The Case of Naomi Clynes (3 page)

“Um! It seems, on the face of it, to be quite a simple case—one that the division ought to be able to clear up without calling in help from outside. Still—if you are really pressed—I'll see what can be done.” He pressed a button on his table and picked up the receiver of his desk telephone.

“Is that you, Mr. Beckett? Is there an inspector free in Central to undertake a case?”

“…”

“Yes, he would do all right. Will you send him round?” Turning to Sergeant Hammett, he said,

“Inspector Richardson will take over the case. You'd better have a talk with him as you go out.”

The coroner rose. “I suppose,” he said, “that this inspector will get into touch with those people in Liverpool and let me know all that he finds out about the woman?”

“Yes, I'm sure he will.”

“He's a good man?”

“About the best of the younger men; he'll make a name for himself some day: he has had very quick promotion.”

H
AMMETT KNEW
all about Inspector Richardson by repute. He was one of the first-class sergeants who imagined that they had a grievance against him because he had been promoted out of his turn, but Richardson was gradually overcoming this prejudice by his unfailing courtesy and good temper; indeed, very few of the malcontents bore him any ill will at this moment.

Hammett went to the inspectors' room and found him packing up stationery and instruments in his attaché-case.

“Mr. Morden has put you in charge of a case in my division, Mr. Richardson. He wants me to tell you how far we've got up to date.”

“A case of suicide, Mr. Beckett said.”

“So far as the police surgeon could say after his first examination of the body, it was an ordinary case of gas-poisoning.”

“I fancy that you must be in a hurry to get back, Sergeant. We might take the Underground and talk as we go.”

They walked across to the Westminster Underground Station and took up their seats at the end of a car where they were free from possible eavesdroppers.

“You say that the dead woman had a servant?” asked Richardson.

“Only a charwoman who came in for a couple of hours in the morning.”

“Intelligent?”

“Too much so. She's one of those women who don't know how to stop talking until you pull them up. She's enjoying herself over this suicide, I can tell you.”

“You say the deceased woman was an authoress?”

“So they told me at the milk-shop; at any rate she had a typewriter.” He said no more until they were approaching Seymour Street. “Here we are, Inspector. This is the door by which the tenants upstairs went in and out.”

The number—37
A
—was painted on the door. One stone step raised the floor from the street level. Richardson noticed that the step was whitened and that the keyhole and knocker on the green door were clean and polished, and so was the brass of the letter-box. There being no means of opening the door without the key, Hammett took Richardson round to the milk-shop and introduced him to the Corders.

“This is Inspector Richardson from New Scotland Yard, Mr. Corder. He'll have to have the run of the flat for a day or two.”

“Very good, sir. While you were away the ambulance called and I helped the men to get the body down the stairs. There was quite a crowd outside to see it go off, and everyone stops to point out the house of the suicide, as they call it. It's a bit unpleasant for us.”

“Oh, they'll soon forget all about it; there'll be some fresh attraction for them to-morrow. Now, Mr. Richardson, if you'll follow me I'll take you upstairs.”

They climbed the back stairs and reached the flat, Hammett briefly explaining the general layout of the house as they went. “You see, if it was a case of murder or even burglary, one might suspect that this office upstairs where the door is never locked was used as a hiding-place by the guilty person, who might have got in unobserved when the shop was empty for a minute, but the police surgeon seems satisfied that it was a clear case of suicide by gas-poisoning. I shall be curious to hear whether you find any relations or friends; it seems extraordinary that a woman in fairly easy circumstances should have no one in the world related to her.”

“I'll let you know, and now as you're a busy man, don't trouble to wait any longer: I'll get to work.”

Richardson had his own way of searching a room. He took off and folded his coat and turned up his sleeves to the elbows. Then he turned the key in the door. His first step was to go over the entire surface of the floor with a reading-glass: very carefully he moved out the divan from the wall and examined the surface of the cork linoleum that lay under it. Here he made his first discovery. Half hidden under the fringe of the Oriental carpet he found a cigarette of an expensive make. He was not himself a connoisseur of cigarettes, but he noted two points about this one—that it was gold-tipped and expensive-looking, and that when rolled gently between the finger and thumb the tobacco was not dry to the touch. This caused him to give a closer attention to the surface of the carpet than he would otherwise have done. Here again he was rewarded, for in front of an armchair a few inches from its right leg he came upon a little core of cigarette ash. Leaving it where it lay, he moved back the divan to its place against the wall and continued his search. His first concern was to ascertain whether there was a box of cigarettes in the room, or an ash-tray. He made a quick scrutiny of the cupboards and shelves. They had neither one nor the other. The deceased lady, he thought to himself, was no smoker, but this conclusion would have to be verified by the charwoman. He made a mental note of this and continued his search of the floor.

Failing to find anything noteworthy on the other part of the carpet, he continued his search on hands and knees into the little kitchen which opened out of the sitting-room. The light was not very good at this point; the floor of the kitchen was covered with a dark green cork linoleum, and as he crawled forward on his knees his trousers were caught by a nail, happily not so firmly as to tear the cloth. He turned and examined the spot under his reading-glass. He found that the edge of the cork, which had been securely nailed down with flat-headed tacks, had begun to crumble away, leaving one of the tacks to protrude above the surface. Here he made his third discovery. Caught under the head of the tack was a minute shred of dark green wool, of a darker shade even than that of the cork lino. Very gently he detached it from the nail, and opening the back of his watch case he slipped it in and snapped it down again. That was material for another inquiry that must be undertaken the same afternoon. Then he proceeded to make a search of the kitchen itself. It was scrupulously clean and neat, except for a few unwashed articles of crockery lying in the sink—the relics of the dead woman's last meal. On the little kitchen table stood a coffee-pot and boiler combined, and one unwashed coffee-cup. There was an inch deep of cold coffee in the pot and the usual sediment that one finds in a coffee-cup. There was nothing unusual in any of these things, nor did he find anything suspicious in the bathroom beyond. He returned to the sitting-room.

His first care in this room was to open the typewriter, a portable Remington. Without touching the keys or the frame he pulled out of the carrier a half-written letter and read it eagerly.

Richardson now embarked on a proceeding that would have puzzled people who did not know him. He brought his magnifying glass to bear on the spacing bar of the machine and took out from his attaché-case a wide-mouthed bottle of fine white powder. Dipping a camel-hair brush into this, he dusted the powder over the spacing bar and blew off the superfluity. Immediately fingerprints appeared on the black varnish with startling clearness.

Carefully replacing the unfinished letter in the machine, he opened the drawer and examined its contents. Besides the usual adjuncts of the typewriting outfit—rubber, oil-can, paper and carbon, he found £25 in Treasury notes, the sum mentioned in the unfinished letter. These he placed in an official envelope, labelled it and stuck it down. Then he ran downstairs to the milk-shop and asked Mrs. Corder to send Bob, the roundsman, to fetch Annie James, the charwoman, as quickly as possible, and also, if possible, the girl clerk to the Jewish organization on the floor above the flat. Then he returned upstairs to continue his search.

His first discovery on opening the wardrobe was a handbag of black leather. He turned out its contents on the table—a letter in its envelope, £1 17s. 3d. in silver and copper, and a latchkey. He ran downstairs to try it in the lock of No. 37
A
Seymour Street and found it fitted perfectly. He put it into his pocket for future use.

The letter also he annexed after running over its contents. It was from a firm of publishers—Stanwick & Co.—signed by a member of the firm, with a name he knew—“J. Milsom.” It was the last name in the list of the directors embossed on the left-hand corner of the firm's notepaper. The letter was encouraging to a budding authoress. There was nothing in it to hint at professional disappointment.

The rest of the things in the wardrobe consisted of women's clothing, hanging or neatly folded. He felt in every pocket in the garments, but found nothing of any interest. At the back of one of the shelves he came upon a pile of typed manuscript which he packed up to examine at his leisure.

A step sounded on the back stairs—a step which hesitated as it drew near the fatal room. It was Annie James, the charwoman, who stopped with her hand to her mouth when she saw the tall figure of the inspector. “I beg pardon, sir, I'm Miss Clynes' help.”

“Oh yes; Annie James is your name, I think.”

“That's right, sir.”

“Come in. I've really only one question to ask you. Did your late employer smoke?”

“No, sir, that I could swear to. No tobacco ever passed her lips.”

“I don't mean to ask whether she was a confirmed and habitual smoker, but you know, Mrs. James, ladies do sometimes indulge in a cigarette. You yourself, for instance.”

“Never, sir. For one thing, when my brother gave me one and dared me to smoke it and put a match to it himself, my stomach rose and I was sick. That cured me of smoking for the rest of me life. I remember asking the poor lady once whether she had had the same experience as me, seeing that she didn't smoke, but she told me that she thought it was a dirty habit for women to get into and made the room messy. And that's why you won't find an ash-tray about the place.”

“I suppose you gave the room a thorough clean at least once a week.”

“Oh, more than that, sir. When I clean a room, I clean it. No dirty corners. ‘Clean the corners and the middle takes care of itself': that's what I say.”

“And you clean under the bed?” He caught a transient flicker of the eyelids before she replied:

“Yes, sir, I do, regular.”

“You had the bed out yesterday morning?”

“Yes, sir, and did it thorough underneath, because the pore lady went out early and I took the opportunity.”

“My colleague has told me all you said to him. You haven't forgotten anything else? No? Well then, that's all I think.”

Richardson locked the door of the room and slipped the key into his pocket before he let himself out into Seymour Street. He covered the ground to the mortuary at a brisk pace, for he was anxious to find its custodian before the light failed.

The custodian was an old soldier who did not like to have his spell of idleness interrupted.

“It's these police all day long,” he muttered, when Richardson tapped on his door. “Well, what is it now?”

Richardson knew how to deal with these municipal Jacks-in-office—knew that it was a waste of time to quarrel with them.

“I'm sorry to trouble you at the end of a busy day,” he said pacifically and without any suggestion of irony. “I am Inspector Richardson of the C.I. Department at New Scotland Yard. I want you to let me take the fingerprints and look at the clothing of a woman named Naomi Clynes whose body was brought in this morning.”

The man's jaw sank in frank astonishment. “Take her fingerprints, when she's dead? I never heard of such an application before. Take the fingerprints of a living person, that I can understand, but a dead person can't do any more burglaries. So what do you want her fingerprints for?”

“I'm afraid it would take too long to explain, but if you like to come along with me it might interest you to see how it's done.”

It was not an easy or an edifying spectacle, for rigor mortis had already set in and Richardson had never had this task thrown upon him before. However, with the help of the custodian, he did succeed in obtaining a set of perfectly legible prints.

“And what are you going to do with these now?” asked the custodian.

“Compare them with some prints that I've found in her room. And now I want you to let me see her outer clothing.”

“Right you are, Inspector. Here's the bundle, all rolled up and labelled.”

Richardson rapidly untied the bundle and observed that it included a dark green jersey dress. This he spread out on the table under a strong light. He took out his reading-glass and went over the whole surface, dwelling long over a spot in the upper part of the skirt at the back where a shred of wool had been unravelled making what would in time have become a tear. Opening his watch-case he took out the shred that he had found attached to the tack in the doorway of the kitchen. The colour and the substance of the wool matched exactly.