14 Murder Mysteries in One Volume. Louis Tracy
ended? In the loft of your club-room, Mr. Tomlin. In a box of old clothes at that. Silly, isn't it?"
"Wot! Them amatoor play-hactin' things?"
"Exactly."
Elkin grunted, though intending to laugh.
"Not so sharp for a London 'tec, I must say," he cried. "Why, those props have been there since before Christmas."
"Yes. I know now," was the downcast reply. "Twelve hours ago I thought differently. Didn't I, Mr. Tomlin?"
Tomlin tried hard to look knowing.
"Oh, is that wot you wur drivin' at?" he said. "Dang me, mister, I could soon ha' put you right 'ad you tole me."
"Well, well. Can't be helped. I may do better in London. What do you say, Mr. Ingerman? The City is the real mint of money and crime. Who knows but that a stroll through Cornhill may have some bearing on the Steynholme mystery?"
"May be you'd get a bit nearer if you took a stroll along the Knoleworth Road, and not so very far, either," guffawed Elkin.
"Who knows?" repeated Furneaux sadly. "Good-day, gentlemen. Some of this merry party will meet again, of course, if not here, at the Assizes. Don't forget my bill. Mr. Tomlin. By the way, one egg at breakfast had seen vicissitudes. It shouldn't be rated too highly."
"I'm traveling by your train," cried Ingerman.
"So I understood," said Furneaux over his shoulder.
There was silence for a moment after he had gone. Ingerman looked thoughtful, even puzzled. He was casting back in his mind to discover just how and when the detective "understood" that his departure was imminent, since he himself had only arrived at a decision after leaving the chemist's.
"That chap is no good," announced Elkin. "I'll back old Robinson against him any day."
"Sh-s-sh! He may 'ear you," muttered the landlord.
"Don't care if he does. Cornhill! What the blazes has Cornhill to do with the murder at The Hollies?"
Ingerman appreciated the value of that concluding phrase. Elkin had used it once before in Siddle's shop, and was quietly reproved by the chemist for his outspokenness.
Ingerman, however, did not inform the company that his office lay in an alley off Cornhill. He elected to rub in Elkin's words.
"Mr. Siddle seemed to object to The Hollies being mentioned as the scene of the crime," he said. "I wonder why?"
"Because he's an old molly-coddle," snapped the horse-dealer. "Thinks everyone is like himself, a regular slow-coach."
Tomlin closed the door into the passage, closed it for the first time in living memory, whereat Furneaux, on the landing above, grinned sardonically, and ran downstairs.
"Wot's this about them amatoor clo'es?" he inquired portentously. "Oo 'as the key of that box?"
"I have," said Elkin. "I locked it after the last performance, and, unless you've been up to any monkey tricks, Tomlin, the duds are there yet."
"You're bitin' me 'ead off all the mornin', Fred," protested the aggrieved landlord. "Fust, the gin was wrong, an' now I'm supposed to 'ave rummidged yur box. Wot for?"
Furneaux popped in.
"My bill ready?" he squeaked.
"No, sir. The train—"
"Leaves at two, but I'm driving to Knoleworth with Superintendent Fowler."
The door closed behind him. Tomlin shook his head.
"Box! Jack-in-the-box, I reckon," he said darkly, turning to a dog-eared ledger.
Neither at Knoleworth nor Victoria did Ingerman catch sight of the detective, though he was anxious either to make the journey in the company of the representative of Scotland Yard or arrange an early appointment with him. True, he was not inclined to place the strange-mannered little man on the same high plane as that suggested by certain London journalists to whom he had spoken. But he wanted to win the confidence of "the Yard" in connection with this case, and the belief that he was being avoided was nettling. He found consolation, of a sort, in the illustrated papers. One especially contained two pages of local pictures. "Mr. Grant addressing the crowd," with full text, was very effective, while there were admirable studies of The Hollies and the "scene of the tragedy." His own portrait was not flattering. The sun had etched his Mephistophelian features rather sharply, whereas Grant looked a very fine fellow.
Ingerman would have been more than surprised were he privileged to overhear a conversation which began and ended before he reached his flat in North Kensington.
Furneaux, who had jumped into the fore part of the train at Knoleworth, and was out in a jiffy at Victoria, handed his bag to a station detective, and turned into Vauxhall Bridge Road, one of the quietest of London's main thoroughfares. There he met a big man, dressed in tweeds, whose manifest concern at the moment seemed to center in a rather bad wrapping of a very good cigar.
"Ah! How goes it, Charles?" cried the big man heartily, affecting to be aware of Furneaux's presence when the latter had walked nearly a hundred yards down a comparatively deserted street.
"What's wrong with the toofa?" inquired Furneaux testily.
"My own carelessness. Stupid things, bands on cigars.... Well, what's the rush?"
"There's a train to Steynholme at five o'clock. I want you to take hold. I must have help. Like your cigar, this case has come unstuck."
Mr. James Leander Winter, Chief Inspector under the Criminal Investigation Department, whistled softly.
"Tut, tut!" he said. "One can never trust the newspapers. Reading this morning's particulars, it looked dead easy."
"Tell me how it struck you. Sometimes the uninformed brain is vouchsafed a gleam of unconscious genius."
Winter appeared to be devoting his mind to circumventing the vagaries of a fragile tobacco-leaf. He was a man of powerful build, over forty, heavy but active, deep-chested, round-headed, with bulging blue eyes which radiated kindliness and strength of character. The press photographer described him accurately to Grant. The average Londoner would have taken him for a county gentleman on a visit to the Agricultural Show at Islington, with a morning at Tattersall's as a variant. Yet, Sam Weller's extensive and peculiar knowledge of London compared with his as a freshman's with a don's of a university. It would be hard to assess, in coin of the realm, the value of the political and social secrets stowed away in that big head.
"First, I must put a question or two," he said, smiling at a baby which cooed at him from the shaded depths of a passing perambulator. "Is there another woman?"
"Yes, the postmaster's daughter, Doris Martin."
"Shy, pretty little bird, of course?"
"Everything that is good and beautiful."
"Is Grant a Lothario?"
"Excellent chap. Quarter of an hour before the murder he was giving Doris a lesson in astronomy in the garden of The Hollies."
"Never heard it called that before."
"This time the statement happens to be strictly accurate."
"Honest Injun?"
"I'm sure of it. If anything, the death of Adelaide Melhuish cleared the scales off their eyes. Those two have never kissed or squeezed—yet. They'll be starting quite soon now."
"How old is Doris?"
"Nineteen."
"But a really good-looking girl of nineteen must have had admirers before Grant went to the village."
"She had, and has. Having educated herself out of the rut, however, she left many runners at the post. One is persistent—a youngish horse-coper named Elkin. Adelaide Melhuish probably saw her with Grant. Neither Doris nor Grant knew that Adelaide Melhuish, as such, was in Steynholme. That is