Murder Will Speak

by J. J. Connington

  “There must be someone in charge.”

  “That fellow Hyson’s in charge for the time being, I believe,” said Malwood in a dry tone.

  “You don’t care for him, I remember,” said Sir Clinton. “Well, I hope old Lockhurst will pull through safely. And now let’s change the subject. What’s the stop-press news about the endocrine glands? I’m always in hopes that you’ll blunder into my field sooner or later, you know.”

  Chapter Eight

  The I.B. Again

  “YOU haven’t netted your poison pen yet?” inquired the Chief Constable. “Otherwise we’d have heard from you, I take it?”

  Duncannon admitted his non-success without showing much sign of depression.

  “No, not yet,” he confessed. “These things are often a bit long-drawn-out, you know. Still, we’ll get the writer, sooner or later. We never drop a case.”

  “Where have you got to, exactly?” Sir Clinton asked. “I have a reason for asking.”

  The Post Office official smiled rather wryly.

  “To tell you the truth,” he admitted, “we struck a false trail at one point. The thing’s getting a shade more difficult for the moment, because our friend the poison pen has taken to new methods. No, thanks, I’d rather smoke a pipe if you don’t mind.”

  He pulled out his pouch, deliberately filled and lighted his pipe, and then resumed.

  “Most of our local postmen are, naturally enough, very keen on this affair. Some of them rather fancy themselves as Sherlocks; and although so far they’ve hardly justified the parallelism they’ve done their best. It means more work for me, sifting all the tales they bring in; but it’s all in a good cause and one mustn’t damp their zeal. The main point is, we’ve shown some of the envelopes of the genuine poison-pen stuff to a lot of them, so they have a good idea of what to look out for. They keep their eyes open for anything of the sort that passes through their hands, and we get the stuff reported every time before it’s delivered. If it passes one sorter, another one spots it, or the delivery man recognises it as he goes his rounds.”

  “Yes. It’s a pity you can’t suppress the stuff as it passes through the P.O. But if you can’t, you can’t.”

  “Must play the game according to the rules,” said Duncannon. “We can’t go running to the Secretary of State every day or two for a warrant, you know. However, my point is that most of our men are on the look-out for any envelopes addressed in that way; and they get a good mark, naturally, if they report they’ve noticed a specimen. Well, a week or two ago, one of our men was clearing the pillar-box at the corner of Acacia Drive and Cowslip Avenue. You know the place I mean, perhaps?”

  Sir Clinton recollected that the Hysons lived in Cowslip Avenue but he refrained from drawing attention to the point at the moment.

  “Yes, I know the pillar you mean,” he admitted.

  “Just as our man had got all the letters into his bag, a rough-looking customer lounged up with a letter in his hand and showed it to the postman. ‘Here! Is this all right?’ he asked our man. Our fellow looked at it and recognised the poison-pen technique at once. The letter was stamped, ready for the post, so he said to the fellow: ‘Right! Shove it through the slit.’ And he picked it out of the wire basket as it fell down.”

  “The point being, I suppose, that your postman could then swear it had passed through the usual channel and so, if any case came out of it, there could be no riding off on an informality?”

  “Just so,” Duncannon agreed. “Postmen aren’t supposed to collect letters by hand, even if they’re standing beside an open pillar-box. This man of ours saw the possibility of the technical point being raised, later on, so he made sure of his ground. He’s no fool. Then, when he’d got his bag shut, he began to question the fellow who had brought the letter. By his way of it, he’d found it lying on the pavement, down Cowslip Avenue, and had brought it along to the pillar to post it. Somebody had dropped it, he supposed, naturally enough; and he was doing his Boy Scout act by posting it.

  “Our man questioned him fairly tactfully, without giving away what he was after, and eventually got the fellow’s address out of him by some stuff about a possible reward. The customer seemed quite straight, gave his address without hesitation; and our man jotted it down. He reported it at once when he brought in his bag of collected letters, and when we looked through them it was easy enough to confirm his suspicion that it was a poison-pen production that he’d spotted.

  “Well, that was the first time we’d come up against a human being in the flesh in connection with the despatch of these things, and naturally we were all out on the trail immediately. It was just possible that this rough-looking fellow’s story wasn’t true and that the poison-pen expert had handed the letter to him to post. For all one could say, this beggar might have been the poison pen in person. So we had to check things up.

  “We did. And at once we cleared the fellow. He was perfectly honest — and completely illiterate! We found that when he drew his unemployment pay at the Bureau he made a cross, for he couldn’t even write his own name. Forgotten all he’d ever learned at school completely. It’s not a common case, but he was considerably below normal in intelligence.”

  “That cleared him, then?” queried Sir Clinton, as Duncannon seemed to hesitate for a moment.

  “Well, not completely,” the Post Office expert admitted with his curious wry smile. “You can’t bet on anything as a certainty in our line. Once we tracked a man for three years and when we ran him down at last he turned out to be illiterate, just like this fellow. And yet we got him, finally. He’d posed as illiterate always, but he could write well enough when he chose. So you see you can’t take anything for granted. However, in this case we went into the man’s character and reputation and he came through with flying colours. His story about picking up the letter was quite sound, so far as could be tested.”

  “Looks as though your poison-pen friend had tumbled to the fact that you watch the pillar-boxes,” commented Sir Clinton. “That’s going to make things more difficult for you. Any other cases of these letters being dropped in the street?”

  “One other, so far,” Duncannon explained. “Curiously enough, it was in the same district, just a day or two later. And, curse it, it let us in for a spot of trouble. You know we’d narrowed down our preliminary investigations to two suspects, and we were keeping an eye on their postings. One of them was a Miss Ruth Jessop. My men were keeping an eye on her, and they reported that she’d been seen posting a letter in the pillar-box near the other end of Cowslip Avenue. One of our men shoved a folded newspaper into the letter-slit as soon as she turned away, so that it opened out in falling down and covered everything that had already been posted. Then he cut off and brought a man from the nearest P.O. to open the box. Meanwhile my other man detained Miss Jessop. She made a devil of a fuss, not unnaturally. Went clean off the handle with rage at being mixed up in such an affair, my man reports. However, he got her to stay till the box was opened. Another couple of letters had been posted in the meanwhile, but they were on top of the newspaper and didn’t count. Underneath the paper were half-a-dozen letters and one of them was a poison-pen one, so far as the address on the envelope showed.”

  “Hardly conclusive evidence, I’m afraid,” Sir Clinton objected.

  “Anything but that,” Duncannon admitted frankly. “And what was worse, she told the same tale as the out-of-work. She’d been coming along Cowslip Avenue after paying a visit to her friends the Hysons who live there, and she’d seen a letter lying on the pavement. As it was stamped ready for posting, she concluded it had dropped out of someone’s hand unnoticed. She’d picked it up and posted it, quite as anyone might well do. So there we were! Nothing for it but to apologise and try to smooth her down — not with much success, I gather.”

  “And both these letters were picked up in the Hysons’ Avenue?”

  “You mean that the other suspect I had was the Hysons’ maid?” Duncannon inferred. “That’s just the
bother. She might quite well have slipped out when the Avenue was clear and dropped these things on the pavement for the first comer to pick up. As, in fact, the fellow on the dole actually did.”

  “Did anyone see the letters being lifted from the pavement, by any chance?” asked Sir Clinton.

  Duncannon’s face showed that he felt the question had gone home.

  “As a matter of fact,” he admitted, “we did get evidence of that in Miss Jessop’s case. From one of your men, whose beat takes in Cowslip Avenue. It seems he was coming along about fifty yards or so behind Miss Jessop and he noticed her stoop down and pick something off the pavement.”

  “He didn’t say anything about it at the time?” queried the Chief Constable. “Why didn’t he, when he saw all this squabble going on at the pillar-box?”

  “Because before she got to the pillar-box and posted the letter, he’d turned off out of Cowslip Avenue into one of the lateral roads, so he saw nothing to attract his attention. It was only afterwards that one of my men remembered having seen him coming along behind Miss Jessop. Then we got hold of him, and he corroborated her tale about the picking up of the letter.”

  “Losers know where to seek,” commented Sir Clinton. “She might easily have sent the letter skimming ahead of her without the constable spotting what she was doing. Then when she came up to it on the pavement, she’d only to stoop down and pick it up in the most innocent way.”

  “That possibility didn’t escape me,” said Duncannon, dryly. “But be that as it may, we’re no better off so far as proof goes. And this contretemps has rather dished us; for we’ve had to call off our watch on Miss Jessop after that fiasco. She’d have spotted it, now that she’s been pounced on. So we’re watching the other woman for a change, at present. If we get her, then well and good. If not, the resources of civilisation and the G.P.O. are not exhausted. But we must let things quiet down a bit in Miss Jessop’s neighbourhood before trying anything fresh. Whether she’s the poison pen or not, she’ll be over touchy at present for us to risk an open row by playing any new tricks.”

  “It’ll be a bit difficult if the pest confines operations to dropping letters about instead of posting them,” opined the Chief Constable. “I don’t know exactly how the thing stands, legally; but it might raise a ticklish problem. The offence is ‘sending or attempting to send a postal packet’ of a certain sort, isn’t it? You might have to prove that dropping a stamped envelope in the street constituted ‘an attempt to send,’ before you could get a conviction. It looks a bit tricky to me. By the way, you’re allowing these foul things to be delivered. Haven’t you a section in the Post Office Act, 1908, which empowers you to detain such letters and still get a conviction eventually? The offence is in putting them into the post, not in their actually reaching the addressee. Why not stop them en route?”

  “Because there’s a fair chance that the contents may give us a clue, and although we can detain them we haven’t the power to open them without a special warrant. For instance, I’m quite willing to admit that both Miss Jessop and the maid may be quite innocent. I may be barking up the wrong tree entirely. If we don’t see the tenor of the things as they come to hand, we might well be missing some straight tip to quite another origin. We simply can’t afford to neglect any possible clues whatever, in an affair of this sort.”

  “Sound enough, that,” Sir Clinton admitted. “And now I think I may be able to put something in your way. Had you ever any complaints about poison-pen letters from a Mr. Telford or his wife?”

  Duncannon shook his head at once.

  “No, that name isn’t on my list.”

  “Well, I have a suspicion in that quarter. Could you find out if one or more of these epistles found its way to the Telfords up in Scotland? They have a cottage in a lonely part of the country — here’s the address — so that possibly the postman who delivered letters there might remember something about what he left for them since he can’t have many letters to deal with on a beat like that. I’ve jotted the approximate date on the paper along with the address. If you sent one of the envelopes of the poison-pen stuff to the local postmaster, he could show it to the man who delivered the letters on that beat, round about that period, and probably the postman might remember.”

  Duncannon glanced shrewdly at the Chief Constable.

  “If you’ve got any inside information, I think you ought to let me share it,” he said.

  “I haven’t any. It’s just a notion of mine. Quite likely I’m sending you on a wild-goose chase,” Sir Clinton admitted frankly. “Here are the facts. Judge for yourself.”

  And he proceeded to give Duncannon the story of Mrs. Telford’s death so far as he knew it.

  “That would be a damnable business if it turns out that you’re right,” the expert declared when he had heard the facts. “You mean that the poison pen had learned something about Mrs. Telford and the very thought of it coming out was enough to drive that wretched girl to suicide?”

  “It’s on the cards,” was as far as the Chief Constable felt inclined to go. “Still, it ought to be sifted, Duncannon. It’s a question of finding out whether it was suicide or not, for until that’s established there’s always room for ill-wishers to hint that young Telford had a hand in his wife’s death. My friend the Procurator-Fiscal is naturally anxious to get down to the roots of the case; and I think your investigation, when you make it, might be of some help. You’ll put it in hand as soon as possible, won’t you?”

  Duncannon reflected for a moment or two.

  “The best thing would be for me to go up there myself,” he decided. “I can get there in less than a day by car, probably quicker than by training it and waiting for connections. But first of all I’ll get on to the local P.O. by telephone, so that no time will be wasted when I do arrive.”

  “And you’ll let me know the result as soon as you can?”

  “Of course. But, frankly, I hope it’s a mare’s nest in spite of your forebodings.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you’re right, I feel my responsibility for not having run down this poison pen before it caused Mrs. Telford’s death. That’s not a very pleasant thought to have on one’s mind. If only we’d been a bit quicker . . .”

  “The damage is done. It’s no good worrying now. The thing is to get the creature before more harm comes of it.”

  “You needn’t tell me that,” retorted Duncannon. “I’ll speed things up, now; you can count on that. And I’ll let you know at once if I find anything up North.”

  Two days later, the expert of the Investigation Branch returned and laid his results before the Chief Constable.

  “You were right enough in your suspicions,” he declared. “I’ve been into the affair and the facts are beyond doubt. I got hold of the postman who takes letters up Glen Terret. He remembered all about it.”

  “Did he?” queried Sir Clinton in a rather sceptical tone.

  “Oh, it’s quite all right,” Duncannon assured him. “You’re suspecting his evidence of being biassed by a desire to score a mark? Actually, it’s a special case, where he had some reason for taking notice. The Telfords had a maid, and it appears that this man was a bit keen on her, though they weren’t actually engaged. She took scarlet fever and went off to hospital. So naturally enough, when he went up Glen Terret on his round, he fell into talk with Mrs. Telford when she came out for her letters. There was only one, that morning; and he held it in his hand while he chatted with her about the girl. He was rather shy of Mrs. Telford, so he looked down at the letter while he was talking to her; and so he happened to notice the peculiarity of the envelope.”

  “How many times does he go that round in the day?” asked Sir Clinton.

  “There’s only a single delivery in Glen Terret; about midday, he reached the cottage, he says.”

  “H’m!” commented the Chief Constable. “So that’s two useful documents which have gone astray: the poison-pen letter and another one.”

  “You me
an the letter she left for her husband?” Duncannon suggested. “Well, of course, we’ve nothing to do with that. It never passed through the post. There’s been some talk about its disappearance, though, up there. It doesn’t take much to make country-folk chatter.”

  “No objection to my passing your results on to the Procurator-Fiscal up there?” asked Sir Clinton. “He’s anxious to get all the evidence in the case. Forrest’s his name. Perhaps you came across him?”

  Duncannon shook his head.

  “No. But you can do what you like in the matter of the letter. He can get hold of the postman if he wants him, easily enough.”

  “Thanks, I’ll drop him a note. By the way, are you any further forward in the matter of the poison pen itself? I’m a bit troubled about the possible effects of these letters, after this Telford affair. No use offering you the services of our finger-print expert, I suppose? You’ve one of your own, no doubt.”

  “All the letters and envelopes smell slightly of rubber, and there are no finger-prints,” Duncannon replied.

  “Ah! Rubber gloves, eh? That will always be confirmatory evidence if we find a pair on the premises after you’ve spotted your quarry. No use in the meantime, though.”

  Chapter Nine

  Gas

  CISSIE WORGATE, the Hysons’ maid, had Thursdays and Sundays to herself from three o’clock onwards; and Mrs. Hyson almost invariably allowed her to go out on Tuesday evenings as well. But had it not been for the cinema and the multifarious activities of St. Salvator’s Church, Cissie might well have found her spare time hanging rather heavily on her hands. A shy, unattractive little thing, she had not the knack of making friends in this town to which she had come a few years earlier in search of a place. No man had ever given her more than a passing glance, and her only intimates were two gossipy old sisters of her own class who entertained her to tea once a week and spent the time in talking scandal about their neighbours.