The Hampstead Mystery Part 9

"Spends all his spare time in cinemas," said Crewe, "and when he is not there he is acting picture dramas. His ambition in life is to be a cinema actor."

Crewe engaged Police-Constable Flack in conversation while waiting for Mr. Holymead to take his departure. Flack had so little professional pride that he was pleased at meeting a gentleman who usurped the functions of a detective without having had any police training, and who could beat the best of the Scotland Yard men like sh.e.l.ling peas, as he confided to his wife that night. He was especially flattered at the interest Crewe seemed to display in his long connection with the police force, and also in his private affairs. The constable was explaining with parental vanity the precocious cleverness of his youngest child, a girl of two, when Holymead made his appearance, and he became aware that Mr.

Crewe's interest in children was at an end.

"Look at that man," said Crewe, in a sharp imperative tone to the police-constable, as the K.C. was walking down the path of the Italian garden to the plantation. "You saw him come in?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do you see any difference?"

"No, sir; he's the same man," said Flack, with stolid certainty.

"Anything about him that is different?" continued Crewe.

Police-Constable Flack looked at Crewe in some bewilderment. He was not a deductive expert, and, as he told his wife afterwards, he did not know what the detective was "driving at." He took another long look at Holymead, who was then within a few yards of the plantation on his way to the gates, and remarked, in a hesitating tone, as though to justify his failure:

"Well, you see, sir, when he was coming in it was the front view I saw, now I can only see his back."

But before he had finished speaking Crewe had left him and was following the K.C. Holymead had gone into the house without a walking-stick, and had reappeared carrying one on his arm. Crewe admired the cool audacity which had prompted Holymead to go into a house where a murder had been committed to recover his stick under the very eyes of the police, and he immediately formed the conclusion that the K.C. had come to the house to recover the stick for some urgent reason possibly not unconnected with the crime. And it was apparent that Holymead was a shrewd judge of human nature, Crewe reflected, for he calculated that the rareness of the quality of observation, even in those who, like Flack, were supposed to keep their eyes open, would permit him to do so unnoticed.

As Crewe went down the path he beckoned to the boy Joe, who at the moment was acting the part of a comic dentist binding a recalcitrant patient to a chair, using an immense old-fashioned straight-backed chair which stood in the hall, for his stage setting. Joe overtook his master as he entered the ornamental plantation in front of the house, and Crewe quickly whispered his instructions, as the retreating figure of the K.C. threaded the wood towards the gates.

"When I catch up level with him, Joe, you are to run into him accidentally from behind, and knock his stick off his arm, so that it falls near me. I will pick it up and return it to him. I must handle the stick--you understand? Do not wait to see how he takes it when you b.u.mp into him--get off round the corner at once and wait for me."

Crewe quickened his pace to overtake the man in front of him. He gave no glance backward at the boy, for he knew his instructions would be carried out faithfully and intelligently. He allowed Holymead to reach the big open gates, and turn from the gravelled carriage drive into the private street. Then he hurried after him and drew level with Holymead. As he did so there was a sound of running footsteps from behind, and then a shout.

Joe had cleverly tripped and fallen heavily between the two men, bringing down Holymead in his fall. The K.C.'s stick flew off his arm and bounded half a dozen yards away. Crewe stepped forward quickly, secured the stick, glanced quickly at the monogram engraved on it, and held it out to Holymead, who was brushing the dust off his clothes with vexatious remarks about the clumsiness and impudence of street boys. For a moment he seemed to hesitate about taking the stick.

"I believe this is yours," said Crewe politely.

"Ah--yes. Thank you," said the K.C., giving him a keen suspicious glance.

CHAPTER VIII

Crewe had well-furnished offices in Holborn but lived in a luxurious flat in Jermyn Street. Although he went to and fro between them daily, his personality was almost a dual one, though not consciously so; his pa.s.sion for crime investigation was distinct--in outward seeming, at all events--from his polished West End life of wealthy ease. Grave, self-contained, and inscrutable, he slipped from one to the other with an effortless regularity, and the fashionable folk with whom he mixed in his leisured bachelor existence in the West End, apart from knowing him as the famous Crewe, had even less knowledge of the real man behind his suave exterior than the clients who visited his inquiry rooms in Holborn to confide in him their stories of suffering, shame, or crimes committed against them. His commissionaire and body-servant, Stork, had once, in a rare--almost unique--convivial moment, declared to the caretaker of the building that he knew no more about his master after ten years than he did the first day he entered his service. He was deep beyond all belief, was Stork's opinion, delivered with reluctant admiration.

Although Crewe did not allow the externals of his two existences to become involved, his chief interest in life was in his work. He had originally taken up detective work more as a relief from the boredom of his lot as a wealthy young man, leading an aimless, useless life with others of his cla.s.s, than by deliberate choice of his vocation. His initial successes surprised him; then the work absorbed him and became his life's career. He had achieved some memorable successes and he had made a few failures, but the failures belonged to the earlier portion of his career, before he had learnt to trust thoroughly in his own great gifts of intuition and insight, and that uncanny imagination which sometimes carried him successfully through when all else failed.

Serious devotees of chess knew the name of Crewe in another capacity--as the name of a man who might have aspired to great deeds if he had but taken the game as his life's career. He had flashed across the chess horizon some years previously as a player of surpa.s.sing brilliance by defeating Turgieff, when the great Russian master had visited London and had played twelve simultaneous boards at the London Chess Club. Crewe was the only player of the twelve to win his game, and he did so by a masterly concealed ending in which he handled his p.a.w.ns with consummate skill, proffering the sacrifice of a bishop with such art that Turgieff fell into the trap, and was mated in five subsequent moves. Crewe proved this was not merely a lucky win by defeating the young South American champion, Caranda, shortly afterwards, when the latter visited England and played a series of exhibition games in London on his way to Moscow, where he was engaged in the championship tourney. Once again it was masterly p.a.w.n play which brought Crewe a fine victory, and aged chess enthusiasts who followed every move of the game with trembling excitement, declared afterwards that Crewe's conception of this particular game had not been equalled since Morphy died.

They predicted a dazzling chess career for Crewe, but he disappointed their aged hearts by retiring suddenly from match chess, and they mourned him as one unworthy of his great chess gifts and the high hopes they had placed in him. But, as a matter of fact, Crewe's intellect was too vigorous and active to be satisfied with the triumphs of chess, and his disappearance from the chess world was contemporary with his entrance into detective work, which appealed to his imagination and found scope for his restless mental activity. But if detective work so absorbed him that he gave up match chess entirely, he still retained an interest in the science of chess, reserving problem play for his spare moments, and, when not immersed in the solution of a problem of human mystery, he would turn to the chessboard and seek solace and relaxation in the mysteries of an intricate "four-mover."

He had once said that there was a certain affinity between solving chess problems and the detection of crime mystery: once the key-move was found, the rest was comparatively easy. But he added with a sigh that a really perfect crime mystery was as rare as a perfect chess problem: human ingenuity was not sufficiently skilful, as a rule, to commit a crime or construct a chess problem with completely artistic concealment of the key-move, and for that reason most problems and crimes were far too easy of detection to absorb one's intellectual interests and attention.

It was the morning after Crewe's visit to Riversbrook, and the detective sat in his private office glancing through a note-book which contained a summary of the Hampstead mystery. Crewe was a painstaking detective as well as a brilliant one, and it was his custom to prepare several critical summaries of any important case on which he was engaged, writing and rewriting the facts and his comments, until he was satisfied that he had a perfect outline to work upon, with the details and clues of the crime in consecutive order and relation to one another. Experience had taught him that the time and labour this task involved were well-spent.

If an unexpected development of the case altered the facts of the original summary Crewe prepared another one in the same painstaking way.

The summaries, when done with, were methodically filed and indexed and stored in a strong room at the office for future reference, where he also kept full records of all the cases upon which he had been engaged, together with the weapons and articles that had figured in them: huge volumes of newspaper reports and clippings; photographs of criminals with their careers appended; and a host of other odds and ends of his detective investigations--the whole forming an interesting museum of crime and mystery which would have furnished a store of rich material for a fresh Newgate Calendar. It was an axiom of Crewe's that a detective never knew when some old sc.r.a.p of information or some trifling article of some dead and forgotten crime might not afford a valuable clue. Expert criminals frequently repeated themselves, like people in lesser walks of life, and Crewe's "library and museum," as he called it, had sometimes furnished him with a simple hint for the solution of a mystery which had defied more subtle methods of a.n.a.lysis.

Crewe, after carefully reading his summary of the murder of Sir Horace Fewbanks, and making a few alterations in the text, drew from his pocket the glove which Inspector Chippenfield had handed him as a clue, took it to the window, and carefully examined it through a large magnifying gla.s.s. He was thus engrossed when the door was noiselessly opened, and Stork, the bodyguard, entered. Stork belied his name. He was short and fat, with a red mottled face; a model of discretion and imperturbability, who had served Crewe for ten years, and bade fair to serve him another ten, if he lived that long. In his heart of hearts he often wondered why a gentleman like Crewe should so far forget what was due to his birth and position as to have offices in Holborn--Holborn, of all parts of London!

But the awe he felt for Crewe prevented his seeking information on the point from the only person who could give it to him, so he served him and puzzled over him in silence, his inward perturbation of spirits being made manifest occasionally by a puzzled glance at his master when the latter was not looking. It was nothing to Stork that his master was a famous detective; the problem to him was _why_ he was a detective when he had no call to be one, having more money than any man--and let alone a single man--could spend in a lifetime.

Stork coughed slightly to attract Crewe's attention.

"If you please, sir," he said, "the boy has come."

While Crewe was busy with his magnifying gla.s.s Stork returned with the boy who had accompanied Crewe on his visit to Riversbrook on the previous day.

The boy, a thin white-faced, sharp-eyed London street urchin, seemed curiously out of place in the handsomely furnished office, with his legs tucked up under the carved rail of a fine old oak chair, and his big dark eyes fixed intently on Crewe's face. The tie between him and the detective was an unusual one. It dated back some twelve months, when Crewe, in the investigation of a peculiarly baffling crime, found it advisable to disguise himself and live temporarily in a crowded criminal quarter of Islington. The rooms he took were above a secondhand clothing shop kept by a drunken female named Leaver; a supposed widow who lived at the back of the shop with her two children, Lizzie, a bold-eyed girl of 17, who worked at a Clerkenwell clothing factory, and Joe, a typical c.o.c.kney boy of fourteen, who sold papers in the streets during the day and was fast qualifying for a thief at night when Crewe went to the place to live.

Crewe soon discovered, through overhearing a loud quarrel between his landlady and her daughter, that Mrs. Leaver's husband was alive, though dead to his wife for all practical purposes, inasmuch as he was serving a life's imprisonment for manslaughter. A fortnight after he had taken up his temporary quarters above the shop the woman was removed to the hospital suffering from the effects of a hard drinking bout, and died there. The girl disappeared, and the boy would have been turned out on the streets but for Crewe, who had taken a liking to him. Joe was self-reliant, alert, and precocious, like most London street boys, but in addition to these qualities he had a vein of imagination unusual in a lad of his upbringing and environment. He devoured the exciting feuilleton stories in the evening papers he vended, and spent his spare pennies at the cinema theatres in the vicinity of his poor home. His appreciation of the crude mysteries of the filmed detective drama amused the famous expert in the finer art of actual crime detection, until he discovered that the boy possessed natural gifts of intuition and observation, combined with penetration. Crewe grew interested in developing the boy's talent for detective work. When the lad's mother died Crewe decided to take him into his Holborn offices as messenger-boy. Crewe soon discovered that Joe had a useful gift for "shadowing" work, and his street training as a newspaper runner enabled him not only to follow a person through the thickest of London traffic, but to escape observation where a man might have been noticed and suspected.

"Well, Joe," said Crewe, as the boy entered on the heels of Stork, "I have a job for you this morning. I want you to find the glove corresponding to this one."

Crewe, having finished his examination of the glove, handed it to the boy, whose first act was to slip it on his left hand and move his fingers about to a.s.sure himself that they were in good working order in spite of being hidden. It was the first occasion on which Joe had worn a glove.

"It was found in the room in which Sir Horace Fewbanks was murdered,"

continued Crewe. "The other one was not there. The question I want to solve is, did it belong to Sir Horace, or to some one who visited him on the night he was murdered? The police think it belonged to Sir Horace because it is the same size as the gloves he wore, and because Sir Horace's hosier stocks the same kind--as does nearly every fashionable hosier in London. They think he lost the right-hand glove on his way up from Scotland. It will occur to you, Joe, though you don't wear gloves, that it is more common for men to lose the right-hand glove than the left-hand, because the right hand is used a great deal more than the left, and even men who would not be seen in the street without gloves find there are many things they cannot do with a gloved hand. For instance, to dive one's hand into one's trouser pocket where most men keep their loose change the glove has to be removed."

"Then the gentleman would take off his right glove when he paid for his taxi-cab from St. Pancras," said Joe, who was familiar through the accounts in the newspapers with the main details of the Fewbanks mystery.

"Right, Joe," said his master approvingly. "And in that case he dropped the glove between the taxi-cab outside his front gates and his room, and it would have been found. I have made inquiries and I am satisfied it was not found."

"He might have lost it when he was getting into the train at Scotland,"

suggested the lad. "He had to change trains at Glasgow--he might have lost it there."

"That is a rule-of-thumb deduction," said Crewe, with a kindly smile. "It is good enough for the police, for they have apparently adopted it, but it is not good enough for me. What you don't understand, Joe, is that an odd glove is of no value in the eyes of a man who wears gloves. He doesn't take it home as a memento of his carelessness in losing the other. He throws it away. Therefore if this is Sir Horace's glove he took it home because he was unaware that he had lost the other. He would put on his gloves before leaving the train at St. Pancras. And he would pull off the right-hand one--he was not left-handed--when the taxi-cab was nearing his home so as to be able to pay the fare. Therefore, if it is Sir Horace's glove the fellow to it was dropped in the taxi-cab, or dropped between the taxi-cab and the house. If the glove had been lost at the other end of the journey in Scotland Sir Horace would have flung this one out of the carriage window when he became aware of the loss. As I have told you no glove was found between the gate at Riversbrook and the room in which Sir Horace was murdered. I got from the police the number of the taxi-cab in which Sir Horace was driven from St. Pancras, and the driver tells me that no glove was left in his cab. So what have we to do next, Joe?"

"To find the missing glove? It's a tough job, ain't it, sir?"

"Yes and no," replied Crewe. "It is possible to make some reasonable safe deductions in regard to it. These would indicate what had happened to it, and knowing where to look, or, rather, in what circ.u.mstances we might expect to find it, we might throw a little light on it. In the first place, it might be a.s.sumed that if the glove did not belong to Sir Horace it belonged to some one who visited him on the night he returned unexpectedly from Scotland. That indicates that his visitor knew Sir Horace was returning; a most important point, for if he knew Sir Horace was returning he knew why he was returning--which no one else knows up to the present as far as I have been able to gather--and in all probability was responsible for his return, say, sent him a letter or a telegram which brought him to London. So we come to the possibility of an angry scene in the room in which Sir Horace's dead body was subsequently found.

We have the possibility of the visitor leaving the house in a high state of excitement, hastily s.n.a.t.c.hing up the hat and gloves he had taken off when he arrived, and in his excitement dropping unnoticed the right-hand glove on the floor."

"And leaving his gold-mounted stick behind him," said Joe, who was following his master's line of reasoning with keen interest.

"Right, Joe," said Crewe. "That was placed in the stand in the hall, and when the visitor left hurriedly was entirely forgotten. But at what stage did the visitor become conscious of the loss of his glove? Not until his excitement cooled down a little. How long he took to cool down depends upon the cause of his excitement and his temperament, things which, at present, we can only guess at. He would probably walk a long distance before he cooled down. Then he would resume his normal habits and among other things would put on his gloves--if he had them. He would find that he had lost one and that he had left his stick behind. He would know that the stick had been left behind in the hall, but he would not know the glove had been dropped in the house. The probabilities are that he would think he had dropped it while walking. But if he felt that he had dropped it in the house, and he had the best of all reasons for not wishing anyone to know that he had visited Sir Horace that night, he would destroy the remaining glove and our chance of tracing it would be gone.

The fact that he had left his stick behind was a minor matter that he could easily account for if he had been a friend of Sir Horace who had been in the habit of visiting Riversbrook. If anything cropped up subsequently about the stick he could say that he had left it there before Sir Horace closed up his house and went to Scotland.

"But the problem of the glove is a different matter, Joe. There are three phases to it: first, if the visitor thought he had dropped it in the house and wanted to keep his visit there a profound secret from subsequent inquiry he would take home the remaining glove and destroy it--probably by burning it. Secondly, if he thought he had dropped it after leaving the house he would not feel that safety necessitated the destruction of the remaining one, but he would probably throw it away where it would not be likely to be found. In the third place, if he had no particular reason for wishing to hide the fact that he had visited Riversbrook he would throw it away anywhere when he became conscious that he had lost the other. He would throw it away merely because an odd glove is of no use to a man who wears gloves. The man who doesn't wear gloves would pick up an odd glove from the ground and think he had made a find.

He would take it home to his wife and she would probably keep it for finger-stalls for the children."

Crewe put down his notes and got up from his chair. "Your job is this, Joe. Go to Riversbrook and make a careful search on both sides of the road for the missing glove. I do not think he threw it away--if he did throw it away--until he had walked some distance, but you mustn't act on that a.s.sumption. Look over the fences of the houses and into the hedges.

Walk along in the direction of Hampstead Underground. Search the gutters and all the trees and hedges along the road. Take one side of the street to the Underground station and if you do not find the glove go back to Riversbrook along the other side. Make a thorough job of it, as it is most important that the glove should be found--if it is to be found."

After Joe had departed Crewe put on his hat and left his office for the Strand. His first call was at the shop of Bruden and Marshall, hosiers, in order to find out if any information was to be obtained there about the ownership of the glove. He was aware that the police had been there on the same mission, but his experience had often shown that valuable information was to be gathered after the police had been over the ground.