Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard MEGAPACK®. Josephine Tey
Had the visit to the theatre with his last few shillings been merely a snapping of fingers in the face of the gods who had defeated him? Was it merely the final irony that the dagger had anticipated his own revolver by an hour or two? But if he were broke, why had he not gone to the friend for money—the friend who was so free with his bank-notes? Or had he? and the friend had refused it? Was it conscience, after all, that had prompted that anonymous twenty-five pounds? If he decided to accept the presence of the revolver and the absence of clues as evidence of intended suicide, then the murder resolved itself into the outcome of a quarrel—probably between two members of a race gang. Perhaps the Levantine had shared in the dead man’s downfall and had held the dead man responsible. That was the most reasonable explanation. And it fitted all the circumstances. The man was interested in racing—probably a bookmaker—he was found without watch or money and evidently prepared for suicide; the Levantine was heard to demand something which the dead man either could not or would not give, and the Levantine had stabbed him. The friend who had refused him help in life—probably tired of pulling him out of tight places—had been seized with such a fit of remorse on learning of the man’s end that he had provided lavishly, if anonymously, for his burial. Pure theory, but it fitted—almost! There was one corner where no amount of insinuation would make it fit. It did not explain why no one had come forward to claim the dead man. If the affair were merely a quarrel between two men, intimidation was washed out as a theory for the silence of his friends. It was not credible that the foreigner had them all in such a state of subjection that not one of them risked even that usual method of the craven and the circumspect, the anonymous communication. It was a curious and almost unique situation. Never in all Grant’s experience had a murderer been on the point of being captured before the identity of his victim had been established.
A light rain felt across the window-pane with stealthy fingers. The end of the good weather, thought Grant. A silence followed, dark and absolute. It was as if an advance guard, a scout, had spied out the land and gone away to report. There was the long, far-away sigh of the wind that had been asleep for days. Then the first blast of the fighting battalions of the rain struck the window in a wild rattle. The wind tore and raved behind them, hounding them to suicidal deeds of valour. And presently the drip, drip from the roof began a constant gentle monotone beneath the wild symphony, intimate and soothing as the tick of a clock. Grant’s eyes closed to it, and before the squall had retreated, muttering into the distance, he was asleep.
But in the morning, a grey morning veiled in dispirited drizzle, the theory still looked watertight—with judicious plugging at the weak spot, and it was not until, hard on the track of the dead man’s friend, he was interviewing the manager of the Adelphi branch of the Westminster Bank that he found his nicely made house of cards pattering round his ears.
The agent was a quiet, grey man whose unluminous skin had somehow taken on the appearance of a bank-note. In his manner, however, he was more like a general practitioner than a financial adviser. Grant found himself momentarily expecting to feel Mr. Dawson’s dry fingertips on his wrist. But Mr. Dawson this morning was a mixture of Mercury and Juggernaut. This was his report.
The five notes in which the inspector was interested had all of them been paid over the counter on the 3rd of the month as part of a payment of two hundred and twenty-three pounds ten shillings. The money had been drawn by a client of theirs who had a running account in the bank. His name was Albert Sorrell, and he ran a small bookmaker’s business in Minley Street. The sum drawn represented the whole of the money deposited with them except a pound, which had been left presumably with the intention of keeping the account open.
Good! thought Grant; the friend is a bookmaker too.
Had Mr. Dawson known Mr. Sorrell by sight? he asked.
No, not very well, but his cashier would be able to tell the inspector all about him; and he summoned the cashier. “This is Inspector Grant from Scotland Yard. He wants a description of Mr. Albert Sorrell, and I have told him that you will provide him with one.”
The cashier provided a very telling one. With a minuteness that defeated any hope of a mistake, he described—the dead man.
When he had finished, Grant sat thinking at top speed. What did it mean? Had the dead man owed the money to the friend, and had the friend taken all he possessed and afterwards been seized with a too tardy charity? Was that how the notes had come into the friend’s possession? On the 3rd, too. That was ten days before the murder.
Did Sorrell draw the money himself? he asked.
No, the cashier said; the cheque had been presented by a stranger. Yes, he remembered him. He was very dark, thin, medium height or a little under, with high cheekbones. Foreign-looking, a little.
The Levantine!
Grant was seized with a mixture of exhilaration and breathlessness—rather as Alice must have felt during her express journey with the Red Queen. Things marched, but at what a bat!
He asked to see the cheque, and it was produced, “You don’t think that this is a forgery?” Such a thought had not occurred to them. Both the amount and the signature had been made out in Mr. Sorrell’s handwriting, and that was unusual in an attempt at forgery. They brought out other cheques of the dead man’s, and exhibited them. They refused to entertain the thought that the cheque was not genuine. “If it is a forgery,” Mr. Dawson said, “it is incredibly good. Even if it were proved a forgery, I should have difficulty in believing it. I think you may take it that it is a genuine cheque.”
And the foreigner had drawn it. The foreigner had had all Sorrell’s deposit with the exception of twenty shillings. And ten days later he had stuck Sorrell in the back. Well, if it proved nothing else, it proved the existence of a relationship between the two men which would be useful when it came to evidence in a court of law.
“Have you the numbers of the rest of the notes handed over in the money to Sorrell?” They had, and Grant took a list of them. Then he inquired what Sorrell’s address was, and was told that they had no home address, but that his office was at 32 Minley Street, off the Charing Cross Road.
As Grant walked up to Minley Street from the Strand he began to digest the news. The Levantine had drawn the money with a cheque made payable to Sorrell and endorsed by Sorrell. Theft seemed to be ruled out by the fact that Sorrell had made no fuss in the ten days intervening between the paying out of the money and his death. Therefore the cheque had been given to the foreigner by Sorrell himself. Why had it not been made payable to the foreigner? Because it had been a transaction in which the Levantine had no intention of letting his name appear. Had he been “bleeding” Sorrell? Had his asking for something, which Raoul Legarde had reported as being the tenor of their conversation on the night of the murder, been but a further demand for money? Had the Levantine been not an unlucky companion in Sorrell’s ruin but the means of it? At least that transaction over the counter of the Westminster Bank explained Sorrell’s pennilessness and intended suicide.
Then who had sent the twenty-five pounds? Grant refused to believe that the man who had had all Sorrell had, and who had stuck him in the back at not getting more, would have disbursed such a sum for so slight a reason. There was some one else. And the some one else knew the Levantine well enough to be in receipt of at least twenty-five pounds of the amount that the Levantine had received from Sorrell. Moreover, the some one else and the dead man had lived together, as witnessed by the dead man’s fingerprint on the envelope which had contained the twenty-five pounds. The sentimentality of the action and the lavishness of the amount spoke of a woman, but the handwriting people had been very sure that the printing was a man’s work. And of course that some one else had also owned the gun with which Sorrell had contemplated putting an end to himself. It was a pretty tangle, but at least it was a tangle—closely related and growing closer, so that at any moment he might pick up a lucky thread which, when pulled, would unravel the whole thing. It seemed to him that he had only to find out about the dead man’s habits and life generally and he would have the Levantine.
Minley Street has, in common with the lesser turnings off Charing Cross Road, that half secretive, half disgruntled air that makes it forbidding. A stranger turning into it has an uncomfortable feeling of being unwelcome, as if he had blundered unwittingly