A Shilling for Candles (11 page)

“I needn’t have worried as to how I was going to live,” Tisdall was
saying. “There seems to be a moral somewhere in this very immoral proceeding.
What do I do about a lawyer, by the way, when I have no money and no
friends?”

“One will be provided.”

“Like a table napkin. I see.”

He opened the cupboard nearest to Grant, and began to take things from
their hangers and fold them into his case.

“At least you can tell me what my motive was?” he said presently, as if a
new thought had struck him. “You can mistake buttons; you can even wish a
button on to a coat that never had it; but you can’t pin a motive where there
couldn’t be one!”

“So you had no motive?”

“Certainly not. Quite the opposite. What happened last Thursday morning
was the worst thing that has ever happened to me in my life. I should have
thought that was obvious even to an outsider.”

“And of course you had not the faintest idea that Miss Clay had made a
codicil to her will leaving you a ranch and a large sum of money.”

Tisdall had been readjusting the folds of a garment. He stopped now, his
hands still holding the cloth, but motionless, and stared at Grant.

“Chris did that!” he said. “No. No, I didn’t know. How wonderful of
her!”

And for a moment doubt stirred in Grant. That had been beautifully done.
Timing, expression, action. No professional actor could have done it better.
But the doubt passed. He recrossed his legs, by way of shaking himself,
recalled the charm and innocence of murderers he had known (Andrew Hamey, who
specialized in marrying women and drowning them and who looked like a choir
soloist, and others of even greater charm and iniquity) and then composed his
mind to the peace of a detective who has got his man.

“So you’ve raked up the perfect motive. Poor Chris! She thought she was
doing me such a good turn. Have I any defense at all, do you know?”

“That is not for me to say.”

“I have a great respect for you, Inspector Grant. I think it probable that
I shall be unavailingly protesting my innocence on the scaffold.”

He pushed the nearer cupboard door to, and opened the further one. The
door opened away from Grant, so that the interior of the cupboard was not
visible. “But you disappoint me in one way. I thought you were a better
psychologist, you know. When I was telling you the story of my life on
Saturday morning, I really thought you were too good a judge to think that I
could have done what you suspected me of. Now I find you’re just a routine
policeman.”

Still keeping his hand on the doorknob, he bent down to the interior of
the cupboard as if to take shoes from the floor of it.

There was the rasp of a key torn from its lock, the cupboard door swung
shut, and even as Grant leaped the key turned on the inside.

“Tisdall!” he shouted. “Don’t be a fool! Do you hear!” His mind raced over
the antidotes for the various poisons. Oh, God, what a fool he had been!
“Sanger! Help me to break this open. He’s locked himself in.”

The two men flung their combined weight on the door. It resisted their
best efforts.

“Listen to me, Tisdall,” Grant said between gasps, “poison is a fool’s
trick. We’ll get you soon enough to give you an antidote, and all that will
happen is that you’ll suffer pain for nothing. So think better of it.”

But still the door resisted them.

“Fire axe!” Grant said. “Saw it when we came up. On wall at the end of the
passage. Quick!”

Sanger fled and in eight seconds was back with the axe.

As the first blow of it fell, a half-dressed and sleepy colleague of
Tisdall’s appeared from next door and announced, “You mek a noise like thet
you hev the cops een!”

“Hey!” he added, seeing the axe in Sanger’s grasp. “What the hell you
theenk you do, eh?”

“Keep away, you fool! There’s a man in that cupboard committing
suicide.”

“Suicide! Cupboard!” The waiter rubbed his black hair in perplexity, like
a half-awakened child. “That is not a cupboard!”

“
Not a cupboard
.”

“No, that is the what you call eet—leetle back stairs. For fire, you
know.”

“God!” said Grant, and made for the door.

“Where does it come out—the stairway?” he called back to the
waiter.

“In the passage to the front hall.”

“Eight flights,” Grant said to Sanger. “Lift’s quicker, perhaps.” He rang.
“Williams will stop him if he tries to go out by the door,” he said,
searching for comfort.

“Williams has never seen him, sir. At least I don’t think so.”

Grant used words he had forgotten since he stopped campaigning in
France.

“Does the man on duty at the back back know him?”

“Oh, yes, sir. That’s what he’s there for, to stop him. But Sergeant
Williams was just waiting for us.”

Words failed Grant altogether. The lift appeared.

Thirty seconds later they were in the hall.

The pleased expectancy on Williams’s pink face told them the worst.
Williams had certainly not intercepted anyone.

People were arriving, people were departing, people were going to tea in
the restaurant, people were going to eat ices in the sun lounge, to drink in
the bar, to meet other people and go to tea at Lyons—the hall of the
Marine was American in the catholicity of its inhabitants. To make oneself
noticeable in that assembly it would be necessary to stand on one’s hands and
proceed so.

Williams said that a young brown-haired man, without a hat and wearing a
tweed jacket and flannels had gone out about five minutes previously. In
fact, two of them had gone out.

“Two of them! You mean together!”

No, Williams meant that two separate men answering to that description had
gone out in the last five minutes. If it came to that, here was another.

Yes, there was another. And watching him, Grant was filled with a despair
that ran up from his feet like a wave hitting him and flooding his whole
being. Yes,
indeed
there would be others. In Kent alone at this moment
were ten thousand men whose description corresponded to Tisdall’s.

Grant pulled himself together and turned to the ungrateful task of forming
a police cordon.

THAT was the biggest scoop of Jammy Hopkins’s life. The
other papers that evening appeared on the street with horrifying photographs
of the mob at Golders Green—Medusa-like heads, close-up, screaming into
the camera: disheveled Furies with streaming locks and open mouths clawing
each other in an abandon of hate—and thought that they were doing
rather well. Nothing, surely, was as important today as the Clay funeral. And
their photographers had done them proud. They could afford to be pleased.

But not for nothing had Hopkins trailed Grant from Wigmore Street to the
Orient offices, and from the Orient offices to the Temple, and from the
Temple to the Yard. Not for nothing had he cooled his heels round the corner
while his paid henchman kept watch on the Yard and gave him the sign when
Grant left. Not for nothing had he followed him all the way to Westover.
“CLAY MURDERED” announced the
Sentinel
posters. “CLAY MURDERED:
ARREST!” And the crowds milled around the excited newsboys, and in the other
offices there was tearing of hair, and much talk of sacking. In vain to point
out to irate editors that Scotland Yard had said that when there was
publishable news they should be told. What were they paid for, the editors
would like to know? Sitting on their behinds waiting to be called up, and
given official scraps of information? What did they think they were? Tote
officials?

But Jammy was in high favor with the powers who signed his paycheck. Jammy
settled into residence at the Marine—much more palatially than Grant,
who also had a bedroom there but was to spend most of his life in the
immediate future at the police station—and gave thanks to the stars
which had ordained so spectacular an end for Christine Clay.

As for Grant, he was—as he had known he would be—snowed under
with information. By Tuesday noon Tisdall had been seen in almost every
corner of England and Wales, and by teatime was beginning to be seen in
Scotland. He had been observed fishing from a bridge over a Yorkshire stream
and had pulled his hat suspiciously over his face when the informant had
approached. He had been seen walking out of a cinema in Aberystwyth. He had
rented a room in Lincoln and had left without paying. (He had quite often
left without paying, Grant noticed.) He had asked to be taken on a boat at
Lowestoft. (He had also asked to be taken on a boat at half a dozen other
places. The number of young men who could not pay their landladies and who
wanted to leave the country was distressing.) He was found dead on a moor
near Penrith. (That occupied Grant the best part of the afternoon.) He was
found intoxicated in a London alley. He had bought a hat in Hythe, Grantham,
Lewes, Tonbridge, Dorchester, Ashford, Luton, Aylesbury, Leicester, Chatham,
East Grinstead, and in four London shops. He had also bought a packet of
safety pins in Swan and Edgars. He had eaten a crab sandwich at a quick lunch
counter in Argyll Street, two rolls and coffee in a Hastings bun shop, and
bread and cheese in a Haywards’ Heath inn. He had stolen every imaginable
kind of article in every imaginable kind of place—including a decanter
from a glass-and-china warehouse in Croydon. When asked what he supposed
Tisdall wanted a decanter for, the informant said that it was a grand
weapon.

Three telephones kept ringing like demented things, and by post, telegram,
wireless, and personal appearance the information poured in. Nine-tenths of
it quite useless, but all of it requiring a hearing: some of it requiring
much investigation before its uselessness became apparent. Grant looked at
the massed pile of reports, and his self-control deserted him for a
little.

“It’s a big price to pay for a moment’s lack of wit,” he said.

“Cheer up, sir,” said Williams. “It might be worse.”

“Might be worse! Would you tell me what occurrence would, in your opinion,
augment the horror of the situation?”

“Oh, well, so far no nut has come to confess to the crime, and waste our
time that way.”

But the nut arrived next morning.

Grant looked up from inspecting a dew-drenched coat which had just been
brought in, to see Williams closing the door mysteriously and mysteriously
advancing on him.

“What is it, Williams?” he asked, his voice sharp with anticipation.

“The nut,” Williams said.

“The what?”

“The person to make a confession, sir.” Williams’s tone held a shade of
guilt now, as if he felt that by mentioning the thing yesterday he had
brought the evil to pass. Grant groaned.

“Not a bit the usual kind, sir. Quite interesting. Very smart.”

“Outside or inside?”

“Oh, her clothes, I meant, sir.”

“Her! Is it a woman?”

“Yes. A lady, sir.”

“Bring her in.” Rage ran over him in little prickles. How dare some
sensation-mad female waste his time in order to satisfy her perverted and
depraved appetite.

Williams swung the door back and ushered in a bright fashionable
figure.

It was Judy Sellers.

She said nothing, but came into the room with a sulky deliberation. Even
in his surprise at seeing her, Grant thought how Borstal she was in spite of
her soigne exterior. That air of resentment against the world in general and
her own fate in particular was very familiar to him.

He pulled out a chair in silence. Grant could be very intimidating.

“All right, Sergeant,” he said, “there won’t be any need for you to stay.”
And then, to Judy as Williams went: “Don’t you think this is a little unfair,
Miss Sellers?”

“Unfair?”

“I am working twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, on dreadfully
important work, and you see fit to waste my time by treating us to a bogus
confession.”

“There’s nothing bogus about it.”

“It’s so bogus that I have a good mind to dismiss you now, without another
word.”

She stayed his half-movement to the door. “You can’t do that. I’ll just go
to another police station and confess and they’ll send me on to you. I
did
it, you see!”

“Oh, no, you didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, you weren’t near the place.”

“How do you know where I was?”

“You forget that in the course of conversation on Saturday night it was
apparent that on Wednesday night you were at Miss Keats’s house in
Chelsea.”

“I was only there for cocktails. I left early because Lydia was going to a
party up the river.”

“Even so, that makes it rather unlikely that you should be on a beach near
Westover shortly after dawn next morning.”

“It wouldn’t be at all surprising if I were in the north of England next
morning. I motored down if you want to know. You can inquire at my flat. The
girl I live with will tell you that I didn’t come home till lunchtime on
Thursday.”

“That hardly proves that your activities were murderous.”

“They were, though. I drove to the Gap, hid in the wood, and waited till
she came to swim.”

“You were, of course, wearing a man’s coat?”

“Yes, though I don’t know how you knew. It was cold driving, and I wore
one of my brother’s that was lying in the car.”

“Did you wear the coat to go down to the beach?”

“Yes. It was dithering cold. I don’t like bathing in the dawn.”

“You went bathing!”

“Of course I did. I couldn’t drown her from the shore, could I?”

“And you left the coat on the beach?”

“Oh, no,” she said with elaborate sarcasm. “I went swimming in it.”

And Grant breathed again. For a moment he had had a fright.

“So you changed into swimming things, walked down to the beach with your
brother’s coat over you, and—then what?”

“She was a fair way out. I went in, swam up to her, and drowned her.”