Crime in Kensington

by Christopher St. John Sprigg

  Mr. Budge cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “no doubt you will wish to know what is to happen to the hotel in my wife’s absence—which we all hope is temporary.”

  “Hear, hear,” interjected Mr. Winterton, with an adenoidal click.

  “I am happy to say that I am temporarily taking my wife’s place, and everything will be carried on just as it was in her time... Everything,” he repeated with a deep significance that apparently was not lost on his audience.

  “That’s a great relief for us all,” pronounced the Colonel solemnly. “We all felt sure that you could do no less—very worrying all the same.”

  “Hear, hear,” clicked Mr. Winterton.

  VII

  “It’s a puzzling case this,” Sergeant Noakes advised his wife. “There are times when all sorts of causes of disappearances suggest themselves. Generally, too, the people concerned in the case—relatives or friends—have a pretty shrewd idea of where and why the dear one has legged it.”

  He shook his head. “It’s quite different in this case. Here’s a woman ill in bed—reason one why she shouldn’t get up and go. And don’t suggest that she was shamming,” he said menacingly to his wife, who, placidly hemming a sheet at her sewing-machine, hardly looked as if she had any intention of doing so. “I’ve had that out with the doctor and he said she couldn’t possibly be shamming. Not that I trust these experts anyway,” he added on a note of despair.

  “Point number two,” he continued. “I’m perfectly certain that no one in the hotel has the least idea where she’s gone to. That damned journalist fellow—a silly ass of a chap—walks round looking as if he knows a lot, and writes up all sorts of daft theories in his rag; but he doesn’t know. Now you’re going to tell me that the husband knows something.” Noakes wagged a finger at his wife. “And so he does, but he doesn’t know where she’s gone to, I’ll be bound.”

  Mrs. Noakes finished her hem. “Why don’t you dig up the garden?” she suggested.

  “Bah!” Noakes exclaimed disgustedly.

  Once, in a case with which he had been connected, his wife had suggested that the body had been buried in the garden. It had been; and the triumph had gone to her head. Ever since she had been unable to make any contribution to any of his cases beyond the suggestion that the body or stolen article had been buried in the garden.

  “I wouldn’t trust that little one-eyed Egyptian farther than I could throw him,” stated the Sergeant, with Anglo-Saxon prejudice.

  VIII

  Eppoliki gently opened the door of Budge’s room. Budge, his back to the door, spun round, and the Egyptian found himself staring into the shaking barrel of an automatic.

  Budge dropped it and grinned sheepishly. “God, you startled me,” he said. “I’ve been a bundle of nerves ever since yesterday evening. Did you find anything to bear out your theory?”

  The medical student shook his head. “Nothing. Think probably I am wrong. Often am, so they tell me at King’s College.” He shrugged his shoulders resignedly.

  Budge meditated for a space. “No, it’s not him, I’m sure. It’s some relation of the woman’s,” he muttered. He didn’t use the word “woman” but that was what he meant. “I was a fool, I suppose; but I’m paying for it now. I jump every time anyone comes near me; but they won’t have an easy job to get me.”

  “What’s this?” asked the Egyptian, his eyes bright and bird-like with curiosity. “Who you been offending and how?”

  Indignation blazed in Budge’s eyes and then died out. “Never you mind,” he said. “You’ll probably know sooner or later.”

  He dropped the revolver and drummed on the desk with his fingers. His forehead was still damp with the sweat of fear from his first fright when Eppoliki had entered the room so noiselessly. His Adam’s apple fluttered as he swallowed.

  “The police suspect me,” he whispered. “That fellow Noakes keeps asking me silly questions. Polite enough to me, of course, but questions that as good as ask me if I did it.”

  “Did you?” asked the Egyptian innocently. “You know I’m beginning to wonder whether——”

  “I suppose you’re trying to be funny,” growled the other. “Well, don’t, see. You’re not.”

  Chapter Six

  Here We Are Again

  I

  IT was strange how cordially the suggestion was received.

  Seated on a sofa by the fire, Venables, for Viola’s benefit, had gradually eliminated the various possibilities.

  “So you see the event could never have taken place at all. What fools we mortals be!”

  “…admirable fellows and eventually get their man,” had droned the Colonel remorselessly near by. Sergeant Noakes had tactfully complimented him on his handling of the affair, and the old warrior’s heart was evidently in cordial sympathy with the police. “Believe me, Mrs. Walton,” he had gone on, “Scotland Yard never lets up. It may take weeks—it may take years, but sooner or later they get him.”

  “Nonsense,” interjected Miss Mumby. “Clumsy idiots, that’s what they are. Socrates went up to speak to that Sergeant Noakes and the brute trod on his foot.”

  Socrates’ ears twitched at the mention of his name, but he kept his eyes fixed on the ball of bright scarlet wool which unrolled itself with fascinating little jerks and bounds at his mistress’s feet as the shapeless scarlet garment on which she was engaged slowly grew.

  “And his language,” continued Miss Mumby. “Disgraceful, all that fuss over a little scratch. I wrote to the Commissioner protesting about it!”

  “Russian gold,” explained Mr. Winterton. “The country is rotten with it. Look at Invergordon. Look at Dartmoor. Look at the number of murders that take place every year. These fellows stop at absolutely nothing.” He dissolved in a staccato series of clicks, expressing his horror of the national situation. “National Party,” he muttered darkly. “I could tell you a thing or two about the National Party!”

  “Oh, but surely it’s saved the country, Mr. Winterton,” said Miss Geranium. “I read it only the other day in the Mercury.”

  “The Mercury! I could tell you something about the Mercury too,” answered Winterton.

  Miss Hectoring looked at him icily. “My father took the Mercury from the day it was started,” she said. “He was a friend of the proprietor, and often used to discuss its policy with him. ‘Camilla,’ he said to me shortly before he died, ‘if ever they give votes for women, don’t trust your own judgment. Do what the Mercury tells you!’ I have done so ever since.” There was a tone of finality in Miss Hectoring’s voice, and Winterton contented himself with one noisy suck at a hollow tooth by way of reply, not the least unpleasant of his mannerisms.

  It was eleven o’clock and the majority of the residents who did not go to work had, as if by a pre-concerted arrangement, drifted into the lounge. All of them had been seeking information about what was the only possible topic of conversation in the hotel that day. No one fancied the idea of leaving the hotel except Mrs. Salterton-Deeley, who was determined to go to the little recherché hat shop she ran in Bond Street even if it meant braving the united stare of the sight-seeing London public still congregated round the Garden Hotel. In fact, being red-headed by nature as well as by art, this prospect added to her determination rather than the reverse.

  The residents had soon found that nothing was to be gained by wandering aimlessly round and crudely interrogating the hotel staff and the policemen. They had thus congregated at intervals in the lounge to discuss with never-diminished interest the events of the day.

  The suggestion had come in the first place from Miss Mumby. Its cordial reception was due in part to the fact that the company were becoming exceedingly bored with each other. Any suggestion for concerted action would have met with a ready response. And deep down in everyone there is a strain of the primitive, immediate successor to the animism of childhood, and almost as old, which never allows logic and reason and science to extirpate completely the belief in som
ething more than natural, in something uneasy, unexpected, the thirteenth chance, the spilt salt, hybris, the warnings and phantasms of midnight...

  “I feel we ought to try to get in touch with Mrs. Budge,” said Miss Mumby. “Here we are, gathered together,” she went on brightly, “with ample spiritual horse-power, as a dear and very wise friend of mine calls it. I feel certain that if we all tried hard and put our hearts into it, we could get into touch with the unfortunate woman. At least we could be certain of getting a message of consolation to her, and there is every possibility of getting a message back again, to tell us whereabouts she is.”

  “In principle,” Miss Mumby explained, “the séance will be telepathic. I am assuming that Mrs. Budge is incarcerated somewhere and is endeavouring to communicate with us. That task will be rendered simple if we unite our spiritual forces and empty our minds. It may be that Mrs. Budge’s astral body will enter this room. On the other hand, it may be that one of us will find a message enter his or her mind.

  “There is a distinct possibility,” she added, “that some kindly spirit may also be attracted to our circle, and supply us with the information which we need, and perhaps give us some consoling message for Mr. Budge.”

  “I don’t believe in it,” remarked Cantrip gruffly. “Was in India for twenty years and couldn’t find a man to do the Indian rope trick.”

  “This isn’t a conjuring trick, Colonel,” answered Miss Mumby. “This is a scientific experiment. None knows better than I we may get no result.” She shrugged her shoulders. “On the other hand, one sometimes gets amazing results.”

  “Something in that,” admitted the Colonel. “I remember in India seeing a fakir take a red-hot coal in his hand and rub it all over his naked body. Damned hot coal it was, too. It set fire to a piece of paper when I applied it.”

  “I think it is worth trying,” urged Winterton. “I don’t believe in it myself, but it can do no harm.”

  “Oh, do let’s try it,” exclaimed Mrs. Walton. “I have known some wonderful things happen at a séance.”

  An excellent idea, thought Charles. The Unconscious, given complete liberty of action in a dark room, might play some revealing pranks. He hurriedly tried to recall what he knew of Freudian symbolism.

  Under Miss Mumby’s directions a light bamboo table was placed in the centre of the lounge. The blinds were drawn and the curtains pulled across. With fingers touching, the ring of adults sat round the table and waited.

  In the faint light filtering through the curtains Viola could make out the features of the sitters. Miss Mumby, with grey hair tightly drawn back from her gaunt Scotch face, looked like a sibyl on her tripod waiting for the descent of the prophetic fire. The others had an expression suitable for Church during the course of a long sermon, except for Charles, whose face seemed absolutely devoid of any expression except for a faint sparkle of animation from his monocle.

  The heavy silence was broken only by a creak of chairs and a steady wheeze ending with an abrupt click from Mr. Winterton, an exaggerated version of which made his table manners so distressing. Eventually it even got on Miss Mumby’s nerves.

  “Perhaps it will distract our minds,” she said, “if we repeat some simple saying. Try this, for instance. There’s so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it ill behoves the most of us to say any ill of the rest of us.”

  With a little prompting the seven were soon able to repeat the rigmarole word perfect, and presently a dreary monotone was established which lulled the senses into stupor. Moreover, it had the wanted effect. The table quivered like a high-spirited horse and then started to rock determinedly.

  In a voice blank of all feeling Miss Mumby addressed it. “Are you a Good Spirit? Knock once for yes and twice for no.”

  The table rose and fell once and then was still, shivering slightly. It was a good spirit.

  “Are you Mrs. Budge?” Miss Mumby asked next, without any preliminary skirmishing.

  One knock.

  Charles heard a swift intake of breath from Mrs. Walton. Miss Geranium’s eyes glittered strangely in the twilight. “Sees visions,” thought Charles, remembering Viola’s words, and was disturbed. Her outburst shortly before had been something more than hysteria.

  Colonel Cantrip snorted, but whether in scepticism or surprise, Charles could not make out.

  “Where are you?” asked Miss Mumby, the faintest tinge of excitement creeping into her voice. “I shall spell out the alphabet. Please knock once when I reach the required letter, and I will begin again.”

  “H” spelt the table.

  “E”

  “L”

  “Hell,” said the Colonel tactlessly. “It can’t be a good spirit.”

  Miss Geranium half rose to speak and then sat down abruptly.

  The table did an abrupt pirouette, and all hurriedly removed their hands for a moment. It sank into quiescence.

  There was a shake in Miss Mumby’s voice as she went through the alphabet again. She lingered for a moment at “L.” The table quivered, but made no movement. “M, N, O, P.” The table selected “P” with a decided rap.

  “Help,” said the Colonel in a surprised tone. “I thought it was going to be ‘Hell.’”

  The table still shuddered, and in spite of every question that Miss Mumby addressed to it, it was inexorable in its demands for “Help.” Efforts to obtain further information from it only appeared to goad it to fury, and it started an insistent rocking which worked up to a stationary dance. This was too much for the nerves of Socrates, who had been sitting quietly by his mistress, and with a miaow of protest he went berserk, tearing round and round the room and leaping on and off chairs and tables. There was a sudden crash as a large Chinese vase on the mantelshelf was whisked off, and the noise seemed to appal even the spirit or, more strictly speaking, the astral body, of Mrs. Budge, for the table stopped and went completely dead.

  Socrates, pacified by the cessation of the noise, began sniffing in the ruins of the vase. Something had evidently been in it, for he dragged out and carried to Miss Mumby an object which in the uncertain light dimly resembled a glove.

  Miss Mumby bent to pick it up. As she did so, to the consternation of everyone, a piercing shriek, of an intensity which Charles had never believed within the scope of a human voice, made Socrates leap very nearly to the ceiling, and sent a chill down the spine of every listener.

  II

  “Well, Sergeant,” remarked Miss Sanctuary, who was sitting on the sofa in the little sitting-room on the ground floor which was her pet retreat, “have you discovered any trace of Mrs. Budge, or of the person who attacked me?”

  “None at all,” groaned the Sergeant. “It is a most puzzling case. Here is Mrs. Budge completely disappeared; so far as we can see she can’t have vanished voluntarily, and yet our organization, which is, as you know, pretty thorough, cannot pick up a trace of her. Not the tiniest, remotest trace,” he added, carefully inspecting the inside of his helmet as if looking for the trace.

  Miss Sanctuary was silent for a moment. She looked up from the scarf she was knitting and glanced at him shrewdly. “I know nothing about these things beyond the detective stories I read,” she said, smiling, “but I can’t help imagining that a little research into the Budges’ past might help a little.”

  The Sergeant returned her glance by one equally penetrating. He had already sized her up as a knowing old lady, for all her benevolent mien—he had an aunt who was the very spit of her, and as cunning as a cart-load of monkeys.

  “You’re right, madam, that would be the obvious line of inquiry, if we had a real case,” he answered. “But, you see, it isn’t a crime to disappear. We have been called in in the first place by Mr. Budge to help him find his wife. We cross-examine him certainly, and he gives us all the information he has, or”—the Sergeant looked knowing—“all the information he thinks it good for us to have. That’s all. I haven’t really any right to be here talking to you in this hotel ex
cept that Mr. Budge has asked us in to help him.”

  “I see your point, Sergeant,” answered Miss Sanctuary. “But what about the attack on me? I may be egotistical, but isn’t that important enough to justify the police taking a strong line?”

  “The Sergeant thought long and deeply. “It is and it isn’t,” he answered guardedly at last. “It all depends on the motive which caused the man to attack you. It wasn’t robbery, so far as we know, and it must be connected with the disappearance of Mrs. Budge. So back we come to the disappearance. If it were the ordinary robbery with violence case it would be easy. Who are the known criminals of the type out of prison, and where were they at the time in question? Those would be the lines we should go on—a mere routine job, you see! But here’s something different. There’s nothing to give us a line on who it is. Once we know what really happened, then we’ve something to start from. At present it’s a complete fog.”

  “I think I see what you mean,” replied Miss Sanctuary. “You want a clue, and it may not be a material clue—a dropped cigarette or a finger-print—it may be just a motive, an indication of the type of mind of the criminal which will provide you with the end of a thread which you can grasp and follow to its termination.”

  “That’s it,” admitted the Sergeant. He crossed his knees and looked coldly at the inside of his helmet, in which there was still apparently no trace of Mrs. Budge. Of course if only we knew one way or the other. Supposing it was murder, for instance”—he dropped his voice gloatingly—“then if we knew that we should act very differently, I can tell you! We should pull the house to pieces from top to foundations, and we should pull you people to pieces too. As far as the Judges’ rules would let us,” he added gloomily.