Eight Murders In the Suburbs (20 page)

In the taxi that was taking him to the office he smelt whisky. Some had splashed on to his shoes. He rubbed them on the mat.

That evening, he gave Jill a substantially truthful account of his day, merely ante-dating his departure from the flat by some three or four minutes.

“I left him a cheque for five hundred, but I doubt whether it will ever be presented. He was very spiteful—even malicious.”

“About—the fire?” asked Jill.

“Oh, no! Nothing about the fire! Nothing at all! Just sneering at our attempts to help him.”

“Funny! I did hear that he had been writing begging letters to people he met at the tennis club here.”

“It doesn't matter to us. I shall never see him again. It will be easy now to take your advice—I mean, to forget that he ever existed.”

The body was found the following Monday, five days later, by the rent collector, the newsagent and the milk man having suspended credit. Before Inspector Karslake arrived on the scene the local police had discovered, from gossip, that a ‘tall, well dressed gentleman' had emerged with deceased from a taxi at the wine merchant's and had accompanied him to the flat, leaving it at about three o'clock.

Karslake was at Grenwood's office in the early afternoon. The cheque and the notes, though an odd combination, very strongly suggested that Grenwood had been paying blackmail and had lost his head. Karslake began by asking if he knew Raffen.

“Very well! A personal friend.” He glanced at Karslake's card. “May I ask—?”

“He has been murdered,” said Karslake and watched the reaction.

There was, in effect, no reaction. Grenwood sat at his desk in total silence.

“When did you last see Raffen?”

“Last Tuesday, At his flat. But I had better tell you the whole unhappy circumstances.” Grenwood began with the meeting at the prison, was precise about the sums of money, the call at the wine merchant's.

“I was not there very long. Twenty minutes, perhaps. It was about three when I left.”

The frankness of the report, corroborated by his own information, was disappointing for Karslake.

“Had he demanded money of you on any, other occasion?”

“Demanded money!” snapped Grenwood. “He never did any such thing! I thrust it on him, having grave doubts whether he would cash the cheque. I've been trying to help him for years. I've had to resort to benevolent trickery—and the trickery failed.”

At the blank look on Karslake's face he went on:

“The poor fellow had a great many disappointments. He took to drink and messed up his career. My wife and I tried hard to find some way of helping him, but his social pride made it all impossible. As to that cheque, we both regarded it as almost a moral debt to him—” Grenwood told him about the house.

Karslake left, with the rueful reflection that the blackmail theory had fallen down, especially as Grenwood had brought his wife into it. The motive obviously had not been robbery. That left only revenge. Raffen evidently had been not a crook but a genteel waster. He might have been mixed up with a tough's girl.

In a week or two he had rounded up most of the Lotties, including the one who had seen Grenwood seven years ago. Gaining nothing he traced Raffen, with some help from Grenwood, from the time he sold the house in 1919, which seemed far back enough. There was not the ghost of a motive against anyone nor the ghost of a trail. The only finger prints in the flat were those of deceased and Grenwood. There were no prints on the neck of the broken whisky bottle.

After a month's adjournment, a Coroner's jury returned ‘murder by a person unknown.' Grenwood told Karslake that he would be responsible for the funeral expenses and for any other claims that might arise because, as the Inspector already knew, he considered that he had morally owed the deceased five hundred pounds.

In 1932—two years after the death of Raffen—Detective-Inspector Rason of the Department of Dead Ends received a slip marked
‘re Raffen,'
attached to a visiting card,
Lieut-Commander N. Waenton
.

“I am a Naval officer,” explained Waenton, somewhat unnecessarily. “I've been on a foreign station for three years and didn't know what had happened to Raffen. I dropped in on the chance that Scotland Yard would be good enough to give me some information.”

“Depends what sort of information you want.”

“I can't find out whether Raffen left any money, and I thought you might know. I have a small claim against any estate there is. I wouldn't bother—only, as you've probably heard, we're always broke in the Navy.”

“I can't tell you off hand.” Rason produced a dossier and rummaged in it. He came upon Karslake's note that Grenwood would be responsible for reasonable claims and expenses, wondering vaguely what it meant.

“As far as we are concerned,” he said grandly, “it would depend on the nature of the claim. There is provisional—er—provision, if you understand me.”

“It's an I. O.U. for a tenner.” Waenton produced a pocket case. “And here's the letter that came with it. He sent the I. O.U. before I sent him the money.”

The letter began ‘
Dear old Waenton
.'

“You knew Raffen very well, Commander?”

“Not exactly. Hadn't seen him since we were boys at Charchester. Sort of special bond, in a way. There was a fire—we were in the same dormitory. I and the other boys got out safely, but Raffen was badly scarred. Lost most of one leg, too! As a matter o' fact I met another man in the East—a planter—not one who had been in the dormitory. Raffen had touched him for twenty-five pounds. I fancy he used an Old Boys list and wrote to everybody.”

“Shouldn't be surprised!” said Rason untruthfully. “If you care to leave this with us, Commander, I can let you know shortly whether there's anything doing.”

When his caller had gone, Rason studied the letter. It was an educated version of the usual begging letter, with which he was familiar. Then he dived into the dossier.

“Grenwood says Raffen refused all offers of money on account of his social pride. He proves it by quoting the dentist, who was to pay Raffen a salary at Grenwood's cost. But Raffen writes a begging letter, to two men, on the old-school-tie gag. You might say that Grenwood begs Raffen to beg from him and then gets turned down every time.
Nerts
!”

The next morning he called on the dentist who had been approached by Grenwood, and asked for confirmation.

“The arrangement only lasted a fortnight. Raffen said very bluntly, ‘You haven't enough patients to need an assistant. Grenwood put you up to this.' I didn't admit it, but of course he was right. I never saw Raffen again.”

In the afternoon Rason called at Grenwood's office.

“I'm following a money trail in the Raffen case, Mr. Grenwood,” he said, almost as if he were speaking to a colleague. “I see a note by Chief Inspector Karslake that you are willing to meet ‘claims,' whatever that means. Are you willing to meet this?”

He showed him the I.O.U. and the begging letter.

“Good heavens! This is utterly incredible! You can take it from me that letter's a forgery.”

“I never thought o' that,” said Rason. “Meaning that man wasn't a naval officer at all?”

“No, I don't! I mean that Raffen was friendly with some very low types. When he was drunk he might have spilled enough information for a crook to be able to write that letter.”

“Thanks for the tip, Mr. Grenwood,” said Rason, knowing well that no professional forger would take all that trouble on the chance of receiving ten pounds. Also, the letter was written from Raffen's address.

So far, he had only the naval officer's letter, the planter being too nebulous to quote. He sent the letter, with other specimens of Raffen's handwriting, to be tested for forgery. Then he thought he might as well try other old Charchester boys who happened to live in London.

The difficulty was to get hold of an Old Boys' list. Charchester was a couple of hours out of London, he took a chance and called on the headmaster, asking for a list and giving his reason.

“I admit that Raffen wrote to me too—and that I made him a small loan. Some of the other masters were also importuned. But can this investigation serve any purpose, now that the unhappy man is dead?”

“We have to find out who killed him, sir. It's most probable that he was killed by a man he had been blackmailing.”

“Blackmail! I hope he didn't sink to that. Cadging is bad enough. But to blackmail an old schoolfellow would be abominable. I feel sure you can safely put that thought out of your mind.”

“Was there a contemporary of Raffen's here, sir, named Grenwood?”

“Your train of thought is obvious. And, if I may say so, Inspector, as obviously fallacious. There was no possibility of his levying blackmail on Grenwood. The report made it abundantly clear that no kind of blame attached to Grenwood.”

Rason agreed with enthusiasm, not having the least idea what the headmaster was talking about. He was given an Old Boys' list and a copy of the report on the fire, which he read on the way back. From his point of view, it was a depressing document, for Grenwood emerged very creditably. Yet the headmaster had come over very headmasterish about that fire. Might be worth shaking it up in the lucky bag!

Back to the original riddle. Raffen had been cadging for fivers and tenners from everybody except Grenwood. And from Grenwood he had turned down offers of hundreds.

Perhaps because he was demanding thousands? There could be, he thought, no other possible explanation.

On his next call at Grenwood's office he took Chief Inspector Karslake with him.

“Our experts have certified that this letter and I.O.U. are not forgeries, Mr. Grenwood. Moreover, we know that Raffen wrote similar letters to the headmaster and other masters at Charchester. Will you admit that you misled us as to Raffen's character—admit that he had no social pride at all?”

“I have to accept your statement,” said Grenwood. “I am utterly astounded. I can only say that I misled you in good faith—in the light of my own experience with him.”

“Yeh! As we've agreed he had no social pride, we want another explanation of why he refused to let you help him in a big way.”

A long silence told Rason he had registered. Grenwood was racking his brain for a credible lie. Why had Raffen begged tenners from others and refused hundreds from him? The perpetual sneer danced before his eyes.

“I have no explanation to offer.”

“The jury will want one,” said Rason. “And they'll probably like to hear all we can tell ' em about that fire!”

Grenwood felt panic rising. As in the trenches long ago, his nerves played him tricks. Again the boyish voice that could not be there screamed his name:
‘Grenwood! Tell them you heard me calling your name and you wouldn't turn back because you were afraid for your own skin.'
And once again Grenwood rushed from the greater fear to an enemy superior in all the relevant talents.

“He was blackmailing me because he had found out I had been unfaithful to my wife. He asked too much. And I lost my temper and hit him with the bottle.”

Surgeons will often claim success for an operation that has resulted in the death of a patient—provided that there is a reasonable lapse of time between the two events. By the same thought process George Hudson might have claimed that he had successfully murdered Ethel Mollett, concealed the body, and removed all traces of the crime.

True that he was hanged for it all. But the fact must not be allowed to dim his brilliance as a criminal. He beat the police and for nearly a year afterwards led a life of blameless domesticity.

By all the rules of the game, if one may call it so—by everything that was logical—he ought to have escaped. He was beaten by a preposterous coincidence—by a million-to-one chance that happened to turn up against him.

George Hudson was born at Salisbury, the son of a well-to-do architect. Both his parents were killed in the Salisbury railway disaster of 1902 when he himself was twenty-two and within a month or two of qualifying in his father's profession.

The death of his parents left him with a little under two hundred pounds a year and a clear sum of about eight hundred. It was just enough to enable him to live in idleness, and with that object in view he decided to move to London where he had neither friends nor relatives to worry him with advice.

Romance met him, as it were, on the doorstep—or, more exactly, in the third-class compartment in which he travelled up to London—in the person of Ethel Mollett.

Ethel was eighteen, the daughter of a farm labourer from an outlying village. She was on her way to take up her first situation as housemaid to a chemist living in Tredegar Road, Bow, E. She was plumpish and pretty, with apple cheeks and big, trustful eyes.

To these rather elementary physical charms she added the subtle fascination of being very bewildered and rather helpless. She had never before left her village except for an occasional jaunt to the market town. She was more than a little afraid of the train and quite horribly afraid of the vast city that lay at the end of the journey.

Hudson told her tales of London, the kind of tales that the rustic mind seems curiously eager to believe—tales of staggering dangers that beset the unwary. If this did not allay her fears, it at least made her snatch at his offer to see her safely to her employer's house.

Before they parted the girl had gratefully accepted Hudson's generous invitation for her first free afternoon.

For the next year the story of their association is the commonplace story of a man's infatuation for a woman who is his social and intellectual inferior. He was fascinated by her
naïveté
and innocence—more brutally expressed, her almost incredible “greenness.”