Red aces Being three cases of Mr. Reeder
strong foreign accent. She had an idea he was an actor, because she
had once seen a box containing wigs and moustaches and theatrical
make-up, and she had seen a photograph of him in some theatrical role.
Although it was a ground floor flat, it only consisted of three rooms
and a kitchenette. One was entirely bare, except that in a cupboard he
found three uncased pillows. Mrs. Adderly explained that occasionally
Mr. Schmidt had a weakness for pillows, though the only time he ever
slept there one sufficed him.
The bedroom contained an iron bedstead with a mattress, comparatively
new, a small dressing chest, a mirror, a little table and two chairs.
The bed was not made, but the blankets were neatly folded at the foot
of the bare mattress and covered with a sheet. On the wall was a
lithographed portrait of a man in a foreign uniform. Mr. Reeder
guessed it was Russian. Over the bed was hung a shelf which contained
four or five Russian books, and here he made a discovery, for on the
fly-leaf of one was a long inscription in French:
“Presented to me by the Grand Duke Alexander on the occasion of my
performance in ‘_Revisor_’.”
Beneath this was a single letter “L.”
The main interest for Mr. Reeder lay in the fact that the handwriting
was not the same as that in the letter.
In the small cupboard he found two medicine bottles half filled. He
sniffed one and discovered the unmistakable scent of spirits of
chloroform. He was hardly as much impressed by the contents as by the
labels, which were those of a Bloomsbury chemist. He left Mrs. Adderly
and went in search of the disgruntled hall porter.
“Mr. Schmidt” had had visitors, but apparently they came after 11
o’clock at night at which hour the porter went off duty; the lift,
being an automatic one, was operated by the tenants themselves. He
would not have known of this, but for the fact that one of the other
tenants in the building had seen people going into or coming from the
flat in the middle of the night. They were invariably men.
A chemist’s shop on the corner of the block was Mr. Reeder’s next
objective. The chemist was a suspicious man, not inclined to answer
readily to the detective’s questions. Mr. Reeder, however, carried
authority in the shape of a small warrant card, for he had definite
association with the Public Prosecutor’s Department.
Both the chemist and his assistant had seen Mr. Schmidt. He had called
to have medicines made up and to purchase surgical supplies.
“Surgical supplies?” Mr. Reeder was almost excited. “Dear me, how
excellently that fits my theory! Pardon me, my dear sir… I--um--was
rather carried away. Now, could you describe Mr. Schmidt?”
They could describe him quite graphically, and Mr. Schmidt was
undoubtedly the dead Litnoff.
Mr. Reeder went home to his house in the Brockley Road, feeling rather
satisfied with his discoveries. He had no illusion about his “luck.”
In a few days the police would discover Litnoff’s home in Lammington
Mansions (they found it the next day through the medium of a laundry
mark as a matter of fact) and at best he was only those few days ahead
of the “regulars.” There were no letters for him, and he had his tea
and toast reading the evening newspapers the while, and at nine
o’clock was in the act of writing up his diary when he heard the
tinkle of the street door bell.
The housekeeper left the two visitors in the hall, and announced them
to Mr. Reeder with bated breath.
“Two young ladies,” she said primly. “I told them you never saw
visitors, but one of them said she was going to see you if she had to
wait all night.”
If Mr. Reeder had harmonized with the tone of sharp disapproval, he
would have ordered them immediately to be thrown into the street.
“Show them up, please,” he said.
One, at least, was Miss Gillette. He guessed the other, and guessed
correctly, for Joan Ralph came into the room behind his trying
secretary.
“I would have telephoned you, but I didn’t think it was safe,” said
Miss Gillette almost before she was in the room. “You remember you
asked Joan about a diamond clasp, or brooch, or something?”
Mr. Reeder offered her a chair.
“Have you seen it?”
A foolish question, he felt, when he saw Miss Gillette’s visible
scorn.
“Of course we haven’t seen it. Joan and I went to dine to-night at the
Corner House. Then a red haired young man came up and asked Joan if
she ever wore plus-fours.”
Mr. Reeder leant back in his chair.
“If she wore plus-fours?” he repeated a little scandalized.
Miss Gillette nodded energetically.
“He was terribly nervous,” said Miss Gillette. “I have never known a
red-haired man to be nervous before; they are usually rather, well,
you know, the other way about, but he started talking a lot of stuff
about his father being a jeweller and being ill, and then he mentioned
a diamond brooch. He said he had under-valued it. I thought he was
drunk. Joan didn’t.”
“What was his name?”
Joan Ralph shook her head.
“It was extraordinary, because I was once photographed in plus-fours.
Daddy took the picture on a day when we had a lot of old Roedean girls
down at Bishop’s Stortford and we played a sort of pastoral, and I
borrowed my cousin’s plus-fours because I was supposed to represent a
man. Daddy was rather amused and took a picture, and said it was the
best photograph that he ever had of me.”
Mr. Reeder ran his fingers through his scanty hair.
“What did he say about the brooch?”
Miss Gillette was not sure that he said anything that was intelligent.
It was not until after she had threatened to call for the manager, and
the red-haired young man had retired abashed--“It was only then,” said
Miss Gillette, “that we felt that we oughtn’t to have been so stupid
and we should have asked him his name and address.”
Mr. Reeder nodded his agreement.
“He was a jeweller, his father was ill, he had under-valued a brooch,
and he had seen a portrait of my young friend in plus-fours. That’s
very remarkable. It is a great pity; you will very likely never see
him again----”
“But we have,” interrupted Miss Gillette. “He was on the tram and he
followed us right down here, in fact--he is outside the house at this
minute.”
Mr. Reeder stared at her.
“Did you speak to him?”
“Of course we did not speak to him,” said Miss Gillette scornfully.
“How could you speak to a red-haired young man in the street! He
didn’t speak to us either, and he just sat in the corner of the
tramcar and kept looking at us from behind his newspaper.”
Mr. Reeder walked to the window, pulled aside the curtain gently, and
peered out. Standing under a lamp post, and barely visible, was a
figure of a man, and even as Mr. Reeder looked, as though aware of the
scrutiny, he turned rapidly in the direction of Lewisham High Road.
In a moment Mr. Reeder was out of the room, flying downstairs, but
when he came to the street, it was absolutely empty of pedestrians. A
tram was moving towards London. He saw a slim figure of a young man
leap upon the footboard. By the time he reached the corner of the
road, the car was beyond pursuit. Mr. Reeder looked round for a
taxicab, but there was none in sight, and with great reluctance and
conscious that he was bareheaded and that a drizzling rain was
falling, and, in consequence, he must look a little ridiculous, he
made his way back to the house.
And yet for all his failure, there was a curious sense of elation in
J.G. Reeder’s heart, for the mystery of certain strange disappearances
was almost solved.
To Miss Gillette he was a great disappointment, for he seemed no
longer interested in red-haired young men, or brooches, or even young
ladies in plus-fours, and she went back to London, with her friend,
her faith shaken in her employer.
With great care Mr. Reeder composed an agony column advertisement
which he telephoned to four newspapers:
“Red-haired young man, please communicate with plus-four girl.”
The address that followed was that of his own office.
CHAPTER III
Miss Gillette arrived an hour late, which was not very remarkable.
She had not seen the advertisements, so Mr. Reeder had nothing to
explain. Her interest in his affairs had apparently waned completely.
At 12 o’clock she came into his room and announced that she had a
luncheon engagement, and might not be back till three. He was not very
sorry. He rather wished she would not come back till three o’clock on
some date to be named by himself, and he wished that he had the
courage to tell her so.
There was no response to his advertisement, and he regretted that his
telephone number had not been included in his address.
Miss Gillette had hardly left before the first of Mr. Reeder’s
visitors came. Inspector Gaylor was curious to know what had been the
result of the visit to Brixton Prison.
“I am inclined to agree with you,” he said, when Reeder had sketched
the conversation he had had with the prisoner. “At any rate, there is
no evidence on which we could get a conviction. The pistol was of
foreign make, and we have been able to trace one important fact--that
when it was sold in Belgium, Alsby was still in prison. It might, of
course, have been resold to him, but that’s unlikely.”
“Have you ever heard of the Pizarro Syndicate?” asked Mr. Reeder
unexpectedly.
Gaylor had an excellent memory, possibly the better because he had
been on that particular case.
“The Treasure Hunters,” he smiled. “It’s strange you should mention
Pizarro. I was trying to trace a man named Gelpin, who was one of the
biggest shareholders and one of the biggest dupes. I wanted him, to
get particulars of a former clerk of his, but I just couldn’t find
him, which is queer, since he was a fairly rich man.”
“Dead,” suggested Mr. Reeder.
Gaylor shook his head.
“No, he is abroad somewhere, I think, anyway he left the Midlands two
years ago.”
Mr. Reeder pursed his lips and looked at the detective tragically.
“Left the Midlands two years ago,” he repeated mechanically. “Dear
me.… Went abroad with a letter of credit, I am sure. How many people
were there in the Pizarro Syndicate?”
Gaylor was looking at him suspiciously.
“What’s the idea? Has any other member of the Syndicate gone to live
abroad?”
“Two, to my knowledge.” Then there was a dead silence which Mr. Reeder
broke. “One was a young man called Seafield.”
Gaylor nodded.
“I remember that name, yes?”
“The other’s name was Ralph,” said Mr. Reeder slowly.
He took from his drawer a written précis that he had prepared that
morning and passed it silently to the inspector. Gaylor read very
slowly, and naturally so, since J.G.’s writing was not the most
legible.
When he finished, he reached for the telephone.
“I happen to know that Gelpin’s bank was the Scottish and Midland in
Birmingham. Do you mind if I put a trunk call through?”
He gave the urgent signal to the long distance operator and within
five minutes he was talking to the bank. Mr. Reeder only heard the
questions and the monosyllabic rejoinders.
Presently Gaylor hung up the receiver.
“£17,500 letter of credit,” he said shortly, “cashed in Paris,
Budapest and Madrid. Since then the bank has had three cheques for
considerable amounts. They had been cashed in foreign cities, and had
been accompanied by letters from Mr. Gelpin. The bank manager says
that Gelpin is a man who loves travel, so that he is not at all
alarmed about it, and he has got a pretty good balance. He said one
thing which may, or may not, have some bearing: that when Gelpin left,
he announced his intention of going to Montreux.”
Mr. Reeder remembered instantly the little map on the wall of
Litnoff’s room with the red irregular triangle.
Mr. Reeder rose at that moment to go to the door of the outer office