‘Look out for Gwen,’ gasped French as he dragged himself over to where Molly Moran lay in a motionless heap against the deckhouse wall.
Carter locked the cabin door, then turned to help with the unconscious girl. They stretched her out on the deck and bathed her face and hands.
‘Only stunned, I think,’ French went on hoarsely. ‘I suppose you realise, Carter, that if she hadn’t been such a plucked one, you and I would be down in Davy Jones’ locker now. You owe your life to her, man, and so do I.’
‘I didn’t see just what happened. It was all over and we were scrapping round before I knew where I was.’
‘It’s clear enough what happened. They had locked her in the cabin and when Gwen went to start the engine she didn’t wait to close the door. Molly dashed out and knocked up this beauty’s hand as he was firing. It was a close thing, Carter. I felt a bullet pass my head. Ah, there. Thank God for that!’
Molly had opened her eyes and was making a pathetic attempt to smile. At sight of it, French forgot himself in the most lamentable manner. Fortunately, no one who mattered was there to see his lapse. French—alas that it must be recorded!—caught the girl up in his arms and implanted not one but two hearty kisses on her mouth.
‘My word, Molly, but you’re the goods!’ he declared in rather shaky tones. ‘If I was about a hundred years younger, and there was no Mrs French, you’d be listening to a proposal of matrimony. You’re really nothing the worse, child?’
And the abandoned creature, instead of indignantly protesting against his conduct and demanding a commission of inquiry into the whole circumstances, smiled up into his face and agreed that, everything considered, she was really very well indeed.
19
Conclusion
Little more remains to be told.
When Gwen Lestrange—to give her the name by which she had been known to French—she was really Mrs James Sibley—saw from the cabin the turn affairs had taken, she surrendered at discretion. It appeared that there were no other members of the gang, and before morning all four prisoners were safely lodged in the cells.
With the additional knowledge he now possessed, French immediately began a further inquiry into their misdeeds and before long the entire details of the coining scheme were revealed.
It seemed that Jim Sibley had long been convinced as to the possibility of profitably counterfeiting silver coins. Even with these composed of nearly pure silver, he believed the thing could be done, but the passing of the Act of 1920, reducing the proportion of pure silver to 50 per cent, and the subsequent fall in the price of silver, left no doubt whatever in his mind. When, therefore, he found himself dismissed from the Mint, it had occurred to him that an auspicious time had arrived to test the truth of his convictions.
He was up, however, against one overwhelming difficulty. He had no capital, and the inception of his scheme required what was to him quite a big sum. For a time his plans hung fire and then he saw his way.
From some of his dubious acquaintances, he had heard from time to time of a Mr Curtice Welland, or as he then called himself, Hervey Westinghouse. Welland, to give him the name he afterwards took, was looked upon by the fraternity of the underworld as an example of a strikingly successful career. He was reported to live by blackmail, and it was hinted that on different occasions he had paid large sums for ‘jobs,’ mostly the burglary of some well-known person’s house for letters of a profitable type. Sibley came to the conclusion that if Welland could be interested in his scheme, the necessary capital would materialise. He introduced himself, sounded the other, and to make a long story short, the firm of Sibley, Sibley & Welland came into being.
When they came to work out the details they found that a fourth member would be required. Here again Welland filled the breach. In his toils was a man called Webster, afterwards ‘Style.’ Owing to an irregularity in connection with the signature of a cheque, Style had handed over his freedom to Welland and he was now told what he must do. Unwillingly Style came in and the quartet started work.
The necessary machines were ordered to be sent to certain ports in the names of various foreign medal making firms, to be kept till called for. There Style, in the guise of an emissary from the foreign firms, obtained them, ostensibly to arrange for their shipment. In reality he ran them in his car to the house near Guildford, which in the meantime had been rented by the Sibleys.
Some means of buying silver without arousing suspicion in the trade being an essential, the silversmiths’ works were purchased, Style becoming the ‘manager.’ All the members of the staff who showed any intelligence were dispensed with, enough being retained merely to keep the place open. Style bought the silver in the name of Theobald & Grudgin and secretly transferred to his garage what Sibley required, bringing it home to Guildford in the car.
The guise of an author enabled Sibley to withdraw himself during long periods on each day, and his wife helped him with the manufacture of the coins. It was considered unsafe for either of these two or Style to take part in their distribution, so this was undertaken by Welland in the way French had already discovered.
Every morning and night, while passing along a quiet stretch of by road, Style changed the number of his car and slightly altered his appearance by putting in a different set of false teeth, brushing his hair and moustache differently and putting on glasses and a different shaped hat. Because of this, and also of the fact that in his earlier circular, French had described the grey car used by Welland instead of Style’s green vehicle, he succeeded in avoiding recognition.
It was part of Style’s duty to spend a good part of his time in shadowing the four box office girls whom they had made their dupes. French’s inquiries were thus early known to the gang. Welland instantly saw through the trick of the broken window and this convinced the gang that they were in dangerous waters. The manufacture of coins was suspended, while Sibley and his wife, both disguised, shadowed the girls. French’s interview with Molly in the Charing Cross Gardens thus became known to them and they saw that they were on the eve of discovery. At once a message was got through to Style to supply Welland with ‘good’ coins for the girls. Style kept a supply in his safe for this purpose, and he passed good bundles to Welland, replacing them with the four faked lots he had brought to town. It was in this way that the coins obtained by French from Molly proved to be good, while those which he found in Style’s safe were faked.
The eventuality which the quartet found themselves up against they had long foreseen and provided against. Their idea was that if England should get too hot to hold them, they would transfer their activities to France. Welland had therefore bought the launch, storing it at Ryde. They were determined, however, not to go without their plant, and preparations for the removal of this were in hand when the whole situation was altered by Molly’s recognition of Style at the silversmiths’.
Style instantly recognised that if Molly were allowed to see French again they were done for. French would get on his trail and would find the house at Guildford before the plant had been got away. He therefore decided to kidnap her, so as to gain the necessary time for this operation.
The question of whether she should not be murdered like those of her predecessors who had shown a desire to communicate with Scotland Yard was carefully considered, and her life was spared as a sort of forlorn hope. If by some unlikely chance French should discover their flight before they got clear away, Molly was to be exhibited and French was to be told that if he attempted to prevent their escape she should be shot then and there in cold blood. They thought this might make him hesitate sufficiently to enable them to effect their purpose.
By the evening of the day on which Molly was kidnapped, all the preparations for the flight were complete, and if the gang had then bolted, in all probability they would have got clear away. But an unexpected hitch at the last minute delayed them for two days and led to their undoing. Welland found that he could not start the engine of the launch, and he lost two vital days
at Ryde in getting the defect put right.
The working out of a method of transhipping their plant from car to launch proved one of their most difficult problems. The need for secrecy forbade the use of a wharf and crane and they knew of no natural harbour or rock from which the machines could be embarked. They therefore chose the position on Southampton Water, one of the rare ‘hards’ on a shore of soft and sedgy flats. At low water they ran the car down on the beach, unloaded and buoyed the machines, and when the tide rose floated the launch to the place and hoisted the machines on board. Two journeys of the car had been necessary to transport all the plant, the second being that by which Molly had been taken. On reaching the shore for the second time, the balance of the machines had been unloaded, and the whole of the party except Style had gone on board. Style utilised the time until the tide rose high enough to lift the machines in attempting a further safeguard. With the object of confusing the chase, should one materialise, he had run the car into Southampton, and it was when walking back after abandoning it there that French and his party met him.
Though French found out all these details without much difficulty, he was at more of a loss to prove the responsibility of the gang for Thurza Darke’s murder. But eventually he managed this also. The attendant at the Milan identified Gwen Lestrange as the young woman who had called for Thurza on the night of her disappearance, and Dr Lappin, of Lee-on-the-Solent, swore that Style exactly answered the description of the man who was attending to the engine of the grey car on the road near Hill Head. This evidence, added to the rest that French had collected, secured a verdict of guilty, and eventually all four paid for their crimes, Welland and Sibley on the scaffold and the other two with life sentences.
Before his death Welland made a full confession. In it he admitted that he and Sibley had murdered all three girls in the horrible and revolting way with which Style had threatened Molly. Following the example of Smith, the ‘brides in the bath’ murderer, they had drowned their unfortunate victims in the bath in the house at Guildford before disposing of their bodies in the quarry hole, the river and the sea respectively.
Of all the interested parties, Molly came off the best. Not only was she not prosecuted, but on the ground that the amount was unknown, the question of her ill-gotten gains was not raised. Most immorally, therefore, she found herself in possession of the nice little sum of nearly four hundred pounds as her share of the affair.
As for French, the consciousness of work well (if slowly) done was his reward. The case had been an unusually troublesome and disappointing one, but he had at least the satisfaction of knowing that he had not only in all probability saved Molly Moran’s life and the lives of other girls who might have fallen into the hands of the gang, but had cleared out a nest of evildoers whose removal was essential to the welfare of the entire country.
About the Author
Freeman Wills Crofts (1879–1957), the son of an army doctor who died before he was born, was raised in Northern Ireland and became a civil engineer on the railways. His first book, The Cask, written in 1919 during a long illness, was published in the summer of 1920, immediately establishing him as a new master of detective fiction. Regularly outselling Agatha Christie, it was with his fifth book that Crofts introduced his iconic Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Joseph French, who would feature in no less than thirty books over the next three decades. He was a founder member of the Detection Club and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1939. Continually praised for his ingenious plotting and meticulous attention to detail—including the intricacies of railway timetables—Crofts was once dubbed ‘The King of Detective Story Writers’ and described by Raymond Chandler as ‘the soundest builder of them all’.
Also in this Series
Inspector French’s Greatest Case
Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery
Inspector French and the Starvel Hollow Tragedy
Inspector French and the Sea Mystery
Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey
By the same author
The Cask
The Ponson Case
The Pit-Prop Syndicate
The Groote Park Murder
Six Against the Yard*
The Anatomy of Murder*
*with other Detection Club authors
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
http://www.harpercollins.com
Inspector French and the Box Office Murders Page 21
