The Allingham Case-Book

by Margery Allingham

  We entered the brightly lit Mayfair shop, hot and dank and smelling like a funeral, and a young woman came forward to serve us.

  Just for an instant I felt a sudden qualm. The likeness was in her movement, the eagerness of her walk, the brightness in her eyes but at once I saw that I was wrong and I blamed the Superintendent for making a normally nerveless man fanciful. This girl had black hair, the blackest I have ever seen in a European, her face was pallid as wax and she kept her eyes downcast. Her clothes were nondescript and her voice was no more than a whisper. Campion spent so much time buying a few violets from her that I suspected him of not knowing his own mind but we came out at last and stood on the damp pavement together, near a street lamp.

  He gave me that gentle smile of his which reminds one that he has not the drive to make a success of his odious profession and said softly: “Of course she has a face anyone could forget—even yourself, Sir Theo.”

  “Who?” said I. “The shopgirl? No, my boy, I shall know her again if ever I see her—which I doubt.”

  He sighed at that. “So,” he said. “In that case I don’t suppose you ever will.” Then, with a swiftness which surprised me, he pulled out a photograph and showed it to me in the light. It was one of these fuzzy modern prints showing a woman in Service uniform. She was the same type as Mrs. Parish or the girl in the flower-shop for that matter but the photograph was bad and did not flatter her. She was babyish, round—no animation.

  I guessed his plan and smiled. “I remember her when she was like that at Brabbington,” I said. “It’s no good your worrying, Campion. I never do. I never forget a face.”

  I heard his laugh of resignation and we prepared to part. And then he shook me. “Yes,” he said gently. “A great natural gift, Sir Theo—but it’s not your only one, you know.”

  The broad nib came to rest and the writer looked up. He was cramped and cold but there was determination in his small judicial mouth. He turned a page once more.

  ‘I have made this record,’ he wrote, ‘because it was an axiom of my predecessor’s that, when confronted by a grave and knotty problem, a man should sit down alone and transcribe his reflections in longhand, not for the edification of posterity, but for the clarification of his own mind.

  For some weeks I have been considering whom I should send to fill a recent vacancy, which has occurred with tragic suddenness, in the service of this firm in South America. The needed man should be resourceful, quick to action, as cunning as his enemies and not overburdened with conventional scruples. He should also understand men. If he succeeds he may become a minor dictator. If he does not succeed he may die.

  At this moment our Overseas Manager is waiting near his telephone; I have promised to give him my decision tonight.

  Shall I send Nicholas Parish?’

  Sir Theo closed the exercise book. For a moment or two he sat, chin on hand; half aware that the glow from the coal fire opposite was turning his black coat to crimson and his linen to ermine.

  At length he rose, tore the book to quarters and threw them on the coals. As soon as the last charred flake flew upward he smiled briefly, returned to the desk and picked up the telephone.

  Evidence in Camera

  There are people who might consider Chippy Wager unethical and others who go a great deal further. At the time I am telling you about he was on the Cormorant, which is not that paper’s real name, but why make enemies if you don’t have to? He was, and is, of course, a photographer; one of those boys who shoot through a cop’s legs and jump on the boot of the limousine so that you can see the Society bride in tears as she takes her first cold look at the man she’s got. They pay those lads plenty, but Chippy had uses for money, mainly liquid, and he made another income on the side by taking photographs privately of practically everything from the Mayor and Corporation to the local beauty queen.

  We went down to St Piers for the fifth murder. I was on the old Post at the time, and when I say ‘we’ went, I mean among others. The Southern Railway put on one excursion train for the Press and another for the police when the body of Mrs. Lily Clark was found.

  The story was simple and, if you like that sort of thing, good. Briefly, someone was killing off middle-aged women redheads in seaside towns. There had been a summer of it. In May Mrs. Wild was killed in Whichborne, in June Mrs. Garrard at Turnhill Bay, and by July the murderer had got round to Southwharf and had attended to a Mrs. Jelf. In August he chose a fashionable resort just outside the polo ground at Prinny’s Plage, and in September there was this latest affair at St Piers.

  In all five instances the details were astonishingly similar. Each victim was respectable, homely in appearance, in the habit of letting rooms to visitors, and either naturally or artificially auburn-haired. Each woman was found strangled in a secluded place in the open air, with her untouched handbag beside her. Each woman lost some trifling ornament, such as a cheap ear-ring, a gold clasp from a chain bracelet, a locket containing edelweiss, and once, in Mrs. Hollis’s case, a small silver button with a regimental crest upon it.

  Not once was any trace of the murderer seen either before or after the crime, and by the time the St Piers news came through, the Press were on the verge of being bored. There was still plenty to write about, but nothing new. The Cormorant and its sisters, who had worked themselves up to screaming hysterics in July, were showing signs of exhaustion, and even the heavies, like ourselves and the World, were falling back on such items as the slayer’s preference for the new moon.

  From my own purely personal point of view the thing was becoming a nightmare, and the principal reason for that was Chippy Wager. I had first met him when I travelled down to Whichborne in May. On that occasion there were seventeen of us in a carriage which might have held ten without active inconvenience, and although he was the last to arrive he was in a corner seat with only myself atop of him before the journey was half-way over. I do not know how he did this. My impression is that there was a jolt in a tunnel and that when we came out into the light there he was, slung with cameras, sitting just underneath me.

  Chippy is a thin rag of a man with a surprisingly large square head in which, somewhere low down in front, has been inserted the bright predatory face of an evil child. Whenever I think of him, I receive a mental picture of white lashes on red lids and a row of widely-spaced uneven teeth bared in a ‘Have you got anything I want?’ smile.

  His is hardly one of the dressy professions but I have seen his confréres blench when confronted by some of his ensembles. Peterson, my opposite number on the World, insists that the man finds his clothes lying about in hotel bedrooms. When I first saw him he was certainly wearing jodphurs, carefully tailored for a larger leg, a green cardigan buttoning on the wrong side, and a new cheap sports coat adorned by a single gigantic beer-stain. Every pocket, one frankly marsupial, bulged strangely rather than dangerously and he carried as much gear as a paratrooper.

  I remember my conversation with him on that occasion. I had pulled back my sleeve to glance at the time and he prodded me in the back.

  “That’s a good watch,” he said. “Ever had it photographed?”

  I said that, strange as it might seem to him, such a notion had never entered my head.

  “It’s wise,” he assured me seriously. “In case you ever had it pinched, see? Gives the busies something to go on. I’ll do it for you when we get in. Won’t cost you more than half a bar. You’re married, of course. Got any kids?”

  I told him no, and he seemed hurt.

  “Kids make good pictures,” he explained. “Kids and dogs. Got a dog?”

  Again I had to disappoint him.

  “Pity,” he said. “What a pal, eh? What a pal. You might pick up one down here. There’s a chap only five miles out who breeds Irish wolfhounds. I’ll put you on to him and we’ll take a spool. Surprise the wife, eh?”

  After that the man became an incubus, haunting me as I drank furtively in corners or hunted our murderer with one eye behind me, so to speak
, lest I myself should be waylaid. I could, I suppose, have got rid of him with brutality and the fishy eye, but I could not bring myself to do it. He was so fearful, so unmitigatedly awful that he fascinated me; and then, of course, he was so infuriatingly useful. There was a rumour that he was lucky, but that explanation did him less than justice. He was indefatigable, and his curious contacts and side jobs sometimes provided him with most useful breaks, as, for instance, when he nipped down to Whichborne station to oblige a man who wanted a shot of his greyhound and got instead a very fine one of the Yard’s Chief Inspector Tizer getting off the train at a time when no one was sure if the local police had appealed to the Yard and, if so, who was going to be sent.

  By the time the murderer had got round to St Piers, Chippy was most anxious that the homicidal nut should be apprehended and the case finished. His reason was personal and typical. I happened to know about it because he had confided it to me one night in a hostelry at Prinny’s Plage. I can see him now, pointing to the brewers’ almanac which hung on the varnished matchboarding of the bar wall.

  “Look, chum,” he said, his forefinger tracing out the dates, “next new moon is September sixteen, isn’t it? Don’t think I’m complaining about that. It’ll still be summer then and the seaside suits me. But what about the month after? New moon, October fourteen. I don’t want anything awkward to happen then, do I?”

  I made a point of never giving him encouragement and I said nothing, knowing perfectly well I should not silence him.

  “October fourteen.” He was indignant. “The Distillers Livery Company Conference begins on the fourteenth. Fancy missing that. What a tragedy, eh? What a tragedy!”

  That was in August. We were all expecting the September murder, though naturally there was no way of telling where it was going to crop up. When the news broke, it was very nearly anticlimax. As Petersen said, there would have been almost more news value in the story if it hadn’t occurred. No one was pleased. The livelier dailies had planted men at most of the larger southern watering-places, but no one had thought of St Piers, cheap and respectable, out on the mudflats of the estuary. We had a local correspondent there, as we had in every town in the country. The last thing he had sent us, according to the book, was an account of a stork which had been seen flying inland one evening in June the previous year. According to his story, the phenomenon had caused wild excitement in the town. It appeared to be that sort of place.

  I managed to avoid Chippy going down, but I saw his back disappearing into the railway Tavern as I picked up a taxi at the station. I was glad of the respite, for the news-flash which had come in was so familiar in its wording—‘Body of well-matured woman found strangled. Lonely woodland. Auburn-haired. Chief Inspector Tizer hurrying to scene’—that I felt a wave of pure nausea at the prospect of having to deal with him as well.

  St Piers was much as I had feared. At first it is only the light and the faint smell of iodine which warns the newcomer that the coast is at hand, but towards the front, where the architecture veers towards Victorian Moorish, a faded ocean licks a dun-coloured strand and the shops sell coloured buckets and sticks of sweet rock and crested china to take home.

  I found our local correspondent, a tobacconist called Cuffley, in his shop on the parade. He was waiting for me on the step, every hair in his moustache electrified with excitement. He had leapt to the job, had been on the spot soon after the body had been discovered, and had even written a short piece which began, as I remember, ‘Mad Killer Visits St Piers At Last. A baleful sun rose early this morning over the municipally maintained woodland behind the Kursaal and must have shone down unheeding for quite a space on the ghastly blue contorted lips of a respected local resident…’

  However, he had got the victim’s name and address for me and had written it down in block caps, on the back of one of his trade cards: MRS. LILY CLARK, KNOLE, SEAVIEW AVENUE. It was the same sort of name and the same sort of address as all the others in the long weary business, and when he told me with delight that he had recognized a relation of the dead woman among his customers, and had gone to the length of having her waiting for me in the little room behind the shop, I knew before I saw her exactly the kind of gal I was going to find. The sameness of all five cases was slightly unnerving. I recognized at once both her horror and the dreadful secret enjoyment she was finding in it. I had seen it often that summer.

  Her story, too, was a fifth variation of a tale I had heard four times already. Like her predecessors, Mrs. Clark had been a widow. She had not exactly dyed her hair but she had touched it up. She had not taken in lodgers in the ordinary way, being much too refined. But, yes, on occasions she had obliged. The idea of her going for a walk with a man she did not know! Well, if the situation had not been so tragic the relation would have had to laugh, she would, really.

  I asked the question I had grown used to asking. “Was she a nice woman? Did you like her?”

  I was prepared for the girl’s hesitation and the faint uneasiness, the anxiety to speak well of the dead. I remembered comments on the other women. “She had a temper.” “You would not call her exactly generous.” “She liked her own way.” “She could be very nice when she wanted to.”

  This time Mr. Cuffley’s customer, in speaking of Mrs. Clark, said something which seemed to me to sum up them all.

  “Oh, she was all for herself,” she said grimly and shut her mouth like a vice.

  At Sub-Divisional Police Headquarters there was no information of a startling character. Mrs. Clark had met her death at some time before midnight and in the process she had not been robbed. fifteen pounds in treasury notes had been found in the mock-crocodile handbag which still hung from her arm. The sergeant in charge spoke of the negligence of the criminal in this respect with an amazement which bordered upon indignation. The only blessed thing she had lost, he said regretfully, was a silver tassel which had hung from the old-fashioned silver brooch she wore in her lapel, and, of course, her life.

  As in all the earlier crimes, there was absolutely no suspect. There were no visitors staying at Knole, Seaview Avenue, and so far no one had come forward to report having seen the woman out with a stranger. I sent my story off and took a bus to the Kursaal. Half the town appeared to have the same idea, and I joined a stream of consciously casual strollers advancing purposefully up a threadbare path between ragged ill-used trees. The body had been found in a dusty glade where cartons and little scraps of paper grew instead of anemones. The spot needed no signpost. The police had got their screens up and I could see Inspector Tizer’s hunched shoulders appearing above one of them.

  The sightseers stood around at a police-prescribed distance, and here again nothing was new. In the last few months reams had been written about the avid, open-mouthed defectives who had come to stare at the last couch of each of the victims, and here as far as I could see they all were once more. I felt certain I had seen the dreary man with the fascinated blue eyes and the watch-chain full of darts’ medals at every road accident, case of illness in the street, or mere surface reconstruction at which I had had the misfortune to be present. The adolescent girl with the weeping baby brother was familiar, too, and as for the plump, middle-aged man with the broad smile, I was sure I had seen him, or someone like him, grinning at the scene of every catastrophe in my experience.

  I had a word with Tizer, who was not pleased to see me and had nothing to tell me. He is never sanguine and by this time his gloom was painful. I came away feeling as nearly as sorry for him as I was for myself.

  The Press was there in force and I walked down the hill with Petersen. We came on Chippy at the turning where the path divides. He was busy, as usual, and he appeared to be taking a photograph of a holiday trio, two plump blondes in tight slacks and brassieres, with a flushed lout wriggling between them. There could be only one explanation of the performance and I was gratified if surprised to see he had the grace not to notice me.

  “Grafters and buskers on fairgrounds call it mug-faking,
I believe,” observed Petersen as we turned into the White Lion. “What does he charge them? Half a dollar? It’s an interesting comment on the price of whisky.” He has an acid little voice.

  For the rest of the week the case dragged on. We had our hopes raised by several false alarms. Tizer thought he had a lead and went scampering to St Leonards with a trail of us behind him, but the chase led nowhere. From our point of view it was all very dull. The weather turned cold, and three of the best hotels ran out of Scotch. I saw Chippy now and again but he did not worry me. He was picking up plenty of work, I gathered, and, if his glazed eyes in the evening were any guide, appeared to find it profitable.

  He had a new friend, I was interested to see. So far I have not mentioned Chippy’s friends. It is one of his major disadvantages that he always seems to discover a local drinking companion who matches, if not exceeds, the man himself in pure unpresentableness. On this occasion he had chummed up with the fat man I had seen grinning at the scene of the crime, or if it was not he it was someone very like him. I had nothing against the man save that if I had seen but the soles of his feet through a grating or the top of his hat from a bus I should have known unerringly that he was a fellow for whom I should never have the slightest possible use. He had crumbs in the creases of his blue serge waistcoat, his voice was hoarse and coarse and negligible, and the broad vacant grin never left his face.

  Chippy went about with him most of the time, and I was grateful for my release. I was agitating the office for my recall on the Saturday and should have left, I think, by Sunday had not I made a sudden startling discovery. Chippy was trying to avoid me, and not only me but every other newspaper man in the town.

  At first I could not bring myself to believe it, but having ceased to hide from him I suddenly found I saw very little of him, and then that Sunday morning we met face to face on the steps of the Grand. In the normal way it would have been I who had become wooden faced and evasive and he who pursued me to insist on the morning snifter, but today he slunk from me, and for the first time in my life I thought I saw him discomposed. I even stood looking after him as he shuffled off, his harness clumping round his shanks; but it was not until I was drinking with Petersen and one or two others some fifteen minutes later that the truth occurred to me.