The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder (3 page)

Though he dismissed the eccentricity of the constable so lightly, the poetical policeman filled his mind all the way home to his house in the Brockley Road, and occupied his thoughts for the rest of his waking time.

It was a quarter to eight o’clock in the morning, and the world seemed entirely populated by milkmen and whistling newspaper boys, when Mr J G Reeder came into Firling Avenue.

He stopped only for a second outside the bank, which had long since ceased to be an object of local awe and fearfulness, and pursued his way down the broad avenue. On either side of the thoroughfare ran a row of pretty villas – pretty although they bore a strong family resemblance to one another; each house with its little forecourt, sometimes laid out simply as a grass plot, sometimes decorated with flowerbeds. Green’s house was the eighteenth in the road on the right-hand side. Here he had lived with a cook–housekeeper, and apparently gardening was not his hobby, for the forecourt was covered with grass that had been allowed to grow at its will.

Before the house numbered 412 Mr Reeder paused and gazed with mild interest at the blue blinds which covered every window. Evidently Miss Magda Grayne was a lover of flowers, for geraniums filled the window-boxes and were set at intervals along the tiny border under the bow window. In the centre of the grass plot was a circular flowerbed with one flowerless rose tree, the leaves of which were drooping and brown.

As he raised his eyes to the upper window, the blind went up slowly, and he was dimly conscious that there was a figure behind the white net curtains. Mr Reeder walked hurriedly away, as one caught in an immodest act, and resumed his peregrinations until he came to the big nursery gardener’s which formed the corner lot at the far end of the road.

Here he stood for some time in contemplation, his arm resting on the iron railings, his eyes staring blankly at the vista of greenhouses. He remained in this attitude so long that one of the nurserymen, not unnaturally thinking that a stranger was seeking a way into the gardens, came over with the laborious gait of the man who wrings his living from the soil, and asked if he was wanting anybody.

‘Several people,’ sighed Mr Reeder; ‘several people!’ Leaving the resentful man to puzzle out his impertinence, he slowly retraced his steps. At No. 412 he stopped again, opened the little iron gate and passed up the path to the front door. A small girl answered his knock and ushered him into the sitting-room.

The room was not well furnished; it was scarcely furnished at all. A strip of almost new linoleum covered the passage; the furniture of the sitting-room itself was made up of wicker chairs, a square of art carpet and a table. He heard the sound of feet above his head, feet on bare boards, and then presently the door opened and a girl came in.

She was pretty in a heavy way, but on her face he saw the marks of sorrow. It was pale and haggard; the eyes looked as though she had been recently weeping.

‘Miss Magda Grayne?’ he asked, rising as she came in.

She nodded.

‘Are you from the police?’ she asked quickly.

‘Not exactly the police,’ he corrected carefully. ‘I hold an – er – an appointment in the office of the Public Prosecutor, which is analogous to, but distinct from, a position in the Metropolitan Police Force.’

She frowned, and then: ‘I wondered if anybody would come to see me,’ she said. ‘Mr Green sent you?’

‘Mr Green told me of your existence: he did not send me.’

There came to her face in that second a look which almost startled him. Only for a fleeting space of time, the expression had dawned and passed almost before the untrained eye could detect its passage.

‘I was expecting somebody to come,’ she said. Then: ‘What made him do it?’ she asked.

‘You think he is guilty?’

‘The police think so.’ She drew a long sigh. ‘I wish to God I had never seen – this place!’

He did not answer; his eyes were roving round the apartment. On a bamboo table was a glass vase which had been clumsily filled with golden chrysanthemums, of a peculiarly beautiful variety. Not all, for amidst them flowered a large Michaelmas daisy that had the forlorn appearance of a parvenu that had strayed by mistake into noble company.

‘You’re fond of flowers?’ he murmured.

She looked at the vase indifferently.

‘Yes, I like flowers,’ she said. Then: ‘Do you think they’ll hang him?’

The brutality of the question, put without hesitation, pained Reeder.

‘It is a very serious charge,’ he said. And then: ‘Have you a photograph of Mr Green?’

She frowned.

‘Yes; do you want it?’

He nodded.

She had hardly left the room before he was at the bamboo table and had lifted out the flowers. As he had seen through the glass, they were roughly tied with a piece of string. He examined the ends, and here again his first observation had been correct: none of these flowers had been cut; they had been plucked bodily from their stalks. Beneath the string was the paper which had been first wrapped about the stalks. It was a page torn from a notebook; he could see the faint lines, but the pencilled writing was indecipherable.

As her feet sounded on the stairs, he replaced the flowers in the vase, and when she came in he was looking through the window into the street.

‘Thank you,’ he said, as he took the photograph from her.

It bore an affectionate inscription on the back.

‘You’re married, he tells me, madam?’

‘Yes, I’m married, and practically divorced,’ she said shortly.

‘Have you been living here long?’

‘About three months,’ she answered. ‘He wanted me to live here.’

He looked at the photograph again.

‘Do you know Constable Burnett?’

He saw a dull flush come to her face and die away again.

‘Yes, I know the silly fool!’ she said viciously. And then, realizing that she had been surprised into an expression which was not altogether ladylike, she went on, in a softer tone: ‘Mr Burnett is rather sentimental, and I don’t like sentimental people, especially – well, you understand, Mr–’

‘Reeder,’ murmured that gentleman.

‘You understand, Mr Reeder, that when a girl is engaged and in my position, those kind of attentions are not very welcome.’

Reeder was looking at her keenly. Of her sorrow and distress there could be no doubt. On the subject of the human emotions, and the ravages they make upon the human countenance, Mr Reeder was a great authority.

‘On your birthday,’ he said. ‘How very sad! You were born on the seventeenth of October. You are English, of course?’

‘Yes, I’m English,’ she said shortly. ‘I was born in Walworth – in Wallington. I once lived in Walworth.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-three,’ she answered.

Mr Reeder took off his glasses and polished them on a large silk handkerchief.

‘The whole thing is inexpressibly sad,’ he said. ‘I am glad to have had the opportunity of speaking with you, young lady. I sympathize with you very deeply.’

And in this unsatisfactory way he took his departure. She closed the door on him, saw him stop in the middle of the path and pick up something from a border bed, and wondered, frowning, why this middle-aged man had picked up the horseshoe she had thrown out of the window the night before. Into Mr Reeder’s pocket went this piece of rusted steel and then he continued his thoughtful way to the nursery gardens, for he had a few questions to ask.

The men of Section 10 were parading for duty when Mr Reeder came timidly into the charge room and produced his credentials to the inspector in charge.

‘Oh, yes, Mr Reeder,’ said that officer affably. ‘We’ve had a note from the PP’s office, and I think I had the pleasure of working with you on that big slush case a few years ago. Now what can I do for you?… Burnett? Yes, he’s here.’

He called the man’s name and a young and good looking officer stepped from the ranks.

‘He’s the man who discovered the murder – he’s marked for promotion,’ said the inspector. ‘Burnett, this gentleman is from the Public Prosecutor’s office and he wants a little talk with you. Better use my office, Mr Reeder.’

The young policeman saluted and followed the shuffling figure into the privacy of the Inspector’s office. He was a confident young man: already his name and portrait had appeared in the newspapers, the hint of promotion had become almost an accomplished fact, and before his eyes was the prospect of a supreme achievement.

‘They tell me that you are something of a poet, officer,’ said Mr Reeder.

Burnett blushed.

‘Why, yes, sir. I write a bit,’ he confessed.

‘Love poems, yes?’ asked the other gently. ‘One finds time in the night – er – for such fancies. And there is no inspiration like – er – love, officer.’

Burnett’s face was crimson.

‘I’ve done a bit of writing in the night, sir,’ he said, ‘though I’ve never neglected my duty.’

‘Naturally,’ murmured Mr Reeder. ‘You have a poetical mind. It was a poetical thought to pluck flowers in the middle of the night–’

‘The nurseryman told me I could take any flowers I wanted,’ Burnett interrupted hastily. ‘I did nothing wrong.’

Reeder inclined his head in agreement.

‘That I know. You picked the flowers in the dark – by the way, you inadvertently included a Michaelmas daisy with your chrysanthemums – tied up your little poem to them and left them on the doorstep with – er – a horseshoe. I wondered what had become of that horseshoe.’

‘I threw them up on to her – to the lady’s windowsill,’ corrected the uncomfortable young man. ‘As a matter of fact, the idea didn’t occur to me until after I’d passed the house–’

Mr Reeder’s face was thrust forward.

‘This is what I want to confirm,’ he said softly. ‘The idea of leaving the flowers did not occur to you until you had passed her house? The horseshoe suggested the thought? Then you went back, picked the flowers, tied them up with the little poem you had already written, and tossed them up to her window – we need not mention the lady’s name.’

Constable Burnett’s face was a study.

‘I don’t know how you guessed that, but it’s a fact. If I’ve done anything wrong–’

‘It is never wrong to be in love,’ said Mr J G Reeder soberly. ‘Love is a very beautiful experience – I have frequently read about it.’

Miss Magda Grayne had dressed to go out for the afternoon and was arranging her hair when she saw the strange man who had called so early that morning, walking up the tessellated path. Behind him she recognized a detective engaged in the case. She walked quickly behind the dressing table into the bay of the window and glanced up and down the road. Yes, there was the taxi which usually accompanies such visitations, and, standing by the driver, another man, obviously a ‘busy’.

She pulled up the overlay of her bed, took out a flat pad of banknotes and thrust them into her handbag then, stepping on tiptoe, she went out to the landing, into the unfurnished back room and, opening the window, dropped to the flat roof of the kitchen. In another minute she was in the garden and through the back gate. A narrow passage divided the two lines of villas that backed on one another. She was in the High Street and had boarded a bus before Mr Reeder grew tired of knocking. To the best of his knowledge Mr Reeder never saw her again.

At the Public Prosecutor’s request, he called at his chief’s house after dinner and told his surprising story.

‘Green was undoubtedly an ex-convict, and he spoke the truth when he said that he had received a letter from a man who had served a period of imprisonment with him. The name of this blackmailer is, or rather was, Arthur George Crater, whose other name was Malling!’

‘Not the night watchman?’ said the Public Prosecutor, in amazement.

Mr Reeder nodded.

‘Yes, sir, it was Arthur Malling. His daughter, Miss Magda Crater, was, as she very truly said, born at Walworth. She said Wallington after, but Walworth first. One observes that when people adopt false family names, they seldom change their given names, and the “Magda” was easy to identify.

‘Evidently Malling had planned this robbery of the bank very carefully. He had brought his daughter to Ealing under a false name, and had managed to get her introduced to Mr Green. Magda’s job was to worm her way into Green’s confidence and learn all that she could. Possibly it was part of her duty to secure casts of the keys. Whether Malling recognized in the manager an old prison acquaintance, or whether he obtained the facts from the girl, we shall never know. But when the information came to him, he saw, in all probability, an opportunity of robbing the bank and of throwing suspicion upon the manager.

‘The girl’s role was that of a woman who was to be divorced, and I must confess this puzzled me until I realized that in no circumstances would Malling wish his daughter’s name to be associated with that of Green.

‘The night of the seventeenth was chosen for the raid. Malling’s plan to get rid of the manager had succeeded. He saw the letter on the table in Green’s private office, read it, secured the keys – although he had in all probability a duplicate set – and at a favourable moment cleared as much money from the bank vaults as he could carry and hurried it round to the house in Firling Avenue, where it was buried in the central bed of the front garden, under a rose bush – I rather imagined there was something interfering with the nutrition of that unfortunate bush the first time I saw it. I can only hope that the tree is not altogether dead, and I have given instructions that it shall be replanted and well fertilized.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the Prosecutor, who was not at all interested in horticulture.

‘In replanting the tree, as he did in some haste, Malling scratched his hand. Roses have thorns – I went to Ealing to find the rose bush that had scratched his hand. He hurried back to the bank and waited, knowing that Constable Burnett was due at a certain time. He had prepared the can of chloroform, the handcuffs and straps were waiting for him, and he stood at the corner of the street until he saw the flash of Burnett’s torch; then, running into the bank and leaving the door ajar, he strapped himself, fastened the handcuffs and lay down, expecting that the policeman would arrive, find the open door and rescue him before much harm was done.