Dorothy Fielding - Chief Inspector Pointer's Cases - 12 Golden Age Murder Mysteries

"Wilmot! A moment." Dorset Steele went to the telephone. He was soon in touch with a man he knew on the Courier. He laid down the tube with a grunt.

"That part is true. He is acting as claims' investigator for the moment to the Insurance Company. In place of Cheale..." Steele sat down again and fell into deep thought. "He's on our side, therefore."

"Are you taking my case?" Vardon asked suddenly and bluntly.

Dorset Steele hesitated. He shot the young man a sour glance.

"Yes," he said at last. "But it's going to be stiffer than you think.. Pointer's name in it means that. Suppose this turns into a murder case. Do you know the facts against you? There's the money traced to you which was last paid Mrs. Tangye. There's your slipping away. Where were you Tuesday afternoon around five?"

"I was strolling through the Army and Navy stores pricing things and making out a rough list."

"Speak to any salesmen?"

"Not one."

"Meet any one you knew?"

"By Jove, I did! Lift man who took me up to the bun floor used to be a chap—" his face fell. "Perhaps I'd better leave him out."

"Who is he?"

"He was one of the under-stewards on the boat I went out on. Got into trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"Some ass dropped his pocket-book literally at the chap's feet one night without noticing it. Poor Pike has a family who seem to specialise in expensive illnesses, so he picked it up, and I'm sorry to say, kept it. That was bad enough. But the worst of it was the Head steward saw him. End of Pike. He'd have been jailed only the passenger refused to prosecute."

"Were you the passenger?"

Vardon gave an awkward laugh.

"Holed it in one," he acknowledged.

"Help him afterwards?"

"Well—yes, I had to. The chap turned up by chance at a ranch where I was painting the barns. He was half starving. Winter was coming on. Winter on a Patagonian plain! He'd have died with those lungs of his. I got the R.M. to give him another chance on one of their fruiters. He's done quite well since then."

Dorset Steele looked at him.

"And that's the best you can do as an alibi? Nice witness for the jury to hear pulled to pieces. Nice motive to put him in your debt, so that he'd swear to anything to help you. That's what they'd say."

"I know the outlook's pretty poor." Vardon thrust his hands deeper into his trouser pockets, "but I didn't kill my one time cousin-in-law, Mr. Dorset Steele, even supposing she was killed. Anc that's something to go on, isn't it?"

Grudgingly the solicitor admitted that it might be. But apparently he would have vastly preferred guilt and a solid alibi.

There was another silence.

"Have you any explanation," Dorset Steele said suddenly, "any that we can make the jury, if it comes to that, I mean, as to why Mrs. Tangye suddenly paid you that money? I leave your story of an additional fifteen hundred out of it."

Vardon did not answer for a minute. "I can't explain it either," he said lamely. "We'd never met before. She said she wanted to settle up all her outstanding debts, and she thought I had a claim on Branscombe's estate. A moral claim. She talked a lot about wiping the slate clean before another start elsewhere, and so on. Oh, she meant to kill herself. Not a doubt about it! At the time I was too flustered to have my wits about me. She said that money could be a fetter under some circumstances, or at least of no use. And as I had written to her several times for a loan from her first husband's estate—"

"Tut! Tut!" barked Dorset Steele, "you had not! but go on in your own way for the moment."

"That was all there was. I thought I was in a dream, I assure you. I've lived in a dream till that man Wilmot touched me on the arm and, as I thought, saved me. By Jove, when he calls around later he'll hear what I think of him. I'm a quiet chap as a rule, but I won't answer for what I shall say to him."

Dorset Steele pursed his lips. Obviously he was considering the effect of a possible black eye on the jury as a consequence of the interview.

"Better not see him." He got up. "I must be off. I'll have a talk with the police and see if they're keeping anything important up their sleeves." He shot a glance at Vardon. There was no answer.

"You've nothing more to tell me?"

"I've told you all I know."

Dorset Steele looked savagely at him.

"And you expect a jury to swallow it?"

"Why not? It's the truth," there was a flash in Vardon's eyes.

"They'll certainly call it stranger than fiction," the solicitor promised grimly.

He got up off his hat, tossed it on his head, thrust his arms into his top-coat which he had taken into the room with him, and made for the door.

"See no one—if you can avoid it. Say as little as possible. And—keep cheerful."

He finished with an unexpected smile.

While Dorset Steele was talking to Vardon, Pointer was going through the artist's luggage. He found no camera, box or otherwise, but he came on a ring of keys beneath everything else in the suitcase which looked like household keys. The number of the Yale key tallied with that on the Riverview front door. So did the number of the safe key. Clearly these were the missing keys of Mrs. Tangye. The keys which Tangye refused to have connected with the missing notes. Which he said he had seen at Riverview on Tuesday, after the police had left.

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HAVILAND was greatly cheered by the news of the keys. "A clue at last!" he chortled.

"To what?" was Pointer's question. "To whom?"

Haviland stared.

"Why, to the whole affair. It's a direct link with Mrs. Tangye. In fact, it's a direct link with her murder, I should say."

Still Pointer did not reply.

"Well, it's a fact anyway!" Haviland said desperately, "just as his having two of those notes in his possession was a fact."

"Yes, but the sole importance of a fact lies in the way we look at it."

"A most true remark, oh, worthy sir!" chimed in Wilmot who had driven down with Pointer, and was now breakfasting at the Twickenham police station. "And let me also remind you two bloodhounds on the trail, that Vardon may have a perfectly satisfactory explanation of those keys being found in his possession."

"He's sure to have! In fact, when you see him, Mr. Wilmot, you'll find he'll explain everything so nicely that you'll think what a pleasure it is to meet such a candid young gentleman." Haviland was still sore.

"Insurance Company's dropping behind, I fear," Wilmot murmured. "I wonder, if after all, it was a crime? I wonder This case certainly has unexpected light and dark places."

"The fact is, they always have," Haviland announced despondently.

"It's the charm of the word, of course," mused Wilmot, "that's why people read detective stories. For that and—the love of the chase."

"The love of justice," Pointer spoke for once with real warmth, "it's because they satisfy that—I suppose the deepest passion of every one's heart, but a criminal's—that people read, and write, detective novels."

"I read 'em for facts, helpful facts," Haviland volunteered. "Really, some of the dodges these writers get hold of—"

"You're wrong. Both of you." Wilmot, as usual, spoke with certainty. "The same thing makes people read, that makes you, Haviland, a policeman, and you, Pointer, a detective. And that is for the sake of the thrill. Of the manhunt. There's nothing else in the world quite like it. Why, even I begin to get the whiff of it in my nostrils."

Pointer was silent. Only his friends knew the Chief Inspector's dislike of that common phrase, and point of view. To himself, Pointer was but a keen, impartial keeper of the open road, the path of law and order. The only path by which civilisation, to his mind, could march on.