Читать книгу The Duke of York's Steps - Sir Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher - Страница 7

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The sudden death of Sir Garth Fratten, interesting and, in financial circles, important as it had been, was not sufficiently sensational to remain in the public memory more than a day or two after the funeral. But it was not entirely forgotten. About three days later, Sir Leward Marradine, the Assistant-Commissioner in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, called the attention of Chief Inspector Barrod to an advertisement in the Personal Column of The Times.

“Duke of York’s Steps. Miss Inez Fratten will be glad to hear from the gentleman who accidentally stumbled against her father, Sir Garth Fratten, on Thursday 24th October, some time after 6 p. m. Write 168 Queen Anne’s Gate, S.W.”

“Make anything of that, Barrod?” asked the A.C.C.^[1] “I wonder if it’s in any other papers.”

[1] Assistant-Commissioner (Crime).

“Yes, sir, a lot of them. Many of the “pennies” have got a paragraph about it. It’s just the sort of thing they seize on to and try and work up into a ‘sensation.’ ”

“I wonder what the girl’s got in her mind,” muttered Sir Leward.

“Hardly a matter for us, is it, sir?” asked his subordinate.

“No, not at—not as far as I know. You needn’t bother about it, Barrod; I know the girl slightly—I’ll go and see her quietly, just in case there’s something behind this. Now, about these Treasury note forgeries; has Murgate reported yet on the Goodge Street plant? I don’t believe myself that that outfit could have produced such high-class work....”

Soon after five that evening, Sir Leward emerged from Scotland Yard and crossed Whitehall in the direction of Storey’s Gate, taking off his hat to the delicate Cenotaph which lay on his right.

The head of the C.I.D. was a squarely built man of medium height, with long arms and rather rounded shoulders. In spite of the fact that he had been a soldier, he was clean-shaven, whilst his mouth, with its full lips, was intelligent rather than firm. Occupying a succession of comfortable posts at the War Office during the last three and a half years of the War, he had been at hand to slip into this plum of ex-service civilian posts when it fell vacant, being wise enough to relinquish a better-paid but moribund Army appointment before the returning flood of warriors from sea and land glutted both service and civilian markets.

The sight of the Cenotaph reminded Marradine that Remembrance Day was nearly at hand again. This annual ceremony, the heart of which lay so close to his own work, always filled him with an intensity of patriotic and heroic feeling. What a wonderful sight it must be for those million dead Britons to look down—if they could look down—upon the dense black and white sea of their comrades and descendants, motionless and silent in memory of them. To see the King—head of the greatest Empire the world has ever known—and all his ministers, his admirals and generals, standing there in reverence, with bared heads. Quaint in a way, when you thought of some of the million whose memory they were hallowing—scoundrels, a lot of them, cowards a good many, and the great bulk only fighting and dying because they had to. Still it was a noble death. War itself was a noble, an heroic affair, in a way, bringing out all that was best in a man. Sir Leward felt a thrill of pride that he himself had been a soldier.

The great Government offices were emptying now and the hurrying crowds of men and women, all with the eager look of “home and supper” in their eyes, gave to the familiar scene an air of vitality, slightly romanticized by the soft haze of autumn twilight.

As Marradine expected, Inez Fratten was at home and in the middle of tea in the comfortable morning-room next to the front door. She was looking even more attractive than Sir Leward remembered and he was glad when a dark young man who was with her, introduced by some name faintly resembling his own, muttered some excuse and departed. Marradine accepted a large cup of tea and a muffin.

“How nice of you to call,” said Inez, smiling sweetly—as she would have called it—at him, after Sir Leward had murmured suitable words of consolation. As a matter of fact Inez was rather at a loss where to “place” her visitor; she remembered meeting him at some dinner, that he was something important under the Government, and that he had paid her rather heavy-handed attention after dinner, but she was not sure whether, under his official manner, he was young-old, or old-young, “rather a dear,” or “a pompous ass.” She didn’t even know whether it was worth the bother of finding out. His first words, however, quickly switched her mind off these trivial matters to one of, for her, intense interest.

“I saw your advertisement in The Times, Miss Fratten. I wondered whether I could help you in any way—I daresay you know that I’m at Scotland Yard.”

“I hadn’t quite realized it—I knew you were something important,” said Inez. “I hope you don’t think it was very silly of me to put that advertisement in.”

“What was in your mind? Don’t tell me, of course, if you don’t want to—I’m not here officially—but if I’m to help ...” Marradine left the sentence unfinished.

Inez thought for a minute. She wasn’t sure that she quite liked what she saw of her visitor, but obviously he could find out far more for her than she could herself. Anyhow, she couldn’t very well do any harm by talking to him.

“I haven’t got anything very definite in my mind,” she replied. “But it seems to me so odd that that man who knocked into father—who must, quite accidentally of course, have been the cause of his death—shouldn’t have shown any sign—written to me, or something.”

Sir Leward waited for a moment or two to see if there was more to come. It was a curiously lame explanation; he felt that there should be more in it than that—but evidently there was not.

“Don’t you think, perhaps, that you’re rather exaggerating the man’s responsibility?” he suggested. “I do remember something about Sir Garth having been jogged by somebody a little time before he fell. But the doctor—whoever he was—can’t have thought much of it; or at any rate, he was evidently expecting your father’s death at any time, otherwise he would hardly have given a death certificate without an inquest.”

“Oh yes, of course he expected it,” said Inez, with a touch of impatience. “At least, he says so now. I knew nothing about it—about his being seriously ill—till about a fortnight before, and then I didn’t know for some time that it was an aneurism—we were told it was heart disease. It’s all come so very suddenly—I feel somehow that something’s wrong.”

With most women Sir Leward would at this point have said something soothing and platitudinous, taken a solicitous farewell, and put the matter out of his mind. The whole thing seemed to him so simple—a storm in a tea-cup. But Inez attracted him; he liked her pale beauty, her calm but decided manner—he liked particularly the peculiar droop at the corners of her mouth when she smiled. It would be easy to see more of her.

“I expect the chap just hasn’t noticed about your father. Those people live curiously localized lives—his own office stool and his circle in Balham. They often are quite unaware of what’s going on in the world outside that. Probably he’ll see this advertisement, though—or someone’ll talk about it in front of him. Then he’s sure to turn up or write. Will you let me know? I might be able to help.”

Marradine rose to go—he knew the importance of brevity in any kind of visit—it enhanced the value, tantalized the imagination.

“By the way,” he asked, as he shook hands. “Who was the young fellow I so unkindly drove away? Not your brother, of course?”

“Mr. Mangane? He’s father’s secretary—was, I mean. There’s a good deal to clear up—he’ll be going soon, of course.”

“Been here long?”

“A month or so, I think.”

Sir Leward opened his mouth to ask another question, but thought better of it and went away, leaving Inez, as he had intended, still wondering about him.

Arriving at his office in Scotland Yard at about ten the next morning, Sir Leward sent for Chief Inspector Barrod. It wouldn’t do to let Barrod know how trivial he thought the matter, so he piled on the interest a bit.

“It’s just possible that there’s something in this Fratten business, Barrod,” he said. “Miss Fratten is a shrewd, level-headed girl, not likely to make a mountain out of a molehill. She’s not at all satisfied with the cause of death; it seems that they’d said nothing to her about an aneurism, which was apparently the trouble—I confess I thought it was heart failure myself—shows how carelessly one reads things when one’s not particularly interested. Sir Garth was a rich man, of course, and a big man—he may have had enemies. Probably there’s nothing in it, but—a wisp of smoke, you know.”

The Chief Inspector was not impressed; he wasn’t even interested. He remained silent. Sir Leward was conscious of the lack, and covered it by a still more decided manner.

“We’ll look into it,” he said. “Put someone on who’s not too heavy in the foot. You know what I mean. Who have you got?”

Chief Inspector Barrod allowed a faint smile to hover on his lips, but he spoke seriously enough.

“I’ve just got the man you want, sir. Poole. Just promoted Inspector—you’ll remember that you put him up yourself, sir, after that Curzon House impersonation case. Well-educated officer, sir—public school and college man.”

The fact of the matter was that Barrod himself thought very little of Detective-Inspector Poole and was delighted to have the opportunity of pushing him off in search of a mare’s nest. Poole was of a type that he did not care for—well-educated, “genteel” (Barrod thought), probably soft, and certainly possessed of a swelled head. A failure—or at any rate, a fiasco—would do him no harm.

“Does he know anything about finance?” asked Sir Leward.

Barrod raised his eyebrows.

“Finance, sir? Do you mean accountancy, or—or what I might call ‘high finance’?”

“I don’t know that I’d ‘fined’ the subject down so closely, Barrod. I meant finance generally—accountancy would certainly come into it—stock markets, bill-broking and so on. Hardly ‘high finance’—that’s more international banking, isn’t it?”

“That was rather Sir Garth Fratten’s line, wasn’t it, sir? He was a banker, and certainly had an international reputation.”

“That’s not quite the same thing, I should say, as being an international banker—Fratten’s was a small private bank.—I should have thought it was more of a family affair. Still, I confess I’m very ignorant on the subject.”

“So am I, sir—an abstruse subject. Anyway, I’m afraid Poole won’t have it. I believe he did go through a course of economics sometime—I’m not quite sure when. I don’t know what he learnt at it.”

“Probably his way about a balance sheet—which is more than most of us know. What about women? Can he keep his head or is he liable to be vamped?”

“That Radinska woman didn’t put it over him in the Curzon case, anyhow, sir.”

“No, nor she did—I remember. Good-looker, too. Bit of a St. Anthony. On the whole he sounds the man for the job.”

“I think he is, sir,” agreed the Chief Inspector, with an inward chuckle.

“Call him up, then, if he’s here. May as well get on with it at once.”

Chief Inspector Barrod pulled the house-telephone towards him.