Jenny was alone. She was too stunned to think. There was still a roaring in her ears, shooting lights before her eyes. In a vague way, she knew that some hitch had occurred in the plan. The police were here—yet they had let their prey escape.
She put on her hat, straightened her hair. Very slowly she walked down the stairs. There was no sign of Duncan or of his men.
As she reached the hall, a door opened and a white puffed face looked at her. Had she quickened her pace or shown the least sign of fear she would never have left that place alive. Her very nonchalance proved her salvation as she unbarred the door with the deliberation bred of custom.
The street was deserted, save for an empty taxi which she hailed.
‘Where to, miss?’ asked the driver.
Involuntarily she glanced back at the drab house, squeezed into its strait-waistcoat of grimed bricks. She had a momentary vision of a white blurred face flattened against the glass. At the sight, realisation swept over her in wave upon wave of sick terror.
There had been no guards. She had taken every step of that perilous journey—alone.
Her very terror sharpened her wits to action. If her eyesight had not deceived her, the killer had already discovered that the alarm was false. It was obvious that he would not run the risk of remaining in his present quarters. But it was possible that he might not anticipate a lightning swoop; there was nothing to connect a raw country girl with a preconcerted alliance with a Force.
‘The nearest telephone-office,’ she panted. ‘Quick.’
A few minutes later, Duncan was electrified by Jenny’s voice gasping down the wire.
‘He’s at 17 Jamaica Square, SE. No time to lose. He’ll go out through the roof…Quick, quick.’
‘Right. Jenny, where’ll you be?’
‘At your house. I mean, Scot—Quick.’
As the taxi bore Jenny swiftly away from the dun outskirts, a shrivelled hag pattered into the upper room of that drab house. Taking no notice of its raging occupant, she approached the parrot’s cage.
‘Talk for mother, dearie.’
She held out a bit of dirty sugar. As she whistled, the parrot opened its eyes.
‘Perlice.’
***
It was more than two hours later when Duncan entered his private room at Scotland Yard.
His eyes sought Jenny.
A little wan, but otherwise none the worse for her adventure, she presided over a teapot which had been provided by the resourceful Yates. The Great Dane—unmindful of a little incident of a letter-weight—accepted her biscuits and caresses with deep sighs of protest.
Yates sprang up eagerly.
‘Did the cop come off, chief?’
Duncan nodded twice—the second time towards the door, in dismissal.
Jenny looked at him in some alarm when they were alone together. There was little trace left of the machine-made martinet of the Yard. The lines in his face appeared freshly re-tooled and there were dark pouches under his eyes.
‘Jenny,’ he said slowly, ‘I’ve—sweated—blood.’
‘Oh, was he so very difficult to capture? Did he fight?’
‘Who? That rat? He ran into our net just as he was about to bolt. He’ll lose his footing all right. No.’
‘Then why are you—’
‘You.’
Jenny threw him a swift glance. She had just been half-murdered after a short course of semi-starvation, but she commanded the situation like a lion tamer.
‘Sit down,’ she said, ‘and don’t say one word until you’ve drunk this.’
He started to gulp obediently and then knocked over his cup.
‘Jenny, you don’t know the hell I’ve been through. You don’t understand what you ran into. That man—’
‘He was a murderer, of course. I knew that all along.’
‘But you were in deadliest peril—’
‘I wasn’t frightened, so it didn’t matter. I knew I could trust you.’
‘Don’t Jenny. Don’t turn the knife. I failed you. There was a ghastly blunder.’
‘But it was all right, for it ended beautifully. You see, something told me to trust you. I always know.’
During his career, Duncan had known cases of love at first sight. So, although he could not rule them out, he always argued along Jenny’s lines.
Those things did not happen to him.
He realised now that it had happened to him—cautious Scot though he was.
‘Jenny,’ he said, ‘it strikes me that I want someone to watch me.’
‘I’m quite sure you do. Have I won the reward?’
His rapture was dashed.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m so glad. I’m rich.’ She smiled happily. ‘So this can’t be pity for me.’
‘Pity? Oh, Jenny—’
Click. The mouse-trap was set for the confirmed bachelor with the right bait.
A young and friendless girl—homely and blossom-sweet.
Cheese.
You Can’t Hang Twice
Anthony Gilbert
Anthony Gilbert was, like Anne Meredith and J. Kilmeny Keith, a pen name used by Lucy Beatrice Malleson (1899–1973). She was a Londoner by birth, and when her family ran into financial difficulties, she became a shorthand typist to earn money while she struggled to establish herself as an author. Success did not come quickly or easily, but her career blossomed in the 1930s, when she was elected to the prestigious Detection Club, and created the solicitor and amateur detective Arthur Crook, who subsequently appeared in most of her books.
Gilbert’s friend and fellow Detection Club member, the solicitor Michael Gilbert, wrote in her obituary for The Times that Crook ‘behaved in a way which befitted his name and would not have been approved by the Law Society’, whilst noting that his relations with the police were excellent. Crook’s blend of roguishness and remorselessness is to the fore in this atmospheric story, which was a prize winner in a contest organised by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
***
The mist that had been creeping up from the river during the early afternoon had thickened into a grey blanket of fog by twilight, and by the time Big Ben was striking nine and people all over England were turning on their radio sets for the news, it was so dense that Arthur Crook, opening the window of his office at 123 Bloomsbury Street and peering out, felt that he was poised over chaos. Not a light, not an outline, was visible; below him, the darkness was like a pit. Only his sharp ears caught, faint and far away, the uncertain footfall of a benighted pedestrian and the muffled hooting of a motorist ill-advised enough to be caught abroad by the weather.
‘An ugly night,’ reflected Arthur Crook, staring out over the invisible city. ‘As bad a night as I remember.’ He shut the window down. ‘Still,’ he added, turning back to the desk where he had been working for the past twelve hours, ‘it all makes for employment. Fogs mean work for the doctor, for the ambulance driver, for the police and the mortician, for the daring thief and the born wrong ’un.’
Yes, and work, too, for men like Arthur Crook, who catered specially for the lawless and the reckless and who was known in two continents as the Criminals’ Hope and the Judges’ Despair.
And even as these thoughts passed through his mind, the driver was waiting, unaware of what the night was to hold, the victim crept out under cover of darkness from the rabbit-hutch-cum-bath that he called his flat, and his enemy watched unseen but close at hand.
In his office, Mr Crook’s telephone began to ring.
The voice at the other end of the line seemed a long way off, as though that also were muffled by the fog, but Crook, whose knowledge of men was wide and who knew them in all moods, realized that the fellow was ridden by fear.
‘Honest, he shuddered so he nearly shook me off the line,’ he told Bill Parsons next day. �
�It’s a wonder a chap like that hasn’t died of swallowing his own teeth.’
‘Mr Crook,’ whispered the voice and he heard the pennies fall as the speaker pressed Button A. ‘I was afraid it would be too late to find you…’
‘When I join the forty-hour-a-week campaign I’ll let the world know,’ said Crook affably. ‘I’m one of those chaps you read about. Time doesn’t mean a thing to me. And in a fog like this it might just as well be nine o’clock in the morning as nine o’clock at night.’
‘It’s the fog that makes it possible for me to call you at all,’ said the voice mysteriously. ‘You see, in the dark, one hopes he isn’t watching.’
Hell, thought Crook disappointedly. Just another case of persecution mania, but he said patiently enough, ‘What is it? Someone on your tail?’
His correspondent seemed sensitive to his change of mood. ‘You think I’m imagining it? I wish to Heaven I were. But it’s not just that I’m convinced I’m being followed. Already he’s warned me three times. The last time was to-night.’
‘How does he warn you?’
‘He rings up my flat and each time he says the same thing. ‘Is that you, Smyth? Remember—silence is golden’; and then he rings off again.’
‘On my Sam,’ exclaimed Crook, ‘I’ve heard of better gags at a kids’ party. Who is your joking friend?’
‘I don’t know his name,’ said the voice, and now it sounded further away than ever, ‘but—he’s the man who strangled Isobel Baldry.’
Everyone knows about quick-change artists, how they come on to the stage in a cutaway coat and polished boots, bow, go off and before you can draw your breath they’re back in tinsel tights and tinfoil halo. You can’t think how it can be done in the time, but no quick-change artist was quicker than Mr Crook when he heard that. He became a totally different person in the space of a second.
‘Well, now we are going places,’ he said, and his voice was as warm as a fire that’s just been switched on. ‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Smyth.’
‘If that’s the way you want it…’
‘I don’t. I’d have liked a more distinguished name. I did the best I could spelling it with a Y, but it hasn’t helped much. I was one of the guests at the party that night. You don’t remember, of course. I’m not the sort of man people do remember. She didn’t. When I came to her house that night she thought I’d come to check the meter or something. She’d never expected me to turn up. She’d just said, ‘You must come in one evening. I’m always at home on Fridays,’ and I thought she just meant two or three people at most.…’
‘Tête-à-tête with a tigress,’ said Crook. ‘What are you, anyhow? A lion-tamer?’
‘I work for a legal firm called Wilson, Wilson and Wilson. I don’t know if it was always like that on Fridays, but the house seemed full of people when I arrived and—they were all the wrong people, wrong for me, I mean. They were quite young and most of them were either just demobilized or were waiting to come out. Even the doctor had been in the Air Force. They all stared at me as if I had got out of a cage. I heard one say, ‘He looks as if he had been born in a bowler hat and striped p-pants.’ They just thought I was a joke.’
And not much of one at that, thought Mr Crook unsympathetically.
‘But as it happens, the joke’s on them,’ continued the voice, rising suddenly. ‘Because I’m the only one who knows that Tom Merlin isn’t guilty.’
‘Well, I know,’ Mr Crook offered mildly, ‘because I’m defendin’ him, and I only work for the innocent. And the young lady knows or she wouldn’t have hauled me into this—the young lady he’s going to marry, I mean. And, of course, the real murderer knows. So that makes four of us. Quite a team, in fact. Suppose you tell us how you know?’
‘Because I was behind the curtain when he came out of the Turret Room. He passed me so close I could have touched him, though, of course, I couldn’t see him because the whole house was dark, because of this game they were playing, the one called Murder. I didn’t know then that a crime had been committed, but when the truth came out I realized he must have come out of the room where she was, because there was no other place he could have come from.’
‘Look,’ said Mr Crook. ‘Just suppose I’ve never heard this story before.’ And probably he hadn’t heard this one, he reflected. ‘Start from page one and just go through to the end. For one thing, why were you behind the curtain?’
‘I was hiding—not because of the game, but because I—oh, I was so miserable. I ought never to have gone. It wasn’t my kind of party. No one paid any attention to me except to laugh when I did anything wrong. If it hadn’t been for Mr Merlin, I wouldn’t even have had a drink. And he was just sorry for me. I heard him say to the doctor, ‘Isobel ought to remember everyone’s human,’ and the doctor—Dr Dunn—said, ‘It’s a bit late in the day to expect that.”’
‘Sounds a dandy party,’ said Crook.
‘It was—terrible. I couldn’t understand why all the men seemed to be in love with her. But they were. She wasn’t specially good-looking, but they behaved as though there was something about her that made everyone else unimportant.’
Crook nodded over the head of the telephone. That was the dead woman’s reputation. A courtesan manquée—that’s how the Press had described her. Born in the right period, she’d have been a riot. At it was, she didn’t do so badly, even in 1945.
‘It had been bad enough before,’ the voice went on. ‘We’d had charades, and of course I’m no good at that sort of thing. The others were splendid. One or two of them were real actors on the stage, and even the others seemed to have done amateur theatricals half their lives. And how they laughed at me—till they got bored because I was so stupid. They stopped after a time, though I offered to drop out and just be audience; and then I wanted to go back, but Miss Baldry said how could I when she was three miles from a station and no one else was going yet? I could get a lift later. Murder was just as bad as the rest, worse in a way, because it was dark, and you never knew who you might bump into. I bumped right into her and Tom Merlin once. He was telling her she better be careful, one of these days she’d get her neck broken, and she laughed and said, ‘Would you like to do it, Tom?’ And then she laughed still more and asked him if he was still thinking of that dreary little number—that’s what she called her—he’d once thought he might marry. And asked him why he didn’t go back, if he wanted to? It was most uncomfortable. I got away and found a window on to the flat roof, what they call the leads. I thought I’d stay there till the game was over. But I couldn’t rest even there, because after a minute Mr Merlin came out in a terrible state, and I was afraid of being seen, so I crept round in the shadows and came into the house through another window. And that’s how I found myself in the Turret Room.’
‘Quite the little Lord Fauntleroy touch,’ observed Crook admiringly. ‘Well?’
‘Though, of course, all the lights were out, the moon was quite bright and I could see the blue screen and I heard a sound and I guessed Miss Baldry was hidden there. For a minute I thought I’d go across and find her and win the game, but another second and I realized that she wasn’t alone, there was someone—a man—with her.’
‘But you don’t know who?’
‘No.’
‘Tough,’ said Crook. ‘Having a good time, were they?’
‘I don’t know about a good time. I think the fact is everyone had been drinking rather freely, and they were getting excited, and I never liked scenes—I haven’t a very strong stomach, I’m afraid—so I thought I’d get out. They were so much engrossed in one another—‘You have it coming to you, Isobel’—I heard him say. I got out without them hearing me—I did fire-watching, you know, and one learns to move quietly.’
‘Quite right,’ assented Crook. ‘No sense startling a bomb. Well?’
‘I went down a little flight of stairs and
on to a landing, and I thought I heard feet coming up, so I got behind the curtain. I was terrified someone would discover me, but the feet went down again and I could hear whispers and laughter—everything you’d expect at a party. They were all enjoying themselves except me.’
‘And Isobel, of course,’ suggested Crook.
‘She had been—till then. Well, I hadn’t been behind the curtain for very long when the door of the Turret Room shut very gently, and someone came creeping down. He stopped quite close to me as if he were leaning over the staircase making sure no one would see him come down. I scarcely dared breathe—though, of course, I didn’t know then there had been a murder—and after a minute I heard him go down. The next thing I heard was someone coming up, quickly, and going up the stairs and into the Turret Room. I was just getting ready to come out when I heard a man calling, ‘Norman! Norman! For Pete’s sake…’ and Dr Dunn—he was the R.A.F. doctor, but of course, you know that—called out, ‘I’m coming. Where are you?’ And the first man—it was Andrew Tatham, the actor, who came out of the Army after Dunkirk—said, ‘Keep the women out. An appalling thing’s happened.”’
‘And, of course, the women came surgin’ up like the sea washin’ round Canute’s feet?’
‘A lot of people came up, and I came out from my hiding-place and joined them, but the door of the Turret Room was shut, and after a minute Mr Tatham came out and said, ‘We’d better all go down. There’s been an accident.’ And Dr Dunn joined him and said, ‘What’s the use of telling them that? They’ll have to know the truth. Isobel’s been murdered, and we’re all in a spot.”’
‘And when did it strike you that you had something to tell the police?’ inquired Crook drily.
‘Not straight away. I—I was very shocked myself. Everyone began to try and remember where they’d been, but, of course, in the dark, no one could really prove anything. I said I was behind that curtain. I wasn’t really playing, but no one listened. I might have been the invisible man. And then one of the girls said, ‘Where’s Tom?’ and Mr Tatham said, ‘That’s queer. Hope to Heaven he hasn’t been murdered, too.’ But he hadn’t, of course. He joined us after a minute and said, ‘A good time being had by all?’ and one of the girls, the one they call Phœbe, went into hysterics. Then Mr Tatham said, ‘Where on earth have you been?’ and he said he was on the leads. He wasn’t playing either. They all looked either surprised or—a bit disbelieving, and Dr Dunn said, ‘But if you were on the leads you must have heard something,’ and he said, ‘Only the usual row. Why? Have we had a murder?’ And Mr Tatham said, ‘Stop it, you fool.’ And then he began to stare at all of us, and said, ‘Tell me, what is it? Why are you looking like that?’ So then they told him. Some of them seemed to think he must have heard noises, but Dr Dunn said that if whoever was responsible knew his onions there needn’t be enough noise to attract a man at the farther end of the flat roof, particularly as he’d expect to hear a good deal of movement and muttering and so on.’
Capital Crimes: London Mysteries Page 36
