The news came through at breakfast next morning when a hearty ring at the bell announced Crook’s unexpected arrival. He was as cheerful, as imperturbable, as cocksure as ever, in spite of the news he brought.
“Well, well, well,” he said, “here we are, right in the middle of the picture. Difficult to see how anyone’s going to miss us now.” He shook out a paper he carried under his arm.
“You mean, they’ve found Ogilvie?”
“Sure they’ve found him. They found him last night at eight o’clock.
It’s one up to the civil defences. It was an air raid warden who wiped the policeman’s eye for him. Went up to complain about a light that was shinin’ through the curtains, and ...”
“A light?” exclaimed Bruce. “But the room was in darkness.”
“Don’t forget your time-table,” Crook advised him. “The room was dark when we left at, say, seven o’clock. When this chap, Bennett, went up he found not only the light but the chap who’d turned it on.”
Bruce looked at him in horror. “You mean, they’ve taken someone already?”
“Chap called Rogers—another of Ogilvie’s victims, it seems. Bennett found him in front of the safe, riflin’ the contents.”
“With—that—in the room behind him?” “He swears he’s not the murderer.”
“We know he isn’t,” agreed Bruce, slowly.
“Point is, how many other people are goin’ to be convinced. Human nature’s a funny thing, Bruce. There are a lot of men who’ll think worse of him for rummagin’ in the safe, in the circumstances, than for puttin’ a bullet through Ogilvie’s head.”
“I suppose I’m losing grip,” said Bruce. “This development never occurred to me. Where is this fellow, Rogers?”
“Brixton.”
“We’ve got to get him out, Crook, right away. He’s spent a night there already, I take it. Now—it’s our turn.”
“We’re for it,” Crook agreed cheerfully, “unless we can pick a hole in someone’s story. Dear, dear, how this reminds me of the old 1 9 14 days. I’d think, Jerry can’t miss me this time. Say your prayers, Art Crook, and go to it—but he went on missing me for four blooming years, bless his clumsy aim.”
Bruce sketched an impatient gesture. “I’ll come round with you now, if you’re ready,” he said, seeing the future so clearly that involuntarily he closed his eyes against it.
Crook on the other hand opened his more widely than usual. “Come with me? No, no, old boy, you leave this to me. It might look a bit fussy if we both turned up in the first chapter.”
Bruce looked puzzled. “But both of us were there. You know, Crook, we were crazy last night, slinking away like that. Now we’ve got to face the consequencies.”
“Spoken like an English gentleman,” said Crook. “Only, you see, I ain’t.”
He laid one big finger against his nose. “The essence of truth is to know where to stop. Always remember there are at least two sides to every legal medal. Where would be the sense in two innocent men like you and me comin’ forward and messin’ up our careers by sayin’ we know this chap, Rogers, must be innocent, too, because we found the corpse before he did? We expect a lot of the law, but you can’t expect it to believe that.”
“What do you propose, then?”
“In the interests of the law, it ’ud be much more to the point if we could find some way of provin’ his innocence without offerin’ ourselves on the altars of Moloch. And that’s precisely what I’m goin’ to do.”
“How do you propose to set about it?”
Crook tilted his hat well over his eyes. “Any chap who’s in the cart wants a lawyer, doesn’t he? Innocent or guilty and take it from me, the innocent ones need him most.”
Even Bruce, accustomed as he was to Crook’s unorthodox ethical code, was staggered at the cool suggestion. “You mean, you’re going to offer to act for him? It’s impossible.”
“Got a better idea up your sleeve?” enquired Crook, tranquilly.
“There’s not another man living who’d have thought of it.”
“Don’t flatter me, Bruce. And don’t look as if you’d seen a snake amble across the carpet. Can’t you see it’s our one chance?”
Before Bruce could reply, Kay had burst into soft passionate speech. “Our one chance? Is that all you can think of? As if we matter any more. It’s that wretched young man who didn’t do it who counts now. I suppose it’s difficult for you to understand what this must be like for him. But I know,
because I’ve been in his shoes. It’s bad enough to have your liberty taken away from you, to know there’s a door there and you can’t walk through it;
to want to be alone and and realize there’s no such thing as privacy. But he’s up against something worse—the knowledge that he’s innocent and that perhaps he won’t be able to prove his innocence, that perhaps he’ll die because he can’t prove it. Oh surely you can see we’ve got to stop trying to defend ourselves, and tell the truth at once?”
Bruce looked as though this last appeal would break him, but Crook turned his big red face towards the speaker, saying, “And who’s goin’ to believe it if we do? I know the law better than you do, Lady Bruce, and you’re not goin’ to find twelve good men and true to believe that you and me and your husband visited Ogilvie last night, and none of us handled that gun. And, since you’re so strong on the innocent suffering, you might remember we’re all innocent and all suffering, all in the cart together. And what I’m out for is to save the whole gang of us and I can’t do that unless I have a free hand.”
Kay looked at him pleadingly. “You mean, you think you can prove his innocence without giving us away?”
“Get this into your head,” said Crook, impressively. “My clients are always innocent. That’s what they pay me for, and if the labourer’s worthy of his hire, it’s up to him to see he earns it. No, no, you leave this to me. Just you remember that unwise talk costs lives; you know more than others; keep it dark. Go on saying that to yourself till you believe it, and by that time it won’t matter if you believe it or not.”
Crook drove himself down to Brixton in the noisy little red car known as The Scourge. In spite of his brave words to Kay, he knew that the reputation of all three of them was at stake.
“If I pull this off, they ought to give me the Foreign Office,” he told himself, parking The Scourge and turning towards the great barred gates of the prison.
He found his new client walking up and down his cell, his hands behind his back. He was a tall, dark young fellow with a black smudge of moustache, dark burning eyes, black hair slicked away from a high intelligent forehead. He came forward with an irrepressible grace to greet the visitor.
“Take a pew,” he said. “Sorry we don’t run to cushions. My oath, this is a mess.”
“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t.”
Rogers leaned against the wall and stared over Crook’s head. “Tell me one thing,” he said. “Do you think there’s a chance?”
“A chance?” Crook’s face was fierce. “D’you know who I am? I’m Arthur Crook, the Bane of Bow Street, and I always get my man.”
He listened intently while young Rogers told his story. In its early stages it was familiar enough, the usual record of a young fellow, ambitious and enterprising, brought down through sheer bad luck, offered a chance if he could put up a bit of capital, seeing it slip, suddenly turning a corner and finding temptation waiting for him, and in a lunatic moment taking a thousand-to one chance and losing.
“So you forged the cheque, telling yourself, like every other young ass since the Garden of Eden, that you were really only borrowing the money, and it didn’t turn out as you’d expected.... Did the fellow prosecute?”
Rogers shook his head. Under his brown skin he was a deep, shameful scarlet.
“No. I’ve repaid it most of it, too, and I’d have repaid the lot but for Ogilvie getting hold of the thing and bleeding me white. I got a bit of a legacy about six months ago and he pu
t up his demands at once. I don’t believe he ever meant to let me go.” His eyes met Crook’s and he spoke with a passionate intensity that was not without its attractive side. “I wonder if you have any idea what living a double life can be,” he said. “I’m in a reserved occupation, doing hush-hush work for H.M. Government, and on the surface everything in the garden’s beautiful. There’s a girl I want to marry and for some crazy reason she wants to marry me and she can’t understand why I don’t push on with the job. How can I tell her what my life really is? That swine holding the paper over my head, threatening to send it to my girl’s father—playing me as you play a salmon—getting hell’s delight out of it the whole time. Did he suppose I’d let him go on bleeding me forever?”
The quick limbs stiffened, the mouth drew into a hard line. Vitality informed every limb, but now it was controlled and dangerous.
“In Ogilvie’s place I’d have cut my losses,” Crook found himself reflecting. “This chap could be dangerous.”
“It was his life or mine,” Rogers was saying. “I had to have that paper at any price, and I went round last night to tell him so.”
“What time was this?” “About a quarter to eight.” “Was he usually there so late?”
“A lot of his—clients—didn’t care about being seen in that neighbourhood before dark. Oh, he was there all right, only I didn’t tell him to get to hell as I meant, because I saw some other chap had done my job for me.”
“Do me a favour,” said Crook. “Don’t say that when you’re in the box. Well, what happened?”
“If I’d had the brains of a louse I’d have cleared out then and there. It never occurred to me to get the police. I wouldn’t have lifted a finger to get his murderer gaoled. It seemed to me he’d done the world a service, putting a bullet in Ogilvie’s brain.”
Crook removed his hat and put it underneath the chair on which he was sitting.
“You are tired of your life, aren’t you?” he suggested. “Leave all that fancy stuff to your counsel and get on with the facts. You arrived at seven-forty-five. Who let you in?”
“I found the door on the latch. I called his name, but nobody spoke. I could see all the lights were off, but I went into his office, turning on the switch by the door—and then I saw him.” His face quivered for an instant. “I’d never seen a dead man before.”
“You couldn’t make much mistake about this one,” was Crook’s unsympathetic comment. “Well?”
“As I say, my first idea was to bolt. Then I remembered the cheque. I knew where it was kept. Ogilvie liked to show it to me—part of the fun, you see.”
“I wonder you didn’t make a grab for it one of those times.”
“He always had his gun on the desk in front of him. Oh, you didn’t catch him out very easily. As a matter of fact, when I first saw him I thought he’d done it himself.”
“That’s what we were meant to think. Well, carry on.”
“It seemed to me a chance I’d never get again. No one knew where I was, I couldn’t see any reason why I should be disturbed, it wouldn’t take me -five minutes to get the thing, and then I’d be safe. Safe! I could hardly remember what security was like.”
“How did you get the safe open?” asked Crook slowly.
Under his deep colour the young man flushed again. “With his keys—out of his pocket,” he said.
“Robbin’ a dead man! You do like to make things difficult for yourself, don’t you?”
“I couldn’t feel anything but loathing. He wasn’t like a human being. I suppose I got the blood on my suit when I stooped above him. Anyway, I’d just got the safe open and was looking for the cheque when I felt someone touch my shoulder and I let out a sort of yell. I thought for one moment it was Ogilvie who’d touched me, Ogilvie come back from the dead... .”
“And it was only the air raid warden, after all?”
“Yes. He said he’d seen a light shining between the curtains and had come up to investigate. He stood staring at me, standing all the time between me and the door. ‘What’s all this about?’ he said. I told him: ‘That’s the way he was when I came in.’ He said: ‘You must be sure and tell the police that’, and he picked up the telephone and asked them to come along. I said again:
‘You can see he did it himself. Look at the gun. And he said: ‘Nicely arranged under the left hand. You think of everything, don’t you?’ And perhaps before he put a bullet through his head he gave you his keys.’ I had to admit I’d helped myself, though I was damned if I was going to say anything about the cheque, and then the police came and Bennett started all over again, saying how he’d seen the light and knowing the police had a purge on that evening, had come up to warn Ogilvie, because he’d taken a lot of trouble with his black-out apparatus and it was just bad luck. Well.” The young man wiped his sweating forehead. “I’ll say it was—for me.”
“Perhaps this chap was a pal of Ogilvie’s,” Crook suggested. “It’s amazin’ how unreasonable men can be in a jam like that.”
“I don’t believe Ogilvie had any friends. I don’t see how it was possible. Anyway, Bennett didn’t know him. He said not. He’d only spoken to him about twice in his life, as the fellow came barging past the wardens’ post. It wasn’t really anything to him if Ogilvie lived or died. And if he’d come on duty ten minutes later—it was about eight o’clock by this time—I’d have been out of the way and none of this would have happened.”
“What did the police say?” Crook enquired.
“What could they say? When you find a blackmailer shot and one of his clients burgling his safe, there’s only one thing the average man’s going to think. They invited me to come down to the station and go through the hoop there.”
“And anything you said to be used as evidence against you? How about the hat? Was it yours?”
“The hat? Oh, the black hat on the table. No, it wasn’t. But it wasn’t Ogilvie’s either. He never wore a hat. We used to say that great red bald dome of his was a target for every bomber in Berlin, and I wasn’t the only one who wished that particular bomber the best of luck.”
Crook stooped and picked up his brown bowler, dusting it fastidiously on his knee in its bright brown gent.’s suiting.
“Well, I think that’ll be all for the present. It’s a pity you messed about with that curtain, though.”
Rogers stared. “I never touched any curtain.”
“Sure?” Crook’s eyes were like little fiery gimlets.
“I swear.”
“Nice work,” said Crook, thoughtfully. “You see where that gets us?”
Rogers didn’t, quite, so Crook told him. Then he left the prison and hopped into The Scourge and came speeding back to town.
“The hat’s the crux of the situation,” he said, discussing the position with Bruce later in the day. “Everythin’ depends on that hat.”
“Do we know whose it is?” Bruce enquired carefully.
“I’ll take my oath it belonged to the murderer. And if it wasn’t for the hat we might never have laid hands on him at all.” He pulled his cigar-case from his pocket and thrust it across the table. “Of course, we’ve still got one lap ahead of us. If Bennett don’t confirm our man’s story we’re back where we started. If he does, all’s well. No one’s goin’ to suggest that Bennett was in a ramp with Rogers to bump off Ogilvie.”
“And—if his evidence doesn’t tally?” Even now, after years of association,
Bruce sometimes felt like a man being dragged across wild country at the tail of a spirited horse, with Crook for its impetuous rider.
“Then we’ll have to get our evidence some other way. I’ve never had any patience with these squeamish chaps who throw in their hand when the facts go against ’em. If my facts don’t help my man, then I go out and get some more. And if I can’t find any, I manufacture ’em. That’s what a chap employs a lawyer for. He doesn’t have to pay another man to tell the truth for him.”
The two men were seated in Crook’s office in Bl
oomsbury Street, waiting for Bennett’s arrival. He had been sleeping when Crook called at his house, after leaving Brixton, but his wife had promised to give him a message, and had later telephoned that he would be with them at six o’clock. It was now almost zero hour and indeed, as Crook glanced at the big turnip watch he lugged out of his waistcoat pocket, Parsons, his A.D.C., opened the door and brought the visitor in.
Bennett was a short dark man, looking worried and pale, as though he, too, hadn’t slept much. “Hope I’m not late,” he said quickly. “Oh, thanks.” He sat down. “No, I don’t smoke. You know, I’ve been having nightmares about that chap they took for murder last night. Murder’s murder, of course, but I can’t help feeling sorry for him.”
“That helps a lot,” said Crook, heartily. “Because it means you’ll do your best for him. This is Sir Aubrey Bruce; he’s going to act for Rogers if it comes to a show-down. I take it, you didn’t know Ogilvie?”
Bennett shook his head. “Only by sight. Our Post is just opposite his flat, and he used to chip us a bit as he came barging past. ‘No bombs yet’, he’d say. ‘My word, you must have put the wind up Hitler.’ Jovial sort of fellow he seemed. No one could have guessed he was a blackmailer. Poor young devil! I bet Ogilvie had had him on the rack for some time.” He shivered.
“You’re right. It was bad luck your timing your visit just when you did. A quarter of an hour either way and everyone ’ud have been happy—except Ogilvie, of course, and he don’t deserve to be.”
“Yes.” Bennett nodded. “He did his best, you know, Rogers, I mean. Nine men out of ten would have plumped for suicide.”
“You didn’t, did you?”
“I couldn’t think of one reason why he should. Not that I’d know, of course. No, what made me think of murder was finding the fellow rifling the safe. He had to admit, when I asked him how he got it open, that he’d helped himself to Ogilvie’s keys. He carried ’em on a ring in his pocket. That’ll go against him, I’m afraid.”
Sequel to Murder: The Cases of Arthur Crook and Other Mysteries Page 18
