by Molly Thynne
Smith nodded.
“That’s a new word to me,” he said. “But I take your meaning. Matter of fact, it’s the first time any one in this building’s held out the glad hand, so to speak, and I appreciate it. The caretaker doesn’t like us, and my wife’s got to such a pitch that she’ll wait in the street rather than meet either of those old pussies downstairs in the hall. She says Miss Webb looks down her nose at her and she don’t like it.”
“I shouldn’t let Miss Webb’s attitude worry you,” laughed Gilroy. “She’s harmless enough, even when her tongue’s wagging.”
“And it does wag! She was seeing a friend out when I came up yesterday and I caught Miss Braid’s name. ‘That sweet young thing,’ she called her, but it didn’t prevent her from speaking her mind about her.”
Gilroy stiffened.
“She’ll find herself in trouble, if she’s not careful,” he said. “There is such a thing as libel.”
“I shouldn’t say that that troubled Miss Webb much. Libel’s a thing she must have been flirting with, as you might say, all her life. And I bet she’s got away with it, too. She’s not the only one, though, who’s slinging mud at Miss Braid, and, if what they say is true, she’s pretty well for it, unless Mr. Fenn’s got something up his sleeve.”
“There’s more in the whole business than meets the eye,” said Gilroy evasively. “But if they say anything to you, you can contradict any rumour that Miss Braid is implicated in any way. She’s got nothing to do with it.”
He flattered himself that he had kept the rising anger out of his voice, but there was a gleam in Smith’s sardonic eye that made him uncomfortable.
“Oh, quite,” he agreed. “I’m not trying to fasten anything on to her. Besides, I’m in the opposite camp, so to speak, though I don’t hold with violence and never did. According to the wife, she doesn’t look the kind of young lady to stick a knife into any one, and I’m willing to take her word for it. All the same, there’s more than a bit of gossip going round, and I thought I’d warn you.”
He put down his glass and rose.
“Thanks for the drink,” he said. “I’ll do the same for you one evening, if you feel inclined to come up and look at a little gas contraption I’m interested in. It’s the only thing of its kind on the market.”
“I didn’t know you went in for that sort of thing,” commented Gilroy tactlessly.
His mind was on the gossip about Jill Braid and he spoke without reflection.
The sardonic lines on Smith’s face deepened.
“Oh, we all have our little hobbies,” he said. “Can’t work all the time, you know.”
Gilroy pulled himself together.
“I should be glad to come up,” he assured him. “Meanwhile, if you’ll wait a moment—”
He took a sheet of paper and scribbled a prescription.
“Get that made up,” he said. “And, if I catch sight of your wife, I shall tell her to make you take it. And keep away from fogs and damp as much as you can.”
Smith nodded good-humouredly as he took it.
“I’ll drink it,” he said, “if only to oblige you. But as for coddling myself, don’t I know all about that! You lay up for a week, and then one morning, when you’re all warm and cosy in your little bed, blessed if it isn’t the old bronchitis again! Thanks, all the same.”
He hesitated a moment, then—
“One good turn deserves another,” he added abruptly. “You may see me again within the next day or two.”
And with that he departed, leaving Gilroy considerably puzzled as to his meaning.
He was as good as his word, however. The next night he turned up again, and Gilroy, as he performed the sacred rites of hospitality, found himself wondering, with some misgiving, whether his neighbour was going to make a habit of dropping in on his evening’s work. It was soon apparent, however, that Smith had come with a definite object in view. It revealed itself before he had been five minutes in the flat.
“To go back to Sir Adam Braid’s murder,” he began. “You asked me last night for my frank opinion on it. As I told you then, you can hardly expect to find me on the side of law and order. But that doesn’t mean that I enjoy watching the police barking up the wrong tree any more than you do. I nearly said something to you last night, and if I’d been the only person concerned, I’d have done so.” He paused, and Gilroy took him up eagerly.
“You mean that you have got some knowledge of what happened that night?” he asked.
Smith held up a thin hand.
“Now, don’t go off the deep end. What I’m going to say may be so much waste of breath for all the good it will do you. If you’re in Mr. Fenn’s confidence, as I take you to be, you know a lot more about this business than I do. But, before this goes any further, I want your word for it that you won’t pass on anything I tell you to the police without my permission. And by the police, I mean Mr. Fenn. That’s understood?”
Gilroy hesitated.
“You’re asking a good deal,” he said at last. “If you can clear Miss Braid, you can hardly expect me to keep your information to myself.”
“I can’t clear her, but you’re free to act on anything I may tell you, provided you hold your tongue on certain points. But I want your word for it that nothing goes through to Mr. Fenn without the permission of the parties, or rather the party, involved. Without that I don’t open my lips.”
“I’ll undertake to hold my tongue,” agreed Gilroy reluctantly, “provided that you do your best to get the required permission from this third person, should it be necessary. Will that do?”
Smith nodded.
“Good enough,” he conceded. “After I left you last night I talked the matter over with the wife, and we agreed that there was something you ought to know, and that there was no harm in passing the word to you, provided it went no further. Now I’ll just go over what I imagine happened that night. If I’m wrong at any point you can stop me. I’m going by what came out at the inquest and things I’ve picked up since. We’ll begin with Johnson. He went out as usual round about six-thirty and didn’t come back again till after seven, by which time the old man was dead. Then there’s this chap Stephens. He came in directly after Johnson had left, and, I understand, swears he was out of the house by six-forty. Barring the people who were already in the house, that’s the lot, I take it?”
“So far as we know, yes,” answered Gilroy guardedly.
“Then you don’t know everything,” said Smith complacently. “Now listen to little Willie. There was another person in this house that night. He was seen to go in, and what’s more, he was seen to go out!”
Gilroy sprang to his feet.
“Good God, man, do you realize—”
Again Smith held up a restraining hand.
“Now, what did I tell you? Don’t run away with the idea that I’m going to tell you the name and address of the murderer, because I don’t know it, and if I did I probably shouldn’t spill it to you. Get this into your head. I don’t know who the fellow was. I don’t even know whether he was old or young or what he looked like. That’s the truth. I’m not kidding you. But I do know there was another man here on the night the old man was murdered, and I give you that for what it’s worth.”
“But why on earth didn’t you come forward with this before?”
“For an uncommonly good reason, if you’ll bring yourself to listen. You may or may not know that we had a friend staying with us upstairs after Sir Adam Braid’s death. She was ‘wanted,’ as a matter of fact, and we naturally weren’t publishing the fact that she was there. Well, Mr. Fenn jumped to it, and the result was that her visit came to an end a bit more suddenly than we’d intended. Now I want you to understand that she’d got no more to do with the killing than we had. We none of us knew of the thing till next morning, and we shouldn’t have known then if that old she-Webb hadn’t gone bleating all over the shop. But the point is that when Mr. Fenn hopped in on our little party I didn’t exactly take him
to my bosom, so to speak, and I may have misled him as to one or two facts. One was as to the length of time Gertie Anderson had been in our flat. I may have led him to believe that she had only arrived two nights before. I don’t mind telling you that she had been with us for a week, but I’ve got your word for it that you won’t pass the information on, remember.”
Gilroy began to think he had been very neatly trapped.
“I’ll keep my word,” he said dryly. “But I put it to you that it’s not very fair to tie my hands like this.”
“It’s the fairness to Gertie, not you, I’m worrying about. You see, I know she had nothing to do with it. She was waiting out there in the street when Braid was killed, and she never set foot inside the flats till half-past seven. If you ask me how I know, I’ll tell you. I brought her in myself.”
“What proof have you that she didn’t enter the flats of her own accord earlier in the evening?” countered Gilroy.
“None. But I know, from what she told the wife, that she was in the street, as she said, or she couldn’t have known the things she did know. Mind you, the wife only let on about what she’d told her after she’d left our flat, and the day Mr. Fenn called on us I hadn’t got the story. I misled him a bit then, for reasons of my own, I’ll admit, through not wanting him to know that my wife was alone in the flat when the old man was killed. To tell you the truth, Gertie hadn’t told me what she’d seen, and I wasn’t so sure in my own mind then that she’d been in the street all the time as she said. And I wasn’t going to have my wife mixed up in anything of that sort. So I let Mr. Fenn think I’d got back by an earlier train, and that Gertie hadn’t come to us till two days before he spotted her.”
“I still don’t see what makes you so certain that she was speaking the truth,” objected Gilroy.
Smith bent forward impressively.
“Because the things she told my wife on the night of the murder were things she couldn’t possibly have known then, unless she’d seen them with her own eyes. This is what she said: There was no light in our front rooms when she got here. Otherwise she’d have gone straight up. My wife was in the kitchen at the back, as she told Mr. Fenn, and Gertie thought the flat was empty and waited in the street to catch one of us on the way home. In the end, she waylaid me and we went in together. While she was waiting she saw three people come into the flats, two men and a woman. Three, mind you! The two men she saw come out again, but the woman, who must have been Miss Braid, didn’t come out. Now, at the time she told the wife all this, no one knew about Miss Braid or Stephens, and, to this day, no one knows about the second man. That’s how I know she was speaking the truth, apart from the fact that she wouldn’t go out of her way to lie to my wife.”
“Couldn’t she describe the second man?”
“No such luck. She was too far off. When the first man, whom I take to be Stephens, arrived, she was sheltering in a doorway opposite, and she saw him pretty clearly. Then she moved up the street, and, though she saw the second man go in and then saw the two of them come out, she was too far off even to be sure which of them was Stephens. But she says the second man went in within five minutes of the other, and one of them came out almost at once and seemed in a hell of a hurry. It was ten minutes or more before the other man came out, and he was taking it easily. It was after that that the woman turned in, just after the church clock had struck seven. Is that any help to you?”
“None,” said Gilroy hopelessly. “We’ve got proof that Miss Braid could not have reached the flats before seven, and this simply confirms it. But this story about the third man does shed some light on things.”
“Well, you can take it from me that he was there, if Gertie says so. And now you see where I stand, doctor. If you can pass the glad news on to Mr. Fenn, without giving us away, you can do it. But Gertie must be kept out of it. I’ve got your word for that. And there’s another thing I can tell you, though I know Mr. Fenn doesn’t see it as I do. That noise my wife heard at a quarter to seven was the old man being done in. She told me about it after Mr. Fenn’s visit, and she’s repeated it since, and I’m as sure of it as I stand here.”
“There’s nothing else you know that you haven’t told me?” asked Gilroy, with a sudden suspicion.
“Not a thing!” asserted Smith, with such conviction that Gilroy was inclined to believe that, for once, he was speaking the truth. “But that’s what I think, and I stick to it. She was right about the time, too, whatever Mr. Fenn may say.”
After he had gone Gilroy was left to face the problem of how to convey to Fenn the information he had just received without giving away Smith or his compromising visitor. He was disposed to take the man’s word for it that she had no connection with the murder, and he recognized how disastrous it would be for one with her record if it were known that she was actually in the vicinity of the flats when it took place. He decided to sleep on it, and began to prepare for bed, first making a careful note of the times at which, according to Smith, the two men had entered the building.
He had hardly begun to undress when his bell rang, and he went to the door, to find the person he was least prepared to meet standing there.
“Good Lord, Fenn!” he exclaimed.
“I won’t keep you out of your bed,” said Fenn, as he stepped into the passage. “I only dropped in for a moment on my way back to Putney. We’ve had a nasty set-back. The Southampton police have telephoned to say that Stephens’ witness, Macnab, has been picked up in the street with a hole in his head. He’s in hospital now, and it’s a question whether his skull’s fractured or not. Anyway, he’s not likely to be able to speak for some time yet. Whoever did it evidently left him for dead.”
“Macnab! But why should any one want to put him out of the way?”
“I can’t tell you, but, if you ask me who did it, I’m ready to make a shrewd guess that it was a gentleman of the name of Goldstein, and when we know why he did it we shall have got the missing link in this confounded case.”
CHAPTER XVII
The news of the attack on Macnab left Gilroy hovering between relief and disappointment. It seemed to him not unlikely that the steward’s assailant was the mysterious second man Smith’s friend, Gertie, had seen entering the building on the night of the murder, though why he had been at such pains to silence Stephens’ witness it was difficult to imagine. At best, Macnab could do no more than clear Stephens, and in view of the fact that, according to the wireless message, the man was returning to London for the express purpose of corroborating Stephens’ statement, whoever attacked him must have known that he would gain little by putting him out of action. That there was some deeper motive behind the assault on Macnab seemed pretty evident, and it looked very much as though there might be a direct connection between it and the Braid case. And it was all to the advantage of Jill, assuming she were innocent, that anything should occur that pointed, however vaguely, to some solution of the mystery. The assault on Macnab, while it delayed the progress of the case in the eyes of Fenn, also definitely postponed any action with regard to Jill Braid, a fact for which Gilroy was proportionately grateful. So long as Stephens was under suspicion, Fenn would no doubt be able to hold his hand.
Gilroy slept badly, and was sick and tired of his own thoughts when he sat down to breakfast next morning. His ancient charwoman, Mrs. Cotswold, whose loquacity he had suffered without protest since Fenn’s suggestion that it might prove useful, chose this particular morning, of all others, on which to let her tongue run freely, and she pottered about the room while he ate, chattering unceasingly. By the time he had reached his second cup of tea she had reverted to Sir Adam Braid’s murder, which was still her favourite topic of conversation.
“To think that only a month ago the poor old gentleman was a-sittin’ eatin’ of ’is breakfast, same as you. And ’im now dead and buried! It do bring it ’ome to one. Another month and you and me may be gone, too, sir!” she declaimed unctuously.
Sustained by this exhilarating thought Gilroy att
acked his egg, emitting an inarticulate sound that Mrs. Cotswold no doubt took to mean encouragement, for she continued in the same strain.
“Well, they say that to dream of death means a weddin’! And it’s a funny thing, if you ask me, that a weddin’ should ’a come of it, after all. Looks as if there was some truth in them old sayin’s. If the old gentleman ’ad lived, I suppose that there Johnson’d ’ave been a free man to-day. And glad of it, I shouldn’t wonder! Much good marriage ’as done ’im!”
Gilroy looked up from his plate.
“What’s the matter with Johnson?” he asked.
“If you ask me, sir, ’e’s got the same disease as Cotswold, though Cotswold ain’t got the same cause for it. For I ’ave been a good wife to Cotswold, though I say it as shouldn’t. Johnson’s up at ‘The Nag’s ’Ead’ every night now, and ’e don’t leave afore ’e’s chucked out, and then it’s as much as ’e can do ter get ’ome. At least, that’s what Cotswold tells me, and ’e ought ter know,” she finished bitterly.
“Drinking, is he? He never seemed to me a drinking man.”
“Nor ’e wasn’t. I’ll lay that ’ussy’s leadin’ ’im a dance. A rare temper she’ll ’ave, if she takes after ’er mother. There’s some as could tell you a thing or two about ’er, if they chose!”
“A bad lot, was she?”
“Well, if you ask me no questions, you won’t get no lies, and I ain’t sayin’ anythin’, mind you. But I never see ’er marriage lines, and it’s my belief she ’adn’t any to show. She was married to ’er first, all right, poor feller. I can remember ’im bein’ fished out of the river as well as if it was yesterday. A lighterman, ’e was. Got ’imself run down by a tug one dark night, and that was the end of ’im. And ’e ’adn’t been dead three weeks afore she went off with the other. Been goin’ on with ’im a fair scandal, too, she ’ad, while ’er ’usband was alive.”
