The Studio Crime (30 page)

“
The Times
,” said John, “if you want the news broken gently. The
Daily Wire
, if you want to get the shock over quickly.”

Laurence chose the latter, and having finished his breakfast, leant back in his chair, lit a cigarette and stoically unfolded the paper. At his sudden stifled exclamation, which seemed to hold even more of surprise than horror, John looked up quickly. Laurence's face looked at him over the print, as white as the paper itself.

“My God, John! Look at this!”

John jumped up and went round to his friend's chair. The headline stared gigantic across the page. “SUDDEN DEATH OF MILLIONAIRE-PHILANTHROPIST.” And crossing three columns below in letters which seemed small only by comparison: “SIR MARION STEEN FOUND DEAD IN HIS STUDY.”

John straightened himself with a sigh.

“I couldn't tell from his parting remarks last night whether he intended to kill himself or me,” he said. “I am glad, not only for personal reasons, that he was wise enough to choose himself.”

Laurence, scarcely listening, went on to read :

“Sir Marion Steen, the millionaire, was discovered lying dead in the library of his house in Mary Street, Mayfair, at eleven o'clock last night. The cause of death is thought to have been strychnine poisoning, and the circumstances point strongly to suicide. The dead financier's butler states that Sir Marion arrived at his house at about eight o'clock last night, apparently in good health and spirits, and retired to his library. About an hour afterwards he rang the bell and gave the footman who answered it an envelope which he required him to take by hand immediately to the office of Mr. Henry Marchant, a solicitor in Bedford Row. He gave orders that a tray of refreshments should be brought to him in the library at eleven o'clock, as he intended to work late. On entering the library at the stated hour, the butler was horrified to perceive the body of his master extended upon the floor. Death appeared to have taken place an hour or two previously. The dead millionaire is stated to have been a man of cheerful disposition, and to have suffered no nervous derangement or illness which might account for this tragic occurrence. A self-made man, he was well known for his charitable activities, and the Steen Homes of Rest now number upwards of thirty.”

Laurence laid the paper on his knees and looked up at John with a sad and puzzled face.

“What an extraordinary thing!” he remarked. “You take it very calmly, I must say, John! Why, the man was perfectly sane and cheerful when he left here last night, and yet within three hours—”

“Oh, he had courage,” said John, with a sigh. “He knew how to make the best of a bad business.”

“Just listen to this,” said Laurence with disgust, taking up the paper again. “‘A tragic feature of this sad affair is that the dead man was to have opened to-morrow the new Steen Home of Rest near Primrose Hill, which will now be inaugurated under such sad conditions.' The way these people write! That's what they call a tragic feature, is it?”

“Well,” replied John quietly, “as it happens there were elements of tragedy in that fact, for Sir Marion Steen... There's Hembrow walking past the window. I thought we should see him here this morning.”

“This is an extraordinary affair, Mr. Christmas,” began Hembrow as soon as he had entered and briefly greeted Newtree. “Ah, I see you've read your paper! I hardly know what to make of this affair!”

He sat down on the edge of the model's throne and frowned in a perplexed and disgruntled way.

“The whole thing seems impossible,” he said irritably. “I thought the case against Merewether and Mrs. Frew quite good enough to justify an arrest, although perhaps I shouldn't have been in such a hurry if they hadn't forced my hand by trying to leave the country. But now!” He ran his hand through his hair and looked from Laurence to John. “Would you say there was a possibility that Sir Marion Steen was insane? I can't find any support for the idea, but it seems he must have been!”

“He was perfectly sane when he left here last night at about half-past seven,” replied John.

Hembrow's eyebrows drew together in a gloomy frown. “Well, he must have gone suddenly off his head almost immediately afterwards. I had a solicitor, a Mr. Marchant, round at Scotland Yard first thing this morning, fairly frothing with excitement and demanding Merewether's immediate release on the grounds that he had received a confession of murder from Sir Marion Steen. Found it in his letter-box when he arrived at his office this morning. I thought it was a hoax at first. But, damn it, it's perfectly genuine, as I found out when I rang up Sir Marion's household. And then to go and do away with himself like that! He
must
have been insane. What other explanation can there be, except—”

“Except that he was the murderer of Gordon Frew,” finished John quietly, “and wished to save himself the unpleasantness of a trial and conviction. Newtree will tell you that he was here yesterday evening, and that I presented him with one or two clues to the identity of the murderer.”

“Yes,” agreed Laurence. “That is so. But, good God, John, you don't mean to say—”

“He took the hint, like a sensible man,” said John. “There is no doubt that he was a sensible man. For consider how admirably sensible his behaviour has been ever since the murder, how natural and detached his interest in the affair has seemed. Yes, the murder itself was the only foolish thing he did. And what an unnecessary piece of folly!” John sighed and smiled. “When a man becomes obsessed by the morbid craving for respectability, there is no knowing to what lengths he will go! He might have known that he was safe, if only his vanity had not destroyed his sense of proportion. Gordon Frew would never really have given him away. For he had the same obsession, and the same stake, as it were, in silence. But I suppose the uncertainty became unbearable. And Gordon Frew was a cruel devil. Suffering amused him.”

“My dear John!” and “Mr. Christmas!” began Laurence and Hembrow simultaneously. “Will you please explain what this is all about?”

John looked at the two rueful faces and laughed.

“Didn't Sir Marion explain it all,” he asked, “in the letter he sent to Mr. Marchant, Solicitor?”

“No, he didn't,” returned Hembrow. “It was quite a short statement. I've got it here. At least, old Marchant wouldn't leave me the original”—a slight bitterness in the Inspector's tone seemed to imply that his feelings had been somewhat ruffled during his interview with Merewether's solicitor—“but I've got a copy.”

He unfolded a sheet of paper and cleared his throat, and began to read in a rather sceptical tone:

“I understand that your client Dr. George Merewether has been arrested on a charge of being concerned in the murder of Gordon Frew at Madox Court, St. John's Wood, on November 24. As I shall in a few hours' time be out of reach of the law, and as I see no reason why Dr. Merewether should be inconvenienced by my affairs, I wish to make the following statement:

“I myself, and no one else, am responsible for the death of my objectionable relation Gordon Frew. For reasons which I do not feel inclined to enlarge on here, I stabbed him in the back as he sat at his writing-table at eight o'clock precisely on the evening of November 24, and I do not in the least regret the action itself, although I regret the consequences. If details are required, no doubt Mr. John Christmas will be delighted to supply you with them.

“I may say that I had no intention of incriminating Dr. Merewether, but had provided as a scapegoat a man whom I well knew to be a pest to society, although I had no personal animosity against him. I should very much like to know (1) what made Dr. Merewether tell that thundering lie about having seen Frew alive at nine o'clock, and (2) what happened to the remarkably beautiful woman who arrived in Frew's studio about five minutes before his death and went into an inner room to await my departure. However, I am afraid that my curiosity will have to go unsatisfied.

“Marion Steen.”

Hembrow folded the paper up with a grim look on his face and put it into his pocket.

“He says you can supply the details, Mr. Christmas,” he remarked. “And perhaps you wouldn't mind doing so. Have I really made a mistake in arresting Mrs. Frew and Dr. Merewether?”

“I'm afraid you'll have to let them go again, Hembrow. I was hoping very much that the arrest could be staved off until this morning, when it need never have taken place. But of course in the circumstances you had no alternative. Better luck next time, Hembrow. Anyway, you're a bit young for promotion yet, aren't you?

Hembrow grinned philosophically.

“Well, let's have these details, Mr. Christmas, if you don't mind. How did Sir Marion Steen manage to go up to Frew's flat and get down again without being seen? Why, he overtook Dr. Merewether in Greentree Road at about twenty-five minutes past eight! He couldn't possibly have got round the block in the time, so unless he flew over the houses, he must have passed Dr. Merewether face to face before he could turn and overtake him. To say nothing of the cabmen on the rank and the crossing-sweeper at Shipman's Mews. Yet none of these people saw him going down the road away from here.”

“Pardon me, Hembrow,” said John with a smile, “Dr. Merewether and the crossing-sweeper not only saw him but conversed with him. He deliberately asked Dr. Merewether the way to Golders Green. And in a moment of mental aberration he asked the crossing-sweeper the way to Primrose Hill. It was unfortunate for him that in his excitement he should have let slip the name of a place he was really interested in, instead of a place he wanted to appear interested in.”

“But Good Lord!” broke in Laurence, staring blankly. “It was the Turk who met Dr. Merewether and asked him. And, dash it, John, he met Sir Marion too!”

John laughed.

“There's no particular difficulty about meeting oneself, you know, Laurence. It's quite easy to be most convincingly circumstantial about it. One has special facilities for observation and can describe oneself minutely afterwards to the police. But one should be careful not to describe oneself too minutely. One should be careful not to observe details which no one else observed. Of all the people who saw the man in the fez that night, only Sir Marion noticed that he had a cast in his left eye. It was when I first realized that, that a glimmering of the truth first crossed my mind.”

“But,” objected Hembrow, who had quickly assimilated this idea, “there's old Lascarides. Now he certainly has a cast in his left eye. Where does he come into it?”

“He doesn't come any farther into it than the pages of the
Collector
,” replied John, producing that magazine with its elegant studio portrait of the Greek, “and the corner of Circus Road. He was only the model and the scapegoat. It was unwise of Sir Marion to make up from a photograph. If he had had a glimpse of his model in real life he would have realized the stumbling-block. For as soon as I saw Lascarides I felt pretty sure that he was not the man we wanted. Nobody who saw him could have failed to notice that diabolical squint.”

“The squint is quite noticeable here,” observed Hembrow, examining the portrait.

“It is quite noticeable as a slight cast,” agreed John. “And a slight cast is not a very noticeable thing on a foggy night. Sir Marion thought he was quite safe in ascribing a slight cast to his other self, even though nobody else could have noticed it. Unfortunately for him, the fashionable photographer who took this picture knew his business.”

“What made you think of this photograph, Mr. Christmas?”

“When I saw Lascarides I knew, or I had a strong suspicion, that he was not the man we wanted. But, except for the squint, he was so like the man we wanted in every way, that the corollary seemed to be that somebody had impersonated him. And once the theory of impersonation had settled firmly in my mind, there was so much to support it that I had no doubt about the matter. There was, for instance, the way the mysterious Greek had broadcasted his intention of going to Golders Green, where Lascarides lived: a likely, though not very subtle, procedure on the part of a man who wished to incriminate Lascarides. There was Lascarides' own story of having been called into the district by a telephone call. And you will remember, Hembrow, that Pandora Shirley, when she was tying her shoe-lace outside Frew's front door, heard Frew say to his visitor: ‘You've mistaken the date, old man!' Now the night on which Frew was murdered was the night before the Arts Club fancy dress ball at the Albert Hall. In the light of that fact and of the theory of impersonation, those words of Frew's took on a significance they had not seemed to have at first. Further, although Greenaway, Merewether, and Sir Marion himself all noticed that the stranger had a gold-filled tooth, the crossing-sweeper at Shipman's Mews swore positively that he had no such thing. And this small article was picked up just inside the mews and handed to me. I am told that under the microscope it shows slight traces of blood. And you will observe that the edges are slightly bent as if to take a purchase on some other small article of the same size—possibly a tooth.”

Hembrow took the little piece of gold and turned it over and over.

“Rather an amateurish way of faking a gold tooth,” he remarked.

“True. But no doubt Sir Marion thought it would be safer not to take his dentist into his confidence. And the gold tooth had to be removable at a moment's notice. Unfortunately for him, it was so easily removable that it removed itself prematurely. But to continue. When yesterday I gave old Greenaway a sight of Mr. Lascarides and he was unable to identify him as the man he had seen in the doorway here, my theory of impersonation was complete. But it was obvious to me that the impersonator could not have seen Lascarides in the life, or he would never have attempted to impersonate him at all. Therefore, he must have taken a photograph or other picture of the gentleman as his model. It only remained to hunt up a paper or magazine with a photograph in it of Mr. Lascarides. Bearing in mind the Greek's business of dealer in works of art I looked first through the collector's periodicals, and it was not long before I found the magazine I wanted.”