Crime in Kensington

by Christopher St. John Sprigg

  Charles shook his head. “I do not see how the matter could be hushed up. It is impossible to keep these things out of the cruel probing of the prosecution, even if you refuse to make any defence.”

  Miss Sanctuary shook her head. “There is something,” she said firmly, “that would silence them something

  ‘that shackles accident, and bolts up change.’

  I have often thought of this eventuality, and prepared for it. You will find my bag on the mantelshelf in the kitchen.”

  Bray, pacing impatiently up and down the corridor, looked up anxiously when Charles came out.

  Charles did not fence. “Look here, Bray,” he said, “this case is incredibly complicated. ‘Miss Sanctuary’ is Mrs. Church—Mrs. Walton’s mother. I can get a full and complete confession from her now—on one condition, and that is that her daughter is not involved in the subsequent trial.”

  “But that’s impossible, Charles!” protested the detective. “You must realize that yourself surely. How can the vital matter of motive be hushed up?”

  “Let me put it another way,” Charles said wearily. “If it is possible for you to make use of her confession and clear up the case without involving the daughter, will you do so?”

  “It is a big ‘if,’” replied Bray. “So big an ‘if’ that I haven’t much hesitation in assenting.”

  “Right,” answered Charles. He looked at Bray keenly. “I shall hold you to that, you know.

  Bray went in with Charles. Miss Sanctuary fished in her bag and produced a pad and little gold fountainpen. She wrote steadily for a few minutes, seated on the wooden box, the pad on her knee. Not a sound broke the silence but the scratching of her pen and the heavy breathing of a constable in the corner of the room.

  “Here you are,” she said at last.

  “Being now in sound mind and body,” the statement ran, “but desirous of the truth being on record, I confess that I murdered George Budge and the woman known as his wife. This statement is made of my own free will and without prompting.

  “(Signed) LAURA CHURCH alias SANCTUARY.”

  IV

  “I should like to write a message for my daughter, if I may?” asked Miss Sanctuary.

  “Very well,” the detective replied shortly. “I can give you ten minutes.” He walked to the window and stared out of it.

  Her message was little longer than her confession. The scratching of her pen had barely ceased when there was a faint choking sound, followed by the hurried intake of breath. Bray wheeled sharply and sprang to her side. The death agony that supervenes on the administration of prussic acid is, however, brief. When Bray reached her, Laura Church was beyond mortal aid, beyond the reach of mortal voice.

  “Damn it, Charles!” said Bray angrily. “You knew about this.”

  “It was a private bargain between us,” answered Charles.

  “Bravest at the last,

  She levelled at our purposes.”

  The pad on which she had been writing lay on the floor. Charles tore off the page and thrust it into his pocket.

  “I will deliver this message myself,” he said finally.

  V

  The Commissioner had placed Charles in the chair of honour, a leather armchair of royal ease. Bray shared in his glory, and sat bolt upright in a chair very nearly as luxurious. The Commissioner passed round the cigars.

  “So one of Cunningham’s Chicks has got ahead of us! Well, between these four walls I don’t mind admitting it is not the first time.”

  Charles laughed. “Got ahead isn’t a fair expression for either party,” he protested. “By sheer luck I stumbled on the missing link needed in the chain built up by Bray. Directly I discovered that, mere suspicion became provable certainty.”

  “And the missing link was?

  “A photograph of ‘Miss Sanctuary’ and her daughter and son-in-law.” Charles explained his visit to Menzies. “When I saw that, the nightmare hypothesis I had built up with Miss Sanctuary as the murderer became the only possible explanation.”

  “Let us begin at the beginning then,” said the Commissioner wearily. “How on earth could Miss Sanctuary have committed the crime?”

  “Easily,” answered Charles. “I saw that from the start. She first garrottes the unsuspecting woman—an easy job with a thin piece of cord. She then ties the corpse under the big old-fashioned bed, between the spring mattress and the loose sacking. An excellent hiding-place which would never be discovered except in a proper search of the room by an expert—and all she wished to do was to gain a few minutes.

  “All one needs to do—I experimented with the idea myself—is to tie the wrists and ankles to the corners of the bed and then tie the sacking underneath. There is a natural recess which makes it a perfect hiding-place.

  “But the man who attacked her?” asked Bray. “Who was he?”

  Charles laughed. “That, of course, was a touch of genius—a perfect alibi. I’ll show you how it’s done—as a matter of fact it’s a little parlour trick which I used to do myself at school.”

  Charles got up and went outside. A moment later the door opened, and Charles’s head, and the right side of his body was visible. Suddenly a gloved hand reached past the edge of the door and fastened round his neck. His expression changed from one of vacuous amiability to terror. He gurgled, but the remorseless hand, apparently exerting a giant’s strength dragged him back out of sight, and the door closed. It opened again instantly, and Charles, wreathed in smiles, a glove on one hand, appeared again to take his bow.

  “Ridiculous! Childish! Absurd!” he said. “Yet see how it succeeds if properly done.”

  The Commissioner laughed. “I should certainly have been prepared to swear that you had been brutally assaulted in the heart of Scotland Yard. And, of course, in the circumstances in which Nurse Evans saw it, she would be bound to be deceived. Well, really! To think that we were taken in by a puerile practical joke.”

  Bray’s ears were red with mortification, and the Commissioner stole a sly glance at him and winked at Charles.

  “So far, so good,” he said. “Proceed.”

  “The door was slammed and locked in the nurse’s face, and Miss Sanctuary crept into the wardrobe with the rope she had concealed in her clothes together with a set of long-nosed pliers. She locked herself in by turning the key from the inside with the pliers—I saw the marks on the key——”

  “An old dodge,” commented the Commissioner, “but one expects it from burglars, not from elderly spinsters.”

  “Then she tied herself up neatly with the rope. It was no amateurish job, but in her circus days Laura Church could give an escape turn with chains, ropes or strait-jacket which, even if it wasn’t up to the highest professional standard, was enough to puzzle anyone but an expert, and of course by the time the police arrived we had untied her.”

  A gleam of amusement at last visited Bray’s face. “I must tell Noakes that while he was fiddling about in the bedroom the body was there all the time!” he murmured.

  “When the police had left the room she rapidly untied the body, dragged it out on to the verandah and toppled it into the next one, which, you will remember, gave her access to Budge’s bedroom. I can vouch for it that she was strong, even if it is twenty-five years since she swung on a trapeze, and she had no difficulty in dealing with Mrs. Budge’s corpse, and packing it in the laundry basket in Budge’s room.

  “By that time she believed that the main part of her task was over. She went back to the bed and later on walked back to her bedroom, without the shadow of a stain of suspicion upon her.

  “Her intention had been to incriminate Budge when the body was found in his room. She would then start to recollect some detail of her assault which would confirm the police’s suspicion that he was the murderer. In this way both the Budges would be wiped out. She started by telling one picturesque detail next day.

  “Unfortunately Budge found the body before the police, and lost no time in moving it into Blood’s room
. The trail was by this time hopelessly confused, but Budge only escaped arrest by his presence of mind. His acute brain searched for a possible enemy, and fixed on Mrs. Walton. But Mrs. Walton had an incontestable alibi. Therefore he concluded it must be some relative of the injured girl.

  “He decided that if he were arrested he would make a clean breast of the whole affair and get the police to investigate the antecedents of his victim to find out whether one of the relatives was in the neighbourhood. Meanwhile he carried a revolver and locked the door at night. At last, in desperation, he went to Miss Sanctuary, the one person in the hotel with the kindness and ripe experience one looks for in a confidante, and confided his problem. Some family has a grudge against him; perhaps, he admitted cautiously, they had some grounds for it. At this point Miss Sanctuary must have smiled ironically to herself. Should he put the whole matter in the police’s hands there and then, or should he wait till he was arrested? Miss Sanctuary, needless to say, strongly advised him to wait till he was arrested. This consorted with his own views and he agreed.

  “Had he confided in the police or in myself he would be alive at this day. A really searching inquiry would inevitably have traced out the relationship between Mrs. Walton and Miss Sanctuary. But Nemesis, as irrevocably as in a Greek play, was drawing him on to his doom. He confided his fears to his wife’s executioner.

  “Next morning Miss Sanctuary was told that Budge was to be arrested. Unless her crime was to be in vain, it was necessary for her to act swiftly. She went to her room and wrote that note which would bring Budge to the toolshed and which, even if the police found it in spite of her injunction to him to burn it, would not incriminate her. There, in the toolshed, she met him. The words of gratitude on his lips were choked by her sudden revelation that she was Mrs. Walton’s mother. Then, before he could cry out, before perhaps the full realization of what she was saying had come to him, she stunned him.

  “The suicide did not take long to fake, and she left the forged confession which she had previously prepared in as prominent a place as she could find. It was not a neat job, not one quarter as neat as her original murder, but then she had had ample time to lay her plans—now she was working against time.

  “Even now, however, the danger was not over. She walked into the lounge and Lady Viola told her of her discovery of Mrs. Walton’s true identity. By this time Miss Sanctuary was virtually a monomaniac. Anyone who stood between her and her purpose had to be removed. Now it was Lady Viola’s turn, and Miss Sanctuary instantly planned as the most likely scene a house in Tooting, which she had already seen the agents about (under her real name) with the object of moving in there when her daughter was married and the trouble had blown over. She invented a fictitious friend who lived there and could give Lady Viola all the information she wanted.

  “By this time I also was on her track. Eppoliki told me before he left that he thought her faint after being released from the cupboard was a sham, and I had constructed a hypothesis on the right lines whereby the murders could have been committed by Miss Sanctuary. But, after all, it could have been committed with very much less expenditure of energy by several other people, each with better motives than this inoffensive, good-natured old spinster. When I got Viola’s note I still did not realize the connection, and then when I saw from Menzies’ photograph that Miss Sanctuary was Mrs. Walton’s mother, everything clicked into place. The fancied familiarity with Mrs. Walton’s face was my unconscious interpretation of the family likeness between her and Miss Sanctuary. Here was a plausible motive, and I realized at once that Mrs. Mortimer was a figment of the ingenious murderess’s fancy, and that Viola’s life was in danger.” For a moment Charles relived the anxiety of those few minutes. There was a silence in the room. Then a siren hooted on a tug-boat coming up the river; Charles pulled himself together.

  “I stole a car that was outside and dashed round. I saw Viola bound, and for a moment I thought I was too late.” Charles mopped his forehead. “I wasn’t; but I hadn’t even the satisfaction of rescuing Viola. When the series of events she had planned came to a head, the old lady found she hadn’t the stuff of the killer in her. She couldn’t strangle in cold blood a girl who had no evil intentions towards her, and when I broke in they were engaged in making some ridiculous pact of silence...”

  The speaker smiled shamefacedly at the Commissioner. “That is why I helped to defeat the ends of justice by giving her the bag in which she had kept a small bottle of poison since she embarked on her carefully planned adventure. That is why I am asking you, when the police evidence is given at the inquest, to make as little use as possible of any evidence that would involve the daughter in publicity.”

  The Commissioner rubbed his chin meditatively. “You are asking a lot, young man. Gordon’s a good coroner, of course, and all the police want is to put in enough evidence to prove that the confession is a real one, and not an act of madness. We shall have to reveal that Miss Sanctuary is really Mrs. Church, but we can explain that the motive is a family grudge without particularizing it.

  “Look here, young man, you’ve helped to clear up this case, and I’ll go and see the coroner myself and stage-manage the inquest with him.”

  “Good,” said Charles. “I think my personal story in the Mercury will set the pace for the rest of the press. Although I sez it that shouldn’t, it’s a masterpiece of omission, and as I’m an eye-witness, the rest of the press will take it for gospel, and gang warily. Thank the Lord for the law of libel in this country...”

  Epilogue

  THE Garden Hotel was closing at the end of the week. But even if it had been left open till the end of the year, Mrs. Walton would still have been methodically packing her clothes, with the slow deliberation of despair.

  The door opened. She turned round. In her eyes a faint glimmer of hope flickered and then died.

  “Have you come to say good-bye?” she said bravely. “That is very nice of you.”

  “Come to say good-bye!” exclaimed St. Clair Addington. “Why, if I didn’t know what a dear little goose you are I should be coming round to demand why you send me the most insulting letter I’ve ever received in my life.”

  Mrs. Walton sat down abruptly and burst into tears. “Oh, I had to say good-bye. Now that everyone knows about my being married and the terrible scandal of it all! It’s sweet of you to try and be nice about it, but I knew it was the end. Please—please don’t make it worse.”

  Addington grasped her by the shoulders. “I’ve a good mind to shake you, Mary,” he said. “Oh, I may be a standing joke as an embodiment of conventionality, but I know that now and for ever I would prefer to have you than the patronizing approval of every worthless highfalutin female in London who thinks she’s entitled to appraise the reputation of her even Christian. To-morrow we’re going to America; somehow or other I shall find Sarto and at Reno divorces are two a penny. I may have to wait a little, but remember I’ve waited three years already! Then we’ll step into my yacht and sail all over the world—to Jamaica once again, and to Peru, and Hawaii and Ceylon, and all the places in the world that must be wonderful if you have someone to share the wonder.”

  Mrs. Walton laughed hysterically. “There doesn’t seem much more to say,” she said. “Are you always going to be as masterful as this?”

  “Worse,” answered Addington.

  II

  “Viola,” said Charles, “I am now the Special Crime Commissioner of the Mercury with, I should add, a salary commensurate with the dignity of that office. I feel that I am justified in once again laying my heart at your feet.”

  “I do wish you would be more serious, Charles,” answered Viola fretfully.

  “Oh, not quite so serious as that,” she said, a moment later. “I can’t breathe and you’ve completely ruined my little hat... Still, I rather like it…”

  THE END

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chap
ter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue