Red Aces (5 page)

The inspector made a very careful search of the bedroom and came back to find Mr Reeder nodding himself to sleep.

“What did they do to the girl – these local blokes?” asked Gaylor coarsely.

Reeder’s right shoulder came up in a lazy shrug. “They escorted her to the station and took a statement from her. The inspector was kind enough to furnish me with a copy – you will find it on this table. They also examined her hands and her clothes, but it was quite unnecessary. There is corroborative evidence that she arrived at Bourne End station at twelve minutes past eight as she says she did – the murder was committed at forty minutes past seven, a few minutes before or after.”

“How the dickens do you know that?” asked the astonished officer. “Is there any proof?”

Mr Reeder shook his head. “A romantic surmise.” He sighed heavily. “You have to realize, my dear Gaylor, that I have a criminal mind. I see the worst in people and the worst in every human action. It is very tragic. There are moments when” – he sighed again. “Forty minutes past seven,” he said simply. “That is my romantic surmise. The doctor will probably confirm my view. The body lay here,” he pointed to the hearthrug, “until – well, quite a considerable time.”

Gaylor was skimming two closely written sheets of foolscap. Suddenly he stopped.

“You’re wrong,” he said. “Listen to this statement made at the station by Miss Lynn. ‘I rang up my uncle from the station, telling him I might be late because of the snowy road. He answered “Come as soon as you can.” He spoke in a very low tone; I thought he sounded agitated!’ That knocks your theory about the time a little bit skew-wiff, eh?”

Mr Reeder looked round and blinked open his eyes.

“Yes, doesn’t it? It must have been terribly embarrassing.”

“What was embarrassing?” asked the puzzled police officer.

“Everything,” mumbled Mr Reeder, his chin falling on his breast.

(“The trouble about Reeder,” said Gaylor to the superintendent in the course of a long telephone conversation, “is that you feel he does know something which he shouldn’t know. I’ve never seen him in a case where he hasn’t given me the impression that he was the guilty party – he knew so much about the crime?”

“Humour him,” said the superintendent. “He’ll be in the Public Prosecutor’s Department one of these days. He never was in a case that he didn’t make himself an accessory by pinching half the clues.”)

At five o’clock the detective shook the sleeper awake.

“You’d better go home, old man,” he said. “We’ll leave an officer in charge here.”

Mr Reeder rose with a groan, splashed some soda-water from a syphon into a glass and drank it.

“I must stay, I’m afraid, unless you have any very great objection.”

“What’s the idea of waiting?” asked Gaylor in surprise.

Mr Reeder looked from side to side as though he were seeking an answer.

“I have a theory – an absurd one, of course – but I believe the murderers will come back. And honestly I don’t think your policeman would be of much use, unless you were inclined to give the poor fellow the lethal weapon necessary to defend himself.”

Gaylor sat down squarely before him, his large gloved hands on his knees.

“Tell papa,” he said.

Mr Reeder looked at him pathetically.

“There is nothing to tell, my dear Mr Gaylor; merely suspicion, bred, as I said, in my peculiarly morbid mind, having perhaps no foundation in fact. Those two cards, for example – that was a stupid piece of bravado. But it has happened before. You remember the Teignmouth case, and the Lavender Hill case, with the man with the slashed chest? I think they must get these ideas out of books,” he said, bending over to stir the embers of the fire. “The craze for that kind of literature must necessarily produce its reaction.”

Gaylor took the cards from his pocket and examined them.

“A bit of tomfoolery,” was his verdict.

Mr Reeder sighed and shook his head at the fire.

“Murderers as a rule have no sense of humour. They are excitable people, frightened people, but they are never comic people.”

He walked to the door and pulled it open. Snow had ceased to fall. He came back.

“Where is the policeman you propose leaving on duty?” he asked.

“I’ll find one,” said Gaylor. “There are half-a-dozen within call. A whistle will bring one along.”

Mr Reeder looked at him thoughtfully.

“I don’t think I should. Let us wait until daylight – or perhaps you wish to go? I don’t think anybody would harm you. I rather fancy they would be glad to see the back of you.”

“Harm me?” said Gaylor indignantly, but Reeder took no notice of the interruption.

“My own idea is that I should brew a dish of tea, and possibly fry a few eggs. I am a little hungry.”

Gaylor walked to the door and frowned out into the darkness. He had worked with Reeder before, and was too wise a man to reject the advice summarily. Besides, if Reeder was entering or had entered the Public Prosecutor’s Department, he would occupy a rank equivalent to superintendent.

“I’m all for eggs,” said Gaylor, and bolted the outer door.

The older man disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a kettle, which he placed upon the fire, went out again and returned with a frying-pan.

“Do you ever take your hat off?” asked Gaylor curiously.

Mr Reeder did not turn his head, but shook the pan gently to ensure an even distribution of the boiling fat.

“Very rarely,” he said. “On Christmas Days sometimes.”

And then Gaylor asked a fatuous question; at least, it sounded fatuous to him, and yet subconsciously he felt that the other might supply an immediate answer.

“Who killed Wentford?”

“Two men, possibly three,” said Mr Reeder instantly; “but I rather think two. Neither was a professional burglar. One at any rate thought more of the killing than of any profit he might have got out of it. Neither found anything worth taking, and even if they had opened the safe they would have discovered nothing of value. The young lady, Miss Margot Lynn, could, I think, have saved them a lot of trouble in their search for treasure – I may be mistaken here, but I rarely fall into error. Miss Margot is–”

He stopped, looked round quickly.

“What is it?” asked Gaylor, but Reeder put his finger to his lips.

He rose, moving across the room to the door which led to the tiny lobby through which he had made his entrance. He stood with one hand on the knob, and Gaylor saw that in the other was a Browning pistol. Slowly he turned the handle. The door was locked from the inside.

In two strides Reeder was at the front door, turned the key and pulled it open. Then, to the inspector’s amazement, he saw his companion take one step and fall sprawling on his face in the snow. He ran to his assistance. Something caught him by the ankle and flung him forward.

Reeder was on his feet and assisted the other to rise.

“A little wire fastened between the door posts,” he explained.

A bright beam shot out from his electric torch as he turned the corner of the house. There was nobody in sight, but the window, which he had fastened, was open, and there were new footprints in the snow leading away into the darkness.

“Well, I’m damned!” said Gaylor.

J G Reeder said nothing. He was smiling when he came back into the room, having stopped to break the wire with a kick.

“Do you think somebody was in the lobby?”

“I know somebody was in the lobby,” he said. “Dear me! How foolish of us not to have had a policeman posted outside the door! You notice that a pane of glass has been cut? Our friend must have been listening there.”

“Was there only one?”

“Only one,” said Mr Reeder gravely. “But was he the one who came that way before – I don’t think so.”

He took the frying-pan from the hearth where he had put it and resumed his frying of eggs, served them on two plates and brewed the tea. It was just as though death had not lurked in that lobby a few minutes before.

“No, they won’t come back; there is no longer a reason for our staying. There were two, but only one came into the house. The roads are very heavy, and they may have a long way to travel, and they would not risk being anywhere near at daybreak. At six o’clock the agricultural labourer of whom the poet Gray wrote so charmingly will be on his way to work, and they won’t risk meeting him either.”

They had a solemn breakfast, Gaylor plying the other with questions, which in the main he did not answer.

“You think that Miss Lynn is in this – in the murder, I mean?”

Reeder shook his head.

“No, no,” he said. “I’m afraid it isn’t as easy as that.”

Daylight had come greyly when, having installed a cold policeman in the house, they plodded down the lane. Reeder’s car had been retrieved in the night, and a more powerful machine, fitted with chain-wheels, was waiting to take them to Beaconsfield. They did not reach that place for two hours, for on their way they came upon a little knot of policemen and farm labourers looking sombrely at the body of Constable Verity. He lay under some bushes a few yards from the road, and he was dead.

“Shot,” said a police officer. “The divisional surgeon has just seen him.”

Stiff and cold, with his booted legs stretched wide, his overcoat turned up and his snow-covered cap drawn over his eyes, was the officer who had ridden out from the station courtyard so unsuspectingly the night before. His horse had already been found; the bloodstains that had puzzled and alarmed the police were now accounted for.

Gaylor and Reeder drove on into Beaconsfield. Gaylor was a depressed and silent man; Mr Reeder was silent but not depressed.

As they came out into the main road he turned to his companion, and asked: “I wonder why they didn’t bring their own aces?”

The most accurate account of the double tragedy appeared in a late edition of the
Evening Post-Courier.

“At some hour between eight and ten James Verity, a member of the Mounted Branch of the Buckinghamshire Constabulary, and Walter Wentford, an eccentric, and, it is believed, a rich recluse, were done to death in or in the vicinity of a lonely cottage in the neighbourhood of Beaconsfield. At a quarter past nine Constable Verity was patrolling the road and came upon a body which was afterwards identified as that of the late Mr Wentford, who lived in a small cottage some hundred yards from the spot where the body was found. Mr Wentford had been brutally bludgeoned, and was dead when the discovery was made. Simultaneously with the discovery there appeared upon the scene Mr Walter Enward, a well known Beaconsfield solicitor, and his clerk, who, at Mr Wentford’s request, were on their way to visit him. It is believed Mr Wentford intended making a will, though no documents were found in the house to support this supposition.

“Leaving Mr Enward to watch the body, Constable Verity rode toward Beaconsfield to summon assistance. He was never seen alive after that moment.

“The dead man’s niece, who also acted as his secretary, Miss Margot Lynn, had been summoned from London, and she, arriving at the cottage a few minutes after the body had been taken away by the unknown murderers, discovered the place in disorder, though she did not at that time suspect a tragedy.

“The mystery was still further complicated in the earlier hours of the dawn, when a cow-boy, on his way to work, discovered the dead body of Constable Verity on the Beaconsfield side of the lane where Mr Wentford’s body was found. He had been shot through the heart at close range. No sound of the shot had been heard, but it may be explained that there are very few houses in the neighbourhood, and snow was falling heavily. A carter in the employment of a neighbouring farmer thought he had heard a shot fired much earlier in the evening, but this may be accounted for by the fact that snow was falling so thickly on the railway line, which is situated a mile away, that fog signals were being used.

“Chief Detective–Inspector Gaylor has been called in by the Buckinghamshire police, and he is being assisted by Mr J G Reeder, of the Public Prosecutor’s Department.

“The timetable, so far as can be ascertained, is as follows:

“7.00.  Constable Verity left police station on patrol.

“9.14.  Constable Verity discovers the dead body of Mr Wentford.

“9.15.  Mr Enward and his clerk drive up by motor-car, and are stopped by the constable, who rides into Beaconsfield for assistance.

“6.45 a.m.  The body of Constable Verity is found shot dead 120 yards north of where the body of Mr Wentford was found.”

Mr Kingfether, the sub-manager of the Beaconsfield branch of the Great Central Bank, read this account and was rightly agitated. He got to the bank very early that morning, for he had a letter to write, and his managerial office gave him the privacy he required. He was a serious man, with serious-looking spectacles on a pale, plump face. He had a little black moustache and his cheeks and chin were invariably blue, for he had what barbers call a “strong beard”.

The newspapers arrived as he was writing. They were pushed under the closed outer door of the bank, and, being at the moment stuck for the alternative to an often reiterated term of endearment, he rose and brought the newspapers into the office, put a new coal on the fire and sat down to glance through them. There were two papers, one financial and one human.

He read the latter first, and there was the murder in detail, though it had only occurred the night before. The discovery of the constable’s body was not described, because it had not been discovered when the paper went to press.

He read and reread, his mind in a whirl, and then he took the telephone and called Mr Enward. That gentleman was also in his office that snowy morning, though the hour was eight.

“Good morning, Kingfether…Yes, yes, it’s true…I was practically a witness – they’ve found the poor policeman…dead…yes, murdered…yes, shot…I was the last person to speak to him. Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful! That such horrors can be – I say that such horrors can be…I said that such…What’s the matter with your ’phone? He banks with you? Really? Really? I’ll come over and talk with you…”