Murder in the Basement

by Anthony Berkeley

  Afford grinned. “I’m afraid I’ll go dry, then. It’s the cement?”

  “It’s the cement,” Moresby nodded. “You remember, there was none under the bricks, only between the joints. He could have carried enough for that job, ready mixed with the sand, in a suit-case. The proportion was two to one if that will help you, but it won’t. In any event, it was a tidy weight.”

  “He wouldn’t have taken it down to Grove Park though, would he? If he had his plans all cut and dried, he probably took that particular case along to Lewisham at once, supposing he had it with him at all.”

  “One of the ‘odd jobs’ he says he was doing that after-noon. Yes, I know all about that. Probably he didn’t have it with him at all. Probably he’d either taken it up before, or went back to Allingford for it afterwards. As soon as Fox has finished at Lewisham he’s going down to Allingford to find out whether Wargrave was seen near the place after the term was over. In the meantime, you see what you can do. But bless us,” added Moresby with a sigh, “I’ve a feeling we’re not going to connect that cement with him. He’s been too cunning, and that’s a fact. Send Johnson up as you go out, Afford.”

  Johnson was the unobtrusive person who had presented the search-warrant at Roland House that morning.

  His report, negative for the most part, contained one interesting suggestion.

  “Nothing at all, Mr. Moresby,” he said. “No letters, no photograph of her, nothing to connect’em whatever. But I’ll take my oath he had a revolver.”

  “‘Had?’” repeated Moresby sharply.

  “Had. At the back of the bottom drawer in his chest-of-drawers there was a wodge of old cotton-wool with a deep impression in the middle of it. I took the measurements, and if it wasn’t a service revolver that made it I’ll be very surprised. There was a smear or two of oil on the wool too. But there’s no revolver in his room now.”

  Moresby said a bad word. “He’s got rid of it since yesterday, that’s what he’s done. Hell’s bells, I ought to have had the place watched. It’s my fault. But it’s pretty smart work on his part. Still, I ought to have allowed for it. Goodness knows I knew he was smart enough. Johnson, get back to Allingford at once, and find that revolver. Understand? Don’t you come back here without it. Find out his movements after I left yesterday afternoon, imagine what he’d have done if he went out at night, search everywhere there is to search. And when you’ve found it, get hold of a witness before you remove it. Then bring it back to me here. Off with you.”

  Johnson went, with a rueful grin.

  Moresby was annoyed with himself. He should have put a watch on Wargrave yesterday. He had made the bad mistake of underestimating the other’s resourcefulness. Moresby did not care to think what Superintendent Green would have to say about such a lapse.

  He pulled the dossier of the case towards him and began flicking over the pages, before fastening in a copy of the enlargement of the snapshot of Mary Waterhouse, sent down from the photographic department that morning. An idea occurred to him. He drew the house-telephone towards him, and asked for the department in question.

  “That you, Merriman? Remember that snapshot I sent up to you yesterday for enlargement? Yes, the Waterhouse case. No, it hasn’t come out too badly at all. Yes, quite recognisable, I should say. Well, I want a lot more copies. What? Yes, for the papers. Oh, say three dozen. Can you push ’em through this afternoon? Thanks. Oh, and I’m sending up another photograph. Name of Wargrave. Yes, same case. Better let me have a dozen of him. Yes. Thanks.”

  He took a piece of paper and began to draft out a note to the Press, asking them to display the portrait of Miss Waterhouse with a discreetly worded caption to the effect that the police would be glad of information from anyone who had seen her alive at any time during the previous August.

  For here was one of the blank periods of the case. From the moment Leila Jevons said good-bye to her at Euston, Miss Waterhouse seemed to have vanished utterly. The moment he got back from Allingford on the previous afternoon Moresby had put two of his best men on to tracing her and finding out where she had spent that first week of August, but so far they had had no luck. It was true that they had not yet been twenty-four hours on the job, but twenty-four hours should have been ample to unearth the taxi that had driven her from Euston if it was ever to be found at all. Evidently it was not. The interval was too great for any driver to remember what had no doubt been a perfectly ordinary journey. But the gap was a bad one.

  Having completed the chit, Moresby pushed the dossier away from him and betook himself to some of the other work which had been piling up for the last forty-eight hours.

  Shortly before six o’clock Inspector Fox returned. He had had a blank day. Not a single one of the neighbours, nor the vicar, nor the house-agent, nor even the local Mabels had recognised either of the photographs.

  “Hell!” said Moresby simply.

  “It’s a brute of a case, sir,” ventured Inspector Fox.

  Moresby frowned at him morosely.

  “Then how the hell did one of them get hold of the key to the house? That’s what I want to know. It’s no use telling me they might not have had a key. They must have had one, to have got in without leaving any traces like that.”

  “And apart from that, how did they know the house was going to be empty like that? You’d say that one of them must have been in touch with either Miss Staples or the neighbours.”

  “I would, and I do,” Moresby snapped. “After all, failure to recognise a photo isn’t conclusive. Slip a pair of horn spectacles on, and people like that’ll swear they’ve never seen you before.”

  “I might get a pair of horn spectacles drawn on those photos and try again, Mr. Moresby.”

  “Oh, don’t take me so damned literally, man!”

  Inspector Fox, who had only been trying to be helpful, retired hurt, and Moresby continued to gloom at him.

  “There’s one way she might have got hold of that key,” he said slowly, after a considerable pause.

  “Sir?” said Inspector Fox, in the unenthusiastic tones of one unjustly snapped at.

  “She was a bag-thief, wasn’t she? Suppose she once stole Miss Staples’s bag, and it had her address inside, and her key. That would account for the key, wouldn’t it? ”

  “That’s right enough, Mr. Moresby,” generously agreed Inspector Fox. “It would.”

  Moresby had taken up the telephone as he spoke, and now asked for the Lewisham police station, and then for the sergeant in charge.

  “This is Chief Detective Inspector Moresby speaking, sergeant. You remember that murder in Burnt Oak Road. I want you to look up your records at once and tell me whether you ever had a complaint from Miss Staples, at No. 4, that her bag had been stolen, or her purse, or anything of that nature. Within the last few years. I’ll hold on.”

  Moresby did not have to wait long. The invaluable card-index produced the information at once. Miss Staples had had her bag stolen, just over three years ago, in a bus in the Old Kent Road. There had been little of value in it, a few shillings, her latch-key, a handkerchief marked “M.S.” There was no record that the bag had ever been recovered.

  “Well, that clears up one difficulty,” Moresby remarked, not without satisfaction, as he hung up the receiver. “It’s a hundred pounds to a farthing that it was Miss Mary Weller, as she was then, who got that bag. And she kept the key by her all that time, just for luck. Well, it’s nice to know it; but I don’t see that it’s going to help us much for all that.”

  “And it doesn’t explain how they knew about the neighbours.”

  “No,” Moresby said thoughtfully, his good temper quite recovered now. “And I’ve a sort of an idea that it would help us a good deal to find that out. But I’m blessed if I can see how we’re going to do it at the moment.”

  He scratched his head for a few moments over the problem, gave it up, and
looked at his notes.

  “Here’s your job to-morrow, Fox. I’ve found that the girl used to wear an engagement ring. One she said had been given her by the Australian. It was a good ring, they tell me; here’s as close a description of it as I could get—three diamonds with two emeralds set between ’em, in platinum. It’s all down here. Find out if any ring answering that description has been sold or offered for sale in London since the first of August last year.”

  Fox nodded. It was an arduous job, but one to which he was well accustomed.

  “You’ll probably have no luck,” Moresby added, as he rose. “On the other hand Wargrave strikes me as a man who wouldn’t throw a good ring away, even if it did come to him through a bit of nasty work.” On this cynical note, Moresby struggled into his overcoat and picked up his hat.

  “You think she had it on when they went to the house?” asked Fox, as they walked down the echoing stone passage.

  “I know she had it on, my lad,” corrected Moresby, who knew nothing of the sort. “And why? Because it’s the only possible explanation for those gloves she was wearing. I told the super that weeks ago. Mr. Smartie thought that if we saw a girl with gloves on and no rings under’em, we’d go about looking for a girl without any rings. But Mr. Smartie forgot that a nice diamond ring will make a nice mark on the inside of a glove; and there the mark was, sure enough. Reminds me of a fellow who writes detective stories, Mr. Smartie does: too smart by half.”

  Inspector Fox laughed heartily.

  Moresby was not going back to his own flat. He had rung up Roger Sheringham earlier in the afternoon to ask if he might call in on his way home to ask a question or two about Roger’s friend at Roland House, who had of course not figured in the manuscript; and Roger had bade him to dinner. Moresby, knowing what Roger’s dinners were, had accepted. Secretly too, though he would have died rather than admit as much to Mr. Sheringham, who was quite bumptious enough already, he wanted to talk over the case with him. An outside mind (as Moresby excused this weakness to himself) can sometimes disentangle threads that to one whose eye is nearer to them seem inextricably jumbled.

  Roger welcomed his guest with smiles and an excellent dry sherry.

  “Patterson?” he said, when they were seated before the fire, for this was the name of the pedagogic friend. “Oh, you can put him out of your mind. You saw him, I suppose? ”

  “I interviewed him one of the last, not knowing him from your book. He couldn’t tell me anything of any use.”

  “No, I don’t suppose he could, except how funny it would all have been if it hadn’t been so tragic. Patterson’s one of the few schoolmasters I’ve met who’ve preserved their sense of proportion. But in this affair he won’t be any help to you.”

  “You’ve spoken to him yourself, Mr. Sheringham?” Moresby asked suspiciously.

  Roger smiled. “I rang him up yesterday evening. You left them all very upset, Moresby.”

  “Did I? “Moresby said callously. “Well, well.”

  “Patterson didn’t say much, but I gathered that opinion there seems to have crystallised.”

  “Meaning . . . ?”

  “That it coincides with your own,” Roger said drily.

  “In other words—Wargrave?”

  “Yes.”

  Moresby absently examined his sherry against the light.

  “And you, Mr. Sheringham? You agree too? ”

  “It’s pretty beastly, but . . . what else can one think? Got a case against him?”

  “Plenty. But no proof. It’s like this.”

  Moresby ran through, the difficulties of the case.

  “Every line we follow seems to have a dead end,” he concluded ruefully. “Except how she got hold of the key, of course; and that’s of no real importance.”

  “What’s this about her stealing a bag?”

  “Oh, I forgot. You don’t know about that. She was a bad lot, Mr. Sheringham.” Moresby explained that too.

  “By Jove!” Roger admired. “Well, she certainly carried it off well. She certainly took me in.”

  Moresby nobly refrained from mentioning that she had not taken in Miss Crimp.

  “Blackmail, then?” Roger continued. “Powerful motive. She was trying to get in the way of his marrying Amy Harrison, of course. Yes, it’s all quite clear. Poor girl, she’d got the wrong man. I wouldn’t like to cross Wargrave myself. But I shouldn’t have expected him to descend to murder, you know, Moresby. Murder’s a sign of weakness when all’s said and done, and Wargrave’s a strong man. I should have expected him to take a firmer line.”

  “It seems difficult to find a firmer line than murder, Mr. Sheringham.”

  “Not a bit of it. There’s far more courage needed to tell a blackmailer to go to hell than to kill him, or her. Far more. Still, that’s beside the point, as he did take that line. So what are the police going to do about it?”

  “We’re doing a good deal about it, sir; but it doesn’t seem to be carrying us far.”

  “No. In fact between ourselves, Moresby, I don’t think you’re going to get him. I don’t see what more you could possibly do than you are doing; but you’ll never convict him without a great deal more.”

  “No, Mr. Sheringham.” Moresby fingered the stem of his glass with an absent air.

  It was Roger’s turn to be suspicious. “Moresby, what have you got in your mind? You didn’t come here just to talk about Patterson. What is it?”

  Moresby grinned. “I’ll tell you, Mr. Sheringham. I want your help on this case, and that’s the truth.”

  “My help?”

  “Yes. You see, sir, it’s like this. Roland House is a big place. It’s impossible for one of our men to watch it properly. Except perhaps at night, he’d have to stop outside the grounds; and what’s the good of that, in twenty or thirty acres? ”

  “Well?”

  “Well, you’ve worked with us often enough before for me to get permission for you to do so again. I want someone inside Roland House. Could you arrange with your friend for him to go sick, and for you to take his place again? ”

  “You mean, you want me to be a spy within the gates, so to speak? To keep an eye on Wargrave, and at the same time ferret out what I can to incriminate him? ”

  “That’s it, sir,” said Moresby with enthusiasm. “That’s just what I want.”

  “Well, I won’t touch it. That’s flat. Any other case, and with pleasure; but not among people I know. No, Moresby, an amateur detective may have few standards left, but I haven’t come down to spying on my friends yet. I wouldn’t think of it.”

  “That’s a pity. You’d rather the murderer went free, then, sir? ”

  “Don’t put the responsibility for his going free on me. You catch him. It’s your job, not mine.”

  “Humph!” said Moresby. “I’m not asking you to catch him, Mr. Sheringham. I’m going to do that myself. All I want you to do is to see that he doesn’t commit suicide, or go murdering somebody else, or destroy important evidence like that revolver. That’s all.”

  Roger laughed. “It’s no good. I won’t go. I’ll talk the case over with you as much as you like, but take an active hand in it I will not.”

  Moresby gloomed into his sherry, and was understood to mumble that a fat lot of good talking would do, it was evidence he wanted.

  “One little bit of real evidence to connect that man with the murder, Mr. Sheringham. That’s all I’m asking at present, just as a sweetener after two months’ work. It’s not much to want, is it? But I’m blessed if I can get it.”

  The small gods who lie in wait for that kind of remark were not asleep. It was precisely at that moment that Roger’s telephone-bell rang.

  “Yes?” he said. “Yes, he’s here. Hold on, please. Moresby, someone wants you.”

  Moresby, who had left word at Scotland Yard where he could be found
, jumped up and took the receiver.

  “Is that Chief Inspector Moresby?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Sergeant Johnson here, sir; speaking from Allingford. I thought you’d like to know at once: we’ve got the revolver.”

  “You have? Well done. Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Me and Gregory, sir.” It was Detective-Constable Gregory who had been detailed to tail Wargrave when he left Scotland Yard.

  “How did you find it?” Moresby asked jubilantly.

  “Well, sir, I connected up with Gregory when I got here. He told me the party came straight back here, so I told him to stay with me and we’d both work where we could keep a bit of an eye on the house. I’d brought a camera with me, meaning to say I was a newspaper-man if anyone wanted to know what I was doing, so I told Gregory to take it and be the camera-man and I’d be the reporter. I searched a lot of places some distance away from the house, but couldn’t find anything, and meant to work nearer after dark. Consequently, me and Gregory were approaching the house at about dusk, when out comes the party.

  “He had a good look round, but didn’t see us, because I pulled Gregory behind a clump of rhododendrons as soon as I spotted him. Well, he set off at a smart walk, and we followed. He took us across the playing-field and began to walk down a hedge on the farther side, slowly, as if he was looking for a place. It was pretty dark, so me and Gregory worked round the hedge at right-angles to his hedge and were able to get fairly close to him. I thought I’d better take Gregory with me on account of what you said about a witness.”

  “Yes, yes,” Moresby said impatiently.

  “Well, after a bit he seemed to have come to the right place, and stooped down. I saw he was busy searching in the hedge, so me and Gregory closed in to within a few yards of him. When he stood up I took a chance that he’d got what he was looking for, and went up to him. He’d got the revolver in his hand. He threatened me with it, and I closed with him, while Gregory got the revolver away from him. I told Gregory to be careful of handling it.”