The Allingham Casebook Page 9

  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 afternoon 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, eyeing 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!”

  I peered in through the plate glass and suddenly saw what he meant. The sight made me feel slightly sick. At the back of the shop was an archway leading into a further salon, which was lit by a skylight. All kinds of decorators’ debris was strewn around, but among the whitewash pails, the planks and the trestles, was something covered with an old coat and a lump of sacking. The shape was suggestive. But the thing that made it horrible was the boot. The boot stuck out from beneath the coat so naturally and yet so lifelessly.

  “It’s a corp!” shrieked the Lieabout, to the crowd which had just reached us. “A corp! Bin there five days. The p’lice won’t do nothink. It’s a murder, that’s wot it is. A murdered corp!”

  He turned to me.

  “What you waitin’ for, lady? Go and tell the rozzers it’s a corp.”

  His voice in my ear recalled me to my senses and I hurried back to my visitors. They were polite but impatient when I gave them my opinion, and it suddenly dawned upon me why I had been singled out for their confidence. A police officer is not allowed to enter private property without authority, nor do the regulations let him ask the owners of such property for permission to enter. But once he is invited in, and has a witness to prove it, he can go wherever his good sense tells him his duty lies.

  “If you get out of our bedroom window on to the roof at the back of the shop you could look through the skylight,” I said. “Would you care to?”

  They were upstairs in an instant, and I had barely time to explain to my astonished husband before they were in the bedroom, negotiating the window. I say “negotiating” because their climb through it required finesse, and a delicacy one would hardly have expected in men of their bulk.

  It was one of those awkward old-fashioned sliding casements which permit a space about two and half feet by one and a quarter when opened to their fullest extent.

  It took a little time but out they went at last, helmets and all, and my husband with them. They disappeared over the roof, and I was left to await their return.

  However, by this time an entirely unsuspected blood-lust had taken possession of me and, unable to control my impatience where I was, I trotted down into the yard again and out into the street.

  To be honest, I did not reach the street. The crowd was packed solid across our entrance, all straining and jostling to peer into the window of the shop next door.

  I climbed up on the iron gate which closed the yard at night and saw over the people’s heads a great expanse of empty street to the east, while the west was packed with every vehicle which had passed that way since the Lieabout’s sensational find.

  It was because I was prevented by the angle of the wall from seeing my two police friends descending into the shop through the skylight that I was an exception from the rest of the crowd and did not have my attention diverted from the excitement over the way.

  I saw the long black car pull up outside the jeweller’s shop and I saw the three men spring out of it. It was not until the crash of broken glass reached me, as the brick went through the window, that I realised that anything untoward was afoot.

  The rest happened so quickly that I hardly followed it. I had a confused impression of flying figures, something flashing in the autumn sun and then of the black car sliding round like a speedboat in the broad road and flying away with smooth acceleration. In a moment it had gone completely. I could not even see which way it turned at the end of the street. Nothing but the ragged hole in the window, with a scared assistant’s face peering through it, remained to show that the raid had occurred.

  At that moment the first policeman to get down into the empty shop must have pulled away the coat, revealed the neatly arranged sacks and distemper tins beneath, and kicked the old boot away angrily, for the crowd suddenly became aware of the other sensation, and surged off across the road to gape anew.

  It was extraordinarily neat. The whole thing had been done in one of the most important streets without anyone being able to give a clear picture of any of the men involved.

  We heard all about the robbery from the tobacconist on the corner.

  Ten thousand pounds’ worth of valu
ables had been snatched, he said, including the gold state salt-cellar which an ancient and worshipful company was presenting to a foreign royal bridegroom, and which had been on view there for a few privileged days. A little small stuff went, too, he said; a couple of trays of rings and several oddments.

  I never saw the Lieabout again. Foolishly I supposed that, after making such an ass of himself by his false alarm, he did not care to show his face in the neighbourhood and had moved off to another corner of the town.

  The parcel came a week later. I found it in the letter box one night when we came in from a show.

  It was the topaz brooch. It lay upon a mat of cotton wool, and there was a note with it written in a neat, educated hand. The message was brief and only too enlightening.

  “Very many thanks for your valuable assistance,” it ran. “Congratulate you. Very gratefully yours.”

  There was no signature and the package had not been through the post.

  So, you see the problem: What should Mrs A. do now?

  Face Value

  ‘I little thought,’ wrote Sir Theo in unaccustomed longhand, while the great desk spread round him and the silence of the magnificent room was intense. ‘I little thought that towards the close of a long, arduous and, I think I may say with modesty, not un-useful career, I should hear myself described, albeit sotto voce, by a comparatively senior officer of the Criminal Investigation Department as a Pompous Old Ass.’

  He hesitated, and his pen made little circles in the air above the faint blue lines in the exercise book which Miss Keddey herself had run out to buy for him.

  ‘Pompous old ass.’ He wrote it again without capitals. ‘At the age of fifty-three – hardly a dotage, if certain aspects of the last war are any criterion – such an experience must give any sapient’ (crossed out) ‘far-seeing’ (crossed out) ‘honest’ (underlined) ‘man furiously to think’.

  He sat back in the beautiful chair which he had inherited from Sir Joseph, the first head of the great firm, read what he had written and permitted a dismayed expression to flit over his handsome clean-shaven face. He removed his eyeglass and changed it for the pair of bent pince-nez which he kept for reading contracts and, since the room was deserted, and the door locked, spoke aloud:

  “No need to be a ruddy fool!” He bent again to write. ‘I have only one natural gift – my success had been due entirely to hard work – and I may at times have appeared vain of it. Nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit. But the fact remains, I have noticed and remarked on it time and time again, I never forget a face. My family, Miss Keddey – who has been a secretary for twenty years – my colleagues on the Board, my brother justices on the Bench, the officers with whom – despite my great age! – I was privileged to serve in the Southern Command, everybody who knows me, will confirm that, pompous though I may be, this is my undisputed gift. It has shown itself many times. When Robert St John walked into the Club, after thirty years, wearing a great black beard as long as one’s arm, who recognised him before he had satisfied even the wine waiter? And who —? but this is unnecessary. My gift is undisputed and the matter I have to consider here is more complex.

  I come now to Nicholas Parish. This young man entered the firm, of which I have the honour to be the Chairman, some few years before the war. I knew his father and did not like him, but it is typical of me that a circumstance of that sort is more likely to predispose me in the favour of a youngster than to detract. Ass though I am, I try to be fair.

  Young Parish is not unhandsome, flashy – by my aged standards – and, according to my wife, who met him once in this office, dangerous, whatever that may mean.

  From the start he showed force which I admired, an unconventional streak which was all very well since he had the wit to control it, and a genius for pushing a job through to its conclusion – the trait which made me like him. At one time he was in charge of our new Psychological Department.

  During the period when I was the ‘unfit’ amateur colonel in an army department of ‘unfit’ amateurs, stationed in a sector of the South Coast which, by the grace of God, was never attacked (Ass perhaps, but not Fool, Mr Superintendent). I found him a most efficient major. It would hardly be true to describe us as wartime comrades, for I am an old hand in the service of this firm and I have no illusions regarding friendships between the head of such a concern and the men who must ever, to their lives’ end, remain his subordinates. But we got on very smoothly. I think I may say that. Very smoothly indeed.

  After the war we returned to our respective desks. In a short time, his desk became a little larger. Mine remained as it is – as a matter-of-fact, so Sharman of the Bank was telling me (his hobby is irrelevant figures) – the largest, save one, in the world.

  Our association, Parish’s and mine, was never social. Theobald Park is in the country and when my wife makes what small effort she can to entertain in these times, the names of the junior members of my staff are not added to her secretary’s list. However, we lunched together on occasion and, while he introduced me to the amusing if frivolous Wardrobe, I have taken him to the Club. In fact, I believe he is on the waiting list so that, should he live a hundred years, poor fellow, his name may well come up before the Committee before he dies.

  That is how matters stood on the twenty-third of October last, the date which the Superintendent finds of such absorbing and recurrent interest. It was the night of our regimental dinner. I was to speak, and I had, I confess, taken Parish’s opinion on the draft of the few words I intended to say. He was very helpful; I can see him now with that flicker in his dark eyes as some little joke of mine touched him.

  We were the only two senior officers from this firm attending and it seemed natural that we should go together. As I told the Superintendent and that odd, evasive fellow, Campion who came with him on the third occasion, I have no idea who suggested it. My impression is that it was so obvious that it needed no suggestion. Frankly, I cannot envisage Parish suggesting a course of action to me; I am the natural leader in any decision, great or small. The only faintly unusual feature of our excursion was that I offered to pick him up at his home in Morter Street, midway between the Club and the Porchester where we were to dine.

  The Superintendent, a squat, obstinate man, did his best to get me to say that Parish asked me to fetch him, which would have been absurd. The younger man, Campion (some sort of consultant whose vague, pale face I have seen somewhere unexpected, possibly in the bar of the House of Lords), muttered something more sensible about a man not being able to refuse a civility in certain circumstances, but I could not acquiesce. I am, as it were, the captain of the ship, and since I went to Morter Street I must have arranged it. I remember that both Parish and I spoke of the difficulties of parking at night and the inadvisability of taking two cars.

  His house is a pleasant, two-storey affair, worth every penny of the rent he must pay for it. It is a cottage in London, snug and yet dignified. I noticed the leaded lights and the frilled muslin curtains particularly – with a pretty woman looking out from between them it might all have been on the stage of the old Gaiety. When Nicholas came running out to tell me we had made a slight mistake in the time and still had twenty minutes, I was only too delighted to step in and take a very good dry sherry with him.

  Poor little woman! She rose up out of the flowered couch which all but smothered her and greeted me like an old friend. In the discreet lighting I like, I saw her small face glowing and her eyes shine. Despite the decrepitude which is so evident to the Superintendent, I felt the warmer for her welcome.

  She held out both hands to me and said, “Sir Theo! Do you remember me?”

  Well, of course I did! And I was happy to tell her so. Since this report is for a special purpose, I may admit that when I felt her hands tremble in mine it gave me a more pleasurable sensation than I have derived from anything of the kind for very many years. I remembered her face, naturally, but not only that. As soon as Parish mentioned Brabbington I was able to tell them when
and where I had the pleasure of being introduced to her, at a sports meeting just before I left the army. At that time, she was in uniform herself and those heavy costumes do not reveal a woman’s shape in the same way as does an expensive rose-silk gown – they are not designed to. She made even more impression on me at this second meeting, while we chatted in her charming room.

  I have been questioned again and again about this simple interlude and I have kept nothing back. The younger people were on edge. I admit it and I cannot think it strange or sinister. The first time Sir Joseph visited my wife and me, we were on edge.

  We drank excellent sherry and talked nonsense, or I did, mainly about Mrs Parish’s charm. When their clock struck the half hour, Nicholas and I left for the dinner together.

  Poor little woman! She came to the door with us to kiss her husband. They were smiling brightly at each other and the only thing I remarked which was at all untoward – I only remember it now as I come to write – was that she refused a wrap and swore she was not cold although I noticed, as I bent towards her fair head, that her teeth were chattering.

  I last saw her waving to us from the bright green door and after that, until the message from the police was brought in to him at the table some hours afterwards, Parish did not leave my side.

  I saw the waiter bring him the note and heard his muttered word of excuse, but I did not know, of course, what had called him. Speeches were over by that time, and having done my duty, I was dozing by my glass. In wartime I discovered that I am no soldier, in peacetime I find myself doubly convinced.

  The shock came when I had got back to the Club and was just in my room. Johnson came hurrying up to ask me if I would see an officer from Scotland Yard.

  That was my first visit from the Superintendent and he told me the news bluntly. At half past nine that evening, Mrs Parish had been found by her sister, who had visited her unexpectedly, lying in her bedroom with her head smashed in and her pretty face obliterated by many savage blows. The maid had been out all the evening, but the sister, it appeared, had a key.