The Case of the Missing Men: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  PART III

  CHAPTER XI

  WHARTON LOOKS ROUND

  I had come by an early train because it was necessary for me to look in at my flat and fetch a few things that I might be needing, for there was no telling how long I might now be detained at Beechingford. At the flat I had breakfast, for I had not wished to upset too much the normal routine at Lovelands, what with Constance upstairs in a case of real or feigned collapse, and Kitty and Daine with that cremation in front of them.

  I got back to the station fairly early and thought I’d try to get a Times. But there wasn’t one, and I was running my eye over the latest books when the bookstall assistant sidled up expectantly.

  “Got anything by Austin Chaice?” I asked.

  “Nothing at all, sir,” he told me, and smiled tolerantly. “We didn’t have many in stock, and this murder business made a rush on them. But here’s something very good, sir.”

  I have learned to be suspicious of the recommendations of most sellers of books. Maybe I am wrong, but I still rather suspect I have bought in my time a good few volumes that might otherwise have gone on cluttering up the stock.

  “How do you know it’s good?” I asked.

  “I’ve read it myself, sir. And one or two of our regulars have said so too.”

  I had a look at it—The Frozen Alibi, by Langford Orr. I didn’t want the book, but there are times when I lack moral courage. Or maybe the assistant was a good salesman; at any rate I bought it, and thought rather guiltily that there was eight and sixpence squander-bugged. Then I went off to place myself strategically for the arrival of Wharton.

  In a couple of minutes he was coming through the barrier, and he was well on time. It had taken me a moment or two to recognise him, for instead of the overcoat with the velvet collar, he was wearing what looked like a brand-new grey one. But the rest was much about the same. There was the leather bag with its ancient labels; there was the hunch of the shoulders and the same vastly protuberant moustache. And there he was darting looks this way and that from under his monumental eyebrows, and doubtless telling himself that not a soul suspected he was looking at a real live Superintendent straight from Scotland Yard. When he caught sight of me his face puckered with geniality.

  “Here you are, then. Got me a seat?”

  I told him I’d done better still—got what looked like being a first-class compartment to ourselves. And so it was to prove, not that there had been anything to boast about. The train was only a glorified local, and when it pulled out it must have been nine-tenths empty.

  “Mind if I hang on to those notes of yours?” he asked me.

  I told him he could keep them as long as he liked. I almost tapped my skull with one of Daine’s gestures to show I had their contents well in mind. What I did ask was whether they’d been any use. He told me, with a deprecatory pursing of the lips, that notes were all very well, but there was nothing like seeing things for one’s self.

  “Too early to ask if you’ve got any ideas?”

  He glared at me at that. Then his look altered.

  “Couldn’t be one of these tontine cases, could it?” He didn’t ask me if I knew what a tontine was, but gave himself the trouble of an explanation. “You know, where the survivor takes all.”

  “In this case you mean that Constance Chaice would take all?”

  “More or less,” he said, with a wave of the hand that was intended to indicate vagueness. “First Chaice is murdered and that puts the money into circulation. Then this Martin Chaice is done in and there’s another little ten thousand put in the kitty.”

  “In other words, you’re wondering who’s going to be the next.”

  He temporised. “Well, I suppose it’s an idea that has occurred to you?”

  I dodged the question with what I thought considerable subtlety by asking if the dangers he anticipated weren’t the main reason for the calling in of the Yard.

  It was only then that I realised a subtlety of his own. Why had he mentioned Martin Chaice’s murder?

  “Anything definite about that gun that was sent up?” I asked him.

  He said the experts hadn’t made up their minds, and then he was asking rather too quickly if I really thought as much of Inspector Goodman as my notes had made out. You see the tortuousness of a mind which can suspect that even one’s private notes may possibly be faked. What I did protest was that that would be like cheating at patience.

  “Well, I’ve asked for his services,” George said. “We don’t want that Chief Constable round our necks, but we might have to use his men.”

  “A good idea,” I said, but what I was wondering was how Goodman would react to George. Rather like the simian-looking man in Punch who told the Zoo attendant that he was just tickled to death at being about to see the chimpanzee, but hadn’t dreamt of wondering what the chimp would think of him. Then as I shifted in my corner I felt something hard in my pocket, and I pulled it out.

  “What’s that?” asked George, suspicious at once.

  “Just a book I bought,” I said, and then I stopped short. Then I passed it over to him. “See anything unusual about it?” He pursed his lips till they were visible under the moustache. “Can’t say I do.”

  “What about the author’s name?”

  “Langford Orr.” He looked a bit annoyed. “Conveys nothing to me.”

  “Try it as a Spoonerism,” I said.

  “A Spoonerism?” Then I saw he had it. “Orford Lang. Chaice’s secretary!”

  “That’s it,” I said. “And do you recall an occasion when there was a discussion at the dinner-table and—”

  “Let me think it out for myself,” he told me impatiently. “A discussion at the dinner-table. Chaice said he could write a detective story round anybody. Round this Lang. Hinted that Lang had broken an agreement and had published a book on his own, and that gave him a motive for murder.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “I thought it was merely a hypothesis, made up on the spur of the moment. Apparently it wasn’t.”

  “Then we’ve got something,” George said, wagging the book at me. Then his eyes opened still wider. “Wait a minute, though. Isn’t this the Lang you suspected of having an intrigue with Mrs. Chaice—as you called it?”

  “The very same.”

  George gave that look which I’ve often called his Colosseum one: the sort of leer that must have come over the face of one of Nero’s lions at the sight of a particularly plump Christian. Then he said nothing for a good few moments, and then he was producing those notes of mine from his bag and consulting them.

  “I thought I wasn’t wrong,” he suddenly announced. “Chaice gave two instances that night. He said Daine had a motive too. Daine had—”

  “No, no, no,” I cut in. “Chaice didn’t say anybody had done anything. It remained hypothesis. And I think he quoted Daine so as to bring in Lang. Daine’s was very definitely a hypothetical case, and it was a cloak for telling Lang about breaking that contract.”

  “There’s nothing about that here,” he said, rapping his knuckles on my notes. “Besides, why shouldn’t he have found out that Daine had been doing him down?”

  “It’s all in the notes,” I told him patiently. “If a client is as shrewd a business man as Chaice undoubtedly was, then Daine couldn’t have swindled him.”

  “Have it your own way,” he said, but made a note in his own book nevertheless. And then he had to approach it from another angle.

  “Why couldn’t this Daine have done the murders?”

  “No reason at all,” I said. “Provided you hadn’t read my notes.”

  “No reason to lose your temper,” he told me wheedlingly. “It’s only a hypothesis.”

  “Then the answer is that he just couldn’t,” I said. “He has a perfect alibi for Chaice. As for Martin, Daine was never out of my sight. Mind you,” I added, “I did have to take him into consideration. In our game we have to suspect our own mothers. I did wonder if Daine might somehow—somehow is wha
t they call the operative word—have managed to shoot Martin through his bedroom window when he was in there, and just before he and I collided outside the lavatory. The question answered itself. Martin’s windows were closed. You can’t shoot through glass and leave no trace. Also I heard no shot. And how did Daine get the gun in the room?—assuming it was the same gun. And where was Daine’s motive? He was handling Martin very well indeed. Even if he wasn’t, that manuscript wasn’t a sufficient motive.”

  “Then only that Richard Chaice is left,” he told me surprisingly mildly. “What about him?” Then he actually chuckled. “I know what you’re going to say. It’s all in the notes.”

  I said he was wrong. What I was going to say was that he’d better be getting his things together, for this was Beechingford.

  Marney-Hope was at the station with his car, and he had some surprising news for us. An arrest had been made in connection with that liquid-squirting, and in an unexpected way. A woman had got in touch with the police and had said that she’d smelt creosote on her lodger’s overcoat. It was in a wardrobe where he kept it locked, but he didn’t know she had a spare key. In a special silk-skin pocket of that overcoat the police found plenty of traces of creosote and a syringe. The man—an Eire Irishman—had been brought in from the factory where he worked, and only a few minutes ago he had made a confession.

  “Those anonymous letters to Mrs. Chaice were fakes then,” Wharton said.

  “We’ve more or less known that the last day or two,” Marney-Hope told him. “The business was still going on after Chaice’s death.”

  Wharton shot a look at me, but I took care not to notice, even though something had happened which was not in the notes. Then we were at headquarters. I wasn’t explicitly asked to go in, so I stayed in the car, and then went in search of Goodman. He was having a cup of tea in his room, so I joined him. Over it I gave him certain guarded information about George and his methods. He seemed to understand; at least he grinned and said it took all sorts to make a world. Then the phone went. I guessed it would be the Chief asking for him, and maybe me too; but it wasn’t.

  “Ah! Good morning, Harris. . . . You don’t say! . . . Wait a minute and I’ll jot that down.”

  There were several ‘yeses’ and an assurance that the matter would be seen into, and then he rang off.

  “Richard Chaice has gone!” he announced.

  “You mean bolted?”

  “Don’t know what to call it,” he said. “Old Harris wondered why he hadn’t come in to the usual early breakfast, so he went along to the garage, but he wasn’t there. Later on, when he had more time, he made more enquiries and nobody had seen anything of him that morning.”

  “What did he take with him?”

  “Two bags he had and all his things. Not his tools. Everything in the garage is perfectly normal.”

  “Bed slept in?”

  “Dammit, I forgot to ask him. Sort of took it for granted that he left this morning.”

  “This morning would have been a good time,” I said. “You not there and I away. Daine and Kitty going up to town. Mrs. Chaice in bed.”

  The buzzer went then, and this time it was for the pair of us. Everything appeared to have been agreeably settled, and almost as soon as Goodman had been introduced, Wharton was saying with a specious reluctance that he supposed we’d have to be getting on with the job.

  Goodman drove the car. George sat in front and I at the back. First we stopped at the Flagon, not a bad little inn-hotel within three hundred yards of the Harcourt Avenue bus stop, and there George expressed himself as satisfied with the room Goodman had reserved for him, and there he left his bag. Then we began the tour of inspection.

  There’s no need for details, but it was well after two o’clock when I at last got some lunch. George had to see for himself everything at No. 6, and all the time he was consulting those notes of mine, and with the attitude of one ready to pounce on the least omission. Then he had to go through the garden of No. 3, and so on to the summerhouse. Next came the annexe at Lovelands, with an inspection of the wire outside Daine’s room. Then he saw the garage and what was left of the cord. Goodman assured him that it was the cord from which had been cut the piece that had strangled Chaice.

  Then came the house itself. George’s nickname at the Yard is ‘the Old General’, and though the name may have in it both admiration and affection as well as wrath, that tour of ours that late morning and early afternoon was worse than any General Inspection that the Army ever inflicted. Not that he wasn’t right to see things for himself. It was the little bits of by-play that took up the time, and more than once Goodman caught my eye and winked.

  The last thing George did was to see Harris. Once more Harris was all of a dither, especially when George froze him with one of his official stares.

  “You don’t know if he left last night? You knew if the bed had been slept in or not, didn’t you?”

  Harris ventured a quavering yes.

  “Then he left this morning,” George grumbled. “Hear any sound of a taxi?”

  Harris had heard nothing. George nodded and then clapped the old boy on the shoulder. If there were more witnesses like Harris he’d be very pleased.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Harris, who was looking suspicious nevertheless.

  “Mumbling old fool,” George grunted when he’d gone. Then for an anxious moment we wondered if there was anything else he could possibly not have seen, but it was mercifully a false alarm. George took a look at his watch, said he was feeling a bit peckish, and he might as well be getting back to the Flagon. He also said that Goodman was to remind him to take all the keys, for he’d rather like to take another look at No. 6 on his own. Unless there was anything to the contrary, he’d meet me and Goodman at Lovelands at four o’clock.

  I promptly rang for Harris and my lunch, and I took the precaution of ordering a cup of tea for a quarter to four. Then no sooner had my spoon dipped in the soup than Harris was telling me I was wanted on the telephone. When I asked who it was he said the gentleman wouldn’t say, but he thought it was the gentleman who had questioned him about Mr. Richard. My heart sank as I said what I guessed might be a final farewell to that soup.

  “Ah! There you are,” George said. “About that disappearance of Richard Chaice. Did he take his ration book with him?”

  I said, naturally, that I didn’t know.

  “Extraordinary how I have to think of everything,” he told me, and not without a recognisable gratification. “Wherever he’s gone, he’s got to have a ration book, hasn’t he? Even if he’s thinking of staying at a hotel.”

  I said I’d make enquiries from whoever kept the books.

  “You needn’t ring me up,” he said. “This afternoon will be soon enough. But if he hasn’t taken the book, then you can bet he’s intending to come back.”

  I returned to my almost cold soup. Harris came in with the next course and I mentioned the matter of the book. I don’t know why, but the question seemed to catch him clean in the wind. Maybe he was thinking of another inquisition with Wharton and a charge of negligence.

  “The book has gone, sir,” he told me when he came back.

  “Who keeps the books?” I asked him. “Mrs. Edwards?”

  “Mrs. Edwards, sir,” was his echo.

  “She gave it to him?”

  “No, sir. She hasn’t any idea how it came to be missing.”

  “Maybe I’d better see her,” I told him, and off went Harris with an obvious relief.

  To Mrs. Edwards the whole thing was a mystery. She kept the ration books in a drawer, admittedly one to which everybody on the staff had access, and that went roughly for Daine’s staff too. She was sure Mr. Richard would never have taken it, even if he had known where it was.

  That was that, and I finished my meal. Then as I sat over my coffee I thought I’d have a look through that detective novel of Lang’s. Then I realised that Wharton had never given it back to me. Maybe, then, he was thinking of Lang as
the best immediate suspect; and if so, it would not be long before Lang learned something at first hand of the gentle art of questioning. That Wharton’s artillery would soon be brought to bear I had no doubt. Like a good general, he had already made a rough survey of the ground, and at that very moment he was supplementing it with a more detailed and private inspection. Before the day was out he would have the details of those notes of mine fixed in his wily old brain, and things would begin to happen.

  That, as I could tell myself, was why he had shown neither perturbation nor alarm at the sudden disappearance of Richard Chaice. All in good time, George was saying to himself. First fit Richard Chaice into the scheme of things, and then the significance of his disappearance could easily be assessed, and if then it were necessary to find him, found he would be.

  I finished a pipe and was then at a loose end. It was true I had that book of Chaice’s to finish, but somehow I didn’t feel like reading. Then the thought of that book brought something back to my mind. Lang was finishing the two novels, but what about that manual of detection? If Lang was going to finish that too, then I had an interest in seeing that the information I’d given Chaice was properly used. And I ought to ensure that Lang implicitly understood that my name was in no case to be mentioned.

  I tapped at the workshop door, and there was Lang typing away, as usual, for all he was worth.

  “I don’t want to disturb you,” I began, and at once he was assuring me that he’d be glad to have a few minutes’ rest.

  “How are the books going?” I asked him. “Up to schedule?”

  “Slightly ahead,” he told me, and allowed himself to look pleased.

  I broached the subject of the manual. Was I right in imagining that most of it had been written?

  “Quite a lot—yes,” he said. “Mr. Chaice was using a different method. A novel’s written straight out. There may be modifications if new and better ideas happen to turn up, but generally it runs straight on.”