Puzzle of the Silver Persian (22 page)

Once Miss Withers got in touch with Sergeant Secker, after much telephoning, and demanded to know what had been done with the torn diary and the other personal effects of Rosemary Fraser.

“They were sent to her people in the States, of course,” she was told.

“Oh, I see,” said Miss Withers, in a tone of distinct disappointment. She hung up the receiver.

She had done her best, but it seemed to be a cold scent and a lost trail. The school teacher took to wandering aimlessly about the fascinating old city of London, peering into the faces of passers-by and through shop windows as if there she expected to find an answer to the riddle which haunted her mind. Normally a person of regular habits and addicted to early hours, she upset her usual routine, sensing that she could never get the real
feel
of the city in daylight—or what Londoners know as daylight.

One night—it was the fourth since the Honorable Emily and her entourage had departed for Cornwall and security—she was walking aimlessly through the streets of Soho, taking a short cut from the shop windows of Oxford Street back to the hotel. There, on the other side of the street, she saw Tom Hammond, walking very briskly and determinedly northward.

“Yoicks!” said Miss Withers to herself, and drew back into a convenient doorway. But he was too intent upon his destination to notice her.

“Now, I wonder where he is going!” she asked. With Hildegarde Withers, wondering was a prelude to the taking of definite steps toward finding out. Beset by curiosity, she followed the young man northward, keeping a discreet distance in the rear and ready to slip out of sight if he should hesitate or turn, which he showed no signs of doing. There were still a goodly number of people on the streets, for it was not yet eleven o’clock.

He turned down Oxford Street and then disappeared through the swinging doors of The King’s Arms. Miss Withers took up a stand on the opposite corner, where she could command a view of both doors to the public house, and was hopeful that in spite of the fact that she leaned against a jeweler’s window she would not be picked up as a snatch-and-grab suspect.

She looked at her watch—it was four minutes before eleven. Her wait was momentary, for almost immediately Tom Hammond reappeared, walking a little more unsteadily but with a continued air of definiteness. He was followed by the other customers of the place, for eleven o’clock is closing time on the south side of Oxford Street.

He turned and headed north along Tottenham Court Road. Miss Withers, who had read enough of the London newspapers to know that this unpromising section has outclassed Limehouse as London’s center of crime and violence, clutched her umbrella the more tightly, and strode onward. There was never a bobby in sight, though buses swung past her at lengthening intervals. Young men walked by her in twos and threes, usually wearing soiled white scarves around their necks in lieu of neckties and shirts—and underwear, Miss Withers feared. But they paid her no attention.

Hammond turned down a side street. She followed, growing rather out of breath.

He knocked at an out-of-the-way door and was admitted to a murky hallway. Again Miss Withers waited, this time for more than half an hour. When Tom Hammond emerged he was rocking a bit, with his hat too far back on his forehead and his legs betraying him now and then. Miss Withers guessed that he had just visited one of the unsavory emporiums which in the not-so-golden yesterday would have been called “speak-easies” in her own country. The world, she observed, was a small place after all.

Tom Hammond proceeded northwards, pressing on into the narrow courts and alleys which cluster about Middlesex Hospital. He turned down a narrow passageway which led on into a more brightly lighted square. But instead of pushing on, he halted and consulted a slip of paper.

It was at this point that Miss Hildegarde Withers had a distinct shock. She realized that someone else shared her ideas about following Tom Hammond, for a swaggering idler in rough clothing and a dingy white scarf and low-drawn cap had halted, even as she, in order to keep from approaching too closely to the young man.

The quarry found what he sought on the scrap of paper and rang a bell. In a moment a door opened to cast a bright glow of light into the passage, and then closed again behind him.

Miss Withers could not make out the other watcher who waited, but she knew that he was there ahead of her, in the shadows.

Puzzled and at a loss, she stood and took stock of the situation for a few moments. Then she decided upon a desperate move. Hammond had been heading constantly northward. There was a good chance that he would continue to press onward into the sections where constables were few and far between and the possibilities, therefore, for acquiring unlicensed beverages at forbidden hours greater.

She turned hurriedly back, found a street cutting through to the right, and made a complete circle, coming out at last into Fitzroy Square and the opposite end of the passage. Here, at any rate, she was not entirely alone, for some distance on a man was tinkering with a stalled motorcycle, and beyond him a solitary taxicab was cruising slowly around the square.

She took up her stand in the shadows, where she could peer up the passage through which she confidently expected Tom Hammond, and the dark figure who pursued him so stealthily, would come.

Of course there was the danger that the mysterious one would choose this particular place to strike. Yet she thought not. If she knew anything about this particular series of murders, it was that the perpetrator was not addicted to man-to-man violence, and Tom Hammond was still well able to hear the tap of feet on the stone flagging behind him and put up a healthy resistance.

The whole situation was foreign to the conception which Miss Withers had developed concerning what she called the Fraser-Noel-Todd case. “Yet if a man can pass as a woman in a fur coat, then a woman could pass as a man in rough clothing and a cap,” she reminded herself.

She waited impatiently in the cold London evening, clutching her umbrella and heartily wishing that Inspector Oscar Piper were here beside her, villainous black cigar and all—or else that she had taken up rock gardening instead of sleuthing as a hobby.

Then she got her signal—a flare of light in the darkened passage as a door opened and Tom Hammond emerged. He was definitely wobbling now—but he set his course in her direction. Miss Withers stepped down into a basement doorway and watched him come out into the lighted square, still hurrying as if he were trying to catch up with himself—or to leave himself behind.

She came out as soon as he had passed, and stood waiting. Had she made a bad guess? No—for soft footsteps were approaching. She caught a brief glimpse of a furtive, rather boyish figure in rough clothing and a low-slung cap—and went into action.

Holding her umbrella by the tip, she swung with all her force against the head of the furtive stranger as he slipped out of the mouth of the passage, at the same time shouting with the full strength of her lungs: “Help! Police! Help!”

The cap must have turned the force of her blow, for the dark stranger did not fall. He turned a dazed face toward her, and she redoubled her screams: “Help! Murder!”

There were the comforting sounds of running footsteps, and she left off swinging her umbrella and closed with her victim. She flung both arms around him and clung for dear life.

“Don’t you try to get away,” she warned. But he did not try.

To Miss Withers combined amazement and delight, the man who had been tinkering the motorcycle turned out to be no less than Chief Inspector Cannon, and the cruising taxicab, when it drew swiftly nearer, she saw contained three constables in uniform.

“I’ve got him!” she announced as Cannon drew near. Tom Hammond also had retraced his steps and stood blinking at the scene.

Her victim went rather limp in her arms, and she had to let him fall to the sidewalk.

Cannon bent beside her quarry. “Haven’t you!” he said, in a peculiar voice.

“I saw him creeping after Tom Hammond here, and I figured that the murderer would consider that a drunk was easy prey,” she went on.

“Nobly done,” the chief inspector said to her. He seemed unusually gentle with the captive. “That is just what we figured at the Yard, and we acted accordingly. We too were waiting for the murderer to strike.” Cannon beckoned to one of the constables. “Get some water, man.” He looked up at Miss Withers. “All the same, I’m afraid we were both wrong.”

“Wrong? Why—I tell you this man was creeping up on Hammond.”

“I know,” said Cannon wearily. He tugged at the limp body and splashed the face with water provided by the constable from the nearest house. He tore away the dirty white scarf and the cap—and Miss Withers looked down on the peaceful, pale face of Sergeant John Secker of the C.I.D. A fine big lump, of the general dimensions of an egg, was rising on his forehead.

Secker opened his eyes dreamily. He stared at Cannon, Miss Withers, and then back at the umbrella with its heavy curved handle.

“Well batted,” he said encouragingly. “Saw you an hour ago, but didn’t dare warn you off. Hoped you’d get tired.”

“Good heavens,” said Miss Withers. “I’m so sorry! Not for the world—”

“I know,” said the sergeant. “Best of motives. All the same, I feel terrible. Anybody got a drink?”

Tom Hammond produced a pint flask. “Bootleg, but it didn’t kill
me,
” he said, somewhat thickly.

“Thanks, old man. But won’t you need it?”

Hammond shook his head. He looked white and almost sober. “Didn’t know I was making a horse—a fool of myself and playing bait for you fellows,” he said. “I think I’d better go on the wagon for a while.”

“Wait,” protested the sergeant feebly, struggling to his feet and avoiding the proffered help of his fellows. “The idea is still a good one. Won’t you be sporting and go on—I mean, won’t you play the drunk and let us lurk about waiting for the murderer to strike?”

Tom Hammond was completely sober now. “No,” he said.
“Nein, non,
nix, no. What do you take me for? The only pleasure I have left is a good howling binge, and you have to spoil that for me.”

He refused Cannon’s offer of transportation home, and departed in search of a taxicab and in the keeping of two constables.

Miss Withers held out her hand to the sergeant. “Sorry,” she said. “I wish I’d known what you were up to, and I wouldn’t have interfered.”

“Quite all right,” said Secker, rubbing the lump on his forehead. “I’ll take it in the spirit in which it was sent, as the vicar said to the old lady who gave him brandied peaches for Christmas.”

“Well,” observed Miss Withers, who was given an undeserved ride back to her hotel in the commandeered taxi-cab of the police, “thus endeth that lesson. The next step is up to Monsieur—or Madame—X.”

“I have a few steps in mind myself,” grunted Chief Inspector Cannon. She was deposited at the door of the Alexandria, and the taxi rolled away. She went wearily inside, feeling that she had done much tonight to destroy any feeling of comradeship that Cannon and the sergeant had been beginning to feel toward herself.

But she forgot all that when she passed the desk, for the night clerk who lounged there produced a telegram.

It was from Penzance, bearing the signature of Emily Pendavid.

HAVE JUST RECEIVED WARNING LETTER FROM LONDON. COME DOWN AT ONCE. TAKE CASE EITHER AS OPERATIVE OR AS FRIEND. WILL GLADLY GUARANTEE MODERATE EXPENSES URGENT WIRE COLLECT DECISION.

Miss Withers did not even smile at the addition of the cautious word “moderate.” She turned to the clerk.

“Have you a time-table for the Great Western?” she demanded. “I am checking out in the morning, or sooner…”

“Ah, a trip to the wonderful Cornish Riviera,” said the man heartily. “Madame will find it the garden spot of England.”

But, Miss Withers told herself, there was a flower growing in that garden which badly needed plucking—a poisonous, luxuriant mandragore or nightshade. The seed of murder had taken root there… and threatened to bloom.

“Leaves Paddington 5
A.M
.—arrives Penzance 12:45
P.M
.” she read. “I’ll do it. Heaven knows there’s nothing happening in London.”

That night Miss Hildegarde Withers went speeding westward out of the city aboard the Great Western’s second-best train, just as the moon was setting. It was also then that the body of Rosemary Fraser came floating up the Thames with the tide.

T
HAT DAY WAS DISMAL
and gray, with low-hanging clouds shutting away the sun even at noon. Miss Hildegarde Withers, who had managed to sleep very little on the train which bore her down to this farthest corner of England, stood alone upon an ancient stone quay, shortly after one.

“Tide’s ebbing fast,” the Cornish taxi man had told her. “Half an hour or so and you’ll be able to walk across to the island.”

The half hour had gone, but still great rolling swells swept in from Mount’s Bay to splash across the black causeway. From where she stood, the gaunt castle-fortress of Dinsul appeared unreal and forbidding, reminding her of Arnold Böcklin’s unforgettable masterpiece at the Metropolitan back in her own New York:
Totinsel
—
The Isle of the Dead,
he had called it. In that picture there had been great granite cliffs plunging down to the sea, against a sky of drifting dark clouds…

She supposed that, if she only had taken the trouble to find out, there were means of communicating with Dinsul from the mainland. A telephone, perhaps—or some system of signals. Certainly she could have sent a message announcing her arrival, and there would have been someone to meet her. But she preferred arriving unannounced and unheralded, and thus receiving her impressions naturally.

Finally the slackening waters drew back from the causeway, and she gingerly set out across the wet passage, carrying her overnight case. It was not as long a journey as she had feared, and within a few minutes she had marched across (feeling somewhat like the children of Israel) and was mounting the interminable steps, cut in the solid rock, which led to the great door of Dinsul.