Calamity in Kent, A British Library Crime Classic (8 page)

“Can't leave you here on your own, guv'nor,” he explained. “You see, guv'nor, I don't mean to insult you, but I don't know who you are, really, and if anything was missing after you'd gone, they'd say I was responsible. They'd say, I expect, that I'd pinched the stuff. And I've got my good name to consider. I've been working here for nine years, I have, and no black mark against my name in all that time. I don't want to spoil that there record, you see.”

I did see. I knew that from the point of view of this man I was a pretty suspicious sort of character. Indeed, if I had been in his position I should have felt very doubtful about allowing any stranger to have a look around the place, And, to do him due justice, I think that the porter had felt pretty doubtful; it was only his natural cupidity, when he realised that I was prepared to pay for the privilege of examining Tilsley's apartment, that had overcome his natural suspicions of me.

So I strolled into Tilsley's bedroom, closely followed by the porter. There was, I soon saw, nothing at all here to deserve my attention. Well-kept and neatly-pressed clothes hung in the wardrobe. On the wall was a reproduction, nicely framed, of Augustus John's portrait of Suggia. On the dressing-table was a picture of the lady whom I had met in the Charrington Hotel at Broadgate. The personal background of the case hung together all right.

I made my way back to the sitting-room again. There was a small roll-top desk beside the window. I opened it (it was not locked), and looked for a few moments at the papers in it. These were piled up in a neat way that seemed to me to indicate that the police had been here before me.

Of course, it was pretty obvious that the police would tend to concentrate on the desk. There was the place where the men from Scotland Yard would expect to find the material they were after. I didn't think that it was really much good for me to go through the masses of papers that there were left. Anything that was of any real importance would have been taken away. No doubt at this moment—or very soon, anyhow—all the valuable stuff from here would be on Shelley's desk. And I should be able to swap my notebooks for whatever information Shelley had managed to extract from the papers.

I couldn't think how the police had missed the little black notebook. Probably they had glanced at the bookcase. They were, however, likely to be looking merely for the hidden document, folded inside a novel, or that sort of thing. The book which, to my mind, stuck out a mile, they would not notice, because they were not looking for that sort of thing.

So I thought that I had really obtained all that I wanted. The way in which I have described it here may make my search sound very perfunctory, but the fact is that I spent some considerable time in hunting there, but found so little of any real value that it seemed to me almost as if my trip to town had been almost wasted. Indeed, if it had not been for the notebook I should have thought that it was so.

Chapter X

In Which I Examine Two Notebooks

My landlady at Broadgate was a pleasant old soul. She must have been completely mystified by my apparent disappearance. For, you must remember, I had set out that morning for a pre-breakfast walk, and had immediately got mixed up in this mysterious case. It was teatime when I got back, bearing the two all-important notebooks.

“Mr. London!” she exclaimed as she met me in the hall on my return. “I thought that you had got lost. I was thinking of going to the police about you.”

I grinned rather shamefacedly. “I'm very sorry, Mrs. Cecil,” I said. “You see, I met an old friend of mine from Fleet Street, and he rushed me off to London. It was a matter of a possible job, where I had to get there without delay. Only by getting there quickly was it possible to be sure that I should be considered. And I'm nearly well now, you know, so that I could go into the matter.”

“And did you get the job?” she asked, looking at me, I thought, rather suspiciously. Indeed, my tale must have sounded rather thin.

“Yes.”

“Oh, I am glad,” she said. And she sounded as if she meant it.

“It's with
The Daily Wire
,” I explained. Indeed, she must know soon, for the articles with my name at the top of them would very soon be appearing. There was no point in trying to keep the matter secret from her.

“I'm glad,” she said again. “And when do you start?” I saw that what was worrying her was the matter of the room which I was occupying. She was mentally envisaging a “long let” suddenly drying up.

“Oh, I shall be doing the work from here for the moment, Mrs. Cecil,” I said. “You see, it's a sort of special correspondent job. I shan't have to attend the office regularly, not to begin with, anyhow.” I knew that the whole background of newspaper work would be completely foreign to her, and she would be compelled to take on trust what I told her. And anyhow it was sure enough that as soon as she saw the first of my contributions to
The Daily Wire
she would realise that I had only told the truth about my connection with the paper.

Now, however, my main concern was to get away from her, and do something with the two black notebooks that seemed almost to be burning holes in my pocket.

“Will you have some tea?” she asked.

“Do you think that you could get a tray sent up to my room, Mrs. Cecil?” I asked. “You see, I have some rather important work to do for my paper, and I can get on with it only if you can get my tea to me up there, so that I can have my tea while I am working.”

“I'll do it, sir,” she said. “But don't forget that you've been very ill. Don't overdo it; I've met too many people who have overworked too soon when they have left hospital, you know.” And the old soul meant it, I knew. She really thought that I was an invalid, who should be looked after.

Still, I was not going to waste any more time over reassuring her. I had wasted enough time in conversation already. I knew that I should have to turn these books over to Shelley later in the day. And I was determined to get out of them everything that I could before I handed them over.

So I merely said: “Oh, I'll take care of myself, Mrs. Cecil,” and made my way upstairs.

In my room I got out the two notebooks and examined them with some care. Externally, as I have already said, they were identical. They had black covers, made of shiny cloth. And they had about a hundred pages each, of which only about a half had been used.

As I compared the two books it became increasingly obvious that one was the clue to the other. This was correct even in some detail, for, as I compared them page by page, it seemed to me that the pages corresponded. For instance, the first page in the Broadgate notebook was headed “H.K.” Then there were a series of cryptic squiggles and signs, with a few dates. The first page of the London notebook was headed “Henry Kipling, 47 Warrington Road, Tooting.” It then went on to list a series of dates and sums of money. The suggestion certainly seemed to me to be that this man Kipling had been buying something from Tilsley, and that the dates and sums of money in the London notebook gave a list of deals. The money involved was pretty big, too. Sums of £100 and more were pretty frequent, and there were one or two cases of £1,000. The dates extended over about six months, and the total sum of money involved was over £4,000. If that was really an account of some deals being carried on, a turnover of over £4,000 for one customer indicated a fairly big business. And the fact that the accounts were being kept in this semi-secret way gave a good suggestion that the deals were on the wrong side of the law.

I made a note of the name and address of Mr. Kipling. Then I turned to the second page in each book. These provided an exact repetition of the first, except that the initials in the Broadgate book were “V.M.”, and the name and address in the London were “Victor Mainwairing, 195 Paddington Terrace, Bayswater.” The amounts of cash and the dates were, of course, different also, but I noted that the total cash over six months again ran into several thousands of pounds.

There were nearly fifty names and addresses in the book altogether. And in each case the sum of money involved was of the same sort of size. The biggest sum was £9,000, paid by Mr. James Jinks, of Brighton; the lowest was £900, paid by Mrs. Billiams, of Ealing. I reckoned that the turnover of the business, if that was indeed what we were to see in this book, was something like £150,000 in the six months covered. A business with a turnover of £300,000 a year is a pretty big business. And if it was, as we had more than a firm suspicion, an illegal, black-market business, the profits would be high. Here, in fact, was ample reason for the murder. After all, whoever was having anything to do with this affair was playing for pretty high stakes.

I spent some time looking at the two books. I had made a note of the names and addresses, though I realised that this was something that was too big for me. I couldn't afford the time to visit fifty addresses, extending from Brighton and Eastbourne in the south to St. Albans and Watford in the north. This business, whatever it was, had ramifications all over the Home Counties. And Scotland Yard would have to investigate it. The police organisation is so well planned that it can carry out a wide investigation of that sort and take it in its stride, whereas any individual like myself could not possibly undertake such a task.

Still, there were one or two addresses in Broadgate. I marked them down for future work. Curiously enough, the Charrington Hotel was not one of them, nor was Doctor Cyrus Watford, that queer intruder, mentioned.

The mysterious signs and symbols which were in the Broadgate notebook I was unable to understand. I had thought at first that the other book would provide the complete clue to the original one, but I now saw that this was a mistaken idea. No doubt there were some things in this affair so secret that they did not commit them to writing. If Shelley's original idea that this was a black-market petrol business was correct, no doubt those signs referred to gallons and coupons and all the other necessary matters connected with the petrol racket. But, even though I badly wanted to get in with the matter and to study this further, I realised that I really should have no time.

After all, I had probably put myself in wrongly with Shelley already, and the longer I hung on to these notebooks, the less he would think of me in future. So I wrote down the last of the fifty-odd names and addresses, put the notebook in my pocket, and hurried down the stairs.

Broadgate looked very pleasant as I made my way along the street to the police station. It was early in the season, but already gaily-clad holidaymakers were in the streets; on that east coast bathing early in the year is a matter for the more spartan souls only; but there were plenty of people who had been sitting on the sands, enjoying the early summer sunshine. I could not help contrasting their happy-go-lucky mood with the grim affair which was now obsessing my thoughts.

It was, indeed, difficult for me to realise that less than twelve hours ago I had been as happy-go-lucky as the best of them. Now I was so full of the matter of this murder that nothing else had any room in my thoughts. I was like a man who has just learned that he is suffering from some dread disease and is unable to get his thoughts away from his body, observing his symptoms all the time. Just as his disease haunts the unfortunate invalid, so the murder was haunting me.

In a few minutes I was at the police station, and was closeted with Shelley.

“Any news, Jimmy?” he asked.

“Not much,” I said.

“Our people got in before you at Thackeray Court, I suppose?” he said with a smile.

“More or less,” I agreed.

There was a distinct pause. Shelley presumably thought that his Scotland Yard colleagues had managed to get so well in ahead of me that there was virtually nothing left for me to find at the apartment which had been rented by Tilsley.

I smiled to myself. I knew that I had a bit of a bombshell for the Inspector, and I was more or less holding it in for a moment. Yet I was not altogether sure of myself, for I knew well enough that I had not played fair in not revealing that first little notebook a good deal earlier on. It might have led the Yard's cipher experts somewhere.

“The only worthwhile things,” I said, “were these two notebooks.”

I fished in my pocket, and slung them across the desk to Shelley. He picked them up, looking first at the one which I had found in Broadgate. He frowned over this for a few moments, then put it down.

The other one startled him. I could see that. He whistled softly to himself as he flipped over its pages. “Where did you get this, Jimmy?” he asked.

“In Tilsley's flat in Thackeray Court,” I explained with a grin. This was my moment of real triumph.

“How did our men come to overlook it?” he asked. “This is quite the most important piece of evidence we have come across yet. Unless I am mistaken, this gives us pretty well all the men who may be involved in the racket. Congratulations on having got it, Jimmy, though, for the life of me, I can't think how our men in London overlooked it.”

“Perhaps you should employ people who are not altogether illiterate,” I said with another grin.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that it was only because I had a look at Mr. Tilsley's literary effects that I found it. It was, in other words, pushed down the end of the bookcase,” I explained.

Shelley smiled. “Well,” he said, “there is, perhaps, something to be said in favour of using a literary man in a case of this sort. He may well find things that would otherwise escape attention.”

“Thank you for those few kind words,” I said.

“But you do realise, Jimmy, the importance of this find?” Shelley asked. “It may well save us weeks of hard work, digging out the names and addresses of the people involved. And, judging by the cash payments made, the sum of money in the business is pretty big, too.”

“I make the turnover about £300,000 a year,” I said.

“Oh, so you've had a good look at the notebooks?” Shelley grinned.

“What do you expect?” I said.

“Anything which puzzled you?” he enquired.

“I can't make out the mysterious signs and squiggles in the other notebook,” I said.

“Some sort of code, I expect,” Shelley replied. “I'll turn the whole thing over to our code and cipher experts. They'll dig it all out in a matter of a few hours, I think.”

I had my doubts on that point, but probably Shelley knew more about the capabilities of his own experts than I did. Anyhow, I was glad that he had greeted my discoveries with so much satisfaction.

“Have you got hold of anything worth while during my absence?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing publishable, anyhow, Jimmy,” he said. “Scotland Yard is a mighty machine, you know, and a fairly slow-moving machine at that. It gets there in the end, as many an over-confident crook has known to his cost. But to get results from a machine of our kind is something that often takes a long time. We can't go on individual hunches and inspirations as a lone wolf like yourself can do.”

“Then what would you suggest I should do next?” I asked. I had, somehow, come to take Shelley's advice on these matters.

“I've really got no suggestions for you just now, Jimmy. I should say just nose around and see if you can dig out anything. That old news-hunter's nose of yours is sure to lead you to something worth while before long.”

I didn't know if this was altogether a good compliment, but I put on it the best face that I could for the moment. I had, after all, a couple of Broadgate addresses which would bear investigation. To see to them would probably be enough to keep me going for the rest of the day. I did not think that I was in any way bound to share with Shelley exact details of what I was proposing to do. After all, he had advised me to go nosing around and finding out what I could. And if he had any sense he would know that I had made a note of those Broadgate addresses that were in Tilsley's book.

So I bade the detective a strictly temporary farewell, after promising to come and see him again the following morning. I had no very great confidence that I should be able to get hold of anything worth while from the two addresses, but they were at any rate worth trying. And it was only when I was walking down the street from the police station that I remembered that Shelley had not asked me where I had found the original notebook. My little bit of deception had gone unnoticed! I smiled happily. I was still well thought of by Shelley.