Читать книгу Chief Inspector Pointer's Cases - 12 Golden Age Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding - Страница 45

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POINTER got through to the stockbroker over the telephone. He told the answering clerk that he—Mr. Wright, the name had been agreed on with Tangye, wanted to speak to Tangye at once. Tangye promptly suggested that Wright should come on to see him in about two hours' time. Until then, every minute was already engaged.

Pointer agreed, and put in some hours, hard work at his own rooms in the Yard, wading through the papers waiting for him. Among them were reports on the purchasers of Lux cameras. In all England, only three of them had been sold from any known photographic dealers during the last six months. And all to men. One had been in the Haymarket to a man identified from his portrait at once by manager and salesman as Tangye. That had been close on a fortnight before his wife's death. One had been in Exmouth, and had been bought by a deeply bronzed, very big, youngish man, who looked as though he had lived an uncommonly hard life. One had been sold in Folkestone, only last Monday morning as soon as the shop opened. In this case the buyer had, by chance, been recognized by the salesman as Professor Orison, guest of honour of the local P.S.A. the evening before.

Like the other two, Professor Orison had carried the camera away with him.

So it was a Lux that Tangye had bought. What had become of it? Pointer had already sent a man down with careful instructions to Norfolk, to the house where Tangye had week-ended. He had learnt that the stockbroker had only been absent from the shooting-party from early on Sunday till the evening.

He knew too, that Tangye had arrived at North Walsingham with a camera, because the railway porter had identified his portrait as that of one of Mr. Riddell's guests who had brought one with him on his arrival on Saturday, and refused to let him, the porter, carry it even as far as the car. When the same man left for town, Monday noon, he had no camera with him. A footman at the house, too, was quite sure that Mr. Tangye had left on Sunday morning with his camera in the car beside him, and had not brought it back on his return in the late afternoon. He said that Tangye had spoken as though he intended making a present of it to a lady, and was only testing it first, he supposed that the stockbroker had done so on the Sunday.

Detective Inspector Watts represented himself as sent from the photographic dealers to whom Tangye had complained of a faulty lens. They maintained that the camera must have had a bad fall after it left their hands, and he, Watts, wanted to trace the camera's movements very carefully. Pointer sat a moment gazing across the river running beneath his windows.

That youngish, sunburnt-looking man at Exmouth—Vaguely the description would have passed for Oliver Headly—supposing Oliver to be alive. He took up his pen. It seemed a hopeless quest, but instructions were sent to the Exmouth constabulary to do their best. They were furnished with portraits of the man as he had been twenty years ago. The photographs from Fez were no good here, for that man had undoubtedly been stood against a wall by a firing-party. Then came the last of the three purchasers—Professor Orison.

Pointer had heard of him as one of the smart lads of the moment. A lecturer in duchesses' drawing-rooms on the Power of the Mind. For all that his erudition, like his degree, was laughed at by scholars.

Pointer had seen him a couple of times. At a royal garden party. At a ducal wedding. Orison was a striking figure. Thin, elderly, bent, with a face like a wrinkled glove in which burned two dark, keen eyes beneath tufted white brows. He claimed to be of noble Polish descent on his mother's side, and wore a long drooping Polish moustache, and a Paderewski-like mop of fine silvery hair. He even spoke with a Polish accent.

Pointer turned to Who's Who, and learnt that Drummond Orison, Ph.D. of Palmyra, U.S.A., the son of a physician, had been born in Brussels some seventy years ago. That he had travelled a great deal, especially in the East. That he had, never married. That he now lived in Hampstead, and that his recreations were "Thinking and butterfly catching." That his publications included two volumes on "The Quantum Theory as applied to Mind," and other books of a like ilk. All of them fairly recent publications.

To any one but Pointer it would have seemed a blameless record. Even a Lux camera might have passed as innocent in such hands, but the Professor had bought it last Monday, and in Folkstone—Folkestone, the end of the railway line on which Tunbridge Wells lies!

Pointer marked his report with a sign that meant that the thinker's home was to be the object of special, but very discreet attention by the policemen who passed it, and that the passing of it should be included in their programme as often as possible.

He added in his neat legible writing that the Folkestone salesman should be skilfully tapped for possible further details of last Sunday evening. Then he wrote out some instructions for his own C.I.D. and wound up by cabling to his confreres in Brussels for particulars of Orison's life while there.

Pointer's man had already learnt that the Professor had apparently spent last Sunday afternoon travelling to Folkestone, and Monday and Tuesday in his study at Hampstead.

All seemed quite as it should be, bar that untimely purchase of a camera. But Pointer took no one at his face value. Or at least very few people.

It was now high time to drive off for Tangye's office. Pointer was shown in at once. Tangye met him with some impatience.

"Some important development, I suppose? Since you've asked me to lose a week-end in town."

"The case is developing," Pointer assured him a little grimly, "but do you think it's quite fair to your old clerk to let him in for perjury? For a criminal prosecution? We have a very reliable witness who saw you during five to six last Tuesday—not here in your office."

"Impossible!" Tangye said fiercely, "a damned lie!"

"What was in that package, sir, that you were seen carrying out of the tradesmen's gate at Riverview about half-past five?"

Tangye seemed to shrink into his clothes. His knuckles whitened as he gripped the edge of the writing-table.

"I tell you I wasn't near the place," he began to bluster. "Mistaken identity!"

"Independent witnesses," Pointer bluffed back.

Tangye rose, and Pointer had to take his leave; to find Haviland waiting for him in his room at the Yard. The Superintendent had had a chat with Mrs. Bligh's maid. Tangye had brought the camera in question with him when he came to lunch at Tunbridge on Sunday. The maid explained that her mistress then expected to be invited on a certain yachting cruise to Egypt, and since her hostessto-be was a keen photographer, she had asked Tangye to buy her the best camera for temples and indoor work, and to show her how to use it.

"But she either lost it, or it didn't please her, or something. Anyway, she didn't have it with her when she came home. Nor he neither. I know, for I went out to the car. There wasn't any camera in it," the maid explained.

In the course of further conversation she let it drop that at the best of times Mrs. Bligh was not a lady who permitted questions, and that since she had not received the invitation in question, it would be as much as the maid's life was worth to speak of photography in any form.

Pointer had already had a private note issued to all photographic dealers, second-hand shops, and even to all dustmen in town, asking them to watch out for a large box-camera which might have been left for repairs, or been thrown out, broken up. So far nothing had resulted. He had not thought that it would.

What had become of Tangye's—or Mrs. Bligh'scamera? Duly entering its absence in his notes of the case, he turned to some other work, but within an hour there came another message over the 'phone from the stockbroker. Would Pointer make it convenient to see him again at his office?

It was a very chastened Tangye who was speaking.

Pointer dropped everything and hurried into the city. Tangye shook hands almost eagerly.

"So glad I could catch you. I wanted to see you again at once. I want to—er—modify—er—In fact, I've a damned unpleasant statement to make." He spoke as though it were the fault of the detective-officer, then he got himself in hand again. "It's about my alibi. There's no use trying to throw dust in your eyes, I find."

Pointer thought that bricks rather than dust had been used, but he only bowed.

"As a matter of fact," Tangye avoided Pointer's placid gaze, "I spent part of those two hours which interest you so much with Miss Saunders, in the Old Deer Park."

Tangye went on to tell of an appeal to him on Tuesday from his wife's companion after she had received notice to leave Riverview at once. They had met in the Park, talked it over until at half-past five, he had driven back to his office to see what could be done.

"Miss Saunders, of course, will bear out every word of this," he finished.

"Of course," Pointer echoed politely.

Tangye shot him a glance, but the Chief Inspector took his leave without further comment. He was due in the Assistant Commissioner's room.

Pointer and his superiors at New Scotland Yard did not see eye to eye about Mrs. Tangye's death. The Assistant Commissioner agreed with Wilmot that only a very active fancy could find a crime in it. Barbara Ash's little story gave Captain Pelham food for thought, however, and he sat awhile digesting it.

"Looks as though you were going to be right once again, Pointer, in that it was a murder, but mistaken in your theory of how it happened."

"I don't think that's possible," Pointer was never conceited, but he spoke very firmly. "In many cases, my theory might be wrong or right, and yet the case would stand. But not here. Either Mrs. Tangye was murdered as I imagine, or she wasn't murdered at all. It's that cousin of her's, Oliver, that complicates all the reasoning."

"You mean that if he dove-tailed with the murderer by chance, or intention, your idea of an appointment in the Riverview morning-room loses all its force? That's one of the things I want to talk to you about.

"We've had a private report from a man whom, even to you, I can only call Captain X. He's been doing some secret service work in Morocco. Personally, from what he told me, I haven't the shadow of a doubt that the Olivier whom the French shot was Oliver Headly. In in any case, Oliver was a doomed man from the time the French and Spaniards joined forces. He knew too much. And he knew it too accurately. When they caught him, he got a note through to Captain X, giving him some very important information. Unfortunately he had clearly sent a. previous note which never reached its billet. The Riffs caught the carrier, X thinks. In this second note he winds up with 'Don't forget the message to my cousin.' He signs his note, as he always did, merely with a circle. X says he met Olivier and is absolutely sure that he was an Englishman, a man of education, a bad hat, and a plucky devil. His age he puts at the age Headly would be now, and he once saw a book in his possession with the initials O. H. inside it. I think all this rules Mrs. Tangye's cousin out. Of course there's just a chance that he wasn't Olivier, and therefore, may still be alive, but I think it's hardly worth considering. Meanwhile, there's another point.

"Vardon's uncle, he's an M.P. for God knows where, has been writing to us," Pelham went on pensively. He was a long, loose-limbed, clever-looking man "A nasty note. Wants to know if we are armed with lettres de cachet, and threatens to set the press on to asking if Habeas Corpus is dead or not. We've got to let Vardon go. Or arrest him. That's an order from on high. Now, what shall it be?"

Pointer had expected this.

"Very good, sir. Vardon shall be told at once that he can go where he likes. Fortunately where he likes will be Patagonia."

"I'm glad that's your idea of good fortune. I suppose you chatter Patagonian too, like a native, and will be off there before we know where you are?"

Pointer laughed.

"No, sir, I'm not interested in Patagonia—so far. What I mean is that he'll be practically under observation all the time. I shall tell him that we have no objection to his leaving, and ask the captain of whatever ship he chooses to keep an eye on him. If I may, I'll telephone the good news to him at once."

"So Oliver Headly, the cousin, is out of it. Well, as a matter of fact, he never was really in it," came from Haviland, as he and Wilmot lunched with Pointer.

"I'm not concerned with Oliver. He's beyond our powers to investigate or locate," Pointer agreed. "At any rate, Tangye doesn't fulfil the necessary conditions. Even without Miss Saunders' support of his latest alibi. I think he's merely a frightened man, though frightened for very good reasons."

"All the facts we've been able to discover, I still consider only accidental, not incidental—from the point of view of a crime," Wilmot mused, "but had there been a crime here, I should have thought Tangye—"

"Vardon, Mr. Wilmot!" Haviland struck in, "Vardon's in the very middle of things. The keys in his luggage. That will—"

"Ah, that will!" the newspaper man frowned thoughtfully, "that will!"

"That will suggests a new thought to me," Pointer said, after a moment's pause.

"A quarrel with her husband?" Wilmot finished.

"I don't call it the will of an angry woman," Pointer continued. "No, I think—I think—there's but one explanation that fits that will. Easily. And that is that Mrs. Tangye felt that Tangye had no right to the money."

"Forfeited it, in fact, by his treatment of her?" Haviland looked a little doubtful. Wilmot only waited.

"Suppose Mrs. Tangye had been married before she met Branscombe? Married secretly. Thought her husband dead. Say he was some one—possibly a criminal—of whom she was bitterly ashamed as soon as she had married him. There are three years of her life of which we have no record, you remember. Suppose she saw down at Tunbridge last Sunday, not Tangye and anybody, but this first husband, this only legal husband whom she had thought long dead and buried—I think, that would explain everything. And that alone.

"Tangye is away Sunday. She sees to it that he's away Monday as well. He may have been speaking the truth when he tells us that that quarrel had a forced, theatrical air. She may have snatched at the pretext afforded her by his having been down at the show, just as she would have jumped at any other excuse. Her one thought, if my idea is correct, would be to get the man out of the house who isn't her husband, who never was her husband, and have a reasonable motive in the eyes of her circle, for leaving him. By the same argument, Branscombe's money reverts to his heir. She halves the sale of the farm, her only loose money, and calls in the sum invested in Tangye's firm which I think she intended to halve too."

There was a silence as he finished.

"You think that Vardon was really her husband!" Haviland ejaculated under his breath.

"Where does this lead to—?" Wilmot asked slowly, "I don't see—?"

"Vardon. That's where it leads to, Mr. Wilmot, and that's a fact."

"Vardon?" Pointer spoke meditatively—. "Maybe, but at any rate it leads, apparently, directly away from Tangye. At any rate I shall work from along a different line, and we shall see where we fetch up. Of course, it's a mere guess. But it's a guess that might account for Mrs. Tangye's wish not to have her visitor come to the front door. She would naturally be nervous about any one seeing the man who was really her husband—and, if I'm right, her only husband. It was a position which would make any woman get rattled."

"But why should he kill her?" asked Wilmot, perplexity in his voice, "this is all very interesting, very exciting even, but where does it lead to? Why the deuce should he kill her? She, him—yes. But there's no sense in his doing away with her!"

"Suppose he were a convicted felon? A sentence still hanging over him? Or, married? Has a family? Or on the eve of another marriage? He, too, may have believed her dead. Since he seems to've made no effort to come across her before. There might be reasons, many reasons, which would fit in here."

"Vardon fits in, right enough in fact," Haviland murmured. "He's in love with that pretty Miss Ash."

"Would fit! Might be reasons!" Wilmot shook his head. "Pointer, your suspicion is like the sun which only circles, but never sets."

"Still, it would fit the facts," Haviland said with enthusiasm, "and—"

"You mean it fits Vardon," Wilmot retorted tartly. "I think we're only getting more and more at sea. You're going too far and too fast, Pointer, when you take to inventing a third husband for that poor lady, or rather only one."

Pointer merely nodded a pleasant good-bye as he hurried off. Three years of Mrs. Tangye's life were unexplored. The years from twenty to twenty-three. Her father was dead by that time. She had gone away with a relative of her mother's, a highly respectable lady, who had died two years before Miss Headly reappeared to teach in a high school in town. She had always been a poor correspondent. Her friends had believed that she had meanwhile been somewhere in the north of England. The Headmistress of the school in London thought that she had gone as governess to some family connection, but as she knew Mable Headly of old, she had not looked the matter up.

It was quite possible that those three years would not explain the mystery, but Pointer could see no other chance of clearing it up. But how to get on the track of them? He had been trying in vain all this week to get into touch with any one who could supply him with a clue, a jumping-off board. None had been found. Possibly there was no mystery. If so, this last effort, too, would end in vague ripples. If the guilty man were Vardon, the investigations would come back to the artist. Slowly possibly, but surely. Those footsteps that stopped in the garden last Tuesday...

They still were on the wrong side of the circle which, as he reminded Wilmot, had two sides. Would they resist his efforts much longer to trace the person to whom they belonged?

It was barely possible, of course, that Mable Headly had got actively entangled with criminals, not merely by a hypothetical marriage to one. She might have dipped down into the underworld herself. But a criminal for three years, and before, and after, those years never to fall below the line of highest respectability? Pointer had never come across such a case, for Mrs. Tangye had not struck any one as a two-sided woman. All that Pointer could learn of her was of a piece.

What did fit his theory, was what he had heard about her throwing a halo over the past. Over what she had lost.

Pointer thought this explained her actions when, or if, she had met a first husband whom she had supposed dead, last Sunday. Suppose that husband in need of money? Suppose he had ingratiated himself with her? Suppose he had talked of starting life again together? Mrs. Tangye had shown herself a woman very easily affected by men. Mrs. Tangye collects her papers bearing on her money affairs, gives away her clothes which would only remind her of what must shock her deeply—life with a man to whom she finds she is not married. That letter to Miss Eden becomes intelligible under this light. After receiving this rediscovered husband on Monday, they arrange that on Tuesday she shall leave Riverview, either with him, or more likely far, after him. Pointer thought that she was obviously planning her escape from her old life to look like a separation from Tangye because of Tangye's flirtations. Pointer could imagine more than one reason why Mrs. Tangye to give her the name she bore, but which he had begun to think might not have been hers legally—should decide not to reveal the truth till later, if ever.

Seeing her husband's infatuation with Mrs. Bligh, Pointer thought that she was the type to have never told the real truth, to have never set free the man and woman she thought had deceived her. She had looked a very jealous woman to Pointer. He recalled Miss Eden's words about her being capable under provocation, of acting very unjustly.

Pointer's men had not been able to trace any marriage earlier than that to Branscombe. But she might have married abroad. Or even under another name. But the point was, how to get into touch with her past?

He went for one of his short, brisk, walks in the pouring rain that slanted down like silver threads sewing earth to heaven.

How to get into touch with that buried past of Mrs. Tangye's? With that unknown bit that extended from fifteen years ago, from the time when the late Lady Susan Dawlish, her mother's aunt, took her away on her father's death, till she reappeared in the London high school, three years later.

The last time he had seen Tangye in Riverview, the stockbroker had been taking down his wife's fishing-gear from the wall. Her basket had been a roomy, Welsh osier creel. How about the flies in an old book that Pointer had borrowed on his first visit to the den, a fly-book evidently home-made, bearing the initials M. H. on the coarse flannelette cover? He had taken it as an additional proof that Mrs. Tangye had really been left-handed in her girlhood, since it dated from then, so Tangye had told him, when he let him keep it temporarily.

They were not Scottish flies, that Pointer knew. Each locality has its own variants of the regular standbys, and these were different from those he had himself used in Scottish rivers. Apart from whence they came, they had told him several things.

They had been made by a left-handed person, and, though very neatly done, the cheapest materials alone had been used. And they were copies of cheap flies, too, so Pointer thought. Now, neither Over nor Nether Wallop lies by a river, yet these flies had seen much usage. They were salmon flies moreover, and such a complete set would hardly have been made for a mere visit to relations. Nor could Pointer trace any such visits, and he had tried hard. These flies therefore, he thought, might belong to that uncharted bit of Mable Headly's life.

Pointer drove to an angler's shop in Jermyn Street which he himself often patronised.

"Welsh flies these," the salesman said, pouring over the lot, "old-fashioned. Twenty years old, I should say, or copies of flies twenty years old. That's an Usk Canary. But whipped to a string of gut! Tut, tut! Home-made evidently. But neatly done. And neatly used too. You can always tell if they've been jerked. Hullo. That's one of Father William's old Parsons. He's given up those hackles years ago. But that's no copy."

"Sure? It may be important."

"Certain. If I found the Grand Lama using it in Thibet, I'd be certain."

"And who is Father William?"

"He's a character, that's what he is, sir. And the best rod south of the Tweed, amateur or pro. He never leaves the Usk. Not he! To see him cast a fly—oh, it's a beautiful sight! He's always out with his rod as soon as they take the nets off. Began life as a gillie. Used to sell his flies to the gentlemen who employed him, and so started in the business. Those Durham Rangers and Jock Scotts over there are his work. They look a bit light, but Lord, they make the right ripples. And that's the whole secret, ain't it, sir? It's not so much the fly you use, though that counts, of course, it's the way he 'lights. But it takes Father William to get the right kick out of 'em. He has a way!"

Pointer asked for the address of this pattern.

"William Morgan is his name. His cottage is Ty-Cerrigliwydian. It's just outside the town of Usk. But you'll never find him there, sir. He's out fishing all day, and at the Inn of an evening. He loves to talk, does Father William. Age? Getting on for seventy, I should say, and good for another seventy again."

Usk? Now Usk is not far from Cardiff. And Pointer had just been reading that name in connection with the dead woman, though not a close connection. Remembering Tangye's and Sladen's words about Mrs. Tangye having told each of them that she had once had something to do with a bank that had failed, Pointer had had a list of all such failures in the last twenty years sent him. Her name had not figured among the depositors, but that meant little. There had been a big smash fourteen years ago in Cardiff.

And also—oddly enough about that time—he was very vague as to dates, said he never could be sure within a couple of years, Vardon claimed to have had his headquarters at Cardiff for some eighteen months while working partly on some local stage scenery, partly on sketches of the country around. His dates were so elastic, and his localities so vague, that Pointer again wondered whether this were accident or design. He had wrung a few names out of him finally, and turned them over to Watts of the C.I.D. to investigate.

Pointer drove first to New Scotland Yard, and arranged matters with the Assistant Commissioner. Then he dropped in to see Wilmot.

"I'm leaving the affair in Haviland's hands for a while," he explained.

"Who's he to lose this time?" Wilmot asked with great interest.

Pointer had to laugh.

"He can turn to you for advice if he gets hung up in too many facts, and the Yard'll throw cold water on any schemes, which are over-desperate with regard to Vardon. I want to be free to do a bit of routine work."

"In the wilds of Upper, or Nether Wallop?"

"Neither. I'm off to hobnob by the banks of the swift-flowing Usk with a gentleman yclept Father William."

"It sounds a pleasant change from the hurly-burly of town," Wilmot murmured enviously, "a big detectve has a tremendous pull over a newspaper man. We can't suddenly feel that our work demands a dash to the forests of Malay, or a fortnight in the best hotel of a smart winter resort. You can. You don't have to keep a list of the relations who've already died; nor check up your attacks of the flu. What's your excuse?"

Pointer told him. Wilmot was thoroughly interested, but expressed himself as very sceptical of any good results.

"Seems a blind alley to me."

"That's to find out. Merely as part of the regular routine it has to be tried."

"The Insurance Company has just sent me a little reminder that things seem to be hanging fire."

"Why not come along with me on your own? The nets are being left off the Usk a month late this year. Come and help me fish."

"Me! My dear chap, I shall prepare to receive you when you return in silence and tears, and I promise you here and voluntarily, to ask no questions, nor, except under severest provocation, to mention the word Wales in your presence for the next five years."

"That ought to suffice."

There was a ring on the telephone. It was from Watts. Was the Chief Inspector in Wilmot's rooms by chance? Pointer assured him that he was.

"I haven't been able to check up Vardon in Cardiff, sir. The address he gave you was pulled down some eight years ago. The company for which he claimed to've painted that scenery, failed about two years before that. None of the inns about remember him. I couldn't come on any trace of him at all."

Pointer turned away thoughtfully.