Puzzle of the Silver Persian (16 page)

The Honorable Emily leaned back in her chair. “Tell me!” she begged. And for more than an hour she listened, engrossed, while Miss Withers recounted some of her adventures. “And so they hung both of them at San Quentin,” she finished. “I’m afraid it isn’t a very pleasant bed-time story.”

“You’ve given me something to think about,” said the Honorable Emily, and hurried off to bed.

Miss Withers slept, and was awakened shortly before noon by a crash of her door against the chair which she had placed as a barrier. She rose sleepily and found the maid standing outside.

“Excuse me, mum—”

“Never mind. It’s high time I was up. Send a waiter with some breakfast, will you? I’m starved.” Miss Withers had a sudden doubt. “I don’t suppose I’ve slept two nights and a day, have I?”

“This is Thursday, mum.”

“Then it’s all right. By the way, how is the young lady down the hall? The one in 505?”

“Her that was sick last night? She’s peaked, mum. But she ate a good breakfast. The perlice was up to see her, and just a few minutes ago I saw her going downstairs with a young man.”

“A young man? A policeman?”

The maid was loquacious. “No, mum. The handsome young man down on the third floor.”

Miss Withers heaved a sigh of relief. “All right, you can go. And tell the waiter I want two eggs this morning.”

She had finished the eggs when she had another caller. Sergeant Secker knocked on her door.

“Good-morning,” she greeted him. “Going to accept me as a consultant?”

He declined a cup of tea. “As a matter of fact, I came on such an errand. You can help us, if you will. I’m not giving away any secrets when I tell you that we’ve traced that box of cigarettes.”

Miss Withers had not expected this. “You know who packed it with poison?”

“Well, not exactly. Our laboratory expert, Sir Leonard Tilton, had a look at it this morning and found that only a dozen or so of the topmost cigarettes were doped. The prettiest ones, as a matter of fact. And he’s still trying to figure out just what the effect would have been if the girl had finished smoking one. He never ran up against cyanide used as incense before.”

“Yes,” urged Miss Withers. “But who sent it?”

“That’s what I’m here to ask you,” said the sergeant brightly. “You see, the box was sold by the main store of the manufacturer, Empey’s, of the Strand. It was ordered by telephone and sent C.O.D. to a Mrs. Charles at the Norwich Hotel. That is a little lodging-house place, full of transients, on an alley off Charing Cross. Mrs. Charles only booked her room for a few hours, it seems. All the record they had of her—she hadn’t even registered, unfortunately—was that she wore a gray fur coat.”

Miss Withers dropped her teacup. “A
what?”

“Not a what. A gray fur coat. The people who run the place have their own reasons for not being too friendly with us at the Yard.”

Miss Withers was staring at the wall. After a moment she said, “Did they mention a long blue silk scarf?”

“They didn’t mention anything,” said Secker. “We dragged it out of them. No, I heard nothing of a scarf.” The sergeant cocked his head. “I came over to ask if you knew any woman connected with this case who has such a coat?”

Miss Withers shook her head absently, more at herself than in answer to his question. “Tell me,” she demanded. “Did you have sense enough to search the room of this mysterious Mrs. Charles?”

The sergeant nodded. “The room was without personality,” he said. “Just a bed and a chair and a bureau. One of those gas heaters that you put a shilling in, you know.”

“But there was
nothing?
Not even a pin or a scrap of paper?”

The sergeant fished in his pocket and brought out a racing form, two lottery tickets, and finally an envelope. “Only this scrap of paper,” he said. “It was with some ashes underneath the gas heater.”

Miss Withers saw, as she had feared to see, a tiny bit of charred paper, paper of a cream color and bearing a faint blue rule across it.

“I see,” she said. But she most emphatically did not see.

“I’ll be running along,” said the sergeant. “Oh, by the way. No need to worry over young Reverson. His story about the chrysanthemums seems to be truthful. The florist remembered him, and so did the page boy. Somebody must have thrown away his flowers and stuck his card in the poisoned cigarettes.”

“As simply as that, eh? So the chief inspector has it all figured out.”

Sergeant Secker looked at her. “Don’t you underestimate old Cannon,” he said. “He’s a real bloodhound. And you know, he’s been handed over this whole affair to sort out—Noel, Todd, and the attempt on Candida Noring’s life. Me, I’m still stuck with the Fraser suicide, and messenger-boy errands in between. Which reminds me that I’d better get back to my sleuthing for a lady in a gray fur coat.”

“Good hunting,” Miss Withers wished him.

She spent the rest of the day at the British Museum, buried in a heap of voluminous tomes in the reading room. When she came out she knew a great deal about the properties and effects of cyanide of potassium in its many forms, but nothing more about the series of mysteries and suicides which was beginning to prey upon her mind to an uncomfortable degree. “And I took this trip for a rest!” she said sadly to herself.

Returning to the hotel, she met Candida and Leslie Reverson, dressed for the evening and headed for a taxi.

“You children seemed undaunted,” she remarked.

“Oh, quite,” said Leslie Reverson.

Candida drew closer. “We’re going out because I’m too nervous to stay in my room,” she confessed.

She seemed paler than ever. Miss Withers wondered again at the way in which she had lost the tanned look of out-of-doors healthiness which had been hers on the boat.

“How do you feel after your narrow escape?” she inquired.

“Shaky,” Candida confessed. “But Leslie thought I’d feel better if we went out to dinner and a variety show. And I feel safe with him.”

“Safe as a vault,” said Leslie gallantly. Miss Withers thought of some vaults that she had seen, and smiled wryly.

She touched Leslie’s sleeve, drawing him aside. “Watch over her,” she whispered.

“Nothing else but,” said Leslie Reverson. It was a phrase that he had learned in Chicago, and he was proud of it.

The young couple rolled away in a taxi, with Miss Withers staring after them. They made a good pair—the new Leslie and the new Candida. After all, their ages couldn’t be so very unlike. Candida, who had had no youth, and Leslie, who had had too much… “She has strength enough for both of them,” said Miss Withers to herself.

She dined in solitary splendor in the hotel dining room, and then, feeling very much at a loose end, decided to forget the problems which beset her and follow the example of the younger set. A vaudeville show, she thought, might be just the thing. It was true that her old friend and one-time fiancé, Oscar Piper of the New York police, had dragged her against her will to the Palace on several occasions, but this was England, and besides, she did not feel up to a play or concert.

She bought a ticket at the hotel desk for the Palladium, and then walked northward through the bewildering little streets of London. After a certain amount of wandering, she found the theater and sat through a show comprising most of the best vaudeville acts she had seen in New York at the Palace in the past two years. She came out onto Oxford Street, hurried along by the crowd, and sought for a bobby to ask how to get back to Trafalgar Square. Strangely enough, there was no stalwart figure in black rubber cape on the corner—but she did glimpse a familiar form which made her start.

She saw Tom Hammond aiding a rather garishly dressed young woman to board a bus marked “Marble Arch-Edgware Road.” He stood back as the vehicle rolled away, waved his hand rather casually, and then started back across the street.

It had not been Loulu Hammond, that girl. Miss Withers was positive of that. There were many questions she would have liked to ask Tom Hammond. For lack of anything better to do, she followed him down Oxford Street, keeping a discreet distance behind.

He rounded a corner, and when she came after him he was out of sight. Miss Withers found herself standing beneath a canopy marked Oxford-Palace. Peering inside, she saw Hammond at a hotel desk. He accepted a key and moved toward the elevator. She would have liked to follow, but she noted that the time was nearing midnight. “At least I know where the Hammonds are staying,” she told herself “Tomorrow will do just as well.”

But tomorrow was Friday, the day set for the inquest into the death of Andy Todd. She had forgotten that, until she was reminded by a telephone call in the morning from Sergeant Secker.

“There may not be anything to it,” he said. “But you’d better be there. At any rate, you won’t have to go away out to the East End. It’s being held just off Drury Lane.”

She found the place without difficulty, but was disappointed in the ceremony. Here was not even the modest drama of the other inquest, though many of the same people sat on the wooden benches.

Chief Inspector Cannon sat at the table behind the coroner, and evidently the sergeant was telling the truth about his being handed over the whole case, for there was no sign of the heavy-handed Filsom. There was a sketchy identification of the body, mostly from Todd’s passport photograph, and testimony from a police surgeon who seemed to have been poured out of the same mold as his fellow medico at the other inquest. He told the jury that the deceased had met his death as the result of a fall of four stories—three floors and a basement—and that the autopsy showed an excessive amount of alcohol in the brain.

“The body was badly injured in the fall,” finished the surgeon.

“Would you say unusually damaged?” inquired the coroner.

The doctor wouldn’t say that. He had seen worse. But not from a fall of that distance. If the man hadn’t been drunk he might have got off with only some broken bones, but as it was he had been unable to catch hold of anything or to land on his feet and had struck head first, with the natural result.

“Were the circumstances such as to impel you to a belief that death was by suicide?” inquired the coroner.

The police surgeon nodded, but before he could speak Chief Inspector Cannon had risen to his feet.

“I
should like to request that this hearing be postponed, sir,” he said. “For reasons satisfactory to the police.”

This remark did not seem to surprise the coroner in the slightest. He was of a somewhat milder temperament than Maggers, Miss Withers decided.

“Very well,” he decided. “I shall adjourn this hearing until Monday week, at the request of Scotland Yard.”

“And that’s that,” Sergeant Secker greeted Miss Withers as she hurried out of the place.

“It certainly is,” she told him cryptically. She did not care to linger, for she had something on her mind.

It was shortly before twelve o’clock, and she hoped to catch the Hammonds before they went out for the day’s sightseeing, or whatever it was that they had come to London for. She took a taxi and was whisked away to the Oxford-Palace.

She marched up to the desk, across a foyer all in glass and silver—a modernistic scheme of decoration which reminded her, by contrast, of her own hotel. She asked the clerk for Mr. or Mrs. Hammond.

“I’ll see if they’re in,” he promised. He reached for a desk phone and dialed a number.

“No answer.” But he was anxious to oblige. “If you’ll wait a moment I’ll find out if they left a message.”

He darted away and was gone for some minutes. Then he came back, shaking his head.

“That’s odd,” he remarked. “They’ve gone.”

“Gone?” Miss Withers looked puzzled.

“Yes, madam. I was off duty yesterday. But it seems that Mrs. Hammond left yesterday morning, and Mr. Hammond very late last night. I was sure that they were here, because there’s some mail in their box.”

“Oh?” Miss Withers concocted an artifice. “I’m a close relative. Can you give me their address?”

The clerk shook his head. “Only that their mail was sent here from the American Express, and I suppose that we shall have to send it back there.”

Miss Withers nodded. “And Master Hammond?” she asked.

By the expression of distaste on the clerk’s face she knew that he had had experiences with the terrible Gerald. “Master Hammond left with his mother,” he said.

Miss Withers thanked him and then displayed a half crown. “It’s a little unusual,” she explained. “But I wonder if you would mind looking in the Hammonds’ mail to see if they received a letter I sent them yesterday. It’s quite important.”

The young man declined the half crown magnificently. “I understand,” he said. He reached behind him and took from an upper box a little sheaf of letters. “All from the States,” he said. “Except this.” He showed her a letter with a border inked with black. It bore the brick-colored penny-ha’penny stamp of the Royal Mail.

His voice took on a note of polite respect. “A death in the family?” he said. “Unfortunately, they left before this arrived.”

Miss Withers had also left, leaving the half crown behind her. She ordered lunch at a near-by restaurant, but had little appetite for it. She could not help thinking of another table at which she had lunched—a round table in the dining saloon of the
American Diplomat.
There had been Rosemary Fraser—she was gone. Andy Todd had likewise departed, willingly or unwillingly… after the receipt of a black-bordered letter. Such a letter had come to Candida Noring, and she had escaped death by the skin of her teeth, as Miss Withers would have put it.

That left the Honorable Emily, Leslie, the Hammonds, and herself of the group who had sat at the doctor’s table.

“I ought to do something,” Miss Withers told herself. But she wasn’t sure just what she must do. There was no use warning the Honorable Emily or Leslie: they had had warning enough. The Hammonds, in spite of the black-bordered note, were out of reach—both of the murderer and of herself. If she could not warn them, it seemed likely that the murderer could not reach them.

Just to calm heir conscience, Miss Withers dispatched a telegram to Tom Hammond, care of the American Express, and telling him to take his wife and child as far from London as he could possibly manage. “Though he’ll only think I’m crazy,” she admitted to herself.