Calamity in Kent, A British Library Crime Classic (6 page)

“You will know which was his room here,” I said.

“Oh, yes.”

“And you will, of course, be able to get hold of a key to it?”

“Yes, of course.”

I looked at her steadily. “Will you trust me enough to let me have a look around that room, Mrs. Skilbeck?” I said.

“You think it would help?”

“I'm sure of it. And I should not be likely to upset things—either the contents of the room or the proprietors of this hotel—as much as the police would do.”

“The police will come here?” She seemed to be a trifle alarmed at this.

“They're bound to, I think,” I admitted.

“Well,” she said, leaning back towards a board behind her. On it there were a series of hooks, each one bearing a key. “Well, you may as well come up to his room right away.” She took down a key, and glided towards the main staircase. I followed quickly, you may be sure.

Chapter VII

In Which I Examine a Dead Man's Room

Clearly John Tilsley had been in some respects a favoured guest. His room was on the first floor, and seemed to be one of the best rooms in the hotel. Mrs. Skilbeck, true to her generally stoical way of looking at things (thus, anyhow, I had summed her up), showed no emotion as she inserted the key into the lock and opened a room which, since it had belonged to the man she had expected to marry, must have had some poignant memories for her. I thought that I had never known a woman so well in control of herself.

Still, it was time for me to forget her. My job now was to examine this room carefully, and make sure that I didn't miss anything of importance in the place. I had a good look around me.

The place was typical of a bedroom in a reasonably good-class hotel. Beneath the window was a divan bed, covered with a clean counterpane of green silk. A dressing-table stood opposite the light, and on the wall was a cupboard, with a mirror front—a shaving cabinet, in other words. A basin, with hot and cold taps, was underneath it. On the opposite side of the room was a chest of drawers—a massive piece of furniture made of mahogany.

This was all the furniture that the room contained, and there was a good deal of space. In other words, the place did not look in any way overcrowded. It was a good indication that the hotel was a reasonably well-run place. The effect of spaciousness, I have often thought, is the test of good taste in furnishing.

The walls were papered; the paper was, however, not one of those hideous patterned things with crawling roses that one often sees in hotels. It was almost plain, and its general principle was cream.

Thus I had taken in the general appearance of the room. It had, of course, little that one could call character; but what hotel room has? Certainly there was nothing about it that would enable one to come to any conclusions as to the type of man who had been living in it. There was, in fact, only one small indication that it had been occupied at all—a large studio portrait of Mrs. Skilbeck, which stood on the dressing table. This provided, at any rate, some superficial confirmation of her story.

“Would his luggage be here?” I asked her.

“The empty cases, trunks, and so on, are taken down into the basement when they are unpacked,” she explained. “I imagine that all his personal possessions would be in the drawers of that chest, or of the dressing-table.” She pointed vaguely at the two pieces of furniture in question.

I looked at her. She was still clearly holding herself in, not allowing any emotion to show itself. I thought that this must be a most difficult affair for her; she must, whether she showed it or not, be feeling very worried and almost distraught.

“Would you rather leave me to do my investigations on my own?” I asked. “I know that all this must be trying and distressing to you, Mrs. Skilbeck.”

“If you don't mind,” she said, “I think that I will go downstairs. If you find anything which you would like to question me about, ring that bell”—she indicated a bell-push in the wall, close to the dressing-table. “I will be up in a moment if you ring.”

And silently as ever she glided from the room. I took a deep breath. Well, here I was! It was odd how I had managed to get right into the heart of this case, almost at the start of the job.

I wondered what Shelley would do, faced with this room to be examined. I glanced around me. I supposed that the first thing he would look for would be papers of one sort or another. But where would papers be hidden?

I made my way to the chest of drawers. Top drawer: handkerchiefs, collars, ties. No papers. Second drawer: shirts, underclothes. No papers. Third drawer: carefully folded flannel trousers. Nothing else; no papers. Fourth, bottom drawer: empty.

That had taken me only a minute or two. Perhaps the most promising piece of furniture in the room, from the point of view of being a possible hiding-place for papers, and I had drawn a complete blank. Still, I was not despondent. There were other chances yet. After all, the man must have had personal papers of some sort. No one, in these complicated days, gets on without having some kind of papers about. Letters, identity cards, and all the other paraphernalia of a complex civilisation—they must be somewhere. And even if the man had merely been on holiday, leaving most of his stuff in London, the fact remained that he would almost certainly have some papers with him in Broadgate. If, as Mrs. Skilbeck had said, he had been a commission agent of some kind, he would probably be doing some deals, even on his holiday. That sort of man is usually in some degree an adventurer, and as such never omits any chance of making some money. That, at any rate, was my experience of the fellows of the kind whom I had come across from time to time.

So the dressing table was the next thing to occupy my attention. It was a modern piece of furniture, with a huge curved mirror. There were two small drawers at the top, one on each side of the mirror, and a nest (if that's the word) of three long drawers underneath.

I glanced at the big drawers first. I didn't really think that there would be anything of importance in them. And I was quite right. Two of them were completely empty, and the other had a few odd pieces of clothing—ties, a pair of braces, a belt, and some of those sundries which do not seem to be easy to classify, if you know what I mean.

Nothing there to interest me. But the two small drawers were more promising. As I opened the first one I whistled gently to myself. The drawer was absolutely crammed with pound notes. I took them out. There was nothing in the drawer but the money. I rapidly counted them. There were over a hundred and fifty of them. A hundred and fifty pounds in notes! That seemed to tie up well enough with my suspicion that the late lamented John Tilsley might be in some way connected with the black market in some commodity; after all, the average black marketeer usually deals in cash; cheques do not suit him as a rule.

I felt pleased at this discovery. Of course, I told myself, there might well be some other explanation; but, as a first guess at what was happening, it might be that my black market idea was a useful one.

It was with a real thrill that I turned to the other drawer. It was here that some papers might be found. And my guess was right. The drawer was crammed with papers. Letters, visiting cards, and sundry odds and ends. This was what I was after. I pulled the drawer right out, took it over to the bed, and tipped it up. Its contents spread over the bed. I rapidly sorted the stuff out.

There were about a dozen visiting cards. These I put into one heap. The letters I put into a pile by themselves.

The letters I thought the best thing to look at first. They were what seemed to me most likely to yield immediate results. And immediate results, which would impress Shelley, were what I was after at the moment. I knew that if I could give the man from Scotland Yard some information that seemed valuable and important well ahead of anything that his minions were able to get, I should be well in with him, and be all the more likely to have a share of whatever information he might have been able to collect in the same time.

The first two or three letters that I looked at didn't seem to be very promising. They were the same sort of thing that I had seen in the dead man's pockets. Just personal notes, saying that the writer hoped John was enjoying his holiday. They were, in fact, the sort of letters that most of us receive when we are on a longish holiday. The people who had been writing to him were living at various London addresses, mostly in the Chelsea and Kensington areas. There was one, I noticed, from Thackeray Court, S.W.5, which I recalled was the address from which Tilsley had come.

The contents of these letters, as I said, were of no real importance. I thought that the writers were probably mere friends or acquaintances of Tilsley's and probably had little to do with him in the course of his business. Or, if they had any business with him, their letters gave little indication of it.

About the fifth letter that I opened, however, was something a little different. It made me raise my eyebrows and whistle again.

This letter bore no address and no signature. It was typewritten on cheap paper. And it read as follows:—

“As usual, I suppose, see you on Wednesday, usual place, usual time. And this time see if you can bring along some of the real stuff, my lad. My folk are getting fed-up with the stuff that you sent last time. They said that it wasn't good enough for them. So I reckon that you'll have to watch your step in future, or you'll be running into a packet of trouble.”

That was all. But it was a very suggestive letter, I thought. It seemed to go quite a long way to support my idea that Tilsley might have been doing something that was on the shady side of the law. Black marketeering might be the explanation; anyhow, whatever it was, that was a letter that Shelley would find interesting. I looked at the envelope. It was postmarked “London,” and was dated a couple of days back. “You'll have to watch your step in future, or you'll be running into a packet of trouble.” Well, Tilsley had run into a packet of trouble all right; I wondered if this letter had really had any influence on the murder.

I thought it at any rate possible that there was some real connection. Shelley might well be a better judge of that than I could possibly be. I pocketed the letter, with the idea to take it to him as soon as I had finished with the rest of the documents here.

The next thing to which I turned was a postcard. This was postmarked “Broadgate,” I noticed, and was scrawled in a hand that was either naturally uneducated, or had been deliberately designed to look like the writing of an uneducated person. This certainly seemed as if it had some direct connection with the tragic events I was enquiring into, for it read:—

“Be careful. They're after you, Take my word for it, be careful.”

Again there was no signature. I thought to myself that John Tilsley seemed to be getting rather a lot of warnings of one sort or another. Whether those warnings had any direct connection with the murder, it was, of course, impossible to say as yet, though, naturally, I inclined to the view that they had. But I hadn't really got enough experience of this sort of thing to be at all certain. I was glad that I had Shelley and all the powers of the police behind me; I knew that Shelley would be only too pleased to have my information, and to let me know how he interpreted it. But these two letters were, in a way, more than I had expected to get. I had hoped for some lead as to the sort of business that Tilsley had been doing. As yet I had no kind of indication on that point. But otherwise I was doing pretty well. I patted myself on the back, so to speak. Then I turned back to the remaining letters.

There were two or three of the purely personal ones, which I rapidly glanced at, and put on one side. There were one or two, addressed to him from Broadgate to his address in London. These were from Mrs. Skilbeck, who had, I noticed, the remarkable first name of Phoebe. They did not express any deep emotion, though, knowing the lady, I should not have expected them to do so. They began “Darling John,” and ended “Love, Phoebe,” which was, I imagined, as much as she would allow herself in the way of tender emotions on paper. But the letters, like the picture of the lady on the dressing table, provided some small confirmation of the truth of the story which she had told about being engaged to Tilsley. In fact, I had been quite impressed by the sincerity of Mrs. Skilbeck. I thought that she was one of the most patently sincere people I had ever met. I believed that she had told the truth; and if Tilsley had been a crook of some sort, I was pretty sure that she had known nothing at all about it.

I had now come more or less to the end of the letters. I had, it was true, learned nothing about Tilsley's business, but I had found a little about the way in which there might have been a basis for murder. In fact, considering the fact that I had been there such a short time, and had, really, only known of the man's existence for a matter of an hour or two, I thought I had done very well.

I left the room and made my way down the stairs. I had locked the door of Tilsley's room, and I handed the key to Mrs. Skilbeck, who was still standing inside the little reception kiosk, as if nothing at all unusual had happened.

“Any luck?” she asked quietly as I handed the key over to her.

“Some,” I said. “But there is nothing there to give any sort of indication of what exactly Mr. Tilsley's business was. You can't clarify my ideas on that point at all, I suppose?”

“Except what I have already told you—that he was working as a commission agent for various firms—I know nothing of the details of his business,” she admitted, though I felt that she might be keeping something back.

“Do you know the names of any of the firms he was working for?” I asked.

She shook her head. It was clear that I was not going to get anywhere along these lines.

“Do you know of anyone who was threatening him, of any sort of danger in which he might be?”

She looked surprised. “Did you find threatening letters?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, “not exactly threatening letters, but letters which suggested he might be running into trouble of some sort. You know nothing of that?”

“No.”

“Well, that seems to be that for the moment,” I said. “I shall be able to find you here at any time if anything else occurs to me?”

She nodded gravely, and I hared off to the police station. It was clear that I had to get hold of friend Shelley at the earliest possible moment.