The Milliner's Hat Mystery

by Basil Thomson

  Verneuil, whose whimsical expression Goron knew so well, observed: “Madame Germaine is looking forward to her interview with her old friend, Monsieur Laurillard.”

  “Yes, indeed,” burst out the woman; “now I shall see justice done.”

  Verneuil bowed obsequiously. “And we shall make our humble apologies for any inconvenience that Madame has suffered.”

  It was at this moment that M. Laurillard was announced. Madame Germaine rose from her chair and approached him with outstretched hand. He drew back.

  “I have not the honour of Madame’s acquaintance,” he said.

  “Oh,” said the lady; “so that is to be the line, is it? It is well to know how we stand. I will give you one chance, monsieur, before laying all my cards on the table before these gentlemen. Is this the first time that we have met?”

  There was a cold light in her eye which Laurillard could not fail to see. His instinct was to compromise. He turned to the others, saying: “Can I see this lady alone?”

  Goron replied: “I cannot see why a private interview should be necessary on the mere question whether you and this lady are acquainted.”

  “It is possible that this is not the first time that I have met this lady. She might recall the incident to my memory if we could talk tête-à-tête.”

  Before either of the men had time to reply, Madame Germaine burst forth with blazing eyes: “So you would cast a slur on my character; you would pretend that if we met it was merely a passing love affair. Very well, then. I have borne much and I can bear no more. I am free to tell these gentlemen all that they are anxious to know.”

  Laurillard made a last attempt to save his face. “Of course you two gentlemen are free to take down any cock-and-bull story that a detractor chooses to make. When the time comes I shall defend my honour. At the moment I have important business to discharge in another part of Paris and I cannot stop to hear her.”

  Goron placed his back against the door. “You will pardon me, monsieur; I, too, have questions to put to you before you go.”

  “By what right? I am a deputy. I have my parliamentary duties to attend to…”

  “Quite right, monsieur, but my questions will have nothing to do with your parliamentary duties.”

  “I shall have to make a complaint to my friend, the Minister of the Interior, about this insult on the part of one of his functionaries. You know that as a deputy I am immune from this form of petty persecution.”

  “I merely wanted to ask you whether M. Charles Laurillard, one of the directors of the Hédouin chemical laboratory in Belfort, is your son.”

  “He is,” burst out Madame Germaine, unable any longer to contain herself. “And this factory turns out the stuff which the Blake and Lewis women have been dealing in.”

  Laurillard drew himself up. “My son’s factory is engaged in important government work.”

  “Yes, and what about the secret room behind two steel doors? What goes on there?” said Madame Germaine vindictively.

  “That,” said Laurillard, sinking his voice almost to a whisper, “is the room in which the famous anti-gas product is being made for the masks. She has no right to know about it.”

  Goron now played his trump card. “Whatever goes on in that secret room is already known to the Sûreté Nationale, who were to pay a visit to it this afternoon.”

  Laurillard made a final attempt to retreat with dignity. “If it is proved,” he said, with lips so dry that they scarcely enunciated the words, “if my son is proved to have done anything contrary to the interests of his country, I shall be among the first to vote for his punishment.”

  Neither Goron nor Verneuil did more than bow him out. When the door was shut behind him, Verneuil’s attitude was trying to Goron’s gravity, for half unconsciously he was mimicking the dignified carriage of their late visitor. In fact, thought Goron, my friend Verneuil is a positive loss to the French stage.

  “Well now,” said Madame Germaine; “you have begun to realize some of the truth, namely that I am guiltless and that the real malefactors are that gentleman and his son Charles.”

  Goron left Verneuil to answer. “I fear, madame, that the hospitality that I provided for you at La Roche has not been entirely to your liking; you would prefer the comforts of your own home, and if I felt sure that you would stay there without having recourse to a laundry basket, we might come to terms.”

  “You are going the best way to ruin me, gentlemen. My shop has been closed for days and all my customers will desert me for rival establishments. Surely you’ve done enough.”

  “We shall have done enough as soon as you have done something on your side by making a clean breast of your connection with this affair of drug smuggling.”

  “Very well; I’ll tell you. My connection with the affair began when those two ladies came to me to buy hats and insisted that the trimmings should be made tubular. They explained laughingly that they wished to smuggle perfume into England. Later they brought to me some coarse white powder which I was to introduce into trimmings in such a way that it couldn’t leak out. I guessed that something was wrong and demurred. After some discussion…”

  “And something passing from hand to hand,” murmured Verneuil. “After some discussion you consented?”

  “Yes, to oblige the ladies.”

  The ex-petty officer’s eyes narrowed to a slit. “It is always worth while to oblige customers, isn’t it?”

  “Well, of course, that’s how commerce goes forward.”

  “In what other way did you oblige your customers?” asked Goron.

  “I did receive letters at my shop for them.”

  “What did you do with the letters?”

  “I had instructions sometimes to forward them, sometimes to hold them till they called.”

  “But you warned these people when we first made enquiries at your shop. Under whose instructions did you do that?”

  “The instructions of M. Laurillard.” She brought out the name almost triumphantly.

  “When did you first meet this distinguished deputy?”

  “Some months ago. I was introduced to him by Madame Lewis. He assured me that I should be safe from molestation by people like you if I consented to act as their post office.”

  “You knew that they were trafficking in drugs,” said Goron.

  “To be frank, I guessed it.”

  “And your friends at the laundry. How came they to be mixed up in this business?”

  “Oh, they had no part in this at all. They helped me to escape for old friendship’s sake. I had been able to help them in building up their business.”

  “You were not a very good guardian of correspondence. You took alarm as soon as you saw that your shop was being watched and you left your letter box in the hands of the police.”

  “Sir, you had me in your power. I was a foreigner and I knew that with a snap of the fingers you could have had me expelled from France and deprived of my livelihood. I had to look after my own skin. As you have learned from your interview with M. Laurillard, he would not have moved a finger to save me.”

  “Well, madame,” said Verneuil, “for the time being you shall be set at liberty, but it is right to warn you that your correspondence will be supervised.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “You may not believe me, gentlemen, but my profession is more to me than this wretched business into which I was dragged. If people write foolish letters to me and you intercept them, it will concern them, not me. I shall do nothing but read the letters which you allow the postman to bring to me. All I ask is that you do not expel me from France, the country that I love.”

  They allowed her to go and Verneuil seized the opportunity for asking how Goron had discovered the identity of Laurillard’s son.

  “That was simpler than you think. ‘Laurillard’ is not a very common name. As you know since this affair started, my department has been getting together all possible information about chemical factories in France. I searched through the lists o
f directors and in one of them I found the name of Laurillard, a director of the Hédouin chemical laboratory in Belfort. As you know, that address was in Germaine’s notebook. I made further enquiries and found, as I expected, that this Charles Laurillard was the son of a distinguished deputy. You can put two and two together. I got a move on and arranged for an inspection of this factory and its accounts. That took place this afternoon. You see the connection. The factory turns out narcotics under the pretence that it is making anti-gas chemicals for the government. The son Charles sells the narcotics through a small gang, and M. Laurillard, the distinguished deputy, sits up aloft as their loving friend and protector.”

  “And,” said Verneuil, “pockets a good share of the profits.”

  “Exactly. Now I think that we know the whole story.”

  “I gather from the telegram sent by our English friend that he has captured his two murderers. We owe him gratitude for having sent us Laurillard’s name.”

  “During my investigation of the Laurillard family I have today learned something that may interest him. The daughter of the deputy married an Englishman named Pearson and is now living in England. The last letter found in the box of Madame Germaine had a London postmark. It intrigued our English colleague because the writing was illiterate, but the text, which was in French, and the spelling were impeccable. This marriage I speak of may be the explanation. At any rate I shall send him this information and he may hunt up Madame Pearson. I leave you now, my friend, in order to write this letter.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  CHIEF CONSTABLE RICHARDSON had been listening to Vincent’s report.

  “Where are these two men now?” he asked.

  “I presume that they are in prison. They were brought up before the Newquay magistrates who, when they heard how the men had landed and that drugs had been found on the two women, remanded them and refused bail.”

  “You have not yet charged them with murder?”

  “No sir, it is about that that I have come to take your instructions. Their story is fantastic.”

  “During a long career, Mr Vincent, I have found that even fantastic stories cannot be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders.”

  “Circumstantial evidence is all against them. The window of the car was shattered by a bullet; they stopped to have the window replaced, which would have been the instinct of guilty people.”

  “We must not forget that the first instinct of these drug traffickers is to avoid any contact with the police. Have you any further evidence?”

  “Yes sir, I have. A note stolen from the murdered man was changed by a woman named Alice Dodds. This woman is a drug addict and we have a letter signed by her proving that she was in contact with these people.”

  “Then she is an important witness. Have you found her?”

  “Yes.” He explained his meeting with the woman in the Hampstead house. “But she is not in a physical condition to be charged or questioned. She has been taken to a cottage hospital, where the matron and the medical superintendent have agreed to notify us as soon as she is fit to be discharged.”

  “But you have made enquiries about her?”

  “I have, sir. She lives in a comfortable little flat in Holland Park and apparently has private means. The housekeeper of the flats could say nothing about her except that she was very delicate and often prostrated by illness. I have told you about the mysterious ‘she’ whom she frequently mentioned. The housekeeper said that a lady often came in a big car driven by a chauffeur to see Alice Dodds, but she did not know her name. From information I have just received from the Paris police I am inclined to think that the mysterious lady may be a Mrs Pearson—a Frenchwoman married to an Englishman, the daughter of the Paris deputy, M. Laurillard.”

  “The man mixed up with the drug-trafficking gang. You have not yet located her, I suppose?”

  “No sir, but we have the name and we know that she has a Lanchester car. We are making enquiries at the London County Council office for licensing cars. I hope to have her address this afternoon.”

  “Very good, but in view of the story told by Lewis and Blake, you ought to find out whether the murdered man had ever been threatened. Have you questioned the servants again?”

  “I am anxious to find the chauffeur, who would know most about the people visited by his master, but at present no one knows his address.”

  “Well, hunt him up.”

  “I have a theory of my own. The dead man frequented card parties, where they played for high stakes. In a second interview I had with Blake he suggested that Pitt was murdered by a man who had lost large sums of money to him and was unable to repay them. As you know, sir, thousands change hands in a single night at these parties.”

  “That theory sounds good. I see why you want to find the chauffeur.”

  “There is someone else who might help me—a Mr Brooklyn—in Jermyn Street. I’ve seen him once and he seemed quite ready to help us if he could. He may be able to furnish the names of people who used to play at these parties.”

  “Then you had better see him again.”

  “Very good, sir. I should probably find him at home now.”

  On leaving his chief’s room, Vincent made straight for Jermyn Street. He found Mr Brooklyn home, but their conversation led to nothing useful.

  “None of the people that I met at those card parties would have been at all likely to resort to murder to get rid of a gambling debt, except, perhaps, those two Americans, but they did not lose; they won.”

  “I may tell you that we suspected those Americans and I have questioned them. They told me a fantastic story of having been held up near Oldbury by a masked bandit.”

  Brooklyn burst out laughing. “You don’t mean to say that you, a hard-boiled officer from Scotland Yard, believed a cock-and-bull story like that. Why, man, it was hatched at Hollywood.”

  “However improbable a story sounds we are trained to investigate it. Only in that way can we arrive at the truth.”

  “Well, Inspector, that further clears all the people I ever played cards with. Mine were well on the wrong side of middle age and the idea of a masked bandit occurs only to the youth between twenty and thirty.” He added with a grin: “I myself plead guilty to being on the wrong side of forty-five.”

  Vincent joined in his laughter and took his leave, reflecting as he went down the stairs that the theory that the murderer was a young man was the more likely—always providing that there was any truth in the story. His next visit was to Hampstead to see what news Anton could give him. The news was important. The chauffeur had called to know whether the car had been disposed of and Anton had got his address from him.

  “Has he another job?” asked Vincent.

  “Not yet, he said. He asked me if any ladies had telephoned. I said: ‘Why do you think ladies should telephone,’ and he said: ‘To take up his reference when he applied for a new job.’”

  “Did you tell him about the woman who came here?”

  “No sir. I think you would wish no one to be told about that.”

  “Quite right, Anton. No one else has telephoned, I suppose?”

  “No, monsieur.”

  “Well, give me the chauffeur’s address and I’ll go and see him.”

  Anton scurried off into the back regions and returned with a slip of paper torn off the margin of a newspaper. Vincent copied the address into his note-book. It was in the neighbourhood of Palmer’s Green. As Vincent had the car he drove out there.

  It was a small house with a tiny garden in front. A middle-aged woman opened the door.

  “Does Mr Arthur Green live here?”

  “Yes sir, he is my son. Do you want to see him?”

  “Yes, I won’t keep him long.”

  “Come in and I’ll call him.” She went to the bottom of the stairs and called: “Arthur, you’re wanted,” and Vincent heard the clatter of boots on the stairs. “It’s a gent in the dining room,” explained his mother.

  The chauffeur look
ed worse for wear since Vincent had seen him last. He apologized for a three days’ growth of beard by saying: “One gets mouldy out of a job. There’s nothing to shave for if you understand what I mean.”

  “Surely you won’t be long out of a job.”

  “In these days there are too many owner-drivers about,” replied the man gloomily. “That’s why there are so many accidents every week; half of them are unfit to be on the road.”

  “Some of the accidents are caused by people driving under the influence of drink,” said Vincent, looking straight at him. “It’s a dangerous thing for a chauffeur to take to.”

  The man flushed. “I never drink when I’m in regular work, but naturally when one’s out of a job with nothing to do…”

  “I understand. First one pal and then another asks you in, but take my advice and keep a hold on yourself.”

  “That’s right; I’m going to.”

  “You used to drive your late master out in the evenings. I want you to give me the names and addresses of people he went to see—to spend the evening with.”

  “I gave you one—Mr Brooklyn of Jermyn Street.”

  “Yes, but only one. I want you to give me others. Did you know any of these friends by sight?”

  “Yes, some of them.”

  “Were any of them youngish men?”

  “Yes, some of them—Mr Brooklyn, for instance.”

  “Can you think of anyone else?”

  “Mr Thelusson in Arkley Street—number 41.”

  Vincent jotted it down in his notebook. “Anyone else?”

  The chauffeur gave quite a string of names and Vincent noted them all.

  “When you were with Mr Pitt did you live in the house?”

  “No, I couldn’t stick the servants, so Mr Pitt let me have my own rooms over the garage.”

  “Why didn’t you like the servants?”

  “Well, they were all blooming foreigners, and I don’t trust foreigners.”

  “Were the keys of your quarters over the garage handed over to the police with the keys of the house?”

  “Yes, your sergeant took them when he took all the other keys.”