by Ngaio Marsh
Presently, however, Fox brought his palm down on his knee and Alleyn, without looking up, said: “Hullo?”
“Peculiar,” Fox grunted. “Listen to this, sir.”
“Go ahead.”
How tender [Mr. Fox began] is the first burgeoning of love! How delicate the tiny bud, how easily cut with frost! Touch it with gentle fingers, dear lad, lest its fragrance be lost to you forever.
“Cor’!” whispered Detective-Sergeant Scott.
You say [Mr. Fox continued] that she is changeable. So is a day in spring. Be patient. Wait for the wee petals to unfold. If you would care for a very special, etc.
Fox removed his spectacles and contemplated his superior.
“What do you mean by your ‘etc.,’ Fox? Why don’t you go on?”
“That’s what it says. Etc. Then it stops. Look.”
He flattened a piece of creased blue letter paper out on the desk before Alleyn. It was covered with typing, closely spaced. The Duke’s Gate address was stamped on the top.
Alleyn said, “What’s that you’re holding back?”
Fox laid his second exhibit before him. It was a press-cutting and printed on paper of the kind used in the more exotic magazines. Alleyn read aloud:
Dear G.P.F.: I am engaged to a young lady who at times is very affectionate and then again goes cold on me. It’s not halitosis because I asked her and she said it wasn’t and wished I wouldn’t harp on about it. I am twenty-two, five-foot-eleven in my socks and well built. I drag down £550 per annum. I am an A grade motor-mechanic and I have prospects of a rise. She reckons she loves me and yet she acts like this. What should be my attitude?
Spark-plug.
“I should advise a damn’ good hiding,” Alleyn said. “Poor old Spark-plug.”
“Go on, sir. Read the answer.” Alleyn continued:
Dear Spark-plug: Yours is not as unusual a problem as perhaps you, in your distress of mind, incline to believe. How tender is the first burgeoning —!
“Yes, here we go again. Yes. All right, Fox. You’ve found, apparently, a bit of the rough draft and the finished article. The draft, typed on Duke’s Gate letter-paper, looks as if it had been crumpled up in somebody’s pocket, doesn’t it? Half a minute.”
He opened his own file and in a moment the letter Félicité had dropped from her bag at the Metronome had been placed beside the other. Alleyn bent over them. “It’s a pot-shot, of course,” he said, “but I’m ready to bet it’s the same machine. The s out of alignment. All the usual indications.”
“Where does this lead us?” Fox asked. Gibson, looking gratified, cleared his throat. Alleyn said: “It leads us into a bit of a tangle. The letter to Miss de Suze was typed on the machine in Lord Pastern’s study on the paper he uses for that purpose. The machine carried his dabs only. I took a chance and asked him, point-blank, how long he’d known that Edward Manx was G.P.F. He wouldn’t answer but I’ll swear I rocked him. I’ll undertake he typed the letter after he saw Manx put a white carnation in his coat, marked the envelope, ‘By District Messenger’ and put it on the hall table where it was discovered by the butler. All right. Now, not so long ago, Manx stayed at Duke’s Gate for three weeks and I suppose it’s reasonable to assume that he may have used the typewriter and the blue letter-paper in the study when he was jotting down notes for his nauseating little G.P.F. numbers in Harmony. So this draft may have been typed by Manx. But, as far as we know, Manx met Rivera for the first time last night and incidentally dotted him what William pleasingly called a fourpenny one, because Rivera kissed, not Miss de Suze but Miss Wayne. Now, if we’re right so far, how and when the hell did Rivera get hold of Manx’s rough draft of this sickening G.P.F. stuff? Not last night because we’ve got it from Rivera’s safe, and he didn’t go back to his rooms. Answer me that, Fox.”
“Gawd knows.”
“We don’t, at all events. And if we find out, is it going to tie up with Rivera’s murder? Well, press on, chaps, press on.”
He returned to the ledger and Fox to the bundle of papers. Presently Alleyn said: “Isn’t it extraordinary how business-like they are?”
“Who’s that, Mr. Alleyn?”
“Why, blackmailers to be sure. Mr. Rivera was a man of parts, Fox. Piano-accordions, drug-running, blackmail. Almost a pity we’ve got to nab his murderer. He was ripe for bumping off, was Mr. Rivera. This is a neatly kept record of moneys and goods received and disbursed. On the third of February, for instance, we have an entry. ‘Cash. £150, 3rd installment. S.F.F.’ A week later, a cryptic note on the debit side: ‘6 doz. per S.S., £360,’ followed by a series of credits: ‘J.C.M. £10,’ ‘B.B. £100,’ and so on. These entries are in a group by themselves. He’s totted them up and balanced the whole thing, showing a profit of £200 on the original outlay of £360.”
“That’ll be his dope racket, by Gum. ‘S.S.’ did you say, Mr. Alleyn? By Gum, I wonder if he is in with the Snowy Santos bunch.”
“And B.B. on the paying side. B.B. is quite a profitable number on the paying side.”
“Breezy Bellairs?”
“I shouldn’t wonder. It looks to me, Fox, as if Rivera was a medium high-up in the drug racket. He was one of the boys we don’t catch easily. It’s long odds he never passed the stuff out direct to the small consumer. With the exception, no doubt, of the wretched Bellairs. No, I fancy Rivera’s business was confined to his purple satin parlor. At the smallest sign of our getting anywhere near him, he’d have burnt his books and, if necessary, returned to his native hacienda or what-have-you.”
“Or go in first by laying information against the small man. That’s the line they take as often as not.”
“Yes, indeed. As often as not. What else have you got in your lucky dip, Br’er Fox?”
“Letters,” said Fox. “A sealed package. And the cash.”
“Anything that chimes in with his bookkeeping, I wonder?”
“Wait a bit, sir. I wouldn’t be surprised. Wait a bit.”
They hadn’t long to wait. The too familiar raw material of the blackmailer’s trade was soon laid out on Alleyn’s desk: the dingy, colourless letters, paid for again and again yet never redeemed, the discoloured clippings from dead newspapers, one or two desperate appeals for mercy, the inexorable entries on the credit side. Alleyn’s fingers seemed to tarnish as he handled them but Fox rubbed his hands.
“This is something like,” Fox said, and after a minute or two: “Look at this, Mr. Alleyn.”
It was a letter signed “Félicité” and was some four months old. Alleyn read it through and handed it back to Fox, who said: “It establishes the relationship.”
“Apparently.”
“Funny,” said Fox. “You’d have thought from the look of him, even when he was dead, that any girl in her senses would have picked him for what he was. There are two other letters. Much the same kind of thing.”
“Yes.”
“Yes. Well now,” said Fox slowly. “Leaving the young lady aside for the moment, where, if anywhere, does this get us with his lordship?”
“Not very far, I fancy. Unless you find something revealing a hitherto unsuspected irregularity in his lordship’s past, and he doesn’t strike me as one to hide his riotings.”
“All the same, sir, there may be something. What about his lordship encouraging this affair with his stepdaughter? Doesn’t that look as if Rivera had a hold on him?”
“It might,” Alleyn agreed, “if his lordship was anybody but his lordship. But it might. So last night, having decided to liquidate Rivera, he types this letter purporting to come from G.P.F. with the idea of throwing the all-too-impressionable Miss de Suze in Edward Manx’s arms!”
“There you are!”
“How does Lord Pastern know Manx is G.P.F.? And if Rivera used this G.P.F. copy to blackmail Manx it wasn’t a very hot instrument for his purpose, being typed. Anybody at Duke’s Gate might have typed it. He would have to find it on Manx and try a bluff. And he hadn’t met Manx. All right. For purpos
es of your argument we needn’t pursue that one at the moment. All right. It fits. In a way. Only… only…” He rubbed his nose. “I’m sorry, Fox, but I can’t reconcile the flavor of Pastern and Manx with all this. A most untenable argument, I know. I won’t try to justify it. What’s in that box?”
Fox had already opened it and shoved it across the desk. “It’ll be the stuff itself,” he said. “A nice little haul, Gibson.”
The box contained neat small packages, securely sealed, and, in a separate carton, a number of cigarettes.
“That’ll be it,” Alleyn agreed. “He wasn’t the direct receiver, evidently. This will have come in by the usual damned labyrinth.” He glanced up at Detective-Sergeant Scott, a young officer. “You haven’t worked on any of these cases, I think, Scott. This is probably cocaine or heroin, and has no doubt travelled long distances in bogus false teeth, fat men’s navels, dummy hearing aids, phony bayonet fitments for electric light bulbs and God knows what else. As Mr. Fox says, Gibson, it’s a nice little haul. We’ll leave Rivera for the moment, I think.” He turned to Scott and Watson. “Let’s hear how you got on with Breezy Bellairs.”
Breezy, it appeared, lived in a furnished flat in Pikestaff Row, off Ebury Street. To this address Scott and Watson had conveyed him, and with some difficulty put him to bed. Once there, he had slept stertorously through the rest of the night. They had combed out the flat, which, unlike Rivera’s, was slovenly and disordered. It looked, they said, as if Breezy had had a frantic search for something. The pockets of his suits had been pulled out, the drawers of his furniture disembowelled and the contents left where they lay. The only thing in the flat that was at all orderly was Breezy’s pile of band parts. Scott and Watson had sorted out a bundle of correspondence consisting of bills, dunning reminders, and his fan mail, which turned out to be largish. At the back of a small bedside cupboard they had found a hypodermic syringe which they produced and a number of torn and empty packages which were of the same sort as those found in Rivera’s safe. “Almost too easy,” said Mr. Fox with the liveliest satisfaction. “We knew it already, of course, through Skelton, but here’s positive proof Rivera supplied Bellairs with his dope. By Gum,” he added deeply, “I’d like to get this line on the dope-racket followed in to one of the high-ups. Now, I wonder. Breezy’ll be looking for his stuff and won’t know where to find it. He’ll be very upset. I ask myself if Breezy won’t be in the mood to talk.”
“You’d better remind yourself of your police code, old boy.”
“It’ll be the same story,” Fox muttered. “Breezy won’t know how Rivera got it. He won’t know.”
“He hasn’t been long on the injection method,” Alleyn said. “Curtis had a look for needle marks and didn’t find so very many.”
“He’ll be fretting for it, though,” said Fox, and after a moment’s pondering, “Oh, well. It’s a homicide we’re after.”
Nothing more of interest had been found in Breezy’s flat and Alleyn turned to the last of the men. “How did you get on with Skelton, Sallis?”
“Well, sir,” said Sallis, in a loud public-school voice, “he didn’t like me much to begin with. I picked up a search-warrant on the way and he took a very poor view of that. However, we talked sociology for the rest of the journey and I offered to lend him The Yogi and the Commissar, which bent the barriers a little. He’s Australian by birth, and I’ve been out there so that helped to establish a more matey attitude.”
“Get on with your report now,” Fox said austerely. “Don’t meander. Mr. Alleyn isn’t concerned to know how much Syd Skelton loves you.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Use your notes and get on with it,” Fox counselled.
Sallis opened his notebook and got on with it. Beyond a quantity of communistic literature there was little out of the ordinary to be found in Skelton’s rooms, which were in the Pimlico Road. Alleyn gathered that Sallis had conducted his search during a lively exchange of ideas and could imagine Skelton’s guarded response to Sallis’s pinkish, facile and consciously ironical observations. Finally, Skelton, in spite of himself, had gone to sleep in his chair and Sallis then turned his attention stealthily to a table which was used as a desk.
“I’d noticed that he seemed rather uneasy about this table, sir. He stood by it when we first came in and shuffled the papers about. I had the feeling there was something there that he wanted to destroy. When he was safely off, I went through the stuff on the table and I found this. I don’t know if it’s much cop, really, sir, but here it is.”
He gave a sheet of paper to Alleyn, who opened it up. It was an unfinished letter to Rivera, threatening him with exposure if he continued to supply Breezy Bellairs with drugs.
The other men had gone and Alleyn invited Fox to embark upon what he was in the habit of calling “a hag.” This involved the ruthless taking-to-pieces of the case and a fresh attempt to put the bits together in their true pattern. They had been engaged upon this business for about half an hour when the telephone rang. Fox answered it and announced with a tolerant smile that Mr. Nigel Bathgate would like to speak to Mr. Alleyn.
“I was expecting this,” Alleyn said. “Tell him that for once in a blue moon I want to see him. Where is he?”
“Down below.”
“Hail him up.”
Fox said sedately: “The Chief would like to see you, Mr. Bathgate,” and in a few moments Nigel Bathgate of the Evening Chronicle appeared, looking mildly astonished.
“I must say,” he said, shaking hands, “that this is uncommonly civil óf you, Alleyn. Have you run out of invectives or do you at last realize where the brains lie?”
“If you think I asked you up with the idea of feeding you with banner headlines you’re woefully mistaken. Sit down.”
“Willingly. How are you, Mr. Fox?”
“Nicely, thank you, sir. And you?”
Alleyn said: “Now, you attend to me. Can you tell me anything about a monthly called Harmony?”
“What sort of things? Have you been confiding in G.P.F., Alleyn?”
“I want to know who he is.”
“Has this got anything to do with the Rivera case?”
“Yes, it has.”
“I’ll make a bargain with you. I want a nice meaty bit of stuff straight from the Yard’s mouth. All about old Pastern and how you happened to be there and the shattered romance…”
“Who’ve you been talking to?”
“Charwomen, night porters, chaps in the band. And I ran into Ned Manx, a quarter of an hour ago.”
“What had he got to say for himself?”
“He hung out on me, blast him. Wouldn’t utter. And he’s not on a daily, either. Unco-operative twerp.”
“You might remember he’s the chief suspect’s cousin.”
“Then there’s no doubt about it being old Pastern?”
“I didn’t say so and you won’t suggest it.”
“Well, hell, give me a story.”
“About this paper. Do you know G.P.F.? Come on?”
Nigel lit a cigarette and settled down. “I don’t know him,” he said. “And I don’t know anyone who does. He’s a chap called G. P. Friend, I’m told, and he’s supposed to own the show. If he does, he’s on to a damn useful thing. It’s a mystery, that paper. It breaks all the rules and rings the bell. It first came out about two years ago with a great fanfare of trumpets. They bought out the old Triple Mirror, you know, and took over the plant and the paper and in less than no time trebled the sales. God knows why. The thing’s a freak. It mixes sound criticism with girly-girly chat and runs top-price serials alongside shorts that would bring a blush to the cheeks of Pegs Weekly. They tell me it’s G.P.F.’s page that does the trick. And look at it! That particular racket blew out before the war and yet he gets by with it. I’m told the personal letters at five bob a time are a gold mine in themselves. He’s said to have an uncanny knack of hitting on the things all these women want him to say. The types that write in are amazing. All
the smarties. Nobody ever sees him. He doesn’t get about with the boys and the chaps who free-lance for the rag never get past a sub who’s always very bland and entirely uncommunicative. There you are. That’s all I can tell you about G.P.F.”
“Ever heard what he looks like?”
“No. There’s a legend he wears old clothes and dark glasses. They say he’s got a lock on his office door and never sees anybody on account he doesn’t want to be recognized. It’s all part of an act. Publicity. They play it up in the paper itself — ‘Nobody knows who G.P.F. is.’ ”
“What would you think if I told you he was Edward Manx?”
“Manx! You’re not serious.”
“Is it so incredible?”
Nigel raised his eyebrows. “On the face of it, yes. Manx is a reputable and very able specialist. He’s done some pretty solid stuff. Leftish and fairly authoritative. He’s a coming man. He’d turn sick in his stomach at the sight of G.P.F., I’d have thought.”
“He does their dramatic reviews.”
“Yes, I know, but that’s where they’re freakish. Manx has got a sort of damn-your-eyes view about theatre. It’s one of his things. He wants state ownership and he’ll scoop up any chance to plug it. And I imagine their anti-vice parties wouldn’t be unpleasing to Manx. He wouldn’t go much for the style, which is tough and coloured, but he’d like the policy. They gave battle in a big way, you know. Names all over the place and a general invitation to come on and sue us for libel and see how you like it. Quite his cup of tea. Yes, I imagine Harmony runs Manx to give the paper cachet and Manx writes for Harmony to get at their public. They pay. Top prices.” Nigel paused and then said sharply: “But Manx as G.P.F.! That’s different. Have you actually good reason to suspect it? Are you on to something?”
“The case is fluffy with doubts at the moment.”
“The Rivera case? It ties up with that?”
