Victim Number Eight
The lights of France grew more and more distinct as the Isle of Thanet approached Boulogne, rising and falling rhythmically on a sea of deepening grey. A harsh, deafening blast issued from the funnel, heralding the conclusion of another journey. If this had been the boat’s maiden trip the loud egotistical note might have sounded appropriate, and the unfortunate folk near the funnel would have stuffed their fingers into their ears without complaint; but the trip had been made countless times, and the volume of the blast seemed to overrate the achievement.
“Well, I suppose it’s necessary in a noisy age,” muttered a passenger next to Kendall.
“Probably the Ichthyosaurus made a worse noise,” answered Kendall.
“Pardon me,” retorted the passenger, “but there is no specific evidence that Ichthyopterygia made any noise at all! On the other hand, we may presume that when the Mesozoic Allosaur attacked the Brontosaur, it snorted.”
“I’m sorry,” apologised Kendall. “But what I really want to know is whether a cat turns round like a dog before it sits down?”
While his fellow-traveller blinked at him, appearing to find the remark as frivolous as the inspector’s red carnation buttonhole, the boat itself turned round, and backed into the harbour.
Kendall’s inquiries of the passport officials, like his inquiries on the boat and at Folkestone, merely corroborated what he already knew. Dora Fenner had crossed that morning, but no other person of that surname, or answering the description of John Fenner, had been seen or heard of. Passing down the subway out of the station, he paused and looked about him. Expectation was in his eye, but the expectation soon changed to a frown.
“Not here,” he murmured. “What’s happened to the fellow?”
Continuing on his way, he walked slowly along. Dim shapes of ships loomed from the water on his left. He sought a particular shape, and did not find it. The trip to Boulogne was not beginning well.
At the bridge he stopped again. He lit a cigarette, and tried to make himself conspicuous. No one seemed interested in him. He grunted with annoyance, hailed a taxi, and said, “Commissariat de police.” A few minutes later he was talking to the commissaire.
“I expected to be met,” he said.
“Of course,” answered the commissaire. “But were you not?”
“No one.”
“I do not understand. As soon as we received your request I sent out my best man. I see you wear your buttonhole—he should have found you.” He turned to a man at a desk. “Have you had any report from Gustav?”
“Nothing,” answered the man.
“He has not been back?” The man shook his head. “No news at all?” The man shook his head again. The commissaire turned back to Kendall with a little shrug. “It is unlike him. He is reliable. Something must have happened.”
“Perhaps he had to go some distance,” said Kendall.
“Even so, we should have had a message. The instruction to meet you, or to report if he could not, was definite. Well, what do you suggest? We are at your disposal.”
Kendall did not reply. The commissaire began to repeat his question, then stopped abruptly, and followed his visitor’s gaze. It was fixed on the desk at which the other man was sitting.
“Something interests you there?” he inquired.
“May I go over and look?” asked Kendall.
“But certainly. We have our problems on this side of the water, as you have on yours—otherwise, you and I would be looking for work, eh? An aeroplane—accident.” Kendall noted the little pause before the last word as he crossed the room. “Some of those items on the desk may become exhibits, to use your phrase.”
“It is not a phrase we use in connection with an accident,” commented Kendall.
“That is true,” admitted the commissaire, rather dryly, “but this seems to have been quite an unusual accident.”
Kendall stared at the exhibits. A cigarette-lighter. An unused postcard of a nude lady. A bunch of keys. A pencil. A blood-stained handkerchief…
“How—unusual?” inquired Kendall, as his roving eye paused at the next item.
“It will not waste your time to hear?” asked the commissaire, watching Kendall with interest.
“Do you and I ever waste time?” retorted Kendall.
“I waste time whenever I can, my friend,” smiled the commissaire, “but so rarely I get the opportunity! The aeroplane came down some little way from here. No one saw the accident. It was not discovered at once. The aviator had been dead—how long?”
“Twelve hours or more,” answered the man at the desk. A detective from the sûreté.
“He was curiously mutilated,” went on the commissaire. “That made immediate identification difficult, and there was nothing on him by which to identify him. The aeroplane, also, was curiously mutilated—”
“In fact, what you’re telling me,” interrupted Kendall, “is that neither the man nor the aeroplane crashed, but there was a cumbrous attempt to give the tragedy that appearance?”
“Our minds move in the same grooves,” nodded the commissaire. “Yes, that is our theory, without doubt.”
“Have you now identified the man?”
“We have now identified the aeroplane—”
“Which will lead to the identification of the aeroplane’s owner,” interposed the man from the sûreté. “I expect a telephone message any moment.”
“I wonder whether I can beat your telephone,” said Kendall. “Was the dead man wearing a grey suit?”
“No, a brown suit.”
Kendall looked surprised.
“What is that, next to the handkerchief?”
The French detective turned to the small object.
“A piece of grey cloth,” he said. “It was found near the spot. Torn.”
“I have torn a piece of the same cloth,” replied Kendall, and produced it from his pocket.
The French detective jumped up, and the commissaire came forward.
“This bit of cloth,” went on Kendall, “is from the suit of the man I am looking for—Fenner. Does it seem reasonable to you that, having torn his suit in England, the place where it was torn might be liable to a second tear—say—in France, during a struggle?” He placed the first bit beside the second bit. “I see I was wrong in thinking I could identify your dead aviator—I have no idea who he is—but I am as interested in him as you are, because I can identify his passenger.”
“But—the coincidence!” murmured the commissaire.
“Forgive me, but is that remark worthy of you? When two points in the same pattern converge—”
The commissaire waved him down apologetically.
“If you are right, there is no coincidence,” he admitted, “but perhaps the cloth is a coincidence? It is, after all, a very ordinary grey cloth, of a pattern much worn.”
Kendall smiled, and again put his hand in his pocket.
“Your next exhibit is not so ordinary,” he said. “How would you describe it?”
“False side-whisker,” answered the French detective promptly.
“One. Here is the other.” He drew it from his pocket. “Fenner pulled off one in England, and your dead aviator pulled off the other in France—eh? Please don’t talk to me for a moment! Please don’t talk to each other. If I am rude, I am rude. But in a moment I will tell you something about your aviator—though not who he is!”
He stood still, staring hard at the ground. His companions glanced at each other, with raised eyebrows, but made no attempt to break the productive silence. If their expressions said, “These strange English!” they realised that, sometimes, these strange English got somewhere.
“Listen,” said Kendall, at last. “You’ll soon be hearing a long story, if you’re interested—and it’s pretty plain now that you’ll have to be—but meanwhile you know that I am investigating the deaths of seven people.”
“We were impressed with the number,” the commissaire assured him, “and we are abashed that we ourselves can only produce a paltry one.”
“But your one increases my number to eight, and may help to discover the murderer of the lot and bring him to justice.”
“You are certain it is murder, then?”
“It is risky to be certain of anything in our very uncertain profession. Even a verdict, which technically ends our uncertainty, has been known to be wrong. But for the sake of argument we can assume that this is murder, and for the sake of argument we are going to assume that—the man I am after is the murderer. Assuming so much, we have the following sequence of events to assist us. Our man leaves his house last night, after his first murders, and cycles several miles to a very large field. He hides his bicycle in a clump of bushes. Your aviator meets him. That is to say, your man in a brown suit meets my man in a grey suit. This meeting is not accidental. It has been prearranged. Perhaps hurriedly. My man is disguised. He sheds—accidentally or by design—one false side-whisker. Everything indicates hurry in that field. Your man flies my man over to France. My man drops certain damning evidence into the sea, but not his second side-whisker. He may not know that he still has it on. In due course, there is a safe landing near Boulogne, but in some isolated spot… Was the spot where the aeroplane was found isolated?”
The commissaire nodded.
“Then trouble brews,” went on Kendall. “Or, I should say, more trouble, for enough has been left behind. What sort of trouble is this new trouble? We do not know. But we know that your man must have been thick with my man, to undertake this trip for him. We may even guess—may we?—that he was aware of my man’s predicament. Either was aware when the trip started, or found out during the journey. Well—anything may happen after that, between rogues. Perhaps your man knows too much. Perhaps he threatens. Perhaps he has to be dealt with. Perhaps there is no premeditation here, but just the tragic flaring of a quarrel. Well, after seven murders, what is an eighth? Still, with an aeroplane handy, why waste the chance of a camouflage? So the eighth murder is made to appear like a landing accident at dusk… And your man is found, and mine is not. But mine has got to be found—”
The telephone broke into Kendall’s words. The man from the sûreté jumped up, went to the wall, and held a brief conversation. He laid down the receiver with a grim smile.
“The dead aviator is Dr. Jones, chez Madame Paula, Haute-Ville,” he said. “I suppose, Mr. Kendall, you will be coming with us?”