“Fifteen Babcock Gardens, sir. And at five-forty-five.”
“Good.” Appleby rose briskly. “He did as he was told, and said he’d walk?”
“Yes. He’s making for the Green Park now.”
“That gives us all very good time. You’ve got three cars out?”
“They should be pretty well posted by now. We’ve studied the maps and had a report from the section.”
Appleby nodded and signed to Derry Fisher to follow him. “And what sort of a problem does this house in Babcock Gardens look like presenting?”
“Tricky, sir – but it might be worse. At a corner, but very quiet. All the houses there have basements with areas. There’s a deserted cabmen’s shelter over the way.” The secretary hesitated. “Are you taking a bit of a risk, sir?”
“That’s as it will appear.” Appleby’s tone suggested that he found this question not wholly in order. “And now we’ll be off.”
“Your car’s outside, sir – with the short-wave tested and correct.”
Below, a discreetly powerful limousine was waiting, and into this Derry Fisher found himself bundled. It had a table with street-plans, and it was filled with low-pitched precise speech. Appleby had no sooner sat down than he joined in. The effect, as of an invisible conference, was very queer and very exciting. Derry had been involved in this sort of thing before – but only in the cinema. He rather expected the car to go hurtling through London with screaming sirens. The pace, however, proved to be nothing out of the ordinary. Turning into the Mall, they moved as sedately as if in a procession. Canton House Terrace seemed to go on for ever, and the Royal Standard fluttering above Buckingham Palace drew only very slowly nearer. When they rounded Queen Victoria on her elaborate pedestal and swung round for Constitution Hill, it was at a speed that seemed more appropriate to sightseers than to emissaries of the law.
But if the car dawdled, Derry’s mind moved fast – much faster than it was accustomed to do in the interest of his uncle’s business. He had never heard of Babcock Gardens, but he guessed that it was an address in Kensington – and the address, too, which he had failed to hear the girl giving at Waterloo that morning. And somebody was walking to it – walking to it through the Green Park. And Appleby had acknowledged that the girl was in danger, and Appleby’s secretary had let slip misgivings over the riskiness of what was now going on. What was now going on? Quite clearly, the setting of a trap. Appleby was setting a trap, with the girl as bait.
“I ought to tell you that there may be a little shooting before we’re through with this.”
Derry jumped. Appleby, apparently unconscious of any strain, had murmured the words in his ear. “Shooting, sir – you mean at the girl?”
“But all this is itself a very long shot.” Appleby had ominously ignored the question. “It mayn’t come off at all. But it’s going to be uncommonly labour-saving if it does… I think we turn out of Knightsbridge at the next corner.”
Derry was silent. He felt helpless and afraid. The crawl continued. Appleby was again absorbed in listening to reports and giving orders. But he had time for one brief aside. “Complicated, you know. Lurking for lurkers. Requires the policeman’s most cat-like tread. Not like marching up and arresting a fellow in the name of the law.”
Again Derry said nothing; he didn’t feel at all like mild fun. Suddenly the pace increased. Appleby’s dispositions – whatever they were – appeared to be completed. The car ran through broad, quiet streets between rows of solidly prosperous-looking houses. Presently it turned left into a narrower road, and then left again into what seemed a deserted mews. And there it drew to a halt.
Appleby jumped out. “The unobtrusive approach to our grandstand seat.”
Derry followed. “A grandstand seat?”
“We are at the back of Babcock Gardens. A surprised but obliging citizen is giving us the run of his dining-room. Number fifteen is just opposite.”
It seemed to Derry Fisher afterwards that what followed was all over in a flash. The dining-room of the obliging citizen was sombre and Victorian, and this gave the sunlit street outside, viewed through a large bay-window, something of the appearance of a theatrical scene – an empty stage awaiting the entrance of actors and the beginning of an action.
Suddenly it was peopled – and the action had taken place. The house opposite stood at a corner. Round this came the figure of a man, glancing upwards, as if in search of a street number. Derry had time only to realise that he was familiar when the door of number fifteen opened and a girl came down the steps. It was the girl of Derry’s encounter on the train that morning. She had almost reached the footpath when she staggered and fell – and in the same instant there came the crack of a revolver shot. The man was standing still, apparently staring at her intently. Denny could see only his back. But he now knew that it was the back of Mark Borlase.
Borlase took a step forward. Simultaneously, another figure leapt across the road – it must have been from the corresponding corner – and made a dash for Borlase. It was Meritt. What he intended seemed to be a flying Rugger tackle. But before he could bring this off, yet another figure dramatically appeared. A uniformed policeman, hurling himself up the area-steps of number fifteen, took the charging Meritt in the flank and brought him crashing to the ground. In an instant there were policemen all over the place.
“Come along.” Appleby touched the horrified Derry Fisher on the arm. They hurried out. Mark Borlase had not moved. Shocked and bewildered, he was looking from one side to the other. On his left, Meritt had been hauled to his feet, and stood collared by two powerful constables. On his right, still sprawled on the steps of number fifteen, lay the girl – a pool of blood forming beneath one arm.
Derry ran towards her, his heart pounding. As he did so, she raised herself, and with a groping movement found her handbag. For a moment, and with a queerly expressionless face, she gazed at Meritt and at the men who held him. Then with her uninjured arm she opened her bag, drew out a small glittering object, and thrust it in her mouth.
“Stop her!”
Appleby’s cry was too late. Another revolver shot broke the quiet of Babcock Gardens. Incredibly – incredibly and horribly – Denny Fisher’s beautiful girl had blown her brains out.
6
Later that evening Appleby explained.
“There was never much doubt, Mr Borlase, that your cousin had been murdered. And clearly the crime was not one of passion or impulse. The background of the case was international espionage. Sir Stephen was killed in order to obtain an important scientific secret and to eliminate the only brain capable of reproducing it. There may have been an attempt – conceivably by the man Krauss – to get at Sir Stephen by the ideological route. But that had certainly come to nothing. You agree?”
Mark Borlase nodded. “Stephen – as I insisted to you – was really perfectly sound. He worried me at times, it is true – and it was only yesterday that I felt I ought to go down and have a word with him. Actually, we didn’t meet. I got him on the telephone, and knew at once that there was no question of any trouble at the moment. So I concealed the fact that I was actually in Sheercliff, put up at the Grand for the night, and came back this morning. I ought to have been franker when you challenged me, no doubt.”
“It has all come straight in the wash, Mr Borlase. And now let me go on. Here was a professional crime. This made me at once suspicious of the genuineness of any muddle over those shoes. But they might be a trick designed to mislead. And, if that was so, I was up against a mind given to doing things ingeniously. I made a note that it might be possible to exploit that later.
“Now the train. I came away from my inspection of it convinced that the girl’s story was a fabrication from start to finish. The fact stared me in the face.”
Denny Fisher sat up straight. “But how could it? I’ve chewed over it again and again–”
“My dear young man, these things are not your profession. This girl, representing herself as badly frightene
d, ignored three compartments – in two of which she would have found feminine support and comfort – and chose to burst in upon a solitary and suitably impressionable young man of her own age. Again, while the mysterious man with the different-coloured shoes would certainly have retreated up the train, the rifled suitcase was down the train – the direction in which the girl herself went off unaccompanied, for her cup of coffee. Again, the Russian cigarettes had discernibly been smoked in a holder. On one of them, nevertheless, there was a tiny smear of lipstick.” Appleby turned to Derry. “I think I mentioned it to you at the time.”
“Mentioned it?” Derry was bewildered – and then light came to him. “When you made that silly – that joke about seeing red?”
“I’m afraid so. Well now, the case was beginning to come clear. Sir Stephen’s body had been dropped on that rock, and not into the sea, deliberately; we were meant to find it in the strange clothes and the unaccountable shoes – otherwise the whole elaborate false trail laid by the girl on her railway journey would be meaningless. But why this elaboration? There seemed only one answer. To serve as an alibi, conclusive from the start, for somebody anxious to avoid any intensive investigation. My thoughts turned to Meritt as soon as he produced that streamlined picture of the man Krauss as the criminal.”
Mark Borlase nodded. “And so you set a trap for him?”
“Precisely. But first, let me give you briefly what my guess about Meritt was. He had been offered money – big and tempting money – to do both things: get the notebook and liquidate Sir Stephen. He saw his chance in Sir Stephen’s habit of taking that nocturnal stroll. Last night he simply followed him up to the Head, killed and robbed him, and dressed the body in clothes he had already concealed for the purpose, including the odd shoes. Then he dropped the body over the cliff so that it would fall just where it did, returned to the Metropole, and telephoned his confederate to begin playing her part on the eight-five this morning. The girl – her name was Jane Grove – was devoted to him. And she played up very well – to the end, I’d say.”
For a moment there was silence in Appleby’s room. Then Derry asked a question. “And your trap?”
“It depended on what is pretty well an axiom in detective investigation. A criminal who has – successfully, as he thinks – brought off an ingenious trick will try to bring off another, twice as ingenious, if you give him a chance. Still guessing – for I really had no evidence against Meritt at all – I gave him such a chance just as irresistibly as I could.
“The girl, you see, must come forward, and repeat the yarn she had told on the train. That was essential to the convincingness of the whole story. It was, of course, a yarn about encountering a man who doesn’t exist. For this nobody I determined to persuade Meritt to substitute a somebody: yourself, Mr Borlase. You had been on that train and had concealed the fact. I let Meritt have this information. I gave him the impression that I strongly suspected you. I let slip the information that you could be contacted at your club, the Junior Wessex. And as soon as Meritt had left I got a message to you there myself, explaining what I wanted and asking you to co-operate. You did so, most admirably, and I am very grateful to you.”
Mark Borlase inclined his head. “A blood-hunt isn’t much in my line, I’m bound to say. But it seemed proper that Stephen’s murderer should be brought to book.”
Derry Fisher looked perplexed. “I don’t see how Meritt–”
“It was simple enough.” Appleby broke off to take a telephone call, and then resumed his explanation. “Meritt represented himself to Mr Borlase on the telephone as my secretary, and asked him to come to my private address – which he gave as fifteen Babcock Gardens – at five forty-five. He then got in touch with the girl and arranged his trap.” Appleby smiled grimly. “He didn’t know it was our trap too.”
“He was going to incriminate Mr Borlase?”
“Just that. Remember, you would have been able to swear that you saw Mr Borlase leaving Waterloo in a taxi just behind the girl. From this would follow the inference that Mr Borlase had tracked her to her home; and that after his interview here he had decided that he must silence her.”
“But Meritt didn’t himself mean to – to kill the girl?”
“He meant to stage an attempted murder by Mr Borlase; and to that he must have nerved her on the telephone. It all had to be very nicely timed.”
Mark Borlase suddenly shivered. “He was going to arrest me, after he had himself winged the girl? He would have said the revolver was mine – that sort of thing?”
“Yes. He may even have meant to kill you, and maintain that it had happened in the course of a struggle. Then the girl would have identified you as the man with the odd shoes. And that would have been that.”
“How would he have explained being on the scene – there in Babcock Gardens, I mean – at all?”
“By declaring that I had prompted him to go and have a look at you at your club; that he had spotted you coming out and had decided to shadow you. It would have been some such story as that. He had lost his head a bit, I’d say, in pursuit of this final ingenuity. It was criminal artistry, of a sort. But it was thoroughly crazy as well.”
“And Stephen’s notebook?”
“That telephone-call was to say it has been found with Meritt’s things. Meritt thought himself absolutely safe, and he was determined to hold out for a good price.” Appleby rose. “Well – that’s the whole thing. And we shall none of us be sorry to go to bed.”
As they said goodbye, Denny Fisher hesitated. “May I ask one more question?”
“Certainly.”
“The shooting in Babcock Gardens was an afterthought of Meritt’s – and I think it was the afterthought of a fiend. But why – after you had examined the train and guessed nearly the whole truth – did you tell me that the girl was in danger?”
“She was in danger of the gallows, Mr Fisher. But at least she has escaped that.”
THE LION AND THE UNICORN
Lady Appleby glanced reproachfully at her husband as he slipped into his place on the stand in Pall Mall. “We thought you wouldn’t get here at all. The streets have been closed for ages.”
The Assistant Commissioner laughed. “My dear, it’s one of those occasions on which I find it useful to be known to the police.” He looked at his watch. “And we still have a good deal of time on hand. Was the breakfast up to scratch?”
“Sir John – that breakfast was out of this world!” It was Mrs Harbot who replied – dropping, in order to do so, the binoculars with which she had been studying whatever of British institutions came within their field. “I think your London clubs are wonderful. But what I don’t figure out, Sir John, is why you’re here with us in these seats. I’d guess that a man high up with the police would be down there on a horse, with a uniform and a sword. Like the one going past now. Isn’t he beautiful? Would he be an Inspector?”
Appleby looked – and paused civilly, as if the question required some little skill to answer. “He’s a major, as a matter of fact, in the Brigade of Guards. The police, you know, require a bit of a helping hand on occasions of this sort.”
Mrs Harbot again surveyed the scene. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Sir John, if something marvellously unexpected happened?”
This, clearly, was a largeness of expectation with which Appleby found it hard to sympathise. “I’ll be quite content with what’s on the programme. I’ve had my share of the unexpected, as a matter of fact, during the small hours of this morning.”
Lady Appleby looked up quickly. “Is that why you didn’t come home?”
“Yes. A little encounter with the Lion and the Unicorn.”
Mrs Harbot’s eyes rounded. “The Lion and the Unicorn? Were they heralds or pursuivants – something like that?”
“Dear me, no. They were just a Lion and a Unicorn.”
“But doing something unexpected?”
Appleby looked doubtful. “That’s rather hard to answer. In a sense, their behaviour was quit
e conventional. They were fighting for the Crown.”
Mrs Harbot was horrified. “Not the crown that–”
“Dear me, no. The traditional crown of the ancient kingdom of Ruritania.”
Lady Appleby eyed her husband with frank scepticism. “Ruritania, John?”
“I’m calling it that.” And Appleby turned gravely to Mrs Harbot. “Even so, you must treat this as a most confidential communication. It is true that Ruritania – the country I am calling Ruritania – disappeared as an independent monarchy round about 1918. That is how its crown jewels came to be alienated. But if the facts that I am about to tell you became generally known, I assure you that the Chancelleries of Europe would be rocked to their foundations.”
Mrs Harbot smiled brilliantly. “If this isn’t just like Sherlock Holmes!”
“I hope you will continue to think so. But let me proceed.
“The offices and showrooms of the Jewellers’ Company,” Appleby began, “are just round the corner. You can see them from the card-room of this club. It was from there, indeed, that Colonel Busteed – one of our oldest members – saw the thing being installed late yesterday evening. It seemed a belated effort in the way of decoration, but it was all done with great speed and efficiency. A lorry with a tall extension-ladder drove up just after office hours, and within fifteen minutes an elaborate affair had been erected at the level of the mansard roof: an enormous coat of arms, flanked by two handsome beasts, pretty well as large as life and done very much in the round. Busteed concluded that the Jewellers had felt something more than the general scheme of decoration in the street was required, and that they had arranged for this imposing display pretty well at the eleventh hour. He thought no more about it – or no more about it just then. But he did happen to mention it to me as I was leaving the club. It was pretty well dusk by that time, but I caught a glimpse of the contraption myself as I turned the corner.
“As it happened, I had to pay a call at the Home Office, and coming out I ran into Lord Anchor. He is a distinguished elderly man, and among other things a former Master of the Jeweller’s Company. By way of making conversation, I said something about this last-moment embellishing of their building. To my surprise, he said he had never heard of it. Indeed, the old boy took quite a high line.”
Appleby Talking Page 20
