Josephine Tey - The Singing Sands

‘No, thanks, I’ll have coffee. It actually smells like coffee,’ he added in a surprised way. ‘Bill checked out on the 3rd. The 3rd of March.’

‘Did you ask about his luggage?’

‘Sure. They weren’t all that interested at first. But eventually they got out a ledger the size of the Judgement Book and said that Mr Kenrick had left nothing either in the box-room or the safe.’

‘That means that he took them to a cloak-room—to a left-luggage office, that is—to be ready to his hand when he came back from Scotland. If he meant to fly when he came back, then I suppose he would leave them at Euston to be picked up on his way to the airport. If he meant to go by sea, then he may have taken them to Victoria before going to Euston. Did he like the sea?’

‘So-so. He wasn’t daffy about it. But he had a mania for ferries.’

‘Ferries?’

‘Yes. Seems it began when he was a kid at a place called Pompey—know where that is?’ Grant nodded. ‘And he spent all his time on a penny ferry.’

‘A ha’penny one, it used to be.’

‘Well, anyway.’

‘So the train-ferry might have had an interest for him, you think. Well, we can but try. But if he was going to be late in meeting you, I should think he would fly over. Would you know the cases if you saw them?’

‘Oh, yes. Bill and I shared a Company bungalow. I helped pack them. In fact one of them’s mine, if it comes to that. He just took the two of them. He said if we bought many things we could buy a suitcase to—’ Tad’s voice died away suddenly and he buried his face in his coffee cup. It was a great flat bowl of a cup, willow-patterned in pink, which Marta Hallard had brought back from Sweden for Grant because he liked his coffee out of large cups; and it made a very good screen for emotion.

‘We have no ticket to recover them with, you see. And I can’t use any official means. But I know most of the men on duty at the big terminuses, and can probably wangle our way behind the scenes. It will be up to you to spot the cases. Was Bill a labeller by nature, would you say?’

‘I expect he’d label things he was going to leave behind like that. Why, do you think, did he not have the left-luggage ticket in his pocket-book?’

‘I did think that someone else may have deposited those cases for him. The person who saw him off at Euston, for instance.’

‘The Martin guy?’

‘It might be. If he had borrowed papers for this odd masquerade, he would have to return them. Perhaps Martin was going to meet him at the airport, or at Victoria, or wherever it was that he had planned to leave England from, with the cases and collect his own papers.’

‘Yeah. That makes sense. I suppose we couldn’t Agony-advertise for this Martin?’

‘I don’t think that this Martin would be very willing to answer, having lent his papers for a piece of sharp practice and being now without identity.’

‘No. Perhaps you’re right. He wasn’t anyone who was staying at that hotel, anyway.’

‘How do you know that?’ asked Grant, surprised.

‘I looked through the book: the register. When I was identifying Bill’s signature.’

‘You’re wasted in OCAL, Tad. You should come to us.’

But Tad was not listening. ‘You’ve no idea what a queer feeling it was to see Bill’s writing suddenly like that, among all those strange names. It sort of stopped my breath.’

Grant took Lloyd’s picture of the crater ‘ruins’ from his desk and brought it over to the table. ‘That is what Heron Lloyd thinks that Bill saw.’

Tad looked at it with interest. ‘It sure is queer, isn’t it? Just like ruined sky-scrapers. You know, until I saw Arabia I thought the United States invented sky-scrapers. But some of those old Arab towns are just the Empire State on a smaller scale. But you say it couldn’t have been this that Bill saw.’

‘No. From the air it must be quite obvious what it is.’

‘Did you tell Lloyd that?’

‘No. I just let him talk.’

‘Why do you dislike the guy so much?’

‘I didn’t say that I disliked him.’

‘You don’t have to.’

Grant hesitated; analysing, as always, just exactly what he did feel.

‘I find vanity repellent. As a person I loathe it, and as a policeman I distrust it.’

‘It’s a harmless sort of weakness,’ Tad said, with a tolerant lift of a shoulder.

‘That is just where you are wrong. It is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in mirrors and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of personality. Vanity says “I must have this because I am me”. It is a frightening thing because it is incurable. You can never convince Vanity that anyone else is of the slightest importance; he just doesn’t understand what you are talking about. He will kill a person rather than be put to the inconvenience of doing a six months’ stretch.’

‘But that’s being insane.’

‘Not according to Vanity’s reckoning. And certainly not in the medical sense. It is merely Vanity being logical. It is, as I said, a frightening trait; and the basis of all criminal personality. Criminals—true criminals, as opposed to the little man who cooks the accounts in an emergency or the man who kills his wife when he finds her in bed with a stranger—true criminals vary in looks and tastes and intelligence and method as widely as the rest of the world does, but they have one invariable characteristic: their pathological vanity.’

Tad looked as though he were only half-listening because he was using this information on some private reference of his own. ‘Listen, Mr Grant,’ he said, ‘are you saying that this guy Lloyd isn’t to be trusted?’

Grant thought that over.

‘I wish I knew,’ he said at last. ‘I wish I knew.’

‘We-e-ll!’ said Tad. ‘That sure puts a different look on things, don’t it!’

‘I’ve spent quite a long time this morning wondering whether I have seen so much of the vanity in criminals that I have begun to have a “thing” about it; to distrust it unduly. On the face of it Heron Lloyd is irreproachable. He is more: he is admirable. He has a fine record behind him; he lives simply; he has excellent taste, which means a natural sense of proportion; and he has achieved enough surely to satisfy the most egotistical soul.’

‘But you think—there’s something wrong somewhere.’

‘Do you remember a little man in the hotel at Moymore who did missionary work on you?’

‘Persecuted Scotland! The little man in kilts.’

‘A kilt,’ said Grant automatically. ‘Well, for some reason Lloyd gives me the same feeling as Archie Brown. It’s absurd, but it is very strong. They have the same—’ He looked for a word.

‘Smell,’ said Tad.

‘Yes. That’s about it. They have the same smell.’

After a long silence Tad said: ‘Mr Grant, are you still of the opinion that what happened to Bill was an accident?’

‘Yes, because there is no evidence to the contrary. But I’m quite prepared to believe that it wasn’t, if I can see any reason for it. Can you clean windows?’

‘Can I what?’

‘Clean windows.’

‘I could make a shot at it if really pushed, I suppose,’ Tad said, staring. ‘Why?’

‘You may have to before this is over. Let us go and collect those suitcases. I’m hoping that all the information we want will be in those cases. I’ve just remembered that Bill booked that berth to Scoone a week in advance.’

‘Perhaps his backer in Scotland couldn’t see him until the 4th.’

‘Perhaps. Anyhow, all his papers and personal things will be in one of the cases, and I’m hoping that it will include a diary.’