“Jas. Elderson, Private Inquiry Agent,” said the notice in dirty yellow lettering on the dirty brown door. Stephen, as he stood collecting his breath on the landing after his climb up the steep staircase, tried to picture what manner of man Jas. Elderson would prove to be. He had never consciously set eyes on a private inquiry agent, but he imagined that a man could hardly be engaged in such a calling without having something more or less sleuth-like in his appearance. A lean, ferrety face, a sensitive nose that quivered slightly at the tip, small, beady eyes and a generally sly, cunning demeanour made up his idea of what a free-lance detective ought to be. If he did not expect to find all the features of his ideal compounded in Mr. Elderson, he did at least look to see some vestige of what he took to be the insignia of the profession. He would probably have been extremely nettled to be told, as was the fact, that his mental image was merely a reincarnation of the illustrations to a serial in a schoolboy’s magazine which he had devoured with gusto some fifteen years before.
The reality, as might have been expected, was a disappointment. Mr. Elderson proved to be a large, bluff individual with a loud voice and a self-confident manner. He had a good-looking face, slightly blurred in outline, and his general appearance vaguely suggested a policeman gone to seed. There was nothing particularly surprising in the latter fact, since it was only a few years ago that he had left the Force; whether the circumstances of his retirement were in any way connected with the faint aroma of whisky which made itself felt as soon as he began to speak was his own secret.
He greeted Stephen in tones that contrived to blend the obsequious with the hearty, and proceeded, as he put it, “to take Mr. Dickinson’s instructions.” Stephen found, however, somewhat to his annoyance, that Mr. Jelks had already told him in general terms what would be required of him, and the only instructions that he found it necessary to give were devoted to confining Elderson’s already ambitious programme. The delight with which the fellow had welcomed an investigation into a case of suspected murder was ludicrous and even somewhat pathetic.
“This is something like, Mr. Dickinson,” he repeated several times, rubbing his beefy hands together. “This is something like!”
He did not specify what it was like, but it was easily to be gathered that the attraction of the case to him lay precisely in the fact that it was utterly unlike the dreary round of private detective’s ordinary activities.
“If there was anything fishy about the people at that hotel,” he went on, “I can promise you I’m the man to find it for you. You’ve come to the right place, sir, I can tell you that! And when it comes to a question of following up inquiries, well, sir, you may not credit it to look at me, but I can make myself to all intents and purposes invisible—virtually, morally, in-vis-ible, sir!”
At various points in the monologue Stephen endeavored to interrupt, but always without success. At last, however, he contrived to interpose: “I’m not at all sure, Mr. Elderson, whether you understand exactly what I am instructing you to do for me.”
“But surely,” Elderson protested, “I’m to be allowed a free ’and in me plan of campaign? Believe me, sir, when you employ an expert it’s the only thing to do—a free hand.” (The aspirate emerged triumphantly this time in an aura of spirits.) “Subject, of course, to your approval in the matter of exes. And I’m always most careful on the question of exes, that I can assure you.”
Exes? Stephen blinked once or twice before he realized what was meant.
“We can discuss the question of expenses later,” he said. “The point is that I am only instructing you to do one specific thing, which for various reasons I can’t undertake myself. The plan of campaign, if there is one after you have done it, is my own business.”
“Very good, sir,” said Elderson, crestfallen, “if you wish it, of course. Theirs not to reason why, as Shakespeare says. At the same time, I should have thought—”
“Please don’t undervalue what I am asking you to do,” said Stephen swiftly, determined not to relinquish his hardly won grip on the conversation. “Your work in the first place, Mr. Elderson—I can’t answer for the future—will be confined to ascertaining who was in the hotel the night that my father died, under what names they stayed, the addresses they gave, what rooms they occupied, and anything else about them that can be found out. Also any useful observations you can make about the staff at the place. I shall want a report on these matters as soon as possible—”
“Time is of the essence, sir; yes, I quite appreciate that,” said Elderson, smacking his lips over the phrase, which meant no more to him than it did to his client. “Of the essence—absolutely. I can start to-day. Now on this question of exes, sir . . .”
That all-important point having been discussed and satisfactorily settled, Stephen prepared to go. Before he left, however, he was subjected to one last appeal.
“I do ’ate working in the dark, sir. Don’t you think you could let me in on this a leetle bit more? If you follow what I mean, sir?”
“We are all working in the dark. That’s exactly why I have had to come to you.”
“But couldn’t you just give me a line, sir, on the way you want things to turn out? I mean, for instance, Motive. You’ve considered that point, no doubt, sir. I presoom there was some motive for somebody to do away with the gentleman. If you could let me have a wrinkle or two on what’s in your mind, then I should know the sort of somebody I’m wanted to find, and save us both a lot of trouble.”
Motive! It was impossible not to realize that Elderson had put his finger on the weak spot in the whole project. But if he was to be of any use, it was clearly inadvisable to make him a present of the fact.
“I can’t say anything about that at the moment,” Stephen said with his hand on the door. Then a sudden thought struck him. “One moment,” he added. “There is another matter which I should like you to look into and deal with in your report. Please be very careful to find out whether anybody on the night in question, or thereabouts, changed his room.”
The speed with which Elderson saw the relevance of the remark did a good deal to raise him in Stephen’s estimation.
“I take your point, sir,” he said. “I take your point. If there was anything of that kind going on, and if the room where the gentleman was put away was the one that was changed, it does open up vistas, so to speak, doesn’t it, sir?”
After which Stephen walked out into the street. Elderson had been confident that his report would be ready within three days. It seemed a short enough time for the work, unless the man was a good deal more efficient than he appeared, but long enough in all conscience to wait. He turned into the first cinema he came to, and spent the first half-hour of those three days aimlessly contemplating records of events which seemed almost as fantastic and unreal as the mission that had brought him to Shaftesbury Avenue.
The time passed more quickly and with less strain than any of the family might have feared. Stephen saw comparatively little of Anne and Martin, and this was on the whole just as well. Since the interview with the Insurance Company’s representative, he had re-established a modus vivendi with his sister, and they had relapsed into the easy-going relationship which had characterized their lives hitherto. A union that dates from the nursery is not easily dissolved. It can survive quarrels and explosions calculated to wreck nine marriages out of ten, possibly if only because the parties to it can take so much more for granted and are so much more ready to recognize what is forbidden territory. So far as Anne was concerned, her relations with Martin were clearly labelled, “Trespassers will be Prosecuted,” and while Stephen kept to his side of the fence no questions were asked. She had not forgotten his attitude towards his future brother-in-law—it was not in her nature to do so—but she was quite capable of putting the cause of dissent away at the back of her mind, and behaving thereafter as if it did not exist. She gave no indication whether she had ever so much as mentioned the subject to Martin (what they did talk about when they were alone together was one of the problems that Stephen could never resolve), and Martin’s manner to him was no more and no less cordial than it had been before. At the same time, a state of peace that depends on ignoring the existence of a cardinal fact is at the best an insecure affair and it was natural enough that the persons concerned should have agreed by common consent not to endanger it by too close association. Whether at Anne’s instigation or not, Martin had suddenly developed a passion for what he described as “jaunts” into the countryside. Every morning his squat, tubby two-seater, looking strangely characteristic of its owner, would carry her away from Plane Street, to deposit her there again late in the long August evening, tired but bright-eyed, and with a strong smell of pipe tobacco clinging to her clothes. It was an arrangement that solved the problem of filling in the period of waiting very satisfactorily for two out of the three.
Engaged couples, in any case, are never supposed to feel, or at all events to admit that they feel, any boredom so long as they are together. Stephen, who was not engaged or likely to be, had resigned himself to a period of more or less unrelieved idleness and depression. But on the day following his call on Mr. Elderson, he unexpectedly found an outlet for his energies. He was sitting after breakfast, gloomily running over the financial columns in the morning paper, when his mother came into the room.
“How are the stocks and shares this morning?” she asked.
“Pretty mouldy,” he mumbled.
“Have you been gambling again?” The matter-of-fact way in which the question was put robbed it of offence. Actually, Mrs. Dickinson disliked her son’s habit, and the dislike was a matter of common knowledge to them both. They did not refer to it more than was necessary, and the present inquiry was recognized as a mere request for information.
“A bit, yes,” he answered.
“Talking of gambles,” she went on, “I rather wanted to talk over this question with you.”
It was unnecessary for her to say which question she meant. Since the production of the letter from Mr. Jelks on the evening after the funeral there had been only one question in the family, overshadowing every other.
Stephen put down his paper reluctantly.
“Must you, Mother?” he said. “And what has it to do with gambling, in any case?”
“Well, it is a gamble, isn’t it?” she answered good-humouredly. “A very big gamble indeed, with a lot of money at stake. I imagine that is why it appeals to you. But what I wanted to ask you in particular was this: Why do you think that anybody should have had any interest in murdering your father?”
Stephen groaned.
“That’s what they all keep on saying! I think that—but look here, Mother, this isn’t a question I feel like discussing with you, of all people.”
“But after all, why not?” said his mother placidly. “If everybody is asking the question, why shouldn’t I? You know, Stephen, you have started this hare, and you can’t complain of anybody else chasing it. As I told you before I feel that all this concerns you much more than it does me, and that is why I have allowed you to take your own course in the matter of the Insurance Company. At the same time, I can’t help being interested in what is going on, and I have been thinking over it a good deal, just as an abstract problem. I’ve been glad to have something to occupy my mind.” She smiled at him, and added: “You mustn’t be shocked at me. It’s only natural.”
“No, I’m not shocked exactly,” said Stephen. “Only I—”
“Only you wish I wouldn’t talk about it. It seems to me to come to very much the same thing. Well, I’m sorry, but I intend to talk about it. If I am to accept, even for the sake of argument, that somebody has murdered my husband, it is of some importance to me who that somebody is. You don’t feel like enlightening me, Stephen?”
“It isn’t that I don’t feel like enlightening you, Mother, exactly. But at this stage, I am a bit in the dark myself.”
“Are you, really?”
Something in his mother’s voice made Stephen look up sharply. For a moment he suspected that she was laughing at him. But her face remained quite serious.
“In that case,” she went on, “it might be rather helpful to talk it over with someone else. Now, for instance, taking a detached view of the matter, suppose this was a case of murder—a clear case of murder, I mean, with a verdict of ‘person or persons unknown’ at the inquest—who do you suppose the police would begin by suspecting?”
Stephen looked at her vaguely.
“I dunno,” he muttered.
“Come, come, Stephen! Where are your wits?” She was speaking to him now in exactly the same tones that she had employed, years ago, when he was stumbling over his first reading lessons. “The first people the police always suspect in such cases are the family.”
“But good heavens, Mother, you don’t mean—”
“The family,” she repeated. It was now, at least, clear that Mrs. Dickinson was giving her somewhat disconcerting sense of humour free rein. “Especially, of course, the widow. Seriously, Stephen, I can’t help feeling a little glad that I was away at Bournemouth all the time. I, at all events, have a very satisfactory alibi.”
“Mother, I hate to hear you talk like this!”
“Never mind,” said Mrs. Dickinson heartlessly. “It’s good for me. After the widow, I suppose, come the rest of the immediate relations. You and Anne are safe enough it seems, with Klosters doing duty for Bournemouth in your case. Then there’s Martin. Is he provided with an alibi, too?”
“Really, I’ve no idea. I haven’t asked him.”
“Well, I’m not suggesting that you should. It might not make for good feeling in the family, and I’m old-fashioned enough to think that of more importance than quite a lot of money. But it is the kind of question the police would ask, isn’t it? Then, I suppose, if Martin satisfied them, they’d go on to the rest of the family. I’m not so sure about that,” she added doubtfully. “Do they include brothers and cousins?”
“Where they are like Uncle George or Robert, I should be in favor of including them every time. Not to mention Uncle Edward, and The Holy Terror. Would you like me to start round cross-examining them straight away?”
“Perhaps on the whole it would be wiser not to. Let’s suppose, though, that the police have seen all these people, and asked all those questions, and found nothing. They are still looking for the person with the motive to commit the crime. Where do they look next?”
“That depends on the kind of man who was murdered, I should imagine.”
“The kind of man—exactly! So they have to set to work to find out what kind of man he was. They may have a good deal of difficulty doing that—almost as much difficulty as you would have in asking inconvenient questions of your Uncle George. Perhaps we have an advantage over them there, though.”
“What is all this leading up to?” asked Stephen, who was evidently now at last genuinely interested.
His mother, as always, still preferred the oblique approach.
“What kind of man would you say your father was?” she asked.
It was not a very easy question to answer.
“Well, I don’t suppose anybody could call him a very friendly bloke,” Stephen said at last.
“But you wouldn’t have thought him the sort of person to have many enemies—mortal enemies?”
“No, certainly not, so far as I know.”
“So far as you know,” she echoed softly. “I suppose that’s as much as any of us could say—so far as we know. Perhaps it’s rather a reflection on our life as a family that we can’t go further than that. But at all events one could hardly expect the police to know more than we do on that point, if as much. They would find that he was retired and living on his pension, so that there was no question of anybody wishing to remove him out of rivalry, or wanting his position, or anything of that kind. They would find no evidence of quarrels or disturbances—outside the family, and we have dealt with them—to make any one anxious to take his life, so far as we know—that is, so long as we have known him. That is right, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“So our imaginary police,” Mrs. Dickinson went on, “would have to go further and further back in their searches, if they had the means to. And that is where I say we have the advantage over them.”
Mrs. Dickinson pursed her lips and her hand went up in the familiar automatic gesture to her hair.
“How much do you know about your father’s early life?” she asked.
“Nothing at all. Except for a few reminiscences about Pendlebury, and they seemed to date mostly from his childhood, he never told me anything about it. That was one of the rather uncanny things about Father—he seemed to be so self-contained, so to speak. One felt he was living in a vacuum.”
She nodded.
“Exactly. And do you know, Stephen, you may think me a strangely incurious person, but I knew hardly any more than you did.”
“Oh!” said Stephen in disappointment. “I thought you were going to tell me something useful.”
“I am. Something interesting, at any rate. How far it will be useful to you I don’t know, but I fancy that the police we have been imagining would have thought it worth listening to. The point is, you see, that I know rather more about it now than I did when he was alive.”
She rose and went to her desk. From a drawer she took out a thick bundle of letters, held together by elastic bands which had grown slack with age.
“I found these last night,” she explained, “put away among your father’s things.”
Stephen glanced at them. He noticed that the letter at the top of the pile was still in its envelope, and that this bore a penny stamp with King Edward VII’s head upon it.
“This looks like ancient history,” he observed.
“Very ancient history, some of it. I told you we should have to go a long way back, didn’t I? But if you take the trouble to go through it, as I have, you may find that it has some bearing on quite recent history. At any rate, it will be an occupation for you. I’m afraid you are finding the present rather a dull and anxious time.”
“Have you been inventing all this just because you thought I wanted something to do?” he asked in some annoyance.
Mrs. Dickinson smiled.
“It is good for you to have something to do, you must admit,” she said. “And at the same time these things may be of real help to you. I think, in any case, that they are matters that you ought to know about. When you have read them, come and talk them over with me, and I dare say I shall be able to explain anything in them which you don’t understand.”
Stephen took the letters away to what had been his father’s study. He sat down at the ugly great desk which loomed over the ugly small room and began to read. He was still reading when the gong went for lunch.
“Well?” his mother asked when they met at table.
“I’ve read them nearly all.”
“Yes?”
“And this afternoon I’m going to read them again. I think it’s all rather horrible, but I suppose I must go through with it.”
Mrs. Dickinson raised her eyebrows at her son’s evident disgust, but did not allude to it.
“Do, dear,” she said amiably, then changed the subject.
Late that afternoon she went into the study. Stephen was just putting the letters back again into the bands that had contained them. He looked up when she came in but said nothing.
“Well,” she said, sitting down in the room’s only arm-chair, “did you find the letters interesting?”
“Interesting?” Stephen made a face. “I thought them disgusting.”
“Really, Stephen,” said Mrs. Dickinson, “it is a pity that you are such a puritan. It makes you so—so ungrown-up. This sort of thing is all perfectly natural, you know. I sometimes think if you were a little more normal in these ways you wouldn’t gamble so much.”
“If by normal,” said Stephen loftily, “you mean behaving in a thoroughly beastly way—”
“No, of course I don’t. I mean taking a reasonable interest in the other sex, which is just what you never do. The moment you see a girl becoming in the least friendly you drop her like a hot potato. There was that nice Downing girl, for example. However, that isn’t what I came in here to say. Tell me what impression you got from your reading.”
“Really, Mother, I’d much rather not discuss these things with you.”
“Nonsense! Of course you must discuss them. If you’re afraid to talk about it, I’m not. What do these letters amount to, in any case? Simply that your father as a young man had an intrigue with a young woman, that there was trouble about it with his father and that he threw her over at a rather awkward moment for her. Then she had a child, in the inconvenient way in which these women always do seem to have children, and your father duly paid up for him until he was sixteen—which I believe is as long as the law can compel anyone to pay in such circumstances.” She laughed softly. “It was just like him, you know, to fulfil his strict legal liability and no more.”
“It’s a pretty disgraceful story,” said Stephen hotly.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Perhaps it is. It is certainly a very old one. The child—it was a boy, wasn’t it?—must be about ten years older than you.”
“That means that Father was still paying for him long after he married, without saying a word to you about it!”
“That was just as well, perhaps. I might not have been quite so philosophical about it then as I am now. But we’ve only told half the story so far. The letters start again quite recently, after a long interval, don’t they?”
“Yes, and this time they are from somebody who calls himself, ‘Your injured son, Richard.’ ”
“Your half-brother, Stephen.”
“Please don’t rub it in. I suppose those letters are the reason why you wanted me to read the whole bundle. They seem to be in the nature of threats to Father. Apparently he claims that he has only recently discovered his parentage, that he is down on his luck, and thinks that he has a right to some assistance from Father.”
“Exactly. And he expresses himself somewhat violently when he finds that he is not going to get any.”
“Well, I suppose it is just possible that all this might be of some use, except for two things. The injured son doesn’t give an address, except a Post Office in London, and we don’t know his name. He merely says, in one of the letters, ‘I have taken my mother’s name.’ And her letters are signed, not very helpfully, ‘Fanny.’ ”
“That was just where I thought I might be able to help you,” said Mrs. Dickinson.
“Good Heavens, Mother! You don’t mean to say that you know this woman?”
“Not exactly. But I have an idea who she is. Do you remember your uncle Arthur’s will?”
“Yes, of course I do. What has that got to do with it?”
“Simply this. The woman to whom half the money was to go after your father’s death was named Frances Annie March.”
“But why on earth should Uncle Arthur want to benefit Father’s old mistress?”
“It sounds a peculiar thing to do, doesn’t it? But then Arthur was rather a strange man—as most of the Dickinsons were, I’m afraid. He had so often said that he meant to keep the money he had made in the family, that I feel it would be quite like him, when he fell out with us, to see that it went to the illegitimate branch. He would feel that he was keeping his word and injuring us at the same time.”
“But that’s no more than guesswork. Just because the woman’s called Fanny, it doesn’t prove that she’s the same one.”
“No. But if you look at some of the earlier letters, the affectionate ones, you’ll find that they are signed, not ‘Fanny,’ but ‘Fannyanny.’ If you’ve had the misfortune to be christened Frances Annie, ‘Fannyanny’ is just the kind of nickname you would acquire, don’t you think?”
Stephen looked at his mother as if he were seeing her for the first time.
“You ought to have been a detective,” he said.
“At all events, if the imaginary police we were discussing just now had found out what we have done, I think they would consider it a clue worth following up. So I can only suggest that while you are waiting for any information that that man in Shaftesbury Avenue can collect for you, you should do what you can to investigate the identity of Frances Annie March.”
Stephen rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“These letters establish the date of Richard’s birth, more or less,” he said. “I suppose Somerset House will do the rest. I’ll go there first thing tomorrow. Meanwhile, we’ll keep this to ourselves. We needn’t say anything to the others unless there turns out to be something in it.”
So it was that after all Stephen found plenty of business to occupy him during the ensuing two days.