Death in Albert Park

by Bruce, Leo

  “As it was, I arrived too late, though with the knowledge I now had I was able to follow the movements of both Slatter and the murderer pretty well. They had been talking together for some time at the Mitre as I had heard from Chumside. Slatter, I knew, suffered from insomnia which gave the murderer a splendid opening. He accompanied him to his lodge, perhaps shared his supper of bread and cheese or perhaps watched him eat it, then on the pretext of giving him something that really would cure his sleeplessness he gave him his overdose. When Slatter began to feel the effects he told him to lie on his bed for a moment and Slatter fell into the sleep from which he could not wake.

  “I find the thought of the next hour or two more spine-chilling than anything connected with the earlier murders. Our man had to wait in the house till he was sure that Slatter was beyond revival, a considerable time in fact. When I reached the lodge between half past three and four I had the feeling—no more than that—that he had not been gone long. Moreover he had to set in position the articles of his disguise and the knife. And since a man about to commit suicide would seem unlikely to have consumed a hearty supper of bread and cheese he had removed all signs of a meal having been eaten.

  “He made two mistakes that I noticed, but probably many more have already been discovered by the police. He left the bread and the cheese in their receptacles, each showing that recent cuts had been made from them. And he left the two-way light switches turned off from the wrong ends.

  “The Coroner’s Inquest, as we know, did not accept the position as the murderer hoped. In the state of psychotic exaltation induced by the successful murder of the three women, he felt he could do no wrong. He was sure that it would never be doubted that Slatter was the Stabber and that Slatter had killed himself. But in this he failed for the verdict was an open one.”

  Mr. Gorringer raised his hand.

  “There, my dear Deene, let us pause and consider. Your brilliant exposition has us all enthralled. Eh, Superintendent?”

  Dyke said nothing and Withers still stared in wonder at the headmaster.

  “At all events you must not exhaust yourself before reaching what must surely be the climax of your story. Pause, my dear fellow, and refresh yourself.”

  “Yes. Let’s have a drink,” said Carolus.

  “Fair enough,” agreed Priggley and busied himself with the bottles.

  “What dark regions there are in the human mind,” reflected Mr. Gorringer weightily. “What jungles, and what slums may flourish in those grey cells. For my part I cannot see why you hesitate to call this unnamed assassin insane. That he may, as you say, have had a cogent motive in one of these murders, does nothing to convince me. I see here the work of a dangerous lunatic. What say you, Sir Boxley?”

  It seemed that Withers was startled from his wrapt contemplation of the headmaster. He hesitated then started slightly and said, “Yes. Yes.”

  “I am glad to find Sir Boxley agrees with my prognosis. This is a most tragic affair.”

  “What I don’t understand,” said Rupert Priggley to Carolus, “is why you are bending over backwards not to name the murderer. You obviously know, or think you know, who done it. So why be coy, sir? Why not let us have it and be done with it?”

  Carolus, like Withers, seemed to awaken.

  “Name the murderer?” he said. “Why not? It was, of course, Jim Crahbett.”

  Twenty

  “ ‘OF course’!” bellowed Mr. Gorringer. “I like your ‘of course’, Deene. To me it would seem that you had merely picked haphazardly among the possible candidates, and I daresay others of your interested audience feel the same. Why ‘of course’?”

  “ ‘The why is plain as way to parish church,’ “ said Carolus, “and I thought you must all have seen it from the time I began talking about supposition. We supposed a man with a motive for killing one of these three women, and who in the world had such a thing except the husband of that rich, pretentious, domineering woman Hermione d’Avernon Crabbett?

  “I reached this to some extent by a process of eliminating the other two. I found that Hester Starkey had inspired rather intense emotions among the staff at St. Olave’s Ladies College, but neither Grace Buller, the hefty and sentimental games mistress, nor Gerda Munshall, the somewhat excessive ‘great friend’ of Hester, could possibly qualify or name anyone else who might do so. Eamon Starkey was eliminated by complete lack of motive, but inquiries and timing, in spite of his phony alibi, would have shown a practical impossibility in his case.

  “So Hester Starkey was out. We are apt to think motives for murder are common. ‘I could have killed her’, we hear people say. But in reality it is not difficult to discover whether anyone could have a motive for killing anyone else, and I was soon convinced that no one known to Hester Starkey wanted her dead, though some of her pupils may have thought they did.

  “It was the same when I came to Joyce Ribbing. I met her husband, her sister, her lover and several of her friends in Albert Park. They were rather stuffy people, for the most part, and seemed to have recovered from the shock of Joyce’s death very quickly, but among them there was not a suggestion of motive. Both husband and lover had obviously been through great distress at their loss. Here again I could not feel anything to awaken suspicions. And as the whole thing so far was working on suspicion and supposition I dismissed the murder of Joyce Ribbing from my mind.

  “But when I came to the third murder there was an immediate change of atmosphere and I found some open hatred. Miss Pilkin hated the Pressleys and they hated her. Pressley had quarrelled with his father-in-law and Miss Pilkin had known ‘angry disputes between Harry Pressley and Mrs. Crabbett’. ‘Pressley seemed to be threatening his mother-in-law with violence’. ‘There were other disputes, sometimes between Pressley and his wife’. And so on.

  “But it was when I went out to Bromley to see Jim Crabbett that my suspicions began to coalesce. It was pretty obvious that Crabbett had for years detested his wife’s social pretentiousness. ‘She liked to be addressed as d’Avernon Crabbett’ he said and added unnecessarily and significantly, ‘Harmless, really. I didn’t mind’. He went on to speak of her ‘kind nature’ and the local charities she supported with a sort of concealed bitterness which I did not like. Mrs. Crabbett was wealthy; Crabbett had nothing and even his job he had had to give up. ‘There was no need for me to continue and my wife … we liked to be together’. Later when I suggested that his wife might have waited for him at her daughter’s that evening, another flash came out involuntarily. ‘You didn’t know her’, Crabbett said, then amended this with, ‘She was so punctual herself always’.

  “A picture emerged of a weak man, secretly resentful, being the lackey of his rich wife and having no way of re-establishing his lost independence until or unless he inherited her money. That after her death he immediately began to do the things he had long wanted to do was apparent to me during my visit to Bromley. I guessed he had banished all photographs of his wife from the living-room when he fetched one whose frame matched those remaining there, but this was only a guess. More significant was his acquisition, ‘only a few days’ before I saw him of a puppy whose ‘family’ he had known for a long time. It was not fanciful to picture him wanting one of a friendly dog’s litter and knowing that Mrs. d’Avernon Crabbett would never stand for a mongrel, or a dog at all for that matter. ‘She couldn’t bear dogs’, her daughter said. Jim Crabbett had lost no time after her death.

  “Then there was the well-stocked drink cabinet which he had ‘found in a furniture shop yesterday’ and from which he proudly offered me a drink as, perhaps, he had longed to offer one many times during his wife’s teetotal regime. In this too he was enjoying his emancipation.

  “But he had not enjoyed his last years with Hermione. ‘I’m sorry for him, really,’ said his daughter. ‘He does not seem to take an interest in anything’. ‘It’s not very nice to talk about it, but it was mother who had the money. Dad retired ages ago, without much of a pension … Mother wanted
him to.’ And he, who as he told me could do anything in a house ‘from cooking to turning out a room’ found himself completely under his wife’s domination.

  “Yes. He was the only one with a motive. But that was no more than the beginning of my circumstantial trail. Hester Starkey was murdered on Thursday February 8th, Joyce Ribbing on the 22nd and Hermione Crabbett on March 15th. The Press made something of this clockwork regularity but did not notice the full force of it. It was on Thursdays that Crabbett had to drive his wife over to Albert Park to see her daughter, on Thursdays that he was free for an hour or two from her observation or more than casual enquiry, on Thursdays that he could wander about the district while waiting for his wife and have no difficulty in explaining himself if seen on the nights of the first two murders. For the third, the ‘real’ murder it had to be a Thursday, of course. So the dates of these murders did indicate something, unlike those of Jack the Ripper which in spite of scrutiny, yield no information at all. (They were April 2nd 1888, August 7th, August 31st, September 8th, September 30th when two women were killed, November 9th, December 20th, July 17th 1889 and September 17th 1889).

  “Then another thing which pointed to Crabbett was, curiously enough, his possession of a car. I expect you noticed how few of those in any way involved were car-owners—it surprised me. Only, as far as I knew, Miss Cratchley the headmistress of St. Olave’s, Turrell, Beryl Knapstick and Dr. Ribbing, in addition to Crabbett himself. I was convinced the murderer either used a car or lived alone in Crabtree Avenue, otherwise how could he so quickly remove his raincoat and other distinguishing marks, deposit them and go to the public lavatory? It was possible that if like Heatherwell or Slatter he was alone in a house he could drop them there, but it was far more likely he put them in the boot of his car. If I was right about Crabbett they probably remained there from one murder to another, as it were. Why not? In his state of mind he was above and beyond any possible suspicion.

  “So this is how I think Crabbett worked. He had been planning his course of action for two years. ‘He’s always late. Or has been for the last two years. Seems to have gone sort of dreamy though I can remember him when he was very wide awake’. That was what his daughter told me about him. His plan did not seem to me so much brilliant as long-pondered and inflexible. I think he congratulated himself on it. No wonder he was ‘sort of dreamy’ when under every humiliation from his wife he had this delicious and undetectable revenge to contemplate.

  “The first murder was the easiest for ‘The Stabber’ did not exist then. He waited among the trees at the top of the avenue until almost everyone had left the school. He may even have known from observation that Hester Starkey went on foot down Crabtree Avenue every evening and have waited for her perhaps on several previous Thursdays without getting the combination of circumstances he wanted—an empty street and Hester Starkey alone. At all events he got this on February 8th and followed his victim as he had planned till she was passing the empty house, near which, I should guess, his car was parked. He laid the body in the garden as he had planned, took off his raincoat etc. and having given himself a glance by a street light to make sure that he bore none of the marks of Cain too obviously, he made for the public lavatory.

  “The knife? Oh yes. Perhaps long possessed, perhaps purchased specially. It is not a very uncommon weapon. I think it will lead now to a conviction. Meanwhile, on that night, it was in the boot of the car with the raincoat and cloth cap.

  “Crabbett had nearly an hour to pass and went to the Mitre. The landlord told me that at this time he came in once a week or so, but after his wife’s death more often. That seemed very natural and ordinary information unless one counted ‘once a week or so’ too literally. Then, having had a couple of drinks, he went to pick up Hermione and drive her home. Perhaps—the suggestion is the merest supposition—perhaps she complained that he smelt of drink. If so, I think he was silent thinking how soon, how few Thursdays away, her turn would come.

  “The next Thursday, however, he drew blank. No woman alone in Crabtree Avenue. But the following Thursday, February 22nd just as he was about to give up for the evening and meet his wife at nine o’clock, Joyce Ribbing came out of the Whitehill’s house and made for Perth Avenue in which was her home. He was only just in time and had to leave her body in the nearest garden which chanced to be Goggins’s. No time for the Mitre that night. He had a wash and brush-up and called for Hermione. ‘Dad was always late’.

  “He had been clever in using Crabtree Avenue for the first two murders. He foresaw that watchfulness and precautions would be concentrated there, though no one would doubt that the third murder, committed in the same way and in the same district, would seem to be by the same hand. He foresaw, moreover, that when he did not come for his wife on time she would eventually decide to ‘teach him a lesson’ as she had often threatened to do, and walk down to the bus stop. Miss Pilkin saw him waiting about for Hermione to emerge. ‘I saw that he wore spectacles. His features were in the shadow of a cloth cap’ she said and when I asked her if she had ever seen this man before she said ‘I was conscious of some sense of semi-recognition. Perhaps I had known him in a previous incarnation’. She had in fact seen him a few hours earlier when dressed in his usual greatcoat and hatless, he had brought his wife to Salisbury Gardens. But not all Miss Pilkin’s instincts were mistaken. ‘I saw an aura of evil round him.’

  “This time Crabbett did not wait to go to the public lavatory. Why should he, now that he had the house to himself. He disposed of the body and having changed his coat in the car returned to his daughter’s house to call for his wife. Then he hurried home to raise the alarm when she did not appear. Within a few hours he was receiving sympathy as the husband of the Stabber’s third victim and within a fortnight he had begun to spend the money, advanced to him by his wife’s executors one supposes.

  “Now comes an interesting problem. Had he already planned the murder of someone who was to appear to have committed suicide as the Stabber? Or was this, as I have been inclined to suppose an afterthought? It may have been in conversation with me that he first realized that someone with a motive might be sought. ‘You can’t discount motive’, I said. ‘Oh, I thought you could with a madman,’ Crabbett replied. ‘Not even then’, I told him. It may be that from this moment he decided that he would establish the Stabber’s identity in the way he sought to do. Yet there is one consideration against that. If he had no plan for the fourth murder why did he not at once dispose of the raincoat, the cloth cap and the glasses and disembarrass himself of the butcher’s knife? It is a point which has yet to be cleared up.

  “At all events he still had these articles and set about finding his victim, as we have seen. On the night he murdered Slatter I heard on the telephone from Chumside the landlord of the Mitre that he had been in deep conversation with Slatter, but I was in pursuit of what by then seemed to me almost certain proof—information from Heatherwell that it had been Crabbett who called on the previous night when he thought Heatherwell was alone.”

  “And did you obtain that information?” Dyke allowed himself to ask.

  “Not in so many words because Heatherwell is a man who tries to keep his promises. But to my own satisfaction, yes. When Heatherwell realizes the importance of the information he will certainly give it. And the lavatory attendant will be able to pick Crabbett out on any identification parade. But you won’t have much difficulty in getting evidence, Superintendent, as you very well know. Think of the juicy lines of enquiry you have. (But you are thinking of them.) The sleeping tablets. The knife. The raincoat, with its possible bloodstains still to be found under the microscope and perhaps traces of something which connect it with the boot of Crabbett’s car. The cap—that alone might hang him. His flat and Slatter’s lodge where I have no doubt you have already made discoveries. The spectacles. The clothes Crabbett wore, if he has not destroyed them.

  “Yet I doubt if you’ll need to work on these. If I read the man rightly you will have a most de
tailed and proud confession as soon as he realizes that you seriously suspect him. His belief in his own cleverness and invulnerability once exploded he will seek another outlet for his paranoia, and will boast freely of what he has done.”

  “If you read the man right,” said Withers suddenly, speaking almost for the first time that evening. “If—but it is certain you do. You have read him all along with most uncanny skill.”

  “Bravo, Deene,” said Mr. Gorringer beaming. “I join our Chairman of Governors in his congratulation. But there is yet one question I would fain ask. You warned both Slatter and Heatherwell, I believe. How did you know that the murderer intended to add this fiendish afterthought to his misdeeds?”

  “I didn’t know. But we all have a little of the murderer in us and I perhaps more than most…”

  “You alarm me, Deene!”

  “I mean that to investigate crime at all one must be able to put oneself in the place of the criminal, turning about in the rat-trap he has created for himself. That is what I did in this case and saw that he might mistake this for a way of escape.”

  “A most felicitous conclusion by which you were able to save Heatherwell’s life.”

  “But not Slatter’s,” said Carolus.

  Dyke made no comment, then or thereafter, but rather abruptly took his leave.

  Six weeks later, when Crabbett had, as Carolus predicted, made a full confession and was awaiting the trial that would send him for a lifetime to Broadmoor, Carolus decided to pay one last visit connected with the affair, the visit he had promised to Eamon Starkey at the Crucible Theatre.