CHAPTER I
A LETTER FOR SCOTLAND YARD
IT was Monday morning, only a few days after the Jordans murder case had collapsed in a manner so disconcerting to the official mind, and Chief Inspector Combridge was in no very confident mood, when he entered Superintendent Davis's office, and that gentleman passed a letter across his desk, with the remark: "If you've got nothing better to do this morning, it might be worth while to look into this."
Chief Inspector Combridge took the letter without eagerness, and read it without enthusiasm. Had it come from any other, hand, and had not his reputation been too securely established to be shaken by a single failure, he would have suspected that he was being deliberately put upon a trivial investigation, as a sign of official displeasure.
The letter was brief, and of a class of communication, usually though not always anonymous, which is continually being received at the headquarters of the investigation of metropolitan crime. Someone has seen a figure lurk in the dusk, or move behind the blind of what should have been an empty house - a quarrelsome wife is said to have left home suddenly, and the neighbours surmise that it is to an address from which there is no return - a door from which a figure would emerge regularly at a morning hour has remained closed - a whisper was overheard indicating a plotted crime.
Such communications are always investigated, although the vast majority of them are the products of idle imagination, or misdirected spite. Such enquiries require discretion as well as acumen. They are excellent training for the younger members of the force, but rarely engage the attention of its superior officers.
Now Inspector Combridge read:
4 Barclay Buildings,
Lower Sloane Street,
S.W.1.
February 28, 193 -
The Commissioner of Police,
New Scotland Yard,
London.
Dear Sir,
The flat on the floor below the above address is occupied by Mr. Adrian Rissole, a retired ship steward, who lives alone.
For the last week, more or less, he has not been observed to enter or leave, and does not answer the door.
Both my wife and myself are rather anxious as to what the explanation may be, as we think it unlikely that Mr. Rissole would have gone away, and it seems best to advise you of the position.
Yours faithfully,
Edwin Lovejoy
"You think," the inspector said, when he had read this letter twice over, with his customary care, "that there may be something here?"
Superintendent Davis, as is the case with many heavily-built slow-moving men, was not wasteful of words. He replied: "Well, what do you think?"
"I couldn't make more than a poor guess. It's the letter of a fairly educated man. Rather stiff, as though he'd composed it carefully. He's particular to mention his wife, and it's ten to one that, if she hadn't badgered him into doing it, he'd never have written at all. I should say that there's nothing in it, about fifty times more likely than not. There's no reason why a retired ship steward shouldn't take a week's holiday without first informing the lady on the floor above.
"On the other hand, a man living alone is always liable to be attacked, especially if he's supposed to have any money hidden away, as those who have given up work often have.
"But it's just as likely - I should say a lot more so - that he's fallen ill and been unable to call for help. That is, if there's anything in it at all."
"Looked at that way," the superintendent suggested, "it seems a bit callous to waste time sending a letter through the weekend post."
"Yes. It would have been a lot quicker to ring us up. But if the man didn't think there was any occasion to write at all - - "
"Well, you might just clear it up. It may be one of those cases where the lady has used her eyes in the right way."
Chief Inspector Combridge got up to go. He turned the letter over, as though looking for those elusive clues which are the favourite theme of the writers of detective fiction. Perhaps he was; but, if so, he caught no more than one of the workless fish which a good angler will throw back contemptuously to the water from which they come.
"Woolworth paper," he said. "There's not much to be learnt from that." There would not have been much even had he been dealing with an anonymous communication, for such paper is purchased by people of widely differing social grades.
Beyond that, his experienced mind had already formed a vague but yet accurate impression of the type of man from whom such a letter must have come.
"Fairly educated," he had said in his first reaction to what he read. He did not analyse the basis of this conclusion. He had not had a classical education himself. But he knew subconsciously that a good linguist, in a letter as deliberately written as that one evidently was, would not use the ugly colloquialism "answer the door"
"I think I'll have a few words with Mr. Lovejoy," he remarked, as he went out; but that was not to be his initial experience in an investigation which would fully occupy him during the next fortnight; for, when he pressed the bell at 4 Barclay Buildings, it was Mrs. Lovejoy who opened the door, and asked him in to an otherwise empty flat.
CHAPTER II
ANXIETY OF JANE LOVEJOY
CHIEF INSPECTOR COMBRIDGE looked at a pretty and attractive young woman. So youthful, indeed, that he would have called her miss without hesitation, apart from the witness of her own lips, and the wedding-ring that she wore.
She received him without embarrassment. Her expression, as he showed his card, actually seemed to be one of relief, as though she would not have been surprised to have to face a less welcome visitor. It was not a reception of which he could reasonably complain, but it was sufficiently unusual to be noticed by one more familiar with experiences of an opposite kind. There are timid women, even of the most blameless lives, who will become visibly perturbed on opening their door to find that a policeman is on the mat.
Still, after the letter which her husband had written, more or less at her own instigation, she must have been prepared for his appearance. He recognized that; and yet subtly her attitude increased the anticipation that he was not wasting time which should have been more profitably employed.
"You'd better come in," she said, "and I'll explain why my husband wrote."
She led the way to a rather drab room, obviously furnished from a hire-purchase stock, but with some evidences that it was occupied by those who made the best of their narrow means.
"I'm glad you've come," she went on, as she stooped to put a match to the gas-fire. "I've been really worried as to what can have happened; though I ought to tell you that Mr. Lovejoy thinks I'm making a fuss about nothing. He didn't want to write to you, only I couldn't rest unless something were done."
"You know Mr. Rissole?"
"Yes. We have been very friendly. That's what makes me feel sure he wouldn't have gone away without letting us know."
"Nothing more than that?"
"Well, it seems to me it's a good deal. We've known him for more than a year - ever since we came here - and he's been coming up in the evening for a game of draughts or backgammon with Mr. Lovejoy about twice a week; and sometimes we go down to him. I don't think that he's ever been away for a night during the whole time, or ever spoken of going anywhere. He's led a quiet regular life.
"You see, he's not very young - I don't mean he's really old; and he's rather lame. There was an accident on his ship. A capstan something fell on his leg. It wasn't what I could understand. But I know he got some compensation, and retired earlier than he would have done in the ordinary way."
"You mean he's a lame man, who can't get about properly?"
"Oh no! He's not a cripple. I didn't mean you to think that.
But he walks a bit lame. He goes a walk every morning - I mean he did. And he goes to football matches, and things like that. I think the football pools were the greatest interest that he had."
Inspector Combridge noticed the unconscious use of the past tense in that final phrase. Did she know more than he had yet been told? Had she more cause to suspect? But her manner was quiet and frank. Perhaps it was natural enough! He knew that those who adopt a mood of suspicion are too apt to find what they seek to see. He asked: "When did you see him last?"
"It was Thursday. Not last Thursday - the one before. So, counting today, it's more than ten days ago. He was up here just as usual then, and I feel sure he would have mentioned it if he had been meaning to go away."
"That sounds likely enough. But he might not have known he was going when he was here. He might have decided later, or had some sudden call, such as a relative's illness. I can't say that there's anything conclusive in that."
"Perhaps not. But you can see what risks there are for anyone living alone. I think something ought to be done to make sure."
"Yes. I see how you feel. But, from our point of view, it's very difficult to do anything. We can't break into people's flats just because they take a week's holiday. We've no legal right, and we should become unpopular if we tried it on."
"Then you will just leave it, and do nothing?"
There was a note of anxiety in her voice which again seemed to the inspector to be rather more than the occasion required, and to indicate a sharper concern than neighbourly regard would be likely to rouse. He reminded himself that women are apt to be emotional with what may seem inadequate cause to the masculine mind, and was cynical enough to wonder whether a mere morbid curiosity, as an alternative explanation; might not be disguising itself in a better dress. But she seemed simple, sincere, and genuinely forgetful of herself in consideration of her neighbour's possible need. He said: "You seem to be worrying about this a good deal. You must have known Mr. Rissole rather intimately?"
"Yes. I told you that. We were, as far as I know, the only friends that he had."
This reply came without embarrassment, and as freely as before. It reduced another possibility which had come to a mind familiar with so many aspects of human weakness. Was it not possible that Mrs. Lovejoy might have been on even closer terms of intimacy with the occupant of the flat below than her husband suspected? Did she know of some reason for attributing a sinister explanation to his absence, such as she could not disclose without admitting more than she could afford to do? In her husband's absence, which might be for long regular hours during the day, how solitary, how free from observation, these two people would have been - the young recently married girl on the top floor of the house, and the retired steward who was "not old", alone in the flat below! Who could say that they had only met in the evening hours? He knew the danger of speculating in advance of the facts he had. But what actresses some women are! His mind in more doubts than one, he answered merely: "Well, I'll have a look at the flat."
He did not expect to learn much from inspecting a closed door. He wanted time to decide what he should do next.
CHAPTER III
MR. RISSOLE IS IN THE FLAT
BARCLAY BUILDINGS do not consist of flats of a modern type. It is a case of a row of old houses of outward respectability being converted into a series of separate flats, one on each floor, by the provision of bathrooms and a minimum of kitchen accommodation. There are no lifts. There is a single porter whose. duties pertain to the whole row. The door before which the inspector paused had not even the security of a modern lock. It was one which would be very easy to pick. He reflected. that it was a door which anyone having a hostile purpose would quickly enter. An elderly or crippled man, living alone in such a place, and perhaps watched when drawing money and taking it home, almost asked for trouble.
But he saw something else. There was a pint milk bottle on a window-ledge by the door.
He prised up the cardboard stopper, and saw that the milk was
fresh. If milk were being taken in daily, he had been brought there by one of the emptiest tales that had ever wasted the time of the Yard. "We'll see," he thought, "what the young woman has to say to this." He went back upstairs.
Mrs; Lovejoy heard him without surprise. "Oh yes," she said. "I ought to have told you that. The milkman spoke to me about it. He said he'd had no orders to stop supplies, so he had been putting a fresh bottle there at every round, and taking the old one away. "
He considered this, and saw that it rather increased the probability that something was wrong. If Mr. Rissole had gone away, he had not only failed to notify his neighbours on the floor above (which he had been under no obligation to do), he had also omitted to inform one at least of the tradesmen with whom he dealt. He went down again to the closed door. He pressed for a long second upon the bell.
He knew that one very competent member of the force would ague seriously that a bell has a different sound in a deserted house, and that it is possible to tell thereby, after ringing once, when persistence will be rewarded and when it will be a saving of time to withdraw. That may be true or not, but now, aided by imagination or fact, he felt that the bell sounded a note of desertion. He would have been almost startled had he heard an approaching step, or seen the door open to confront him with a living man.
He pushed open a letter-flap which had no box on its inner side, and saw a thin scatter of letters or circulars on the floor.
He looked with some attention at the lock, which he was now disposed to pick. He observed that it had no key on the inner side. He saw that to be a singular fact if it had been locked (and locked it certainly was) on the inside, but natural if someone had gone away after securing it from without, in which event he would have taken the key with him. It was equally natural whether Mr. Rissole himself had taken it, as his right was, or it had been used in the same way by a fleeing criminal, who would not be likely to simplify discovery by leaving an open door behind him.
In fact, the absence of the key showed no more than that the flat was most probably empty.
Yet that was something. It decreased the likelihood that, if he should force the door, he would come upon a man quietly eating his lunch, or perhaps sleeping off the effects of some weekend indulgence, who would ask unpleasant questions as to his justification for trespassing there.
It was the kind of dilemma which his department had to face continually, and in which no excuse, however good, was of much avail, either for mistaken action or for inaction at the wrong time. What his superiors expected was that he should make the right guess, and it is by the instinctive capacity for such decisions that officers in the detective service avoid censure, and rise to such conspicuous positions as that which Chief Inspector Combridge already held.
He considered that there should be a porter in charge of such buildings, one who would probably have a master key, and who might enter the flat with a better right than himself, though perhaps not much.
He might have asked Mrs. Lovejoy that. In two minutes he might do so still. But he was indisposed to make further enquiries from her. There were two flats below. He would hear what their occupants had to say.
That proved to be simpler to resolve than to do. The first-floor flat was untenanted. That on the ground floor appeared to be occupied, but efforts with bell and knocker produced no reply.
Used to meeting such obstacles, and to overcoming them by patient pertinacity, he went on to the next house.
Here the first door at which he rang supplied him with the address of the porter, who lived on the other side of the road. He learned also that the man would be unlikely to be at home at that hour. But his wife might.
So it proved. Mrs. Neasom, a gaunt woman with a baby on her arm, said that her husband would be out till one o'clock. She knew Mr. Rissole. He lived at number three. She could not say that she had seen him for some days, but she evidently saw nothing singular in that circumstance, She described him as a quiet, pleasant gentleman. Elderly? Well, you might say. And lame? Yes, a little. Not much to notice. Not when you got used to it. She hoped there was nothing wrong?
Inspector Combridge saw that her idea of anything being wrong was of some trouble coming from the police, rather than of illness or misadventure which they should relieve. To avert that familiar form of misunderstanding, he gave a brief explanation of the enquiry which he was making.
Mrs. Neasom appeared unimpressed. She thought Mr. Rissole to be quite capable of looking after himself. She said darkly that she should have thought the Lovejoys had got enough to do minding their own affairs.
As to a key for the flat, she had none to offer, even had she shown more disposition to help. Nor would her husband be able to do more if he were in. Their duties were with the main doors and lights; and to keep stairs and passages clean.
Inspector Combridge saw that she took a common-sense view of the matter, with which he was still half inclined to agree. But he did not fail to observe that the isolation of those two upstairs flats was more absolute, both by day and night, than he had previously supposed.
He turned the conversation to the Lovejoys. He learned that Edwin Love joy was an ironmonger. He had a business in the Hornsey Road. The woman evidently knew something more about these tenants which she was reluctant to say. He did not press for what might have been no more than irrelevant gossip. The whole enquiry seemed too likely to end in nothing. If he should want more information, he was content to know that it could be had here. But he had decided to resolve the matter by entering the almost certainly empty flat.
The keyless lock would be easy to open in such a manner that there would be no remaining evidence of his lawless action. In all probability, if no irregularity had occurred to justify his invasion, it would be an interference which might remain unguessed. He could advise the Lovejoys to maintain silence, which they should be very willing to promise. At the worst, there was the husband's letter to give occasion for what he did. He sought an ironmonger, avoiding the Hornsey Road, procured the keys that such a lock would require, and entered the flat without difficulty.
As he entered the little ill-kept sitting-room, he knew that he would not be called to account for that illegally opened door. The foul odour which met him had already prepared his eyes for the sight upon which they fell.
That which had been Adrian Rissole ten days before lay face downwards upon the floor.
CHAPTER IV
CONCERNING MOTIVE AND OPPORTUNITY
THE dead man lay with his feet towards the door, his face in the wool hearthrug. There was no sign of a struggle. No disorder in a room which was over-furnished in a shabby way, and in the style of an earlier period. A room the walls and mantelpiece of which were covered with dusty portraits and knicknacks, as was the top of the ancient roll-top desk, and where any violence of movement would have produced a chaos not easily to have been straightened again.
He had been stabbed in the back. It was a wound which could not have been self-inflicted. It had been deep and wide, and had bled as such wounds will not always do. The inspector judged that Adrian Rissole had fallen as he was struck.
He might well have been dead for a week, but that was for the medical gentlemen to decide.
He concluded this without touching the body. It was not a case where anything need be hastily done. Not one where the murderer was to be captured by swift pursuit.
He withdrew from the flat, locking the door again, and after a moment's hesitation as to whether he should acquaint Mrs. Lovejoy with his discovery, and request the use of her telephone, went downstairs instead of up, and entered a street call-box. It might be discourteous treatment of those who had led him to the discovery of the crime, but there are circumstances under which courtesy cannot be a paramount consideration to the officers of the C.I.D.
Having acquainted Superintendent Davis with the discovery which he had made, and summoned the expert assistance which such an investigation requires, he went back to Barclay Buildings. He still did not feel it necessary or desirable to ascend to the fourth floor. The time when it would be necessary to interview Mr. Edwin Lovejoy could not be far ahead, but he wished to learn first what he could from inspection of the dead man's flat.
The result of this detailed inspection, and of information which came to him during the afternoon, confirmed the discretion of the attitude which he had adopted. When he knocked again at the Lovejoys' door at 6.45 p.m. St was with the knowledge that Edwin Lovejoy had ascended the stairs a few minutes before, and after he had ascertained such facts as, while they fell far short of implicating the tenants of the upper floor in the crime, yet led to a grave doubt concerning the innocence of the man he was about to interview, and of the motives prompting the letter which had originated the investigation.
Had Mr. Lovejoy, he wondered, written reluctantly under the pressure of his wife's urgent importunity? Or had he, perhaps, coldly calculated that it was an action likely to divert suspicion from himself? Was it not possible that Edwin Lovejoy was the one man in the world - perhaps the only one - who knew of the corpse which lay rotting in the sordid disorderly room that would be directly below his feet as he indulged in the comfort of his evening meal? Was it too wild a guess that he had spent the last days in nervous calculation as to when and how the murder would be discovered, as it surely must be at last, and now, with his plans fully formed, his answers to every possible question prepared, had decided that a little friendly concern as to the welfare of their next-floor neighbour would be natural for him and his wife to show? Well, Inspector Combridge concluded, he would be able to judge better when he had seen the man.
He might know more - much more - when certain finger-prints had been developed, and when he had ascertained how Mr. Lovejoy had spent the latter part of the Saturday and the Sunday a week before.
The facts with which he had become armed for his interview with Mr. Lovejoy were briefly these: Adrian Rissole had been stabbed in the back with a broad-bladed weapon, such as a carving-knife. The position of the wound indicated that the attack had been furtive and unexpected, and this was supported by the absence of any sign of a struggle in the untidy room. The exact nature of the weapon used must be a matter of conjecture, though it could scarcely be one which most men would have in their possession when paying a friendly call. But it might be one such as an ironmonger could easily select from his own stock, without the risk of a purchase which might be brought in evidence against him.
The opportunity for striking such a blow at Adrian Rissole's back would be more likely to be offered to an acquaintance than a stranger. Men do not commonly admit those whom they do not know into their living-rooms, and then turn their backs upon them. It is possible to postulate a variety of circumstances under which this might happen, yet it remains a fact that normally it would not. But Edwin Lovejoy was an acquaintance, or, on his own wife's testimony, something more. On her word also, Mr. Rissole's other friends were few, or perhaps, none.
Suppose that Mr. Lovejoy had brought cutlery for his neighbour to consider purchasing? How easy the crime would have been! The lonely flat, without even a resident caretaker to consider - the sudden blow, too unexpected for any outcry before, too savagely deep for more than a choking groan after it had been driven in. Yes, there had been no absence of opportunity.
And motive? Yes, if the Lovejoys knew or suspected the nature of the dead man's will, even apart from any money which they might have known - might be the only outsiders who knew - the flat to contain. For everything that he had, including a capital sum which brought in about three-pounds-ten a week, was left to Adrian Rissole's "kind friend Jane Lovejoy, who had done so much to cheer the days of a lonely man". That was the wording of the will which had lain in the old-fashioned roll-top desk, which had no better lock than a common penknife could force open, leaving no more evidence than a scratch when it should be closed again - and several scratches were there.
There was here a clear motive of greed; or - perhaps rather less probably - jealousy might have urged the blow. Suppose that Edwin Lovejoy, whether or not he might be aware of the will, had observed a degree of intimacy between the dead man and his wife which he had not liked, and had thus been led to plot a crime so carefully, so leisurely, planned that he could feel confident that detection could never follow?
Suppose that there had been an occasion when he had returned unexpectedly from his shop during the day, and found to his surprise that his flat was empty? That he had heard voices from the one below? Voices he knew? That he had waited for a long time, during which his wife had not returned to her own apartment?
Suppose that he had then gone away, unobserved as he had come, and then set a watch, and discovered that there was a regular daytime intimacy between his wife and that downstair neighbour? Suppose he had then decided that it would be better to take a course which would remove his rival for ever, rather than create a scandal by which he might lose his wife, merely transferring her to a man who had sufficient means for her support - more indeed than his own precarious financial position could assure?
There were other ways in which his suspicions might have been aroused without the knowledge of those who wronged him. A hint from a fellow-tradesman who had overseen something while delivering goods. A word between the guilty pair, not meant for him, which he overheard.
There was a possible motive; but of that greed was even more strongly indicated, for a midday talk with the porter and his wife had led to disclosure of the fact that the Lovejoys were in acute financial difficulties. They were known to be pressed by tradesmen. Their Christmas rent had only been paid last week, after a distress had been levied, jeopardizing the hire-purchase furniture, which had been barely saved. Whoever had struck that cowardly unsuspected blow had put a near end to their troubles, just as it must have been seeming impossible to them that they could escape the worst experience of impecuniosity.
It did little to reduce the significance of these sinister circumstances that, while the roll-top desk had been left apparently unexplored, a small oak box which must have been kept under the bed in the adjoining room, and which had been more strongly secured, had been pulled out, its double locks forced, and its contents, consisting of miscellaneous letters and other documents, of private rather than valuable character, scattered upon the floor.
This suggested robbery as the motive of the crime, and the scattering of the papers as incidental to the search for money which might or might not have, but probably had, been there. It might have been done deliberately to mislead; but if the hand had been Edwin Lovejoy's which struck the blow, the desire for some immediate profit from his crime would have been strong enough, without any secondary motive of what he did.
The time of the murder had also been fixed within comparatively narrow limits. It must have been before the arrival of the Tuesday morning's post, for there were two letters bearing Monday night's postmark among those which were scattered upon the floor, and one of these, containing a cheque for £247 3s. 2d., as the reward of a lucky or skilful coupon which Mr. Rissole must have forwarded to a football pool on or before the previous Friday night's post, was not of the kind which a living man would have been likely to disregard.
That evidence, incidentally confirming Mrs. Lovejoy's witness as to the principal interest or occupation of the dead man, appeared to place the murder almost certainly between Friday night and Tuesday morning, which was confirmed by the medical testimony, Dr. Haliburton, the police-surgeon who had appeared very promptly upon the scene, having expressed a preliminary opinion that the unfortunate man had been dead for "at least a week, and probably longer than that".
Examination of the contents of the desk had revealed evidence which appeared to fix the time within still narrower limits. The dead man had kept a diary which had every appearance of having been regularly, though not very lengthily, written up.
It was one of those books which have ruled spaces of a dozen or twenty lines for each day of the year, and for the Saturday which was almost certainly the last complete day that the man had known, there appeared this entry:
"Went out for coffee as usual, and then called to pay P's account. Afternoon to see Chelsea - Brentford match."
There was no entry for the next day. No indication that Mr. Rissole had looked over his copies of football coupons after the results of the afternoon matches had been published, and ascertained that he was a winner of something which, by the erratic course of such betting, might be anything between-four-and-sixpence and four thousand pounds.
Presumably he had entered up the diary for the day when he had returned from watching the Chelsea match, and had then let in some visitor - a man almost certainly known, if not expected - by whom he had been foully stabbed in the back; unless, of course, which was a diminishing probability, the crime had not been committed until some hour of the following day.
With these facts, among others, arranging themselves in Chief Inspector Combridge's clear and experienced, if not brilliant mind, he rang the bell once again on the upmost floor.
CHAPTER V
MR. LOVEJOY HAS A GOOD APPETITE
CHIEF INSPECTOR COMBRIDGE did not find that he was instantly admitted. He heard Mrs. Lovejoy's light steps approach the door, and had a well-founded impression that his legs were being examined cautiously through the letter-box flap. His newly-acquired information upon the state of the Lovejoy finances led him to another conclusion equally sound, that this display of caution might not be directed against himself; and reflecting that the evidence of his legs alone might be inconclusive, he stepped a couple of paces back, and was rewarded by the sight of a promptly opened door.
It was not because he was in any doubt on the subject that he asked whether Mr. Lovejoy were in, for he knew that that gentleman had been followed from shop to flat less than half an hour before; but as Mrs. Lovejoy responded with a ready affirmative, and asked him in, the feeling that he was regarded as a welcome visitor came again, as it had done at his morning call. Well, that might be the lady's reaction, but would Mr. Lovejoy feel the same?
Mr. Lovejoy's feelings, whatever they might be, appeared to have left his appetite in working order. A pleasant scent of grilled mutton chops met the inspector as he entered the room, and his observant glance noted that the bones of two, already eaten, decorated Mr. Lovejoy's plate, while a third was in course of disappearing and a fourth awaited its fate upon the dish before him.
The man who sat consuming this meal was sparely made, as heavy meat-eaters often are. His head was small, his features rather sharp, his hair and eyes dark, his eyebrows bushy. He was sometimes described as resembling his country's excellent Premier, at which he was pleased. At others, he suffered less complimentary comparisons.
Now his black eyes glittered upon the inspector with a sharp glance of apparent self-assurance and affability, as he excused himself for continuing his meal. He had had, he said, a hard day. After that, he came to the subject of the inspector's call with a blunt directness.
"I'm afraid," he said, "from what I hear's been going on this afternoon, that it's bad news you'll be giving us about Mr. Rissole."
Inspector Combridge considered the implications of this remark. Had the man given himself away? No, he could not fairly say that he had. The investigations which had been proceeding during the afternoon on the floor below had been conducted with extreme discretion, the body had not yet been removed, and there had been no public announcement of the murder. But the coming and going of the police-surgeon, the photographers, and other members of the force such as are attracted, like waiting vultures, to a scene of crime, could hardly have been unobserved by one so interested in the event as Mrs. Lovejoy had shown herself to be. He could not tell how audible, in this ancient house, movements on the floor below might be to one who was watching and lonely there. Short as the time had been between Mr. Lovejoy's return and his own appearance, his wife might well have given him an account of the morning calls, and of what she had heard subsequently, which would justify that remark.
Anyway, there should be no ambiguity in his reply. He prided himself on the fact that he played fair. Actually, he lacked both the subtlety of mind and the type of character which would have fitted or inclined him to deceive the criminals whom he so tenaciously followed. His method was rather that of the patient bloodhound, careful, slow, but relentless in following every twist of his victim's flight on a track which he would not leave.
If Edwin Lovejoy were an innocent man, he told him no more than he had some title to be informed, and, if he were not, no more than he already knew, when he answered: "I'm sorry to say that he's been murdered. There's no doubt about that. Stabbed in the back. I came to see what information you could give us Mrs. Lovejoy told me that you knew him better than most."
Mrs. Lovejoy had gone into the kitchen when this was said. Her husband paused with a loaded fork half lifted towards his mouth. He exclaimed: "What a ghastly thing!" with as much show of horror, and perhaps surprise, as the occasion required, allowance being made for the fact that he was not of an emotional type.
He got up and went to the kitchen door, where the inspector heard him say: "Jane, it's bad news about Adrian. He's been murdered. And then, more faintly, with more of emotion but even less of surprise, there came his wife's reply: "What a dreadful thing! Poor Adrian! But it's no more than I've said we should hear. At least, I was almost sure he was dead."
The couple re-entered the living-room together and, as they did so, Mrs. Lovejoy added, half to her husband, half to the inspector: "But I don't say it's as bad as if he'd laid there ill till he died, and unable to call for help. It was that that I was so afraid about, and what made me get you to write."
"No," Inspector Combridge admitted, "perhaps not." The proposition did not invite discussion. To him, a man who died naturally was of no professional interest, whether his last hours were short or solitary, or prolonged to the latest possible second by the sedulous efforts of a surrounding group of doctors and nurses. "I was hoping," he went on, "that you might be able to give us some useful information."
"I don't know that we could," Mr. Lovejoy replied. "But you'd better tell me first what you've been able to find out, and then it'll be easier for us to say."
Inspector Combridge did not like this reply. It seemed that the man fenced with him, as innocence need not do. Yet the request was not entirely unreasonable, and he had no means of making these people speak, except upon their own terms. Showing no sign of his thoughts, he answered with apparent readiness: "Well, he'd been stabbed in the back, and almost certainly robbed. We don't know much more than that yet, though I expect we soon shall."
"How long ago should you say it was?"
"Perhaps a week, perhaps more."
A glance passed between husband and wife as this answer was given, and the woman said: "Then you'd better tell what you saw, Edwin. I'm sure it will be the better way."
Mr. Lovejoy did not appear to resent this open advice, which really gave him no option but to speak with the frankness (if that were the right word) which his wife proposed. But he was not quick to begin, and when he spoke, it was only to ask a question: "You mean it might be as far back as the Friday before last?"
Inspector Combridge was literal in his reply. Why mention the evidence - the diary in particular - which so emphatically indicated the following day, until he had heard what Mr. Lovejoy would have him believe? "The condition of the body," he answered, "is consistent with it being as far back as that."
But the ironmonger still seemed reluctant to communicate whatever was on his mind.
"I don't want," he said, "to bring trouble to an innocent man, and I'm not as clear as I should like to be that I mightn't be had up for slander. I suppose you'd guarantee me against that?"
"If you tell us in confidence any grounds for suspicion that you may have, you can rely on our discretion not to put it to any improper use."
"Well, it's no more than this. We've known Mr. Rissole for the last year, or a bit more. Been quite friendly together, and all that. And he's never seemed to have any people he knew. Just a quiet solitary man. In fact, he once told us that he'd got no near relatives, and no one to leave his money to when he died. He's said more than once that when that happened Mrs. Lovejoy would get a pleasant surprise. I'd like to think that she will, but I know people often talk like that without putting anything into writing, even when they mean what they say, so it's probably a case of blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for that's precisely what she's going to get."
"There is a will which, so far as appearances go, is in order, and was only made about three months ago. It leaves everything to your wife."
"Then it's good news for us, and I don't mind telling you we can do with a bit of cash. But this isn't what I was going to say. We've got off the track somehow. It was the Friday evening before last, and the time must have been about a quarter past seven. That's almost exact, because we close at seven on Fridays, and I came straight home, as I mostly do. I met a man on the stairs - they're not very well lighted, as you can see for yourself - below Mr. Rissole's landing, whose face I didn't see clearly, but I didn't like his looks, or the way he pushed past me, as though he didn't want to be recognized.
"I thought he looked like a seaman - not naval, not neat enough for that - and a rough sort. I had a queer feeling at the time that when he saw me coming up he was half of a mind to turn back, and half to fling me to the bottom, but he just pushed past me, with his head turned away.
"I didn't think of his having been at Mr. Rissole's. I thought he'd been here, and the first thing I did when I got in was to ask what his business had been; but when I heard he hadn't called here, I saw he must have been at Mr. Rissole's below.
"When the days passed after that without Rissole being seen about, I naturally wondered if the two things had anything to do with each other, though I couldn't see what. Of course, I didn't expect anything as bad as this. In fact, if I'm frank, it was Mrs. Lovejoy who was worrying me to write. I thought it would all turn out to be nothing, more likely than not; and we should get no better thanks than busybodies usually do.
Chief Inspector Combridge considered this story. It seemed to him rather thin. In fact, just the kind that a murderer might make up to turn suspicion from his own door. He had been standing until now as one who had intended to do no more than inform these people of the fact of the tragedy of the floor below; but now he took the seat which Mrs. Lovejoy had offered when he first entered the room. He thought that there might be profit in further words than he had first intended to speak.
CHAPTER VI
FINGER-PRINTS FROM THE LOVEJOYS
"Do I understand." Inspector Combridge asked, "that you wouldn't recognize that man, if you should see him again?"
"No. I wouldn't say that exactly. I couldn't swear to his face. But I think I should know his shoulders and neck, and - well, the general shape of the man. You see, I looked at him rather closely, as far as the light and the way he pushed past me allowed."
Inspector Combridge saw that, if Mr. Lovejoy were lying, he was one who would do it with circumstance, and that he had his tale well prepared. He asked: "But you have no reason for suspecting the man, apart from the way he passed you on the stairs?"
"Not except that, and the fact that he looked a seafaring man, and we know that Rissole had been at sea, and we don't know how his money may have been made."
"I understood that he had compensation for an accidental injury."
"Yes. That's what he told us. We don't know more than that."
Inspector Combridge considered this suggestion, and believed the tale even less than before. The idea of the man who retires to enjoy money made nefariously abroad, and who is then visited by mysterious foreigners with murderous purpose - well, it may be useful to writers of the class of fiction to which it rightly belongs, but his experience had not confirmed the idea that foreigners were either more mysterious or more habitually criminal than his metropolitan neighbours, nor that those who. take the way of the sea may not make their money as honestly as an ironmonger in the Hornsey Road.
It was the sort of suggestion which might appear plausible to a homebred suburban mind, and which it would be likely to put forward in the effort to turn suspicion aside. As a serious theory, Inspector Combridge had no use for it at all. But he only said: "Well, if that's all you can tell me, the man won't be very easy to find." He turned the conversation to a subject of more immediate interest to himself, by asking: "I suppose Rissole didn't always come up here - Mrs. Lovejoy told me how often he did that - you sometimes went down to him?"
"Oh yes. As much as once a week more often than not."
"I'll tell you," the inspector went on, with partial frankness, "why I'm asking you that. It's a question of finger-prints. Of course, we're making a thorough examination of the flat for any there are, and if, for instance, we should trace the seaman you saw, and find his prints where they shouldn't be, it might just be sufficient to bring the charge home to a guilty man. But as you and Mrs. Lovejoy were often there, your finger-marks may be all over the place without being any help to us.
"What I wondered was - of course, it's as you like - I've no right to ask - whether Mrs. Lovejoy and you would mind letting us have copies of yours, so that we needn't waste time over what means nothing at all."
He watched Mr. Lovejoy very closely as he asked this. What he had said was true so far that the mere presence of the finger-prints of the ironmonger and his wife in the flat of the murdered man might have no sinister significance, but the places where they would be found might give them a deadly meaning. Even so, he could have obtained them in other ways, but half his purpose had been to see how Mr. Lovejoy would respond to the proposal, the unspoken implications of which would not be lost to a guilty mind.
As to that, he did not look pleased, and his reply was not quick to come. But in the end he said, genially enough: "Well, you've brought us some good news, though I'm sorry the money comes in the way it does, and if we can save some trouble to you, I don't think we ought to refuse that. Not if Mrs. Lovejoy doesn't object." It appeared that the lady, who had been listening, more or less, to the conversation as she had been clearing the debris of her husband's meal, did not object at all. Indeed, she seemed rather childishly pleased at the idea. When a detective-sergeant arrived, with significant celerity, from the floor below, bearing the simple apparatus which the occasion required, Mrs. Lovejoy's only anxiety appeared to be that she might retain a copy of the print of her own thumb. The operation reminded her, she said, of a garden-party competition, the aim of which is to produce butterflies by folding paper over three dabs of paint.
In spite of many previous experiences of female duplicity, the official mind concluded that her own conscience was clear, not merely of complicity in Adrian Rissole's death, but of any suspicion that her husband was not equally innocent.
For the moment, he felt that he had obtained all the information that he was-likely to get, and his retreat was hastened by a word from the detective-sergeant spoken aside. He said that there were County Court bailiffs upon the stairs. He had asked them to wait for a short time, so that the police might not be interrupted in a legal mission even more important than theirs. But they were becoming impatient, and could not be much longer delayed.
CHAPTER VII
WHY MR. LOVEJOY WAS SHORT OF CASH
"IT looks to me, Combridge," Superintendent Davis concluded, when he had listened to the inspector's account of the investigations of the previous day, "to be one of those cases where the culprit will hang himself without much assistance from us."
Inspector Combridge was disposed to agree. The tale of the sea-faring man might have been useful to bamboozle a jury, had there been nothing to disprove that the murder had been committed on Friday night. But with the dead man's diary providing decisive evidence that he had been alive on the next day, it might easily be so handled that it would have a contrary effect. It could be argued that this rendered the alleged incident even less credible than before; and if Edwin Lovejoy had invented something he had not seen, it was an evidence of guilty conscience which any jury would be likely to read aright.
The case might not yet be sufficiently clear to justify an arrest, but it was much to feel sure that they had their eyes on the guilty man, and encouraging to observe that he had already done so much to put the rope round his own neck. Having done so much, he might be expected to do more.
But Inspector Combridge could not accept the position with the entire complacency of his superior officer. It was not his part to sit back contentedly to watch the development of a satisfactory case. To complete that satisfaction rested with him, and he saw that there might still be difficulties upon the way.
"It doesn't follow," he said, "that the man couldn't have gone back and done Rissole in on the following day."
"No. They'll say that. We must hope that Lovejoy will try something which will put him a bit deeper in the mud than he is now. And you may learn a lot from the people on the ground floor. You've hardly begun yet."
Inspector Combridge recognized the reason of that. Considering that it was barely twenty-four hours since he had undertaken the investigation, he had little cause for dissatisfaction with the progress that he had made. The trouble was that he had been in a despondent mood. He had just failed rather badly It was an error which a cheque drawn upon his past reputation had been sufficient to pay. But he could not afford to fail twice in succession, lest that account should be overdrawn. He was bound, for the moment, to be over-cautious in all he did.
Still, so far, he had done well enough, and it seemed that fortune had been his friend. They were agreed upon that. They could have no foresight of the dilemma which lay ahead. A dilemma which, if it should not prove them wrong in their present guess, would be potent to turn their eyes to another trail, which then itself would foil them, and turn them back to that on which they already were.
"Well," he said, as he rose to go, "it's half the battle to feel that we know the criminal. It'll only be the usual grind, mugging up the proofs now."
He scarcely noticed that the telephone rang, until the superintendent called him back from a closing door, while a slow smile creased his heavy delusively-somnolent features. "Show him up," he said into the instrument, and then, as he laid it down: "Funny how they never can leave the rope alone, till they've got it fixed where it ought to be. Lovejoy's here, asking to see you on urgent business."
Mr. Edwin Lovejoy, entering a moment later, certainly looked a harassed man, but he knew what he had come to say, and he lost no time. "I don't understand," he began, "what the procedure is in a case like this, but I suppose you keep possession, for a time, of what you find in the flat. That wouldn't be anything to do with me, except that you told me that there's a will in Mrs. Lovejoy's favour, and, if that's in order, it might be very important - very important indeed - if you could let my solicitor have a sight of it sometime this afternoon, and let him satisfy himself that there is really money to come."
"We shouldn't wish," the superintendent answered, "to hold the will back from whatever may be the proper direction for it to go; that is, not unless we see reason to think that it's got something to do with the crime.
"But I suppose you know that the fact that your wife may benefit doesn't give her or her solicitor any claim to take possession of it - that is, not unless she's named as executrix. . . How's that, Combridge?"
"The will's drawn by Mr. Jellipot, and it makes him the sole executor. "
Mr. Lovejoy received this information blankly, not being familiar with the solicitor's name, but the eyebrows of Superintendent Davis were slightly raised as he answered: "Jellipot's client, was he? Then the man who stuck that knife in him is going to be sorry for himself, if he makes it his business to hunt him down."
"I didn't suppose," the ironmonger answered, without appearing to notice the last remark, "that my wife had any claim to possess the will. It's the information I want to have as promptly as possible, as to what my wife s benefit is."
"Well," Superintendent Davis considered noncommittally, "I don't see how you can learn much today. A will isn't a document of any certain value till probate's granted, and sometimes not even then. There might be another a week later, leaving everything to a cats' home. But we'll send it round this morning to Mr. Jellipot's office - he's a solicitor in Basinghall Street - and your solicitor can get in touch with him. I dare say he'll give you any information he can; that is if your solicitor can give a good enough reason for wanting to know."
Mr. Lovejoy was blunt in his reply: "I've got an execution in the shop, and another at home, and I can raise the money to pay them out if I get my wife's signature added to mine, and I can show that Rissole's money's coming to her."
"That's bad luck," Superintendent David answered slowly, "but it sounds the sort of reason that any solicitor would understand." He was studying the man closely as he spoke, wondering whether he saw a criminal who, to release himself from financial ruin, had murdered an unsuspecting friend, or one to whom a most opportune gift of fortune had come innocently, although by a tragic path. It was to learn more of the man, rather than from any interest in the event itself, that he added: "I shouldn't have said that you were quite the sort to get into a mess like that."
Mr. Lovejoy's eyes glittered with anger, either at the imputation these words conveyed, or the memories which they stirred. His cheek-bones flushed darkly as he answered; giving an explanation which caused his hearers to forget that it was a probable murderer with whom they talked. More shortly than in the bitterness of his own words it may be stated that his troubles arose through a firm of multiple providers having opened a branch almost opposite the business which he had brought to a position of moderate profit by the hard work of eight previous years. He had been married no more than a few weeks when the disaster had confronted him, and from that day had fought a desperate losing battle, striving by novel methods of advertising, by the introduction of new lines of stock, by devices of window-dressing, by cutting prices, and other expedients which had only exhausted his resources more rapidly than a more passive attitude would have done, to maintain a struggle which yet moved inexorably to its certain end.
"Well," Superintendent Davis commented, when the tale was done, "it's been tough luck for you." And then he reminded himself that even tradesmen who are being ruined by a multiple store must not stab their friends in the back so that their wives may receive legacies with the promptitude which the position requires.
He added: "I shouldn't put your solicitor in touch with Mr. Jellipot, if I were you. Not at first, anyway. Go and see him yourself sometime this afternoon, and explain the jam that you're in. He might be more willing to say the right word after he'd understood what the trouble is."
Mr. Lovejoy thanked him for good advice, which he said he would take. The superintendent excused himself to his own conscience with the reflection that his advice really might be good, if the iron-monger were an innocent man; if he were not it was as good as he deserved to get. But he knew that his real object had been to give an exceptionally astute solicitor an opportunity of studying a man who might have murdered one of his own clients.
"You might almost say," he remarked, after Mr. Lovejoy had gone, "that Rissole was murdered by Scars & Huxley's multiple stores. That is, if we're making a good guess at who handled the knife. . . . But you'd better get to Mr. Jellipot as soon as you can. Let him have the will, and put him wise to what the position is. It'll be a pleasure to have him on our side, though I'm not saying that the case can't be handled without his help."
CHAPTER VIII
INFORMATION FROM MR. JELLIPOT
MR. JELLIPOT was a good listener. He heard the tragic tale with few interruptions, and these were no more than brief questions intended to elucidate some point on which the narrative had been less than full.
When it was done he said: "I'm sorry about Rissole. An inoffensive man, who might, I suppose, have enjoyed life for many years in his own quiet way. He had been a client of mine for longer than I have known you, Inspector. In fact, from when I had a very small practice. He was one of those clients whom it is pleasant to have - always grateful and appreciative of what you do."
It crossed Inspector Combridge's mind that if there were more lawyers as solicitous as was Mr. Jellipot for their clients' good and as indifferent to their own gain they might earn a more general gratitude from the public on whom they live. But he did not say it, for Mr. Jellipot was speaking again in his slow, hesitant manner, almost as though he were merely thinking aloud.
"As I understand, your conclusion is that the murder was committed by Edwin Lovejoy, and that he has made up the tale of the seafaring man to divert suspicion from himself?"
"Yes. That's how it looks to us."
"It would be an amazingly foolish thing to do. But I should hesitate to say that it is therefore an improbable explanation. The commission of such a murder may be taken as almost conclusive evidence of a singularly unbalanced mind. Normal prudence is not to be anticipated from such a source. So, at least, it appears to me. Yes, it has a very probable sound. . . . But as to the existence of the seafaring man, I have to suggest that you may be wrong. Adrian Rissole had a second cousin, who was a seaman. A ship's carpenter. A man named Anthony Rissole, whom, you may like to know, I could identify without difficulty He was in this office less than six months ago."
"That certainly makes it look a bit different."
"Does it? I am not sure. You will understand that I am expressing no opinion upon the guilt or innocence of a man I have never met, and whom you have described to me as a victim of circumstance rather than his own folly, in the acute commercial difficulty which he is now experiencing. "Beyond that, I know only that mg late client had a very kindly feeling towards his wife, who had shown consideration for a lonely man.
"But is it not at least possible - or even likely - that Adrian Rissole mentioned the existence of his cousin to these people of whom he saw so much during the last year? And might not have that put the idea of inventing such a visitor into the mind of a guilty man?"
"Yes. That's possible. And it brings us to the conclusion we'd already reached, only up a new road. We think the seafaring man can be ruled out. But we want to examine every possibility, all the same. I suppose you can't tell me whether the murdered man was involved in anything which might bring him in touch with the criminal world? Anything which might have made enemies for. him of a dangerous kind?"
"No. I should answer with. some confidence that he had none. Actually, I have seldom met a man less likely to be involved in any serious trespass against the law. I should describe him as having had a particularly simple, truthful, but singularly irresolute character. "
"Suppose a young woman made love to him?"
"It is a position which I find some difficulty in visualizing. Still, it is obviously possible. He might have felt flattered. Perhaps grateful. He would certainly not have been rude. Beyond that, I cannot say what his reaction would have been likely to be. . . . No, it is a question to which I am unable to give you a valuable reply."
"Then the next thing seems to be to look up this Tony Rissole. I suppose you don't happen to have his address?"
"Yes, I think I can give you that. But, if so, it's not one where you can make a quick call, and, of course, it may have changed. If he killed Adrian Rissole, it almost certainly has. It's in New York. Twenty-seventh Street East, if I remember rightly. I'll have it looked up for you now."
"Can you tell me whether the two men were on bad terms?"
"I shouldn't put it quite like that. Tony certainly considered he had a grievance, because an old woman, a distant relative of both, left a considerable sum of money entirely to Adrian. which Tony had expected to share.
"I believe that the trouble was that Tony's mother was of Italian origin. Unfortunately for him, he followed his mother in appearance, and the old lady said that a wop, which is, I have understood, an expression somewhat discourteous in its implications which is applied to citizens of the United States who show physical characteristics indicative of Italian blood, should not have a cent of hers.
"Anthony considered that his cousin should have ignored the will, and divided the money equally, which was somewhat further than he was prepared to go, or I could advise, and he remained acutely dissatisfied, though Adrian had assisted him more than once with substantial sums."
"Sort of dago who'd be quick with a knife?"
"I cannot say that. I. have never seen him with such an article in his hand. But it is not an entirely improbable assumption. He was rather truculent on the last occasion when he was here, with the result that I told him - I told him firmly" - Mr. Jellipot repeated the word in his mildest tone - "that he would have no further advances with my consent, either large or small."
Inspector Combridge, hearing this, had no difficulty in visualizing the interview, and appreciating the baffled anger of the man who would not readily understand that the more diffident in manner Mr. Jellipot became, the more unshakable would his decision be.
"I thought," he said, "that Adrian's money came from a compensation award for a damaged leg."
"He had a pound a week from that source, which will cease now. He had a total income from other sources of nearly four pounds weekly. It was an amount which tended to increase, as he lived within his income. I may add that his money was invested with more regard to security than to the income which it would earn. If matters should prove to be otherwise in order, there is no doubt that Mrs. Lovejoy will benefit to a substantial amount."
"Yes? It seems to me that it's a rather big if."
"I must assume that your mind is on the principle of English law that a man may not benefit by his own crime. But it would be going too far to say that there are not circumstances in which his wife may. That is, if she cannot be shown to be an accessory either before or after the event. But it is a question which, we may hope, will not arise. I would prefer to meet Mr. Lovejoy this afternoon with an absolutely open mind."
"And I'd better find out a bit more about Tony Rissole."
"Yes. I think you should," Mr. Jellipot assented thoughtfully. He added: "I will instruct Newman to let you have his address as you go out. You will understand that it is a New York address, and not recent. It may be useless; but you are welcome to it, for anything it is worth."
Inspector Combridge was cheerful about that. "The New York cops," he said, "don't often let us down, if we start them on the right trail. But I don't say it was him. I just want to be sure he wasn't about, and then we'll give Mr. Lovejoy a chance of telling a jury it wasn't him."
Mr. Jellipot, either because he was too much distressed by the. inspector's regrettable grammar, or because he approved the indicated programme, made no answer to this, and the interview terminated.
Inspector Combridge left with the determination, in a spirit of routine thoroughness, to eliminate Tony Rissole before proceeding to the extremity of applying for a warrant for Edwin Lovejoy's arrest; but he did not overlook the possibility which Mr. Jellipot had put into his mind. If Adrian Rissole had talked of his cousin, perhaps indicating his character unfavourably, and implying that there was little friendship between them, which in view of the admitted intimacy which had existed between himself and his upstair neighbours was at least probable, it would have been sufficient to originate the idea of the "seafaring man", even had it not been likely, apart from that, to come to the mind of a murderer aware of Adrian's antecedents, and having had a full week's leisure in which to prepare his tale.
If that were so, the C.I.D. would be fooled indeed if they should allow themselves so easily to be turned aside.
CHAPTER IX
MR. JELLIPOT CONSULTS HIS CLERK
MR. JELLIPOT had lunch served in his own room, as he would often do when pressure of business was heavy. It was understood that he was not to be disturbed at such times, unless the occasion should be extreme.
While he consumed the cold meat and cheese which was the simple fare he preferred at that time of day, he took the opportunity to review the various matters he had on hand with the patient thoroughness of a methodical mind.
Now the murder of which he had just heard occupied his thoughts to the exclusion of the provisions of a most complicated will on which they should have been more profitably engaged. Mr. Balker's abstruse intentions would receive sufficient consideration, if necessary during the night hours; but Adrian Rissole was a man whom he had known for many years, though only as an occasional client. He had been drawn into cases of criminal homicide against his will more than once before, and had defended those who had not all been guiltless with a success which certainly had not vexed his mind.
But now he had been introduced to murder from a different angle: almost - for his imagination was singularly vivid when it had realities with which to deal - from that of the one who can never be present when such inquisitions are held. He saw the long years of placid contented life, the uncounted days, the innumerable minutes of sentient existence, of which Adrian Rissole had been irretrievably robbed by that one pitiless thrust. Indignation stirred him to articulate speech. "It is a matter," he informed his empty room in a mild voice, "on which no peradventure should be allowed." His voice sank to an even quieter note as he added: "It should be resolved beyond doubt." His thoughts were on Anthony Rissole, whom he did, and Edwin Lovejoy, whom he did not, know. On the information he had, it seemed that it was between them that the law must choose.
His knowledge of Tony Rissole inclined him to think him the guilty man, but he rebuked this presumption with the thought that he was one whom he did not like. And he saw that, if Tony were innocent, there was probability that he would have been sufficiently far from the scene of the crime to prove it beyond dispute.
But the case against Edwin Lovejoy was widely different. He saw that, at its weakest, it was not without the maximum indications both of motive and opportunity. These may not be proof, even in conjunction, however strong, but they are pointers which will most often cause the light of enquiry to be directed upon the guilty man. And the inferences which might be drawn therefrom would become far stronger if it should appear probable that the vision of the seafaring man was no better than a concocted tale. It might even be held to go far in justifying the police should they arrest and thereby require him to prove his innocence, which, as the law regarding the giving of evidence by accused persons is now interpreted, is the actual result of putting a man on trial upon a capital charge.
But the immediate question was how he should receive Mr. Lovejoy, or his solicitor, during the afternoon. He saw that the time for reflection would not be long, for the intended application was not of a nature to be delayed. The interval of his customary seclusion had not ended when he picked up the telephone and summoned his managing clerk from the outer office.
"Newman," he said, "here is Adrian Rissole's will, which Inspector Combridge brought this morning."
"Nothing wrong, sir, I hope?"
"Nothing wrong with the will Mr. Rissole was murdered a week ago."
Newman, a neat young man, with a faint suggestion of Hebrew origin in his intelligent face, and a habit of unobtrusive efficiency which his employer approved, took this information quietly, though there was some evidence of feeling in his voice as he answered.
"I'm sorry to hear that, sir. He wasn't the sort of man you'd expect to get into any trouble. It seems queer we hadn't heard earlier."
"Yes. It has only just been discovered. You would feel confident that he had not made any later testamentary dispositions?"
"Yes, sir. Not without letting us know We could feel sure of that."
"So I think. Then we shall answer any enquiry frankly, but exactly, that we are satisfied that the will is in order, and has not been superseded."
Edward Newman received this instruction with his usual intelligence. He saw that there was more that he might be told, but it was not his habit to ask for more than his employer gave. He only asked: "We are not to say that we expect that it will be admitted for probate?"
"No. It will be better that it should not be put in that way Nor, of course, to the contrary. It is a matter on which we have no need to express any opinion."
"Yes, sir. That will be all?"
"Not quite. I believe you sometimes saw Rissole outside business hours?"
"Yes, sir. I just saw him. He used to drop in at the 'Black Eagle'. He liked watching the darts there on Saturday nights."
"That was the only day of the week?"
"I couldn't say that. No doubt others could. I don't go myself except when there's a match there."
"You probably noticed his absence last Saturday?"
"No, sir. We were playing away."
Mr. Jellipot was slightly surprised. "You mean," he asked, "that you are a member of a team which engages regularly in this popular sport?"
Mr. Newman had occasion to observe the erratic limits of human fame. There are probably not more than two men in the south of England who can throw a dart with such accuracy as he, and one of these requires three strong whiskies before his hand becomes steady enough to display his skill. He said: "Yes, sir. I play a little."
"Then I have no doubt that I can congratulate you on playing a good game. But, on the Saturday before, was he there then?"
"I could scarcely say that with certainty. No, I believe not."
"But you are not sure? It might be a most important point."
"I shouldn't be prepared to swear that he wasn't there." He paused a moment, recollecting the occasion. "I could swear that I didn't see him. He used always to sit in one corner. I could say that he wasn't there for most of the time between seven and nine."
"Which he usually was?"
"Yes. Like a fixture."
"You would have spoken to him if he had been there?"
"Just to say good evening. Perhaps a word or two more. Nothing beyond that."
"You never met Mr. Lovejoy?"
"I don't recognize anybody by that name."
Mr. Jellipot approved the careful limitation of this reply. Newman might have seen a dozen men in the bar-parlour of the 'Black Eagle' without knowing the names they bore.
"He is an ironmonger in the Hornsey Road. He and his wife occupy the flat above that in which Rissole lived."
"Isn't it a Mrs. Lovejoy who benefits by the will?"
"Yes. The wife. Combridge suspects the husband of the murder. "
"Not the lady, sir?"
"He thinks it may have been with her knowledge. But more probably not. It is unlikely that she struck the blow. . . . Edwin Lovejoy is coming to see me any moment now. Or I may hear from his solicitors. But he is more likely to come.
As Newman made no comment on this information, Mr. Jellipot went on: "It is not a matter of undertaking his defence for a crime with which he is not yet charged, which, under any circumstances, I should emphatically refuse. But Mr. Lovejoy has his own solicitors. He wants to arrange with them for an immediate advance on Mrs. Lovejoy's expectations under the will."
"Yes, sir? He isn't losing much time."
"I understand that he is in acute financial difficulties."
This statement also being received in expressionless silence, Mr. Jellipot added: "We must, of course, assume nothing. Many people of excellent character are short at times of adequate financial resources in a sufficiently liquid form."
"Yes, sir. Of course."
"There is no one whom your slight knowledge of Rissole would cause you to suspect?"
"I might have thought of the cousin, sir. That is if he'd been anywhere around. "
"So did I. Mr. Lovejoy says that he saw someone whom he describes as a seafaring man leaving Rissole's flat about the time of the murder."
"Well, sir, if anyone else saw him?"
"Yes. It is a point on which Inspector Combridge is sure to make very thorough enquiries."
"Yes, sir. He's not one to miss much."
Mr. Jellipot agreed. "He has qualities which we, who cannot hope to emulate, must be content to admire."
Newman withdrew to the door, and then turned to say: "I rather think Mr. Lovejoy's here now, sir."
"Very well. Have him shown in at once.
Next moment, Edwin Lovejoy entered the room.
CHAPTER X
SURPRISING ACTION BY MR. JELLIPOT
SUNK in the comfortable chair at the left of the solicitor's desk, Mr. Lovejoy came to his point with the same directness which he had shown to his previous auditors. He found Mr. Jellipot to be a patient listener to a tale which he had heard little more than an hour before. But, beyond that, he was not helpful. His voice was toneless: his attitude semi-detached.
It was an attitude too colourless to be felt as hostile, but Mr. Lovejoy became aware that he was not sympathetically received.
"You have told your solicitors," Mr. Jellipot asked at last, "that you would be calling upon me?"
"Yes I gave them a look in just before lunch."
"You would like me to give you a letter addressed to them?"
"I should be very much obliged."
"Very well, I will do that."
Mr. Jellipot rang for a stenographer. He asked, as the young lady entered: "Your solicitors are?"
"Jones & Snelpit. New Bedford Alley."
Mr. Jellipot accepted the information in his previous expressionless manner. In any case, it was no business of his. He dictated:
"Adrian Rissole, deceased.
"I am writing at the request of Mr. Edwin Lovejoy to inform you of the existence of a will dated" (Mr. Newman will supply you with that), "and duly executed by the above deceased, under which Mrs. Alice Lovejoy, described as of 4 Barclay Buildings, S.W.1, is the sole beneficiary, to an amount which, to the best of my present knowledge, is likely to be somewhat over four thousand pounds.
"Writing as the sole executor of the said will, I may add that I see no reason to doubt that it represents the final testamentary dispositions of the above deceased.
"Yours faithfully."
Mr. Jellipot's telephone had already sounded its summoning note as he finished this short dictation. He said, as he picked up the receiver: "Let me have it for signature as soon as it has been typed. Mr. Lovejoy will take it with him," but then, as he heard the name of those who had rung up, he added "You'd better wait a moment, Miss Gill. . . . Yes, Mr Jellipot speaking."
"This is Jones & Snelpit," he heard. "Isaac Snelpit speaking. We understand that you will be acting in connection with the estate of Adrian Rissole."
"Yes."
"You'll be having a man named Lovejoy calling on you this afternoon - - "
"He is with me now."
"He says you've got a will by which a pot of money comes to his wife."
"Adrian Rissole left his whole estate to Mrs. Alice Lovejoy."
"Then it's all O.K.? We thought we'd rather have it from you direct."
"The will was drawn in this office about six months ago. I can vouch for it having been duly executed."
"Ye-s. There's another point that we're bound to look at. There's the point of who bumped Rissole off, as the Yankees say. We know you're in with the police on this. We'd like just a word from you of the right sort."
"You appear to have been seriously misinformed. I am not acting, nor expecting to act, in any capacity whatever, except as executor of the will."
"But you could give us the right tip all the same?"
Mr. Jellipot was slow to reply. When he spoke it was with unusual deliberation, even for him: "I do not profess to misunderstand you. It may be a natural question for you to raise. But it is one on which I can express no opinion."
"But you'd know if the police - - "
"I am sorry. I can express no opinion at all."
Mr. Jellipot cut off with some abruptness. He had been aware that Mr. Lovejoy watched him with anxious eyes. He knew that what he had said would have rendered it impossible to obtain the advance so urgently needed, or - more probably, Jones & Snelpit being what they were - that it would be made on the most onerous terms that the law allowed, or that the extremity of Edwin Lovejoys necessity could induce him to undertake. And having done this, he was not entirely easy in mind.
"You can leave that letter, Miss Gill, unless I ring for it to be done." Having given this instruction he turned to his anxious visitor. There were things in his mind which would not be pleasant but which a fine sense of honour might constrain him to say. Or he might see a stronger reason for saying less. Timidly tenacious, he started at some distance from a point which he was no less certain to reach.
"You've known Jones & Snelpit a. good while?"
"No. I went to Gordon Montague, the moneylender, last week. There was no other way by which I could hope to get through. And he sent me to them. He said, if they advised a loan, it could be arranged. Of course, that was before we'd any idea of this money coming the way it has."
"No other way?" Mr. Jellipot thought. It seemed that another had been found, by whatever hand. He asked: "You will have grasped the purport, more or less, of the conversation, one side of which you have just heard?"
"Not very well, I'm afraid."
"Your solicitors put a question to me to which I do not know the answer - and had I been more fully informed it is improbable that I should have been free to gratify their curiosity." After a moment's pause, Mr. Jellipot, being scrupulous in verbal equity, even towards those whom he did not approve, added: "But perhaps curiosity is an inappropriate word. It may be considered to be a question material to the security of the transaction which is proposed."
As he spoke, he looked at a man whose perturbation, from whatever cause it might arise, was beyond concealment. "You mean I shan't be able to get the advance?"
"I am not aware that I expressed any opinion on that point, nor that I should be asked to give it. But I should suppose that, if you obtain the accommodation which you require, it may be on very onerous terms."
"I said last week that I'd pay anything up to twenty per cent for a hundred pounds to tide me over till I could realize on some stock that I may get another firm to take off my hands. I hoped to get it in time to save what's been happening during the last few days. But I reckon ten per cent ought to be enough now, with Mrs. Lovejoy's signature added to mine. But I can't get them to say anything definite. I couldn't last week, and I can't now. Only I understood this morning that there'd be some cash in sight if I could get this letter from you."
"It is not for me," Mr. Jellipot answered, with professional propriety uppermost in his mind, "to express any opinion as to the terms on which your legal advisers will be able to negotiate the accommodation which you have instructed them to arrange. But if ten per cent per annum were in your mind, I am afraid that substantial revision of that - - "
Mr. Lovejoy interrupted with some impatience, for which he had the excuse that his affairs were urgent, and it was difficult to see how these depressing opinions could help his need. "Well," he said, "I don't see why they shouldn't. Anyway, I've got to hear what they say. If they were willing to talk about helping me last week, I don't see why there should be much dallying now. I thought the letter sounded all right. If you'll be kind enough to let me have that - - "
"Yes. You can have that." But having given this assurance, Mr. Jellipot made no motion towards the telephone through which the instruction to type it must be conveyed. He sat for some moments in thought, as though ignoring the existence of the anxious man at his side.
He was in no doubt as to the course which he would take. He paused only to examine the origins of his knowledge, the circumstance of the official confidence he had received, and the degrees to which either honour or etiquette should restrain his lips. He was still unsure whether he were in the company of a heartless criminal or a man whose financial crisis was to be relieved by a tragic chance; but, guilty or not, he was surely entitled to understand the suspicion under which he lay, and the nature of the obstacle to his obtaining a loan on the easy terms which he had expected to gain.
Relieved of restraining doubts, Mr. Jellipot moved obliquely towards the explanation which he had determined to give, as diffident courtesy, and a radical doubt as to the character of Edwin Lovejoy, impelled him to do.
"You will readily understand - you are, indeed, doubtless aware - that there are a variety of circumstances under which the provisions of a will may fail to materialize to the benefit of those who are mentioned therein, or to the extent which its terms express?"
"You mean that there's a snag that the letter didn't mention, and that Jones & Snelpit have nosed out?"
The man spoke now in a voice of sharp anxiety. He had forgotten his impatience to go.
"No. I meant less than, or somewhat differently from, that. At least, I should have expressed it another way.
"I was merely generalizing on that which must be obvious to any intelligent mind. A will may not be properly executed. It may be superseded by one of a later date. It may purport to dispose of property which does not exist; or has been subsequently alienated from the disposition of the testator, or will be consumed in the discharge of unsuspected liabilities of the deceased. The testator may not have been of sound mind when he made the will.
"These are the routine risks of anyone who advances money upon an expectation of such a kind. In the present instance, I do not think that any of them need give you an anxious hour.
"But there are others which are equally serious, but more improbable - more remote. There is a provision of English law which prohibits any man from profiting by his own crime."
"Well, that sounds right enough. But what's the one that's going to make trouble for us?"
Mr. Lovejoy, as he asked this, looked genuinely puzzled. Mr. Jellipot knew that if he could gauge the authenticity of that bewilderment he would know at least half of that which the police were concerned to prove. But that was beyond his power. Would a guilty man be able to control himself to such blankness of incomprehension? Or would an innocent one be so slow to grasp the fact that the circumstances of Adrian Rissole's death brought suspicion inevitably to his own door? They were questions which he must ask himself without obtaining any certain reply.
He said quietly: "If you consider the circumstance surrounding the murder, and the fact that Mrs. Lovejoy is the one - the only one - who benefits from it, you will see that, however unfortunate or unfair it may be to you, it suggests a possibility which anyone contemplating an advance upon Mrs. Lovejoy's expectation must, almost inevitably, observe."
There was no doubt that Mr. Lovejoy understood now. His black eyes glowed with anger. His face reddened to the neck. "You're as good as telling me that I killed Adrian. Or perhaps" - his voice changed to a rasping sarcasm - "you'd make out that Mrs. Lovejoy did it herself. I think it's a monstrous thing! Why, it as we who put the police on to it, or he'd be lying there now, it's about ten chances to one."
Mr. Jellipot was unimpressed by this outburst. "If," he said, "you had listened with even moderate attention to what I said, you must have known that I made no accusation against either Mrs. Lovejoy or yourself, which it is not my business to do."
Mr. Lovejoy controlled himself to say: "I beg your pardon. That was how it sounded to me."
"I merely warned you that there is a theoretical possibility which such a firm as Jones & Snelpit - towards whom this verbal construction must not be taken to imply anything which is unsaid - would be unlikely to overlook."
"You mean that they're a low lot? Well, it makes no difference now. If they thought that - and they must have been spitting it out to you over the 'phone - I wouldn't take any money from them as a gift. Not if it meant saving the shop. And I know that Jane will feel just the same."
He seemed to be stirred by his own words to a second fury of indignation. He rose abruptly as he spoke. Mr. Jellipot was again unsure whether he watched an exhibition of genuine feeling or a well-acted part.
"Your feeling may be natural," he said, with little cordiality in his voice, "but you would, I think, be wiser to consider the position in a calmer mood."
"I'm not going to them now, if you mean that."
"It is not a course which, under any circumstances, I should have advised, and I am consequently unlikely to urge you to do so, though it would have been outside my province to interfere. But you will observe that I might have answered their enquiry in a way which would have disposed them to assist you more readily than they would now be likely to do."
"You mean you think the same thing!"
"No. In your own word, it would be monstrous, on any knowledge I have, to accuse you of such a crime. But Messrs. Jones & Snelpit assumed that I was acting for the police, which was a mistake, and therefore that I could give them assurances which were beyond my power."
Mr. Lovejoy sat down again. "You mean the police - - " he began, and stopped. There was a note of incredulity in his voice, but his colour had changed to a mottled pallor. "You don't really mean that they think we'd be capable of a thing like that?"
"I mean nothing which I have not said. I hope very sincerely that the truth will be discovered in such a way that you will be relieved of any further anxiety."
Mr. Lovejoy rose again. "Well, you've given me something to think of I didn't expect to hear." He said this with a scowl, and there was no gratitude in his voice. It was with an obvious effort that he added: "But I dare say that you've meant it well."
He half held out his hand, and then withdrew it, either from unwillingness to exchange a handshake with one who had voiced such an accusation, or, more probably, in doubt of whether he might not be met with a disconcerting rebuff.
Certainly Mr. Jellipot made no corresponding motion. He asked, as though seeing nothing and oblivious of what he heard: "What do you propose to do to satisfy the executions of which you have told me?"
"I don't feel that I care much if they sell me up."
"It is," Mr. Jellipot spoke as one who contemplates abstract truth, "a wasteful process, of which I seldom approve."
"When I left this morning there was two pound three in the till. You can't do much with that."
"It is normally possible, if it should have my recommendation, to secure an advance of moderate amount against such expectations from a respectable bank."
Mr. Lovejoy stared incredulously "You mean you'd recommend it, after what you've said?"
"It would not be a matter for which you should thank me at all.
I have to consider that it is what my client might have wished me to do."
"I suppose you'll want me to bring Mrs. Lovejoy here?"
"No, I think not."
The suggestion had brought an almost frightened look to Mr. Jellipot's face. Was he to have some intolerably pathetic woman, in three days' time, begging him to undertake the defence of a guilty man? There were few people in London whom he would be more reluctant to meet.
"No," he repeated. "We can do rather better than that. You are on the telephone at your home address? Mrs. Lovejoy would most likely be there?"
"Considering she's got a man sitting all the time on the kitchen chair - - "
"I'm afraid she must risk leaving him in the flat. You can 'phone her from here to be at the High Holborn branch of the London & Northern Bank within half an hour, or as near to that as a taxi can get her there. If necessary, she must ring at the side door. Meanwhile, I will send a clerk with you who will arrange the matter in the customary manner. No, it is a purely business affair. You should not thank me at all."
CHAPTER XI
THE BANKER IS PLEASED TO LEND
MR. NEWMAN, accompanying Mr. Lovejoy to the High Holborn branch of the London & Northern Bank, his eyes observant, and his lips only opening for such casual interchanges as the incidents of the short journey required, concluded that he sat beside a man who was well content.
So it was. The indignation, real or assumed, with which Edwin Lovejoy had met the suggestion that he might be suspected of the crime appeared to have passed away.
He may have accepted Mr. Jellipot's unexpected offer as evidence of the solicitor's confidence in his own innocence, as most men would.
He may, beyond that, have taken it for proof that Mr. Jellipot knew him to be unsuspected by the police.
He may have drawn some subordinate satisfaction from the fact that Mr. Isaac Snelpit awaited a client who would not come.
He had, at least, the confident expectation that his immediate financial troubles would be relieved, and that on better terms than he could have expected an hour before.
Arriving at the bank, they were shown without delay into the manager's office.
Mr. Rutland, a man of good sense, but with some pomposity of manner, received his new client with cordiality, a telephone call from Mr. Jellipot having already acquainted him with the essential facts of the case, and the probable extent of the accommodation required. Mr. Jellipot was the trusted solicitor of the bank, and his word was not lightly to be disregarded.
In this instance, he had taken all responsibility from the bank manager's shoulders. He had made no mention of the suspicions which might attach to Mr. or Mrs. Lovejoy, or the possible legal consequences of a successful prosecution, though he had, of course, mentioned the tragic circumstance from which the lady was expected to benefit; but he had added: "As I am the executor of Adrian Rissole's will, I am sending you a letter accepting responsibility for any advance you may make up to £300, prior to probate being granted."
Mr. Rutland might be slightly surprised, but it was not his business to question so satisfactory an assurance. A bank makes its profit by lending money. When it can do so without risk, it may have little curiosity concerning the motives of those who guarantee a hazard it would be slower to undertake. And Mr. Jellipot had the reputation of having good reason for what he did.
Mr. Rutland occupied the time until Mrs. Lovejoy arrived by enquiring the extent of the immediate accommodation required. He spoke of a joint account, but prudently avoided suggesting that that of the ironmongery business should be transferred to his own bank, until he had gained further experience of the position. It was too probable that there would he an existing overdraft there!
In stating the nature and extent of his liabilities, Mr. Lovejoy became blunt and bitter, in a tone which Mr. Rutland approved. He gave an impression of telling the whole truth, which, on such occasions, is rarely done.
The executions which were now levied would require £57 for their discharge, including their mounting costs.
Other urgent payments would absorb nearly £100. Possibly quite that figure.
Mr. Rutland proposed an overdraft of £200. "If you should require rather more, you must see me again."
He felt that he had carried out Mr. Jellipot's instructions, and protected his interests. More always was required in such instances. It would have been a mistake to offer too readily the outside figure which his instructions allowed.
Mrs. Lovejoy arrived in some natural excitement. It was a mood which showed her limited physical attractions at their best. Mr. Rutland shook hands benignly. He thought her a pretty girl. Her eyes sparkled. After the experiences of the past year, with its increasing stringencies, its ever narrowing credit, its acuter worries in recent weeks, it was pleasant to think that present money was available, and that there would be more in the days to be.
It means much to a woman to know that tradesmen will be obsequious again. She could not be hardly condemned if she gave little thought to a dead man from whose kindness her rescue came. She thought of suede shoes which she would buy before 6.30 tonight, after which it would be no longer desirable to keep her feet as far as possible under the table.
She watched Mr. Rutland fill in the blanks of a printed form which he required her to sign. She wrote her full name. Then her specimen signature on a separate slip. She was impressed by the importance of what she did.
Finally, a cheque-book was supplied. A cheque drawn and signed. Mr. Rutland touched his bell. A clerk entered, took out the cheque, and returned with banknotes and cash. Eighty-five pounds lay on the table. Her husband made no motion, giving her the pleasure of picking it up.
Edward Newman, watching her with a very dubious mind, inclined to the same opinion that Chief Inspector Combridge had formed, that she had a conscience at happy ease; but he too reflected what good actresses women are. Of Edwin Lovejoy he was even less sure. He judged him to be a man of alert wits, and of some bitterness against a world which had not been kindly to him. He had been obstinate, desperate, in a struggle which he would not resign. He might be ruthless under such stress: one whom fine scruples would not retard. Even one who, to avoid shameful defeat, would go to the length of cunningly plotted crime. Was it possible that the letter to Scotland Yard of which he had heard from Mr. Jellipot had been prompted not only by strategic considerations of his own safety, but to hasten the moment when this urgent relief could be obtained?
It must have been exceptionally exasperating to have the bailiffs about the door if he knew that the will which made his wife a moderately affluent woman lay undiscovered and inoperative with the dead man on the floor below!
They left the bank together, and Mr. Newman said that, with Mr. Lovejoy's permission, he would accompany them home. It had been Mr. Jellipot's instruction to him that he should render any desired assistance in discharging the executions.
Mr. Lovejoy accepted this offer with as gracious a manner as it was his habit to show. Mr. Newman signalled to a passing taxi. Mrs. Lovejoy, who did not often enter such vehicles, felt that the pleasures of wealth were already hers.
They drove first to the shop, where Mr. Newman quickly disposed of an unwelcome occupant of the rear office, and then to the flat, where a similar clearance was made with the same professional brevity. As the man slouched out, Mrs. Lovejoy pushed up the kitchen window.
"He wasn't such a bad sort," she said, "in his own way. Said he'd just lost an aunt from Bright's disease, whatever that is, and was worried because he thought he'd got some of the same symptoms. If it has anything to do with getting soaked, I should say he's heading the right way. Anyhow, I shall feel better when we've got some fresh air." She invited Mr. Newman to stay to tea, which he was willing to do.
Eating buttered toast in this atmosphere of hospitable familiarity, it was hard to think of these two everyday people as being guilty of a sordid and cruel crime. Hard - and rather dreadful - to think that one or both of them might soon be feeling a rope adjusted around the neck, to die without receiving - or deserving - sympathy from a hostile world. They were happy now, animated in the relief which had come so promptly, and through a better channel than they had expected. Or, at least, the woman appeared to be so, without any qualifying doubt. The man seemed at times almost as light-hearted as she; but at others he would seem to rouse himself with conscious effort from a gloomier mood Was there meaning in that?
Edward Newman would have preferred to think not, but judgment was more dubious than inclination. He had no wide experience of criminal character, for Mr. Jellipot's practice was mainly in civil matters. But he had heard it said that murderers are not outwardly different from their fellow men. They kiss their children. They say: "Haven't you passed me the wrong cup? I'm sure there's more than one lump in this," in the most natural manner, as Mr. Lovejoy was doing now. Actually, the two murderers with whom he had come into previous professional contact had been pleasant people, easy to like.
But their murders had been of a different order from this; they had not been sordid, treacherous, mean, as this surely was.
He reflected that Mr. Jellipot appeared to be giving the Lovejoys his support. While that was so, loyalty to his employer constrained him to the same attitude. And there was more than routine loyalty in the confidence he felt in any course which Mr. Jellipot might take. "The old man," he thought, "doesn't often go wrong." But, on the other hand, the solicitor's actions were not always of the obvious kind.
He thought, as he rose to go, that the conversation between the two during the following ten minutes would almost certainly be of a revealing quality. The doubt of whether it might be possible to turn back and listen at the door entered his mind, but was not entertained. He felt that it would transgress the ethics of a particularly respectable solicitor's office. Yet he supposed that Chief Inspector Combridge would do such things without hesitation should the opportunity arise. He did not condemn, but preferred to think that his own weekly £6 15s. 0d. (and extras) came to him by other means. And he concluded philosophically that if he had decided to look and listen through the letter-slit in the door, he might have found that he could hear little and see less.
"You'll let me know," he said, "if you get any more trouble - summonses, I mean, and things like that. You can't be too quick in such matters, if you wish to keep down the costs."
Mr. Lovejoy said he certainly would, though he thought there wouldn't be much more of that sort of thing now. He shook hands with warmth, for him.
So did Mrs. Lovejoy. Her parting words were warm also, with a gratitude that her eyes confirmed.
CHAPTER XII
THE TENANTS ON THE GROUND FLOOR
MR. NEWMAN considered that the afternoon was too far advanced for it to be worth while to go back to the office, where he had left nothing undone which could not wait till the next day. Not being in the habit of using taxis for his private affairs, he stood for a moment upon the edge of the pavement, debating what bus would serve his homeward purpose best, and in which direction to seek it.
As he did so, he observed Inspector Combridge approaching, and without turning his head again was aware that he had entered the porchway of Barclay Buildings. He supposed that the inspector sought a further interview with the suspected couple, and concluded that, had he been foolish enough to stoop to the keyhole, he would have been interrupted from the rear in that inglorious attitude. It showed the folly of what he had never seriously intended to do.
Actually, he was mistaken. Inspector Combridge went no further than the ground floor.
Both observing the other, neither had supposed himself to have been observed, nor that there was any importance in his having noticed the other's presence. Yet there was to be one momentous consequence. For when next morning Inspector Combridge was discussing with Superintendent Davis the information which he had obtained by this visit to Barclay. Buildings, he mentioned casually: "I saw Jellipot's clerk leaving as I went in. He must have been at the Lovejoys'. That's a safe guess."
Superintendent Davis looked serious. "If that means Jellipot's taking up their defence - - "
"I don't see that it does. We sent the man to his office."
"Only so that he could give him a letter, and have a chance of telling us whether he thought him a guilty man. I don't see why that should take his clerk to the flat. . . . I suppose you told him the whole case, so far as we've got it now?"
"Yes. More or less. But we got something from him. It was he who put us on to Rissole's cousin."
"Who'll probably prove to have been at sea."
"Well, we'll soon know that. If it turns out that he was here at the time, he'll have my vote for the dock."
"You think that's more likely than that Lovejoy made up the tale about meeting someone on the stairs?"
"I don't say that. I said if. I'm just doubtful between the two."
"You told Jellipot about the diary?"
"No. I don't think I mentioned that. Nor to the Lovejoys. I know I didn't to them. I'd got a feeling that that might do us most good as a surprise when we've picked the man, and he's spit out whatever lie he wants to make a jury believe."
"Well, if you haven't mentioned it to Jellipot, I don't think I should now."
Chief Inspector Combridge agreed easily. He didn't think that the solicitor intended to take on the Lovejoys' defence, and he knew him well enough to see the extreme improbability of his exerting himself in such a direction before any charge had been made against them. But he knew the value of silence. The reticence merely became deliberate which had been instinctive before; but this probably turned the scale between silence and speech in the conversation of a later day, and so deflected the course of events.
"Remember the Porson murder?" he asked, hi mind reverting to his visit to the ground floor of Barclay Buildings, from which he had been momentarily diverted, and where he had come on an unexpected and somewhat disconcerting fact, which must extend enquiries to a third direction, and yet might be of no relevance whatever.
Superintendent Davis said that he did, which was not surprising, for it was his conduct of that notorious case which had secured him promotion to the position he now enjoyed.
"Yes," he said. "What of that?"
"Harry Vestman's living on the ground floor of Barclay Buildings."
"Sure there's no mistake? I thought he cleared off to America."
"So he did. He was quite frank about that, and so was the woman, when they found I remembered them too well to make denial worth while. He's got the woman with him who used to call herself Jimmy's wife. They've taken the name of Aide - Mr. and Mrs. Aide - now. Says it was his grandmother's, and he went to America, and changed it while he was there, because he didn't like to be pointed at as one who'd been charged with murder, and whose brother had been hanged, however innocent he'd been."
"Lucky'd be a better word."
"Well, if a jury say a man's innocent, we can't go beyond that."
Superintendent Davis rarely allowed any expression of emotion, unless it were a faint flicker of humour in half-shut eyes, to appear on his heavy features, but there was some evidence of annoyance now, as he answered: "That wasn't quite what happened. You ought to remember better than that I We withdrew the case against him. The evidence wasn't strong enough, with him having an alibi which we couldn't upset. If we'd tried to get them both convicted, a jury might have been fools enough to let them both go. So we put Jim in the dock alone, and made sure of him. But Harry was just as guilty as he. . . . What does he say that he's doing now?"
"Got a shop in Dean Street. Cheap gown. He and the woman run it together. Of course, we must check that, but it's probably true. If they'd gone on with their old games, we should have run across them before now."
The superintendent agreed upon the soundness of that deduction. It is not often that those whom Scotland Yard regards as criminals who have escaped the due penalty of their misdeeds elude its subsequent observation, and the man and woman who had made reluctant admission of their identity under the pressure of Inspector Combridge's retentive memory were not of the kind to be easily overlooked.
The man had almost certainly been his brother's companion in a burglary which had resulted in the brutal murder of an elderly lady who had surprised the thieves. Jim Vestman, betrayed by a receiver to whom he had offered some of the dead woman's jewellery, had been convicted and hanged on convincing though entirely circumstantial evidence, countered only by an ineffectual alibi; the woman who had then called herself his wife, and was now living with his brother on the same basis, having sworn that he had been with her during the night.
But Harry Vestman's alibi had been of better quality, and the evidence against him much weaker. It was a case where the police knew much which could not be offered in evidence, including the past records of the two men, who had worked inseparably together in previous crimes of a similar kind.
But neither of them had been previously convicted, though they had been unsuccessfully charged. On the official records, they were entered as the almost certain perpetrators of a similar murder three years earlier. The police regarded them as particularly cunning and ruthless criminals, and it had been no small satisfaction to see one pass into the hangman's hands, though the other had wriggled free.
"Of course they said they knew nothing about it?"
"Not exactly. They said they knew nothing about the murder, of course. But when I pressed them as to what they had observed about Rissole's habits, or who they might have seen him with, they brought up the same tale as Lovejoy. They'd seen a seaman go up to his flat about a fortnight ago, or perhaps less, but they couldn't say which day of the week it was."
"How did they know he was going up to Rissole's flat?"
"Because they knew the man. They say they'd seen him walking out with Rissole before."
"Then they could identify him?"
"Yes. So they say. Though they're not the kind of witnesses you'd choose to put into the box. But they both say they could. They say he was a foreign-looking man. Probably dago. It's evident, for what it's worth, that it's Tony Rissole they've seen about."
"To an extent, it confirms Lovejoy's tale?"
"I'm not sure that it does. Not to help to let Lovejoy out I mean. It goes to prove that Tony used to call at the flat, but we knew that from Jellipot already. If Lovejoy or Vestman did the murder, they'd either of them be glad to throw suspicion on Rissole's cousin. If Tony did it, we can suppose that the Vestmans and Lovejoy are all telling the truth. If either of them did it, then the other is telling the truth much more likely than not.
"That's how it looks to me, and it may be useful when we've got other evidence, and decided who to charge; but it doesn't seem to help us much in that direction. We've just got three suspects now, instead of two.
"But there's one point that may prove to be of some importance. They say they can't be sure which day it was they saw Tony last, but it wasn't a Saturday. It might have been any weekday except that. They say they were coming home together, and they saw the man enter the building before them. That puts it at between six and seven p.m., and rules out Saturday, because that day the woman comes home separately at one o'clock, and the man stays on to write up the books."
"That sounds rather as though they're telling the truth."
"Yes. Perhaps it does. But how far does it take us? Say they did see Tony going upstairs. Say that it was the Friday that Lovejoy says that he saw him too. It doesn't prove more than that the man called. It isn't a crime for a cousin to do that. It doesn't even show that he was let in. Adrian might have been dead before that, and Tony knocked and gone away. Or he may have left him alive, and he may have been murdered by someone else on the next day. As a matter of fact, we know by the diary that it was the next day, unless it was later still. But that doesn't show that it wasn't Tony. He may have come back next evening."
Superintendent Davis did not dispute this somewhat negative analysis. He only said: "Well, it all goes to show how important that diary's likely to be. One of them may come to wish he'd talked about Saturday a bit more, and said less about other days. We can't be too quiet about that. Not till we've got them to talk a bit more than they have yet."
"Yes. It's the best card in the pack for us. The best of a poor lot. But they couldn't well help saying that. Not if the tale was to be that they both saw him. We could have found out easily that they don't come home together on that day. But I can't see that it gets us anywhere, all the same. We've just got one more suspect on the list."
Superintendent Davis was inclined to be more hopeful. Every fresh fact to him was like a further bit of a jigsaw puzzle falling into its place. But he agreed that the suspects were now three. No one could say that Vestman's record made it improbable that he would attempt to rob the flat of a lonely man, or resort to violence if he were discovered in the attempt.
"I suppose you told them that we should want a statement from them?"
"Yes. I told them they'd better both be here at ten-thirty tomorrow morning. Vestman didn't look pleased, and the woman tried some excuse about not leaving the shop, but he interposed at that - I suppose he'd thought better of it - and said they'd be glad to be any help they could, though he was afraid it wouldn't be much."
"Well, we shall be the best ones to judge that when we've got something signed."
The superintendent knew that the statement of a guilty man, after he has been expertly questioned, will usually contain some damaging and probable lies. even where there may be little occasion for him to leave the path of the simpler truth. The trouble is that the statement of an innocent one may prove to be of a very similar character.
CHAPTER XIII
A QUARREL AT LOVEJOY'S FLAT
THE conversation which followed Mr. Newman's departure might have been illuminating in some particulars, though different from anything he would have expected to hear.
Jane Lovejoy glanced at the clock. "I thought," she said, "he would never go!" She turned alertly towards the couch on which she had thrown her hat and gloves when she came in. "The tea-things will have to wait. I want to get out while the shops are open."
Her husband asked: "What's the hurry now?" He no longer maintained the aspect of cheerfulness which he had imperfectly shown to their legal guest. He had the look of a harassed man.
He was debating in a vexed mind whether he should tell her of the sinister hint which Mr. Jellipot had so discreetly given. Would her own discretion increase by being warned of the suspicion which was being directed upon them, or would she lose her head, and say or do foolish things which would make the position worse than it was now?
There had been little of real confidence between these two during the short period of their married life. They had not been divided merely by difference of age. That may be no obstacle to comradeship if the younger partner be of sympathetic intelligence, even in the absence of the love by which all differences will be overcome. But they had, in fact, little in common. She had married a man who had wooed her with some persistence rather than conspicuous ardour, to whom she had been mildly drawn, but mainly influenced by desire to escape from a position of irksome penury, and because marriage was her natural goal. She had expected something better than a bailiff on the kitchen chair!
She liked simple gaieties, in which she had expected to have the means to indulge. But he would, even under more favourable circumstances, have had little inclination for such pursuits. His business would have absorbed most of his time, and more of his thoughts, even had it been prosperous, and easy to run. As it was, he had neither leisure, money, nor mood for anything but the bitter struggle which had been forced upon him. He came home for an evening meal and an evening rest, and his conversation - if he would talk at all - would be of the business troubles he had experienced during the day, or anticipated on the next - those, and the petty economies, the petty vexations, which must be contrived or endured by those who have the disease of an empty purse.
She was of a natural amativeness, which, had he been normally responsive, might have maintained a sufficient bond; but as the strain of anxiety and overwork had increased, he had shown, even in this respect, a diminished inclination to give her that which is a wife's due.
A child might have bridged the gap which had been widening between them, and given her an interest in life which would have made her less conscious of other needs but he had refused her that on the plea of financial stress. Many would say that circumstances had justified him in this decision, but, be that as it may, the price of unnatural living has to be paid.
It was not that they normally quarrelled, though there were sharp words from him at times, to which she would respond with sulky silence or easy tears. Rather, there had been a growing indifference, a lowered temperature of marital intercourse, more ominous than any quarrel could be.
If she had found some consolation in other directions during the long hours when he must leave her alone, she might have said in her own defence that she had given nothing away which he had shown eagerness to retain. And as (so she thought) he had been without suspicion of what she did, it had been almost guiltless satisfaction to her.
When he asked: "What's the hurry now?" there was irritation in his voice. He did not want her to go out. He wanted to talk. A murderer or an innocent though suspected man may equally feel the need of sympathy and support, if he think that the police are inclined to charge him with such a crime. Edwin Lovejoy was not one who would often ask sympathy from his fellows. He had a manner which made no friends. Even when he had confided his financial troubles to his own wife, it had been in tones of sarcastic bitterness, rather than in more appealing or weaker moods.
"I want," she said, "to buy lots of things. Shoes for one. There won't be much time tonight, but I want to do what I can."
But he did not want her to go out, for whatever purpose, urgent or not. He wanted to talk to her in a way that he seldom did. And besides - "lots of things"? The money hadn't been meant for that. She seemed to him callous, abrupt, thinking only to take instant advantage for herself, regardless of him.
This was only partly fair, for she could not be expected to sympathize with a worry of which she had not been told, but feelings are often illogical, and yet may be instinctively sound.
"There can't be such a hurry as that. You can get shoes tomorrow."
The words, perhaps the tone, brought a look of obstinacy to her face. "I'd rather get them tonight. Just look at these! You haven't cared much how I've been dressed. I've not been fit to go out anywhere. . . . After all, it's my money."
The remark may have been regretted when it was said, as quickly spoken words often are. But spoken words are hard to unsay, especially when they are true. They gave Edwin Lovejoy an unpleasant intimation of the new relationship which Adrian Rissole's money might establish between them. Hitherto, she had been financially dependent upon them. He might not have provided for her as liberally as she had expected, or as he would have liked to do, but everything she had had, such as it was, she had - or so he supposed - owed to him. Now she was about to become personally independent. Worse than that, the position threatened that he might become financially dependent upon her. He attributed her last remark to a clearer perception of this than, in fact, she had; and resentment might have made him silent had he not seen a fallacy in her argument which could be used in effectual retort.
"It's not your money for spending just as you like. It's been found for special purposes on our joint names. If you've got the decency to wait a few weeks - I don't suppose it will be more than that - you can spend Adrian's money any way you like and just let the business smash."
"You know I didn't mean that! It wouldn't be much to buy one pair of shoes out of what we've got. And I thought I'd pay Radley's account, and get some poultry for tomorrow. I was only thinking of you."
Self-pity at this partial truth - for it was a fact that Edwin did like poultry, which an unpaid bill had rendered it hazardous to order during recent weeks - and realization that while they argued the time went, brought an outbreak of facile tears.
Her husband looked at her gloomily. He made no motion to comfort her, but a note of apology had come into the irritation of his voice as he answered: "Well, you needn't take it like that. You'll get shoes enough before long. You can get a pair tomorrow. I dare say I could pay for them. But that lawyer Jellipot hinted at another trouble today, and I was wanting to tell you about that. I don't want to worry you, but I think it's something you ought to know. He seemed to think that the police might try to make out that I killed Adrian about as likely as not."
For a long moment his wife made no answer. She looked at him with frightened astonished eyes in a whitening face. "They'll say you killed Adrian?" she repeated. "But why