The Casefiles of Mr J. G. Reeder Page 22

  ‘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 sympathise 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 through the window the night before. Into Mr Reeder’s tail 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 have had a note from the P. P.’s office, and I think I had the pleasure of working with you on that big slush case [footnote: slush = forged Bank of England notes] 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 window-sill,’ corrected the uncomfortable young man. ‘As a matter of fact, the idea didn’t occur to me until I had 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 is 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 putting on her hat, when she saw the queer man who had called so early that morning, walking up the tessellated path. Behind him she recognised a detective engaged in the case. The servant was out; nobody could be admitted except by herself. She walked quickly behind the dressing-table into the bay of the window and glanced up and down the road. Yes, there was the taxicab 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 the flat pad of bank-notes that she found, 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 High Street and had boarded a car 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, who had the unusual experience of being promoted to his position over the heads of his seniors, for special services he rendered during the war, 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 on the 17th of October, 1900. 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, in a false name, to Ealing, 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 recognised 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 realised that in no circumstances would Malling wish his daughter’s name to be associated with the bank manager.

  ‘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 portable money from the bank vaults as he could carry, hurried them round to the house in Firling Avenue, where they were 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 fertilised.’

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

  ‘In planting 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. Hurrying back to the bank, he 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 lamp; 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.

  ‘But Constable Burnett had had some pleasant exchanges with the daughter. Doubtless she had received instructions from her father to be as pleasant to him as possible. Burnett was a poetical young man, knew it was her birthday, and as he walked along the street his foot struck an old horseshoe and the idea occurred to him that he should return, attach the horseshoe to some flowers, which the nurseryman had given him permission to pick, and leave his little bouquet, to so speak, at his lady’s feet – a poetical idea, and one worthy of the finest traditions of the Metropolitan Police Force. This he did, but it took some time; and all the while this young man was philandering – Arthur Crater was dying!

  In a few seconds after lying down he must have passed from con-sciousness . . . the chloroform still dripped, and when the policeman eventually reached the bank, ten minutes after he was due, the man was dead!’

  The Public Prosecutor sat back in his padded chair and frowned at his new subordinate.

  ‘How on earth did you piece together all this?’ he asked in wonder.

  Mr Reeder shook his head sadly.

  ‘I have that perversion,’ he said. ‘It is a terrible misfortune, but it is true. I see evil in everything . . . in dying rose bushes, in horse­shoes – in poetry even. I have the mind of a criminal. It is deplorable!’

  The Treasure Hunt

  There is a tradition in criminal circles that even the humblest of detective officers is a man of wealth and substance, and that his secret hoard was secured by thieving, bribery and blackmail. It is the gossip of the fields, the quarries, the tailor’s shop, the laundry and the bakehouse of fifty county prisons and three convict estab­lishments, that all highly placed detectives have by nefarious means laid up for themselves sufficient earthly treasures to make work a hobby and their official pittance the most inconsiderable portion of their incomes.

  Since Mr J. G. Reeder had for over twenty years dealt exclusively with bank robbers and forgers, who are the aristocrats and capitalists of the underworld, legend credited him with country houses and immense secret reserves. Not that he would have a great deal of money in the bank. It was admitted that he was too clever to risk discovery by the authorities. No, it was hidden somewhere: it was the pet dream of hundreds of unlawful men that they would some day discover the hoard and live happily ever after. The one satisfactory aspect of his affluence (they all agreed) was that, being an old man – he was over 50 – he couldn’t take his money with him, for gold melts at a certain temperature and gilt-edged stock is seldom printed on asbestos paper.

  The Director of Public Prosecutions was lunching one Saturday at his club with a judge of the King’s Bench – Saturday being one of the two days in the week when a judge gets properly fed. And the conversation drifted to a certain Mr J. G. Reeder, the chief of the Director’s sleuths.

  ‘He’s capable,’ he confessed reluctantly, ‘but I hate his hat. It is the sort that So-and-so used to wear,’ he mentioned by name an eminent politician; ‘and I loathe his black frock-coat; people who see him coming into the office think he’s a coroner’s officer, but he’s capable. His side-whiskers are an abomination, and I have a feeling that, if I talked rough to him, he would burst into tears – a gentle soul. Almost too gentle for my kind of work. He apologises to the messenger every time he rings for him!’

  The judge, who knew something about humanity, answered with a frosty smile.

  ‘He sounds rather like a potential murderer to me,’ he said cyn­ically.

  Here, in his extravagance, he did Mr J. G. Reeder an injustice, for Mr Reeder was incapable of breaking the law – quite. At the same time there were many people who formed an altogether wrong con­ception of J. G.’s harmlessness as an individual. And one of these was a certain Lew Kohl, who mixed bank-note printing with elementary burglary.

  Threatened men live long, a trite saying but, like most things trite, true. In a score of cases, when Mr J. G. Reeder had descended from the witness stand, he had met the baleful eye of the man in the dock and had listened with mild interest to divers promises as to what would happen to him in the near or the remote future. For he was a great authority on forged bank-notes and he had sent many men to penal servitude.

  Mr Reeder, that inoffensive man, had seen prisoners foaming at the mouth in their rage, he had seen them white and livid, he had heard their howling execrations, and he had met these men after their release from prison and had found them amiable souls half ashamed and half amused at their nearly forgotten outbursts and horrific threats.

  But when, in the early part of 1914, Lew Kohl was sentenced for ten years, he neither screamed his imprecations nor registered a vow to tear Mr Reeder’s heart, lungs and important organs from his frail body.

  Lew just smiled and his eyes caught the detective’s for the space of a second – the forger’s eyes were pale blue and speculative, and they held neither hate nor fury. Instead, they said in so many words: ‘At the first opportunity I will kill you.’

  Mr Reeder read the message and sighed heavily, for he disliked fuss of all kinds, and resented, in so far as he could resent anything, the injustice of being made personally responsible for the per­form­ance of a public duty.

  Many years had passed, and considerable changes had occurred in Mr Reeder’s fortune. He had transferred from the specialised occup­ation of detecting the makers of forged bank-notes to the more general practice of the Public Prosecutor’s bureau, but he never forgot Lew’s smile.

  The work in Whitehall was not heavy and it was very interesting. To Mr Reeder came most of the anonymous letters which the Director received in shoals. In the main they were self-explanatory, and it required no particular intelligence to discover their motive. Jealousy, malice, plain mischief-making, and occasionally a sordid desire to benefit financially by the information which was conveyed, were behind the majority. But occasionally –

  Sir James is going to marry his cousin, and it’s not three months since his poor wife fell overboard from the Channel steamer crossing to Calais. There’s something very fishy about this business. Miss Margaret doesn’t like him, for she knows he’s after her money. Why was I sent away to London that night? He doesn’t like driving in the dark, either. It’s strange that he wanted to drive that night when it was raining like blazes.

  This particular letter was signed ‘A Friend’. Justice has many such friends.

  ‘Sir James’ was Sir James Tithermite, who had been a director of some new public department during the war and had received a baronetcy for his services.

  ‘Look it up,’ said the Director when he saw the letter. ‘I seem to remember that Lady Tithermite was drowned at sea.’

  ‘On the nineteenth of December last year,’ said Mr Reeder sol­emnly. ‘She and Sir James were going to Monte Carlo, breaking their journey in Paris. Sir James, who has a house near Maidstone, drove to Dover, garaging the car at the Lord Wilson Hotel. The night was stormy and the ship had a rough crossing – they were half-way across when Sir James came to the purser and said that he had missed his wife. Her baggage was in the cabin, her passport, rail ticket and hat, but the lady was not found, indeed was never seen again.’

  The Director nodded.

  ‘I see you’ve read up the case.’

  ‘I remember it,’ said Mr Reeder. ‘The case is a favourite specul­ation of mine. Unfortunately I see evil in everything and I have often thought how easy – but I fear that I take a warped view of life. It is a horrible handicap to possess a criminal mind.’

  The Director looked at him suspiciously. He was never quite sure whether Mr Reeder was serious. At that moment, his sobriety was beyond challenge.

  ‘A discharged chauffeur wrote that letter, of course,’ he began.

  ‘Thomas Dayford, of 179, Barrack Street, Ma
idstone,’ concluded Mr Reeder. ‘He is at present in the employ of the Kent Motor-Bus Company, and has three children, two of whom are twins and bonny little rascals.’

  The Chief laughed helplessly.

  ‘I’ll take it that you know!’ he said. ‘See what there is behind the letter. Sir James is a big fellow in Kent, a Justice of the Peace, and he has powerful political influences. There is nothing in this letter, of course. Go warily, Reeder – if any kick comes back to this office, it goes on to you – intensified!’

  Mr Reeder’s idea of walking warily was peculiarly his own. He travelled down to Maidstone the next morning, and, finding a bus that passed the lodge gates of Elfreda Manor, he journeyed com­fort­ably and economically, his umbrella between his knees. He passed through the lodge gates, up a long and winding avenue of poplars, and presently came within sight of the grey manor house.

  In a deep chair on the lawn he saw a girl sitting, a book on her knees, and evidently she saw him, for she rose as he crossed the lawn and came towards him eagerly.

  ‘I’m Miss Margaret Letherby – are you from — ?’ She mentioned the name of a well-known firm of lawyers, and her face fell when Mr Reeder regretfully disclaimed connection with those legal lights.

  She was as pretty as a perfect complexion and a round, not too intellectual, face could, in combination, make her.

  ‘I thought – do you wish to see Sir James? He is in the library. If you ring, one of the maids will take you to him.’

  Had Mr Reeder been the sort of man who could be puzzled by anything, he would have been puzzled by the suggestion that any girl with money of her own should marry a man much older than herself against her own wishes. There was little mystery in the matter now. Miss Margaret would have married any strong-willed man who insisted.

  ‘Even me,’ said Mr Reeder to himself, with a certain melancholy pleasure.

  There was no need to ring the bell. A tall, broad man in a golfing suit stood in the door-way. His fair hair was long and hung over his forehead in a thick flat strand; a heavy tawny moustache hid his mouth and swept down over a chin that was long and powerful.