by Zenith Brown
The Chief Inspector stared at the smoke rising from the end of his cigar.
“Then why, sir,” he said with a polite impatience, “put Humphrey Bull on the case? Nobody likes Bull better than I do, or thinks more of his ability in certain lines; but it doesn’t run to gang crime.”
“Is this gang crime, Dryden?”
“Typically American, sir. The exact way it’s done. The cold brutality of the gangster. Sheer, deliberate murder.”
Commissioner Debenham shook his head.
“You have American crime and American methods on the brain. We’ll give Bull a chance at it. If it appears to be a gang of Americans, or an Americanised gang of Englishmen, you can take it yourself. I’m a little prejudiced in Bull’s favour, I must admit, since he discovered that Tito Mellema murdered that womari—what’s her name? La Mar. If I’m not mistaken, Inspector, you thought her death was a gang racket because she was connected with an American musical comedy.”
Inspector Dryden grinned in spite of himself.
“Perhaps you’re right, sir. Well, I’ll be getting home. I’m sorry old Colton’s dead.”
“So am I,” said the Commissioner. “There wasn’t much he didn’t know about precious stones, and who owns ’em, and how much they paid.”
“Or when they sold them and for how much, sir.”
“I’m afraid that’s right too, Dryden. I hope you’re not thinking, by the way, of the recent loss of Lady Blanche’s emerald collar, which rightfully belongs—or belonged—to her mother-in-law the Duchess?”
Inspector Dryden allowed himself only half a smile.
“Oh, no, sir,” he said soberly.
“Of course not, Dryden. Well, we certainly got ‘down the banks,’ as young Boyd says, for that collar. And worse luck, I have to look in on the Home Secretary tonight, and he’ll have enough to say about this business of Colton. Good-night, Inspector.”
CHAPTER THREE
It was a little after eleven that night when Inspector Bull and Mr. Pinkerton drove up to the Colnbrook police station in Inspector Bull’s open Morris Oxford. It had begun to rain in torrents, but Bull had refused to take the time to put up the curtains. Cold and wet, he and Mr. Pinkerton listened with impassive silence to the sergeant’s account of the holdup and murder. At least Inspector Bull did, in the best manner of the Metropolitan police. Mr. Pinkerton’s attempt to appear impassive was a little-comical; he was quivering like a badly bred hound at the kill. The sergeant in the meantime had learned for the first time from Inspector Bull the importance of the victim that Fate had left on his doorstep, and was little short of interested himself.
“Well, we’d better run down and have a look,” Bull said when the man had finished. “This rain’ll leave everything a blank. What time did you phone in to have the London Road watched?”
“About 9.35, sir.”
The sergeant tended to be a little aggressive, without particularly being able to think of anything he had left undone. But he had told his story ten times in the last hour, and Inspector Bull was the only person not impressed.
“Any report come in?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you notify the station at Slough?”
The sergeant looked bewildered.
“He was headed for London!” he replied with some vexation.
Bull grunted. “If I was him,” he said calmly, “I’d have turned left into the by-pass and gone right through Slough, or anywheres else, and left the people at Cranford still waiting. But I guess he could have got to Dover by the time we heard about it. Let’s get along.”
A lone constable in a rubber cape was on guard in the road.
“That’s the place,” the sergeant said.
Bull turned his overcoat collar up around his neck and got heavily out of the small car. It was pitch dark except for the small sea of light from their headlights. The sergeant explained
“The man stopped by the gate there and waited until they came along. When the car came, he stepped out and held up his hand. The driver stopped and asked what he wanted. He found himself looking in a gun. He gets out and holds up his hands. The man orders Colton to get out. The lady is to stay where she was—she’d started to get out too, you see?”
Bull grunted.
“The car was right here?”
“That’s right. The man stood here, and the driver stood just here. Then the woman takes a revolver out of the pocket in the car and fires at him. The fellow shoots twice straight into Colton. He drops right forward here. Then he’s off on the cycle.”
Bull grunted at this second recital and made a rapid examination, with the help of his pocket lamp, of the entrance in which the man had stood while waiting. The rain washing down the brick walk made a small sea at the side of the road. So far as Bull could make out, there was no evidence that either a man or a machine had ever stood there.
“There’s one point, Inspector,” the sergeant went on judicially. “That’s how did he know the car with those diamonds was coming this way? It’s the first thing on wheels that’s not a touring lay-out that we’ve seen here for a month of Sundays. You know the by-pass takes ’em all around the other way.”
Inspector Bull’s grunt was even less interested than usual.
“Has anybody been by here while you’ve been on duty?” he asked the constable.
“No, sir. Only the 102 bus from Windsor. No private cars.”
“And nobody on a motor-bike, I suppose.”
“No, sir.”
Bull chewed his lower lip.
“Colton was standing right here when he was shot?”
“That’s the spot, sir,” said the sergeant. He pointed to what Mr. Pinkerton could imagine was still the tinge of crimson that nature, in her inexorable cleanliness, had washed away with swift torrents of rain.
“Where is the body now?” Bull asked.
“Had it taken to Slough, sir. We don’t have much room in the village for that sort of thing.” The sergeant’s voice suggested a certain fastidiousness. People seldom died in Colnbrook; no one was murdered.
“Right. We’ll push along then. You might keep your man here till morning. Somebody might show up. Ready, Pinkerton?”
The little man was standing in the gateway where the killer had stood. He was dripping wet, but his eyes were bright. He decided that what he wanted to say could wait.
At Slough Inspector Bull lifted the sheet from the dead face of George Colton, jeweller by appointment to half the royal heads, crowned and decrowned, of Europe. He knew something of the history of the man on the cold marble slab in front of him. If he hadn’t, he thought then, he could almost have guessed it from the prosperous well-fed look, some of which lingered even in death. The round smooth discreet face had settled into the complacent mask of the successful London merchant. For that was what George Colton had been, exclusive of everything else.
Five generations of Coltons had done business over the same counter of the little shop off Bond-street. They had done better business in the little upper room across a table made from one of Mr. Chippendale’s designs done especially for Mr. George Colton, jeweller to his Majesty, in 1750. The alliances and mésalliances of half the great houses of Europe had been sealed for two hundred years by a priceless bauble from the little shop. It hardly ever changed. The Coltons ceased to reside in the little rooms above the shop sometime in the Eighties; and in 1910 they were virtually forced, by their assurance agent, to put up steel shutters. Otherwise things were much the same over a hundred years. The Colton business was small in number of transactions, but large when they counted the year’s profits. If a customer paid before a year had passed—so people said—they added twenty-five per cent, for the embarrassment of lowering the standard of their clientele; otherwise they added ten per cent, for credit.
Inspector Bull did not know all this. He only knew that Colton was reputed to be one of the most prosperous jewellers of London, his firm highly solvent and above all immaculately respectable; th
at he was dead—murdered, in fact; that he had been robbed of a collection of diamonds reputed to have considerable value; and that it was Inspector Bull’s job first to find the murderer and second to recover the jewels. He knew the habits of jewel thieves well enough to know that the two things weren’t necessarily synonymous. Quite probably the continental police would put their hands on the jewels if they turned up abroad; or it was conceivable that one of the London fences might handle them. But Inspector Bull knew very well that the Commissioner would be concerned with the man who had done the thing rather than the jewels. Scotland Yard still regards human life as of more importance than precious stones. If such an outrage went unpunished, the highways of England would be as dangerous as the tracks of the jungle.
Bull looked at the collection of small articles taken from the dead man’s pockets. A watch, a card case, a few notes, a handful of silver, a key ring with ordinary house keys, a handkerchief. The only article of interest the local sergeant kept, with the instinct of a showman, until the last.
“He wore this around his neck, sir.”
It was a single small gold key attached to a long flat black cord.
“I’ll take that,” said Bull quickly. He examined it, then put it in his pocket. “In fact, I’ll take the other keys too. By Jove!” he added, and then reached for the telephone.
“Bull speaking,” he said when he had got Scotland Yard. “Have you got a man detailed at the Colton shop in St. Giles-street?”
He listened intently for a minute. Then he hung up the receiver.
“Well, I’m damned,” said Inspector Bull mildly.
Mr. Pinkerton looked at him with bright expectant eyes.
“A man was detailed at the shop at half-past ten,” Bull said placidly. “But P. C. Maxim is on point duty there. He reports that at five minutes to ten a man entered the shop by the front door, with a key. Maxim was going past when the man opened the door. The man said ‘Good evening,’ and asked Maxim to stand by for a minute till he came out, so he wouldn’t have to lock up behind him. He was inside three minutes or so, came out, said good-bye to P. C. Maxim, and walked off.”
“That’s very interesting,” Mr. Pinkerton said eagerly.
CHAPTER FOUR
Inspector Bull was in his small room on the Embankment before eight o’clock the next morning.
The papers he had gathered in on his way from Hampstead were unpleasantly full of sensational news.
“Lone Bandit Robs and Murders Jeweller.”
“Scotland Yard Powerless to Cope with New Conditions, says Expert.”
Bull put them aside wearily. He especially disliked the constant comparison of London and certain well-known American cities. To accuse Scotland Yard of inefficiency was one thing—after all it wasn’t necessarily inefficient not to have caught a murderer or a bandit within twelve hours of the act. It was quite another thing to liken London to Chicago. Englishmen should have more pride.
He had to admit, however, that reports were not encouraging. Nineteen motor bicyclists had been picked up during the night. One in Maidstone was a hairdresser, coming back from seeing his young woman in Pimlico. One in Staines was a draper returning from he preferred not to tell where near Kingston. Near Oxford an undergraduate out without permission had been first detained and then turned over to the proctors. In Hounslow William Archer, occupation and age uncertain, had been playing darts to such an extent that he had forgot his way home. But no one who, as far as could be seen, had been within three miles of Colnbrook since Midsummer.
“They’ll be cabling to say they’ve got him in Canada before noon,” Inspector Bull groaned, pushing the reports aside and wondering how soon he could decently call on Mrs. Colton.
When Chief Inspector Dryden objected to the Commissioner’s putting Bull in charge of what the papers came to call “the Colnbrook Outrage,” he was objecting on purely professional grounds. Inspector Bull’s position at the Yard was, in a sense, unique. Like all professional policemen and unlike all amateur detectives of fiction, Bull was sober, matter-of-fact, infinitely painstaking, and as shy as a colt of anything that smacked of the brilliant or the miraculous. He did not believe in mysteries. To Humphrey Bull the world was about as plain as a pikestaff. When the brilliant amateur of Jermyn-street showed, by the closest marshalling of the facts and the most logical deduction from them, that Queenie La Mar could not have been poisoned by arsenic because she had not taken any, Inspector Bull, being reliably informed that her symptoms were precisely those of arsenical poisoning, very ploddingly had her exhumed and analysed, and found arsenic in her hair, nails and internal organs. He then proceeded to go over her diet again. In thus examining into what she ate, he corroborated the discovery of the brilliant amateur that like most modern young women she ate practically nothing. Still, the facts were the facts; and Inspector Bull recalled what he had learned by observation of Mrs. Bull, that even if modern young women avoid all other forms of fat, they steadily eat small but adequate quantities of lip stick. And Queenie La Mar (whose real name is not important) used more lip stick than any woman in London. Bull confiscated the cosmetics from Queenie La Mar’s sealed rooms, and soon after a man ended his life in the small house in Pentonville. As Bull explained to his wife, “You see, if it isn’t one thing it must be something else.” It was all plain.
As a matter of fact Bull, for all his simple and matter-of-fact attitude towards his occupation, was at heart both credulous and romantic. His wife, in the fashion of wives, was unable to see how he ever managed as well as he did. Anyone could sell him anything, for instance. A manly fear of his wife’s amusement was all that kept him safe from every dealer in old china in town. And he had deeply ingrained in him the prejudices of his class and of his profession. For example, one of the maxims he had learned when he first became a member of the Metropolitan police was “Be careful of women in a house of trouble.” Yet with all his experience of that truth, he was never convinced that a woman, in any of his own cases, had played any rôle but that of mouse to someone else’s cat. When Mr. Pinkerton had forced him to admit, in one of his most celebrated and puzzling cases, that the vicar’s widow had poisoned the choir master, he convicted her. No one was more relieved when that sweet-faced old lady died a natural death before she was hanged; and in his heart of hearts Bull was convinced that it was the choir master’s own fault.
In his way Inspector Bull was a specialist. He knew the impulses and motives of the great middle class, from which occasionally a great criminal springs, more unerringly than any other man at the Yard. As they used to say at the Yard, Bull was useless in St. James’s or St. Giles, Mayfair or Whitechapel. But in his own field no one reached so infallibly into the inner motives of those who had broken the law of God or man. Queenie La Mar was Drury-lane—but her father was a draper in Earl’s-court; and Tito Mellema’s father (Titus Mellinovski) had brought up Tito, very inadequately, in the area of his interior decorating and wall paper establishment in Camden-town. Inspector Bull knew, though he could never have said it, that a middle class soul is a middle class soul, and when it commits murder in Drury-lane, Elephant and Castle or Half Moon-street, it does it from middle class motives and usually with middle class weapons.
That was why Chief Inspector Dryden did not want Bull to have the Colnbrook Outrage. It was clearly outside his field. But the Commissioner had decided it; and at ten o’clock, when Bull called on Mrs. George Colton, he was well launched into dangerous seas,
Mrs. Colton was in her sitting room when Bull was announced. He looked hesitatingly at the slim graceful young woman with clear hazel eyes and smoothly waved ash-blonde hair standing by the fire-place.
“Is Mrs. Colton . . . ?”
“I am Mrs. Colton.” Her voice was slightly husky and vaguely disturbing. “Will you sit down?”
Inspector Bull was slightly embarrassed. He realized how many preconceived notions he had brought with him. Quite unconsciously he had made up a picture of George Colton’s home life, bu
ilt around the image of the plump, pink, well-nourished jowls of the dead jeweller. The discreet complacency, the shrewd respectability of that dead face were in the oddest contrast with the pale lovely woman in black sitting across from him, regarding him thoughtfully out of calm sad eyes. She could not be more than twenty-seven or eight, Bull thought. As he sat down he forgot, with admirable adaptability, the fat, weeping, bejewelled old lady he had expected to meet.
He got out his notebook.
“I’ve heard the principal facts about this, Mrs. Colton,” he said a little awkwardly. “I would like to know first, now, how many people knew your husband had the jewels with him last night.”
Mrs. Colton showed no surprise. She thought for a moment.
“I knew it,” she said then. “I don’t know surely how many others did. Mrs. Royce, of course. And her son too. That’s all I’m sure of.”
“Your chauffeur?”
“I think he didn’t know. Surely if he had he wouldn’t have stopped the car.”
“Do you think it’s out of the question, madam, that he knew the man in the road?”
She looked at him quickly.
“Oh, that’s absurd. He’s been with us over two years. My husband trusted him in everything.”
“What about the other servants?”
“That’s out of the question too. My husband never discussed his affairs with anyone. I knew quite by accident that he had the jewels with him. I came into the drawing room at Mrs. Royce’s when she was taking his receipt for them. I tried to persuade him to send a guard out for them today. Mrs. Royce thought I was silly and so did Mr. Colton.”
