“Who knows what happened on that grim staircase on the fatal Friday morning? We can picture the young man’s entreaties; the old lady’s stern refusal; her rigid adherence to her conception of her duty as a citizen—an adherence which was to bring about her tragic death. We can picture the young man’s desperation”—mustn’t seem to justify him, though, thought the journalist—“his rising anger, anger which flamed into blind rage. Instinctively his hand goes to his pocket, the pocket in which is the leather leash thoughtlessly placed there on the last occasion when he returned the little dog to its unsuspecting mistress”—or perhaps snatched up from the hall on Thursday night when he talked to the old lady there; snatched up when no one was looking, perhaps already with some obscure idea of revenge—must look up that point.…“He whips out the leash, takes a step upward and flings it round the old lady’s neck. She is old and feeble; her faint cries of despair are quickly stifled; the deed is done!”
“Blimey! How you talk!” said the ticket collector. “But that ain’t Bob Thurlow. He’s a quiet sort of chap; not the one to fly into a rage. And look here—the last thing he wanted was for anything to happen that would bring that brooch affair to light! The old lady hadn’t told the police nor anyone else as far as we know, and he hoped she wouldn’t ever tell them. Her death wouldn’t do him no good.”
“He didn’t know that her death would bring the whole affair to light. He realized that it would prevent her telling the police, and he couldn’t guess that she’d have the brooch wrapped up in an envelope with his name on it. His natural idea would be that it would be found among her property and would excite no remark. It was the sort of thing any old lady might have, by all accounts.”
“You’re all wrong,” the ticket collector declared. “I tell you Bob Thurlow’s not that sort of chap.”
Mrs. Bliss, however, thought otherwise, as a severely tailored young woman from the Evening Snatch was discovering. They were sitting in the little room behind the dining-room at the Frampton, which Mrs. Bliss called her sanctum, and which was furnished with Victorian appurtenances that had been banished from the public rooms to make way for the more easeful chairs and sofas that decadent modern taste demanded. It was also cluttered with an incongruous assortment of objects which had been abandoned by past boarders and were now reverently preserved by Mrs. Bliss. They provided useful starting points for reminiscences.
“That was Colonel Horsley,” she would say, pointing to a small ebony elephant. “Such wonderful experiences he had had, and such an interesting man!” Mrs. Bliss had already been wondering which of the late Miss Pongleton’s treasures would pass into her possession to be given a place of honour on the mahogany corner table. Would it be the ostrich egg on the teakwood stand, or the pair of china dogs gazing over their shoulders with languishing eyes, to which she would point in the future when she wanted to say: “That was poor Miss Euphemia Pongleton, who was strangled on the stairs at Belsize Park.”
“It’s a sight that will haunt me to my dying day,” she was telling the tailored young woman, apparently with the intention that it should haunt as many others as possible. “The poor soul laid out there in her old purple coat! Why, only this morning, as I was putting on my last year’s hat—which I keep for wet weather, you know—I thought to myself, now if my time should have come to-day—and with all these motor-cars dashing about the streets you can never tell—should I like to think of myself laid out in that old hat? It makes you careful, doesn’t it?”
The tailored young woman tucked a straying lock of hair away beneath her rakish cap. “Yes,” she said; “yes. I suppose Miss Pongleton had no premonition of her death?”
“We none of us know and we none of us ever shall know,” declared Mrs. Bliss impressively, “what the poor lady thought when she met Bob Thurlow on those stairs with the light of death in his eye. When that young man, that she had trusted and befriended, set upon her there with murderous intent, it must have been such a shock to her that it would have been enough to kill her, let alone the leash belonging to her own little dog.”
“We don’t know yet that it was Bob Thurlow who murdered her,” the young woman pointed out cautiously.
“And who else could it be?” Mrs. Bliss enquired. “It’s all as clear as daylight. He only didn’t get the brooch because he was disturbed, and for some reason he couldn’t get back to search the body. If the poor lady hadn’t been so careful and particular we might never have known that he had cause to wish her dead, but there was the brooch in an envelope, and written on it: ‘Brooch believed to be stolen property, obtained from Nellie Foster, who had it from Bob Thurlow, March 15th.’ If that isn’t enough to hang a man I’d like to know what is?”
“I suppose no one had any suspicion that Bob Thurlow was concerned in the burglary until all this happened?”
“We had no idea of any such thing, or, of course, I’d never have had him in the house again, and poor Miss Pongleton would never have trusted him with her little dog that she set such store by, had she known. But when the body was found, and the brooch, and the police asked Bob about it, it seems he made a clean breast of all the affair of the burglary, hoping, no doubt, that he’d get off with that, and maybe thinking he could save his own skin by giving away his friends.
“It’s dreadful to think how we’ve all trusted that young man, and he’s been in and out of this house almost like one of ourselves, and one of the first things I did when I’d got over the shock was to count the silver, but I’m glad to say there’s nothing missing except a little teaspoon, and I can’t be sure that didn’t go down the drain, for the last maid I had was something chronic, the way she’d empty everything away without so much as noticing!”
The tailored young woman was sympathetic. Mrs. Bliss had given her “quite a lot of useful stuff”, and it only remained to extricate herself not too abruptly from the sanctum.
Whilst these investigations were in train on Saturday, other reporters sought out Basil, the nephew and probable heir of the victim of the crime. But he had given Mrs. Waddilove firm instructions that he would not talk to any of them; she was to say that he was too much upset, and anyway he couldn’t tell them anything about it.
This refusal to interview the Press, considered in conjunction with the gentleman in brown boots and bowler hat who leant against the railings opposite Basil’s front door and carefully observed everyone who went in or came out, aroused the lively interest of the Sunday Smatter, personified in a sleek young man who was buoyed up by the conviction that nothing escaped him.
“I’m sorry Mr. Pongleton won’t see me,” he confided in Mrs. Waddilove. “For his own sake as much as mine, you understand, for naturally the public will be interested in him, and they are always ready to sympathize with anyone who frankly tells them what they want to know. I’m sure you will agree with me, Mrs. Waddilove, that no one can afford to ignore the great newspaper public, and especially, if I may say so, the Sunday public. But, of course, I can feel for Mr. Pongleton; a shocking affair, and naturally very distressing to him!”
The strains of “lunch-time music” floated down the stairs.
“Mr. Pongleton enjoys the wireless?” the Sunday Smatter suggested.
“He’s very musical,” agreed Mrs. Waddilove. “But it doesn’t seem quite right to me at such a time as this—”
“Perhaps he finds that it soothes the nerves! I expect he has suffered from the shock?”
“That he has. Real strange he was when he came in on Friday night, with a paper in his hand and no hat; and he says to me, ‘Mrs. Waddilove,’ he says, ‘have you seen the news?’ ‘I’ve heard it,’ says I; ‘and there’s a police officer will be here to see you in half an hour or so and your cousin’s waiting up in your room, and whatever have you done with your hat?’ He gave me a queer look at that, and says, ‘I’ve lost it somewhere,’ and upstairs he goes. Well, I ask you, it’s a bit funny, isn’t it, to go losing a g
ood bowler hat—and he hadn’t worn it so many times either—and no more fuss about it than that?”
“Don’t you think, Mrs. Waddilove, that the sudden news of his aunt’s death in such tragic circumstances might make the loss of a bowler hat, even a new one, seem comparatively unimportant?”
“It wasn’t such a new one in point of time, if you take my meaning. Mr. Pongleton’s one of these writers—he’s not a city gentleman—and what he usually wears is a more artistic sort of hat; black and widish. He only put the bowler on when there was some special reason for it; it’s my belief he didn’t really feel at home in it.”
“And that special reason was…?” enquired the Sunday Smatter.
“Ah! That’d be telling, and I never was one to give away secrets,” declared Mrs. Waddilove, peering at him speculatively from her little twinkling eyes. “But I do say that it looks like fate that Mr. Pongleton should lose that bowler hat just when he won’t have any more call to use it!”
“Miss Euphemia Pongleton didn’t favour that Chelsea appearance, I’ll be bound,” suggested the Sunday Smatter.
“I said not a word about Miss Pongleton,” Mrs. Waddilove pointed out; “but since you say it yourself—well, she was very genteel; there’s some might call her a sight too particular.”
“I wonder why Mr. Pongleton chose to wear that hat on Friday?” the Sunday Smatter remarked to the doorstep.
“I’m not one to pry into my gentlemen’s affairs,” Mrs. Waddilove assured him; “but I must say it was a real surprise to me when he told me he hadn’t been to see his aunt on Friday morning. That’s to say, he told me in a manner of speaking, because he said he’d been to Golder’s Green to see a man about a picture, which I don’t doubt, but I must say I did think when he got that letter that he was up and away to Hampstead to see his aunt because of it.”
“Ah, yes; the letter!” said the Sunday Smatter knowingly, never having heard of the letter. “Perhaps the last letter the unfortunate lady ever wrote!”
“Of course, it’s not for me to say that the letter came from his aunt,” Mrs. Waddilove pointed out. “I’m not one to go snooping around looking for bits of torn-up letters as some might do, though they wouldn’t have found much of that one, for into the fire it went! Mr. Pongleton is what you might call hasty, and whatever was in that letter it didn’t please him!”
“Perhaps he changed his mind on the way to Hampstead and went to Golder’s Green instead,” suggested the Sunday Smatter. “To see a man about a—picture, you said?”
“That’s what I said and that’s what he said. Some furrin painter who’s to do a picture of Mr. Pongleton’s cousin, Miss Sanders; and she’s pretty enough, though a bit pale for my taste; but she’ll look all right in a picture, I’ll be bound. Miss Watson, now, she’s more lively, and Mr. Pongleton thinks a lot of her.”
“Watson?” The Sunday Smatter brooded for a moment over the name. “Lives up at the Frampton, doesn’t she? No relation, I take it?”
“Not yet,” Mrs. Waddilove informed him coyly.
“I suppose Mr. Pongleton has chosen a good artist to paint his cousin’s picture?”
“I don’t think a great deal of his painting myself,” said Mrs. Waddilove, with the air of a connoisseur. “A bit wishy-washy, if you know what I mean. But he’s thought a lot of; Mr. Pongleton showed me one of his pictures on the cover of a magazine. Great bearded fellow he is, with an outlandish name—Koo—Koo…” Mrs. Waddilove cooed plaintively, but could get no further.
The Sunday Smatter persuaded her to search for the magazine cover, and when it was disinterred he was able to decipher “Kutuzov” scrawled across one corner. With the help of a directory he ought to be able to run the fellow to earth. As he was preparing to depart, Mrs. Waddilove had a momentary feeling of alarm.
“Mind you, I know nothing at all about this business,” she assured the sleek young man. “I wouldn’t like to say anything that’d bring trouble to Mr. Pongleton, even if he isn’t so reg’lar as he might be with his rent; for he’s in a way about his aunt’s death, goodness knows, and although she was a bit of a tartar, it’s a dreadful thing to happen to anyone. But I always did think those undergrounds were nasty, dangerous places. And I hope you won’t go putting anything about that letter in your paper, for people’s private letters are their own affair, I always say, and so I always said to Waddilove. Of course, when Mr. Pongleton chooses to say anything about the letter himself, that’s a different matter—and say it he will in his own good time, if it’s of any importance to anyone.”
“Quite so,” the Sunday Smatter agreed. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Waddilove; you have been absolutely discreet, and you can be assured that I shall respect your confidence.”
The Sunday Smatter strode away thoughtfully. This was all very interesting. He had sought an interview with Basil in the hope of eliciting what the journalists call “a story” about his aunt, and although he had drawn a blank as far as the intended “human document” for to-morrow’s issue was concerned, he had chanced on something far more interesting. He did not see how he could make any immediate use of the idea that Basil Pongleton might be responsible for his aunt’s death, or at least implicated. But it would be worth while to try to see this artist fellow at Golder’s Green, for if this clue should really be the right one—and the watcher outside the house in Tavistock Square indicated that it might be—Basil might be arrested at any moment, and any knowledge of his movements and behaviour would then be of value.
It was Kutuzov’s wife, Delia, who interviewed the Sunday Smatter. Directly she learnt that he represented the Press she smiled at him expansively; bade him “Come right in!” and led him into the studio. She was a big handsome woman with a flamboyant manner. Peter was out, and that was just as well, for he never would grasp the importance of being nice to the Press. Delia was fully alive to the fact that any opportunity of impressing a journalist with the idea that Peter Kutuzov was “one of the coming men”—and, moreover, had a charming wife—was to be seized and exploited to the full.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you a great deal about Miss Pongleton,” she told the Sunday Smatter. “Unfortunately, my husband never painted her, but her niece is to sit to him, as you know, and I can show you several drawings of Basil Pongleton, her nephew. Basil is a great friend of ours, and I believe he is Miss Pongleton’s heir.”
“The old lady was well off, I understand?”
“She was supposed to have a fortune, but I don’t really know, except for the fact that she helped her nephew a good deal. She was apt to make a mystery about her affairs, and she was rather chary of parting with her money, so that you would never have thought she was well off from the way in which she lived.”
Delia was rummaging in a portfolio from which she produced a sketch of an amiable young man with a wide mouth and rather long, ruffled hair. “That’s Basil Pongleton. Perhaps the drawing will be of some public interest now? My husband might be persuaded to allow it to be reproduced. Portraits are his best work. He had a show at Coryton’s Galleries last month. We hoped that Miss Pongleton might commission a portrait of Basil; she suggested it herself, but couldn’t bring herself to part with the money when it came to the point. Though, as I have said, she had fits of something almost like generosity when she was pleased with any of Basil’s work—perhaps you know his writing?—and would hand him a fiver neatly sealed up in an envelope. He’s not well off, and he’ll miss her a good deal—but, of course, I suppose he’ll come into her money, so it will be all right in the end.”
“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with Mr. Pongleton’s work. Short stories?”
“Yes; and newspaper stuff, and poems; all free lance work. But I don’t think he’s really found his own line yet. That’s so important for an artist, isn’t it? My husband has been drawing portraits since he was five, and he would have made a greater name for himself by now if he hadn’t always been so terr
ibly shy of publicity. I understand his feelings utterly; I shrink from it myself, but one can’t afford to hide one’s light under a bushel, can one?”
“You’re right there,” the Sunday Smatter agreed. “I’m sure you must help your husband a lot. When Mr. Pongleton comes into his aunt’s money I expect he will be ordering some more of Mr. Kutuzov’s work—perhaps a portrait of Miss Watson?”
“Betty Watson at the Frampton? He might do; it’s an idea. Of course, there’s Beryl Sanders’ picture to be done first. He was talking to my husband about that on the very day Miss Pongleton was murdered—yesterday, in fact. It was a curious thing: Basil came up to see us in the morning, by the underground, but he was so upset that he couldn’t discuss anything connectedly, and his shoes were covered with mud. I feel that he must have had some premonition of his aunt’s death. It’s most curious.”
“Perhaps he had heard that she was missing and was anxious?”
“No, I don’t think so. It was too early for anyone to have realized that she was missing. He got here at about half-past ten, I believe. I was out at the time, but I came home about eleven, and he stayed until the afternoon.”
“What do you suppose upset him?”
“Really, I don’t know. But he was utterly distrait. He may have some kind of second sight and not be aware of it.”
As the Sunday Smatter walked back to Golder’s Green station he wondered about Basil’s muddy shoes. He, too, had heard of the footmark on Belsize Park stairs, but how could Basil pick up mud on his shoes between Tavistock Square and Belsize Park? Friday morning had been fine, but Thursday had been memorable for a heavy shower which broke the winter drought. There would certainly be muddy spots on the Heath. He dismissed that problem for the moment, and meditated on Delia Kutuzov’s account of Basil’s state of mind on Friday morning. He visualized a splendid headline: NEPHEW HAS PREMONITION OF AUNT’S DEATH. Would the editor stand for it? He thought it would be safe provided the “story” were carefully worded:
Murder Underground Page 7
