by Clara Benson
‘I can’t say for certain,’ said Freddy, ‘but I know Leonard Peacock, at least, is plotting something.’
‘Oh?’ said Henry, and listened as Freddy related the conversation he had overheard between Peacock and the other unidentified person.
‘That’s interesting,’ he said at last. ‘It looks as though they suspect someone of being a traitor.’
‘Yes,’ said Freddy. ‘I don’t know who it is, but I shouldn’t like to be in his shoes at present. They seemed to be considering a replacement for him, but they thought Trevett wouldn’t be suitable.’
‘I wonder whether that means Trevett isn’t part of all this,’ said Henry musingly.
‘Perhaps it does. For my part, if I were brewing up a secret plot I shouldn’t ask him to take part in it. He’s so fond of talking at the top of his voice to anyone who will listen that I’m not sure one could trust him to keep it quiet. Still, he and Schuster do seem prone to disappearing into corners to confer together, so I suppose we oughtn’t to discount him completely.’
‘Then I shan’t cross him off the list just yet,’ said Henry. ‘Who was Peacock talking to, do you think?’
‘I don’t know. I thought it might have been Schuster, but I couldn’t say for sure. The voice was too quiet to make anything out.’
‘What about your friend Bagshawe? Might he have been the second person? Do you think he knows anything?’
‘It wasn’t St. John,’ said Freddy, ‘because they were talking about him. They said he would be easy enough to fool, although I have no idea what they meant by that. I assume it has something to do with the Radical. No, I know he’s done one or two queer things in the past, but I think we may have to accept that he isn’t concerned in this particular business.’
‘Well, you know him best, so I suppose I ought to trust your judgment,’ said Henry. He sighed. ‘It’s all very frustrating. I was hoping we’d find some evidence against Anton Schuster, but it appears he’s too discreet for us.’
‘But are you sure he’s the one behind all this?’
‘Of course one can’t be sure of anything,’ said Henry. ‘But he has a history of stirring things up while keeping in the background. Words can be just as dangerous as guns, and the Austrians certainly considered him a threat. If he hadn’t left Vienna when he did he would most likely have been arrested for sedition. Now we’ve got him, and I’d much rather we hadn’t. Very well; did you find out anything else?’
‘No—at least, not exactly. But Mrs. Schuster seems to think someone wants to kill her,’ said Freddy slowly.
‘Oh? Did she say who?’
‘No. To be perfectly truthful I couldn’t decide whether to believe her or not. I rather thought at the time she had other intentions, and was using the story as a means to get my sympathy.’
‘I see. And did she—er—get your sympathy?’
‘I’m not sure. I can’t quite make her out. She’s something of a vamp, so it’s difficult to tell whether she’s sincere or whether she merely likes collecting men.’
‘She might be useful, though. Do you think you might allow yourself to be collected?’ said Henry.
‘Oh, I never refuse an appeal from a lady,’ said Freddy lightly. ‘Although I have the feeling that this one might be a little more dangerous than most.’
‘I have every faith in you,’ said Henry with a smile.
‘I should like to know what Peacock is planning,’ went on Freddy. ‘Whatever it is, he’s doing it on Thursday night.’
‘Can you find out?’ said Henry. ‘You might follow him.’
‘I could try, I suppose,’ said Freddy. ‘But wouldn’t it be better if one of your people did it? What about your man on the spot? I haven’t heard anything from him.’
‘Nor have we,’ said Henry, half to himself. ‘I was expecting a report this morning. No, I think it would be better if you did it. You don’t mind that sort of thing, do you?’
‘Not at all,’ said Freddy. ‘I’m as curious as you are to find out what this mysterious plot is. Do you think Miss Stapleton found out about it and was silenced for her pains? I don’t suppose you’ve made any progress on that case, by the way?’
‘Not much,’ admitted Henry. ‘The problem is we have very little evidence apart from a dead body and a missing takings box. Nobody will admit to having seen her after half past nine that evening. I’m beginning to think there’s no connection at all between Olive Stapleton’s death and the Communist Alliance.’
‘Oh, but there must be,’ said Freddy. ‘Tell the police to keep digging. They’ll find something, you’ll see.’
The police had been digging, it seemed, for news soon got out that Ronald Dyer had gone missing. The first Freddy heard about it was from Mildred Starkweather, who telephoned him at the office on Tuesday. He was out on a story, and so did not receive the message until almost lunch-time.
‘I tried you at home but you weren’t there,’ she said. ‘Then I remembered you work sometimes.’
‘Yes, I do work sometimes,’ said Freddy in some distraction. He was at that moment frowning over three stories which had been put on his desk at once, and wondering which one to look at first.
‘Anyway,’ Mildred went on, ‘I dare say you’ve heard about Ronald Dyer.’
‘No,’ said Freddy, his attention snapping back to her at once. ‘What about him?’
‘He’s run off!’ she said.
‘What do you mean, he’s run off? Do you mean he’s disappeared?’
‘Yes. We heard it from the police this morning. They wanted to know whether Miss Stapleton had ever mentioned having any suspicions about him. Well, Mummy and I couldn’t remember anything in particular—I mean to say, she was suspicious of all of them, but never mentioned Dyer in particular, as far as I know—so we said no. They weren’t going to tell us anything else, but I got it out of them that he’s vanished from his flat and nobody knows where he’s gone.’
‘Who reported it?’ said Freddy. ‘Peacock, I suppose?’
‘Yes. Apparently they share rooms. Peacock says that Dyer went out on Sunday and didn’t come back. He thought nothing of it at first, but then Sunday night went by and Monday, and still he didn’t turn up. Peacock called the bank where Dyer works, and they hadn’t seen him either, and wanted to know when he’d be coming in. Then Peacock got a bit worried and went into Dyer’s bedroom, and found he’d left a note to say that he was sorry for what he’d done, and that he was going away for a while, and that nobody was to look for him.’
‘Sorry for what he’d done?’ repeated Freddy. ‘What had he done?’
‘He didn’t say, but it’s perfectly obvious, isn’t it? Why, he must have been talking about Miss Stapleton. The note was a sort of confession to the killing.’
‘Good Lord!’ said Freddy. ‘Is that what the police said?’
‘Well, no,’ admitted Mildred. ‘They didn’t say much at all really, but what else could it possibly be?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Freddy. He was thinking. Ronald Dyer might conceivably have murdered Miss Stapleton—he had certainly been at the central hall that night, at around the time Miss Stapleton had died. But it seemed very odd. Freddy did not know Dyer at all well, of course, but he should never have thought of him as the type to stab an elderly woman to death for a relatively small amount of money. It had been a petty sort of crime, he thought. Yes—that was the word: petty. Even if the takings box had been stolen purely to divert attention away from the Communist Alliance, this was not a grand sort of murder. It did not seem to fit with the kind of conspiracy he was now investigating, which was supposedly founded on great causes and the class struggle. There was no doubt that Dyer’s disappearance and the note he had left did look very suspicious, but Freddy was not convinced.
Mildred was still talking.
‘By the way, Mummy didn’t suspect a thing about
the party,’ she said. ‘Iris and I came up with a beautiful story about her having been taken ill, and told her Iris’s ’phone hadn’t been working, so we couldn’t call, and she fell for it.’
‘Oh—ah—jolly good,’ said Freddy.
‘I put in a good word for you with Iris,’ she went on. ‘She seemed to think it was all your fault, so I told her it wasn’t. I think I managed to convince her.’
‘Splendid,’ said Freddy.
‘You might talk her round if you tried, you know.’
‘I don’t want to talk her round.’
‘Oh, but Ralph is the limit. I don’t know what she sees in him. You don’t really want her to marry him, do you?’
‘It’s none of my business whom she chooses to marry,’ said Freddy coldly. ‘Look, I’d better go. You will tell me if you hear anything else, won’t you?’
Mildred promised to do so and hung up, leaving Freddy to ponder what he had heard. At length he picked up the telephone again and made a call to the police. He soon found out that the Communist Alliance were now claiming that some of their money had gone missing too. It looked, in fact, as though Ronald Dyer had been stealing funds from them for some time. The police were non-committal about their suspicions, but it was impossible not to draw the conclusion that here was the murderer of Olive Stapleton. For many months Dyer had contented himself with taking money only from his own organization, but on that Tuesday night, when confronted with a defenceless woman holding a box full of cash, he had been unable to resist temptation, and had struck. For some days he had sat tight, sure that there was no evidence to link him with the crime, but eventually he had been overcome by guilt, or fear, or something else, and had vanished, leaving a note of confession. It all seemed perfectly clear. Freddy drummed his fingers on the desk for some minutes, for he did not believe a word of it. He called Henry Jameson and proposed a walk in St. James’s park.
‘I have rather a foreboding about this,’ said Henry Jameson, as they strolled around the lake. ‘Dyer was our man, in a manner of speaking, and I don’t mind telling you I’m not a little concerned about him. We haven’t heard from him since last week.’
‘What do you mean, “in a manner of speaking?”’ said Freddy.
‘You might call him a turncoat of sorts,’ replied Henry. ‘He was an avowed Communist—still is, as far as I know—but he became uneasy when Schuster arrived, as he suspected the man of being some sort of agitator, out to cause trouble. Dyer’s the kind of moderate who would rather see a Communist government brought about by peaceful means, and he became alarmed at the change in direction at the Alliance once Schuster got his feet under the table. We got wind of this through another of our agents, and persuaded Dyer to let us know if he found out about anything illegal. He was wary of us at first, but he didn’t like what was happening and so eventually agreed to send us along a report every so often. I was never certain whether or not to trust him, so we didn’t tell him too much about what we knew at this end, but the information he gave was usually sound enough.’
‘What did he tell you?’
‘Precious little, as it happens. He knew Leonard Peacock from Oxford, but he didn’t think Peacock trusted him, and told me quite frankly that he didn’t expect to gain admittance to the group’s inner circle. Dyer was on the Committee, but he knew he wasn’t fully accepted by the leaders of the Alliance. He told me they were holding secret meetings without him, and that they withheld information from him. They never mentioned the coded advertisements in his presence, for example, although we’d charged him with trying to find out what they were. Was he at the Schusters’ on Saturday?’
‘Yes,’ said Freddy. ‘And I wonder whether his disappearance mightn’t be partly to do with me. I got the impression he was trying to tell me something that night. He wanted to know why I was really there, and said I ought to be careful. I couldn’t find out any more because just then Trevett came along and swept him away, and I rather think he overheard what we were saying. Then later in the box-room Peacock said that somebody couldn’t be trusted. Perhaps he was talking about Dyer.’
‘Hmm. It would make sense,’ said Henry.
‘Peacock said some disparaging things about Dyer on Saturday,’ said Freddy. ‘He told me he’d never liked him.’
‘They shared rooms, you know,’ said Henry. ‘It was at Peacock’s suggestion, apparently. We thought it would be a good way for Dyer to find out more, but of course it also enabled Peacock to keep an eye on him.’
‘Did they know he was in communication with you?’
‘I didn’t think so until now. He always assured me he was very careful and that they had no reason to find out.’
‘He didn’t really steal the Communists’ money, did he?’
Henry was silent for a moment.
‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘He might have. His motives in working for us weren’t purely disinterested, since we had to pay him for the information he gave us. He was short of funds, he said, and wasn’t about to betray anybody unless we made it worth his while. So if that’s the case, then it’s also possible he wasn’t above helping himself to the takings whenever he felt like it.’
‘And what about Olive Stapleton?’
‘He might have done that, too, yes.’
‘But you don’t really believe it, do you?’
‘No.’
‘What about the note he left? Was it written or typed?’ said Freddy, although he could already guess the answer.
‘It was typed.’
‘On a machine with a raised lower-case “e” and a sliced-off upper-case “R,” I expect.’
‘Why, yes. However did you guess?’ said Henry dryly.
‘It’s a good thing they don’t know we know about the typewriter,’ said Freddy.
‘Yes, that was a good find of yours. Of course, there’s no proof that Dyer didn’t type the note himself. He might easily have done it while he was at the Schusters’ on Saturday.’
‘But it’s suggestive, don’t you think? Why should a man type a letter of that kind at a party? I mean to say, it’s not the sort of thing one normally does on these occasions. Surely if he really was having an attack of remorse, he’d have gone home and written the note by hand afterwards, once he had some peace and quiet and time to think about it.’
‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘But from the point of view of someone planning something underhand, it’s much easier to type a letter than to copy someone’s handwriting.’
‘Look here,’ said Freddy. ‘Can’t you arrest Anton Schuster now? After all, thanks to the typewriter you have proof that he was at least partly responsible for the unofficial strikes. He’s evidently a danger. Wouldn’t it make sense to put him out of the way so he can’t cause any more trouble?’
‘It might,’ conceded Henry. ‘But he’s only one man, and we’d like to catch all of them. From what you say, Leonard Peacock at least is also involved in the conspiracy, and most likely some of the other members of the Alliance too. But we don’t have any evidence against them, and who’s to say they won’t simply carry on without Schuster if we arrest him? Besides, the man I’d really like to get is John Pettit. As far as I’m concerned he’s the most dangerous man in Britain. He’s a radical, yes, but he’s also a union man through and through, and he has many loyal supporters who won’t hesitate to follow him wherever he leads. If he were to become leader of the Labourers’ Union, then I don’t mind telling you that I fear for the stability of the country.’
‘Do you still think Miss Stapleton’s death is connected with all this?’
‘I don’t know. It’s a facer, all right. One doesn’t wish to be unsympathetic to the dead, but this murder has rather thrown a monkey-wrench into the machinery. The whole thing would be much simpler if Miss Stapleton had kept her nose out of matters that didn’t concern her. I expect the Communists would be relieved if we’d take
it as read that Dyer did it, but I don’t think it’s that simple.’
‘What do you think has happened to Dyer?’ said Freddy. ‘Is he dead or has he done a bunk?’
‘I don’t know, but I fear the worst,’ said Henry soberly.
‘They must find him sooner or later, surely, even if the worst has happened. I mean to say, it’s not all that easy to hide a fully-grown man. Where could they have put him?’
‘Personally speaking,’ said Henry carefully, ‘if I had a bulky object I wanted to dispose of, I’d drop it into the Thames at Greenhithe or Gravesend just as the tide was going out.’
They fell silent, thinking of the implications of this, then Henry looked up.
‘So now we must rely on you,’ he said. ‘The police are going to put it about that they believe Dyer was a thief, if not a murderer, so there’s no reason to suppose the plotters have any suspicion that we’re on to them. That means you can continue to investigate freely as you have been doing. You don’t think they suspect you?’
‘Not as far as I can tell. I’ve done my best to look as affably idiotic as possible. I had a close shave on Saturday when they nearly found me in the box-room, but other than that, nobody’s given any indication that they think I’m anything other than what I claim to be: that is, a press-man sniffing around—not too hard—for a story.’
‘Good,’ said Henry. ‘Go on as you have, then, and see what you can unearth. You’ll go to the meeting tonight, won’t you?’
‘Try and stop me,’ said Freddy. ‘I want to see what Peacock has to say about all this. I never liked the fellow, and I like him even less now.’
‘Don’t arouse his suspicions,’ warned Henry.
‘I won’t. Don’t forget, I’m supposed to be shadowing him tomorrow, so I shall have to keep him happy until then. I don’t want to put the wind up him and frighten him into changing his arrangements. I wonder where he’s going, though. He said he was going to need money for whatever it was. Presumably that means he’s going to buy something.’