Capital Crimes: London Mysteries

by Martin Edwards

  It redounds to Louis Carlyle’s credit as an inquiry agent that in an exacting world no serious voice ever accused him of taking unearned money; for so long as there was anything to be learned he plied his novel client with questions, explored surmises and bestowed advice. Even when they had come to the end of useful conversation and the prolific notebook had been closed Carlyle lingered on the topic.

  ‘It’s an abnormal situation, Mr Poleash, and full of professional interest. I shall keep it in mind, you may be sure, and if anything further occurs to me, why, I will let you know.’

  ‘Please don’t write on any account,’ begged Mr Poleash with sudden earnestness. ‘In fact, I’d ask you to put a line to that effect across my address. You see, I’m liable to be out at any post time, and if my wife should happen to get curious about a strange letter, why, that, in the language of the kerb, would blow the gaff.’

  ‘I see,’ assented Mr Carlyle. ‘Very well; it shall be just as you like.’

  ‘And if I can settle with you now,’ continued Poleash; ‘for of course I don’t want to have an account sent. Then some day—say next week—I might look in to report and to hear if you have anything further to suggest.’

  ‘You might, in the meanwhile, consider the most practical course—that of having your man kept under observation.’

  ‘I will,’ promised the other. ‘But so far I’m all in favour of letting sleeping dogs lie.’

  Not unnaturally Mr Carlyle had heard that line before and had countered it.

  ‘True, but it is as well to know when they wake up again,’ he replied. With just the necessary touch of dignity and graciousness he named and received the single guinea at which he assessed the interview and began to conduct Mr Poleash towards the door—not the one by which he had entered from the waiting-room but another leading directly down into the street. ‘Have you lost something?’

  ‘Only my hat and things—I left them in your ante-room.’ He held up his gloved left hand as though it required a word of explanation. ‘I keep this on because I am short of a finger, and I’ve noticed that some people don’t like to see it.’

  ‘We’ll go out that way instead then—it’s all the same,’ remarked Carlyle, as he crossed to the other door.

  Two later callers were sitting in the waiting-room, and at the sight of them Mr Carlyle’s somewhat cherubic face at once assumed an expression of the heartiest welcome. But beyond an unusually mellifluent ‘Good afternoon!’ he said nothing until his departing client was out of hearing. Names were not paraded in those precincts. With a muttered apology Mr Poleash recovered his belongings from among the illustrated papers and hurried away.

  ‘And why in the world have you been waiting here, Max, instead of sending in to me?’ demanded the hospitable Carlyle with a show of indignation.

  ‘Business,’ replied Mr Carrados tersely. ‘Your business, understand. Your chief minion was eager to blow a message through to you but ‘No,’ I said, ‘we’ll take our proper turn”. Why should I interrupt the Bogus Company Promoter’s confession or cut short the Guilty Husband’s plea?’

  ‘Joking apart, that fellow who just went brought a very remarkable story,’ said Mr Carlyle. ‘I should be glad to know what you would have had to say to him when we have time to go into it.’ (Do not be too ready to condemn the gentleman as an arrant humbug and this a gross breach of confidence: Max Carrados had been appointed Honorary Consultant to the firm, so that what would have otherwise been grave indiscretions were strictly business discussions.)

  ‘In the meantime the suggestion is that you haven’t taken a half-day off lately and that Monday morning is a convenient time.’

  ‘Generous man! What is happening on Monday morning then?’

  ‘Something rather surprising in wireless at the Imperial Salon—ten to twelve-thirty. I know it’s the sort of thing you’ll be interested in, and I have two tickets and want someone fairly intelligent to go with.’

  ‘An ideal chain of circumstances,’ rippled Mr Carlyle. ‘I shall endeavour to earn the price of my seat.’

  ‘I am sure you will succeed,’ retorted Carrados. ‘By the way, it’s free.’

  To a strain of this intellectual horseplay the arrangements for their meeting were made, and that having been the only reason for the call, Mr Carrados departed under Parkinson’s watchful escort. In due course the wireless demonstration took place, but (although an invention then for the first time shown bore no small part in one of the blind man’s subsequent cases) it is unnecessary to accompany them inside the hall, for with the enigma centring in Mr Poleash that event had no connexion. It is only touched upon as bringing Carrados and his friend together at that hour, for as they walked along Pall Mall after lunching Mr Carlyle suddenly gave a whistle of misgiving and surprise and stopped a hurrying newsboy.

  ‘Holloway Flat Tragedy,’ he read from the bill as he investigated sundry pockets for the exact coin. ‘By gad, if that should happen to be—’

  ‘Poleash! My God, it is!’ he exclaimed as soon as his eye had found the paragraph concerned—a mere inch in the ‘Stop Press’ news. ‘Poor beggar! Tshk! Tshk!’—his clicking tongue expressed disapproval and regret. ‘He ought to have known better after what had happened. It was madness. I wonder what he actually did—

  ‘Your remarkable caller of last Thursday, Louis?’

  ‘Yes; but how do you come to know?’

  ‘A trifling indiscretion on his part. With a carelessness that must be rare among your clients I should say, Mr Poleash dropped one of his cards under the table in your writing-room, where the conscientious Parkinson discovered it.’

  ‘Well, the unfortunate chap doesn’t need cards now. Listen, Max.

  NORTH LONDON TRAGEDY

  Early this morning a charwoman going to a flat in Meridon House, Holloway, made a gruesome discovery. Becoming suspicious at the untouched milk and newspapers, she looked into a bedroom and there found the occupier, a Mr Poleash, dead in bed. He had received shocking injuries, and everything points to deliberate murder. Mrs Poleash is understood to be away on a holiday in Devonshire.

  ‘Of course Scotland Yard takes it up now, but I must put my information at their service. They’re devilish lucky, too. I can practically hand over the miscreant to them and they will scoop the credit.’

  ‘I was to hear about that,’ Carrados reminded him. ‘Suppose we walk across to Scotland Yard, and you can tell me on the way.’

  At the corner of Derby Street they encountered two men who had just turned out of the Yard. The elder had the appearance of being a shrewd farmer, showing his likely son the sights of London and keeping a wideawake eye for its notorious pitfalls. To pursue appearances a step farther they might even have been calling to recover the impressive umbrella that the senior carried.

  ‘Beedel,’ dropped Mr Carlyle beneath his breath, but his friend was already smiling recognition.

  ‘The very man,’ said Carrados genially. ‘I’ll wager you can tell us something about the Poleash arrangements, inspector.’

  The two plain-clothes men exchanged amused glances.

  ‘I can tell you this much, Mr Carrados,’ replied Inspector Beedel, in unusually good spirits, ‘my nephew George here is going to do the work and I’m going to look after the bouquets at the finish. We’re on our way there now.’

  ‘Couldn’t be better,’ said the blind man. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind us going up there with you?’

  ‘Very pleased,’ replied Beedel. ‘We were making for the station.’

  ‘You may as well help to fill our taxi,’ suggested Carrados. ‘Mr Carlyle may have something to tell you on the way.’

  On the whole Mr Carlyle would have preferred to make his disclosure to headquarters, but the convenience of the arrangement was not to be denied, and with a keen appreciation of the astonishing piece of luck Beedel and George heard the story of the inquiry age
nt’s client.

  ‘It looks like being simply a matter of finding this girl, if the conditions up there bear out his tale,’ remarked George, between satisfaction at so veritable a clue and a doubt whether he would not have preferred a more complicated case. ‘Did you happen to get her name and address, sir?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Mr Carlyle with a slight aloofness, ‘it did not arise. Poleash was naturally reluctant to bring in the lady more than he need and I did not press him.’

  ‘Makes no odds,’ conceded George generously. ‘Shopgirl—kept company with a foreigner—known as Peter. Even without anything else there ought to be no difficulty in finding her.’

  Sturgrove Road was not deserted, and there was a rapid concentration about the door of Meridon House ‘to see the ’tecs arrive.’ On the whole, public opinion was disappointed in their appearance, but the action of George in looking up at the frontage of the building and then glancing sharply right and left along the road was favourably commented on. The policeman stationed at the outer door admitted them at once.

  A sergeant and a constable of the local division were in possession of No. 12, and the scared daily woman, temporarily sustained by their impression of absolute immobility, was waiting in the kitchen to indicate whatever was required. Greetings on a slightly technical plane passed between the four members of the force.

  ‘Mrs Poleash has been sent for, I suppose?’ asked Mr Carlyle.

  ‘We telephoned from our office to Torquay some hours ago,’ replied the sergeant. ‘They’ll send an officer to the place she’s staying at and break it to her as well as possible. That’s the course we usually follow.’ He took out a weighty presentation watch and considered it. ‘Torquay. I don’t suppose she could be here yet.’

  ‘Not even if she was in first go,’ amplified his subordinate.

  ‘Well,’ suggested George. ‘Suppose we look round?’

  The bedroom was the first spot visited. There was nothing unusual to be seen, apart from the outline of the bed, its secret now hidden beneath a decorous covering—nothing beyond the rather untidy details of the occupant’s daily round. All these would in due course receive a careful scrutiny, but at the moment one point drew every eye.

  ‘Hold one another’s hands,’ advised the sergeant, as he prepared to turn down the sheet. The hovering charwoman gave a scream and fled.

  ‘That’s a wild beast been at work,’ said Inspector Beedel, coolly drawing nearer to appreciate the details.

  ‘My word, yes!’ agreed George, following a little reluctantly.

  ‘Shocking! Shocking!’ Mr Carlyle made no pretence about turning away.

  ‘Killed at the first blow,’ continued the sergeant, indicating, ‘though it’s not the only one. Then his face slashed about like a fancy loaf till his own mother wouldn’t know him. Something dreadful, isn’t it? Finger gone? Oh, that’s an old affair. What’re you to make of it all?’

  ‘Revenge—revenge and rage and sheer blood-thirstiness,’ summed up Mr Carlyle. ‘Was anything taken?’

  ‘Nothing disturbed so far as we can see, and the old party there’—a comprehensive nod in the direction of the absent charlady—‘says that all the things she knows of seem to be right.’

  ‘What time do they put it at?’ asked Beedel.

  ‘Dr Meadows has been here. Midnight Saturday to early Sunday morning, he said. That agrees with the people at the flat opposite hearing the door locked at about ten on Saturday night and the Sunday morning milk and paper not being touched.’

  ‘Milk-can on the doorstep all day, I suppose?’ suggested someone.

  ‘Yes; people opposite noticed it, but thought nothing of it. They knew Mrs Poleash was going away on Saturday and thought that he might have gone with her. Mrs Jones, she doesn’t come on Sundays, so nothing was found out till this morning.’

  ‘May as well hear what she has to say now,’ said Beedel. ‘No need to keep her about that I know of.’

  ‘Just one minute, please, if you don’t mind,’ put in Mr Carlyle, not so much asking anyone’s permission as directing the affair. The sight of a wardrobe had reminded him of the dead man’s story, and he was now handling the clothes that hung there with keen anticipation. ‘There is something that I really came especially to see. This is his dressing gown, and, yes, by Jupiter, it’s here!’

  He pointed to a clean cut through the material as they gathered round him.

  ‘What’s that?’ inquired the sergeant, looking from one face to another.

  ‘Previous attempt,’ replied Beedel shortly.

  ‘There ought to be a sheet and a bolster case somewhere about,’ continued the eager gentleman, now thoroughly intrigued, and under the impulse of his zeal drawers and cupboards were opened and their contents gingerly displaced.

  ‘Something of the sort here among the shirts,’ announced George.

  ‘Have them out then. Not likely to be any others put away there.’ The hidden things were unfolded and displayed and here also the tragic evidence lay clear before them.

  ‘By gad, you know, I half thought he might have dreamt it until this came,’ confided Mr Carlyle to the room at large. ‘Tshk! Tshk! How on earth the fellow could have gone—’ He remembered the quiet figure lying within earshot and finished with a tolerant shrug.

  ‘Let’s get on,’ said Beedel. These details could very well have waited had been his thought all along.

  ‘I’ll fold the things,’ volunteered Mr Carrados. All the others had satisfied their curiosity by glance or scrutiny and he was free to take his time. He took up the loose bundle in his arms and with the strange impulse towards light that so often moved him he turned away from them and sought the window.

  ‘Now, missis, come along and tell us all about it,’ called out the young constable.

  ‘No,’ interposed the inspector kindly, ‘the poor creature’s upset enough already without bringing her in here again. Stay where you are, Mrs Jones, we’re coming there,’ he announced from the door, and they filed along the skimpy passage into the dingy kitchen. ‘Now can you just tell us quietly what you know about this bad business?’

  Mrs Jones’s testimony, given on the frequently expressed understanding that she was quite prepared to be struck dead at any point of it if she deviated from the strictest line of truth, did not disclose any new feature, while its frequent references to the lives and opinions of friends not concerned in the progress of the drama threatened now and then to stifle the narrative with a surfeit of pronouns. But she was listened to with patience and complimented on her nerve. Mrs Jones sadly shook her antique black bonnet and disclaimed the quality.

  ‘I could do nothing but stand and scream,’ she confessed wistfully, referring to the first dreadful moment at the bedroom door, ‘I stood and screamed three times before I could get myself away. The poor gentleman! What harm was he, for to be done in like that!’

  There was a string of questions from one or another of the company before she was finally dismissed—generally from Beedel or George with Mr Carlyle’s courteously assertive voice intervening once or twice: the Poleashes had few visitors that she had ever seen—she was only there from eight to six—and she had never known of anyone staying with them; no one had knocked at the door for anything on Saturday; she had not noticed anyone whom she could call to mind as ‘a foreigner’ loitering about or at the door recently (a foreign family lived at No. 5, but they were well spoken of); neither Mr nor Mrs Poleash had talked to her of anything uncommon of late—the gentleman was mostly out and ‘she’ wasn’t one of the friendly sort; the couple seemed to get on together ‘as well as most’, and she had never heard a ‘real’ quarrel; Mrs Poleash had gone off for a week (she understood) about noon on Saturday, and Mr Poleash had accompanied her to Paddington (as he had mentioned on his return for tea); she had last seen him at about five o’clock on Saturday, when she left, a little earlier than usual; she
knew nothing of the ashes in the kitchen grate, not having had a fire there for weeks past; the picture post card (passed round) from Mrs Poleash, announcing her arrival at Torquay, she had found on the hall floor together with the Sunday paper; she was to go on just the same while Mrs Poleash was away, coming daily to ‘do up’, and so on; it was a regular arrangement ‘week in and week out’.

  ‘That seems to be about all,’ summed up Inspector Beedel, looking round. ‘We have your address, Mrs Jones, and you’re sure to hear from us about something pretty soon.’

  ‘Before you go,’ said a matter-of-fact voice from the door, ‘do you happen to remember what you were doing last Thursday afternoon?’ It was the first question that Mr Carrados had put, and they had scarcely noticed whether he had re-joined them yet or not.

  ‘Last Thursday afternoon?’ repeated Mrs Jones helplessly. ‘Oh, Lor’, sir, my head’s in that whirl—’

  ‘Yes, but it isn’t so difficult if you think—early closing day, you know.’

  This stimulus proved effective and the charwoman remembered. She had something special to remember by. On Thursday morning Mrs Poleash has passed on to her a single ticket for that afternoon’s performance at the Parkhurst Theatre, and told her that she could go after she had washed up the dinner things.

  ‘So that you were not here at all on Thursday afternoon? Just one more thing, Mrs Jones. Sooner or later a photograph of your master will be wanted. Is there one anywhere about?’

  ‘The only one I know of stands on the sideboard in the little room. There may be others put away, but not being what you might call curious sir—’

  ‘I’m sure you’re not,’ agreed Carrados. ‘Now, as you go you shall point it out to us so that there can be no mistake.’

  ‘You couldn’t make no mistake because there’s only that and one of her stands there,’ explained Mrs Jones, but she proceeded to comply. ‘There it—’

  ‘Yes?’ said the blind man, close upon her.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, indeed. I must have made a mistake—’