Who Killed Dick Whittington? Page 5

  He paused.

  “. . . This girl had a dose injected with a hypodermic syringe.”

  “What!” The inspector let out a startled exclamation.

  “Hypodermic injection. I’ve never heard of that before. I found the prick when I made the post-mortem.”

  “Then that disposes of any accident, Doctor?” the inspector asked.

  The doctor grinned. “Unless the lady made a hobby of running round with a syringe charged full of the stuff—yes. Seems to be a stupid way of carrying it when a little bottle is easier and safer.”

  Remembrance came to the inspector. “What about the man?” he asked.

  “He had a dose, too, but diluted. He’ll pull through, I think. Doctor McBane gave him strychinine and washed him out with sodium thiosulphate and potassium carbonate. I couldn’t have done better myself. It was a near thing, but he’ll do. It will be some days before you can see him, however.”

  Inspector Bradley sat silent in his chair, his brow creased in thought. A startling idea had come into his mind. He was considering how to propound it to the doctor without presenting it in the form of what counsel call a leading question. He wanted the doctor to make an assertion of something he himself feared. “Supposing, Doctor,” he said at length, “supposing for some reason Miss de Grey did carry a syringe of hydro—hydro—”

  “Hydrocyanic acid,” the doctor encouraged.

  “Yes. And supposing that, while she was lying on the stage, the needle pierced her skin, and killed her. Could the stuff in any way have overcome the cat who was lying across her, and have only taken effect on him when he had left the stage and reached his own room?”

  “I thought you would come to that,” was the doctor’s reply. “The answer is ‘no’—because the man drank his dose. And if he had drunk the same stuff that was in that syringe, there would have been two corpses on the stage instead of one. Damn it, Inspector, I reckon she had five grains pumped into her.”

  “And the Cat?”

  “Don’t know yet. Doctor McBane kept some stomach content. He’s sent it to your analyst. He thinks it was taken in beer.”

  “Where was the syringe mark, Doctor?”

  “Ah, now, that’s another very interesting feature, Inspector. It was on her left thigh.” He chuckled at the inspector’s expression.

  “I’m going to see the Colonel,” the policeman said abruptly. “I don’t like the sound of it.” He picked up his cap and left.

  Colonel Lovelace, the chief constable, after he had grasped the points of the doctor’s story, and the questioning of the theatre company, agreed that neither did he like the accumulated evidence.

  “You see, sir,” the inspector emphasized, “in the scene the Cat lies across Dick Whittington’s legs, and they are both there for about three minutes. He could have needled her left thigh. Then, when the curtain came down, and he left the stage, he could have run to his dressing-room and taken the poison.”

  “Any substantiating evidence, Inspector? Any reason for it?”

  “No, sir. Not at present—” He stopped suddenly, and an ejaculation broke from him. “I wonder if there is, sir?” he said.

  The Colonel eyed him—waiting.

  “The Fairy Queen, who was standing in the wings when the couple laid down on the stage, said that Miss de Grey said in an angry whisper, ‘Don’t stick your damned claws into me’. Now, sir, might not that claw have been the prick of the needle felt by Miss de Grey? Everybody agrees that she did not move again.”

  Colonel Lovelace digested this piece of information. “It might be so,” he agreed. “But what motive? Why should the Cat go round killing his Principal Boy, because that is what you are suggesting, Inspector, isn’t it? There were other people on the stage, and in close association with Miss de Grey.”

  “Tell you what, sir. I am having the company on the stage again at eleven-thirty o’clock. Would you come along and witness an experiment I want to try out?”

  The experiment was obvious to the company when they arrived on the stage at the hour named, for, in response to a telephoned message, the Highgate Hill scene had been set. Inspector Bradley, sitting the chief constable in the front row of the stalls, addressed the crowd.

  “I want you all to go through the scene exactly as you did last night,” he announced. “Two of you not usually in it can play Dick and the Cat. I want to watch it through.”

  “Have we to dress, sir?” asked the fairy.

  “No. That will not be necessary.”

  The inspector, sitting with his sergeant alongside Colonel Lovelace, gave the signal for the shadow performance to begin. He watched the pseudo Dick Whittington walk on, followed by the Cat, say her lines, and lay on the bank. At the moment of the lying he interrupted.

  “Now, was that exactly as last night?” he asked. “This is most important. If anyone sees the slightest difference will they please say so?”

  A reflective silence, followed by a general nodding of heads, was broken by the voice of the stage-manager.

  “I don’t know whether it is of any importance, Inspector,” he said, “but there is a slight difference. Last night the Cat did not at once follow Miss de Grey on the stage. He was a few moments late. I remember getting the wind up in case he had missed his entrance, and I leaned round to look. He was just coming on from the back of the stage.”

  “Away from his usual entrance?”

  “Certainly. He should have come on with Miss de Grey from there.” The stage-manager indicated an opening between two flats.

  “And Miss de Grey was flaming,” called out one of the chorus. “She fluffed her lines.”

  “Right.” The inspector acknowledged the explanation. “Proceed.”

  The stage made its half revolve, and the Ballet was mimed to the end. The Fairy Queen spoke her lines and the revolve returned.

  “This is the stage at which Miss de Grey should have awakened,” the stage-manager called out “She did not do so, and I rang down the curtain. We carried her off—”

  “Who carried her off?”

  Three stage-hands stepped forward. The sergeant recorded their names for future questioning. Together the chief constable and Bradley climbed on to the stage.

  “What happened to the Cat after you rang down the curtain?” asked Inspector Bradley.

  The company looked at one another in perplexity. The stage-manager scratched his head.

  “Blessed if I know, sir,” he said. “I suppose he went to his room. He usually ran there to get ready for his front-of-the-house act. But I can’t say that I saw him go last night. I was too concerned over Miss de Grey.”

  “Did anybody see him leave the stage?” The inspector addressed the question to the company at large. There was a general shaking of heads.

  “When did you first miss the Cat?”

  “When the front of the house telephoned to ask why he was not doing his act for the children,” replied the stage-manager. “I sent the call-boy up to his room.”

  “All right, ladies and gentlemen. Just one more question, and you can all go home,” the inspector announced. “Had there been any unpleasantness between Miss de Grey and the Cat?”

  An audible chorus of sniffs greeted the question. It was the Demon King who ultimately expressed the views of the crowd.

  “There was disagreement, laddie, between Miss de Grey and everybody,” he announced grandiloquently. “She was a difficult woman to get on with. She had not the troupers’ spirit. The Cat . . . er . . . got too much applause to suit Miss de Grey. She resented applause except when it was directed towards her own performance.”

  “Her and the Cat had an ’ell of a row just before the scene, mister—in the Green Room,” said a voice from the back of the stage.

  The inspector peered through the gloom. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Arthur Black, stage-hand.” He came forward. “They was a’rowing over something she said the Cat had done the previous night. I says to the stage-manager, ‘Just liste
n to her rortin’ to the Cat now.’ Then I says, ‘He’s walked out on her.’ And he had, too. Left her talkin’ to herself.”

  The inspector looked for confirmation to the stage-manager.

  “I remember Arthur saying that,” was the reply.

  It was as the company was breaking up that the chief constable said his first word. He had watched the reconstruction intently, and had listened intently to the interrogation of the people on the stage. It had given him an idea, which he now proceeded to implement.

  “Have any of you seen anywhere an article like a glass tube?” he asked. “About four inches long”—he indicated with his fingers the length.

  There was a chorus of “Noes.”

  “Has the stage been swept this morning, Mr. Stage-Manager?”

  “No, Colonel. We decided not to touch it until you gentlemen had finished.”

  The chief constable nodded dismissal. He stood by the side of Inspector Bradley until they were alone by the footlights. Then:

  “You see the point, do you not, Inspector?” he asked. “If Miss de Grey was poisoned on the bank with an hypodermic syringe—where is the syringe now? The point is important because—”

  “Because, sir, only one person could have done it, and he hadn’t the syringe on him, and I saw no sign of it in his room.”

  Colonel Lovelace regarded his executive searchingly. “Theory—or fact?” he asked.

  “Fact, sir. If the scene we have just re-enacted was exactly as played last night, then the only person who was near enough to Miss de Grey to stick a needle into her was the Cat.”

  “Proof?”

  “The doctor said that she would be dead within ten seconds of the prick. She had had rows with the Cat. She was heard to say ‘Don’t stick your damned claws into me’. The Cat vanished without attempting to give any assistance to her, though he must have known by her silence that she was ill. He never even tried to give her the cue which she missed. And within a few minutes he is found himself poisoned with the same stuff.”

  “I must acknowledge that you have strong case for suspicion, Bradley,” the chief constable agreed.

  The inspector turned to his sergeant. “I want a couple of plain-clothes men at the Cat’s bedside,” he said. “They are not to leave him until relieved by two others. They will make a note of everything the man says. Tell the hospital authorities that he is to be moved into a private ward. After you’ve arranged that, I want a dozen men to search this stage, and every inch of the way from it to the dressing-room of the Cat, as well as the dressing-room itself.”

  “And outside—underneath the windows,” the chief constable put in. “He may have disposed of it by throwing it through the dressing-room window.”

  CHAPTER V

  SCOTLAND YARD HEARS A STORY

  The High Street in the Lincolnshire town of Welsborough was resting quietly under a cloud-filled sky as the clock struck eleven-thirty on an October night. Welsborough was a busy town enough during the daytime hours, particularly on market days and on Saturdays. Farmers and their cowmen, their horsemen and their labourers, floated into it with their womenfolk and girl friends, to do the week’s shopping, and to experience the only bustle of life they were likely to encounter until the end of the following week.

  The High Street was, of course, the shopping street of Welsborough. You needed not to leave its length to procure anything the farmer required from seed to sow for his crops to a cultivator, plough or a harvesting machine to harvest the said crops. And his womenfolk could purchase in the same confines a thread of cotton or a separator for the milk in the dairy.

  But at night-time the High Street of Welsborough was usually deserted after the old church clock had struck its cracked notes of eight o’clock. The permanent residents were conservative people, in habits as well as in politics; and the pubs had found no space in which to intrude themselves in the shopping centre—they were in the adjacent side streets. So at 11.30 p.m. the High Street was deserted. Well, not quite deserted. A solitary figure walked swiftly down its length. At the bottom it turned into Kitchener Road (not named in honour of the General), and walked half-way down to where the Dog and Gun was sleeping off the effects of the evening’s libations. There it stepped into a small two-seater car; and presently the motor-car started up, and was driven away in the direction of Lincoln.

  The High Street resumed its silence. At 12.15 a.m. Police-Constable Castle wandered down the street on his beat, trying carefully the fastenings of each door. Thus had he pursued his way for thirty-two years, so that his feet walked, as it were, an unseen groove in the pavement. Never, in all that time, had he found a door unfastened; and he would have been puzzled into confusion had he suddenly come upon a door that gave to his hand.

  So, proceeding down the High Street on this October night—or rather, morning—he reached the shop of the London Fashion Modes, Ltd., a comparative newcomer to the town; it had appeared in all its glory in the old shop which had previously housed the drapery business of Mr. Franks, now defunct.

  London Fashion Modes, Ltd., had taken over the premises and filled them with frocks and ‘underneaths’ which, the advertisement said, were straight from the great fashion houses which had the distinction of clothing from skin to fur coat the leading ladies of society—who would, be it said, have rather been found dead than seen in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot in such garments. Trade with the L.F.M. had been brisk in Welsborough; the result had been some peculiar pastoral fashions in the farmyards, the dairies, and among the chickens of the countryside. Business, however, had slackened off considerably of late.

  London Fashion Modes, Ltd., differed in one regard from all the other shops in Welsborough. Alone of the business houses it wisely prepared itself against prowlers. Each night at seven o’clock the manager put up the shutters, hiding the wares in the windows from the possibility, however remote, of their desirable qualities so seducing the women of Welsborough from the path of rectitude, that they would remove with violence the garments in the dark hours of the night.

  Police-Constable Castle reflected on this inferred insinuation against the reputation of Welsborough as he passed the shuttered windows of London Fashion Modes and stepped into its doorway. His hands had just found the fastenings secure when he paused and sniffed.

  A pungent aroma wafted itself on the chilly air.

  “Somebody’s chimbly afire, blow it,” he said.

  He stepped back, and from the middle of the road inspected the heavens; no cloud obscured or darkened the grey of the sky.

  The constable’s nose led him again into the doorway of London Fashion Modes; the smell, he decided, must emanate from there. He pushed open the letter-box and peered inside. A reddish glow rewarded him.

  “Dang me, the place is afire,” he said; and ran to the house of Mr. Dingwall, the plumber, who was also the chief of the voluntary fire brigade of Welsborough. When, half an hour later, the members of the brigade had been assembled by a messenger on a bicycle and steam had been got up in the forty-year-old engine, flames had burst through the roof of the shop and stock-rooms. Another half hour, and the fashion hopes of Welsborough’s femininity were laid low; the creations of Bond Street (£3 10s., or 10s. down and 2s. a week) had dissolved into ashes.

  The managing director, and principal shareholder, Mr. Jabez Montague, stood in front of the debris and wrung his hands at the doleful sight. He had been fetched from the neighbouring village, where he had a furnished house. He could not account for the fire, he said, unless it was from a cigarette left by one of those damned cigarette-smoking women. He had had to ask two only that morning to keep their cigarettes in their mouths or extinguish them, instead of putting them on show-cases while they tried on his confections.

  “Insured?” Of course he was insured, he told the inspector of police. But only for £6,000. It would cost him double that figure to replace the stock he had, at today’s prices. Three months later Mr. Montague collected the sum of £5,550 from the Provincial In
surance Company. Welsborough saw him no more; there was no other shop in the place which could house his wares and do justice to them, he said.

  The next stage in the affairs of the London Fashion Modes, Ltd., had its setting in the room of the Assistant Commissioner (Crime) at Scotland Yard. Sir Edward Allen sat at his desk in the horseshoe-shaped chamber overlooking the Embankment and the Thames. His right hand fingered a monocle, attached to a thin black silken cord. Yard men would have recognized by the fingering that Sir Edward was perturbed; had he not been so, the monocle would have been held, precariously, in his perfectly good left eye.

  His eyes, under a furrowed brow, looked thoughtfully at a card that lay on his desk. It read:

  JOHN REDWOOD

  Solicitor

  Lincoln’s Inn, London, E.C.4

  Nat. Assn. of Insurance Societies

  From the card the eyes turned to the man sitting in front of his desk—Mr. Redwood himself, in black coat, lavender waistcoat and striped trousers—a strictly legal-looking personality. For half an hour Mr. Redwood had talked. He now waited silently for the reply from the Assistant Commissioner.

  “And you think—?” Sir Edward queried.

  “That we are being defrauded. We think that these fires are being deliberately caused for the purpose of collecting the insurance.”

  “I do not see the sense of it, Mr. Redwood,” retorted the Assistant Commissioner. “They would apparently do as well, if not better, by not purchasing the stock at all rather than by buying it, setting fire to it, and collecting the insurance money. It is true, of course, that they collect a trading profit on the insurance value, but—”

  He ceased in puzzled silence.

  His visitor smiled grimly.

  “But supposing the stock is not in the place when the fire occurs?” he suggested. “Suppose it has, or the more valuable part of it, has been removed. What then?”