The Allingham Casebook Page 4

  He led the way out to the back and stood for a moment on the concrete path which ran under the kitchen window, separating the house from the small rectangle of shorn grass which was all there was of a garden.

  A high rose hedge, carefully trained on rustic fencing, separated it from the neighbours on the right; at the bottom there was a garden shed and a few fruit trees and, on the left, greenery in the neglected garden of the old lady who was in hospital had grown up high so that a green wall screened the lawn from all but the prying eyes of Miss Dove, who, even at that moment, Mr Campion suspected, was standing on a chair and clinging to a sash to peer at them.

  Luke indicated the empty line slung across the green. “I had the linen brought in,” he said. “The Heskiths were worrying and there seemed no earthly point in leaving it out to rot.”

  “What’s in the shed?”

  “A spade and fork, and a hand-mower,” said the Chief promptly. “Come and look. The floor is beaten earth and if it’s been disturbed in thirty years I’ll eat my ticket. I suppose we’ll have to fetch it up in the end, but we’ll be wasting our time.”

  Mr Campion went over and glanced into the tarred wooden hut. It was tidy and dusty, and the floor was dry and hard. Outside a dilapidated pair of steps leaned against the six-foot brick wall which marked the boundary.

  Mr Campion tried them gingerly. They held, but not as it were with any real assurance, and he climbed up to look over the wall to the narrow path which separated it from the tarred fence of the rear garden of a house in the next street.

  “That’s an odd right of way,” Luke said. “It leads down between the two residential roads. These suburban places are not very matey, you know. Half the time one street doesn’t know the next. Chestnut Grove is classier than Philpott Avenue, which runs parallel with it.”

  Mr Campion descended, dusting his hands. He was grinning, and his eyes were dancing.

  “I wonder if anybody there noticed her,” he said. “She must have been carrying the sheets, you know.”

  The chief turned round slowly and stared at him.

  “You’re not suggesting that she simply walked down here over the wall and out! In the clothes she’d been washing in? It’s crazy. Why should she? Did her husband go with her?”

  “No. I think he went down Chestnut Grove as usual, doubled back down this path as soon as he came to the other end of it near the station, picked up his wife and went off with her through Philpott Avenue to the bus stop. They’d only got to get to the Broadway to find a cab, you see.”

  Luke’s dark face still wore an expression of complete incredulity.

  “But, for Pete’s sake, why?” he demanded. “Why clear out in the middle of breakfast on a wash-day morning? Why take the sheets? Young couples can do the most unlikely things but there are limits. They didn’t take their savings bank books you know. There’s not much in them but they’re still there in the writing desk in the front room. What are you getting at, Campion?”

  The thin man walked slowly back on to the patch of grass.

  “I expect the sheets were dry and she’d folded them into the basket before breakfast,” he began slowly. “As she ran out of the house they were lying there, and she couldn’t resist taking them with her. The husband must have been irritated with her when he saw her with them, but people are like that. When they’re running from a fire they save the oddest things.”

  “But she wasn’t running from a fire.”

  “Wasn’t she?!” Mr Campion laughed. “There were several devouring flames all round them just then, I should have thought. Listen, Charles. If the postman called he reached the house at seven-twenty-five. I think he did call and with an ordinary plain business envelope which was too commonplace for him to remember. It would be the plainest of plain envelopes. Well, who was due at seven-thirty?”

  “Bert Heskith. I told you.”

  “Exactly. So, there were five minutes in which to escape. Five minutes for a determined, resourceful man like Peter McGill to act promptly. His wife was generous and easy going, remember, and so, thanks to that decision which you yourself noticed in his face, he rose to the occasion. He had only five minutes, Charles, to escape all those powerful personalities with their jolly, avid faces, whom we saw in the wedding group. They were all living remarkably close to him, ringing him round as it were, so that it was a ticklish business to elude them. He went the front way so that the kindly watchful eye would see him as usual and not be alarmed. There wasn’t time to take anything at all and it was only because Maureen, flying through the back garden to escape the back way, saw the sheets in the basket and couldn’t resist her treasures that they salvaged them. She wasn’t quite so ruthless as Peter. She had to take something from the old life, however glistening were the prospects for —” He broke off abruptly. Chief Inspector Luke, with dawning comprehension in his eyes, was already half-way to the gate on the way to the nearest police telephone box.

  Mr Campion was in his own sitting-room in Bottle Street, Piccadilly, later that evening when Luke called. He came in jauntily, his black eyes dancing with amusement.

  “It wasn’t the Irish Sweep but the Football Pools,” he said. “I got the details out of the promoters. They’ve been wondering what to do ever since the story broke. They’re in touch with the McGills, of course, but Peter had taken every precaution to ensure secrecy and is insisting on his rights. He must have known his wife’s tender heart and have made up his mind what he’d do if ever a really big win came off. The moment he got the letter telling him of his luck he put the plan into practice.” He paused and shook his head admiringly. “I hand it to him,” he said. “Seventy-five thousand pounds is like a nice fat chicken, plenty and more for two, but only a taste for the whole of a very big family.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Us? The police? Oh, officially we’re baffled. We shall retire gracefully. It’s not our business.” He sat down and raised the glass his host handed to him.

  “Here’s to the mystery of the villa Marie Celeste,” he said. “I had a blind spot for it. It foxed me completely. Good luck to them, though. You know, Campion, you had a point when you said that the really insoluble mystery is the one which no one can bring himself to spoil. What put you on to it?”

  “I suspect the charm of relatives who call at seven-thirty in the morning,” said Mr Campion simply.

  The Psychologist

  Did you ever see a man set light to money? Real money: using it as a spill to light a cigarette, just to show off? I have. And that’s why, when you used the word “psychologist” just now, a little fish leapt in my stomach and my throat felt suddenly tight. Perhaps you feel I’m too squeamish. I wonder.

  I was born in this street. When I was a girl I went to school just round the corner and later on, after I’d served my apprenticeships in the big dress houses here and in France, I took over the lease of this old house and turned it into the smart little gown shop you see now. It was when I came back to do that I saw the change in Louise.

  When we went to school together she was something of a beauty with streaming yellow hair and the cockney child’s ferocious knowing grin. All we kids used to tease her because she was better looking than we were. The street was just the same then as it is now. Adelaide Street, Soho. Shabby and untidy and yet romantic, with every other doorway in its straggling length leading to a restaurant of some sort. You can eat in every language of the world here. Some places are as expensive as the Ritz and others are as cheap as Louise’s papa’s Le Coq Au Vin with its one dining-room and its single palm in the white-washed tub outside.

  Louise had an infant sister and a father who could hardly speak English but who looked at one with proud foreign eyes from under arched brows. I was hardly aware that she had a mother until a day when that grey woman emerged from the cellar under the restaurant to put her foot down and Louise, instead of coming with me into the enchantment of the workshops, had to go down into the kitchens of the Coq.

  Fo
r a long time, we used to exchange birthday cards since neither of us were writers exactly and then even that contact dropped, but I never forgot her and when I came back to the street I was glad to see the name ‘Frosne’ still under the sign of the Le Coq Au Vin. The place looked much brighter than I remembered it and appeared to be doing fair business. Certainly, it no longer suffered so much by comparison with the expensive Glass Mountain, which Adelbert kept opposite. There is no restaurant bearing that name in this street now, nor is there a restaurateur called Adelbert, but diners-out of a few years ago may remember him, if not for his food at least for his conceit and the two rolls of white fat which were his eyelids.

  I went in to see Louise as soon as I had a moment to spare. It was a shock, for I hardly recognised her, but she knew me at once and came out from behind the cash desk to give me a welcome which was pathetic. It was like seeing thin ice cracking all over her face, as if by taking her unawares I’d torn aside a barrier.

  I heard all the news in the first ten minutes. Both the old people were dead. The mother had gone first, but the father had not died until some years later and, meantime, Louise had carried everything including his vagaries on her shoulders, or that was what I gathered. She did not complain. Things were a bit easier now. Violetta, the little sister, had a young man who was proving his worth by working there for a pittance, learning the business.

  It was a success story of a sort, but I thought that Louise had paid pretty dearly for it. She was a year younger than I was, but she looked as if life had already burned out over her, leaving her hard and polished, like a bone in the sun. The gold had gone out of her hair and even the thick lashes looked bleached and tow-coloured. There was something else there, too: something hunted which I did not understand at all.

  I soon fell into the habit of going in to have supper with her once a week and at these little meals she used to talk. It was evident that she never opened her lips on any personal matter to anyone else, but for some reason she trusted me. Even so, it took me months to find out what was the matter with her. When it came out, it was obvious.

  The Coq Au Vin had a debt hanging over it. In Mama Frosne’s time the family had never owed a penny, but in the few years between her death and his own, Papa Frosne had somehow contrived not only to borrow the best part of four thousand pounds from Adelbert of the Glass Mountain, but to lose every halfpenny of it in half a dozen senile little schemes.

  Louise was paying it back in five-hundred-pound instalments. As she first told me about it I happened to glance into her eyes and I saw there one sort of hell. It has always seemed to me that there are people who can stand debt in the same way that some men can stand drink. It may undermine their constitutions, but it does not make them openly shabby. Yet, to others, debt does something unspeakable. The Devil was certainly having his money’s worth out of Louise.

  I did not argue with her, of course. It was not my place. I sat there registering sympathy until she surprised me by saying, suddenly:

  “It’s not so much the work and the worry, nor even the skimping I really hate so much. It’s the awful set-out when I have to pay him. I dread that.”

  “You’re too sensitive,” I told her. “Once the money’s in the bank you can put the cheque in the envelope for once, can’t you?”

  She glanced at me with an odd expression in her eyes; they were almost lead coloured between the bleached lashes.

  “You don’t know Adelbert,” she said. “He’s a queer bit of work. I have to pay him in cash and he likes to make a regular little performance of it. He comes here by appointment, has a drink and likes to have Violetta as a witness by way of audience. If I don’t show him I’m a bit upset, he goes on talking until I do. Calls himself a psychologist; says he knows everything I’m thinking.”

  “That’s not what I’d call him,” I said. I was disgusted. I hate that sort of thing.

  Louise hesitated. “I have known him burn most of the money for effect,” she admitted. “There, in front of me.”

  I felt my eyebrows rising up into my hair. “Get away!” I exclaimed. “The man’s not right in the head.”

  She sighed, and I looked at her sharply.

  “Why, he’s twenty years older than you are, Louise,” I began. “Surely there wasn’t ever anything between you? You know… like that?”

  “No. No, there wasn’t, Ellie, honestly.” I believed her: she was quite frank about it and as puzzled as I was. “He did speak to Papa once about me when I was a kid. Asked for me formally, you know, as they still did round here at that time. I never heard what the old man said, but he never minced words, did he? All I can remember is that I was kept downstairs out of sight for a bit, and after that Mama treated me as if I’d been up to something, but I hadn’t even spoken to the man – he wasn’t a person a young girl would notice, was he? That was years ago, though. I suppose Adelbert could have remembered it all that time, but it’s not reasonable, is it?”

  “That’s the one thing it certainly isn’t!” I told her. “Next time I’ll be the witness.”

  “Adelbert would enjoy that,” she said, grimly. “I don’t know that I won’t hold you to it. You ought to see him!”

  We let the subject drop, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I could see them both from behind the curtains in my shop window and it seemed that whenever I looked out there was the tight-lipped silent woman, scraping every farthing and there was the fat man watching her from his doorway across the street, secret satisfaction on his sallow face.

  In the end it got on my nerves, and when that happens I have to talk, I can’t help it.

  There was no one in the street I dared to gossip to, but I did mention the tale to a customer. She was a woman called Mrs Marten whom I’d particularly liked ever since she’d come in to inquire after the first model I ever put in my shop window. I made most of her clothes and she had recommended me to one or two ladies in the district where she lived, which was up at Hampstead, nice and far away from Soho. I was fitting her one day when she happened to say something about men and the things they’ll stoop to if their pride’s been hurt, and before I’d realised what I was doing I’d come out with the little story Louise had told me. I didn’t mention names, of course, but I may have conveyed that it was all taking place in this street. Mrs Marten was a nice gentle little thing with a sweet face, and she was shocked.

  “But how awful,” she kept saying, “how perfectly awful. To burn it in front of her after she’s worked so hard for it. He must be quite insane. Dangerous.”

  “Oh, well,” I said, hastily, “it’s his money by the time he does that, and I don’t suppose he destroys much of it. Only enough to upset my friend.” I was sorry I’d spoken. I hadn’t expected her to be quite so horrified. “It just shows you how other people live.” I finished and hoped she’d drop the subject. She didn’t, however. The idea seemed to fascinate her even more than it had me. I couldn’t get her to leave it alone and she chattered about it all through the fitting. Then, just as she was putting on her hat to leave, she suddenly said: “Miss Kaye, I’ve just thought. My brother-in-law is Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard. He might be able to think of some way of stopping that fearful man torturing that poor little woman you told me about. Shall I mention it to him?”

  “Oh, no! Pray don’t!” I exclaimed. “She’d never forgive me. There’s nothing the police could do to help her. I do hope you’ll forgive me for saying so, Madam, but I do hope you won’t do anything of the sort.”

  She seemed rather hurt, but she gave me her word. I had no faith in it, naturally. Once a woman has considered talking about a thing it’s as good as out. I was quite upset for a day or two because the last thing I wanted was to get involved, but nothing happened, and I’d just started to breathe again, so to speak, when I had to go down to Vaughan’s, the big wholesale trimming house, at the back of Regent Street. I was coming out with my parcels when a man came up to me. I knew he was a dick; he was the type, with a very short haircut, a
brown raincoat and that look of being in a settled job and yet not in anything particular. He asked me to come along to his office and I couldn’t refuse. I realised he’d been tailing me until I was somewhere right away from Adelaide Street where someone would have noticed him at once.

  He took me to his boss who was another definite policeman. Quite a nice old boy in his way, on nobody’s side but his own, as is the way with coppers, but I got the impression that he was square on the level, which is more than some people are. He introduced himself as Detective Inspector Cumberland, made me sit down and sent out for a cup of tea for me. Then he asked me about Louise.

  I got into a panic because when you’re in business in Adelaide Street you’re in business and the last thing you can afford is to get into trouble with your neighbours. I denied everything, of course, said I hardly knew the woman.

  Cumberland wouldn’t have that. I must say he knew how to handle me. He kept me going over and over my own affairs until I was thankful to speak about anything else. In the end I gave way because, after all, nobody was doing anything criminal as far as I could see. I told him all I knew, letting him draw it out bit by bit and when I’d finished he laughed at me, peering at me with little bright eyes under brows which were as thick as a bit of silver fox fur.

  “Well,” he said, “there’s nothing so terrible in all that, is there?”

  “No,” I said, sulkily. He made me feel a fool.

  He sighed and leant back in his chair.

  “You run away and forget this little interview,” he told me. “But just so that you don’t start imagining things let me point out something to you. The police are in business, too, in a way. In their own business, that is, and when an officer in my position gets an inquiry from higher up he’s got to investigate it, hasn’t he? He may think the crime of destroying currency, ‘defacing the coin of the realm’ we call it, is not very serious compared with some of the things he’s got to deal with, but all the same if he’s asked about it he’s got to make some sort of move and make some sort of report. Then it can all be… er… filed and forgotten, can’t it?