Bobby agreed that it was a rum go – that, indeed, had been the unofficial verdict already rendered at the Yard – and then further discussion was stopped by the appearance of an elderly lady, dressed in a somewhat old-fashioned style, in person short, stout, dignified, and cross, who came abruptly into the hall and said breathlessly:
“Fisher, ring up Mr. Dickson at once and ask him if he will kindly let me know when I may expect him – that is, if it’s really not expecting too much to ask for his attendance. Tell him I’ve been waiting – waiting,” repeated the lady rather awfully, “nearly a quarter of an hour.”
“Very good, your grace,” said the butler as, with as near an approach to a run as the dignity of a portly butler permits, he made for the ’phone.
And at that very moment – the psychological moment if ever moment deserved the epithet – the lift shot up and there emerged a small, slightly built, handsome youth, beautifully dressed, with small, regular features, a tiny moustache, the teeth of a musical comedy actress, hair that would have broken Monsieur Marcel’s heart to think how little need it had of him, and really finely shaped and most carefully kept hands he held out towards the elderly lady with a gesture graceful and imploring, and at the same time presenting those exquisite hands for observation and admiration.
“Duchess,” he said, in a soft, musical, really agreeable voice, “I’m more than sorry, I’m most awfully sorry, but honestly I can’t swim. I never could. I sink like a stone.”
“Charles,” said the duchess, still awfully, but distinctly less so, “you’re a quarter of an hour late, and you know very well I detest being kept waiting.”
“The rain,” pleaded Charles, in tones to move the hardest heart, “the rain? No, the flood – not forty days, perhaps, but forty inches – forty feet rather. I had to wait ten minutes for a taxi, and then we were held up in a traffic block.”
“You could walk, couldn’t you? Hadn’t you an umbrella – and your coat?”
“I don’t know what you’ll think of me, duchess,” the young man sighed, his sigh almost a song in itself, “but I’ve lost it already – left it in a bus or something. Of course, I shall get it back.”
“I never heard anything so careless,” said the duchess, grown awful again.
She turned and walked, or rather marched, away. The young man made a face at Fisher and followed droopingly, though with about him a kind of aura of confidence that he would soon smile his way back into favour. When they had disappeared, Fisher said to Bobby:
“That’s the coat she gave him only last week – wanted him to go somewhere for her. It was raining, and he said he hadn’t a coat; said he couldn’t afford one – all my eye and Betty Martin, but he gets lots of things out of her like that. She rang up the Stores to send one round same as the duke’s just got for himself, ready made being cheapest – she’ll be mad at his losing it so soon.”
Since this nice-looking young man with the beautiful hands was evidently the new private secretary who had supplanted Hilda May, Bobby was a trifle inclined to suspect that the loss of the new raincoat was a by-product of last night’s exuberance that had culminated in the lamp-post-climbing experiment and a visit to the police station. However, that was no business of his, he supposed, and certainly the young, fresh complexion and quick, bright, and alert eyes did not suggest that such excitements were too frequent in Charley Dickson’s life. To the butler Bobby said:
“Is the duke likely to be long? It’s official business I’ve come on, you know.”
“What his grace will want to know is whether you’ve caught them that broke in here,” Fisher retorted. “Proper vexed about it he was, proper vexed. But I’ll see.”
He went off accordingly, and came back soon.
“If you’ll wait in the library,” he said, “his grace will see you in a few minutes. This way.”
He led Bobby across the hall into a fair-sized room whose windows afforded a fine view over London. Bobby admired it, and then turned his attention to the books on the shelves, hoping to gather from them some indication of the character of their owner. But they were all library sets of classical authors that not only looked as if they had never been read but had never even been intended for such a purpose. Even a complete set of Jane Austen’s works had a stiff and dignified and unapproachable air, as though to chuckle over them in an arm-chair by the fire would be a kind of lèse-majesté. As for The Pickwick Papers, upright in calf and gilt, it positively scared the reader away; impossible to believe that pompous volume held the jests of Mr. Samuel Weller, the simple friendliness of Mr. Pickwick. “Just furniture,” Bobby told himself, and the door opened and there dashed into the room young Mr. Charley Dickson.
“Oh, I say,” he gasped, “Fisher’s just told me you’re police. I say, you haven’t come about that binge of mine last night, have you?”
“Good gracious, no,” said Bobby. “Nothing to do with me.”
Charley sighed with relief.
“I won’t say it’s the first time,” he declared earnestly, “but it’s not often, and it is the first time I’ve got run in – forty bob or seven days’ hard, I suppose, and where the hell the forty bob’s coming from, only the good Lord knows. You don’t give a chap time, do you? I say, that’s a joke, isn’t it? Just what you do give a chap. I mean to say, has a chap got to pay up on the nail?”
“That’s not for the police to say,” Bobby answered, smiling a little at this ingenuous chatter. “The magistrate settles that.”
“Well, I’ll have to pop something,” decided Charley. “Won’t be the first time. Have to be the last, though,” he said, shaking his head gravely at himself. “Gave me a scare when I heard you were police. What’s up?”
“I have asked to be allowed to see the duke for a few minutes,” Bobby answered.
“The old boy been up to something?” demanded Charley, grinning. “I say, what a lark if we both turn up in the dock together! Got tight, too, did he? Was that the trouble Saturday night?”
“Why? What trouble? What do you mean?” Bobby asked quickly, startled in spite of himself. “What happened Saturday night?”
“That’s what we all want to know,” returned Charley, and added, bestowing upon Bobby a most portentous wink: “Especially the old girl.”
“You mean the duchess?”
“I do that,” answered Charley. “Wish I knew where hubby was – might do a spot of blackmail. It was somewhere about eight or nine last evening when the American Ambassador rang up – wanted him badly; some sort of hands-across-the-sea tommy-rot they’ve got on. Fisher rang up the club. He wasn’t there. Rang up every other place they could think of. Couldn’t get in touch with him. Came home in the small hours. The old girl waited up for him with the rolling-pin – metaphorical rolling-pin, of course, but just as nasty as the real thing. Scene.” Charley grinned again, and made a gesture of which the meaning was not to be mistaken. “At his age, too – the gay old dog!” he said. “He covers up his tracks jolly well, though. No one even knows who the lady is, except that she must be a real tip-topper. I say, you’ll keep all this to yourself, won’t you? I should get it in the neck if they knew how I had been gassing.”
Privately Bobby thought that very probable. Aloud he said:
“The first thing you learn in the police is absolute discretion – subject to duty, of course.”
“That’s all right, then,” said the ingenuous and communicative Charles, and vanished as abruptly as he had appeared.
CHAPTER 12
EXHIBITION OF TACT
Bobby was still wondering whether Charley babbled like this to all comers all the time, or whether his communicativeness was a result of a kind of “hangover” from last night’s escapade, of which, however, his clear eyes and healthy skin showed no effects, when the door opened again and there entered the duke himself.
He was a small man, small boned, thin and stooping, with small, distrustful eyes, a generally worried expression, and curious claw-like hands that s
eemed somehow prominent in his personality, as though expressive of a continuous subconscious desire to grasp and hold. At a first glance he might well have been taken for an uneasy clerk or shopman precariously hanging on to an uncertain post held only at the whim of an employer. But as soon as he spoke or moved he showed in every tone or gesture that unconscious authority, poise, self-assurance, that comes from a universal deference paid since earliest childhood to a great position held by right of birth – and “no damned merit about it,” as was once said of the Garter.
For birthright’s a fact, but merit only an opinion, an idea, one of the mere imponderables.
In those oddly prominent hands of his the duke held Bobby’s card, and even that he held as though he would never let it go again. But it was not that on which Bobby’s eyes fastened, nor was it that which gave him the sudden shock and thrill he now experienced as he recognised in the half-smoked cigar the duke also held the exact replica of that found by the side of a murdered man. A mere coincidence, of course, but Bobby had grown to have a passionate hatred for coincidence, and in his thin and precise tones the duke said:
“Sergeant Owen, I see? I think you have been here before. You have been able to get some information at last about that insolent intrusion I mentioned?”
“Well, sir, it’s really another matter I’ve come about,” Bobby answered hesitatingly.
How clearly he remembered the emphasis with which Ulyett had enjoined upon him the necessity for tact, and how exactly the duke looked a man with whom tact – oceans of tact, all the tact that ever was or could be – would be required; and how jolly to be a superintendent, and push off dirty jobs like this upon unfortunate subordinates. Quite clearly Bobby realised that it was because Ulyett had shirked the job himself that it had been passed on to him. The duke, for instance, evidently didn’t feel it necessary to “report” or “complain” or “request” or anything like that; he merely “mentioned” a thing, and that, he felt, was enough for all relevant machinery to be set zealously in motion. And that was the man – Personage, rather – he had been landed with the job of putting through a kind of third degree – a ducal third degree that would emphatically need tact.
“It is rather a complicated affair, sir,” he said desperately. “It will need a lot of explaining.”
“Indeed,” said the duke, loftily surprised. “Was it necessary to see me in person? I should have thought my secretary... my lawyers... however, as you are here...” He indicated a chair, and set the example by seating himself, choosing an arm-chair for himself but not for Bobby, who now continued slowly:
“It is a serious matter I have to trouble you about, sir – a case of murder. We are fortunate in knowing that we can rely upon a gentleman of your position for every possible help.”
Tactful Bobby thought this speech, but the duke did not seem to notice.
“Murder,” he said, a little as he might have said “Kamchatka” or “Timbuctoo” as something vaguely familiar but unutterably remote. “I am at a loss to conceive...” he said stiffly, for, indeed, he was a man from whom tact poured as ineffectively as water from a duck’s back. “Utterly at a loss...” he repeated.
“Yes, sir, naturally,” agreed Bobby. “Your grace knows a firm of jewellers in Mayfair Square – Messrs. Jessop & Jacks?”
“Extremely worthy – er – tradespeople,” conceded the duke, to whom the head of an old-established firm of West End jewellers and a grocer’s assistant selling quarter pounds of sugar and cheese in Islington were much of a muchness.
“They have been trying to sell a valuable diamond neck-lace,” Bobby went on. “It belongs to a film actress – Miss Fay Fellows. She wants to get rid of it, and she asked Jessop & Jacks to see what they could do. I believe you inspected it yourself, sir, on one occasion, with a view to purchase?”
“They asked an absurd price,” declared the duke, with a touch of irritation in his dry and precise tones, and Bobby, who could not keep his eyes from that half-smoked cigar, saw, too, how the long and claw-like fingers twitched and half closed, as though involuntarily eager, instinctively disposed, to snatch and seize even a mere memory. “I did not consider it for one moment,” the duke asserted.
“Last night,” Bobby continued, “Mr. Jessop was found shot in a house at Brush Hill. He died almost immediately.”
“Jessop?” repeated the duke. “You mean – Jessop?”
He seemed really astonished. “Shocking! Most shocking! A most respectable man, I always thought. Brush Hill, did you say? A suburb, no doubt? How did it happen? You have arrested the murderer?”
“No, sir,” answered Bobby. “There is nothing yet we can act on. It is because it is thought your grace might be able to give us information...”
“I am unable to conceive...” said the duke coldly. “Is there any possible connection?”
Bobby had decided by now that tact was about as useful as, to quote Sydney Smith’s famous simile, stroking the dome of St. Paul’s was likely to please the dean and chapter. He continued:
“By Mr. Jessop’s body was a half-smoked cigar, presumably left behind by the murderer. It is believed to be one of those made specially for him, in his own factory, of Mr. Patterson, an American gentleman and a friend of yours, recently staying with you, sir. The cigar seemed to show his monogram.”
And, as he said this, Bobby could not for the life of him prevent his eyes from resting on the half-smoked cigar in the duke’s hand. Then he looked away again quickly, and that was even worse – not a bit tactful, and just as well he had decided to give up tact. He went on hurriedly, ignoring the startled anger gathering on the ducal brow:
“It was thought your grace might be able to give us the names of any persons likely to be in possession of any of Mr. Patterson’s cigars.”
The duke paused. It was fully a minute before he replied. Then he said coldly and precisely:
“The inquiry seems to savour of insolence.”
“I regret more than I can say,” answered Bobby, “that your grace should think so. I am, of course, acting on the instructions of my superior officers. It was felt that a gentleman of your position would be willing in such a case to give every possible assistance, in spite of any inconvenience or annoyance caused.”
“I am quite unable to understand,” replied the unplacated duke, “why you should come to – Me.”
“We understood that Mr. Patterson had close business relations with your grace,” Bobby answered. “Our information is that he returned to America last week.”
“As a matter of fact,” remarked the duke, “he seems to have left the boat at Cherbourg. I understand he was in Paris last week.”
“Oh, indeed,” Bobby exclaimed, startled, for this, he thought, might mean a good deal.
But then he dismissed the idea as absurd. At any rate, it would be for his superiors to follow up, if they thought fit. So far as was known, Mr. Patterson was a man of high standing in business circles, even if it might be as well to look up his record and make sure that he had stayed in Paris during the week-end. Though sometimes, Bobby reflected again, it does happen that agents are employed who go far beyond their instructions, and it might be too well known in certain circles that Mr. Patterson offered for the necklace a ready market in which few questions would be asked.
So Bobby decided that it would be worth suggesting that, some attention should be paid to Mr. Patterson; and, while he was silent, as these thoughts raced through his mind, the duke also was silent, absorbed in his own train of thought.
“I very much doubt,” he said at last, “whether the steamship company would refund his fare.” Then he seemed to remember Bobby: “I take it, then,” he said, “you have nothing more you – er – wish to question me about?”
How full were those last few words of a dignified and condescending rebuke! Bobby felt that on hearing them he ought to bow and retire – backwards. Instead he said:
“Well, sir, what we specially wanted to know was about Mr. Patterson’s cig
ars. I mean, those he manufactures himself with his monogram on them. We thought you might be able to tell us if he left any of them behind, or if he was in the habit of distributing them freely, and, if so, to whom?”
“To everyone he met, I think,” the duke answered. “He insisted on leaving me several boxes. Mr. Patterson is a very keen, experienced business man. He was by no means unaware of the advantage to his cigar factory if it became generally known that its products were smoked by – Me.”
“I can quite understand that,” murmured Bobby, thinking to himself that his grace of Westhaven was probably also not altogether unaware of the advantage of getting free smokes.
“Mr. Patterson,” continued the duke, “offered his cigars freely to all his friends – at the club, everywhere he went. He even consulted me as to the possibility of introducing them into – er – the highest circles, the Very Highest. In that respect I could not assist him, and I believe those particular plans came to nothing. At one or two business conferences held here to discuss matters we were both interested in, he insisted on putting an open box on the table.”
He paused, and Bobby realised that all this meant Mr. Patterson had been conducting a very clever advertising campaign by way of what amounted to a liberal distribution of free samples. But that meant the cigars might have found their way almost anywhere, and the significance of the clue seemed to fade into the air.
“I have even seen,” continued the duke, dry disapproval in every tone, “Mr. Patterson give a couple to Fisher, my butler. Americans have very often very little sense of what is Due to Themselves. It is no doubt the result of the lack of a true Native Aristocracy.”
“Yes, sir,” said Bobby. “Very regrettable; very unfortunate,” he could not help adding, and was rewarded by what was almost like a passing gleam of approval in the duke’s small and troubled eyes. “It means there’s a wide circle of casual friends and acquaintances who might have been in possession of these cigars?”
“Exactly,” agreed the duke, and, apparently regretting having given way to so weak a sentiment as a passing moment of approval, he added: “It was, I think, totally unnecessary to insist upon a personal interview to learn that. The information could have been obtained otherwise.”
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