by Cyril Hare
“I see. Which are your other suspects?”
“The Howard-Blenkinsops. This is really a rather extraordinary story, and rather—rather an unpleasant one. To begin with, their name isn’t Howard-Blenkinsop at all, but March. A Mrs. March and her son.”
“Is that the Frances March to whom your father paid a weekly allowance up to some twenty years ago?”
“You know about it, then?” Stephen asked in surprise.
“Certainly. All the payments were made through this office, and I came across the receipts in clearing up your father’s papers this morning. Nothing very remarkable about it. It happens to scores of our clients. Then the son mentioned here was your father’s illegitimate child?”
“No. That’s just the point. He wasn’t. That son is dead.”
“Oh? Who told you that?”
“Actually, I wasn’t told. My sister and Mr. Johnson were. Perhaps it would be more satisfactory if they gave you the whole story.”
“Perhaps it would.”
Mr. Dedman turned to the other two and, Anne remaining silent, it was Martin who related the story of the discoveries at Bentby Grange.
“I see,” said Mr. Dedman again when he had done, and made no other comment. “There are still four other names on the list. I take it that you do not consider them as probabilities?”
“No,” said Stephen. “Vanning we have dealt with already. Mallett was a detective from Scotland Yard on holiday. Davitt turned out to be a perfectly innocent stockbroker’s clerk with a passion for literature, and Mr. and Mrs. Jones—”
“Were simply a couple out on the loose.” It was Anne who spoke, for the first time since they had come into the room. “I’ve spoken to Mrs. Jones, and I know.”
Mr. Dedman looked at her in astonishment. So did Martin and Stephen. Dedman noted that her remarks seemed to be as surprising to them as they were to him, and the fact afforded him a momentary gleam of amusement.
“Very well,” he said, and turned again to Stephen. “As to Davitt, you have seen him, I suppose?”
“No. But I had a long talk with his landlady.”
“That was even better, I dare say. Few people have any secrets from their landladies. I certainly had none in my younger days. So that represents the sum of your researches, does it?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Then,” said Mr. Dedman with a smile that seemed to make his pugnacious jaw look fiercer than ever, “I have only one piece of advice to give you. Accept the company’s offer.”
It was some time before Stephen found words.
“Do you mean to say you really think—” he began.
“Accept the company’s offer!” repeated Mr. Dedman in louder tones. “And think yourselves lucky. It’s more than you deserve, anyway.”
While his visitors remained in stunned silence at the undisguised rudeness with which he spoke, Mr. Dedman pushed his chair back from the desk, clasped his hands and crossed his legs. Had any of his staff been present they would have readily interpreted the movements as signs that he was about to “let himself go.” And they would not have been wrong.
“You people,” he began, “took upon yourselves to prove that the late Mr. Dickinson was murdered. I dare say he was. Far more people are murdered every year than the average person suspects. In any case, from my knowledge of him, I should not say that he would have committed suicide—in the first year of a life policy, at any rate. He knew that much about insurance, I have no doubt. Having adopted that course, you have gone about it in a way that I can only truthfully describe as imbecile. Your object was, or should have been, to collect evidence, evidence, that would convince a Court of law that the probability of his having been murdered was substantially higher than the probability of his having died by his own hand. By what you have done, and by what you have failed to do, you have made it virtually impossible to do anything of the kind.”
He paused to take breath. Martin opened his mouth to say something but Mr. Dedman forestalled him.
“I gather from what you have told me,” he went on, “that you have come to the conclusion that Parsons in all probability poisoned Mr. Dickinson by mistake in an attempt to rid himself of a blackmailer whom we have agreed to call Vanning. I dare say you are right. Speaking between these four walls, as an ordinary individual, I consider it quite possible that he did kill your father, in the way that you have suggested. But what have you done? You took no advice—you made no inquiries—you simply walked in on this wretched Parsons creature and killed him. And with him you killed whatever chance you ever had of proving your case. Do you imagine that it will be possible now to prove that Vanning ever had a penny from him—the very first step in your case? Of course, as the result of his death, all Parsons’ defalcations will come out—quite a sufficient motive for suicide without adding blackmail and murder to it. Can you visualize what sort of case you’ve got left now? I can, and I’ve been in charge of all the litigation in this office for fifteen years and I know what I’m talking about. You’ll be reduced to accusing a dead man of murder. That will be bad enough—‘blackening the memory of the deceased,’ and so forth. But you’ll have to do more than that—you’ll have to accuse another man of blackmail, a man very much alive and able to defend himself, without a shred of evidence to support you. You’ll simply be laughed out of Court, if you ever get there—which you won’t, so long as I’m solicitor to the estate. With Parsons alive, with a charge of embezzlement pending against him, it might have been possible to do something. Very carefully handled, I can visualize negotiations with the Company coming to a successful conclusion. As it is—the thing is a wash-out.”
He slapped his hand on the desk to emphasize his words.
“Then, the Carstairs. Your theory there, I gather, is that this parson and his wife, or the wife without the parson, encountering Mr. Dickinson accidentally in this hotel, seized the opportunity to murder him for the good of this charity and more particularly of its secretary. Well, I’ll make you a present of this—the S.R.D.W.P.M. is not one of the charities that solicitors of good standing care to advise their clients to remember in their wills. What your uncle Arthur’s motives were, I don’t know. His will was not drawn up in this office. I had occasion to look at the Society’s accounts some time ago, and I didn’t like them. I estimated that approximately thirty per cent of the money contributed by the public reaches the widows of professional men. The rest goes into the pockets of the whole-time salaried organizers—people like Mrs. Carstairs. But because the woman’s a parasite on public benevolence, does that prove that she’s a murderess? Of course the Society was hard up. That sort of concern always is. Of course the falling in of the reversion was a very useful windfall. But so far, all you’ve got is the word of Mr. Carstairs—of all people!—to support your extraordinary theory. And has it occurred to you that if this so-called charity was really in such desperate straits, they could have sold the reversion to the bequest, not for the whole amount, of course, but for a good round sum? A much safer method of raising the wind than murder, I can assure you. The whole idea is simply too preposterous for words.
“But what I simply cannot forgive you,” Mr. Dedman proceeded with unabated vigour, “is the way you have handled the March business. Here you’ve got the almost ideal suspect. A discarded mistress, with a fortune in prospect! And has it occurred to you also that she was the only person in the hotel who would have been in the least likely to penetrate into your father’s room with his knowledge and consent?”
“But,” Martin protested. “She didn’t even know who Mr. Dickinson was until after he was dead!”
“So she told her employer. Or rather, so her employer told you she had told her. And on that third-hand evidence you believed it! Well, it may have been so. I’m not suggesting that it isn’t possible. I’m looking at the possibility of using facts to persuade the Insurance Company to cough up the policy moneys. If you had gone to them and said: ‘You are proposing to rely on suicide as a defence to this
action. We can prove the presence in this hotel of a woman with the opportunity of murdering the deceased, and an overwhelming motive for doing so. Now what about it?’ If you had said that—I think they would have been ready to discuss matters with you.”
“But we can still say that to the insurance people,” Stephen put in.
Anne said: “But Mr. Dedman, I believe what Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop told me. You don’t want us to accuse an innocent person, do you?”
The solicitor disregarded Anne, and answered Stephen.
“Of course you can,” he said. “But do you think they are going to listen to you after next Monday? And don’t forget, after the time limit for taking their offer has expired, you’ll have nothing to fall back on. It’ll be all or nothing then, with tremendously heavy litigation in front of you.”
“I can approach the insurance people tomorrow,” Stephen objected. “Today, for that matter.”
“Do, by all means, and see what sort of answer you get. They will say: ‘Indeed? And who was this Mrs. March? We have a list of people staying in the hotel and her name doesn’t appear there.’ What’s your answer? ‘Well, it must have been Mrs. March, because Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop told me so.’ ‘Quite so,’ they’ll say. ‘And how can you produce Mrs. March?’ And you’ll be reduced to saying: ‘As a matter of fact, Mrs. March isn’t here. I don’t know where she is, but I believe she’s abroad.’ Then the Insurance Company will look down its collective nose and inform you that it doesn’t believe a word you are saying and the offer remains open till Monday, good morning. Well, you can take the risk if you like, but if you do, you do it against my advice, that’s all.
“Incidentally,” he added, by way of afterthought, “have you troubled to test in any way the truth of the assertion that Mrs. March’s eldest son is dead? No? I thought not. For all you know this rather remarkable cook may have invented his death as an excuse for getting a couple of day’s holiday out of her employer. He may be alive still. He might have been one of the waiters at Pendlebury Old Hall. He might—oh, well, there it is,” he concluded pettishly. “I’m afraid, taking it altogether, I can’t congratulate you on your efforts at detection. And my advice remains as I have stated.”
Mr. Dedman completed his tirade, handed Elderson’s report back across the desk to Stephen and at the same instant made it clear in some indefinable but unmistakable way that he had lost all interest in the subject. So much so that when a moment later they rose to go he sounded genuinely surprised to see them there at all. It was Anne who led the retreat. Stephen seemed capable of sitting sulkily in his chair forever, and Martin was always unable to take a hint.
“Thank you so much, Mr. Dedman, for taking such trouble about our affairs,” she said in a voice of apparently sincere gratitude. “You have put everything very clearly. We will let you know what we want done in good time.”
She went out of the room, the men following meekly in her trail. Mr. Dedman gave her his jerky little bow as she went. Before she was out of the office he was dictating like mad. The letter was on a totally different subject. A fresh point had occurred to him while Stephen had been talking about Parsons. The ability to think of two things at once was what had made it possible for Dedman to get through approximately twenty-four hours of work in a normal day. It had never occurred to him to wonder why he was not popular in the office. Even he could not think of three things at once.
Chapter Eighteen
An Inspector with Indigestion
Thursday, August 31st
It would be inaccurate to say that Inspector Mallett had forgotten his interview with Stephen Dickinson. It was never safe to assert that the inspector had forgotten anything. But it was certainly the fact that since the interview had taken place he had scarcely given the matter a further thought. It was only an accident that brought it to his attention again—an accident that was to have important consequences. Admittedly it was a very rare and therefore unexpected occurrence, and as such worthy of record for its own sake. To Mallett at the time it seemed positively overwhelming.
The truth was that on this particular morning he, of all people in the world, was suffering from an acute attack of indigestion. So unfamiliar to him were the symptoms that he actually spent some time wondering what was the matter with him. He spent a good deal longer speculating in vain what could have caused the trouble. He ran over in his mind the gigantic meals which he had consumed during the past day and could find no solution. There had been nothing out of the ordinary in any of them, for Mallett, incontestably the heartiest trenchman of the force, liked his food plain and plentiful. True, the exigencies of the service had compelled him to lunch, comparatively sparingly, at noon and to postpone his enormous supper till two in the morning. But that was nothing out of the ordinary, and he had dispatched his usual breakfast at seven-thirty without a qualm. But there it was—the odious, inescapable fact that he was now reduced to as pitiful a condition as any dyspeptic that ever swelled the profits of the pill manufacturers.
By half-past ten, he could stand it no longer. Something would have to be done to stay the griping pain which was making existence unbearable and work impossible. He was, naturally, completely ignorant of the proper treatment of a malady with which he was so utterly unacquainted; and his first instinct was to turn to someone else for help. At this crisis, his mind went to one Sergeant Weekes, whose indigestion was almost as celebrated in New Scotland Yard as was Mallett’s own appetite. Weekes was a man who never went anywhere without a little box of wonder-working tablets, changing in character according to the season of the year or the vagaries of his complaint, but invariably described by their owner in confidential tones as, “The only thing that keeps me going, old man.” The inspector had often laughed at poor Weekes with all the unconscious cruelty of ignorance. Now he put his pride in his pocket and, bent double with pain, made his way to the other’s room in search of advice and assistance.
Thus it came about that the inspector was at Weekes’s elbow at the precise moment when a message was put through to the sergeant from the borough police at Midchester. If Mallett had been slightly more or slightly less stoical in his attitude to pain he would not have been there to hear it. Indeed, if the message had come through as little as two minutes earlier his intense preoccupation with his own affairs would probably not have allowed him to give it any attention. But at the critical moment it so happened that one of the famous tablets had been administered just long enough to secure, if not the instant relief claimed for them on the label, at least an intermission from agony sufficient to permit him to be conscious of what was going on around him.
The telephone conversation, from the London end at least, was not particularly interesting at first. It consisted mainly of the word, “Yes,” several times repeated, and varied at intervals—for the sergeant prided himself on being up to date—by “O.K.” Meanwhile he was jotting down notes in an illegible shorthand of his own devising on a pad. Near the end of the call, Weekes paused in his hieroglyphics and said: “Just a minute, old man. Will you repeat the names? I want to get them O.K.”
The voice at the other end evidently complied and the sergeant confirmed, writing as he spoke, in longhand capitals this time: “Stephen Dickinson and Martin Johnson. Yes, thanks, old man, I’ve got the descriptions. We’ll let you know what we can do. Yes. . . . Yes. . . . O.K. . . . ’Bye.”
He hung up and turned to the inspector with a grin.
“Feeling better?” he asked. “They’re pretty wonderful, these little fellows, aren’t they? They say it’s the charcoal in them that does the good work. Now, if you keep quiet for half an hour or so, you’ll be as right as rain, I give you my word. Of course, a big man like yourself, it might take a bit longer. Perhaps you’d like to take another one away with you, just in case. Might come in handy after lunch.” He looked at Mallett severely. “That is, if you have any lunch.”
“Thanks,” said the inspector. “I am much better already. As to lunch—we’ll see. But tell me,
what was that matter you were discussing on the telephone?”
“Witnesses wanted for an inquest on one Parsons at Midchester,” said Weekes. “It seems the coroner there is getting all het up about it.”
“And one of them is called Dickinson, I gather.”
“That’s right. Stephen Dickinson of London. Useful, ain’t it?”
“It may be. I’d like to hear the description they give of him.”
Wondering at this display of interest in Midland inquests, the sergeant read from his notes a description which, vague though it was, was perfectly recognizable.
“The other individual is named Martin Johnson,” he went on.
“I don’t know him,” said Mallett. “But Stephen Dickinson I do know. This may be interesting. What has he to do with the late Mr. Parsons at Midchester?”
“That’s just what the Borough Force there would like to know. It seems that these two young men spent the night in Midchester, two nights ago. They made an appointment to see Parsons next day on the telephone. They didn’t give no names, but they were traced through the hotel afterwards. The phone call was made from the hotel, see?”
“I see. Go on.”
“Well, this man Parsons was an official of the local Gas Company, and quite an important figure in the town, see? He saw these two. He wasn’t in the room with them above five minutes, and then off they went. And an hour later he’s found in his room with his head blown to bits and a letter to explain that he’s been robbing the Gas Company right and left for donkey’s years.”
“Very interesting. Very interesting indeed.”
“D’you think so? Anyhow, the coroner seems to want to get hold of this couple. Bit of luck if you know one of them. I don’t see that there’s much chance of tracing them otherwise.”
“Stephen Dickinson,” said Mallett, “lives at 67 Plane Street, Hampstead.”
“That’s all right, then. I’ll notify the station there, and they can serve the witness summons on him.”