The Man in the Queue ag-1

by Josephine Tey

  When Grant was at war with himself his mouth had a slight twist in it, and tonight the twist was very marked. He had found not one definite answer to the problems that troubled him. He did not know whether Mrs. Ratcliffe had recognized the brooch or not. He did not know whether she had said New York to her maid or not. And though he had seen her writing, that helped to no conclusion; a large percentage of women wrote large and very round hands. Her pause at the sight of the brooch might have been merely the pause while she read the twined initial. Her veiled questions as to its origin might have been entirely innocent. On the other hand, they most emphatically might not. If she had anything to do with the murder, it must be recognized that she was clever and not likely to give herself away. She had already fooled him once when he dismissed her so lightly from his mind on the first day of the investigations. There was nothing to prevent her from going on fooling him unless he found a damning fact that could not be explained away.

  "What do you think of Mrs. Ratcliffe?" he asked Miss Dinmont. They were alone in the compartment except for a country yokel and his girl.

  "Why?" she asked. "Is this merely making conversation, or is it more investigation?"

  "I say, Miss Dinmont, are you sore with me?"

  "I don't think that is the correct expression for what I feel," she said. "It isn't often I feel a fool, but I do tonight." And he was dismayed at the bitterness in her voice.

  "But there's not the slightest need," he said, genuinely distressed. "You did the job like a professional, and there was nothing in it to make you feel like that. I'm up against something I don't understand, and I wanted you to help me. That's all. That's why I asked you about Mrs. Ratcliffe just now. I want a women's opinion to help me — an unbiased woman's opinion."

  "Well, if you want my candid opinion, I think the woman is a fool."

  "Oh? You don't think she's clever, deep down?"

  "I don't think she has a deep down."

  "You think she's just shallow? But surely — " He considered.

  "Well, you asked me what I thought, and I've told you. I think she's a shallow fool."

  "And her sister?" Grant asked, though that had nothing to do with the investigations.

  "Oh, she is different. She has any amount of brain and personality, though you mightn't think so."

  "Would you say that Mrs. Ratcliffe would commit a murder?"

  "No, certainly not!"

  "Why not?"

  "Because she hasn't got the guts," said Miss Dinmont elegantly. "She might do the thing in a fit of temper, but all the world would know it the next minute, and ever afterwards as long as she lived."

  "Do you think she might know about one and keep the knowledge to herself?"

  "You mean the knowledge of who was guilty?"

  "Yes."

  Miss Dinmont sat looking searchingly at the inspector's impassive face. The lights of station lamps moved slowly over and past it as the train slid to a halt. "Eridge! Eridge!" called the porter, clumping down the deserted platform. The unexpectant voice had died into the distance, and the train had gathered itself into motion again before she spoke.

  "I wish I could read what you are thinking," she said desperately. "Am I being your fool for the second time in one day?"

  "Miss Dinmont, believe me, so far I have never known you do a foolish thing, and I'm willing to take a large bet I never shall."

  "That might do for Mrs. Ratcliffe," she said. "But I'll tell you. I think she might keep quiet about a murder, but there would have to be a reason that mattered to herself overwhelmingly. That's all."

  He was not sure whether the last two words meant that that was all that she could tell him, or whether it was an indication that pumping was to cease; but she had given him food for thought, and he was quiet until they ran into Victoria. "Where are you living?" he asked. "Not at the hospital?"

  "No; I'm staying at my club in Cavendish Square."

  He accompanied her there against her wish, and said good night on the doorstep, since she would not be persuaded to dine with him.

  "You have some days of holiday yet," he said, with kindly intention. "How are you going to fill them in?"

  "In the first place, I'm going to see my aunt. I have come to the conclusion that the evils one knows are less dreadful than the evils one doesn't know."

  But the inspector caught the glint of the hall light on her teeth, and went away feeling less a martyr to injustice than he had for some hours past.

  17 — Solution

  Grant was disconsolate. His radiance was dimmed as the Yard had never known it dimmed. He even snapped at the faithful Williams, and only the surprised hurt on that bland pink face recalled him to himself for a little. Mrs. Field blamed it unconditionally on the Scots: their food, their ways, their climate, and their country; and said dramatically to her husband, after the manner of a childish arithmetic, "If four days in a country like that makes him like this, what would a month do?" That was on the occasion when she was exhibiting to her better half the torn and muddy tweeds that Grant had brought back with him from his foray in the hills; but she made no secret of her beliefs and her prejudices, and Grant suffered her as mildly as his worried soul would permit. Back in the everyday routine and clearing-up arrears of work he would stop and ask himself, What had he left undone? What possible avenue of exploration had he left untravelled? He tried deliberately to stop himself from further questioning, to accept the general theory that the police case was too good to be other than true, to subscribe to Barker's opinion that he had «nerves» and needed a holiday. But it was no use. The feeling that there was some-thing wrong somewhere always flowed back the minute he stopped bullying himself. If anything, the conviction grew as the slow, unproductive, tedious days passed, and he would go back in his mind to that first day, little more than a fortnight ago, when he had viewed an unknown body, and go over the case again from there. Had he missed a point somewhere? There was the knife that had proved so barren a clue an individual thing to be so unproductive. Yet no one had claimed to have seen or owned one like it. All it had done was to provide the scar on the murderer's hand — a piece of evidence conclusive only when allied with much more.

  There was this, there was that, there was the other, but all of them stood the strain of pulling apart, and remained in their separate entities what they had been in the pat-tern of the whole; and Grant was left, as before, with the belief, so strong and so un-reasonable that it amounted to superstition, that the monogrammed brooch in Sorrell's pocket was the key to the whole mystery; that it was shouting its tale at them, only they could not hear. It lay in his desk with the knife now, and the consciousness of it was with him continually. When he had nothing to do for the moment he would take both it and the knife from the drawer and sit there "mooning over them," as the sympathetic Williams reported to his subordinate. They were becoming a fetish with him. There was some connexion between the two — between the offering that Sorrell had made to a woman and the knife that had killed him. He felt that as strongly and distinctly as he felt the sunlight that warmed his hands as he played with the objects on the table. And yet both his own reason and that of others laughed at the idea. What had the brooch to do with the affair! Gerald Lamont had killed Sorrell with a small Italian knife — his grandmother had been Italian, and if he hadn't inherited the knife he had probably inherited the will to use one — after a quarrel in a queue. On his own showing he resented Sorrell's departure from Britain, leaving him jobless and more or less penniless. Sorrell had had the money to pay for his passage, but had not offered it. And on his own showing he had not known that Sorrell had given him any money until two days after the murder. Where did a pearl monogrammed brooch come into that? The little silver-and-enamel knife was a pièce de résistance in the case — a prince of exhibits. It would be photographed, paragraphed, and discussed in every house in England, and the little crack on its boss handle would hang a man. And all the time that pearl brooch, which would not appear in the case at all, gl
owed a silent and complete refutal of all their puny theories.

  It was utterly ridiculous. Grant hated the sight of the thing, and yet he went back again and again to it as a man does to a mocking mistress. He tried "shutting his eyes" — his favourite resort in a difficulty — and either distracted himself with amusement, or buried himself in work for long periods at a time; but always when he opened his eyes again it was the brooch he saw. That had never happened before — that he had opened his eyes again and seen no new angle in a case. It was borne in on him that either he was obsessed or he had reached the last angle in the case — the vital one — and that it told him nothing; it was there for him to read, and he did not know how to.

  Suppose, he would think, just suppose that the murder was an emissary's work after all, and not the result of the quarrel in the queue, what type of person would an emissary be? Not one of those nearest the murdered man, certainly. But no one else had had access to the queue except the policeman, the doorkeeper, and Lamont. Or had there been another who had made his escape unnoticed? Raoul Legarde had gone, and Lamont had gone, without attracting notice — the one because the queue was self-absorbed, the other because it was absorbed in the murder. Was it possible that there had been still another? He reminded himself how indifferent to their surroundings the various witnesses had proved them-selves to have been. Not one of them had been able to give an adequate account of the people who had stood next them, with the exception of Raoul Legarde, who was more critical because he was a stranger to En-gland, and an English crowd was still an entertainment to him. To the others it had been no entertainment, and they had not bothered about their neighbours; they had had all the self-absorption of Londoners and habitual queue-goers. It was still possible that some one else had got away without being remembered. And if that were so, what chance was there now of his being captured? What possible clue had they?

  The brooch, said his other self, the brooch!

  On Friday, Lamont was again brought up at Gowbridge Police Court, and his counsel protested, as Grant had foreseen, about the statement that had been taken from Lamont. Grant had expected him to protest as a matter of form, but it was evident that he was protesting from conviction. He had become aware of the use the Crown might make of Lamont's admission that he had resented Sorrell's departure. The magistrate said that he could see no evidence of coercion on the part of the police. The prisoner had been evidently not only willing but anxious to make a statement. But Lamont's counsel pointed out that his client had been in no mental or physical condition to make such an important statement. He was barely recovered from a bad concussion. He was not in a fit state to…

  And so the wordy, futile argument went on, and the two people whom it most concerned — Grant and Lamont — sat bored and weary, waiting till the spate of words should cease and they could depart, the one to his cell and the other to his work and his ever-present problem. Miss Dinmont was in the now crowded court again, and this time there was no doubt of her graciousness to Grant. Her interview with her aunt seemed to have had the strange effect of softening her in every way, and Grant, remembering Mrs. Everett, marvelled. It was only on the way back to the Yard that it occurred to him that her aunt's belief in Lamont had bred in her a hope that had nothing to do with reason or logic, and that it was the hope that had given her that queer unusual charm that was almost radiance. And Grant swore. She might hope that after all Lamont was not guilty, but what would that avail her if he were convicted?

  That pearl brooch! What was it saying? Who had had access to the queue? He flung himself into his room and glared out of the window. He would give up the service. He wasn't fit for it. He kept seeing difficulties where others saw none. It was pure proof of incompetence. How Barker must be laughing at him! Well, let him. Barker had about as much imagination as a paving-stone. But then he, Grant, had too much of it for the police force. He would resign. There would be at least two people who would be grateful to him — the two men who hankered most after his job. As for this case, he would think no more of it.

  And even as he made the resolution he turned from the window to take the brooch from its drawer yet once again, but was interrupted by the entrance of Barker.

  "Well," said his chief, "I hear they're making a fuss about the statement."

  "Yes."

  "What good do they think that's going to do them?"

  "Don't know. Principle, I suppose. And they see a few admissions that we could make use of, I think."

  "Oh, well, let them wriggle," Barker said. "They can't wriggle out of the evidence. Statement or no statement, we've got them on toast. Still worrying over the business?"

  "No; I've given it up. After this I'm going to believe what I see and know, and not what I feel."

  "Splendid!" said Barker. "You keep a rein on your imagination, Grant, and you'll be a great man some day. Once in five years is often enough to have a flair. If you limit it to that, it's likely to be an asset." And he grinned good-naturedly at his subordinate.

  A constable appeared in the doorway, and said to Grant, "A lady to see you, sir."

  "Who is it?"

  "She wouldn't give her name, but she said it was very important."

  "All right. Show her in."

  Barker made a movement as if to go, but subsided again, and there was silence while the two men waited for the new arrival. Barker was lounging slightly in front of Grant's desk, and Grant was behind it, his left hand caressing the handle of the drawer that sheltered the brooch. Then the door opened, and the constable ushered in the visitor with an official repetition of his announcement, "A lady to see you, sir."

  It was the fat woman from the queue.

  "Good afternoon, Mrs. - Wallis." Grant recalled her name with an effort; he had not seen her since the inquest. "What can I do for you?"

  "Good afternoon, Inspector," she said, in her rampant Cockney. "I came because I think this business has gone far enough. I killed Bert Sorrell, and I'm not going to let any one suffer for it if I can 'elp it."

  "You — " said Grant, and stopped, staring at her fat shining face, beady eyes, tight black satin coat, and black satin toque.

  Barker glanced at his subordinate and, seeing him utterly at a loss — really, Grant must have a holiday — he took command of the situation. "Sit down, Mrs. - Wallis," he said kindly. "You've been thinking too much about this affair, haven't you?" He brought forward a chair and settled her into it rather as though she had come to consult him about heartburn. "It isn't good to brood over nasty things like murders. What makes you think you killed Sorrell?"

  "I don't think," she said rather tartly. "I didn't make any doubt about it, did I? A very good job it was."

  "Well, well," said Barker indulgently, "let us say how do we know you did it?"

  "How do you know?" she repeated. "What do you mean? You didn't know till now, but now I've told you and you know."

  "But, you know, just because you say you've done it is no reason that we should believe you have," Barker said.

  "Not believe me!" she said, her voice rising. "Do people usually come and con-fess to murdering people when they didn't?"

  "Oh, quite often," said Barker.

  She sat in surprised silence, her bright, expressionless dark eyes darting swiftly from one face to the other. Barker raised a comical eyebrow at the still silent Grant, but Grant hardly noticed him. He came from behind the desk as if loosed suddenly from a spell that had held him motionless, and came up to the woman.

  "Mrs. Wallis," he said, "will you take off your gloves a moment?"

  "Come now, that's a bit more sensible," she said, as she drew off her black cotton gloves. "I know what you're looking for, but it's nearly gone now."

  She held out her left hand, gloveless, to him. On the side of her first finger, healed but still visible in the rough skin of her hard-worked hand, was the mark of a jagged scar. Grant expelled a long breath, and Barker came over and bent to examine the woman's hand.

  "But, Mrs. Wallis," he
said, "why should you want to kill Sorrell?"

  "Never you mind," she said. "I killed 'im, and that's enough."

  "I'm afraid it isn't," Barker said. "The fact that you have a small scar on your finger is no proof at all that you had anything to do with Sorrell's death."

  "But I tell you I killed 'im!" she said. "Why won't you believe me? I killed 'im with the little knife my 'usband brought home from Spain."

  "So you say, but we have no proof that what you say is true."

  She stared hostilely at them both. "You'd think you weren't police at all to listen to you," she remarked. "If it weren't for that young man you've got, I'd walk home right now. I never knew such fools. What more do you want when I've confessed?"

  "Oh, quite a lot more," Barker said, as Grant was still silent. "For instance, how could you have killed Sorrell when you were in front of him in the queue?"

  "I wasn't in front of 'im. I was standing behind 'im all the time till the queue began to move up tight. Then I stuck the knife in and after a little I shoved in front, keepin' close to 'im all the time so he shouldn't fall."

  This time Barker dropped his complaisant manner and looked at her keenly. "And what was Sorrell to you that you should stick a knife in him?" he asked.