Matthew Damon had not been killed when he was alone, shut up in his study behind barred doors and windows. On the contrary! Only the house was locked up on the inside. Suppose she had some accomplice inside High Chimneys itself?
Georgette makes a spectacular exit, flaunting bag and baggage, at about half-past five. Burbage bars the front door after her. Shortly before the time of the murder, then, this accomplice opens a door or a full-length window, admits Georgette for her masquerade, and locks up again after she has gone.
‘Nonsense!’ said his common sense. ‘What accomplice? Can you really credit this?’
‘No, I cannot,’ replied the same. ‘But all things are possible in the nightmare. And it is just feasible.’
Clive, raging, wished to all gods he could make up his mind about her.
There she walked, in blue gown and short fur jacket, with the smoky wind whooping round her. At times she was coy and shrinking, at other times angry and imperious, at still others fearful and racked by conscience, precisely like all the other women he had ever known. Was Georgette, unlike most women, unduly preoccupied with thoughts and dreams of sensuality? Well, so was his own Kate. And Clive, who was damned if he would be a hypocrite, refused to condemn in Georgette what he found so agreeable in Kate.
Steady!
Georgette walked a little faster. So did Clive.
Berners Street, full of expensive shops and kept women, went by on their left. So did Newman Street, ditto. They were approaching Rathbone Place, with Laurier’s round the corner. Straight ahead, beyond the other side of Tottenham Court Road, lay the odorous slums and thieves’ kitchens which were not supposed to exist.
Georgette had crossed Rathbone Place. A four-wheeler, whisking out of the Place just after she crossed, momentarily obscured Clive’s view of discreet windows in arabesques of frosted glass below the curly gilded letters Laurier.
On the far pavement she did not turn left in the direction of Laurier’s. Instead she pressed on towards the intersection of Tottenham Court Road with Crown Street and St. Giles’s High Street.
Then, unexpectedly, as Clive quickened his step, trouble was upon him.
IX. ENCOUNTER IN OXFORD STREET
“I DON’T KNOW YOU, sir,” said Georgette, suddenly stopping and turning round. “Why are you following me?”
“And yet, Mrs. Damon, I had the honour of making your acquaintance yesterday. It was for the second time, you said.”
“My name is certainly Mrs. Damon. But you are either mistaken or mad. Why are you following me, sir? Do you mean to molest me?”
Her actress’s voice again rose up clearly.
This was the one weapon, Clive thought with an inner curse, that you could never meet.
Wind blew the sparks from a pieman’s fire. A pavement artist, hunched against the wall in the last stretch of Oxford Street, looked up in blear-eyed glee from a coloured-chalk drawing of Napoleon Bonaparte and a couple of herrings.
“Mrs. Damon, let me assure you—!”
“And I assure you, sir, that if you have made a mistake I shall be glad to excuse you. If you continue to molest me, I shall be obliged to call a policeman.”
The word policeman rang out with peculiar effect above all other noises.
Hitherto there had been any number of well-dressed and stately passers-by. Now the pavement, for yards round Georgette and Clive, was cleared of them as though by magic. They did not hurry; they kept their eyes fixed ahead; they simply vanished. But the word acted with equal magic to whistle up others.
That was where Georgette’s expression changed.
Head raised, innocent blue eyes fixed on Clive, beaded reticule clasped against her breast, she had been poised in an air of martyrdom. Now she looked past him.
“No!” Georgette cried. “No!”
“Oh, yes,” said a heavy, pleased voice Clive recognized only too well. “I don’t excuse him.”
A self-confident figure, as tall as Clive but more burly, came padding round the corner of Rathbone Place with a wickedly pleased smile and the step of a tame tiger. Tress’s glossy hat was stuck on the back of his head; his chest swelled under a plum-blue greatcoat with an astrakhan collar.
In his right hand, grey-gloved, Tress gripped a thick walking-stick with a silver head. He looked Clive up and down.
“Well, well,” Tress said agreeably, as though just recognizing him. “So it’s Strickland, is it?”
“Now look here, Tress—!”
“Up to your old tricks, eh?”
“No!” cried Georgette, clasping both hands on the reticule. Something honest, something deeply human and likeable, flashed in her blue eyes.
“Got anything to say for yourself, Strickland?”
“Yes. Keep off. I warn you.”
“Oh, you warn me? Why?”
“Do you want a public scene? Here in the street?”
“You don’t, I’ll be bound.”
“Now look here—”
Tress’s wide-spaced teeth, framed in yellowish Dundreary whiskers with beard-like hair under the chin, appeared in a smile.
“You don’t want a public thrashing, Strickland. But that’s what you deserve. And that’s what you’re going to get.”
With a lightning-like motion Tress shifted his grip on the walking-stick, lifted it, and slashed it down at the other’s face. Clive’s temper blew to pieces. He slipped aside, swinging his weight to drive his left fist into the middle of Tress’s stomach, at the same moment that powerful hands locked his arms at both sides and flung his weight back again.
A roar of delight from spectators almost drowned two other voices.
“Now, then!” said a bearded police-constable at Clive’s left side. “None of that, you!”
“Now, then!” said a bearded police-constable at Clive’s right side. “What’s all this?”
“Was you molesting the lady, sir?”
“No,” said Clive.
“Oh, yes,” said Tress, unruffled and grinning.
“Ask the lady,” shouted Clive.
The lady was not there.
“Was you molesting the lady, sir?”
“Heard her say so, didn’t you?” inquired Tress.
“That’s right,” agreed Police-Constable Number One. “Quiet, you!” he added to Clive. “Station-house, Tom.”
“Make way, there!” interrupted a new voice. “Make way, there!”
Both constables stiffened to salute-position without relaxing their hold on Clive. Into the nightmarish group of spectators, who had begun to whistle and caper, pushed a shortish thick-set man, his face somewhat pock-marked, with an unmistakable air of authority despite his shabby plain clothes.
“Indecently molesting a lady, sir,” Police-Constable Number One announced importantly. “Lady’s fainted, most likely. Anyways, she ain’t here.”
“I heard it, I heard it!” The pock-marked newcomer, after studying Clive for an instant with a bland, shrewd eye, turned to Tress. “Do you give this man in charge, sir?”
“I do,” said Tress, unbuttoning his greatcoat. “Here’s my card.”
“Ah. That’ll do, sir. All right, my lads: St. Giles’s Station-House. Take him along.” There are times when it is just as well not to speak, because the extent of your rage would make you sound foolish. Two noises most affected Clive Strickland then. One was the first note of the clock at St. Giles’s Church, banging out the hour of noon when he should have been elsewhere. The other was Tress’s deep, almost noiseless laugh.
Clive’s shoulders opened and heaved with a sudden wrench that threw Police Constable Number Two off his feet before both officers fastened on him again.
“You’d better be quiet, Strickland,” Tress said maliciously. “You’ve got nothing to say.”
“I’ve got something to do, Tressider, the next time you and I meet.”
Tress, not impressed, turned away.
“Quiet!” snapped the pock-marked man, and swung to the crowd round the prisoner. “That�
�s all,” he said. “Stall your mugs, the lot of you! Hook it!”
Most of these obediently hooked it and faded away. But some few, the more nightmarish from the slums, trailed after the fighting group as Clive was borne across towards St. Giles’s High Street.
“All right, my lad,” the pock-marked man told him loudly. “If you’ve got anything to say, get it off your chest now.”
“As a matter of fact,” panted Clive, making the others stop when he stopped, “I have quite a few things to say. The fact that I did follow Mrs. Damon may make it partly my own fault. But that’s as far as it goes. At this minute I ought to be talking to a man named Whicher about a murder that was committed in Berkshire last night. Why the hell don’t you go the whole hog and arrest me for that too?”
The pock-marked man got in front of him.
Shortish and thick-set, in one of the new-style bowler hats and new-style suits with the short coat, yet shabby and greatcoatless, he had a manner which was not quite that of the gentleman yet far from being that of the lout.
“Let drive all you please, sir,” he urged in an apologetic whisper, “but for God’s sake stop fighting until we get you to the police-station so they won’t know it’s not a real arrest. I am Whicher.”
A dray loaded with beer-barrels went over ruts with a rumble and crash. Clive, still panting, looked down at the other man.
Then the little group, with Clive offering only a token resistance, staggered through an offensively foul street to the station-house in the shadow of the church. Inside the charge-room the policemen dropped their hands; both beards were split with grins.
“Sorry, sir,” said Police-Constable Number Two, setting out a chair by the fire.
“Sorry, sir,” said Police-Constable Number One. “Ex-Inspector Whicher is an old pal of ours. He thought the gent with the Dundreary whiskers was out to make trouble for you, and we’d best handle it like this. Good thing the sergeant’s not here, though.”
“Well, I’ll be so-and-so’d,” observed Clive, and sat down in the chair.
“Ah!” breathed Mr. Whicher, in a more cheerful tone. “That’s all right, then.”
But Jonathan Whicher was far from being cheerful at the back of it.
Always with a reserved and thoughtful air, as though turning over some deep arithmetical calculation in his mind, he regarded Clive with his head on one side.
“I ask your pardon, sir,” he apologized, “for putting you to this inconvenience. You must think I am foolish, like; ay, and more than foolish. But I heard this gentleman,”—and he held up Tress’s card—“shouting your name. My little game might have had a different ending if I could have talked to the lady. I never thought Mrs. Damon would hook it too.”
Clive jumped up from his chair.
“Inspector …” he began.
“Stop!” said Mr. Whicher, holding up his hand. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’d rather you didn’t call me Inspector. Charley Field got into trouble for calling himself that; and he retired from the Force in good order. He wasn’t forced to resign like me.”
“Then what do I call you?”
“Well, sir, that’s as you like. Mr. Dickens, when he wrote some pieces about us in Household Words fifteen years ago, called me Witchem. The swell mob spelled Witchem with a B. I’ll answer to any name that allows I’ve got wits in my head.”
“Anyway!” said Clive, sweeping this aside. “Are you acquainted with Mrs. Matthew Damon?”
“You might say I am. In a way.”
“And you know my name too. So you got the note I left at your office?”
“Yes, I got it.” A grim look crossed the pock-marked face. “Pity I wasn’t there. But I knew Mr. Damon had been shot before I read your note. That’s why I wasn’t there; the electric telegraph sent the news to Scotland Yard this morning, and a friend of mine thought I might be interested.”
“You were interested, I hope?”
“More than interested,” said Jonathan Whicher, removing his bowler hat to show scanty greyish hair. “You mightn’t believe it, sir, but that gentleman was one of the kindest-hearted men I ever knew. I’d hate to think I was partly responsible for his death.”
“You told him something, didn’t you? Three months ago?”
“Yes!” said Mr. Whicher, putting on his hat again.
“And you know which one of his daughters is really the daughter of Harriet Pyke?”
It was only afterwards, long afterwards, that Clive interpreted the strange look on the other man’s face. But the riddle, the doubts and all the weighing of possibilities, had come back with a kind of anguish.
Police-Constable Number One spoke up heartily.
“Well, Mr. Whicher, Tom and I are on duty. Look sharp, Tom! You and this gentleman stay here, Mr. Whicher, until the last of them curious ’uns clear away from the station-house.” He turned to Clive. “No offence taken, sir?”
“No, no, of course not!”
Far from offence being taken, money changed hands. The two constables saluted and marched out with hoarse chuckles. The only other person left with Clive and Whicher was a third policeman, bearded but helmetless, who sat on a kitchen chair near the entrance to the cells, smoking a clay pipe and reading the Morning Post.
“Tell me!” Clive insisted. “You know whether Harriet Pyke’s daughter is Celia or Kate?”
“No, sir, I don’t know,” answered Whicher. “And I’d hardly have to tell Mr. Damon, now would I? He knew it already. But there’s somebody else at High Chimneys who knows it too.”
The air in the station-house, never very clean, had grown choking to Clive’s lungs.
“Inspector … I beg your pardon. I explained in my note, Mr. Whicher, why I’m here today.”
“That’s right, sir. You did.”
“Mr. Damon had an appointment with you for four o’clock this afternoon. At least, I suppose you got his telegram?”
“Again very true. I did.”
“Mr. Damon made me promise, if anything happened to him—”
“Stop!” said Jonathan Whicher. “Did he expect something to happen to him?”
“Yes. He had a revolver, the revolver, in his desk-drawer. According to a witness named Dr. Bland, Mr. Damon bought the weapon a fortnight ago. If he armed himself like that, it doesn’t seem to indicate he suspected a member of his own family.”
Throughout this Mr. Whicher’s gaze, thoughtful and deprecating and fixed, had never left Clive’s face. With one hand he jingled coppers in his pocket; with the other he ticked his thumb against Tress’s visiting-card.
“Mr. Damon made me promise, then,” Clive went on, “that if anything happened to him I was to be here in his place. I want to engage you to find the murderer. And you may name any fee you like.”
“Thank you kindly. I’ll take your fee, sir, and I won’t deny I need it. But finding the murderer may not be as hard a job as it looks.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Because I think I can guess already.”
A little reflection of firelight climbed the wall in the fusty room.
“Oh, not from police-work!” said the pock-marked man, making a face and jingling coins. “Not from brain-work, more’s the pity! It’s a guess from information received by accident only last August.”
“Then who killed him?”
“No!” said Mr. Whicher. He took a turn up and down the room. “If you don’t mind, I’ll keep that to myself for the moment, specially as I may be wrong and specially as I’ve not heard one word except what came over the wires to Scotland Yard. I made one mistake, the tomfool’s mistake of my life, in the Road-Hill House murder in ’60. I arrested Constance Kent before I’d got enough evidence; and it finished me. The King might have backed me up, and stood by me….”
“The King? What king?”
“‘King’ Mayne. Sir Richard Mayne, the Commissioner of Police. He’s a very old man, I grant you. He’s been commissioner since there were two commissioners when the Metropolitan Polic
e was founded in ’29. Howsoever! He didn’t stand by me, and that’s that. The girl was guilty then. It may be, sir, another girl is guilty now.”
“Damn and blast the air in this place,” said Clive, tugging at his collar.
The third police-constable, who was sitting by the entrance to the cells, took the clay pipe out of his mouth and spoke with passion.
“It’s no warse o’ flowers,” he said. “Not in St. Giles’s it ain’t.”
“Sorry,” muttered Clive.
Jonathan Whicher studied him without seeming to do so.
“Howsoever! By your leave, sir, I won’t intrude my troubles when I can see you’ve got ’em about a young lady.”
“You are mistaken, Mr. Whicher. I have no troubles or doubts at all.”
The other drew a deep breath, still ticking his thumb against Tress’s card.
“Then if you’ll just come along with me to my office, sir, I’d like to know what did happen last night. That’s before, with your permission, we go down to High Chimneys and hammer the one person who can tell us the truth. There’s nothing more been happening today, has there?”
“Not at High Chimneys, no. Purely by accident I did follow Mrs. Damon into the Princess’s Theatre a while ago. I saw how a certain set of clothes, the murderer’s clothes, are to be hidden until needed; I heard a reference to a young woman, unnamed, who will be condemned to the treadmill if she’s caught.”
You couldn’t tell what would go unremarked and what might cause an explosion.
Whicher, it is true, never exploded; and he seldom raised his voice above that courteous, insistent, worry-away tone. But, at this reference to a treadmill, he gave so obvious a start that Clive became even more disquieted.
“Now, sir, if you don’t mind,” he suggested, tapping his finger lightly on Clive’s chest, “you might begin this story of yours now, and tell it to me as we walk along. No! Not the part about the Princess’s Theatre. At the beginning and from the beginning, if you will.”
Their departure was hastened by an elderly woman, suffering the horrors from drink in one of the cells, who at this point began to scream. An angry pickpocket, and a thin young mother with a child at her breast (arrested for begging) added complaints to the din.
Scandal at High Chimneys Page 9
