‘That would be too kind,’ he said with earnest conviction. ‘I’m afraid I may be hours, literally. Thank you so very much. Good-bye.’
‘Good-bye then,’ said her ladyship regretfully. ‘I shall look out for you at Dorothea’s next week.’
Mr Campion smiled a trifle wanly and walked towards the entrance. Since there was nothing for it but a visit to his old friend Superintendent Oates, or undignified concealment behind a gate pillar until the Daimler should elect to depart, he sighed and, waving to the inquisitive figure in the back of the car, he gave his name to the man on the door and sent up his card.
The Superintendent embarrassed him considerably by receiving him at once, having taken his unheralded arrival as a sign of great urgency.
‘What’s up?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve never known you blow in here without making an appointment. Something serious?’
Inwardly Mr Campion cursed all strong-minded old ladies, and after a while he mentioned the fact aloud.
Oates began to laugh. He was a thin grey man with light intelligent eyes and a certain natural mournfulness of expression.
‘That’s fine,’ he said with relish. ‘This is just the place for a nice rest in the middle of the morning. Put your feet up. Don’t mind me.’
Mr Campion took a silver case from his pocket and drew out a cigarette, which he laid upon the desk with quiet dignity. ‘Get this analysed for me, old boy, will you?’ he said earnestly.
The policeman’s smile faded and he prodded the cylinder gently with a broad forefinger. ‘Which is it?’ he demanded. ‘Drugs or explosives?’
‘Heaven knows,’ said his visitor seriously.
‘Really? Where did you get it?’ Oates was as alert as a terrier.
Mr Campion surveyed him affectionately. ‘I bought it in an open shop right in your own district. Think that over.’
Oates sniffed at the cigarette suspiciously. ‘Righto,’ he said, ‘I’ll send it down. What are your grounds for doubting it?’
‘Three extra in a packet and they taste like hell,’ explained his visitor affably. ‘They’re a new brand, advertised all over the place.’
The Superintendent regarded him coldly for a moment or two and finally lit the exhibit, which he puffed contentedly.
‘All right,’ he said ominously, ‘all right, my lad. If you’re looking for something to employ your time I’ll see what I can do for you. Sit down. I’ve got something in your line. This’ll just about suit you. Somebody wants a miracle. I thought of you when I got the inquiry.’
His guest looked suitably chastened and would have drifted towards the door, but Oates’s ferocious good humour increased.
‘Sit down,’ he repeated, taking up a sheaf of official papers. ‘Here’s the dope. This is what comes of persuading foreigners to say “Your police are wonderful”. They’re beginning to take it literally, the lunatics. This is an inquiry from the U.S. The Federal Police are looking for a Society blackmailer who, so they say, always spends October in England. They can’t give us any more than that on him. They simply say they’d be obliged if we apprehended him. Obliged isn’t the word. They mean staggered.’
Seated on the hard visitor’s chair, Mr Campion did his best to look intelligent, and his pale eyes were amused and friendly behind his horn-rimmed spectacles.
‘He’s male, is he?’ he said. ‘That’s a step. I mean it reduces it from all the population of America to half the population of America, doesn’t it?’
Oates turned over the blue sheets in his hand.
‘Yes, they seem fairly certain of that,’ he said without smiling. ‘But you see what I mean when I say the description is slight. This is the story, as far as I can make it out. Late last year there was a fatal accident to the young wife of one of those fabulously wealthy financial men they breed over there. She fell off the roof of a skyscraper, and no one seemed to know why. There was no suggestion of foul play, but the question of suicide was raised. The husband, poor chap, was far too broken up at first to go into the thing thoroughly, but afterwards he seems to have pulled himself together and made several interesting discoveries.
‘The first thing he noticed was that the girl died without a halfpenny in her private account, and that there were records of large, ever-increasing sums withdrawn from it to explain this.
‘This money had been paid out from the bank in cash and naturally he began to think of blackmail.’
He paused and Campion nodded.
‘The girl,’ Oates continued, ‘was very young, not at all the type to have a dangerous secret, and the whole notion seemed incredible to the husband until he cross-questioned the coloured maid who had come up from his wife’s home with her on her marriage. From her he got an interesting story.
‘It appeared that the young wife had kept some letters, a sentimental memento of a boy-and-girl love affair which had fizzled out before the older man put in an appearance. The maid thought that someone had got hold of these and convinced the wife that her husband would read a great deal more into them than ever they had originally contained. To prevent this eventuality the poor wretched child ruined herself financially, worked herself into a state of nervous collapse, and finally threw herself off the roof. You know how these things sometimes happen, Campion.’
The elegant personage in the horn-rimmed spectacles did not speak at once. It was an ugly little story, and one which he had heard too often in his career to doubt. Like the Superintendent, he knew only too well that the clever blackmailer who picks the right type of victim seldom has to find anything that is really reprehensible on which to base his threats.
‘Too bad,’ he said seriously. ‘Didn’t they get any line on the chap?’
Stanislaus Oates made a few vulgar and not altogether relevant remarks which seemed to relieve his feelings.
‘I told you,’ he said finally. ‘Why don’t you listen? They haven’t got a sausage, not a whiff, not a faint delicate aroma floating out from the window of a passing car. They don’t know anything. And they have the calm impudence to write and say “We hear your Force is wonderful. How about sending this lad along in a plain van?”’
‘Yes, I know.’ Mr Campion spoke soothingly. ‘But they must have something to go on. Otherwise why apply to you? Why not go to the Chinese or to the Nevada Sheriff?
Oates grunted.
‘They think they’ve got two clues,’ he admitted. ‘They concede that they’re slight. I like that word of theirs, “concede”. They’re both based on something the dead girl said to the maid. The first one is a remark she made late in the summer of last year, when she first showed signs of worry. “It’ll be all right in October,” she said. “He goes to England in October.” She wouldn’t explain herself and seemed to regret the admission of trouble as soon as she had made it. That’s the first.
‘The second is just demented. Apparently, on the morning of the “accident”, she was sitting up in bed and she said to the maid, who seems to have been a reliable witness, “It’s no good, Dorothy, it’s no good. It’s written in ink. He saw it in ink.” And then she went out on the roof.’
He paused and shrugged his shoulders.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘There’s the lot, and I hope it means more to you than it does to me. Written in ink, indeed! What was written in ink? And why was it more important than if it had been written in pencil? Or cross-stitch, for that matter?’
Mr Campion sat looking thoughtfully at the toes of his shoes for some moments.
‘This girl who died,’ he inquired at last, ‘what sort of life did she lead? Was she likely to come into contact with shady characters?’
‘No, that’s the odd part about it.’ Oates studied the blue sheaf again. ‘She was one of New York’s pampered babies. Looked after as if she was royalty or something. She never went out unescorted and never visited anywhere but in the most exclusive circles. Whoever got hold of her must have had peculiar facilities for getting into the best houses. I think the whole story is scatty
, I shall write and tell ’em so, in a nice way, of course, when you’ve broken a tooth or two on the problem.’
‘Me?’ Mr Campion seemed startled, and the Superintendent was amused.
‘I’ll tell ’em I’ve put a Society expert on the job,’ he said, grinning. ‘That’ll please ’em and keep ’em quiet for a bit. There you are. You came in here looking for something to do and now you’ve got it. There’s a little miracle for you. Pull that off. Written in ink my foot!’
‘In ink?’ repeated Mr Campion with sudden interest as a chance remark he had heard earlier that morning returned to him with sudden significance. ‘I wonder …’
Oates regarded him sympathetically.
‘You’re getting swell-headed,’ he said kindly. ‘It often happens to amateurs. You’re beginning to think you’re gifted with supernatural powers. This’ll do you good. It’s impossible. If you had all the luck in the world it’d still be impossible.’
Mr Campion collected his hat and gloves and wandered to the door.
‘I’ll let you know if I spot him,’ he said.
‘Do,’ said Oates cheerfully. ‘And send me a wreath at the same time. I’ll need it.’
His visitor looked pained. ‘Do I get a reward if I bring him in?’ he inquired.
‘You get an illuminated address of five thousand words, written in my own hand and coloured,’ said the Superintendent heartily.
Mr Campion seemed both pleased and surprised.
‘I shall like that,’ he said.
He went quietly out of the building, and that evening did what was in the circumstances a very extraordinary thing. After certain elementary researches he wrote a careful and slightly effusive note to old Lady Laradine and begged her not to forget her promise to get him an invitation to the dance in honour of Miss Roberta Pendleton-Blake.
He paid for this fit of apparent lunacy a few days later when he sat beside that paralysing old lady in the corner of a ballroom which was not so much decorated as obliterated with heavily scented flowers and watched a vast throng of young people moving in mass formation on a glistening floor.
Lady Laradine was at the top of her form. She had spent the earlier part of the evening in a black velvet tent in an ante-room of the big Clarges Street house consulting the latest Society entertainer, and was bursting with her experiences.
‘My dear,’ she was saying happily, ‘my dear, the creature is too astonishing. Dorothea was inspired to engage him. I told her she would be. Look at Roberta and young Pettering dancing together over there … aren’t they charming? I’m so glad the uncle was reasonable. Dorothea tells me she cried with relief when she heard that the wretched man had consented. Dear me, let me see, where was I?’
Mr Campion had not the faintest idea and was on the verge of forgetting himself sufficiently to say so when she recollected unassisted.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘the fortune-teller. Quite an astounding person. A psychometrist. Fortunately I’m never indiscreet, but really some of the things he told me about people I know …’
Her resonant voice rose and fell, and it occurred to her patient audience that she must have told the seer quite as much as ever he told her. Her flow of chatter was quite remarkable.
‘He took my ring and put it in an envelope,’ she hurried on. ‘I put the envelope under the crystal and then he looked in and told me the most astonishing things about my mother. Wasn’t that amazing?’
‘A ring?’ inquired Mr Campion, pricking up his ears.
The old lady looked at him as if she thought he were deficient.
‘I don’t believe you’ve been listening,’ she said unjustly. ‘I’ve been explaining to you for the last half hour that Cagliostro is amazing. You give him something that belonged to someone dead, or elsewhere anyway, and he tells you all about them.’
‘Cagliostro?’ repeated Mr Campion, temporarily out of his depth.
Lady Laradine threw up her small yellow hands in exasperation.
‘Bless the man, he’s delirious!’ she said. ‘Cagliostro the Second is the fortune-teller, animal. The psychometrist. The man I’ve been telling you about. He’s in a black velvet tent somewhere in the house. Go and see him yourself. I can’t be bothered with you if you don’t use your mind at all. All you young men ought to take up Yoga. It clears the brain. Come and see me and I’ll put you on to a very good man.’
Mr Campion rose. His ears were singing, but his eyes were alert and interested. ‘I’ll go and find him at once,’ he said. ‘I like fortune-tellers.’
The suddenness of his dash for freedom routed the old lady, and he was half-way down the room and out of ear-shot before she collected sufficient breath to call him back.
Mr Campion went off on his quest with that hidden, almost absent-minded, purposefulness which was his most misleading characteristic. He paused in the doorway to exchange a word with Tommy Pettering and be presented to the entirely delightful Roberta, chatted carelessly with two or three acquaintances, put himself in the good graces of his hostess with a few intelligent compliments, and wandered out into the main body of the house practically by accident.
It took him some time to find the psychometrist and his velvet tent, indeed he became definitely lost in the house at one period before that and came to a full stop in a dark corridor on the floor below the ballroom.
He was standing on the threshold of a small room furnished as a woman’s study. The place was dimly lighted and the slender walnut furniture made graceful shadows on the silk-panelled walls. But it was not at these that the tall man with the diffident manner remained to stare with speculative interest.
Kneeling before a bureau on the other side of the room was a girl in a green chiffon dress. The first thing Campion noticed about her was her extreme youth, and the second the astonishing fact that she was forcing the catch of a drawer with a brass paper-knife.
He then saw that her hair was curled on the top of a small and shapely head and that her green dress floated about a slender, childish figure.
As he watched her she slid the drawer open an inch or so and inserted a little inquiring hand.
Mr Campion, deeming that the moment had come, coughed apologetically.
The girl in the green dress stiffened and there was a moment of painful silence. Campion had some experience of the hardened criminal and he thought he had never witnessed such an exhibition of calm nerve. Before she even looked round she opened the drawer a little further and, with a nonchalance that had guilt stamped all over it, drew out a small flat packet which she wrapped in her georgette handkerchief. Then she turned and rose quietly to her feet.
Mr Campion found himself looking into a small, intelligent face which would blossom into radiant beauty in a year or so. At the moment he judged her to be seventeen at most. She was very red and her grey-green eyes were angry and alarmed, but her dignity was tremendous.
Her remark was as bald as it was unexpected, and it had a strong element of truth in it which silenced him altogether.
‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ she said and darted past him before he could stop her, leaving him staring in blank astonishment at her tiny whirlwind figure disappearing into the darkness of the passage.
Mr Campion pulled himself together and went quietly up to the ballroom. He was mildly startled. Young ladies who open bureau drawers with paper-knives and run off with mysterious packages wrapped in green georgette handkerchiefs constitute a responsibility which cannot be altogether ignored.
He had plenty of fish to fry of his own, however, for he had not braved an evening in the same house with Lady Laradine for nothing. He looked in at the ballroom again and reflected that every woman he had ever met at a dinner table seemed to be present with her daughter, but of the little girl in the green dress there was no trace at all.
Lady Laradine saw him from the other side of the room and bore down upon him like a very small ship in very full sail and he ducked into the first doorway to avoid her, thereby discovering the thing
he had sought so unobtrusively for the past hour.
A black velvet tent hung with gilt fringe and topped by a directoire eagle rose up, dark and impressive, in the centre of the high-ceilinged Georgian room. He wandered over to it and raised the flap.
The scene within was much as he had expected, and the sight of it gave him a thrill of satisfaction. One point in particular interested him immensely. A strong overhead light shone down upon a small ebony table which supported a red satin hand-cushion and a black crystal ball.
The man who smiled at him over an unimpeachable shirtfront was unusual. This Cagliostro was not the sleek huckster with the twinkle and the swagger which the credulous public has come to expect in its seers, but a surprisingly large man with thin fluffy hair and prominent cold light eyes. His smile was secretive and not at all pleasant. He did not speak, but indicated the consultant’s chair very slowly with a sweeping movement of a great fin-like hand.
Mr Campion would have accepted the invitation but he was frustrated. Lady Laradine pounced upon him from behind.
‘Oh, there you are,’ she said irritably. ‘Well, I hope you’ve been hearing something entertaining for it’s more than I have. Has anybody any conversation at all these days? What did Cagliostro tell you?’
Mr Campion was explaining meekly that he had had as yet no time to consult the psychometrist when he caught sight over his captor’s shoulders of a slender little figure in a green dress. There was quite a little crowd in the ante-room and she did not notice him, but made straight for the tent and passed inside.
‘Really!’ Lady Laradine, who had known by instinct the precise moment when his attention had wandered and had spun round herself, was now looking at him with impolite amusement.
‘My dear boy, a child?’ she burst out in her tremendous voice. ‘Well, it’s an extraordinary thing to me, but I’ve noticed it over and over again. You clever men are absolutely devastated by immaturity, aren’t you? Still, seventeen … Dear boy, is it wise?’
‘Do you know who she is?’ Campion got the inquiry in edgeways.
Mr Campion & Others Page 22
