The Studio Crime (7 page)

“N-no. Frankly, it would not,” replied the police-surgeon uncomfortably, with another rather deprecating glance at his silent colleague.

“Do you find anything positively incompatible with death having taken place after nine?”

“Well... yes. Yes,” said the little doctor, gathering courage, “I do. When I first examined the body at a quarter-past ten the blood had already clotted considerably in the neighbourhood of the wound—very much more so than I should have expected to find it had the death taken place only an hour before. The small drops of blood which had fallen upon the parquet floor were completely dried. I should have thought it impossible that they should have dried within an hour. However—”

“Now, Dr. Merewether,” said Hembrow in a kind but business-like tone. “A good deal hangs on this. Can you swear that the man who opened the door to you at nine o'clock was the deceased himself? You thought it was at the time. But think. Don't answer in a hurry. Try to revisualize the man as he opened the door. Are you positive of his identity?”

“Absolutely.”

“Could it not have been a brother or somebody bearing a strong resemblance to the deceased? Or somebody impersonating him?”

“The man who opened the door to me at nine o'clock,” said Merewether with a sort of weary firmness, “was Gordon Frew, and no one else.”

“You were well acquainted with his appearance?” persisted Hembrow.

“Yes. As I have told you already, Inspector, I attended him last April during a prolonged attack of influenza. I assure you I am not mistaken. The man I saw was Gordon Frew. I would swear to it anywhere, at any time, in any court—”

His voice rose queerly, and he broke off abruptly, as if he were afraid he was about to lose control of himself. This sudden ascent into rhetoric was so unlike the Merewether he knew that Laurence looked at him in amazement. Merewether looked back at him and round at the other faces with a queer, defiant smile. There was a pause.

“Well,” said the police-surgeon amiably at last, “I'll be getting back, Hembrow. Can I give anybody a lift?”

“If I may,” said Merewether, regaining his urbanity with a visible effort and looking questioningly at Hembrow, “I will accompany you. If there is nothing more I can do, Inspector?”

“That's all right, Doctor,” replied Hembrow, looking stolidly, but, as Christmas knew, very observantly, at the pale, set face. “There's nothing more.”

He glanced at John with a slight lift of his eyebrows as the two medicoes left the room.

“Seems a bit rattled, for a medical man,” he observed, resuming his examination of the papers on the desk. “They're not usually so put out by a little matter of a murder or so. Friend of the deceased?”

“No, I don't think so,” replied Laurence, looking as puzzled as he felt. “Apart from having attended him professionally and meeting him once or twice at my place, I don't think he knew him at all.”

“Oh, well!” said the Inspector in a casual tone. “Perhaps he was annoyed at our man seeming to question his evidence.... Hullo! Mr. Frew seems to have been writing a book.” He lifted the top page of a pile of manuscript lying face downwards in a shallow basket. “This sheet, which seems to be the last, is numbered eighty-seven, and the one underneath it is number eighty-six.”

He took up the pile of manuscript and flicked it through. “‘ People and Places,'” he read from the neatly-written title-page. “‘ A Record of an Adventurous Career.' Seems to be a sort of book of reminiscences. Everybody writes them nowadays.”

“If they're true reminiscences, they ought to be very interesting,” observed Laurence. “Gordon Frew had an eventful life, according to his own account.”

“Unfortunately,” said Christmas, who had been raking carefully among the ashes and cooling cinders in the fireplace, “the capacity to live an eventful life and the ability to write about it don't often go together. Gordon Frew's book on Persia was really one of the dullest works I have ever run across. And I see,” added Christmas, glancing at a letter which lay in the basket from which Hembrow had removed the manuscript, “that even to produce that masterpiece he had to have a good deal of assistance.”

Hembrow picked up the letter and read it through, then handed it to Laurence. It was a note written on the cheapest block paper but in a good clear hand to remind Mr. Frew, after many compliments and apologies, that he owed the writer the sum of twenty pounds in consideration of the manuscript “The Soul of Persia” re-cast, re-written, and duly delivered to Mr. Frew.

“I am sorry to trouble you with this small matter so soon after the delivery of the manuscript,” the letter ended, “but the fact is that I am rather pressed at the moment, and the money would be most acceptable to pay one or two creditors who are becoming rather troublesome. With all best wishes for the success of the book, believe me,

Yours very truly,

“Gilbert Cold.”

“Poor devil!” said Christmas, making a note of the address. “Some mute, inglorious Milton making a poor living by licking into shape the effusions of the illiterate rich!”

“Hardly likely to know anything about the murderer, is he?” remarked Newtree.

“No. But having for his sins read through one of Frew's own original untouched compositions, he may know something quite interesting about the murdered. And the more one knows of a man, the more one knows of his murderer.”

Hembrow laughed.

“At your old theories, Mr. Christmas!” he observed good-humouredly. “I believe you'd hang a man because you thought he was the sort of man who'd be likely to murder the sort of man you took the victim to be!”

“I shouldn't be quite so arbitrary as to hang him,” said John gravely. “But I should inquire very closely into his history.”

“Well, it's early to say,” remarked Hembrow cheerfully. “But my feeling at present is that we shan't have far to look for the murderer.”

“And mine,” said Christmas, looking thoughtfully at a scrap of charred paper he held in his hand, “is that we shan't have to look too near.”

Hembrow smiled indulgently.

“Ah, you don't like the obvious thing, do you, Mr. Christmas! When you've had as much experience of this game as I have, you'll know that when the obvious means and the obvious motive stare one in the face, the obvious man's probably the murderer. Life isn't so much like plays and novels as you clever gentlemen think.”

“Is the motive so obvious?” asked Christmas dreamily.

“Robbery and a woman,” replied Hembrow succinctly. “Motive of ninety-five per cent, of the murders that get themselves committed, one or other of them. Here we have certainly one, and possibly the other as well.”

“And yet, you know, young Greenaway's story rings so true. His behaviour, as recorded by himself, seems so natural.”

The Inspector stared at his friend, then laughed.

“You're joking, aren't you, Mr. Christmas? If you think it natural for a servant who's been given an unexpected evening off to spend half of it hanging around his master's front door and the other half of it walking up and down in a thick fog—well, I don't, Mr. Christmas!”

“But consider the circumstances, Hembrow, and the state of mind of the man we have to deal with. Young Greenaway is obviously a weak emotional character of the type easily thrown off its balance by an unhappy love affair.”

“Exactly,” interpolated the Inspector grimly.

“But one moment, Hembrow. Now consider his evidence. He is given an unexpected evening off. What are his natural suspicions in the circumstances? That Frew expects a visit from Pandora Shirley. Instead of going home or otherwise amusing himself, he, in his own words, hung about the house for three-quarters of an hour. Why? To watch for the arrival of Pandora Shirley. After three-quarters of an hour, in other words at about a quarter to eight, he left Madox Court and walked up and down Greentree Road. According to old Greenaway's evidence, Miss Shirley left the building at about a quarter to eight. Isn't it fairly obvious that the young man watched her in, watched her out, followed her home and walked up and down the road she lived in to make sure she did not go out again?”

“You're forgetting, Mr. Christmas, that by his own account Ernest Greenaway did not wait to see Shirley enter the building. The last person he saw enter the court was the man in the fez.”

“But my dear Hembrow,” protested John gently, “do remember that a murder has been committed, and that I am presuming young Greenaway knows nothing about it. For all he knew, Pandora Shirley might herself have been the murderess. His suppression of the fact that he had seen her enter Madox Court was a laudable, if not very well-considered, attempt to shield her.”

Hembrow looked thoughtfully at his friend for a moment.

“Well,” he said at length non-committally, “if Greenaway's story is true, it oughtn't to be difficult to get corroboration of it. There's a taxi-rank in Greentree Road, and one or two of the drivers will probably be able to tell us whether they saw a man walking up and down between eight and nine o'clock... Is that a piece of the letter that was burnt you've got there, Mr. Christmas?”

“The only piece, unfortunately, that remains,” said Christmas, handing the Inspector a small torn fragment of greyish paper, slightly charred at one edge. “But it's not uninteresting. The complete letter would have told us quite a lot, I fancy, if Frew hadn't so inconsiderately burnt it.”

“Queer writing,” commented Hembrow, and indeed the hand, though small and fairly legible, was peculiarly loose, straggly and ill-formed. “Looks as if it had been written in a hurry. Let's see what we can make of it.”

The fragment measured about a square inch and a half, and appeared to have been torn from the middle of the page, showing torn edges all round. On one side were the words, or parts of words: “or God's sa,” and underneath “tolerable posi.” On the other side, more informatively, the words “bout eight o'cl,” and, on the second line, clear and distinct, three complete words: “risk. The fog.”

“This is certainly tantalizing,” commented Hembrow, studying the broken words with knitted brows. “It's fairly obvious, of course, that the first line represents ‘For God's sake,' but the ‘tolerable' something doesn't convey much.”

“You notice, though,” said John, “that the ‘t' of ‘tolerable' starts with a long up-stroke. Very few English people decorate their ‘t's' like that. It looks to me as if the ‘t' were not at the beginning of the word, but somewhere in the middle. As if the whole word, in fact, were not ‘tolerable,' but ‘intolerable.' And the next word, I take it, will be ‘position.' ‘For God's sake let us end this intolerable position,' is the sentence that comes naturally into one's mind.”

“Yes,” assented the Inspector. “You're probably right there, Mr. Christmas. And the back of the paper would give one the impression that something was going to happen at eight o'clock that would involve risk, and that the fog—by the way, at what time did this fog come on?”

“Soon after three,” replied Laurence promptly. “At ten past three I had to turn on the light. I looked at my watch because I was surprised it was getting dark so early. And then I saw it was a fog coming up.”

“H'm,” said Hembrow. “In that case the letter must have been posted fairly near at hand—or else the writer had the gift of prophecy, and I don't think we need trouble ourselves with that supposition!”

He laid the scrap of paper carefully in his pocket-book and put it away for later reference, and returned to his methodical search through the papers in the drawers of the dead man's desk.

“Deceased,” he observed conversationally, “seems to have made a habit of burning his letters. It's a funny thing, but I haven't found a single personal letter of any kind among all this stuff. Files and files of receipts and bills and press-cuttings, all very orderly. But not a line in the way of a private letter. Plenty of cards for picture-shows and catalogues of exhibitions, but nothing that really throws much light on the dead man's affairs.”

“There's a good deal to throw light on the dead man's character,” observed John, “which is the next best thing. This book of press-cuttings, for instance, so beautifully bound in morocco. He was a vain man.”

“Dash it, John,” said Newtree, looking a little pained. “You can't call a man vain just because he keeps press-cuttings about himself. Lots of people do. I do it myself, in fact.”

John smiled.

“But just have a look through these press-cuttings, Laurence, and you'll see what I mean. What's the first thing that strikes you about them?”

“That there aren't very many,” said Laurence promptly. 

“And the second?”

“That they're mostly from provincial papers, and all appreciative—gushing would be a better word.”

“Yet Frew's book on Persia had a good many reviews from London papers, and was not at all well received on the whole. It's obvious that he discarded all the more unsympathetic criticisms and kept only those which pleased his vanity. In other words, that he was a vain man.”

“And much good may that conclusion do you, Mr. Christmas,” said Hembrow with a smile, as he whipped open a secret drawer and took from it a cheque-book and several small piles of used cheques neatly banded with india-rubber.

John returned his friend's smile and went on blandly to Newtree:

“In fact, I should say that our late friend was a pretty considerable poseur. He posed as a writer, but he did not write his own books. He posed as a painter, but whether he could paint or not you know better than I.”

“Well,” said Laurence slowly, “he had a good feeling for colour, of course—but—”

“Exactly. He posed as a connoisseur, but—” John looked slowly around the richly-hung and decorated room. “Doesn't it strike you that there's something rather curious about this collection?”