The Man in the Queue (10 page)

It was late when Grant got home, but he had not left an avenue of exploration untrodden. With the coming of evening the spate of reported appearances had gradually diminished and died away. But as he ate his supper—to Mrs. Field a meal was a necessary concomitant to a homecoming—he was wearily conscious of the telephone by the fireplace. He went to bed and dreamed that Ray Marcable called him by telephone and said, "You'll never find him, never, never!" She kept repeating the phrase, unheeding of his pleas for information and help, and he wished that the exchange girl would say "Time up" and release him. But before that relief had come the telephone had turned into a fishing-rod without exciting any surprise on his part, and he was using it, not as a fishing-rod but as a whip to encourage the four-in-hand which he was driving down a street in Nottingham. At the end of the street was a marsh, and in front of the marsh, and exactly in the middle of the street, stood the waitress from the hotel. He tried to call out to her as the horses advanced, but his voice died in his throat. Instead, the waitress grew bigger and bigger, until she filled the whole street. As the horses were about to charge into her she had grown so that she towered over Grant and overwhelmed him, the horses, the street, and everything. He had that sense of inevitability which attends the moment of a catastrophe. It's come, he thought, and woke to thankful consciousness of a safe pillow and a reasonable world where there was motive before action. Damn that cheese souffle! he thought, and, turning on his back, surveyed the dark ceiling and let his now wide-awake brain go its own way.

Why had the man hidden his identity? Was it perhaps mere accident? Nothing but the tailor's name had been obliterated from his clothes, and the makers' name had been left on the tie—surely a most obvious place if one had been deliberately eliminating identification marks. But if it were a mere accident that eliminated the tailor's name, how account for the scantiness of the man's belongings? Small change, a handkerchief, and a revolver. Not even a watch. It spoke loudly of intended suicide. Perhaps the man was broke. He didn't look it, but that was no criterion. Grant had known many paupers who looked like millionaires, and beggars with large bank balances. Had the man, at the end of his resources, decided to end it rather than sink slowly into the gutter? Had the visit to the theatre with his last few shillings been merely a snapping of fingers in the face of the gods who had defeated him? Was it merely the final irony that the dagger had anticipated his own revolver by an hour or two? But if he were broke, why had he not gone to the friend for money—the friend who was so free with his bank-notes? Or had he? and the friend had refused it? Was it conscience, after all, that had prompted that anonymous twenty-five pounds? If he decided to accept the presence of the revolver and the absence of clues as evidence of intended suicide, then the murder resolved itself into the outcome of a quarrel—probably between two members of a race gang. Perhaps the Levantine had shared in the dead man's downfall and had held the dead man responsible. That was the most reasonable explanation. And it fitted all the circumstances. The man was interested in racing—probably a bookmaker—he was found without watch or money and evidently prepared for suicide; the Levantine was heard to demand something which the dead man either could not or would not give, and the Levantine had stabbed him. The friend who had refused him help in life—probably tired of pulling him out of tight places—had been seized with such a fit of remorse on learning of the man's end that he had provided lavishly, if anonymously, for his burial. Pure theory, but it fitted—almost! There was one corner where no amount of insinuation would make it fit. It did not explain why no one had come forward to claim the dead man. If the affair were merely a quarrel between two men, intimidation was washed out as a theory for the silence of his friends. It was not credible that the foreigner had them all in such a state of subjection that not one of them risked even that usual method of the craven and the circumspect, the anonymous communication. It was a curious and almost unique situation. Never in all Grant's experience had a murderer been on the point of being captured before the identity of his victim had been established.

A light rain felt across the window-pane with stealthy fingers. The end of the good weather, thought Grant. A silence followed, dark and absolute. It was as if an advance guard, a scout, had spied out the land and gone away to report. There was the long, far-away sigh of the wind that had been asleep for days. Then the first blast of the fighting battalions of the rain struck the window in a wild rattle. The wind tore and raved behind them, hounding them to suicidal deeds of valour. And presently the drip, drip from the roof began a constant gentle monotone beneath the wild symphony, intimate and soothing as the tick of a clock. Grant's eyes closed to it, and before the squall had retreated, muttering into the distance, he was asleep.

But in the morning, a grey morning veiled in dispirited drizzle, the theory still looked watertight—with judicious plugging at the weak spot, and it was not until, hard on the track of the dead man's friend, he was interviewing the manager of the Adelphi branch of the Westminster Bank that he found his nicely made house of cards pattering round his ears.

The agent was a quiet, grey man whose unluminous skin had somehow taken on the appearance of a banknote. In his manner, however, he was more like a general practitioner than a financial adviser. Grant found himself momentarily expecting to feel Mr. Dawson's dry fingertips on his wrist. But Mr. Dawson this morning was a mixture of Mercury and Juggernaut. This was his report.

The five notes in which the inspector was interested had all of them been paid over the counter on the 3rd of the month as part of a payment of two hundred and twenty-three pounds ten shillings. The money had been drawn by a client of theirs who had a running account in the bank. His name was Albert Sorrell, and he ran a small bookmaker's business in Minley Street. The sum drawn represented the whole of the money deposited with them except a pound, which had been left presumably with the intention of keeping the account open.

Good! thought Grant; the friend is a bookmaker too.

Had Mr. Dawson known Mr. Sorrell by sight? he asked.

No, not very well, but his cashier would be able to tell the inspector all about him; and he summoned the cashier. "This is Inspector Grant from Scotland Yard. He wants a description of Mr. Albert Sorrell, and I have told him that you will provide him with one."

The cashier provided a very telling one. With a minuteness that defeated any hope of a mistake, he described the dead man.

When he had finished, Grant sat thinking at top speed. What did it mean? Had the dead man owed the money to the friend, and had the friend taken all he possessed and afterwards been seized with a too tardy charity? Was that how the notes had come into the friend's possession? On the 3rd, too. That was ten days before the murder.

Did Sorrell draw the money himself? he asked.

No, the cashier said; the cheque had been presented by a stranger. Yes, he remembered him. He was very dark, thin, medium height or a little under, with high cheekbones. Foreign-looking, a little.

The Levantine!

Grant was seized with a mixture of exhilaration and breathlessness—rather as Alice must have felt during her express journey with the Red Queen. Things marched, but at what a bat!

He asked to see the cheque, and it was produced. "You don't think that this is a forgery?" Such a thought had not occurred to them. Both the amount and the signature had been made out in Mr. Sorrell's handwriting, and that was unusual in an attempt at forgery. They brought out other cheques of the dead man's, and exhibited them. They refused to entertain the thought that the cheque was not genuine. "If it is a forgery," Mr. Dawson said, "it is incredibly good. Even if it were
proved
a forgery, I should have difficulty in believing it. I think you may take it that it is a genuine cheque."

And the foreigner had drawn it. The foreigner had had all Sorrell's deposit with the exception of twenty shillings. And ten days later he had stuck Sorrell in the back. Well, if it proved nothing else, it proved the existence of a relationship between the two men which would be useful when it came to evidence in a court of law.

"Have you the numbers of the rest of the notes handed over in the money to Sorrell?" They had, and Grant took a list of them. Then he inquired what Sorrell's address was, and was told that they had no home address, but that his office was at 32 Minley Street, off Charing Cross Road.

As Grant walked up to Minley Street from the Strand he began to digest the news. The Levantine had drawn the money with a cheque made payable to Sorrell and endorsed by Sorrell. Theft seemed to be ruled out by the fact that Sorrell had made no fuss in the ten days intervening between the paying out of the money and his death. Therefore the cheque had been given to the foreigner by Sorrell himself. Why had it not been made payable to the foreigner? Because it had been a transaction in which the Levantine had no intention of letting his name appear. Had he been "bleeding" Sorrell? Had his asking for something, which Raoul Legarde had reported as being the tenor of their conversation on the night of the murder, been but a further demand for money? Had the Levantine been not an unlucky companion in Sorrell's ruin but the means of it? At least that transaction over the counter of the Westminster Bank explained Sorrell's pennilessness and intended suicide.

Then who had sent the twenty-five pounds? Grant refused to believe that the man who had had all Sorrell had, and who had stuck him in the back at not getting more, would have disbursed such a sum for so slight a reason. There was some one else. And the some one else knew the Levantine well enough to be in receipt of at least twenty-five pounds of the amount that the Levantine had received from Sorrell. Moreover, the some one else and the dead man had lived together, as witnessed by the dead man's fingerprints on the envelope which had contained the twenty-five pounds. The sentimentality of the action and the lavishness of the amount spoke of a woman, but the handwriting people had been very sure that the printing was a man's work. And of course that some one else had also owned the gun with which Sorrell had contemplated putting an end to himself. It was a pretty tangle, but at least it
was
a tangle—closely related and growing closer, so that at any moment he might pick up a lucky thread which, when pulled, would unravel the whole thing. It seemed to him that he had only to find out about the dead man's habits and life generally and he would have the Levantine.

Minley Street has, in common with the lesser turnings off Charing Cross Road, that half secretive, half disgruntled air that makes it forbidding. A stranger turning into it has an uncomfortable feeling of being unwelcome, as if he had blundered unwittingly into private property; he feels as a newcomer feels in a small café under the half surprised, half resentful scrutiny of the habitués. But Grant, if he was not an habitué of Minley Street, was at least no stranger to it. He knew it as most of the Yard know the purlieus of Charing Cross Road and Leicester Square. If the outwardly respectable but sly faces of the houses said anything to him, it was "Oh, here again, are you?" At 32 a painted wooden notice announced that on the first floor were the offices of Albert Sorrell, Turf Accountant, and Grant turned in at the doorway and climbed the dim stairs smelling of the charwoman's Monday-morning ministrations. The stairs came to a pause at a wide landing, and Grant knocked at the door which had Sorrell's name on it. As he expected, there was no answer. He tried the door, and found it locked. He was about to turn away, when there was a stealthy sound from inside. Grant knocked again loudly. In the subsequent pause he could hear the loud hum of the distant traffic and the footsteps of the people below on the street, but no sound came from inside the room. Grant bent to the keyhole. There was no key in it, but the view he obtained was not extensive—the corner of a desk and the top of a coal-scuttle. The room he was looking into was the back one of the two which had evidently constituted Sorrell's offices. Grant stayed where he was for a little, motionless and expectant, but nothing living crossed the small still-life picture that the keyhole framed. He rose to go away, but, before he had taken the first step, again there was that stealthy sound. As Grant cocked his head the better to listen, he became aware that over the banister of the floor above hung an inverted human head, grotesque and horrible, its hair spread round it by the force of gravity into a Struwwelpeter effect.

Finding itself observed, the head said mildly, "Are you looking for some one?"

"The evidence points that way, doesn't it?" said Grant nastily. "I'm looking for the man who has these offices."

"Oh?" said the head, as if this were an entirely new idea. It disappeared, and a moment later appeared right way up in its proper place as part of a young man in a dirty painter's smock, who came down the last flight to the landing, smelling of turpentine and smoothing down his mop of hair with paint-covered fingers.

"I don't think that man's been here for quite a while now," he said. "I have the two floors above—my rooms and my studio—and I used to pass him on the stairs and hear his—his—I don't know what you call them. He was a bookie, you know."

"Clients?" suggested Grant.

"Yes. Hear what I presume were his clients coming sometimes. But I'm sure it's more than a fortnight since I saw or heard him."

"Did he go to the course, do you know?" Grant asked.

"Where's that?" asked the artist.

"I mean, did he go to the races every day?"

The artist did not know.

"Well, I want to get into his offices. Where can I get a key?"

The artist presumed that Sorrell had the key. The agent for the property had an office off Bedford Square. He could never remember the name of the street or the number, but he could find his way there. He had lost the key of his own room or he would have offered it for a trial on Sorrell's door.