Mr. Minto looked at his brother sadly, and wondered again what had possessed him to go through life wearing his collar that way round.
“Who did kill Anton, then?” he demanded.
The priest gave a worried smile.
Mr. Minto shrugged his shoulders, sighed, and walked away. He had not expected an answer, and ought not to have asked the question. The fact that Robert knew the solution of the circus mystery was no business of his, and any investigations he had to make must be made without pumping Robert. Mr. Minto, abandoning all thought of a quiet evening getting his top-hat into condition, stepped back into the fray and got busy once again.
Lorimer, to begin with. He had been trying to buttonhole Lorimer for a pleasant chat all day, but so far had not succeeded. Why had Lorimer disappeared last night? Where had he gone after the party, and what had he done? Mr. Minto went up to Lorimer’s room, knocked, received no answer, came downstairs again and was told by the hall-porter that both Lorimer and Loretta had left for the evening performance of the circus.
“Arm in arm?” asked Mr. Minto.
“Beg pardon, sir?” said the hall-porter.
“I mean, did they appear friendly…or just like husband and wife?”
“They seemed to be getting on very well, sir. Joking-like, if you know what I mean, sir.”
“Joking-like?” said Mr. Minto. “That’s bad—very bad.”
Mr. Minto put off his questioning of Lorimer until later in the evening, and rang up the local police-station to ask, politely enough, if anything had been done about his requests of the early hours of that morning. Mr. Minto didn’t want to hurry them, and knew that he had no business butting in on a purely private murder, but if they were doing anything about what he asked, would they mind getting a move on? The local police-force got a move on at once: Superintendent Padgeham, in person, arrived at the Station Hotel and, in reply to a question of Mr. Minto’s, said that he wouldn’t say “no” to a small one. Even after the small one, the Superintendent kept on looking at Mr. Minto as if thinking how much better the world would be if Scotland Yard inspectors minded their own business. He passed on his report in a grudging baritone.
The occupants of No. 288, Bank Street, according to Superintendent Padgeham, were sober and respectable citizens of the name of Winter. They had lived above the pawnshop for sixteen years and—apart from what the Superintendent called “a bit of a to-do” about stolen milk-bottles away back in the spring of 1928—they had never had anything to do with the police. Mr. Winter was an elderly gentleman who lived on his old-age pension, a system of backing horses which rarely came off, and the earnings of his wife and daughter. The wife took in washing and, on occasions, lodgers. A lodger was believed to be living in the house just now, as well as an invalid sister of Mr. Winter.
The daughter (here the Superintendent became a little involved) was not actually a daughter of the Winters; it was believed that they had adopted the girl, though some unkind persons were inclined to think other things. In any case, the daughter looked after the pawnshop below, and received two pounds per week in wages from the gentleman who ran the business. The Winters were prominent members of the local Methodist Chapel, were understood to have voted for the National Government at the last General Election, and had won prizes for the excellent leeks which they grew in the small garden at the back of the pawnshop.
The Superintendent wound up his report on the Winter family with the remark that, if any Brilliant Brains from Scotland Yard thought they had hit on the headquarters of a gang of dangerous international crooks at No. 288, Bank Street, they had better think again.
“Thanks very much, Padgeham,” said Mr. Minto, still polite. “Very good of you to go to all this trouble. Now, there’s just one other thing. What about drugs?”
“Drugs?” said the Superintendent.
“Yes. I wonder—could you let me have a note of any known drug addicts, or cases in which drugs had been mixed up within the last few years?”
“Lord bless my soul!” said the Superintendent, slapping his stomach and laughing heartily. “Drugs, indeed! There hasn’t been a case of drug-taking in this town, not as far back as I can remember.”
“There may have been cases of drug-taking,” said Mr. Minto, “without you knowing about it, of course.…”
“Don’t you waste your time about drugs in this town, sir. We’d soon get to hear about it, if that kind of thing was going on. Drugs, indeed! Ho-ho!”
“Ho-ho!” said Mr. Minto sadly. “Well, never mind. It’s just as well. Drugs aren’t nice things to have going round a town. Thanks very much, Superintendent. Good night.”
Mr. Minto waited until the Superintendent had gone, and made his way at once to No. 288, Bank Street. For no sounder reason, it must be admitted, than that the Superintendent’s report sounded far too good to be true. He took a look in the crowded windows of the pawnshop, climbed the stairs to the flat above, and beat a tattoo on the door.
Mrs. Winter (presumably) answered the door and said, “Well?”
“I’m the Housing Inspector,” said Mr. Minto, never at a loss for words. “Overcrowding, you know. Did you get the form?”
No, Mrs. Winter had received no form.
“Dear, dear!” said Mr. Minto. “Slackness somewhere. However—it’s just a formality, you know. Housing Act of 1935—I’ve got to look round and report any cases of overcrowding—see the number of rooms you have, and that sort of thing. May I step in? Thank you so much.”
Mr. Minto stepped into the sitting-room. If he had been really an inspector of housing conditions, he would have found plenty of grounds for condemning at least this one room for overcrowding.
At a rough guess, two hundred and fifty china ornaments were busily gathering dust on a number of shelves, cupboards, mantelpieces, whatnots, and what not around the room. There was a great deal of furniture, mainly upholstered in green plush, as well as a bird-cage (empty) which stood in the middle of the room, like a policeman directing traffic on point duty. The room stank of stale tobacco smoke. Mr. Winter (again presumably) lay on a sofa in his shirt-sleeves, reading the Racing Chronicle.
“Who’s this bloke?” he asked.
“Someone from the housing people,” said Mrs. Winter vaguely. “Wants to see through the house for overcrowding, or something.”
“At this time of night?”
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Minto. “I won’t take a minute.”
“You won’t find no overcrowding here, you won’t,” said the man. “There’s five rooms in this house, and only the three of us and the wife’s sister, what’s staying here with us in the meantime. You can’t turn us out for that, you can’t.”
“Of course not. It’s just a formality. Don’t you take in lodgers sometimes?”
“We do. We’ve got one with us now. There isn’t any law against taking in lodgers, is there? If this country was worth living in, people wouldn’t need to take in lodgers to make ends meet. You take me, now. Right through the War, I was—beginning to end, and a couple of wounds in that leg there what I could show you this very minute—and what has the country done for me, eh? Not a ruddy thing, it hasn’t. And now they start all this monkey business about overcrowding—sending blooming inspectors nosing through people’s houses, without so much as a beg-pardon or a by-your-leave. What things is coming to, I don’t know. Inspectors for this, and inspectors for that, and inspectors for the other thing. And who pays for them?—that’s what I’d like to know. The ratepayers, of course. You take Income Tax, now. All I have in this world is what we make off lodgers and odd jobs what I do, and they have the blooming nerve to make me fill up forms to pay Income Tax! I may tell you, mister, that I joined up in 1914 and I was right through the War until the end—and what have I got in return, eh? If a bloke what fights for his country isn’t good enough to—”
“Oh, shut up!” said Mrs. Winter
.
Mr. Minto murmured an agreement. The man whose one attitude towards the War is one of personal grumbling was not one of Mr. Minto’s favourite types. He crossed the room, circumnavigated the bird-cage, and opened the bedroom door.
“That’s the lodger’s room,” said Mrs. Winter. “He’s out now. He works at the circus.”
“Oh? What’s his name?”
“Miller. He usually comes back here between his shows, but he’s doing someone else’s turn today. I expect he’s staying down at the field.”
“I expect so,” said Mr. Minto, and walked to another door.
“That’s where we sleep. You can’t go in there just now.”
“Why not?”
“My sister’s in there. She’s an invalid. You can’t disturb her.”
“I won’t hurt her. I’ve just got to see the size of the room—regulations, you know.”
“You’re not going into that room, you aren’t!” said Mr. Winter, bobbing up to the surface again over the top of the Racing Chronicle. “I don’t care who you are, or what you’re after, but you can’t come barging into people’s houses and walking about as though you owned the place, you can’t. She’s very ill, she is. And nervous. The least thing upsets her. God knows what a blooming Inspector would do to her, barging in without so much as a—”
Mr. Minto barged in. He stayed in the doorway rather longer than he had intended. The woman lying on the bed interested him.
“What’s the matter with her?” he asked, as he shut the door.
“It’s a sort of paralysis.”
“Dear me. Poor soul. Where does this stair lead to?”
“Down to the shop below. We never use it.”
“Never?”
“Never. It hasn’t been used for years.”
“And have you a cover to your cistern to prevent mice, insects, and dust from gaining access to the water contained therein?”
Mr. Minto was not at all interested in the Winters’s cistern, but he remembered that this was one of the points on which the Housing Act of 1935 was particularly hot, and—like Pooh-Bah—he was anxious to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
Mrs. Winter said that she didn’t know about the cistern, but from the colour of the water in the tap she felt pretty sure that mice, insects, and dust could fall in it just as they felt inclined.
Mr. Minto said it really didn’t matter and that, as long as Mrs. Winter had no more than five children within the next three years, there was no danger of the premises being condemned for overcrowding until 1940. Mrs. Winter threw out her chest and hooted loudly at the idea of having five children between then and 1940, jerking her thumb back over her shoulder and in the direction of Mr. Winter to emphasize the folly of Mr. Minto’s remark. Mr. Minto raised his hat, apologized for troubling everyone, and went downstairs to pawn his watch in the shop below.
The shop was being looked after by a young girl—a very charming young girl, Mr. Minto thought. Well-spoken, quiet, good-looking, and a little shy. He had a preliminary skirmish about the value of his watch, and was invited into a back room to complete the deal. While this was being done he heard a scuffle immediately above his head. Mr. Minto looked up and realized that the stairs leading to the house above—the stairs which had not been used for years—formed part of the roof of the back room. They were being used now. Someone large and heavy was coming down. Reaching the bottom step, the owner of the feet which had made such a commotion on the stairs called out, “Hoi!”
The charming young girl excused herself and ran out into the shop. Mr. Minto, wiping the dust from a window-pane and peering through, saw a man in a checked suit hand a small parcel to the girl, pat her cheek, and pass on out of the shop. It was not Mr. Winter. It was, in fact, Joseph Carey, proprietor of Carey’s Circus.
The girl returned, gave Mr. Minto his ticket, and shepherded him back into the main shop and towards the door. The collection of articles scattered across the counter intrigued Mr. Minto, and he paused to admire a blunderbuss, two pairs of corduroy pants, a crucifix, an edition of Robbie Burns’ poems, and a pipe-rack executed in complicated fretwork.
“What queer things people leave in a pawnshop,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” said the girl. “You’d be surprised, sir.”
She had a very soft, refined voice. Mr. Minto took quite a fancy to her.
“That, for instance,” he said, holding up a brightly coloured garment. “Now who on earth would ever wear a thing like that?”
“It’s a fancy-dress costume, I suppose, sir,” said the girl. “A gentleman popped it last night. A very nice, quiet gentleman, too. You wouldn’t ever have thought that he would have been the sort what would have needed for to have done anything like that, sir.”
Mr. Minto parsed this sentence inwardly and inspected the garment more carefully.
“It’s a little torn, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Is it, sir? So it is. Still, that’s easily put right if you’ve got a piece to match.”
Mr. Minto took out his note-case and put his pawn-ticket away beside the piece of Dodo’s clown costume.
“And…isn’t that a spot of blood on it?”
“So it is, sir. Some of the things what we get popped here are in a terrible state, sir. Messy isn’t the name for them, sir. Tomato soup and everything all over them, sir.”
Mr. Minto put his note-case away, resisting the temptation of handing the girl the piece of torn material and telling her to mend the garment lying on the counter. It would have done the job very well, for the garment was Dodo’s clown costume.
He changed his tactics.
“Who was that gentleman who came down the stairs just now?” he asked.
“Just a friend of mine, sir,” said the charming girl, in a softer and more polite voice than ever.
“And what was the parcel he gave you?” asked Mr. Minto. “A present for a beautiful young lady, eh?”
“Listen, you…” said the girl, in quite a different kind of voice. “You keep your nose out of this, Mr. Ruddy Detective! Think you’re a smart guy, do you? You get this, son—with feet like yours, you couldn’t ever disguise yourself as anything but a ’tec. There’s your watch, mister. Now scram!”
Mr. Minto scrammed.
Chapter Twelve
The evening performance of the circus was nearly over before Mr. Minto reached Martin’s Field. The audience was bigger than ever; news of the afternoon’s tragedy having got round, they rolled up in their thousands—people who would have written strong letters to the newspapers condemning bull-fighting as a cruel sport—in the hope of more blood. They did not get blood; instead, they were themselves bled.
The tiger act did not appear at all, owing to a strange reluctance on the part of everyone in the circus to take the place of Anton and Miller; but Joseph Carey, with an eye always open for business, made a neat little speech towards the close of the performance, regretting that the tigers were not able to appear in the ring, and inviting the audience to view these dangerous man-eating animals in their cage at the conclusion of the show. A small charge would be involved for the privilege of seeing the beasts—sixpence per head, children half-price. The attendants would pass among the members of the audience, and Mr. Carey advised all to purchase tickets in advance, and on no account to miss a sight that only came once in a lifetime.
The audience flocked to gape at the tigers, and Joe Carey found himself nearly fifty pounds richer as a result. It was, he decided, an ill wind that blew nobody any good.
Mr. Minto cornered Lorimer at last, two turns before he went on.
“I’ve been wanting to see you all day,” he said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
The trapeze artist smiled.
“I’ve been expecting you,” he said. “Loretta, stay here—in case he arrests m
e.”
“Well, now…where did you go after you left Dodo’s party?”
“I went to keep an appointment.”
“With whom?” asked Mr. Minto, remembering his prepositions.
“With Anton.”
Mr. Minto rubbed his chin.
“And did you keep the appointment?”
“I did.”
“What happened?”
“We talked for a quarter of an hour or so. Then I left him, and went across to my own dressing-tent.”
“Why?”
“To get a revolver.”
“What for?” asked Mr. Minto, forgetting his prepositions this time.
Lorimer lit a cigarette before answering.
“To kill Anton,” he said.
Loretta, sitting on a table and staring at her husband, did not move. Mr. Minto scratched his head. He did not like these people who were so commendably frank and who told you everything.
“You realize what you’re saying, Lorimer, don’t you?” he asked. “I could arrest you for the murder of Anton.”
“You could,” said Lorimer. “You’d be a damned fool if you did, though. I said I got a revolver to kill Anton. I didn’t say that I killed him. I didn’t kill him, if you want to know—I was beaten to it.”
“Really?” said Mr. Minto. “Very interesting. Come on, now. Wouldn’t it be better to tell me the whole story?”
Lorimer looked across at his wife.
“Tell the man, Lorrie,” said Loretta. “He’ll find it out in any case, so you might as well tell him.”
Mr. Minto bowed an acknowledgment of this compliment.
“Right,” said Lorimer. “I’ll start at the beginning.”
“A very sensible place to start,” said Mr. Minto.
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