Dictator's Way

by E. R. Punshon

  There was a note of terror, of urgency in her voice that made him forbear further questioning. The car door was already open. He got in. Instantly Olive started and they shot away into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 27

  INK-STAINED FINGER

  She drove fast, with a swift dexterity and ease, with apparently a complete knowledge of the district, avoiding traffic-lights and crowded thoroughfares by slipping down side-streets, taking more than once chances that showed how desperate she felt the need for haste. Plain, too, was the tension and the strain her pale, drawn features showed, and her eyes, too, no longer aloof and searching as it were things far away, but desperately intent upon the instant. Only once did Bobby speak to her. He said:

  “How do you know?”

  “The ’phone,” she answered in a voice suddenly clear and high as though it might at any moment break into a scream. “The ’phone – a voice – whispering – that’s all.”

  “What did it say?” he asked.

  “My name. – that’s all,” she answered, “that’s all – The Manor and my name – that’s all.” But a moment after she added: “A noise like a book falling – twice.”

  “Ah,” Bobby said below his breath, for it seemed to him that sound of a falling book might well have been a pistol shot.

  She gave a look at him over her shoulder, a look full at once of fear, of appeal, of trust, so that his heart gave a sudden leap. Then she turned once more to her driving and he did not speak again.

  The Manor gates were open, left probably so by some of the many sightseers recently attracted to the place as people always are to the scene of any sensational crime. They swept through and up to the house and round to the back where Bobby was not surprised to find also open the back door by which once before he had gained admittance to the house. This time just within the door an electric light was burning.

  Olive leaped out and ran into the house. Bobby followed quickly and caught her up.

  “Let me go first,” he said and drew her back and went by.

  They reached the great hall. Here, too, lights burned, making pools of clear radiance in the murky darkness that reigned elsewhere. Instinctively they both stood still to listen for any sound that might reveal another’s presence, but the silence around seemed absolute. Bobby began to run up the stairs. Olive followed closely behind. On the landing all was dark, save for one thread of light that came from the door, not quite closed, of the room in which, on another day, a dead man had lain. They ran together, side by side, along the wide corridor. Bobby flung open the door, told Olive to wait, and went in. Ignoring what he had said, Olive followed close behind.

  Before the ’phone Peter Albert lay supine. His head had been injured and was bleeding slightly. He had been shot three times in the chest. None of the wounds had bled much. Evidently he had been shot down in an attempt to telephone, for the loose receiver dangled just above his head. There were fresh bloodstains on it, just as there had been once before. He tried to lift himself as he heard them enter, but it was a last effort, the last before the spirit went elsewhere. He knew them and called out:

  “Hullo, you two,” and then in a voice from which the strength was quickly ebbing: – “Same room, same thing, same way, trying to ’phone, too – fair do’s all round.”

  He lay back as he spoke and sighed heavily twice over, and so was it finished. Bobby bent over what once had been the habitation of a human spirit and made sure that now it was void and the spirit gone to another place. He turned back to Olive. Neither of them said anything, but abruptly he found Olive was in his arms, crying and trembling, and that clumsily enough he was trying to soothe her, muttering incoherent endearments, murmuring in her ear the first words that came to him. She freed herself presently and said:

  “He always knew it would be this he wanted it, I think he said once what right had he to live when all over the world the dictators were killing, killing, killing...”

  Bobby took her by the hand and led her out of the room.

  “There is nothing you can do,” he said.

  She submitted passively. She had become very quiet and still, and she seemed content now to leave everything to him. He found the switch controlling the corridor lights and turned them on. From one of the rooms near he brought a chair and told Olive to sit there and wait while he summoned help. He kissed her and she clung to him and seemed comforted and then he went back into the room where Peter’s body lay. He found himself wondering for a moment whether Peter’s self was also there, still lingering on the same spot, a little dazed perhaps by so sudden a passing, aware of what was going on and yet unable to manifest or interfere.

  For never had it seemed to him more clear and certain that no absurdity could be greater than to suppose that the accident of the impact of a few bits of lead upon its fleshy habitation could obliterate all that splendid vitality he had known under the name of Peter Albert.

  Putting aside such thoughts he stood there, looking round intently, with all that concentrated attention upon every visible detail he had taught himself to use. There was a torn paper lying on the floor. It was a torn I.O.U. signed by Waveny. Part of it was missing but enough remained to show what it was. Under one of the chairs was a hat. Bobby picked it up. Inside were the initials: ‘C.W.’. In a corner lay a walking-stick, of the kind known as Penang Lawyers. On the silver mount was a stain of fresh blood. Obviously it was not the one Bobby had seen previously in Waveny’s possession, for that was in the hands of the police, and also the silver mount of this one was different. But Bobby remembered that Waveny had told him he had two walking-sticks of the same kind.

  “Making it plain,” he said to himself.

  He bent over the dead body and examined the injuries to the head. Serious, he thought, but probably not fatal by themselves. Apparently the blow had been struck from behind. Bobby thought of Peter as he had known him, alert, watchful, active.

  “Caught him unawares,” Bobby muttered. “I wonder how?”

  A chair was overturned, the table pushed aside. On it was some fresh blotting-paper and an unused writing-pad. Apparently Peter had been sitting at it when attacked. As Bobby reconstructed the tragedy in his thoughts, Peter had been struck with the stick from behind and had fallen. His assailant, thinking him either dead or insensible, had left him like that and become occupied with something else. Peter had recovered sufficiently to get to the ’phone, and, probably still half dazed, had called up Olive with the idea of asking her to summon help. His assailant, discovering suddenly what he was doing and probably afraid he was calling up the police, had drawn a pistol and fired, and Peter had fallen with his cry for help only half uttered.

  Bending over the body Bobby noticed there was a stain of fresh ink on the forefinger of the right hand.

  “Making it quite plain,” said Bobby with satisfaction.

  He went to the ’phone, and, handling the receiver with great care, rang up the Yard to report what had happened and ask for help. Superintendent Ulyett had gone home but Bobby was told he would be instantly communicated with. Help would be sent at once, and till it arrived Bobby was to stay on guard but take no action. He hung up the receiver accordingly and went back to Olive.

  “There is ink on his finger – fresh ink,” Bobby said. “Peter was writing when he was attacked. I think that makes it clear. But there is no sign of any pen.”

  “I saw Mr. Waveny’s stick,” Olive whispered. “It’s the one he threatened to thrash Mr. Macklin with. I don’t – understand.”

  Before Bobby could reply the ’phone bell rang and he had to go back to answer it. It was Ulyett ringing up from his home, apparently for further information, as if he could hardly believe the reports he had just received. Bobby repeated what he knew and while he was still in the middle of his explanations Ulyett interrupted to say the police car had just come for him and he would be at The Manor as soon as it could get him there.

  Olive by now was in a very distressed, nervous condition, as if she
were beginning to realize more clearly what had happened. He did his best to soothe her and soon help arrived, first the emissaries from the Yard direct, and then Ulyett, so that Bobby was very busy telling his story over and over again and explaining how it was he had been there to make the discovery. Olive, too, had to answer many questions. She had been staying, she said, at a small hotel in Bayswater. She had gone there at the dead man’s request, rather, by his insistence. For he had believed they were all in great and imminent danger and that the attempts to dispose of them by ramming and sinking the yacht would be continued with even greater intensity on land.

  *‘‘Here, in London?” someone asked incredulously.

  Olive did not answer but she looked towards the closed door before which a uniformed constable stood on guard, behind which lay Peter Albert’s body.

  “He thought they might try to get things out of me they would think I knew,” she explained. “Even when I got the ’phone message to-night I wasn’t quite sure. I thought it might be a trick. Peter said if I wasn’t sure, I must go to Mr. Owen. I wasn’t sure to-night, only that it was something terrible. So I told Mr. Owen and he came here with me.

  Bobby was conscious of a sudden glow that warmed him through and through, as though all at once he stood in an actual ray of heat. She had spoken as though somehow it were natural for her to turn to him, as though indeed she had a special right to his help, as though, too, in his protection, she felt safe. Ulyett, who was questioning her, asked her what she had actually heard, and almost in the same words she repeated what she had told Bobby. It was told with the dramatic force that is given by utter simplicity and truth, and they were all silent, as if they, too, heard that faint summons whispered over the telephone wire and those distant sounds that had resembled the noise of a book falling on the floor.

  Olive had no more to tell and presently she was allowed to go. But Bobby was not permitted to be the one to accompany her back to her hotel. That task was entrusted to someone else and Bobby was told to wait. Then he was told that Ulyett wanted him, and going to the superintendent he found him examining the hat and walking-stick discovered near the dying man in the room where the murder had been committed.

  “Waveny again, eh?” Ulyett said. “Looks like it, doesn’t it? Same M.O., walking-stick and all. Anyhow, he’ll be here in a minute or two, and we can hear what he has to say. We got word he rang up the block of flats where he lives to say he would be back to-day. Did this little job and then bunked off home to put in a spot of alibi, eh? Probably meant to come back here and clear up, or else he panicked after he had done the job. Anyhow, what he’s left behind makes it pretty plain.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bobby answered, “only there is ink on his fingers. And no pen.”

  “Whose fingers? Peter Albert’s?” Ulyett asked. “Well, what about it?”

  Before Bobby could reply there was the sound of another car arriving and a moment or two later Waveny himself was brought in. He was in a great state of indignation and protested vehemently that he knew nothing about what had taken place. He admitted at once that the hat and stick shown him were his property, but protested he had no idea how they had got there.

  “Must have been pinched,” he said angrily, “probably you did yourselves, just as you pinched my other stick.”

  “We didn’t pinch it, did we?” Ulyett asked mildly. “I think we asked you for it and you handed it over.”

  “Same thing,” growled Waveny. “Your fellows just said might they have it and didn’t give me a chance to say no.”

  “There was blood on the handle,” Ulyett remarked. “The report says it is blood of the same class as Macklin’s.”

  “I know there was blood on the handle,” Waveny answered. “I hurt my hand getting out of a taxi and it bled a bit and I daresay some got on the handle. Why shouldn’t it? and why shouldn’t my blood be the same class or whatever you call it as Macklin’s?”

  “That can easily be proved by a test,” remarked Ulyett, and in fact the test later on proved that, as it chanced, both Macklin’s blood and Waveny’s belonged to the same, and smallest, class known, one including only about ten per cent of the population.

  Waveny went on to deny with still more heat that he had been in hiding. He had simply been away on a motor trip.

  “Who with?” demanded Ulyett. “None of your friends knew anything about you, and your car is in your garage and has been all the time.”

  “I didn’t use my own car,” Waveny explained sulkily, “and I wasn’t with friends exactly. I was feeling a bit down, I wanted to get away from people, and my aunt made a suggestion and offered to pay and so I said all right.”

  “What were you feeling down about?” demanded Ulyett, and presently it came out, after a good deal of stammering, hesitation and fencing, that Waveny had had a letter from Olive, making it quite plain that, much as she appreciated his attentions, and greatly as she felt honoured by them, she thought it would be better for them both if they saw as little of each other as possible for the future. It was then, on receipt of this letter, that he had gone out to her cottage and found in it, as he believed, a burglar. A struggle had ensued, he had knocked the supposed burglar out, he had been afraid he had killed him, and in a panic, hearing someone approaching, possibly another of the burglars, he had run for it.

  He admitted he had had a pistol with him and had fired two or three shots, but only, he insisted, in the hope of frightening his opponent. Under pressure he admitted he had taken the pistol with him with some idea of committing suicide at Olive’s feet. But he was rather glad now it hadn’t got that far, and perhaps it never would, only perhaps Olive, at the sight of the revolver, since such a threat would have convinced her of his desperate plight, might possibly have relented.

  “It was her beastly letter,” he complained. “You would have thought she never wanted to see me again.”

  Ulyett grunted, as if he thought that was no subject for wonder, and wanted to know next what the aunt’s suggestion had been.

  “She said I ought to study the proletariat,” Waveny explained.

  “The – how much?” asked Ulyett.

  “The proletariat,” repeated Waveny simply. “You see, it’s this way. Hitler was one of ’em, and see where he is. So was Mussolini, and look at him. Then take that Etrurian fellow – the Redeemer they call him. Been in an asylum for the cure of drug addicts and all that, and see where he is. Then take our own man, Oswald Mosley – always been a rich man and has a rich man’s ideas all through – and look at him, or rather, as aunt said, you can’t, because he simply isn’t there, not visible, except as a bit of chalk on a wall. So aunt said it was a chance for me to catch on where he had got off.”

  “Good God,” said Ulyett.

  “Why? asked Waveny, and when Ulyett did not answer he went on: “Besides, she had been hearing gossip about bad company and all that rot and being mixed up with the Macklin murder, though of course I wasn’t, and so she said I must take it on, and she said she would cut me off with a shilling unless I did what she told me, and to keep out of the way for a time till the Macklin affair had settled down, and meanwhile I could study the proletariat so as to be ready to go into Parliament.”

  “Parliament?” repeated Ulyett in a faint voice.

  “All our family do,” explained Waveny. “It’s a bore, but you have to before you join the Cabinet.”

  “The Cabinet?” murmured Ulyett, whose eyes by this time had nearly started out of his head.

  “All our family do,” Waveny explained once more, “and aunt said the best way to get in touch with the proletariat and a good start to study their way of thinking and understand them and their ways was to go one of those motor excursion trips – you know ‘Visit the Wye in an Arm-Chair’ or ‘See the Lakes at Sixty m.p.h.’ Aunt said it was that sort of proletariat that really counted, because of course what she called the workhouse end don’t matter one way or the other.”

  Ulyett looked round helplessly. Everyone within
earshot was listening in awed silence. Ulyett said:

  “My God!”

  “Why?” asked Waveny. “You said that before,” he complained, and added thoughtfully: “People often do when I talk to them.”

  “Means they think you ought to go into the Church,” suggested Ulyett. “Well, Mr. Waveny, I suppose you can give us details of this trip of yours?”

  “Oh, yes,” agreed Waveny, “it was one aunt chose herself, and of course I had to let her because she was paying. It was ‘The Cathedrals of England in Quick Time’. I can’t think where they all come from,” added Waveny, sighing. “Why, some days we did two, morning and afternoon.”

  It seemed that Waveny’s whereabouts during the last few days was now fully explained. Evidently his aunt had wanted to get him out of the way of any awkward questioning and avoid further possible gossip but not having wished to explain her fears to Waveny had hit on this pretext of a kind of preliminary political training.

  But though the details given proved where Waveny had been during the time the police were searching for him, there was nothing to prove an alibi for the moment when Olive had heard the dying man’s voice whispering to her over the ’phone and then those sounds she had described as like those made by a book falling to the floor. His own story was that he had had a message over the ’phone to tell him to go to Euston to meet his aunt, unexpectedly arriving in town. But when he arrived there was no sign of her and after waiting for the next train on the chance of her coming by that he had returned home. He had gone to Euston by bus, expecting that his aunt as usual would have a hired Daimler waiting for her, and he had returned home by the same method. He had in fact no proof of his story, and he had no explanation to offer of the presence of his hat and stick at The Manor.

  Ulyett looked very glum, for he hated arresting prominent and well-to-do people who could employ K.C.’s of great fame and extraordinarily loud voices. He said glumly to Bobby:

  “No alibi. Thin yarn altogether. Hat, stick, on the spot. He may be a Cabinet Minister some day, but meanwhile we’ve got to pull him in all right.”