The Man in the Queue (11 page)

"And what do you do when you go out?" asked Grant, curiosity for a moment overcoming his desire to get behind the locked door.

"I just leave it unlocked," said this happy wight. "If any one finds anything in my rooms worth stealing, they're cleverer than I am."

And then suddenly, apparently within a yard of them and just inside the locked door, that stealthy sound that was hardly sound—merely a heard movement.

The artist's eyebrows disappeared into the Struwwelpeter hair. He jerked his head at the door and looked interrogatively at the inspector. Without a word Grant took him by the arm and drew him down the stairs to the first turn. "Look here," he said, "I'm a plain-clothes man—know what that is?" for the artist's innocence as to courses had shaken any faith he might have had in his worldly knowledge. The artist said, "Yes, a bobby," and Grant let him away with it. "I want to get into that room. Is there a yard at the back where I can see the window of the room?"

There was, and the artist led him to the ground floor and through a dark passage to the back of the house, where they came out into a little bricked yard that might have been part of a village inn. A low outhouse with a lead roof was built against the wall, and directly above it was the window of Sorrell's office. It was open a little at the top and had an inhabited air.

"Give me a leg up," said Grant, and was hoisted onto the roof of the outhouse. As he drew his foot from the painty clasp of his assistant, he said, "I might tell you that you are conniving at a felony. This is house-breaking and entirely illegal."

"It is the happiest moment of my life," the artist said. "I have always wanted to break the law, but a way has never been vouchsafed me. And now to do it in the company of a policeman is joy that I did not anticipate my life would ever provide."

But Grant was not listening to him. His eyes were on the window. Slowly he drew himself up until his head was just below the level of the window-sill. Cautiously he peered over. Nothing moved in the room. A movement behind him startled him. He looked around to see the artist joining him on the roof. "Have you a weapon," he whispered, "or shall I get you a poker or something?" Grant shook his head, and with a sudden determined movement flung up the lower half of the window and stepped into the room. Not a sound followed but his own quick breathing. The wan, grey light lay on the thick dust of a deserted office. But the door facing him, which led into the front room, was ajar. With an abrupt three steps he had reached and thrown it open. And as he did so, out of the second room with a wail of terror sprang a large black cat. It cleared the rear room at a bound and was through the open window before the inspector recognized it for what it was. There was an agonized yell from the artist, a clatter and a crash. Grant went to the window, to hear queer choked moans coming from the yard below. He slid hastily to the edge of the outhouse and beheld his companion in crime sitting on the grimy bricks, holding his evidently painful head, while his body was convulsed in the throes of a still more painful laughter. Reassured, Grant went back to the room for a glance at the drawers of Sorrell's desk. They were all empty—methodically and carefully cleared. The front room had been used as another office, not a living-room. Sorrell must have lived elsewhere. Grant closed the window and, sliding down the lead roof, dropped into the yard. The artist was still sobbing, but had got the length of wiping his eyes.

"Are you hurt?" Grant asked.

"Only my ribs," said Struwwelpeter. "The abnormal excitation of the intercostal muscles has nearly broken them." He struggled to his feet.

"Well, that's twenty minutes wasted," said Grant, "but I had to satisfy myself." He followed the hobbling artist through the dark passage again.

"No time is wasted that earns such a wealth of gratitude as I feel for you," said Struwwelpeter. "I was in the depths when you arrived. I can never paint on Monday mornings. There should be no such thing. Monday mornings should be burnt out of the calendar with prussic acid. And you have made a Monday morning actually memorable! It is a great achievement. Sometime when you are not too busy breaking the law, come back, and I'll paint your portrait. You have a charming head."

A thought occurred to Grant. "I suppose you couldn't draw Sorrell from memory?"

Struwwelpeter considered. "I think I could," he said. "Come up a minute." He led Grant into the welter of canvases, paints, lengths of stuff, and properties of all kinds which he called his studio. Except for the dust it looked as though a flood had passed and left the contents of the room in the haphazard relationships and curious angles that only receding water can achieve. After some flinging about of things that might be expected to be concealing something, the artist produced a bottle of Indian ink, and after another search a fine brush. He made six or seven strokes with the brush on a blank sheet of a sketching block, considered it critically, and having torn it from the block handed it over to Grant.

"It isn't quite correct, but it's good enough for an impression," he said.

Grant was astonished at the cleverness of it. The ink was not yet dry on the paper, but the artist had brought the dead man to life. The sketch had that slight exaggeration of characteristics that is halfway to caricature, but it lived as no photographic representation could have done. The artist had even conveyed the look of half-anxious eagerness in the eyes which Sorrell's had presumably worn in life. Grant thanked him heartfeltly and gave him his card.

"If there is ever anything I can do for you, come and see me," he said, and went away without waiting to see the altering expression on Struwwelpeter's face as he took in the significance of the card.

Near Cambridge Circus are the palatial offices of Laurence Murray—Lucky-Folk-Bet-With-Laury Murray—one of the biggest bookmakers in London. As Grant was going past on the other side of the street, he saw the genial Murray arrive in his car and enter the offices. He had known Laury Murray fairly well for some years, and he crossed the street now and followed him into the shining headquarters of his greatness. He sent in his name and was led through a vast wilderness of gleaming wood, brass, and glass partitions and abounding telephones to the sanctum of the great man, hung round with pictures of great thoroughbreds.

"Well," said Murray, beaming on him, "something for the National, is it? I hope to goodness it isn't Coffee Grounds. Half Britain seems to want to back Coffee Grounds today."

But the inspector denied any intention of losing money even on such an attractive proposition as Coffee Grounds seemed to be.

"Well, I don't suppose you've come to warn me about ready-money betting?"

The inspector grinned. No; he wanted to know if Murray had ever known a man called Albert Sorrell.

"Never heard of him," said Murray. "Who is he?"

He was a bookmaker, Grant thought. "Course?"

Grant did not know. He had an office in Minley Street.

"Silver ring, probably," said Murray. "Tell you what. If I were you, I should go down to Lingfield today, and you can see all the silver-ring men in one fell swoop. It'll save you a lot of touting round."

Grant considered. It was by far the quickest and most logical method, and it had the additional advantage of offering him a knowledge of Sorrell's business associates which the mere obtaining of his home address would not have done.

"Tell you what," Murray said again as he hesitated, "I'll go down with you. You've missed the last train now. We'll go down in my car. I have a horse running, but I couldn't be bothered to go down alone. I promised my trainer I'd go, but it was such a beast of a morning. Have you had lunch?"

Grant had not, and Murray went away to see about a lunch basket while Grant talked to the Yard on his telephone.

An hour later Grant was having lunch in the country; a grey and sodden country truly, but a country smelling of clean, fresh, growing things; and the drizzle that had made town a greasy horror was left behind. Grey, wet-looking torn clouds showed blue sky in great rifts, and by the time they had reached the paddock the pale unhappy pools in the rock-garden were smiling uncertainly at an uncertain sun. It was ten minutes before the first race, and both rings from Grant's point of view were impossible. He pushed down his impatience and accompanied Murray to the white rails of the parade ring, where the horses for the first race were walking sedately round, the looker-on in him loving their beauty and their fitness—Grant was a fairly competent judge of a horse—while his eyes wandered over the crowd in a businesslike commentary. There was Mollenstein—Stone, he called himself now—looking as if he owned the earth. Grant wondered what bogus scheme he was foisting on a public of suckers now. He shouldn't have thought that anything as uncomfortable as a jumping meeting in March would have appealed to him. Perhaps one of his suckers was interested in the game. And Vanda Morden, back from her third honeymoon and advertising the fact in a coat of a check so aggressive that it was the most obvious thing in the paddock. Wherever one looked, it seemed, there was Vanda Morden's coat. And the polo-playing earl who had been shadowed in the hope that he was the Levantine. And many others, both pleasant and unpleasant, all of whom Grant recognized and noted with a little mental remark.

When the first race was over, and the little eddy of lucky ones had surrounded the bookmakers and been sent gloating away, Grant began his work. He pursued his inquiries steadily until the ring began to fill again with eager inquirers after odds for the second race, when he returned to the paddock. But no one seemed to have heard of Sorrell, and it was a rather disconsolate Grant who joined Murray in the paddock before the fourth race—a handicap hurdle—in which Murray's horse was running. Murray was sympathetic, and as Grant stood with him in the middle of the parade ring he mixed adjurations to admire his horse with suggestions for the tracking of Sorrell. Grant wholeheartedly admired the magnificent bay that was Murray's property and listened with only half an ear to his suggestions. His thoughts were worried. Why did no one in the silver ring know Sorrell?

The jockeys began to filter into the ring, the crowd round the rail thinned slightly as people moved away to points of vantage on the stands, lads kept ducking eager heads under their charges' necks in anxiety to intercept the summons that would mean mounting time.

"Here comes Lacey," said Murray, as a jockey came stepping catlike over the wet grass to them. "Know him?"

"No," said Grant.

"Flat-race crack really, but has a go over hurdles occasionally. Crack at that too."

Grant had known that—there is very little between a Scotland Yard inspector and omniscience—but he had never actually met the famous Lacey. The jockey greeted Murray with a tight little smile, and Murray introduced the inspector without explaining him. Lacey shivered slightly in the damp air.

"I'm glad it's not fences," he said, with mock fervour. "I'd just hate to be emptied into the water today."

"Bit of a change from heated rooms and all the coddling," said Murray.

"Been in Switzerland?" asked Grant conversationally, remembering that Switzerland was the winter Mecca of flat-race jockeys.

"Switzerland!" repeated Lacey in his drawling Irish voice. "Not me. I've had measles. Measles—if you'd believe it! Nothing but milk for nine days and a whole month in bed." His pleasant, cameo-like face twisted into an expression of wry disgust.

"And milk is so fattening," laughed Murray. "Talking of fat, did you ever know a man called Sorrell?"

The jockey's pale bright eyes trickled over the inspector like twin drops of icy water and came back to Murray. The whip, which had been swinging pendulum-wise from his first finger, swung slowly to a halt.

"I think I can remember a Sorrell," he said, after some cogitation, "but he wasn't fat. Wasn't Charlie Baddeley's clerk called Sorrell?"

But Murray could not recall Charlie Baddeley's clerk.

"Would you recognize a sketch?" asked the inspector, and took Struwwelpeter's impressionistic portrait from his pocketbook.

Lacey took it and looked at it admiringly. "It's good, isn't it! Yes; that's old Baddeley's clerk, all right."

"And where can I find Baddeley?" asked Grant.

"Well, that's rather a difficult question," said Lacey, the tight smile back at his mouth. "You see, Baddeley died over two years ago."

"Oh? And you haven't seen Sorrell since?"

"No, I don't know what became of Sorrell. Probably doing office work somewhere."

The bay was led up to them. Lacey took off his coat, removed a pair of galoshes, which he laid neatly side by side on the grass, and was thrown into the saddle. As he adjusted the leathers he said to Murray, "Alvinson isn't here today"—Alvinson was Murray's trainer. "He said you would give me instructions."

"The instructions are the usual ones," said Murray. "Do as you like on him. He should about win."

"Very good," said Lacey matter-of-factly, and was led away to the gate, horse and man as beautiful a picture as this weary civilization can provide.

As Grant and Murray walked to the stands, Murray said, "Cheer up, Grant. Baddeley may be dead, but I know who knew him. I'll take you down to talk to him as soon as this is over." So it was with a real enjoyment that Grant watched the race; saw the colour that flickered and streamed against the grey curtain of the woods on the back stretch, while a silence settled eerily on the crowd—a silence so complete that he might have been there alone with the dripping trees, and the grey wooded countryside, and the wet grass; saw the long struggle in the straight and the fighting finish, with Murray's bay second by a length. When Murray had seen his horse again and congratulated Lacey, he led Grant into Tattersalls and introduced him to an elderly man, with the rubicund face of the man who drives mail coaches through the snow on Christmas cards. "Thacker," he said, "You knew Baddeley. What became of his clerk, do you know?"

"Sorrell?" said the Christmas-card man. "He set up for himself. Has an office in Minley Street."

"Does he come to the course?"