Death in the Dentist’s Chair: A Golden Age Mystery Read online

  “Well then, assuming that it was an outside job, we have to find someone who not only knew Mrs. Miller and had a motive for getting rid of her, but who was aware, first that she had an appointment with Davenport for that particular day and time, and, second, that the work he was doing for her would necessitate his leaving her alone in the room at some period during the consultation. We have ruled out her husband, who might very well have known these things. Can you suggest anyone else?”

  “I cannot, but that doesn’t mean that Miller couldn’t, if you are right in your assumption that he is holding something back. As I see it, your job is to concentrate on Miller s past and leave me to get on with mine.”

  “Yours being?”

  “To clear Richard, seeing that you’re too pig-headed to accept my point of view,” snapped the old man.

  After Arkwright had left him Constantine rang up his friend, the Greek jeweller, at his private address and asked him if he could ascertain for him which of the West End firms had been specially favoured by Sir Richard Pomfrey in his more palmy days. Half an hour later the old jeweller telephoned to him to say that he had rung up various friends of his in the trade and had found his man almost immediately. He gave Constantine the name of a firm in Bond Street with which Sir Richard had at one time dealt almost exclusively. If Constantine cared to call there the proprietor would see him himself and give him any information he required.

  By ten o’clock next morning Constantine was in a private room behind the shop in Bond Street. The proprietor, a man almost as old as himself, had known Sir Richard for years, though of late he had not dealt with him. He remembered the great days of the Pagoda and sent his clerks for the ledgers that covered the period of Sir Richard’s connection with the theatre.

  “Did he ever bring Lottie Belmer here?” asked Constantine.

  “It’s curious you should ask that,” answered the jeweller, with a reminiscent smile. “I was talking to my head clerk here only yesterday about her. We were discussing her death and found ourselves raking up old memories. She was the daughter of a piano tuner out Wandsworth way, did you know that? The old man’s still alive and appeared at the inquest, I believe. So far as I can remember, Sir Richard only brought her here once. I happened to be in the shop myself that day and it’s an occasion I’m not likely to forget.”

  Selecting one of the ledgers, he flecked over the pages.

  “I can place it fairly accurately,” he murmured. “It must have been just about a week before Derby Day.”

  He ran his finger down a page and gave a little exclamation of triumph.

  “That’s what I’m looking for,” he exclaimed. “Here it is. Diamond star brooch, twelve points, to be delivered to Miss Lottie Belmer, Pagoda Theatre, tonight without fail. Sir Richard Pomfrey’s account. That’s the only time he ever got anything from us for her. There was a strong counter-attraction at the time, you know, and I don’t mind admitting to you, sir, that we did well out of that!”

  “I quite see that her tragic death must have brought Lottie Belmer back to your mind, but you will forgive me for asking whether this remarkable performance is the result of an incredibly efficient system of book-keeping or is merely an astounding feat of memory on your part,” enquired Constantine, with pardonable curiosity.

  The jeweller laughed.

  “I hoped you would appreciate it,” he said. “The truth is, I’m hardly likely to forget that visit of Sir Richard’s! He gave me a tip for the Derby that day that brought me in fifteen hundred pounds. I’m not a betting man as a rule and when I do back a horse I invariably lose my money. That Derby Day will remain in my memory till the end of my life!”

  “The brooch wasn’t paste, I suppose?”

  “Paste? Not for Lottie, sir I There was very little she didn’t know about diamonds, even in those days. That Drooch cost Sir Richard a cool five hundred!”

  Constantine walked back through the Green Park to his flat. After Manners had relieved him of his hat and coat he stood for so long staring into space that that faithful guardian of his comfort began to grow anxious.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, sir?” he asked.

  Constantine glared at him.

  “You can’t tell me, I suppose, why a man should suddenly give a woman in whom he has never shown the slightest interest a brooch worth five hundred pounds?”

  “No, sir, I’m afraid not, sir,” answered Manners imperturbably.

  Arkwright rang up in the course of the morning.

  “That diamond thing that Sir Richard gave Mrs. Miller wasn’t Palais Royal,” he said. “Very much the reverse. I’ve had a look at Miller’s insurance policy and it’s listed as being worth six hundred and fifty pounds.”

  It is to Constantine’s credit that he answered Arkwright in his silkiest voice and then replaced the receiver quite gently on its hook. He had seldom spent a more aggravating morning.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Constantine, still suffering from a severe attack of what he described as spiritual indigestion, betook himself to his Club. But before leaving his flat he rang up Mrs. Vallon.

  “No sign of Richard yet,” he said. “How are you getting on at your end?”

  A sigh was wafted gently over the wires.

  “He’s being difficult,” she answered. “His attitude is that the police can go to Hell for all he cares.”

  “You might point out to him that they certainly won’t go anywhere at his bidding and that he, just as certainly, will go to prison at theirs if he refuses to see reason.”

  “I did that for a solid hour last night and, when I’d finished, he told me that I was overwrought and nervy and that what I needed was a good, long day in bed or a whiff of sea air! If I’d hit him, as I felt inclined to do, he’d merely have said I was hysterical. I’m not sure that I wasn’t!”

  “If hysteria will do the trick, use it!” Constantine admonished her shamelessly. “Seriously, I am relying on you to send him to me as soon as possible.”

  He deliberately chose the Club’s prize bore to lunch with and did his best to keep the conversation on Vallon and the Pagoda girls. But, beyond fully justifying his reputation, the man, a garrulous egotist, looked like giving little in return for Constantine’s patient endurance. Being a snob of the first water, he took no interest in the Miller murder, and Lottie Belmer, who at best, had been an unimportant member of the Pagoda galaxy, he had never considered worthy of his notice. Sir Richard he could gossip about and did, but, after the manner of his kind, he had only managed to amass those facts that were already common property. Owing to an unhappy blend of inaccuracy and discursiveness even these lost all zest in the telling. Constantine was already regretting this lost venture in Sir Richard’s cause when, at the end of a long and depressing list of the casualties that had befallen the bulk of the young sparks of his day, his companion casually let fall one sterling piece of information.

  “Phipps tells me that he saw Richard Pomfrey with one of the old Pagoda girls the other day. Lottie Belmer, it was. Never knew her myself, but he appears to have recognised her. Says she had grown fat and coarse. They all do, curiously enough. I remember seeing ...”

  He prattled on unheeding. Constantine shook him off as soon as possible and went in search of Phipps. He found him in the library, his broad, florid face flushed with the unwonted exertion of putting pen to paper.

  “What’s that? Hubbard told you? Well, he was right for once. It was this way. My wife arranged to meet me at the Futurist Galleries, of all ghastly holes, and of course she was late, so I toddled round and had a look at their funny pictures. Of all the rubbish! However, that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, who should I see, jammed up next to a fat woman on one of those sofa things, but Richard! Looking pretty sick he was, too, I can tell you. Thought he’d been lugged there by one of his rich aunts or something of the sort and I was having a quiet chuckle to myself over it when I caught sight of the woman’s face. Blessed if it wasn’t old Lottie Belmer! She’d
put on a bit of flesh since the Pagoda days, but she was unmistakable. She and Richard had got their heads together, going it hammer and tongs, so I sheered off. Shouldn’t have thought of it again if it hadn’t been for what happened two days later. Seemed to bring it home to one, somehow, seeing her like that and then hearing that she’d been done in. At a dentist’s too, of all places. Seems to make it worse, what?”

  Constantine agreed that it did and drifted gently but firmly away. The news he had just heard, disquieting though it was, merely confirmed his suspicion that Mrs. Miller had got some hold over Richard Pomfrey and had decided to put the screw on shortly before her death. That she had applied it at least once, long ago, he shrewdly suspected, unless the diamond brooch had been the result of a wager, the only other convincing explanation he could think of.

  Constantine was well known to most of the London picture dealers and, when he strolled into the Futurist Galleries, the secretary hurried to meet him with a hopeful gleam in his eye. This Constantine, in his most urbane manner, proceeded to extinguish.

  “I’m not buying today,” he said. “The truth is, I find myself a little old for this sort of thing, interesting as it undoubtedly is. You will see me next month, however, if the advance notice you sent me is correct. At the moment I’m in search of a little information.”

  The secretary cast a deprecating glance at a nude which the artist had innocuously camouflaged as a cooked beetroot, expressed himself as entirely at Dr. Constantine’s disposal, and supplied him with a specimen of the New School of furniture, the object of which seemed to be to discommode the sitter as much as possible. Constantine fitted himself cautiously into it.

  “Did you or any of your bright young men know Mrs. Miller by sight?” he asked.

  The secretary’s eyes lit up with interest.

  “The poor woman who was murdered?” he exclaimed. “I’m afraid I can’t help you. One of our assistants is at lunch, but I can send for the other if you like, though I doubt if he has ever seen her. Was she interested in this sort of thing?”

  Constantine’s eye lingered for a moment on the walls of the gallery.

  “Not greatly, I should say,” he said, with a solemnity that would have delighted Arkwright. “We won’t bother your assistant for the moment. Can you carry your mind back to the afternoon of the twelfth of this month?”

  “Our opening day? Certainly.”

  Choosing his words carefully, Constantine described Sir Richard and Mrs. Miller. He was, he felt, pursuing a forlorn hope, but the gallery was a small one and the secretary, trained to observe and canvass possible buyers, could hardly have failed to notice anyone so patently opulent as Mrs. Miller.

  “These two people were here for some time, I believe,” he concluded. “They probably met by appointment and certainly sat talking for some time on one of these abominably uncomfortable seats. I should doubt whether they looked at the pictures at all.”

  “They sat on this seat,” answered the secretary surprisingly. “I remember the lady well. She looked just the sort of client we hope to attract and I admit I was disappointed when I realised that she had not come with any intention of looking at the pictures. She and the man with her were deep in conversation for a long time and they left the building together.”

  “Did the conversation strike you as being friendly or the reverse?” asked Constantine.

  The secretary hesitated.

  “They were not quarrelling, though the lady struck me as being annoyed. I had an impression that she was getting the worst of it. Until they actually left the building I didn’t give up hope of doing a deal with her and there was no one else in the gallery at the time who looked in the least promising, so I gave a good deal of attention to her. Was she really Mrs. Miller, Dr. Constantine?”

  “It seems more than likely that she was. You inspected her pretty closely, I gather, so you ought to know,” said Constantine, with a smile.

  “The only portraits published by the Press were old ones, taken in her chorus girl days,” pointed out the secretary. “They conveyed nothing to me when I saw them but, now that you’ve put the idea into my head I can quite imagine that she might have grown into the woman I saw. A Press photograph isn’t exactly helpful as a means of identification.”

  Constantine cast a mischievous glance at the beetroot nude.

  “You find this sort of thing more inspiring perhaps,” he enquired politely.

  The secretary laughed.

  “Strictly between ourselves, I am less to be blamed than pitied,” he answered. “I do my best to sell these, but I don’t buy them. May I give you my frank impression of Mrs. Miller’s interview with the man who was with her?”

  “That’s precisely what I’ve come to hear.”

  “Frankly then, I concluded that the man had tired of her and that she was doing her best to get him to take her back. In the end I believe she went so far as to threaten him.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “From the only sentence that I overheard. I was crossing the room and passed close to them. I caught the words ‘Scotland Yard’ and involuntarily pricked up my ears. It was followed by ‘rather than submit to anything of the sort’ or words to that effect. They left almost immediately afterwards. Mrs. Miller, if it was Mrs. Miller, looked pretty poisonous and I remember wondering whether there wasn’t going to be a first-class row on the pavement outside.”

  Constantine rose stiffly.

  “If they sat for long on one of these instruments of torture,” he said drily, “their conversation must have been an engrossing one. I am very grateful to you and should be still more so if you would keep what you have told me to yourself for the present. If it got about it might involve a person who is innocent of any complicity in the murder and who, incidentally, is a very good friend of mine.”

  “I’ve mentioned it to no one,” the secretary assured him, “and you can trust to my discretion now. If you could let me have a photograph of Mrs. Miller’s companion I should no doubt recognise it.”

  Constantine thanked him and hurried out to his waiting taxi. He had made up his mind. Sir Richard would have to be dealt with at once and drastically. Arkwright used the Club a good deal in his spare time and, at any moment, might stumble on Phipps’ information. Richard must be made to understand that the time for playing the fool was over.

  He drove first to Sir Richard’s rooms. He was out. At his club, his servant believed. Constantine climbed back into his cab and took up the chase once more, only to find that his quarry had left the Club five minutes before his arrival. Undefeated, he returned to Sir Richard’s flat and announced his intention of waiting there until he came back.

  He had been nursing his impatience for a good half-hour when he heard the latch-key turn in the lock of the front door and the sound of voices in the hall. He opened the door and was just in time to see Sir Richard making for the street, his coat over his arm.

  “That you, Richard?” he remarked urbanely. “Glad to have caught you.”

  Sir Richard was a poor dissembler and his plight was accentuated by the knowledge that he was no match for his father’s astute old friend. He threw his coat and hat on the table and followed Constantine into the room, looking so like a sheepish schoolboy who has been caught red-handed that it was all the old man could do to keep the amusement out of his voice as he turned on him and launched his attack.

  “Did Mrs. Vallon give you a message from me?” he asked abruptly.

  Sir Richard looked acutely uncomfortable.

  “She suggested that I should see you,” he answered, with an attempt at bravado. “But as the matter did not seem urgent ...”

  He caught a withering glance from Constantine’s dark eyes and the sentence tailed off into silence. The years seemed unaccountably to have rolled away and, to his disgust, he found himself slipping back into the attitude of futile defiance which, in years gone by, had failed to carry him through many a painful interview with his elders and betters.
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br />   “Won’t you sit down, sir?” he said awkwardly, as the silence grew oppressive. Constantine ignored the invitation.

  “Are you going to treat me as a friend or an enemy, Richard?” he demanded, with more ferocity than he felt. There was something absurdly disarming about this well-groomed, florid giant who, for all his years, still retained so much of the clumsiness and naivete of a boy. “I’ve put myself out considerably to see you today and it rests with you whether I have wasted my time or not.”

  Sir Richard shifted his feet uneasily.

  “I’m sorry you had all this bother, sir ...”

  Constantine cut him short.

  “You’ve got yourself into a devil of a mess,” he snapped. “What do you propose to do about it?”

  Sir Richard flushed a deep red. For a moment it seemed as though the interview was going to terminate swiftly and violently. Then he controlled himself.

  “I think you can trust me to manage my own affairs, sir,” he said with ominous quietness.

  “You are no longer in a position to control them,” Constantine assured him. “In a few hours’ time the police will have charge of both you and your affairs and the only person at liberty to do anything will be your solicitor. I don’t envy him.”

  “If the police are such damned fools as to lay their hands on me ...” began Sir Richard.

  “The police are not damned fools. That’s where your danger lies. They’ve got a sound case against you, so sound that, if I did not know you, I should be convinced of your guilt myself. It’s because I do know you that I’ve come here today. It so happens that I am in a better position to help you than any other of your friends. I, at least, know exactly how you stand in the eyes of the police and, if you decide to pocket your pride and behave like an ordinary human being we still have time to map out some sort of defence before they act. Are you prepared to meet my offer reasonably or do I leave you now and wash my hands of the whole business?”

  Constantine’s words fell slowly; cold, biting and contemptuous, but behind them burned an anger so sudden and so un-English that Sir Richard’s hot-headed bluster collapsed before the shock of the encounter. He had never met the old man in this mood before and was unaware that he had deliberately unleashed the pent up exasperation of the last twelve hours in his determination to achieve his aim. He waited now, passive and inexorable, for the other’s answer.