The Studio Crime (10 page)

“I should like you to tell me how you first met Mr. Frew, and all you know of him, Mrs. Steen.”

The woman carefully turned the fish in the pan, and the fat caught fire and blazed up, giving off an acrid blue smoke. When she had blown it out she replied thoughtfully:

“He first came to the shop some time in March, I think. We had a place off Westbourne Grove then. It was just before we moved. He came in to ask about a little Chinese bowl we had in the window. I forget whether he bought it. Do you remember, Alfred?”

“Yes,” said her husband mournfully. “We were just going to pack it up for him when he found it had been mended with soft paste, and brought his price down from two pounds ten to seven and six.”

“And since then you have had frequent dealings with him?”

“Occasional.”

“When did you last see him, Mrs. Steen?”

The woman shot a glance at him sideways from under her strong black lashes, and paused. With her extreme composure she seemed to John like a voyager determined at all costs to keep his head while walking along a path beset with invisible dangers. She replied steadily at last:

“Oh, five or six weeks ago, I should say. He used to look in occasionally when he was in the district. He took rather a fancy to Alfred, I think.”

Alfred's eyebrows went up a fraction at this remark, and the hand scratching at his stubbly chin paused for a moment while he gazed at his wife with a sad, wondering admiration.

“And that's all you know of Mr. Gordon Frew?” asked Hembrow affably.

The woman lifted her fish carefully on to a plate and put it in the oven, then turned and looked squarely at the detective.

“That's all,” she answered with an air of surprise. “Why, Inspector?”

“I thought,” said Hembrow suavely, “that you might be able to explain why the counterfoils of Mr. Frew's cheque-book show that he sent a cheque for ten pounds on the first of every month to Emily Rudgwick. That is your name, is it not?”

The woman's composure deserted her at last. Her eyes widened and her lips fell apart. She said nothing. It was plain that she was flabbergasted beyond the power of uttering even inarticulate words. A chair creaked violently at the far end of the room as her husband suddenly sat down. She glanced at her husband and back at Hembrow, and moistened her lips.

“Steen, I take it,” went on Hembrow, “is a name used for purely business purposes.”

“Well,” said the woman defiantly, as if glad of this diversion from the matter of the cheque-book, “there's nothing very peculiar about taking a fancy name for a business, is there?”

Even in her obviously genuine fright and anger her voice retained its cultured accent, which contrasted curiously with her dirty, slatternly appearance and circumstances and placed her in a class apart from her little Cockney husband.

“Not in the least,” agreed Hembrow amicably. “But there is something peculiar about a woman who professes to know nothing about her own brother.”

Of the three listeners Christmas was not the least surprised. He glanced incredulously at Hembrow, and then at the tall, slatternly woman with her square, high-coloured face and black brows that met over her nose and large-boned, masculine figure, and he knew why it was that her appearance had been faintly, teasingly familiar to him.

She had just that cold glance, that polite and yet inimical composure, that hard swagger that had made Gordon Frew a striking, if not exactly a lovable personality.

She drew in her breath quickly, opened her lips as if to let out a flood of abuse, then suddenly closed them again, and smiled, tight-lipped and hard-eyed. Slowly she undid the strings of her apron, took it off, and sitting down in a creaking wicker chair, folded her hands on her large knees and asked quietly:

“Well? What's the game?”

“You are Emily Rudgwick, formerly Emily Frew, are you not?” asked Hembrow sternly.

“I don't deny it.”

“The sister of Gordon Frew?”

“Gordon Frew is my brother, though until he walked into the shop at Westbourne Grove last March I didn't know he was alive, not having seen him for thirty years.”

“Mrs. Rudgwick,” said the Inspector slowly, “have you not seen a morning paper?”

The woman looked up curiously at his tone.

“Not yet,” she answered. “And not likely to, unless a customer leaves one in the shop. Why? What's up?” she added, and slowly rose to her feet.

“Gordon Frew was murdered yesterday evening in his studio in Madox Court,” said Hembrow quietly, and narrowly watched her face.

She went pale and stared at him. Her lips fell apart. From the corner of the room came a faint high exclamation:

“Murd— Oh, my God!

There was a silence. Slowly the colour came back:o Emily Rudgwick's florid face. She said stoically:

“That means no ten pounds a month for us, Alfred, in future.”

The more susceptible Alfred repeated:

“Oh, my God! Murdered! Oh, my God!” and subsided into quietness.

“Well,” said his strange wife, “I didn't murder him, gentlemen. Neither did Alfred. And if you think I'm taking the matter lightly, just remember that I'd forgotten I ever had a brother till he turned up last March. I was glad to see him, he looked so prosperous. But I couldn't be expected to feel sisterly towards him. I never could make out,” she added dreamily, “what he wanted with us. If I'd been in his shoes I'd have steered clear of my poor, disreputable relations.”

“He may have thought it his duty to provide for you,” remarked Hembrow tentatively.

The woman shrugged her shoulders.

“Perhaps,” she said with a cynical smile. “I was always expecting him to give me some dirty job to do. But he never did, though the cheque came regularly every month. We shall miss it.”

“Were there no conditions attached to your receiving the allowance?”

“Only that we were never to let anybody know that he was my brother, and were never to try to see him at his own address. I didn't mind. I'm not proud. Neither's Alfred.”

“You say you had not seen your brother for thirty years?”

“Not seen him nor heard of him. Thought he was dead, or settled down to be a true-blue American, like my other brother.”

“Your other brother?”

“My elder brother James. He went to America when I was quite a girl. Went for his health, so to speak, having emptied the till at the shop where he worked. And a year or two afterwards Gordon went after him. Felt lonely without someone to quarrel with, I suppose. And till last spring I never heard of either of them again, and never expected to.”

“At what date was this, Mrs. Rudgwick?”

“Well, let me see. I was a girl of twenty-two when my eldest brother went, and now I'm fifty-four, and my second brother, Gordon, who was a couple of years younger than me, he went two years later, when I was twenty-four and he was twenty-two. Just thirty years ago, in fact.”

“What made them go, Mrs. Rudgwick, can you tell me? Did they go to join friends, or had they jobs waiting for them?”

The woman laughed.

“Not they. My eldest brother, James, he went because he thought the air'd be healthier for him, I should imagine. And after a year or two he wrote home to say he was doing well, so Gordon went to see if he couldn't do better. They were always trying to go one better than each other. I never knew two brothers dislike one another so much. And they both had ideas above their station.”

Hembrow looked at his informant curiously.

“If it's not too personal a question, Mrs. Rudgwick, could you give me an idea of what the station was?”

She laughed again, good-naturedly.

“Lord, I don't mind! I never did see any sense in making oneself out to be better than one was. Well, you see, Mr. Hembrow, it was this way. My great-grandfather belonged to a good family that had a title somewhere in it, and a coat-of-arms, and all that. But he was -one of the younger branches, as they say, and a very long way off the title, and a longer way still, if possible, off the money. It was just something for him to boast about. He had no money. He was an artist by profession. His son, my grandfather, was an out-and-out rotter. And by the time it came to my father, our branch of the family had sunk a bit low in the world. My father taught at the village school in Arrodale. He was quite contented. But my brothers were different. You never saw two young men so full of swank, with so little to swank about.... Not that they weren't clever. They were both that, in a way. But they hadn't had any proper education, and though they thought so much of themselves, they weren't really fit for anything better than the jobs they got. James went to work in a draper's shop in the big town near Arrodale, and Gordon became a bank clerk. Gordon made a great fuss and pretended he wanted to be an artist. But of course he didn't really, he only wanted to have an easy, gentlemanly job and a lot of money. And after James had sulked and sworn over the draper's shop for two or three years, he grabbed all the loose cash he could find lying about, and bolted. The draper was a friend of my dad's and a good sort, otherwise it would have been a matter for the police, and Master James would have found himself in prison. They let him go, and we had a letter a year after saying he had fallen on his feet, and since then I've not heard of him. Somebody's strangled him by now, I should think. Superior blighter, I never could stand him. Gordon wasn't such a bad sort, as a boy, though you couldn't trust him a yard.... Oh, Lord! It's funny!”

“Funny?”

“Funny how brothers and sisters live when they're kids, like a lot of young puppies fighting and scrambling together, and then thirty years afterwards it's ‘ Yes, sir,' and ‘ No, sir,' and ‘ Anything you like, sir,' as long as you're rich and I'm poor.”

“I should always call a customer sir,” spoke up her husband with a sort of quavering dignity, as if he suspected a taunt in her words. “Brother-in-law or no brother-in-law, I should always call a customer sir. I should think it only proper.”

“Am I to understand, Mrs. Rudgwick, that you know nothing about your brother's private affairs since thirty years ago?”

Emily Rudgwick's bold, florid face relaxed suddenly into a wide, candid smile, not unattractive, though it disclosed a great gap in her front teeth.

“You can search me, Inspector. I'm glad to say I know nothing. Though I can guess a good deal. I asked my brother Gordon how he'd managed to make so much money. And he said he'd made one or two lucky investments, and grinned. I bet I can make a rough guess at the sort of investments they were!”

“You don't seem,” remarked Christmas gently, speaking for the first time, “to have a very good opinion of your brother's character, Mrs. Rudgwick.”

This queer, strong, sardonic personality intrigued John no less than the family resemblance he perceived between her and her dead brother, whose uncompromising cynical humour had at times attracted and repelled him. Emily Rudgwick turned her hard, dark eyes on him and considered him lazily, as if she wondered what he were doing in this galley.

“Ah!” she uttered, with a negligent gesture of her large hand. “Honesty doesn't seem to be in the blood, does it?” She glanced at Hembrow with a sardonic smile.

“Wasn't he my brother, wasn't he my own flesh and blood? Aren't there a thousand things I can remember about him when we were both children? He went away, and I didn't see him for thirty years. But was he any less my brother when he came back? Do you think I didn't know the kind of man he was? Do you think I couldn't feel ? Pah! He was like my twin when we were children, we were so alike. Do you think I couldn't feel the likeness when we met again, that I shouldn't have known if he'd been altered into a different, honest man? I know my guesses are no use to you, Mr. Hembrow. What you want is facts. And I can't give you any. And I can tell you it's good to be talking to a detective without having to think whether one's yarn sounds plausible or not. It's restful, it's a change. It's nice to know that however hard you try you won't be able to mix me up in this thing.”

“Emily!” remonstrated her husband in tones of sorrowful surprise.

“Ah, what's the good of putting on side in front of a tec?” she threw over her shoulder at him scornfully. “He knows as well as you do we've both seen the inside of quod.”

“Mrs. Rudgwick,” began Hembrow, “you're a very intelligent woman”

“I am,” she put in simply. “But I don't make the best use of my gifts. That's because I drink. I'm not drunk now. But very often I am. Aren't I, Alfred?”

“I was wondering whether you could help me,” went on Hembrow. “I expect you know a great many secondhand dealers.”

“If you mean fences, say fences, Mr. Hembrow. We shan't feel insulted.”

“Would you tell me whether this description conveys anything to you? A man of about fifty, olive-skinned, small grizzled moustache, height about five foot six, gold filling in front tooth, slight cast in left eye, wears a fez—”

“A what?”

“A fez.”

“Oh, I know.” She looked thoughtfully up at Hembrow and then at Christmas. “No, none whatever. Except that the age and the height are just the same as Alfred's.”

“Here, don't say things like that, Emily!” cried her husband with a note almost of physical pain in his voice. “I don't like it!”

“Oh, don't be a silly fool!” she replied good-humouredly. “No, I don't know anybody like that. Most of my friends wouldn't care to make themselves quite so conspicuous as that. But surely it's not difficult for a clever tec like you to lay your hand on a man with all those peculiarities! Why, if he lived in these parts he wouldn't be able to go down the street without a crowd following him. They'd expect him to stop at a corner and start to do conjuring tricks!”