Читать книгу The Private Eye - Ernest Dudley - Страница 7

THE THREATENING LETTER

The man next to Craig smacked his lips, put down his half-empty glass, and said across the bar counter:

“Single-’anded today, Boss?”

The landlord of the Rotunda Arms nodded. He wiped his moist brow with a tattooed, muscular forearm and smiled.

“Yes, it’s Eddie’s afternoon off. He’ll be back this evening, though.”

The other chuckled. He winked knowingly.

“Taking one of his blondes to the pictures, eh?”

“Shouldn’t wonder. A lad for the girls is Eddie.… Same again, Mr. Craig?”

Craig slid his glass over and glanced round the crowded bar.

Most of the customers were enjoying a quick one before hurrying across to the Rotunda Theatre where the matinée was due to start in a few minutes.

The landlord fixed Craig’s drink and answered further inquiries coming across the bar after the absent Eddie. It seemed the young barman, with his ready cockney wit, taste in startling tie-pins, and inevitable cigarette, was something of a favourite with the habitués of the little Shaftesbury Avenue pub.

Craig lit a cigarette, then glanced at his watch.

As the result of her phoning him that morning, he was due to look in presently on Sarah Lane.

He’d read about the anonymous threat to kidnap the blonde, pulchritudinous Sarah Lane before she’d phoned him. He’d put it down to a bright idea thought up by her over-enthusiastic, if not altogether original-minded press agent.

When she told him it wasn’t any publicity stunt, she’d had the letter all right, he’d told her maybe wasn’t it merely some harmless crank, with inhibitions the way cranks have, loosing off a little steam?

She’d said to him, her voice cool in his ear over the wire:

“You could be right, Mr. Craig. All the same, I’m taking it seriously. The idea of someone, cranky or not, trying any funny business has practically no allure for me. Come and see me during my matinée this afternoon.”

Craig still didn’t think it was the sort of business he wanted any part of. Actresses were not his favourite type of client—tricky to work for, he’d usually found them, un-business like and unreliable.

“Why don’t you get Scotland Yard in?”

“One thing I don’t want is police fussing around. I’m told you’re a good private detective, Mr. Craig, and I think you could settle this quietly without any trouble.”

Maybe this time it would be different, Craig thought. Besides, he hadn’t been entirely unsusceptible to the flattering intonation in her delightfully husky voice. Added to which, she was a star all right, and should be okay from the money angle, and he liked to eat.

He knocked back his drink and went out, the landlord calling after him: “So long, Mr. Craig,” for he was not entirely unknown in those parts.

A minute later he was leaning through the cubbyhole inside the Rotunda stage door. The doorkeeper looked up from the racing news and regarded him aggressively over his steel-rimmed spectacles.

“Well, if you’ve got an appointment with ’er, you’ve got an appointment with ’er,” he muttered.

“What’s on your mind, Fred?” Craig asked.

“Things is a bit ’umpty,” the other grumbled through his soup-strainer moustache. “Miss Lane’s only just come in, which means she’ll be late, and besides.…”

“This kidnapping threat?” Craig suggested.

The other snorted.

“It isn’t that. It’s—well—” He lowered his voice confidentially: “It’s her carrying on with Mr. Barry, and his wife in the show, too. Oh, Miss Lane don’t mean no ’arm, but with Mrs. Barry being the jealous kind.… Anyway, I’ll tell her you’re here.”

He lifted the internal telephone off its hook. After a few moments Fred replaced the receiver, shaking his head.

“’S funny,” he muttered. “She should be there.”

Grumbling, he shuffled off, beckoning Craig to follow him.

They went through double doors and across the back of the stage. The orchestra was tuning up, stagehands padded around in last-minute tidying-up before the curtain went up. They made their way through the gloom that was cut by blindingly glaring beams of light from the lamps round the stage.

As they reached the door on the opposite side of the stage, a large, distraught woman burst out on them.

“Police—! Quick, the police—”

“Wot’s up, Mrs. Abbott?” Fred demanded.

“Miss Lane—! Miss Lane, she’s unconscious! She’s been attacked—!” the woman gulped.

“Cripes!” observed Fred inelegantly and turned to Craig. “Looks like a job for you, Mr. Craig,” and hurried after Mrs. Abbott.

As they gained the dressing room, Craig noticed something glittering up at him just outside the door. He made a quick movement and slipped it into his pocket.

* * * *

It was the same evening. Place, the Rotunda Arms:

The man next to Craig set down his beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and turned from his evening paper carrying the story of the Rotunda robbery.

“Wot I says is,” he declared, “wot does she want with all that jewellery? Fair asking to ’ave it pinched, I reckon.”

Craig regarded him thoughtfully and nodded, then glanced again at Eddie. The young barman caught his eye and came from the other end of the bar, grinning at him perkily.

“Same again, Mr. Craig?”

The man was burbling in Craig’s ear:

“Lucky she didn’t get herself done in. I see she was ’alf strangled, but she come round all right. Who d’you think knocked off ’er sparklers?”

He stopped talking to look at Craig expectantly.

“Yes, Mr. Craig,” Eddie said, handing him his drink. “Who did?”

Craig smiled back at him genially.

A little later found him once more leaning casually through the cubby-hole of the Rotunda stage door.

“Perlice don’t seem to have no clue, Mr. Craig,” Fred told him gloomily. “Only thing is, it must have been someone in the theatre. Who else could it have been? No one who I don’t know come through here this afternoon—”

“How about when you took me along to the dressing room?”

“Perlice asks me that, but you remember I left you when you went in with her dresser—Mrs. Abbott—and got back here to find the call-boy keeping my chair warm for me. He hadn’t let any strangers through. And even if he had, ’ow could they have got out—without me seeing ’em?”

Craig gave him a bleak stare and a little later took his unhurried departure.

Big Ben boomed midnight as, in answer to his ring, the woman opened the door. She regarded him with some suspicion. Then, when he told her who he had called to see, just for a little chat, she said:

“He’s only just come in.”

She held the door wider for him.

“Thanks,” and he followed her along the dingy hall.

“Visitor for you…,” she called, and he went in, closing the door behind him.

“What d’you want?”

Craig took something out of his pocket and threw it on the table between them.

“Found it outside her dressing room this afternoon,” he said through a puff of cigarette smoke.

“It don’t prove a thing. I could have lost it there last night, or—”

“If you had, the cleaners would have swept it up before the matinée.”

The other started to say something, then broke off, inarticulate.

Craig paused to survey the tip of his cigarette. “I didn’t connect it with you first time,” he murmured unhurriedly. “Then, you see, Fred was dead sure no stranger had gone in or out of the stage door at the time of the robbery and the penny dropped. You wouldn’t be a stranger to him. He was used to you going in and out with drinks. He never thought of you. That’s what you counted on, just as you counted on that crank’s threatening letter putting them off your track. And of course, Fred wasn’t to know it was your afternoon off.” He indicated the imitation bit of jewellery that winked up at them. “Tonight, it wasn’t in your tie.…”

There was silence in the room.

Craig’s voice was almost gentle.

“Well, Eddie?” All his perkiness gone, Eddie fingered the place where his tiepin had been.

“All right,” he said, suddenly caving in. “I’ll give myself up. I got the stuff here.…”

They went along together.