Man in the Queue

by Robert Barnard

  Back in his room Grant sat and thought. What did it mean, and of what value was the knowledge? Did the revolver not belong to the dead man? Borrowed, perhaps? But even if it had been borrowed there would surely have been some indication that the dead man had had it in his possession. Or had the dead man not had it in his possession? Had it been slipped into his pocket by some one else? But one could not slip anything of the weight and bulk of a service revolver into a man’s pocket unknown to him. No, not a living man, but—it could have been done after the knife-thrust. But why? Why? No solution, however farfetched, presented itself to him. He took the dagger out of its wrappings, and considered it through the microscope, but could mesmerize himself into no hopeful state over it. He was stale. He would go out and walk a bit. It was just after five. He would go down to the Woffington and see the man who had been doorkeeper at the pit last night.

  It was a fine still evening with a primrose sky, and London was painted against it, in flat washes of a misty lavender. Grant sniffed the air appreciatively. Spring was coming. When he had run the Levantine to earth, he would wangle some leave—sick leave, if he couldn’t get it any other way—and go fishing somewhere. Where should he go? You got the best fishing in the Highlands, but the company was apt to be darned dull. He would go fishing in the Test—at Stockbridge, perhaps. Trout were poor sport, but there was a snug little pub there, and the best of company. And he would get a horse to ride there, and turf to ride it on. And Hampshire in spring—!

  So he speculated, walking briskly along the Embankment, on things far removed from the business on hand. For that was Grant’s way. Barker’s motto was: “Chew it over! Chew it over continually, sleeping and waking, and you’ll find the kernel that matters.” That was true for Barker but not for Grant. Grant had once retorted that when he had chewed to that extent he couldn’t think of anything but the ache in his jaws, and he had meant it. When something baffled him he found that if he kept on worrying it, he got no further, and lost his sense of proportion in the process. So when he came to a dead stop he indulged in what he called “shutting his eyes” for a little, and when he “opened” them again he habitually found a new light on things that revealed unexpected angles and made the old problem a totally new proposition.

  There had been a matinée that afternoon at the Woffington, but he found the theatre in its usual state of shrouded desolation in front and untidy dreariness behind. The doorkeeper was on the premises, but no one was very sure where he was to be found. In the early evening his duties were many and various, it seemed. After several panting messengers had returned from the bowels of the building with reports “No, sir, there wasn’t a sign of him,” Grant himself joined in the exploration and eventually ran the man to earth in a dim passage behind the stage. When Grant had explained who he was and what he wanted, the man became voluble in his pride and eagerness. He was used to being within hailing distance of the aristocracy of the stage, but it was not every day that he had the chance of conversing on friendly terms with that much more august being, an inspector from the C.I.D. He beamed, he continually altered the angle of his cap, he fingered his medal ribbons, he dried his palms on the seat of his trousers, and he quite obviously would have said that he had seen a monkey in the queue if it would have pleased the inspector. Grant groaned inwardly, but the part of himself that always stood aloof whatever he did—the looker-on part of him which he had in such abundance—thought appreciatively what a character the old boy was. With that providing for a hypothetical future which is second nature in a professional detective, he was taking a friendly farewell of so much devoted uselessness, when a charming voice said, “Why, it’s Inspector Grant!” and he turned to see Ray Marcable in her outdoor things, and evidently on the way to her dressing-room.

  “Are you looking for a job? I’m afraid you can’t have even a walking-on part at this late hour.” Her still small smile teased him and her grey eyes looked at him friendlily from under the slight droop of her lids. They had met a year previously over the theft of a fabulously expensive dressing-case which had been one of her richest admirers’ gifts to her, and though they had not met again since she had evidently not forgotten him. In spite of himself he was flattered—even while the looker-on bit of him was aware of it and laughed. He explained his business in the theatre, and the smile faded from her face instantly.

  “Ah, that poor man!” she said. “But here is another,” she added immediately, laying a hand on his arm. “Have you been asking questions all the afternoon? Your throat must be very dry. Come and have a cup of tea in my room with me. My maid is there and she will make us some. We are packing up, you know. It is very sad after such a long time.”

  She led the way to her dressing-room, a place that was walled half with mirrors and half with wardrobes, and that looked more like a florist’s shop than any apartment designed for human habitation. She indicated the flowers with a wave of her hand.

  “My flat won’t hold any more, so these have to stay here. The hospitals were very polite, but they said quite firmly that they had had as much as they could do with. And I can’t very well say, ‘No flowers,’ as they do at funerals, without hurting people.”

  “It’s the only thing most people can do,” Grant said.

  “Oh, yes, I know,” she said. “I’m not ungrateful. Only overwhelmed.”

  When tea was ready she poured out for him, and the maid produced shortbread from a tin. As he was stirring his tea and she was pouring out her own his mind brought him up with a sudden jerk, as an inexperienced rider jabs at his horse’s mouth when startled. She was left-handed!

  “Great heavens!” he said to himself disgustedly. “It isn’t that you deserve a holiday, it’s that you need it. What did you want to italicize a statement like that for? How many lefthanded people do you think there are in London? You’re developing the queerest kind of nerves.”

  To break a silence and because it was the first thing that came into his head, he said, “You’re left-handed.”

  “Yes,” she said indifferently, as the subject deserved, and went on to ask him about his investigations. He told her as much as would appear in the morrow’s press and described the knife, as being the most interesting feature of the case.

  “The handle is a little silver saint with blue-and-red enamel decoration.”

  Something leaped suddenly in Ray Marcable’s calm eyes.

  “What?” she said involuntarily.

  He was about to say, “You’ve seen one like it?” but changed his mind. He knew on the instant that she would say no, and that he would have given away the fact that he was aware that there was anything to be aware of. He repeated the description and she said:

  “A saint! How quaint! And how inappropriate!—And yet, in a big undertaking like a crime, I suppose you’d want some one’s blessing on it.”

  Cool and sweet she put out her left hand for his cup, and as she replenished it he watched her steady wrist and impassive manner and wondered if this too could be unreasonableness on his part.

  “Certainly not,” said his other self. “You may be suffering from attacks of flair in queer places, but you haven’t got to the stage of imagining things yet.”

  They discussed America, which Grant knew well and to which she was about to make her first visit, and when he took his leave he was honestly grateful to her for the tea. He had forgotten all about tea. Now it wouldn’t matter how late he had dinner. But as he went out he sought a light for his cigarette from the doorkeeper, and in the course of another ebullition of chatter and good will learned that Miss Marcable had been in her dressing-room from six o’clock the previous evening until the call-boy went for her before her first cue. Lord Lacing was there, he said, with an eloquent lift of his eyebrow.

  Grant smiled and nodded and went away, but as he was making his way back to the Yard, he was not smiling. What was it that had leapt in Ray Marcable’s eyes? Not fear. No, recognition? Yes, that was it. Most certainly recognition.

  3 DANNY
MillER

  GRANT OPENED HIS EYES and regarded the ceiling of his bedroom speculatively. For the last few minutes he had been technically awake, but his brain, wrapped in the woolliness of sleep and conscious of the ungrateful chilliness of the morning, had denied him thought. But though the reasoning part of him had not wakened, he had become more and more conscious of mental discomfort. Something unpleasant waited him. Something exceedingly unpleasant. The growing conviction had dispelled his drowsiness, and his eyes opened on the ceiling laced across with the early sunlight and the shadows of a plane tree; and on recognition of the unpleasantness. It was the morning of the third day of his investigations, the day of the inquest, and he had nothing to put before the coroner. Had not even a scent to follow.

  His thoughts went back over yesterday. In the morning, the dead man being still unidentified, he had given Williams the man’s tie, that being the newest and most individual thing about him, and had sent him out to scour London. The tie, like the rest of the man’s clothes, had been obtained from a branch of a multiple business, and it was a small hope that any shop assistant would remember the individual to whom he sold the tie. Even if he did, there was no guarantee that the man remembered was their man. Faith Brothers must have sold several dozens of ties of the same pattern in London alone. But there was always that last odd chance, and Grant had seen too much of the queer unexpectedness of chance to neglect any avenue of exploration. As Williams was leaving the room an idea had occurred to him. There was that first idea of his that the man had been a salesman in some clothing business. Perhaps he did not buy his things over the counter. He might have been in the employ of Faith Brothers. “Find out,” he had said to Williams, “if any one answering the dead man’s description has been employed by any one of the branches lately. If you see or hear anything interesting at all—whether you think it is important or not—let me know.”

  Left alone, he had examined the morning’s press. He had not bothered with the various accounts of the queue murder, but the rest of the news he scrutinized with some care, beginning with the personal column. Nothing, however, sounded an answering chord in his brain. A photograph of himself with the caption, “Inspector Grant, who is in charge of the Queue Murder investigations,” caused him to frown. “Fools!” he said aloud. He had then collected and studied a list of missing persons sent in from all the police stations in Britain. Five young men were missing from various places, and the description of one, who was missing from a small Durham town, might have been that of the dead man. After a long delay, Grant had succeeded in talking on the telephone to the Durham police, only to learn that the missing man had originally been a miner and was, in the opinion of the Durham inspector, a tough. And neither “miner” nor “tough” could be applied to the dead man.

  The rest of the morning had been occupied with routine work—settling about the inquest and such necessary formalities. About lunch-time Williams had rung him up from the biggest branch of Faith Brothers, in the Strand. He had had a busy but unproductive morning. Not only did no one recall such a purchaser, but no one remembered even selling such a tie. It was not one of a range that they had stocked lately. That had made him want further information about the tie itself, and he had come to the headquarters and asked to see the manager, to whom he explained the situation. The manager now suggested that if the inspector would surrender the tie for a little it should be sent to their factory at Northwood, where a list could be furnished of the destination of all consignments of such ties within, say, the last year. Williams now sought permission to hand over the tie to the manager.

  Grant had approved his action, and while mentally commending Williams’ common sense—lots of sergeants would have gone on plodding round London because they were told to and it was their duty—thought not too hopefully of the hundred or so branches of Faith Brothers all over Scotland and England. The chances narrowed slightly, however, when Williams appeared with a fuller explanation. Ties like that, it appeared, were made up in boxes of six, each tie in the box being of a different shade though usually in the same colour scheme. It was unlikely that more than one, or at the most two, ties of the exact shade of their specimen had been sent to any one branch. There was therefore more hope of a salesman remembering the customer who had bought it than there would have been if the tie had been merely one of a box all the same shade. The detective part of Grant listened appreciatively while the looker-on part of him smiled over the sergeant’s fluency in the jargon of the trade. Half an hour with the manager of Faith Brothers had had the effect of studding the sergeant’s habitual simplicity of word and phrase with amazing jewels of technicality. He talked glibly of “lines” and “repeats” and similar profundities, so that Grant had, through his bulk, in a queer television a vivid picture of the manager himself. But he was grateful to Williams and said so. That was part of Grant’s charm; he never forgot to say when he was pleased.

  In the afternoon, having given up hope of learning anything more by it, he had sent the dagger to the laboratory for analysis. “Tell me anything you can about it,” he had said; and last night when he left he was still waiting for the answer. Now he stretched out an arm into the chilly air and grabbed at the telephone. When he got the number he had asked for, he said:

  “Inspector Grant speaking. Any developments?”

  No, there were no developments. Two people had viewed the body last night—two separate people—but neither had recognized it. Yes, their names and addresses had been taken and were lying on his desk now. There was also a report from the laboratory.

  “Good!” said Grant, jammed the earpiece on the hook and sprang out of bed, his sense of foreboding dispelled by the clear light of reason. Over his cold bath he whistled, and all the time he was dressing he whistled, so that his landlady said to her husband, who was departing to catch an eight o’clock bus, “I’m thinking it won’t be very long now before that horrible anarchist is caught.” “Anarchist” and “assassin” were synonymous terms to Mrs. Field. Grant himself would not have put it so optimistically perhaps, but the thought of that sealed package waiting on his desk was to him what a lucky packet is to a small boy. It might be something of no importance and it might be a diamond. He caught Mrs. Field’s benevolent glance on him as she set down his breakfast, and it was like a small boy that he said to her, “This my lucky day, do you think?”

  “I don’t know about luck, Mr. Grant. I don’t know as I believes in it. But I do believe in Providence. And I don’t think Providence’ll let a nice young man like that be stabbed to death and not bring the guilty to justice. Trust in the Lord, Mr. Grant.”

  “And if the clues are very thin, the Lord and the C.I.D.,” Grant misquoted at her and attacked his bacon and eggs. She lingered a moment watching him, shook her head in a gently misgiving way at him, and left him scanning the newspapers while he chewed.

  On the way up to town he occupied himself by considering the problem of the man’s non-identification, which became momentarily more surprising. True, a few persons every year are thrown up by London to lie unclaimed for a day or two and then vanish into paupers’ graves. But they are all either old or penniless or both—the dregs of a city’s being, cast off long before their deaths by their relations and friends, and so, when the end came, beyond the ken of any one who might have told their story. In all Grant’s experience no one of the type of the dead man—a man who must have had the normal circle of acquaintances if not more—had remained unidentified. Even if he had been a provincial or a foreigner—and Grant did not think he was; the man’s whole appearance had proclaimed the Londoner—he must have had a dwelling in London or near it; hotel, lodgings, or club, from which he must now be known to be missing. And the appeals from the Press that the fact of a missing person should be communicated to Scotland Yard without delay would most certainly have brought some one hurrying to report it.

  Then, granted that the man was a Londoner—as Grant most heartily believed—why did his people or his landlord not com
e forward? Obviously, either because they had reason to think the dead man a bad lot, or because they themselves had no wish to attract the attention of the police. A gang? A gang getting rid of an unwanted member? But gangs didn’t wait until they got their victim into a queue before dispensing with his services. They chose safer methods.

  Unless—yes, it might have been at once a retribution and a warning. It had had all the elements of a gesture—the weapon, the striking down of the victim while in a place of supposed safety, the whole bravado of the thing. It eliminated the backslider and intimidated the survivors at one and the same time. The more he considered it the more it seemed the reasonable explanation of a mystery. He had scouted the thought of a secret society and he still scouted it. The vengeance of a secret society would not prevent the man’s friends from reporting his loss and claiming him. But the defaulting member of a gang—that was a different thing. In that case all his friends would either know or guess the manner and reason of his death, and none would be fool enough to come forward.

  As Grant turned into the Yard he was revising in his mind the various London gangs that flourished at the moment. Danny Miller’s was cock of the walk, undoubtedly, and had been so for some time. It was three years since Danny had seen the inside, and unless he made a grievous error, it would be still longer before he did. Danny had come from America after serving his second sentence for burglary, and had brought with him a clever brain, a belief in organization that was typically American—the British practitioner is by nature an individualist—and a wholesome respect for British police methods. The result was that, though his minions slipped occasionally and served short sentences for their carelessness, Danny went free and successful—much too successful for the liking of the C.I.D. Now, Danny had all the American crook’s ruthlessness in dealing with an enemy. His habit was a gun, but he would think no more of sticking a knife into a man than he would of swatting the fly that annoyed him. Grant thought that he would invite Danny to come and see him. Meanwhile there was the packet on his table.