Elk 04 White Face Page 9

  There was a small writing-table in the drawing-room, but a search of this—the drawers were unlocked—revealed nothing that was in any way satisfactory to the searcher. It was in the bedroom that he and his assistant decided to make their most careful scrutiny. This was the room next to the drawing-room and the last to be visited. As soon as he switched on the lights, Mason realised that something unusual had happened. The drawers of the dressing-table had been pulled out, the plate-glass door of the wardrobe stood wide open. On the floor was a medley of garments and wearing apparel, and amidst them Mason saw the corner of a black box. He went quickly to this. It had been locked, but somebody had broken open the lid. Scattered about the floor were oddments and papers. There was no framed photograph. What he did see was a small cardboard cylinder. He picked it up and squinted through it; it was empty.

  The cylinder interested him, because he knew it was the kind in which marriage certificates were kept; and however unhappy a marriage might be, that little slip of paper is one with which no woman parts willingly.

  “Get the men in and we’ll dust the place for fingerprints,” he said.

  He had hardly spoken the words before he saw lying on the bed a pair of white cotton gloves. The intruder had taken no risks. He examined them carefully, but they told him nothing except that they were white cotton gloves which had been carefully washed, probably by their user.

  When had the burglar come, and how had he secured admission? The door below had not been forced; only the black box, which, he guessed, had been in the bottom drawer of the bureau when it was found, for nothing in this drawer had been disturbed, and there was a space which such a box might have occupied.

  Of clues by which he could judge the time, there was none.

  “There’s somebody knocking on the door down below,” said Shale. “Shall I see who it is?”

  “No, wait; I’ll go.”

  Mason went quickly down the stairs and opened the door. A woman was standing there with a shawl over her head to protect her from the rain. She looked dubiously at Mason standing in the light, and edged farther back. It struck him that she was ready to run.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked nervously.

  “Everything is all wrong,” said Mason. And then, recognising her timidity and guessing the reason: “Don’t worry—I’m a police officer.”

  He saw she was relieved.

  “I’m the caretaker of the house opposite; the lady is away in the country; and I was wondering whether I ought to go to the police or not.”

  “Then you saw somebody go into this flat tonight?” asked Mason quickly.

  “I saw them come out,” she said. “I wouldn’t even have taken notice of that if it hadn’t been for the white thing—”

  “What white thing? You mean, it was somebody with a white mask?” Mason snapped the question at her.

  “I won’t swear to who it was, but I will swear that he had white on his face. I saw it as plain as can be in the light of the street lamp. I’ve had toothache all night and I’ve been sitting in our front parlour—”

  He cut short her narrative.

  “When did you see this somebody come out?” he asked.

  It was less than a quarter of an hour ago. She had also seen him and Shale enter and, believing that they were police officers, she had ventured to come over and knock at the door. He questioned her closely as to how the burglar had been dressed, and the description was a familiar one: the long coat that reached to the heels, the black felt hat and the white mask. He learned one characteristic which had never before been noticed: the man limped painfully. She was very sure of this. He came in no car and went away walking, and had disappeared round the corner of the block, in the direction opposite to that which the two detectives had followed on their way to the flat.

  Shale came down and took a shorthand note of her statement, and then the two men returned to the flat and made an even more careful scrutiny in the hope that White Face might have left something else behind than his gloves.

  “I don’t even know that these won’t tell us something.”

  Mason put the gloves carefully into a paper bag and slipped them into his pocket.

  “Then it’s true, White Face is an institution here.”

  “They all think so,” said Shalee. “The little thieves round here glorify him!”

  Mason returned to the station, a very much baffled man. He had two pieces of evidence, and these he had locked away in the station safe. He took out the ring and the capsule and brought them into the inspector’s room. The garrulous Rudd would be able to tell him something about this. He opened the door and called to the station sergeant.

  “I suppose Dr. Rudd will be in bed by now?”

  “No, sir; he rang me up a quarter of an hour ago. He said he was coming round to offer rather a startling theory. Those were his words—‘rather a startling theory.’”

  Mason groaned.

  “It’ll be startling all right! Get him on the ‘phone and ask him if he’ll step round. Don’t mention the theory. I want him to identify a medicine.”

  He examined the ring through a magnifying-glass, but there was nothing that could tell him a twentieth of what Michael Quigley could have told.

  “That Quigley knows something,” grumbled Mason. “I nearly had it out of him, too.”

  “What could he know, sir?” asked Shale.

  “He knows who owns that ring,” nodded Mason. The station sergeant opened the door and looked in. “Dr. Rudd went out five minutes ago on his way, sir,” he said, “and there’s a message for you from the Yard.”

  It was from the Information Bureau. The mysterious Donald had been located.

  “His name is Donald Bateman,” said the reporting detective. “He arrived from South Africa three weeks ago and is staying at the Little Norfolk Hotel, Norfolk Street, The description tallies with the description you sent us, Mr. Mason.”

  “He’s not in the hotel now by any chance?”

  “No, sir, he went out this evening, wearing a dinner jacket, and said he wouldn’t be back till midnight. He hasn’t been seen since. He has a scar under his chin—that corresponds with your description, too—and he’s about the same height as the murdered man.”

  “Pass his name to the Identification Bureau,” said Mason, “see if we have any record of him and—don’t go away, my lad—post a man in the hotel. If Mr. Donald Bateman doesn’t return by seven o’clock tomorrow morning have his trunks removed to Cannon Row Police Station and held until I come and search them,”

  He hung up the receiver.

  “Donald Bateman, eh? That’s something to go on, Mr. Bray hasn’t rung up?”

  “No, sir.”

  Mason strolled back to the inspector’s room and resumed his examination of the ring and the capsule.

  “Yes, Michael knows all about the ring or I’m a Dutchman. The young devil nearly fainted when he found it.”

  “Where could the ring and the capsule have come from?” asked Shale.

  “Where else could they have come from than out of Donald Bateman’s pocket? You’ve heard all the witnesses examined: they agree that when Bateman fell he put his hand in his waistcoat pocket and tried to get something out. He probably got both these things in his hand; they rolled down the sidewalk into the gutter, and they wouldn’t have been found then but for Michael. I’ll say that of the kid, he’s got good instincts.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “How far does the doctor live from here?”

  “Not four minutes’ walk,” said Shale, who had been sent to fetch the divisional surgeon when the murder was reported.

  “Then he ought to be here by now. Ring him again.”

  But Dr. Rudd’s housekeeper insisted that he had left ten minutes before.

  “Go out and see if you can find him.”

  Mason was suddenly serious. He mistrusted the doctor’s theories; he mistrusted more his garrulity. A man who talks all the time and whose topics are li
mited in number must inevitably say something which the police would rather he did not say. He hoped he had not met a friend on the way.

  In a little under ten minutes Shale came back. He had been as far as the doctor’s house but had seen no sign of Rudd. It was a comparatively short and straightforward walk.

  “He may be with Dr. Marford. Ring him.”

  But Marford could offer no explanation, except that he had been in his surgery and that Rudd had passed, tapping on the big surgery window to say good night.

  “And frightened me out of my skin,” complained Dr. Marford. “I hadn’t the slightest idea who it was until I went up and looked behind the blinds.”

  The distance from the doctor’s surgery to the police station was less than two hundred yards, but there was another way, through Gallows Alley, an unwholesome short cut, by which the distance could be cut off some fifty yards. As nobody ever went into Gallows Alley, except those lost souls who dragged out their dreary existence there, it was presumable that Rudd had taken the longest route.

  The lower end of Gallows Alley ran out through a tunnel-shaped opening flush with and a few yards north of Dr. Marford’s side door. In the days when drunken sailormen from the docks and wharves were as common as lamp-posts, Gallows Alley was a place of picturesque infamy. It was no longer picturesque.

  A Chinaman had a tiny lodging-house there in which he housed an incredible number of his fellow countrymen. Four or five Italian families lived in another house, and other families less easy to describe dwelt in the others. It was said that the police went down Gallows Alley in pairs. That is not true. They never went at all, and only with the greatest circumspection when bona fide cries of “Murder!” called for their attention.

  Dr. Marford was one of the few people who went down that lane day or night voluntarily and suffered no harm. Did he wish, he could tell hair-raising stories of what he had seen and heard in that malodorous thoroughfare, but he was from choice a poor raconteur.

  “I shouldn’t think Rudd would go down there,” he said in answer to the superintendent’s inquiry. “At any rate, if you have any doubt I’ll go myself.”

  Half an hour passed, and at a quarter to two Mason gathered all his reserves and sent them on a search. A telephone call brought swift police launches to the water front, to the distress of the local gang that was illicitly breaking cargo when the boats arrived. But there was no sign of Rudd or message from him. Momentarily he had vanished from the face of the earth.

  This was the situation as Michael Quigley found it when he arrived on the scene. He sought an interview with the superintendent and told him frankly, as Janice had directed him to tell, the story of the ring. Mr. Mason listened wearily.

  “Hiding up!” he wailed. “What good did it do? Why couldn’t you tell me right away—not that it would have made any difference, except that I should have known the name earlier. Yes, that’s his name, Donald Bateman. We’re getting warmer—hallo, Doctor!”

  It was Marford, who had come for news of his colleague.

  “None. He’s probably discovered that the murderer was an Irishman and he’s gone off by the night boat to Ireland to get local colour. Sit down, Doctor, and have some coffee.”

  He pushed a steaming cup towards Marford, who took it and sipped painfully.

  “Where he’s gone I don’t know, and don’t care.” Mason yawned. “I’m a weary man, and I did hope this murder was coming out nicely. If Mr. Louis Landor would only come home like a good lad, we ought to have all the threads in our hands by the morning. But if Mr. Louis Landor has taken his passport and his three thousand pounds in a private aeroplane to the Continent, then this is going to be one of those well-known unravelled mysteries of London that reporters write about when they’re too old for ordinary work.”

  The doctor finished his coffee and went soon after. His second case was due.

  Mason walked with him to the door.

  “Any more theories?”

  “Yes, I’ve got, not a theory, but an absolute conviction now.” said Marford quietly. “But for the trifling detail that I’m not in a position to supply the evidence, I think I could tell you the murderer.”

  Mason nodded.

  “I wonder if you are thinking of the same person, Doctor?”

  Marford smiled.

  “For his sake, I hope not.”

  “Which means that you’re not going to give us the benefit of your logic and deductions?”

  “I’m a doctor, not a detective,” said the other.

  Mason came back to the charge-room fire and warmed his hands.

  “No message from Bray or Elk?”

  He glanced at the clock; it was a quarter-past two. He began to have his doubts whether Mr. Louis Landor would ever return to his flat.

  Accompanied by the reporter, he strolled out in the direction of Gallows Alley. The rain had ceased, but the wind still blew fitfully.

  “And if you’re writing about this place,” he said, “don’t fall into an error common to all cub reporters that Gallows Alley stands on the site of Execution Dock. It doesn’t. It was named after a man called Gallers, who owns a lot of property about here, and if, instead of putting up his silly clinics, the doctor would get his rich pals to buy this area and clear away the slums, he’d be doing the world a service—and the police.”

  The entry of Gallows Alley looked dark and formidable. Within a few yards were the gates of the doctor’s yard. It was a small courtyard, at one end of which was a shed, which he hired out to the famous Gregory Wicks, a veteran owner of a taxicab. It was in another way a most useful assembling place for the doctor, who dispensed his own medicines. Almost any evening could be seen a queue of poorly-dressed men and women lined up, waiting their turn to enter the narrow passage that flanked the surgery and receive through a small hatch from the doctor’s hands the medicine he had ordered and dispensed.

  It’s more like the waiting-room of a hospital than a private surgery,” explained Michael. Mason grunted.

  “Why keep ‘em alive?” he asked in despair. A wall divided Gallows Alley from the doctor’s yard, the houses in that by-pass being built on one side of the court only.

  Mason looked up and down, and again felt that unaccountable sensation of menace.

  The road was a black canyon, and the starry arc lamps emphasised the desolation. A street of tombs; black, ugly, shoddy tombs, nailed and glued and cheaply cemented together. The dingy window-glass hardly returned the reflection of the lights; no chimney smoked, no window glowed humanly. Up Gallows Alley, where the door panels had been used for firewood, men and women slept in the open, huddled up in the deep recesses of doorways, slept through the rain and the soughing wind, old sacks drawn over their knees and shoulders.

  As Mason and his companion picked a way over the slippery cobbles, a voice in the darkness chanted—the voice of a woman husky with sleep:

  “I spy a copper with a shinin’ collar. If he touches me I’ll holler—P’lice!”

  He never ceased to wonder how they could see in the dark.

  “They’re rats,” said Mike, answering his unspoken thought.

  A chuckle of sly laughter came to them.

  “They never sleep,” said Mason in despair. “It was the same in my time. Day and night you could go through Gallows Alley and there would be somebody watching you.”

  He wheeled suddenly and called a name. From a entry slunk a figure, which might have been man or woman.

  “Thought it was you,” said Mason.

  (Who it was, or who he thought it was, Michael never learnt.)

  “How are things?”

  “Bad, Mr. Mason, very bad.” It was the whining voice of an old man.

  “Have you seen Dr. Rudd tonight?”

  Again came that eerie peal of laughter from invisible depths.

  “He’s the coppers’ man, ain’t he—Rudd? No, Mr. Mason, ‘we ain’t seen him. Nobody comes down ‘ere. Afraid of wakin’ people up, they are!”

  The c
huckles came now like the rustle of a wind.

  Mason stopped before No. 9. A man was sitting on the step, his back to the door, a bibulous man who slept noisily. An old hearth-rug was drawn over his knees and on top some belated wag of Gallows Alley had balanced an empty tomato can.

  “If it doesn’t fall and wake him, old man Wicks will give him a shock if he finds him there!” said Mason.

  “Uncanny, isn’t it?” he said when they had emerged from the court. “They talk about Chinamen in the East End of London. Lord! they’re the only decent people they’ve got in Gallows Alley, and old Gregory.”

  “I wonder what they do for a living?”

  “I should hate to know,” said Mason.

  They came back by the way they had entered.

  “I’m giving Bray another hour, and then I’m going up to the Yard.”

  “I’ll drive you, if you like. There’s nothing more to be got here.”

  The shadowy figure they had seen emerged from the opening, holding an old overcoat about his throat.

  “White Face has been around tonight, they say, Mr. Mason.”

  “Do they, indeed?” said Mason politely.

  “You don’t treat us right, Mr. Mason. You come down ‘ere an’ expect us to ‘nose’ for you, and everybody in the court knows we’re ‘nosing.’ If you treated us right and did the proper thing, you’d hear something. What’s the matter with old Gregory, hey? That’s something you don’t know—and nobody else knows. What’s the matter with Gregory?”

  And with this cryptic remark he vanished.

  “He’s mad—genuinely mad. No, I don’t know his name, but he’s mad in a sane way. What in hell does he mean about Gregory?”

  Mike could not answer. He knew old Gregory—everybody in London knew the man who housed his cab in Dr. Marford’s yard and lived alone in the one decent house in Gallows Court.

  “I’d give a lot to know what that crazy man knew about him—what he was driving at.”

  Mason was disturbed, irritable. A detective officer has an instinct for sincerity—it is two-thirds of his mental equipment, and the demented denizen of the court was not rambling. To speak ill, or hint suspicion, against Gregory Wicks was a kind of treason.