The Tiger In the Smoke (7 page)

His voice dropped a tone or two. ‘Quietly. Quietly. Up behind … Got yer!' He finished with a soft but blood-curdling little gulp, and the scene was as vivid and as unspeakably brutal as if it had happened before them. ‘It wasn't so easy though,' he rattled on, unaware of a tenth part of the impression he was creating on that gentle civilized company. ‘Bad luck really. Or good. Depends which side you were on. A patrol car ran slap into the fight. Money and valuables had passed so the law was happy. The two were inside and up before the Beak before they knew what had happened to them. Neither was in uniform and there was no traceable sign that either of them was entitled to wear one. They weren't talking, of course, but their fingerprints were on the files, so they didn't miss anything that was coming to them. The other man got the full ten years for robbery with violence. But the charge against Duds was reduced to “Assault with intent to rob” and he got the limit of five. He can't have been a good boy inside in spite of his pretty voice. There was no remission.'

Meg smoothed the silk over her knee and the diamond on her hand winked and trembled. She looked a trifle dazed. It was an effect which Luke's descriptive methods were liable to produce in the uninitiated.

‘That just makes it utterly incomprehensible,' she said softly. ‘Is that all you know about him?'

‘Oh no.' His intelligence was sharp and he prodded her bewilderment like a carpenter prodding a beam for rot. ‘From nineteen thirty-two to nineteen forty he was in and out of prison for various offences, larceny, demanding with menaces, assault. After that he vanished, might have died, for nearly five years, which suggests that he was being taken care of by the Army. He might have done well in it. That did happen.'

‘Did he serve with Martin Elginbrodde at any point?' demanded Amanda, her cool voice deliberately conversational in the tension.

‘We haven't established it.' Luke met her eyes and flashed a question at her which she either could not or would not recognize. ‘He says he never heard of him, naturally. His story is that he's an actor by profession. That probably means he once went on the stage for a spell. He gave the name of a provincial management and we're checking on that now. It won't get us far, or – ' he peered at Meg again, ‘will it?'

‘He certainly had a most professional moustache,' murmured Mr Campion with uneasy lightness.

Meg raised her head. ‘How did he explain the moustache?'

‘Oh, said he used to wear one but lost it in stir, and didn't like to turn up among his pals without one.' The D.D.C.I. spoke in a new light voice, with a careful clipped accent. He also twisted his body slightly and immediately the absent Duds was recalled to the mind's eye. ‘He gave his present address, which is a well-known lodging house just over the river, and we were able to check on that at once. After we let him go …'

‘You let him go!' Meg looked at him in amazement and he stiffened.

‘We couldn't hold him, ma'am.' He sounded scandalized. ‘We can't hold a man because a lady thinks she recognizes him as her husband.'

‘But he ran away.'

Luke opened his mouth but checked the retort just in time. He glanced hopefully at Mr Campion, who did his best to explain.

‘If the police arrest a man they're bound to bring him before a magistrate as soon as possible,' he said gently. ‘That's the law the wars are fought for nowadays. Habeas Corpus and all that. This man Morrison hasn't even been proved to have got himself photographed in a false moustache and plagued you with copies of it, but even if he had I doubt if the act would constitute nuisance. That was why we hoped he'd speak to you. Once he had asked for money or uttered threats, some point in his performance would have appeared.'

She shook her head wonderingly and Luke exploded.

‘We were only within our rights in marching him off for questioning because the chump ran away,' he announced inelegantly. ‘If he'd raised his hat and wandered off we could hardly have stopped him. The courts can be very mind-my-wig when they begin on the subject of police persecution of the marked man.' He threw in a brief but vivid impression of some legal dignitary who possessed a commanding manner, a throat infection, and a small but obtrusive corporation. ‘However, we're on to the blighter now. He knows we are and – '

The trill of the telephone bell on the landing outside cut him short. Meg had sprung up at its first hesitant note. Her movement was unconscious, as was also her glance at the French clock on the mantelshelf. The golden hands showed the time as a few minutes before seven, and in the silence everyone remembered that Geoffrey Levett had promised her to telephone at five. Meanwhile a firm flat Midland voice was speaking in the passage outside.

‘Hallo, hallo. Aye, it is. But no, no, you can't speak to her. I'm sorry.' The tone was patient but utterly uncompromising. ‘Oh yes, I've got your name. I'll remember. Yes, she has seen it. Aye, it was indeed a great shock. Someone playing the go-at. Not in good taste. No, I quite agree. Good-bye.'

The phone rang off and the tiny sound was followed by a bellow which would have carried across a playing-field. ‘Meg, lass!'

‘Yes, Uncle Sam?'

‘The Dowager Lady Totham, Park Street. Seventeen going up.'

‘Thank you, darling.' She sighed and reseated herself. ‘That's been happening all the time. Sam's keeping a list. I do hope Geoff doesn't keep finding this number engaged. I'm sorry, Chief Inspector, what were you saying?'

Luke stood looking at her. His hands were in his pockets, his jacket hitched back into a flounce behind his narrow hips. His shoulders were flat and wide and his dark face glowed with the half-ferocious, half-condoning knowingness which was the essence of the man. He had clearly made up his mind to come clean.

‘Mrs Elginbrodde,' he demanded bluntly, ‘just how well did you know that husband of yours when you married him?'

Mr Campion's face became misleadingly blank and Amanda looked up, her brown eyes surprised and wary. They were hostile to Luke, and he was aware of it and used to hostility.

‘Well, you see how it is,' he went on, taking the room into his confidence. ‘Now I've had a talk with Duds I see he's a smooth piece. Nice voice. Plausible. May have come from a good home, as they say. May easily have had a very good war record.'

Canon Avril, who had been sitting very quietly in the darkest corner of the room, leant forward.

‘If you're asking if he had ever had any serious illness or nervous trouble, we don't know,' he remarked. ‘I hadn't known him from boyhood and when his grandmother wrote me from France she did not mention anything of the kind. He was introduced here by a young nephew of mine soon after the war had started. Then, when he returned from the Middle East we saw a lot of him. I thought he and Meg were young to marry, but then life was shorter in those days. Youth is relative, after all.'

The D.D.C.I. hesitated, but his sophisticated eyes smiled at the old man.

‘As long as you satisfied yourself about the chap, sir,' he said, ‘as long as you did check up on him – '

‘Check up?'

Luke sighed. ‘Neither Mr Campion nor I ever met Mr Elginbrodde. Today we questioned a man called Duds Morrison. There are five years in Morrison's life which from our point of view are unaccounted for, and it was during those same five years that Elginbrodde met and married your daughter. I'm just making quite sure they're not the same man.'

Meg gaped at him. In her amazement she let the murmur of the telephone outside pass unnoticed.

‘But I saw him too.'

Luke regarded her stolidly. ‘I know you did,' he said, and added with an irritable gesture which destroyed his official manner, ‘you're human, aren't you?'

‘But of course.' To everyone's astonishment the Canon got up and, coming down the room, took his daughter's hand. ‘Of course,' he repeated. ‘This young man must make sure of that, Meg. Good gracious me. No good purpose is ever served by discounting the possibility of
sin
.' He made the word sound familiar if not downright homely.

Luke's smile grew slowly broad and absent-mindedly he turned his thumbs up. ‘That's all right then. You must take a squint at him yourself, sir …'

‘Is there a Chief Inspector of Po-lice in there, Meg? Name of Luke?' The bellow from the landing cut him short and sent him hurrying to the door. ‘Divisional Headquarters, urgent.'

Everyone listened to the ensuing conversation but it was not revealing.

‘Where?' Luke demanded after a long silence, and then ‘I see. Right. I'll come there now. No good sending a car in this fog.'

He came striding back into the room, unusual touches of colour on his cheek-bones.

‘I'm afraid it'll have to be tonight, sir,' he said to Avril, ‘and I'll have to ask you to come out again too, Mr Campion, if you will. I haven't been very bright. They've just picked up Duds in an alley off Crumb Street. He's what you might call thoroughly dead by all I can hear.'

Mr Campion sat up slowly and then rose to his feet.

‘So soon?' he murmured. ‘That's a black mark against us, Charles. I wondered if he had it coming to him, but I didn't envisage anything quite so – prompt.'

‘Are you saying he's been murdered?' Meg was very pale.

Luke smiled at her from the midst of his preoccupation. ‘He didn't die of neglect.'

The Canon got up. ‘We must go at once,' he said.

*

As the front door closed behind the three men and its distinctive slam echoed in the apartment upstairs, Meg walked down the room and back again.

‘I love Geoffrey,' she said.

‘Yes.' Amanda did not move. Her eyes looked warm and honey-coloured in the firelight. ‘That's obvious, if you'll forgive my saying so. Did you quarrel this afternoon?'

‘No, I tried to explain, though, which was silly. I thought I knew Geoff but I don't, Amanda. I love him unbearably but I don't know him at all.' She looked so young of a sudden that the other woman glanced away.

‘I don't expect he's very knowable at the moment,' she observed. ‘Getting married is always rather complicating, don't you think? I know it's useless to say don't worry, but I feel you must wait. Waiting is one of the great arts.'

‘That awful little man on the station wasn't Martin.'

‘No, of course he wasn't.'

‘The Chief Inspector didn't believe me.'

‘Luke was mystified. When he talked to Morrison he must have decided it wasn't blackmail. Now of course he's furious with himself.'

‘Because he didn't guess the man was going to get killed?'

‘Well,' said Amanda, who was giving the matter her deepest consideration, ‘he hasn't looked after him very well, has he?'

Meg made an effort to think about Morrison and gave it up.

‘Suppose Geoff
doesn't
ring.'

‘Eeh, he'll telephone, lass.' The door had been kicked open a little wider by a soft-soled shoe and Sam Drummock came cautiously into the room. He was carrying two large tulip glasses which he had overfilled, and he walked very steadily, like a three-year-old carrying a pitcher. He was a round man with a round bald head, and possessed the great strength which is inherent in the Midland breed. He had small shrewd eyes and a red face and was at the moment clad in his working garment. This was a sort of high-collared pyjama jacket in heavy shantung, most beautifully laundered and worn over tidy little grey flannel trousers. His small round feet were set in neat and shiny red slippers, and his entire appearance managed to suggest the highly conventional costume of some unknown land.

‘Gin sling,' he explained, handing each of them a glass. ‘I mixed it myself so I know it's all right. It's a pick-me-up. You need it. Wait till I get my can. It's on the stairs.'

He moved very quickly and lightly like the boxers he admired so much, and was soon back again, a shining pewter tankard in his hand.

‘Well, I listened,' he announced cheerfully. ‘It's a killing, eh? Well, that's bad. Still, cheer up. Thank God it's not uz.' A little chuckling laugh escaped him, and he roamed over to a bureau on whose lid a design for a wonderful wedding dress was displayed. ‘I'm going to see the old Queen in this,' he said to Amanda with enormous satisfaction. ‘I'm going to sit in the front pew and hold my little top hat on my knee. If the old Bishop (and he hasn't been looking too good lately, mind you) only foozles it, and Hubert has to do the marrying, I'm going to give her away.'

He peered at the drawing again and made an explosive noise.

‘I don't like the bit underneath. That spoils it for me, that does. “
Darling, if I could only wear this myself I'd be in heaven
.” Signed Nicky. I'd Nicky the little so-and-so.'

Meg smiled in spite of her preoccupation. ‘Nicolas de Richeberg is the most brilliant dress designer in the world, Uncle Sam.'

‘So he ought to be.' Sam raised his tankard. ‘Only the best is good enough for uz. But she'd look lovely in calico, my old Queen would. Meg – '

‘Yes?'

‘It's on my conscience so I'll have to tell you. That girl in Geoff's office rang again. He's forgotten a personal call that was booked to him by his Paris foreman or broker or whatever they call them. She wants him to phone the moment he comes here.' Sam was worried. The anxiety peeped out of his kind little eyes and was gone again. ‘But it doesn't signify.' A hopeful idea occurred to him. ‘Maybe he's gone and had a drink or two, eh?'

‘That wouldn't be like him.'

‘No.' He put his head into his mug and reappeared, refreshed. ‘Mind you,' he said, ‘if it was Martin that was on the tiles I wouldn't give it another thought. I'd
know
.'