It was an anti-climax seeing that pawnbroker, even if it did have its interesting moments. It was my friend, thank heaven! and his eyes fairly bulged when he saw me in Wharton’s chair.
I told him that what had passed between us at the shop was just as confidential as ever. I hinted, too, that he had nothing to fear, and that five minutes or so would settle the business in hand.
It took just ten minutes. A formal statement as to the pawning was taken down. The three articles had been pawned at one and the same evening by Markovitch. One had been redeemed by Markovitch and the other two he had brought along, and I gave him the necessary receipts. The watch had been pawned for forty pounds and the cigarette-case for thirty. There followed a detailed description of Markovitch.
“In fact,” I said, as I rose, to show the interview was over, “the three articles were pawned by this Markovitch and Markovitch redeemed one of them, the ring.”
He assured me unblushingly that that was correct. I thanked him formally and out he went. The room wasn’t hot, but as soon as he’d gone my forehead was, and I was mopping it with my handkerchief. Another hurdle successfully negotiated, I could tell myself, and then was wondering how much longer my uncanny luck would hold.
CHAPTER XIII
THE DRY BONES STIR
I woke at seven the next morning and tried to drop off to sleep again, but it was no use. My brain was far too active, for it had picked up again the two thoughts that had last been in my mind. One concerned that clear bill of health I’d given Wharton about Barbara Grays. I’d also assured myself that she could never have been concerned in the death of her sister; and all the time I’d been forgetting something. Why, on that first morning when I had met him at his flat, had Worrack hinted that Barbara Grays had a pretty strong motive for being behind the disappearance? Surely the charge must have had some basis of fact. What, then, had I missed? Somewhere there must be a clue to the discrepancy.
I had also thought about Hamson, and once more Worrack came in. Worrack had almost forced some sort of co-operation with Hamson upon me, and I still didn’t know why. The death of Worrack had relieved me of that particular incubus, but only after I’d given Hamson one small commission—to find out something about Jean. And now it appeared that Hamson had continued to be interested in Jean, according to Jean’s own yarn to Wharton. But whatever Wharton thought of the yarn, I didn’t credit it. What I believed was that Jean had sold Hamson dope long before that inquest, and that the yarn had probably been concocted between the pair of them. If so, it looked as if Hamson was pretty heavily involved in the death of Worrack, however innocent he might be of any share in the disappearance and death of Georgina Morbent.
Before eight o’clock I was dressed and ready for breakfast, so I went down to have a look at Frank’s Daily Telegraph. Once more there was never a message for me, and in a rather petulant mood, perhaps, I told myself that I’d give READY another twenty-four hours—forty-eight, since it was a Saturday—and then myself announce that I was withdrawing from the case. That would bring READY out into the open and produce some action. That was what I was beginning to want—action, and spelt with capital letters and followed by a couple of exclamation marks. Before the forty-eight hours had gone I was certainly going to get it, though I didn’t know it then.
I had just finished breakfast when Wharton rang up. “Can you be here at nine-thirty? Shan’t keep you long, and I’ll have seen Carpenter again by then.”
“Did Carpenter do any telephoning?” I asked.
“That’s where we slipped up,” Wharton said. “There was a kiosk in the place where he stayed.”
I had wondered why he had spoken so gently, at least till I knew he had made that slip-up. George’s own mistakes were always those that might happen to any man; other people’s were those that could never have happened to George.
“What do you think of that damn fellow O’Clauty?” he was saying, and his tone now was one of tremendous indignation. Something had happened, I gathered, and it was not George who had slipped up.
“What’s he done?” I asked.
“He’s bolted!”
“Bolted?”
“Dammit, don’t you understand the King’s English? Bolted—skedaddled—hopped it back to Ireland!”
I was just going to ask why not, when George went splutteringly on. “You know as well as I do that he’d agreed to stay and help all he could. Gave me his London address and everything. Now he’s probably back in Dublin.”
He rang off then and I couldn’t help chuckling. O’Clauty had never, to my knowledge, promised to stay on in town, and if he had, then it was refreshing to find someone sufficiently acute to have worked a fast one on George. In any case, it looked as if he was back in Dublin, and in spite of that bluff about the will, the devil of a job George would have to get him to England again.
I thought George was looking quite pleased with himself when I went into his room.
“Get anything out of Carpenter?” I asked.
“No,” he said bluntly. “He’s gone back to his old diggings, and he’ll be watched.”
“A pity,” I said. “I’d hoped he’d have come clean about that dope.”
He grunted. “Yes, and give himself a certain three years. We shan’t be able to get at him through his customers. There isn’t one of them who’d ever squeal.” He shook his head. “No. What they may do is want more dope. That’s why he’s being watched.”
I went into that pawnbroker business with him, and he seemed quite satisfied. No trace of that private car had been found at Richmond, and how Markovitch was to be picked up he didn’t know. I said I’d arranged with the pawnbroker that if Markovitch turned up with anything else to pawn, he was to be held at all costs and the Yard or local police informed. George was good enough to tell me that I couldn’t have done more.
“I’ve seen most of those people again we saw at the club,” he said. “That Molde’s a queer cove, isn’t he?”
“I’d call him unhealthy rather than queer,” I said.
“One of the Nobs, isn’t he?” George was a bit of a snob in his way, even if he would allude with a simulated scorn to the Big Bugs, and the Nobs, and the Powers-that-Be. “And that Scylla Payton. He’s keeping her?”
“I rather gathered so,” I said. “What’d you think of her?”
“Seemed all right to me,” George said. “Not that I’m much at home with that Society gang.”
A hell of a lot of Society about Scylla, I thought to myself. Then he was mentioning Hamson.
“There’s a man who didn’t strike me as telling the whole truth, and nothing but,” he said. “I felt as if I was fencing with somebody, if you know what I mean.”
I knew all right, though I didn’t say so.
“Now there’s something I’d like you to do,” George was going on, and his tone had the old familiar unction. “I doubt if there’ll be any other job for you in the next day or two, so what about cultivating the acquaintance of that chap Hamson? I feel it’s going to be worth it.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said. “I know him well enough already, so he shouldn’t find me too obvious.”
“Good,” he said. “Then I think I’ll be pushing along. Richmond first. Then I’ve got one or two more to see.”
“Slow work,” I said.
“What else do you expect?” he fired at me. “A penny in the slot and things come out?”
“Maybe,” I told him amiably. “Nothing new from the Worrack angle?”
He shot me a look and I knew he was keeping something back. “What more do you want? Haven’t I told you already?”
“The last you told me was that duropine had a variable action,” I said. “I didn’t see anything in that. All poisons have, according to the dose.”
He threw up his hands. “And you call yourself a detective!”
“I don’t,” I said.
He ignored that. His tone took on a long-suffering patience.
“Haven’t I enou
gh to do without having to show you how two and two make four? You heard what I told Carpenter about that duropine stuff. Well, use your sense. If you can’t do that, then listen to me. I had a special analysis of the stomach contents.”
I could have said that he hadn’t told me that. But he was referring to his notebook.
“Now then, listen to this. He had a very scratch meal at somewhere round half-past seven. Just sandwiches and a coffee, and he got those at his flat. A fairly strong dose of the poison was found in the lower part of the partially digested meal. The next thing he apparently had was that long brandy and soda, but there wasn’t a trace of poison in that.”
“Good Lord!” I said, and my fingers went to my glasses.
“You see it now, do you?”
“Yes,” I said. “He was given the poison before half-past seven, and the strength was worked out so that he’d die some two or three hours later, and at the club. But there wasn’t any additional poison in the brandy. Someone dropped that in from a capsule after Hamson had carried him away.”
“Excellent!” he told me ironically. “And why was it worked like that?”
“So that it’d be thought that poison in the brandy had killed him. That gave colour to the suicide motive, especially when the capsule was dropped by his chair.” I remember something else. “That was why Worrack felt so seedy that night. The poison was working on him.”
“That’s it,” he said. “Now you see why I’d like you to get acquainted with Hamson. He could have dropped that poison in the brandy before Worrack collapsed. At any time after that blasted mouse appeared.” He nodded grimly. “I’d like to know just who was responsible for that. Conroy hinted at a naval officer, and then said he’d gone back to sea again.”
“I believe there was one there,” I said, as if by no means sure. “But what about callers at Worrack’s flat that early evening? Found anything out?”
He pursed his lips, and I knew he was wondering whether to spill the information or not.
“As a matter of fact we know of only one caller. That Lulu Mawne. Conroy let on in confidence that she went regularly about that time.”
I remembered well enough, and that quarrel between the two, and how they’d previously been drinking sherry, even if all that was the night before.
“What motive could she have had for poisoning him?” I asked, with a look of bewilderment.
“There’s a motive all right,” he said. “That Georgina Morbent cut her out with Worrack. A jealous woman’ll do anything.”
Then he was making for his overcoat and demanding why I was keeping him hanging about when he ought to be at Richmond. I walked downstairs with him to his car, and the last thing he said to me was that I was God’s gift to the Yard, so to speak, in the matter of worming things out of Hamson.
I walked on to Charing Cross and took a train to Piccadilly Circus and then strolled along to my club, and I wasn’t doing too much thinking about what George had told me, especially in the case of Lulu Mawne. I knew what Wharton didn’t know, perhaps, that Worrack was accessible to any members of his club, and that anybody might have called there besides Lulu. Frankly, her motive, whatever I’d thought in the past, didn’t strike me as sufficiently strong.
On the other hand, there was the fact that poison was always woman’s weapon.
I wasn’t in any hurry to ring up Hamson. No need to let him think I was being at all anxious to lunch with him, so I looked through the dailies and the illustrated weeklies, and then saw that it was just turned noon. I rang up his hotel, but there was no reply, and when I checked up through the hotel I was told he had gone out. I left no message, and then was trying to decide where I should lunch myself. To tell the truth I was rather relieved that I had not got Hamson. Wharton had suggested that worming things out of him would be easy, but I knew far better. And I hadn’t thought of any plan of campaign.
I remembered a good place to lunch, and as I made my way there I was thinking about Hamson again, and all the queer things I had against him. Worrack’s thrusting him on me, for instance, and the way he’d found out who I was. How he’d probably tried to get himself off the list of suspects by swearing he’d never marry Barbara Grays if she came into Georgina’s money, and how he’d wanted it kept dark about his supposed connection with the Indian Police. How he’d told me that Barbara wasn’t herself that day at the lunch, and how Worrack had said he’d been lying. How he was mixed up with the unspeakable Carpenter, and quite a few more things. But how could I question him about any of them? That was the point, and it had me flummoxed.
I had a fair lunch at rather too stiff a price, and then strolled along Regent Street. Something caught my eye in a shop window, and while I was looking at it I noticed something else—the clear reflection of Hamson as he went by towards Piccadilly Circus. Who should be with him but Scylla! In the brief glimpse I’d had of them I’d seen that they were on very good terms with themselves. In fact, they’d eyes for nobody else, otherwise Hamson must have spotted me.
I followed them at a discreet distance, though I needn’t have worried about that, for neither of them looked back. At the traffic block he took her arm and they crossed the street, his head bent down close by hers. I crossed, too, and I followed them down to the Underground Station at Swan and Edgar’s Corner. They went straight through and came out on the Lower Regent Street side, and I was twenty yards behind.
They turned right, and then in a few yards halted before cinema. I halted too; in fact I turned down a convenient side-street, and from there took a cautious peep, for I was now not ten yards from where they stood. Then almost at once another girl came up, and she was hailing the pair. Hamson she could not have met before, for Scylla was introducing him. A good-looking girl she was—in the early twenties, I guessed—and very well dressed, and then, before I could get another good view of her, the three were entering the doors of the cinema, like three old friends.
I glanced at my watch and the time was a quarter-past two. So I took a short stroll along the side-street and then entered the cinema vestibule myself, and consulted the time-table of events. The big picture—a well-reviewed one —was timed for two-twenty, and as I came out to the pavement again I was busy on a reconstruction. The second girl, a friend of Scylla’s most likely, had not been able to join the two for lunch, but had made a rendezvous for the cinema. All I had to do was to wait for the end of the show and pick them up as they came out.
Then I changed my mind. There were more exits than one, and the three might not stay till the end of the show, but leave when the big picture was over. In that case it would mean my hanging around for most of the afternoon and dodging from one exit to another, and that wasn’t good enough. Yet I abandoned the idea with reluctance. I’d have liked to know just why Hamson was being so affectionate with Scylla, about the last one I’d have thought he’d have fallen for. And I’d have liked to know some more about her friend Goldilocks, as I’d christened her. Lovely hair she’d had. Scylla’s was the latest thing in platinums, as you’ve heard before, but the other girl’s was two good classes above it.
Then I thought of a compromise and turned back and bought myself a seat. It was a good picture, and when it was on I didn’t do much looking round, but when the lights went up I took a careful look or two. But the place was so huge and so packed that looking for those three was a waste of time or an expectation of incredible luck, so I sat the programme out. When I emerged with the crowd there was never a sign of Hamson, so I pushed on to Moroni’s for tea in case the three should come on there. But they didn’t, and that was that. Then, as I came out again I thought of something else. Whoever READY was, I had about a hundred pounds of his money, and waiting to be used for the purposes of discovering who had killed Worrack. Why not invest some of it in having Hamson watched? That would make the job someone else’s headache, and if there were any discoveries I could report to Wharton. But there seemed something just a bit too flamboyant in that idea, and I told myself the origina
l idea was far better—to wait till the Monday and then, if READY had no communication for me, to begin the process of winkling him out into the open.
Sunday morning dawned, and I didn’t know it was to be a decisive day for me. All I thought when I woke was that there would be another twenty-four hours to wait before I should know if READY had made a communication. As Wharton would probably be busy with routine enquiries and in no need of me, I did contemplate a restful day. I would take a stroll in the Park, I thought, and then read the papers and do the crosswords and in the evening I’d write to my wife. Then I thought of something rather strange. Bernice was probably too busy to have much time for reading newspapers, but surely she must have heard some talk about the severed head affair. If so, and if she had known Georgina Morbent at all well, then why hadn’t she mentioned the affair to me? Particularly, as I remembered, after my asking her about Barbara Grays.
But that wasn’t anything to stay in my mind. After breakfast I took my stroll, and it was about half-past eleven when I got back. I glanced at the headlines of the two papers and then wondered if there was anything worth listening to on the wireless. The Home Service mentioned an orchestra, but didn’t specify what kind, and the Forces Programme a variety show for workers, so I switched on to see what. As soon as the sound came on I realised that the last time I’d listened it had been to the Forces Programme, though heaven knew why, and I was just going to change over to the Home Programme when I heard something that made me wince. Who should I be hearing but my old comic friend and his gag about the hens!
“. . . and what do you think the hens were singing? ‘Hold tight, hold tight.’”
I didn’t switch off, but cynically awaited the next part of the same old gag. The applause subsided, and it came.
The Case of the Running Mouse: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 18
