Puzzle of the Silver Persian

by Stuart Palmer

  Cannon frowned. “She disappeared, didn’t she? How else can you account for it? She didn’t fly away in the air. She couldn’t escape observation on that boat for two days, not with everybody looking for her. There’s only one place where the Fraser girl could have gone, and that’s Davy Jones’ locker.”

  “Fair enough,” said the sergeant. “But when?”

  “Don’t be a cryptic ass,” said Cannon.

  “Sorry, sir. What I meant to say was—supposing she was killed, and her body hidden somewhere for a few hours, and dropped overboard when the splash wouldn’t be noticed? Or supposing she hid herself for some reason, and was killed at a later hour?”

  “Supposing the moon was made of green cheese,” Cannon remarked unkindly. “It’s clear enough. Here’s the Fraser girl, at the rail of the ship, near a pair of lifeboats swung on davits, or whatever you call ’em. There’s the deck house at her back, with a door leading into the radio operator’s cabin, and two doors leading into cabins for the mates and captain respectively. Latter both locked. Forward of the ship is a ladder to the bridge, and one down to the promenade deck. Aft we have the old maid school mistress in a deck chair that blocks most of the passageway. Forward ladder blocked by the Noring girl, who is searching for her room mate. How could any of the business you suggest have happened?”

  “Supposing,” suggested the sergeant, “that there was a man concealed behind those lifeboats? Supposing he killed the Fraser girl, and hid her underneath the canvas cover of one of them, and then stole away after the two women were starting the search?” He paused. “Or supposing that she crawled in a lifeboat to meet this man and was killed there by him?”

  Cannon pouted. “Won’t wash, I’m afraid. When the girl was suspected to be missing, they of course searched the lifeboats.”

  “They did.” The sergeant smiled. “But it was not until the next forenoon. You see, they were so sure she had gone overboard.”

  “What I don’t see is—” began Cannon. A sharp knock had come at the door, and the doddering constable who guarded the main entrance looked in.

  “Lady to see you, sir,” he told the chief. “She was here before. Name’s Withers.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Cannon. “The Yankee sleuthess. I suppose I’d better see her; sometimes she has an idea. You stay, Secker.”

  The sergeant had no intention of leaving unless he was thrown out. A moment later Miss Hildegarde Withers achieved her lifelong ambition and entered an office of the C.I.D. at Scotland Yard.

  Cannon rose and politely offered her a chair. “I’m very busy,” he said unpromisingly. “That’s why I had you come here instead of to the reception room. Well?”

  “First,” began Miss Withers, “I wanted to ask how you are progressing with the Fraser-Noel-Todd-etc. murder case? If it isn’t entirely a dead issue I’d like to offer a suggestion.”

  “The case is still open,” said Chief Inspector Cannon coldly. “But I might call your attention to the fact that in the year 1932 we had just one unsolved murder in England and Wales.”

  “Looks as if you’ll have two or three this year, doesn’t it?” Miss Withers said sweetly. “Or maybe half a dozen. Dr. Waite had a lot of cyanide stolen.”

  The chief took out his notebook. “If you have any additions to your statement, I shall be glad to take them down.”

  “I just want to ask a question,” Miss Withers told him. “I have no facilities for finding out, but I’d like to know. Can you wire the Buffalo police back in the States and discover whether or not Rosemary Fraser was unusually good at water sports—swimming and diving and so on?”

  The inspector laughed. “Swimming, eh? You think that she was good enough a swimmer to fight the waves six hundred miles or so to shore?”

  “There are fishing boats which go out into the Gulf Stream beyond the Scilly Isles,” suggested the sergeant. “Supposing—”

  “We sighted no boats until off Land’s End,” Miss Withers told him. “No, I didn’t mean that Rosemary might have swum to shore. Although, if she had been in London this past week or more, it would simplify this case tremendously.”

  “Here at the Yard we don’t believe in ghosts,” said Cannon heavily. “I don’t mind answering your question. We got a full report on Rosemary Fraser, description, tastes, and past history. She was not an athletic type, according to the report.”

  “But she spent every summer of her life at Bar Harbor, Maine,” put in the sergeant. “Isn’t that one of your Yankee watering places? She’d pick up a good bit of swimming there.”

  Miss Withers thanked him. “I’ll leave you to your labors, gentlemen. If I get any more ideas, or notice any more murders—”

  “The cycle ought to be complete,” said Cannon. He was friendlier than at the beginning. “The people concerned in the case seem to have scattered to the four winds. Of course, we’re keeping an eye on their whereabouts…”

  “I have an idea that we’re not anywhere near the end of the cycle, as you call it,” Miss Withers told him. “And furthermore, how do you know just who among the many passengers and members of the crew of that ship are mixed up in this affair?”

  Cannon smiled. “Easy, my dear lady. If you knew anything about criminology you’d know that in any case of anonymous letters—poison-pen letters as your yellow press calls them—the writer always sends one to himself or herself, figuring that that gives him a certain protection from suspicion. Therefore, the sender of those black-bordered notes has received one—and made a great to-do about it, most likely.”

  Miss Withers knew that as well as he, but she nodded. “I don’t suppose you have looked into the affairs of the Hammond family, have you? They received a joint letter edged in black, you know.”

  Cannon looked at some papers in his desk. “The child was dispatched to a school in Cornwall. Mrs. Hammond is out of our jurisdiction, in Paris. And out of reach of the murderer, too.”

  “But Tom Hammond is right here in London,” Miss Withers pointed out. “And from information received, as you people say, I understand that he is trying to drink himself to death. He’d be easy prey for somebody, in that dulled condition. Remember, Andy Todd was dead drunk when he fell to his death through an elevator—I mean lift-shaft—door that was too narrow to let his hand through to the catch.”

  “Well?” Cannon was growing weary of this.

  “I think Hammond ought to be warned to follow the example of the others and get out of London,” Miss Withers announced. “For his own good. Or at least told to take care of himself and be on his guard.”

  The chief inspector rose to his feet. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “I will consider the suggestions that you have made.”

  He was a human wall too thick and high for Miss Withers. “I know what you intend to do about this murder case,” she remarked acidly. “You’re going to wait until every person in the group has been killed but one, and then arrest that one, figuring that you can’t make a mistake.”

  She swept from the room, and the sergeant looked at his superior. “At that, it wouldn’t be a bad idea,” said Secker.

  “I detest amateur sleuths,” Cannon complained. “If people want to be detectives, let ’em start at the bottom as P.C’s.”

  Sergeant Secker smiled at the thought of a helmet atop the long and somewhat horselike visage of Hildegarde Withers. “I didn’t mean her idea about waiting to arrest the last surviving member of the group,” he continued. “I mean—she gave me an idea. Hammond has been marked down by this murderer—at least, he received a black-bordered letter. If he’s seen about town drunk, that puts him in a dangerous position right now…”

  “We can’t give him police protection unless he asks for it,” cut in Cannon.

  “I didn’t mean that. Don’t warn him. Let him go on as he is. And don’t frighten off the murderer. But set a trap!”

  “Eh?”

  “A trap—with Hammond as the bait.” The sergeant enlarged upon his plan, and Chief Inspector Cannon, a
just man, considered it and found that it was good.

  Miss Hildegarde Withers was writing a letter, back in her room at the Alexandria. She puzzled for a while over the proper manner in which to address the envelope. One couldn’t begin “Dear the Honorable Emily.” She finally sent down for a copy of DeBrett’s, and discovered that her friend’s name was not Reverson but Pendavid: “The Honorable Emily Pendavid, only surviving daughter and heir of the late Earl of Trevanna, title now extinct.”

  “Dear Miss Pendavid [she began], I have been doing a good deal of thinking about the events of the past week and more, and I am more and more convinced that we have not reached an end to the tragedies. Scotland Yard seems at a complete loss. I feel it my duty to warn you to take the utmost precautions for your own safety. Remember that you and your nephew, besides myself, are the only members of the party at the doctor’s table on board ship who have not yet been threatened. Place your servants on their guard, and see to your doors and windows at night. Be overly suspicious of everybody and everything, particularly of anything sent to you in the mail. And write to me, besides notifying the Yard, if you receive one of those horrible letters.”

  She signed “Hildegarde Martha Withers” in a large round script, and placed the message in a square gray envelope. “To the Honorable Emily Pendavid, Dinsul Castle, Cornwall,” she wrote.

  The letter mailed, she turned her attention to the chase. For two days she divided her time between the newspaper files, the reading room at the British Museum, and a search for the mysterious Mrs. Charles—discovering no more about the latter than had the police. The mysterious young woman—if she was a woman—had taken cheap lodgings in several hotels in the neighborhood of Charing Cross, not far from the Alexandria. She had worn a squirrel coat, collar turned high. That was the sum total of her findings—except that one chambermaid, well tipped, admitted that “Mrs. Charles” had been seen smoking a cigar in her room. Moreover, she had been a person of strange nocturnal habits, staying out most of the night and returning in the broad light of day.

  Once Miss Withers got in touch with Sergeant Secker, after much telephoning, and demanded to know what had been done with the torn diary and the other personal effects of Rosemary Fraser.

  “They were sent to her people in the States, of course,” she was told.

  “Oh, I see,” said Miss Withers, in a tone of distinct disappointment. She hung up the receiver.

  She had done her best, but it seemed to be a cold scent and a lost trail. The school teacher took to wandering aimlessly about the fascinating old city of London, peering into the faces of passers-by and through shop windows as if there she expected to find an answer to the riddle which haunted her mind. Normally a person of regular habits and addicted to early hours, she upset her usual routine, sensing that she could never get the real feel of the city in daylight—or what Londoners know as daylight.

  One night—it was the fourth since the Honorable Emily and her entourage had departed for Cornwall and security—she was walking aimlessly through the streets of Soho, taking a short cut from the shop windows of Oxford Street back to the hotel. There, on the other side of the street, she saw Tom Hammond, walking very briskly and determinedly northward.

  “Yoicks!” said Miss Withers to herself, and drew back into a convenient doorway. But he was too intent upon his destination to notice her.

  “Now, I wonder where he is going!” she asked. With Hildegarde Withers, wondering was a prelude to the taking of definite steps toward finding out. Beset by curiosity, she followed the young man northward, keeping a discreet distance in the rear and ready to slip out of sight if he should hesitate or turn, which he showed no signs of doing. There were still a goodly number of people on the streets, for it was not yet eleven o’clock.

  He turned down Oxford Street and then disappeared through the swinging doors of The King’s Arms. Miss Withers took up a stand on the opposite corner, where she could command a view of both doors to the public house, and was hopeful that in spite of the fact that she leaned against a jeweler’s window she would not be picked up as a snatch-and-grab suspect.

  She looked at her watch—it was four minutes before eleven. Her wait was momentary, for almost immediately Tom Hammond reappeared, walking a little more unsteadily but with a continued air of definiteness. He was followed by the other customers of the place, for eleven o’clock is closing time on the south side of Oxford Street.

  He turned and headed north along Tottenham Court Road. Miss Withers, who had read enough of the London newspapers to know that this unpromising section has outclassed Limehouse as London’s center of crime and violence, clutched her umbrella the more tightly, and strode onward. There was never a bobby in sight, though buses swung past her at lengthening intervals. Young men walked by her in twos and threes, usually wearing soiled white scarves around their necks in lieu of neckties and shirts—and underwear, Miss Withers feared. But they paid her no attention.

  Hammond turned down a side street. She followed, growing rather out of breath.

  He knocked at an out-of-the-way door and was admitted to a murky hallway. Again Miss Withers waited, this time for more than half an hour. When Tom Hammond emerged he was rocking a bit, with his hat too far back on his forehead and his legs betraying him now and then. Miss Withers guessed that he had just visited one of the unsavory emporiums which in the not-so-golden yesterday would have been called “speak-easies” in her own country. The world, she observed, was a small place after all.

  Tom Hammond proceeded northwards, pressing on into the narrow courts and alleys which cluster about Middlesex Hospital. He turned down a narrow passageway which led on into a more brightly lighted square. But instead of pushing on, he halted and consulted a slip of paper.

  It was at this point that Miss Hildegarde Withers had a distinct shock. She realized that someone else shared her ideas about following Tom Hammond, for a swaggering idler in rough clothing and a dingy white scarf and low-drawn cap had halted, even as she, in order to keep from approaching too closely to the young man.

  The quarry found what he sought on the scrap of paper and rang a bell. In a moment a door opened to cast a bright glow of light into the passage, and then closed again behind him.

  Miss Withers could not make out the other watcher who waited, but she knew that he was there ahead of her, in the shadows.

  Puzzled and at a loss, she stood and took stock of the situation for a few moments. Then she decided upon a desperate move. Hammond had been heading constantly northward. There was a good chance that he would continue to press onward into the sections where constables were few and far between and the possibilities, therefore, for acquiring unlicensed beverages at forbidden hours greater.

  She turned hurriedly back, found a street cutting through to the right, and made a complete circle, coming out at last into Fitzroy Square and the opposite end of the passage. Here, at any rate, she was not entirely alone, for some distance on a man was tinkering with a stalled motorcycle, and beyond him a solitary taxicab was cruising slowly around the square.

  She took up her stand in the shadows, where she could peer up the passage through which she confidently expected Tom Hammond, and the dark figure who pursued him so stealthily, would come.

  Of course there was the danger that the mysterious one would choose this particular place to strike. Yet she thought not. If she knew anything about this particular series of murders, it was that the perpetrator was not addicted to man-to-man violence, and Tom Hammond was still well able to hear the tap of feet on the stone flagging behind him and put up a healthy resistance.

  The whole situation was foreign to the conception which Miss Withers had developed concerning what she called the Fraser-Noel-Todd case. “Yet if a man can pass as a woman in a fur coat, then a woman could pass as a man in rough clothing and a cap,” she reminded herself.

  She waited impatiently in the cold London evening, clutching her umbrella and heartily wishing that Inspector Oscar Piper were here b
eside her, villainous black cigar and all—or else that she had taken up rock gardening instead of sleuthing as a hobby.

  Then she got her signal—a flare of light in the darkened passage as a door opened and Tom Hammond emerged. He was definitely wobbling now—but he set his course in her direction. Miss Withers stepped down into a basement doorway and watched him come out into the lighted square, still hurrying as if he were trying to catch up with himself—or to leave himself behind.

  She came out as soon as he had passed, and stood waiting. Had she made a bad guess? No—for soft footsteps were approaching. She caught a brief glimpse of a furtive, rather boyish figure in rough clothing and a low-slung cap—and went into action.

  Holding her umbrella by the tip, she swung with all her force against the head of the furtive stranger as he slipped out of the mouth of the passage, at the same time shouting with the full strength of her lungs: “Help! Police! Help!”

  The cap must have turned the force of her blow, for the dark stranger did not fall. He turned a dazed face toward her, and she redoubled her screams: “Help! Murder!”

  There were the comforting sounds of running footsteps, and she left off swinging her umbrella and closed with her victim. She flung both arms around him and clung for dear life.

  “Don’t you try to get away,” she warned. But he did not try.

  To Miss Withers combined amazement and delight, the man who had been tinkering the motorcycle turned out to be no less than Chief Inspector Cannon, and the cruising taxicab, when it drew swiftly nearer, she saw contained three constables in uniform.

  “I’ve got him!” she announced as Cannon drew near. Tom Hammond also had retraced his steps and stood blinking at the scene.

  Her victim went rather limp in her arms, and she had to let him fall to the sidewalk.

  Cannon bent beside her quarry. “Haven’t you!” he said, in a peculiar voice.

  “I saw him creeping after Tom Hammond here, and I figured that the murderer would consider that a drunk was easy prey,” she went on.