To Love and Be Wise (23 page)

Something phoney somewhere....

'Grant!'

He came back to the realisation of his chief's surprise. What was he to say? Acquiesce and let it go? Stick to the facts and the evidence, and stay on the safe side?

With a detached regret he heard his own voice saying: 'Have you ever seen a lady sawn in half, sir?'

'I have,' Bryce said, eyeing him with a wary disapproval.

'It seems to me that there is a strong aroma of sawn-lady about this case,' Grant said; and then remembered that this was the metaphor he had used to Sergeant Williams.

But Bryce's reaction was very different from the Sergeant's.

'Oh, my
God
!' he groaned. 'You're
not
going to do a Lamont on us, are you, Grant?'

Years ago Grant had gone into the farthest Highlands after a man and had brought him back; brought him back sewn up in a case so fault-proof that only the sentence remained to be said; and had handed him over with the remark that on the whole he thought they had got the wrong man. (They had.) The Yard had never forgotten it, and any wild opinion in contradiction to the evidence was still known as 'doing a Lamont'.

The sudden mention of Jerry Lamont heartened Grant. It had been even more absurd to feel that Jerry Lamont was innocent, in the face of an unbreakable case, than it was to smell 'sawn-lady' in a simple drowning.

'Grant!'

'There's something very odd about the set-up,' Grant said stubbornly.

'What is odd?'

'If I knew that it would be down in my report. It isn't any one thing. It's the—the whole set-up. The atmosphere. The smell of it. It doesn't smell right.'

'Couldn't you just explain to an ordinary hard-working policeman
what
smells so wrong about it?'

Grant ignored the Superintendent's heavy-handedness, and said:

'It's all wrong from the beginning, don't you see. Searle's walking in from nowhere, into the party. Yes, I know that we know about him. That he is who he says he is, and all that. We even know that he came to England just as he says he did. Via Paris. His place was booked by the American Express office at the Madeleine. But that doesn't alter the fact that the whole episode has something queer about it.
Was
it so likely that he would be all that keen to meet Walter just because they were both friends of Cooney Wiggin?'

'Don't ask me! Was it?'

'Why this need to meet Walter?'

'Perhaps he had seen him broadcast and just couldn't wait.'

'And he had no letters.'

'Who hadn't?'

'Searle. He had no letters all the time he was at Salcott.'

'Perhaps he is allergic to the gum on envelopes. Or I
have
heard that people leave letters lying at their bank to be called for.'

'That's another thing. None of the usual American banks or agencies has ever heard of him. And there is one tiny thing that seems odd to me out of all proportion to its actual value. Actual value to this case, I mean. He had a tin box, rather like an outsize paint-box, that he used to hold all his photographic stuff. Something is gone out of the box. Something roughly 9 inches by 3½ by 4, that was packed in the lower compartment (it has a tray like a paint-box with a deeper space below). Nothing that is now among his belongings fits the space, and no one can suggest what the thing could have been.'

'And what is so odd about that? There must be a hundred and one things that might have been packed in a space that size.'

'As what, for instance, sir?'

'Well—well, I can't think off-hand, but there must be dozens.'

'There is ample space in his other cases for anything he wanted to pack. So it wouldn't be clothes, or ordinary possessions. Whatever was there, in the tin box, was something that he kept where only he would be likely to handle it.'

Bryce's attention grew more sober at that.

'Now it is missing. It is of no obvious importance in this case. No importance at all, perhaps. It is just an oddity and it sticks in my mind.'

'What do you think he might have been after at Trimmings? Blackmail?' Bryce asked, with interest at last.

'I don't know. I hadn't thought of blackmail.'

'What could have been in the box that he could turn into cash? Not letters, that shape. Documents, perhaps? Documents in a roll.'

'I don't know. Yes, perhaps. The thing against the blackmail idea is that he seemed to have ample means.'

'Blackmailers usually have.'

'Yes. But Searle had a profession that kept him very nicely. Only a hog would want more. And somehow he didn't look to me like a hog.'

'Be your age, Grant. Just sit quiet for a moment and think of the blackmailers you have known.' He watched this shot go home, and said, dryly: 'Exactly!' And then: 'Who would you say was the blackmailee at Trimmings? Mrs Garrowby got a past, do you think?'

'Possibly,' Grant said, considering Emma Garrowby in a new light. 'Yes, I think it's quite possible.'

'Well, the choice isn't very wide. I don't suppose Lavinia Fitch was ever out on the tiles?'

Grant thought of kind, anxious little Miss Fitch, with the bristling pencils in her mop of hair, and smiled.

'There isn't much choice, you see. I suppose if it was blackmail at all it must have been Mrs Garrowby. So your theory is that Searle was murdered for a reason that has nothing to do with Liz Garrowby.' And as Grant made no immediate answer to that, 'You believe that it
was
murder, don't you.'

'No.'

'No!'

'I don't believe he's dead.'

There was a moment of silence. Then Bryce leaned forward over the table and said with immense self-control: 'Now, look here, Grant. Flair's flair. And you're entitled to your whack of it. But when you take to throwing it about in chunks it becomes too much of a good thing. Have a little moderation, for Pete's sake. You've been dragging a river for a whole day yesterday trying to find a drowned man, and now you have the nerve to sit there and tell me you don't think he was drowned at all. What do you think he did? Walked away barefoot? Or hobbled away disguised as a one-legged man supported by crutches which he had tossed off in an idle moment from a couple of oak branches? Where do you think he went to? What is he going to live on from now on? Honestly, Grant, I think you must need a holiday. What, just tell me
what
, put this notion into your head?
How
does a trained detective mind jump from a straight-forward case of "missing believed drowned" into a wild piece of fantasy that has no connection with anything in the case at all?'

Grant was silent.

'Come on, Grant. I'm not ribbing you. I really want to know. How do you arrive at the conclusion that a man isn't drowned after finding his shoe in the river? How did the shoe get there?'

'If I knew that, sir, I'd have my case.'

'Did Searle have a spare pair of shoes with him?'

'No. Just the ones he was wearing.'

'The one that was found in the river.'

'Yes, sir.'

'And you still think he didn't drown?'

'Yes.'

There was a silence.

'I don't know which to admire more, Grant: your nerve or your imagination.'

Grant said nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say. He was bitterly aware that he had already said too much.

'Can you think of any theory, however wild, that would fit your idea of his being alive?'

'I can think of one. He could have been abducted, and the shoe tossed in the river as evidence of drowning.'

Bryce regarded him with dramatised respect. 'You mistook your vocation, Grant. You're a very good detective, but as a writer of detective fiction you'd make a fortune.'

'I was only answering your challenge and supplying a theory to fit the facts, sir,' Grant said mildly. 'I didn't say I believed in it.'

This slowed Bryce down a little. 'Take them out of a hat like rabbits, do you. Theories in all sizes to fit any figure! No compulsion to buy! Walk up! Walk up!' He stopped and looked for a long moment at Grant's imperturbable face, sat slowly back in his chair, relaxed, and smiled. 'You damned poker-face, you!' he said amiably. He searched in his pocket for matches. 'Do you know what I envy about you, Grant? Your self-control. I'm always flying off the handle about something or other; and it doesn't do me or anyone else any good. My wife says that it is because I'm not sure of myself and I'm afraid I'm not going to get my way. She attended a course of six lectures on psychology at Morley College, and there is nothing about the human mind she doesn't know. I can only conclude that you must be damned sure of yourself behind that nice equable temper of yours.'

'I don't know, sir,' Grant said, amused. 'I was anything but equable when I came in to report, and had nothing to show you but a situation that was exactly the same as it was when you handed it over to me four days ago.'

'So you said: "How's the old man's rheumatism today? Is he approachable or do I go on all fours?"' His little elephant eyes twinkled for a moment. 'Well, I suppose we present the Commissioner with your neat report of the facts as they exist, and leave him in ignorance of the finer flights of your imagination.'

'Oh, yes, sir. I can't very well explain to the Commissioner that I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach.'

'No. And if you'll take my advice, you'll stop paying so much attention to the rumblings of your stomach, and stick to what goes on in your head. There is a little phrase commonly used in police work that says, "in accordance with the evidence". You say that over six times a day as a grace before and after meals, and perhaps it will keep your feet on the ground and stop you ending up thinking you're Frederick the Great or a hedgehog or something.'

IN his schooldays Grant had learned that if he was stumped by a problem it paid to leave it alone for a while. A proposition that had seemed insoluble the night before was simple to the point of being obvious in the light of morning. This was a lesson that he learned for himself and consequently never forgot, and he took it with him both into his personal life and into his work. Whenever he reached deadlock he transferred his attention. So now, although he did not follow Bryce's advice about the daily ritual, he did give heed to his words about ignoring 'the rumblings of his stomach'. Where the Searle affair was concerned he had reached deadlock, so he withdrew his attention and thought upon Tom Thumb. The current Tom Thumb being an 'Arab' potentate who had lived at a Strand hotel for a fortnight, and had disappeared without the formality of paying his bill.

The daily routine, a routine where there was always more work than men to do it, sucked him back into its vortex, and Salcott St Mary disappeared from the forefront of his mind.

Then, on a morning six days later, his mind flung it back at him.

He was walking along the south pavement of the Strand on his way to lunch in Maiden Lane, pleased with the report that he was going to give Bryce when he went back to the Yard, and wondering idly at the large display of women's shoes in a street as unpopular with women as the Strand. The thought of women's shoes reminded him of Dora Siggins and the slippers she had bought for the dance, and he smiled a little to himself as he began to cross the street, remembering her vitality and her chatter and her friendly sharpness. She had nearly left the shoes behind after all, he remembered; even after missing a bus home in order to buy them. They had been lying on the seat because they wouldn't fit into her packed shopping bag, and he had had to point them out to her. An untidy parcel in cheap brown paper, with the heels——

He stopped dead.

A taxi driver, his face contorted with rage and fright, yelled something into his ear. Brakes screamed as a lorry came to a halt at his elbow. A policeman, hearing the yelling brakes and the protests, made slow but purposeful movements in his direction. But Grant did not wait. He flung himself against the next approaching taxi, wrenched the door open, and said 'Scotland Yard and quick' to the driver.

'Exhibitionist!' said the driver, and chugged away to the Embankment.

But Grant did not hear him. His mind was busy on the old sucked-dry problem that suddenly seemed so new and exciting now that he had taken it out again. At the Yard he looked for Williams and when he had found him he said: 'Williams, remember saying on the telephone that all your Wickham notes were good for was the wastepaper basket? And I said never to destroy notes.'

'I remember,' Williams said. 'When I was in town picking up Benny Skoll and you were at Salcott dragging the river.'

'You didn't by any chance take my advice, did you?'

'Of course I took your advice, sir. I
always
take your advice.'

'You have those notes somewhere?'

'I have them right here in my desk.'

'May I see them?'

'Certainly, sir. Though I don't know if you can read them.'

It was certainly not easy. When Williams wrote a report it was in a faultless schoolboy script, but when making notes for his own use he indulged in a hieroglyphic shorthand of his own.

Grant flipped over the pages looking for what he wanted.

'"The 9.30 Wickham to Crome",' he murmured. '"The 10.5 Crome to Wickham. The 10.15 Wickham to Crome." 'M. 'M. "Farm lane: old"——old
what
and child?'

'Old labourer and child. I didn't detail what they had in the buses to start with. Just what they picked up on the road.'

'Yes, yes; I know; I understand. "Long Leat crossroads." Where is that?'

'It's a "green" place, a sort of common, on the outskirts of Wickham, where there's a collection of Fair stuff. A merry-go-round and things.'

'I remember. "Two roundabout men, known." Is it "known"?'

'Yes; known to the conductor personally from other journeys.'

'"Woman going to Warren Farm, known." What comes after that, Williams?'

Williams translated to him what came after that.

Grant wondered what Williams would think if he flung his arms round him and embraced him, after the fashion of Association Footballers to successful goal shooters.

'May I keep this for the moment?' he asked.

He could keep it for good, Williams said. It wasn't likely to be much good now. Unless—unless, of course——