Death of a Beauty Queen

by E. R. Punshon

  ‘Would you know that motor-cyclist again?’ Mitchell asked quickly.

  ‘Anywhere. You don’t forget a man who gives you a pound note when you’re as hard up as I was that night. Besides, there was a rummy thing happened after, with the same man. I had had a shock with such a near escape, and I felt I needed a little drop of something to put my nerves right. There was a pub round the corner, so I popped in to have a drink, and as I was coming out there was that same cyclist chap pelting off down the street the way they do, and as he passed I saw him, plain as could be, throw something into a dark doorway across the road. A bit funny, I thought, and I went across to look, though thinking very likely it was only an empty cigarette-case. But it wasn’t.’

  ‘What was it?’ Mitchell asked, when Quin paused for dramatic effect. ‘The ring you took back to Regent Street?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Quin answered. ‘At the time I thought it queer, chucking away a thing like that, only I thought perhaps he hadn’t known what it was. You do chuck away things without meaning to at times. Well, I thought what to do, and then I took a peep inside Carrie’s handbag, and – well, I couldn’t hardly believe it, a great fat wad of notes there was. No wonder she had been in such a hurry to snap the bag up again. Very awkward position for me, you’ll understand. That girl was every bit capable of declaring I had meant to steal her bag, and I made Up my mind at once I would simply give it her back again, just as it was. Besides, I could see some of the notes were fivers and tenners that are easy traced. And then if I put it to her I had saved her bag for her, which practically I had, and but for me she would have lost it, I didn’t see how she could turn up less than ten per cent on that two hundred – you would do as much for any perfect stranger who brought you back your bag you thought you had lost. But when I got it settled clear in my mind what was the right thing to do, and went round the corner back to the cinema to do it, there was everyone running about and excited, and crowds rushing up, and people telling each other one of the competitors, Carrie Mears, had been murdered.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ continued Mr Quin impressively, ‘you can see at once what a very awkward and unfortunate position I was in, through no fault of my own – pure bad luck, and all the worse for that. I admit I was scared so bad my nerves got the better of me. Anyone would have felt the same. I wanted to help, but I didn’t feel I was called on to put my head in a noose through acting too precipitate. There was the girl murdered, and me with her bag with two hundred in it in notes. Shivery, it made me, and my nerves the way they were, and, acting on the impulse, before I knew what I was doing, with my mind all a blank, so to speak, there I found myself in the motor-coach going back home again. But my nerves were all anyhow still, and there was a big fellow sitting opposite looking at me in a curious sort of way that made me go all cold. I was in such a state I was carrying poor Carrie’s handbag under my arm instead of having the sense to wrap it up, which just shows what my nerves were like. I suppose he thought it queer to see a man carrying a lady’s handbag, especially one that was worth money – crocodile it was. Anyhow, I lost my head a bit more, and, seeing the way he looked, like a fool I told him a lady must have lost it and I had just picked it up. One of the interfering sort, he was, and he nodded to the conductor. A pity some people can’t mind their own business, but most likely he wasn’t honest himself and couldn’t believe others were. Anyhow, up came the conductor, and I had to hand the thing over, and, to tell the truth, I don’t know that I was so sorry to get rid of it, now my nerves were a bit calmer. And the ring the motor-cyclist chap had thrown away, I took back next day to the shop it came from, according to the name on the box. I felt it would be just as well to let people understand I was straight and honest through and through, even if, thanks to that interfering meddling fellow in the coach, I hadn’t had the chance to prove it by taking back Carrie’s two hundred same as I had meant to. And where the girl got all that money from, is another thing I should very much like to know.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Escape

  Quin was now allowed to depart on his promise to return on the morrow to read over and sign the statement he had just made and that by then would be written out in due form.

  ‘Probably, too,’ Mitchell told him, ‘we shall have to ask you to see if you can identify the motor-cyclist you told us about. Do you think you will be able to?’

  ‘Know him anywhere,’ asserted Quin, with confidence, and, since it was as well to keep him in good temper, he was driven back to his address in a police car. Then, when he had gone, Mitchell looked gravely round at the grave faces of his companions.

  ‘It looks to me as if we had come to the end at last,’ he said slowly. ‘For what else can Quin’s story mean, but that Maddox murdered Carrie Mears?’

  ‘If he can identify him,’ Ferris put in. ‘If he does, at any rate that’s proof positive Maddox was lying when he pretended afterwards he had only just arrived at the cinema.’

  ‘What was the motive?’ Penfold asked. ‘Jealousy?’

  ‘There may have been a quarrel, too,’ Mitchell said. ‘She was flinging him overboard for Leslie Irwin, whom Maddox had always rather looked down on. In her letter she said she was going to “tell him off.” She may have sneered at him for not having been able to help her or get the money she wanted, and the knife was lying there, ready to his hand. It would be quickly done, and then what a magnificent bluff – to come straight back to the cinema, back to where the dead girl lay, as if he knew nothing. He didn’t attempt to prove an alibi, he just let us infer it – nerve that took, but I think he over-strained it a bit perhaps. And he made mistakes. He told us Miss Mears had her crocodile handbag with her, though on his own showing he had not. seen her since lunch, and there was no reason why she should have brought that special bag rather than any other. Miss Perry, you remember, said she was hesitating up to the last moment whether to take it. It was only a small point, and a jury might easily have accepted the view that it was a kind of unconscious guess that merely happened to be right. All the same, I saw it struck Owen, too, as one of those little inconsistencies that often mean a lot. Also it seemed inconsistent with Maddox’s vain character and fondness for showing off that, if his story was true and he was really engaged to her, he should buy so comparatively cheap a ring – and a little inconsistent with her character that she didn’t go with him to choose for herself. Even the shop assistant who served him was a little surprised. But if already the thought of murder was in his mind – if he had already made up his mind that, if he couldn’t have her, no one else should, and certainly not the Leslie Irwin he had always looked down on then the purchase of the ring, and the claim to an already existing engagement, would help a lot to ward off suspicion. And then, again, Owen reported that Maddox seemed nervous and uneasy about his display of challenge cups in his office; and, too, that display of challenge cups in an office suggested a good deal of vanity and self-love – the kind of character that can’t put up with being outdistanced, or with open failure in any way. It struck me it might be useful to find out what there was about a sports cup Maddox didn’t want seen, so I made an excuse to have a look in his room at his firm’s offices, and found one cup had disappeared – if Owen’s reckoning was correct. That seemed still more curious, and I sent off a cable. To-day the reply came that an Englishman named Claude Maddox had won a cup offered in a knife-throwing contest at a town up-country in the Argentine.’

  ‘He threw the knife,’ Penfold exclaimed. ‘It was there, and he knew just how, and he threw it – that explains why we could never find any bloodstains.’

  ‘That’s the theory I should put up,’ Mitchell agreed. ‘I expect Maddox’s nerve was beginning to wear thin – he had tried it a bit too highly, perhaps when he ran that bluff of coming back to where he had done the murder. Anyhow when he saw Owen looking at the challenge cups he couldn’t, help showing uneasiness, and afterwards thought he had better get rid of that one. That meant he had something to hide – a clear invitat
ion to us to find out what.’

  ‘She must have got them both pretty well worked up,’ Ferris said musingly, ‘to make one of them ready to commit forgery for her, and the other to sling a knife at her throat.’

  ‘Beauty of woman,’ Mitchell said slowly, ‘it can make even a wise man mad, and neither of these, I think, were wise.’

  ‘She wouldn’t think much of the ring he bought,’ Ferris observed. ‘Not when she had two hundred pounds in her bag. He may not have meant murder at all, but only to show her the ring to prove he meant business, and then she could come and choose another, as he hinted in the shop. But if she turned up her nose at it when it came out, or laughed at him for being mean, that might have started a quarrel between them, ending in the knife-throw.’

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone will ever know which way it was,’ Mitchell remarked, ‘unless he chooses to tell himself.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Late,’ he said, ‘or early, according to which way you take it, but all the more likely to catch our man in bed. We’ll push along, I think.’

  This time Penfold did not accompany them. Instead Mitchell took with him Ferris and Bobby, and two uniformed men as well, in addition to the chauffeur. It made a full car-load, and, some hundred yards or so from the Maddox residence, Mitchell ordered a halt.

  ‘It’s our ringing him up with that inquiry about his automatic that’s worrying me,’ he explained. ‘It may have made him suspicious, and if he hears a car at this time of night he may take the alarm.’

  They completed their journey, therefore, on foot, and, when they reached the house, Mitchell sent one uniformed man to the rear, and put Bobby and the second uniformed man to watch the side windows.

  ‘Don’t want to take any risk,’ Mitchell observed. ‘He may try to make a bolt for it.’

  These dispositions complete, he and Ferris went to the front door, and knocked and rang, though not loudly, for Mitchell had no wish to attract the attention of neighbours, though in fact one or two windows did go up, and the policeman on duty on that beat, hearing the knocking, thought it his duty to come along and see what was happening. Pausing under the nearest street-lamp, he stood there, opposite the house, waiting for possible developments.

  Almost immediately a light showed in one of the windows to prove they had been heard. Then another light appeared, and Mitchell knocked and rang once more, though again quietly, for he still hoped to avoid attention, and then all at once from behind the house there broke a sudden clamour, a sound of scuffle and loud shouting.

  ‘He’s off,’ Mitchell cried, and he and Ferris raced round to the rear, Bobby and the second uniformed man preceding them at full speed, and the policeman on the beat running from his post under the lamp to follow behind.

  They found the back door wide open, and before it the first uniformed man, sprawling at full length, his helmet yards away, his truncheon half drawn, his head bleeding from a badly contused wound, he himself dazed and half unconscious. But he managed to gasp out something about ‘a barefooted man in pyjamas,’ and ‘landed me one before I knew it,’ and, when he heard that, Mitchell lost no time, but dashed into the house, where the inmates were now running about in a state of considerable agitation and alarm.

  ‘I’m a police officer. Where’s the phone?’ he demanded, and, finding it, issued at once quick far-reaching orders so that almost simultaneously, so ready was the organization, so smoothly did it work, the majority of the London police were keenly on the look-out for ‘a bare-footed man in pyjamas.’

  ‘Won’t be long before we have him,’ Mitchell thought, with satisfaction. ‘That is, unless he means to do himself in, and he’ll hardly have time even for that.’

  Satisfied that the net had been spread so widely and so swiftly that a quarry so well-marked as ‘a barefooted man in pyjamas ’ could not escape it for long, Mitchell went back to where the injured constable was receiving first aid from both his colleagues – the man on the beat, that is, and the other uniformed man, both of them anxious to secure a little practice in first aid, and bath of them getting very much in each other’s way.

  ‘Came at me like hell and laid me out and gone before I knew nothing hadn’t happened,’ confessed the slowly recovering constable, an elderly man of the old school. ‘I saw a window go up, and I watched out, ready for him if he jumped, and then bang went the door and out he comes all in one jump, so he was on me before I knew it. In pyjamas he was, and something the light shone on like a pistol, or a knife, in one hand and a spanner in the other – a whopping big one – and bare feet. Just one jump he made, and on me like – like hell,’ said the constable, whose stock of metaphors seemed limited, ‘and laid me out before I knew it, and I don’t believe Jack Petersen himself or no one wouldn’t have caught it just the same, that quick he was, and one over the head before you knew it, and down away through the garden there like – like’ – he searched his mind for a moment, and finding the mot juste at last – ‘like hell,’ he declared.

  ‘Well,’ commented Ferris, ‘he won’t get far, that’s one thing – not like that; not in bare feet and pyjamas. Even if no alarm had gone out, the first man who saw him would want to know what was up.’

  On that, indeed, they were all agreed, as on the obvious, for what chance had, in fact, a man at that time of night, dressed only in pyjamas, without shoes even, of avoiding arrest or notice for long?

  Mitchell went back into the house, where there now had to be carried through the always painful and distressing task of explaining to incredulous, bewildered women that one of their menfolk was suspected of crime. Though Mrs Garvie, Claude’s sister, did not show much surprise.

  ‘It’s that girl – that Carrie Mears,’ she said at once. ‘It’s been all her doing from the very start.’

  ‘Do you know anything about that?’ Mitchell asked her. ‘You understand, we are police officers, inquiring into her murder.’

  ‘All I know is she drove him mad, playing with him and leading him on and not meaning it,’ Mrs Garvie retorted. ‘It’s all been through her from the very start.’

  It was quite evident she thought she was defending her brother, and did not in the least realize that she was implicating him more deeply by showing adequate motive. Mitchell said:

  ‘Any statement you can make, any information you can give us, we shall be very glad to have. If the case proceeds to trial, you will probably be asked to give evidence. May I see Mr Maddox’s room now?’

  This suggestion of taking a statement from her, and of her having to give evidence at a possible trial, silenced Mrs Garvie very effectually, as, indeed, Mitchell had expected it would. In silence she led the way upstairs to the room her brother had occupied. The disarranged bed, the clothing lying about the floor, the general disarray – all showed in what haste and panic he had fled. In one corner of the room stood a writing-table, whereof the drawers were locked. One drawer looked as if an attempt had been made to force it open, and when Mitchell asked for the keys to the drawers none could be found. A maid, who now had appeared, wide-eyed and excited, obviously quite enjoying this dramatic interlude in the dailiness of daily life, volunteered the information that, hearing a noise at the door and concluding immediately that the house must be on fire, she had rushed down from her own room on the floor above, and had opened Mr Claude’s door to give him the alarm. But he was already awake and up, she said, and banging at his desk, trying to get it open. When she called to him, he turned round and rushed past her.

  ‘Did you say anything to him?’ Mitchell asked.

  ‘I told him it was the police,’ she answered, ‘and the house must be on fire. When I was woke with the noise, I looked out of the window, and I saw a policeman, quite plain, under the lamp.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’ Mitchell asked, resignedly accepting the bad luck that had brought the man on the beat on the scene at the very moment best calculated to spoil the plan of operation.

  ‘No,’ she answered. ‘He just rushed past and downstairs like mad – nearly k
nocked me over, he did.’

  ‘What was he using to try to open the drawer?’

  ‘He was banging away at it,’ she answered, ‘frantic-like, if you know what I mean, 1 think it was the ruler he had, and he threw it down and made a sort of run at me when he saw me, and then he seemed to see his keys on the table behind a book. He stopped, grabbed them quick-like, and I said the police was here and was it fire, and he never answered, but he looked awful, like a dead man come alive, but the grave still with him, and he rushed away, nearly knocking me down, so you would have thought he didn’t dare stop another minute.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he did,’ Mitchell observed grimly. ‘Not after you told him police were here.’

  At a sign from him Bobby picked up the indicated ruler from the floor. It showed plain signs of having just been put to violent use, and it fitted well enough the marks made on the still-locked drawer, though evidently it was far too light a thing to have been of much help in the attempt to break the drawer open.

  ‘Seems,’ remarked Mitchell, ‘he couldn’t put his hand at once on his keys, in his panic and excitement, so he grabbed the first thing he could to try to get the drawer open, and couldn’t manage it. Then, as he was rushing off, he saw the keys, where they had been all the time lying on the table.

  I suppose he didn’t look there because it was the natural place for them. Evidently the keys were what he had in his hand that our man saw the light shining on and took for a pistol or a knife – lucky for him it was keys. And then, somewhere in the house, he picked up the spanner he used in escaping.’