On that I have informed myself. I paid even, so as to be sure. A lawyer. He put it in writing. It is perfectly correct so long as it remains private, select, chic. That is the English common sense. A thing may be quite wrong when it is done coarsely, brutally perhaps, by poor, ignorant people, and quite correct and lawful when it is done with chic, with style, by those who understand how to behave. No strangers must be admitted, nothing to eat or drink must be sold. Naturally, it is there. Champagne, whisky, sandwiches, but one does not pay. Also, the play is perfectly O.K. For that I answer with my professional reputation.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Ulyett. “Who was the swell you say you recognised?”
“Oh, for that, excuse me. One has one’s discretions.”
“That’s all right,” said Ulyett. “Quite all right. Never mind it then. Now ” He produced more photographs, handfuls of them. “We want to know if Mr. Jessop played. It may be a great help to know that. Do you recognise his picture among these?”
Carton picked it out at once.
“A gentleman who played high, a gentleman it was a pleasure to see at one’s table,” he said. “But he was not lucky. A courageous player, not a great one. He was obstinate. When the really gifted player finds he is not in the vein, he stops. This gentleman continued.”
Ulyett produced some more photographs, none of which Carton knew. But when one of the Duke of Westhaven was put before him, he looked for once a little startled. Then he shook his head with much – too much – vigour.
“Another I have never seen,” he said.
“Lying, aren’t you?” asked Ulyett. “Looks bad, lying to the police. No good either. Odds are, we know. That’s the Duke of Westhaven, and we have information –”
He left the sentence unfinished, the information not specified, and Carton shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh, well,” he said, “if you know! After all, there is no harm. It is inside the law. But it was not a he. I do not lie – never. It was professional etiquette. I knew him as Mr. West. It was the name he gave always. I ascertained that. For one day it happened that I saw him in public and I recognised him. A duke. It is something, a duke. Also he is enormously rich, since others have built houses on his land that before was only sand-heaps. But his play – oh, miserable, paltry, of an inconceivable triviality. He would go pale to see the sums the plucky Mr. Jessop risked. It was as though he could not bear it, though the money was not his.”
“Mr. West, eh? Got to remember that,” grunted Ulyett.
Then he produced a photograph of Denis Chenery. Carton recognised it, but did not think Denis played much, unless it was at the card-tables.
“With them I have nothing to do,” Carton explained with a slight air of contempt. “The little ball runs true, but with cards –” And an expressive shrug of the shoulders concluded the sentence.
Yet another photograph, this time of Charley Dickson, he failed to recognise, and then he was allowed to go, though told he would presently be asked to read over and sign the statement he had just made.
“And that,” said Carton resignedly, “puts the hat on my chance of getting the boarding-house of my aunt at a nephew’s price.”
But Ulyett promised they would do their best to keep any mention of Miss Irene’s name becoming public, and so Carton departed, a trifle consoled.
CHAPTER 21
DISCREPANCY
When Carton had gone and they were alone together, Ulyett turned doubtfully to Bobby.
“He tells a good straight story,” he said, “only for one thing – notice it?”
“About the pistol?” Bobby asked.
“Yes. You are sure the girl said he showed it to her? You said so in your report, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Bobby. “I’m quite clear about that.”
“Have to look into it,” Ulyett repeated. “Wouldn’t be the first time what looked like a good, straight, convincing yarn slipped up on some little detail.”
“Might be some explanation, sir, I suppose,” suggested Bobby.
“Have to look into it,” repeated Ulyett. “Check up on his Monte record, too. Mustn’t tell them there we suspect him, though, because we don’t – yet. Have to put it we want him as a witness and is he trustworthy? The Cliftonville end as well. Anyhow, Carton’s cleared up one point for us. His story explains how the duke knew Jessop played high.”
“Yes, sir,” agreed Bobby, “and it may explain, too, where the duke was himself Saturday night, and why he couldn’t be found, and why he won’t say.”
“At one of these private gambling shows, you mean?” Ulyett said. “And doesn’t want it known. Disapproves of gambling, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, sir. Sponsored that last Anti-Betting Bill,” answered Bobby. “It looks as if he is so fascinated by gambling he can’t leave it alone; can’t quite keep away, though he is too afraid of losing to play much himself. And he tries to even up afterwards by denouncing it.”
“Queer tangled-up minds people have, haven’t they?” mused Ulyett. “Now we shall have a nice little job of work trying to dig up what special show his dukeship honoured Saturday night. They keep that sort of thing as dark as possible, though. Lie like fun if there’s any inquiry. Quite likely his identity wasn’t known either – just went as Mr. West perhaps. You had better have another chat with him, Owen, and see what you can fish out.”
“Very good, sir,” said Bobby, with an entirely deceptive air of brisk and willing obedience. But desperately, wildly, he searched his mind for some means of evading, dodging, and avoiding, though, of course, with entire propriety, the direct order just received – a difficult feat, certainly, but one in which some juniors achieve, by a kind of innate gift, a very high degree of technical perfection. He said: “If I might make a suggestion, sir, I think the duke is a bit touchy. Didn’t quite like it, I thought, that only a sergeant had come to see him. Felt a duke deserved more than a sergeant; felt he didn’t care to talk freely to such a very junior rank. I do feel very strongly, sir, that an officer holding really high rank would have a much better chance of success. Someone really important,” suggested Bobby negligently. “More on his own level, sir, so to say.”
Ulyett looked coldly at Bobby.
“The work of the department can’t be messed about just to suit a duke’s whims,” he said with severity.
“No, sir,” agreed Bobby, shocked. “Of course not, sir. Er – or perhaps the Assist. Commish. himself. He could make it a kind of friendly call. So much better, don’t you think, sir, if with a touchy gentleman like the duke any inquiry can be kept on a sort of social footing?”
“Hu-mm, er-r, ah-h,” said Ulyett, less coldly this time. A faint movement became perceptible at the corners of his mouth – not a smile; nothing like a smile; just a movement. “I’ll put it to him,” he said.
“Then I will wait further instructions, sir?” Bobby asked, and Ulyett nodded.
“Better see Wynne again now,” he said. “Got to let him go, I suppose, for the time anyhow, but we’ll give him a flea in the ear to take away with him.”
Wynne was duly summoned, and, being asked first why he had described himself at the Cut and Come Again as the Count de Teirney, replied with unblushing impudence that the title had been bestowed upon him by the Tsarist Government as a reward for important secret services rendered during the Great War.
“Lie,” said Ulyett dispassionately. “What have you done with the Fellows necklace?”
“Super,” said Wynne earnestly, “I won’t deceive you. I’ve made up my mind. A clean breast of it, super, that’s me.
“Well?” said Ulyett, though with no great enthusiasm.
“Super,” said Wynne, still more earnestly, “the simple truth is – I’ve never set eyes on the thing in my life, and never so much as heard of it till now.”
Ulyett scowled.
“You mean you have it tucked away somewhere and you think you’ll get away with it presently,” he said. “Now, Wynne, my lad,
you listen to me. We’re on you. Mind that. We’ll tail you day and night. Once a week, or oftener, we’ll find an excuse – easy enough with your record – to bring you in. There won’t be a job done in all England but we’ll find cause to suspect you. Better come clean, my lad. Play the game with us and we’ll play it with you. Turn the necklace up and we’ll let you down as lightly as we can. If you don’t, I’ll see your life isn’t worth living. Don’t bother to tell me any more lies, but think it over. Kick him out now, Owen.”
“Brutality of the police,” sighed Wynne. “I’ll write to the Daily Worker about you, you see if I don’t. And me just turning over a new leaf and starting out in straight business to lead an honest life henceforth for evermore.”
Ulyett had turned to his papers again, but this was too much for him.
“You?” he repeated, quite bewildered. “You in straight business? You – an honest life?”
“That’s right,” said Wynne virtuously. “No more crooked work for me. I’m changing. Honest and respectable from now on. That’s me. It pays best. Furniture removing – Birmingham. Nice little business there a cousin of mine runs, and he’s offered to let me in if I like it and put up some money. But he says I must get some experience first – take a job for three months and get to know the ropes. Seems hard to get a job, though, when you’ve no experience. Could you give me a reference to some firm you know or deal with here? Honest, sober, industrious, trustworthy – that sort of thing. Duty of the police to help an old con. make a fresh start. What about it, super?”
Ulyett stared at him and then made a gesture to Bobby, who touched Wynne gently on the shoulder.
“I don’t want to obey orders literally,” he said, with a significant gesture of his foot, “but it would be a pleasure –”
“All right, all right, I’ll go,” said Wynne, with some haste. At the door he said: “Don’t mind, do you, if I ask some of the others for a ref?... Oh, all right.”
He disappeared, and a moment later opened the door again that he had slammed behind him in Bobby’s face.
“Super,” he said, “I only wish I did know where the damn’ thing is.”
With that he vanished again, and Bobby, from the doorway, watched him pass down the corridor in the company of the waiting officer whose duty it was to see him safely outside.
To Bobby, Ulyett said:
“Tough lad! Cheek and impudence enough to set up a boat-load of monkeys and then some. He’s got the necklace all right.”
“Yes, sir,” responded Bobby as usual.
“Furniture-removing business indeed,” growled Ulyett. “Trying to pull our leg about Saturday.”
“Yes, sir,” agreed Bobby, more heartily this time. “It reminds me, I met Mr. Dickson just now. He had some wild yarn about a racecourse gang planning to raid T.T.’s for the necklace they think he has hidden at his place.”
“Lot of rubbish,” growled Ulyett. “T.T.’s place was gone over with a comb, and he wouldn’t keep it there, anyhow, when he knows we are watching and might raid him again any moment. Dickson has just been listening to gossip. Of course, he was quite right to come and tell us.”
“Yes, sir,” agreed Bobby automatically. “Someone had been pulling Dickson’s leg – told him a firm in Crust Lane, in the City, was where we got the van from on Saturday.”
“Find out who it was and tell him off,” said Ulyett. “Leg-pulling’s not allowed in Government time.”
“Yes, sir,” said Bobby as usual, and retired, though his efforts to find out who had been misleading Dickson were without success. The offence was hardly grave, but no one would admit to it, and so Bobby turned his attention to his formal report. That finished, he signed off, and returned home for supper and bed in such a mood of abstraction and deep thought he as nearly as possible got himself run over by an enormous furniture van making a stately progress through the streets at about four miles an hour.
“Nothing but furniture vans, furniture vans, all the way, just now,” complained Bobby, and the driver was, naturally enough, most indignant.
“Ain’t we big enough and slow enough for a blind cripple paralysed from birth to keep out of our way?” he demanded, and Bobby agreed, and apologised, explaining, in doing so, that sometimes it was the big things and the slow that were the most difficult to see. Whereon the driver expressed an opinion that Bobby was balmy, and Bobby said anyhow he had cause to be, and so went still more thoughtfully upon his way.
All that remained of the evening he spent in meditation and the consumption of tobacco. Next morning, reporting for duty, he found instructions waiting him to interview Miss May, stated now to be in a condition to receive visitors.
“Funny lot at that hospital,” complained Inspector Ferris. “Talk as if a bit of a tap on the head was something nobody had ever hardly seen before. A Dr. Perkins rang up to say the patient is not to be pressed in any way or questioned closely, and there’s to be no formal statement taken – too exciting. Strongly recommended that the per-son interviewing her should be tactful and not a complete stranger, if possible. Suppose they think we’re full up with all her old friends. And if we don’t do just what they say, they won’t be answerable for the consequences. Seem to think we may drive her off her head. So the super says you had better take the job on – not,” added Ferris sternly, “on account of tact, which the Duke of Westhaven doesn’t seem to think you’ve much of, to judge from what we’re hearing confidential like. But, seeing as it was you found her inside the cupboard, you ought to be like old friends almost. And mind,” concluded Ferris, “you wash your face and curl your hair first – and don’t forget to powder your nose. Better put on your old school tie, too, if you’ve got one, or even if you haven’t. A good first impression goes a long way with the feminine sex. Why, if it wasn’t for my moustache” – he touched it lovingly in all its waxed and pointed perfection –”why, but for that, I might be a free man to-day.”
Bobby, having carried out these instructions to the best of his ability – though more in the spirit than in the letter – presented himself at the hospital, and was a little astonished to be told there that he had arrived only just in time, as Miss May was on the point of departure. She was, in fact, only waiting for the taxi she had ordered.
“But I thought,” protested Bobby, “we were told – I mean, in a case of concussion...”
“Oh,” said the nurse to whom he was speaking, “old Peter Perkins been talking to you? He’s got a concussion complex. Miss May had better keep quiet for a day or two still, and so I’ve told her, and, if she doesn’t, she’ll know it – dizzy, and pains in the head most likely. But she’s practically all right if she’s sensible, and three weeks in bed is only Perkins piffle. We can do with her bed, too. So when she insisted on taking her discharge, and threatened to scream the place down if we didn’t bring her clothes, and going to ring up her tame lawyers, too – well, Perkins’s instructions or not, we caved in, and glad to. Perkins will rave a bit, and tell everyone he won’t be answerable for the consequences; but, then, he never is. He’s not answerable for more things than anyone else on the register.”
“I can see her before she goes though, can’t I?” Bobby asked.
The nurse thought so, and promised to tell Miss May he was there. He was ushered into a small waiting-room accordingly, and was soon joined by Hilda, looking a little pale but otherwise not much the worse for her adventure.
CHAPTER 22
HILDA MAY’S STORY
Hilda began by protesting that she knew nothing and could tell nothing, though she consented to the taxi she had ordered being used by someone else who had need of one at the moment, so that her talk with Bobby might not be troubled by thoughts of ticking up pennies.
She had been out on Sunday she said, and on her return to her flat had noticed that the door was open an inch or two. Her first impression was simply that the lock had failed to catch. She remembered thinking she must be more careful, pushing the door more widely open, entering, a
nd that was all she knew, except for a vague, confused impression of falling and of darkness. She had had no glimpse of her assailant, and could not even offer a guess at his identity or his purpose. The next thing she remembered was waking up in hospital and wondering where she was. She had no knowledge of her rescue from the lobby cupboard or of her narrow escape from death by suffocation.
“Was there anything of value in the flat?” Bobby asked.
“Some jewellery I have, and a little money, and my post office savings book,” she answered, “nothing else, and I’ve asked, and they’re all safe.”
“Would you think it possible,” Bobby asked, “that there might be an idea about that Mr. Jessop had left the missing Fellows necklace in your charge, and that was what the thief was after?”
“Good gracious, no! Why should they?” retorted
Hilda, with a very surprised air. “I’m sure Mr. Jessop would never have done anything of the sort.” She began to look a little disturbed. “I don’t see how anyone could have such an idea,” she said.
“We are looking for some explanation,” Bobby explained. “It doesn’t seem an ordinary case of housebreaking. Your flat had been thoroughly ransacked, turned upside down. Something was being looked for, something badly wanted, and yet not your money or your jewellery.”
She was looking very worried now. Her feet began to move in that strange, rhythmic manner that seemed her natural response to difficulty or to danger. She said slowly: “Well, I don’t see what it could be, unless someone did think I had the necklace, and I don’t see why anyone should.”
“Did you return to your flat because you were expecting Mr. Chenery?” Bobby asked.
“Oh, no,” she answered. “It was his Sunday at the garage – he owns a garage business. One Sunday in four he has to be there himself to let the foreman off.”
“He is said to have been seen leaving the flats where you live about the time of the attack on you.”
Mystery of Mr. Jessop Page 19
