The Mad Hatter Mystery

by The Mad Hatter Mystery (retail) (epub)

  “No. Your men will attach no importance to what I want to find. I don’t suppose they bothered to look at his typewriter, did they?”

  “His what?”

  “Typewriter. You know what a typewriter is,” said the doctor, testily. “And also, I want a brief look about the kitchen. If he has one, as I’m sure he has, we shall probably find it stowed away in the kitchen. Where’s that waiter? I want the bill.”

  The mist was clearing as they emerged from the restaurant. Narrow Wardour Street was crowded; restaurant signs glowed with dull lights, a barrel-organ tinkled at the corner among a group of small boys, and there was a sound of jollification from several pubs. The theatre traffic had just begun to thin in the glare of Shaftesbury Avenue, and Hadley had some difficulty in maneuvering his car. But, once out of the center of Town and across Oxford Street, he accelerated the big Daimler to a fast pace. Bloomsbury lay deserted under high and mournful gas lamps; silent, with the muffled rumble of traffic beyond. They cut across into Great Russell Street, and turned left past the long and prison-like shadows of the British Museum.

  “Get that report out of my briefcase, will you?” Hadley requested. “I think Somers said it was on the west side of the square.”

  Rampole, craning his neck out of the tonneau, watched the street signs. Montague Street; the bare trees and sedate house-fronts of Russell Square; Upper Bedford Place, where Hadley slowed down.

  Tavistock Square was large and oblong in shape, not too well supplied with street lights. Along the west side the buildings were higher than on the others, and rather more imposing in a heavy Georgian style. Tavistock Chambers proved to be a red-brick block of flats with four entry halls, two on either side of an arch beneath which a driveway led into the court. Into this court Hadley drove the car.

  “So this,” he said, “is the way the woman escaped. I don’t wonder she wasn’t noticed.”

  He slid from under the wheel and peered about. There was only one lamp in the court, but the mist was rapidly lifting into a clear, cold night. A few windows were alight in the plaster-faced walls which hedged in the court.

  “Lower parts of the windows frosted glass,” the chief inspector grunted. “I left instructions to question the tenants about her, but it’s useless. A red Indian in his war bonnet could have walked out of here without being seen, even on a clear day. Let’s see. Those are the glass doors giving on the rear of the entry halls. We want the third entry. There it is. That’ll be Driscoll’s flat, with the light in the rear window. Hum! Evidently my man hasn’t left the place yet; I should have thought he’d be finished by this time.”

  He crossed to the glass door, stumbled over a rubbish can, and disturbed a hysterical cat. The others followed him up some steps into a red-tiled hall with brown distempered walls. Its only illumination was a sickly electric bulb in the cage of the automatic lift. But a thin line of light slanted out from the door on their left, which was not quite closed, and they saw the splintered wood about the lock.

  Flat 2. Rampole’s eyes moved to the door facing it across the hall, where the watchful and whaleboned Mrs. Larkin might be peering out from the flap of the letter slot. It was damp and cold in the hallway, and still except for somebody’s radio talking hoarsely on an upper floor.

  There was a crash, sudden and violent. The line of light in the doorway of Flat 2 seemed to shake, and the noise echoed hollowly up the lift-well. It had come from that door.

  While the echoes were still trembling, Hadley moved swiftly across to the door and pushed it open. Rampole, peering over his shoulder, saw the disorder of Philip Driscoll’s sitting room as it had been described a short time ago. But there was another piece of disorder now.

  In the wall directly opposite was a mantelpiece with an ornate mirror behind the shelf. And in front of this mantelpiece, his back to the newcomers, a tall and heavy man stood with his head bowed. They saw past his shoulder a foolish plaster figurine standing on the mantelshelf—a woman painted in bright colors, with a tight-waisted dress and a silver hairnet. But there was no companion figure beside it. The hearthstone was littered with a thousand white fragments to show where the other figure had been flung down a moment before.

  Just for a moment the tableau held—weird and somehow terrible in its power. The echo of that crash seemed to linger; its passion still quivered in the bent back of the man standing there. He had not heard the newcomers. He seemed weighed down, and lonely, and damned.

  Then his hand moved out slowly and seized the other figure. And as he raised it his head lifted and they saw his face in the mirror.

  “Good evening,” said Dr. Fell. “You’re Mr. Lester Bitton, aren’t you?”

  XI

  The Little Plaster Dolls

  NEVER BEFORE that time, Rampole afterwards thought, had he ever seen a man’s naked face. Never had he seen it as for a brief instant he saw Lester Bitton’s face in the mirror. At all times in life there are masks and guards, and in the brain a tiny bell gives warning. But here was a man caught blind in his anguish, as nerveless as the hand which held poised that little painted figurine.

  And, oddly enough, Rampole’s first thought was how he might have looked at this man had he seen him in his everyday existence: going in a bus to the City, say, or reading his newspaper at a club. Where you saw your staunch and practical British business man, you saw Lester Bitton. Well tailored, inclined to corpulence. Clean-shaven face, beginning to draw and go dry at the eyes and mouth, hard but pleasant; thick black hair frizzed with gray, and fresh from the clean hair-tonicy smell of the barber’s.

  He looked a little like his brother, though his face was inclined to be reddish and have heavy folds. But you could not tell now—

  The lost, damned eyes stared back at them from the mirror. His wrist wobbled, and the figure almost slid through his fingers. He took it with his other hand and put it back up on the mantelpiece. They could hear him breathing as he turned about. Instinctively his hand went to his tie, to straighten it; instinctively he felt down the sides of his dark overcoat.

  “Who the hell,” said Lester Bitton, “are you?”

  His deep voice was hoarse, and it cracked. That almost finished him, but he fought his nerves. “What Goddamned right have you got to walk in—”

  Rampole couldn’t stand this. It wasn’t right to look at him, in the way that man felt; it wasn’t decent. The American felt mean and petty. He moved his eyes away, and wished he hadn’t come inside the door.

  “Steady,” said Hadley, quietly. “I’m afraid it’s you who have to make an explanation. This flat has been taken over by the police, you know. And I’m afraid we can’t respect private feelings in a murder case. You are Lester Bitton, aren’t you?”

  The man’s heavy breathing quieted somewhat, and the wrath died out of his eyes. But he looked heavy and hollow, and unutterably tired.

  “I am,” he said in a lower voice. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Hadley.”

  “Ah,” said the other, “I see.” He was groping backwards, and he found the edge of a heavy leather chair. Slowly he lowered himself until he was sitting on the arm. Then he made a gesture. “Well, here I am,” he added, as though that explained everything.

  “What are you doing here, Mr. Bitton?”

  “I suppose you don’t know?” Bitton asked, bitterly. He glanced back over his shoulder, at the smashed figure on the hearthstone, and looked up again at Hadley.

  The chief inspector played his advantage. He studied Bitton without threat and almost without interest. Slowly he opened his briefcase, drew out a typewritten sheet—which was only Constable Somers’s report, as Rampole saw—and glanced at it.

  “We know, of course, that you have employed a firm of private detectives to watch your wife. And”—he glanced at the sheet again—“that one of their operatives, a Mrs. Larkin, lives directly across the hall from here.”

  “Rather smart, you Scotland Yard men,” the other observed in an impersonal voice. “Well, tha
t’s right. Nothing illegal in that, I suppose. You also know, then, that I don’t need to waste my money any longer.”

  “We know that Mr. Driscoll is dead.”

  Bitton nodded. His heavy, reddish, rather thickly-lined face was assuming normal appearance; the eyes had ceased to have that dull and terrible glitter; but a nerve seemed to jump in his arm.

  “Yes,” he said, reflectively. His eyes wandered about the room without curiosity. “The swine’s dead. I heard it when I went home to dinner. But I’m afraid it hasn’t cut my detective agency off from much money. I was intending to pay them off and get rid of them tomorrow. Business conditions being what they are, I couldn’t afford an unnecessary expense.”

  “That, Mr. Bitton, is open to two meanings. Which of them do you imply?”

  Lester Bitton was himself again—hard, shrewd, very clear-eyed; a fleshy and utterly stolid version of his brother. He spread out his hands.

  “Let’s be frank, Mr.—er—Hadley. I have played the fool. You know I was having my wife followed. I owe her a profound apology. What I have discovered only does credit to her name.”

  Hadley’s face wore a faint smile, as one who says, “Well done!”

  “Mr. Bitton,” he said, “I had intended having a conversation with you tonight, and this is as good a place as any. I shall have to ask you a number of questions.”

  “As you wish.”

  Hadley looked round at his companions. Dr. Fell was paying not the slightest attention to the questioning. He was running his eyes over the small, pleasant room, with its dull, brown-papered walls, sporting prints, and leather chairs. One of the chairs had been knocked over. The drawer of a side table had been thrown upside down on the floor, its contents scattered. Dr. Fell stumped across and peered down.

  “Theater programs,” he said, “magazines, old invitations, bills. H’m. Nothing I want here. The desk and the typewriter will be in the other rooms somewhere. Excuse me. Carry on with the questioning, Hadley. Don’t mind me.”

  He disappeared through a door at the rear.

  Hadley removed his bowler, gestured Rampole to a chair, and sat down himself.

  “Mr. Bitton,” he said, harshly, “I suggest that you be frank. I am not concerned with your wife’s morals, or with yours, except in so far as they concern a particularly brutal murder. You have admitted you had her followed. Why do you trouble to deny that there was an affair between your wife and Philip Driscoll?”

  “That’s a damned lie. If you insinuate—”

  “I don’t insinuate. I tell you. You can hardly be very excited by an insinuation which you made yourself when you put a private detective on her movements—can you? Let’s not waste time. We have the ‘Mary’ notes, Mr. Bitton.”

  “Mary? Who the devil is Mary?”

  “You should know, Mr. Bitton. You were about to smash her on the hearth when we walked into this room.”

  Hadley bent forward; he spoke sharply and coldly.

  “I warn you again, I can’t afford to waste time. You are not in the habit of walking into people’s houses and smashing ornaments off their mantelshelves because you don’t approve of the decoration. If you have any idea that we don’t know the meaning of those two figures, get rid of it. We do. You had broken the man, and you were about to break the woman. No sane person who saw your face at that moment could have any doubt of your state of mind. Do I make myself clear?”

  Bitton shaded his eyes with a big hand, but a crooked vein stood out at his temple. “Is it any of your business,” he said at length, in a repressed voice, “whether—”

  “How much do you know about Driscoll’s murder?”

  “Eh?”

  “Have you heard the facts of Driscoll’s murder?”

  “A few. I—well, I spoke to my brother when he returned from the Tower. Laura—Laura had come home and locked herself in her room. When I—when I came back from the City, I knocked at her door and she wouldn’t let me in. I thought everybody had gone mad. Especially as I knew nothing of this—this murder. And Sheila said that Laura had run into the house as white as death and rushed upstairs without a word.” The hand before his eyes clenched spasmodically. “Then Will came in about seven-thirty and told me a little.”

  “Are you aware, then, that an excellent case could be made out against your wife for the murder of Philip Driscoll?”

  Hadley was in action now. Rampole stared at him; a placid merchant ship suddenly running out the masked batteries. Hitherto, the American knew, he had lacked proof of his most vital point, and Bitton had supplied it. There was about him now nothing of the urbanity with which he had treated witnesses that afternoon. He sat gray and inexorable, his fingers interlocked, his eyes burning with a glow behind the eyeballs, and heavy lines tightening round his mouth.

  “Just a moment, Mr. Bitton. Don’t say anything. I’ll give you no theories. I simply intend to tell you facts.

  “Your wife was having an affair with Philip Driscoll. She wrote a note telling him to meet her today at one-thirty at the Tower of London. We know that he received this note, because it was found in his pocket. The note informed him that they were being watched. Driscoll, I need not tell you, lived off the bounty of a quick-tempered and far from indulgent uncle. I will not say that if the uncle ever discovered any such scandal he would disinherit his nephew—because even that obvious point is a theory. I will not say that Driscoll saw the vital necessity for breaking off his liaison—because that obvious point is a theory, too.

  “But he did telephone Robert Dalrye to get him out of a mess, just after he received that letter. And, later, someone did speak to Dalrye on the telephone, in a high voice, and lure him away on a wild-goose chase to this flat. You need not consider the following inferences, because they are theories. One. That Driscoll always ran to Dalrye when he was in trouble. Two. That all Driscoll’s family knew this. Three. That Dalrye’s level-headedness would have caused the impressionable Driscoll to break off such a dangerous entanglement. Four. That Driscoll was in a mood to break it off, because he had not seen his paramour for several weeks and he was a youth of roving fancy. Five. That his paramour felt convinced she could keep him in line if she saw him once again alone, without the interference of a cool-headed third party. Six. That Driscoll’s paramour knew of this morning telephone call through Sheila Bitton, who had also spoken with Dalrye on the phone that morning. Seven. That the voice of Driscoll’s paramour is, for a woman, fairly deep. And, finally, eight. That a voice on the telephone speaking quickly, chaotically, and almost unintelligibly, can pass without detection for the tones of almost anyone the speaker may choose.”

  Hadley was quite unemotional. He spaced his words as though he were reading a document, and his interlocked fingers seemed to beat time to them. Lester Bitton had taken his hand away from his face, and he was holding the chair-arms.

  “I have told you these were inferences. Now for more facts,” the chief inspector continued. “The appointment in the note had been for one-thirty. One-thirty is the last time Driscoll was seen alive. He was standing near the Traitors’ Gate, and some person approached out of the shadows and touched his arm. At precisely twenty-five minutes to two, a woman answering to the description of your wife was seen hurrying away from the vicinity of the Traitors’ Gate. She was hurrying so blindly, in fact, that she bumped squarely into the witness who saw her in a roadway no wider than this room. Finally, when Driscoll’s body was found on the steps of the Traitors’ Gate, he was discovered to have been stabbed with a weapon which your wife purchased last year in southern France, and which was ready to her hand in her own home.”

  He paused, looked steadily at Bitton, and added in a low voice, “Can’t you imagine what a clever lawyer could to with all those points, Mr. Bitton? And I am only a policeman.”

  Bitton hoisted up his big body. His hands were shaking and the rims of his eyes were red.

  “Damn you,” he said, “that’s what you think, is it? Well, I’m glad you saw me so soon. I�
�m glad you didn’t make an unutterable ass of yourself before you told me how good your case was and arrested her. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to blow your whole case higher than hell without stepping any further than that flat across the hall. Because I have a witness who saw her the whole time she was at the Tower of London, and can swear Driscoll was alive after she left him.”

  Hadley was on his feet in an instant. It was like the lunge of a swordsman.

  “Yes,” he said, in a louder voice, “I rather thought you had. I rather thought that was why you came to Tavistock Chambers tonight. When you heard about the murder, you couldn’t wait for the usual report of your private detective over there. You had to go to her. If she knows anything, bring her over here and let her swear to it. Otherwise, so help me God! I’ll swear out a warrant for Mrs. Bitton’s arrest inside an hour.”

  Bitton shouldered out of the chair. He was fighting mad, and his usual good sense had deserted him. He flung open the door with the broken lock, and closed it with a slam. They could hear his footsteps ring grittily on the tiles of the hall; a pause, and the insistent clamor of a door-buzzer.

  Rampole drew a hand across his forehead. His throat was dry and his heart hammering.

  “I didn’t know—” he said—“I didn’t know you were so certain Mrs. Bitton had—”

  There was a placid smile under Hadley’s clipped mustache. He sat down again and folded his hands.

  “Sh-h!” he warned. “Not so loud, please; he’ll hear you. How did I do it? I’m not much of an actor, but I’m used to little demonstrations like that. Did I do it well?”

  He caught the expression on the American’s face.

  “Go ahead, my boy. Swear. I don’t mind. It’s a tribute to my performance.”

  “Then you don’t believe—”

  “I never believed it for an instant,” the chief inspector admitted, cheerfully. “There were too many holes in it. If Mrs. Bitton killed Driscoll, what about the hat on Driscoll’s head? That becomes nonsense. If she killed him by Traitors’ Gate with a blow straight through the heart at one-thirty, how did he contrive to keep alive until ten minutes to two? Why didn’t she leave the Tower after she had killed him, instead of hanging about unnecessarily for nearly an hour and getting herself drawn into the mess without reason? Besides, my explanation of the faked telephone call to Dalrye was very thin. If Bitton hadn’t been so upset he would have seen it. Dalrye, of course, never talked to Sheila Bitton this morning and told her Driscoll had made an appointment. But I had to hit Bitton hard and frequently while his guard was down. A little drama also did no harm; it never does.”