Читать книгу Suicide Excepted - Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark - Страница 4
ОглавлениеMonday, August 14th
Hotels in England, however bad, seldom go very far wrong with breakfast, and Mallett, fortified by a good night’s rest, for which, perhaps, he owed more to the admirable brandy of the previous evening than to the somewhat stony comfort of his bed, attacked his imported eggs and bacon next morning with his usual appetite. As he did so, his mind reverted more than once to his curious encounter with Mr. Dickinson. A garrulous, peevish old man, he reflected, with a bee in his bonnet about the hotel, and probably, if one could have got him to talk on any other subject, about everything else as well. If his conversation ran on the same gloomy lines at home, it was not very surprising that his family didn’t altogether love him. At the same time, Mallett could not but feel a certain sympathy for him. He gave the impression of a man unjustly treated by fate. It seemed wrong for any one to be so depressed as to have to confide in a chance acquaintance in the way that he had done. And when the confidence amounted almost to a threat of suicide ... ! He shrugged his shoulders. People who contemplated such things didn’t confide their intentions, whether to chance acquaintances or to anybody else, he told himself. But at the same time, he could not altogether rid his mind of a persistent feeling of uneasiness with regard to Mr. Dickinson. The man seemed in some way haunted. Mallett’s whole training rendered him averse from relying on, or even recognizing, any suspicion that was not founded on tangible facts. Nevertheless, he had to admit to himself that his companion of the night before had left him in a vaguely disturbed frame of mind. He seemed to carry an aura of calamity about him. And Mallett, who was hardened enough to calamities of all kinds, did not like auras.
As he finished his meal, the inspector glanced round the room. The hotel was evidently not very full, for only a bare half-dozen of the tables were occupied. He looked round for Mr. Dickinson, and looked in vain. For an instant the ominous “Perhaps!” on which they had parted flashed into his mind. Then his common sense reasserted itself. The old gentleman was having his breakfast in bed, most probably—at his age he was quite entitled to it, particularly at the end of a strenuous walking tour. In any case, it was none of his business. There would be plenty of genuine problems awaiting his solution at New Scotland Yard that afternoon.
Some five minutes later, he was walking across the lounge to the reception desk with the intention of paying his bill, when he saw a white-faced chambermaid hurry down the stairs and run to the desk in front of him. There was a hasty colloquy between her and the girl clerk. The latter spoke into the house telephone, and after a few moments, during which the maid hung miserably about the lounge, looking sadly out of place (which indeed she was, at that time of the morning), the manager, swart, flabby, and irascible, came on the scene. He had a few angry words with the girl, who seemed on the verge of tears, and the pair of them disappeared up the stairs together. The clerk applied herself to the telephone, and seemed to be speaking with some urgency.
When she had finished, Mallett asked for his bill. It was some time in being prepared. The clerk seemed preoccupied and nervous. Obviously, something was not as it should be in the hotel, and once again the inspector felt an unreasoning qualm at the pit of his stomach. Once again, he told himself that whatever it was it did not concern him. Accordingly, without comment or inquiry, he settled his account, asked the hall porter (whom he found, quite irregularly, gossiping with someone from the kitchen regions) to fetch his bag down from his room, and went out to the garage for his car.
When he drove round to the front door to pick up his bag, there were two cars there that had not been there before. From the second of these, as Mallett drew up, there alighted a man in uniform. He turned to say something over his shoulder to another who was following him, looked up, and his eyes met the inspector’s. Recognition was mutual. The man in uniform was the sergeant of police in charge at the local market town. Mallett had met him a year or two before in connexion with some inquiries which had resulted in the conviction of an important “fence,” specializing in the produce of country-house burglaries. He had liked the man at the time, but just now, as he smiled and nodded, he could have wished him in Jericho.
“Mr. Mallett!” exclaimed the sergeant, coming across to him. “This is a coincidence, and no mistake! Are you here on business, sir?”
“I am here on holiday,” said the inspector, firmly. “That is, I was here. Just now I’m on my way back to London.”
The sergeant looked disappointed.
“Pity,” he said. “It would have been a comfort to have you around, sir, just in case there did turn out to be anything in this job. Not that there ever is, in this part of the world.”
“And even if there was, Sergeant,” returned Mallett, “I am on holiday, and so remain until I report at the Yard at three o’clock this afternoon.”
“Quite so, sir. Well, I’m very glad to have seen you again, sir, in any case. I must go and attend to my business now. It’ll be quite a sensation in the neighbourhood, I expect, seeing that it’s old Mr. Dickinson.”
“Oh, it is Mr. Dickinson, is it?” exclaimed the inspector, taken off his guard for once.
The sergeant paused, one foot on the doorstep of the hotel, and looked at him with renewed interest.
“So you knew Mr. Dickinson, sir?” he said.
“I met him last night for the first time in my life. What has happened to him?”
“Found dead in bed this morning. An overdose of something or other, so far as I can understand. The doctor’s up there now.”
“Poor chap!” said Mallett. Then, conscious of the sergeant’s curious gaze upon him, he added: “Look here, Sergeant, I had rather a curious talk with Mr. Dickinson last night. There’s just a possibility I might be a useful witness at the inquest. I’d better give you a statement before I go, and meanwhile—do you mind very much if I come upstairs with you, purely as a witness, mind?”
Leonard Dickinson’s room was at the end of the long corridor which ran the length of the hotel’s first floor. Facing south and east, it was now flooded with the mellow August sun. On the large, old-fashioned bed lay the body, the angularities of the wizened features softened in death, the lines of anxiety smoothed away. Mallett, looking down on the still countenance, reflected that he looked happier now than he had in life. The last line had been traced on the map, and the end was where he had desired.
The map, appropriately enough, lay on the table beside the bed, open at the section where the Hall marked the centre of the spider’s web of tracks. Also on the table, he observed, was a bottle of small white tablets, and another, similar bottle, which was empty.
The doctor was just putting away his instruments when they entered. He was young, brisk, and cocksure.
“Overdose of a sedative drug,” he remarked. “I suppose you’ll have to have those things analysed.” He nodded at the table. “But I can tell you what’s in them.” He muttered some scientific polysyllables and added: “Analyse him, too; you’ll find he’s full of it. It’s apt to be a bit dangerous, that kind of stuff. You take your dose—it doesn’t work properly—you wake up in the night, feeling a bit stupid—think, Good Lord, I never took my dose—take another—wake up again perhaps, if you’ve had a drink too much—take two or three more for luck, and you’re in a coma before you know anything about it. Easy as winking.”
Something white protruding from beneath the map caught the sergeant’s eye. It was a small card, bearing on it some writing in a firm, clear hand. Without speaking, he drew it out, read it, and held it up for Mallett to see.
The words were: We are in the power of no calamity, while Death is in our own.
Mallett nodded silently. After the doctor had gone, he said, “That’s why I thought I might be wanted as a witness.”
He glanced round the room, and then, reminding himself that this was not his case, left the sergeant to carry on until he was free to take a statement from him in due form.
When the time came for this, the sergeant, who could not bring himself to forego the rare opportunity of cross examining so great a man, had a few supplementary questions to ask. Mallett answered them good-humouredly enough. Having seen the statement completed to the other’s satisfaction, he had a question of his own to ask.
“I don’t want to waste your time, Sergeant,” he said, “but I can’t help being a bit interested in old Mr. Dickinson. He seemed rather an odd fish, to judge by the little I saw of him.”
“He was, and all that,” the other agreed heartily.
“I wish you could tell me a little about him. He said something to me last night about having been born in this place.”
“You didn’t mention that in your statement,” said the sergeant severely.
“I’m afraid not. I thought it was hardly relevant.”
“Well, perhaps it wasn’t. In any case, sir, we hardly needed your evidence for that. It’s what you might call common knowledge in these parts.”
“He was a well-known character, then?”
“Lord bless you, yes, sir! You see, the Dickinsons had this place ever since it was built, and that was near on two hundred years ago, they say.”
“But they got rid of it some time ago, surely?”
“Thirty years ago come Michaelmas—when old Mr. Dickinson died, that was.”
Mallett laughed.
“I see that memories are long in the country,” he said.
“’Tisn’t that exactly, sir,” the sergeant explained. “Mr. Leonard—the deceased, I suppose I should call him—he couldn’t bear to leave the house. He’s been here and hereabouts off and on ever since. Quite potty about the place, he was.”
“So I gathered from what he said to me.”
“Funny, wasn’t it, sir? None of the rest of the family felt that way about it. Mr. Arthur—that was his brother—made a pile of money in London and could have bought the old place back several times over, but he never bothered to. But Mr. Leonard, for all he had a wife and family of his own, couldn’t keep away from it. Well,” the sergeant concluded pointedly, “I mustn’t keep you any longer, sir.”
It was not often that Inspector Mallett had to be reminded that he was wasting his own time or anybody else’s. He was quite ashamed to discover how interested he had allowed himself to become in what was, on the face of it, the commonplace suicide of a commonplace, if eccentric, elderly gentleman. He pulled himself together, thanked the sergeant for his kindness, and left the hotel. Then he turned his car in the direction of London, and put the tragedy of poor Mr. Dickinson firmly out of his mind.
