‘In the drawing-room,’ corrected Mrs Creen.
‘You took a cocktail,’ Leon went on, ‘and then you suddenly went out. In other words, somebody had doctored your drink with a knock-out drop. Mrs Creen was not, of course, in the room. When you fell, Margaret Lein examined your book and got the combination words she wanted. She had been abroad with Mrs Creen, so she knew this playful little method of yours of caching your ill-gotten gains.’
True’s face went from livid red to ashy white.
‘The combination word?’ he said huskily. ‘She got the combination word? Oh, my God!’
Without another word he flew from the room and they heard the front door thunder as he slammed it.
Leon went at greater leisure, but he arrived, in Curzon Street in time for supper.
‘I’m not going to investigate any further,’ he said, ‘but it’s any odds that those safes in Paris and Rome are empty by now, and that a very clever girl, who is certainly the daughter of one of Mr True’s deluded clients, is now in a position to help her parents.’
‘How do you know that she has parents?’ asked Manfred.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Leon frankly. ‘But I am certain she had a father – I wired to General Fole last week to discover if his clever daughter was staying with him, and he wired back that ‘Margaret had been abroad finishing her education for the past year’. And I suppose that acting as maid to the partner of a share crook is an education.
The Man Who Sang in Church
To Leon Gonsalez went most of the cases of blackmail which came the way of the Three Just Men.
And yet, from the views he had so consistently expressed, he was the last man in the world to whom such problems should have gone, for in that famous article of his entitled ‘Justification’, which put up the sales of a quarterly magazine by some thousand per cent, he offered the following opinion:
‘ . . . as to blackmail, I see no adequate punishment but death in the case of habitual offenders. You cannot parley with the type of criminal who specialises in this loathsome form of livelihood. Obviously there can be no side of him to which appeal can be made: no system of reformation can affect him. He is dehumanised, and may be classified with the secret poisoner, the drug pusher and . . . ’ [he mentioned a trade as degrading]
Leon found less drastic means of dealing with these pests; yet we may suppose that the more violent means which distinguished the case of Miss Brown and the man who sang in church had his heartiest approval.
There are so many types of beauty that even Leon Gonsalez, who had a passion for classification, gave up at the eighteenth sub-division of the thirty-third category of brunettes. By which time he had filled two large quarto notebooks.
If he had not wearied of his task before he met Miss Brown, he would assuredly have recognized its hopelessness, for she fell into no category, nor had he her peculiar attractions catalogued in any of his sub-sections. She was dark and slim and elegant. Leon hated the word, but he was compelled to admit this characteristic. The impression she left was one of delicate fragrance. Leon called her the Lavender Girl. She called herself Brown, which was obviously not her name; also, in the matter of simulations, she wore a closely-fitting hat which came down over her eyes and would make subsequent identification extremely difficult.
She timed her visit for the half-light of dusk – the cigarette hour that follows a good dinner, when men are inclined rather to think than to talk, and to doze than either.
Others had come at this hour to the little house in Curzon Street, where the silver triangle on the door marked the habitation of the Three Just Men, and when the bell rang George Manfred looked up at the clock.
‘See who it is, Raymond: and before you go, I will tell you. It is a young lady in black, rather graceful of carriage, very nervous and in bad trouble.’
Leon grinned as Poiccart rose heavily from his chair and went out.
‘Clairvoyance rather than deduction,’ he said, ‘and observation rather than either: from where you sit you can see the street. Why mystify our dear friend?’
George Manfred sent a ring of smoke to the ceiling. ‘He is not mystified,’ he said lazily. ‘He has seen her also. If you hadn’t been so absorbed in your newspaper you would have seen her, too. She has passed up and down the street three times on the other side. And on each occasion she has glanced toward this door. She is rather typical, and I have been wondering exactly what variety of blackmail has been practised on her.’
Here Raymond Poiccart came back.
‘She wishes to see one of you,’ he said. ‘Her name is Miss Brown – but she doesn’t look like a Miss Brown!’
Manfred nodded to Leon. ‘It had better be you,’ he said.
Gonsalez went to the little front drawing-room, and found the girl standing with her back to the window, her face in shadow. ‘I would rather you didn’t put on the light, please,’ she said, in a calm, steady voice. ‘I don’t want to be recognized if you meet me again.’
Leon smiled.
‘I had no intention of touching the switch,’ he said. ‘You see, Miss – ’ He waited expectantly.
‘Brown,’ she replied, so definitely that he would have known she desired anonymity even if she had not made her request in regard to the light. ‘I told your friend my name.’
‘You see, Miss Brown,’ he went on, ‘we have quite a number of callers who are particularly anxious not to be recognized when we meet them again. Will you sit down? I know that you have not much time, and that you are anxious to catch a train out of town.’
She was puzzled.
‘How did you know that?’ she asked.
Leon made one of his superb gestures.
‘Otherwise you would have waited until it was quite dark before you made your appointment. You have, in point of fact, left it just as late as you could.’
She pulled a chair to the table and sat down slowly, turning her back to the window.
‘Of course that is so,’ she nodded. ‘Yes, I have to leave in time, and I have cut it fine. Are you Mr Manfred?’
‘Gonsalez,’ he corrected her.
‘I want your advice,’ she said.
She spoke in an even, unemotional voice, her hands lightly clasped before her on the table. Even in the dark, and unfavourably placed as she was for observation, he could see that she was beautiful. He guessed from the maturity of her voice that she was in the region of twenty-four.
‘I am being blackmailed. I suppose you will tell me I should go to the police, but I am afraid the police would be of no assistance, even if I were willing to risk an appearance in Court, which I am not. My father – ’ she hesitated – ‘is a Government official. It would break his heart if he knew. What a fool I’ve been!’
‘Letters?’ asked Leon, sympathetically.
‘Letters and other things,’ she said. ‘About six years ago I was a medical student at St John’s Hospital. I didn’t take my final exam for reasons which you will understand. My surgical knowledge has not been of very much use to me, except . . . well, I once saved a man’s life, though I doubt if it was worth saving. He seems to think it was, but that has nothing to do with the case. When I was at St John’s I got to know a fellow-student, a man whose name will not interest you and, as girls of my age sometimes do, I fell desperately in love with him. I didn’t know that he was married, although he told me this before our friendship reached a climax.
‘For all that followed I was to blame. There were the usual letters – ’
‘And these are the basis of the blackmail?’ asked Leon.
She nodded. ‘I was worried ill about the . . . affair. I gave up my work and returned home; but that doesn’t interest you, either.’
‘Who is blackmailing you?’ asked Leon.
She hesitated. ‘The man. It’s horrible isn’t it? B
ut he has gone down and down. I have money of my own – my mother left me two thousand pounds a year – and of course I’ve paid.’
‘When did you see this man last?’
She was thinking of something else, and she did not answer him. As he repeated the question, she looked up quickly.
‘Last Christmas Day – only for a moment. He wasn’t staying with us – I mean it was at the end of . . . ’
She had become suddenly panic-stricken, confused, and was almost breathless as she went on: ‘I saw him by accident. Of course he didn’t see me, but it was a great shock . . . It was his voice. He always had a wonderful tenor voice.’
‘He was singing?’ suggested Leon, when she paused, as he guessed, in an effort to recover her self-possession.
‘Yes, in church,’ she said desperately. ‘That is where I saw him.’
She went on speaking with great rapidity, as though she were anxious not only to dismiss from her mind that chance encounter, but to make Leon also forget.
‘It was two months after this that he wrote to me – he wrote to our old address in London. He said he was in desperate need of money, and wanted five hundred pounds. I’d already given him more than one thousand pounds, but I was sane enough to write and tell him I intended to do no more. It was then that he horrified me by sending a photograph of the letter – one of the letters – I had sent him. Mr Gonsalez, I have met another man, and . . . well, John had read the news of my engagement.’
‘Your fiancé knows nothing about this earlier affair?’
She shook her head.
‘No, nothing, and he mustn’t know. Otherwise everything would be simple. Do you imagine I would allow myself to be blackmailed any further but for that?’
Leon took a slip of paper from one pocket and a pencil from another.
‘Will you tell me the name of this man? John – ?’
‘John Letheritt, 27, Lion Row, Whitechurch Street. It’s a little room that he has rented, as an office, and a sleeping-place. I’ve already had inquiries made.’
Leon waited.
‘What is the crisis – why have you come now?’ he asked.
She took from her bag a letter, and he noted that it was in a clean envelope; evidently she had no intention that her real name and address should be known.
He read it, and found it a typical communication. The letter demanded £3,000 by the third of the month, failing which the writer intended putting ‘papers’ in ‘certain hands’. There was just that little touch of melodrama which for some curious reason the average blackmailer adopts in his communiqués.
‘I’ll see what I can do – how am I to get in touch with you?’ asked Leon. ‘I presume that you don’t wish that either your real name or your address should be known even to me.’
She did not answer until she had taken from her bag a number of banknotes, which she laid on the table.
Leon smiled. ‘I think we’ll discuss the question of payment when we have succeeded. What is it you want me to do?’
‘I want you to get the letters and, if it is possible, I want you so to frighten this man that he won’t trouble me again. As to the money, I shall feel so much happier if you will let me pay you now!’
‘It is against the rules of the firm!’ said Leon cheerfully.
She gave him a street and a number which he guessed was an accommodation address.
‘Please don’t see me to the door,’ she said, with a half-glance at the watch on her wrist.
He waited till the door closed behind her, and then went upstairs to his companions.
‘I know so much about this lady that I could write a monograph on the subject,’ he said.
‘Tell us a little,’ suggested Manfred. But Leon shook his head.
That evening he called at Whitechurch Street. Lion Row was a tiny, miserable thoroughfare, more like an alley than anything, and hardly deserved its grand designation. In one of those ancient houses which must have seen the decline of Alsatia, at the top of three rickety flights of stairs, he found a door, on which had been recently painted: ‘J. LETHERITT, EXPORTER’.
His knock produced no response.
He knocked again more heavily, and heard the creaking of a bed, and a harsh voice on the other side asking who was there. It took some time before he could persuade the man to open the door, and then Leon found himself in a very long, narrow room, lighted by a shadeless electric table-lamp. The furniture consisted of a bed, an old washstand and a dingy desk piled high with unopened circulars.
He guessed the man who confronted him, dressed in a soiled shirt and trousers, to be somewhere in the region of thirty-five; he certainly looked older. His face was unshaven and there was in the room an acrid stink of opium.
‘What do you want?’ growled John Letheritt, glaring suspiciously at the visitor.
With one glance Leon had taken in the man – a weakling, he guessed – one who had found and would always take the easiest way. The little pipe on the table by the bed was a direction post not to be mistaken.
Before he could answer, Letheritt went on: ‘If you have come for letters you won’t find them here, my friend.’ He shook a trembling hand in Leon’s face. ‘You can go back to dear Gwenda and tell her that you are no more successful than the last gentleman she sent!’
‘A blackmailer, eh? You are the dirtiest little blackmailer I ever met,’ mused Leon. ‘I suppose you know the young lady intends to prosecute you?’
‘Let her prosecute. Let her get a warrant and have me pinched! It won’t be the first time I’ve been inside! Maybe she can get a search warrant, then she’ll be able to have her letters read in Court. I’m saving you a lot of trouble. I’ll save Gwenda trouble, too! Engaged, eh? You’re not the prospective bridegroom?’ he sneered.
‘If I were, I should be wringing your neck,’ said Leon calmly. ‘If you are a wise man – ’
‘I’m not wise,’ snarled the other. ‘Do you think I’d be living in this pigsty if I were? Me . . . a man with a medical degree?’
Then, with a sudden rage, he pushed his visitor towards the door.
‘Get out and stay out!’
Leon was so surprised by this onslaught that he was listening to the door being locked and bolted against him before he had realized what had happened.
From the man’s manner, he was certain that the letters were in that room – there were a dozen places where they might be hidden: he could have overcome the degenerate with the greatest ease, bound him to the bed and searched the room, but in these days the Three Just Men were very law-abiding people.
Instead he came back to his friends late that night with the story of his partial failure.
‘If he left the house occasionally, it would be easy – but he never goes out. I even think that Raymond and I could, without the slightest trouble, make a very thorough search of the place. Letheritt has a bottle of milk left every morning, and it shouldn’t be difficult to put him to sleep if we reached the house a little after the milkman.’
Manfred shook his head.
‘You’ll have to find another way; it’s hardly worth while antagonizing the police,’ he said.
‘Which is putting it mildly,’ murmured Poiccart. ‘Who’s the lady?’
Leon repeated almost word for word the conversation he had had with Miss Brown.
‘There are certain remarkable facts in her statement, and I am pretty sure they were facts, and that she was not trying to deceive me,’ he said. ‘Curious item Number One is that the lady heard this man singing in church last Christmas Day. Is Mr Letheritt the kind of person one would expect to hear exercising his vocal organs on Christmas carols? My brief acquaintance with him leads me to suppose that he isn’t. Curious item Number Two was the words: “He wasn’t staying with us”, or something of that sort; and he was “nearing th
e end” – of what? Those three items are really remarkable!’
‘Not particularly remarkable to me,’ growled Poiccart. ‘He was obviously a member of a house-party somewhere, and she didn’t know he was staying in the neighbourhood, until she saw him in church. It was near the end of his visit.’
Leon shook his head.
‘Letheritt has been falling for years. He hasn’t reached his present state since Christmas; therefore he must have been as bad – or nearly as bad – nine months ago. I really have taken a violent dislike to him, and I must get those letters.’
Manfred looked at him thoughtfully.
‘They would hardly be at his bankers, because he wouldn’t have a banker; or at his lawyers, because I should imagine that he is the kind of person whose acquaintance with law begins and ends in the Criminal Courts. I think you are right, Leon; the papers are in his room.’
Leon lost no time. Early the next morning he was in Whitechurch Street, and watched the milkman ascend to the garret where Letheritt had his foul habitation. He waited till the milkman had come out and disappeared but, sharp as he was, he was hardly quick enough. By the time he had reached the top floor, the milk had been taken in, and the little phial of colourless fluid which might have acted as a preservative to the milk was unused.
The next morning he tried again, and again he failed.
On the fourth night, between the hours of one and two, he managed to gain an entry into the house, and crept noiselessly up the stairs. The door was locked from the inside, but he could reach the end of the key with a pair of narrow pliers he carried.
There was no sound from within, when he snapped back the lock and turned the handle softly. He had forgotten the bolts.
The next day he came again, and surveyed the house from the outside. It was possible to reach the window of the room, but he would need a very long ladder, and after a brief consultation with Manfred, he decided against the method.
Manfred made a suggestion.
‘Why not send him a wire, asking him to meet your Miss Brown at Liverpool Street Station? You know her Christian name?’
The Complete Four Just Men Page 106
