Puzzle of the Silver Persian (17 page)

Then she stopped short. She had forgotten one person who had been at the table—the doctor himself!

The ship sailed on its return journey to the States today, she knew. But there was still time and to spare before half-past two. She paid her bill in the restaurant and hailed a taxi outside. “Pier seven at George the Fifth dock,” she told the driver. “And try to hurry.”

He did his best, and better. They wound through the interminable streets of eastern London and drew up at the waterfront shortly before two o’clock.

Miss Withers gave the man a generous tip and then bustled through long and strangely vacant piers until she came out on the open dock.

There were a few broken bits of paper ribbon at her feet, but the slip was vacant.

“Isn’t this where the
American Diplomat
sails from?” she demanded of a solitary person in a blue coat who was sweeping up.

He stared at her dully. “She’ll be back again three weeks from Monday,” he informed her. “Went out hours ago.”

“But I thought she sailed at two-thirty…”

“Eleven in the mornin’, mum. They has to go out with the tide, y’see.”

Miss Withers noticed a strip of glistening wet along the bottom of the cement pierhead. The tide was going out—and the
American Diplomat
was somewhere off Gravesend.

On board that trim little cabin-class vessel, Dr. Waite was just rising from the table over which he presided. There was a pleasant crowd on board, mostly American students driven home by the fall in the dollar, and the genial doctor anticipated a pleasant cruise. This would not, he was sure, turn out like the last trip over, with suicides and investigations and such. But he mentioned only pleasant topics.

“What
a crowd and a voyage that one was,” finished Dr. Waite. “Dancing until eleven or twelve every night.”

There was no Loulu Hammond to be sweet and sarcastic about the pace that kills. Feeling a tremendous sense of relief, Waite walked back to his sick bay and seated himself at the desk.

The vessel was beginning to roll in the Channel swell, a comforting rocking motion. The doctor rubbed his bald head with the palm of his hand, loosened his vest, and leaned back in his chair. The world wasn’t so bad, after all. What if he had come off rather badly with the not-too-married lady who lived in Maida Vale? There would be other weeks in London, and in the meantime he had one faithful mistress.

He reached in the drawer of his desk and took out a glass and a tall bottle. He poured himself out six fingers of the brandy and then held up the rich dose to the light which streamed in his port.

“Here’s to a smooth voyage,” said Dr. Waite to himself. He stopped suddenly and squinted at the glass. There was, instead of the fine clear glow of the brandy, an oily cloud of something heavy and dark at the bottom of his glass.

“Now what in the devil’s got into that?” he asked himself. He sniffed, almost tasted, and then set it down with shaking fingers. Hastily he fumbled in his medicine cabinet and made a laboratory test that he remembered from dim distant days at Rush Medical.

When he had his result, he was shaking all over. “Good God!” said Dr. Waite. “It’s loaded with cyanide!”

He took the bottle, holding it at arm’s length, and dropped it out the porthole. Then he went to his medicine cabinet, found a small bottle of whisky, and though it smelled perfectly as it should, he put it away again.

“I’ll be damned!” he assured himself. “Completely damned!”

There was a knock on his door, and fat, cheerful Sparks entered, smoking a new curving calabash which he had bought in London to add to his growing collection. The wireless operator took the pipe from his mouth. “Message for you,” he said. “Figure it out if you can.”

He handed over a yellow sheet of paper upon which he had typed out the words:

SUSPECT WHOLESALE MURDER PLOT TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. HILDEGARDE WITHERS.

For the first time the bald and sniggering doctor realized that the black-bordered note which had awaited him when he came back on board was not simply a bad joke.

“I’ll be thoroughly and completely damned,” he said.

“I
MAY NEED YOUR SUPPORT,”
said Hildegarde Withers. “Come on in with me, and be surprised at nothing.”

The Honorable Emily and Miss Withers had been taking a pleasant stroll on this bright and windy Saturday morning, and now they stood outside that Mecca of tourists, the offices of the American Express. Around them the busy Hay-market roared and boomed.

“But for what?” demanded the Englishwoman.

“Never you mind,” Miss Withers told her. “Just look like the daughter of a hundred earls and say nothing.”

They went inside, and after standing in line for a few minutes, stood before the mail desk. The young man at the counter wore very thick eyeglasses and peered through them dubiously.

“Anything for Mr. or Mrs. Thomas Hammond?” inquired Miss Withers. She spoke firmly, with an air of uprightness and authority, in spite of the fact that she was planning a bare-faced robbery of the Royal Mail.

It was all too easy. The young man at the counter reached behind him and then handed her a sheaf of letters. Most of them were from New York, and one was forwarded, with the old address, “T. H. Hammond, Advtg. Mgr. Pyren Extinguisher Co., N. Y. C.” The women turned to go.

“Just a moment,” said the clerk, staring over his eyeglasses with a cold appraisal. “Are you Mrs. Hammond?”

“Er—no,” Miss Withers admitted.

“Well, I can’t let you have mail addressed to anyone else unless they identify you and you register here,” he told her. “I have Mr. Hammond’s signature in the book, and on a written order from him I’ll be glad to—”

“Go jump in the Thames,” Miss Withers remarked in a very low voice. She smiled brightly. “I’m sorry—I didn’t know the rules,” she said.

She handed back the sheaf of letters and then stalked out of the place, with the Honorable Emily in tow.

“Well, whatever you were trying to do, you didn’t do it,” said that lady drily.

“Didn’t I!” Miss Withers well concealed any feeling of chagrin that might have filled her maidenly bosom. “At least I’ve discovered that no package of poisoned cigarettes or gumdrops or bath salts is waiting for the Hammonds. There was nothing but letters and postcards.”

“Was that what you had in mind?” The Honorable Emily looked incredulous.

Miss Withers smiled and patted the crinkling envelope—with a narrow inked border of black—which reposed snugly in her sleeve.

“Of course!” she answered, and they walked back toward their hotel in silence. They parted in the elevator.

“I’m alone a great deal now that Leslie has set about paying court to Candida Noring,” said the Honorable Emily a bit wistfully. “Would you care to have tea with me around five?”

“I should love to,” Miss Withers told her. “But I’m afraid I shall be very, very busy around five o’clock.”

As soon as she was in her room she got down to business. From her sleeve she took the black-bordered letter which she had first seen at the mail desk of the Oxford-Palace and which she had chased all the way down to the express office. For a long time she studied it. No doubt there were fingerprints on it—prints which might solve the whole mystery of this wholesale chain of murders—or what she was beginning to suspect must certainly be murder on a wholesale scale.

Yet heaven only knew how many other persons beside the sender had touched the envelope. There was certainly herself, the man at the desk in the American Express and the hotel clerks at the Oxford-Palace, together with whoever had sorted and handled the mail in the post office. Besides, the police had one of these fantastic messages intact, taken from the pocket of dead Andy Todd. They would find whatever was to be found in the line of fingerprints. Miss Withers had no facilities for such work, and, moreover, she had learned from her friend Inspector Piper that few juries on either side of the Atlantic will accept fingerprint evidence even in this advanced day and age.

“Bother the prints,” she decided. She turned her attention to the envelope itself. It told her very little at first glance.

It was squarish and white—of a rather cheap grade. The stamp was affixed on a slight angle, and the postmark read, “London—8 A.M.—26 SEP—1933.” Beneath the date was a single letter “C” which she took to represent the post office at which the stamp had been canceled. That would mean more to Scotland Yard than to her, and probably very little even to them. Yet, after all, it meant something to know that this was the first of the murder messages that had gone through the mails.

The address was written in common blue-black ink, in a roundish hand from which most of the personal characteristics of the writer had been removed. It was the same writing as the other letters edged in black, Miss Withers was quite sure of that. Yet as an intelligent, if rather elementary, student of handwriting through the treatises of such experts as the famous Gypsy Louise Rice, she knew that very little indeed can be done with so limited a sample of handwriting as the address on an envelope. This white square bore only the words “Mr. and Mrs. Tom Hammond, American Express, London.” There were also scribbled forwarding notations—to and from the Oxford-Palace—but they of course meant nothing.

It was certain, then, that the writer of that address had been almost without emotion. Only someone impassioned and cool could have kept personality so hidden. There was nothing more, except that the black border had been hurriedly inked.

Without a second’s hesitancy Miss Withers inserted a hairpin in the flap and opened the message.

As she had known, it consisted of a few scraps of cream-colored paper glued upon a blacked-in background. The handwriting was, if not the same, very similar to that on the envelope, yet it seemed a bit more definite, more natural and human and intense. The writer of this message had been inflamed with passion.

“And you, you superior self-satisfied fools, one of these days you’ll learn that the people around you aren’t just puppets to laugh at…
”

“Never end a sentence with a preposition,” Miss Withers told herself absently. She was disappointed, having hoped for something definite, something pointed, in the message. It was like all the rest, showing a very real malice which almost reached hatred, and which still did not seem quite in tune with the doom which had descended upon at least two of the recipients of these letters. It was not until months afterward, when it was all over, that she knew that Dr. Waite had been added to the list.

She sat and stared at the black-framed message for a long time, but no further inspiration came to her. The whole affair seemed essentially childish and almost ridiculous—and yet three persons had died exceedingly unpleasant deaths, and one more had come so close to the scythe of the Grim Reaper that she would sleep ill o’ nights for many and many a month.

“I wonder,” Miss Withers asked herself, as she put the purloined letter carefully away, “I wonder just what it was that Peter Noel was throwing into the sea that morning?” There had been the cryptic letters “osem” on the one scrap she had found. That might, of course, be part of the word “Yosemite.” It also fitted into the name “Rosemary.” Miss Withers inclined very strongly to the latter possibility. Then had Noel, also, received a warning note before his death? If so, what about his suicide?

Supposing it wasn’t suicide? And then—how on earth could anybody make a man swallow a dose of poison, in full view of the police, against his will? Miss Withers was back where she had started.

She ordered tea sent up to her room, and tried to put the whole affair out of her mind for the time being. But it was no use. She felt herself in the middle of the second act of a mystery melodrama, stuck in the center of the stage before a crowded house, and without the vaguest notion of what her lines and business should be.

“For the last three years,” she scolded herself, “you’ve been wishing for a chance to tackle a murder mystery without Oscar Piper and the police to back you up. Now you’ve got it and you don’t know what to do with it.”

On an impulse, she went downstairs to the lobby and telephoned to Scotland Yard, asking for Chief Inspector Cannon. She learned that he was not on duty. “He’ll probably ring in after the football game,” said the man at the desk. “Shall I give him a message?”

“Never mind,” Miss Withers answered wearily. She asked for Sergeant Secker.

“He’s not available either,” she learned. “He usually goes up to his home in Suffolk over the week-end.”

“I only hope that the criminal world observes its holidays as carefully as the police in this fair land,” Miss Withers remarked acidly, and hung up.

Driven by sheer necessity to the company of the Honorable Emily, Miss Withers went down to the third floor and rapped at her door. But there was no answer.

She continued on down to the foyer and asked at the desk if the Honorable Emily had left any message.

“Her ladyship is, I think, having a guest for tea in the lounge,” the clerk told her. “Shall I have her paged?”

“No, thank you.” Miss Withers gave it up. She went out to the nearest newsdealer, and bought an armful of American newspapers and magazines, with which she proceeded to stupefy her intelligence through the evening and through most of the following Sunday.

She took a long walk in the Sabbath afternoon, strolling through the Embankment Gardens. In spite of the mist in the air, and a chill wind which swept up the Thames, the place was filled with young men and women, paired off two and two, most of whom were happily courting in the English fashion, which consists of striding under a load of heavy tweeds in no particular direction but with a great deal of energy. “No doubt until they finally drop in each other’s arms of sheer exhaustion,” Miss Withers decided.

She saw one couple who, instead of striding vigorously forward, were strolling idly along the walk above the river, and now and then stopping to toss chestnuts to the screaming gulls over the water. As she drew closer she saw that it was Leslie Reverson with the Noring girl again. They were walking very close together and laughing at nothing at all. At least, Reverson was laughing.