Death of a Beauty Queen Read online

  That this was curious, Ferris admitted; but no more than Bobby could he see any possible connection between that agitation and the subject of their investigation.

  ‘Unless, of course,’ he suggested, ‘there was something Maddox kept inside one of the cups he didn’t want you to see. And that don’t seem likely. But it isn’t hardly possible for a sports cup won in South America some years ago to have anything to do with Carrie Mears’s murder. I think we can wash that out – got to keep inside sense and reason. But this Quin business is a bit more than funny. It may mean something, though I don’t see where it fits in. Nothing even to show Quin was the name of the party who was asking for Miss Quin before the murder happened. Lots of loose strings in this case that don’t none of them connect,’ he said, shaking his head gravely.

  Miss Perry returned, a little exhausted, wheezing more badly than ever, but triumphant with the tea. In honour of the occasion she had produced her best china and her solid silver spoons, as well as some seed cake, preserved in careful wrappings for visitors, but that had, nevertheless, not entirely escaped the effect of the slow passing of the days. However, Ferris did not seem to mind; and, if Bobby practised a sleight of hand that transferred most of his share of the cake to his pocket instead of to his mouth, no one noticed. Once, it is true, he was nearly caught when Miss Perry, recovering with unexpected rapidity from a fit of coughing, turned round to offer him some more milk. He was only just able to avoid detection by displaying a sudden interest in the tea-spoons.

  ‘Fine old silver,’ he pronounced, the first adjective being quite conventional, for there was nothing specially fine about their very ordinary make and workmanship, and the second being fairly obvious for long usage had worn them nearly smooth. He looked more closely at the one in his hand, trying to make out the hallmark and failing, so nearly erased was it by constant polishing. All at once he stiffened with sudden attention. ‘The initial,’ he said, ‘is it a “Q”? It looks like a “Q”.’

  ‘They belonged to my sister’s second husband,’ Miss Perry explained. ‘Good-for-nothing scamp he was, too. It’s a wonder they never went to the pawnshop, but I suppose Aggie saved them somehow.’

  ‘Was his name Quin?’ Bobby asked, making his voice sound as indifferent as he could.

  ‘How did you know?’ asked Miss Perry suspiciously. ‘He left her after he had spent all her money – a sponger if ever there was one. Got it all from her, every penny, and then left her to face all the other people he had got money out’ of. I’ve heard people say that if you stopped Quin in the street to ask the way he would borrow half a crown from you before he told you. A good-for-nothing if ever there was one, and up to all kinds of tricks. Why, once Aggie came home and found him on the stairs with a rope round his neck. Just done to frighten her into giving him more money, but she couldn’t see it.’

  ‘Where is he now? ’ Bobby asked.

  ‘Dead,’ Miss Perry answered. ‘He went to Australia and then Aggie got a paper with a notice of his death: ‘‘Deeply regretted by numerous friends.”’ She sniffed comprehensively: ‘True enough,’ she commented, ‘if friends meant them he owed money to. After that Aggie came to live near here, and when she died Carrie came to me. A good thing Quin did die,’ she concluded, ‘or he would have been back here before long, trying to sponge on Aggie – at least, it he hadn’t been too afraid of his creditors, for there were some had said they would take it out of his skin if they couldn’t out of his purse. He wouldn’t have got much after Carrie had grown up, though, she would have been a match for him and all his tricks.’

  ‘Did she ever go by the name of Quin?’ Bobby asked. ‘Always till she came to live with me. Then I said Mears was her proper name, and Mears she was going to be so long as she was with me, and Mears she always was after that. And to do the girl justice, willing enough. She remembered enough of Quin to know the kind of good-for-nothing he was.’ Bobby asked if she could give a description of Quin’s appearance, but it seemed she had never seen him or even a photograph of him – he had had no taste for being photographed – ‘had his reasons, most likely,’ snorted Miss Perry – and any description she had ever heard from her sister, she had long forgotten. In fact she knew little or nothing of him except his name, his talent for borrowing, as exemplified by his successful extraction from her sister of the few hundreds left by her first husband, and his departure to Australia and opportune death there.

  ‘All very interesting,’ commented Ferris afterwards, as he and Bobby were making their way back to headquarters, ‘but I don’t see that it takes us much further forward. If Quin’s dead, it can’t be him was making inquiries at the cinema that night, or who found the engagement-ring, and anyhow there doesn’t seem any reason why he should want to kill his step-daughter, supposing it was him.’

  ‘I should think it quite likely the announcement of his death in the paper was a fake to put off any specially pressing creditors,’ Bobby observed.

  ‘Likely enough,’ agreed Ferris. ‘Anyhow, I suppose it means another line to follow up, though we weren’t exactly short of lines before. Nothing to show, though, that the man at the cinema is the same as the man who returned the engagement-ring to the Regent-Street shop, or that either of them has any connection with the step-father. Of course, it’s quite possible it was the same man in both cases, and that he is the step-father come to life again and back from Australia.’

  ‘We shall have to try to find him,’ remarked Bobby.

  ‘As if we hadn’t enough on our hands already,’ grumbled Ferris. ‘Of course, he may come forward on his own account, but he sounds more like one of your shy birds.’

  ‘It might turn out he is the murderer himself,’ Bobby suggested, though a little doubtfully. ‘Miss Perry called him a sponger. Suppose it was Quin himself, and suppose he was trying to get money out of his step-daughter. She refused, there was a quarrel, the knife was lying there, and it was he, and not Sargent, who slung it at the girl. Only, that theory leaves the knife unexplained still.’

  ‘Take it from me,’ said Ferris, slowly and thoughtfully, ‘it’s the knife that counts; it all depends on who we can trace it to. If it ever is traced at all,’ he added, somewhat despondently.

  Mitchell was not at the Yard when Ferris and Bobby returned. They made out their reports, and then, both having been continuously on duty for a very considerable time, were allowed to go home.

  Bobby went straight to bed the moment he got in, and never woke till his alarm-clock went off with a bang next morning. At headquarters he found more tasks awaiting him, though they did not prove of great interest or value, and also a special order to report to Mitchell at three in the afternoon.

  ‘The old man,’ explained someone confidentially to Bobby, ‘won’t be turning up much before then – seems he was out all night. Something in the City.’

  ‘In the City?’ repeated Bobby, slightly surprised, for the City police look after their own area.

  ‘Seems so,’ said the other. ‘We thought he had cleared out all his other work to concentrate on this beauty queen affair. But last night he came in late, read the day’s reports, and then went off – and next thing we heard was when the City police rang up with a message from him. That was about three this morning. He had been out with them all night – some fresh case turned up, but Lord knows what!’ Bobby wondered, too, and since one of the tasks assigned him necessitated a visit to the City, he took occasion to go round by the building wherein were situated on the first floor the offices occupied by Claude Maddox’s firm. Nor was Bobby greatly surprised when discreet inquiries revealed that there had been a burglary alarm there during the night, that the building had, in consequence, been thoroughly searched from cellar to roof, but that nothing had been found in any way suspicious, neither burglar nor any trace of one.

  ‘False alarm,’ Bobby’s informant pronounced. ‘Police wanted something to do for a change – they must get jolly tired of dawdling about the streets all day with nothing to do but sta
re in the shops and tell old ladies the time.’

  Bobby gasped faintly at this view of police work. When he had slightly recovered, he said, with tremendous, but entirely and completely unnoticed irony:

  ‘I expect that was it. Do you know if they took long over it – made a close search, I mean?’

  ‘Went into every room in the building,’ asserted the other. ‘Looked under every table and inside every waste-paper basket.’

  ‘Well, it would be a change from staring in shops and telling old ladies the time,’ observed Bobby bitterly, and went away, wondering a good deal why Mitchell had gone to all that trouble, for he could not doubt but that the reason why the co-operation of the City police had been invoked in order to search this building was that Claude Maddox worked there.

  ‘Only, even if he thinks Maddox is guilty,’ Bobby wondered, ‘what could he expect to find? The missing handbag? But, even if Maddox has it, surely he would never hide it where he works?’

  Bobby was careful to be punctual in keeping the appointment given him for that afternoon. When he reported himself, he was sent for almost immediately to Mitchell’s room, where he found Ferris deep in consultation with the superintendent.

  ‘Making progress?’ Mitchell was saying, somewhat irritably, as Bobby entered. ‘Oh, yes, we’ve got quite a good case against some of ’em – only a much better case against the rest. One snag is the older Irwin won’t tell us what he knows, and he certainly knows something.’

  ‘One of the Brush Hill men pointed him out to me this morning,’ Ferris remarked. ‘I saw a report yesterday described him as looking young for his years, but I thought he looked his age all right and a bit more, too. A feeble sort of way with him somehow.’

  ‘You thought that? ’ Mitchell asked, though half to himself.

  ‘Yes – quite breaking up. Of course, it’s partly his hair and beard being all streaked with white the way it is.’

  Mitchell and Bobby glanced at each other. Neither of them spoke, but Ferris seemed to divine something in their looks. He said sharply:

  ‘Well, what about it? At his age...’

  ‘Yes, at his age,’ Mitchell agreed. ‘Perhaps in time he’ll tell us what he knows. Owen, I think you had better make it part of your job to keep in touch with both the Irwins. Don’t try to question them. Just try to be on the spot. It may all come out with a rush. That happens sometimes. People get to feel they simply can’t keep it to themselves any longer. But I don’t think it will ever be like that with Paul Irwin – he is a stronger type.’

  ‘Do you think it can be him did it, sir?’ Ferris asked. ‘Miss Perry did say there was nothing he would have stopped at to prevent his boy marrying Miss Mears. His hat was in the room, too.’

  ‘I think the case against him is so strong,’ Mitchell said slowly, ‘I think we could proceed to arrest, if it wasn’t just as strong against half a dozen others.’

  ‘He’s very religious,’ Ferris mused. ‘Highest character and all that – leader in Brush Hill church and chapel circles. But sometimes these religious people feel so sure everything they do is right, they’ll do almost anything.’

  Mitchell nodded an agreement. He would have thought the observation one of unusual penetration for Ferris’s somewhat slow and pedestrian but always trustworthy mind, had he not recognized it as almost word for word a repetition of what he himself had said to Ferris only the day before. But that sometimes happened with Ferris, though always quite unconsciously; for if he could not originate, he could at least repeat, and that is a rarer gift than is always thought. Mitchell turned to Bobby:

  ‘Owen,’ he said sharply. ‘How many silver challenge cups did you see in Maddox’s room?’

  ‘Seven, sir,’ answered Bobby at once.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Quite. A big one mounted on oars in the middle, and three smaller ones on each side.’

  ‘Well, there are only six now,’ Mitchell remarked. ‘The big one you speak of, three smaller, on the side next the fireplace, and two towards the window.’

  So that was what the burglary alarm had been staged for! Mitchell had not seemed to pay much attention to Bobby’s report of the apparent agitation Maddox had displayed at the reference to his collection of challenge cups. Yet he had thought it of sufficient importance to investigate – and to stage all that elaborate business of the supposed burglary, so that his real purpose might escape observation; and Maddox, when he heard that a search had been made, have no reason to suppose it was in any way connected with himself. That meant, then, that Mitchell’s mind was moving, so to say, Maddox’ way, but was that because of definite suspicion, or merely because every line of inquiry must be followed up with equal close attention, nothing forgotten and nothing neglected?

  And yet, once again, what possible connection could there be between a silver challenge cup, won years ago in South America, and the recent murder of Caroline Meats?

  Impossible, Bobby told himself, to suppose that any such connection did in fact exist. Yet apparently Maddox had taken the precaution to remove one sports cup from any risk of such examination as Mitchell had so elaborately attempted to carry out. Or was it all mere coincidence, and had Maddox taken the cup away for some quite other reason?

  Bobby put his hand to his head with a gesture of complete bewilderment, and his look at Mitchell was almost piteous in its entreaty. But Mitchell had turned to Ferris, and was speaking to him:

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘The knife. Yes, that’s been traced; the report’s just come in. It’s been identified at a shop in Brush Hill as having been sold to Wood, the door-keeper at the Central Cinema.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Whitening Hair

  For the rest of that day, and for most of the day following – a Sunday – Bobby found himself assigned to no more onerous duty than to hang about Brush Hill, apparently, only that it was a Sunday and therefore all the shops were closed, in order to conform to that opinion of police work expressed by the gentleman who held that it consisted of staring into shop windows and telling old ladies the time.

  He was expected, he knew, to keep in touch with the Irwins, both father and son, and yet, also, his instructions were that he was to take no action to that end. Everything was to come about quite naturally and inevitably, as it showed at present absolutely no sign of doing.

  Wandering about, idly and dismally, between the residence of the Irwins and the old-fashioned, substantial dwelling Claude Maddox shared with his mother, a lady approaching her seventies and old for her years, and an elder sister married to the first officer of one of the Australian liners, Bobby spent most of his time trying to guess what Mitchell really had in his mind, and what’ lie himself was really expected to do.

  Be on the spot, apparently, if anything happened, as it probably wouldn’t, and that was all. A nice tedious uninteresting sort of job, Bobby thought resentfully, and one little to the taste of an ambitious young detective, avid for every chance, for earning distinction.

  It was, of course, quite in harmony with Mitchell’s general theory. Once before, in the first case in which Bobby had ever been associated with him, Mitchell had remarked that the really successful detective was the man who sat and waited for people to come and tell him things. So now it seemed he expected enlightenment simply through setting Bobby to stand and watch.

  ‘They also detect who only stand and stare,’ Bobby murmured to himself, wickedly parodying an august line of English poetry.

  Probably that really was what Mitchell aimed at – the making of as complete a picture as possible of the actions and reactions of all concerned, so that presently there might appear the motive pointing to the actual perpetrator of the deed.

  The incident, so elaborately staged, of the pretended burglary in the building-where Claude Maddox worked seemed to suggest that it was he who occupied in Mitchell’s mind the position of chief suspect, and that the missing challenge cup was considered an important element in the case, but, then, why was Bobby set t
o dawdle about Brush Hill with nothing to do, apparently, but wait for some vague possible development affecting one or other of the Irwins? – or both of them? – or, if not both, then which? – and was it the father or the son who was to be regarded as the principal? That the knife used in the murder had been traced to the door-keeper at the Central Cinema showed every line of inquiry was being carefully followed up, just as, as Bobby was well aware, intensive efforts were being made to trace the mysterious personage who had asked on the night of the murder for a Miss Quin. But probably this unknown was now to be identified with the finder of the engagement-ring, who had given his name in the Regent Street shop as Quin, and who might easily turn out, also, to be the dead girl’s step-father. For the notice in the Australian paper of Mr Quin’s death did not strike Bobby as being in the circumstances sufficient evidence of the fact.

  Only, supposing that this stranger did prove to be Carrie Mears’s step-father, was he just hovering on the outskirts of the affair, little concerned in its development, or was he one of the central figures? Roy Beattie and Lily Ellis seemed, Bobby reflected thankfully, to have faded away out of the picture. But at any moment, in a business so bewildering as this they might be prominent again, and anyhow, what had become of Miss Mears’s handbag, and why had it disappeared? Why had the murderer taken it – if, that is, it was the murderer who was responsible for its disappearance?

  So round and round, to little purpose, went Bobby’s ‘thoughts till, tired out with putting to himself unanswerable questions, a little despondent, indeed, of ever seeing the sequence of events made clear in all their tangled interaction, he turned into a public house when presently opening time arrived. In more than one of these establishments in that district he had recently acquired a reputation for incipient lunacy from the fact that, having ordered a drink, he would sit or stand with it before him for long enough, listening to, and sometimes taking part in, the chatter going on around that was so seldom, for his purposes, either interesting or enlightening, and then presently departing again, leaving his drink still untasted. For Bobby, though no teetotaller, believing fervently, indeed, that all good things are for use, had no more intention, while engaged on such a problem as this, of taking off the fine edge of his mentality by the use of the soporific, alcohol, than he would have had of lessening by it his nervous reactions when about, for instance, to compete at a Bisley shooting range, or drive a motor-car through crowded streets.