Читать книгу The Murder Germ - A. O. Pollard - Страница 5

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Despite the severe handicap of having been christened Algernon Kitchener, Chief Inspector Dunthorne was considered one of the smartest members of the Criminal Investigation Department. In a service where promotion is by merit only his rise to his present position from the uniformed ranks was a record. Already it was whispered that if his luck held he would eventually become one of the few Deputy Commissioners to be appointed from the “inside”.

In appearance he was a typical policeman, tall and broad-shouldered. His bulk and gait, which marked him for what he was, had not proved in any sense a drawback, however. On the contrary, he had found them on many occasions to be an effective disguise.

The criminal mind against which he fought, naturally warped in its outlook, looked beyond him for something more subtle. Either, it argued, he was too obvious to be a detective or, if he were one, his ponderous tread and slow, unhurried manner suggested a sluggish brain.

That was where his victims made their mistake. His intelligence and acumen were well above the average, whilst training and practice had developed powers of clear thinking which enabled him to view each case he handled in its proper perspective. His deliberate deportment was but the outward and visible sign of a methodical tidiness of mind which pigeon-holed impressions so that they were immediately available when needed.

The news of le Maitre’s attempted break from Broadmoor interested him intensely, for it was his handling of the case which led to le Maitre’s arrest and conviction, that gained him his step to chief inspector.

Sidney le Maitre was by no means a member of the criminal classes. The son of a parson related to a noble house, he had graduated by way of Harrow and Sandhurst to a crack infantry regiment of the line. During the war he distinguished himself on more than one occasion and had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross when a shell during the battle of Passchendaele Ridge abruptly terminated his military career.

For months he had lain between life and death in a base hospital, and when, towards the end of the campaign, he was discharged, with his body physically healed, he was only a wreck of his former self.

Prior to being wounded he had never exhibited the slightest sign of insanity, but now, little by little, he began to indulge in queer inexplicable actions which, after a few years of anxious observation, caused his wife secretly to consult a famous brain specialist.

The symptoms were harmless enough in themselves, she explained, and his childishness, as she called it, was only apparent at irregular intervals. Normally he loved her very dearly and treated her with every courtesy, but when the bad mood was on him he used to fly into an ungovernable rage for no apparent reason. On two occasions he struck her with his fist.

Afterwards he was so terribly apologetic and so abject in his remorse that she felt constrained to forgive him, whereupon their relationship became agreeably pleasant once more.

Nor was his temper directed solely against her. He used to declare that he was a member of the British Secret Service employed on counter-espionage against foreign spies in England. She was never quite able to determine whether he was officially appointed to this work or whether it existed solely in his imagination, since, whenever she referred to it, either he swore at her or pleaded secrecy.

What caused her to doubt the genuineness of his appointment was the way he went about his task. He would pick upon a perfect stranger in a restaurant, a railway train, or in the street and stalk him for hours. Sometimes—when the subject realized he was being followed—there would be an unpleasant scene, when le Maitre would blandly apologize and withdraw, only to suffer agonies of self-reproach at what he termed his failure to carry out his duties.

The specialist shrewdly inquired whether there had ever been any previous “mental” cases in the family, and on receiving a negative reply had assured Mrs. le Maitre that as long as her husband had no worse delusions she had nothing much to worry about. He had experienced thousands of neurasthenic cases brought on by the shock of war, and his belief was that time and sympathetic treatment would eventually cure a large proportion of them.

His advice was perfectly sound as far as it went, but, as he afterwards declared, it would have been very different had he been in possession of the full history of the family. Mrs. le Maitre did not tell him, because she did not know, that three generations back the titled head of the family had been a homicidal lunatic who had committed two murders before an attack of typhoid fever had sent him to an early grave.

Pride of name and the exaggerated importance of his position in the country had caused the dreadful secret to be hushed up so that no one outside his immediate relatives and the family solicitor had the slightest inkling of his crimes. Had he lived he must have gone to trial and the scandal would have been out, but his timely decease provided an opportunity for drawing a veil over the family skeleton.

That misconceived duty of a century earlier to an aristocratic lineage was to cost Mrs. le Maitre her life. She was found one morning lying at the foot of her bed with her head terribly mutilated by a blunt instrument. The weapon, a German mace used in trench-bombing raids which le Maitre had brought home as a war souvenir, was near her on the floor. Its handle was devoid of finger-prints.

It might have been taken for an ordinary murder but for one horrible fact. What convinced Detective Inspector Dunthorne, as he was then, that the crime was the work of a lunatic was the discovery that the victim’s tongue had been cut out at the roots.

At first the whole affair was a baffling mystery. Although le Maitre’s idiosyncrasies, revealed by the servants and the brain specialist, focused suspicion on him, he appeared to have a perfect alibi. On the night the crime was committed he was away from home at a small hotel in Hampshire, where he was spending a fishing-holiday.

His attitude towards his wife’s death was irreproachable. Though stricken with grief he gave the police every possible assistance, answering all their questions without hesitation and offering a large reward for the apprehension of the criminal.

It was the zest with which he threw himself into the hunt that eventually gave him away. He was constantly suggesting to Inspector Dunthorne that in his opinion the crime was the work of spies. The theory was so palpably ridiculous—doubly so in view of the mutilation of the victim—that at first Dunthorne dismissed it with scorn as having no bearing on his investigation; later he changed his mind.

Careful investigation of all the evidence obtainable gradually eliminated every possible suspect until Dunthorne was faced with the astounding fact that as long as le Maitre’s alibi held good he had not a single clue which led to anybody. Yet try as he would to upset it, the alibi remained unshakable.

The distance from the hotel to the le Maitre residence was approximately fifty miles—an easy two hours’ journey in a car. Four hours counting both ways; allowing half an hour to enter the house and perpetrate the murder and another half an hour for eventualities made a total of five hours.

Le Maitre was known to have retired to bed shortly after ten-thirty at night. There was an outhouse immediately below his window, which was at the rear of the hotel, and it was quite practicable for him to have climbed out and later returned without being seen.

His car was kept in some stabling adjacent to the main building. As the entire premises were on the slope of a hill it would have been possible for le Maitre to have pushed it out of the garage and allowed it to coast down out of hearing before starting the engine. By returning along a route which brought him to the top of the hill above the hotel he could have replaced the car in its garage equally soundlessly.

Once he had established the feasibility of le Maitre being the criminal, Dunthorne instigated searching inquiries to find some evidence to support his theory, but he came up against a blank wall. No one could be found who had seen le Maitre outside his bedroom during the night, and although numerous people asserted that they had noticed a car of a similar make at various points along the route between the two places their testimony when examined closely was too vague and contradictory to be of value.

Six weeks passed without the inquiry making any progress—weeks in which Dunthorne explored every possible avenue, likely and unlikely, with painstaking thoroughness, only to return inevitably to the conviction that le Maitre was his man if only he could pin the crime on him.

One day le Maitre repeated his suggestion that the murder was the work of a foreign spy. In a sudden fit of pique—the Press had expressed some scathing opinions regarding police failure to track down a homicidal lunatic—Dunthorne answered him harshly:

“To the devil with your spies; you’ll be mistaking me for one next!”

He noticed that le Maitre looked at him strangely and for the rest of the day followed him like a shadow.

That night after he had gone to bed Dunthorne was awakened by a telephone call. The man who spoke was one of a police picket which had been keeping le Maitre under observation ever since the detective’s suspicions were first aroused.

The purport of his message was dramatic. Le Maitre had climbed out of a side window of his home, had pushed his car silently from the garage to a point about a hundred yards from the building, had then started the engine and driven off. A mobile police patrol car was following him at a discreet distance.

“Where the deuce can he be going at this time of night?” queried Dunthorne. It was past one o’clock in the morning.

He was soon to discover. Three-quarters of an hour later he was waiting in his sitting-room for further news when he heard a pane of glass break in the kitchen. Hurrying to the spot, he was in time to see le Maitre climbing in through the open window. He was carrying a heavy spanner and his eyes were blazing with maniacal fury.

Before he could fully enter the room he was seized from behind by the mobile police; but he fought desperately until he was finally overpowered.

His venom was clearly directed against Detective Inspector Dunthorne, and he made it quite clear that he had intended to kill him.

“Blasted spy!” he kept calling out. “Let me get at him! I’ll silence him! He won’t give away any information when I’ve done with him!”

But even such strong circumstantial evidence as his attack on the detective would not have been sufficient by itself to prove that he had murdered his wife. Fortunately for their case the police found on him, when he was searched, the large jack-knife with which he had cut out his victim’s tongue. Clots of blood round the hinge were compared with the blood of the dead woman and found to be in the same type, and it was this apparently minor item that decided the jury in their verdict.

Although nearly ten years had passed since le Maitre had received his sentence, the incidents which led up to it were still quite fresh in Dunthorne’s mind. He was particularly interested in reading in the report of the escape that the madman still regarded himself as being attached to the Secret Service.

“That delusion of his was an object lesson which I’ve never forgotten,” he confided to the Deputy Commissioner when they were discussing the affair. “It taught me that every remark of a possible suspect in a case, however trivial or irrelevant, is worth weighing carefully. Had I paid more attention to le Maitre’s original suggestion that his wife was killed by spies I should have nabbed him in half the time and saved myself a deal of worry and anxiety.”

The Deputy Commissioner flicked over the pages of the report.

“I suppose we can accept the story told by this fellow Francis Antony Grayling?” he inquired “He was in the Air Force, I see.”

Dunthorne shook his head.

“If you are wondering whether the break was prearranged with an aircraft conveniently handy to whisk the prisoner out of reach of pursuit, you can set your mind at rest. I’ve checked up on every detail, and there isn’t the slightest doubt that le Maitre did a bunk on the spur of the moment.”

“Well, that’s that, then,” said the Deputy Commissioner, and tossed the file into a basket. “I suppose the Broadmoor people have arranged to take him back as soon as he can be moved?”

“He’ll never be moved. The doctor tells me that the crack he got on the head has settled his hash. It can only be a question of time.”

“Hum! Well, he’s better off dead than a prisoner for life, in my opinion. Let me know——Yes, what is it?” he asked as a messenger entered the room.

“It’s a message for Chief Inspector Dunthorne, sir.”

Dunthorne glanced at the flimsy and tossed it across the desk.

Le Maitre died this afternoon, it read.

“That’s the end of the tongue murder case,” commented Dunthorne shortly.

But before many months had passed he was constrained to wonder whether it was only the beginning.