by Cyril Hare
Frant strolled towards Eales, his pulses quickening slightly with the uncontrollable excitement of the hunter. But the latter instead of paying the cab, as he had expected, walked straight up to the front door of the house, leaving his suitcase behind him in the waiting vehicle. The sergeant judged it wise to hold his hand. He allowed Eales to enter the house unmolested, walked on past him to the corner, turned and came slowly back. He had not proceeded far when Eales emerged once more from the house. On the steps he turned, and called out to someone behind him: “Mind you, this is the last time!” Frant caught a glimpse of Du Pine standing in the porch, could just distinguish the expressionless smile which greeted the words, and then the door closed.
By the time Eales had given his order to the driver and had settled himself again on the seat of the taxi, the police car had been summoned and the sedate pursuit began anew. This time the course lay southward. The little procession of two skirted Lord’s cricket ground, ran down Regent’s Park Road, crossed the Marylebone Road and went on down Baker Street and across Oxford Street towards the West End. The chase ended just off Piccadilly, at the headquarters of an air line to the Continent. There Frant tapped his man on the shoulder as he was about to climb into a motor-coach bound for Croydon aerodrome, and murmured a few words in his ear which caused him to abandon the idea of flying for that day.
Eales, a little pale but perfectly self-possessed, entered the police car with a shrug of his thin shoulders.
“You have got the warrant. I suppose?” he asked Frant as they started for Bow Street.
Frant read it over to him. The effect was somewhat strange.
“Bigamy!” exclaimed the prisoner. “Oh, my God!” He laughed aloud above the noise of the traffic.
The rest of the journey was accomplished in silence, but in the charge-room at Bow Street Eales spoke once more.
“I suppose that damned little double-crosser Du Pine is responsible for this?” he demanded.
“I am not allowed to tell you through what channels information reaches the police,” answered Frant warily.
“Because if he is, I can tell you a thing or two——”
The sergeant cut him short and at once administered the statutory caution. Eales, a little impressed by the official verbiage, fell silent once more. Frant watched him narrowly.
“I think I am entitled to tell you”, he said in detached tones, “that we are a little interested in a trip abroad you made on the night of the 13th of November. But of course if you prefer to say nothing, you are perfectly entitled——”
The prisoner’s face changed.
“Here, give me a pen and paper!” he snarled.
He began to write, copiously, fluently, pausing only at intervals to swear under his breath.
23
SUCCESS
* * *
* * *
Wednesday, November 25th
The taxi wound its way slowly through the thronging traffic. The gloom of a late winter afternoon had set in, and the street lamps, which had just been lighted, only illuminated fitfully the corner in which Harper sat. Mallett looked at him curiously. The pose suggested to his experienced eyes a sense of strain, as though the young man was compelling himself to appear at ease, without altogether succeeding. His head lolled back comfortably enough against the back of the car, his legs were jauntily crossed, but at the same time there was to a close observer a rigidity in the body which told of muscles that were taut with the effort of doing nothing, of nerves protesting against the ordeal to which they were being subjected. None the less, the inspector looked in vain for any sign of the acute terror which their encounter at Brighton had so unmistakably inspired. Then he had been frightened—horror-struck, almost; now he was ill at ease, nervous perhaps, but no more. Here was an enigma, and one that the inspector determined to resolve without delay.
“The last time I saw you,” he began, “you seemed to be enjoying yourself.”
“Enjoying myself?” echoed Harper in apparent surprise. “That seems rather an odd way of putting it.”
“I don’t see anything odd about it,” returned Mallett. “It would have been my idea of enjoying myself, at your age, and most people’s, too.”
“People’s ideas of enjoyment evidently differ. I really can’t answer for yours. Personally, I found it a most distasteful experience, and I thought I made it clear at the time.”
“No, I’m damned if you did!” exclaimed Mallett, irritated at this absurd piece of fencing. “If ever I saw a young couple enjoying themselves——”
“Really, Inspector,” Harper broke in, “I think we are talking at cross-purposes. Now I come to think of it, you mentioned the last time you saw me. Strictly speaking, I have no idea when that was. As a detective you may, for all I know, make a practice of seeing people when they aren’t looking. I can only speak of the last time I saw you, and that was at the inquest.”
The taxi travelled some distance before Mallett found words to answer this extraordinary assertion.
“Are you going to deny that you were at the Riviera Hotel, Brighton, the evening after the inquest?” he asked sternly.
“Certainly not. Why should I?”
“And that you saw me there—in the interval between two dances—and seeing me, showed every sign of surprise and fright, and”—he paused for greater emphasis—“and guilt?”
Harper’s manner had changed completely. Abandoning altogether his attitude of defensive suspicion, he now leant forward and spoke with an appearance of entire sincerity.
“Look here, sir,” he said. “I don’t in the least understand what you are driving at. I was at the hotel on that evening. I was dancing. I was enjoying myself very much. As for being frightened or guilty, I never felt less like it in my life. You tell me that you saw me. Well, you can take my word for it that I did not see you. Now, will you please tell me what all this means?”
“You did see me,” Mallett maintained. “I was standing within a few yards of you—just behind you, in fact.”
“Which of course explains why I didn’t see you.”
“You were looking in a glass to tie your bow-tie. It was at that moment that you saw me and looked—as I have said—frightened and guilty.”
“Looking in the glass to tie my tie. . . .” The young man mused a moment. “Good lord, so that was it?”
“Ah, so you remember now?”
“Certainly I remember—not seeing you, though. I may have, of course, but your face made absolutely no impression on me.”
“Then what was there to be frightened of?”
“I was frightened”, said Harper soberly, “of myself.”
“What?”
“Of my own appearance, I mean. That bow-tie. Don’t you remember. Inspector, the day we found him there—at Daylesford Gardens—I commented to you about his tie—what an ugly thing it was, and how badly tied? Well, when I looked in the glass, I got the shock of my life. Mine looked exactly like it. It suddenly brought it all back to me—that horrible swollen face and how his tongue stuck out from the corner of his mouth—ugh!”
Mallett was laughing.
“So that was why you looked so scared!” he chuckled. “Well, well! I always said you knew something about this case we didn’t know! What a lot of trouble you might have spared us!”
“Trouble? You don’t really mean that tie business was important?”
“About the most important thing in the whole case.”
“I don’t understand. Please tell me.”
Mallett had no objection. It was a minor point—now. He was relieved to find that this likeable young fellow was free from suspicion, and success had loosened his tongue.
“Your tie looked odd”, he explained, “because someone else had just tried to tie it for you—and done it very badly.”
“Yes,” said Harper, blushing a little in spite of himself.
“Ballantine’s looked odd for just the same reason.”
“But why should anyone tie it
for him?”
“For the same reason that he put on his coat and trousers for him—to make him look like Ballantine.”
“After he was dead, do you mean?”
“Precisely.”
“Then what,” Harper asked with growing excitement, “what did he look like before he was killed?”
“He looked remarkably like a stout gentleman with a beard who once came to your office to take a furnished house in South Kensington.”
“Do you mean, then,” the young man breathed in a voice hardly above a whisper, “that James was Ballantine?”
“I do. A fact,” added Mallett, “which is going to prove very inconvenient to a number of otherwise excellent alibis.”
There was silence between them as the car crossed the end of Trafalgar Square and sped along Whithall.
“Of course,” murmured Harper, “I always thought that couldn’t have been his tie. Nobody could have worn one that colour with those clothes. I wonder why he changed it.” He shivered and then seemed to rouse himself suddenly from his reflections. “I’ll get out here, if you don’t mind,” he said. “That is, unless you want——”
“That’s all right,” said the inspector. “You’ve told me all I wanted to know, and very interesting it was.”
He ordered the driver to stop, put Harper down, and drove on alone into New Scotland Yard. He was feeling in a genial mood, expansive and self-satisfied. The chase was almost at an end and he was about to reap the reward of his persistence and ingenuity. It did not occur to him to look back at his late companion. Had he done so, he would have seen him stand a moment irresolute on the pavement, and then go quickly to a public telephone box.
Mallett made his way at once to his office. As he entered it, he was overtaken by Frant, in a high state of excitement. He motioned him to come in.
“Well?” he asked.
“I arrested Eales this afternoon,” said the sergeant.
“Yes? Is that all?”
“And Du Pine half an hour later.”
The inspector smiled. “More bigamy?” he asked.
Frant shook his head. “You may laugh, sir,” he said, “but that charge of bigamy has worked like a charm.”
“I’m sure it has. But what exactly is Du Pine’s offence?”
“Drug-trafficking.”
“Aha! So that was his little game, was it?”
“Yes. He’d been importing it on quite a large scale for some time apparently, and latterly employing Eales as his messenger to Paris. The poor devil was so hard up he couldn’t refuse, he tells me, and he was quite well paid. When I arrested him this morning he was just off on another trip—by air this time.”
“The infernal cheek of that fellow Du Pine—right under our noses!”
“It was rather more than just cheek,” said the sergeant gently. “You see, he had to get the stuff—he wanted it, desperately.”
“For his own use, you mean?”
Frant nodded. “He was in a ghastly state when he was brought in,” he went on. “The station doctor had to give him a pretty stiff dose of morphia or he’d have gone off his head. I really felt sorry for the blackguard. It seems that he’s been an addict for years, but since the crash of the company and Ballantine’s death, worry and fright have so wrecked his nerves that he’s been increasing the doses until he’d used up all his supply—and his customers’ too. That’s why he sent Eales over today. It’s a very useful capture, and if the French police play up, we ought to be able to round up a whole gang on both sides of the Channel.”
Mallett rubbed his hands in satisfaction.
“The end of a perfect day,” he purred. “I think we’ve both earned a cup of tea.”
“And now,” said Frant as they sat down to tea, “would you mind telling me, just for my own information, what you have done and just how you managed to get to the bottom of this?”
“Pure—what is the word?—ratiocination,” answered the inspector proudly. “I approached it this way. There were several people who might have killed Ballantine. Of them all the one who took my fancy from the start was Fanshawe. Apart from the question of motive, he was the only man who seemed to me to be of the stuff of which murderers are made. Not that he is a common sort of killer by any means; on the contrary, I should put him down as a distinctly superior type—high-minded, fastidious, and all the rest of it. But vain, Frant, vain—or, if that’s too small a word, proud as Lucifer. The sort of man who, if he decided that someone else ought to be wiped out would think no more of doing it than of squashing a fly on the window-pane. That was my first reflection.
“Then I went on to consider the evidence. One thing struck me at once. Fanshawe went to France by the night boat on Friday the 13th. So, we found, did Eales. A coincidence, no doubt, but a perfectly possible one. But so also did Colin James. That struck me as a perfectly impossible coincidence—that three individuals, connected with this crime, should all have chosen independently to travel by that boat. Now we know, had known from the start, that James was someone else in disguise. It stuck out a mile. To reduce my three travellers to two, my impossible coincidence to a possible one, James must be one of the others in disguise, either Eales or Fanshawe. I struck out Eales, for reasons which you know. Therefore James was Fanshawe. At the same time, we knew on irrefutable evidence that James had been a tenant in Daylesford Gardens while Fanshawe was a tenant of a cell in Maidstone. Therefore James was not Fanshawe. Two perfectly logical propositions arriving at opposite results. I left them there and went back to consider what we have always regarded as the crux of the problem, the identity of James.
“Who had I got to look for? Either somebody who had disappeared altogether, about the time that James came to life, or somebody whose manner of living enabled him to lead a double life, putting in sufficient appearances in his old haunts and under his normal guise to avoid suspicion, while spending the rest of his time building up the new identity of Colin James. I went through the records of disappearances, and found none that would suit. I was not surprised. James had been only intermittently at Daylesford Gardens, and I suspected all along that he had been spending the rest of his time elsewhere in another identity. So I had to find someone whose conduct had recently been irregular and abnormal, whose sleeping places one couldn’t trace, and who had a motive for building up another personality at the time in question. I found him—Lionel Ballantine.
“Once that was established, the rest fell into place easily enough. The letter to the bank, the uneasiness of Mrs. Eales, everything was explained. Then I turned back to the first part of the problem, and that fell into place too. James was Fanshawe; James was Ballantine. Why not, when it was simply a case of taking a disguise off a dead man and putting it on a live one? It only remained to prove it, and that turned out to be the difficulty. Unexpectedly, I wasn’t able to prove what I know to be the fact, that Ballantine ordered James’s suit from Mrs. Bradworthy, but my second shot turned out a winner. The evidence at the inquest was that Ballantine left his office with his umbrella. No umbrella was found with him at Daylesford Gardens. Therefore he must have left it behind when he changed into James. I pondered over various possible places which he could have used for the job, and hit on the Anglo-Dutch offices, which seemed to have no other purpose in life. As it turned out I was right.”
He brandished the umbrella in triumph.
“A pretty little thing, isn’t it?” he remarked. “Strictly, I suppose, it belongs to the creditors, but I should love to keep it. It would be a pity to make a hole in such a nice piece of silk, though. But just as a memento, I think I must have it.”
“I’ve got my own memento,” said Frant. “I shall frame this.”
He held up a scribbled sheet of paper.
“Identity of Colin James.
”The following are the names of the chief suspects in the case of Lionel Ballantine: X
Eales
Du Pine
Fanshawe
Harper
Crabtree
“James was a mask for Ballantine. The mask survived the wearer!—J.M.”
Mallett laughed.
“That was a piece of conceit on my part,” he said. “But I was so pleased when I had seen through the problem that I couldn’t resist the temptation of mystifying you. Well, the case is at an end now, I suppose, so far as detection is concerned. Tomorrow I shall apply for another warrant at Bow Street and after that the lawyers take charge. Do you know, Frant, in some ways I feel quite sorry——”
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in!”
24
ESCAPE
* * *
* * *
Wednesday, November 25th
Mallett was not a superstitious man, but he always declared that from the moment he heard that knock at the door he felt confident that something had gone wrong. Certainly there was no excuse for the glare which he fixed on the man who now came into the room—a perfectly commonplace plain-clothes detective.
“What do you want?” he barked.
“I was told to report to you, sir,” was the reply.
“Told to report—who by?”
“By the Deputy Commissioner, sir.”
Mallett looked at him more closely.
“I don’t understand. Weren’t you on duty at Daylesford Court Mansions?”
“I was, sir.”
“Well? Who has relieved you?”
“Nobody, sir. I was simply ordered to cease keeping observation and report to you.”
“What?” cried Mallett, leaping from his chair.
“I understand there was a special instruction to that effect from the Home Secretary,” the man continued.
“ ‘I always treated him very decently when he was my fag at school,’ ” murmured Frant with a wry smile, but the inspector did not heed him. With a roar he dashed from the room and sped along the corridor, leaving Frant and the bewildered newcomer to follow as best they could.
