Calamity in Kent, A British Library Crime Classic

by John Rowland

  One thing I felt thankful about. I was in a good position with regard to my competitors. As far as I knew no other newspaperman even knew of the existence of Tilsley’s London address. So I was a good few steps ahead of everyone else.

  I looked at the block of flats with interest. It was about eight storeys high, built on a plain, severe, what I think is called “functional” plan. In other words, there were no frills and decorations on it.

  I went up to what appeared to be the main entrance. Here a porter sat in a small alcove.

  “Yus?” he said, fixing me with a stony glare.

  “I’m trying to find out something about a Mr. John Tilsley who lives, or did live, here,” I said. It seemed to me that there was nothing to be gained by hiding my reason for coming to the place.

  “And who are you?” he retorted, glaring at me again. A most unfriendly chap, this hall-porter. I thought that the financial approach was definitely indicated.

  I felt in my pocket and produced a couple of half-crowns. I slid these towards him, and thought that I could detect a sign of a thaw sliding over his grim visage.

  “I’m a newspaper man,” I said. “We are interested in Mr. Tilsley, and it will be worth your while to help.”

  He looked a bit more amiable. “Oh, I thought you was another of them cops,” he said.

  I raised my eyebrows, doing my best to simulate surprise. “Oh, have the police been here?” I asked.

  “Have they been here?” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Why, mister, they’ve been in and out of the place for hours this morning. It’s not half an hour since the last of ’em left.”

  This was good news. If I found some of Shelley’s underlings from Scotland Yard in possession I might well have found it a bit difficult to explain my presence, and what exactly I was after. Whereas, now that they had gone, it would be easy, I hoped, for me to find my way around the place and do what seemed to me to be necessary in the way of investigating the home of John Tilsley.

  “Do you think that I could have a look at Tilsley’s flat?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” He appeared very doubtful as to the wisdom of this course of action.

  I guessed, however, at the reason for this hesitation. I fished in my pocket and produced another five shillings. These I slid, with an almost diffident air, towards him. This time there was a positive grin on his face as he swiftly pocketed the cash.

  “The trouble is,” he said, “that the police locked the flat and took away the key and told me that nobody was to go in until they gave me permission to let people in.”

  “Did they say why?” I asked.

  “Yus. They said as Tilsley had been murdered.” There was an almost ghoulish expression on the man’s face as he said this. It seemed that he took a considerable delight in being even indirectly involved in a murder case.

  “Did you give them the key, then?” I said, wondering how to get around this.

  “Yus.” But I thought that I could detect a definite sense of mischief (that is the only word for it) about his face. There was, I thought, something which he had done and which he did not intend to let out; something, in fact, which had been in some way a daring defiance of police orders.

  That this was true enough soon became evident. “Is there, then, no way for me to get in and have a look at Tilsley’s flat?” I asked. I guessed that this was the best way to get this awkward customer to tell me what was going on.

  “Well, there is and there isn’t, as you might say,” the porter replied.

  “What do you mean?”

  “These flats have got a tradesman’s entrance at the back,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Yus. And the police took away the key to that door as well as the front one. But they didn’t ask if there was any sort of master key.”

  Now I understood the crafty look which he had given me. “And you’ve got a master key?” I said.

  “Yus. You see, it’s got to be kept here, because some of the people in the flats are out all day. And they may order some stuff from the grocer or the greengrocer. And then it’s part of my job to take the stuff in and put it in their flats. So I’ve got a master key to deliver the stuff with. See?” This was all said with an air of crafty confidence which is difficult to describe. I congratulated myself, however, on having established such terms of financial confidence with the porter earlier on. It meant that I should have little difficulty in having a view of the flat soon; I didn’t quite know what Shelley would think about what I was doing: he would probably think it strictly unethical; that, however, didn’t matter.

  The great thing was that I was getting in, and I was now managing to acquire confidential information that would be of the greatest value in my work for The Daily Wire.

  Within five minutes, indeed, I was in Tilsley’s apartment. This was on the fourth floor, at the back of the building. It was an unpretentious flat—probably one of the cheapest in the building, I thought. But if Tilsley was actually involved in some black market racket it was highly probable that he would live in a comparatively unostentatious way. The super-spiv, driving a Rolls-Royce and wearing a fur coat, is for the most part a figure of fiction. The man who is living on the wrong side of the law is usually a man who is anxious not to attract undue attention to himself.

  Certainly John Tilsley was a man who lived in a quiet, comparatively inexpensive way. His flat consisted of a living-room, with a gas-cooker hidden by a curtain in an alcove, and a bedroom. Neither of the rooms was big, and they were furnished with a quiet simplicity that spoke eloquently of the taste of the man who had bought the furniture.

  “Are these flats let furnished?” I asked the porter, who had followed me into the room.

  “No,” he said. “This is Tilsley’s furniture that you can see here, guv’nor.”

  I was impressed, I must admit. Somehow I had thought of the late lamented Mr. Tilsley as a rather flashy type. And the way in which this pleasant little sitting-room was furnished showed clearly enough that, whatever might have been his faults, a lack of taste was quite certainly not one of them.

  I glanced around. It was no good to think of doing the orthodox things in searching. The police would have done all those things. First of all I did what I always do when I come into a strange room—I looked at the bookshelf. This was a tall, narrow piece of early Victorian mahogany. It had six shelves, crammed tightly with books. I glanced idly at them. They were, at first sight, the miscellaneous stuff that most vaguely literary people accumulate. There were a few novels—P. G. Wodehouse, Edgar Wallace, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell. A very mixed batch. I did not spend much time over these, however. My job was not to investigate the late Mr. Tilsley’s literary taste.

  The non-fiction shelves interested me more. There were a batch of text-books of chemistry. Not the ordinary school text-books, however, such as one finds in most households where books are not quickly disposed of when not any longer of use. These were advanced text-books, some dealing, I noticed with a feeling of some excitement, with oils and petroleums. There was even a book of the purification of petroleum and gasoline. There were also books on the alkaloids. It looked as if there might be something in Shelley’s hunch that Tilsley was in the petrol black market. He was certainly interested in the chemical background of petrol and oil in a way which was, to say the least, unusual.

  Actually, these text-books were the only indication of anything unusual. The other books, as I have said when I wrote of the novels, were a perfectly normal assortment of works, such as one found in any household of ordinary people.

  But wait! I pulled myself up as I glimpsed a little black notebook. It was pushed down at the end of a shelf. I fished in my pocket. The book which I had found in Tilsley’s pocket at Broadgate (and which I had kept to myself, thus, I suppose, not playing quite fair with Shelley) was an exact twin. And the scribbles in the Broadgate book h
ad all been obviously written in some sort of code which I had, as yet, had no chance to try to decipher. I had carefully kept the original notebook in the background, and I now thought that in this new book I might well have the clue which would enable me to get to the real heart of the mystery.

  I know that this was something in every way reprehensible. I ought not to have tried to keep anything to myself. But I salved my conscience by telling myself that Shelley had not told me by any means all he knew. That, indeed, was almost certainly so; but I knew that I ought to have told him something about these notebooks. Still, I thought that if this new book gave me a clue which would enable me to find out something about the original book I should be able to go to Shelley in real triumph, a first-rate piece of work done.

  The first glance at the pages of the new notebook gave me a sense of genuine exultation. I could see, since there were a series of names and addresses, with some cryptic signs and symbols opposite each of them. This was doubtless the clue to enable me to decipher the original book. I made a mental resolution to hand the two books over to Shelley when I got back to Kent. But meanwhile I should spend an hour or two over them, in the hope that I should be able to do something in the way of getting the information that they hid.

  I became conscious of the fact that the porter was looking at me curiously.

  “Anything else you want to see, guv’nor?” he asked quietly, as if he felt that I had been spending a long time over things that were totally unimportant.

  “I want to have a look around,” I explained. “But you need not stay, if you are busy.”

  “Can’t leave you here on your own, guv’nor,” he explained. “You see, guv’nor, I don’t mean to insult you, but I don’t know who you are, really, and if anything was missing after you’d gone, they’d say I was responsible. They’d say, I expect, that I’d pinched the stuff. And I’ve got my good name to consider. I’ve been working here for nine years, I have, and no black mark against my name in all that time. I don’t want to spoil that there record, you see.”

  I did see. I knew that from the point of view of this man I was a pretty suspicious sort of character. Indeed, if I had been in his position I should have felt very doubtful about allowing any stranger to have a look around the place, And, to do him due justice, I think that the porter had felt pretty doubtful; it was only his natural cupidity, when he realised that I was prepared to pay for the privilege of examining Tilsley’s apartment, that had overcome his natural suspicions of me.

  So I strolled into Tilsley’s bedroom, closely followed by the porter. There was, I soon saw, nothing at all here to deserve my attention. Well-kept and neatly-pressed clothes hung in the wardrobe. On the wall was a reproduction, nicely framed, of Augustus John’s portrait of Suggia. On the dressing-table was a picture of the lady whom I had met in the Charrington Hotel at Broadgate. The personal background of the case hung together all right.

  I made my way back to the sitting-room again. There was a small roll-top desk beside the window. I opened it (it was not locked), and looked for a few moments at the papers in it. These were piled up in a neat way that seemed to me to indicate that the police had been here before me.

  Of course, it was pretty obvious that the police would tend to concentrate on the desk. There was the place where the men from Scotland Yard would expect to find the material they were after. I didn’t think that it was really much good for me to go through the masses of papers that there were left. Anything that was of any real importance would have been taken away. No doubt at this moment—or very soon, anyhow—all the valuable stuff from here would be on Shelley’s desk. And I should be able to swap my notebooks for whatever information Shelley had managed to extract from the papers.

  I couldn’t think how the police had missed the little black notebook. Probably they had glanced at the bookcase. They were, however, likely to be looking merely for the hidden document, folded inside a novel, or that sort of thing. The book which, to my mind, stuck out a mile, they would not notice, because they were not looking for that sort of thing.

  So I thought that I had really obtained all that I wanted. The way in which I have described it here may make my search sound very perfunctory, but the fact is that I spent some considerable time in hunting there, but found so little of any real value that it seemed to me almost as if my trip to town had been almost wasted. Indeed, if it had not been for the notebook I should have thought that it was so.

  Chapter X

  In Which I Examine Two Notebooks

  My landlady at Broadgate was a pleasant old soul. She must have been completely mystified by my apparent disappearance. For, you must remember, I had set out that morning for a pre-breakfast walk, and had immediately got mixed up in this mysterious case. It was teatime when I got back, bearing the two all-important notebooks.

  “Mr. London!” she exclaimed as she met me in the hall on my return. “I thought that you had got lost. I was thinking of going to the police about you.”

  I grinned rather shamefacedly. “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Cecil,” I said. “You see, I met an old friend of mine from Fleet Street, and he rushed me off to London. It was a matter of a possible job, where I had to get there without delay. Only by getting there quickly was it possible to be sure that I should be considered. And I’m nearly well now, you know, so that I could go into the matter.”

  “And did you get the job?” she asked, looking at me, I thought, rather suspiciously. Indeed, my tale must have sounded rather thin.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, I am glad,” she said. And she sounded as if she meant it.

  “It’s with The Daily Wire,” I explained. Indeed, she must know soon, for the articles with my name at the top of them would very soon be appearing. There was no point in trying to keep the matter secret from her.

  “I’m glad,” she said again. “And when do you start?” I saw that what was worrying her was the matter of the room which I was occupying. She was mentally envisaging a “long let” suddenly drying up.

  “Oh, I shall be doing the work from here for the moment, Mrs. Cecil,” I said. “You see, it’s a sort of special correspondent job. I shan’t have to attend the office regularly, not to begin with, anyhow.” I knew that the whole background of newspaper work would be completely foreign to her, and she would be compelled to take on trust what I told her. And anyhow it was sure enough that as soon as she saw the first of my contributions to The Daily Wire she would realise that I had only told the truth about my connection with the paper.

  Now, however, my main concern was to get away from her, and do something with the two black notebooks that seemed almost to be burning holes in my pocket.

  “Will you have some tea?” she asked.

  “Do you think that you could get a tray sent up to my room, Mrs. Cecil?” I asked. “You see, I have some rather important work to do for my paper, and I can get on with it only if you can get my tea to me up there, so that I can have my tea while I am working.”

  “I’ll do it, sir,” she said. “But don’t forget that you’ve been very ill. Don’t overdo it; I’ve met too many people who have overworked too soon when they have left hospital, you know.” And the old soul meant it, I knew. She really thought that I was an invalid, who should be looked after.

  Still, I was not going to waste any more time over reassuring her. I had wasted enough time in conversation already. I knew that I should have to turn these books over to Shelley later in the day. And I was determined to get out of them everything that I could before I handed them over.

  So I merely said: “Oh, I’ll take care of myself, Mrs. Cecil,” and made my way upstairs.

  In my room I got out the two notebooks and examined them with some care. Externally, as I have already said, they were identical. They had black covers, made of shiny cloth. And they had about a hundred pages each, of which only about a half had been used.

  As I
compared the two books it became increasingly obvious that one was the clue to the other. This was correct even in some detail, for, as I compared them page by page, it seemed to me that the pages corresponded. For instance, the first page in the Broadgate notebook was headed “H.K.” Then there were a series of cryptic squiggles and signs, with a few dates. The first page of the London notebook was headed “Henry Kipling, 47 Warrington Road, Tooting.” It then went on to list a series of dates and sums of money. The suggestion certainly seemed to me to be that this man Kipling had been buying something from Tilsley, and that the dates and sums of money in the London notebook gave a list of deals. The money involved was pretty big, too. Sums of £100 and more were pretty frequent, and there were one or two cases of £1,000. The dates extended over about six months, and the total sum of money involved was over £4,000. If that was really an account of some deals being carried on, a turnover of over £4,000 for one customer indicated a fairly big business. And the fact that the accounts were being kept in this semi-secret way gave a good suggestion that the deals were on the wrong side of the law.

  I made a note of the name and address of Mr. Kipling. Then I turned to the second page in each book. These provided an exact repetition of the first, except that the initials in the Broadgate book were “V.M.”, and the name and address in the London were “Victor Mainwairing, 195 Paddington Terrace, Bayswater.” The amounts of cash and the dates were, of course, different also, but I noted that the total cash over six months again ran into several thousands of pounds.

  There were nearly fifty names and addresses in the book altogether. And in each case the sum of money involved was of the same sort of size. The biggest sum was £9,000, paid by Mr. James Jinks, of Brighton; the lowest was £900, paid by Mrs. Billiams, of Ealing. I reckoned that the turnover of the business, if that was indeed what we were to see in this book, was something like £150,000 in the six months covered. A business with a turnover of £300,000 a year is a pretty big business. And if it was, as we had more than a firm suspicion, an illegal, black-market business, the profits would be high. Here, in fact, was ample reason for the murder. After all, whoever was having anything to do with this affair was playing for pretty high stakes.