever mud I stir up, it won’t be that.” He made the mental reservation to suppress any information he came upon, if he so thought good.
Charles, too, had that feeling that there was something familiar in Mrs. Walton’s face. She obviously did not know him, and he assumed that she had been at some time in the public eye. If that were so, then somewhere in the Mercury office should be someone who could put his finger on time, place, and name.
Every big newspaper office is a repository of forgotten secrets, or secrets that have never come to life. If you have been in the thick of every cause célèbre, if you have streaked like a hound on the faintest scent of a “story,” if you have sat through long police-court proceedings of which the greater part could not be published, if you have read the “private and confidential” letters to the editor giving the well-authenticated intimate information which the law of libel and public policy will not let you publish, if the principal actor in many a sorry drama has tried to justify his action to you with a final “But of course this is not for publication, old boy,” and if you have in addition a brain whose professional pride it is to store this information away for reference when necessary—then you would realize why Charles took the faded but truthful snapshot to the offices of his paper.
He started with the art editor, Perry, whose incredible immaculacy was proverbial in Fleet Street. Perhaps the only man in England who habitually made up the picture page in a frock-coat, a white slip, spats, and a carnation, Perry could turn suddenly from a lounging fashion-plate to a raging, tearing piece of energy, who dispatched aeroplanes, racing cars, and on one historic occasion three teams of Eskimo dogs, to bring back the precious plates.
“Congratulations, Charles,” he remarked, eyeing the photograph professionally. “I am afraid it will not reproduce very well.”
“Who is she?” asked Charles.
Perry looked surprised. “Good heavens, did you forget to ask her name? How awkward!”
“Joking apart,” said Charles wearily, “will you bring your brains to bear upon the problem of identifying this lady? Has she ever been through your hands—in the negative, I mean?”
Perry thought for five minutes. “I have a vague recollection I’ve seen something like it on the box of chocolates I bought my wife yesterday, that’s all. Sorry.”
Next in order of likelihood was the librarian. Isaac Hubbard had a system of filing press cuttings so ingenious and with cross reference so elaborate that it was believed that he could find anything that had appeared in the British Press for fifty years past in fifty seconds. His files were so rich in material that the breath had hardly left a distinguished subject’s body before the Mercury’s evening newspaper was on the streets with a fuller account of his life than any of its rivals. The only fault of the system was that it was so ingenious, it was believed that no one but Hubbard could ever grasp its complexities. The matter had never been put to the test, however, for Hubbard, a long-armed hunchback, with huge tortoiseshell spectacles and a squeaky voice, appeared to live permanently in the library, without taking a holiday from year’s end to year’s end. Legend said that in gloom and silence he expiated the dreadful memory of the one mistake of his life, twenty-five years ago, when a man, eminent in that day, named Arthur Thurston, had died and Hubbard had given the reporter who was due to write his obituary, the folder of his still living namesake.
Hubbard scrutinized the snapshot in silence. “A very lovely lady,” he said at last, “but I do not know her face. I should say almost for certain she hasn’t appeared in our paper.” Seeing Charles’s disappointment, he went on: “Of course I’m not answerable for the advertisement columns, and if it were an actress or a film star it is just possible—why not see Mr. Hardy?”
Hardy, the advertisement manager, had only two ambitions in life. One was to see the total number of single column inches of display advertising appearing in the Mercury in a year exceed that of its rival, and the other was to be mistaken for Lord Bensdale by a friend of that peer. So far, at that date, they were only five thousand inches behind their rival’s figures, and only two days before at a city banquet a cousin of Lord Bensdale had stared incredulously at Hardy, and was apparently on the verge of speaking to him. As a result, Hardy was in a mellow mood when Charles spoke to him.
“Do I know it? Why, don’t I see that face every time I go into the reps.’ room? Come with me!”
The reps. burst into activity as Hardy entered. He led Charles up to a sheet of brown paper on which were pasted a whole collection of pretty ladies who had appeared in the advertising columns of the Mercury. His forefinger stabbed the centre one. With arms extended, form displayed with all the cold emphasis of the camera, was, so the headline in battering black “sans” informed the reader, the “Human Swallow, twice nightly.” Absorbed in her feat, unconscious of the camera, the “Human Swallow” looked out of the paper. The face was that of Mrs. Walton.
“A circus turn!” exclaimed Charles.
Hardy laughed. “Did you think you had got off with a duchess?”
Charles ignored the remark. “Now where could I get hold of more information about that turn? I see it is over five years since it was advertised in the Mercury.”
Hardy thought a moment. “I don’t think you can do better than go to Menzies. He is press agent for half the leading circus people, and he knows all the circus families and their connections—and you could number the people who can do that on one hand. He is probably press agent to the Human Swallow.”
Hardy scribbled an address on the back of his card.
V
Charles had been astonished at his discovery of the beautiful Mrs. Walton’s lurid past. What was she doing now, apparently moderately well off, and about to be married to a man very definitely belonging to society? What strange secrets were buried in that past; and what was the import of this marriage certificate for it to be an instrument of blackmail in the hands of the Budges?
Charles’s speculation was cut short by the arrival of a note from Viola.
“DEAR OLD THING,” she wrote, “the post is so infernally efficient, you will probably get this in Fleet Street almost at once. Prepare yourself for a shock. I am on the track of big things.
“Mrs. Walton has a lurid past! Quite by accident I suddenly remembered where I had seen her face—she was a circus turn at Olympia five years ago. There!
“I confided in Miss Sanctuary, and she has given me the name of a woman friend of hers who knows all about circuses. She lives in Tooting, of all places, and in a house called Pentecost!
“I’m going along there now to discover what I can, but I’ve been simply boiling over with excitement, and felt I must tell you what had happened! I hope to have some really interesting news when I have seen Mrs. Mortimer, but don’t be surprised if my investigations take me to China or Peru or somewhere. We detectives, you know.
“Ever thine,
“VIOLA.”
Charles smiled ruefully. If anything, Viola was ahead of him in the investigations. What would Xavier have said?
“Never make use of a woman for criminal detection,” he used to caution his operatives. “They are incapable of the sheerly logical processes—devoid of emotional prejudice—which are the instruments of the investigator’s art
!”
“I suppose I had better back my press agent against Miss Sanctuary’s woman friend!” Charles concluded. “I hope to goodness Viola pumps her properly.”
Menzies lived in an extraordinary block of offices of the Charing Cross Road. A dirty, blistered door confronted one, plastered with the tarnished brass plates of a score of dubious enterprises. There was no knocker or bell, but violent hammering with his umbrella on a susceptible panel eventually brought a suspicious and frowsty “char” to the door. An ancient and carpetless staircase seemed to wind endlessly up without reaching any offices until eventually it fulfilled its proper function with a rush and one found one’s head emerging on a level with the floor of an ante-room. As one rose, piles of playbills and autographed photographs of all sizes were visible, whose age could be approximately dated by the thickness of the dust upon them. Waves of steak and onions, mingled with the trilling of a piano, drifted from the apparently residential quarters upstairs. The char flung open a door at the end of the ante-room and discovered Menzies in his shirt sleeves gloomily concentrated over a current Punch. Tall, pale, with large horn-rimmed glasses and a waxen complexion, Menzies bore about him more of the atmosphere of æsthetics than of ballyhoo. But he was notoriously efficient at his job.
Hardy’s introduction was good enough for him. “The Human Swallow?” he said. “That’s a curious thing. Only the other day I was wondering what had become of little Mary Church—that was her name before she married an Italian juggler called Sarto.”
“Tell me anything you can about her, will you?” asked Charles. “What was she doing in the circus business, for instance?”
Crime in Kensington Page 18