Читать книгу More Cases of a Private Eye: Classic Crime Stories - Ernest Dudley - Страница 5

THE REDHEAD MURDER

Babs Wilson had never had much of a break. Until she met Ken Morris. Not that he was much to look at, with his sparse black hair topping a sallow complexioned face and thin, stooping shoulders.

It was the stoop that added years to his age, though he was a good deal older than Babs for a start. Still, Ken had what it takes—money. It was a necessary item to Babs’s way of living, and if it meant taking Ken along with it, Babs could do that too.

“I like Ken,” she would protest to critical friends, smoothing back her long straight hair that flamed like fire. “And anyway, I’ve had to scrimp along on my own for long enough. I’m sick to hell of living in a one-eyed backroom in the Fulham Road.”

So, for a year, she had what she wanted.

She exchanged the backroom for a modern flat of her own and the Fulham Road for Mayfair. She had clothes to match the flat and jewellery to match the clothes, and Ken Morris was easy to manage.

She didn’t quite know when Ken first ceased to be so easy.

The change took place gradually, and she hardly noticed when he began taking her to less expensive restaurants. Then one day, he told her she would have to move to a less expensive neighbourhood.

Babs sat up then.

“But why, Ken?”’ she asked sulkily, wondering whether it would be worth while mussing up her make-up by trying to produce a tear or two. “Isn’t business good anymore?”

She had never had a very clear idea of what Ken’s business was. So long as the cash came rolling in, it was enough and she was not curious. Now, apparently, the cash wasn’t rolling. She began wondering about his suite of luxurious offices, ostensibly there for the comfort of his clients wishing for advice on the interior decoration of their homes.

“It’s Lucas,” he said morosely.

Babs remembered.

A few months ago he had taken a partner, and the firm had become Morris and Lucas. She had only met Lucas once, and then he had been bouncy and very ready to allow Ken to buy the drinks.

She asked:

“What’s the matter with him?”

He fidgeted and looked uncomfortable.

“He’s difficult,” he said evasively.

Babs hunched a slim shoulder and her flecked green eyes grew cold.

“Then get rid of him.”

Ken said miserably:

“I can’t. You don’t understand, Babs.”

Babs didn’t. She didn’t understand what had come over Ken at all. In his quiet, shifty way he had up till then always been so successful. But she was going to find out. She visited Lucas the following morning at a time when she knew Ken wouldn’t be there. Lucas wasn’t so shy about telling her one or two things in connection with the luxurious suite of offices that Ken had not thought necessary to impart to her.

“You mean,” Babs said incredulously, “all this is a cover-up for receiving stolen goods?”

Lucas smiled unpleasantly.

“Just that.”

“And Ken doesn’t know a thing about interior decorating?”

Lucas shrugged.

“Not very much, my dear.”

Babs was quiet for a bit, and she didn’t register a thing.

But Lucas, watching her, knew that she was doing some pretty rapid thinking. At last she said shrewdly:

“What do you get out of this?”

Lucas was still smiling as he spread out his hands.

“Half the profits, naturally.”

“And?”

“I don’t understand you. Ken and I are very good friends—”

Babs thought back. It was ever since Lucas had become a partner that her profits had ceased to be so profitable.

“You’re blackmailing him,” she said flatly. Little devils of fury were dancing in her eyes.

Lucas cocked his head on one side. He said softly:

“You’re very astute, my dear.”

She went on quickly:

“I could go to the police about you both, or—”

“Or blackmail us both?” Lucas laughed loudly. “You wouldn’t be such a fool.” He leaned forward in genuine amusement. “I get half the profits—on the interior decorating. That’s perfectly legal. If the police got on to some unpleasant facts about Ken—well, I wouldn’t know anything about that side of his life, would I? I should, of course, be very shocked.”

“You swine,” she said between her teeth.

Suddenly she relaxed. Her brain was working quickly. If Lucas had put one over on Ken, Lucas would be the one with the money. She smiled suddenly.

“And,” Lucas said urbanely, watching her out of his creased-up little eyes, “I’m not quite so susceptible as Ken, my dear.”

She knew what he meant, but she wasn’t going to give up so easily. Lucas might feel differently after she’d got to work on him. If he didn’t, she’d think of something else. But one thing she did know, and that was that she wasn’t going to lose what she’d got. Not after all those long years of waiting and doing without.

“I know,” she agreed submissively. “You’re clever. But I must talk to Ken. Will you meet me tonight?”

Lucas went on smiling.

“I don’t mind buying you a drink, if Ken doesn’t,” he told her. “But it won’t do you any good.”

She said: “I’d like a longer talk with you, that’s all. I have to go now.”

* * * * * * *

Although it was early, the Mirrobar was crowded. Craig steered Simone expertly to the bar and ordered two whiskies.

“You’ll feel better when you get outside that,” he told her. “Here’s to crime.”

They had dropped in for a drink before he took her on to dinner at a little place he knew. She had a yearning for somewhere quiet and cosy.

Craig took a swift look round the bar. There was no one he wanted to know and he was just about to return his entire attention to Simone, when his glance was arrested by a girl sitting at a table in the corner. She was talking to a man who had his back to Craig.

Simone broke off saying something and her eyes followed Craig’s. She frowned.

“She’s pretty, in a hard way.”

Craig laughed.

“Allergic to redheads?”

But Simone was right. The girl was attractive and showing plenty of sheer silk-stocking. Her hair was beautiful. Like a flame, and long and silky.

Craig worked his gaze round to her face and it startled him.

There was a murderous look about the sulky mouth. He switched over to her companion. There was something vaguely familiar about his back. The thick squareness of the neck and shoulders.

Craig frowned over the flame of his lighter. His narrowed eyes went on puzzling about the identity of that back.

Quite suddenly the redhead stood up. It was a swift movement, like a python preparing to strike, and she seemed to be issuing an ultimatum.

The man leaned back and laughed, then he shook his head. The redhead bent over the table, her long hair falling over the curve of her cheek and, from the fierce way she was speaking, Craig gathered the conversation was not exactly dripping with friendship. The man made a short reply and the redhead mashed her cigarette angrily into an ashtray, and without another word stormed across to the door.

As she went the man turned, obviously amused to witness her exit, and in a flash Craig got it.

“What is it?” Simone asked him.

Craig unhitched himself from the bar.

“Hang on a second,” he told her, “and keep your eye on that character in the corner with the neck like a bull. I’ll be back.”

“But—”

But Craig wasn’t there any more. He reached the door only just in time to spot the redhead standing on the kerb outside. She was clearly waiting for someone.

As Craig hesitated in the doorway a thin little figure of a man joined her under the street lamp, they exchanged a few words, and then the girl hailed a cruising cab. Craig was too far away to catch the address. Then, as he didn’t want to lose his old friend in the bar, he made his way back to Simone.

“The man in the corner has just left by the other door,” she told him. She was tapping an impatient foot. Her curiosity got the better of her. “Who was he?”

“He’s an unsavoury customer by the name of Lucas. He’s been mixed up in every kind of racket you can think of, plus a few more. So far he has managed to evade the police. Last I heard he’d been abroad. Wonder what the game is this time.”

“Maybe he’s gone and got straight ideas?” suggested Simone.

“So has a spiral staircase.”

They had another drink. Craig downed it in silence. Out of the blue he announced:

“I’m slipping.”

“Why?”’ asked Simone, not visibly perturbed.

He looked at her.

“Lucas. We might do some checking up.”

“He’s been gone a long time.”

“We’ll take a chance and call on him.”

“I thought he had been abroad?”

Craig was piloting her to the door.

“So he has. But he has a house in Kensington, which he may have returned to. It’s worth a try.”

Simone said nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say. After all, she liked excitement, in or out of office hours.

Five minutes later they turned into Park Lane and grabbed a taxi. A quarter of an hour later they drew up outside a large house surrounded by a beshrubbed garden in an expensive corner of Kensington. There was a light burning in a downstairs room.

“There’s someone in, anyway,” Simone murmured as Craig turned from paying off the driver.

“Question is—who?” Craig smiled at her in the darkness.

He rang twice before the door opened a crack and a sallow-faced individual poked his nose into the air.

“What’s the matter?” Craig asked with concern. “Afraid of getting a cold?”

“What do you want?”

“To see Mr. Lucas.”

“I’m afraid—” began Sallow Face, then he glanced down at Craig’s feet neatly wedged between door and doorpost and licked his lips. “Perhaps you had better come in.”

“That’s what I thought,” Craig said chattily.

Standing under the hall light, the man peered at them nervously and fingered his lapel.

“I’m afraid—” he tried again.

“We gathered you are.” Craig was finding the conversation beginning to sag. “If Mr. Lucas isn’t in, we’ll wait.”

For a second something like a sour smile appeared round Sallow Face’s lips, but it was a fleeting expression. Then he lowered his eyes and said primly:

“He is in.”

“What are we waiting for?”

“He’s dead.”

Sallow Face’s reply was something Craig hadn’t expected. He snapped:

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs.” The other took a flickering look at Craig’s face as he placed his hand on the banisters. “It—it is a terrible tragedy. I think he’s been murdered. You must forgive me if I seem—” He broke off. “I’m rather upset. I have just telephoned the police.”

“That’s something,” Craig said. “Come on. Show me the way.”

Simone made a move to follow him. He admired her determination, but there was no need for her to get mixed up in this more than was necessary. “Keep guard in the hall,” he told her.

She nodded and drifted obediently back to the front door.

Sallow Face was waiting patiently on the bottom stair. “You are a friend of Mr. Lucas?”

“Yes,” Craig said without hesitation. “You?”

The man stared into space.

“I was his partner,” he replied quietly. “My name is Morris. Ken Morris.”

Partner in what, Craig wondered. But he said nothing and padded up the stairs behind the other.

Before a closed door, Morris stopped.

“It’s not so very nice,” he said.

Craig looked at him curiously. The man obviously was upset. He didn’t look as if he had the guts to kill a mouse. Craig decided at this stage to keep an open mind.

“I don’t suppose it is. Let’s go in.”

Without another word Morris opened the door and stepped into the room. Lucas was sprawled untidily across the bed, blood oozing from the dent in his head. A newspaper on a chair flapped dismally in the light breeze that drifted through the open window,

Craig paused for a moment by the bed and then walked over to the window. Morris watched him silently from the door.

“What do you know?” Craig asked over his shoulder.

“Not very much. I was downstairs. Mr. Lucas had come up here to fetch some papers he wanted to show me, when I heard the scream. I came as fast as I could, but when I arrived I found him like this.”

“Was the window open?”

“I was coming to that.”

Morris’s mouth twitched with nerves and emotion. Craig let him talk.

“When I recovered from the first shock, I went over to the window and looked out. There was a man climbing over the wall in the back garden—too dark to see properly. He—he must have descended the ladder that is against the window sill.”

Craig smiled thinly.

“I had noticed it. Were you two alone in the house?”

“Yes. There is a manservant, but he is away on holiday.”

Craig shrugged.

“Not much more we can do until the police arrive.”

He followed Morris down into the hall.

Simone was waiting by the front door wearing a martyred look. Craig grinned at her.

“We’ll wait in there,” he said to Morris, indicating a door on the right. By his reckoning it must be the room where they had seen a light earlier.

“You are going to wait?”

There was a surprised lift to the man’s dreary tones.

Craig’s eyebrows lifted.

“Naturally. The police will want to see us, astonishing as it may seem to you.”

Morris permitted himself to smile.

“Very well.”

He opened the door into the lounge. It was a long room, running the width of the house with windows back and front. Craig wandered thoughtfully over to the window that led into the back garden.

“Check up on that phone call,” he told Simone.

Morris sat himself quietly down in an unobtrusive corner while she picked up the receiver and dialled. When she had hung up she went over to Craig.

“They’re on their way,” she told him as he lit a cigarette. “Incidentally, I thought I heard someone moving about in here while I was waiting in the hall.”

Craig threw a glance over in Morris’s direction. He did not appear to have heard them.

“It wouldn’t altogether surprise me,” Craig mur­mured. He stepped through the French windows that led on to the gravel path running round the house.

His eyes flicked over the loose earth at the base of the thirty-foot ladder that stood about two feet away from the foundations of the house. The ladder reached up to the window of Lucas’s bedroom. He smiled grimly as he stooped down to inspect more closely the prints of a man’s shoes in the soft ground.

When he was through, he went back into the lounge and said to Morris:

“Is there any other way out of the back garden except through this room?”

“No. There is no connecting path through to the front garden, and, as you can see, a wall surrounds the back.”

There was a hush in the room as Craig tapped the ash off his cigarette into the grate in a leisurely fashion.

“That’s what I thought.”

He said it so softly that the hidden meaning in his words temporarily escaped Morris.

“The man I saw escaping over the wall must have had a grudge against poor Lucas,” Morris said expressionlessly. “I—I don’t like to say it, but Lucas had a funny way with him. Of course, he and I always got on extremely well,” he added hastily. “But there is no denying it, Lucas had got enemies.”

A crafty glint had appeared in Morris’s eyes. He moved in a sliding movement and stood at Craig’s shoulder looking up at him.

“By the way,” he inquired softly, “who are you?”

“Craig,” said Craig. He didn’t see why, at this juncture, he should enlighten him any further.

Morris puzzled over the name.

“Sounds familiar. Why so officious, checking up on my phone calls?”

“I’m a friend of Lucas.” There was no mistaking the mockery in Craig’s tone. “As good a friend as you were.”

“Maybe I heard Lucas say something about you.” Then another angle occurred to him. “What do you mean, as good a friend as I was?”’

Craig looked innocent.

“Weren’t you?”

“Yes, I was. I told you that.” The crafty look had returned to his eyes. “Maybe we have a lot in common.”

Craig shook his head.

“I don’t really care for redheads,” he said chattily. “I go for brunettes.”

“What do you mean?”

“You should know what I mean by redheads. By the way, where is she?”

“Where is who?”

Craig sighed.

“What a lot of question and answer we do have before we get anywhere. The girl friend. Your girl friend. Strawberry-blonde, I believe is another name for ’em—and this one has a temper. You’ll have to be careful!”

“Careful?”

“Here we go again. Yes, careful. You might go the same way as Lucas. Anyway, I’m crazy to meet her, and she was here a few minutes ago.”

He looked round with interest.

Simone’s eyes widened as the other backed against a small table.

“I don’t know what your game is, Mr. Craig, or who you are, but I do know you know too much.” He leapt for Craig’s throat, but he never reached it: he was much too busy sprawling backwards against the table after he had collided head-on with a punch like a kangaroo’s kick. As he staggered to his feet:

“Good night, Mr. Morris.” That was the last he heard before something like a block of steel hit him somewhere on the point of the chin and he slid into a deep and peaceful sleep.

Craig turned to Simone.

“It’s so easy—” he began, but she wasn’t there.

Over by the open window the redhead was raising herself slowly and painfully from a position she had been occupying flat on her face on the carpet. Over her stood a breathless but triumphant Simone, clutching a poker in one hand. She looked at Craig.

“You were saying?” she asked.

He grinned at her. He said:

“Just that it’s easy when you know how. And apparently you know how. What happened?”

“Just as that horrible man jumped at you I saw the curtain by the window move. You were busy so I thought I would do a little work myself. So, when she came out with a poker in her hand I kicked her hard on the shin and tripped her up.”

Craig started to laugh. He cast a dispassionate eye on the redhead.

“Get up,” he told her. “You look much more alluring on your feet.”

She paid no attention, but continued to sit on the floor, her head in her hands with her red hair falling about her face.

“Get up.”

She looked at him, her green eyes dazed, but there was all fury there too.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

“I might,” said Craig politely, “ask you the same.”

“Mind your own business.”

Craig shrugged.

“Have it your way. Only the police will be here in a minute and they will probably want to know. If they don’t already.”

“They don’t. I’m Babs Wilson.” Her lip curled. “If that’s any use to you.”

He smiled blandly.

She scrambled to her feet, glowering at him. Craig said chattily: “I’ve got all the information we’ll need, but I’d like to know why you did it?”

“Did—what?”

“Murdered Lucas.”

He lit a cigarette and eyed her over the top of his lighter. She had gone deathly white and her hand pushing her hair back was shaking.

“I didn’t,” she whispered. Suddenly she began screaming. “I didn’t. I didn’t. I swear I didn’t do it—it was Ken.”

She started to sob.

Craig eyed her for a second or two.

“Maybe you didn’t sock him the fatal blow,” he allowed. “But your boy friend Morris would never have done it if you hadn’t planned the thing. You certainly weren’t friendly with Lucas.”

“How do you know?”

Craig smiled again.

“You shouldn’t have such obvious quarrels with men like Lucas in public places.”

Her attitude changed.

“They can’t do anything to me. It was Ken, I tell you. Ken Morris. Lucas was blackmailing him, I tried to persuade Lucas to lay off. He—he just laughed at me. He deserved all he got.”

Her eyes held that murderous quality that he had noticed in the Mirrobar.

“I could agree with you on that,” Craig said, “but unfortunately for you, it is still murder. Ken Morris wouldn’t have had the guts to carry it out unless you were on the premises to see that he did. He had been paying blackmail money to Lucas quite meekly until you discovered it,” he hazarded shrewdly. “It was bad luck we turned up before you could make your getaway as you had planned to do. And it was bad luck my secretary stayed in the hall barring your only exit. Pity for you that you didn’t know then it was only a girl out there, or you might have chanced it.”

Her choked reply was drowned by a shrill ringing at the doorbell. Craig nodded to Simone.

“Let them in. It’s the police.”

She started across the room, then she stopped.

“How did you get on to Morris and her?” she asked curiously.

Craig grinned. “When Morris stood under the hall light, I recognized him as the man under the street lamp, which tied him up with her. That started me thinking. I knew later that it couldn’t be the outside job they wanted it to appear to be.”

“How?”

“It was the ladder. It stood two feet away from the wall of the house. Anyone trying to climb a thirty-foot ladder in that position would have upset its centre of gravity and the ladder would have tipped backwards.”

The ringing outside started up again.

“The law,” he added, “is getting impatient.”

Simone smiled at him. “I will let them in,” she said, and went out into the hall.