Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns Read online

  The field was the property of a small company which was buying land in the neighbourhood – the Land Development Corporation, which had an office in the City. Its business was to buy suitable building sites and to resell them on easy payments.

  It was growing dark by the time Mr Reeder finished his personal investigations.

  “And now,” he said, “I think I would like to see this unfortunate man.”

  They took him to the shed where the murdered man lay, and the Inspector in charge gave him the gist of the doctor’s report.

  “He was beaten over the head, his skull fractured; there is no other sign of injury, but the doctor said these are quite sufficient to cause almost instantaneous death. An iron bar must have been used, or something equally heavy.”

  Mr Reeder said nothing. He went out of the shed, and waited while the door was padlocked.

  “If we can only get him identified–” began the Inspector.

  “I can identify him,” said Mr Reeder quietly. “His name is Buckingham – he is an ex-constable of the Metropolitan Police Force.”

  Within two hours Reeder was examining Buckingham’s record in the Inspector’s office at Scotland Yard. It was not a particularly good one. The man had served for twelve years in the Metropolitan Police Force and had been six times reprimanded for conduct prejudicial to discipline and on one occasion had narrowly escaped expulsion from the force. He had a history of drunkenness, had twice been before the Commissioner accused of receiving bribes, once from a bookmaker and once from a man whom he had arrested and had subsequently released. Eventually he had retired, without pension, to take up a position in the country. Particulars of that position were not available, and the only information on file was his last address.

  Reeder charged himself with this investigation, he went to a small house in Southwark, discovered Buckingham’s wife living there and broke to her the news of her husband’s death. She accepted the fact very calmly, indeed philosophically.

  “I haven’t seen him for three or four years,” she said. “The only money he ever sent me was ten pounds last Christmas, and I wouldn’t have got that only I met him in the street with a girl – and a sick-looking creature she was! – and had a row with him.”

  She was a little inconsistent in her indignation, for she told him quite calmly that she had married again, relying upon a law which is known only to the poor and certainly unknown to any lawyer, that if a husband deserts a wife and is not seen for two years she may marry again. And Mrs Buckingham had undoubtedly married again.

  Mr Reeder was not concerned with this blatant act of bigamy, but pressed her as to where the man had been employed. Here he came against a blank wall. Her husband had told her nothing, and apparently throughout their married life his attitude had been one of reticence, particularly with regard to his financial position and his private affairs.

  “He was a bad husband to me. He’s dead, and I don’t want to say anything against him. But I’m telling you, Mr Whatever-your-name-is, that I’m not going into mourning for him. He’s deserted me three times in my married life, and once he gave me a black eye, and I’ve never forgiven him for that. It was my right eye,” she added.

  Mr Reeder could wonder if there were any greater enormity in blacking the right than the left eye, but he did not pursue inquiries in this direction.

  All the woman could tell him was that her husband had taken a job in the country, that he was making a lot of money, and that when she had seen him in town he was “dressed flash, like a gentleman.”

  “When I say a gentleman,” she said, “he might have been a waiter. He had a white shirt-front on and a black tie, and he was looking as though he’d come into a fortune. Otherwise I wouldn’t have asked him for any money.”

  So far as she knew, he had no friends; at any rate, she could not supply the name of any person from whom particulars of his life might be secured.

  “When you say he worked in the country, which part of the country? Have you any idea what station he came from or went to?” he persisted.

  She thought a while.

  “Yes, Charing Cross. My brother saw him there one night, about two years ago.”

  She had none of his belongings, no notebook or papers of any kind.

  “Not even,” she said, “as much as a tobacco tin.”

  She had cut herself completely and absolutely adrift from him, never wanted to hear from or see him again, and her accidental meeting with him in the street was only to be remembered because it was so profitable.

  Mr Reeder returned to headquarters, to consult with investigators who had followed other lines of inquiry, and learned that they too had come to a dead end. J G Reeder was puzzled and exhilarated, and could have wished that he controlled the inquiries instead of being an independent seeker after knowledge.

  Here was a man, an ex-policeman, so prosperous that he could afford the finest silken underwear, found in a field, with no marks to identify him, obviously murdered, obviously conveyed from the scene of the murder by a car and deposited in the dark in a ditch which only those closely acquainted with the ground could have known existed.

  There was another woman in London who could give him information: the “highbrow lady” with the pallid face, who loved classical music and strong drink. London would be combed for her; there was a possibility that she might easily be found.

  The next morning he went early to the concert hall and interviewed the attendant. Mr Reeder might know little about music, but he knew something about music-lovers, and if this woman was a regular concert-goer, the attendant might remember her. Fortune was with him, for two men knew her, one by name. She was a Miss Letzfeld and she was especially to be remembered because she suffered from an inferiority complex, believed that attendants deliberately slighted her and pestered the management with letters of complaint. By luck, one of these letters had been kept. Miss Letzfeld lived at Breddleston Mews in Kensington.

  Mr Reeder went straight to the address and, after repeated knockings, gained the attention of the occupant. She came down to open the door, rather unpleasant to see in the clean daylight. A thin, long-faced girl, with sleepy eyes and an ugly mouth, wrapped in a dingy dressing gown.

  To his surprise she recognised him.

  “Your name’s Reeder, isn’t it? Didn’t Billy introduce you – at the Queen’s Hall? You’re a detective, aren’t you?” And then, quickly: “Is anything wrong?”

  “May I come up?” he asked.

  She led the way up the narrow stairs, her high-heeled shoes drumming unmusically on the bare, uncarpeted treads.

  The room into which he was ushered was expensively furnished, but most cheaply maintained. The untidy remnants of a meal were on a table. The room gave him the impression that it had neither been dusted nor swept for a week. Over one chair were a few articles of women’s apparel, which she snatched up.

  “I want to say this, Mr Reeder,” she said, almost before he was in the room, “that if there is anything wrong I know nothing about it. Billy’s been very good to me, but he’s trying. I don’t know how he got his money, and I’ve never asked him.”

  To Mr Reeder fell the unpleasant duty of telling her of the fate that had overtaken her man, and again he found that the tragic end of ex-Constable Buckingham evoked no very violent emotions. She was shocked, but impersonally shocked.

  “That’s terrible, isn’t it?” she said breathlessly. “Billy was such a good boy” (the description sounded a little ludicrous even in that tragic moment), “though he wasn’t what you might call particularly intellectual. I only saw him now and again, once a fortnight, sometimes once a week.”

  “Where did he come from?” asked Reeder.

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know. He never told me things; he was very close about his private life. He worked in the country for a
very rich man. I don’t even know what part of the country it was.”

  “Had he plenty of money?”

  “You mean Billy? Yes, he always had plenty of money, and lived well. He had an office in the city somewhere, something to do with land. I wouldn’t have known that, but I saw a telegram that he left behind here one day. It was addressed to the Something Land Corporation, but it wasn’t in his own name–”

  “The Land Development Corporation?” asked Mr Reeder quickly. “Do you remember the address?”

  The girl wasn’t sure, but she knew it was in the City.

  She had nothing of the man’s in her possession except – and here was the most important discovery – a photograph of Buckingham taken a year before. With this in his possession Mr Reeder drove to the City.

  The Land Development Corporation had an office in one of the big blocks near the Mansion House. It consisted of one room, in which a clerk and a typist worked, and a smaller room, very plainly furnished, where the Managing Director sat on his infrequent visits.

  For an hour Mr Reeder plied clerk and typist with questions, and when he got back to Scotland Yard he was in possession of so many facts that contradicted one another, so many that were entirely irreconcilable, that he found it difficult to put them in sequence.

  The plain, matter-of-fact report which he put before his superior may be quoted in full.

  “In the case of William Buckingham. Line of investigation, Land Development Corporation. This corporation was registered as a private company two years ago. It has a capital of £1,000 and debentures amounting to £300,000. The Directors are the clerk and the typist and a Mr William Buck. The bank balance is £1,300, and the company is proprietor of a large number of land blocks situated in the south of England, and evidently purchased with the object of development. A considerable number of these have been resold. Mr Buck was undoubtedly Buckingham. He came to the office very rarely, only to sign cheques. Large sums of money have been paid into and withdrawn from the bank, and a superficial inspection of the books suggests that these were genuine transactions. A further examination, necessarily of a hurried character, reveals considerable gaps in the accounting. The field where the body of Buckingham was found is part of the property of this company, and obviously Buckingham would be well acquainted with the land, though it is a curious fact that he had been there recently twice by night…”

  5

  The next morning a portrait of Buckingham appeared in every London newspaper, together with such particulars as would assist in a further identification. No news came until the afternoon of that day. Mr Reeder was in his office, examining documents in relation to a large and illicit importation of cocaine, when a messenger came in with a card. “Major Digby Olbude,” it read, and in the left-hand corner: “Lane Leonard Estate Office, Sevenways Castle, Sevenways, Kent”.

  Mr Reeder sat back in his chair, adjusted his unnecessary glasses and read the card again.

  “Ask Major Olbude to come up,” he said.

  Major Olbude was tall, florid, white of hair, rather pedantic of speech.

  “I have come to see you about the man Buckingham. I understand you are in charge of the investigations?”

  Mr Reeder bowed. It was not the moment to direct what might prove an interesting and informative caller to the man who was legitimately entitled to have first-hand information.

  “Will you sit down, Major?”

  He rose, pushed a chair forward for the visitor, and Major Olbude pulled up the knees of his creased trousers carefully and sat down.

  “I saw the portrait in this morning’s newspaper – at least, my niece drew my attention to it – and I came up at once, because I feel it is my duty, and the duty, indeed, of every good citizen to assist the police even in the smallest particular in a case of this importance.”

  “Very admirable,” murmured Mr Reeder.

  “Buckingham was in my service; he was one of the guards of what the local people call the treasure house of Sevenways Castle.”

  Again Mr Reeder nodded, as though he knew all that was to be known about Sevenways Castle.

  “As I say, my niece reads the newspapers, a practice in which I do not indulge, for in these days of sensationalism there is very little in newspapers in which an intellectual man finds the least pleasure and instruction. Buckingham had been in the employment of the late Mr Lane Leonard, and on Mr Lane Leonard’s death his services were transferred to myself, Mr Lane Leonard’s brother-in-law and his sole trustee. I might say that Mr Lane Leonard, as everybody knows, died very suddenly of heart failure and left behind a considerable fortune, eighty per cent of which was in bullion.”

  “In gold?” asked Mr Reeder, surprised.

  The major inclined his head.

  “That was my brother-in-law’s eccentricity. He had amassed this enormous sum of money by speculation, and lived in terror that it should be dissipated by his descendants – unhappily, he has only a daughter to carry on his name – in the same manner as it was amassed. He also took a very pessimistic view of the future of civilisation and particularly of the English race. He believed – and here I think he was justified – that for ten years there would be no industrial development in the country, and that English securities would fall steadily. He had a very rooted objection to banks, and the upshot of it all was that he accumulated in his lifetime a sum in gold equivalent to over a million and a half pounds. This was kept, and is still kept, in a chamber which he had specially built practically within the walls of the castle, and to guard which he engaged a staff of ex-policemen, one of whom is on duty every hour of the day and night. It is unnecessary for me to tell you, Mr Reeder, a man with a commercial knowledge, that by this method my brother-in-law was depriving his daughter of a very considerable income, the interest at five per cent on a million and a half pounds being seventy-five thousand pounds per annum. In ten years that would be three-quarters of a million, so that the provisions of this will mean that nearly four hundred thousand pounds is lost to my ward, and almost as much to the Treasury.”

  “Very distressing,” said Mr Reeder, and shook his head mournfully, as though the thought of the Treasury losing money cut him to the quick.

  “There is a separate fund invested in high-class government security,” the major went on, “on which my niece and myself live. Naturally, the custody of such an enormous sum is a source of constant anxiety to me – in fact, only two years ago I ordered an entirely new strongroom to be built at a very considerable cost.”

  He paused.

  “And Buckingham?” asked Mr Reeder gently. “I will come to Buckingham,” said the major with great dignity. “He was one of the guards employed. There are in all seven. Each lives in his own quarters, and it is against the rules I have instituted that these men should meet except when they relieve one another of their post. The practice is for the guard on duty to ring a bell communicating with the quarters of his relief, who immediately comes to the treasure house and, after being identified, is admitted. Buckingham should have come on duty at six o’clock on Saturday night. His predecessor at the post rang the bell as usual, but Buckingham did not appear. After an hour the man communicated with me, by telephone – there is a telephone connection between my study and the dome – I call it the dome because of its shape – and I set immediately to find the missing man. His room was empty, there was no sign of him, and I ordered the emergency man to take his place.”

  “Since then you have not seen him?”

  The major shook his head.

  “No, sir. Nor have I heard from him.”

  “What salary did you pay this man?”

  “Ten pounds a week, quarters, lighting and food. All the guards were supplied from the kitchen of the castle.”

  “Had he any private means?”

  “None,” said the other emphatically.

  “Wo
uld you be surprised to know that he has been speculating heavily in land?” asked Mr Reeder.

  The major rose to his feet, not quickly, but with a certain stately deliberation.

  “I should be both surprised and horrified,” he said. “Is there any way by which he could have had access to the – um – treasure house?”

  “No, sir,” said Olbude, “no method whatever, except through the door, of which I hold the key. The wall is made of concrete twelve inches thick and lined with half-inch steel. The locks are unpickable.”

  “And the foundations?” suggested Mr Reeder.

  “Eight feet of solid concrete. It is absolutely impossible.”

  Mr Reeder rubbed his chin, looking down at the desk, his lips drooping dismally.

  “Do you often go into the – um – treasure house?”

  “Yes, sir, I go in every month, on the first day of every month. In other words, I was there last Friday.”

  “And nothing had been disturbed?”

  “Nothing,” said the other emphatically.

  “I presume the bullion is in steel boxes–”

  “In large glass containers. That was another of Mr Lane Leonard’s eccentricities. There are about six hundred of these, each containing two thousand five hundred pounds’ worth of gold. It is possible to see at a glance whether the money has been disturbed. The containers are hermetically closed and sealed. They stand on reinforced concrete shelves, in eight tiers, on three sides of the treasure house, each tier holding seventy-five containers. The treasure house, I may explain, consists of two buildings; the inner shell, which is the treasure house proper, and another separate building, as it were a box placed over this to give protection to the guard and sufficient space for them to promenade. The outer building contains a small kitchenette, with tables, chairs and the necessary accommodation for the comfort of the guard. Attached to this is a lobby, also guarded with a steel door, and beyond that an iron grille, above which is a powerful electric light to enable the inner guard to scrutinise his relief and make sure that he is the right man – that is to say, that he is not being impersonated.”