Below the Clock
David Brawn
J. V. Turner
A classic Golden Age detective novel set at the heart of Westminster, when the murder of the Chancellor of the Exchequer threatens to topple the whole House of Cards…Many highly dramatic and historic scenes have been enacted below the clock of Big Ben, but none more sensational than on that April afternoon when, before the eyes of a chamber crowded to capacity for the Budget Speech, the Chancellor fell headlong to the floor with a resounding crash. For the first time a murder had been committed in the House of Commons itself – and Amos Petrie faced the toughest case of his career.In Below the Clock, John Victor Turner – a journalist who as David Hume had become known as ‘the new Edgar Wallace’ for creating Britain’s first hardboiled detective series – returned to classic Golden Age writing with an ingenious whodunit set at the heart of the establishment, a novel that did the unthinkable by turning Parliament into a crime scene and all its Members into murder suspects.This Detective Club classic is introduced by David Brawn, who looks at the distinguished crime-writing career of J. V. Turner and his alter egos Nicholas Brady and David Hume, who achieved remarkable success with nearly 50 books in only 14 years.
BELOW THE CLOCK
A STORY OF CRIME
BY
J. V. TURNER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
DAVID BRAWN
Copyright (#uf5e340c6-cb93-51f5-8d7c-ad33f88d27c0)
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain for The Crime Club
by W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1936
Introduction © David Brawn 2018
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008280260
Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008280277
Version: 2018-03-23
Dedication (#uf5e340c6-cb93-51f5-8d7c-ad33f88d27c0)
TO MY FRIEND
JOHN MEIKLE
Table of Contents
Cover (#ue910340c-df9e-5dd7-82e4-15ab98810ef9)
Title Page (#ua2afe0d9-7a6e-56b8-9c4b-eda9ffe61b81)
Copyright (#u98c56689-5b9d-5265-926a-f4ad52209b9c)
Dedication (#u7e0aac70-ea93-5b31-a2cf-437b4eabd5ac)
Below the Clock (#u71432bb0-a946-5ea5-a643-e3152f546ed8)
Introduction (#u5d93aaa7-7425-5c9f-b972-81a3fcee8183)
Chapter I (#u6a1e469d-34ea-5d37-99de-848dbc6bf498)
Chapter II (#ueb097519-a25b-5e1f-8fa6-b886ed8be1b2)
Chapter III (#uf7a1b5d0-1042-5533-ac12-d2ee549dc63a)
Chapter IV (#u3e5eb6ce-b2ea-58bd-80a2-5d2f0264ebea)
Chapter V (#u000461e6-4ca8-57f2-b296-93d5477c4e7c)
Chapter VI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter VII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter VIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter IX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter X (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XIV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XVI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XVII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XVIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XIX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXIV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XXVI (#litres_trial_promo)
The Detective Story Club (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
BELOW THE CLOCK (#uf5e340c6-cb93-51f5-8d7c-ad33f88d27c0)
‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’
Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929
Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.
INTRODUCTION (#uf5e340c6-cb93-51f5-8d7c-ad33f88d27c0)
THE Elizabeth Tower is purportedly the most photographed building in the UK, and yet most people would not be able to name it. But as the clock tower that dominates the Palace of Westminster and houses the great bell of Big Ben, it is an instantly recognisable global landmark. Completed in 1859 as part of a 30-year rebuild of the Houses of Parliament after the original palace complex was all but destroyed by fire in 1834, the tower and its clock face quickly became the defining symbol both of the mother of parliaments and of London itself, and the hourly chimes of its 14-tonne bell indelibly associated over 157 years with national stability and resilience. When the bell was silenced on 21 August 2017 for an unprecedented four-year programme of essential maintenance, for some it was as though a death had occurred at the heart of Westminster.
In the annals of crime fiction, of course, deaths at Westminster are all too common. But this was not always the case. When Collins’ Crime Club published J. V. Turner’s Below the Clock in May 1936, the idea of a minister being killed in the chamber was rather sensational, not to say disrespectful of the high office. Ngaio Marsh had dispatched the Home Secretary in The Nursing Home Murder in 1935, although even she hadn’t the audacity to have him drop dead at the Despatch Box. But then Marsh’s stories were not as audacious as those of J. V. Turner.
John Victor Turner, known to family and friends as Jack, was the youngest of three boys in a family of six children. His father Alfred was a saddle-maker, who married Agnes Hume in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, in 1890. Jack was too young to serve in the First World War, but his eldest brother Alfred (after his father) joined up at only 16 and was profoundly affected by shell-shock for the rest of his life. The middle brother, Joseph, moved to London and joined the police, and eventually attained a senior rank at Scotland Yard. Jack himself attended Warwick School and worked on a local newspaper before moving to Fleet Street, where he worked for the Press Association, Daily Mail, Financial Times and as a crime reporter on the Daily Herald. Turner was seemingly married twice, his first wife having tragically drowned.
At first sight, J. V. Turner was not a prolific author, having written seven detective novels under his own name, all of them featuring the solicitor-detective Amos Petrie, published between 1932 and 1936. However, under the pseudonyms Nicholas Brady and more famously David Hume, Turner wrote almost 50 crime novels in a relatively short writing career. He wrote impressively quickly, publishing up to five books a year, with his obituary in the New York Times claiming, ‘while still in his early thirties [he] was often called the second Edgar Wallace. At one period he wrote a novel a fortnight.’
Some of David Hume’s books bore an author photo and short biography on the back of the dust jacket. Under the heading ‘If David Hume can’t thrill you no one can’, it revealed a little about the author:
‘David Hume has an inside knowledge of the criminal world such as few crime authors can ever hope to command, for he has had first-hand experience of it for over fourteen years. During his nine years as a crime reporter he spent most of his days at Scotland Yard, waiting for stories to “break”. In this way he gained an extraordinarily wide and intimate knowledge of criminals and the methods employed in tracking them down. And his personality is such that he won his way completely into the confidence of the criminals themselves, who revealed to him the precise methods they employ to enter a house or to open a safe. Indeed, no one knows more about the technique of crime or criminal detection: and (we should add) David Hume, far from sitting back on his author’s chair, is taking care to maintain the contacts from which comes the convincing realism that is the greatest feature of his books!’
Hume’s supercharged thrillers, dripping with underworld slang, typically dealt with gangs in Soho and Limehouse and featured Britain’s first home-grown ‘hardboiled’ detective. The Private Eye was an established fixture of the American detective novel by 1932, but when Mick Cardby appeared in the first David Hume novel Bullets Bite Deep, he must have been something of a revelation for readers. Hume’s version of London was a city of gun-toting gangsters, and the fist-swinging Cardby—a detective who tended to rely on brawn rather than brains—offered a refreshingly exciting alternative to the cerebral whodunits that had grown so incredibly popular over the previous decade. Although they would continue to dominate the genre in the years leading up to the Second World War (and arguably beyond), tastes were beginning to change, and as authors and publishers became more innovative, so came diversity within the genre.
Twenty-seven of Hume’s books featured Mick Cardby, two of which were adapted into films: Crime Unlimited (1935, remade four years later as Too Dangerous to Live) and They Called Him Death (1941, entitled The Patient Vanishes). Hume also wrote a trilogy of novels about crime reporter Tony Carter, and under his Nicholas Brady pseudonym he created the eccentric amateur sleuth, Reverend Ebenezer Buckle. But it was using his own name that Turner wrote more traditional detective novels of the kind that are now characterised as ‘Golden Age’, although they had a darker vein running through them than many of their cosier contemporaries. The first, Death Must Have Laughed (1932, published in the US as First Round Murder), was a classic impossible crime story, and featured an amateur detective, the solicitor Amos Petrie, and his long-suffering Scotland Yard counterpart, Inspector Ripple: Below the Clock was their last, and arguably most accomplished, case, and outsold the others—maybe in part thanks to its striking but understated jacket featuring a painting of that famous Westminster clock tower.
As well as writing the hardboiled books (as David Hume) for Collins from 1933 right up to his death in 1945—they were still being published a year after he died—he also participated in the collaborative novel Double Death (1939). Often mistaken for a Detection Club book, on account of its principal authors being Dorothy L. Sayers and Freeman Wills Crofts, in fact it was not, and none of the other collaborators were members of that august body. At Turner’s suggestion, the writers each included notes in the book about the others’ contributions, which although interesting to the fan did rather highlight deficiencies in the novel, which was unfortunate at a time when the ‘round-robin’ format had begun to drop out of fashion. He also co-wrote the screenplay for the 1941 adaptation of Peter Cheyney’s Lemmy Caution novel, This Man Is Dangerous.
Sadly, Turner’s reign as one of the most reliable crime writers in the UK came to a sudden end. On Saturday, 6 February 1945, he died from tuberculosis at Haywards Heath in West Sussex, aged only 39. His early death and the transitory nature of authors’ popularity have sadly resulted in Turner, Brady and even Hume becoming almost entirely forgotten about, and the books very hard to track down. It is to be hoped that the republication of Below the Clock will be the first step towards this remarkable and in many ways trailblazing talent being rediscovered by mystery and crime fans.
DAVID BRAWN
August 2017
CHAPTER I (#uf5e340c6-cb93-51f5-8d7c-ad33f88d27c0)
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
THE House of Commons has its moments.
Ascot bends a fashionable knee to hail Gold Cup Day with an elegant genuflection, Henley hesitates between pride and sophistication to welcome the Regatta, Epsom bustles with democratic fervour as Derby day approaches, Cowes bows with dignified grace as curving yachts carve another niche in her temple of fame, Aintree wakens and waves to saints and sinners on Grand National day, and Wimbledon wallows for a week in a racket of rackets.
The House of Commons has its Budget Day …
The afternoon sun broke into a smile after an April shower, and beamed through the leaded glass in the western wall, throwing lustre on the dark-panelled woodwork, turning brass into a blaze of gold, brightening the faces of Members of Parliament, revealing dancing specks of dust so that they scintillated with the brilliance of diamonds. One widely elliptical ray wandered from the stream of the beams, and bathed the spot where Edgar Reardon, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was to stand. The ray glistened on the brassbound despatch box at the corner of the table and shimmered beyond to waste its beauty on the floor. Nature, in a generous moment, had provided a theatrical spectacle.
The flood of golden light brought no solace to the men who stared at it from above. For the leaders of finance and industry shuffled their feet on the floor of the gallery, and waited for the worst while hoping for the best. They were not thinking of happy omens, portents, and auguries as they eyed the sun beaming on the despatch box. With the passage of years their hopes had faded until budgets meant burdens. Ladies in the grille abandoned their furtive whispers to advance with muffled tread and peer over the brass-work in front of them, looking first of all for relatives, and later, for celebrities.
Members blinked as the sun winked in their eyes. The lambent glow was even noticed by the Cabinet Ministers, who sat out of the beams, arrayed on the Treasury Bench, endeavouring to look as wise as Pythian oracles. The wandering radiance actually distracted attention from Mr Speaker, resplendent in his robes, although an errant ray stabbed a glimmer on the silver buckle of the shoe which he elevated so carefully in the general direction of Heaven. The sun had fascinated the spectators so effectively that few spared a thought for the lesser glories of the Sergeant-at-Arms, although he wore archaic dress, and exercised his privilege of being the only person in the House to bear a sword.
In the minds of the onlookers the sunbeams had one competitor. They were thinking of the man for whom the vacant place on the Treasury Bench had been reserved—and of his deficit!
A stranger casting a casual glance round the House might well have imagined the Members as wholesale breakers of minor laws. For each one apparently held a police summons in his hand. But they were not summonses—only blue papers giving details of how the deficit was made up, but not a single hint of how it was to be met. The filling of the gap between revenue and expenditure was reserved for a white paper, perhaps so coloured to signify the cleansing power of gold, maybe so blanched to prepare the nervous for the shock, but never issued until industry trembles and the City is at rest.
Joe Manning, the Opposition leader, flung down his blue paper as though the sheet were wasp-ridden and turned to Fred Otwood—a small, beetle-browed man who had been Chancellor in the previous Government, and hoped to repeat the performance in the next.
‘Fred,’ said Manning aggressively, ‘if Reardon runs his household as he does national finance the bailiffs would have called on him long ago. As a Chancellor of the Exchequer he’d make a good confidence man.’
‘I said that last year,’ remarked Otwood wearily, ‘and the tale’s getting a bit worn at the corners. No sense in attacking Reardon whatever he says. After all, Joe, somebody has always to pay.’
Manning pulled his whiskers into a new shape and looked at his lieutenant somewhat critically. There were times when Otwood seemed to lack all the requisites for instructing and moulding public opinion. The former Prime Minister glanced away from the sunlight and looked along the line of faces on the Treasury Bench.
‘I can’t understand it,’ he remarked. ‘They’re all smiling as if they were disposing of a surplus. Anyone would think that Willie Ingram had arrived to give a present to the nation.’
Ingram, the Prime Minister, had a flabby face, a fleshy nose, an outsize in eyebrows, and a polished skull. The eyes redeemed other features. They were brightly keen and puckishly humorous.
‘He must think he’s backing a winner,’ said Otwood.
Joe Manning continued to stare at them until he suddenly gripped Otwood’s arm and whispered another pointer for his forthcoming speech:
‘Callous indifference, Fred. That’s the note to strike.’
‘Perhaps it’s still a good line, Joe, but doesn’t it begin to sound a bit like a cracked gramophone record?’
The conversation was halted by a new arrival. Tranter, a doctor from the north, made his way with difficulty to a place behind them, and sat perched upon the knees of two unwilling supporters. Tranter had one fixed panacea for political ailments, but each time he produced it with the earnestness of an original performer.
‘Couldn’t we make a stand for inflation?’ he whispered. Currency inflation was Tranter’s method by which money could be raised without anyone paying for it. As he received no reply he moved away, satisfied that he had struck another blow for national welfare. Fortunately, he did not hear Otwood’s comment:
‘If that man, Joe, had studied medicine as he’s studied economics he wouldn’t know enough to bandage a cut finger.’
Manning tugged more viciously at his moustache and peered anxiously at the clock. During all this time the ritual of question time was proceeding, carried on by a scratch crew under the guidance of Mr Speaker. People grew restless, whispers increased, feet shuffled.
There was a crowd at the Bar. Eric Watson, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Mr Chancellor Reardon, sat with his face bathed in the sunlight. He ought not to have been there. On such a day there must have been many other things for him to do. But the occasion was great, and Watson took his share of the limelight, basking with the self-importance of a cock pheasant flaunting before a hen at mating time.
Watson had made a name for himself by a couple of striking speeches. Now he was consolidating his position, pushing steadily towards minor office in the recognised way—by bottle-washing for someone who had already arrived. He was tall and too handsome. The fine features suggested—to those who were unkind—that strength might have been sacrificed in the process of modelling. He looked round the House, and spoke with unnecessary emphasis:
‘Wait until Edgar comes. He’ll tickle them up more than a bit.’
A Member sitting behind him chuckled softly. It was Dick Curtis, yet another who had joined the long procession and added politics to a legal profession. Curtis imagined that the ranks were full in the present Government. Perhaps that explained why he belonged to the Opposition.
‘He may find that he’s tickling a pike instead of a trout,’ he said. ‘Deficits are not like air bubbles. They won’t be burst and they refuse to blow away.’
Watson smiled tolerantly. He had faced Curtis in many a wordy war in the Law Courts, knew his gift for banter, his flair for argument. Curtis had a full, round voice, and a tonal range that embraced most varieties of expression. Some air of prosperity was conveyed by the figure which indicated the commencement of a senatorial roundness. His next words showed that his banter covered a judicial brain:
‘Reardon’s got one great thing in his favour, Watson. The City isn’t frightened of him. I know the Account that’s closed resembled business in a deserted village, but there was some brisk buying on the Stock Exchange before that. From your pestilential point of view that’s not a bad sign.’
‘Reardon is pleased about that,’ whispered Watson. ‘I know he wants to carry the City with him.’ He spoke as though he had rendered more than a little assistance to his chief in the bearing of the burden.
‘He doesn’t seem in any hurry to arrive,’ said Curtis. ‘Wife with him?’
Watson nodded a wordless affirmative.
‘I thought so,’ remarked Curtis dryly. ‘She’ll be keeping him.’
The Parliamentary Private Secretary seemed disinclined to discuss women in general, or his chief’s wife in particular. He changed the subject with surprising abruptness:
‘Tranter is jumping your seat, Curtis. Turf him out of it.’
Curtis looked lazily. A silk hat threw the light back from his seat like a reflecting glass. His eyes gleamed with humorous brightness.
‘Tranter will soon learn wisdom after I’ve—’
A rising cheer drowned the remainder of the sentence. Mr Chancellor Reardon had arrived in the House.
‘I’ll have to go,’ whispered Watson, hurrying away to return a couple of minutes later with a long glass, filled with claret and seltzer water for Reardon’s use during his speech. The Chancellor interrupted his talk with the Prime Minister to place the glass on the table. As he turned Curtis sat on the hat Tranter had left on his seat. There was a muffled sound of constrained mirth, followed by a peal of loud laughter. The noise increased when Curtis withdrew the hat from beneath him, appeared astonished to find it in his hand, and then held it aloft for all to see. He seemed to have some difficulty in recognising it as a hat.
Tranter snatched the ruin from Curtis’ hand and ran with it up the steps of the gangway. The overhanging gallery offered shelter from derision. The Speaker had to delay his departure from the Chair to restore a sense of responsibility to the House. Even the removal of the mace was attended with the backwash of earlier laughter.
The speech for which the stage had been set, for which the nation waited with apprehension, started in an atmosphere of levity.
As Edgar Reardon stood in the beam of the sun’s spotlight he was revealed to the observant and discerning as a mass of contradictions. The forehead, by its width, depth and sweep, showed intellect, almost patrician nobility; the eyes were vague, flickering and wavering with uncertain darts; his nose was finely chiselled; the mouth was set too low, and the sagging lips might well have fitted a voluptuary; his jaw had the firm, sweeping outline of a determined man; the pale, thin hands moved unceasingly, long fingers wriggling like worms.
The Chancellor had a gift of persuasive speech, and during the customary review of national finance, with which he prefaced the important business, he used the gift to advantage. He reached the end of his preamble at quarter to five. Operators had grown tired of waiting to see the new taxes flashed over the tape machines. But so far Reardon had given no hint of which milch cow he would grasp, of where his money was to come from.
Members leaned forward and there was a perceptible flutter among the financiers and industrialists in the gallery. Relaxed figures became taut.
Mr Chancellor Reardon prolonged the moment of suspense until it became irritating. The way in which the man wasted time was more than exasperating; it was astonishing. He fingered his notes as though he had never seen them before, damping a thin finger on his lips as he turned page after page. He drank from his glass of claret and seltzer, and flicked through his notes again. Perplexity and disquiet increased. Everyone knew that Reardon had worked on the notes for a full week, preparing and arranging them. It seemed that his delay was deliberately insulting, that the Chancellor was verifying unnecessarily that which he must have memorised.
A low murmur rose round the House. The Chancellor was carrying his taunt too far, was playing like a cat with a mouse, refusing to open Pandora’s box until nerves were on edge.
The murmurs grew until individual voices were clear. The impatient were begging him to proceed, Opposition members sneeringly suggested that he had every cause to hesitate, and the members of the Cabinet urged him to hurry, admonished him against delay.
At last Edgar Reardon turned away from his notes and resumed his position in the spotlight, leaning his elbow on the Despatch Box. His gaze wandered round the House before settling upon the face of Joe Manning. The leader of the Opposition moved a little uneasily. The Chancellor stared at him as though the first announcement was to be a direct, personal challenge.
But Reardon hesitated unaccountably on the brink of that announcement. Joe Manning’s face flushed and he started to rise to his feet. Even as he moved he spoke, his voice burdened with temper:
‘Why this farce, Mr Chancellor? Are you so ashamed of the Budget you have to produce that your nerves have failed you?’
The questions provoked cheers from the Opposition members. Ingram, the Prime Minister, rose with a retort, hoping that the Chancellor would save the situation by speaking first.
Reardon frowned. Then his mouth twitched. His left hand groped until it found a corner of the Despatch Box.
For the first time Members began to suspect that something had gone wrong, that all was not well. Within a few seconds suspicion grew to a certainty. Reardon’s eyes were strange. They ceased to wander, were fixed in a persistent stare. The pupils shone strangely, and the man’s body stiffened until it seemed unnaturally tense.
His appearance changed with each fleeting second. He seemed numbed, almost paralysed. Even the golden light from the sun could not disguise the pallidity of his face. Reardon looked distressingly like a man who stands in a daze after concussion.
A colleague decided that it was time to act. He rose and caught the Chancellor by the tails of his coat from behind.
It seemed that the action was the only thing wanting to upset the Chancellor’s balance. He fell headlong to the floor with a crash!
The moment that followed was one of those in which the whole being is concentrated in the eye. The hush that fell over the House was poignantly dramatic. It was an uncomfortable silence.
Tranter broke the spell by claiming right of passage, and dashing forward to the side of the Chancellor. Members who had sat with the muteness and stiffness of statues found their tongues. Ingram cast the secrets of the Budget all over the table in a frenzied search for water. Abruptly he seized the remains of the claret and seltzer, flung it into the face of the Chancellor. Reardon did not move.
Watson, the P.P.S., recovered sufficiently to run for water. As he hurried the Hon. John Ferguson, President of the Board of Trade, worked with trembling fingers and whipped off the man’s collar. Sam Morgan, anxious to help, but uncertain of the procedure, stood wishing that he were a doctor instead of a Home Secretary.
In the general confusion everyone succeeded in getting in everyone else’s way.
At last Tranter produced some sort of order out of the chaos. As he knelt down by Reardon’s side he gave short, sharp directions to those around him. He was definitely a better doctor than he was an economist. The whispering ceased. There was a silence ladened pause. Then Tranter raised his voice again:
‘Carry him outside at once.’
The prostrate form was seized by half a dozen willing, but clumsy, hands. Reardon’s flaccid muscles writhed under the pull and thrust of the shuffling figures, the trunk bowing as they lifted him. The helpers bustled him into a position they fondly hoped was comfortable. It was a grotesque parody of a chairing. The Chancellor’s head wobbled hideously, the body sank into itself telescopically, looking invertebrate and horribly unhuman, swaying and jolting to each step of the bearers as they staggered with their burden out of the House.
The Members watched the procession with bewilderment. This was something that the Chancellor had not budgeted for! They need have felt no sympathy for the sagging figure.
Edgar Reardon was dead!
CHAPTER II (#uf5e340c6-cb93-51f5-8d7c-ad33f88d27c0)
BEHIND THE SPEAKER’S CHAIR
‘I SUPPOSE it was apoplexy,’ whispered the Prime Minister.
‘I can’t tell definitely what it was,’ said Tranter. His brows were knitted, and there was a tone in his voice that the other misjudged. The group stood in the long hall behind the Speaker’s Chair. The body of Edgar Reardon lay on a couch against the wall. The figure was dishevelled, the head was supported on the rolled-up jacket of the dead man, one of the legs had slipped off the side of the couch.
‘If there’s any room for doubt,’ said Ingram after a pause, ‘we’d better have him taken across to Westminster Hospital’
The doctor waved his hands impatiently and commented sourly:
‘Oh, I know death when I see it. He was dead when we carried him out of the House. I’m not troubled about that. What’s worrying me is that I can’t figure out how it happened.’
‘But, man, you saw it all yourself,’ protested the Prime Minister.
Tranter’s nerves were ruffled and his temper ebbed. He flung his hands helplessly into the air.
‘Of course, I saw all that you saw,’ he snapped. ‘But I’m a doctor. This, Ingram, is a case for the Coroner of the Household. I don’t want to say much more. An autopsy may show that death was due to natural causes. His heart may have given out; a hundred and one things may have happened. But I’m going to say this now: It didn’t look to me like natural death at the time when it happened and I don’t think it was even now. Just look at him. Does it look right to you?’
The Prime Minister gazed at the corpse and shuddered. Reardon certainly did not look as though his heart had failed him. There was something odd about the expression of the face, an atmosphere of violence about the distorted limbs. For years Ingram had boasted that he was able to cope with any emergency. That faculty, and his solid sense, had won him the Premiership. But now he felt as though his brain were addled as he groped feebly after an idea.
The Cabinet Ministers who had assisted in carrying the Chancellor out of the House stood in a group like frozen images, staring with awed fascination at the corpse, and not trusting themselves to speak.
A little farther away the widow stood against the wall, her body twitching, her startled eyes, distended but dry, turning from Tranter to Ingram, and from Ingram to the remains of her husband. Her face was tragically pathetic. The skin was marble white and her make-up turned her pallor into a shrieking incongruity. The mascara on her eyelids and lashes showed midnight black against a surround of ghastly white; rouge, high on the cheek-bones, was almost silhouetted against the pale flesh, and the lips swerved in a carmine spread. Her green eyes were overshadowed by grief and mascara. Tufts of golden hair caught the rays of the sun as they waved in curls from the side of a black cloche hat.
Watson flitted in the background like a hovering moth, straying from Tranter’s side to whisper condolences to the widow, moving again to stare at the corpse as though he still disbelieved that Reardon was dead. As seconds passed Ingram’s brain began to function again.
‘Tranter,’ he said, ‘this is absolutely absurd. I can’t understand what on earth you’re talking about. Edgar Reardon was a man without a care in the world. Why should a man with position, money, good health, and a devoted wife commit suicide? And you suggest that he didn’t die a natural death! The idea is preposterous.’
‘You’ve been thinking instead of listening,’ remarked the doctor caustically. ‘I did not say that he committed suicide at the time of his death, and I don’t say so now. I haven’t mentioned suicide.’
‘But … but …’ Ingram paused, bewildered. He did not complete the sentence. Before he could collect his scattered thoughts a shrill laugh interrupted him, a peal that broke abruptly at the end of a high trill. If the roof of the House had fallen through it would not have created a greater sensation than the unexpected sound. On the overwrought nerves of the men in the hall the effect was hair-raising. They wheeled round together.
Mrs Reardon stood with her head tilted back, the face entirely mirthless, the mouth twisting with spasmodic jerks, the eyes wild and distended. Here, at least, was a case which Tranter could treat with confidence. Before he reached her side Mrs Reardon had ceased to laugh and her body was convulsed by sobs. Watson handed the doctor a glass of water. Tranter threw it into the face of the hysterical woman. As she quietened down he tried to speak to her persuasively. The effort was useless. She was quarrelsome and querulous. Watson stood by her side, gripping her trembling hands.
While Tranter was attempting to coerce the woman a newcomer arrived, walked across the hall towards them. He was tall, and a trifle too elegant, his clothes immaculately tailored, his features sharply defined. The grave, dark eyes were luminously brown. He stopped before the widow and bowed. Mrs Reardon moved Tranter to one side and stared at the newcomer ungraciously, almost venemously.
‘How on earth do you come to be here, Mr Paling?’ she snapped.
The man accepted her insulting tone without change of expression.
‘Your husband,’ he said, ‘was kind enough to procure my admission to the public gallery, and I saw what happened. I have taken the liberty of ordering your car. It is now waiting. That is what I came to tell you.’
‘Oh, did you?’ Her voice was tart, her manner definitely rude.
‘It was my desire to be of assistance,’ said the man easily.
‘Thanks.’ Mrs Reardon sniffed, dabbed at her eyes with a frail lace handkerchief. In an instant her grief changed to anger again. ‘I prefer to walk home. Give that message to my chauffeur.’
The men in the hall watched the fast-moving scene with amazement. It seemed odd that a man of such appearance, of such apparent self-confidence, should make no retort. He smiled gently, a chiding smile such as a mother might bestow upon a much loved but unruly child. Then he bowed slightly and retired from the hall.
Tranter led her to a chair, comforted her for a short time and then walked away, leaving Watson by her side. Farther away in the hall an informal meeting of the Cabinet was already in progress. The Prime Minister was urging an immediate adjournment of the House.
‘I’m not going to make a Budget speech myself,’ he said, ‘and I’m not going to listen to one from anyone else. You couldn’t expect the House to sit through a speech after what has happened.’
John Ferguson, the President of the Board of Trade, added more weighty reasons to support Ingram’s argument:
‘Adjourn the House. None of the taxes has been announced so you haven’t got to do anything with the Budget resolutions tonight. There isn’t any danger of premature disclosure. We’re just where we were this morning.’
Ingram nodded. The question was settled. While the Ministers talked Curtis joined Mrs Reardon and Watson in the hall. Between them they persuaded the widow to leave the House, and both gripped her arms as she walked falteringly to the door. Curtis hailed his own chauffeur and they escorted Mrs Reardon to 11 Downing Street.
The Prime Minister said little to the occupants of the House. In two sentences he informed them that Mr Chancellor Reardon had met an unexpectedly sudden death and that the House, as a tribute to the memory of the deceased, would adjourn immediately.
Shortly afterwards the last loiterer departed. The House was empty, except for what had been the Right Honourable Edgar Reardon and the attendants in evening dress, their shirt fronts decorated by the large gilt House of Commons badge. They watched over his bier …
For two or three hours Watson and Curtis made inquiries here and there, striving ineffectively to straighten out the mystery for the sake of the distressed widow. They found more difficulties in their way than either had anticipated. A sudden death in the House of Commons, apart from the fact that death has occurred, is unlike that which takes place anywhere else. Rules and laws which have been embedded in the dust for centuries hamper inquiries, tradition erects formidable barriers. The two men were unable to report any progress when they arrived at 11 Downing Street.
They found Mrs Reardon alone in the drawing-room. A black velvet evening gown accentuated her pallor. She swayed to and fro as she spoke to them. Watson avoided her eyes as she looked at him. At other times he looked at nothing else. But once she became conscious of his glance, and searched for it in return, his eyes coasted round the room. It was an uncomfortable and depressing hide-and-seek. Curtis coughed informatively and stroked his hair. Watson blushed. The widow still seemed dazed. An awkward silence arose. The woman broke it:
‘But you must have discovered something. What happened? Edgar had never been ill as far as I know. How did he—what killed him?’
‘Had he been to see a doctor recently?’ asked Curtis.
‘No, not since I’ve known him. Edgar was always terribly fit.’
‘Would you mind if I telephoned to his doctor, Mrs Reardon?’
‘Of course I wouldn’t. I’m only too grateful to you for helping me. It’s Dr Cyril Clyde, of Welbeck Street.’
The widow and Watson sat miserably silent while Curtis was out of the room. Fleeting glances passed between them. The woman’s fingers were jerking nervously. Again and again a shudder caused her body to move with the agitation of a marionette. They were both relieved when Curtis returned.
‘Only makes things worse,’ he announced. ‘I told him what had happened, and he says that your husband, Mrs Reardon, was a singularly healthy man, that his heart was perfectly sound, that he was not known to suffer from any ailments, and that he was the last man in the world who would die with such suddenness from natural causes.’
‘What does he suggest doing, Mr Curtis?’
‘He talked about going to the House to take a look at the body. I told him that he could, of course, make an attempt, but I doubted whether he would gain admission. The matter is now in the hands of the Coroner of the Household, and he is not in the position of an ordinary coroner. But he can try.’
The woman was again silent for a time. Suddenly she sat stiffly erect and stared at Curtis.
‘Do you mean,’ she asked, ‘that there is going to be an inquest?’
She was bordering on another lapse into hysteria. The two men glanced at each other. Watson left Curtis to soothe her.
‘Just a pure formality,’ he said casually. ‘Nothing at all for you to trouble about.’ From that point Curtis disregarded the curiously embarrassing glances of both Mrs Reardon and Watson as he maintained a thin stream of talk, striving to dim the tragedy in the widow’s mind. His idle chatter covered a vast range, skimming here, dipping there, but the light, discursive style had its effect. Ten minutes afterwards neither could have remembered a thing he said. Yet he had fed the woman’s mind with a flow of comforting suggestions, sliding away dexterously from any subject which might call for a reply. In that way he broke the silence gently rather than by expressing any views or feelings.
Curtis had just drawn to a conclusion when a knock sounded on the door. A manservant entered.
‘Mr Paling would like to see you, madam,’ he announced.
The widow closed her top teeth over her lip and tapped her foot irritably. Watson half rose, opened his mouth as though to speak and suddenly sat down again. Curtis looked from one to the other with a puzzled frown on his forehead.
‘I do not wish to see the gentleman tonight,’ said Mrs Reardon.
The manservant bowed and retired. But he soon returned. This time the widow glared at him angrily.
‘Mr Paling says his call is reasonably important, madam, and he thinks it advisable that you should speak to him.’
‘Show him in,’ she snapped. She moved from her seat and stood at Watson’s side. The two men rose. Paling strolled into the room with an easy style and a confident manner. He scarcely looked the part of a man who had been curtly rebuffed.
‘What is it?’ asked the widow. She might have been speaking to a recalcitrant dog. Paling continued to smile. Small veins were pulsing in Watson’s forehead.
‘I thought I would call to tell you, Mrs Reardon,’ said Paling, ‘that a detective—I think his name was Inspector Ripple—has just called on me to ask what I know about the … eh … the tragedy.’
The widow threw a look at Watson that was at once both startled and apprehensive. The creases on Curtis’ brow deepened.
‘A detective?’ repeated the woman. ‘What on earth does that mean?’
‘They haven’t lost much time in getting to work,’ said Curtis.
‘Getting to work?’ queried Watson. ‘What on earth have detectives got to do with Reardon’s death?’
‘I suppose they’re making inquiries instead of the coroner’s officer,’ said Curtis soothingly. ‘You’ve got to remember that this is not a routine matter. When things happen in the House of Commons the aftermath runs along lines outside the ordinary track.’
‘One would have imagined that this man Ripple would have seen me before anyone,’ said Watson.
‘You’ve got your turn to come,’ remarked Curtis.
‘I thought it only right that I should call and give you that information, Mrs Reardon,’ said Paling, ‘and since I realise the extent of my unpopularity I’ll leave. Good-evening.’
The widow did not glance at him as he walked out of the room. She appeared stunned. Watson was in no condition to quieten her nerves. He drummed on the top of a chair with his fingers and licked his dry lips. It seemed that a fresh emotional disturbance had arisen.
‘I think,’ said Mrs Reardon deliberately, ‘that I hate that man Paling more than any person I have ever met. I loathe him.’
‘Come now!’ pleaded Curtis, ‘I don’t know him at all but his news wasn’t in any way bad, and it was pretty decent of Paling to drift along and tell you. Perhaps he was only trying to be considerate.’
The woman pursed her lips. The men watched her. When she spoke the words poured in a flood, sounded so ladened with venom that hysteria might have explained them:
‘That’s the trouble. He’s always considerate about things that don’t matter. For nearly a year I’ve tried to stop him coming to this house, almost gone on my knees to Edgar to bar the man from here. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it. And I’m supposed to be the mistress of the place! I hate, loathe, and detest the man.’
‘He seems a gentleman,’ protested Curtis.
‘Gentleman? Pshaw! I hate him.’
‘Now I should have thought—’ The sentence was not completed. A knock sounded and the manservant entered again.
‘Chief Inspector Ripple wishes to speak to Mr Watson.’
Mrs Reardon slumped into a chair. Curtis wiped his hand across his forehead. Watson stalked out of the room as though marching to meet a firing squad. The door closed. The widow commenced to sob.
‘I think you ought to take a sedative and retire, Mrs Reardon,’ said Curtis. ‘You are too overwrought, and each minute is making you worse. If you don’t get to bed you’ll be mentally and physically exhausted.’
‘I couldn’t sleep, positively couldn’t. I just want to be quiet, to be still while I realise that I’ll never see Edgar again.’
She pushed a box of cigarettes towards the man. The hint was obvious. He lit a smoke and sat on the arm of a chair, swinging his legs, and trying unsuccessfully to blow rings. Seven or eight minutes dragged by before the door opened again. Watson entered, a little less jaunty, a trifle more pale. She stared at him with wide eyes.
‘Has he given you a real third degree interview?’ asked Curtis.
‘Asked me about two million questions. All of them uselessly mad.’
‘Did he happen to worry you at all about the claret and seltzer?’
Watson started. The widow looked at Curtis with the sudden head twist of a frightened bird.
‘He seemed to be more interested in that infernal drink than he was in anything. I told him what bit I knew about it.’
‘Did he seem satisfied when you’d finished your statement?’
‘Those men are never satisfied, Curtis. Why, he even started talking about murder. Either that man is mad or I am.’
Whichever was mad, Mrs Reardon was not conscious. She had fainted.
CHAPTER III (#uf5e340c6-cb93-51f5-8d7c-ad33f88d27c0)
THE START OF THE HUNT
MINUTES passed before Mrs Reardon returned to consciousness. She shuddered, stared round the room with haunted eyes. Watson patted her hands consolingly. Curtis waited for the widow to speak, wondering what her first thoughts would be as full consciousness returned.
‘Why didn’t Paling die instead of my husband?’ she inquired.
The men tried to hide their surprise. Watson slipped another cushion under her head and said nothing.
‘Oh! The number of times I told Edgar, grovelled to him, begged him, not to have any more to do with the man. But it made no difference. He was always on the doorstep.’
‘Perhaps Edgar was fond of him,’ said Curtis.
‘Fond of him? I’m sure he wasn’t. He got no pleasure out of the man’s company. It wasn’t that Paling couldn’t talk. He certainly could, and he’d been everywhere. But they never had anything to talk about. While they were together it always seemed to me that some sort of a struggle—a silent struggle—was going on. I couldn’t understand it. I hated it.’ She paused to recover her breath.
Then she rose from the chair. Every sign of her listlessness had gone. The effects of the faint had vanished. Her eyes shone with anger, her breast moved convulsively.
‘What was he to your husband?’ asked Curtis.
Mrs Reardon flung up her hands and turned to face him.
‘What was he? Friend, secretary, factotum … anything and everything or nothing. He seemed to do mostly what he liked.’
‘He had no fixed appointment with Edgar?’
‘I couldn’t tell you. I don’t think Edgar would have tolerated the man unless he had been useful for something. I only hope that it was nothing disgraceful.’
Curtis elevated his eyebrows, looked keenly at the widow.
‘Aren’t you being somewhat harsh, Mrs Reardon? Poor Edgar positively basked in affection. Do you think he might have been disturbed by the idea that you and he were drifting a little apart?’
The woman began to tap one foot on the carpet.
‘I have often wondered,’ she replied softly, ‘whether Edgar loved me or whether I loved him.’
Watson interrupted in a voice so strained that Curtis stared.
‘Then why did you marry him, Lola?’
She answered and it seemed almost that she was thinking aloud:
‘You know that I was very young. And Edgar was Edgar. I think he could have persuaded a nightingale to sing out of his hand. But I doubt whether he would have listened to the song.’
Watson burst into a perspiration. He drew a handkerchief and passed it to and fro across his forehead.
‘We’ll leave you now,’ said Curtis, ‘so that you can get to bed.’
The men shook hands with her and left. She was gazing into the fire when the door closed after them.
‘I’m sorry for that little lady,’ said Curtis as they stood at the corner of Downing Street and Whitehall.
‘So am I. It’s a rotten shame. Poor little Lola!’
‘I hate to think of her being harried by Ripple and it looks as though she’s bound to be. Let’s hope that it won’t be too awkward for her. It certainly will be if she’s got a few facts she wants to hide. Those little peccadilloes can be very embarrassing.’
‘Don’t talk like that, Curtis. It isn’t like you to make nasty suggestions. I’ve known her ever since she was a kid, and there’s not one word that can be said against her reputation.’
‘Watson, you speak with the confidence of a father confessor, and with rather more than a confessor’s warmth. I could understand your tone if she were your own wife. If I were you I wouldn’t be so anxious to defend the lady’s good name before it is attacked. If the inquiry digs deep the purity of your motives might be suspected. I’ll remind you that Inspector Ripple is perhaps a coarse-minded man.’
Colour flooded Watson’s face. Even in the blue of the street lamps it was discernible as a widening stain. He looked uncomfortable.
‘I … I only wanted to make it plain …’
Curtis slapped his back and checked the sentence impatiently.
‘Man alive, you make it too plain! What you say to me doesn’t matter a hoot. What you say to the police might mean everything. They would fasten on your words as eagerly as leeches bite into a piece of bruised flesh. If you’re not very, very careful you’ll have the coroner asking questions that will write finis to your political career and make Mrs Reardon exceedingly uncomfortable.’
‘But there’s nothing for us to be uncomfortable about.’
‘Quite. You’ve explained that. So there can’t be anything to get excited about. But for the love of crying out loud don’t get so pink round the gills each time her name is mentioned. If you act in front of other people as you have tonight everyone will swear that there’s something in it. I’m going back to the Temple to work.’
Watson was unwilling to leave things as they stood. He walked with his friend through the quiet streets at the back of Whitehall and along the Embankment. For some time both were silent. Then Watson spoke with startling abruptness:
‘Did you know that Edgar cut me out years ago with Lola?’
‘No, I didn’t. But after tonight, of course, I guessed it.’
‘I thought I had given you a false impression.’
Curtis took a cigarette from his case, handed one to Watson and lighted the two, glancing at the miserable face of his friend in the flickering light of the match. He spoke with a tone of smooth toleration:
‘Look here, old man, you’d better tell me nothing. You can’t prevent me putting two and two together. What does it matter if I think they make five? But you insist on talking, tell me what I am to believe.’
Watson winced and the cigarette glowed and glowed again.
‘I don’t want there to be an appearance of mystery where there is none. We were boy and girl together. When I came down from the university she floored me. I’d never thought of a woman before. Then Edgar came down for some shooting. After that I never had a chance. It was just as though he’d put a veil on her so that she could only look at him. I was nowhere. The trouble was that even now I fancy Edgar didn’t know he was cutting me out. He was infernally friendly.’
‘But afterwards? Was he never jealous?’
‘He had no cause. I saw her alone very little. Lola encircled her life with her wedding ring. Besides, I came to look on Edgar as a close friend.’
‘It was an impression he had a way of creating,’ said Curtis, dryly. ‘Take my advice, Watson, and tumble into bed. Your nerves are shaken. I’ll see you tomorrow. The troubles may have lifted by then.’
A few minutes before Watson and Curtis parted company a conference was in progress in the office of the Commissioner of Police. There were three men in the room. Sir Norris Wheeler, the Commissioner, was fifty, corpulent, bald-headed and irritable. Chief Detective Inspector Ripple was tall, cadaverous and melancholic. Amos Petrie, a solicitor from the Public Prosecutor’s Department, was an odd specimen. About five feet four in height, nearer fifty than forty, he had weak eyes that blinked behind rimless spectacles, large ungainly hands, had a nasty habit of staring over a person’s shoulder while talking to them and a worse habit of rubbing his hands on a huge coloured handkerchief every two or three minutes.
‘I asked you to come round, Petrie,’ said Sir Norris, ‘because we want some assistance. Ripple suggested to me that I should borrow you, and I think your services might be very helpful.’
Petrie glanced at Ripple with malevolence and coughed nervously.
‘I’ve got plenty of work to do without butting into Yard work,’ said the little man. ‘Why can’t you handle the case here?’
‘Because the inquiry is the most difficult we’ve ever had,’ said Ripple, ‘and we haven’t forgotten what you’ve done for us in other cases. I don’t think this is a job for an official Yard man.’
‘Why not? Thought you were paid to investigate sudden deaths.’
‘But you must know when such a death takes place in the House of Commons police work is hampered in a hundred and one ways. It looks as though every member of the Cabinet has got to be questioned and some M.P.’s have got to explain things. Add to that the fact that you can’t meet them in the House and you’ll see the start of the difficulty.’ The Commissioner was indignant.
Petrie played with his handkerchief.
‘I think you’re raising a mare’s nest,’ he remarked. ‘At the moment you don’t know what caused Reardon’s death. Why not wait?’
‘We know enough about the surrounding circumstances to realise that a few preliminary inquiries are justified,’ said Wheeler.
‘And what part am I supposed to play?’ asked the little man. ‘Do I sit on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street until I can chat to the members of the Cabinet? Or do I stand back and applaud while Ripple does his stuff?’
Sir Norris opened his mouth to snarl a retort. He hesitated, and changed his mind. Petrie was an odd man. For twenty years he had been known as a person who didn’t take kindly to discipline. His usual reply to a rebuke was simple and effective. He pointed out that since his private means were sufficient to sustain him, and since he preferred fishing to hanging around Whitehall it seemed that the time for a quiet removal had arrived. And Petrie was not the type of servant the Department wished to lose.
‘I can’t give you any details now,’ said the Commissioner. ‘Ripple can tell you all that there is to be known. You two have worked together many times. I only hope that you will be successful this time. May I take it that you commence to assist us tomorrow?’
Amos pursed his pale lips and played with a thin wisp of hair. The Inspector was gazing at him hopefully.
‘I’ll make a few inquiries in the morning,’ he said eventually, ‘and if I then consider that I can help Ripple I’ll lend a hand.’
‘That’s very good of you,’ said Sir Norris.
‘Actually, it isn’t. I don’t want to discover how or why Edgar Reardon passed from this world. But I’m glad of the chance to aggravate Ripple somewhat. I’m sure he’ll be glad to know that.’
The Inspector sighed heavily. His faith in the powers of Petrie were tremendous; after working with the small man many times he had developed a measure of respect for him. But their association meant the consumption of more beer than Ripple appreciated and the narration of many stories and much advice concerning the art of angling. Amos rose from the chair, looked at his uncreased trousers, picked up a bowler hat that hadn’t been dusted for years, pushed a tie that looked like a length of rope a little farther away from his collar, nodded his head to Wheeler, winked at Ripple, and ambled out of the room with the soft tread of an angler and the rolling gait of a sailor. The Inspector hurried after him. Petrie turned to view him disconsolately.
‘Sunshine,’ he said, wagging a head that was a couple of sizes too large for his thin neck, ‘I’m not congratulating you on dragging me into this lot. In other words, damn you! What about some beer?’
‘Not yet, not yet. Come into my office and I’ll tell you how things stand at the moment. After that we may have a drink.’
‘May have?’ Petrie sounded aghast. ‘I must have misheard you. If I can’t have an ale when I want one I’m resigning from this job now.’
‘I won’t keep you more than ten minutes. Then I’ll drink with you.’
‘The very soul of consideration, laddie. Lead the way, Sunshine.’
‘And don’t keep calling me Sunshine!’
‘Rather too masculine, you think? I’ll try Rainbow if it suits you better. Or shall we call you Epidemic? The words seem to fit.’
Ripple said nothing until they were seated in his office.
‘Did I tell you,’ commenced Amos, ‘about that chub I collected just before the start of the—’
‘Forget it,’ said Ripple wearily. ‘Let’s talk about the late Edgar Reardon. Tell me what you know about the affair and that I needn’t pass on old information.’
‘I don’t know much. He was thirty-nine. Graduated into politics after the usual education and a stay of a couple of years in Paris. Tried his hand as a barrister, but had no enthusiasm for it. Turned from the Bar to the City, and built up a name and collected a fair amount of money, as financial adviser to a few trust companies. Married Lola Andrews, only child of Sir Clement Andrews. Elbowed his way into the Cabinet because the other men in the party weren’t much good. Slick talker, affected dresser, unusually conceited, fond of company, posed as a friend to everyone, fancied himself as a coming Premier, did a bit of hunting and shooting, played cards a lot and settled down to a life of eminent respectability after he became Chancellor. Rose this afternoon to explain in his Budget how he intended to overcome a serious deficit, collapsed and died during his speech before he indicated the new financial programme. Cause of death at present unknown, but previously regarded as a man in good health. That’s all.’
‘Seems to be plenty. I’ve questioned two or three folks, but I can’t add much to what you’ve said. I can’t see the point in asking many questions until I know how he died. The whole affair is daft.’
‘Then why on earth do you drag me into it, Angel? When do you think you’ll have the genuine information about what happened?’
‘By lunch-time tomorrow. I’ve had a word with the Coroner for the House and his officer will pass the information to me as soon as he gets it from the doctor. Perhaps you’d better collect me at the Yard in the morning. Maybe you’ll be excused from duty. I hope you are. That’d let me out of it. This death looks everything that’s odd.’
‘Don’t tell me that, Sunshine. Every time they throw you into an inquiry the whole affair bristles with difficulties and trouble.’
‘You know perfectly well that I get every rotten job they can find.’
‘And you make the best of them, lad! If they delivered the culprit to you with a signed confession in his hand you’d find a catch in it somewhere. Be more like the intelligent carp. They never worry. So long as the Cyprinus Carpio can collect an occasional meal it lets the troubles of the world drift by. You, Ripple, never wait for awkward moments. You stay awake at night inventing them. What about this beer you were going to buy for me?’
‘The shout is on you. I don’t get half your money.’
‘Maybe,’ said Amos as they walked out of the building towards Whitehall, ‘but think of the value I give them for what they pay!’
Ripple grunted, bowed his meagre shoulders in an outsize overcoat. Petrie trotted along by his side, chattering about fish. The Yard man was not listening. He was thinking about Edgar Reardon, wondering what would happen if he had to arrest a Cabinet Minister. After the second glass of beer he thawed a little. They were alone in a far corner of the bar.
‘If Reardon was murdered,’ he said, ‘he must have been poisoned, and if he was poisoned the stuff must have been given to him in a glass of claret and seltzer. That’s all he drank while he made his speech. The drink was given to him by Eric Watson, his Parliamentary Private Secretary. He seemed flustered when I saw him tonight.’
‘Might give you a lead. What made you talk to Paling?’
‘I was told that he had been seen around a lot with Reardon and was in the House at the time of his death. He’s a curious bloke.’
‘Aren’t they all? Seen the widow yet, Sunshine?’
‘I thought I’d leave her until she got over the shock.’
‘Did you discover first whether it had been much of a shock?’
Ripple replaced his glass on the table. Frowns ran across his face.
‘You’re a funny little devil. What do you mean?’
‘Nothing. When I see a school of roach swimming like blazes I fancy I can smell a pike behind them. Sometimes when I think of sudden deaths I wonder about women. Perhaps that’s why I’m a bachelor.’
‘Don’t you think we ought to wait a while before we start making guesses? After all, Reardon might have passed away very harmlessly.’
‘There is that possibility. If the idea is strong in your mind I can’t see why you had to pester me. Have another beer.’
‘Not me. I have to keep a clear head. Tomorrow means work.’
‘All right. Take some brightness home to your wife. Good-night.’
Petrie strolled out of the public house, whistling cheerfully.
CHAPTER IV (#ulink_a8e8226c-78f7-572d-9a3c-930752309510)
THE MEDICAL REPORT
WORD passed round the House of Commons on the following day that Edgar Reardon had died of heart failure. It was difficult to trace the origin of the information, but members linked it obscurely with the post mortem which had taken place early that morning. The news was received eagerly and immediately accepted. It was satisfactory to all to know that there was no foundation for the vague fears of Tranter.
Curtis first heard the news while waiting in the outer lobby to speak to Fred Otwood. At the time he couldn’t find an opportunity. Otwood was talking to a small man with a frightened air and an ill-fitting suit—Amos Petrie.
‘I didn’t know that Reardon had a heart,’ said Curtis. ‘In that case Tranter was wrong, almost foolishly wrong.’
‘That’s old news,’ asserted his informant. ‘I wouldn’t take his word for anything that really mattered.’
Curtis smiled vaguely and was walking away when from the corner of his eye he sighted Fred Otwood. At that instant the former Chancellor of the Exchequer leaped to one side as if he had been stung by a tarantula.
‘How dare you, sir?’ he cried.
The little man seemed more surprised than any man of his inches had a right to be.
‘I’ll report you to the House,’ shouted another Member. Otwood’s trouble seemed to be catching! Petrie blinked his eyes and tugged nervously at his coloured handkerchief. He stared round as though searching for an ally.
With unbelievable suddenness the octagonal space in which members woo constituents and placate troublesome petitioners, was converted into pandemonium. It seemed that before the mind recovered from one surprise the eye was shocked by another. Member after member left those to whom they had been speaking and retreated hastily to the Inner Lobby where the outside world may be defied.
Amos Petrie, his mild face creased in bewilderment, walked over to Curtis.
‘Did you see that?’ he inquired. ‘What’s the matter with the man?’
‘I was as much surprised as you were.’
A wan smile passed over Petrie’s face. He remarked artlessly:
‘I only asked him if he could tell me something about the death of the late Edgar Reardon.’
‘Well? And what then?’
‘He didn’t seem to hear me. So I touched his arm to attract his attention. How do you explain it all?’
Curtis laughed and also beat a retreat to the Inner Lobby. Petrie stood with a smile twisting his mouth. Now he realised some of Ripple’s difficulties. It may be generally conceded that those seeking news with regard to an occurrence at a particular time and place first ask those who were present. But whenever detectives attempt such a move in the precincts of the House of Commons they raise nice questions about freedom of ingress and egress and the immemorial Privileges of Parliament. It was so now.
The Inner Lobby was seething with discontent and ruffled vanity. The walls were echoing to discordant voices.
‘They’ve no right in here except as servants of the House …’
‘But if Reardon’s death was not heart failure after all …’
‘Nonsense. Of course it was heart failure.’
‘Why this shoulder clapping business anyway …’
‘A sheer impertinence …’
‘A gross breach of privilege, too.’
‘I’ve never been so insulted before during my years …’
‘We must tell the Speaker. We certainly must …’
‘And discover if he authorised it …’
Fred Otwood promised to raise the question and walked into the House. Curtis followed him and immediately walked over to Joe Manning. He told him of the trouble.
Manning was puzzled as well as annoyed.
‘You’re a lawyer and I’m not, Curtis. What’s the constitutional line?’
‘That depends,’ whispered Curtis. ‘I’d advise you to go slow.’
Manning nodded and took no part in the Parliamentary crisis produced by the arrival of Amos Petrie. He did not need to fan the trouble and he couldn’t assuage it. The Home Secretary made an attempt to temporise and the House became more and more impatient. Matters were not improved when the Speaker admitted that he knew nothing whatever about the affair. He had been kept in entire ignorance about the inquiries.
That fact disturbed even the Speaker. And if the pale ghost of Charles I had appeared at the Bar of the House the private members could not have been more shocked. The Home Secretary was harried, baited and badgered until anyone but an M.P. would have felt sorry for him. He began to wilt, looked hopefully at the Prime Minister. There was no help coming from that quarter.
Ingram sat on the Treasury Bench, his elbow on his knee, his head supported on his hand, listening to the disheartening exhibition made by his Home Secretary. The Premier decided to close the storm of questions and silenced everyone by stepping to the table.
‘I think,’ announced Ingram, ‘that this House will have to reconcile itself to accepting the aid of the Civil Power. I say that although I should have disapproved of its intrusion without the sanction of the House. To explain why I am of this opinion I must say that I hold in my hand the reports of two eminent medical men who this morning performed a postmortem in connection with the tragic death of the late Edgar Reardon.’
The members moved restlessly. Ingram seemed tiresomely verbose. The forensic mantle dropped from Ingram with cruel abruptness.
‘The late Chancellor of the Exchequer died of poison!’
The last word shot through his lips as though it had blistered his tongue. Five hundred breaths were intaken.
‘He was poisoned with strophanthin.’
A whisper rose round the startled House. What was strophanthin? To Eric Watson that seemed unimportant. He felt like a fly taken in the web of a spider. He flashed dimmed eyes round the vague sea of faces, half-unconsciously seeking for a friendly glance. Instead he heard five hundred repetitions of the word strophanthin.
Tranter knew what it was. He smacked his thigh to proclaim his knowledge. Those on each side began to question him. The whispers faded away as Ingram opened his mouth to speak again:
‘I understand that strophanthin is one of the most dangerous drugs in the pharmacopœia,’ he announced.
‘How did the deceased Member get it?’ The questioner was Manning.
‘That is one of the matters demanding inquiry. I am told, though, that in minute pathological doses it is used medicinally.’
‘Oh!’ Manning sat back and relaxed. ‘That explains it, of course.’
‘Not quite,’ said the Prime Minister unhappily. ‘The late Member was not taking such a medicine and more strophanthin was found in the course of the postmortem than could ever have been administered medicinally.’
To Watson that added a further complication to his entanglement. To all others it gave a final element of the fantastic to a situation already incredible. Members rose to insist upon further information being supplied.
‘The effect of strophanthin upon the heart is well known,’ he said, ‘and I am told that it is very peculiar.’ He stopped to raise a slip of paper before his eyes. Then he proceeded: ‘Even the beat upon which the heart stops tells its tale in corroboration. It stops in systole, and not in diastole, and movement is arrested in a tetanic spasm which the postmortem inevitably reveals. It is somewhat the same condition as that we know as lockjaw.’
Ingram moved back to the Treasury Bench. The Members gaped at him. The facts had now been realised and accepted. The bewilderment grew and grew. Questions were flung with the rapidity of machine-gun fire. Ingram had to return to the table. He shook his head wearily as he listened to the bombardment.
What was the explanation? Why should a man give himself a cramp in the heart that kills? Above all, why should Edgar Reardon have done it? Was it certain that the tragedy was not an entire accident? From whence did the strophanthin come? Was there any connection between the tragedy and the pending Budget?
Those who sought information were disappointed. Ingram replied to all the questions without adding to that which they already knew.
‘I share the bewilderment and perplexity of Members,’ he said. ‘I have been asking myself all these questions since the information was first placed in my hand. I cannot answer them. So far as I know the physicians have no replies to them. It is certain that the late Chancellor of the Exchequer could not have taken the poison outside the House. All who were here yesterday will attest with me that he could not have been poisoned in the House. To all who knew him it is inconceivable that he should have poisoned himself. It seems also impossible that an accident could have happened. Yet our friend is dead. There is nothing further I can say.’
For a space there was a complete silence. Then a voice rose:
‘What about the claret and seltzer he drank?’
Watson licked his dry lips, wanted to shriek out that there was no poison in the glass. He restrained himself with an effort and searched the benches to discover who had asked the question. He could not even find a look of malevolence towards himself. He seemed unnoticed, almost as though he were out of existence. The Members were inhumanly impersonal. The Prime Minister alone deviated from this attitude by a hair’s-breadth. He glanced at Watson as he proceeded to answer the question that had been fired:
‘I do not know about the claret and soda. But we all know that the greatest part of it was drunk during the course of the speech. That means that if the poison were in that drink the late Chancellor of the Exchequer was slowly absorbing it into his system during a period of approximately an hour. I am told upon the highest possible authority that it would not have been possible for him to do that without experiencing most serious effects. And we all know that he appeared in good health until a minute before he collapsed.’
The Members looked at the Premier and refrained from pressing further questions. They were completely out of their depth. Watson thought that Ingram might generously have used more definite words. A greater emphasis would have been fairer. Still, the underlying truth was one that must be recognised. Watson felt that he was entitled to relax. So he sat back in his chair and sighed with an approach to satisfaction. And in that very instant Ingram robbed his own indefinite words of every semblance of significance.
‘Of course, it is not intended to withdraw anything from the police,’ he stated. ‘All these matters I have mentioned will have to be weighed and considered. I have told you what the medical men have said. I cannot profess, and do not profess, to have any real knowledge upon those points. I have to rely upon the reports of the specialists, and I advise the House, also to be guided by them. I need scarcely tell you that the action taken by the police will depend to a great extent upon the doctor’s statements, and that the police have special experience in dealing with such matters. I have myself discussed the matter with Sir Norris Wheeler, the Commissioner of Police, and he assures me that he has taken special steps to ensure that the inquiry which concerns this House so nearly will be under the personal supervision of an investigator well able to discover the truth, and set the mind of this House at peace.’
Watson felt the ground sliding from beneath his feet. The reference to the claret and soda had only emphasised the ambiguity of his position, and the thought of the coming investigation flung his thoughts back in a panic to the position of Lola Reardon. Watson felt sick, wanted to dash from the House and dare not.
Curiously enough, there were those in the House who sat with lips moving in disguised smiles. They could see some element of comedy. A death was shrieking to be investigated, and the only witnesses were objecting to being questioned in a particular place, were arguing about the conditions under which they might give statements.
Joe Manning felt that as Leader of the Opposition it was essential that he should enter the fray. He rose with a cough.
‘Everyone knows,’ he commenced in sarcastic parody of the Prime Minister, ‘that the effects of poison may be long delayed. So why should members be troubled about a matter of which they know nothing when the death may have been the result of something that happened hours before the collapse?’
His supporters cheered feebly but ceased abruptly when Ingram commenced to reply. The Prime Minister spoke slowly, chose his words with scrupulous care:
‘I am told that the fatal dose must have been absorbed at some time between a few minutes and a few seconds before death.’
The implication was obvious—and ugly. Eric Watson regarded it almost as an accusing finger. He found himself rising to his feet and stopped when he heard another voice raised. Curtis was up, his hands resting before him, his strong voice strangely strained.
‘We naturally accept the statement in good faith as the best that can be afforded at the moment. I think it right to indicate to the Hon. Members, however, that the Prime Minister’s final remark definitely implies that every Member is a potential suspect.’
He paused and a rippling whisper wafted round the House.
A Member in a far back bench commenced to giggle. The Speaker intervened with no uncertain tongue:
‘If the Honourable Member cannot control his mirth it might be better if he indulged it outside the House. This is a serious matter.’
Ingram looked at Curtis as though grieved. The barrister had said what the Premier had carefully avoided. Curtis sat down.
‘In the long history of this House,’ said the Premier, ‘there has been no such thing as a suicide. It is true that a murder did occur, but that tragical happening took place outside in the Lobby. I mention those two facts for one reason only—so that you will rightly regard the present set of circumstances as entirely without precedent. That being so I feel justified and compelled to ask this House to take exceptional measures to deal with it.’
No arguments were raised. Members were oppressed by the oddities surrounding the death, by the peculiarities of this new type of heart failure. Ingram had certainly suggested that a murder had been committed while they were all looking on!
Watson shivered as though seized with an attack of ague. But the day was warm, and the House overheated. Curtis smiled consolingly. Watson nodded, anxious to get outside the building.
The Prime Minister scribbled a note and had it passed to Watson. Eric read it twice before he grasped the meaning of the contents:
‘The small man in the pew under the gallery is in charge of the investigation. Rough hair, untidy clothes, rimless glasses.’
Watson flushed almost guiltily. Why should Ingram pass on the information to him? Then he pulled himself together, realised that he was solely in charge of Reardon’s papers which the police would want to examine. Watson rose and walked to the pew which is reserved for Civil Servants whom Ministers on the Treasury Bench may want to consult at short notice. Watson felt less alarmed when he saw the little man. There was a disarming air of simplicity about him.
‘Are you anxious to get rid of me?’ he asked Watson.
‘I didn’t know that you knew me. I only came to say that I’d like to hand over Reardon’s papers if you are ready to look them over. The keys have been given to me and I want to go home.’
‘I’ll be sorry to leave this seat. I found it all most amusing.’
‘You’re the only person here who could see the joke.’
Watson stopped abruptly and looked at the solicitor. Perhaps, after all, he wasn’t as innocent as his appearance advertised. They did not speak as Watson led the way through the door at the back of the pew and entered a lobby, walking from there to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s private room. Amos glanced round the chamber with sudden speed, and sat down on the edge of a table. He seemed quite happy and entirely at ease.
A half empty bottle of claret stood on a side shelf. Petrie eyed it almost casually and passed no comment.
CHAPTER V (#ulink_5f4e60b8-0add-5dcb-a1b3-f86c2d3ccd37)
WATSON PLAYS FOR SAFETY
‘SEEMS impossible that a murder could have taken place in there before hundreds of people until you’ve seen the place,’ said Amos.
‘It seems less improbable to you now?’
‘Much. I sat in that pew working out a few ways in which it could be done. But most of my schemes lacked finesse.’ Petrie wagged his head to indicate that deficiency in finesse was as deplorable as the murder itself. Watson again felt confident. There was nothing to fear about this strange little person. Watson thought it over and decided to take a gambler’s throw and clear the atmosphere.
‘Among these theories you’ve been working out, did you find one that fitted me?’
Petrie produced his handkerchief and his voice dropped a tone:
‘I’ve got a separate theory for you—one all for yourself.’
Eric repressed the shiver that coursed down his spine and took another plunge:
‘Thinking, of course, of the claret and soda?’
Amos nodded brightly, almost as though seized by sudden delight.
‘I don’t want to ask you about that now. But I don’t mind telling you that one man felt inclined to arrest you last night.’
‘Meaning Inspector Ripple?’
‘Yes. You know him?’
‘His fame reached me last night,’ said Watson nastily. ‘He was pictured to me as a person lacking in your favourite finesse.’
‘Dear me! Poor Ripple would be mortified to hear that. I’ve blamed him at times for many things—but never for that. It’s too bad.’
‘The man deserves all that’s coming to him if he thinks I’d poison a friend with six hundred people looking on.’
‘It would be gauche,’ conceded Amos. ‘Very gauche.’
‘Why don’t you want to question me about the claret and soda?’
‘My friend, when I go fishing I study the conditions of the stream before I throw in my line. I don’t know enough about this case yet.’
Petrie was staring over Watson’s shoulder. The younger man grew restive, turned to discover that the solicitor was looking at a blank wall and bit his lips as he considered the position. Finally, he commenced to speak with a burst of words:
‘Look here, I’m in rather a mess. I’m not standing in too good a spot. It might be said that things look suspicious as far as I’m concerned. But I’m prepared to put myself in your hands. You can make any search you like and I’ll answer any questions you like. I can’t be fairer or more open than that, can I?’
‘Perhaps you can’t. It might be an advantage.’
‘An advantage to me?’
‘Possibly. Who can say? Ever do any fishing yourself?’
‘Fishing? What on earth has that got to do with it?’
‘Nothing at all,’ replied the little man easily. ‘You’ve missed a lot, my friend.’ He looked round the room as though taking his first glance. Then he pointed to the claret bottle.
‘Is that the bottle from which Reardon’s last drink was taken?’
‘That’s the one, and I poured out the drink personally.’
‘How interesting. For myself I prefer beer. But it takes all sorts to make a world, and I can’t blame anyone for liking claret. I don’t think many people would like to drink out of this bottle.’
‘Surely you don’t think the strophantin was in the claret?’
‘I never could guess. Pity I’ve lost my palate for wine.’ Petrie removed the cork and sniffed the contents of the bottle daintily. He had a wholesome respect for strophantin fumes—if any were present. Watson eyed him suspiciously, waiting for some change of expression on the wrinkled face. The solicitor smiled.
‘Can you lend me some sort of a case so that I can take this bottle away? The stuff will have to be analysed.’
Watson produced a small attaché case and the bottle was stowed away.
‘Do you live very far from here, Mr Watson? By the way, I didn’t mention before that my name is Amos Petrie. Not that the name matters but I suppose there is some sort of etiquette even about murder cases. Now that we know each other—where do you live?’
‘I have a flat in St Margaret’s Mansions. I live at the top.’
‘Like an eagle in his eyrie, eh? Aren’t the Mansions in Millbank?’
‘That’s right. Only round the corner, so to speak.’
‘I’d like to amble round and peep about the place for a while.’
‘I told you that I am willing for any search to be made.’
‘Splendid. We’ll start now. I can collect your friend Ripple on the way. Maybe you’ll like him more now that the raw edges of a first meeting have worn away. Hand me Reardon’s papers and we’ll walk.’
Watson felt inclined to protest against the sudden move. Petrie stood near the door, waiting for him. Eric shrugged his shoulders, collected the papers, tucked them into two despatch cases, and handed them over. They met Inspector Ripple in the courtyard. He was talking to a sergeant. Amos handed the case containing the claret bottle to the sergeant, instructing him that the contents were to be sent for immediate analysis. The documents were handed over to be left in Ripple’s room. Then the three men walked to Millbank.
They rose in the lift to the fifth floor and were admitted to the flat by a manservant. Ripple took a quick look round, and phoned to the Yard for another man to assist in the search. Amos sat down in a small lounge and waited for the scrutiny of the flat to begin. He was as placid as a removal contractor. Watson found it difficult to settle down and over a whisky and soda he recounted to Amos all that happened on the previous day from the time he entered the House until he left it. He was still adding details to the story when Ripple and his assistant commenced the search. Half an hour later Ripple returned to the lounge, holding in his hand a small bundle of papers.
‘These papers and oddments seem to be the only things of any value,’ he announced.
‘And no trace whatever of any strophantin?’ asked Watson.
‘None whatever,’ replied the Yard man, looking at the speaker curiously. ‘Why? Did you think we might find some?’
‘I was sure that you wouldn’t. I’ve never heard of the stuff until this morning. Perhaps you’re satisfied now?’
‘Don’t speak before you think,’ said Petrie curtly. ‘If you gave the strophantin to Reardon it isn’t very likely that you’d have kept some of the stuff in your flat. And since you were so certain that there was no poison here why did you ask whether any had been found?’ Before Watson could speak Petrie picked up the bundle of papers and commenced to run through them. Eric watched him closely. The search was conducted at lightning speed, paper after paper being dropped on the table as soon as they had been glanced at. Then Amos stopped abruptly. In his hand he held a photograph.
Watson could not see it. He did not need to. He knew it was a woman’s. Petrie raised his eyes and Eric reddened under the inspection.
‘When you were talking to me you said nothing about the lady. Did you think the matter so unimportant?’
‘There’s nothing to tell. Otherwise I would have spoken.’
‘I see. Well, we’ll take a look and see whether the photograph itself can give us any information. I’m sure you don’t mind.’
Amos did not wait to discover whether Watson objected or not. He opened the back of the frame and extracted the photo. Watson looked on with dull resentment. His anger rose when the little man turned the photograph over and inspected the face for a full minute. Finally he tapped the frame on the table and examined what fell out, making sure that it was neither makers’ shavings nor packer’s dust.
‘There’s no mystery about it,’ snapped Watson. ‘It’s an old photo.’
‘I see it is,’ said Amos calmly. ‘Judging from the last time I saw Mrs Reardon it must have been taken about ten or twelve years ago. You had it in a different frame not long ago. I think the lady was foolishly impetuous when she scribbled on this. Was she a classical student? “Omnia vincit amor. Lola.” Very pretty. I suppose that means, “Love conquers all things”? I wonder whether it conquers death—particularly sudden death? Do you think Mrs Reardon imagines that love is quite so potent? Maybe she has changed her mind by now.’
Watson squirmed, wanted to throttle the man. He started to speak and stopped when he saw Petrie take another photograph in his hand.
‘Well, well, well, Mr Watson! Now this one does tell a story. I see it’s quite new. It’s never been framed and there’s no dust on it. H’m, rather looks as though the ancient affection has continued to quite recent times. This was taken about a year ago, I imagine. I wonder whether Mrs Reardon ever contemplated inscribing this one as she did the other? I see she hasn’t even signed it. I believe I might have suggested something suitable for her to use—although I was never a classical scholar.’
‘Oh, yes? And what would you have suggested?’ Watson sat forward tensely, wondering whether Petrie would give away a clue to his thoughts. The solicitor scratched his forehead before replying:
‘My French is very elementary. Still, I seem to remember someone writing: Mais on revient toujours a ses premières amour. Perhaps you’ll agree that it would have appeared pleasing on the bottom of this second photograph?’
‘I can see no possible reason why Mrs Reardon should write about one always returning to one’s first love. If you think it at all remarkable that I should have been presented with a photograph quite recently may I remind you that I was Parliamentary Private Secretary to the lady’s husband? Apart from that your acuteness dazzles me. I don’t know how you work these things out.’ Watson was too heavily sarcastic and it displeased him to see that Petrie was smiling as though appreciating the rebuff.
‘I had recalled, of course,’ said Petrie, ‘that you were Reardon’s P.P.S. But I am incredibly dense. It had not occurred to me that that was why you kept his wife’s photograph in your bedroom. I didn’t appreciate that it was part of your duties. I will never be able to understand the complexities of politics.’ He shook his head almost mournfully and Watson cursed silently. This little man was not quite as harmless as one assumed.
‘From the colour of my necktie,’ he sneered again, ‘I suppose you deduce that I am in love with the lady?’
‘Not exactly,’ replied Amos casually, ‘I imagined that from your former silence and your present anger.’
The calmness of the judgment made it more devastating. It seemed to Watson that those few words encompassed all he dreaded. They stripped him of his anger and his sarcasm. He was unmanned. Now he stared at the curious person whose suspicions he had aroused and whose suspicions had travelled so far.
‘Had you forgotten those photographs, Mr Watson, when you asked me to search your flat?’
‘Not at all. It never occurred to me that they, or she, had anything to do with the matter. Nor does it now. Even assuming that all your deductions are right I don’t see how the photos affect the issue.’
‘No? Then you don’t recognise that even ladies are at times associated with such crimes as murder?’
‘Perhaps, in some cases, they are. But this time you are hopelessly and hideously wrong.’
‘I’ve found myself entirely wrong before today—particularly when fishing. Ripple, you haven’t much to say. Are there any questions you’d like to ask Mr Watson before we leave?’
‘One or two. You must expect some bluntness from me,’ said the Yard man. ‘I don’t play about with words.’
‘My friend does not practise the art of finesse,’ remarked Amos.
‘I have already been informed about that,’ said Eric surlily.
‘Did Reardon know that there had been an affectionate association between yourself and his wife before her marriage?’ asked Ripple.
‘I couldn’t tell you. He was not the sort of man to worry about that. In any case, he had every right to trust me and he did trust me.’
‘Do you consider that Mrs Reardon is in no way concerned with her husband’s death?’
‘Good God, man! I am certain upon that point. Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Then why have you swerved away from questions, become annoyed over trifles, and acted like a person with a lot to hide?’
‘I have acted quite straightforwardly all the way through.’
‘Was that bottle of claret unopened when you took the drink out of it for Reardon?’
‘Quite untouched. I had to extract the cork myself.’
‘You would have noticed if the bottle had been tampered with?’
‘Naturally. I can swear that it had not been touched.’
Petrie frowned and rapped on the table.
‘Are you trying to make things as awkward as possible for yourself.’
‘Certainly not. I am telling you the truth. Don’t you believe me?’
‘Did Reardon instruct you personally to bring him a claret and soda? I know that he would take a drink, but did he specify what sort of drink he wanted?’
‘Certainly. Men don’t drink an unusual mixture like that by pure accident. Surely you know that without asking me?’
‘Being nothing except a beer drinker I couldn’t answer you. I don’t think we’ll detain you any longer. When you see Mrs Reardon again you might tell her that within the next few hours I’ll call upon her. It might save her from a shock when I arrive.’
‘Is it necessary, Mr Petrie?’ asked Watson anxiously.
‘Entirely so—and you haven’t helped her position.’
‘I haven’t?’ Watson seemed staggered, quite amazed. ‘But I’d never do a thing to make difficulties for her.’
‘Perhaps that accounts for most of the trouble. Your object in asking me to come here has failed. Partial revelation is never of any service to a man unless he’s fighting for time. Instead of clearing yourself and getting Mrs Reardon out of the line of inquiry, you’ve merely presented me with a new problem. You have compelled me to ask myself whether you can have any object in gaining time.’
‘Mr Petrie, this is outrageous!’
‘Believe me, my friend, nothing is further from my immature mind than outrage. I came here thinking that you might assist me and that in return for your help I might give you a few words of fatherly advice. You have not enabled me to do anything of the kind. The only way in which you can help me is by complete frankness. I hope you’ll bear that in mind. It might assist you the next time we meet—and that will be before much more water flows under Westminster Bridge.’
‘Doesn’t sound as though you’re satisfied,’ said Watson.
‘I’m not. Oh! Before I go would you mind telling me what you know about this man Paling?’
‘That’s quite easy. I only know that he has been associated with Reardon during the last twelve months. I don’t know how, why, or where they met, and I don’t know what they had in common. It always seemed to me that they were frightened of each other. That’s all I know.’
‘Doesn’t help me. Thanks very much.’
Petrie and Ripple left the building and walked round to the Yard. The miserable Ripple was more melancholic than ever.
‘This case will never break in a month of Sundays,’ he complained.
‘Maybe it won’t, Sunshine. You’ll find when you do get to the tail end of it that all your trouble has been worthwhile. I can see quite a lot of things that don’t fit. It may help us to discover what’s happened about the analysis of that claret. At any rate, the report should give us a start. Think it will be ready?’
‘I imagine so. I’ll give a ring as soon as we reach the office.’
Petrie sat down with a copy of the Fishing Gazette while the Inspector got his number. The little man heard Ripple’s request for information and then saw the man’s jaw sag. The Yard man slapped down the receiver and slumped into a chair.
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