Читать книгу The Silk Stocking Murders - Anthony Berkeley, Anthony Berkeley - Страница 8

ROGER SHERINGHAM halted before the little box just inside the entrance of The Daily Courier’s enormous building behind Fleet Street. Its occupant, alert for unauthorised intruders endeavouring to slip past him, nodded kindly.

‘Only one for you this morning, sir,’ he said, and produced a letter.

With another nod, which he strove to make as condescending as the porter’s (and failed), Roger passed into the lift and was hoisted smoothly into the upper regions. The letter in his hand, he made his way through mazy, stone-floored passages into the dark little room set apart for his own use. Roger Sheringham, whose real business in life was that of a best-selling novelist, had stipulated when he consented to join The Daily Courier as criminological expert and purveyor of chattily-written articles on murder, upon a room of his own. He only used it twice a week, but he had carried his point. That is what comes of being a personal friend of an editor.

Bestowing his consciously dilapidated hat in a corner, he threw his newspaper on the desk and slit open the letter.

Roger always enjoyed this twice-weekly moment. In spite of his long acquaintance with them, ranging over nearly ten years, he was still able to experience a faint thrill on receiving letters from complete strangers. Praise of his work arriving out of the unknown delighted him; abuse filled him with combative joy. He always answered each one with individual care. It would have warmed the hearts of those of his correspondents who prefaced their letters with diffident apologies for addressing him (and nine out of ten of them did so), to see the welcome their efforts received. All authors are like this—and all authors are careful to tell their friends what a nuisance it is having to waste so much time in answering the letters of strangers, and how they wish people wouldn’t do it. All authors, in fact, are—But that is enough about authors.

It goes without saying that since he had joined The Daily Courier Roger’s weekly bag of strangers had increased very considerably. It was therefore not without a certain disappointment that he had received this solitary specimen from the porter’s hands this morning. A little resentful, he drew it from its envelope. As he read, his resentment disappeared. A little pucker appeared between his eyebrows. The letter was an unusual one, decidedly.

It ran as follows:

The Vicarage,

Little Mitcham, Dorset.

DEAR SIR,—You will, I hope, pardon my presumption in writing to you at all, but I trust that you will accept the excuse that my need is urgent. I have read your very interesting articles in The Daily Courier and, studying them between the lines, feel that you are a man who will not resent my present action, even though it may transfer a measure of responsibility to you which might seem irksome. I would have come up to London to see you in person, but that the expense of such a journey is, to one in my position, almost prohibitive.

Briefly, then, I am a widower, of eight years’ standing, with five daughters. The eldest, Anne, has taken upon her shoulders the duties of my dear wife, who died when Anne was sixteen; and she was, till ten months ago, ably seconded by the sister next to her in age, Janet. I need hardly explain to you that, on the stipend of a country parson, it has not been an easy task to feed, clothe and educate five growing girls. Janet, therefore, who, I may add, has always been considered the beauty of the family, decided ten months ago to seek her fortune elsewhere. We did our best to dissuade her, but she is a high-spirited girl and, having made up her mind, refused to alter it. She also pointed out that not only would there be one less mouth to feed, but, should she be able to obtain employment of even a moderately lucrative nature, she would be able to make a modest, but undoubtedly helpful, contribution towards the household expenses.

Janet did carry out her intention and left us, going, presumably, to London. I write ‘presumably’ because she refused most firmly to give us her address, saying that not until she was securely established in her new life, whatever that should be, would she allow us even to communicate with her, in case we might persuade her, in the event of her not meeting with initial success, to give up and come home again. She did however write to us occasionally herself, and the postmark was always London, though the postal district varied with almost every letter. From these letters we gathered that, though remaining confident and cheerful, she had not yet succeeded in obtaining a post of the kind she desired. She had, however, she told us, found employment sufficiently remunerative to allow her to keep herself in comparative comfort, though she never mentioned the precise nature of the work in which she was engaged.

She had been in the habit of writing to us about once a week or so, but six weeks ago her letters ceased and we have not heard a word from her since. It may be that there is no cause for alarm, but alarm I do feel nevertheless. Janet is an affectionate girl and a good daughter, and I cannot believe that, knowing the distress it would cause us, she would willingly have omitted to let us hear from her in this way. I cannot help feeling that either her letters have been going astray or else the poor girl has met with an accident of some sort.

My reasons, sir, for troubling you with all this are as follows. I am perhaps an old-fashioned man, but I do not care to approach the police in the matter and have Janet traced when probably there is no more the matter than an old man’s foolish fancies; and I am quite sure that, assuming these fancies to have no foundation, Janet would much resent the police poking their noses into her affairs. On the other hand, if there has been an accident, the fact is almost certain to be known at the offices of a paper such as The Daily Courier. I have therefore determined, after considerable reflection, to trespass upon your kindness, on which of course I have no claim at all, to the extent of asking you to make discreet enquiries of such of your colleagues as might be expected to know, and acquaint me with the result. In this way recourse to the police may still be avoided, and news given me of my poor girl without unpleasant publicity or officialism.

If you prefer to have nothing to do with my request, I beg of you to let me know and I will put the matter to the police at once. If, on the other hand, you are so kind as to humour an old man, any words of gratitude on my part become almost superfluous.—Yours truly,

A. E. MANNERS.

P.S.—I enclose a snapshot of Janet taken two years ago, the only one we have.

‘The poor old bird!’ Roger commented mentally, as he reached the end of this lengthy letter, written in a small, crabbed handwriting which was not too easy to decipher. ‘But I wonder whether he realises that there are about eight thousand accidents in the streets of London every twelve months? This is going to be a pretty difficult little job.’ He looked inside the envelope again and drew out the snapshot.

Amateur snapshots have a humorous name, but they are seldom really as bad as reputed. This one was a fair average specimen, and showed four girls sitting on a sea-shore, their ages apparently ranging from ten to something over twenty. Under one of them was written, in the same crabbed handwriting, the word ‘Janet’. Roger studied her. She was pretty, evidently, and in spite of the fact that her face was covered with a very cheerful smile, Roger thought that he could recognise her from the picture should he ever be fortunate enough to find her.

For as to whether he was going to look for her or not, there was no question. It had simply never occurred to Roger that he might, after all, not do so. Roger (whatever else he might be) was a man of quick sympathies, and that stilted letter through whose formal phrases tragedy peeped so plainly, had touched him more than a little. But for the fact that an article had to be written before lunch-time, he would have set about it that very moment, without the least idea of how he was going to prosecute the search.

As it was, however, circumstances prevented him from doing anything in the matter for another ninety minutes, and by that time his brain, working automatically as he wrote, had evolved a plan. He felt fairly certain that the girl was still in London, alive and flourishing, and had postponed writing home as the ties that bound her to Dorsetshire began to weaken; the old man’s anxiety was no doubt ill-founded, but that did not mean that it must not be relieved. Besides, the quest would prove a pretty little exercise for those sleuth-like powers which Roger was so sure he possessed. Nevertheless, unharmed and merely unfilial as he did not doubt the girl to be, it was easier to begin operations from the other end. If she had had an accident she would be considerably easier to trace than if she had not, and by establishing first the negative fact, Roger would be able the sooner to reassure the vicar. And as the only real clue he had was the snapshot, he had better start from that.

Instead, therefore, of betaking himself to Piccadilly Circus in the blithe confidence that Janet Manners, like everybody else in London, would be certain to come along there sooner or later, he ran up two more flights of stairs in the same building, and, the snapshot in his hand, sought out the photographic department of The Daily Courier’s illustrated sister, The Daily Picture.

‘Hullo, Ben,’ he greeted the serious, horn-bespectacled young man who presided over the studio and spent most of his days in photographing mannequins, who left him cold, in garments which left them cold. ‘I suppose you’ve never had a photograph through your hands of this girl, have you? The one marked Janet.’

The bespectacled one scrutinised the snapshot with close attention. Every photograph that appeared in The Daily Picture passed, at one time or another, through his hands, and his memory was prodigious. ‘She does look a bit familiar,’ he admitted.

‘She does, eh?’ Roger cried, suddenly apprehensive. ‘Good man. Rack your brains. I want her placed, badly.’

The other bent over the snapshot again. ‘Can’t you help me?’ he asked. ‘In what connection would I have come across her? Is she an actress, or a mannequin, or a titled beauty, or what?’

‘She’s not a titled beauty, I can tell you that; but she might have been either of the other two. I haven’t the faintest notion what she is.’

‘Why do you want to know if we’ve ever had a photograph of her through here, then?’

‘Oh, it’s just a personal matter,’ Roger said evasively. ‘Her people haven’t heard from her for a week or two and they’re beginning to think she’s been run over by a bus or something like that. You know how fussy the parents of that sort of girl are.’

The other shook his head and handed back the snapshot. ‘No, I’m sorry, but I can’t place her. I’m sure I’ve seen her face before, but you’re too vague. If you could tell me, now, that she had been run over by a bus, or had some other accident, or been something (anything to provide a peg for my memory to hang on) I might have been able to—wait a minute, though!’ He snatched the photograph back and studied it afresh. Roger looked on tensely.

‘I’ve got it!’ the bespectacled one proclaimed in triumph. ‘It was the word “accident” that gave me the clue. Have you ever noticed what a curious thing memory is, Sheringham? Present it with a blank surface, and it simply slides helplessly across it; but give it just the slightest little peg to grip on, and—’

‘Who is the girl?’ Roger interrupted.

The other blinked at him. ‘Oh, the girl. Yes. She was a chorus-girl in one of the big revues (I’m sorry, I forget which) and her name was Unity Something-or-other. She—good gracious, you really don’t know?’

Roger shook his head. ‘No. What?’

‘She was a friend of yours?’ the other persisted.

‘No, I’ve never met her in my life. Why?’

‘Well, you see, she hanged herself four or five weeks ago with her own stocking.’

Roger stared at him. ‘The deuce she did!’ he said blankly. ‘Hell!’

They looked at each other.

‘Look here,’ said the photographer, ‘I can’t be certain it’s the same girl, you know. Besides, this one seems to be called Janet. But I tell you what: there was a photo of Unity Something published in The Picture at the time, a professional one. You could look that up.’

‘Yes,’ said Roger, his thoughts on the letter he would have to write to Dorset if all this were true.

‘And now I come to think of it, I seem to remember something rather queer about the case. It was ordinary enough in most ways, but I believe they had some difficulty in identifying the girl. No relatives came forward, or something like that.’

‘Oh?’

‘The Picture didn’t pay much attention to it, beyond publishing her photo; rather out of our line, of course. But I expect The Courier had a report of the inquest. Anyhow, don’t take it for certain that I’m right; it’s quite possible that I’m not. Go down and look up the files.’

‘Yes,’ said Roger glumly, turning on his heel.

‘I will.’