The Man in the Queue (5 page)

"Not if it'll set your mind at rest, Inspector. I'll do anything to oblige."

The inspector put his hand into his pocket and brought it out full of coins, as if to make sure of his loose change before setting out. A sixpenny piece slid through his fingers and rolled swiftly across the smooth surface of the table towards Miller, and Miller's hand shot out in an abrupt preventive movement as it was about to drop off the table's edge to the floor. He fumbled for a moment with his gloved hand and then laid the coin down on the table.

"Trifling things, these," he remarked in his flat amiable voice. But it was his right hand that he had used to stop it.

As they were driving down to the mortuary in a car he turned to the inspector with the almost noiseless expulsion of breath that in him did duty for a laugh. "Say," he said, "if any of my pals see me now, they'll all be boarding a dangler for Southampton inside five minutes and not waiting to pack."

"Well, we'd do the packing—back," said Grant.

"Got us all taped like that, have you? Would you bet on it? I'll lay you five to one in dollars—no, pounds—five to one in pounds that you don't have one of us settled inside two years. You won't take it? Well, I think you're wise."

When Miller was brought face to face with the body of the murdered man, Grant's eager eyes could trace no shadow of expression on that poker face. Danny's cool grey glance wandered over the dead man's features in a half-interested indifference. And Grant knew certainly that, even had Miller known the man, his hope of a betraying gesture or expression had been a vain one.

"No," Danny was saying, "I never saw the man in my—" He stopped. There was a long pause. "Say, but I did!" he said. "Oh, gosh, let me think! Where was it? Where was it? Wait a minute, and it'll come." He beat a hectic tattoo on his forehead with his gloved palm. Was this acting, thought Grant? Good acting, if so. But then Miller would never make the mistake of acting badly. "Oh, gosh, I can't get it! I talked to him, too. Don't think I ever knew his name, but I'm. sure I talked to him."

In the end Grant gave it up—he had the inquest in front of him—but it was more than Danny Miller did. The fact that his brain had gone back on him was an outrage in his eyes and quite insupportable. "I never forget a man," he kept saying, "any more than a 'bull' does."

"Well, you can think it over and telephone to me," said Grant. "Meanwhile, will you do one thing more for me?...Will you take your gloves off?"

Danny's eyes shut suddenly to bright slits. "What's the big idea?" he said.

"Well, there isn't any reason that you shouldn't take them off, is there?"

"How do I know that?" snapped Danny.

"Look here," said Grant good-naturedly, "a minute ago you wanted a gamble. Well, here's one. If you take your gloves off, I'll tell you whether you've won or not."

"And if I lose?"

"Well, I have no warrant, you know." And Grant smiled easily into the gimlet eyes boring into his own.

Danny's eyelids lifted. His old nonchalance came back. He drew his right glove off and held out his hand. Grant glanced at it and nodded. Then he slipped off his left glove and extended his hand, and as he did so the right hand went back into his coat pocket.

The left hand that lay open to Grant's gaze was clean and unscarred.

"You win, Miller," said Grant. "You're a sportsman." And the slight bulge in Danny's right-hand coat pocket disappeared.

"You'll let me know the minute you have a brainwave, won't you?" Grant said as they parted, and Miller promised.

"Don't you worry," he said. "I don't let my brain go back on me and get away with it."

And Grant made his way to lunch and the inquest.

The jury, having swallowed at one nauseating gulp the business of viewing the body, had settled into their places with that air of conscious importance and simulated modesty which belongs to those initiated into a mystery. Their verdict was already certain, therefore they had no need to worry themselves over the rights or wrongs of the case. They could give themselves up wholly to the delightful occupation of hearing all about the most popular murder of the day from lips of eyewitnesses. Grant surveyed them sardonically, and thanked the gods that neither his case nor his life depended on their intelligences. Then he forgot them and gave himself up to the rich comedy of the witnesses. It was strange to compare the grim things that fell from their lips with the pretty comedy they themselves presented. He knew them so well by now, and they all ran so amusingly true to form. There was the constable who had been on duty at the Woffington pit queue, brushed and shining, his dampish forehead shining most of all; precise in his report and tremendously gratified by his own preciseness. There was James Ratcliffe, the complete householder, hating his unexpected publicity, rebelling against his connexion with such an unsavoury affair, but determined to do his duty as a citizen. He was the type that is the law's most useful ally, and the inspector recognized the fact and mentally saluted him in spite of the fact that he had been unhelpful. Waiting in queues bored him, he said, and as long as the light was good enough he had read, until the doors opened and the pressure became too great to do anything but stand.

There was his wife, whom the inspector had last seen sobbing in her bedroom. She still clutched a handkerchief, and obviously expected to be encouraged and soothed after every second question. And she was subjected to a longer examination than any one else. She was the one who had stood directly behind the dead man.

"Are we to understand, madam," said the coroner, "that you stood for nearly two hours in close proximity to this man and yet have no recollection of him or of his companions, if any?"

"But I wasn't next to him all that time! I tell you I didn't see him until he fell over at my feet."

"Then who was next in front of you most of the time?"

"I don't remember. I think it was a boy—a young man."

"And what became of the young man?"

"I don't know."

"Did you see him leave the queue?"

"No."

"Can you describe him?"

"Yes; he was dark and foreign-looking, rather."

"Was he alone?"

"I don't know. I don't think so, somehow. I think he was talking to some one."

"How is it that you do not remember more distinctly what occurred when it is only three nights ago?"

The shock had put everything out of her head, she said. "Besides," she added, her gelatinous backbone ossified suddenly by the coroner's ill-hidden scorn, "in a queue one doesn't notice the people next one. Both I and my husband were reading most of the time." And she dissolved into hysterical weeping.

Then there was the fat woman, shiny with satin and soap-and-water, recovered now from the shock and reluctance she had displayed at the crowded moment of the murder, and more than willing to tell her tale. Her plump red face and boot-button brown eyes radiated a grim satisfaction with her rôle. She seemed disappointed when the coroner thanked her and dismissed her in the middle of a sentence.

There was a meek little man, as precise in manner as the constable had been, but evidently convinced that the coroner was a man of little intelligence. When that long-suffering official said, "Yes, I was aware that queues usually go two by two," the jury allowed themselves to snigger and the meek little man looked pained. As neither he nor the other three witnesses from the queue could recall the murdered man, or throw any light on any departure from the queue, they were dismissed with scant attention.

The doorkeeper, incoherent with pleasure at being so helpful, informed the coroner that he had seen the dead man before—several times. He had come quite often to the Woffington. But he knew nothing about him. He had always been well dressed. No, the doorkeeper could not recall any companion, though he was sure that the man had not habitually been alone.

The atmosphere of futility that characterized the inquest discouraged Grant. A man whom no one professed to know, stuck in the back by some one whom no one had seen. It was a sweet prospect. No clue to the murder except the dagger, and that told nothing except that the man was scarred on a finger or thumb. No clue to the murdered man except that a Faith Brothers employee might have known the person to whom he sold a fawn patterned tie with faint pink splashes. When the inevitable verdict of murder against some person or persons unknown had been given, Grant went to a telephone revolving in his mind the Ratcliffe woman's tale of a young foreigner. Was that impression a mere figment of her imagination, brought into being by the suggestion of the dagger? Or was it a genuine corroboration of his Levantine theory? Mrs. Ratcliffe's young foreigner had not been there when the murder was discovered. He was the one who had disappeared from the queue, and the one who had disappeared from the queue had most certainly murdered the dead man.

Well, he would find out from the Yard if there was anything new, and if not he would fortify himself with tea. He needed it. And the slow sipping of tea conduced to thought. Not the painful tabulations of Barker, that prince of superintendents, but the speculative revolving of things which he, Grant, found more productive. He numbered among his acquaintances a poet and essayist, who sipped tea in a steady monotonous rhythm, the while he brought to birth his masterpieces. His digestive system was in a shocking condition, but he had a very fine reputation among the more precious of the modern littérateurs.

But over the telephone Grant heard something which put all thoughts of tea out of his head. There was waiting for him a letter addressed in capitals. Grant knew very well what that meant. Scotland Yard has a wide experience of letters addressed in capitals. He smiled to himself as he hailed a taxi. If people only realized that writing in capitals didn't disguise a hand at all! But he sincerely hoped they never would.

Before he opened the letter that awaited him he dusted it with powder and found it covered with fingerprints. He slit the top delicately, holding the letter, which was fat and softish, in a pair of forceps, and drew out a wad of Bank of England five-pound notes and a half-sheet of notepaper. On the notepaper was printed: "To bury the man who was found in the queue."

There were five notes. Twenty-five pounds.

Grant sat down and stared. In all his time in the C.I.D. a more unexpected thing had not happened. Somewhere in London tonight was some one who cared sufficiently for the dead man to spend twenty-five pounds to keep him from a pauper's grave, but who would not claim him. Was this corroboration of his intimidation theory? Or was it conscience money? Had the murderer a superstitious desire to do the right thing by his victim's body? Grant thought not. The man who stuck another in the back didn't care a hoot what became of the body. The man had a pal man or woman in London tonight, a pal who cared to the tune of twenty-five pounds.

Grant called in Williams, and together they considered the plain, cheap, white envelope and the strong, plain capitals.

"Well," said Grant, "what do you know?"

"A man," said Williams. "Not well off. Not used to writing much. Clean. Smokes. Depressed."

"Excellent!" said Grant. "You're no good as a Watson, Williams. You get away with all the kudos."

Williams, who knew all about Watson—at the age of eleven he had spent hunted moments in a hayloft in Worcestershire trying to read
The Speckled Band
without being discovered by Authority, who had banned it smiled and said, "I expect you have got far more out of it, sir."

But Grant had not. "Except that he's a poor hand at the business. Fancy sending anything as easily traced as English five-pound notes!" He blew the light, soft powder over the half-sheet of notepaper, but found no fingerprints. He summoned a constable and sent the precious envelope and the bundle of notes to have all fingerprints photographed. The sheet of notepaper bearing the printed message he sent to the handwriting expert.

"Well, the banks are shut now, worse luck. Are you in a hurry to get back to the missus, Williams?"

No, Williams was in no hurry. His missus and the baby were in Southend with his mother-in-law for a week.

"In that case," Grant said, "we'll dine together and you can give me the benefit of your ideas on the subject of murders in queues."

Some years before, Grant had inherited a considerable legacy—a legacy sufficient to permit him to retire into idle nonentity if such had been his desire. But Grant loved his work even when he swore and called it a dog's life, and the legacy had been used only to smooth and embroider life until what would have been the bleak places were eliminated, and to make some bleak places in other lives less impossible. There was a little grocer's shop in a southern suburb, bright as a jewel with its motley goods, which owed its existence to the legacy and to Grant's chance meeting with a ticket-of-leave man on his first morning out. It was Grant who had been the means of "putting him away," and it was Grant who provided the means of his rehabilitation. It was owing entirely to the legacy, therefore, that Grant was an habitué of so exclusive an eating place as Laurent's, and—a much more astonishing and impressive fact—a pet of the head waiter's. Only five persons in Europe are pets of Laurent's head waiter, and Grant was thoroughly conscious of the honour, and thoroughly sensible of the reason.

Marcal met them halfway down the green-and-gold room, with his face screwed to an expression of the most excruciating sorrow. He was desolated, but there was not a table worthy of Monsieur left. There were no tables at all except that much-to-be condemned one in that corner. Monsieur had not let him know that he was to be expected. He was desolated, desolated simply.

Grant took the table without a murmur. He was hungry, and he did not care where he ate so that the food was good, and except for the fact that the table was directly outside the service door there was no fault to be found with it. A couple of green draught-screens camouflaged the door, and the door, being a swing one, kept the rattle of crockery to a faint castanet music that blossomed every now and then in a sudden fortissimo as the door swung wide and closed again. Over their dinner Grant decided that in the morning Williams should visit the banks in the area indicated by the letter's postmark, and with that as a basis, track down the history of the bank-notes. It shouldn't be difficult; banks were always accommodating. From that they turned to the discussion of the crime itself. It was Williams' opinion that it was a gang affair; that the dead man had fallen foul of his gang, had known his danger, had borrowed the gun from the only friendly member of the crowd, and had never had a chance to use it. The money that had arrived tonight had come from the secretly friendly one. It was a good enough theory, but it left out things.