“I don’t remember that.” Polly had become obstinately stupid. “I don’t remember any more about it than what you’ve just said.”
“Then although you’re younger, my memory is better.”
The little woman threw herself back on the couch with a crow of amusement.
“I remember you suddenly brought out a terrible police picture of a single glove with an awful stained wrist, which you’d cut out of the paper. You pushed it over to him and said ‘Aren’t those like the gloves I gave you?’ and he turned on you as if you’d bitten him.” She slid a tiny arm through the other woman’s own and squeezed her. “It wasn’t very tactful, dear,” she said, laughing. “It was something a murderer had left behind.”
“Oh no, Sybylle, no!” Polly’s cry was from the heart. It escaped her involuntarily and the woman beside her set down her glass and wriggled round in her corner so she could look in her face.
“Polly.”
“Yes?”
“What’s happened, my dear? What is it? Come on, out with it.”
“Nothing. Honestly, Sybylle.” She was making a great effort, forcing herself to meet the enquiring eyes. “Truly. Well, almost nothing. Just some silly man who appears to be a private detective called and asked me in a roundabout way if I’d ever bought a pair of men’s gloves to give away as a present….”
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing.”
“Good.” Mrs. Dominique had become the business woman again, shock-proof and packed with resource. “A private detective. That’s nearly always divorce. You don’t want to get involved in that. Oh how irritating of Gerry, silly man! He’s attractive you see, and women are quite relentless. Well, never mind, better find out now than later.”
She was sitting very upright at the edge of the settee, managing to suggest somehow a miniature black poodle begging.
“Don’t worry, dear. Perhaps it’s as well. This girl is out of the question because of her age, and it’ll give you time to find another, or her to grow a year or so older. Women age faster than men.”
“I don’t think it was divorce.” Polly made the statement and closed her lips. Mrs. Dominique watched her mouth and said “Oh” flatly, and there was silence for a moment.
“Polly,” she began at last, taking a long breath, “this is only an idea. Only something I’d do myself just to be on the right side. I mean, dear, no one would ever dream …”
“What are you thinking of?”
Mrs. Dominique hesitated and presently busied herself pouring out cold coffee.
“When one is fond of a son, real, adopted or step, one has no rules,” she began oracularly. “I know that. One forgives. That is all there is to it, and the whole nature of the attachment. That’s life. But, dearest, one still ought to know. One should take common precautions, both for his sake and for one’s own.”
“How do you mean?” Polly’s blue eyes were suspicious and the other woman put a little arm round her shoulders.
“Dearest, we have both been friendly with this charming boy for ten or twelve years now, and yet what do we really know about him? Nothing that he has not told us himself. Now wait, wait …” She held up her free hand imperatively, although Polly had not spoken, “I only want to take that appalling look off your old face, bless you. Why don’t you let me find out the facts about him really discreetly, so that no one ever knows an enquiry has been made?”
“Through the trade?”
“No, easier than that. Superintendent Cullingford often comes in here to see Pete. A most charming man. He’s Security himself, but these fellows all know one another. If …”
“No.” Polly was very pale and her eyes were dark again. “No, Sybylle, promise. No. Not a word.”
Mrs. Dominique sat looking at her anxiously, true apprehension appearing for the first time on her small face.
“All right, dear,” she said, “all right. Now you want to ring up Matt. He’s a real true friend, that man. You can trust him. There’s the telephone. I shall just be in the desk.”
She went out in her precise dignified way and the portly sommelier, who happened to be passing, hurried himself for the honour of helping her up into her high chair.
Alone in the office, Polly took up the telephone and gave a Hampstead number. After a minute or so a voice answered her and her face cleared.
“Hullo, Mrs. Harper. Is Mr. Phillipson in yet? Hullo? Hullo my dear, what is it? Mrs. Harper, what’s the matter? This is Mrs. Tassie. He … what? Oh where? Where? In his office tonight? Shot? Oh no, no, no, no!”
“Polly, hush. My dear, the diners.” Peter Dominique, pale and startled, closed the office door hastily and came over to her in time to take the receiver from her hand.
Chapter 15
POLICE MACHINE
THE YOUNG PLAIN-CLOTHES man, stepping carefully to avoid the gap where floorboards had been removed to be examined for bloodstains by the police laboratory, edged down the little ’bus towards the two model figures arranged on the front seat and adjusted them slightly.
Mr. Campion, who was standing next to Charlie Luke in the darkness, watching the proceedings, thought he had never seen anything so macabre in his life, yet all the horror was implied and not actual.
The moonlight was still very strong, although it was clouding over in the east, and at this end of the Dump, which was a graveyard of vehicles of all descriptions, with an open space before it where the wall of oil drums had been, the scene was like a deserted battlefield. The black shadows were suggestive and the highlights incongruous.
In the midst of it the shabby, homely little ’bus stood panting. Its engine was noisy but sound enough and its single interior light made a faint pool of yellow in the black and silver world.
The two figures had been tidied as much as possible and the glimpse of them, which was visible through the looped and fringed curtains of the front window, was unexpectedly convincing. They had been designed and made in the heyday of such models, when time was no object, so that even now when they were practically in pieces they remained extraordinarily lifelike.
The plain-clothes man climbed out again and Luke, who was playing with the coins in his pocket, took a sighing breath. Campion could see his sharp face and crop of shorn curls silhouetted against the floodlit sky. He was taking a considerable chance in backing his hunch and no one knew better than he how dangerous it might be for him.
If the shed should prove to be the innocuous workshop of a reputable man who decided to stand on his rights, and the figures proved to be his innocent property and nothing to do with the ’bus, then questions very difficult to answer might easily be put not only to the Superintendent but to his superior officers, whose attitude to the Goff’s Place mystery had been expressed already.
“Right,” Luke said as the plain-clothes man’s slim body dissolved into the pool of dark behind the ’bus. “Now I think we’ll have the principal witness, Sergeant.”
“Okay, sir. Shan’t be a jiffy. He’s outside in the car.”
The voice in the shadows to their left betrayed a tremor beneath its heartiness. The sergeant was a local man from the Canal Road Station near by. It had been one of his men who had followed up the chance word from the oil drum loaders overheard in a public house, and who had made the discovery of the ’bus itself. The incident had entailed a great deal of work for his office and for a time there had been frustration, when it had appeared as if the Tailor Street Station in the West End, Headquarters of the C.I.D. Division to which the Goff’s Place case properly belonged, could not supply the witnesses required. At last two of them had been located, one, mercifully, the all-important waiter whose recollection had been so particularly vivid. Now the test which was to decide if the whole exercise had been a waste of time was about to take place.
“I should have waited for Donne.” Luke’s confidential murmur buzzed like a whole hive of bees in Mr. Campion’s ear. “Have you met him? He’s the D.D.C.I. of Tailor Street. You’ll like him
. Funny vague sort of bloke until you know him, then you see where you made your big mistake—not unlike you, really.” He paused. “No offence, of course.”
Mr. Campion smiled in the darkness.
“This is his pidgin, I suppose.”
“Very much so. Goff’s Place is in his manor and he did the original homework, such as it was. Worry, mostly.” He laughed softly but still managed to make the sound ferocious. “He’ll be along soon but they’ve just copped in for another showy homicide up there. Some old legal eagle got himself written off in Minton Terrace this afternoon. Donne was in the thick of it when I caught him on the telephone.” He cleared his throat and spoke more softly than ever. “But I thought I’d better find out about this particular exercise before old Yeo takes it into his head to blow down here himself.”
He turned his head quickly as a murmur of voices reached them from the winding path behind them.
“Now for the witness,” he muttered. “Hold your breath.” There was a brief moment of quiet, during which the far-off noises of the city became noticeable, and then, from a yard or so behind them, a strong cockney voice, villainously refined, said distinctly:
“Oh yase.” Nobody spoke and he repeated it. “Yase. That’s them all right and that’s the ’bus. I’d know it anywhere, anywhere I’d know it.” The speaker then moved closer, paused, and presently made a remark, which in the circumstances was absolutely terrifying. “The old lady’s awake now, I see. Of course she was all out, sleeping like a rock, when I see her before, when the ’bus was in Goff’s Place.”
“Half a moment, sir.” The sergeant’s voice, brisk and resourceful, was welcome. Someone had giggled hysterically and Mr. Campion felt for him. He hoped it was not himself. There was a muttered consultation near the ’bus and presently the young plain-clothes man appeared again, edging his way along it. He moved the head of the figure nearest the window very slightly, so that the eyes were in shadow.
The effect of the manœuvre was oddly reassuring to most of the audience but the impact on the witness was completely different and much more violent. He swore abruptly and unprintably and in an entirely different accent now that the refinement was absent.
“Now that, I did not know,” he said at last and his tone would have carried conviction even in the Old Bailey. “That’s got me, that ’as, right in the wind. Images! ’Strewth, you wouldn’t believe it, would yer?” There was a long pause and he suddenly said, “’Ere, what about …?”
The new idea which had presented itself to his mind was apparent to Luke before he expressed it.
“Wait a moment, son,” he chipped in hastily. “Don’t say anything now about any other occasion on which you may or may not have seen any part of the exhibit. One thing at a time. All we want to know at the moment is if, in your opinion, this is the vehicle you saw in Goff’s Place on the date as recorded in your statement. Sergeant, you’ll see to this, will you?”
He led Mr. Campion away quickly, picking his way towards the moonlit path which led down through the Dump to the shed.
“He’ll remember on his own where else he saw them,” he confided in the same sepulchral rumble. “Once we start helping him we’re suspect. Must be. The old girl in Garden Green says she put those figures out. We’ll find out what she meant by that tomorrow. She probably paid the dustman to take them away.”
“Do you think these are hers?”
“Oh yes I do.” Luke’s peaked eyebrows were briefly visible as a shaft of light passed over his face. “I do. I mean to say, they’re remarkable. They take people in. There can’t be two sets of jokers like that wild in the pack.” He hesitated. “She was on the level though, I thought, didn’t you? She knew nothing.”
Mr. Campion did not commit himself. He was saved from the necessity by the appearance of the local Inspector from the Canal Road Station, a compact bustling man called Kinder, only just above regulation height. He came hurrying through the chequered darkness, his torch beam bobbing on the path before him.
“The first shot is a bull, Inspector,” Luke said, and Campion heard the man’s grunt of relief.
“An unqualified identification, sir?”
“He seems quietly confident.” The Superintendent appeared to echo the mood. “It’s in the bag, barring Act of God. While we wait for the other witnesses I shall authorise a search of the shed. I’m going down there now.”
“Yes, sir.” Kinder was far too experienced to criticise. Instead he opened the subject he had come to discuss. “Young Waterfield, Superintendent,” he began, “he’s made a very full statement and there is only one point in it which isn’t entirely satisfactory. His address has been checked and his proofs of identity are all right. He has spent the day with the man who owns the shed, and he’s not the type to break in and enter save in the way of friendship, as it were. Do you still feel that we should hold him until this fellow Hawker, or Chad-Horder, turns up?”
“You don’t?” Luke’s laugh was not lighthearted. “What’s the unsatisfactory item in his statement?”
“Nothing very much. I simply felt he wasn’t giving us quite the lot. He says he first saw Hawker in a barber’s in Edge Street about eleven this morning, but he isn’t particularly clear why he went there. It’s not the place where he usually gets a haircut. He simply says he found Hawker interesting, but he doesn’t say why or why he spent the day with him instead of going to work.” He paused. “None of the possible explanations which leap to my mind apply,” he added primly. “He’s a decent kid from a good and influential sort of home, and my instinct is to let him go. It may be that he’s right when he says that he began to think Hawker was a crook who was trying to use him to alibi some job between half past five and six which went wrong. Waterfield may just fancy himself as a detective.”
Luke’s teeth flashed in the half light.
“Same like me,” he said cheerfully. “All right. Do what you think best, chum. He’s all yours. All I want is an eye kept on him so that when I need him I can have him brought in on a dog lead. Have you got the staff for that?”
“I think so, sir.”
“Fine.” Luke’s shrug was not visible in the shadows but both men would have sworn to it. “I’m expecting Chief Inspector Donne from Tailor Street, by the way. I shall be obliged if he could be told to look for me down here in the shed.”
“Righto, sir. I’m just going along to the exhibit now but I’ll send someone back with the message.” Kinder continued towards the ’bus and Luke and Campion pressed on towards the shed.
“He’s quite right, blast him,” Luke said presently. “I can’t go holding nice little lads from literate families who can write to Members of Parliament just because I’ve got a hunch I may need ’em. Of course I can’t. Who do I think I am, I wonder.” An obstinate grunt escaped him. “I tell you what, though. On the strength of an identification from one bird-headed grill-room hand from a temperance hotel I am going to take this shed apart if it costs me my ticket. There’s some discreet homework going on there now.”
They walked on to the hollow together and Mr. Campion was struck again by the extraordinarily sinister appearance of the small group of ruined buildings amid the debris, the single skylight window in the tin roof yellow in the moonlight. The door at the back of the shed was still open and as they came in one of Luke’s own men, a sharp-eyed youngster called Sam May, emerged from the shadow round the entrance to the further chamber.
“There’s one or two objects of interest about, sir,” he began. “Nothing actually actual yet, but a lot of curious stuff. Will you step down here for a minute? Mind the bit of marble as you come.”
Luke waited to look down at the slab and the two wooden boxes of bricks beside it.
“What’s that all about?” he said to Mr. Campion. “How to make ‘a chic marble-topped coffee table as a surprise for her birthday’?”
“I doubt it.” The thin man in the horn-rims touched the edge of the stone with the toe of his narrow shoe. “It’s been be
dded in, see, with a spot of sand. It suggests to me an experiment of some kind. I don’t quite see what.”
“There is something experimental down here or I should have my conk seen to,” murmured Detective Constable May, who appeared to be enjoying himself. “This way, sir.”
He led them through the tarpaulin curtain to the partially roofless cell where the figures had been found. A second Detective Constable, an older man from the Canal Road Station, was waiting for them. He carried a powerful torch of the kind that is mounted on a wire stand and was directing its beam at the solid door of a well-head set in the worn bricks of the floor. He looked thoroughly shocked and the area round his eye sockets was pale.
“Evening, sir,” he said as Luke appeared. “I’ve closed this again. It’s not very nice.”
Luke made no movement towards it. His angular shadow, made giant size by the low based lamp, towered menacingly above the scene.
“Can you see anything down there at all?”
“Not a lot, sir. It might be crude oil to look at, and Gawd knows how deep it is. It’s sludge of some sort, that’s certain.”
“Huh. Anything else?”
“Nothing conclusive. There are four empty carboys which at one time have contained sulphuric acid, just outside over the wall here. We found two galvanised tanks in the shed itself, and there’s a stirrup-pump, or the remains of one, among the junk under the work bench.”
“You’re thinking of the Haigh case.”
The detective eyed him woodenly. “Well, it’s not unnatural of me, sir, is it? I mean to say, if we’ve got the ’bus and the passengers, but we haven’t got the moneylender …?”
Hide My Eyes Page 15
