The Case of Naomi Clynes (13 page)

“I asked her to meet me at the Globe—a little restaurant in Soho. I dare say you know it.”

“And did she come?”

“No. I had invited her at seven o'clock and I reached the Globe ten minutes before the time.”

“Did you go in to wait for her? I ask because if you had gone in, one of the waiters would be able to corroborate your story.”

“No, I didn't go in. I walked up and down outside, and looked into the window once or twice to see whether she was there, but she never came. At half-past seven I gave her up.”

“And you dined there alone?”

“No. I was so sick at heart that I went off and got a snack at Lyons', and stayed there until past ten. I couldn't go back to the hotel before that, as I was supposed to be with my mother.”

“Did you go down to Chelsea to ask Miss Clynes why she hadn't come?”

“Certainly not. I should never have dared to call upon her in the evening.”

“Are you prepared to make a signed statement of what you have told me? I ask because the coroner may want to call you at the inquest as being one of the last people who saw her before her death.”

Bryant gripped the edge of his chair: it was clear that he was frightened.

“Oh, you must not ask me to do that, Inspector. I couldn't make a written statement. I shall keep away from the inquest altogether…”

“You will have to attend the inquest in any case, Mr. Bryant. If there is any doubt about that I shall have to see that you receive a summons from the coroner.”

A cunning smile showed in Bryant's face. “I can't attend if I am out of England, can I?”

“Not if you are out of England, but you will not be out of England.”

“You can't stop me, Inspector. This is a free country; my home is in France, and if I choose to go home…”

“I shouldn't try it if I were in your place, Mr. Bryant. You may have a most disagreeable surprise if you do. People may say that you were in Miss Clynes' flat that night, and that you were running away from justice”

“I am quite sure that no police officer has a right to question me as you are doing; still less to threaten me. I've told you that my wife is in a delicate state of nerves—you saw that for yourself—and yet you are trying to force me into some admission that may prove fatal to her reason. I'm sure that that would not be approved of by your superiors.”

Richardson felt that this righteous indignation was not ringing true. “I have done no more than warn you, Mr. Bryant, of the consequences of leaving the country when your evidence may be required at an inquest. As far as I know at present you were the last person to see Miss Clynes alive.”

“Nonsense; a dozen people must have seen her after I met her in the Army and Navy Stores in the morning. Besides, what sort of a life should I have with my wife if I told the coroner that I had asked Naomi Clynes out to dinner that night? She'd believe anything—yes, anything—and say it, too, in open court before a lot of gaping reporters. I can produce a doctor's certificate that any mental shock might drive my wife out of her mind. Let me get out of the country and have done with it.”

“Come, come, Mr. Bryant; pull yourself together. No one here wishes you any harm. I don't pretend to understand
why
you asked Miss Clynes to dine with you that night without the knowledge of your wife, but this I do know—that if you attempt to leave England to escape being asked questions at the inquest, you will be letting yourself in for much more serious trouble than a quarrel with your wife. I must ask you to wait here for a few minutes. I won't keep you long.”

To the messenger in the hall Richardson said as he passed, “See that nobody goes in there except a police officer, and if that man attempts to leave the building, shut the door and hold him till I come.” He went first to the sergeants' room, where he found Williams. “I want you to leave your present job for a few minutes, Williams. Take your hat and stick; go out by the back door and come in up the steps as if you are a visitor from outside. Get Dukes to show you into the waiting-room and ask you to take a seat. You'll find a gentleman there—it's Bryant. He may take it into his head to bolt before signing his statement. If he does you must say that you are a police officer and hold him.”

Williams caught up his hat and stick and went quickly down the corridor. Richardson went to his desk and wrote furiously. In less than ten minutes he had written out the statement which Bryant was to sign.

All was at peace in the waiting-room as he approached it. Williams had pushed back his chair to the wall and was acting the part of the bored visitor to the life: Bryant had slewed his chair round to get a view of the hall through the glass door.

“Mr. Smith will see you now, sir,” said Richardson to Williams, who caught up his hat and stick and passed his senior with a wink.

“Now, Mr. Bryant, I'm going to read you the statement which you made to me just now and ask you to sign it. It is quite short. Let me read it to you.” He read it. “There is nothing in that that you can object to signing, is there?”

“It's true enough, but I don't want to sign any statement.”

“But if you get a summons from the coroner to attend the inquest, you'll have to obey it, and if you refuse to speak when you're called into the witness-box, think of what you will be letting yourself in for. The papers will come out with headlines, ‘Scene at inquest. Witness refuses to speak.' You'll be set upon by reporters outside the court to get you to give your reason. They'll dig out your past history; find out about your wife and she'll be dragged into it. Whereas, if you sign this statement, it is quite possible that the coroner will decide not to waste time by calling you. You can, of course, refuse to sign a voluntary statement, for it was voluntary, but I ought to tell you that if you do refuse, you may regret it all your life.”

“Very well, then, I'll sign it.” He stretched out his hand for the pen, screwed his chair round to face the table and wrote his name in a very shaky handwriting.

“I've one more question to ask you, Mr. Bryant. Do you know the French town of Clermont-Ferrand?”

“I've motored through it several times, but I've never stopped there except to take petrol.”

“Have you ever posted a letter to Miss Clynes from there?”

“Never. I never wrote to Miss Clynes until after I met her at the Stores. I didn't know where she was living.”

“Thank you. That's all I have to ask. The adjourned inquest is to be held the day after tomorrow at ten o'clock in the coroner's office at High Street, Lambeth. You may receive a summons to attend. Good-bye, Mr. Bryant.”

As the man limped out to the top of the granite steps and the door was shut behind him, Richardson went quickly to a window that commanded the street and looked down at the retreating figure. He nodded with satisfaction.

“Is Mr. Morden alone?” he asked the messenger.

“Yes, but I've just taken a stack of papers in to him.”

Richardson knocked and heard a weary “Come in” from the other side of the door. Morden's head was half hidden by the stack. “Oh, it's you, Mr. Richardson. Come in. I know that your business can't wait.”

“I've seen the Bryants, husband and wife, sir. I've taken a statement from the husband and I want to consult you as to whether he ought not to be subpoenaed at the adjourned inquest as an unwilling witness. Perhaps I'd better tell you what happened when I went to the hotel this morning—the Cosmopolis Hotel.” Thereupon he related his interview with the Bryants in detail.

“This statement was made voluntarily, I suppose. Bryant won't go back on it and say that he was forced to make it under threat?”

“No, sir; I don't think so, but I think it right to tell you that the man is not the cripple that he pretends to be. I watched him from the window just now as he was going away. He limped down the steps as if each pace he took was to be his last, but when he reached the pavement and thought that no one was looking at him, he walked away with quite an alert step. He refused at first to sign any statement; told me that he wouldn't go near the inquest even if we served a summons on him; said that he was going to leave London for France and that no one could stop him.”

“He mustn't do that.”

“So I told him, sir. He pretended that his objection to signing a statement was that he would have a bad time with his wife.”

“Let me have a look at the statement. H'm!—unless we have good reason for suspecting him I don't think that the coroner will want to call him on this. What do you think about him?”

“Well, sir, there is an entire absence of motive as far as I can see, but you can't ignore the evidence of that Jew, Stammer, who says that he heard a man's voice in the flat.”

“Yes, but there's nothing to prevent the coroner's jury from returning a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown and leaving us free to go on with our inquiries. We have so little against Bryant that I don't think we need force him to attend the inquest or even to give his name to the coroner as a possible witness.”

“Quite so, sir; but his story of how he passed the evening of the murder is rather thin. I admit that if he has spoken the truth in that statement we have no evidence at all. I might mention one very slight incident this afternoon. When he was becoming excited in the waiting-room I tried to calm him by advising him to smoke a cigarette in order to see whether his cigarettes resembled the one I found in Miss Clynes' room, but he took out of his pocket a packet of Gauloises, which, as you know, is nearly the cheapest French cigarette, and he told me that he'd lost his taste for any other kind.”

“Well, Mr. Richardson, my feeling is against giving his name to the coroner, but at the same time I don't think we ought to let him leave the country until you have got further in your inquiry. It might, perhaps, be difficult for the port officers to stop him going on board the steamer, but if you let him know that he won't be called as a witness he may elect to stay.”

“Very good, sir. I'll ring him up on the telephone and tell him that he won't be called.”

J
IM
M
ILSOM
had received a telegram from his uncle, James Hudson, which he dared not disobey. “Meet boat-train at Victoria Thursday. Uncle.”

Mr. James Hudson, being a steel magnate from Pittsburgh, accustomed to control large bodies of foreign workmen, was prone to exercise dictatorial powers, but he had a softer side which, if aptly played upon by his nephew, showed him to be in many ways as simple as a child. He had two weaknesses—a horror of being worsted in a deal and a terror of being kidnapped. On this latter subject he was never tired of deploring the administration of the criminal law as it existed in the United States. It was this terror that had driven him to build a large villa in Valescure and to pass an increasing part of the year there. He was a self-made man and he gloried in it. Despite his wealth and the numerous public testimonials to hair lotions he was almost completely bald, and indulgence in the good things of life had imparted to his rather pink and fleshy face the look of a six months' old child—an obstinate child, over-prone to become the bugbear of his nurse.

Jim Milsom, his nephew, knew that the name of Hudson would prevail with the chairman of the board to procure him as much leave of absence as he wanted, and he began at once to make plans. His uncle had always wanted to study English life under a competent guide, and this visit, as his nephew viewed it, was a heaven-sent opportunity.

The train came slowly to rest and Mr. Hudson descended from the Pullman, very broad and rotund, very short in the leg and rolling in the gait. His nephew would have recognized him half a mile away. The cherubic features beamed as he came up.

“What ho, Uncle Jim! Did you have a good crossing?”

“Upon my word, I don't remember. I suppose it was good as I heard no sounds of basins from my neighbours. How are you settling down to work?”

“I love it. The firm is knocking the town. You know, Uncle Jim, I believe I have a nose for crime stories that'll go. I believe that I could write one myself now that I've mastered the rules of the game.”

“What are the rules?”

“Well, you start with a crime, a sort of everyday crime that might happen to anybody; then you bring on your super-sleuth. He noses around with micro-scopes and fingerprints and things and spots the man who didn't do it and fixes up an okay case against him. Then you bring in your brilliant amateur, who looks around for the most unlikely guy and fixes on a minister who had nothing whatever to gain from the crime, and wipes the eye of the super-sleuth. You have the trial, a row between the guilty minister and the prison chaplain in the death house, and the execution; only in this country you can't have press-men in the shed when the drop's pulled: it isn't done on this side. I picked a winner the other day—a young woman who'd got the knack; there was a pot of money in her, only they got her.”

“They got her? What d'you mean?”

“Murdered her, of course: it was just my luck.”

“Did they catch the killer?” asked the uncle in an awed tone.

“Not yet; they've been keeping it until you came.”

“What d'you mean?”

“I mean that you're just in time to see how they work on this side from the beginning. To-morrow you and I will go and sit right through an inquest, and I'll introduce you to a friend of mine who is the coming super-sleuth of Scotland Yard. What d'you think of that?”

Mr. Hudson looked impressed. “It's one of the things that I've always wanted to do—see how these Scotland Yard sleuths work. Over in America it's become a scandal. The police are all right, I believe; they catch their man ten times out of a hundred, and then what happens? The lawyers get to work with appeal after appeal until the public has forgotten all about it. Then the judge sends the murderer to the electric chair. Does he go? Nah. The sob-sisters get to work and write letters to the governor of the State and he, poor fish, commutes the sentence to life. Does he die in prison? Nah. His friends smuggle in a machine-gun in a tub of boot polish and he holds up the warder, uses him as a shield, and walks out of the main gate as lively as you please and the whole racket starts again. Why, out of every ten gangsters they catch you'll find that nine of them have escaped from gaol. And now it's not bootlegging, it's kidnapping they've turned to, and if I was over there at any time, they'd have me. Stick me down in some cold underground cellar and feed haricot beans to me till the ransom was paid. There's too much milk of human kindness spilt over criminals in America, and I want to see what they do over here to stop it.”