The Terror Page 6

  ‘Get me the record of the O’Shea gold robbery, will you?’ he said. ‘And data of any kind we have about O’Shea.’

  It was not the first time he had made the last request and the response had been more or less valueless, but the Record Department of Scotland Yard had a trick of securing new evidence from day to day from unexpected sources. The sordid life histories that were compiled in that business-like room touched life at many points; the political branch that dealt with foreign anarchists had once exposed the biggest plot of modern times through a chance remark made by an old woman arrested for begging.

  When the clerk had gone Hallick opened his notebook and jotted down the meagre facts he had compiled. Undoubtedly the shot had been fired from the ruins which, he discovered, were those of an old chapel in the grounds, now covered with ivy and almost hidden by sturdy chestnut trees. How the assassin had made his escape was a mystery. He did not preclude the possibility that some of these wizened slabs of stone hidden under thickets of elderberry and hawthorn trees might conceal the entrance to an underground passage.

  He offered that solution to one of the inspectors who strolled in to gossip. It was the famous Inspector Elk, saturnine and sceptical.

  ‘Underground passages!’ scoffed Elk. ‘Why, that’s the last resource, or resort—I am not certain which—of the novel writer. Underground passages and secret panels! I never pick up a book which isn’t full of ’em!’

  ‘I don’t rule out either possibility,’ said Hallick quietly. ‘Monkshall was one of the oldest inhabited buildings in England. I looked it up in the library. It flourished even in the days of Elizabeth—’

  Elk groaned.

  ‘That woman! There’s nothing we didn’t have in her days!’

  Inspector Elk had a genuine grievance against Queen Elizabeth; for years he had sought to pass an education test which would have secured him promotion, but always it was the reign of the virgin queen and the many unrememberable incidents which, from his point of view, disfigured that reign, that had brought about his undoing.

  ‘She would have secret panels and underground passages!’

  And then a thought struck Hallick.

  ‘Sit down, Elk,’ he said. ‘I want to ask you something.’

  ‘If it’s history save yourself the trouble. I know no more about that woman except that she was not in any way a virgin. Whoever started this silly idea about the Virgin Queen?’

  ‘Have you ever met O’Shea?’ asked Hallick.

  Elk stared at him.

  ‘O’Shea—the bank smasher? No, I never met him. He is in America, isn’t he?’

  ‘I think he is very much in England,’ said Hallick, and the other man shook his head.

  ‘I doubt it.’ Then after a moment’s thought: ‘There’s no reason why he should be in England. I am only going on the fact that he has been very quiet these years, but then a man who made the money he did can afford to sit quiet. As a rule, a crook who gets money takes it to the nearest spieling club and does it in, and as he is a natural lunatic—’

  ‘How do you know that?’ asked Hallick sharply.

  Before he answered, Elk took a ragged cigar from his pocket and lit it.

  ‘O’Shea is a madman,’ he said deliberately. ‘It is one of the facts that is not disputed.’

  ‘One of the facts that I knew nothing about till I interviewed old Connor in prison, and I don’t remember that I put it on record,’ said Hallick. ‘How did you know?’

  Elk had an explanation which was new to his superior.

  ‘I went into the case years ago. We could never get O’Shea or any particulars about him except a scrap of his writing. I am talking about the days before the gold robbery and before you came into the case. I was just a plain detective officer at the time and if I couldn’t get his picture and his fingerprints I got on to his family. His father died in a lunatic asylum, his sister committed suicide, his grandfather was a homicide who died whilst he was awaiting his trial for murder. I’ve often wondered why one of these clever fellows didn’t write a history of the family.’

  This was indeed news to John Hallick, but it tallied with the information that Connor had given to him.

  The clerk came back at this moment with a formidable dossier and one thin folder. The contents of the latter showed the inspector that nothing further had been added to the sketchy details he had read before concerning O’Shea. Elk watched him curiously.

  ‘Refreshing your mind about the gold robbery? Doesn’t it make your mouth water to think that all these golden sovereigns are hidden somewhere. Pity Bradley isn’t on this job. He knows the case like I know the back of my hand, and if you think this murder has got anything to do with O’Shea, I’d cable him to come back if I were you.’

  Hallick was turning the pages of the typewritten sheets slowly.

  ‘As far as Connor is concerned, he only got what was coming to him. He squealed a lot at the time of his conviction about being double-crossed, but Connor double-crossed more crooks than any man on the records, and Soapy Marks. I happened to know both of them. They were quite prepared to squeak about O’Shea just before the gold robbery. Where is Soapy?’

  Hallick shook his head and closed the folder.

  ‘I don’t know. I wish you would put the word round to the divisions that I’d like to see Soapy Marks,’ he said. ‘He usually hangs out in Hammersmith, and I should like to give him a word of warning.’

  Elk grinned.

  ‘You couldn’t warn Soapy,’ he said. ‘He knows too much. Soapy is so clever that one of these days we’ll find him at Oxford or Cambridge. Personally,’ he ruminated reflectively, ‘I prefer clever crooks. They don’t take much catching; they catch themselves.’

  ‘I am not worrying about his catching himself,’ said Hallick. ‘But I am a little anxious as to whether O’Shea will catch him first. That is by no means outside the bounds of possibility.’

  And here he spoke prophetically.

  He got through by ’phone to Monkshall, but Sergeant Dobie, who had been left in charge, had no information.

  ‘Has that woman, Elvery, left?’ asked Hallick.

  ‘Not she!’ came the reply. ‘She will hang on to the last minute. That woman is a regular crime hound. And, Mr Hallick, that fellow Fane is tight again.’

  ‘Is he ever sober?’ asked Hallick.

  He did not trouble about Fane’s insobriety, but he was interested to learn that life in Monkshall, despite the tragedy and the startling event of the morning, was going on as though nothing had happened. Reporters had called in the course of the day and had tried to interview the colonel.

  ‘But I shunted them off. The general theory here is that Connor had somebody with him, that they got hold of the money and quarrelled about it. The other fellow killed Connor and got away with the stuff. When I said “The general idea”,’ said Dobie carefully, ‘I meant it is my idea. What do you think of that, sir?’

  ‘Rotten,’ said Hallick, and hung up the receiver.

  CHAPTER X

  ALL the machinery of Scotland Yard was at work. Inquiries had gone out in every direction and not even Mrs Elvery and her daughter had been spared. By midnight Hallick learned the private history, as far as it could be ascertained, of every inmate of Monkshall.

  Mrs Elvery was a woman in fairly comfortable circumstances, and, since her husband’s death had released her from a gloomy house in Devonshire, she had no permanent home. She was more than comfortably off, by certain standards she was a wealthy woman, one of that mysterious band of middle-aged women who move from one hotel to another, and live frugally in fashionable resorts in the season. You find them on the Lido in August, in Deauville in July, on the Riviera or in Egypt in the winter.

  Mr Goodman held a sleeping partnership in an old-established and not too prosperous firm of tea importers. Probably, thought Hallick, the days of its prosperity expired before Goodman retired from business.

  Cotton, the butler, had the least savoury record. He was a
man who had been discharged from three jobs under suspicion of pilfering, but no conviction could be traced against him. (Hallick wrote in his notebook: ‘Find some way of getting Cotton’s fingerprints.’) In every case Cotton had been employed at boarding houses and always small articles of jewellery had disappeared in circumstances which suggested that he was not entirely ignorant of the reason for such disappearance.

  Colonel Redmayne’s record occupied a sheet of foolscap. He had been an impecunious officer in the Auxiliary Medical Staff, had been court-martialled in the last week of the war for drunkenness and severely reprimanded. He had, by some miracle, been appointed to a responsible position in a military charity. The disappearance of funds had led to an investigation, there had been some talk of prosecution, and Scotland Yard had actually been consulted, but had been advised against such a prosecution in the absence of direct proof that the colonel was guilty of anything but culpable negligence. The missing money had been refunded and the matter was dropped. He was next heard of when he bought Monkshall.

  The information concerning Redmayne’s military career was news to Hallick.

  ‘A doctor, eh?’

  Elk nodded. He had been charged with collecting the information.

  ‘He joined up in the beginning of the war and got his rank towards the finish,’ he said. ‘Funny how these birds hang on to their military rank—“doctor” would be good enough for me.’

  ‘Was he ever in the regular army?’

  Elk shook his head.

  ‘So far as I could find out, no. Owing to the trouble he got into at the end of the war he was not offered a permanent commission.’

  Hallick spent the evening studying a large plan of Monkshall and its grounds, and even a larger one of the room in which Connor had been found. There was one thing certain: Connor had not ‘broken and entered’. It was, in a sense, an inside job, he must have been admitted by—whom? Not by Redmayne, certainly not by his daughter. By a servant, and that servant was Cotton. The house was almost impossible to burgle from outside without inside assistance; there were alarms in all the windows and he had seen electric controls on the doors. Monkshall was almost prepared for a siege. Indeed, it seemed as though Colonel Redmayne expected sooner or later the visitation of a burglar.

  Hallick went to bed a very tired man that night, fully expecting to be called by telephone, but nothing happened. He ’phoned Monkshall before he left his house and Dobie reported ‘All is well.’ He had not been to bed that night, and nothing untoward had occurred. There was neither sound or sight of the ghostly visitor.

  ‘Ghosts!’ scoffed Hallick. ‘Did you expect to see one?’

  ‘Well,’ said Dobie’s half-apologetic voice, ‘I am really beginning to believe there is something here that isn’t quite natural.’

  ‘There is nothing anywhere that is not natural, sergeant,’ said Hallick sharply.

  There was another case in which he was engaged, and he spent two unprofitable hours interviewing a particularly stupid servant girl concerning the mysterious disappearance of a large quantity of jewellery. It was nearly noon when he got back to his office and his clerk greeted him with a piece of unexpected information.

  ‘Mr Goodman is waiting to see you, sir. I put him in the reception-room.’

  ‘Goodman?’ Hallick frowned. At the moment he could not recall the name. ‘Oh, yes, from Monkshall? What does he want?’

  ‘He said he wished to see you. He was quite willing to wait.’

  ‘Bring him in,’ said Hallick.

  Mr Goodman came into the tidy office a rather timid and diffident man.

  ‘I quite expected you to throw me out for I realise how busy you are, inspector,’ he said, putting down his hat and umbrella very carefully; ‘but as I had some business in town I thought I’d come along and see you.’

  ‘I am very glad to see you, Mr Goodman.’ Hallick placed a chair for him. ‘Are you coming to enlarge on your theories?’

  Goodman smiled.

  ‘I think I told you before I had no theories. I am terribly worried about Miss Redmayne, though.’ He hesitated. ‘You cross-examined her. She was distressed about it.’ He paused a little helplessly, but Hallick did not help him. ‘I think I told you that I am—fond of Mary Redmayne. I would do anything to clear up this matter so that you would see, what I am sure is a fact, that her father had nothing whatever to do with this terrible affair.’

  ‘I never said he had,’ interrupted Hallick.

  Mr Goodman nodded.

  ‘That I realise. But I am not as foolish as, perhaps, I appear to be; I know that he is under suspicion. In fact, I imagine that everybody in the house, including myself, must of necessity be suspected.’

  Again he waited and again Hallick was wilfully silent. He was wondering what was coming next.

  ‘I am a fairly wealthy man,’ Goodman went on at last. He gave the impression that it required a desperate effort on his part to put his proposition into words. ‘And I would be quite willing to spend a very considerable sum, not necessarily to help the police, but to clear Redmayne from all suspicion. I don’t understand the methods of Scotland Yard and I feel I needn’t tell you this’—he smiled—‘and probably I am exposing my ignorance with every word I utter. But what I came to see you about is this—is it possible for me to engage a Scotland Yard detective?’

  Hallick shook his head.

  ‘If you mean in the same way as you engage a private detective—no,’ he said. Goodman’s face fell.

  ‘That’s a pity. I had heard so much from Mrs Elvery—a very loquacious and trying lady, but with an extraordinary knowledge of—er—criminality, that there is a gentleman at Scotland Yard who would have been of the greatest assistance to me—Inspector Bradley.’

  Hallick laughed.

  ‘Inspector Bradley is at the moment abroad,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ replied Mr Goodman, getting glum. ‘That is a great pity. Mrs Elvery says—’

  ‘I am afraid she says a great deal that is not very helpful,’ said Hallick good-humouredly. ‘No, Mr Goodman, it is impossible to oblige you and I am afraid you will have to leave the matter in our hands. I don’t think you will be a loser by that. We have no other desire than to get the truth. We are just as anxious to clear any person who is wrongfully suspected as we are to convict any person who comes under suspicion and who justifies that suspicion.’

  That should have finished the matter, but Mr Goodman sat on looking very embarrassed.

  ‘It is a thousand pities,’ he said at last. ‘Mr Bradley is abroad? So I shan’t be able even to satisfy my curiosity. You see, Mr Hallick, the lady in question was talking so much about this superman—I suppose he is clever?’

  ‘Very,’ said Hallick. ‘One of the ablest men we have had at the Yard.’

  ‘Ah.’ Goodman nodded. ‘That makes my disappointment a little more keen. I would have liked to have seen what he looked like. When one hears so much about a person—’

  Hallick looked at him for a second, then turning his back upon the visitor he scanned the wall where were hanging three framed portrait groups. One of these he lifted down from the hook and laid on the table. It was a conventional group of about thirty men sitting or standing in three rows and beneath were the words ‘H.Q. Staff.’

  ‘I can satisfy your curiosity,’ he said. ‘The fourth man on the left from the commissioner who is seated in the centre is Inspector Bradley.’

  Mr Goodman adjusted his glasses and looked. He saw a large, florid-looking man of fifty, heavy-featured, heavily built. The last person in the group he would have picked out.

  ‘That’s Bradley; he isn’t much to look at, is he?’ smiled Hallick.

  ‘He is the livest wire in this department.’ Goodman stared at the photograph rather nervously, and then he smiled.

  ‘That’s very good of you, Mr Hallick,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t look like a detective, but then no detective ever does. That is the peculiar thing about them. They look rather—er—’


  ‘A commonplace lot, eh?’ said Hallick, his eyes twinkling. ‘So they are.’

  He hung up the portrait on the wall.

  ‘Don’t bother about Miss Redmayne,’ he said, ‘and for heaven’s sake don’t think that the employment of a detective, private or public, on her behalf will be of the slightest use to her or her father. Innocent people have nothing to fear. Guilty people have a great deal. You have known Colonel Redmayne for a long time, I think?’

  ‘All my life.’

  ‘You know about his past?’

  The old tea merchant hesitated.

  ‘Yes, I think I know,’ he said quietly. ‘There were one or two incidents which were a little discreditable, were there not? He told me himself. He drinks a great deal too much, which is unfortunate. I think he was drinking more heavily at the time these unfortunate incidents occurred.’

  He picked up his hat and umbrella, took out his pipe with a mechanical gesture, looked at it, rubbed the bowl, and replaced it hastily.

  ‘You can smoke, Mr Goodman, we shan’t hang you for it,’ chuckled Hallick.

  He himself walked through the long corridor and down the stairs to the entrance hall with his visitor, and saw him off the premises. He hoped and believed that he had sent Goodman away feeling a little happier, and his hope was not without reason.

  CHAPTER XI

  IT was four o’clock when Goodman reached the little station which is some four miles distant from Monkshall, and, declining the offer of the solitary fly, started to walk across to the village. He had gone a mile when he heard the whir of a motor behind him. He did not attempt to turn his head, and was surprised when he heard the car slacken speed and a voice hailing him. It was Ferdie Fane who sat at the wheel.

  ‘Hop in, brother. Why waste your own shoe leather when somebody else’s rubber tyres are available?’

  The face was flushed and the eyes behind the horn-rimmed spectacles glistened. Mr Goodman feared the worst.

  ‘No, no, thank you. I’d rather walk,’ he said.

  ‘Stuff! Get in,’ scoffed Ferdie. ‘I am a better driver when I am tight than when I am sober, but I am not tight.’