Crime in Kensington

by Christopher St. John Sprigg

  “Up to a late hour there were no further developments in the Dismembered Body Mystery. Inspector Bray, however…”

  “Rottenly,” replied Charles, hurling the pad from him. “An hour ago the police were going to arrest Budge, and he turned up with a watertight alibi. Now they think they are going to arrest Blood, but I feel quite certain that he is not guilty and will be able to prove it. Meanwhile nothing is happening and my reputation at the Mercury is dwindling.”

  “Poor boy,” commiserated Viola, smiling. “What do you intend to do about it?”

  “Do you know, it has suddenly occurred to me that I might find the murderer myself,” said Charles, who had, in fact, been cherishing the idea ever since his interview with the Chief.

  Viola laughed. “If you did, I should begin to suspect you of having brains. Have you decided on the culprit already?”

  “No, but I’ve got a shadow of a suspicion,” replied Charles, drawing a comic face on the pad, “a shred of an inkling,” he added, surmounting it with a top hat, “of how the murder might have been done. Bray, of course, would laugh at it,” he said bitterly, giving the face a beard, “but I’ve a good mind to follow it up.”

  “I shouldn’t,” remarked Viola unencouragingly. “I have a feeling if you follow up your intuitions you will make a priceless ass of yourself. Leave that to the professional.”

  “I suppose I am a professional,” remarked Charles casually, jamming his eyeglass home and looking at her sternly. “I was a detective for two years.”

  “Are you really serious?”

  He nodded solemnly. “Yes. I cannot reveal where I was employed”—he looked round in the manner of the stage conspirator—“but I have a genuine letter of thanks with deep regrets at my resignation from the organization that employed my services.”

  Viola looked at Charles closely, removed his eyeglass and brushed his hair down over his forehead. “Good heavens!” she exclaimed in awestruck tones, “I believe I have misjudged you. You are not such a fool as you try to look. Did you track down erring wives, or did you specialize in following husbands in Paris? … But, after all,” she added despairingly, “no detective could possibly play bridge as badly as you.”

  “Bridge isn’t everything, my girl,” answered Charles. “I’ll show you something in a day or two, and then you’ll be sorry you said ‘No’ that afternoon in the Dutch garden at Tankards.”

  “Dear old days,” exclaimed Viola, quite suddenly and irritatingly finding her eyes go misty. “A few years in London makes me feel quite sentimental when I think of spring in the country with the lambs and the violets and the incredible quantities of mud. It was excruciatingly boring but really rather nice. Are you still as much in love with me?”

  “Curiously enough I am,” he said.

  Viola looked at him. She patted his hand. “I am sorry, Charles, I shouldn’t have said that, should I? You’ve been awfully nice, and really I’m beginning to feel rather tired of London. I suppose it is a sign of a hidden strain of domesticity asserting itself. If I’m not careful I shall find myself saying yes.” She smiled at Charles.

  “‘Maybe I shan’t ask you, Madam,’ he said,” retorted Charles haughtily, replacing his eyeglass. “What the devil has Bray been doing with Blood?”

  III

  The detective, on entering Blood’s room somewhat perfunctorily, had been astonished to see an enormous cone of brilliantly embroidered fabric standing upright in the room. The cone was truncated, and surmounted by the dark little Gaelic head of Blood, blue jowled and rubicund, squinting at his reflection in the mirror.

  “Oh, Lord,” groaned the detective to himself, “another lunatic!”

  Blood swept towards him. “Sit down, Inspector,” he said cordially. “I suppose you don’t happen to know anything about the Coptic rite?”

  “I don’t,” answered the Inspector.

  “I can’t remember whether or no one wears a maniple with this cope,” the parson complained.

  The Inspector, who had been nurtured on Evangelical principles, looked somewhat shocked. “Millinery,” he murmured to himself. More politely he said, “Do you know anything about dissection, Mr. Blood?”

  The parson glanced at him warily, and busied himself with the chains of his cope. Freeing himself, at length he spoke in an expressionless voice.

  “I have a medical degree, but my province, of course, is bacteriology. Why?”

  “Mrs. Budge’s corpse was dissected by an expert.”

  “Well?”

  (Probably not so daft as he looks, thought Bray.)

  “Do you think a man of, say, Eppoliki’s experience capable of doing the job?”

  “Don’t trifle with me, Inspector,” said Blood waspishly. “You didn’t come here to ask me a question which could have been better answered by your experts. Do you suggest I had any hand in this ghastly business?”

  “That is a question you could best answer yourself, sir,” answered the Inspector. “You will realize that it is necessary for us to consider every possible hypothesis, and it is at least practicable for someone to have stowed the body temporarily in this room and dissected it on this table.” He pointed to the glazed table about seven feet long, on which were a rack of test tubes containing cultures, a pipette and a few trays of gelatine. “The body might have been stowed anywhere—this basket would have made a good hiding-place, for instance.”

  He lifted the lid and scrutinized the inside with an acute glance.

  Blood smiled mirthlessly. “Make a microscopic examination of it,” he suggested.

  Bray, sensitive enough to shades, felt that wherever the corpse had been disposed, Blood had no fears of its leaving traces in this basket. Anyway, he wasn’t getting very much change out of the Welsh parson. He decided to make a personal appeal. Blood was humming to himself and folding up the cope.

  “Very well, sir,” he said, “I will lay all my cards on the table.”

  “Good. Let’s see them.”

  “Information from a trustworthy source has been laid”—the Inspector secretly smiled at this description of Charles’s wild guess—“that prior to the time of its dissection the body was, to your knowledge, in this room.”

  Blood flushed to the roots of his hair. “The swine,” he said passionately. “There’s a limit beyond which I won’t be driven. Can’t you see a yard, Inspector? The man who gave you that information could give it to you because he put the body there himself. Budge is the murderer, and he’s in it up to his neck. He’s pushed his impositions on me too far, though.” The little man’s face was an alarming study in swift chromatic changes. “To think that Budge had the colossal impertinence to accuse me to you when a few words from me would end the whole farce of this precious Garden Hotel!” His tone rose to a scream and his hands were flung outwards. “End it,” he repeated decisively.

  For the second time that day—and the last time in the course of his career—the detective intervened with a remark on the brink of a confession.

  “To be perfectly fair,” he answered, “the accusation did not come from Budge.”

  The parson looked puzzled, then comprehension dawned in his eyes. “Oh, it’s that lanky fellow, Venables, is it? He’s not such an ass as he looks! I suppose I gave myself away pretty completely. Well, I’m glad Budge had the sense not to push his little joke too far.”

  The Inspector waited, but Blood said no more.

  “You were saying,” he prompted.

  The parson looked at him sullenly. “I forget. In any case your information is pure inference and utterly without foundation. I defy you to prove that I knew anything about this affair, and I consider you are grossly exceeding your rights in badgering me in this manner. Did anyone see the body in my room? Did anyone see me dispose of it? The whole suggestion is monstrous and is a mere hypothesis founded on the fact that I have a doctor’s degree.”

  “I am the best judge of that,” said the Inspector sternly, changing his tone as he realized that Blood had sa
id all he was likely to say. “I assume that as you have so little on your conscience you will have no objection to my having this room searched?”

  Satisfied with this Parthian arrow, he went.

  IV

  Mrs. Walton faced her tormentor. Budge, his face pursed up into a dry watchfulness, looked at her with the vacant, emotionless eyes of a reptile.

  “You know more than you pretend,” he snarled. “I believe you’re in on this business! If I find out that you are connected with it in the remotest way, by God I’ll end your little romance!”

  Dry-eyed, Mrs. Walton pressed her handkerchief wearily to her lips. “Why can’t you let me alone? Haven’t I paid for your silence—aren’t I paying now?”

  “Oh, yes, you’re paying all right, and you’ll go on paying. You’ll be able to afford to pay a little more heavily in a month or two.” He smiled wickedly.

  “Oh, I’ll pay, I’ll pay,” she said tonelessly. “What is the money compared to the hell of deception in which I live?” She rose and looked out of the window. “Sometimes I think I must end it all, make a clean breast of it whatever it costs. But I can’t. I’m a coward, I suppose. It is like coming up against a blank wall suddenly. There it is, and it hardly seems a part of oneself, it’s so permanent a barrier.”

  “Well, we must all pay for our little weaknesses. That’s how I live, and so do a good many more, from doctors to judges.” He turned on her suddenly. “Do you know who killed my wife?”

  She looked at him, eyes steady. “No. If I did, I would thank him.”

  His eyes snapped fire. “Oh, you would, would you?” He addressed vacancy. “She’d thank him, she would,” he mimicked, parodying her flash of spirit. “Well, my lady, I’ve more than a suspicion that you do know him, or if you don’t, you have a pretty shrewd idea.” He rose to his feet menacingly. “Now I’m not going to be caught so easily.” He slapped his hip pocket. “I’ve got a little toy in there, and I know how to use it—I shan’t hesitate to shoot, and I shall shoot to kill. What’s more, if ever my suspicion proves a certainty, a certain document is going to Mr. St. Clair Addington by registered post, from an anonymous friend, with a little explanatory note. So tell that to your friend when you are thanking him.”

  His eyes bored into her, but she met them bravely. “You are mistaken,” she answered, twisting her handkerchief. “Your wife and yourself must have made more than one enemy. You’d better look for danger from somebody who has refused to pay!”

  V

  “I’m quite sure that Blood is in it as deep as hell,” concluded Bray, as he recounted the story of his fruitless interview, “but what is the good of knowing that if I can’t lay my hands on some tangible clue or motive.”

  “Blood obviously knows a lot about it,” said Charles. “Stubborn swine. It ought to be possible to make him own up, and one thing I’ll swear. The sight of that corpse was a sheer surprise. He turned absolutely green.”

  “Anyway, I’ve given him a stiff warning and told him that we shall search his room,” Bray answered.

  “You never found the shawl Mrs. Budge was wearing, did you?” said Charles thoughtfully.

  “No, nor any instruments which could have been used for the dissection.”

  “How long ago did you leave Blood?”

  “I came straight here—about ten minutes ago. Why?”

  Charles disregarded the question. “Is there a fire in his room?”

  “No, central heating. Why?” replied the astonished detective.

  “He’s not been out of the hotel to-day, has he?”

  Bray looked puzzled. “What’s your drift? I don’t see it. He’s not left the hotel to-day.”

  “Good,” replied Charles. “I’m in possession of incriminating evidence. I have been interrupted trying to get rid of it. I can’t burn it. I haven’t been outside the hotel. Policemen in great boots are tramping up and down my corridor and I must get rid of it quickly—what do I do? Answer, follow me.”

  A look of comprehension relieved the surprise of the detective’s face, and he followed Charles without demur. “Sound reasoning,” he said. “I am much afraid, Charles, that you are going to turn into one of those brilliant amateur investigators who know who the murderer is from the start but have to let the fool from Scotland Yard blunder through eighteen chapters before they let the reader into their confidence.”

  Darkness was falling as they made their way into the yard at the bottom of the back wall of the main block of the hotel building. Black against the greying winter skies they could see the outlines of the two balconies of the Budge suite. Had they been standing in that place forty-eight hours or so earlier, they might have seen the ominous silhouette of Mrs. Budge’s assailant going and returning on his deadly work. Stare as they might now, the incident had drifted out of sight down the stream of time. Cunning, patience and perseverance might weave a fabric of circumstantial evidence which would satisfy the clear eyes of justice, but the sharp outlines of the deed as it had been actually done must inevitably remain for ever blurred by the mists of conjecture.

  They stared up at the grey mass of the building. Blood’s window was in darkness but the window itself was open.

  They watched for ten minutes and then the curtains moved. The two pressed themselves into the shadow of the fire-escape. The dim outline of a head appeared at the window, peered downwards into the yard as if to pierce the blackest shadows, and then disappeared. Like the Lady of the Lake, a hand appeared, grasping a long baton-like object, and then Excalibur fell with a plop on the ground. The arm vanished again and the head took its place. It was apparently satisfied with its second scrutiny, for it appeared no more.

  Bray walked quietly into the yard, grabbed his prize, and came back.

  “All according to schedule,” he said. “Come along.”

  In Charles’s sitting-room they unwrapped Excalibur. His outward integument was composed of the shawl, of texture almost as Victorian as the furnishing of her bedroom, in which Mrs. Budge had been dressed, according to the nurse’s description. Rolled up neatly inside it were a set of dissecting scalpels and a saw, which Bray realized with resignation might have been bought second-hand at any shop for medical supplies.

  “Blood may or may not be guilty,” said Bray, “but I’ve a good mind to arrest him as an accessory and see if he’ll speak.”

  VI

  “Speak, kindly voice, from out th’ encircling gloom;

  Tell us life is, even beyond the tomb.

  Beyond the darkness lies our sunlit home;

  Speak, kindly voice, from out th’ encircling gloom.”

  With the final “gloom,” the door of the lounge opened and there was a patter of feline feet. The spiritualistic version of a popular hymn which was being sung by Miss Mumby was mournful at the best of times, but now her voice seemed to be staggering under a dead weight of dejection.

  Charles was lounging in a deep chair with its back to the door. Miss Mumby’s glance did not take him in—at any rate she continued singing with the self-confident air of the songster of indifferent voice who believes that he is unheard:

  “The darkness falls, and we are sore perplexed,

  With sceptic doubt and legal rigour vexed.

  Speak to us, voice, and cheer our workers on,

  Ye, too, were workers, in times past and gone.”

  Moved to his catty core, little Walter mewed plaintively. Charles stole a look at Miss Mumby. She was sitting in a chair and large teardrops were oozing from her eyes and coursing clammily down her cheeks.

  A thought that had been loitering idly at the back of his mind suddenly sprang to attention. He checked his impulse to reveal his presence by a discreet cough or, discreeter still, a sudden snore. He watched her intently. She seemed absorbed in her thoughts. Presently, perhaps she would make the revealing movement for which he was waiting.

  After five minutes it came. There was a quick mechanical glance right and left, which missed her watcher. Then Miss Mumby slowl
y opened her bag...

  “My sainted aunt,” murmured Charles to himself. “Oh, you idiot, you fool, you blind, deaf, crass blunder-head of a disgraced and defeated detective!” He wrestled with an inclination to kick himself violently and subdued it. “Three days and more to find out what was happening under my very nose!”

  “Come on, Walter! Get up, Socrates!” commanded Miss Mumby clearly. Having, all unconsciously, advanced the mystery of the Garden Hotel on the road to solution, she rose and left the room. The door closed, but her voice, now raised militantly and enthusiastically, floated back to the lounge.

  “Onward, gifted mediums,

  Onward to the fray!

  Spirit hands are round you

  From the break of day.

  Hear the spirit voices

  From the sunny land.

  Help them, gifted mediums!

  Lend your helping hand!”

  VII

  “Well, there it is!” said Bray to his superior bitterly. “There are enough suspicious characters there to stock Dartmoor, yet I’m damned if I can lay a finger on one of them. They simply dance round me making long noses.”

  “I realize how hampered you are nowadays,” said the Commissioner in an understanding tone that was not without its sting, “but the very fact that these people are so involved should place you in a position sufficiently strong to enable you to force some information out of them.”

  “The more information I get, the less the business makes sense,” replied Bray. “Look at Blood—a perfect sitter for the murderer. No motive, of course, but”—he laughed sardonically—“we can’t expect everything in this case. But the very evidence that put us on the track—Venables’ story—also goes to show that he cannot have been the murderer, because the appearance of the corpse came as a complete surprise to him. Equally, of course, if he wasn’t the murderer, why did he dispose of the body?”