His packet was a lump of shrapnel in the belly. It didn’t trouble him much, he said, but he had to be careful over what he ate.
We stood for a time in the deserted room. Table and chairs had been stacked, the roulette apparatus put away, and the bar front drawn down.
“A bad business this for you, George,” I said.
“I’m all right as far as that goes,” he said. “It’s him I shall miss. I thought the world and all of him, sir.”
“And he did of you,” I said. “I can’t tell you how I know, but you’ll be finding out. What’s happened to Jean, by the way?”
He grinned, and that should have told me something. “Oh, him. He’s been paid off, sir. He won’t have any trouble in finding a job.”
“A queer-looking cove,” I said.
“People liked all that parley-vooing of his,” George was going on. “Used to give the place a romantic, foreign sort of air, if you know what I mean.”
I thought I did, but I missed the whole point of what he was saying, and it was not till days later that I knew just what he had meant.
Then as I was turning to go, in came Lulu. She gave me a casual hallo.
“How are you this morning?” I asked solicitously.
“Not too bad,” she said. “Sorry I made such a fool of myself when that policeman was here.”
“You did nothing of the sort,” I assured her. “I thought you did uncommonly well. But what are you going to do now?” I asked, and waved a hand at the empty room to show what I meant.
“Oh, I’ll get a job easily enough,” she said.
“I bet you will,” I told her, and then held out my hand. “Well, cheerio, Lulu. I hope some time I shall see you again.”
She gave me one of her old fascinating glances at that, and when I looked back at the door with George, she gave me a little wave of the hand. There, if I wanted one, was a secretary who wouldn’t be too scrupulous about combining business with pleasure.
George went to the front door with me, and we wished each other good luck. As I came out to the main road I saw a pub, and as my throat was like a cross-section of Libya, I had a beer. There was a telephone kiosk there, so I tried Ellice’s office again. He was there all right and pawing the ground. Twice in the last hour he’d rung me and had no reply.
“Nothing from Richmond,” he said, “but the straight tip from Ireland. Our friend crossed over on the Tuesday night boat from Belfast to Liverpool, so he got to town at about one o’clock. He went back on the Friday night boat, same route.”
“Good work, Bill.”
“Want me to follow him up from Euston?” he said. “And back from Richmond if I can?”
“Sorry, Bill—no,” I said. “What you’ve found out is all we wanted to know. Thanks a lot and send me in your account and I’ll drop you a cheque.”
I knew by his silence that he was a bit flabbergasted at that. When he did speak it was to hope he’d given satisfaction, and if there were anything else at any time he’d be only too pleased. Things were rather slack and he wasn’t so particular as he had been. I said I’d remember it, thanked him again, and rang off.
So there was I, rid of the case and clear of what, with Worrack’s death, might have become for me an extremely awkward situation. As a sign of my emancipation I took my time about strolling home, and then I had a go at my Times crossword. Before I’d been at it ten minutes, the bell rang and in came Molde.
“Morning, Molde,” I said, not too pleased. “What brings you along?”
“Just popped in,” he said. “I’m not staying a moment. Got to lunch with some people. Most frightfully good of you, last night. By the way, is your name Blunt or Travers? Rather pointed of me, I know, but that policeman chap alluded to you as Travers.”
“Travers is the name,” I said. “I didn’t think it would have done for me to show up at Worrack’s place as Travers, so he and I agreed I was to be Blunt.”
“Well, it was frightfully good of you in any case,” he said, and then twiddled a bit with his green pork-pie hat. “What I can’t understand is why you were so decent. I mean, why you did it.”
“Surely that’s simple,” I said. “You said something was yours and it had your name on it. If it was a question of you and the police, well, I had to stand by you. Anything special, was it?”
“Only some rather private papers—deeds really. I haven’t a safe and he was always frightfully obliging. A bad business about poor old Worrack—what?”
I said it was. He twiddled with his hat again and then said he’d better be going.
“How’s Scylla?” I asked him at the door.
“Absolutely prostrate,” he said. “A frightful shock, all that business. She didn’t get away till nearly three.”
“Well, I hope to see you both again some time,” I said, and he repeated his vague invitation for a lunch, and that was that. I returned to my puzzle, finished it, and then had a second look through the news. Then the telephone went. It was Hamson.
“Sorry to worry you, Travers,” he said, “but are you doing anything in particular?”
“It all depends,” I said guardedly. “Just what is it you want?”
“Could you have lunch with me? I know it’s a late invitation, but I’d be awfully obliged.”
I put my foot promptly down. No use fooling around on the fringes of the case.
“That’s the one thing I just can’t do. As a matter of fact I’m busy all day.”
“A pity,” he said, and I thought I heard him heave a sigh.
“By the way, I’ve done that little job for you,” he went on. “The one about Jean. He was due on duty not later than eight-thirty each night. Not earlier because he was supposed to leave everything in order each morning when he left. And about that special night you asked for, he was on duty on time.”
“I’m most grateful,” I told him. “Afraid, though, it’s been a waste of time.”
He seemed surprised, so I explained how, if I’d been working for Worrack, that was a thing of the past. He appeared to understand.
“A bad business, that,” he said. “And it reminds me of something. I know it sounds a bit of a coincidence, but a pal of mine was asking me only last night about a reliable detective agency. Nothing in your line. Just the old divorce stuff. I give you my word, by the way, that it’s absolutely genuine.”
“If you want a reliable chap for your friend, I can give you one,” I said, and gave him Bill Ellice’s address and number. I also said I’d rather his friend didn’t mention my name.
“I’m tremendously obliged,” he said. “What about lunching with me in the near future? Can’t be to-morrow on account of that damnable inquest.”
I said it was good of him, and I’d see. Maybe I’d give him a ring. In any case, we’d be meeting somewhere. Then, as an afterthought, I said I’d be grateful if he’d forget any ideas he might have had about my ever working for Worrack, or anybody else for that matter.
“Worrack?” he asked tactfully. “Who’s Worrack?”
That was that, and I promptly rang down for a service lunch. I also thought I was several kinds of a fool to go on being a hermit, so I ran my eye over the movies and matinees, and that afternoon I treated myself to a show. Then I had a quiet little tea at Fuller’s, and as the sun was shining gloriously, I walked the whole way home.
Frank hailed me as soon as I stepped inside the hall. “Been looking for you, sir. This came for you while you were out. I signed it, sir, so perhaps you will let me have your signature.”
“This” was a large envelope, addressed to L. Travers, Esq., and marked PRIVATE and URGENT.
“Who brought it, Frank?” I asked when I’d signed the book.
“Special messenger, sir. Most particular he was.”
I gave Frank a tip and went up with the envelope. It was a good-quality envelope, so I opened it carefully with a knife. The first thing I saw was a wad of banknotes, and then a second wad. On top was a letter.
Dear Tra
vers,
I know you to be a man of honour and that is why I am trusting you implicitly in a certain matter. Before you read any further I know you will respect any confidences about to be made and will afterwards burn this letter. Mr. Worrack was a friend of mine and I do not believe he took his own life. In fact I have strong reasons which I am unable to divulge for thinking he did not do so. In any case I know, and again I cannot divulge my source of information, that you are the one to discover the truth. What I beg of you to do, then, is to find out all you can without revealing any discovery to the police unless you are forced. I leave it to your honour to decide that.
Will you therefore regard me as your backer in the matter, and as evidence of my own good faith I enclose £100 in notes to cover any immediate expenses. While I do not suggest any line of action, I believe the attached may prove of interest to you. I would also add that I trust you implicitly to keep to yourself anything whatever that you may find discover, reporting it only to me.
If you agree, will you insert in the Personal Column of the Daily Telegraph the following:
READY. Accept your offer. T.
If you cannot accept, simply say “refuse” instead of “accept” and I will thereupon arrange for the return of the contents of this envelope. But I beg of you to help. And I would also ask that if at any time you suspect who is the writer of this letter, you will give no hint that you know. I forgot to add that if you accept, further expenses will be sent if you intimate your wishes in the Personal Column.
Yours gratefully,
READY
That was the most extraordinary letter I’d ever received in my life, and even the first reading had made me gasp. When I’d read it a second time I did a bit of quick wondering. Hamson had written it, I thought, and had worded it craftily and so out of character that I could never connect it with him. Then I switched. It was typewritten, except for the signature, and that was neatly hand-printed. Lulu had typed it. She would be interested in who had poisoned Worrack. Yet I didn’t know. Whoever had written it had done the job sufficiently well to bamboozle me entirely.
The notes, all in fivers, were attached to the letter by a clip, and I made them the £100 that had been mentioned. Then I turned my attention to the second enclosure, also held by a clip. First was a half sheet of paper on which was typed:
HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL
and beneath that was a pawn-ticket! Attached to that was £90 in ten-pound notes!
Do you know what a pawn-ticket is like? If you don’t, here is a drawing of that one.
The serration at the bottom showed where the pawn-broker’s counterfoil had been torn off. That gives him a duplicate, and he also makes an entry in his ledger. And in case you don’t know it, here is an important fact. In spite of the name on the ticket, the law assumes that the holder of the ticket is qualified to redeem the article pawned.
My free hand had gone to my glasses, even if there was still something I had missed. All I guessed, and bewilderedly enough, was that I was to redeem the ring with the ninety pounds. Charges, of course, would be paid out of the expense and retaining fee. You may think me slow in the uptake, but it was only then that I realised just what it was that I had to redeem. An emerald ring, pawned for ninety pounds and maybe worth double at least. Georgina Morbent had had such a ring!
A moment or two, and I was telling myself that there couldn’t be a shadow of doubt. The clue to Worrack’s death lay in Georgina’s disappearance, and I’d know more about that when I’d found out about the ring. Another moment, and my fingers were at my glasses again and I was nervously moistening my lips.
As Syd Walker used to ask, “What would you have done, chums?” I won’t tell you—yet—what I did, but I will say this. The money had no interest for me. I am far from a wealthy man, but I’m the very devil of a way from a poor one. For my amusements and hobbies in life I’ve always been prepared to pay handsomely, and here, in a dramatically reopened case, was something that had fascinating prospects. Dangerous prospects, too, as I knew, and I told myself I’d be a fool to get myself in wrong with the Yard if my activities leaked out. In fact I was in the very devil of a quandary, and it was not till the morning that I’d made up my mind.
CHAPTER IX
HERE ENDETH
In the morning, as I’ve said, I made up my mind, but I reached a decision by devious routes. Don’t forget—and I don’t think you are likely to forget it—that I’m not the least bashful about making theories. In my judgment, and it’s not wholly as an armchair critic, the three rules for winning most things are, attack, then attack again, and then attack some more. In detective work theorising is attacking.
Long before I went to sleep I’d done some theorising about my employer, that is if I accepted the offer. I had the letter before me, and for an hour at least I tried to visualise various certainties about the one who had written it. Hamson was my first favourite. At one minute I was dead sure he had written it, and then I’d be not so sure. I hadn’t quite credited, for instance, that yarn of his about wanting the name of a detective agency for a friend. Probably it was right, but if it wasn’t, then why should he want to employ me? But my main objection to Hamson as the writer of the letter was that to me the letter showed signs of having been written by a woman.
I switched to Lulu, the rectory offspring whose urban education had been only too well completed by Worrack. She was my second favourite, displacing Hamson, that is.
It seemed to me that she might have had a better chance of acquiring that pawn-ticket—wheedling it out of some admirer, for instance—than Hamson, for how on earth he could have acquired it I had no idea. Doubtless, too, she had the money, for her salary must have been good and, as Worrack had cynically hinted, there were pickings. But I had two objections to Lulu. One, a very small one, was that the letter was not too well typed. Mistakes had been made and erased; in fact it was not a good advertisement for Lulu as a secretary. But that might have been designed, and to throw one off the scent. But the second objection was far more important, that the letter showed unmistakable signs of having been written by a man.
Then I had my brainwave, and just when I was thinking of Scylla. A man and a woman might have concocted that letter, so why not Scylla and Molde? Something told me I was on the scent. Scylla, according to Hamson, had money; and Molde, whatever I may inadvertently have led you to believe to the contrary, very definitely had brains. Scylla had them too, and quick-working ones, as I’d discovered that night in Worrack’s office. But if those two were behind the letter, then every intuition told me that behind it was something crooked.
What could the scheme be? Obtaining through me information for the purposes of blackmailing someone? Making the £190, in fact, a lucrative investment? It couldn’t be anything so foolish as luring me to the pawnshop to pay ninety pounds for a fake ring. A scheme so devious as that would mean not only that the pawn-ticket was a forgery but that the pawnbroker was the one who would get the ninety pounds. And the ninety pounds wouldn’t be mine!
That was what I thought overnight, and when I woke in the morning it was all clear again in my mind. But setting aside that letter, and whoever had written it, I now had a new thought that was something of a resolve. Worrack had been murdered—of that I was sure—and I had liked him, and I was going to do my best to get the one who had got him. As for my unknown employer, well, I had the whip-hand. I could insert that acceptance in the newspaper, and then go blandly on in my own way. It would be for the employer to make the next move. In fact, if I wished I could force him, or her, or them, clean out into the open.
But I had also a last remnant of caution. Without going into the reasons why I should be a fool to involve myself farther in a highly complex and dangerous case, I made a bargain with myself; tossing, if you like, the coin of an event. To begin with, the pawnshop might be risky. What I would do would be to look up Ivan Markovitch—a phony name if ever there was one—and if anything suspicious arose, then I would insert the notice.
If Ivan was a genuine person, then I would go no farther.
After breakfast I looked up Yeovil Street in a large-scale map of the town. There were three of them altogether, so the useful appendix told me, but the others were far removed from W.2. It was at about half-past nine when I left, and as it was again a perfect morning I decided to walk. My own views on Yeovil Street were that it would be a turning off a larger residential street, and that Number 273 would be a tobacconist’s or other accommodation address. But when I reached it, after ten minutes’ walking, I found it to be a fork from the main road and quite a high-class residential street in itself. Quite modern and expensive-looking flats were there but never a sign of a shop.
I began walking slowly along the side with the odd numbers until I came at last to Number 147. Then something peculiar happened, for the street forked into two new streets and neither was a continuation. Upwell Street was the name of one and Aukland Crescent the other. So I guessed that Yeovil Street had one-way numbers, and crossed to the other side. The first house was 148, but to my exasperation the second wasn’t 149. It was 146, and after that came 144.
Along the road was a milkman and I asked him about it. He said there wasn’t a 273. The last number was 148, and so it looked as if Ivan had given a faked address. Then I another idea. What if one of those big blocks of flats had one that was numbered 273? Hardly likely, perhaps, but worth trying. And just as I arrived at what was undoubtedly the biggest block, a taxi was going away and the hall porter who had helped with the luggage was still on the pavement.
“I expect it’s a ridiculous question these days,” I said to him, “but you haven’t got a flat available here?”
“Not a hope, sir,” he told me.
The Case of the Running Mouse: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 12
