Death in the Dentist’s Chair: A Golden Age Mystery Page 5

  It was late when they finished dinner and Arkwright had only time for coffee and a cigar before leaving to keep his appointment with Charles Miller.

  The jeweller’s house was in one of those decorously opulent Squares that lie between Piccadilly and Oxford Street. Arkwright was to learn later that Miller, who dabbled in house property, had bought it as a speculation from the executors of a deceased law lord and had only decided to live in it owing to his wife’s insistence. A butler, flanked by a spectacular footman, opened the door, but, in spite of the pomp and circumstance with which he was ushered into the library, there was a lack of polish about both servants that made Arkwright suspect that their wages were not on a par with the footman’s ornate livery.

  Miller was taking his ease in a huge leather-covered armchair by the fire. He waved his cigar in the direction of a formidable pile of letters on the writing table.

  “See that those are taken to the post,” he said to the butler. Then, with a glance at the hideous marble clock on the mantelpiece: “Take a seat, Inspector. I have to meet the boat train at Victoria, but I can give you twenty minutes.”

  As he sat down Arkwright took stock of the jeweller for the second time that day and liked him even less than when he had first met him. Under the first staggering shock of his bereavement he had achieved a certain dignity and it had been difficult not to feel sorry for him. Now, in the ugly, over-furnished room into which he fitted so admirably, he had become a definitely unpleasing object. The small, cunning eyes, watchful behind the thick lenses of his glasses, the long, predatory nose, drooping over moist, fleshy lips that showed deeply red against the dry, yellow skin of his heavily lined face, and the white, gesticulative hands marked him as the type of man who is distrusted by his business associates and loathed by his dependants. Without rising from his chair he craned towards a table and picked up a sheet of paper.

  “Here is a list of the jewellery my poor wife was wearing,” he said, in a voice so unexpectedly soft and mellow that, coming from so inharmonious a personality, it startled, rather than attracted those hearing it for the first time. “My secretary typed it at the dictation of her maid. As the things are still in your possession I cannot check it.”

  His English was perfect, but he spoke with a precision that betrayed his foreign origin.

  Arkwright took the list and studied it, stroking his chin with his large, capable fingers. At one point his eyes narrowed, but he went stolidly on to the end. Then he looked up.

  “You told the servants to be on hand, as I requested?” he demanded.

  Miller stared at him.

  “Certainly,” he said. “But I can vouch for the correctness of that list. My wife’s maid was positive as to the things she was wearing.”

  Arkwright gathered himself to his feet.

  “All the same, I should like to see her,” he said slowly. “Unless she has made a mistake, Mrs. Miller’s jewels are intact, with the exception of one piece.”

  Miller snatched the cigar from his mouth and leaned forward eagerly.

  “Then it was robbery,” he exclaimed, his voice quivering with excitement. “I knew it! What has been taken?”

  Arkwright consulted the list once more.

  “A platinum chain with a small diamond and emerald clasp,” he read out, “supporting a large oval emerald in a platinum and diamond setting.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Arkwright was standing before the grate in a small room opening off the hall in Miller’s house. The office desk, typewriting table and filing cabinet proclaimed it for what it was, the lair of Miller’s secretary. A bright fire burned in the grate and a large leather covered armchair was drawn up to the hearth. Altogether the room exhibited more comfort than Arkwright would have expected the little chap to bestow upon a dependant, though the extremely capable looking individual who had been at work there when Miller’s butler ushered him into the room had struck him as unlikely to stay long in any situation that did not please him. Arkwright, in the course of the few words he had exchanged with him before he gathered up his papers and left the room, had summed him up as belonging to the ruthlessly efficient type, which uses a secretaryship merely as a stepping-stone to something more ambitious. He was of a very different class, mentally and physically, from his employer who, when Arkwright left the library, was already engaged in drafting a letter to the Company with which he had insured his wife’s jewels.

  “If you wish to conduct your inquiry in private, the secretary’s room is at your disposal,” he had vouchsafed, as he unscrewed the cap of an enormous fountain pen. “I have to go out myself, in any case.”

  Arkwright’s interview with Mrs. Miller’s maid had proved more entertaining than instructive. Instead of the rather flashy foreign soubrette he had expected to see he had been confronted with an amazing and bedizened lady of uncertain age, whose garrulous speech betrayed her Cockney origin and who informed him that her name was Mrs. Snipe; that she had been “Miss Lottie’s” dresser before she married and that he need only ask any of the stage hands at the Pagoda if they remembered “Snipey” to receive an unsolicited testimonial as to her many sterling qualities both as friend and employee. Arkwright let her talk, knowing from experience the pearls that may be garnered from just such meaningless outpourings, and learned that she had loved and cherished Miss Lottie more than life itself and that: “Where her poor lamb would have been without her, that husband of hers grudging her every penny as he did, she did not know. Time after time as she’d had to sit up all night with the poor lamb after one of them bills had come in and she wouldn’t forget the fuss there was over that there emerald pendant, not if she lived to be a hundred. As if her pore lamb couldn’t have had a dozen like it and better, in the days before she tied herself to a stinking little miser!”

  At this point, seeing that Mrs. Snipe was beginning to grow incoherent in her excitement, Arkwright brought her firmly back to the matter in hand. As regards the pendant, she was unshakable. Her mistress had been wearing it when she left the house to go to the dentist’s. There had even been some argument over it as, according to Mrs. Snipe, the clasp was notoriously unsafe and she had been trying to get her mistress to have it seen to for some time. But Miss Lottie was that fond of that pendant that she couldn’t bear it out of her sight, not even for a day or two. Arkwright, with the skill born of long practice, stemmed the flood of eloquence once more and elicited the information that Miss Lottie, bless her dear heart, hadn’t never had no enemies. How could anyone wish her any harm? As for that Miller, she couldn’t say. If it had been him as had been killed now!

  With some difficulty Arkwright shepherded her tactfully out of the room and sent for the butler. From him he got a comprehensive account of the movements of the household that morning.

  Mr. Miller had gone to Hatton Garden as usual at nine thirty and Mrs. Miller had left the house at eleven thirty. He was positive as to the time because he had given the order to the chauffeur for that hour. Immediately afterwards Mr. Bloomfield, the secretary, had gone into the Square with the Pekinese dog, an animal, Arkwright gathered, cordially detested by the household staff. He had remained in the Square until shortly after twelve fifteen, when he had returned to the house. The servants had been in the house all the morning. As a matter of routine Miller’s movements had already been checked earlier in the day. He had undoubtedly been at his office at the time of the murder and had rung up Davenport’s house from there, in the presence of his typist. Before leaving Arkwright telephoned to the Yard, only to find that nothing had yet been heard of Cattistock. If he had collapsed in the street it seemed fairly certain by now that he had not been taken to any of the London hospitals and it was beginning to look more and more as if his disappearance was voluntary. Having given instructions for the circularisation of the description of the missing pendant, Arkwright groped his way through the fog to bed.

  But, in the meantime, as though gathering a speedy harvest before the stifling grey blanket of the fog lifted,
murder had stalked once more through the streets of London.

  Big Ben had just boomed the half hour. High above Parliament Square the hands of the clock showed half past ten, but, owing to the shrouding mist, they were invisible to the few misguided pedestrians who groped their way below. The chime, curiously dead and muffled, reached the ears of the constable on patrol as he turned into Eccleston Square. It was so faint that, had he not been exceptionally keen of hearing, he would have missed the familiar sound altogether. As it was, he halted to listen, rubbing his hand across his stinging eyes, then resumed his monotonous beat, past the interminable, cavernous porticoes, each with its stretch of area railing, that loomed, grey and mysterious, through the fog. The light of his bull’s-eye lantern, flickering like some absurd and inadequate will o’ the wisp on locks and window catches, marked his progress and he was half-way down the southeast side of the Square before anything occurred to break the dreary monotony of his vigil.

  And then it was only the sight of a woman, a tramp or flower seller, probably, sitting huddled on the steps under one of porticoes, that arrested his attention. Pimlico fringes the borders of a much less reputable neighbourhood and it was no uncommon occurrence for drunks to stray into its squares and dream their happy dreams on its prim, Victorian doorsteps.

  The constable bent over the sleeping woman. She was sitting, crouched together, her knees drawn up and her head bowed over her folded arms, obviously deep in oblivion. He placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “Wake up, mother,” he said. “You’ll have to move on from ’ere, you know.”

  There was no response from the huddled figure and the constable, straightening his back, turned the light of his lantern more fully on it.

  “Foxing,” he reflected ponderously, “or so blind to the world that it’ll be a case for the ambulance.”

  Then, as he stared at her, a doubt began to assail him. Women’s fashions were beyond his ken, but there was something about the shape and texture of the neat black hat, tilted awry though it was on the bowed head, that did not fit well with his conception of a drunken drab. There was fur, too, on the collar of the dark coat, and expensive fur at that. Some old lady, perhaps, overcome with the fog on her way home. It behooved him to go carefully.

  He leaned over once more, keeping the light of his lantern focussed.

  “Anything wrong, mum?” he demanded, giving the shoulder he held a gentle shake.

  The cloth of the coat slid from under his hand as the figure toppled woodenly towards him. The shoulders hit the steps with a soft thud, then slithered down them almost onto his feet. As the woman fell her hands dropped apart, dragging inertly from step to step.

  He saw the hands first, red and glistening with blood, before his eyes fell on the gash in the upturned throat.

  At midnight the fog lifted and, some twenty minutes later, a body of silent men filed through the gate into Eccleston Square and, for the next three quarters of an hour, spear points of light darted and probed among the bushes behind the railings. At the sound of a low call the dark figures foregathered, there was a whispered consultation and they slipped out as quietly as they had come in. They had found what they were searching for.

  At nine thirty next morning Superintendent Thurston, his stocky figure jammed into a chair that looked at least a size too small for it, leaned forward and touched a button on his desk. He waited, impatiently fingering his grizzled moustache, until the door opened to admit Arkwright.

  “Morning,” snapped Thurston. His speech was invariably limited to the smallest possible quantity of words, released grudgingly from his mouth as though each one was a very small mouse escaping from a capacious trap. “Interested in this?”

  He jerked his head towards an object on his desk. At the sight of it Arkwright’s eyes snapped.

  “That’s not the Miller knife, sir!” he exclaimed.

  “How d’you know that?”

  Thurston had a grim, subterraneous humour of his own which he gratified occasionally by baiting his subordinates.

  “There’s a nick out of the blade of the other, but this one’s the very spit of it. Where did it come from, sir?”

  “Found early this morning in Eccleston Square.”

  “Eccleston Square?” said Arkwright slowly. “That’s a far cry from Illbeck Street, but it’s possible that our chap had got a pair of them and didn’t dare keep the second one.”

  The Super snorted.

  “Kept it all right and used it. Woman found stabbed on doorstep.”

  Arkwright fell headlong into the trap.

  “Not with this knife, sir!”

  Thurston’s chair creaked as he jerked himself forward and glared at Arkwright with truculent grey eyes.

  “Found at two o’clock. Expert’s seen it, been dusted for prints, blood test taken, photographed and washed! That’s why it’s clean. Can you say as much for the Miller exhibit?”

  Arkwright flushed.

  “That’s the trouble, sir,” he said. “It is an exhibit, and I treated it as such. We shall need it at the trial.”

  Thurston froze him with a glance.

  “If there is a trial,” he barked contemptuously. “Slipshod methods! Blade coated with congealed blood, I suppose. If I hadn’t been down with flu this wouldn’t have happened.”

  Arkwright controlled his feelings and preserved a respectful silence. He had had flu not so long ago himself and recognised the inevitable after effects.

  Thurston made a long arm and turned the knife over so that the other side of the blade lay uppermost. Then he jammed himself back in his chair and turned a sardonic, parrot-like eye on Arkwright.

  Arkwright bent over the table and caught his breath. High upon the blade, close to the shaft, was a series of marks, roughly resembling letters, and, underneath them, unmistakably, a number: 620.

  In answer to a nod from Thurston he picked the knife up and carried it to the window. The scratches showed clearly enough now.

  “Amateur work,” he said slowly. “The chap did that himself and didn’t take much trouble over it. Looks more like English than Chinese. What does Grierson say, sir?”

  “It’s got Grierson beat, so you can take it it’s not Chinese.”

  “The numeral’s English, right enough,” went on Arkwright, “and the first, second and fifth letters might stand roughly for M. A. and H. The fourth might be another attempt at H., but the third might mean anything.”

  The Super grunted.

  “Try t’other way up,” he growled.

  Arkwright reversed the blade until the handle was towards him. The third letter now showed plainly enough as U.

  “M.A.U.H.H.,” he said. “With the U. upside down. That’s not very helpful.”

  Thurston, who had been filling a peculiarly foul pipe, proceeded to light it.

  “Neither are you,” he mumbled, between puffs. “Get the Miller knife exhibit cleaned up and let me see it.”

  The Miller exhibit provided another bitter pill for Arkwright’s palate, though he knew that, in leaving the weapon untouched, he had only followed the usual routine in such cases. In view of Thurston’s jaundiced state of mind it was unfortunate that, when washed, the blade should be discovered to have been scratched in exactly the same way as that of the knife found in Eccleston Square. The lettering was, if anything, clearer, the only difference being in the numeral, which showed up distinctly as 300.

  Taking the inscriptions into account it was impossible to ignore the probable connection between the two crimes, and Arkwright spent the greater part of the morning gathering what data there was from the inspector in charge of the case.

  “Haven’t been able to identify the woman yet, sir,” was his discouraging report, “and it’s not going to be easy. A foreigner, I should put her down as, and you know what those little lodging houses are Vauxhall Bridge Road way. Swarming with Frenchies and Italians, a lot of them without any friends or relations on this side of the Channel, and, if one goes missing once in a way,
the landlady knows better than to report to us. Just hangs onto the luggage for six months or so and then bones it. The woman hadn’t a pocket in her coat and her hand bag’s missing. No papers, no money, nothing! There’s the name of a Paris boot maker, Dufour, in her shoes and there’s a chemise that comes from The Louvre. That’s all we’ve got to go on.”

  “How long had she been dead?”

  “Over an hour, the surgeon says. She wasn’t there at seven thirty, because the owner of the house went up the steps and let himself in then.”

  “Whom does the house belong to?”

  The inspector grinned.

  “Mr. Justice Farrer. I reckon we can rule him out. I’ve passed the tape over the household, but everything seems straightforward. The only person that saw her is a telegraph boy. He had a wire for a house two doors away and he noticed her sitting there as he passed, but, having no occasion to climb the steps, he didn’t bother about her. He puts the time at round about eight o’clock.”

  “Which places the murder as having taken place between seven thirty and eight. That narrows it down a lot. Did the surgeon say anything about the wound?”

  “He said as like as not it was done from behind. Whoever did it knew his job. Nearly took her head off. If the neck hadn’t been muffled round with a shawl, that boy would have spotted the blood all right. As it was, there wasn’t anything to show till the constable moved her.”

  “Sure there’s nothing more in that shrubbery? The murderer may have chucked away her bag when he got rid of the knife.”

  The inspector shook his head.

  “We’ve been over every inch of the whole Square. Tried the drains, too, round about, but there’s nothing. I hear you’re taking over, Sir?”

  Arkwright sighed.

  “I’ve got to. If there isn’t some connection between this and the Miller business I’ll eat my hat, but I can’t see where the link lies. I’ll go over to the mortuary now and see you later. Had many visitors there?”