Richardsons first case, p.9
Richardson's First Case, page 9
“Where does she live?”
“Down at Abbey Wood with her mother. Her salary keeps them both.”
“Did he tell you her address?”
The butler looked down his nose. “I can’t say that he actually told me her address, but I happen to know it.”
“I see. You have to post the letters in the pillar box?”
“Exactly. The address is ‘Miss Stella Martin, 13 Rosewear Road, Abbey Wood.’”
Richardson noted the address, shook hands warmly with the butler, and took his leave, murmuring his hope that his young master would return within the next twenty-four hours.
No. 13 Rosewear Road proved to be one of a row of semi-detached little red-brick houses, all exactly alike, each with its little front garden and its hen house behind it. An enterprising builder had provided them for the aristocracy of the Arsenal foremen, and they were all tenanted. The door was opened by a middle-aged lady, whom he rightly assumed to be Miss Martin’s mother. She seemed to take him for a commercial drummer of some kind, and as life is monotonous in Rosewear Road in the mornings, she was quite ready for a chat and even invited him into the sitting room. He found himself regretting that he had not brought a sample carpet sweeper with him. When he said that he had come to see her daughter, “Miss Stella,” she bridled. Miss Stella, it appeared, was not at her office in the City that morning. She was not very well.
Richardson expressed concern, but explained that his business would not take him more than three minutes if she was well enough to come down.
“Can’t I take her a message?” asked the mother.
“I would rather see her myself if you don’t mind. It is about something rather private,” explained Richardson.
“Well, I’ll go and see,” said the mother reluctantly.
Left alone, Richardson sniffed the air. The mother did not look like a woman who smoked good cigarettes, yet there, in the fireplace, lay a half-smoked cigarette with a gold tip, still emitting the incense that perfumed the room. He rose and approached the fireplace. On the shelf above it, among the dried flowers and the pottery, lay a cigarette case bearing the initials “A. H.” His spirits rose at the sound of a light step running down the stairs. He had just time to get back to his chair when the door opened and a tall, fair girl entered the room. She was very pretty, and if she had risen from a bed of sickness, she must have gone to bed in a very neat costume and with her nose delicately powdered.
“You wish to speak to me?”
Richardson had risen to his feet. “Yes, Miss Martin. May we sit down?” Whoever he might be, there seemed to be nothing terrifying about this mysterious visitor. She sat down.
“May I smoke a cigarette,” he asked pleasantly, “or does your mother object to the smell of tobacco? Oh, no, I see that she smokes too.” He pointed to the half-smoked cigarette in the fender. “It was alight when I first came into the room. I see that she smokes better cigarettes than mine.” He saw her change colour, and her eyes grew wide with alarm. She laughed nervously. “She didn’t expect a visitor,” she said lamely.
“No, and I must apologize for bursting in upon you like this. The fact is that I have been asked by the Harrises to find their son, Arthur, who left home the day before yesterday without saying where he was going. They are in great trouble about him—especially his poor mother.” This was a random shot, but it seemed to tell. Richardson had an intuition that Arthur was the kind of youth that owed his instability of character to the indulgence of a doting mother.
“Why do you come to me? How should I know where he is?”
“I came to you because you often meet him and I thought he was sure to write to you. I think, Miss Martin, that you have seen him since he left home.”
She flushed angrily. “What makes you think that?”
“Only because his cigarette case is lying on that mantelpiece.” This remark threw her into confusion.
“I don’t see what right you have to question me like this,” she stammered. “My only right is the anxiety of his poor mother. For all she knows he may have been run over and killed by a motorcar. Think of that poor woman not sleeping at night for anxiety about him!”
“Oh, he’s all right.”
“It will relieve her very much to know that you have told me this.”
“Oh, you mustn’t tell her that I said so. It would cause endless trouble.” There was real alarm in her tone. “Promise me that you won’t.” She laid her hand on his arm in her anxiety.
“I need say nothing at all about you if you can manage for me to speak to him for a moment.” Richardson knew now that he was actually in the house.
“I know how I can communicate with him. If you could come back at about five o’clock, I could give you his answer.”
“That would make me rather late, Miss Martin. Can’t you make it earlier? It’s nearly twelve now. Shall we say half-past two?”
“Very well, half-past two—that is, if I can find him in the time.” She seemed nervously anxious to get away.
Richardson rose. It was awkward having to go without his lunch, but duty was duty, and he did not intend to lose sight of the house for an instant in the intervening two hours and a half.
She came to the door with him to show him out. “Let me see, do I turn to the right or left?” he asked. “Is there a way out at the bottom of the road?”
“No, you can’t get out that way,” she laughed. “There is only one way out of Rosewear Road. Turn to your left.”
He took off his hat in farewell and strode off to the left without looking back. What she had told him about Rosewear Road made his task easier. He had only to watch one end of the road and need not risk discovery by keeping the house in sight, and if the young man attempted to bolt he would be ready for him. He smiled to himself as he thought of the conversation now in full flow in No. 13 and hoped that the artless Stella would not be unduly blamed by the object of her affections. The foremen now began to pass him by twos and threes from the Arsenal to their homes for dinner. They seemed too hungry to notice him, or perhaps they took him for a young man waiting to walk out with a neighbour’s daughter. After that the time hung heavily. When the foremen, full-fed and pipe in mouth, came back from dinner he avoided them by walking down the road in the opposite direction from the Arsenal.
At three minutes before the appointed time he rang the bell at No. 13. He must have been seen from the window, for the door was opened instantly, not by the mother this time, but by the daughter, who was in a nervous flutter.
“He thought it better to come back with me,” she whispered mendaciously. “He’s in there!” She opened the sitting-room door for him and fled upstairs. Arthur Harris, looking like a condemned prisoner, rose from his chair.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Harris. You remember me? No? I was the constable who took you to the mortuary at the hospital. Let us sit down and talk things over comfortably.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not at all. I came down here to find you and bring you back to London. Your parents are in a great way about you. They think that you may have met with an accident.”
“I’m not going back.”
“Oh, come, Mr. Harris, there you’re mistaken; you’re coming back with me. In fact”—looking at his watch—”we’re going to start in ten minutes.”
“Where are you taking me to?”
“To Marylebone police station to make a statement and then back to your home in Wigmore Street—at least, I hope so.”
“Is he dead?”
“You mean the boy that you knocked off his bicycle on the Guildford Road last Tuesday? I can relieve your mind on that score: he’s not dead.”
“It was entirely his fault; he wobbled into me.”
“Yes, it’s always the other fellow’s fault, but you drove on without stopping.”
Harris bit his lip; there was no answer to that. “Well, what were you doing down at Guildford?”
“I went there to see a friend.”
“Was that after or before you saw Mr. Catchpool that day?”
“After, of course. I saw the old boy in the morning, and he told me that unless I paid up twenty pounds before five he’d go round and tell my father. So I ran down to Guildford and got a pal to lend me twenty pounds. Of course, I had to drive fast; I had to get to the old man before he started for Wigmore Street, and naturally I couldn’t afford the time to stop when that young fool wobbled into me.”
“Did you go to the shop when you got back?”
“I did, but I was too late. I suppose the old blighter had started; at any rate, the shop was locked up. So I went back home and lay in wait for him with my twenty pounds, and I was going to give the old swine a bit of my mind, and the next thing I knew was that you blew in.”
“Then why did you say that you’d never seen old Catchpool before?”
“What did you expect me to say? Hadn’t I been taking all this trouble to keep it from my father?—dashing down to Guildford, worrying my pal for a loan, risking my life as you might say—and then you expect me to give the whole show away by saying I knew him! Now look here, if I do come with you will you give me your word of honour never to say where you found me?”
“I give you my word that I’ll tell nobody but my chief, and, of course, all such information is confidential. It won’t get to your friends, if that’s what you mean. Get your hat now: we’ll start.”
Getting his hat seemed to be a more complicated process than usual. Unless Richardson’s ears deceived him there were sounds of osculatory exercises from the back regions, but at last the young man tore himself away and joined him.
Chapter Ten
“SIT DOWN there,” said Richardson, when they arrived at Marylebone police station, and as he passed the station sergeant’s table he murmured, “Don’t let him leave.”
He found Inspector Foster in his room. “Back already? No luck, I suppose?”
“I’ve brought Arthur Harris with me, sir.”
“You haven’t! Where did you find him?”
“Down at Abbey Wood, sir, staying with his young lady.”
“Did he come willingly?”
“Not very eagerly, sir. He says he ran away because of that boy he knocked over on the Guildford Road; thought he might have killed him.”
“Then that’s one up to you, Richardson: that was your theory from the start. We’ll have to go into all that presently. What we have to do now is to take a statement from him. You’d better be in the room, and if he goes back on what he said to you, you can nudge me. Bring him up.”
But Arthur Harris went back on nothing. To Foster, his statement did not sound like a made-up story. He answered every question readily and without reservation; he had every address on the tip of his tongue and, what seemed more convincing, there was a sense of injury in his tone; clearly, he thought that he had been shabbily treated.
“Did you sign any acknowledgment of your loan from Catchpool?” asked Foster.
“Trust the old Shylock for that; he made me sign a blue paper.”
“Which you took away with you?”
“How could I take it away? He stuck to it.”
“And you’ve never seen it since?”
“Never.”
“Well, now, Mr. Harris, you must go home, and as your father applied to the police to find you, Constable Richardson will accompany you to the door.”
Arthur Harris looked sheepish. “Perhaps you won’t mind telling me what sort of mood my father was in when you saw him about me.”
“I didn’t see him myself, sir, but I understand that he did not seem resentful against you.”
“Put the whole blame on the police, you mean? Just like him; he always must blame somebody.” He turned to Richardson. “Well, I’m ready if you are.”
As he led the way downstairs, Foster detained Richardson to say, “I’m going down to C.O. with this statement. Come on there when you’ve seen him safely into the house.”
The chief constable was busy with expense sheets when Foster knocked at his door. He growled at the interruption but pushed his work aside when he saw who the visitor was. “Oh, it’s you, is it? Anything new?”
“Yes, sir, we’ve found young Harris.”
“H’m! That hasn’t taken long. Who found him?”
“P.C. Richardson, sir. It was smart work. I’ve taken a statement from Harris, if you’d like to look at it.”
Beckett read the statement, initialled it, and threw it into the registry basket. “Well, that seems to clear Harris out of the way.”
“You think so, sir? I’m not so sure. All the early part of the statement may be true; it hangs together, but I’m not so sure about what happened after he knocked at the door of the shop and found it locked. At all hazards he wanted to prevent Catchpool from seeing his father. Suppose that he went down Baker Street pretty quickly in order to get to the house first, and overtook Catchpool, he might have seen that blue paper sticking out of his pocket and snatched it. That would fit in with the eyewitness of the accident who said that he overheard Catchpool say ‘Very well, then, I’ll call a policeman.’ Catchpool would have been taking that blue paper with him when he went to see the father.”
“How you Scotsmen do stick to your theories! Even if you are right there’s no proof of the murder, whatever that old artist of yours said, and besides, he’s not the sort of man you’d care to bring forward as principal witness in a capital case, is he?”
“No, sir, he is not, and besides he never saw the murderer, so he says.”
“Exactly. I keep an open mind myself, but so far you’ve produced nothing to shake my theory that old Catchpool strangled his wife and then got himself run over and killed. By the way, Mr. Morden left a message that he would like to see you if you came in. I’ll tell him you’re here.” He opened the communicating door and passed Foster in.
“Well, Mr. Foster, I hear that you’ve found the missing man and restored him to his sorrowing family.”
“Yes, sir, it was a good piece of work on the part of that young uniformed constable, and I’ve taken a statement from Harris which will come before you in due course.”
“A true statement, do you think?”
“It hangs together, sir. Whether it is all true or only part of it, it is too early to say.”
“Did he explain why he ran away?”
“Yes, sir, he’d knocked over a boy on the Guildford Road, and he thought that the police were after him for that.”
“Young fool! Didn’t he stop?”
“No, sir, he said he hadn’t time. He had to get back to stop Catchpool going to his father.”
“I can see that you still cling to your theory that he was concerned in the murder. You think that Catchpool was taking the lad’s note of hand to the father and that Harris met him in the street and got hold of it. Well, it’s a plausible theory, I admit. The note of hand is missing from the file, and Arthur Harris was the only person who had a strong interest in getting hold of it, and yet I can’t help the feeling that the murder took place after six o’clock, when young Harris was with P.C. Richardson.”
“Well, sir, I suppose we must each have our own theories and see how they fit in with the new bits of evidence that may come in.”
“I saw Catchpool’s lawyer yesterday, and he told me that, if it came to a scrap, the wife would have been a better man than the husband. Of course, a quick grab at the throat may be successful against a prize fighter; but he also said that a man like the nephew, Michael Sharp, could not have been mistaken when he says that he saw the woman alive at six-ten. It seems that the other theory that the husband was guilty originated with the other nephew, Herbert Reece.”
“Yes, sir, and Mrs. Catchpool’s servant thought the same. I think that Mr. Beckett has held that theory all along.”
“Well, Mr. Foster, my advice to you is to keep an open mind and in your further inquiries not to exclude evidence that points to the woman having been alive after six. You see the difficulty. If she was alive at six, how did she get into the shop unless she had a key, or unless someone who had a key got there before her and let her in?”
“Yes, sir, everything seems to turn on that key. The charwoman saw him lock up the shop and go off with the key; no one touched his body except P.C. Richardson after the accident, and Richardson found no key in his pocket. We know that there was only one key which he guarded jealously. In the short distance between the shop and the scene of the accident, he was very unlikely to have dropped it or to have been robbed of it.”
“There is just a chance that it fell out of his pocket when he was knocked down. Sometimes people pick up keys in the street and foolishly take them into the nearest shop in case the owner should come and search for them, instead of taking them to a police station. Wouldn’t it be worth while to make house-to-house inquiries in the shops nearest to the scene of the accident?”
“Perhaps it would, sir,” replied Foster, looking doubtful.
“Even if we don’t find the key we may get some scrap of useful information. Why not put young Richardson onto that?”
“I will, sir; it’s an idea, certainly.”
Richardson was waiting in the passage. Foster explained to him rapidly what he was to do, and the young policeman went off at once with an unhappy feeling that his inquiry would prove fruitless. At the first two shops—a cake shop and a hairdresser’s—he drew blank. They remembered the accident, certainly, but they had been too busy to notice more than the usual crowd round the injured man and a policeman’s helmet in its midst. The next shop specialized in baby linen. The saleswoman, a young lady of unripe years, looked a little surprised at receiving a customer of the opposite sex, but when he explained the object of his visit she summoned a girl rather older than herself.
“What did I tell you, Bertha!” she exclaimed triumphantly. “Here’s a gentleman called about that accident on Tuesday week—you remember when that old gentleman was knocked down by a car—wants to know whether anyone came in here with a doorkey he’d picked up.”
“No,” said Bertha, cautiously. “Someone did call in about the accident, but he didn’t leave a key.” A hint of suspicion clouded her countenance. “You’re not the insurance agent, are you? You’ve not come about a claim for damages?”
