Crime in Kensington

by Christopher St. John Sprigg

  “It is almost incredible,” he said to his assistant, “that poisoners should go on using arsenic and criminals should go on leaving finger-prints in this year of grace. Well, it makes our task easier, I suppose.”

  “I’ve sometimes wondered, sir,” replied his young assistant, “whether there are so many arsenic poisoning cases, because those are the only cases that are discovered. In the same way, perhaps, the criminal is traced so often by finger-prints, because it is only criminals that leave finger-prints who are caught.”

  Bray glanced at him keenly. “It’s an ingenious theory, Cuff, and one which has sometimes worried me in my more despondent moments. I’ve come to the conclusion, however, that if we really believed it we might as well throw up our jobs here.”

  He immersed himself again in the poisoning case. Outside traffic moved up and down London river, sirens moaned, cars hooted. Inside a drama of covetousness, hate, and death had been reduced to the verdict of a physician on the entrails of the deceased. Macbeth, thought Bray, reduced to the terms of a butcher’s shop.

  It was 3.45 and he had got as far as the liver of the deceased (“definitely positive results were obtained from the Hans-Browning reaction...”) when the ’phone bell rang.

  Sergeant Noakes was at the end of the wire. Had anyone been overlooking Bray they would have seen his lips purse in a whistle of excitement and his eyes glitter. “This sounds like a real case,” he said, making rapid notes on a pad. He rang off and, seizing the Sergeant’s report from its pigeon-hole, committed it to memory, while Superintendent Etherton in his larger, but still sufficiently small room, gazed impatiently at his memorandum pad, which bore accusingly a notation of an appointment at four o’clock with Detective Inspector Bray. In a few minutes, however, any annoyance was wiped out by the news brought him by Bray, who in a short time had reduced the facts of the case to passable coherence.

  III

  Charles clung limply but happily to a telephone and poured out a story whose ripe details enabled the Mercury’s best sub to put up headlines of surpassing juiciness.

  “You’re in great form to-night, Mr. Barnard,” said the hoary-headed Father of the Chapel as he drove the wedges into the forme, and Barnard, standing on the stone beside him, modestly agreed.

  In the ghostly silence of the early morning streets, when Aurora trysts with Tithonus and the shrill voices of humanity seem to invade the silent empire of night with uneasy trepidation, slatternly looking women with tousled hair and shirt-sleeved men with unshaven faces were fixing the Mercury’s bills outside the windows of faded tobacconist shops. The early workers stopped, stared, and purchased.

  The Garden Hotel Mystery had become a matter of national importance.

  Chapter Five

  The Morning After

  I

  EVERYBODY got up surprisingly early for breakfast on the morning following Mrs. Budge’s disappearance. Charles, who rarely looked at his tongue in the glass before eleven in the morning, found himself beaming over a steaming jug of coffee at Viola at nine o’clock.

  “I met one of our heavy-footed friends on the way to my bath,” said Charles conversationally. “He was lurking in the linen-room next door with the chambermaid, whom he was doubtless cross-examining. Anyway, there was a great deal of tittering going on. Apparently there is still no sign of Mrs. Budge.”

  “I suppose when they do find her she will only be a body,” speculated Viola.

  Charles pushed his kidneys away in disgust. “Please,” he protested.

  At that moment he caught sight of the front page of the Mercury, and had he not forgotten the trick, would certainly have blushed. At the same time he had to admit to an acute and simple feeling of pleasure at the sight of his story blazoned across the front page, illustrated by a front view of the Garden Hotel, a close-up of Mr. Budge walking down the steps with his hat in front of his face, and the portrait Charles had purloined the night before.

  The sedate thoroughfare of Tunbridge Gardens was already blocked by the crowd of sightseers gaping against the area railings of the Garden Hotel.

  “I am glad to find that the coffee is good,” said Charles, pouring himself out another cup. “It is an excellent tribute to the way this place is run that the disappearance of the proprietress has not disturbed the service of breakfast.”

  “I wonder you can eat breakfast at all,” replied Viola. “I feel we ought to be prowling round doing something. I’ve a good mind not to go to the studio to-day.”

  “Well, I’m not going to the office,” said Charles. “I’m a crime reporter for the moment, my girl. Little Pouncefoot will have to run my page. It means he will devote six paragraphs to his sweetie, Doris Desirée, but as I’ve kept the wretched girl out of the gossip for six months I can’t really grumble.

  “An idea strikes me. Why not run crime gossip on social lines, if, as apparently is the case, society and crime are the only two things the Mercury’s reader is interested in? Dropping into the Sailors’ Friend at Limehouse, who should I see but Sally, the charming young wife of Bouncing Bill, who is wintering in Dartmoor. Sally is, of course, the daughter of Mr. Jim Grimes, whose recent bigamy will be fresh in the memory of the public. Sally was her usual soignée self, and shook her finger playfully at me as she abstracted a purse from the pocket of a stranger beside her. It is, by the way, considered perfectly permissible in the most advanced criminal circles to pick a pocket of a person one has not been introduced to. These modern informal ways are very charming.”

  “Damn,” remarked Viola suddenly. She had been paying no attention to Charles’s burbling.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Charles.

  “I faithfully promised to return Mr. Blood’s stole before breakfast,” she explained.

  “What did Mr. Blood steal before breakfast?” asked Charles, spreading too much butter on his toast.

  “No, silly, stole—a thing you wear round your neck,” replied Viola. “Mr. Blood has a rare Byzantine one which is terribly valuable and he gave it to me the other day to use in a drawing I am making for a poster to advertise the Anglo-Byzantine Church Congress at Much Muddleton. Whether I shall ever be paid for it remains to be seen,” she added reflectively. I wish you’d be an angel and get the stole from my room—it’s hanging on a chair—and give it back to Blood. You’ll find him in his room—he always has breakfast brought up to his room.”

  As Charles strolled across the lounge, with the stole over his arm, a reporter who had penetrated past the police on duty approached him.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but can you give me a few words about the happenings in the hotel yesterday?”

  Charles duly admired the dexterity with which he was impalpably drawn aside.

  “What paper do you represent?” asked Charles severely, fixing him with his monocle. “I should not mind making a brief statement to the Times.”

  “I represent the Gazette,” answered the reporter, naming the Mercury’s 2,104,326 net sale rival.

  “In the circumstances I can give you a full personal statement of all that took place here.”

  The reporter’s eyes glittered. He whipped out the professionally inconspicuous little scrap of paper on which he took his notes.

  “Yes,” said Charles, drawing out from his pocket that morning’s Mercury, “here it is.”

  The reporter, an eager young new-comer to the Gazette’s staff from the provinces, saw the joke and laughed so much that Charles, quite touched, gave him an account of what had occurred that morning.

  II

  Blood, like Charles, was a late riser, except on Sundays, and he was seated in a dressing-gown with a breakfast tray beside him, diverting himself with a monograph on “the Streptococcal Ingestion of Enzymes.” He looked up in surprise when Charles entered. “Ah, yes, the stole,” he said, “a very fine one. That was presented to me for my work in organizing the first Anglo-Byzantine Congress. As a journalist, you will remember it; it caused a great sensation.” Charles remembered it.
An enthusiastic Evangelical whose mind had become disordered had climbed up one of the pillars that supported the hall in which the meeting was held. Shrieking, “Milliners! Milliners!” he had flung into the audience articles of feminine clothing of dubious respectability at such a time and place.

  While Charles was conversing with Blood, the gentle murmur of the crowd outside had suddenly risen to a cheer. Charles went to the window and was gratified to see an old lady of about seventy endeavouring to climb the area railings. A small boots boy was standing guard with a broom, and the two were evidently engaged in a verbal interchange which was being cheered by the crowd.

  “I can never decide whether a Roman collar gets dirty quicker or slower than an ordinary collar,” the parson was saying.

  The old lady’s bonnet had been knocked off, and Charles was too engrossed to reply.

  Suddenly he heard a strangled moan in the room behind him. He turned. Blood’s face had turned completely white; his eyes were destitute of expression. He was staring ahead unseeingly. In one hand he held the lid of the laundry basket and in the other a collar. Replacing the lid on the basket, but still holding the collar in his hand, he staggered back to his chair and collapsed into it.

  “Good heavens, Blood,” said Charles, “what’s the matter?”

  For two minutes Blood said nothing, but stared at Charles. Twice he made as if to speak, but seemed unable to articulate the words. Slowly the colour drained back to his face.

  “Just a touch of faintness,” he said painfully at last.

  “Look here,” Charles said anxiously, “don’t you think I had better get a doctor?”

  “No,” the other answered tonelessly. “I’ve had these attacks before.” He paused. “I once got a go of fever from my bacteriological work and I’m subject to faintness occasionally as the result. I shall be quite all right in a few hours’ time. I have some medicine I keep by me.”

  There was a knock at the door, and Mr. Budge appeared.

  “Come to collect your laundry, sir,” he said. “We’re a bit short-handed this week, so I’m helping collect the baskets.”

  Blood’s nerves were obviously overwrought as a result of his seizure for he jumped visibly.

  “Come again later, Mr. Budge,” he said in an irritated voice. “Mine isn’t ready yet.”

  “All right, sir,” replied Mr. Budge, “I’ll collect what you’ve got, and call for the rest later.”

  If, in Blood’s last remark, Charles had detected the twang of overstrung nerves, he now heard a distinct snap.

  Blood jumped to his feet and bore down on Budge. “Is this an hotel, or is it a blasted workhouse?” he screamed, with a falsetto quiver in his voice. “Get out of my room; get out of my room at once. Damn and blast you. If I see your bloody face round this door again to-day I’ll knock it off.”

  Charles prepared to act the rôle of the friend who separates two combatants—a task almost as exacting and embarrassing as breaking up a dog-fight; but Mr. Budge showed none of the resentment that he would, thought Charles, have been more than human not to show. On the contrary, he retreated with a bland and understanding smile.

  “Oh, well, sir, if you feel like that I’m quite prepared to leave your laundry. This disappearance has upset us all.”

  Before he closed the door, however, he hesitated. “I’m afraid you’ll be disturbed again to-day, however. The police are going to search the hotel this evening.” Then he was gone.

  “I’m sorry, Venables,” remarked the parson in a small voice. “My nerves are absolutely in pieces. I don’t expect I shall be able to prepare a microscopic slide for three days. You’d better leave me before I make another scene. So long.”

  Venables left the room, and the parson put the breakfast tray outside, locking the door behind him. He lifted the house telephone and gave instructions that he would be working all the morning and must not be disturbed.

  For half an hour he sat in his chair with his head in his hands. For close on another half-hour he paced the room. Then with a gesture in which determination and resignation were equally mingled, he pulled a table into the middle of the room and cleared the top. Drawing on a thin pair of gloves, he went to a cupboard and took out a case of shining instruments.

  Then the Rev. Septimus Blood went to the laundry basket and lifted the lid…

  III

  Bailey tapped his pipe reflectively on the desk. “What do you make of it, Venables?” he said at length. “Is it a real story or isn’t it?”

  Charles, summoned to report on the Garden Hotel Mystery, nibbled the top of his umbrella. “Difficult to say. Most of these disappearances are disappointing. Unless a corpse turns up somewhere, there’s nothing in it. I’ve got a hunch, though, that something’s behind this business that isn’t obvious to the eye. There’s someone lying like hell, I’m certain, and there’s something simmering below the surface at that place that will come to the top sooner or later.”

  Bailey looked at him keenly. He was an old hand at his game, and more raw material in the shape of journalists had passed through his hands than of anyone else in Fleet Street. He was puzzled now.

  “Are you sure you can run this story, Venables?” he asked. “Your first story was excellent, but can you keep it up? To be perfectly frank, you have had no experience of this sort of thing. You were only on the reportorial staff for three months and then you were put on to the gossip column, you know.”

  “I think I can hold it down all right,” answered Charles. “I have one or two lines I should like to work on, and I don’t think I will let the Mercury down.”

  “Go ahead then,” said the other. “Don’t get yourself arrested, and don’t let us in for a libel action. Otherwise you’ll get all the rope you need. I may say the Chief was extremely keen on your continuing with this assignment. He’s a friend of the family, I believe, and he hinted that your murky past qualified you for this.”

  “Oxford, Geneva and the League of Nations, and rural Surrey, are the extent of my experiences,” said Charles innocently. “However, I’ll do my best. By the way, I was thinking of leaving the Garden Hotel.”

  Bailey stared at him. “What! Why on earth...”

  “But now,” added Charles ingenuously, “I shall stay on.”

  “Very neat,” Bailey acknowledged, smiling. “I, of course, press you to stay there, and you therefore put down your bill at the hotel as part of your expenses. Right oh, carry on; charge it out.” In his time Bailey’s expenses sheets had been the admiration of Fleet Street.

  Charles looked in at Pouncefoot before he left.

  “Gr-rr——” he said, “I’m fed up with Desirée already. Can’t you give her a rest? Put in a paragraph about the new crime specialist of the Mercury.”

  “Who’s that?” asked Pouncefoot.

  “Me,” replied Charles.

  IV

  Charles might not have been quite so cheerful if he could have seen what was happening in his room.

  Kneeling on the floor before his trunk was Eppoliki. With an occasional furtive glance behind him, Eppoliki went steadily through his belongings. Every paper was sorted and examined.

  Apparently the results of his search disappointed him. He turned his attention to the chest of drawers, but here again he drew blank.

  “Funny,” he muttered. “Can he have been telling the truth?” This last proposition seemed too fantastic an assumption for the Egyptian, however, for he resumed his methodical search.

  At last he ended his labours. Evidently what he had been searching for was not to be found…

  V

  The Rev. Septimus Blood hurried down the corridor of the hotel. He glanced stealthily to the left and the right. In his hand he held the battered leather case, bigger than the traditional doctor’s bag, which, he had once confided, sometimes contained enough bacilli to wipe out the population of London. At first the residents of the hotel had regarded it with alarm and had shied away from it with the same instinctive shrinking that th
e normal person exhibits towards an infernal machine. After a time, however, they had become used to it, for it appeared to be his constant companion. “Blood and his little pets,” the combination had been nicknamed.

  The lounge seemed to be empty. He glanced round. A large vase on the mantelshelf caught his eye.

  “Excellent,” he mumbled. “Ideal.” He opened his bag…

  The Rev. Septimus Blood looked round the lobby. Mrs. Salterton-Deeley’s hat and coat hung on a peg: and below it was a leather hat-case.

  Evidently some humorous thought had struck the Rev. Septimus Blood. His lips were parted in a smile.

  “Hussy,” he said to himself, “impudent creature!”

  The hat from the hat-box was put in his bag...

  VI

  A few of the residents were sitting in Mr. Budge’s own office, on the ground floor, where the dark secrets of his laundry business were discussed and settled.

  There was a show-case, glazed, of dress shirts whose gleaming whiteness was in striking contrast to the dusty appearance of the laundry as a whole. Two mottoes, prepared by the United Kingdom Society of Launderers, hung on the wall. “A firmly sewn button cannot come off,” said one. “Bad material is shown up by the wash,” admonished the other. These two mottoes at once produced an inferiority complex in those who had come to complain about the ravages of Budge’s Hand Laundry.