Murder in the Museum, A British Library Crime Classic (10 page)

Chapter XIII

Cunningham on the Trail

Cunningham leaned forward eagerly in his seat at the back of the flying-squad car, peering over the driver's shoulder at the streaming road ahead. Rain had started, and the streets were muddy mirrors in which the headlamps of passing cars reflected brilliantly.

Soon they were outside Henry Fairhurst's house at Streatham, and here the trail really began.

“I wonder,” mused Cunningham, “if there is any through route from here to Pinner? Are there any buses which run through, do you think?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” said one of his companions. “I used to go with a girl out this way, and so I know.”

“Splendid,” said Cunningham. “Which way?”

“Out on the main road,” said the other. “First on the right and then second on the left. The buses start out there—it's the main road, you see.”

“First right, second left,” snapped Cunningham, and the driver obeyed promptly.

“Now what?” asked Cunningham as they got there.

“Here's the bus,” remarked the constable as a great red giant came lumbering down the street towards them. “If we follow that, I reckon we shall be following the way that the young lady went. Yes—see, it's South Harrow and Pinner that it goes to.”

Cunningham chafed at the inactivity now forced upon him. Their car, with its great potentialities of speed, crawled along in the wake of the great bus, stopped when the London Transport vehicle stopped, and started again when the passengers had alighted and made their slippery way to the pavement.

The rain was descending in sheets, and along the lengthy road ahead of them the yellow glow of the street lamps stretched in a seemingly endless line into the distance. The paler colour of gas lamps took their place, and then the hideous sheen of the newer type of daylight lamps made their faces look ghastly as they peered at the road where it slipped away, an endless shiny ribbon ahead.

After this had continued for some time they saw a traffic policeman, a solemn, solitary figure in a streaming mackintosh cape, standing in the middle of the road where another important artery of traffic crossed it at right angles. Cunningham spoke excitedly.

“Stop!” he said. “Let's see if this fellow has anything to say.”

They stopped, and Cunningham pulled down the window at his side of the car, and popped his head out, looking intently at the policeman.

“Here,” he said, and the constable approached. Cunningham showed him his authorisation as a Scotland Yard man, and described what they were after.

“A young lady,” he said, “was travelling on a bus to Pinner and Harrow. She was probably hailed by a young man”—and he described Moses Moss—“who took her off the bus, probably in his car.”

Stolidly the constable shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “Seen nothing like that, Sergeant. Nothing at all out of the usual has happened here this evening, I'm afraid. Sorry I can't help you.”

Cunningham shut the window with a slam, and ordered the driver to go on. The madcap chase after nothingness started once more. He remembered similar chases in the past, when he had been in the company of Shelley, thought of the times that he had spent in racing thus after desperate characters, never quite knowing what might be waiting for him at his journey's end. Never before, however, had he chased something as vague as this, never before had he been engaged in trying to track down something that might never exist at all. Still, it was enough for him that Shelley had a “hunch” on the matter, for he was quite prepared to back Shelley's “hunches” as much as he would back another man's certainties.

Soon they found another traffic policeman, but here again they drew blank, and, his temper fast deteriorating, Cunningham ordered the policeman at the wheel to drive on once more. And again this happened…and again…and again. At last Cunningham began to think that the whole affair was the craziest of wild-goose chases, for they were now drawing near to Pinner. Above them on the hill they could see the tower of Harrow Church, and still they had not succeeded in finding the least trace of Miss Arnell and her possibly hypothetical kidnapper.

At last, however, just as they emerged on to the main street of Pinner, still “old-world,” if in a somewhat more self-conscious manner than of yore, they struck oil. They found a policeman who seemed to have some memory of Miss Arnell and a man who took her off the bus.

“Yes,” he said. “I remember a fellow taking a girl off a bus. Just along the main street here, it was, just by the bus-stop down there. She was a pretty girl”—here Cunningham swiftly produced a portrait of Violet Arnell with which he had been careful to provide himself, and it was rapidly identified by the constable.

“What happened to her?” Cunningham asked with some eagerness.

“She was on the bus, as I said, and a young fellow came along in a low racing car—one of them noisy things that makes a roar as they go along,” said the constable. “He stopped the car just in front of the bus, and jumped out. He hopped on to the bus, and must have spoken to her, for she got off the bus with him.”

“Did she seem to know him?”

“Now you mention it, I shouldn't have said she did.”

“Why not?” Cunningham was more eager than ever now. It began to look as if he was getting on to the trail with a vengeance. He had scarcely dared to hope that he would do so, his successive failures on the long road having driven a rod of pessimism into his soul.

“Well.” The policeman scratched his head thoughtfully. “'Tis difficult to lay my tongue on any exact reason. But I think it looked as if she was arguing with him, saying ‘What the devil do you want with me?'—if you understand what I mean.”

“I think I do,” said Cunningham, and prepared to play his trump card. He fished in his pocket and produced a photograph of Moses Moss.

“Was this the man?” he asked.

Again the slow policeman scratched his head.

“It might be,” he said cautiously.

“What do you mean, it might be?” asked Cunningham in irritated tones.

“I mean what I say, Sergeant,” responded the other. “It's not easy to identify anybody in the light of these lamps when they're nigh on fifty feet away.”

“Still, you identified the lady without any difficulty,” Cunningham objected.

“Ah, but that's different. You see,” he said with what was almost a leer, “young ladies don't grow beards.”

“Beards?” Cunningham was almost startled by this new item of information.

“Yes. The young fellow had a beard. One of them little black things, like a tuft of grass stuck on the end of their chins,” explained the constable.

“Black?”

“Yes.”

Cunningham rapidly sketched in a neat little beard on the photograph, and handed it to the policeman again.

“What about it now?” he asked. “Would you say that it looked like him now?”

“No,” said the man decisively. “You've drawn the beard a bit more pointed than his was, but I'm dead sure that it wasn't the fellow. His head was a different shape. 'Twas more squarer, if you follow what I mean.”

“H'm.” Cunningham was nonplussed. This was a real problem. If the kidnapper was not Moses Moss, who could it be? It was, of course, possible that the man was mistaken. Moss might have disguised himself effectively, and the disguise might even have seemed better than it was, so that the constable had been completely deceived by it. Still, on the other hand, it was possible that the young man who had taken Violet Arnell off the bus had not been Moses Moss at all, in which case they would have to begin their theorising all over again. Anyhow, that was Shelley's job, Cunningham reminded himself. His own immediate task was to get as much information as he could on the spot.

“What happened afterwards?” he asked.

“She got in his car and they drove off,” answered the man.

“What direction?”

“They seemed to be making north,” answered the other with a knowing smile. “Making for the Great North Road they were. Gretna Green, if you ask me.”

“I didn't ask you,” Cunningham snapped.

“Anything more, then?”

Cunningham pondered the matter for a while, wondering what Shelley would want to know about the case, when he came to hand in his report later.

“One thing,” he said at length. “Do you happen to know who were conductor and driver on the bus?”

“As it happens, I do,” answered the policeman. “In my place, you see, we get to know most of the regular men on the routes passing here.”

“Who were they?”

“The driver was Harry Davison, and the conductor Bill Angelus,” answered the policeman. All his replies, Cunningham noticed, were given without any hesitation. He was clearly a man who used his eyes. Even though he might occasionally be irritatingly obtuse, he had nevertheless that gift of acute observation which is of such vital importance to the first-rate policeman.

“What depot would they clock in at?” asked the man from Scotland Yard.

“Willesden, I think,” replied the other.

“Which way?” asked Cunningham.

“Straight through here,” answered his informant. “You can't miss it. Just follow straight through along the main road. You'll be there in a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes at the most.”

This time Cunningham did not chafe at his inactivity. The fast car was full out. Such things as speed limits were forgotten, and they skidded perilously at one or two sharp corners. But they soon got to Willesden, and were, before very long, in earnest colloquy with the manager of the bus depot.

Cunningham explained that he wanted a word with Harry Davison and Bill Angelus, adding that a suspicious character was rumoured to have been on the bus which was in their charge that afternoon and evening.

The manager glanced at the clock. “They'll be in any moment now,” he said. “As a matter of fact, they're two or three minutes overdue already, but it's difficult to keep up to time schedules with this beastly weather. The roads get so slippery that they have to be mighty careful with those heavy buses.”

Soon the two men arrived. Harry Davison was a heavy-jowled man with grizzled grey hair, and Bill Angelus a small man with bright red hair.

Cunningham explained his mission, and the driver announced at once that he knew nothing whatever about the incident, which, of course, was what the detective had anticipated, for it was not to be expected that the man in the front seat of the bus should have seen anything that was happening behind him. He would be far too intent in watching the road ahead and on listening for the conductor's bell, signalling the restart.

“I remember it, mister,” said the conductor, and Cunningham breathed again. The information had taken some tracking down, but it looked as if he was to get the required confirmation of the evidence already gained in Pinner.

“Yes,” he said. “What happened? Tell me the whole story from the beginning.”

Bill took a deep breath and started.

“She got on in Streatham,” he said, “and took a sixpenny ticket to Pinner.”

“Do you usually remember each one of your passengers like this, Bill?” asked Cunningham, and the little man grinned cheerfully.

“Not everyone, by any means, governor,” he said. “But I do remember anybody when there's anything peculiar happened to 'em, like there did to this young lady, as I'm about to tell you.”

“I see. Carry on.”

“Well, she sat there, reading her paper, and then, when we stopped at the first stop in Pinner High Street there was a big racing car roared up and stopped just ahead of us—I think Harry must have seen it, didn't you?” he added, turning to the driver, who nodded surly confirmation.

“The young fellow who drove this car hopped out quick, as soon as he was stopped in front of us. He came around to the bus, jumped in, and went straight up to the young lady. ‘Miss Arnell, I think,' he says, in a thick, foreign-sounding sort of voice.”

“Foreign-sounding?” said Cunningham. “What do you mean? Had he a foreign accent?”

“Not exactly accent. More like a thick, deep, rough sort of voice. Sort of German voice, if you know what I mean,” added the conductor, obviously finding it difficult to make his exact meaning clear.

“Yes, I think I understand,” said Cunningham. “And what did the lady say?”

“She said ‘Who are you?' in a frightened sort of voice. And he said ‘I'm your friend. H.B. is in trouble, and he sent me to you.'”

Cunningham was fairly jumping with excitement now.

“What happened next?” he asked.

“She said ‘Has he escaped?' and the man said ‘We can't talk here. If you'll come with me I'll take you straight to him.' And he took hold of her wrist and fairly dragged her off the bus. As we started off I glanced back and saw them getting into his car. So I reckon that he was right. He was taking her off to see some pal of hers. Maybe her boy-friend had escaped from the jug or something,” the conductor added helpfully.

“What was the man like?” asked Cunningham.

“Weedy little chap,” said the conductor. “About five foot five, I should think. Thin and miserable-looking. He had black hair, long, greasy-looking, and untidy, and he had a little black beard—a silly little beard like a lot of the fellows calling themselves artists what we sometimes pick up out Chelsea way.”

“That's very helpful, Bill,” announced Cunningham. “I'm very much obliged to you.”

He produced his photograph of Moses Moss, on which the beard was still pencilled. “This the fellow?” he asked.

Bill shook his head.

“The beard may be the wrong shape,” Cunningham warned him. “I think that it may be a disguise, and I have to draw it in on a photograph of the man when he was clean-shaved.”

“No,” said Bill firmly. “That's not the fellow. He had a different shape face from that photo. Ask Harry here.”