Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard MEGAPACK®. Josephine Tey
caricature, but it lived as no photographic representation could have done. The artist had even conveyed the look of half-anxious eagerness in the eyes which Sorrell’s had presumably worn in life. Grant thanked him heartfeltly and gave him his card.
“If there is ever anything I can do for you, come and see me,” he said, and went away without waiting to see the altering expression on Struwwelpeter’s face as he took in the significance of the card.
Near Cambridge Circus are the palatial offices of Laurence Murray—Lucky-Folk-Bet-With-Laury Murray—one of the biggest bookmakers in London. As Grant was going past on the other side of the street, he saw the genial Murray arrive in his car and enter the offices. He had known Laury Murray fairly well for some years, and he crossed the street now and followed him into the shining headquarters of his greatness. He sent in his name and was led through a vast wilderness of gleaming wood, brass, and glass partitions and abounding telephones to the sanctum of the great man, hung round with pictures of great thoroughbreds.
“Well,” said Murray, beaming on him, “something for the National, is it? I hope to goodness it isn’t Coffee Grounds. Half Britain seems to want to back Coffee Grounds today.”
But the inspector denied any intention of losing money even on such an attractive proposition as Coffee Grounds seemed to be.
“Well, I don’t suppose you’ve come to warn me about ready-money betting?”
The inspector grinned. No; he wanted to know if Murray had ever known a man called Albert Sorrell.
“Never heard of him,” said Murray. “Who is he?”
He was a bookmaker, Grant thought.
“Course?”
Grant did not know. He had an office in Minley Street.
“Silver ring, probably,” said Murray. “Tell you what. If I were you, I should go down to Lingfield today, and you can see all the silver-ring men in one fell swoop. It’ll save you a lot of touting round.”
Grant considered. It was by far the quickest and most logical method, and it had the additional advantage of offering him a knowledge of Sorrell’s business associates which the mere obtaining of his home address would not have done.
“Tell you what,” Murray said again as he hesitated, “I’ll go down with you. You’ve missed the last train now. We’ll go down in my car. I have a horse running, but I couldn’t be bothered to go down alone. I promised my trainer I’d go, but it was such a beast of a morning. Have you had lunch?”
Grant had not, and Murray went away to see about a lunch basket while Grant talked to the Yard on his telephone.
An hour later Grant was having lunch in the country; a grey and sodden country truly, but a country smelling of clean, fresh, growing things; and the drizzle that had made town a greasy horror was left behind. Grey, wet-looking torn clouds showed blue sky in great rifts, and by the time they had reached the paddock the pale unhappy pools in the rock-garden were smiling uncertainly at an uncertain sun. It was ten minutes before the first race, and both rings from Grant’s point of view were impossible. He pushed down his impatience and accompanied Murray to the white rails of the parade ring, where the horses for the first race were walking sedately round, the looker-on in him loving their beauty and their fitness—Grant was a fairly competent judge of a horse—while his eyes wandered over the crowd in a businesslike commentary. There was Mollenstein—Stone, he called himself now—looking as if he owned the earth. Grant wondered what bogus scheme he was foisting on a public of suckers now. He shouldn’t have thought that anything as uncomfortable as a jumping meeting in March would have appealed to him. Perhaps one of his suckers was interested in the game. And Vanda Morden, back from her third honeymoon and advertising the fact in a coat of a check so aggressive that it was the most obvious thing in the paddock. Wherever one looked, it seemed, there was Vanda Morden’s coat. And the polo-playing earl who had been shadowed in the hope that he was the Levantine. And many others, both pleasant and unpleasant, all of whom Grant recognized and noted with a little mental remark.
When the first race was over, and the little eddy of lucky ones had surrounded the bookmakers and been sent gloating away, Grant began his work. He pursued his inquiries steadily until the ring began to fill again with eager inquirers after odds for the second race, when he returned to the paddock. But no one seemed to have heard of Sorrell, and it was a rather disconsolate Grant who joined Murray in the paddock before the fourth race—a handicap hurdle—in which Murray’s horse was running. Murray was sympathetic, and as Grant stood with him in the middle of the parade ring he mixed adjurations to admire his horse with suggestions for the tracking of Sorrell. Grant wholeheartedly admired the magnificent bay that was Murray’s property and listened with only half an ear to his suggestions. His thoughts were worried. Why did no one in the silver ring know Sorrell?
The jockeys began to filter into the ring, the crowd round the rail thinned slightly as people moved away to points of vantage on the stands, lads kept ducking eager heads under their charges’ necks in anxiety to intercept the summons that would mean mounting time.
“Here comes Lacey,” said Murray, as a jockey came stepping catlike over the wet grass to them. “Know him?”
“No,” said Grant.
“Flat-race crack really, but has a go over hurdles occasionally. Crack at that too.”
Grant had known that—there is very little between a Scotland Yard inspector and omniscience—but he had never actually met the famous Lacey. The jockey greeted Murray with a tight little smile, and Murray introduced the inspector without explaining him. Lacey shivered slightly in the damp air.
“I’m glad it’s not fences,” he said, with mock fervour. “I’d just hate to be emptied into the water today.”
“Bit of a change from heated rooms and all the coddling,” said Murray.
“Been in Switzerland?” asked Grant conversationally, remembering that Switzerland was the winter Mecca of flat-race jockeys.
“Switzerland!” repeated Lacey in his drawling Irish voice. “Not me. I’ve had measles. Measles—if you’d believe it! Nothing but milk for nine days and a whole month in bed.” His pleasant, cameo-like face twisted into an expression of wry disgust.
“And milk is so fattening,” laughed Murray. “Talking of fat, did you ever know a man called Sorrell?”
The jockey’s pale bright eyes trickled over the inspector like twin drops of icy water and came back to Murray. The whip, which had been swinging pendulum-wise from his first finger, swung slowly to a halt.
“I think I can remember a Sorrell,” he said, after some cogitation, “but he wasn’t fat. Wasn’t Charlie Baddeley’s clerk called Sorrell?”
But Murray could not recall Charlie Baddeley’s clerk.
“Would you recognize a sketch?” asked the inspector, and took Struwwelpeter’s impressionistic portrait from his pocketbook.
Lacey took it and looked at it admiringly. “It’s good, isn’t it! Yes; that’s old Baddeley’s clerk, all right.”
“And where can I find Baddeley?” asked Grant.
“Well, that’s rather a difficult question,” said Lacey, the tight smile back at his mouth. “You see, Baddeley died over two years ago.”
“Oh? And you haven’t seen Sorrell since?”
“No, I don’t know what became of Sorrell. Probably doing office work somewhere.”
The bay was led up to them. Lacey took off his coat, removed a pair of goloshes, which he laid neatly side by side on the grass, and was thrown into the saddle. As he adjusted the leathers he said to Murray, “Alvinson isn’t here today”—Alvinson was Murray’s trainer. “He said you would give me instructions.”
“The instructions are the usual ones,” said Murray. “Do as you like on him. He should about win.”