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

  Constantine placed his hat and stick on the table.

  “‘The aching void the world can never fill,’” he quoted, with a sigh. “Only that or wild horses would drag me to Illbeck Street. Am I really the third on the list?”

  Sir Richard grinned.

  “Your turn will come soon enough,” he assured him. “Davenport’s finished with me, thank the Lord. You know Mrs. Vallon, I think. She’s for it in a minute.”

  Constantine bowed gravely.

  “Moritorus te saluto,” he murmured. “I knew your husband well, Mrs. Vallon, in the great days of the Pagoda, but I don’t think we ever met. The old theatre has gone deplorably downhill since then.”

  He was rewarded by an appreciative glance from her fine eyes. Her late husband had been the most brilliant actor-manager of his day, but she was already beginning to learn that reputations swiftly made are, nowadays, as swiftly forgotten, and she was grateful for so genuine a tribute.

  “I am glad sometimes that he did not live to see it in other hands,” was all she said, but she looked on Constantine now with friendliness as well as interest.

  She had heard of him, of course, but, until now, they had never met. The only son of a rich Greek merchant, he had been a notable figure in London society when she was still a girl at school, partly owing to his good looks, partly to sheer force of character. He was one of the finest chess players in England, but Society recks little of the game and had this been his only claim to distinction, he would have been unknown outside the chess columns of the daily papers. As it was, it would be difficult to define the reasons for his success. “Constantine has a flair for everything,” Mrs. Vallon’s shrewd old father had once said, “from cooking to Grand Opera, and his taste’s hardly ever at fault.” With the instinct of an acknowledged beauty she knew now that this flair extended to pretty women and that, as he faced her, his dark eyes ablaze with a vitality disconcerting in so old a man, he was appreciating her to the full. With the frankness that was part of her charm she returned the compliment. Beside Constantine’s clear-cut, olive-skinned features, a trifle fine-drawn now with age, surmounted by the still thick, virile white hair, Sir Richard’s florid good looks seemed blunted and coarsened. With a queer little feeling of protection she turned to the younger man, found his gaze, as usual, fixed upon her, and for reasons she could not define, liked him all the better for the clumsiness of his patent adoration.

  “Richard’s crowing too soon,” she said. “He’s only reached the temporary stopping stage, so far. His time’s to come.”

  Constantine smiled.

  “Then I’ve the advantage of both of you,” he declared. “My tooth was stopped on Thursday! I’ve only dropped in for a final polish. Judging by the unfortunate remnant of humanity I met on the doorstep, Davenport’s in a savage mood today!”

  Mrs. Vallon shuddered.

  “Don’t!” she implored him. “Do you realise that my tooth hurts? Goodness knows what he may be going to do to me!”

  Sir Richard moved uneasily. He was in no mood for a three-cornered conversation.

  “I’ll just ring my man up,” he said. “Then I must be going. It takes hours to get anywhere in this beastly fog. In case you’re in Davenport’s clutches when I get back, good luck! I hope he’ll stop it aching, anyway,” he added, as he shook hands with Mrs. Vallon.

  The manservant was not in the hall, but Sir Richard had used Davenport’s telephone before and knew where to find it. He switched on the light and, shutting himself into the dark little cupboard under the stairs, rang up his flat.

  Meanwhile Mrs. Vallon and Constantine settled down to the task of knowing each other better. They possessed a host of common acquaintances and it was due only to the fact that she still clung to the theatrical set in which she had moved during her husband’s lifetime that they had not met before. With unerring instinct Constantine led the conversation to Sir Richard, whom he had known since his schooldays, and found instantaneous response. It was easy to see how things stood between these two.

  The minutes passed. Mrs. Vallon’s tooth, which, after the manner of aching teeth, had become steadily less painful since she had made her appointment with Mr. Davenport, had now ceased to hurt. Indeed, until Constantine alluded to it, she had forgotten all about it.

  “Does Davenport know that you’re in pain?” he asked. “It isn’t like him to keep you waiting.”

  “I’m not,” she answered. “It’s stopped aching altogether! If he doesn’t see me soon, I shall turn tail and go home! I can’t keep my courage screwed up to concert pitch forever!”

  Constantine looked at his watch.

  “My appointment was for twelve,” he said, “and it’s a quarter past now. Richard must be ringing up half London.”

  As he spoke the door opened and Sir Richard came in.

  “Couldn’t get through for ages,” he said. “There’s no end of a fuss going on in the hall outside. Davenport can’t get into his own consulting room! He’s sent down for some tools, his man tells me. Doesn’t look as if you were going to get your turn for some time yet.”

  Constantine looked up quickly.

  “Has the last patient gone, then?” he asked.

  Sir Richard shrugged his shoulders.

  “The chap outside says he hasn’t let her out. I thought I should find her in here.”

  Constantine rose and moved swiftly to the door.

  “I say,” expostulated Sir Richard, “she can’t be locked in there. She’d have made an appalling shindy by this time!”

  But Constantine had left the room, inspired by two motives: one, an inveterate dislike to playing gooseberry, the other, that flair for a situation that lay behind the insatiable curiosity that had led him into so many strange places in the course of his varied life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Constantine passed quickly down the hall and joined the little group outside the consulting room door.

  The dentist’s mechanic who had been summoned from the workroom below was kneeling in front of it, removing the screws from the lock. Mr. Davenport, austere and priestlike in his white overall, stood over him, a worried frown on his usually imperturbable countenance.

  “I can’t understand it,” he was saying. “I could swear the key was there when I came out. Can you get the lock off?”

  The mechanic nodded.

  “It’s coming,” he replied. “Lucky the screws are on the outside.”

  Davenport’s eyes fell on the new arrival.

  “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, Dr. Constantine,” he said. “But you see what’s happened. I’ve never known that lock to do such a thing before.”

  Constantine was watching the mechanic.

  “The key’s gone, I see,” he remarked.

  “It’s not on the other side,” answered Davenport. “You can see right through the keyhole. I’m practically certain it was on the outside as usual when I came out, but of course I wasn’t looking for it. I may be wrong.”

  “It’s lucky for you that it chose a moment between two appointments,” continued Constantine. “I’m not sure that I should care to be incarcerated among your instruments of torture myself!”

  The dentist’s frown deepened.

  “It didn’t,” he snapped. “There’s a patient in there now, unless she slipped out while I was in the workroom downstairs.”

  “She’s being very quiet then,” said Constantine thoughtfully. “I wonder what she thinks is happening. Who is she?”

  “Mrs. Miller.”

  Constantine raised his eyebrows.

  “Not Charles Miller’s wife?”

  The dentist nodded.

  “The last person I would have had this happen to,” he murmured sombrely. “She won’t forget it. One of my best patients, too.”

  Constantine moved nearer to the door, bent his head and listened.

  “Not a sound,” he said. “Yet she must know someone’s at work on the door. If Mrs. Miller were inside we should have heard from her by
now, if I know anything of the lady. I think you may take it that she’s gone home. Probably got tired of waiting and slammed the door after her, jamming the lock. It’s the sort of thing she would do.”

  For answer Davenport thrust his hand into his overall pocket, withdrew it and disclosed its contents.

  “Not without her teeth,” he asserted gloomily. “I’ve got them here.”

  Constantine’s mouth twitched involuntarily, but there was no answering gleam in Davenport’s sombre face. He was gazing with professional pride at the denture in his hand.

  “There was a small adjustment,” he continued. “I went downstairs to make it. I was counting on having them fitted and being well on with my next patient by now.”

  The mechanic twiddled the last screw out and dropped it into his pocket.

  “Done it,” he said, as he helped the lock away from the door with the screw driver. “It was locked all right. No wonder we couldn’t open it.”

  He rose to his feet, stood back while Davenport pushed past him into the room, then collected his tools and departed to his lair in the basement.

  Constantine lingered. He had no earthly excuse to go in, but for the life of him he could not resist waiting to overhear Mrs. Miller’s reception of Davenport.

  To his surprise there was not a sound from inside the room. Unconsciously he moved nearer to the door. Davenport was a taciturn creature, but surely even he would hardly go quietly about his business without a word of explanation to a notoriously temperamental patient? Mrs. Miller’s silence was more easily accounted for. Constantine’s lips twitched again as he reflected on the various means dentists have at their disposal should they wish to restrict any undue flow of language on the part of their patients. He knew Mrs. Miller well by sight and had even overheard her give vent to exasperation, and the vision of her deftly gagged, say, with a little tray of plaster of Paris, was an alluring one.

  He was startled into alertness by the sound of his own name.

  “Dr. Constantine, are you there?”

  Davenport’s voice was low-pitched and even as usual, but there was an unnatural note of restraint about it that Constantine’s sharp ears were quick to detect and which brought him over the threshold before his own reply had left his lips.

  At the first glance there seemed nothing unusual in the scene before him. Mrs. Miller was undoubtedly there, seated in the dentist’s chair, facing the window, her back to the door. He could see the top of her head and one pudgy, over-jewelled hand that was resting on the arm of the chair. On the other side of the chair stood Davenport. Constantine’s brain had time to register two impressions: one, the unwonted quietness of Mrs. Miller, the other, the hue of Davenport’s face, which now exactly matched the spotless white of the surgical overall he wore, before the dentist spoke again in that toneless voice that, but for the most rigid self-control, would have been a shout.

  “Will you shut the door, please, and look at this?”

  Constantine closed the door. Owing to the absence of a lock he could not latch it. Then he crossed the room to the dentist’s chair.

  Davenport’s voice came again, repeating, parrot-like:

  “Just look at this!”

  Constantine looked.

  There was a long silence before he spoke.

  “What a fiendish business,” he whispered at last. Then: “Poor, poor soul!”

  Mrs. Miller’s head lay tilted back against the head-rest of the chair, her mouth slightly open, as though awaiting Davenport’s ministrations. But where the fat white roll of flesh underneath her chin should have been was now a larger and more gaping travesty of the toothless mouth above, a dark gash in which the blood that had now ceased to spurt still frothed and bubbled.

  Involuntarily Constantine closed his eyes, in a futile attempt to shut out the horror, only to find himself confronted with a worse assault upon his senses, for the darkness became filled with the hot, sweet reek of blood. With a shudder, he opened them again, keeping them resolutely away from the chair and its burden. But there was blood everywhere, even on the glass of the window pane, where a little trickle had already reached the white woodwork.

  Davenport was speaking mechanically, with stiff, dry lips.

  “Right through the jugular,” he said. “God, what a mess.”

  He stared at the denture in his hand with mild surprise, as though he were seeing it for the first time, and made a movement to put it down on the table by his side. But the table was in no fit state to receive it and his hand shot back as though it had been stung. With an air of concentration that would have been absurd in other circumstances he crossed to the mantelpiece and carefully deposited the denture on it. He stood gazing at it, his back to the room.

  “I’d better get onto the police,” he said, at last.

  Constantine nodded. He had been watching Davenport and, oddly enough, in doing so, had regained his own nerve. The passionate desire to know, stronger than any idle curiosity, that had lured him down so many odd bye-paths in the course of his life and had kept him young and full of zest in spite of his years, had asserted itself, and in contemplating Davenport’s reactions to the shock, he had insensibly shaken himself free from the mists of pity and disgust that had obscured his vision. He stepped back from the body and took the scene in, in detail, for the first time.

  The result was a low exclamation that brought the dentist to his side. His eyes followed Constantine’s pointing finger.

  “Don’t touch it,” Constantine warned him. “That’s what it was done with, though.”

  Lying on the floor, to the left of the dentist’s chair, was a knife, not unlike a butcher’s carver in shape, but with a somewhat broader blade, its handle half covered by the sleeve of a garment of some kind that had been flung down beside it.

  “Looks like one of my overalls,” said Davenport, bending over it. “There was one hanging in the work room. ...”

  His voice trailed off as he raised himself with a little shiver of disgust. The thing was drenched with blood.

  “I can’t stand this,” he said suddenly. “The place is a shambles. Besides, we must do something.”

  Constantine laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Steady,” he said. “Where’s your telephone?”

  “In the hall, under the stairs.”

  “Get onto the police, then, and tell them to bring a surgeon. I’ll keep watch on the door here and see that no one comes in.”

  He did not follow Davenport out of the room, however, but stood brooding, his keen eyes taking in every detail of the scene before him. When at last he did move it was to step carefully to the window and stand peering down onto the leads that formed the roof of the kitchen underneath.

  When Davenport returned from the telephone he found him in the hall, just closing the door of the consulting room behind him.

  “I’ve found the key,” he said.

  Davenport stared at him.

  “The key?” he repeated stupidly.

  “Of this room, presumably. It’s on the leads outside the window there. It looks as if whoever attacked Mrs. Miller made his exit that way after locking the door.”

  Davenport assented absently. His mind was on other things.

  “That’s a matter for the police,” he said. “They’re on their way here now. What’s bothering me is, those people in the waiting room. My brain’s gone, but there should be a couple of patients there. What am I to do? Get rid of them, or wait till the police come?”

  “There was only one when I left. Mrs. Vallon. Sir Richard Pomfrey’s there, but I gather that he’s seen you.”

  Davenport frowned irritably.

  “What’s he hanging about for?” he snapped. “My patients don’t usually cling to the premises after I’ve done with them!”

  “Done for them, you mean,” countered Constantine unkindly.

  But his eyes were friendly and a little anxious. Davenport, he knew, had spent three years of the war in a German prison camp and his nerves were
none too good. He was badly rattled now and had a long and troublesome interview with the police before him. Constantine detached his mind for a moment from the tragedy.

  “Got anything to drink in the house?” he asked.

  “Yes. I lunch here, you know. Can I get you something?”

  Constantine placed a hand on his shoulder and pushed him gently in the direction of the stairs.

  “Nothing for me, I can think better without it. Get yourself a stiff drink and take things quietly for a minute or two. You’ve time before the police get here.”

  Davenport hesitated, then ran swiftly up the stairs. Constantine stood thoughtfully regarding the waiting room door. The mask had dropped from his face now and he looked an old man, tired and apprehensive. His usual clarity of vision had deserted him and his mind was fumbling. He was trying to remember how long he had sat by the fire talking to Mrs. Vallon while Sir Richard was out of the room, trying to recall Sir Richard’s face and the tone of his voice when he rejoined them, and all the time hearing again Davenport’s fretful comments: “What was he hanging about for?” He had known Richard Pomfrey all his life and the thing was ridiculous on the face of it, but Constantine had lived long enough to know that nothing is too absurd to be true. He moved uncertainly towards the door and found the manservant at his elbow.

  “Is anything the matter, sir?” he asked.

  Constantine jerked his thoughts back to the present. The man looked honest and dependable and, in any case, he would have to know the truth soon.

  “There has been a tragedy, I’m afraid,” he said. “Mr. Davenport’s last patient, Mrs. Miller, has died suddenly.”

  “In the consulting room, sir?”

  The man’s shocked voice suggested that Mrs. Miller had taken an unpardonable liberty.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” answered Constantine. “Mr. Davenport has sent for the police. Meanwhile, no one is to go into that room until they arrive. You had better turn away any patients who may come. Here is Mr. Davenport. He will tell you what to say to them.”

  As Davenport rejoined them the door bell rang. Constantine watched the man open it, caught a glimpse of blue uniforms on the step outside, and slipped quietly through the door into the waiting room, closing it behind him.