A Scream in Soho

by John G. Brandon

  With incredible speed and force a knife flew across the dividing space, piercing his throat and pinning his head to the solid door behind him. Like a flash it was followed by the thrower, who plunged a second weapon right to his heart. With a groan, which was the last sound he ever made, he hung there limply for a second or two, then his weight dragged the first knife from the door and he collapsed in a heap immediately beneath it.

  With that same swiftness with which he seemed to do everything, the little figure pulled the knife from his victim’s throat and recovered the other. As calmly as though he were eating his dinner, he wiped both weapons upon the dead man’s clothes and put them back in their sheaths. Systematically, he went through every pocket of Mascagni’s clothes and emptied them, then slid out of the alley as noiselessly as he had entered it!

  ***

  Curiously enough it was that never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed nuisance, Paolo Vanadi, who found the body of the gangster. The mere fact of his being at large proved Fasoli’s positive conviction that his belligerent customer had fallen into the hands of the police, as usual, to be entirely wrong.

  One would have thought that, with his police record for bellicosity when in drink, the reveller from the North Country would have made a rush to find the nearest constable to prove that he had no complicity in the crime. Another strange fact, strange considering the condition he had been in but a little over two hours before, Signor Vanadi was now as sober as the proverbial judge and, instead of following what would seem to be the natural course for him to have taken, began to behave in an exceedingly strange manner.

  First, in the light of a small torch he concealed beneath his coat, he examined the two dreadful wounds, then himself went through every pocket of the dead man’s clothes, finding, of course, nothing. Then, in the same methodical way, he gave his attention to the door behind the dead man, found that cleft where the first knife had pinned Mascagni to the woodwork, and stood for a few moments in thought.

  Giving his attention now to the doorway opposite and the cobbles between, he examined them carefully and apparently came to some decision concerning them. Following the alley along in the direction in which Mascagni had been moving, he found a tiny footprint marked clearly in blood, which showed him that someone, ostensibly a woman, though the foot, although short, was extraordinarily broad for its length, had not only been upon the scene, but must have been extremely close to the body to have stepped in the pool of blood in which it lay.

  Still fainter traces of the same foot-spoor showed him that it had proceeded as far as Greek Street and then turned north. An examination of the other end of the alley showed him more than one trace of the way Mascagni had come. Apparently he had seen sufficient to stamp upon his mind some theory as to how the crime had been committed.

  But something was still puzzling the signor; there was some little thing which, to judge by the frowning perplexity of his saturnine face, left an unanswered question in his mind—something which did not fit in. Returning to the body he again, and in the same cautious way, turned his torch upon it, and commenced a second search of Mascagni’s clothing; it proved as futile as had the first. Suddenly he lifted one of the murdered man’s hands, the right, and examined the finger-tips closely. Something he saw there brought from him a deeply-uttered, well-satisfied “Ah!”—it was a faint blue stain which marked the whorls of the dead man’s first finger and thumb.

  The puzzled expression had gone from the signor’s face, and its place was taken by one of intense eagerness. Leaving the alley he made his way to the nearest telephone box and, in his weird, broken English, informed the police where they would find the murdered body of Floriello Mascagni. After which Signor Paolo Vanadi did something which would have considerably enlightened the denizens of Soho amongst whom he periodically paraded his wild antics.

  Moving quietly to Dean Street, and first making very sure that there was no one hanging about in the immediate vicinity, he produced a latchkey and let himself into the lodgings of Detective Inspector McCarthy. Some half-hour later that officer emerged as his well-known self and, keeping well clear of the alley which by now he knew would be a hive of police, made his way by a circuitous route to the Circolo Romagna.

  A very few minutes’ earnest conversation with Olinto Delmorti—who had fear of the law in the very highest degree where Inspector McCarthy was concerned—sufficed to give the inspector the information he needed.

  Firstly, that Mascagni had come into the Circolo somewhere in the region of a little after half-past eleven o’clock; that he had told Delmorti to put a call through to a certain number—carefully noted down by the inspector—and which was that of Tessa Domenico’s lodgings in Doughty Street, off Holborn. That was at twelve-thirty; an hour later. He had learned that the beautiful Tessa had not returned home at that hour.

  Secondly, that at one o’clock the phone rang and, answering it, Delmorti found it to be Tessa Domenico, asking for Mascagni. He was informed that the message must evidently have been an assignation made by Tessa for later that night, or, rather, that morning. Mascagni had been exceedingly cheerful about it and had informed his fellow-gamblers that he was finishing in something under the hour, as he had a date. He had left the club at about a quarter to two with quite a large number of notes in his possession.

  “And,” McCarthy thought to himself, “was found not six minutes’ walk away, murdered, and with empty pockets!”

  From the Circolo, McCarthy put through a police call to Exchange, and was promptly given the correct address of the number given to Delmorti as Tessa Domenico’s. He quickly gleaned the further information that the subscriber was a Mrs. Flannigan and the house a boarding establishment. So much for that.

  “Right,” he said in parting, to the club proprietor. “You can keep the fact to yourself that I’ve been asking a few questions, Delmorti.”

  It was as he was leaving the place, followed by the well-nigh grovelling Delmorti, that he observed one man, a dark, swarthy-skinned Italian in the dress-clothes of a waiter, covered by an overcoat, who was seated alone. What quickly fastened the inspector’s attention upon him was that his keen eyes detected more than one spot of blood upon the man’s collar, and also upon his shirt-front. The latter marks had been made still more prominent by a vigorous attempt to rub them out!

  Any person carrying bloodstains so close to the vicinity in which Mascagni was lying murdered was of considerable interest; moreover, the man’s face showed signs of having been heartily battered, and not so long since. He had a lump between his neck and jaw which suggested that he might have been kicked by a horse!

  “Who’s that chap?” he asked, though without appearing to give the man any particular attention.

  Carefully turning his back so that the man in question should have no suspicion that he was speaking about him, Delmorti informed McCarthy that the man’s name was Andrea Praga, a waiter.

  “He is not long com’ to Soho,” he informed McCarthy, confidentially. “He is no good—what you call a messee job, Inspectore. To-night ’e is sack forwit’ from the Hotel Splendide, becos’ he juggle wit’ the change of a customer—sapeti?”

  “That sort, is he?” McCarthy said. “But that doesn’t explain where he got the pasting from.”

  “To-night,” Delmorti informed him, in a still lower tone, “he run across a man called Paolo Vanadi—you know him, p’raps? One tough guy, so to spik. He com’ here from the North each six months or so, and drinks all the wine in Soho.”

  “I fancy I have heard of him,” McCarthy said, without move of a muscle.

  “Well, to-night,” the signor went on, “Vanadi he is ver’ drunk in de street, and this Praga ’e tries to run da rule over ’im, for his mon’. Plenty mon’ this Vanadi always has on him when ’e com’ to Soho.”

  “He’s luckier than I am, Delmorti,” the inspector said. “Well?”

  The signor shrugged his sho
ulders.

  “Well, that ees what ’appened to ’im. P’raps it teach ’im to keep ’is ’ands in ’is own pockets.”

  McCarthy nodded. “We’ll hope so,” he said, as he turned towards the door. “I must have an eye kept on this Vanadi. We’ve got trouble enough in Soho without his sort bargin’ in. Don’t forget to forget that I’ve been in here making inquiries to-night,” he cautioned. “So long.”

  Chapter XVII

  “Big Bill” Does a Spot of Sleuthing

  The inspector was in an exceedingly thoughtful mood as he made his way back to his Dean Street lodgings. The discovery of that tell-tale stain upon Mascagni’s fingers had opened up a quite unexpected angle in the Soho Square crime. That Mascagni had been connected with it in some way or other had been patent from the fact that he had been in the car which had attempted to run him, or Regan, down that morning. But that the gang-boss had actually had the stolen prints through his hands was the very last thing McCarthy had ever dreamed of. But there was no gainsaying that stain; that told its own story, and that it could possibly have been there through any other medium was unthinkable.

  Mulling it over in his mind there seemed only one possible way in which that could have occurred. Mascagni’s mob, probably including Floriello personally, had committed the Anselmi murder and purloined the coffee-stall. When, right after that scream, the body of the butchered Rohner had been tossed into it, the prints had been hurriedly passed to Mascagni, in case anything should go wrong with the killer’s getaway. He would have certain explicit orders concerning them, of course. The probability was that he had returned them only that night—in all likelihood to the mysterious personage whom McCarthy, on the prowl, had picked up leaving Fasoli’s, only to lose him in that car. He would have given a month’s salary to have caught even one glimpse of the face of that individual.

  On the other hand there was another possibility to be considered: that Mascagni had still had them in his possession when he was done to death after leaving the Romagna, but, looking at it in every light, the inspector did not think so. But now that that tell-tale stain had made it a certainty that the dead gang-boss had had the prints in his possession, that intriguing business of the knock upon the window by the table at which the Baroness Lena Eberhardt regularly had her déjeuner, took on a totally different perspective. Had his first idea of that rather extraordinary happening been right, and the knock been a definite signal, or message, to the baroness? Looked at in the light of Withers’ report as to her later movements, and particularly her amazing disappearance somewhere in the vicinity of Fasoli’s, it certainly looked so.

  That thought brought another to his mind: what had become of Withers who had an assignment with him to be somewhere on the prowl in the vicinity of the Circolo Venezia at about eleven o’clock? Not one sign of him had the inspector seen during his peregrination of the Soho streets, though, he admitted freely, the taxi would have had to have pulled up right under his very nose for him to have been aware of its presence. Still, the black-out was something Withers would have been well hardened to by now, and he would certainly have found McCarthy had he been on the spot as arranged. That he had not been, intrigued the inspector considerably, for as a rule the big taxi-man was the soul of reliability.

  Dismissing the thought of Withers’ lapse as of little consequence since he had not needed him, his mind reverted again to Mascagni and the sudden and terrible death which had been dealt out to him. That he well deserved it there was no question of doubt, and particularly so if he had had any hand in the equally brutal slaying of poor old Joe Anselmi, not to mention the butchery in Soho Square; but that was not the point. Murder was murder in the eyes of the law; no matter how much the murdered deserved the fate dealt out to him.

  And in that connection there was another thing which puzzled McCarthy considerably—that tiny footprint which, he had no doubt whatever, had been left behind either by the killer or someone connected with him, and present, when the crime was committed. That it was the spoor of a man was impossible, albeit it seemed, despite its size, of an extremely ungainly shape to be left by a woman’s modern shoe. Automatically his mind turned upon the only two women he knew to have been connected with Mascagni within the last twenty-four hours: the Baroness Lena Eberhardt (and behind her name there must be set a very large note of interrogation), and Tessa Domenico. The foot of the former, he remembered perfectly; during that lunch-hour he had had more than one opportunity of noticing, not only the perfect shape of her feet and ankles, but also the highly expensive perfection of the shoes she was wearing. He was as certain as he could be of anything that they had not left that particular spoor.

  For one thing the baroness, although perfectly formed, was a woman of rather over average height, and built in proportion; her feet, though leaving nothing whatever open to criticism, were definitely of a long and narrow mould, quite different to the extremely short and thickish print he had found in the alley. And there was another side of that which could not be overlooked: if the Austrian woman were connected with this espionage gang who killed so readily, it would certainly not have been left to her to carry out the murder of Flo. Mascagni.

  Just what the feet of the perfectly formed Tessa Domenico were like he could not recall to memory, but she, too, although the perfection of female anatomy, was upon the tall and stately side, and generously built. Her feet, he was certain, were not of the tiny variety which would account for so short a spoor. But there was one thing connected with her which certainly gave him to think, and think hard: that was the fact that, after being away from home at the time that Delmorti had rung up at Mascagni’s request, she, at one o’clock, should put a call through there and make what undoubtedly was an assignation to meet Mascagni at a still later hour—possibly at two o’clock, since he had not left the Circolo till a quarter to that hour. Knowing all the short cuts of Soho backwards, Mascagni would have been able to get to Doughty Street comfortably by two o’clock, even handicapped by the black-out.

  And Tessa Domenico, born and bred in Soho and, like most of its youthful denizens, having run its streets night and day for years, knew it as well as did her lover. She would know exactly which short cuts he would take to bring him out at the nearest point to Doughty Street. She would also have a fairly good idea just about what time he would leave the Romagna; he could, quite possibly, have told her that in their talk over the phone.

  There came back to him Withers’ words to the effect that Tessa still ran around with Mascagni though more from fear than any love she might have for him; a cynical comment with which he had agreed. Had she, for any ulterior motive arising out of that situation, had anything to do with the “removal” of the jealous lover she went in terror of? Had that phone call been the medium by which Flo. Mascagni had been put “on the spot”?

  But there, again, he found himself up against a theory to which he could not give credence. If those footprints were to be taken as of any value at all towards the elucidation of the crime, then Tessa Domenico must have either committed the murder herself or at any rate been present when it had been done; neither of which possibilities—if only from the very method by which the murder had been committed, would, in his opinion, hold water for a single moment. And in the latter case why was there no spoor left by the murderer?

  But the fact remained that the call making the assignation with Mascagni had come from Tessa Domenico and within a few minutes of leaving to join her he had been ruthlessly killed. If, again, this espionage gang with which he was undoubtedly connected had had anything to do with his death, then there was a possible argument that she, too, must be in some way connected with them. He could see it was not possible for them to have known, other than by information from herself, that Mascagni was leaving the club at the time he did, to keep an appointment with her. However, whichever way it was, that call would have to be followed up and the beautiful Tessa put through an interrogation which would leave nothing
concerning her movements that night in doubt.

  With Inspector McCarthy, to make up his mind was usually to act instanter, but he realized that to make for the boarding-house in Doughty Street at that hour of the morning, and, without warrant, or any other authority, pull the girl out of bed for an inquisition would be absolutely useless and, more than likely, defeat his own ends. He decided to turn in and get an hour or two’s sleep.

  Six o’clock saw him out of bed again, and dressing; less than an hour after that saw him out upon the street and this time the debonair, perfectly-groomed Inspector McCarthy that the world knew, and, knowing, had taken to its bosom.

  He was proceeding along New Oxford Street when a taxi-cab coming along at an entirely illegal pace drew up with a screech of brakes beside him. In the driver’s seat, penitence stamped indelibly upon his huge face, was Mr. William Withers, evidently making his way from his Clerkenwell residence.

  “Guv’nor,” he exclaimed, before McCarthy could utter a word, “I know just what you’re a-goin’ t’ say, an’ I ain’t got no answer for it. I done in your job last night; leastwise,” he qualified, “I never done it in intentional—only on account o’ losin’ me temper. When I got back again I couldn’t find you nowhere.”

  “No bones broken, Withers,” McCarthy returned equably. “As it turned out I didn’t want you. Where did you get to anyway?”

  “Well, it’s this way, sir, an’ I ain’t makin’ no excuses for meself. I was just makin’ for Soho Square to come in by Greek Street, when a bleeder wiv a big car come slashin’ out into Oxford Street wiv no lights on, takes the corner on two wheels and all-but rams me proper. He gave my mudguards a dam’ good rakin’—’ow ’e didn’t take ’em off is more than I know. Take a mike at ’em, guv’nor, an’ you’ll see as ’ow I ain’t tellin’ no lies—th’ dirty arsterbar!”

  McCarthy pricked up his ears and took a glance at the mudguards; their condition upon one side amply corroborated Withers’ story.