Except For One Thing

by John Russell Fearn

  Alberti, the head waiter, was standing in his usual position as Richard entered at twelve-thirty the following day.

  “Gooda morning, Meester Harvey! You like for a table, eh? Thees way…I show you…”

  “Just a moment! I’m looking for a lady — a Miss Prescott. You know her…auburn hair…”

  “Ah, Miss Prescott!” Alberti beamed. “Eef you come thees way, Meester Harvey, I fix you good, eh?”

  He led Richard to a table in a far corner, where Joyce Prescott was seated. “There! Everything all right, eh?”

  “Hello, Joyce,” Richard greeted quietly, settling into a chair opposite her.

  “Hello, Ricky.” The girl’s voice sounded listless.

  Alberti hovered. “What ees it to be, Meester Harvey? Ees it to be — ”

  “The usual,” Richard said, glancing up.

  Richard watched Albert vanish behind swing doors. Then he looked back at the girl. “You’ve taken it hard, Joyce, haven’t you?” he asked.

  “After what you said last night, everything sort of — broke up for me.”

  “Perhaps I put it badly,” Richard mused. He noticed that her usually bright face was sombre. The firm, full mouth was dragged down at the corners; the brown eyes had lost their sparkle. He was looking at a youthful, twenty-six year old face with its normally clean-cut features blunted by despair.

  “Since she won’t release you,” she said at last, “that’s the finish of everything for us. Are you afraid to risk a breach of promise suit?”

  “I’d risk fifty of ‘em, though for your sake I’d rather settle it out of court. Trouble is she has letters of mine, and other mementoes. She can use those to wreck my social and professional position — and she’s vicious enough to do so.”

  Richard tightened his lips. He wanted Joyce Prescott more than anything else on earth.

  “I suppose, Ricky, you won’t tell me who she is? Perhaps I could reason with her and explain the position.”

  “I’d as soon let loose a child in the den of a lioness, darling. She’d tear you in pieces!”

  Alberti was back with a tray. In silence he set out cold chicken sandwiches and a bottle of champagne.

  “Thanks, Alberti. Just leave us alone now, please. We’re in the middle of an important conversation.”

  As Alberti went off the girl said: “Why champagne? We’ve nothing to celebrate this time.”

  “To even be with you is a celebration!” Richard unfastened the wire and exploded the cork ceilingwards. “Drink, my darling, and banish dull gloom!”

  Joyce smiled faintly and obeyed with the simplicity of a child.

  Richard caught her hand. “If I deliberately cut this woman out she can make things so unpleasant for me that I’ll be ashamed to give you my name anyway — ”

  “But Ricky, I don’t just want you for your name!”

  “I can’t make you my wife with such an unsavoury business hanging over our heads. You’re a girl with a good background, from a sheltered home. Your father is a philanthropist and you act as his unofficial secretary…The daughter of a retired doctor of philosophy marrying a man whose name has become a local scandal. No, not for me!”

  “You do love me, though, don’t you?” Joyce asked, puzzling.

  “More than anything! If only I had met you two years ago instead of — her! I only met you over a year later, and ever since then I have striven to think of a way to clear the path for us. I’ll never forget how you stood by me when I told you I was secretly engaged to her. I had no right to expect it.”

  “We all make mistakes. And because I love you, I let our bargain be sealed without an engagement ring…But from what you’ve told me, I thought she’d consent to being — bought off.”

  “So did I.” Richard tightened his lips. “But I’d overlooked that I am her only chance of being able to prove to the world that she isn’t male-poison. I’d also overlooked that she isn’t in need of money…Supposing this thing should go through to the bitter end and I have to marry her to keep her quiet? What then? I know how I would feel, always thinking of you and unable to reach you…But what would you do?”

  “I think I would kill myself!”

  There was silence. To Richard the statement had been shattering.

  “You couldn’t!” he protested.

  “Why not?” Joyce asked. “There have never been any men in my life who mattered — until I met you opening the chemistry branch of that orphanage father founded. Then…Don’t you see, Ricky, it’s grown to such proportions that I can’t bear to think of cutting you out of my life! I’d much sooner be dead than live the rest of my life without you.”

  “You’re putting me in a dreadful spot,” Richard muttered.

  “If you really love me you’ll find some way — any way — to get rid of this woman who’s nailing you down. Risk the scandal! You have money, fame as a chemist, influential friends…Can’t you call on some of them to help us make our lives happy? If we’re separated it means dreary years for you chained to this woman whose name I don’t know; and for me…”

  “You’re right, Joyce,” Richard said slowly.

  “Then — you think there might be some way out, after all?”

  “I’m going to try and discover one. I’ll shift heaven and earth to make that come about!”

  *

  Left a considerable fortune by his father — likewise a brilliant chemist whose inventions had accumulated for him a sum running into millions — Richard had come to regard life’s pleasures and disappointments as business deals, summoned or banished at will by his signature on a cheque. So he had always thought since the death of his parents in a car smash six years previously…Now, for the first time, his signature on a cheque was powerless.

  He decided against revealing Valerie’s name to Joyce. He knew what little chance the girl would stand against Valerie.

  He could risk Valerie’s wrath and let her start her scandal — but he didn’t want it that way. It would upset his entire career as a chemist and reflect adversely on the girl he really loved and on the ministrations of her genial, philanthropic father.

  Richard’s one passion in life was chemistry and it flattered him to think that the Government and at times the Home Office, engaged him on matters of complicated research. No, he could not risk shattering all that, even though he had enough money to leave the country and take Joyce with him. But that would mean abandoning old friendships, starting again. The prospect, to a man of fixed habits like Richard, was appalling…

  When he left Joyce he did not return home to finish his latest work. Instead he walked through the frosty autumn afternoon and turned the problem over in his mind. If Joyce kept her word and did commit suicide — !

  “Hell no!” Richard whispered. “Anything but that!”

  He looked up as the full realisation of her threat pervaded him, noticing that he was on Waterloo Bridge. He rested his arms on the parapet, and pondered again.

  He saw Joyce’s slender youthful figure poised beside the stonework, saw her glance quickly round. She clambered quickly on to the parapet and then…He closed his eyes and the sound of splashing water smote him like a blow and sent deadly ripples through every nerve.

  “It might benefit society if Val did it,” he whispered. “But not Joyce…She’s fine and decent.”

  His thoughts seemed to come to a sudden stop. If Val did it! If it were made to look as if Val had done it…Here was an insidious thought…

  With a sigh he resumed walking, back towards the city, in no mood to return to the rigours of laboratory work.

  So he went to the Stag Club, lying just off the Mall, where perhaps he might find seclusion to think things out.

  But as he stepped into the cosy warmth of the clubroom he knew he would not get that opportunity. The three men lounging in the broad overstuffed armchairs by the fire satisfied him on that. He smiled resignedly to himself and went forward towards then, across the soft carpet.

  “Hello, Dick!” one
of them greeted him. “Still kicking around in the stinks department, I suppose?”

  Richard strolled between the seated men and stood for a moment with his back to the fire. The club was otherwise deserted at the moment. Softly lighted, it expanded away in polished tables and heavy armchairs to the dark panelled walls with their armoury and brass plaques. In the distance a waiter glided soundlessly.

  “Crime must be quiet, I take it?” Richard commented at last, looking at the man who had addressed him.

  Chief Inspector Garth of the C.I.D. shrugged heavy shoulders. “My last case finished and I’ve a bit of time to draw breath — as much as I can with my damned indigestion.” He thumped his broad chest.

  “Did I interrupt something?” Richard asked.

  “We were talking about crime!” Garth looked momentarily severe. “As a chemist with a few Yard dabblings to your credit you may be able to contribute something useful…Sit down and let’s hear from you.”

  Richard moved to an armchair near the fire. He watched Garth as he frowned over his thoughts.

  Mortimer Garth was reputedly a brilliant analytical thinker. His face was thin to the point of emaciation with high cheekbones and then sunken hollows that gave the thin, tight lips an illusion of fullness. The fleshiest thing about the face was the jaw, bulging with taut muscle on each side. His face was generous when it smiled, inhuman when it didn’t. His brown wiry hair was becoming scanty at the temples, making Garth look a good deal older than his factual forty-seven.

  “You were saying, Garth, that a murderer’s hardest job is to rid himself of the body…”

  Richard turned his gaze to the fat man on his left. He knew him vaguely — a retired merchant with a morbid penchant for harrowing crime details.

  “So I was,” Garth agreed. “A criminal may think of all kinds of ingenious ways of killing a person, but it’s the body that usually gets him down. It’s impossible to be rid of a corpse so completely that nobody can find it.”

  “That shouldn’t trouble modern criminals much,” commented Colonel Melrose, directly opposite Richard. “I mean — dammit, there are acids for one thing.”

  Garth smiled. “You can’t entirely do it with acids, Colonel. I was on such a case a few years back. The murderer managed to dissolve most of the body but he forgot the gold and platinum in the teeth of his victim. A dental surgeon identified the stuff which had resisted the acid and the murderer was caught.”

  “All of which destroys, I suppose, the possibility of a perfect crime?” asked the retired merchant.

  “There isn’t such a thing,” Garth said. Criminals like Crippen, Mahon, Fox, Ruxton…All the lot of ‘em found the corpse still speaking no matter how carefully they tried to shut it up. Probably Sheward of Norwich was the most thorough. He dismembered his wife into such small pieces and strewed them over so wide an area it took the police thirteen days to prove there had even been a murder, and even then they couldn’t identify the victim. Sheward got away with it for eighteen years until his own conscience finally got him down and he confessed.”

  “One would hardly think such a man would have a conscience,” said the Colonel, brooding.

  “He had, anyway.” Garth mused. “And he was thorough enough to clip the woman’s hair into fine dust and scatter it about the streets of Norwich as he walked. That was clever. Hair is hard to hide. It smells if you burn it, and if you don’t you can never be sure of some strands haven’t blown away somewhere.”

  “Nice cheerful sort of talk for a dull autumn afternoon,” Richard observed languidly, proffering his cigarette case to the Chief Inspector. “And I don’t see what it proves, either. Perfect crimes do exist, and because they’re perfect we never hear of them.”

  “I admit” — Garth lighted his cigarette — “I admit there may be crimes so perfect they’ve never been solved, but in the vast majority of cases over-confidence or else pure idiotic bungling has legged down the killers.”

  For instance?” prompted the merchant.

  “Well, take Crippen.” Garth sat back. “The damned fool was infinitely thorough in cutting up the victim, yet he made the glaring mistake of wrapping the grisly pieces in his own pyjama jackets which had his laundry mark! Then there was Voirbo, the French killer, who threw the remains of a victim down a well from which a famous cafe drew its drinking water. The acidity of the water led to arrest. Then take Kate Webster and Henry Wainwright. They carried their gruesome parcels of remains about London until Wainwright hired a boy — a boy, mind you! — to look after the remains of Harriet Lane while he called a cab. On the other hand, Kate Webster also had a boy to help her. Both boys, with the inquisitiveness normal to their age, were suspicious — and there you are! Then there was Greenacre who carried the head of Hannah Brown in a cardboard box on top of a bus and later threw the box in Regent’s Canal. Unfortunately for him the head jammed the lock gates! There it is! Perfect crime always coming unstuck.”

  “You mean “nearly always”,” Richard murmured from the depths of his chair, “In all the cases you have quoted, Garth, it wasn’t police work that did it. It was chance, circumstance, Providence. It wasn’t sheer deduction.”

  “Admitted,” the Chief Inspector agreed. “We’re not magicians, Dick, after all. Though of course science and police methods have improved so much in these latter days since the war that I’m willing to gamble that in this age of nineteen-forty-nine crime — of the perfect variety — could not exist.”

  “That’s a big gamble,” commented the Colonel.

  Richard stared into vacancy. He was in a world apart. There was a feeling of security about the room, a pleasurable realisation of the fact that Chief Inspector Garth was only human like the rest of people…He had known Mortimer Garth intimately for many years, usually in the line of chemistry business or else at the club here. He had come to look upon him as a machine…

  Yet he could make mistakes! He had said so himself.

  CHAPTER III

  “Well, Dick, what’s your opinion?” Garth asked. “You’re a first class chemist. I don’t have to tell you that chemistry plays a major function in solving crime. Do you think that in these days a murder could be so cleverly committed as to defy solution?”

  Richard threw his cigarette into the fire. “Yes, I think it could. I believe that criminals, like Scotland Yard, have improved their methods. The days of Dr. Crippen have gone. What science has placed before Scotland Yard it has also placed before the criminal. So, the two will keep pace — or so I think. I cannot see why a perfect crime should not exist even today.”

  “That,” said the merchant, “puts a spoke in your wheel, eh, Inspector?”

  Garth smiled. “I have the advantage of knowing the mind of a killer,” he said. “Murderers as a rule possess colossal vanity — egotism. What they think is original the Yard found out about years ago…However” — Garth got to his feet — “I’ve got to be going. I’ve an appointment with Assistant Commissioner Farley at five-thirty. When the perfect crime blows in, gentlemen, I’ll be glad to let you in on it!”

  He turned away, and Richard watched him pass beyond the panelled oak doors. Then his eyes returned to the Colonel and the merchant once more.

  “Damned clever fellow, Inspector Garth,” the Colonel said.

  Richard wasn’t even listening. He had relapsed into introspection again, his eyes on the fire. Garth had mentioned fire. Fire — water — burial — dismemberment — concealment. But all the killers Garth had cited had been limited by the point of advancement to which their period had attained. Today, in 1949, it was different. Science had walked with seven-leagued boots between and especially during the two World Wars. None of the early murderers had been first-class chemists with modern equipment; none of them had had a father with supreme chemistry knowledge such as Richard had had. In fact they had been motivated by only one thing in common — hatred for a particular person, or persons. Just as he hated Valerie Hadfield.

  Abruptly he got to his feet and turned
to face the two elderly men.

  “If you’ll pardon me, gentlemen…I too have an appointment.”

  He took his coat from the attendant in the hall, tipped him, then went out into the darkening cold of the autumn afternoon.

  Buttoning up his collar Richard walked down the street until he reached a telephone box. Inside it he dialled the same number as on the previous evening. It was Joyce Prescott who presently answered him.

  “Something happened, Ricky?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes. Something that is going to make all the difference in the world to you and me. It may mean that I shall be less regular in seeing you than I have been — but promise me you won’t do anything rash on that account.”

  “You mean you can do something about…?”

  “Yes. I mean just that. My only worry now is that you may think I’ve deserted you or something with my being less punctual than usual — ”

  “I understand — completely. I’ll wait for whenever you call again…” Joyce hesitated. “Ricky, you’re not going to do anything rash, are you?”

  Richard laughed. “Bless your heart, no!”

  *

  Richard’s home was in the Belsize Park neighbourhood — a massive detached residence with the grounds thick with plane trees. He liked the privacy they gave to the house, the leafy shield they formed in summer for the modern brick laboratory at the back of the residence.

  Building was Richard’s hobby, and he had built the laboratory himself — a low brick annex with a flat concrete roof and broad ground-glass windows to give both maximum daylight and absolute secrecy.

  For some time now he had been thinking of building a garage at the side of the house, where a driveway led straight up to an empty part of the grounds. An architect friend had drawn up the plans for it long ago, and had obtained Council approval. Only somehow Richard had never got round to it. He used his car — a black Jaguar saloon — very little, and most of the time it lay dust-sheeted in a public garage.

  Tonight, however, as he walked slowly home the idea of a garage had a new appeal for him.