Menace for Dr. Morelle

by Ernest Dudley

  Cleo Latimer, shrewd psychologist, had not been unaware of the effect she produced upon the other the moment the front door had opened and she saw the plain, kindly face of the nurse. It needed but a minute or two for her first impression to be confirmed.

  Suddenly, Mrs. Latimer faced the nurse with eyes that were brimming. With a catch in her voice she said:

  “I am a close friend—a very close friend—of Sir Hugh Albany. Tell me—how is he? The truth, please. Do not spare my feelings!”

  The other’s eyes widened.

  Here, she scented, was Romance! The idea sent thrills running up and down her spine. Sir Hugh Albany, young, rich and handsome, the nurse recollected from her avid study of the glossy magazines, was going to marry the young and lovely Sherry Carfax. And now, out of some mysterious and glamorous past, stepped this beautiful woman—a ‘very close friend!’

  “Don’t worry,” the nurse breathed. “He’ll be all right. I’m sure of it. The operation was quite successful. He will be awake very soon.”

  Mrs. Latimer leaned forward eagerly, lips parted, hands clasped. She was laying it on thick and heavy.

  “May I see him?” she whispered. “Only for a minute?”

  “Oh, no,” was the shocked reply. “He’s in no fit state to receive visitors yet. Those were strict orders of Sir David Owen and Doctor Bennett——”

  “You don’t know what you’re denying me!” Mrs. Latimer exclaimed, her voice low and intense. She dropped into a chair gracefully, twisting and turning a scrap of handkerchief in her slender fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” the nurse faltered. “I’m only obeying orders——”

  “How often has that been said to a wretched victim!” Mrs. Latimer interrupted her bitterly. “I am a victim! A victim of terrible circumstances.”

  She broke off while the other stared at her, wide-eyed.

  Cleo Latimer decided she could go ahead with confidence. She said:

  “At this moment you hold a great deal of my future happiness in your hands. Perhaps more than mere happiness—peace of mind. I came to say good-bye to Sir Hugh. Today, I am going out of his life—forever. Once, he and I were . . .” She paused, artistically. The nurse swallowed hard, her rapt gaze upon the beautiful face, like a rabbit fascinated by a snake.

  “Never mind the past,” Mrs. Latimer continued, and her hands fluttered, speaking volumes of renunciation. “That is gone. There can only be memories for me. The memory I would most like to treasure would be that of saying good-bye. I leave for America this evening, and I am never returning. Surely you can’t deny me a minute with him.”

  The other blinked.

  “But—but,” she stammered uneasily, “there were such strict orders. It was such a delicate operation . . . .”

  But she was weakening. Mrs. Latimer was quick to press her advantage.

  “More reason why I should see him!” she said. “And no one will know. No one will ever know.”

  Magically, a couple of crisp notes rustled and were pressed quickly into the reluctant hand of the nurse.

  “Oh, but I couldn’t—–”

  “Don’t misunderstand this little gift, please. What I would like you to do is to buy some little thing for yourself as a memento of a moment in your life when you were able to bring a moment of happiness to an anguished woman. A secret between you and I. Quickly, quickly!”

  The nurse was lost.

  It had nothing to do with the two crisp five-pound notes. She was hardly aware that she clutched them. She was bemused by Mrs. Latimer. She was in that condition of false entrancement as when she sat damp-eyed and starry-faced through some emotional movie in which her favourite stars performed. For her this was life—in the raw.

  “All right,” she whispered. “Come along.”

  She led the way quickly up the wide staircase, along a thickly carpeted corridor. Outside a door she paused, her hand on the handle, and gave a conspiratorial glance, to which Mrs. Latimer responded appropriately.

  The nurse opened the door and Cleo Latimer followed her.

  The room was not large, with two windows looking down on to the street. Pale linen curtains were half-drawn across them. The same linen covered a screen which half-hid the white-painted hospital bed from the doorway. A large bowl of flowers stood on a narrow table between the two windows.

  The nurse advanced silently to the bed. Mrs. Latimer stood beside her. Her face was quite pale now, and her eyes brilliant and hard as she stared at the man lying motionless before her.

  Albany lay like a figure carved in marble. His head was heavily bandaged and his young, good-looking face was pale as the bandages. For a moment Mrs. Latimer stared intently at the closed eyes, as if by the very force of her will she would awaken him.

  There was an atmosphere of tension which awed the nurse. In her romantic mind she had formed a nebulous sort of story about these two, a conglomeration of all the rubbish she had read and seen on the movies and which was her escape from life.

  She was not surprised when the beautiful, glamorous woman at her side turned commandingly and said in a still, hushed voice:

  “Leave us!”

  True, for a moment she looked dismayed and uncertain, but Mrs. Latimer gripped her arm and repeated in a voice of tense command:

  “Leave us. I do not ask more than a few precious moments with him.”

  There was a compulsion about her too strong for the other to resist. As she left, from the tail of her eye she saw Mrs. Latimer drop to her knees by the bedside. With a tremulous sigh, the nurse quietly closed the door behind her.

  Chapter Thirty – The Patient Whispers

  The moment Cleo Latimer heard the door close, her hands shot out and gripped the shoulders of the sleeping man. The long, fragile fingers were like steel. She shook him gently but insistently, hissing his name in a menacing sibilant.

  “Hugh! Hugh, wake up! Wake up! Listen to me, you fool!”

  If the nurse could have seen the expression on Mrs. Latimer’s face as she sought desperately to arouse Albany from his condition of half-stupor, half-sleep, she would have been shocked and horrified. She would have believed she was either in a nightmare or Mrs. Latimer had gone mad.

  Gone now was the air of drooping tragedy, of beautiful wistfulness. Cleo Latimer seemed like a tigress. She knew she was working against time. Against desperate seconds. So long as she could get Albany to utter one brief sentence, his life meant nothing to her.

  The man’s eyes slowly opened.

  He stared without focus or recognition at the beautiful face bent over him. The woman drew back a little.

  “Hugh!” Her whisper was tense. “It’s Cleo! Hugh, listen to me!”

  The blank eyes were fixed on her, but they remained dream-like and unseeing.

  “The picture!”

  Mrs. Latimer uttered the words in a low, deliberate voice, a voice taut and harsh. “The picture of the Purple Lake. Where was it painted? The Purple Lake!”

  The man’s lips moved. He spoke in a voice which was scarcely audible.

  “The Purple Lake? Oh yes. The Purple Lake. Father painted that years ago.”

  “Where?”

  He closed his eyes. She bent over him. There was murder on her face now.

  “Where? Where was it painted?”

  Her voice was almost a suppressed scream.

  “Where? Damn you, damn you! Where did he paint it?”

  “I remember.”

  Very slowly and with a fading clarity Albany spoke again. “The Purple Lake. Father painted it, years ago . . .”

  His voice faltered. The sentence trailed off into an almost incoherent whisper. The woman bent lower to catch the last few words. They barely reached her, and then his lips closed. Albany’s face settled into a carved, graven expression.

  But Mrs. Latimer drew back, her hands dropped to her sides. On her face was an expression amounting almost to exaltation. She drew in a great breath, one clenched hand pressed against her heart. She moved away
from the bed with difficulty, gasping a little. The nurse, who had been waiting in agonized uncertainty outside, now opened the door and hurried towards her.

  “It’s been too much for you,” she said remorsefully. “I really shouldn’t have let you.”

  Mrs. Latimer allowed herself to be half supported to the corridor. At the end, by the landing, there was a settee against the wall.

  “Rest here for a minute. I’ll just slip back and see if the patient is all right.”

  Cleo Latimer nodded, her eyes half closed. As the other hurried back to the sick-room, Mrs. Latimer slipped her hand into her bag and drew out the little gold box. From it she took one of the tablets Doctor Morelle had given her.

  The nurse tiptoed to her patient and regarded him critically. She took his pulse, frowned a little, slipped her large watch back into the pocket of her apron, and fussed with the already impeccably smooth bedclothes.

  Well, no harm had been done, she thought. But she’d never do a thing like this again. Though she might be aiding the greatest love-story of the age, it wasn’t worth the emotional strain. And, judging from the look of the woman, it had been too much of an emotional effort for her, too. Poor thing had looked real ill.

  She bustled quietly out of the room, hurrying along the corridor to the landing. She stopped short by the settee in utter surprise. The woman wasn’t there. The nurse glanced back uncertainly along the corridor, then reached the head of the stairs.

  As she stood there, she heard the faint click of the front door closing.

  Cleo Latimer had gone.

  Chapter Thirty-One – The Watcher

  Miss Frayle was at that point in an argument where she was on the verge of talking to herself since, as she was arguing with herself, there was no one else to talk to.

  With none too good a grace she had returned to Harley Street as the Doctor had instructed her, leaving him and Inspector Hood to go on to Scotland Yard to pick up the dossier on Chalmers and also any information they could rake in on the lovely Mrs. Latimer.

  Miss Frayle would like to have gone with them.

  She enjoyed visiting Scotland Yard, she liked Inspector Hood, and she was just becoming the tiniest bit weary of always being the one who had the shock of finding the body, then being sent into the corner and told to twiddle her thumbs and not interfere while the experts got on with the job of investigating the crime.

  The experts certainly didn’t seem to have got very far in this case, she reflected. The murderer seemed to be one jump ahead the whole time. Even Doctor Morelle appeared not to have reached any definite conclusion. Excepting, of course, his deduction that the picture of the Purple Lake was a definite clue. That had been quite smart of him, she told herself magnanimously, completely confirmed by the telegram she had found.

  Relaxed comfortably in a deep armchair in Doctor Morelle’s study, Miss Frayle was reaching a point now where she not so much argued as dogmatized. For it was quite obvious, she thought with a mental sniff, Cleo Latimer was the guilty party.

  Miss Frayle had not the slightest doubt about it and, if she were a Scotland Yard detective, Mrs. Latimer would have been under lock and key almost from the minute Miss Frayle had set eyes on that richly expensive coat. The fact that her convictions were based entirely on feminine mistrust of the glamorous Cleo Latimer was not allowed to affect Miss Frayle’s calculations. She knew she was right, and that was the end of it so far as she was concerned. If Doctor Morelle and Inspector Hood wished to behave stupidly just because they were men dealing with an attractive woman—if you liked that kind of attractiveness—then they could get on with it.

  All that was needed was a clue to the motive of the murders.

  Why had Gresham tried to murder Albany?

  What was the significance of the telegram Gresham had obviously taken from his hapless victim?

  And if—Miss Frayle pursued the somewhat tangled thread of her reflections—if Mrs. Latimer had killed Stefan Zusky, what was her motive?

  Or had, as Inspector Hood had hinted, Baron Xavier killed him? If so, why?

  Miss Frayle frowned.

  Admittedly, it was far easier to pin a motive on the Baron than on Cleo Latimer. He might have a dozen reasons for wanting his secretary out of the way. They might have had a personal quarrel. They might have had terrific political differences which necessitated the Baron eliminating Zusky, even so drastically. Zusky might be blackmailing Xavier.

  Miss Frayle’s spectacles had slid down to the end of her nose.

  The line of thought she was pursuing inevitably and immediately took her back to Mrs. Latimer. She had denied knowing Zusky, then had afterwards confessed she had lied. She had known him all along. Hence she and Zusky could have been in league against the Baron. That might have been the motive for Baron Xavier shooting Zusky. Cleo Latimer and Gresham were associates—Miss Frayle preferred to think of them as confederates—and now Gresham had been killed.

  Was it possible, then, that Mrs. Latimer was next on the list?

  Miss Frayle sat up with a jerk. Although she disliked the woman very much indeed, she had no wish for her, too, to fall victim to a desperate and ruthless killer.

  Miss Frayle wondered if the possibility of Cleo Latimer being next on the list had occurred either to Inspector Hood or Doctor Morelle. She didn’t think it had, otherwise they would have said so, and taken steps to have her guarded.

  She rose quickly from the armchair and crossed to the telephone. As her hand went to lift the receiver, the instrument jangled into life.

  The quick and unexpected stab of sound made her jump like a cat.

  Miss Frayle stared at the telephone for several moments while it continued to shrill.

  “If it’s her saying she wants to see me, I shan’t go!” she murmured half aloud. “I won’t!”

  She had a frightening vision of going to see Mrs. Latimer and then finding yet another body. That would be more than she could bear!

  The telephone continued to ring.

  Gingerly she lifted the receiver, and in a high, strained voice said: “Hullo? This is Doctor Morelle’s residence.”

  She gasped with relief as she heard Sherry Carfax’s voice.

  “Miss Frayle?” Sherry sounded eager and excited. “Miss Frayle, is he there? The Doctor?”

  “I’m afraid not. I was going to telephone you——”

  “I’m glad he’s not!” was the excited response. “Listen—can you come along and see me at once? I—I can’t talk to you about it over the telephone—but it’s terribly important!”

  “Has anything happened?”

  “Yes! Something quite extraordinary. Please come as quickly as you can—I can’t say anything more now. Too risky. But I think we may have an answer to everything we want to know—fairly soon.”

  “Be there quick as I can,” Miss Frayle squeaked.

  She hung up, stared at the telephone as if it were going to leap up and bite her. Then, with a murmured: “Oh, dear—oh, dear me!” snatched up hat, bag and gloves.

  For once she was lucky in getting a taxi.

  One had pulled up next door, and she rushed up to it just as the passenger was paying it off. Hastily giving Sherry’s address, she tumbled in.

  Sherry Carfax was no less excited than Miss Frayle. As they greeted each other, her eyes were bright and sparkling with excitement, her pretty face alight with mingled eagerness and determination.

  “What’s happened?” Miss Frayle asked breathlessly. “I got here as quickly as I could.”

  “Doctor Morelle doesn’t know you were coming here?”

  “I told you he was out. I came right away.”

  “Where is he? Will he be wanting you soon?”

  “He’s with Inspector Hood at the moment. They were going on to Scotland Yard to pick up a dossier about Charles Gresham.”

  She broke off and paused for a moment. She suddenly realized Sherry Carfax didn’t know Gresham had been killed.

  “He was murdered this afternoon
,” she said quietly.

  “What!”

  Sherry sprung round and stared at her, her hand at her throat, her eyes wide. She asked in a calmer voice:

  “Gresham—murdered? Oh, how dreadful! How—what happened?”

  Briefly Miss Frayle acquainted her with the dramatic events of the afternoon. The eagerness left the other’s face. It grew hard and cold.

  “I didn’t know Gresham well,” Sherry Carfax said slowly. “I didn’t like him. But I can’t pretend to feel anything but horror.”

  She stopped, then, after a moment, murmured as if musing to herself:

  “Gresham dead. Another one. Did Doctor Morelle have any idea who had done it? Any theory?”

  Miss Frayle looked round almost guiltily, as if afraid the Doctor might be within earshot.

  “Never let him hear you say that,” she said. “He says he never has a theory. Haven’t you ever heard him say: ‘To theorize is to conjecture’?” Miss Frayle gave a quite passable imitation of Doctor Morelle’s precise, icy mode of speech. “‘And to conjecture upon crime is the inevitable path to a wrong conclusion. Conclusions must be based upon logic. Logic and evidence.’ That’s what he says,” she concluded.

  “So many murders are illogical. And evidence is often circumstantial. Did Doctor Morelle offer any logical conclusion, then?”

  “He confided nothing in me.” She hesitated, and then went on: “Between you and me, I believe he’s a bit stuck. Although,” she added with gloomy satisfaction, “he’s always right in the end. Always seems to manage to work it out.”

  She glanced sharply at the other.

  “But I’m sure,” she said, “you didn’t send for me to discuss Doctor Morelle’s way of working, Sherry. You said something had happened. You said you had the answer to it all.”

  “I did.”

  Miss Frayle stared at her speculatively. There was something about the girl’s voice that held a new note. It was a tone which struck Miss Frayle as being somehow taut. Scared? Miss Frayle wondered.

  Again she eyed Sherry Carfax.