The Allingham Case-Book Read online

  She led them into a spotless dining-room which glowed with mahogany and limpid silver, and the wan afternoon light showed them her reddened eyes and worn navy blue housedress. She was a timid-looking person, not quite so old as Kenny had suggested, with very neat grey hair and a skin which had never known cosmetics. Her expression was closed and secret with long submission, and her shoulder-blades stuck out a little under the cloth of her dress. Her hands still trembled slightly from the shock of the evening before.

  Kenny introduced Campion. “We shan’t be long, Miss Smith,” he said cheerfully. “Just going to have another little look round. We shan’t make a mess.”

  Campion smiled at her reassuringly. “It’s difficult to get help these days?” he suggested pleasantly.

  “Oh, it is,” she said earnestly. “And Mrs. Cibber wouldn’t trust just anyone with her treasures. They are so very good.” Her eyes filled with tears. “She was so fond of them.”

  “I daresay she was. That’s a beautiful piece, for instance.” Campion glanced with expert interest at the serpentine sideboard with its genuine handles and toilet cupboard.

  “Beautiful,” echoed Miss Smith dutifully. “And the chairs, you see?”

  “I do.” He eyed the Trafalgar set with the cherry leather seats. “Is this where the quarrel took place?”

  She nodded and trembled afresh. “Yes. I—I shall never forget it, never.”

  “Was Mrs. Cibber often bad tempered?” The woman hesitated, and her firm small mouth moved without words.

  “Was she?”

  She shot a swift unhappy glance at him.

  “She was quick,” she said. “Yes, I think I ought to say she was quick. Now, would you like to see the rest of the house or—?”

  Campion glanced at his watch and compared it with the Tompion bracket clock on the mantelpiece.

  “I think we’ve just time,” he said, idiotically. “Upstairs first, Inspector.”

  The next thirty-five minutes reduced Kenny to a state of jitters rare to him. After watching Campion with breathless interest for the first five, it slowly dawned on him that the expert had forgotten the crime in his delight at discovering a treasure trove. Even Miss Smith, who portrayed a certain proprietorial pride, flagged before Campion’s insatiable interest. Once or twice she hinted that perhaps they ought to go down, but he would not hear of it. By the time they had exhausted the third floor and were on the steps to the attic, she became almost firm. There was really nothing there but some early Georgian children’s toys, she said.

  “But I must see the toys. I’ve got a ‘thing’ on toys, Kenny.” Campion sounded ecstatic. “just a minute—”

  A vigorous tattoo on the front door interrupted him and Miss Smith, whose nerves were suffering, emitted a little squeak.

  “Oh, dear. Somebody at the door. I must go down.”

  “No, no.” Campion was uncharacteristically effusive. “I’ll see who it is and come back. I shan’t be a moment.”

  He flung himself downstairs with boyish enthusiasm, Miss Smith behind him, and Kenny, seeing escape at last, following as quickly as the narrow stairs would permit.

  They reached the hall just in time to see him closing the door. “Only the post,” he said, holding out a package. “Your library book, Miss Smith.”

  “Oh, yes,” she came forward, hand outstretched. “I was expecting that.”

  “I rather thought you were.” His voice was very soft and suddenly menacing. He held the cardboard box high over his head with one hand, and with the other released the flap which closed it. The soft gleam of metal appeared in the light from the transom, and a service revolver crashed heavily to the parquet floor.

  For a minute there was silence. Even Kenny was too thunderstruck to swear.

  Then, most dreadfully, she began to scream…

  * * *

  A little over an hour later Kenny sat on a Trafalgar chair in a room which still seemed to quiver and shudder with the terrible sound. He was pale and tired-looking. His shirt was torn and there were three livid nail scratches down his face.

  “God,” he said, breathing hard. “God, can you beat that?”

  Mr. Campion sat on the priceless table and rubbed his ear.

  “It was a bit more than I bargained for,” he murmured. “It didn’t occur to me that she’d become violent. I’m afraid they may be having trouble in the car. Sorry, I ought to have thought of it.”

  The C.I.D. man grunted. “Seems to me you thought of plenty,” he muttered. “It came as a shock to me. I don’t mind admitting it since I can’t very well help it. When did it come to you? From the start?”

  “Oh, Lord, no.” Campion sounded apologetic. “It was that remark of Woodruff’s you quoted about the sun going down. That’s what set me on the train of thought. Weren’t you ever warned as a kid, Kenny, and by an aunt perhaps, never let the sun go down on your wrath?”

  “I’ve heard it, of course. What do you mean? It was a sort of saying between them?”

  “I wondered if it was. They knew each other well when he was a child, and they were both quick-tempered people. It seemed to me that he was reminding her that the sun had gone down, and he showed her he could have smashed her precious bowl if he had liked. It would have broken, you know, if he hadn’t taken care it shouldn’t. I wondered if, like many quick-tempered people, they got sorry just as quickly. Didn’t you think it odd, Kenny, that directly after the row they should both have settled down to write letters?”The detective stared at him.

  “She wrote to her solicitor,” he began slowly. “And he—? Good Lord! You think he wrote to her to say he was sorry?”

  “Almost certainly, but we shall never find the letter. That’s in the kitchen stove by now. He came back to deliver it, pushed it through the door, and hurried off looking just as your plainclothes man said, as if he’d got something off his chest. Then he could sleep. The sun had not gone down on his wrath.” He slid off the table and stood up. “The vital point is, of course, that Mrs. Cibber knew he would. She sat up waiting for it.”

  Kenny sucked in his breath.

  “And Miss Smith knew?”

  “Of course she knew. Mrs. Cibber hadn’t the kind of temperament which can be kept secret. Miss Smith knew from the moment that Mrs. Cibber received the initial letter that the nephew would get his way in the end unless she could stop it somehow! She was the one with the bee in her bonnet about the furniture. I realized that as soon as you said the whole house was kept like a bandbox. No woman with a weak heart can keep a three-story house like a palace, or compel another to do it, unless the other wants to. Miss Smith was the one with the mania. Who was to get the house if the nephew were to die on active service? Mrs. Cibber must have made some provision.”

  Kenny rubbed his head with both hands. “I knew!” he exploded. “The lawyer’s clerk told me this morning when I rang up to find out if Woodruff was the heir. I was so keen to confirm that point that I discounted the rest. If he died the companion was to have it for her lifetime.”

  Campion looked relieved.

  “I thought so. There you are, you see. She had to get rid of them both—Woodruff and his new wife. With a young and vigorous woman in the house there was a danger of the companion becoming redundant. Don’t you think?”

  Kenny was fingering his notebook.

  “You think she’d planned it for a fortnight?”

  “She’d thought of it for a fortnight. She didn’t see how to do it until the row occurred last night. When she found the gun on the window sill, where young Mrs. Woodruff left it, and Mrs. Cibber told her that the boy would come back, the plan was obvious.” He shivered. “Do you realize that she must have been waiting, probably on the stairs, with the gun in her hand and the book-box addressed to herself in the other, listening for Woodruff’s letter to slide under the door? As soon as she heard it, she had to fly down and get it and open the door. Then she had to walk into the drawing-room, shoot the old lady as she turned to see who it was, and put the
gun in the book-box. The instant she was sure Mrs. Cibber was dead, she had to run out screaming to her place between the lamp and the pillar box and—post the package!”

  Kenny put down his pencil and looked up.

  “Now there,” he said with honest admiration, “there I hand it to you. How in the world did you get on to that?”

  “You suggested it.”

  “I did?” Kenny was pleased in spite of himself. “When?”

  “When you kept asking me where one could hide a gun in a London street with no wide gratings and no sandbins. There was only the mail box. I guessed she’d posted it to herself as no one else would have been safe. Even the dead letter office eventually gives up its dead. That’s why I was so keen to get her to the top of the house, as far away from the front door as possible.” He sighed. “The book-box was misguided genius. The gun was an old Luger, did you notice? Loot. That’s why he never had to turn it in. It just fitted in the box. She must have had a thrill when she discovered that.”

  Kenny shook his head wonderingly. “Well, blow me down!” he said inelegantly. “Funny that I put you on to it!”

  * * *

  Mr. Campion was in bed that night when the telephone rang; It was Kenny again.

  “l say, Mr. Campion?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sorry to bother you at this time of night but there’s something worrying me. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Think nothing of it.”

  “Well. Everything is all right. Smith has been certified by three medicos. The little girl is very happy comforting her boy, who seems to be upset about his aunt’s death. The Commissioner is very pleased. But I can’t get off to sleep. Mr. Campion, how did you know what time the afternoon post is delivered in Barraclough Road?”

  The lean man stifled a yawn.

  “Because I went into the chemist’s shop on the corner and asked,” he said. “Elementary, my dear Kenny.”

  The Lieabout

  I still have the brooch but I can hardly wear it. I thought of throwing it away once, but it is so very pretty. I don’t think it is valuable but I have never dared to take it into a jeweler’s to find out. It is a very awkward position.

  I might have sent it back to the people who owned it, in fact I ought to have done that, but if ever it was traced to me who would believe my story?

  It was when we lived in London. We had a small flat in a courtyard leading off High Holborn, right in the city. The courtyard was really only the foot of an airshaft striking down amid enormous office buildings. There were only two doors in it; one belonged to a printing works and the other one was ours.

  When you opened our door you found yourself at the foot of a flight of steep stairs, at the top of which were our three rooms and a sort of corridor called a kitchenette-bath.

  Our domain had once been the caretaker’s premises of the insurance building which was below us and still ran right through to the main street. By the time we went there it had been converted into two shops. These shops were empty when we arrived and remained so for nearly a year, although from time to time gangs of workmen were very busy in them, obliterating, we supposed, still more of the atmosphere of insurance.There are several odd things about living in the city. One is the quiet of the place at night. When we moved to the country the noises of the night birds were almost too much for us after that deathly peace of the City of London when the offices have closed.

  Another curious thing is the surprising intimacy and friendliness of it all. In no village in which I ever lived did I acquire so many acquaintances.

  The shops where one could buy the ordinary necessities of life as opposed to an adding machine, a battleship or a two-thousand-guinea emerald ring were all of the small and homely variety and were nearly all of them tucked away in courtyards like our own. The people who owned them were friendly and obliging and told us their family histories at the slightest encouragement.

  The news-sellers and the hawkers were other regulars who were anxious to gossip or pass the time of day, and as I walked down the crowded pavement with my shopping basket on my arm I found I had as many people to nod to as if I were in a small town street which had suddenly become overrun with half a million foreigners.

  I first met the Lieabout in our own yard. He was sitting there one evening among a pile of packing-cases from the printing works when I went out to play with Addlepate. Addlepate leapt on him, mistaking him for a sack of waste paper in which he delighted. The misapprehension led to a sort of introduction and after a while the Lieabout watched the dog to see that he did not go out into the traffic and commit suicide and I went up to get the man some tea.

  He was a frail old person with a beaky face and little bright red eyes like a ferret or one of the old black rats who come out and dance on the cobbles in the small hours.

  All lieabouts are necessarily dirty. Genuine tramping can never be a hygienic method of life. But he was horribly so. He looked as though he had just slipped down from his niche among the gargoyles of St Paul’s before the cleaners could get him. He was sooty with London, and his garments, which were varied and of dubious origin, were all the same grey-black colour, and not with dye.

  He was glad of the tea, and when I said I had not seen him about before, he explained that he had come up from Cheapside, where he had been spending the summer. He did not ask for money and I did not offer him any, naturally. We parted friends, he to return to his packing-cases in which he was making himself a temporary home and I to my work upstairs.

  He lived in the packing-cases for nearly a week and we kept up a nodding acquaintance.

  I was out shopping one morning when I saw the brooch. It was on a lower shelf in the window of one of those very big jewelers and silversmiths whose principal trade seems to be in challenge cups and presentation plate. The shop was not quite opposite the entrance to our courtyard, but about fifty yards down on the other side of the traffic. I stood for some time looking at the brooch. It consisted of seven large topaz set in oxidized silver and the finished effect was rather like the rose window in Notre Dame.

  I was still gazing at it when the Lieabout appeared at my elbow.

  “Nice, ain’t it?” he said. “Goin’ to ‘ave it?”

  I laughed and indicated my basket, which held one of Addlepate’s Friday bones protruding rather disgustingly from a sea of lettuce.

  “Not this week. Food’s gone up,” I said, and would have passed on, but the ornament had evidently attracted him, too, for he came nearer to look at it and I should have had to brush past him to get into the jostling stream in the middle of the pavement again. “It’s not worfa thousand quid,” he observed, after a moment or so of contemplation. “Go in an’ arsk ’em. They’ll say a tenner, I betcha.”

  “Very likely,” I said. “And what should I do?” He grinned at me, disclosing a most disreputable assortment of different-sized teeth.

  “Same as me, I reckon,” he said. “Beat it like one o’clock. ’Day, lady.”

  I went home and forgot all about the incident and the next day was Saturday.

  Up to this point the story was quite ordinary, but once the police came into it the whole thing became a little fantastic. Saturday morning in the city always has a last day at boarding school atmosphere. Fewer strangers swoop out of the fat red buses or come boiling up out of the tubes, and those that do appear are definitely in holiday mood. When the big clock of St Paul’s strikes noon the exodus begins, and by a quarter to one the streets look like a theatre after the show is over.

  The road outside our courtyard, which all the week had been a sort of nightmare Brooklands, turned suddenly into a great river of dull glass, with only an occasional bus or taxi speeding happily down its wide expanse.

  There were people about, of course, but only a dozen or so, and the city policemen in their enormous helmets, which they use as small personal suitcases, I believe, stood out, lonely and important.

  It was nearly two o’clock on this particular Saturday a
fternoon when the police arrived. My husband leant out of the studio window and reported that there were two large bobbies on the step. I went down to open the door. None of our visitors had left a car outside the yard gates for some considerable time, but although my conscience was clear, much clearer than it is now, I felt vaguely uneasy. One policeman may be a friend, but two are the Law.

  On the step I found two of the largest, bluest specimens I have ever seen and they were both vastly uncomfortable. They hesitated, eying first me and then each other with embarrassment.

  I waited awkwardly for them to begin, and presently the larger one spoke.

  “I wonder if you’d do me a personal favour, Ma’am?” he said.

  It was such an unexpected request that I gaped at him, and he continued:

  “I want you to go out into the street and look in the empty shop next door. Don’t say nothing to anyone. Just behave perfectly casual, and then come back and tell us what you think you see.”

  I began to feel a trifle lightheaded, but they were certainly real policemen and, anyway, Addlepate was barking his head off at the top of the stairs.

  “All right,” I said stupidly. “Aren’t you coming?”

  The other constable shook his head.

  “No, Ma’am. We don’t want a crowd to collect. That’s our idea. See?”

  I went off obediently, and as soon as I turned out of the yard I saw that any hopes my official friends might have cherished concerning the absence of a crowd were doomed to disappointment. Everyone in the street seemed to be converging on the first of the empty shops, and I saw another policeman hurrying down the road towards the excitement.

  On the step of the shop stood my friend the Lieabout. He was making a tremendous noise. “It’s a disgrice!” he was shouting. “A bloomin’ disgrice! It’s bin there five days to my knowledge. Look at it. Look at it!”