The Man in the Queue ag-1

by Josephine Tey

  It was only a moment or two before Grant realized the simple significance of that apparently staggering fact.

  "Communal notepaper, of course," he said offhandedly, while his looker-on half mocked at him for having allowed himself to be victimized even for a moment by the childish amazement that had overcome him. "Your theory blossoms, Williams. The man who lent the gun and provided the money lived with the dead man. That being so, of course he can spin any kind of yarn he likes to his landlady or his wife or whoever would be interested about the disappearance of his chum." He took up the telephone on his desk. "We'll see what the handwriting people have to say about the piece of notepaper."

  But the handwriting experts had nothing to add to what Grant already knew or guessed. The paper was of a common type that could be bought at any stationer's or bookstall. The printing was that of a man. Given a specimen of a suspect's handwriting, they would probably be able to say whether or not the printing had been done by him, but so far they could be of no more help than already indicated.

  Williams departed to his temporarily bereaved home to comfort his uxorious mind by reminding himself how short a week was, and how pretty Mrs. Williams would be when she came back from Southend; and Grant remained where he was, trying to mesmerize the dagger into giving up its tale. It lay on the dark green leather surface of his desk, a graceful, wicked, toy-like thing, its business end in its slender viciousness making a queer contrast to the bluff saint on the handle with his silly, expressionless face. Grant considered the saintly features sardonically. What was it Ray Marcable had said? You'd want a blessing on an undertaking as big as that. Well, Grant thought, he would choose a more potent saint as 0.C. affairs than the ineffectual holy one on the handle. His thoughts went to Ray Marcable. This morning's press had been full of her projected departure for America, the popular papers expressing themselves in lamentation and the more high-brow in bitterness and indignation that British managers should allow the best musical comedy star of a generation to leave the country. Should he go to her, Grant wondered, before she left and ask her bluntly why she had looked surprised at the description of the dagger? There had been nothing to connect her even remotely with the crime. He knew her history — the little semi-detached villa in a dreary suburb that she had called home, and the council school she had attended, her real name, which was Rosie Markham. He had even met Mr. and Mrs. Markham over the affair of the suitcase. It was exceedingly unlikely that she could throw any light on the Queue Murder. And it was still more unlikely that she would if she could. She had had her chance to be frank with him over that tea in her dressing-room, and she had quite deliberately kept him outside any knowledge she might have had. That knowledge, of course, might be entirely innocent. Her surprise might have been due to recognition of the dagger's description, and yet have nothing to do with the murder. The dagger was far from unique, and many people must have seen and handled similar weapons. No, either way he was not likely to get much satisfaction from another interview with Miss Marcable. She would have to depart for the United States uninterrogated.

  With a sigh for its unproductiveness he locked the dagger away in its drawer again and set off for home. He came out on to the Embankment to find that it was a fine night with a light, frosty mist in the air, and he decided that he would walk home. The midnight streets of London — always so much more beautiful than the choppy crowded ones of the daytime fascinated him. At noon London made you a present of an entertainment, rich and varied and amusing. But at midnight she made you a present of herself; at midnight you could hear her breathe.

  When at length he turned into the road where he lived he had come to the stage of walking automatically, and a starry mist possessed his brain. For a little while Grant had "shut his eyes." But he was not asleep, actually or metaphorically, and the eyes of his brain opened with a start at the dim figure that was waiting on the opposite corner just outside the lamplight. Who was hanging about at this hour?

  He debated rapidly whether or not to cross and walk down the other side of the street, and so come within criticizing distance of the figure. But it was rather late to change his direction. He held on, ignoring the loiterer. Only when he was turning in at his own gate he looked back. The figure was still there, almost indistinguishable in the gloom.

  It was after twelve when he let himself in with his latchkey, but Mrs. Field was waiting up for him. "I thought you'd like to know that there has been a gentleman here asking for you. He wouldn't wait and he wouldn't leave a message."

  "How long ago was that?"

  More than an hour, Mrs. Field said. She didn't see him rightly. He had stood well out beyond the step. But he was young.

  "No name?"

  No, he refused to give a name.

  "All right," said Grant. "You go to bed. If he comes back, I'll let him in."

  She hesitated in the doorway. "You won't do anything rash, will you?" she said solicitously. "I don't like the thought of you bin here all alone with some one who might be an anarchist for all we know."

  "Don't you worry, Mrs. Field. You won't be blown up tonight."

  "It isn't blowing up I'm afraid of," she said. "It's the thought of you lyin' here perhaps bleeding to death and no one knowing. Think how I'd feel when I came in in the morning and found you like that."

  Grant laughed. "Well, you can comfort yourself. There isn't the slightest chance of anything so thrilling happening. No one has ever spilt my blood except Jerry at Contalmaison, and that was more by luck than good management."

  She conceded the point. "See you have a bite before you go to bed," she said, indcating the food on the sideboard. "I got you some English tomatoes, and the beef is Tomkins' best pickled." She said good night and went, but she could not have reached her kitchen before a knock sounded on the door. Grant heard her go to the door, and even while his brain was speculating about his visitor, the looker-on in him was wondering whether it was spunk or curiosity that had sent Mrs. Field so willingly to answer the knock. A moment later she threw open the sitting-room door and said, "A young gentleman to see you, sir," and into Grant's eager presence came a youth of nineteen or twenty, fairly tall, dark, broad-shouldered, but slight, and poised on his feet like a boxer. As he came forward he shot a furtive glance from his brilliant dark eyes into the corner behind the door, and he came to a halt some yards from the inspector in the middle of the room, turning a soft felt hat in his slim gloved hands.

  "You are Inspector Grant?" he asked.

  Grant motioned him to a chair, and the youth, with a completely un-English grace, subsided sideways on to it, still clutching his hat, and began to talk.

  "I saw you tonight at Laurent's. I am in the pantry there. I clean the silver and things like that. They told me who you were, and after I think for a while, I decided to tell you all about it."

  "A very good idea," said Grant. "Carry on. Are you Italian?"

  "No; I am French. My name is Raoul Legarde."

  "All right; carry on."

  "I was in the queue the night the man was killed. It was my night off. For a long time I was standing next the man. He trod on my foot in accident, and after that we talked a little — about the play. I was on the outside and he was next the wall. Then a man came to talk to him and came in in front of me. The man who was new wanted something from the other man. He stayed until the door opened and the people moved. He was angry about something. They were not quarrelling — not as we quarrel — but I think they were angry. When the murder happened I ran away. I did not want to be mixed up with the police. But tonight I saw you, and you looked gentil, and so I made up my mind to tell you all about it."

  "Why didn't you come to Scotland Yard and tell me?"

  "I do not trust the Sыreté. They make very much out of nothing. And I have no friends in London."

  "When the man came to talk to the man who was murdered, and pushed you back a place, who was between you and the theatre wall?"

  "A woman in black."

  Mrs. Ratc
liffe. So far the boy was telling the truth.

  "Can you describe the man who came and went away again?"

  "He was not very tall. Not as tall as me. He had a hat like mine, only more brown, and a coat like mine" — he indicated his tight-fitting, waisted navy-blue coat — "only brown too. He was very dark, without moustache, and these stuck out." He touched his own beautifully modelled cheek and chin bones.

  "Would you know him again if you saw him?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "Well enough to swear to?"

  "What is that?"

  "To take your oath on."

  "Oh, yes."

  "What did the two men quarrel about?"

  "I don't know. I didn't hear. I was not deliberately listening, you understand, and though I speak English, I do not understand if people talk very quickly. I think the man who came wanted something that the mangy who was killed would not give him."

  "When the man went away from the queue, how is it that no one saw him go?"

  "Because just then the policeman was walking down saying 'Stand back' to the people."

  That was too glib. The inspector took out his notebook and pencil and, laying the pencil on the open page, held it out to his visitor. "Can you show me how you stood in the queue? Put marks for the people, and label them."

  The boy stretched out his left hand for the book, took the pencil in his right, and made a very intelligent diagram, unaware that he had at that moment defeated the distrusted Sыreté's attempt to make something out of nothing.

  Grant watched his serious, absorbed face and thought rapidly. He was telling the truth, then. He had been there until the man collapsed, had backed with the others away from the horror, and had continued backing until he could walk away from the danger of being at the mercy of foreign police. And he had actually seen the murderer and would recognize him again. Things were beginning to move.

  He took back the book and pencil that the boy extended to him, and as he raised his eyes from the consideration of the diagram he caught the dark eyes resting rather wistfully on the food on the sideboard. It occurred to him that Legarde had probably come straight from his work to see him.

  "Well, I'm very grateful to you," he said. "Have some supper with me now, before you go."

  The boy refused shyly, but allowed himself to be persuaded, and together they had a substantial meal of Mr. Tomkins' best pickled. Legarde talked freely of his people in Dijon — the sister who sent him French papers, the father who disapproved of beer since one ate grapes but not hops; of his life at Laurent's and his impression of London and the English. And when Grant eventually let him out into the black stillness of the early morning, he turned on the doorstep and said apologetically and naively, "I am sorry now that I did not tell before, but you understand how it was? To have run away at first made it difficult. And I did not know that the police were so gentil."

  Grant dismissed him with a friendly pat on the shoulder, locked up, and picked up the telephone receiver. When the connexion was made, he said:

  "Inspector Grant speaking. This to be sent to all stations: 'Wanted, in connexion with the London Queue Murder, a left-handed man, about thirty years of age, slightly below middle height, very dark in complexion and hair, prominent cheek and chin bones, clean-shaven. When last seen was wearing a soft brown hat and tight-fitting brown coat. Has a recent scar on the left forefinger or thumb. "

  And then he went to bed.

  5 — Danny Again

  Running out of Marylebone into the sunlight of the morning, Grant looked out of his carriage window and felt more optimistic than he had since he had first interviewed the officials at Gow Street Police Station. The murderer had ceased to be a mythical being. They had a full description of him now, and it could only be a matter of time before they ran him down. And perhaps by tonight he would have settled the identity of the murdered man. He stretched his legs in the empty compartment and let the sun slide slowly back and fore over them as the train wheeled in its progress. A pleasant country, England, at ten of a bright morning. Even the awful little suburban villas had lost that air of aggressiveness born of their inferiority complex, and were shining self-forgetful and demure in the clear light. Their narrow, inhospitable doors were no longer ugly in the atrociousness of cheap paint and appliqué mouldings; they were entrances of jade and carnelian and lapis lazuli and onyx into particular separate heavens. Their gardens, with their pert, ill-dressed rows of tulips and meagre seed-sown grass, were lovely as ever the hanging gardens of Babylon had been. Here and there a line of gay, motley child's clothes danced and ballooned with the breeze in a necklace of coloured laughter. And farther on, when the last vestiges of the town fell away, the wide acres of the grass country smiled broadly in the sunlight like an old hunting print. All England was lovely this morning, and Grant knew it. Even Nottingham canals had a Venetian touch of blue today, and their grimy, imprisoning walls were rosy as Petra.

  Grant came out of the station into the drone and clamour of trams. If he had been asked what represented the Midlands in his mind, he would unhesitatingly have said trams. Trams in London always seemed to him alien incongruities, poor provincials who had been inveigled to the Metropolis, and drudged out a misanthropic and despised existence, because they had never made enough money to get out of it. Grant never heard the far-away peculiar sing of an approaching tramcar without finding himself back in the dead, airless atmosphere of the Midland town where he had been born. The Midlanders did not hide away their trams in back streets; they trailed them proudly through their chiefest thoroughfares, partly from braggadocio, partly from a misplaced idea of utility. A long yellow string of them stood in Nottingham marketplace, blocking the view of the wide, almost continental square, and making the passage from the pavement on one side to the stalls of the market on the other a most exhilarating game of hide-and-seek. But the natives, with that adaptability to circumstances which is nature's greatest marvel, seemed to enjoy the hop-skip-and-jump business, and to find it not too dangerous to be indulged in. No one was killed during the time that Grant walked down the street at any rate.

  At Faith Brothers' he produced the tie which had belonged to the dead man, and explained that he wanted to know whether any one remembered selling it. The man at the counter had no recollection of the transaction, but summoned a colleague, who was flipping a white and too flexible forefinger up and down the wall of cardboard boxes in an endeavor to find an article that would meet with his customer's approval. Something told Grant that in matters sartorial this youth would have the memory of an oldest inhabitant, and he was right. After one glance at the tie, he said that he had taken it out of the window — or one exactly like it — for a gentleman about a month ago. The gentleman had seen it in the window and, because it matched the suit he was wearing, hail come in and bought it. No, he did not think that he was a Nottingham man. Why? Well, he didn't talk Nottingham for one thing, and he didn't dress Nottingham for another.

  Could he describe the man?

  He could, and did, with minuteness and accuracy. "I can tell you the date, if you like," said this surprising youth. "I remember because" — he hesitated, and finished with a refreshing lapse from his worldly-wise air to a pink naпveté — "because of something that happened that day. It was the 2nd of February."

  Grant noted the date and asked what his impression of the stranger had been. Was he a commercial traveller?

  The youth thought not. He didn't talk business and he didn't seem interested in the growth of Nottingham or anything.

  Grant asked if there was anything on in the town on that date that would bring a stranger to Nottingham, and the youth said yes, most emphatically. There had been a huge musical festival a festival for all the Midlands; and there had been a good few people from London too. He knew, because he himself had taken part in it. He sang in a church choir and knew all about festivals. The stranger had looked much more like some one interested in the festival than like a commercial traveller. He had thought at the t
ime that that was probably what the man was in Nottingham for.

  Grant thought it was quite likely. He remembered the man's sensitive hands. And he had been an habitué of the Woffington — which, if not highbrow, is at least invariably musical. It didn't march with the gang theory, but he could not afford to ignore it because of that. The gang theory had no support in fact. It was a theory and nothing else — pure speculation. He thanked the youth and asked for the name of some one in Nottingham who would know all about the festival and the people who came to it. The youth said that he had better go and see Yeudall, the solicitor. Yeudall wasn't the secretary; but he was a sort of chairman, and it was his hobby. He sat there from morning to night, all the three days of the festival, and he would be certain to know any one who was interested enough to come from London for it.

  Grant wrote down Yeudall's address, conscious that the youth's inquisitive mind was docketing him as it had docketed the dead man, and that years hence, if some one asked him to describe the man who took Yeudall's address, he would do it faithfully. He was wasted in a hatter's-and-hosier's.

  "Are you looking for the man who bought the tie?" the youth asked. He said «looking» in inverted commas, giving it its police sense.

  "Not exactly," said Grant, "but I want to trace him if I can." And he departed to interview Mr. Yeudall.

  In a little side street, near the castle — the kind of street that has never seen a tramcar and where one's footsteps echo until one involuntarily looks behind — were situated the small and gloomy offices of Yeudall, Lister & Yeudall. Three hundred years old they were, and the waiting-room was panelled in oak that extinguished the last valiant ray of light as it fought its way past the old greenish glass of the window-pane. The light died on the window-sill as the last survivor of a charge dies on the enemy parapet, murdered but glorious. But Mr. Yeudall, of Yeudall, Lister & Yeudall, would have considered it heresy if it had been suggested that things might be otherwise. Otherwise! That meant a building like a meat-safe, fretted with windows until the walls were practically non-existent. A collection of plate-glass bound together by pilasters of an incredible ignobility! That was modern architecture! But, as if to make up for the dim dustiness of his surroundings, Mr. Yeudall himself beamed and shone and welcomed all humanity with that sublime lack of suspicion which makes friends, and «confidence» men, but never lawyers. Being the only Yeudall of the third generation, he had been given in his youth a cupboard-like corner in the warren of small rooms that were the Yeudall offices, and, since he loved oak panelling and beams and greenish glass second only to symphonies and sonatas, he had stayed there. And now he was Yeudall, Lister & Yeudall — though a competent clerk kept anything too awful from happening.