The Nine Tailors (33 page)

“I name no names,” said Mr. Cranton. “Honour among—gentlemen. I burnt that letter,
being
an honourable gentleman, but it was some story, and I don’t know that I can do justice to it. Seems that when Deacon made his getaway, after an unfortunate encounter with a warder, he had to sneak about Kent in a damned uncomfortable sort of way for a day or two. He said the stupidity of the police was almost incredible. Walked right over him twice, he said. One time they trod on him. Said he’d never realised so vividly before why a policeman was called a flattie. Nearly broke his fingers standing on them. Now I,” added Mr. Cranton, “have rather small feet. Small and well-shod. You can always tell a gentleman by his feet.”

“Go on, Nobby,” said Mr. Parker.

“Anyhow, the third night he was out there lying doggo in a wood somewhere, he heard a chap coming along that wasn’t a flattie. Rolling drunk, Deacon said he was. So Deacon pops out from behind a tree and pastes the fellow one. He said he didn’t mean to do him in, only put him out, but he must have struck a bit harder than what he meant. Mind you, that’s only what he said, but Deacon always was a low kind of fellow and he’d laid out one man already and you can’t hang a chap twice. Anyway, he found he’d been and gone and done it, and that was that.

“What he wanted, of course, was duds, and when he came to examine the takings, he found he’d bagged a Tommy in uniform with all his kit. Well, that wasn’t very surprising, come to think of it. There were a lot of those about in 1918, but it sort of took Deacon aback. Of course, he knew there was a war on—they’d been told all about that—but it hadn’t, as you might say, come home to him. This Tommy had some papers and stuff on him and a torch, and from what Deacon could make out, looking into the thing rather hurriedly in a retired spot, he was just coming off his leaf and due to get back to the Front. Well, Deacon thought, any hole’s better than Maidstone Gaol, so here goes. So he changes clothes with the Tommy down to his skin, collars his papers and what not, and tips the body down the hole. Deacon was a Kentish man himself, you see, and knew the place. Of course, he didn’t know the first thing about soldiering—however, needs must and all that. He thought his best way was to get up to Town and maybe he’d find some old pal up there to look after him. So he tramped off—and eventually he got a lift on a lorry or something to a railway station. He did mention the name, but I’ve forgotten it. He picked some town he’d never been in—a small place. Anyway, he found a train going to London and he piled into it. That was all right; but somewhere on the way, in got a whole bunch of soldiers, pretty lit-up and cheery, and from the way they talked. Deacon began to find out what he was up against. It came over him, you see, that here he was, all dressed up as a perfectly good Tommy, and not knowing the first thing about the War, or drill or anything, and he knew if he opened his mouth he’d put his foot in it.”

“Of course,” said Wimsey. “It’d be like dressing up as a Freemason. You couldn’t hope to get away with it.”

“That’s it. Deacon said it was like being among people talking a foreign language. Worse; because Deacon did know a bit about foreign languages. He was an educated sort of bloke. But this Army stuff was beyond him. So all he could do was to pretend to be asleep. He said he just rolled up in his corner and snored, and if anybody spoke to him he swore at them. It worked quite well, he said. There was one very persistent bloke, though, with a bottle of Scotch. He kept on shoving drinks at Deacon and he took a few, and then some more, and by the time he got to London he was pretty genuinely sozzled. You see, he’d had nothing to eat, to speak of, for a coupla days, except some bread he’d managed to scrounge from a cottage.”

The policeman who was taking all this down in shorthand scratched stolidly on over the paper. Mr. Cranton took a drink of water and resumed.

“Deacon said he wasn’t very clear what happened to him after that. He wanted to get out of the station and go off somewhere, but he found it wasn’t so easy. The darkened streets confused him, and the persistent fellow with the bottle of Scotch seemed to have taken a fancy to him. This bloke talked all the time, which was lucky for Deacon. He said he remembered having some more drinks and something about a canteen, and tripping over something and a lot of chaps laughing at him. And after that he must really have fallen asleep. The next thing he knew, he was in a train again, with Tommies all round him, and from what he could make out, they were bound for the Front.”

“That’s a very remarkable story,” said Mr. Parker.

“It’s clear enough,” said Wimsey. “Some kindly soul must have examined his papers, found he was due back and shoved him on to the nearest transport, bound for Dover, I suppose.”

“That’s right,” said Mr. Cranton. “Caught in the machine, as you might say. Well, all he could do was to lie doggo again. There were plenty of others who seemed to be dog-tired and fairly well canned and he wasn’t in any way remarkable. He watched what the others did, and produced his papers at the right time and all that. Fortunately, nobody else seemed to belong to his particular unit. So he got across. Mind you,” added Mr. Cranton, “I can’t tell you all the details. I wasn’t in the War myself, being otherwise engaged. You must fill up the blanks for yourself. He said he was damned seasick on the way over, and after that he slept in a sort of cattle-waggon and finally they bundled him out at last in the dark at some ghastly place or other. After a bit he heard somebody asking if there was anyone belonging to his unit. He knew enough to say ‘Yes, sir’ and stand forward—and then he found himself foot-slogging over a filthy road full of holes with a small party of men and an officer. God! he said it went on for hours and he thought they must have done about a hundred miles, but I daresay that was an exaggeration. And he said there was a noise like merry hell going on ahead, and the ground began to shake, and he suddenly grasped what he was in for.”

“This is an epic,” said Wimsey.

“I can’t do justice to it,” said Mr. Cranton, “because Deacon never knew what he was doing and I don’t know enough to make a guess. But I gather he walked straight into a big strafe. Hell let loose, he said, and I shouldn’t wonder if he began to think kindly of Maidstone Gaol and even of the condemned cell. Apparently he never got to the trenches, because they were being shelled out of them and he got mixed up in the retreat. He lost his party and something hit him on the head and laid him out. Next thing he knew he was lying in a shell-hole along with somebody who’d been dead some time. I don’t know. I couldn’t follow it all. But after a bit he crawled out. Everything was quiet and it was coming on dark, so he must have lost a whole day somehow. He’d lost his sense of direction, too, he said. He wandered about, and fell in and out of mud and holes and wire, and in the end he stumbled into a shed where there was some hay and stuff. But he couldn’t remember much about that, either, because he’d had a devil of a knock on the head and he was getting’ feverish. And then a girl found him.”

“We know all about that,” said the Superintendent.

“Yes, I daresay you do. You seem to know a lot. Well, Deacon was pretty smart about that. He got round the soft side of the girl and they made up a story for him. He said it was fairly easy pretending to have lost his memory. Where the doctor blokes made a mistake was trying to catch him out with bits of Army drill. He’d never done any, so of course he didn’t have to pretend not to recognise it. The hardest part was making out that he didn’t know any English. They nearly got him on that, once or twice. But he did know French, so he did his best to seem intelligent about that. His French accent was pretty good, but he pretended to have lost his speech, so that any mumbling or stammering might be put down to that, and in the intervals he practised talking to the girl till he was word-perfect. I must say. Deacon had brains.”

“We can imagine all that part,” said Parker. “Now tell us about the emeralds.”

“Oh, yes. The thing that started him on that was getting hold of an old English newspaper which had a mention of the finding of a body in the dene-hole—his own body, as everyone thought. It was a 1918 paper, of course, but he only came across it in 1924—I forget where. It turned up, the way things do. Somebody’d used it to wrap up something sometime, and I think he came across it in an estaminet. He didn’t bother about it, because the farm was doing pretty well—he’d married the girl by then, you see—and he was quite happy. But later on, things began to go badly, and it worried him to think about those sparklers all tucked away doing no good to anybody. But he didn’t know how to start getting hold of them, and he got a vertical breeze up every time he thought of that dead warder and the chap he’d thrown down the hole. However, in the end, he called to mind yours truly, and figured it out that I’d be out on my own again. So he wrote me a letter. Well, as you know, I wasn’t out. I was inside again, owing to a regrettable misunderstanding, so I didn’t get the letter for some time, my pals thinking it wasn’t quite the sort of thing to send to the place where I was. See? But when I came out again, there was the letter waiting for me.”

“I wonder he made
you
his confidant,” observed Parker. “There had been—shall we say, ungentlemanly words passed on the subject.”

“Ah!” said Mr. Cranton. “There had, and I had something to say about that when I wrote back. But you see, he’d nobody else to go to, had he? When all’s said and done, there’s nobody like Nobby Cranton to handle a job like that in a refined and competent manner. I give you my word I nearly told him to go and boil himself, but in the end I said. No! let bygones be bygones. So I promised to help the blighter. I told him I could fix him up with money and papers and get him across all right. Only I told him he’d have to give me a bit more dope on the thing first. Otherwise, how was I to know he wouldn’t double-cross me again, the dirty skunk?”

“Nothing more likely,” said Parker.

“Ah! and he did, too, blast his worm-eaten little soul! I said he’d have to tell me where the stuff was. And would you believe it, the hound wouldn’t trust me! Said, if he told me that, I might get in and pinch the bleeding lot before he got there!”

“Incredible!” said Parker. “Of course you wouldn’t do such a thing as that.”

“Not me,” replied Nobby. “What do
you
think?” He winked. “Well, we went on writing backwards and forwards till we reached what they call an impasse. At last he wrote and said he’d send me a what d’you call—a cipher, and if I could make out from that where the shiners were, I was welcome. Well, he sent the thing, and I couldn’t make head or tail of it, and I told him so. Then he said, All right; if I didn’t trust him I could go down to Fenchurch and ask for a tailor called Paul as lived next door to Batty Thomas, and they’d give me the key, but, he says, you’d do better to leave it to me, because I know how to handle them. Well, I didn’t know, only I thought to myself if these two chaps come in on it they’ll want their share, and they might turn sour on me, and it seemed to me I was safer with Deacon, because he stood to lose more than I did. Call me a mug if you like, but I sent him over the money and some perfectly good papers. Of course, he couldn’t come as Deacon and he didn’t want to come as Legros, because there might be a spot of trouble over that, and he suggested his papers should be made out as Paul Taylor. I thought it a bit silly myself, but he seemed to think it would be a good joke. Now, of course, I know why. So the papers were made out, with a lovely photograph—a real nice job, that was. Might have been anybody. As a matter of fact, it was a composite. It looked very convincing, and had quite a look of all sorts of people. Oh, yes! and I sent him some clothes to meet him at Ostend, because he said his own things were too Frenchy. He came across on the 29th December. I suppose you got on to that?”

“Yes,” said Blundell, “we did, but it didn’t help us a lot.”

“That bit went all right. He sent me a message from Dover. Telephoned from a public call-box—but I’ll forgive you for not tracing that. He said he was going straight through and would come along up to London with the stuff next day or the day after, or as soon as he could. Anyway, he would get a message through somehow. I wondered whether I oughtn’t to go down to Fenchurch myself—mind you, I never trusted him—but I wasn’t altogether keen, in spite of my face-fungus. I’d grown that on spec, you understand. I didn’t want you people following me about too much. And besides, I had one or two other irons in the fire. I’m coming clean, you see.”

“You’d better,” said Parker, ominously.

“I didn’t get any message on the 30th, nor yet on the 31st, and I thought I’d been had proper. Only I couldn’t see what he had to gain by double-crossing me. He needed me to handle the goods—or so I thought. Only then it struck me he might have picked up some other pal over at Maidstone or abroad.”

“In that case, why bring you into it at all?”

“That’s what I thought. But I got so windy, I thought I’d better go down to the place and see what was happening. I didn’t want to leave a trail, so I went over to Walbeach—never mind how, that’s off the point—”

“Probably Sparky Bones or the Fly-Catcher,” put in Parker, thoughtfully.

“Ask no questions and you’ll hear no lies. My pal decanted me a few miles out and I footslogged it. I made out I was a tramp labourer, looking for work on the New Cut. Thank God, they weren’t taking on any hands, so they didn’t detain me.”

“So we gathered.”

“Ah! I suppose you would go nosey-parkering round there. I got a lift part of the way to Fenchurch and walked the rest. Beastly country it is, too, as I said before. I’m not doing my hiking thereabouts, I can tell you.”

“That was when we ran across one another, I think,” said Wimsey.

“Ah! and if I’d known who I had the pleasure of stopping I’d have walked off home,” said Mr. Cranton, handsomely. “But I didn’t know, so I trotted along and—but there! I expect you know that part of it.”

“You got a job with Ezra Wilderspin and made inquiries for Paul Taylor.”

“Yes—and a nice business that was!” exclaimed Nobby with indignation. “Mr. Paul Bleeding Taylor and Mr. Batty Thomas! Bells, if you please! And not a hide nor hair of my Paul Taylor to be seen or heard of. I tell you, that made me think a bit. I didn’t know if he’d been and gone, or if he’d been pinched on the way, or if he was lurking about round the corner or what. And that chap Wilderspin—he was a good hand at keeping a hardworking man’s nose to the grindstone, curse him! ‘Driver, come here!’ ‘Steve, do this!’ I didn’t have a minute to call my own. All the same, I started to think quite a lot about that cipher. I took the idea that maybe it had to do with those bells. But could I get into the confounded belfry? No, I couldn’t. Not openly, I mean. So I made out to do it one night and see if I could make sense of the thing up there. So I made a couple or so of pick-locks, the forge being handy for the job, and on Saturday night I just let myself quietly out of Ezra’s backdoor.