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

Christine was the first to arrive in London, where she was met by a pale, gaunt-faced young man. Pointer, carrying the signed paper which Mr. Beale had staked so much to obtain, followed, and with him, though in a different compartment, travelled Mr. Beale and his valet.

The Chief Inspector, after an interview with the authorities at the Yard, went on to the Enterprise Hotel. The manager was in, and he practically repeated his opening words to Mr. Beale.

The manager might or might not be made of better stuff than the American, but he certainly was of softer. He sank back into his chair, looking as though he saw the hangman already entering his cell.

Table of Contents

THE Chief Inspector gave the manager no time to collect himself. He went rapidly over Mr. Beale's accusation that it was Mr. Hughes who had offered the papers of the dead man to him.

"I'm in an awful hole." The manager poured out a glass of whisky and soda with a shaking hand.

"Pretty bad," agreed the unsympathetic police-officer, "but perhaps it might be worse." His glance around the room pointed his meaning. The tumbler was set unsteadily back on the tray.

"I'm a ruined man in any case. I might as well have thrown up the sponge when you came last time—"

"Perhaps," murmured Pointer.

"—but here's the true story. You can take it down, and I'll sign it here before we go to the police-station, or you can arrest me first and have it afterwards."

"Let's have it here."

"Well, the case was exactly as I told you up to that moment when Beale and I sat here after you had gone, talking over the suicide. I jumped up, for I suddenly remembered after all that Eames—I mean Erskine—had given me a cardboard box to keep in the safe. I had joked him about it, saying it looked like a box of chocolates, and he had said it wasn't much more important, but still he wished me to take care of it for him. Without thinking—for it is one of my strictest rules that I never go to the safe without the booking-clerk or the hall porter with me, and never in the presence of a visitor, I unlocked the combination and opened it. That shows how rattled I was by what had just happened. I pulled out the box—"

"Wrapped in green and white striped paper?"

"That's the one. And I said something about 'Good God, I forgot to speak of this to the police.' I moved towards the door when Mr. Beale stopped me. He was tremendously excited, and said that as soon as he. had seen Eames' face in the full light he had recognized him as a dangerous crook whose partner, and doubtless murderer, he (Beale) was after. In fact, he stuffed me with the same yarn he filled you up with when you arrested Carter."

The Chief Inspector gave no sign that he felt the dig.

"He declared that the box would contain plans and signals in cipher for the use of the gang. Would I let him have a look at it? I finally—well, I refused at first" —the bitterness of the manager's voice told the whole story—"but you know what a way Mr. Beale has with him. He claimed to recognize the plan of his own house in the note-book, and then—I'd just been letting myself go a bit about what a blow the suicide would be to the hotel, which was having its work cut out to keep its head above water—he referred to that. Said that he wanted a scoop for his paper. Finally he offered me one thousand pounds down on the table for the box, and I let him take it for another five hundred. Mind you, I'm not trying to clear myself, but I believed his story. And of course when you arrested Carter I thought what a Quixotic fool I should have been to have acted differently."

He stopped and had another drink.

"But that isn't all that you have to tell."

"You mean the pages torn out of the receipt-book. You know about them."

"No, I don't mean them. I know all about that, as you say. I mean something else."

"Do you want my confession as to how I killed Eames?" asked the manager sardonically.

"I want to know first who the man was you showed over the balcony rooms, including No. 14, at midday on Saturday, August third?"

"That was Sikes. He lends money strictly on the q.t. and at only seven hundred per cent. But the mere idea that his little hobby might get about infuriated him so that after you sent that blundering chap of yours down to investigate he broke the whole thing off. He's aiming to get into Parliament: that's why he's Sykes with a 'y' now."

"Humph! And had you never seen Erskine before?"

"Never."

"Nor Mr. Beale?"

"No. I assure you, Inspector, that I had never seen either man before."

"And now about those 'phones on Saturday at five o'clock?"

But the manager could only repeat that he knew nothing more than he had already told the police. He could not recollect 'phoning at all about five o'clock; but if he had, it had been a vain attempt to get through to his hatter.

The police-officer asked him to sign his statement.

"We may not have to use it—"

The manager drew a deep breath.

"—but, of course, you must keep yourself within touch of our people. And now, Mr. Manager, what can you tell me about what has become of the occupants of rooms eleven and twelve?"

The manager looked over his papers.

"Mrs. Willett left an address in Devonshire to which her letters were to be forwarded. The hall-porter has it, I suppose."

"Yes, but Mrs. Willett did not go there. The Devonshire hotel has no knowledge of her whereabouts beyond the fact that she wrote from here, and engaged a room on August 16th."

The manager was unable to help.

"Now as to Miss Leslie, the occupant of number twelve. She left here on September seventeenth, and all inquiries at the theatre only show that no one has her address. Apparently she has gone away in the midst of an engagement without leaving a trace of her plans."

Here, too, the manager was not able to offer any help. Pointer swung himself on his homeward bus, not over-pleased with his men. He had given orders that the occupants of the balcony rooms were to be kept under constant surveillance, and the two most important ones had slipped away into the unknown. Miss Leslie he had tried to trace through the Thompsons, father and son, and even through the Blacks, but all to no purpose.

"Mrs. Able has very tactfully chosen roast veal," O'Connor jibed as he took his seat at the table. "Now, wanderer, what of thy goings to and fro?"

Pointer merely raised his eyebrows and asked what was under the other cover, and not until the meal was well out of the way and he had lit a pipe did he give a rapid review of his "holiday tramp."

O'Connor thought that the green and white scrap of paper backed up the manager's rather than Beale's version of the selling of the papers, and Pointer agreed that it might, but he did not say how much of the rest of the tale of either man seemed to him likely.

Next morning he had a long interview with Carter, and found that, as he thought, the Canadian had arrived on July twentieth in London. He had expected to go straight to a hotel as near Erskine's as possible, but on arrival at Liverpool Street Station he had been handed a telegram from "Meunier," instructing him to come on to Brussels at once. Erskine had come to meet the train, after engaging a room for him at the Marvel and one at the Enterprise for himself. The connecting balcony was too good to lose, so at their hurried meeting in a corner of the refreshment room, where they posed as strangers, one of whom handed a newspaper to the other and discussed the weather for a moment, it was arranged that Erskine was to write to the Marvel in Carter's name, enclosing enough money to retain number two, while Carter rushed off to Dover and Ostend. Ten days later Carter had to come back to London to buy some special tools he could not get in Brussels, and had spent a couple of hours with Erskine. It was on his way to the night boat-train that he had bought him the cough medicine. When he had returned again on the fatal Saturday night of August 3rd it had been for the express purpose of telling his "pard" that success was certain. The sight of the policeman when the window opened warned him that something was wrong. After an interval he had crept out on to the balcony again and peered into the room. He could see only an empty bed and Miller on guard. Full of anxiety, he had to start back for Brussels at once, followed, though he did not know it, by Beale. Then came hours of torturing uncertainty, and finally the few lines in an English paper telling of "Eames' suicide." Carter could hardly bear to speak of it. But they had each bound themselves before starting from Canada that in case of danger they would separate at once, and in case of any accident to the one, the other would "carry on"; also he was under the most solemn pledges of absolute secrecy to M. Bonnot. So in bitterness of soul he worked on, only determined to avenge his friend's death some day.