"What do you know about my wages, mister?"
"Well, I don't know anything. I'm just dedoocing. Pretty girl, nice house, good wages."
"Oh the wages are good enough," she said in a tone that indicated other shortcomings.
"Wouldn't the lady of the house like to have a look at them?" he said.
"There's no lady," she said. "I'm the lady of the house just now. The misses is at Eastbourne. You been in the Army?"
"I was in the Army during the War. That's the only time bin in the Army counts. France? I was four years in France, miss."
"Well, you can come in and have some tea, and let me see the things properly. We're just in the middle of it."
She led him into the kitchen, where the table was spread with butter, bread, several kinds of jam, and cake. At the table, with an enormous cup of tea halfway to his mouth, was a freckled fair man with a blue muffler and a discharged soldier's silver badge on his lapel. Beside him on the table was a pile of cheap writing-pads.
"This is another ex-serviceman," the maid said. "He's selling writing-paper. I shouldn't think there's much sale for it now. It's ages since I seen some one round selling pads."
"How do, mate?" said the freckled one, meeting the quizzical regard of the pedlar with complete equanimity. "How's trade?"
"Fair. Just fair. You seem to be very comfortable."
"Well, I needed it. Haven't sold a pad today. This country's going to the dogs. It's something to come across some one now and again who has a heart."
"Have some jam," said the maid, pushing his cup of tea across to the pedlar, and he helped himself liberally.
"Well, I'm glad the missus isn't at home in one way, but I'm sorry in another. I thought as how she might buy something, too."
"Well, I'm not sorry," she said. "It's a blessed relief. What with her airs and her tantrums, life isn't worth living."
"Got a temper, has she?"
"Well, I call it temper, but she calls it nerves. And ever since this murder affair — she was in the queue that night the man was murdered, you know. Yes, stood right up against him. And oh, what a to-do! And then she had to go to the inquest and give evidence. If she'd done the murder herself she couldn't have kicked up a bigger fuss about going. The night before she was screaming and howling and saying she couldn't stand it. And when the poor master tried to quiet her down she wouldn't let him go near her. Hurling names at him you Wouldn't use to a dog. I tell you it wasn't half a relief when she went off to Eastbourne with Miss Lethbridge — that's her sister."
"Yes, the best thing they can do when they're like that is to go away for a bit," said the freckled man. "Does she go often?"
"Not so often as I'd like, believe me. She was going to Yorkshire the day after the murder, and then was so upset that she couldn't go. Now she's gone to Eastbourne instead, and long may she stay there, say I. Let's see your stuff," she said to the pedlar.
He jerked his head at the tray. "Have a look for yourself. Anything you fancy you can have cheap. It's a long time since I had a tea like this. Wot say, Bill?"
"Ar," agreed his fellow-itinerant through a large mouthful of cake. "It isn't often people has a heart."
She gloated over the bright-coloured collection awhile. "Well, the missus is missing something," she said. "She's mad on curios and such-like things that hold the dust. Artistic, she is. What's this for?" she said, holding up the dagger. "Murdering people with?"
"An't you ever seen one like that before?" the pedlar said in astonishment. "That's a paper-knife. Same as the wooden ones."
She tried the point absently on a fingertip, and with a queer little shudder of disgust that was quite involuntary she put it down again. In the end she chose a little painted bowl, quite useless but very gay to look upon. The pedlar let her have it for sixpence, and in her gratitude she produced cigarettes of Mr. Ratcliffe's, and while they smoked enlivened them with talk of what was obviously uppermost in her mind the murder.
"We had an inspector of police here, if you'd believe it. Quite nice-looking he was. You'd never say he was a policeman. Not coarse like a bobby. But it wasn't nice, all the same, having him round. Of course he was suspicious, with her carrying on like that and not wanting to see him. I heard Miss Lethbridge say to her, 'Don't be a fool, Meg. The only way to stop him is to see him and convince him. You've got to do it. "
"Well, Eastbourne's a nice place," said the freckled man. "She'll have company there to forget her troubles."
"Ah, she's not one for company much. Always having crazes for some one or other, and then she runs them to death and has some one new. Boys, as often as not. She's queer, she is."
When her talk began to be repetitive instead of informative the freckled man stood up and said, "Well, miss, I ain't had such a tea not in years, and I'm real grateful to you.
"You're welcome," she said. "If you take my advice, you'll give up the writing-pad business. There's nothing in it nowadays. It's old-fashioned. Try stuff like him there — novelty stuff like they sell in the shops at Christmastime."
The freckled man's glance fell sardonically on the dagger among the "Christmas goods."
"You going up the road or down?" he said to the pedlar.
"Up," said the pedlar.
"Well, cheerio, I'll be going. Many thanks again for the tea, miss." And the door closed behind him. Five minutes later the pedlar took his leave.
"If I was you, miss, I wouldn't be so free with my teas," he said. "There's lots of decent chaps on the road, but there's lots of the other kind, too. You can't be too careful when you're alone in the house."
"Are you jealous of the freckly man?" she asked coquettishly and quite unimpressed. "You needn't be. I didn't buy a pad, you know."
"Well, well," said the pedlar, frustrated in his good intentions, and went laggingly down the path to the gate.
By sheer chance he found the freckled man occupying the front outside seat of the bus he boarded.
"Well?" said that worthy cheerily. "Had a good day, mate?"
"Rotten," said the pedlar. "Just rotten. How you been doing?"
"Fair. Isn't it amazing," he said, seeing that the bus-stop behind them was deserted, "what fools these girls are! Why, we could have polished her off and made away with everything in the house, and it never seemed to occur to her."
"I said as much to her when I was going, but she thought I was jealous of you."
"Of me? It should be the other way about. She didn't buy a pad!"
"So she pointed out."
"That was a good stock you had. The boss choose it?"
"Yes."
"Thought so. He's a daisy. What's he nosing out there?"
"Don't know."
"The girl didn't fall for the knife, I noticed."
"No." The pedlar was not communicative.
The freckled one resigned himself.
"Chatty bird!" he remarked, and drawing two cigarettes from the recesses of his person he handed one to his companion. The pedlar cast an idle glance at the maker's name and recognized it as one of Mr. Ratcliffe's. His stern features relaxed into a smile.
"Scrounger!" he said, and held his cigarette to the offered match.
But there was nothing of the freebooter in the reports which Mullins and Simpson presented to Grant an hour later. Simpson said that Mr. and Mrs. Ratcliffe lived on amicable terms, with intervals of very severe squall. Simpson was unable to say whether the squall was started by Mr. Ratcliffe's shortcomings or by Mr. Ratcliffe's resentment of his wife's, since the maid was never present at the beginning of a quarrel. What she heard she heard through a shut door usually. The biggest row had occurred when they came home on the night of the murder. Since then they had not been on friendly terms. Mrs. Ratcliffe had intended to go to Yorkshire the day after the murder, but was too upset to go; and after the inquest she and her sister had gone down to Eastbourne, where she was now at the Grand Parade Hotel. She was a person who took sudden and violent likings for people, and during the time she like
d them would be quite unreasonable about them. She had a little money of her own, and was rather independent of her husband.
Mullins said that at 98 he had had difficulty in making Mrs. Everett interested enough to allow him to open his tray. She had insisted that she wanted nothing. When he did uncover his wares, the first thing her eyes had lighted on was the dagger. She had immediately cast a glance full of suspicion at him and had said, "Go away!" and shut the door in his face.
"What do you think? Did she know it?"
Mullins could not say, but it was the sight of it that had made her shut the door like that. She had been going to put up with him until she saw the knife. The maid at Lemonora Road had never seen it before. That he was sure of.
When he had dismissed Mullins and locked away the knife in its drawer again, Grant sat thinking for a long time. This was an unlucky day. There had been no arrest — though he was inclined to think of that as a mixed blessing — there had been the stunning discovery that Sorrell had really meant to go to America, and there had been no trace of the bank-notes handed over to Lamont with the rest of the two hundred and twenty-three pounds, of which the twenty-five sent by the unknown friend had been part. It was seven days since the murder, and the notes had been handed out before that, and not one of them, apart from the twenty-five in their possession, had been traced. Moreover, his two scouts had brought in nothing of importance. In no way could he account for a connexion between Mrs. Ratcliffe and Sorrell. He was inclined to think it sheer coincidence that had put their names together in a ship's list and had placed them together in the queue. Her husband's appearance of shock when Grant had mentioned the departure for New York might have been merely the result of the recollection that he had omitted to tell the inspector of his wife's intended departure. As for Mrs. Everett, her sudden withdrawal spoke more of intelligence than of guilt. Mullins had said that she looked at him suspiciously. She had made no attempt to carry off the situation with a high hand by ignoring the dagger or by wantonly calling attention to it. She had been merely suspicious. He decided to give the Everett woman a few more marks for intelligence and to acquit her of complicity. As for the Ratcliffes, he would temporarily cut them out. They didn't fit, and there was no evidence. Things often fit to the police satisfaction when there is no evidence whatever, but here things neither fitted nor were backed by evidence, and consequently would have to stand aside. Presently he would find out why Mrs. Ratcliffe had told her maid that she was going to Yorkshire when she intended to go abroad.
The telephone buzzed. Grant took it up with an eagerness of which he was not conscious. It was Williams.
"We've located him, sir. Would you like to come, or shall we carry on?"
"Where is it?" Williams told him. "Have you got the exits all secured? No chance of failure if we hang on for a little?"
"Oh, no sir. We've got him all right."
"In that case meet me at the Brixton Road end of Acre Lane in half an hour."
When he joined his subordinate he asked for details, and Williams supplied them as they went along. He had found his man through the house-agents. Lamont had engaged a furnished top flat — two small rooms — three days before the murder, and had moved in on the actual day of the murder, in the morning.
Yes, thought Grant, that fitted Mrs. Everett's story. "What name did he give?" he asked.
"His own," Williams said.
"What! His own name?" repeated Grant incredulously, and was silent, vaguely troubled. "Well, you've done well, Williams, to run him down so soon. Shy bird, is he?"
"He is," said Williams, with emphasis. "Even yet I can't get any one to say that they've seen him. Shy's the word. Here we are, sir. The house is the fourth in the terrace from here."
"Good," said Grant. "You and I will go up. Got a shooter in your pocket, in case? All right, come on."
They had no latchkey, and there was apparently no bell for the third floor. They had to ring several times before the inhabitants of the ground floor came grumbling to their rescue and admitted them. As they ascended the increasingly shabby stairs in the last of the daylight Grant's spirits rose, as they always did at the point of action. There would be no more pottering round. He was about to come face to face with the Levantine, the man he had seen in the Strand, the man who had stuck Sorrell in the back. He knocked abruptly at the door in the shadows. The room beyond sounded hollow and empty; there was no answer. Again Grant knocked, with no result.
"You might as well open it, Lamont. We're police officers, and if you don't open it we'll have to burst it."
Still a complete silence. "You're sure he's here?" Grant asked Williams.
"Well, he was here yesterday, sir, and no one's seen him since. The house has been under observation since three this afternoon."
"We'll burst the lock, then," Grant said, "and don't forget to stand back when the door goes in." With their combined weight they attacked the door, which gave up the unequal struggle with a groaning crash, and Grant, with his right hand in his pocket, walked into the room.
One glance round him told him the truth, and he suddenly knew that ever since he had arrived on the landing outside he had had a conviction that the rooms were empty. "The bird's flown, Williams. We've missed him."
Williams was standing in the middle of the floor, with the expression of a child from whom a sweet has been taken. He swallowed painfully, and Grant, even in the middle of his own disappointment, found time to be sorry for him. It wasn't Williams' fault. He had been a little too sure, but he had done well to locate the man so quickly.
"Well, he went in a hurry, sir," said Williams, as if that fact were a palliative to his own hurt pride and disappointment. And Certainly there was every evidence of haste. Food was left on the table, drawers were half open and obviously ransacked, clothing had been left behind, and many personal possessions. It was not a methodical getaway, it was a flight.
"We'll go through what he has left behind," Grant said. "I'll test for fingerprints before we have to light the lights. There seems to be nothing but the lamp for illumination." He went round the two rooms with his light powder, but there were few surfaces in the flat on which a print was likely to show clear and unmistakable, and these were so patterned over with prints as to be unproductive. But fairly high up on the varnished wood of the door, where a person's left hand would rest as his right took a coat from the hooks nailed there, were two good prints. A little consoled, Grant lit the lamp and went through the things Lamont had left behind. An exclamation from Williams in the bedroom took him there. Williams was holding a wad of Bank of England notes.
"Got them at the back of this drawer, sir. He did go in a hurry!" Balm was flowing on Williams' excoriated soul. "Won't he be biting himself!"
But Grant was searching in his own pocketbook, and presently produced a list of numbers, which he compared with those on the notes. Yes, there was no doubt about it, these were the notes that Lamont had drawn with the cheque he had had from Sorrell. And Lamont had been so hurried in his flight that he had actually forgotten a thing so vital. The whole amount was there, except for the twenty-five pounds sent for Sorrell's burial. That was rather extraordinary. Why had the Levantine, as Grant continued to think of him, spent none of it in the ten days between the time he had received it and the murder? There had been no need of fear then, surely. The value of the notes was large, but that was no explanation. The man had drawn the money himself, and could have had the whole amount in Treasury notes if he had so wanted. Why had he spent none of it?
There was little else in the flat to interest them. The man had a catholic taste in literature, Grant thought, looking along the single row of books that adorned the mantelpiece: Wells, O. Henry, Buchan, Owen Wister, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Sassoon's poems, many volumes of the annual edition of Racing Up-to-Date, Barrie's Little Minister. He took down one and opened it. On the flyleaf, in the writing he had seen on the cheque at the bank, was the owner's name: Albert Sorrell. He took down the others one by one. Nea
rly all of them had belonged to Sorrell. They had evidently been bequeathed to Lamont by Sorrell on his departure for the United States. Up to the last minute, then, these two men had been friendly. What had happened? Or was it only an outward friendship? Had Lamont always been a snake in the grass?
And now there was the new problem of Lamont's present hiding-place. Where would he be likely to go? He was in a hurry — a desperate hurry. It was no planned affair. That meant that he had probably had to take what refuge came his way. There was no need for them to consider any such possibility as an escape abroad in an elaborate disguise. He had not done that, certainly. He had almost certainly not gone out of London. He would, as he had done before, stick ratlike to the place he knew.
Grant left instructions that the search was to go on as before, and went back to the Yard trying to put himself in the wanted man's place in the hope of working out a line of flight. It was very late at night, and he was very weary, when at last he found light on the matter. The photographs of the prints he had found on the door were sent to him, and the prints were Mrs. Everett's! There was no doubt of it. That first finger that had left a mark at the back of Sorrell's photograph in the little room at Brightling Crescent belonged to the hand that had leaned against the door in the effort of reaching for something in Lamont's room. Mrs. Everett. Good Heaven! Talk of snakes in the grass! And he, Grant, should really retire. He had got to the stage of trusting people. It was incredible and humiliating, but he had believed Mrs. Everett was being straight with him. His putting a man to watch her had been the merest form. Well, it was a bad break, but he had his line on Lamont now. He would get him through Mrs. Everett. He did not doubt for a moment that it was information furnished by Mrs. Everett that had stirred Lamont into flight. She had probably gone straight to him after he had left her yesterday evening. She was gone before the watcher arrived, but he should have seen her come back; that would have to be looked into; Andrews was careless. And in all probability she had either suggested or provided the new hiding-place. He did not believe that a woman of her intelligence would be fool enough to believe that she could keep Lamont hidden at Brightling Terrace, therefore he had now to find out all about Mrs. Everett and all the ramifications of the Everett family. How should he do it? What was the best avenue of approach to a woman of Mrs. Everett's moated and castellated type? No back-door business, anyhow. She was not a door-gossiper, evidently, and now she was on her guard. That effort to stampede her into a show of emotion had been both futile and ill-advised. He might have known that she wasn't the woman to give anything away in a back-door conversation. Well, what then? In what kind of society, on what kind of occasion, if any, did Mrs. Everett open out? He visualized her in various surroundings, and found her invariably grotesque. And then he suddenly had it. Church! The woman shrieked church-worker. She would be greatly respected by all the congregation, but very slightly unpopular because she kept herself to herself, a quality little beloved by the earnest members of work-parties and such Christian activities who, having provided a titbit such as a rumoured bankruptcy among the flock, expect to be offered a decently sized and tolerably luscious titbit in return. «Church» had placed her, and since she was most certainly not overpopular, her fellow-worshippers would be all the more ready to talk about her.
The Man in the Queue ag-1 Page 12
