Читать книгу The Magnificent Hoax - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 5

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The day after the indeterminate inquest upon the body of the unknown man found in Bunter’s Alley, Sergeant Sanders presented himself at the tenement house, mounted to the top floor but one, and knocked at Judy’s door. It was not until after his second effort that it was grudgingly opened and Judy, clad in a flaming negligee but looking exceedingly weary and dishevelled, gazed out upon her visitor. As soon as she recognised him she made a feeble effort to shut him out, a gesture which he gently but firmly resisted.

“Judy, my dear,” he said soothingly, “don’t be afraid of an old friend. We treated you all right at the inquest, didn’t we? I only want a word or two with you. You’re alone, I see.”

She opened the door a little wider.

“Yes, I’m alone,” she admitted, “and likely to be until I get over that horrible afternoon in your stuffy Court House. I can’t sleep at nights for thinking of it.”

“I’m not blaming you,” he declared. “It was a sight to turn up a strong man. However, they did their best. Our old coroner, he would have waited until you came to from your faint and had you in again. Dr. Grayson, he’s a gentleman, though.”

The sergeant was inside the room by now, with 23 its cheap bazaar-like ornamentations, its shabby pink bows and fans, its tawdry bed hangings. He looked doubtfully at the chairs and subsided onto the edge of the bed.

“What is it you want?” she asked.

He stroked his chin.

“Well, Judy,” he said, “this matter of identification still presents complications. The poor chap was unrecognisable all right, but what was left of his clothes seemed somehow too good for your friend, Mr. Loman, and besides that, these few little trinkets don’t look as though they belonged to a tenant of Bunker’s Buildings.”

He displayed a battered gold cigarette case, the crushed fragments of a briquet, a stained pocket-book—the material of which, however, was of fine morocco.

“Ever seen any of these before?” he asked, looking at her keenly.

She shook her head.

“Never,” she declared. “They might very well have been Mr. Loman’s, though. He was quite well dressed and looked as though he belonged to the West End the first day he came here.”

“That’s quite in accordance with our own information,” the sergeant agreed. “The coroner had the same idea when he adjourned the inquest. There’ll never be a definite verdict, so far as I can see. ‘Some person unknown.’ That’s how they’ll bury him and that’s what he is. Opens up an interesting question, though.”

“What question?” she demanded.

“The question of who Mr. Loman really was.”

She sat down on the bed by his side. She was nervously twisting and untwisting her hands.

“He was a queer chap anyway,” she admitted. “He was always fond of these sudden disappearances, although he had never been away so long as this time. As to throwing himself off that fire escape, I should never have dreamed that he would have the courage to do such a thing.”

“Someone else,” the visitor reflected, “might have thrown him off.”

He was sitting side by side with Judy and he could almost feel the little shivers that were going through her body. He dived into his pocket and produced a flask.

“Got two glasses and any water fit to drink?” he enquired.

She pointed to a shelf. He found two tumblers of coarse glass, washed them out with tap water and rescued a syphon from the floor.

“Quite a handy man at a picnic, aren’t you?” she observed, with an attempt at lightness. “There are some biscuits in that cupboard.”

He found them and placed the glass of whisky-and-soda in her hand.

“Judy,” he said, “there’s no one going to worry you about this job but you must buck up and help us so far as you can.”

“How can I help you?” she asked.

“Perhaps not at all,” the sergeant admitted soothingly. “However, we’ll see later on. The question we’re up against now is: Are those remains really the remains of Mr. Loman? If so, did he have a visitor that night, and where’s the telegram?”

She remained silent with her eyes fixed upon the opposite wall.

“Think hard,” he begged. “You’re sure you didn’t see a stranger about the place that evening?”

“Not a sign of one,” she declared.

“Or did you see anything more of the telegram?”

“I saw it when I unpinned it from the door,” she replied, “and that’s all. Mr. Loman fairly snatched it away from me. I never saw him open it, even. Wherever he is—in hell or wandering about the streets—he took it with him.”

Her visitor sighed heavily.

“I’m disappointed, Judy,” he confessed, taking a sip from his tumbler. “I thought he might have put his head in at the door to say good-bye to you and just beg you not to mention that he was going away. You see, it wouldn’t have seemed important to you then, so you would have promised all right, naturally. Now it’s become very important indeed.”

“Why should he say good-bye to me even if he were doing a flit?” she demanded. “He wasn’t one of my friends. He’s never been in this room in his 26 life. He was a poor skeleton of a fellow that I just took pity on that last day and helped up to his room. He’s never been anything to me, Mr. Sanders. Don’t you get any wrong ideas in your head.”

“I’m not harbouring any, of my own good will,” he assured her, “but I don’t see how it happens, Judy, that you—a strong young woman—have come to this broken-down state just because they asked you to identify some remains that oughtn’t to have been exhibited. Days ago it was, and here you are shivering and all, so to speak, on edge.”

“Perhaps I’ve been drinking too much,” she confessed doggedly. “We were all pretty gay, you know, at the Green Man that night. We went on board the boat after we left the pub—the whole crowd of us.”

He stroked his stubbly moustache.

“You sometimes make me a bit thoughtful, young lady,” he admitted. “You seem to go the whole hog with these fellows and yet every now and then there seems something about you entirely different.”

Judy was recovering herself.

“You do take notice, don’t you?” she remarked with a chuckle.

“That’s my job,” he answered. “You’ve never given us any trouble, Judy, and I’m not looking to bring any on you, but there’s a mystery about that man Loman, a mystery about the telegram, a mystery about the remains that were found smashed to 27 pulp down in the Alley. It’s our business to get at the bottom of these things.”

“Well, you generally find out what you want to.”

The sergeant rose to his feet. He shook the biscuit crumbs from his overcoat and replaced the flask in his pocket.

“We find out grains of truth now and then,” he acknowledged, “but we make some awful boggles sometimes. Of course, the Chief says my great fault is that I’m too credulous.”

“It doesn’t seem to me that you’re that way.”

“This case, for instance,” he went on. “I’ve got to take the whole of it on trust.”

“What do you mean?”

Sergeant Sanders passed his coat sleeve over his black Homburg hat. Judy slipped off the bed and stood by his side.

“Well,” he pointed out, “I have to believe you when you tell me that there was never anything between you and Loman and that he didn’t show you the contents of the telegram. I have to believe you when you tell me that you didn’t see him except for those few minutes when you helped him upstairs and you didn’t know that he was thinking of committing suicide, and your evidence in Court that you heard no sounds of a struggle on the top floor. . . . With all that believing, you see, I don’t get anywhere. That’s what being too credulous means. I have to try and find another loose end.”

She stretched herself lazily. There was something of the old colour in her cheeks and light in her eyes.

“Well,” she acknowledged, “that whisky has done me a great deal of good. I guess I shall go down and visit my friends at the Green Man as soon as it’s opening time. Shall I be seeing you there?”

He shook his head.

“You never can tell. I may stick around here or I may find myself working at the other end of the case.”

“What do you mean—the other end of the case?” she asked, with a suspicious gleam in her eyes.

“Miss Judy,” he explained, “the first thing a detective has to learn is that there are two ways of going to work about a job like this. You can start from what actually happened and go forward, or you can imagine what may have happened, work backwards on some of your ideas, and try and pick up a bit of the truth that way. Seems to me that’s what I’m driven to.”

“I wish you luck, Mr. Sanders,” she said.

He smiled, drew on a pair of worn dogskin gloves, forgot his manners so far as to cram his hat over his head, and opened the door. From the other side of the threshold he looked back.

“Before I say good-bye, Judy,” he ventured ingratiatingly, “you wouldn’t like to tell me, I suppose, what really happened to Mr. Loman? 29 No, I know you wouldn’t, so I shan’t ask you.”

He closed the door quickly. The boot she had thrown at him fell harmlessly against its panels. The sergeant went down the stone steps whistling softly to himself.