Red Aces

by Edgar Wallace

  “The letters that came to the office too?” he asked.

  She smiled at the question.

  “Naturally I did not see those – those were very few, and Daddy had nothing furtive in his composition. I did know that he was corresponding with Dr Ingham; my father was what is known as a High Churchman and wrote letters to the Church papers. That is practically the only friend he had outside our little circle at Bishop’s Stortford.”

  Mr Reeder looked at her thoughtfully.

  “Did you think Frank Seafield had – um – a lady friend?” he asked.

  She was emphatic on this point. He would have been surprised if she had not been.

  He guided her to Miss Gillette’s room and presently he heard the three go out. That Miss Gillette should have left the office without asking permission was not remarkable.

  With great care he composed three telegrams, and, calling at the post office, handed them in. One was certainly addressed to Murphy.

  A tramcar deposited him within walking distance of Brixton Prison, where men under remand are segregated.

  Mr Reeder was not unknown at Brixton, though his visits were rare, and within a few minutes of his arrival he was taken to a bare waiting-room where he was joined by Jake Alsby.

  The man was shaken. The rather defiant impertinent criminal Mr Reeder had known had disappeared, and in his place was a man terror-stricken by the fate which had overcome him.

  “You know me, Mr Reeder.” His manner was a little wild, and the hand that emphasized almost every sentence was trembling. “I never had a gun in my life, and I would no more think of shooting a man than I would of cutting my own throat. I bashed a fellow or two–”

  “And there are one or two that you intended bashing,” said Mr Reeder, pleasantly.

  “It was drink, Mr Reeder,” pleaded Jake. “I suppose Gaylor told you that I was coming to see you. That dirty dog would say anything to put me wrong. Besides, Mr Reeder, I didn’t know this Russian – why should I want to shoot him?”

  Mr Reeder shook his head.

  “People sometimes shoot the merest acquaintances,” he said brightly. “Now tell me all about it, Alsby, with fewer lies than usual. Maybe I can help you. I don’t say that I can, but it may be possible.”

  Alsby told his story as coherently as he could. Occasionally Mr Reeder had to bring him back from rambling side issues, but, on the whole, the tale he had to tell was convincing. He forgot, however, one important detail.

  “When that man was charged with being drunk some days ago,” said Mr Reeder, “he talked to the police in his – um – intoxication, of a diamond clasp–”

  “That’s right, sir,” interrupted the man eagerly. “He mentioned it to me, too. I’d forgotten all about that. He told me I could see it. I thought it was just being soused that made him speak that way, and, to tell you the truth, I’d forgotten all about it.” And then a new note of anxiety came into his tone: “Has that been lost? I swear I never saw it.”

  J G Reeder looked at him long and fixedly. A gentle glow of satisfaction came to him. He had spoken of the clasp to Joan Ralph for no other reason than his recollection of the police court proceedings against Litnoff. That reference to the diamond brooch had intrigued him at the time he had read of it. Litnoff had no history as a receiver – that fact had been brought out in court.

  “Try to remember, Alsby, what other things he said.”

  Alsby knitted his forehead in an agony of recollection.

  “I can’t remember anything, Mr Reeder. I wasn’t with him long after we left the boozer – the public house. He was going home; he lived in Bloomsbury – Lammington Buildings. That was a funny thing: I had known of Lammington Buildings through a pal of mine, who got five years for slush printing. He had a friend who lived there.”

  Mr Reeder was interested mainly because the only address which the police knew in connection with Litnoff was his lodging in Pimlico.

  “How did all this come out, that he was living in Lammington Buildings?” he asked.

  “He wanted to take a taxi. I told him I was living in Holborn. He said ‘You can drop me at Lammington Buildings.’ After that he sort of corrected himself, but I knew he had let his address slip out. You are going to do something for me, ain’t you, Mr Reeder? You have always been fair to me.”

  “That is not my recollection of your expressed opinion,” said Mr Reeder acidly.

  Going back to town he pondered on the possibility that Litnoff also might have had a “friend” in this block of flats.

  It was raining heavily when his ’bus dropped him at the corner of Southampton Row; but it had been raining more or less all day, and since he wore his shabby yellow mackintosh which, coming almost to his heels, gave him, despite his bent shoulders, a giant-like appearance, he did not think it necessary to unfurl the umbrella which he carried on his arm, summer and winter, although it was never known to be opened.

  He found Lammington Buildings without much trouble. It was situate in a side turning off Gower Street.

  Mr Reeder opened his enquiries with the hall porter. The name of Litnoff was unknown; but the hall porter was a reader of newspapers and had seen a portrait of the murdered man. Almost before Mr Reeder could put a question, the porter blurted out his suspicion.

  “I bet that’s Schmidt. If it isn’t, it’s his twin brother. In fact, I was just writing a letter to the Daily Megaphone. I always thought that Schmidt was a queer customer. He only slept here once or twice a month. I was talking to Mrs Adderly this afternoon about him. As a matter of fact, she’s in his flat now, though she’s one of those kind of women who wouldn’t talk. You can’t get a word out of her. I says to her ‘Suppose the police come here and want to know?’ ‘Let ’em come,’ she says. What can you do with a woman like that?”

  Mr Reeder could supply no reply to this pertinent question, and then, surprisingly, the hall porter said: “I know you, Mr Reeder, the moment I put my eyes on you. You were in the Orderley Street affair. I was the porter at the hotel, if you will remember, who saw the man getting out of the window…”

  He went, with surprising accuracy, into the particulars of a case in which the detective had figured many years before.

  Mr Reeder was a good listener. He discovered at the very early stages of his career that the art of listening was the art of detection, and he allowed the porter to continue his reminiscences before he asked: “Is Mrs Adderly in the flat now?”

  The porter pointed dramatically to a door that led to the front of the vestibule.

  “Do you want to see her?”

  “I should like,” said Mr Reeder.

  The porter rang and knocked. After a considerable time the door was opened a little way, and the space was filled by a suspicious-looking and bare-armed lady, who wore a soiled apron and had a face which was equally in need of hot water and soap.

  “This is Mr Reeder,” said the porter, with such satisfaction that it was evident he had no deep affection for the untidy charwoman. “The well-known detective,” he added.

  Mrs Adderly wilted at the word.

  “Everything can be explained,” she said, a little incoherently, and as Mr Reeder followed her into the hall, she slammed the door in the face of the outraged porter, who at least expected to participate in the portion of the confidences which hitherto she had withheld from him.

  “Will you come in, sir.”

  She led the way into a barely furnished little room which obviously had served as a sitting-room. There was a table, a sideboard, a small square carpet on the floor, and a couple of chairs. On one wall was a map printed, as Mr Reeder discovered, in Switzerland. It showed a section of the Canton of Vaud, and there was an irregular patch outlined in red ink from the contours; it evidently stood at some considerable height upon the lake. Its significance Mr Reeder did not grasp till muc
h later.

  “I don’t know what to say or what to do next,” said Mrs Adderly. She spoke very rapidly, without full stops, commas, or any other form of punctuation. “The money was honestly come by and is in the Post Office bank except the rent which I paid and I have a receipt with the stamp on it and I have done what Mr Schmidt told me to do as I can prove by his letter. I am a widow with five mouths to fill…”

  She went on to explain that they were the property of her five legitimate offspring, that she “did” for respectable families, and that she had never been in trouble, or accepted out-door relief from the parish even in her most difficult times.

  “What money is this?” interrupted Mr Reeder when he thought she had gone far enough.

  The money that had come to her on Wednesday. She had found it on the table in the dining-room with a letter. Beneath her skirt she had a pocket. Mr Reeder looked discreetly away while she explored this receptacle, and presently brought out an envelope from which she took a single sheet of notepaper.

  Please pay the rent with the enclosed. I am going away to France, and shall not be back for three months. You may take double wages while I am gone, and I do not wish you to discuss my business.

  The letter was written in a neat clerkly hand.

  “You found this on the table, you say?”

  “On Wednesday morning; I put the money into the Post Office saving bank,” she went on even more rapidly. “I paid the rent and I have got a printed receipt with a stamp on it–”

  “Nobody doubts that,” said Mr Reeder soothingly.

  “If you are in the police – “

  “I am not,” said Mr Reeder. “I really am not a policeman at all, I am – um – an investigator.”

  She knew very little about her employer. Three days a week she used to come to tidy the flat. For this purpose she was entrusted with a key. She had very strict orders that, if the door did not yield when she turned the key and was obviously bolted on the inside, she was to go away. This had happened three times in the course of the past year. Mr Schmidt, though a very healthy-looking gentleman, was an invalid. Sometimes he had very bad spells, and she had come to find the atmosphere of his bedroom sickly with the smell of drugs. He never spoke about his business, and when he spoke at all, it was with a very strong foreign accent. She had an idea he was an actor, because she had once seen a box containing wigs and moustaches and theatrical make-up, and she had seen a photograph of him in some theatrical role.

  Although it was a ground floor flat, it only consisted of three rooms and a kitchenette. One was entirely bare, except that in a cupboard he found three uncased pillows. Mrs Adderly explained that occasionally Mr Schmidt had a weakness for pillows, though the only time he ever slept there one sufficed him.

  The bedroom contained an iron bedstead with a mattress, comparatively new, a small dressing chest, a mirror, a little table and two chairs. The bed was not made, but the blankets were neatly folded at the foot of the bare mattress and covered with a sheet. On the wall was a lithographed portrait of a man in a foreign uniform. Mr Reeder guessed it was Russian. Over the bed was hung a shelf which contained four or five Russian books, and here he made a discovery, for on the fly-leaf of one was a long inscription in French:

  Presented to me by the Grand Duke Alexander on the occasion of my performance in ‘Revisor’.

  Beneath this was a single letter “L”.

  The main interest for Mr Reeder lay in the fact that the handwriting was not the same as that in the letter.

  In the small cupboard he found two medicine bottles half filled. He sniffed one and discovered the unmistakable scent of spirits of chloroform. He was hardly as much impressed by the contents as by the labels, which were those of a Bloomsbury chemist. He left Mrs Adderly and went in search of the disgruntled hall porter.

  “Mr Schmidt” had had visitors, but apparently they came after 11 o’clock at night at which hour the porter went off duty; the lift, being an automatic one, was operated by the tenants themselves. He would not have known of this, but for the fact that one of the other tenants in the building had seen people going into or coming from the flat in the middle of the night. They were invariably men.

  A chemist’s shop on the corner of the block was Mr Reeder’s next objective. The chemist was a suspicious man, not inclined to answer readily to the detective’s questions. Mr Reeder, however, carried authority in the shape of a small warrant card, for he had definite association with the Public Prosecutor’s Department.

  Both the chemist and his assistant had seen Mr Schmidt. He had called to have medicines made up and to purchase surgical supplies.

  “Surgical supplies?” Mr Reeder was almost excited. “Dear me, how excellently that fits my theory! Pardon me, my dear sir…I – um – was rather carried away. Now, could you describe Mr Schmidt?”

  They could describe him quite graphically, and Mr Schmidt was undoubtedly the dead Litnoff.

  Mr Reeder went home to his house in the Brockley Road, feeling rather satisfied with his discoveries. He had no illusion about his “luck”. In a few days the police would discover Litnoff’s home in Lammington Mansions (they found it the next day through the medium of a laundry mark as a matter of fact) and at best he was only those few days ahead of the “regulars”. There were no letters for him, and he had his tea and toast reading the evening newspapers the while, and at nine o’clock was in the act of writing up his diary when he heard the tinkle of the street door bell.

  The housekeeper left the two visitors in the hall, and announced them to Mr Reeder with bated breath.

  “Two young ladies,” she said primly. “I told them you never saw visitors, but one of them said she was going to see you if she had to wait all night.”

  If Mr Reeder had harmonized with the tone of sharp disapproval, he would have ordered them immediately to be thrown into the street.

  “Show them up, please,” he said.

  One, at least, was Miss Gillette. He guessed the other, and guessed correctly, for Joan Ralph came into the room behind his trying secretary.

  “I would have telephoned you, but I didn’t think it was safe,” said Miss Gillette almost before she was in the room. “You remember you asked Joan about a diamond clasp, or brooch, or something?”

  Mr Reeder offered her a chair.

  “Have you seen it?”

  A foolish question, he felt, when he saw Miss Gillette’s visible scorn.

  “Of course we haven’t seen it. Joan and I went to dine tonight at the Corner House. Then a red-haired young man came up and asked Joan if she ever wore plus-fours.”

  Mr Reeder leant back in his chair.

  “If she wore plus-fours?” he repeated a little scandalized.

  Miss Gillette nodded energetically.

  “He was terribly nervous,” said Miss Gillette. “I have never known a red-haired man to be nervous before; they are usually rather, well, you know, the other way about, but he started talking a lot of stuff about his father being a jeweller and being ill, and then he mentioned a diamond brooch. He said he had undervalued it. I thought he was drunk. Joan didn’t.”

  “What was his name?”

  Joan Ralph shook her head.

  “It was extraordinary, because I was once photographed in plus-fours. Daddy took the picture on a day when we had a lot of old Roedean girls down at Bishop’s Stortford and we played a sort of pastoral, and I borrowed my cousin’s plus-fours because I was supposed to represent a man. Daddy was rather amused and took a picture, and said it was the best photograph that he ever had of me.”

  Mr Reeder ran his fingers through his scanty hair.

  “What did he say about the brooch?”

  Miss Gillette was not sure that he said anything that was intelligent. It was not until after she had threatened to call for the manager, and the red-haired y
oung man had retired abashed – “It was only then,” said Miss Gillette, “that we felt that we oughtn’t to have been so stupid and we should have asked him his name and address.”

  Mr Reeder nodded his agreement.

  “He was a jeweller, his father was ill, he had under-valued a brooch, and he had seen a portrait of my young friend in plus-fours. That’s very remarkable. It is a great pity; you will very likely never see him again–”

  “But we have,” interrupted Miss Gillette. “He was on the tram and he followed us right down here, in fact – he is outside the house at this minute.”

  Mr Reeder stared at her.

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “Of course we did not speak to him,” said Miss Gillette scornfully. “How could you speak to a red-haired young man in the street! He didn’t speak to us either, and he just sat in the corner of the tramcar and kept looking at us from behind his newspaper.”

  Mr Reeder walked to the window, pulled aside the curtain gently, and peered out. Standing under a lamp post, and barely visible, was a figure of a man, and even as Mr Reeder looked, as though aware of the scrutiny, he turned rapidly in the direction of Lewisham High Road.

  In a moment Mr Reeder was out of the room, flying downstairs, but when he came to the street it was absolutely empty of pedestrians. A tram was moving towards London. He saw a slim figure of a young man leap upon the footboard. By the time he reached the corner of the road, the car was beyond pursuit. Mr Reeder looked round for a taxicab, but there was none in sight, and with great reluctance and conscious that he was bareheaded and that a drizzling rain was falling, and, in consequence, he must look a little ridiculous, he made his way back to the house.

  And yet for all his failure, there was a curious sense of elation in J G Reeder’s heart, for the mystery of certain strange disappearances was almost solved.

  To Miss Gillette he was a great disappointment, for he seemed no longer interested in red-haired young men, or brooches, or even young ladies in plus-fours, and she went back to London, with her friend, her faith shaken in her employer.