These Names Make Clues

by E. C. R. Lorac

  On this occasion he dispatched a sergeant to Thavies House to find out and report immediately on the time of Elliott’s arrival, so that Macdonald’s own time should not be wasted.

  His report was only in the outline stage when Sergeant Brading rang up, and Macdonald slid his papers together and was out of his room a very few seconds after he had hung up the receiver. With Inspector Jenkins at his side he drove up the sunny Embankment, and turned into the Strand by way of Norfolk Street, arriving at Thavies House within a few minutes of Brading’s message. The building where Elliott carried on his business was a narrow slip of a block recently constructed, let out in offices and rooms to a large number of different tenants. The entrance to the block was in Arundel Passage, just off the Strand, and a constable on duty at the door had already attracted the attention of the inevitable loungers of the London streets.

  “Top floor, sir,” said the constable as he saluted the two C.I.D. men. “The sergeant is up there.”

  Macdonald and Jenkins went up in the lift—an automatic one, independent of a lift man, and they shot up to the seventh and top storey. There were three sets of offices opening on to the landing, and Macdonald rang at the door which showed Elliott’s name; the door was opened by a C.I.D. sergeant. He stood back to let the two officers enter a lobby, in which stood some chairs and a table with books on it, denoting a waiting-room. Two people were in the lobby, sitting at the table and they stared at Macdonald and Jenkins. One was a white-faced young man, thin and startled looking, the other a girl whose face might have been white under its make-up, but whose expression denoted a lively curiosity. There were three doors opening on the lobby. One, with glass panels, was labelled “Inquiries,” another, of solid wood “Private.”

  “In there, sir,” said Brading. “This is Mr. Elliott’s secretary and his stenographer.”

  Macdonald nodded pleasantly to the pair who sat at the table (both looking quite unaccustomed to being relegated to a waiting-room), and said:

  “I want to talk to you both later. I won’t keep you waiting longer than I can help,” before he went to the door indicated by Brading and entered it followed closely by Jenkins.

  It was a pleasantly furnished little room, with light, clean walls, and bookcases round three sides. A grandfather clock stood by the fireplace. Sunshine gleamed through the opaque glass of the window and rendered the electric light which was burning in the pendant lamp a sickly powerless yellow. The beam of sun shone on the grey head and dark clad shoulders of the man whose body had slumped forward over the desk, shone too on an overturned inkpot and the coagulated trickle of blood which had flowed from the head.

  Macdonald touched one of the rigid hands which was thrust forward on the desk, but after that he stood still and looked round the room.

  “Well, that’s a facer and no mistake,” said Jenkins and Macdonald nodded.

  “Yes. About the last thing I should have expected. Shot through the right temple, but no sign of a gun. Well, that’s plain enough—nothing nebulous here.”

  Mardon-Elliott, Gardien’s literary agent, if this were he, was fully dressed for going out. He wore a black top-coat of fine cloth, and a white silk scarf showed above the collar of it. An opera hat lay on the ground beside him with a clean chamois glove just beside it. The other glove was on his right hand. The blotting pad on the kneehole desk was pushed away to the edge of the table farthest from the body, and a blue pencil lay just by the gloved hand. Across the clean blotting paper a word had been scrawled in the blue pencil, the big letters trailing across the surface and ending in a series of spasmodic illegible jerks. The word written was Gardien.

  “A touch of originality about this,” said Macdonald. “One is led to believe that they killed one another, which as the geometry book says, is absurd. Phew! It’s hot in here.”

  It was very hot. An electric stove stood in the fireplace behind the chair in which the body sat, and all its bars were alight. The radiator beneath the window formed another focus of heat and Macdonald guessed the temperature of the room to be over 80° F.

  “We’ll just make certain that the pistol hasn’t rolled into a corner anywhere,” he went on, “and then I’ll go and talk to the pair out there. You can stay here until the surgeon comes and see that he doesn’t move anything more than he can help.”

  Jenkins nodded. “There’s a tumbler under that chair, might as well mark it and pick it up. What do you bet it’s got Gardien’s fingerprints on? That’d about put the cap on it.”

  “It’s so damned difficult not to theorise,” said Macdonald, bending down to peer into every corner of the carpeted floor. “It suggests that the same person killed both Gardien and Elliott, and planted evidence to prove that they killed one another. I wonder how a jury would like that—pure reason again.”

  “No gun here,” said Jenkins, grunting a little as he straightened himself after perusing his section of the floor, “and I’ll bet my head to a china orange the chap didn’t live long enough after he got that bullet in his head to play any tricks with hiding guns. I wouldn’t have thought he could have written anything, either, but that blotting pad’s not been moved since he fell forward. There’s a mark of blood all round one corner—not smudged.”

  Macdonald made a swoop into a corner of the room, where there was a space between a small revolving bookcase and the wall. Using his handkerchief to hold it, he picked up a small round clock, the glass of which was cracked in and forced against the hands. The hands stood at eight o’clock.

  “Oh, ho!” said Jenkins. “What time did your party start last night? Perhaps it was friend Gardien after all.”

  “Convenient of him to leave all the tokens and sign manuals,” said Macdonald. “Having shot Elliott, Gardien went on to Caroline House and later died of a heart attack, when Elliott walked into the telephone-room, alive and well. Quite enough to give any one a heart attack. Banquo, being buried, should not have come out on’s grave. All right, Jenkins. Stay and ponder over it according to the rules of logic. Losh keep’s! You’ll need ’em.”

  Going back to the door and opening it without handling the knob, Macdonald looked at the pair in the waiting-room. The girl was calmly reading a magazine, but the young man sat twisting his fingers miserably together.

  “Damn it, I don’t see why you won’t let me smoke,” he was complaining, and Macdonald put in:

  “Mr. Lethem? I understand that you were the first to find the body, I should be glad if you’d answer a few questions. We could use your own office, perhaps.”

  The young man jumped up as though relieved to hear the sound of the chief inspector’s quiet pleasant voice.

  “Yes, sir. Through ‘Inquiries’ there.”

  Macdonald after a word of instruction to Brading crossed the little waiting-room and opened the glass-panelled door. This gave on to a narrow slip of an office, in which a typist’s table stood under the window. A door in the farther wall stood open, showing a larger office beyond, into which Macdonald walked with Lethem just behind him.

  “Sit down—and smoke if you want to,” said Macdonald, seating himself at the table. “I expect you had a pretty nasty shock.”

  “I should say I did,” replied the white-faced young man, his face twitching as he spoke. “I thought things were a bit odd here lately, but I didn’t expect that. I suppose he shot himself?”

  “Suppositions aren’t much good at this stage,” said Macdonald. “I’d like your name and address first, please, then you can tell me about your arrival here and finding the body.”

  “Gerald Lethem, 190 Mayfield Grove, Harrow,” was the prompt rejoinder. “I’ve been with Mr. Elliott for six months. I generally get here by half-past nine in the morning and Miss Burton comes at the same time. I have the key and open the door. I got here a bit earlier than usual this morning as I’d got a lot to do. When I opened the outer door, before I turned the electric light on, I saw a line of light under the door of Mr. Elliott’s office, and thought he must have left the li
ght burning. I went straight in and saw him.”

  He broke off, his face puckering up oddly as though he would have liked to cry. “I’m not much good at horrors,” he went on. “It made me feel sick. I went up to the desk, near enough to see the blood, and then I bolted out again and rushed on to the landing. Wilson was there, the porter, and I told him that Mr. Elliott had shot himself. He, Wilson, went in and had a look and then some one came to the outer door—the sergeant there. Then he took things in hand, and I was jolly glad he did. I’m willing to face up to most emergencies, but the sight of blood makes me feel sick.”

  Macdonald nodded sympathetically. He had been studying the young man during the foregoing speech and was in two minds about him. Lethem was a tall slim fellow, very neat and stylish with black hair which gave the impression of being set like a girl’s, so immaculate was its regular wave. His face was certainly pallid and his hands unsteady, but his narrative was singularly direct. He had taken the trouble to explain, without waiting to be asked, exactly why he had gone into Elliott’s room, as though he had foreseen the question and been ready for it. Most witnesses, in Macdonald’s experience, when under the stress of agitation in a situation like this one, rushed straight into a description of their grim discovery without thinking to explain their own actions. Lethem showed a mixture of excitement and carefulness which seemed contradictory.

  “When you went into Mr. Elliott’s room, did you touch anything?” queried Macdonald, and Lethem replied promptly.

  “Nothing at all. I just thought ‘he’s done it then.’ I was going to lift him up but I realised he was dead, and then—well, I got panicky. I just bolted out to get help.”

  “You say that you assumed he shot himself. Could you see a pistol or revolver anywhere?”

  “No. I didn’t stay to look.”

  “What made you think of suicide?”

  “I knew Elliott was pretty depressed and I believe his affairs are in a fine old mess. He’s been down with ’flu just lately and hadn’t taken enough time off to recover properly. He said only a few days ago, ‘I’m fed up. I reckon it’d be easiest to blow my brains out’—I didn’t take much notice at the time. He was always a bit odd and given to extremes. Frightfully bucked with life one day and thoroughly depressed the next.”

  “Difficult to work with?” queried Macdonald.

  “Yes and no. Pretty maddening if you’re methodical and businesslike, but he had flair—temperament you know. He never made a mistake in estimating the market value of a manuscript, but he made mistakes every other way. Nearly drove his auditors mad. I got on with him all right personally but he’d had a new secretary every month before I came, more or less.”

  “Do you know what he was depressed about?”

  Lethem shrugged his slim shoulders. “You’d better look at his ledgers. He’d got a good business all right, both here and in the U.S.A., but it’s my opinion he’s in Queer Street. If you want to know, I was hanging on in the hopes of buying him out if he went bankrupt.”

  “I see. Now, we’d better get on to the facts about the last person who saw him alive.”

  “Probably me,” replied Lethem gloomily. “No. Wait a minute. It’d have been Mr. Gardien, if he turned up. It was like this,” he went on, explaining with a touch of condescension in his voice. “I stayed a bit later than usual last night. The char had come in to clean up, she does it after office hours in the evening. Mr. Elliott was here, too. He’d brought a suitcase with him so as to change here as he sometimes did, when he was dining out. He told me I could use his room until I was through, as Mrs. Gadds, the char, could leave cleaning it for once and give it an extra doing to-day. I was here until half-past seven. Mr. Elliott changed in his own cloak-room and told me to bung off. He rather expected Mr. Gardien was coming in about eight o’clock. That’s Andrew Gardien. You may have heard of him?”

  “Yes. I have,” replied Macdonald, and Lethem went on, “I left just after half-past seven. Old Gadds had gone by that time, and there was nobody in the place but Mr. Elliott. The porter’s on duty till eight, because he organises the cleaning of some of the offices. The main entrance was still open when I left, but the lights on the stairs were off.”

  A thoughtful witness this one, mused Macdonald. He produced, unprompted, most of the details which had to be asked for as a rule.

  “Had Mr. Elliott told you previously that he had an appointment with Mr. Gardien, or entered it in his engagement book, so far as you know?”

  “He hadn’t said anything to me about it at all, and there was no entry in the diary I keep for office use.” The young man indicated a loose-leaf calendar block lying on his own desk. “It struck me as a bit odd, after office hours like that and so on, but Elliott was given to doing surprising things.”

  “Such as—?”

  “Well, stopping here till all hours and then not turning up till tea-time next day. I can tell you he needed some one with a spot of method to help him run this show. I reckon his business has improved fifty per cent since I came.”

  Macdonald sat silent and studied the young man again. Mr. Lethem’s nervousness seemed to have quieted down now, and he lit another cigarette with quite a nonchalant air.

  “If you ask me, I should say the poor chap was a bit batty,” he added. “That go of ’flu was the last straw. It does get some fellows down.”

  Again Macdonald nodded agreement, pleasantly.

  “You can give me Mr. Elliott’s home address, and Mr. Gardien’s, I expect?”

  “Mr. Elliott had just moved to a place in Surrey— Boxleith Hall. It’s one of those residential country clubs, I believe. I’ve never been there, myself. He was rather close over his own affairs. Took it amiss if I tried to ring him up when he was away from the office. A maddening fellow in some ways. If he’d have given me authority to act on my own initiative—however there it is.” He shrugged his shoulders and blew out a cloud of heavy fragrant smoke.

  “And Mr. Gardien’s address?”

  “I rather think he’s at the Savoy this time,” replied Lethem, putting the accent on the first part of Savoy and somehow contriving to infer that it was a haunt of his own. “Gardien’s always travelling about—the devil of a nuisance to act for.”

  “Can’t you do better than rather think?” enquired Macdonald. “Don’t you forward Mr. Gardien’s letters for instance?”

  “Letters come for him here, but I haven’t forwarded any lately. Elliott saw to it. Sometimes we have been out of touch with Gardien for months, even his bank didn’t know his address. In my opinion Gardien likes doing the mystery man touch. Seeks publicity by avoiding it, if you see what I mean.”

  “Has Mr. Gardien been here frequently of late?”

  “He’s been in three or four times in the past month to see Elliott personally. I know very little about him really. Never exchanged more than a dozen words with him.”

  “So far as you can judge, were he and Mr. Elliott friends, apart from their business association?”

  “Yes, I should say they were. Lunched and dined together, and so forth. Elliott would always put off any other appointment to suit Gardien.”

  “So far as you know, they hadn’t quarrelled?”

  “Quarrelled? Good Lord! You’re thinking Gardien shot him?” Lethem stared at Macdonald with his mouth open, and then went on, “If they quarrelled I never heard anything about it. Elliott was all over him. Had good reason to be. Gardien’s books sold all over the world. What you’d call a profitable proposition.”

  Macdonald glanced at his watch. “I am sure that you will be able to give me a lot of assistance, Mr. Lethem, but there are certain routine matters which I must attend to now. I shall need these offices for the time being. Is there anywhere else on the premises where you can work? I expect you can carry on with some of the usual business, in spite of this deplorable happening.”

  “There’s dispatch,” said Lethem. “I can work there. Can I open the mail?”

  “Quite shortly,” said M
acdonald.

  Lethem gave his characteristic shrug. “All the same to me. I’ve got an M.S. to go through, so I may as well get on with it. Business is Business.”

  “It is. I have to know just what you did when you left here last evening, of course.”

  “Certainly. I went into Byng’s for a snack—just off the Strand. Got there at about twenty to eight. Met a man named Crome and went to the Academy Cinema with him—and so to bed.”

  “Crome’s full name and address?”

  “Walter Crome. Photographer on the staff of the Morning Mail. Lives in Bloomsbury somewhere.”

  “Thanks. That’s all for the moment. You will have to stop in the waiting-room for a bit, but I won’t keep you there long.”

  For the next quarter of an hour Macdonald heard the report of Detective Green, who had followed the two inspectors with the C.I.D. photographers and fingerprint men. Green and Brading had been making inquiries of the other two employees in Elliott’s office, Miss Burton, the stenographer, and Hands, the boy in charge of the dispatch room. Both of these had left the building the previous evening by six-fifteen, and since they had no evidence to give of immediate importance they were told to go home, as Macdonald wanted the offices left empty for the investigation. The porter of the building turned out to be an ex-policeman of D division, who gave evidence with police court precision. He had seen young Hands and Miss Burton leave Thavies House at their usual time, shortly after six. Holland (the porter) was on duty in the entrance hall at the time, where he stayed until half-past six, by which time most of the occupants of the offices had left. Between six-thirty and seven-thirty, Holland was about the building, superintending the cleaners. At seven-thirty these also had left, and Holland had seen Mr. Lethem go out of the main entrance just after seven-thirty. The lights on the stairs were off, but those in the entrance hall were still burning. Holland had shut the entrance doors shortly after Lethem had gone, but had remained in the building until eight o’clock, his official hour for going off duty. Between seven-thirty and eight o’clock he had been on the ground floor, putting to rights a piece of rubber floor cloth which had been torn by some furniture movers: Holland was certain that no one entered the building between seven-forty, when he closed the doors, and eight o’clock.