“And if I know you,” I said, “the Government will be paying for a new one.”
“That’s more like your old self,” he told me delightedly. “And now would you like to hear some news? Or have they told you.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve gone and frightened the life out of Bernice!”
“I did think of letting her know,” he said, “and then they told me you’d be about again in a day or two. What I thought you might like to know was about Dane.” His voice lowered as he drew in his chair. “That last bomb went plumb on the back of the house.”
“And he’s dead?”
“Blown to smithereens,” he said. “No one else hurt. That man of his was down in the front with the wardens and never got a scratch. I’ve been round there this morning watching them sift the ruins.”
“Sift?” I said.
“That’s it,” he said. “Sift’s the word. Hoping to find that missing ring.”
I said nothing. There was something else I wanted to know and yet I was afraid to put the question. And while I was trying to think of some roundabout approach, George gave the information himself.
“Another old friend of yours has slipped through the meshes.”
“Leverton?”
“Leverton!” He gave a little snort. “He’s where we want him—thank God. I meant our friend Mrs. B. You haven’t heard about her?”
I shook my head and I could feel my heart beginning to race.
“Took an overdose of sleeping tablets that very same evening”—it would be the Tuesday that he meant—“and wasn’t found till late the same night.”
“Dead, was she?”
“Dead as a door-nail,” Wharton said, and was looking guiltily round. Wroce had come up on the blind side.
“What’s this about dead,” he said. “Nice cheerful subject to talk about?”
George chuckled as he got to his feet.
“Time’s up in any case,” Wroce told him. “To-morrow you can talk death and bloody murder to your heart’s content.”
“You’re letting me out?” I said.
“Kicking you out,” he said, and George guffawed. “What do you think this is? A hotel?”
I got back to the flat the following afternoon. George rang me after tea and said he’d come round for an hour, if it wouldn’t tire me too much. I told him to come before seven o’clock and stay for a meal, but he wouldn’t make any promise.
As a matter of fact it was just after six when he turned up. I told him I was feeling fine and that it was damned nonsense about taking things steady. The head was a bit sore but for the rest I’d never felt more fit.
“You’re looking pretty pleased with yourself too,” I said.
“I don’t know that I won’t take a little holiday when Leverton’s case is over,” he told me.
“You mean all the other business is settled to your satisfaction?”
“Signed, sealed and delivered,” he told me, and was feeling in his waistcoat pocket. “What do you think of that?”
What he gave me was a tiny circular piece of gold. I stared for a moment, then fetched my glasses. Just visible inside that back section of the ring a letter or two could be made out:
. . . y to . . . ide
“He had that ring then?” I asked.
“Of course he had it! Wasn’t that what we were sifting that rubble for?” He wrapped the piece of gold in paper and put it back in his waistcoat pocket. “Signed, sealed and delivered; that’s what it is. The Blaketon woman kept him informed. She pumped that little chit of a Chaddon, and young Mavin. She made Pelle miss his train and then Dane cracked him on the skull. Clear as crystal, that’s how everything is.”
“But if the bomb hadn’t caught him, you’d probably have never brought it home.”
“I’m not so sure,” he said. “That Blaketon woman was beginning to weaken. If I’d caught her that evening before she did herself in, I think she’d have talked.”
“There is just one little thing I’d like you to enlighten me on,” I said. “I can understand his sending back the balance of the jewellery after he’d got the ring, but wouldn’t you have thought that Marion Blaketon would have insisted beforehand on the rest of that jewellery as her perquisite?”
“Have you ever tried to argue with Dane?” he told me, and I thought he was begging the question uncommonly badly. “Unscrupulous, that’s what he was. Even if he’d promised the balance of the jewellery to her, he’d have changed his mind if he thought fit. And he did think fit. Wasn’t there an enormous risk in letting a woman like her have all that stuff to dispose of? Far safer to send it back. And maybe he gave her a cash payment instead.”
“And what about Grace Allbeck?”
“Who killed her?” He waved a quick airy hand. “Who could have killed her but Dane. You ought to know that. You saw him that morning just leaving Kenray’s shop. He’d taken that ring there to ask her opinion on it. It wasn’t common property, if you remember, that Kenray was advising on that jewellery. Grace Allbeck had suspicions and wouldn’t have anything to do with it, and that’s why he was shaking his fist at her. Then later he learned through Marion just what kind of brick he’d dropped. It was when that Leverton business broke and the Blaketon woman was scared stiff.”
“But suppose Grace Allbeck had mentioned the ring to her brother.”
“The answer’s that she didn’t,” he said with a shrug of the shoulders. “If she had, then he’d have told us. Or wouldn’t he? People in their high-class line of work have to be very careful of making disclosures about customers.”
“Well, everything looks good to me,” I said, and never had I felt so much of a hypocrite as I filled his glass. “Another case finished, George. Here’s to it, and the next.”
He gave me a nod and then took a swig.
“Between you and me,” he said, and swept that hand-kerchief of his across his vast moustache, “I’m saying goodbye to that case with devilish few regrets. One or two things still don’t satisfy me, but since they satisfy the Powers-that-Be why should I worry? Hush-hush cases never were in my line, and never will be.”
“Then here’s hoping this will be the last of them,” I said, and finished off my tot. “And where did you think of going for this holiday of yours?”
We talked about that and other things for another quarter of an hour and then George got up to go.
“Well, we’ve pulled it off again,” he told me at the door, and it took me a second or two before I realized he was harking back to the case.
“I don’t seem to have contributed much,” I told him, and I really meant it.
“What about Corporal Trigg?” he said. “Wasn’t he just the little bit of something extra we needed when things didn’t look any too good?”
“That’s rather generous of you, George,” I said. “You might as well say the case wouldn’t have been solved if Corporal Trigg hadn’t been going on leave.”
He gave a shake of the head that meant nothing in particular and then held out his hand. He’d be seeing me before that holiday, he said—if it eventuated—and would I remember him to Bernice when I wrote. And didn’t I think I’d be sensible if I told her about that raid and got her to come to town for a few days.
I gave a smile as good as any of his non-committal best, and watched till the lift had gone. Then I went back to the room. But when I came to analyse myself I couldn’t make up my mind. What was I? Merely a liar out-and-out, or a liar through lack of moral courage? And then by the time the evening meal had come in, I could almost tell myself I was neither. How could I possibly have said to George, “George, you’re all wrong. Dane didn’t kill Grace Allbeck. Dane had nothing to do with Marion Blaketon. It wasn’t Dane who cracked old Pelle on the skull.”
I repeat, how could I have told George that? And why should I have told him? What was it that Theseus had said to the Athenian clown?
Never excuse, for when the players are all dead, there need none to be blamed.
That was it—the players all dead and none to be blamed. And why drag in Francis Kenray, far from blameless though he too had been? And old Tom Fulcher too.
So I shook my head and told myself that I’d done right to leave Wharton with his solution of the case. And then a night or so later I changed my mind.
Chapter XVII
WHARTON LISTENS
On the Saturday morning I took my first walk. I wasn’t so full of beans as I’d boasted to Wharton and there was a faint humming in my ears but the walk wasn’t long. No farther than Kenray’s shop, in fact, and the excuse was the returning of that photograph. But before I set out I rang the shop to make sure Kenray wouldn’t be there.
“Thank you, sir,” Tom said, pocketing the photograph. “I’d been lookin’ for it everywhere.”
“Did you say Mrs. Allbeck had thrown it away?” I asked. “I found it among some old paper for salvage,” Tom said. “I reckon she might have made a mistake, though.”
“And you’ve no idea when Mr. Kenray will be back?”
Tom said he thought he’d be in at midday.
“Must be trying, that daily travelling,” I said. “Pangley isn’t too far, but I shouldn’t like to have that journey each way every day. Has he always lived down there?”
“Bless you no, sir,” Tom said. “Only about fifteen year or so. When I first come up here we was livin’ at Faversham Square. Why we moved out to Pangley was because he thought the country would do Mrs. Kenray good. And then there was Miss Grace. She allust had a hankerin’ after a flat, as they say, so we give up the Dover Street shop and took this place here. And a rare good change it turned out to be.”
Those were the last inquiries I was to make and I could tell myself that what I had learned I would keep to myself. Wharton had said that the case was over. He was satisfied, and, what was more to the point, the Powers-that-Be were satisfied too. Who then was I to go raking things up?
But there I reckoned without myself. I mentioned how cases and books can so work on the minds of those immediately concerned that the work in hand becomes an obsession and the mind has no rest till it is rid of it. By the Sunday afternoon I had worked myself up to just such a pitch. Either I had to confide in Wharton or I would have no freedom from its haunting. And then I made a sudden decision. I guessed that George would be at home, and I rang him there. I was feeling a bit lonely, I said, and would he drop in some time and share my evening meal. He said he’d be delighted and we agreed on half-past six.
When I hung up I hardly knew what I was feeling. In a way I had wished him to refuse, for in the very depth of me I was scared stiff. How could I, the apprentice, have the effrontery to criticize the old master? How could I do it without causing some reopening of the case? And yet in a way I was pleased that I’d committed myself. It was like being scared of a visit to the dentist and then the subsequent relief when one has forced one’s self to the step of making an appointment.
George arrived on time and as I took his hat and coat I thought I knew my opening questions. But I deferred them till we were comfortably at the fire and the two tots of beer had been poured.
“Well, here’s to another case over, George,” I said again. “I take it is now very definitely over?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, and raised his glass before he took a swig.
“Even if anything else came out, it wouldn’t be re-opened?”
“What else could come out?” he said, and settled snugly into his chair. Then he was giving me a look. “What’s behind all this? You’re not getting at anything, are you?”
“Well, yes and no,” I said. “But one does have ideas, you know. Do you think any conscientious author, for instance, ever wrote a book without realizing afterwards that he might have made a better hand of it? The same surely with a case.”
“That wouldn’t pay in our line,” he told me. “Done’s done, and the motto is, get on with the next.” Then came another suspicious look. “Mind you, I think we might have handled that case differently. Still, why worry now?”
“That’s how things strike me,” I said. “I think if we’d had the wisdom of both men and angels, we’d have handled it differently, and we mightn’t have arrived at the same end. Wait a minute,” I said hastily. “That statement wasn’t quite right. I should have said that I might have handled my side of things differently, and I might have arrived at different conclusions.”
“Such as what?”
I fortified myself with a pull at my glass and then freshened up both before I spoke.
“I’ll be perfectly frank, George. There’s something on my mind and I’d regard it as a favour if you’d listen patiently while I get it off.”
“Why not?” he said, and tried to make the remark humorous.
“That’s very good of you, George,” I said. “Honestly I’m regarding it as a favour. But I do have to say that I want you to be fair to me, and I’m certainly going to try to be implicitly fair to you. For example, I own that there were things which Tom Fulcher told me which I thought at the time had no bearing on the case, and which I never, therefore, mentioned to you. There were things about Kenray which didn’t strike me as important at the time, but which have certainly done so since. There were things I noticed about Grace Allbeck and to which I saw no reason to attach importance. There were things in Pelle’s autobiography which struck me as curious and no more. Then when it was too late they acquired a significance.
“In fact,” I went on, “I probably shan’t be talking for a minute before you’ll be saying, ‘You didn’t tell me that,’ or ‘That’s the first time I ever heard of it.’ Also I may mention things that I did tell you, and you didn’t attach any special significance to them, perhaps because I hadn’t done so myself.
“As to your being fair to me, I ought to remind you that there’s nobody now who can be questioned and so I have to rely on such past impressions as I’ve already mentioned. And if I’m to speak impartially, then I have to admit here and now that I can’t recall every tone of voice and every gesture, and so certain words and statements may still sound bald and unconvincing to you.”
“A hell of a long prologue, isn’t it?” He was trying to make his tone whimsical. “And what’s it all lead to?”
“If you’ll be patient with me, you’ll see,” I said. “It may be a longish story but dinner isn’t till a quarter-past seven and it’ll be over by then. All you’ve got to do George, is to keep your glass filled and listen to me.”
“Won’t be the first time,” he told me.
But that long preamble of a tale had cleared my mental air. Something told me to discard apologies and get down to facts and let recriminations and minor inquests look after themselves.
“Well, I’d like to begin with Grace Crowner,” I said.
“Who’s she?”
I explained all that, and then made a fresh start.
“In 1911 Grace Crowner had just left finishing school in Paris and was announcing that she wanted to take up painting. She was a high-spirited girl who was quite capable of looking after herself, and I think her family had to agree to her proposal. And then almost at once she was writing home that she might be getting married. The old Vicar, her father, went to Paris in considerable alarm, and what happened I don’t know. I can only judge that he was too late to see the man in question, and I’m fairly sure his name never came out publicly. Tom Fulcher showed me, however, a photograph of her with that man, and I had no great difficulty in identifying him as Pelle.”
“No!” he said, and sat up in his chair.
“It’s beyond question,” I said. “And in that photograph she looks brimming with happiness and he’s holding her arm with an air of satisfied possession. And yet—and that almost as soon as he got back to India—he was marrying another girl.
“He was on leave in Paris, where his father lived, in 1911, you may not remember, and in his autobiography he gives no account whatever of how he spent that leave. And why? Because his time was all taken up with Gra
ce, and because he must have known all his life that the whole episode and what followed was as near despicable as could be.
“Why did he marry, for instance? I think we can believe Marion Blaketon for once. It was for the purpose of advancement, and he certainly did uncommonly well out of it. But I wonder what lies and subterfuges he had to resort to when he had to write to Grace Crowner. I know the effect his letter had on her. She had a nervous breakdown, and nervous breakdowns aren’t easily forgotten, nor are the causes that led to them.
“At any rate she came home and she recovered sufficiently to be marrying in a few years’ time an artist named Allbeck. My own view is that it was a kind of rebound marriage, though that doesn’t affect the argument. He joined the Artists’ Rifles and was killed in France at the very end of the last war. Her son, I gather, was posthumously born.”
“But why wasn’t I told about that photograph?” George was asking and not without cause.
“Because it didn’t come into my possession till too late,” I said. “But to go on with Grace Allbeck’s story. She must have heard news of Pelle from time to time, if only the snippets one sees in the Press. He had a son and doubtless she was aware of his doings in the days when athletics made splash headlines. Her own boy went to Cranwell and then to an Indian station. Later he came back and was killed in action over Dieppe. That was the final and culminating tragedy of her life, and yet she began slowly to get over it. Then she began really to change, and my evidence is what Tom Fulcher told me. I think the change was due to two things. I think she saw about six months ago a picture of young Pelle when he was home on leave and having a good time at Newmarket. Mavin showed me that picture which Sir William had cut from Society News. The second thing that happened was, I think, a much later reading of that paragraph in the Clarion. Tom Fulcher took the Clarion, though we didn’t know that at the time.
“Now take the concentrated effects of seeing that photograph and reading that gossip paragraph. I claim that all her life she’d nourished a bitter hatred of Pelle, and now what did she read? That he was to be in charge of jewellery—a small point and one that made only a small rankling. But he with his sheltered and prosperous life and his knighthood and her husband dead in France. His son, sleek and safe and basking in cheap publicity, and her boy dead in the sea by Dieppe. Was there justice in the world, or right? What else had life to give Pelle, and what pitiful little was left for it to take from her?
The Case of the Corporal's Leave: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 21
