Elk 04 White Face (3 page)

Elk called on the evening Janice Harman took her farewell, and found Dr. Marford’s melancholy eyes fixed upon the dreary pageant of Endley Street. They were working overtime in the shipyard, which was almost opposite his surgery, and the din of mechanical riveters would go on during the night. Dr. Marford was so accustomed to this noise that it was hardly noticeable. The sound of drunken songsters, the pandemonium which accompanied amateur pugilism, the shrill din of children playing in the streets—hereabouts they played till midnight—the rumbling of heavy lorries on the way to the Eastern Trading Company’s yard which went on day and night never disturbed his sleep.

“If I was sure this was hell”—Mr. Elk nodded his own gloomy face towards the thoroughfare—“I’d get religion. Not that I don’t say my prayers every night—I do. I pray for the Divisional Inspector, the Area Inspector, the Big Five and the Chief Commissioner; I pray for the Examining Board and all other members of the criminal classes.”

The ghost of a smile illuminated the thin face of Dr. Marford. He was a man of thirty-five who looked older. Spare of build, his greying hair was thin on the top. He wore absurd little side-whiskers half-way down his cheek, and gold-rimmed spectacles, one lens of which was usually cracked.

For a long time they stood in silence behind the calico curtains, attracting no attention from the passers-by, for there was no light in the surgery.

“My idea of hell,” said Elk again.

Dr. Marford laughed softly.

“With its own particular devil, by all accounts,” he said.

Detective-Sergeant Elk permitted himself to guffaw.

“That bunk! Listen, these people believe anything. Funny thing, they don’t read, so they couldn’t have got the idea out of books. It’s one of the—what do you call the word—um—damn it! I’ve got it on the end of my tongue…”

“Legends?”

“That’s it—it’s like the Russians passing through England with the snow on their boots. Everybody’s met the man who saw ‘em, but you never meet him. Every time there’s a murder nobody can explain, you see it in the newspaper bills: ‘The Devil of Tidal Basin,’ an’ even after you’ve pinched the murderer an’ all the earth knows that he never heard of Tidal Basin, or thinks it’s a patent wash-bowl, they still hang on to the idea. These newspapers! Next summer you’ll have joy-wagons full of American trippers comin’ here. Limehouse has had it, why shouldn’t we?”

A bright young newspaper man had invented the Devil of the Basin. It was the general opinion in Tidal Basin that he wasn’t any too bright either.

“There is a devil—hundreds of ‘em! The waterside crowd wouldn’t think twice of putting me out. They tried one night—Dan Salligan. The flowers I sent to the man when he was in hospital is nobody’s business.”

Dr. Marford moved uncomfortably.

“I’m afraid I helped that legend to grow. The reporter saw me and very—er—indiscreetly, I told him of the patient who used to come to me—he hasn’t been for months, by the way—always came at midnight with his face covered with a mask. It wasn’t good to see the face, I mean. Explosion in a steel works.”

Elk was interested.

“Where does he live?”

The doctor shook his head.

“I don’t know. The reporter tried to find out but couldn’t. He always paid me in gold—a pound a visit, which is forty times more than I get from my regulars.”

Mr. Elk was not impressed. His eyes were fixed upon the squalling larrikins in the roadway.

“Weeds!” he said, and the doctor laughed softly.

“Those ugly little boys are probably great political leaders of the future, or literary geniuses. Tidal Basin may be stiff with mute, inglorious Miltons,” he said.

Sergeant Elk of the Criminal Investigation Department made a noise that expressed his contempt.

“Nine-tenths of that crowd will pass through the hands of me and my successors,” he said drearily, “and all your electric rays won’t stop um! And such of them as don’t finish in Dartmoor will end their days in the workhouse. Why they call it a workhouse, God knows. I’ve never known anybody to work in a workhouse except the staff. You know Mrs. Weston?” he asked suddenly. “A pretty woman. She’s got the only respectable apartment in the Basin. All Ritzy—I went up there when some kids broke her windows. She’s not much good.”

“If she’s not much good,” said Marford, and again that ghost of a smile came and went, “if she’s not much good, I probably know her. If she’s the kind of woman who doesn’t pay her doctor’s bills, I certainly know her. Why do you ask?”

Elk took a cigar from his pocket and bit off the end. It was obviously a good cigar. He had hoarded it so long that it had irregular fringes of leaf. He lit it with great deliberation and puffed enjoyably.

“She was saying that she knew you,” he said, fully two minutes after the question had been asked. “Naturally I said a good word for you.”

“Say a few good words for the clinic,” said the doctor.

“I’m always doing it,” said Sergeant Elk complacently. “You’re wasting your time and other people’s money, but I do it. That’s a pretty nurse you’ve got—Miss Harman. Quigley the reporter’s all goo-ey about her.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Marford quietly.

He rose and pulled down the blind, went to a cupboard, took out a whisky bottle, a siphon and two glasses, and looked inquiringly at the detective.

“I’m off duty,” said Elk, “if a detective is ever off duty.”

He pulled up a chair to the writing table. The doctor was already in his worn leather chair. “Ever read detective stories?” asked Elk.

Dr. Marford shook his head.

At that moment the telephone rang. He took up the instrument, listened for a while, asked a few questions, and put down the receiver.

“That’s why I don’t read detective or any other kind of stories,” he said. “The population of Tidal Basin increases at a terrific rate, but not so rapidly as some people expect.”

He jotted a note down on a little pad.

“That’s a come-at-once call, but I don’t suppose they will require my attention till three o’clock to-morrow morning. Why detective stories?”

Sergeant Elk sipped at his whisky. He was not a man to be rushed into explanation.

“Because,” he said eventually, “I’d like some of these clever Mikes to take my patrol for a couple of months. I saw an American crook play up in the West End the other night. It was all about who-did-it. First of all they introduced you to about twenty characters, told you where they were born and who their fathers were, and what money they wanted and who they were in love with—you couldn’t help knowing that the fellow who did the murder was the red-nosed waiter. But that’s not police work, Dr. Marford. We’re not introduced to the characters in the story; we don’t know one. All we’ve got in a murder case is the dead man. What he is, who his relations are, where he came from, what was his private business—we’ve got to work all that out. We make inquiries here, there and everywhere, digging into slums, asking questions of people who’ve got something to hide.”

“Something to hide?” repeated the doctor.

Elk nodded.

“Everybody’s got something to hide. Suppose you were a married man—”

“Which I am not,” interrupted Marford.

“We’ve got to suppose that,” insisted Elk. “Your wife is abroad. You take a girl into the country…”

The doctor made faint noises of protest.

“We’re supposin’ all this,” conceded Elk. “Such things have happened. And in the morning you look out of your window an’ see a feller cut another feller’s throat. You are a doctor and cannot afford to get your name into the papers. Are you going to the police and tell them what you saw? And are you going to stand up in court and tell them what you were doing out of town and the name of the lady you were with, and take the chance of it getting into all the papers? Or are you going to say nothing? Of course you are! That happens every day. In a murder case everybody has got something to hide, and that’s why it’s harder to get the truth about murder than any other kind of crime. Murder is a spot-light. You’ve got to take the stand and face a defending counsel who’s out to prove that you’re the sort of fellow that no decent jurywoman could ask to meet her young daughter.”

The detective sucked at his cigar for a long time in silence. Then he asked:

“Bit of a mystery, this woman Lorna Weston?”

The doctor’s tired eyes surveyed him thoughtfully.

“I suppose so. They’re all mysteries to me. I can’t remember their names. God, what names they’ve got! Like the patterns of a dull wallpaper—one running into the other. Jackson, Johnson, Thompson, Beckett, Dockett, Duckett, Roon, Doon, Boon…eh? And some without any names at all. I attended a young woman for three months—she was just ‘the young woman upstairs,’ or ‘Miss What’s-her-name.’ Her landlady didn’t know it. She was a waitress working nobody knew where. If she had died I couldn’t have certified her. I called her Miss Smith—had to put some sort of name on the books. What does Mrs. Weston do for a living?”

Mr. Elk made a little grimace.

“Well, you know, she’s…well, she goes West every night all dolled up.”

The doctor nodded.

“There are lots of ‘em—a whole colony. Why do they live in this hell shoot? I suppose it’s cheap. And their earnings are not what they were. One girl told me—but you can’t believe ‘em.”

He sighed heavily and sighed again.

“You can’t believe anybody.”

Elk got up, drained his glass and reached for his hat.

“She wanted to know if you were an easy man to get on with. I got an idea she’s a dope-getter. I don’t know why, but I’ve just got that idea. There was a doctor in Silvertown who made a fortune out of it: he spent over a thousand on his defence when I got him to the Old Bailey…”

The doctor went out with him, and they arrived at the street door at an opportune moment.

The earlier sound of the battle had come to them in a confused hubbub of sound as they passed through the disinfected passage. As Marford opened the door he saw two men fighting, surrounded by a crowd. It was a fair fight, both men being well matched in point of physique and equally drunk. But they were too close to the granite kerb of the sidewalk. One of the combatants went down suddenly, and the grey, dusty kerbstone went red.

“Here—you!”

Elk made a grab at the victor and swung him round. The policemen came running and plunged through the crowd.

“Take this man.”

Elk handed over his dazed prisoner and shouldered his way through the tightly packed knot of people that surrounded the man on the kerb.

“Get him inside the doctor’s shop. Lift him…”

They carried the limp thing into the surgery and Dr. Marford made a brief examination whilst Mr. Elk bustled the bearers into the street.

“Well?” he asked when he came back. “Hospital case, isn’t it?”

Marford was fixing an enormous pad of gauze and cottonwool to the head of the white-faced man.

“Yes. Do you mind ringing the ambulance? Two shillings’ worth of surgical dressings and I don’t get a cent for it. You can’t sue their relations—they need the money for a swell funeral. Everybody has to go into black, and that costs money.”

Elk screwed up his lips painfully.

“Is he booked?” he asked, looking at the figure with the awed curiosity which the living have for the dead.

“I should think so: compound fracture of the occiput. Get him to the London and they may do something. It costs me ten shillings a week just for surgical dressings. I’ll tell you something, and you can arrest me. If I get ‘em alone, I go through their pockets and take the cost of the dressing. But usually they’ve got some howling women with ‘em who won’t leave ‘em. ‘When pain and anguish wring the brow,’ eh?”

The ambulance came noisily and the patient was taken away.

It was an incident not worth remembering—except for two shillings’ worth of dressing that would never be liquidated.

The doctor closed the door upon Mr. Elk, and went back to his books and his thoughts. Two inconvenient new lives were coming to Tidal Basin. The district nurses would call him in good time. Inconvenient…the children of an unemployable labourer and a father who was resting in one of His Majesty’s prisons.

As to this Lorna Weston…

He knew her, of course. She often passed the surgery on her way to the provisions store next door, and once or twice she had come in to see him. A pretty woman, though her mouth was a trifle hard and straight. He never confessed to Elk that he knew anybody. Elk was a detective and respected no confidences.

There was a phone call from Elk. The fighter had died on admission to hospital. The doctor was not surprised. An inquest, of course.

“We shall want you as a witness,” said Elk’s voice. “He’s a dock labourer from Poplar—a man named Stephens.”

“How thrilling!” said the doctor, hung up the receiver and went back to his book—the intrigues of Louis’s court, the scheming Polignacs and the profitable machinations of Madame de Lamballe.