The final admonition was occasioned by a wholly unexpected development. The front door at the other end of the hall was moving furtively. Campion kept his gun turned on Bream.
“Now go over,” he whispered. “I’ll shoot, remember.”
Obediently the crook edged towards the widening door, his arms raised. From his place of vantage on the floor Mr. Campion had an excellent view of the ensuing scene. Over the threshold, stepping gingerly to avoid making a sound, came a red-faced, white-haired stranger who stopped in his tracks, not unnaturally, when confronted by the spread-eagled Bream.
“Beg your pardon,” he ejaculated, his bright eyes widening and his face burning with embarrassment. “Ought not to have come bargin’ in again like this. Very foolish of me.” He cleared his throat noisily. “Tell you what happened. Matter of fact was nearly in Ipswich when it came to me I wanted to clinch the deal. Came back, came up to the door, saw it wasn’t latched and couldn’t resist the impulse to come in like I used to thirty years ago. Good God, man, don’t stand lookin’ at me like that. What have you got your hands up for?”
“Oh, my hat. The colonial,” murmured Mr. Campion wearily. Bream was quick to seize the advantage.
“Look out!” he shouted and leapt behind the bewildered visitor for the open door.
Campion fired, but avoiding the newcomer the shot went wide and splintered the woodwork of the door frame.
“God bless my soul!” The stranger peered into the shadow of the hall and suddenly perceived Campion still sitting on the floor. “Firin’?” he demanded. “You can’t do that here, man. Get up and fight like a Christian. Oh, I see, tied you up, has he? What are you doin’? Burglin’? Put that gun away.”
This matter-of-fact reaction to what must have seemed, to say the least of it, a remarkable situation had a profound effect upon the young man. The newcomer was such a perfect specimen of his type that to doubt his integrity seemed comparable with the suspicion that the Nelson monument was built of plaster.
“I say, is this really your old home?” he heard himself saying stupidly.
“Certainly. Best years of my life were spent in this house and I hope to die in it. Don’t see what the devil it’s got to do with you, though. Got him, Sacret?”
He spoke a moment too soon. Bream, who had been creeping up behind Campion from the inner doorway, had not quite reached his goal. Campion swung over just as the man leapt. The gun shot out of his hand and slithered across the stones towards the stranger. Bream was after it instantly but Campion gripped him by the lapel and they rolled over together.
“Pick it up!” he shouted, trying to put authority into his voice. “Pick it up, for the love of Mike! This chap’s dangerous.”
The rest of his appeal was choked as Bream’s hands found his throat. His blunt fingers dug into his neck and he found himself weaken.
“Look out, man, you’ll kill him!” The stranger’s vigorous voice echoed through the room. “Stand up, sir! I’ve got you covered. What are you doin’, damn you? The feller’s tied.”
The shocked astonishment in the last phrase had its effect. The fingers relaxed their stranglehold and Bream staggered to his feet, his puffy face twisted in a depreciatory grimace.
“I’m afraid I forgot myself,” he said. “He frightened me. I’ll take the gun, shall I?”
“No!”
Campion’s croak was frantic in its appeal and the. stranger stepped back.
“Wait a moment,” he said. “Keep your distance, sir. Untie the feller’s legs. Like to have this all made clear, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, come now, really.” Bream had gone back to his old ingratiating manner. “This is my house, you know.”
“Lying,” whispered Campion again. Don’t let him have the gun.”
“Not your house, eh?” The newcomer seized the suggestion with interest. “Hang it, whose house is it? Must get that straight. Explain yourselves, both of you.”
“All in good time.” Bream was edging forward. “I’ll just take the gun first. They——they are such dangerous things.”
“The devil you do! Stand back.” The old man was showing remarkable spirit. “This fellow here has made a serious allegation and I’d like it properly refuted. Frankly, Sacret, there were one or two things you said this afternoon which made me wonder. Do you know you pointed out the old walnut on the lower lawn and told me there were fine pears on it last year? At the time I thought it was a slip of the tongue, but now I’m beginnin’ to look at it in a different light.”
Bream drew back from the revolver.
“This is an outrage,” he said feelingly. “Holding up a man in his own house.”
The newcomer’s bright blue eyes snapped suspiciously.
“Who’s house is it?” he demanded, his voice raising. “For the last time, sir, who owns this house?”
“I do, I’m afraid. Is anything wrong?”
The pleasant voice from the doorway behind them startled everybody. Margaret Buntingworth, followed by Jane, Rose and Alice, to say nothing of a taximan with the luggage, trooped into the hall. Margaret was weary, dishevelled and utterly charming, the complete mistress of any situation.
The stranger thrust the gun behind him and stepped back. Bream gaped helplessly and Mr. Campion perforce remained where he was. Margaret caught sight of him and paused in the act of removing her travelling coat.
“Oh, Albert,” she said, “how very nice of you to be here! I didn’t see you at first down there. I got your telegram, my dear, and we packed up and came home just as soon as we could. What on earth are you doing? Your ankles… Dear me, is something going on?”
She turned to face the others, passing over Bream, who evidently meant nothing to her, and came face to face with the stranger. The man stared at her for a moment, grew an even more virulent crimson, and finally uttered a single strangled word.
“Meggie!” he said.
Margaret Buntingworth dropped her coat, her gloves, and the rolled travelling rug which contained the two half-litres of eau-de-Cologne she had smuggled so successfully through the customs. Her little scream was an expression of pure delight.
“Morty!” she said. “Oh, Morty, my dear boy, how you startled me!”
Mr. Campion bent forward and began to untie his ankles. He looked up at Bream.
“Twenty-four hours,” he said meaningly. “And it’s a great deal more than you deserve.”
The man glanced at him and nodded. His face was blank. Without a look behind him he made for the inner door.
As Campion scrambled painfully to a chair Margaret came over to him, dragging the newcomer behind her.
“Isn’t this all wonderful?” she said, her eyes dancing. “Morty says you two haven’t actually met yet. My dear, this is Morty himself. I haven’t seen him for years and years and years. He used to live in a cottage down by the plantation and we used to play together up here when we were kids. He was the cleverest boy in the world. I cried my eyes out when he went away. He always promised to come back and buy the old house for me but, of course, I never believed him. Neither of us wrote, of course. You know how it is. And now here he is! Morty, you haven’t changed a bit.”
“I’ve never forgotten you, Meggie.” The stranger seemed suddenly overcome with shyness. “Matter of fact I came down here in the hope—in the hope—” He coughed, blew his nose and steered away from a dangerous subject. “Upset me to see that chap in possession,” he remarked. “Where is he, by the way? Somethin’ very funny was goin’ on here just now, Meggie. We’ll have to have an explanation from you, young feller. I’m completely in the dark. Where is that man Sacret?”
“Oh, the Sacrets!” Margaret remembered them with consternation. “I forgot all about them. You put them clean out of my head, Morty. I’ve let the house. I ought not to be here if everything’s all right. What has happened, Albert? Where are the Sacrets, dear?”
Campion ceased to massage his bruised ankles.
“If you listen,” he said
, “you’ll just hear their car going off down the drive. I should forget ’em, if I were you. Something tells me that neither of us will hear of them for some considerable time.”
Margaret frowned and gave the subject up as being too difficult.
“Perhaps if we all had some food and something to drink?” she suggested. “Food helps the brain so, don’t you think? After we’ve eaten you two boys must tell me all about it. Morty, can you draw a cork?”
“Comin’, me dear.” The stranger strode after her, regaining his youth at every step.
Mr. Campion rose stiffly to his feet and practised walking.
Much later that evening the two men sat before the fire in the big shabby drawing-room. Margaret had gone to bed after an orgy of remembrances. Morty glanced round the room affectionately.
“Just as I remember it,” he said. “Foolish of me to confuse everybody by callin’ it my old home. Had always thought of it that way, you see.”
Mr. Campion looked into the fire.
“Thinking of buying it?” he inquired.
The elder man cocked a bright blue eye in his direction.
“Well,” he said evasively, “I’ve found just exactly what I was lookin’ for, don’t you know.”
Is There A Doctor in the House?
If Detective-Constable Macfall had been a man with charm about him this story would have been too tragic to relate and as it is, with him the thickest dunderhead God ever put breath into, it has an element of great sadness.
On what was surely the most unfortunate day in his whole existence he was walking down the narrow city street, pleased and proud of himself as he usually was, for his remarkable gift gave him always a feeling of delighted astonishment that he was so much more powerful than anyone else. He was not exactly thinking about his accomplishment as he strode along for he had possessed it so long that the thing was a common place with him but he was reflecting how splendid it was that he had it and how the police could hardly fail to promote him fairly soon. His gift was indeed a remarkable one and the police doctor, who was of an inquiring mind and did not like wonders, had made him display it again and again without satisfying himself about it. Something must be double-jointed but he said he was darned if he saw what.
The fact was that the slender Detective-Constable Macfall was able by some trick of muscle, leverage, or mysterious power as yet unknown to science, to put any other man, up to twice his own weight, neatly upon his back upon the floor. He did not know how he did it and nor did anybody else. Experts, and the Metropolitan Police of London is a body which is no shorter of those than is any other authority, rose irritably from the C.I.D. room floor and said “Oh, judo, of course. An interesting throw!” and went off sulkily, talking of something else. Macfall would swell a little and grin and mention that he never drank or smoked either. It had gone through his mind once or twice, in the vague way that one speculates about the outcome of nuclear fission, or the eternal mysteries of life and death, that it was astounding that he was not more popular. But the question did not bother him. Why should it? Who cares if a man likes you or not if you can put him on his back and keep him there?
On the whole Macfall got along very well without popularity and on that fateful day when he was walking along Old Soot Lane, which is one of the few remaining shopping centres in that corner of business London, he was as happy as it is reasonable to suppose a human bulldozer can be.
It was at this point that Mr. Mevagissy, the manager and proprietor of one of those minute jeweler’s shops whose size of premises has nothing to do with the size of their prices, popped out of his dusty but elegant doorway and beckoned to Macfall whom he knew slightly.
Innocent and proud as the day he was born the Detective-Constable went across. Mr. Mevagissy, who was an elderly gnome of a man, neat and prim looking with the mouth of a worrier or a string bag, was in something of a tizzy.
He had nothing to complain of, he said, but it was odd… Didn’t the constable think it was odd? The man wasn’t in the book, not a sign of him in the medical register. But that was not the affair of Mevagissy and Company, was it? Or was it? A firm couldn’t be too careful, could it? What did the Detective-Constable think?
Macfall, who never thought at all according to the best authorities, appeared completely befogged and Mr. Mevagissy hastened to make himself clear.
A customer had come into his shop that morning, he explained, and had left a large old-fashioned silver salver to have an error corrected in the engraved inscription upon it. It was not a very valuable piece in the jeweler’s opinion and he mentioned that it was the kind of item which could be picked up fairly cheaply in any of the silver auctions in the city any day of the week. The inscription upon it was to the effect that it was presented to Dr. Phinias P. Roup, M.D., etc, etc, on the occasion of his marriage by his grateful pupils and the nurses of St Jude’s Hospital, Trinidad. The customer had explained that he was the Dr. Roup in question and that he had just noticed that his second initial was given as P. and not B. He asked Mr. Mevagissy to have the trifling matter put right and arranged to call for it at noon that day week.
Mr. Mevagissy had accepted the small commission without any surprise at all. As he told Macfall the frequency with which the donors of presentation plate make errors in their instructions to the engravers had long ceased to astonish him. There was probably some deep psychological reason for it in his opinion, he said, but he wouldn’t bother Macfall with that. However, later, when he was wrapping the salver to send it round to the backstreet engraver who did that sort of work for him, he noticed that the design of the piece of lettering was not quite symmetrical and that did astonish him for that is not the sort of mistake engravers ever make.
He examined the blank space very carefully and discovered that something had already been erased by some other craftsman. When at last, by some jewelerish method best known to himself, he found out what it was, it proved to be a date, 1888. Far too early to have anything to do with his customer or even his father before him.
The little mystery nagged him all the morning and, because he was that sort of fussy little man, he put on his hat and stepped down to the library on the corner and looked up Roup in the medical register. The name was not there and indeed, the only trace of it which he could find anywhere was as the author of a long out-dated treatise on tropical medicine published at the end of the last century. He came back puzzled but, of course, not alarmed for, as he pointed out, the customer had done nothing but entrust him with a piece of plate. All the same it was a peculiar little incident and he felt bound to report it to somebody. Seeing Detective-Constable Macfall walking down the road it had come to him that the easiest thing to do would be to mention it. What did Macfall think?
It may have been the unfortunate insistence by Mr. Mevagissy on this fatal word, or it may have been merely Macfall’s unlucky day but, at any rate, his narrow, deep-set eyes appeared to move a fraction closer together. His expression became wooden and he flushed as at some secret effort.
“This day week at noon, eh?” he said. “He’s coming back is he?” Mr. Megavissy intimated that indeed was so.
“Then don’t worry,” said Macfall. “And don’t mention it to anybody else either. I’ll be along myself.”
He went off even more pleased with himself than usual and when he returned to the station he did not report the matter.
To those unacquainted with the machinery of the Metropolitan police this omission may seem, perhaps, to be of a trifling nature but that remarkable body has a rule, which is as hard and fast as those governing say, mathematics, or the laws of supply and demand, which decrees that when an officer receives an intimation from a responsible member of the public that something suspicious may have occurred he shall, forthwith, write it all down and pass it on to the man above him.
It is important to make it clear here that Macfall knew perfectly well what he was doing. Moreover, the omission was the outcome of what was, for him, deep thought. He arrived
at Mevagissy’s shop on the appointed day soon after the shutters were down. He had worked out a plan and his mind was fully occupied with the difficulty which he foresaw in persuading the jeweller to fall in with it. He wanted to spend the morning behind the silver counter as a temporary assistant so that he could serve the doctor when he arrived. A little to his regret he discovered Mr. Mevagissy not only perfectly willing to let him do anything he liked but also not particularly interested in the matter any more. A new interest was absorbing him. He told Macfall about it hurriedly between frenzied orders to his two regular assistants.
He was expecting a highly important customer, he told the Detective-Constable, “somebody, quite somebody, indeed”.
Macfall gathered that the distinguished visitor was a foreigner, a senior member of the suite of a celebrated Indian Prince, who had arrived at the Lorraine Hotel in a blaze of publicity, earlier in the week. Along with other jewelers of repute, Mevagissy had sent in his trade card and had been delighted to get a telephone message the night before telling him that a royal representative would call to see his choicer stones on the stroke of ten in the morning.
There was such an air of excitement in the place that in spite of himself Macfall was entertained. The minute premises which consisted of two showrooms, one leading out of the other, were positively seething. Macfall was in the outer room which was reserved for silver but he could just see through the small doorway into the inner chamber, which was so protected it was virtually a large safe, and where, as Mr. Mevagissy had just told him, there was one of the most interesting small collections of gems in London.
Punctually at ten the representative arrived and was ushered into the fastness by Mr. Mevagissy and his two bona fide assistants. All Macfall saw of him was a shock of white hair above a very dark neck.
For the rest of the morning a deep and reverent hush spread over the little shop. The visitor was both knowledgeable and thorough and the whole of the more valuable part of Mr. Mevagissy’s stock was considered.
The Allingham Case-Book Page 15
