Death in the Dentist’s Chair: A Golden Age Mystery

by Molly Thynne

  “And the next step?” enquired Arkwright.

  “I’ll keep that to myself till I know whether it is a next step or not,” retorted Constantine, as he slipped his note into his case and handed the original back to Arkwright. “I’m not trying to annoy, but I dislike making a fool of myself as much as you do.”

  “So, going on the principle that no man is a hero to his valet,” murmured Arkwright.

  It was the first time he had ever succeeded in putting the old man out of countenance and he duly chronicled it as the one bright spot in a gloomy day. Constantine recovered himself with remarkable quickness.

  “So Manners has been making himself conspicuous,” he said. “Now I wonder when you spotted his activities? But, if you think I have taken him into my confidence, you’re mistaken. One of the many good points about Manners is that one merely has to give him instructions and he carries them out with remarkable efficiency.”

  “I wish I could say the same for some of my myrmidons,” replied Arkwright. “It’s only fair to say that I stumbled on him by accident. May one enquire, sir, if you have been defacing the currency of the realm for the benefit of Manners?”

  “If I say, for the benefit of certain of Manners’ acquaintances I shall be telling you more than you ought to know,” smiled Constantine. “Fortunately, I’m in a generous mood.”

  “Won’t you go further and tell me what you were doing this afternoon?” enquired Arkwright, with his most engaging grin.

  “If, in return, you will do something further for me,” answered the old man. “There are certain questions that Mrs. Miller’s maid might be able to answer and you can approach her more easily than I can. If you’ll give me a piece of paper, 111 jot them down.”

  He scribbled a few lines and handed them to Arkwright.

  “The major part of my afternoon was spent at Somerset House,” he said, “looking up the will of a certain Mr. Isidor Marks. As a document I commend it to your notice.”

  After he had gone Arkwright gave his attention to the sheet of paper he had left behind him. It consisted of three questions:

  “How and when was Mrs. Miller’s denture broken?

  Was she in the habit of sleeping in it?

  If not, where did she put it at night?”

  He was still staring thoughtfully at the list when a messenger arrived with a cable from the Berne police, in answer to the one Arkwright had sent earlier in the day.

  At the sight of the smudgy, typewritten message Arkwright’s temper slipped its leash at last. It ran:

  “Oppenheimer left Berne three days ago for England stop present destination unknown.”

  For ten lurid minutes Arkwright gave expression to sentiments that would possibly have caused Miller considerable gratification had he been there to hear them.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Constantine was still in bed when Arkwright rang him up next morning.

  “Shall I take the message, sir?” enquired Manners, who was as fussy as a hen over his master and strongly disapproved of any form of exertion before breakfast.

  Constantine, wide awake in an instant, raised himself on his elbow.

  “No, put him through to me here,” he ordered, the receiver already in his hand.

  “I’ve got the information you asked for,” Arkwright reported. “Mrs. Snipe is a Roman Catholic and goes to Mass every morning at seven. As luck would have it she mentioned the fact to my man, among about a thousand other bits of extraneous information, and he caught her on her way back this morning. She says Mrs. Miller never slept in her denture. It was kept in a tumbler in the bathroom adjoining her bedroom. Mrs. Snipe does not know precisely what went wrong with the denture, but her mistress was very much annoyed as the damage prevented her from wearing it and Davenport was unable to give her an appointment before eleven thirty. I gather that in consequence Mrs. Miller was in a pretty bad temper all the morning and Mrs. Snipe had to bear the brunt of it. Anyhow, plenty was said about the teeth. Mrs. Snipe thinks Mrs. Miller must have damaged them herself when she cleaned them the night before, though she refused to admit this and accused Mrs. Snipe of having dropped them when she was preparing her bath in the morning. There seems to have been something of a scene over it.”

  “The damage was actually discovered, then, on the morning of the murder?”

  “When Mrs. Miller tried to wear the teeth, to be exact.”

  “Did anybody use the bathroom besides Mrs. Miller?”

  “She and Miller shared it, but it has a second door opening into the passage. When the door into Mrs. Miller’s bedroom was shut, any member of the household could have entered the bathroom unperceived. Miller, apparently, was not by way of using it in the morning. He always shaved in his dressing-room. That’s as much as she could tell us. I see what you’re driving at, but Miller’s alibi still holds, remember. And we’ve no evidence that he ever touched the denture.”

  “We’ve no evidence against Miller at all, come to that,” agreed Constantine, “but, if there is a crack in that alibi we ought to find it. And why all these lies?”

  “The man’s naturally shifty. And he’s afraid of the police. If he was under the impression that we knew nothing of that affair in Cape Town, it would account for a good deal. By the way, he sent that secretary of his for the pendant first thing this morning. I’ve a fancy he didn’t dare risk leaving it with us too long! Well, sir, you go your way and I’ll go mine. I’m not talking through my hat when I say that I hope yours will prove the right one. I sent a man down to Somerset House. What do you make of that will?”

  “It didn’t surprise me altogether,” answered Constantine blandly, “though I shouldn’t have credited Mrs, Miller with an uncle called Isidor Marks! That peroxide hair was misleading, though.”

  “Marks seems to have left a tidy sum of money. That he should have made Miller Mrs. Marks’ trustee seems natural enough. After all, Miller was his niece’s husband. You don’t suspect any irregularity there, do you?”

  Television being still in its infancy Constantine’s smile was lost on Arkwright. His voice betrayed nothing.

  “None,” he answered blandly. “He probably looks after the old lady’s property admirably, though I admit I wouldn’t trust him with sixpence of my own. It’s interesting, all the same.”

  “It would interest me more to see the inside of your mind. I’ve an inkling that you’ve got ahead of us somewhere, but I can’t, for the life of me, make out where. Where is the catch, sir?”

  “There isn’t one,” answered Constantine, “if I seem secretive it’s because I don’t see my way clearly yet. For your comfort, I may tell you that I’m asking myself two questions, How and why? And I haven’t got the answers yet to either of them. Did you look up that firm of decorators?”

  “Yes, and drew a blank. They’re prepared to vouch for all their men.”

  Constantine gave Davenport time to reach his consulting rooms, then rang him up.

  “I won’t keep you a moment,” he said. “Can you tell me, in language adapted to the intelligence of the layman, precisely what was the matter with Mrs. Miller’s denture?”

  “Easily,” answered the dentist. “It was quite simple and the damage was not great, though the job required skilled handling. The denture consisted of six front teeth, kept in place by two gold bars which ran behind her own back teeth. One of these bars had become so bent that it was impossible for her to adjust the denture, much less wear it. Gold being a soft metal, it was easy enough to bend it back into position, but it needed careful adjustment. Is that clear?”

  “Quite. To remedy this you would have to have recourse to the moulds you had taken of the patient’s mouth, I imagine?”

  “Naturally, though, if the moulds had been broken or mislaid, it would have been possible to do the work, using the patient’s mouth as a model. It would have been a slower and more troublesome business, though. Fortunately, in this case, the plaster mould had been taken recently and was reliable. Plaster shrinks, y
ou know, after a time.”

  “Any dentist, having the moulds, would have used them?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “How was the damage done, do you suppose? Could it have happened when she was wearing the teeth?”

  “Impossible. My own theory is that she either used too much pressure in cleaning them, which is unlikely, as the force used would have to be considerable, or she dropped them and stepped on them. She assured me that she had done neither of these things, but, as you know, she was an excitable woman and not very exact in her statements.”

  “If she kept them in a drawer and had caught them in it in shutting it, would the effect have been the same?” enquired Constantine guilelessly.

  Davenport swallowed the red herring whole.

  “That explanation hadn’t occurred to me, but it would account for it admirably. Have you any reason to think it happened in that way?” he enquired with interest.

  “It’s not impossible,” Constantine assured him, then thanked him and rang off.

  His next act was to ring for Manners, to whom he gave the note he had doctored in Arkwright’s room at Scotland Yard, together with certain instructions which sent that imperturbable person forth, dignified calm personified, but with adventure in his heart. After he had gone, his master settled himself by the fire, filled his pipe and, with curiously mixed feelings, gave his mind to the progress he had made during the last twenty-four hours.

  The laws of coincidence are admittedly amazing, but Constantine refused to believe that the injury to Mrs. Miller’s denture, an injury that would oblige the dentist to leave her alone in the consulting room while he supervised his mechanic’s work, was due to an accident. Assuming that the damage was done intentionally, it placed the murderer definitely as a member of Miller’s household, someone who was conversant with Mrs. Miller’s habits and who had easy access to the bathroom in which she kept the teeth at night. This knowledge must also have extended to Davenport’s house and it seemed safe to argue that the murderer was or had been, at one time, a patient of Davenport’s. Whether he had made use of the empty house next door as a means of escape was still open to question, but it seemed significant, to say the least of it that this house should turn out to be the property of Mrs. Marks, whose affairs were in Miller’s hands. The property had been bought as an investment and there seemed little doubt that the purchase had been made by Miller on her behalf. Constantine had a shrewd suspicion that the keys of that house were probably in the possession of her trustee at the moment. And, finally, Vera Abramoff was on her way to Miller’s house when she died. Miller, it would seem, was the centre to which every path in that bewildering maze led, and yet Miller had been on the other side of London at the time of his wife’s death and at work in his library when Vera Abramoff was killed. There had been little love lost between him and his wife, it was true, but Arkwright, in the course of his investigations, had been unable to trace any entanglement with any other woman. Miller was too rich a man to be seriously embarrassed by Mrs. Miller’s expenditure, which, after all, owing to her penchant for precious stones, would, in the jeweller’s eyes, savour more of investment than extravagance. On the face of it he stood to gain little by his wife’s death and still less by that of an obscure Russian actress, whom, according to his own account, he had never even set eyes on. There remained, it is true, those lost years between Miller’s departure from the Cape and his appearance in England, spent, so he had declared, in Switzerland, that hot-bed of secret agents during the war. It was certainly suggestive that he should have disappeared from Cape Town in nineteen fourteen, shortly before the outbreak of hostilities, and not unlikely that he had run across Vera Abramoff in Switzerland, in which case the motive for the murder might date from something that had passed between them there. But, even if this were true, it was difficult to fit Mrs. Miller into the picture, for she had been pursuing her rather dubious stage career in the Provinces during this period and was unlikely to have met her husband, whom she married in nineteen twenty-seven, until his appearance in England in nineteen twenty-six.

  Constantine knocked the ash out of his pipe and rose to his feet, irritably aware that this was getting him nowhere. The knowledge that Arkwright, with his dogged persistence, and the immense resources of New Scotland Yard at his call, was working against him, oppressed him with the sense of his own futility. He had purposely exaggerated the seriousness of the position in his interview with Richard Pomfrey and he knew that, as matters stood, Arkwright would hardly dare to risk an arrest, but circumstantial evidence is a dangerous thing and, at any moment, the police might unearth some fact that would enable them to move.

  Constantine’s restless walk had brought him to the writing table, a massive Buhl affair out of keeping with the room, but which he had retained for old associations’ sake. He unlocked a drawer and took out the notebook in which he had jotted down the salient facts connected with the case. That it opened of its own accord at the page that dealt with Miller’s alibis was silent testimony to the amount of time he had wasted on them. Sitting down he bent over the book and ran, once more, through the evidence collected by the police and, later, amplified by Manners in the course of his investigations. Unless the whole of Miller’s office staff was lying, he had, undoubtedly, been in his office at the time of his wife’s death. With an exasperated shrug of his shoulders Constantine passed on to the evening of November the fourteenth. According to the police estimate, the murder of Vera Abramoff had taken place sometime between seven thirty and eight. At seven twenty-five the footman, going to the library to make up the fire, had found Miller writing at his table, and the butler had stated that he was still at work there when he went in at seven forty-five to enquire about the wine for dinner. He had been seen by the butler again at eight, coming from the secretary’s room. Bloomfield, who had been working in his room had stated that he had taken letters into the library for Miller’s signature several times in the course of the evening and on each occasion had found him there. It was physically impossible for Miller to have been in Eccleston Square at the time of the second murder.

  Constantine leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head, and stared at the ceiling, and, as his eyes mechanically took note of certain dusty patches on the cornice, and one side of his brain registered the determination to have the room done up in the spring, the other side, still groping uncertainly among the dark issues of the Miller problem, was illumined by a sudden ray of light.

  With an exclamation he straightened himself and, snatching up the notebook gave his mind once more to the time schedule of the night of the Abramoff murder. From there he turned back to the morning of the same day. Then, thrusting the book into the drawer, he rose and, with a new lightness in his step, hurried from the room, shrugged himself into his overcoat and, seizing his hat, ran down the stairs with a briskness that belied his years. He went on foot to his destination, for he needed time to sort his thoughts. Someone, if his theory were correct, had gone from Miller’s house to Illbeck Street on the morning of Mrs. Miller’s murder and had covered the distance in the quickest possible time. Arkwright, he knew, had circularised the cab ranks, but had been unable to trace any fare to Illbeck Street that could not be satisfactorily accounted for. Miller’s car, after taking him to his office, had returned to the house, and the chauffeur had waited in the basement, in conversation with the servants, until it was time to drive his mistress to the dentist’s, and had had his eye on the car practically all the time. It was while he was waiting for a break in the traffic at Piccadilly that Constantine had his inspiration.

  As a result, the decrepit old Army pensioner, whose duty it was to keep an eye on the cars parked at the north end of the square onto which Miller’s house looked, hobbling painfully back to the upturned box on which he was accustomed to rest his aged limbs, found an alert elderly gentleman with a little pointed white beard waiting for him.

  “You haven’t seen my man, I suppose?” he asked, with a singul
arly charming smile. “He was to wait for me here. Wearing a dark green livery and driving a Humber.”

  The old man shook his head.

  “There ain’t been no one of that description,” he said, “I’d a noticed ’im all right.”

  The gentleman shrugged his shoulders.

  “I’m before my time, I think,” he remarked. “There’s nothing for it but to wait.”

  He drew out a cigarette case and offered it to his companion.

  “Not a very exciting job, yours,” he went on, “unless someone takes it into his head to borrow a car. Have you had any trouble with car thieves?”

  The old fellow squared his shoulders.

  “They wouldn’t have much chance ’ere,” he declared “I’ve got my eye on the cars, I ’ave, and there’s a policeman on point duty at the corner there. I’d only ’ave to blow me whistle, and they know it. Never ’ad a car stolen yet, which is more than some can say.”

  The gentleman looked thoughtfully across the Square. From where he stood the upper windows of Miller’s house could be seen through a gap in the trees.

  “It’s all right on a day like this,” he remarked, “but in foggy weather it must be difficult to keep an eye on a whole string of cars. It’s a good deal to expect of one man.”

  The gentleman had a way with him and no mistake. Later, as he stumped off duty, the old man wondered at the unaccustomed looseness of his own tongue. There had been no call to tell a stranger how he’d got the push from that night watchman’s job through him going to sleep and omitting to punch the clock, nor yet about Captain Walker and the fuss he’d made because he declared someone had used his car while he was calling on his mother at number twenty-seven. Said he knew by the speedometer. Probably made a mistake in the mileage though. Anyway, as he’d told him, he was only human and, with a fog like there was that morning, he couldn’t be expected to keep an eye on a car right at the end of the line. But there hadn’t been no sense in telling the gentleman about it. Silly to give himself away like that, just because anyone smiled pleasant and seemed to enjoy a bit of a chat. Couldn’t remember when he’d done such a thing before. Captain Walker wouldn’t make no fuss, he was a good sort, he was, but this gentleman, a stranger and all! Might as like as not cost him his job. Mumbling and grumbling the old man turned in at his favourite pub, to derive what comfort he could from the new ten shilling note that was burning his pocket.