The girl from Scotland Yard
She passed through the swing doors into the street. The night was
bitterly cold and the sky overhead was clear. The bright moon which
she had recklessly inferred was not in evidence, but there were all
the other attractive conditions for a midnight ride.
The car was an open tourer with a plenitude of rugs, and as Mr.
Coldwell fixed the rear screen to shield her face from the cutting
air, the journey promised no discomforts. The car passed swiftly
through Kensington and across Hammersmith Bridge, and in an incredibly
short space of time was running down Kingston Vale. The driver pulled
up at the police station behind a big touring car which was
unattended, and they got down.
In the charge room they found the inspector talking to a middle-aged
man who was apparently the owner of the car.
“Sorry to bring you down, Mr. Coldwell,” said the inspector, “but this
sounds almost like one of the motor crowd’s little jokes.”
The car owner apparently was the proprietor of a small garage. That
afternoon he had been approached by a seemingly decent man, who asked
him if he would come to London with the idea of negotiating for an
important journey. The garage keeper, as it happened, had some
business in town and had met the hirer at a little restaurant in the
Brompton Road.
“He seemed all right to me,” the garage keeper continued his
narrative. “It was only after I got home that I began to smell a rat.
He wanted me to pick him up at the end of Barnes Common, near the
Wimbledon Road, at a quarter past ten to-night, and drive him to
Southampton. He asked for a closed car, but I told him I hadn’t got
one that could do the journey, and I didn’t like the idea, anyway. But
as he offered me double the fare I should have asked, and paid half of
it down, I agreed.”
“Did you ask him why he wanted to go to Southampton at a quarter past
ten?”
“That was the first question I asked,” said the man. “He told me he
was dining with some friends, and that that would mean he would lose
the boat train--the _Berengaria_ pulls out at five o’clock to-morrow
morning, and all the passengers must be on the ship overnight. I’ve
had that job before, so it wasn’t unusual. The only queer thing about
it was that, instead of asking me to pick him up at a house, he fixed
this place on Barnes Common. But he told me he didn’t want his friends
to know that he was leaving the next day. At any rate, I fell for him,
but as time went on I began to get suspicious and communicated with
the police.”
“What sort of looking man was he?” asked Leslie.
“A middle-aged man, miss,” said the chauffeur-owner, a little
surprised at a question from this quarter. “It struck me that he’d
been booz--drinking a little, but that’s neither here nor there. He
was well dressed, and that’s all I can tell you about him except that
he was clean-shaven, had rather a big face, and wore a soft felt hat.”
Coldwell turned to the girl.
“Does that describe any of the people we have been looking over?” he
asked.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said quietly, “but it rather accurately describes Druze!”
“Druze?” he said incredulously. “You’re not suggesting that Druze is
one of the gang?”
“I’m not suggesting anything,” she said, biting her lip thoughtfully.
“Did you notice his hands, Mr.----”
“Porter,” said the chauffeur. “Yes, miss, I did notice his hands when
he took off his gloves to pay me. They were very white.”
She looked at Coldwell.
“That is an even more accurate description,” she said.
“You didn’t go to the Common, did you?” asked Coldwell.
“No, sir. The inspector went up in my car with a couple of policemen.”
“He must have smelled a rat,” said the local inspector. “There was no
sign of anybody at a quarter past ten, and apparently he was very
particular about his being there absolutely on time. He told Mr.
Porter: ‘If I’m not there by twenty-five minutes past, don’t wait for
me.’ That sounds rather like the gang, Mr. Coldwell,” he added. “It is
an old trick of theirs to hire a car and arrange to be picked up in
some quiet spot----”
The telephone bell tinkled in another room and he went to the
instrument. He was gone five minutes. When he came back:
“The gang ‘busted’ a house the other side of Guilford at nine
o’clock,” he said. “The car smashed into a ditch and two of them have
been caught by the Surrey police.”
Coldwell pursed his lips.
“That disposes of your theory,” he said.
Driving back up Kingston Vale, Coldwell expatiated upon his favourite
theme, which might be headed, “No effort is wasted when you’re dealing
with law-breakers.”
“A lot of men would grouse about being brought out in the middle of
the night on a fool’s errand, but it isn’t possible to investigate the
reason why a condensed milk tin has been found in an ashpit without
learning something valuable. And if that hirer was friend Druze----”
“As it was,” said Leslie promptly.
“Well, we’ve learned something,” continued Coldwell. “It brings him
into a new list, so to speak. He’s in the people-who-do-strange-things
class, and that makes him stand out from the mass of law-abiding
citizens.”
They passed swiftly down Roehampton Lane, climbed the little slope
that carried them over the railway bridge, and had reached the middle
of the Common when Chief Inspector Coldwell began to enlarge and
illustrate his theory. Just ahead of them, Leslie saw the rear lights
of a car moving out from the side of the road.
“Never despise little cases,” he began, “because----”
There was a grinding of brakes; the car stopped so violently that
Leslie’s nose touched the glass screen painfully.
“What’s wrong?” asked Coldwell sharply. He, too, had seen the car
ahead, and his first thought was that his driver was avoiding a
collision.
The police chauffeur was looking round.
“I’m sorry, sir, I was rather startled. Did you see a man lying on the
sidewalk?”
“No, where?” asked the interested Coldwell.
The driver reversed and the car moved slowly backward. They saw a
black something in the darkness, and then, as the machine moved back a
few more feet, the headlamps showed the figure of a man.
Coldwell got down from the car slowly.
“It looks like a drunk,” he mumbled. “You’d better stay where you are,
Leslie.”
But his foot had hardly touched the ground before she had followed.
Well enough Inspector Coldwell knew that this was no drunk. The
attitude, the outstretched arms, the legs slightly doubled, told him,
before he saw the little pool of crimson on the sidewalk, that there
was no life here.
For a second the two stood gazing down at the pitiable figure.
“Druze,” said the girl quietly. “Somehow I expected it.”
It was Druze, and he was dead. The heavy overcoat was buttoned across
his chest; there was no sign of a hat, and his hands, ungloved, were
tightly clenched. As she looked, Leslie saw a queer green glitter in
the light of the motor lamps.
“He has something in his left hand,” she said in a hushed voice, and,
kneeling down, Inspector Coldwell pried loose the fingers, and the
thing that the dead man held fell with a tinkle to the gravelled path.
Coldwell picked it up and examined it curiously. It was a large,
square emerald in a platinum setting, one edge of which was broken, as
though it had been torn forcibly from a large ornament.
“That is queer,” he said.
She took the emerald from his hand and carried it nearer to the lamp.
Now she knew that she had made no mistake. It was the pendant on the
chain she had seen that evening glittering on Lady Raytham’s neck!
CHAPTER VI.
THE EFFECT ON LADY RAYTHAM
In a few words she told her companion. For his part he was too
worried about her presence to comprehend fully.
“You had better get into the car, Leslie. Driver, take Miss
Maughan----”
“I’ll stay here,” said Leslie in a low voice. “I’m not very shocked.
And please don’t touch that overcoat.”
He was stooping to unfasten the button when she spoke.
“Not till you let me see it.”
Mr. Coldwell hesitated a moment and then stepped aside, and the girl
bent over the figure, keeping her eyes averted from that white face.
“I thought so,” she said. “The second button has been fastened to the
third buttonhole. Whoever killed him, put on his overcoat and buttoned
it. Now you can unfasten it.”
Mr. Coldwell sent the chauffeur for assistance and resumed his
examination of the body. The man had been shot at close range through
the heart; the waistcoat had been burned by the explosion. There were
no other injuries that he could see. One side of the figure was yellow
with dust, as though it had been dragged some distance along the
ground.
“I wish you wouldn’t----”
Coldwell looked round in helpless distress. He had taken an electric
flash light from the car before he sent it away, and this he had
placed on the path so that the rays spread fan-shape over the body.
“Couldn’t you wait at a little distance?”
“Please don’t worry about me, Mr. Coldwell,” said Leslie. There was no
tremor in her voice, he noted with satisfaction. “I am not going to
faint. You seem to forget that the majority of nurses are women; and
death isn’t so horrible to me as some expressions of life. Can I help
you at all? I’ve got a tiny little pencil lamp in my bag.”
He scratched his chin.
“I don’t know,” he said dubiously. “You might look in the road and see
if you can find any marks of a body being dragged, and then search
around a bit.”
She got out the lamp, which, in spite of its smallness, gave a very
bright light, and carried out his instructions methodically. She had
not to look far before she found the traces she sought: a serpentine
smear that reached from the centre of the road to the sidewalk. There
were stains--little red smudges that were still wet when she put her
finger to them.
The conditions were favourable to an undisturbed search, for Barnes
Common was unusually free from traffic. One motor bus lumbered past, a
homeward-bound limousine from town was succeeded by another, and if
the chauffeurs were interested in the spectacle of a man kneeling by
what looked like a heap of rags on the sidewalk, the occupants of the
cars did not apparently share their curiosity.
She paced the trail, judged it to be between twelve and thirteen feet
from the place where the body was found. On the other side of the
footpath was rough, common land: grass and bushes in irregular
patches. She began to search the ground; and here she had an unusual
reward, for, passing round a thick, low bush, she saw, lying together
on the grass, a number of objects. The first was a flat pocketbook
that had been opened and its contents pulled out, for round about was
a litter of papers, which she collected quickly. Fortunately, it was a
still night, and there was no wind to carry them away. The second
package was a brown envelope, and she made a brief examination.
There was a steamship ticket issued to “Anthony Druze, First Class
Saloon, Southampton to New York.” In this envelope was a new passport.
The third object was also a pocketbook--brand-new--the perfume of the
Russian-leather cover told her that. This also had been opened in such
a hurry that the strap about it had been broken. It was stuffed tight
with thousand-dollar notes.
She collected the three packages and sought for more, but there was
none. And then she took stock of the place where she had found them.
It was immediately behind a big bush which effectively screened all
view of the road. She put her lamp close to the ground and moved it
slowly. Here was a curiously mottled patch of grass; in some places it
was gray with frost, in others wet and crushed. The ground was too
hard for footprints, but without their aid she could reconstruct all