Dead Man’s Shoes (16 page)

There was not a photograph in the house, either. That was not extraordinary so far as any display of photographs was concerned. Many people detest them to be framed and shown. But in this case there were none put away anywhere. Surely not many people, except of the most primitive races, have homes in which there are no personal papers, no handwritten words and not a single snapshot?

But what puzzled Carolus most was the contents of the kitchen cupboard. Remembering Lance's description of Larkin as a very good cook who invited Lance to excellent dinners which he cooked himself, Carolus expected to find here at least some indication of the man's tastes. There was a packet of tea, some sugar, salt, a bottle of tomato sauce, a
jar of marmalade and a bottle of vinegar. The rest of the space was occupied with tinned food—baked beans, tinned vegetables, sardines, corned beef, even tinned meat loaf. There were no spices, no wine. In the kitchen itself there was no sign of onions, garlic or herbs. Scarcely, one would have thought, the stock-in-trade of a gourmet.

Turning to the
batterie de cuisine,
Carolus found that it consisted of one frying-pan, one saucepan and a kettle. This mystified him and he remained for some time looking unhappily at the poor little collection, then went upstairs again.

As he stood on the landing he became aware of a sound from the floor below. Someone was slowly opening the front door.

Carolus stood still. He would wait till the intruder was inside and had shut the door before interrupting him. Whoever it was, he must be aware that someone was in the house, since the front door was unlocked. But he might not expect that it was Carolus.

Presently Carolus moved to the door and started going downstairs. He neither hurried nor dawdled. A man was looking up at him, a large dark man with a heavy face and sullen eyes.

“What do you want here?” asked Carolus coolly.

“You Mr Deene?” The fellow spoke in a deep raw voice and even from those few syllables it was evident that English was not his language.

“Yes. How did you know I was here?”

“Never mind that. I've watched you since you landed. I want to talk to you.”

“Go ahead.”

“You do no good here. You go back to England.”

“What's this nonsense? A threat of some kind?”

“More than a threat. I tell you plain. You do no good here. Leave things alone you don't know about.”

Carolus smiled.

“That's exactly what I can never do,” he said chattily. “I'm the most inquisitive person.”

“This time you must. It isn't for a joke, I tell you.”

“Cigarette?”

What made Carolus uncomfortable was that the other was as composed outwardly as he was. This was not, in other words, a piece of acted melodrama. The man, whoever he was, was sincere.

“Look here,” the man went on, “you don't know about this. You forget what you know already. This is not the thing you think—it's a bigger thing.”

“Very likely. That makes it more attractive. But what chiefly interests me is not anything to do with Larkin's past life, except in so far as it enables me to discover who killed Gregory Willick. Anything that he may have done here is not my business.”

The man seemed to consider this.

“It doesn't matter. It's all one. You leave the whole thing alone, as the English police have done. It is a serious thing. You look for other things to investigate. This is not a thing for a man's hobby.”

“I'm sorry, you know, but it is. I'm tired of cases in which all I've got to do is to solve a problem. I've been waiting for you to turn up, in a sense, ever since I started to be interested in crime.”

“You mean you refuse? You will not give up and go home?”

“Oh dear me, no. I can't tell you how interested I've become in this case in the last half-hour.”

“Then I shall have to kill you.”

The man spoke quietly, almost regretfully and, Carolus believed, with deadly sincerity.

“I don't think so,” said Carolus. “I don't think you are very likely to try, and I'm quite sure you wouldn't succeed. But let's talk of more sensible things. What is your interest in the matter?”

“That is not important. It is sufficiently strong for me to do exactly what I have said.”

“You've plenty of experience, I daresay?”

“Yes. I have experience.”

“What is your name?”

“Michaelis. They call me Mike.”

“You live here?”

“For the moment. Now you listen, Mr Deene. You fly back to England tomorrow. I mean it. I
must
do what I say if you stay. No other remedy. You believe me?”

“I believe you mean what you say. I think you would be more likely to influence me if you would tell me a little more. Why is it essential that I go? Am I getting warm, as we used to say in the children's guessing game? Are you, or is someone else, afraid that I shall find out the truth?”

“No one is afraid of anything. But you cannot stay here.”

“What would you say if I told you that I had discovered the truth already? Not the details, certainly, but the basic fact from which all details come?”

“I should say you were a liar. There is no basic fact. This is something you do not understand.”

“You are wrong there, you know. I do not understand it all, certainly, but I know what happened to Larkin and I know who killed Gregory Willick.”

“These are not altogether the questions.”

“But they are. The only questions for me. I'm not interested in anything else about Larkin. I don't want to know, for instance, where he got his money. I set out to find out who killed Willick, and I know.”

“Can you prove that to me? Can you prove that you know?”

“By asking you a question, yes.”

“A question?”

The big man stood over Carolus. His attitude was not exactly threatening—it was clear that he had come to give a warning and no more. Probably, Carolus considered, his
orders were to leave it at that. But he was evidently baffled, perhaps perturbed, by the turn the conversation had taken.

“What question?” he asked.

“This. Where are the dead man's shoes?”

If Michaelis was startled or even surprised by this he did not show it. He looked calmly at Carolus, then turned to go.

“Aren't you going to answer?” asked Carolus. “Or don't you know?”

“I tell you once more, Mr Deene. You may be a clever man but you are acting like a fool. Surely you understand a man like me? I do not lie and threaten empty words. You go back to England on the plane tomorrow. You don't play around here.”

He said no more and Carolus watched him slowly go out and close the door after him.

T
HE FIRST
thing to do was to get rid of Rupert Priggley. Carolus was convinced that the man called Michaelis was not bluffing and that there was real danger in the situation. He could not possibly expose a schoolboy to that, however often he had flippantly besought a violent death for Priggley.

He thought it over as he locked the house and made his way by the passage and narrow street Lance had shown him. He realized that it was going to be no easy matter. Priggley was enjoying Tangier and if he suspected that he was being sent away from possible danger he would flatly refuse to move. That would involve Carolus in dragging in the Consul and cause a lot of trouble all round. The best thing would be to give Priggley some job in England connected with the case—send him down to Barton Abbess perhaps on the plea that events and people there should be under day-to-day observation.

He found a taxi in the Kasbah square and gave the driver Lance Willick's address. Watching the speedometer, he saw that the total distance from the Kasbah, which was two hundred yards from Larkin's house to Lance's, was less than half a kilometre, so that the whole distance could be covered on foot in ten minutes.

Lance's home was the opposite to Larkin's. It was not without taste but entirely modern, its bric-a-brac from Scandinavia and Germany instead of the Mohammedan countries.

Lance seemed both amicable and hospitable.

“Find anything?” he asked when he had poured long cool drinks for them both.

“Yes. Quite a lot. Or rather there was quite a lot I didn't find. The kitchen cupboard had practically nothing but a packet of tea in it. You told me that Larkin was a very good cook.”

Lance laughed.

“He was a little crazy, you know. He thought more about his bits and pieces of cookery than his collections of old pottery and glass. When he was going away he borrowed an old trunk of mine to pack the lot in so that they could be stored in safety.”

“Here?” asked Carolus.

“No. I don't know where he put that trunk. He probably would not trust my servants. What else was missing?”

“There wasn't a line of handwriting, a personal document, a letter or a photograph in the whole house. And like the cabin in the
Saragossa
the place was without a single spare pair of shoes.”

“Those shoes seem to worry you. Perhaps Larkin only kept one pair. It wouldn't have been his only eccentricity.”

“It certainly wouldn't.”

Carolus decided to say nothing to Lance Willick about Michaelis. The less people who knew about that, the better. He took his leave soon after lunch, conveniently forgetting to return the key of Larkin's house.

That afternoon he decided to use a letter of introduction he had obtained to a high-ranking police officer and went to the Comisaria. He found his man a business-like but friendly Belgian, to whom he explained his business in Tangier, emphasizing that he was working as an amateur on a crime which had happened in England, in other words that he was in no way interfering in Tangerine affairs. This explained, he said he would like to ask a favour—that a fingerprint expert should accompany him to Larkin's house and obtain a few prints of the late inhabitant. The policeman, after explaining good-humouredly how irregular it was, agreed. It was arranged that the finger-print man should
call for Carolus tomorrow at eleven in the morning when, presumably, he would have got rid of Rupert Priggley.

He soon found that this was going to be harder than he thought. Priggley came to dinner that night in high spirits with two pieces of news. The fact that he threw these at Carolus with the most
blase
unconcern did not mean that he was not inwardly thrilled by them.

“The beach was pretty good today,” he began.

“Yes?”

“Met a little piece from Milan. Quite a reasonable number.”

“You did?”

“You know, proportionate, if nothing else.”

“Proportionate ?”

Rupert made expressive curves in the air.

“Oh, I see. You mean well-proportioned.”

“Don't be carping. I mean she's a reasonable bit of nonsense for the time we're here. You won't have to worry yourself about your pupil. You'll know exactly where I am and what I'm doing.”

“I should hate even to imagine that. But in any case I've got something to tell you presently which I'm afraid will change all that. An end to frolics. You have work to do. But that can wait till after dinner. What else have you done besides meet the young girl from Milan?”

“Don't talk as though she was something in a limerick. I've told you she'll do for the rest of our stay here. What else? I've found out something for you.”

“Indeed? Perhaps you know who killed Gregory Willick?”

“No. But I've found someone who'll help you to find out.”

“Who's this?”

“Character called Eric Luck. Keeps a bar here.”

“How is he going to help?”

“You are rather obtuse sometimes, sir. You surely don't
think I would be recommending you this if I hadn't good reason? Eric is a Character.”

“Frankly I'm rather sick of Characters. They're usually frantic bores playing up to some idiotic role that has been thrust on them.”

“Eric's the real thing. He's been ‘in' four times, including once on Dartmoor and once in Italy. He preferred Italy. The food was better, so was the organization. He comes from a family so drearily respectable that he took to crime chiefly to annoy them.”

“What's he doing here?”

“He skipped his bail on a larceny charge in England and he's resting. No visiting journalist fails to write him up. Sometimes they make him an ex-gangster dying of consumption and starvation in the Moorish quarter, sometimes they make him an ex-gangster leading a life of luxury in Tangier with a large American car, a yacht in the harbour and a harem of women at his beck and call. Sometimes they make him an ex-gangster who is the boss of the waterfront mob, a hard-bitten smuggler. One way or another he gets a bigger Press than a film star.”

“But what use is that to me?”

“There's nothing about this town he doesn't know. He's been here over five years and he can tell you the lot. The lot. You've only got to drop in at his bar.”

When they had finished dinner, Carolus called Rupert rather mysteriously aside and told him gravely if ambiguously that he had received a telegram from England.

“I'm afraid you've got to go back at once,” he said, “and get down to Barton Abbess as quickly as you can. I'll join you in a couple of days when I've finished here.”

“Oh, look here, sir, what about my Italian number? She …”

“This is pretty urgent. I want you to keep the whole lot under observation during the next few days. Particularly Gusset, Ridge, Socker and Packinlay. There's a good bit
more about the past to find out, too. They didn't tell me everything. Stay at the Barton Bridge and see if you can make Mrs Gunn admit that she knew about Willick's usual afternoon walk.”

“When do you want me to go?”

“I've booked you a seat on the plane leaving tomorrow morning. I've hired a car to drive us to the airport. I'm sorry you're missing this, but you must see it's urgent.”