Two Murders (A Jules Poiret Mystery Book 36)

by Frank Howell Evans

  “Ahoy aboard!” he called tentatively, then smiled when the barmaid spun around towards the sound of his voice and he got a chance to see her face for the first time. She, for her part, was a little off balance by his sudden appearance in the midst of her solitude but recovered her calm quickly.

  “Hello, you startled me. I was washing the glasses and didn’t hear you enter. The pub is usually empty at this hour of day.” She was assessing the young man before her. He was tall, handsome and clean-shaven. She found him somehow quite appealing. “What will it be?” She asked, wondering just who he was.

  “Hello, I’m Oscar. Can I have a dark brew, please?” he said.

  He opened his wallet, put the money for the beer on the counter and put away his wallet. He wasn’t quite sure what to say next and so fell silent.

  “On the double,” the barmaid said, smiling inwardly to herself. Yes indeed, she thought, this was an interesting man, a man of affairs. She continued, “Are you new in the neighborhood or do you work in one of the offices around the corner?”

  He was boldly examining her as she spoke, and he liked what he saw. Even clad in a simple dress, she was very feminine and her blue grey eyes had a wonderfully deep and sparkling look about them like the gold ring on her finger. The barmaid felt his scrutiny and became a little self-conscious.

  “So do you live here?” she asked. He chuckled, a rich sound that she thought suddenly made him seem older than she had at first guessed.

  “No, but now that you mention it, maybe I should.” He smiled winningly, and added, “We could just say this is the first visit of many to follow. What do you think?” He winked at her.

  She had seen him look at the ring, still, he came on to her. She smiled broadly at his boldness. His green eyes flashed with enjoyment of the little game he was concocting and she found herself liking him despite all the usual warnings she knew so well about jealousy. He straightened himself. She realized he was quite a bit taller than she had first thought. He was very slim but beneath the fine features she could detect strength and solidity. Oscar extended his hand.

  “Donna.”

  They exchanged an almost formal handshake. The barmaid was again conscious of his strength through the firm grip he took of her hand. He held the grip a little longer than necessary and caught her eyes in his sparkling green ones.

  “So it’s official, Donna.” He broke into a boyish grin and added, “Now how about that beer?”

  It was the evening before the Tunbridge Wells cricket week would commence, and Captain Harry Haven was listening to the radio in master detective Jules Poiret’s office in Fitzrovia. A rap on the door shook him out of his thoughts. A new client needed Poiret’s help. There was a husband and a wife and a dead body.

  Haven poured the man a stiff drink and telephoned his employer. Luckily his manservant was awake and managed to rouse the detective out of bed. He was not pleased.

  “Haven,” were his first words, “the stomach, it needs the time to digest the food. If there is the murder, please to contact the police.”

  The client took the horn from Haven’s hand and said quite emotionally, “But I didn’t murder anyone.”

  “Monsieur,” said Poiret, when he arrived at the office, thirty minutes later, dressed and groomed immaculately. “Please to tell everything and omit nothing to Poiret.”

  “I was waiting in my flat for Donna,” said the young man, “Donna has her own method of meeting me, which never fails to drive me to the edge of anxiety, but then again I have fallen deeply in love with her ever since I met her three months ago. She’s only been in London for four years. Her husband owns a pub in Holland Park. Recently I also have seen him. I was curious, and wished to meet this man. He’s a soft-spoken graybeard with an ingratiating smile, an incessant bow, and the shiftiest old eyes that ever flew from rim to rim of a pair of glasses.

  I was still to see Donna, and I waited and waited with an impatience that grew with the darkening evening. At my open window I had played records, until the faces in the street below were no longer distinguishable. And now I was pacing to and fro in the grip of horrible visions, a grip that tightened when at last the elevator-doors opened with a clatter outside, that held me breathless until a well-known rap followed on my door.

  “Why, Oscar, what’s wrong?” said Donna, as I opened the door, and put my arms around her.

  “Nothing, now you’ve come,” I said, shutting the door behind her in a fever of relief and anxiety. “Well? Well? What did it fetch?”

  “Five hundred.”

  “Down?”

  “Got it in my pocket.”

  “Good girl!” I cried, as she handed me the money. “You don’t know what a stew I’ve been in. I’ve been thinking of you and nothing else for the last hour. I thought something had gone wrong!”

  Donna was smiling, and white light filled the room, but for the moment I did not perceive the peculiarity of her smile. I was foolishly full of my own fears and relief, and my first idiotic act was to spill some whiskey and squirt the soda-water all over in my anxiety to pour her a drink.

  “So you thought something had happened, darling?” said Donna, leaning back in her chair as she lit a cigarette, and looking rather amused. “What would you say if something had? Oh, Oscar!” She smiled at the worried expression on my face. “It was nothing of the slightest consequence, and it’s all over now. An invigorating chase and a long one, Oscar, but I think I made it.”

  And suddenly I saw that her face was red, her hair tangled, her shoes thick with dust.

  “Your husband?” I whispered aghast.

  “Oh, dear, yes! It was only old Halliwell.”

  “Halliwell! But wasn’t it he who took the gold ring?”

  “It was.”

  “Then why was he chasing you?”

  “Oh, my dear Oscar, I’ll tell you if you only give me a chance. It’s really nothing to get in the least excited about. Old Halliwell has at last spotted that I’m not quite the respectable wife I would have him think me. So he’s been doing his best to run me to my sin.”

  “And you call that nothing!” I asked.

  “It would be something, if he had succeeded, but he has still to do that. I admit, however, that he made me run this time. There was the old brute with his morning paper. The front page reported a robbery in Mayfair. I saw his eyebrows go from the ring to the newspaper. That moment I told him I knew the robber.”

  “What? But why, Donna?” I asked, sitting down next to her.

  “I did my best to repair the damage, but I saw that it was too late. I had already given myself away. He gave up haggling, as he thought the ring belonged to one of my friends, who were, not for the first time, out of money. He paid the price I asked for it, and smiled as though he enjoyed doing it. But afterwards I felt him following me, when I left the pub, though, of course, I didn’t turn around to look.”

  “Why not?”

  “My dear Oscar, it’s the very worst thing you can do. As long as you look unsuspecting they’ll keep their distance, and so long as they keep their distance you stand a chance to get away. If you let them on that you know you’re being followed, then it’s confess or flight, leaving everything behind. I just hurried up to Holland Park Station, and bought a ticket for Green Park, at the top of my voice. When we got to Oxford Circus out I sprang, and bounded up all those stairs like a cracker jack. Well, to be on the safe side, I lay low at a tea-room all the afternoon. Well, the coast seemed clear, and it was really merely my idea that he would follow me. I didn’t actually see him. So I left the place, and almost walked straight into old Halliwell’s arms!”

  “No! What
on earth did you do?”

  “I walked past him as though I had never seen him in my life. I took a cab in East Castle Street, and asked the driver to drive like the deuce to Piccadilly Circus. I jumped into the first train I saw, without a ticket, got out at Covent Garden, walked full tilt back to Leicester Square, took the train to Farringdon, and here I am, ready for another bath and new clothes, and the best dinner the club can give us. You see, Oscar, I thought you might be feeling anxious.”

  “Are you certain you’ve given him the slip, Donna?” I asked, as I put on my hat.

  “Certain enough, but we can make enough doubly sure,” said Donna, and went to my window, where she stood for a moment or two looking down into the street.

  “All right?” I asked her.

  “Mhmm,” she mumbled, and we went downstairs. She took my arm and chatting happily as if nothing had happened that evening, we went to our usual night spot.

  But I was rather silent on the way. I was wondering what Donna would do, if her husband had followed her successfully. To me the point seemed one of paramount importance, but when I mentioned it she said there was time enough to think about that. The other remark I made was, when we greeted a young man of our acquaintance, who seemed to be doing his best to get himself a bad name.

  “Poor Bobby Stevens!” said Donna, with a sigh. “Nothing’s sadder than to see a good fellow going to the bad like that. He’s about mad with drugs and debt, poor devil! Did you see his eyes? Odd that we should have met him tonight. Marrying old Halliwell wasn’t the worst of my ideas after all.”

  “By God,” I said, “I’d like to skin old Halliwell!”

  She laughed. “Poor Oscar!”

  Her air after this exchange took a sudden dive, made the more noticeable by the long silence, which lasted, indeed, throughout an otherwise excellent dinner and show at the club. Then at last I saw Donna looking at me with her lazy smile, exhaling the smoke of her cigarette, and I knew that the morose fit was at an end.

  “Do you know what I was thinking about all this time?” she said. “I’ve been thinking what rot it is to go doing things by halves!”

  “Well,” said I, returning her smile, “that’s not a charge that you can bring against yourself, is it?”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Donna, blowing another puff into the grey-blue air of the club. “Actually, I was thinking less of myself than of that poor devil of a Bobby Stevens. There’s a fellow who does things by halves. He’s only half gone bad, and we…”

  “And we?” I asked.

  “We?” She sighed, put out her cigarette in the ashtray, and leaned towards me. “Look at the difference between him and us! He’s taken to narcotics, and his friends are beginning to avoid him, because he always tries to borrow money from them, which is stealing by halves.”

  “And we?” I asked again.

  “I’m not sure, Oscar, we’re not doing the thing by halves ourselves!”

  “Why? What more can we do? Your husband refuses to grant you a divorce,” I exclaimed in anger, looking round, however, to make sure that we were not overheard.

  “What more,” said Donna. “Well, murder, for one thing.”

  “I say!” Haven exclaimed.

  Poiret put a hand up and said softly, “Please to continue, Monsieur, and Haven, please to pour the drinks.”

  “Phooey! Donna!” I said, naturally.

  “A matter of opinion, my dear Oscar. I’ve told you before that the most vivacious man alive is a man, who’s committed a murder, and not yet been found out. Just think of it! Think of talking to others, very likely about the murder itself, and knowing you’ve done it, and wondering how they’d react if they found out!”

  I looked at her in amazement. She smiled.

  “Oh, it would be great, simply great! And when you were caught there’d be a merciful quick end of you. You’d fill the nick for a few weeks, and then be snuffed out with a flourish!”

  “Good old Donna!” I chuckled.

  “But I was never more serious in my life.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “I mean it.”

  “You know very well that you’re not a murderer.”

  “I’m an adulterer, Oscar, and I’ve decided I’m going to become a murderer tonight!”

  She took another cigarette, picked up the match box, and leaning back in the chair, watching me with cheerful eyes, she struck a match and lit her cigarette, without taking her eyes off me. It struck home to my slow wits. I could no longer doubt the meaning. I read murder in her lips, locked around the cigarette, and in her soft, smiling blue eyes.

  “Your husband?” I stammered, moistening my lips with my tongue.

  “Of course.”

  “But you said you being married didn’t matter to you?”

  “I lied, Oscar. Every time I’m in bed with you I think of him.”

  “Donna, don’t say that to me!”

  “And now he’s seen us together.”

  “Halliwell?”

  “I thought I had lost him, when I came up to you this evening, but when I looked out of your window, you remember?” I nodded, too afraid to say the words. “There he was, standing opposite your building, waiting.”

  “You never said a word about it!”

  “I wasn’t going to spoil your dinner, Oscar, and I wasn’t going to let you spoil mine. But there he was as large as life, and, of course, he followed us here. A fine game for him to play. It’s a game after his mean old heart, blackmail for you, a smacking for me.”

  “What blackmail?”

  “To expose you to your employer!”

  “No! You haven’t told him, have you?”

  “You will lose your position, Oscar! But old Halliwell won’t play it with me! He shan’t live to, and the world will have a rotten man the less.”

  “No!” I said.

  She suddenly looked over my shoulder. “Waiter! Two whiskeys and sodas.” She turned her gaze on me again. “At eleven, Oscar, it’s the only thing to be done.”

  “Out in Holland Park way.”

  Again I looked round the room. It was a young Londoner’s night club, and young men and women were laughing, chatting, dancing, smoking, drinking, everywhere. One saw me look, and nodded to me through the smoke. Like a machine I nodded to him, and turned back to Donna with a groan.

  “Surely you will give him a chance!” I urged. “Maybe I can talk to him and bring him to his senses.”

  “It wouldn’t make him keep them. No! Here’s a drink for you, Oscar. Wish me luck.”

  “I’m coming too,” I said, now terrified.

  “I don’t want you.”

  “But I must come!”

  An ugly gleam shot from her blue eyes.

  “To interfere?” asked Donna.

  “No,” I stammered.

  “You give me your word?”

  “I do,” I heard myself utter.

  “Oscar,” she said and stood up, “it’s time.”

  She wished to powder her nose and I rushed outside. My face was glowing. The cold air, however, was not able to bring me to my senses. I thought that there might be some lesser cold-blooded manner of dealing with her husband. I wanted to avert tragedy at all costs. But soon Donna and I were fairly on our way to Holland Park, and, I think, my good intentions were tainted with a devouring love for her, overlaid by fascination, which goes hand in hand with horror.

  I have a poignant recollection of the hour it took us to reach the house. We had some minutes to wait for the last train to Holland Park. We walked through the park. I can still see the lights, even now, bright along the path and blurred in the water. We walked on through streets, that were not new to me. On many evenings, when she was home with her husband, I parked my car outside and looked at the windows, hoping she wouldn’t see me, but maybe deep inside maybe I did, and maybe I did want her husband to notice me and have it out with me. The suspense which surrounds our secret relationship has worn me down and even before she proposed this plan, my
nerves had been rattled to the core.”

  “Please to drink and continue, Monsieur,” said Poiret.

  He emptied his glass in one single draught, and then continued, “The clocks began striking twelve.

  “Surely,” said I, “we shall find him in bed and asleep?”

  “I hope we do,” said Donna grimly.

  “No man should die that way!” I said aghast at the cold-bloodedness of it all.

  “How else do you propose we should murder him?”

  I had not thought about it at all. I had frozen any thought of the ultimate crime in my mind. He would certainly have firearms, and might be the first to use them.

  “I could wish nothing better,” said Donna. “The devil take the worst shot. You don’t suppose I enjoy this, do you? Die he must, by one or the other, or it’s the end of us and blackmail for you.”

  “Better that than this!” I cried.

  “Then stay where you are, Oscar. I told you I would do it alone for us. This is the house. So goodnight, Oscar, sleep well, because tomorrow we’ll be rid of him.”

  I could see the house rising in the night, with the moonlight glittering on the window panes. Donna had come prepared to make it look like a burglary.”

  Poiret’s eyes flashed red for a moment. “Monsieur, where is Madame Donna at this moment?”

  “In jail. They arrested her, because…”

  “Ah,” said Poiret. “But, Monsieur, please to continue. We will talk about the rest later.”

  Oscar sighed. “Mr. Poiret, I have no idea how I ever got mixed into this…”

  “Monsieur,” interrupted Poiret with a cold smile, “please to continue.”

  “She walked to the front door. I followed her.

  “Coming after all?” she asked.

  “Rather!”

  “Take care, then. It’s no soft thing, this!” she replied. “There, stand still while I look through the window.”

  “He must’ve gone to bed!” I whispered.

  “I don’t think so, Oscar. I believe he’s seen us,” she replied, craning her neck to see inside.

  “Why?”

  “I saw a light.”

  “Where?”

  “Downstairs, for a moment, when I…”