Flowers for an Angel

NIGEL MORLAND

SOME WOMEN HAVE SAID that Mrs. Pym was never young, that even in her initial stages she was probably an elderly baby. Obviously, such women should drink milk out of saucers; still, it is a fact that Mrs. Pym was somehow stolid, enormously capable, and frequently harsh, even in the early 1920’s when she must have been around thirty.

She affected the same ugly tweeds, the same enchantingly insane hats, and the same air of magnificent omnipotence as she does today. But her hair was brown then, with only the faintest touch of her current greyness. Her speech was as biting, and her contempt for authority and inefficiency as ready as on that notable day when she crashed the shocked portals of New Scotland Yard, the first woman ever to hold rank in Central C.I.D., where, in these present jittery times of nuclear fission and H-bombs, she is Mrs. Assistant-Commissioner Pym.

In those extraordinary 1920’s she had drifted away from the job of chief secretary to the Director of Remounts (War Office, Special Service) in China, where they were still talking about her merciless “I think we’re supposed to mount the British Army on Mongolian ponies; God knows why, but we Islanders are notable at confounding the enemy—particularly with the war over and done with!” She arrived, of all places in this world, as a woman detective-sergeant in the surprised ranks of the Shanghai Municipal Police Force.

I was still a cub reporter on the Shanghai Evening Star. “Still,” because I had publicly stated that Benjamin Cudworth, that aristocratic darling of the Shanghai Club, was selling guns to Wu Pei-fu (which later turned out to be the truth). It made me less than the dust beneath worthy British shoes—me, the Chinese, the Griffins, and the miserable itinerants who were not even Shanghailanders. But it was enough for Mrs. Pym; if she’d been in India she would have turned up at a Hindu dinner-party with an Untouchable. That seemingly granite exterior regarded all stiles as something to help lame dogs over—even if she usually kicked them on their way.

I used to go round to her flat in Bubbling Well Road, where I could watch the races, or the golfers in the middle of the central racecourse. She always had a liking for reporters—wasn’t she one herself for a year?—though what she told me about the local social set should not have been poured into my nineteen-year-old ears: I thought the Country Club people were next to holiness—she stripped off their outward façades with the zest of a kid tearing the wrapping off candy.

Her private life was a mystery to me. I knew Richard Pym had been a retired ironmaster, that he had died a few months after their marriage (the Country Club went to town on that!), and that because the Municipal Council was regretting her appointment she was given no more than routine assignments—mostly traffic violations and such things—which were not C.I.D. work at all.

But when Klara Dimmick came drifting down the Whangpoo one chill winter’s night, it became Mrs. Pym’s business. She and I were in a large sampan, illegally moored off the Customs’ Wharf. She was bartering for some rather nice jade which the boatman said was his father’s—he claimed to be a refugee from Nanking. I daresay the jade was loot, since Wu Pei-fu was on the rampage: when those old-time tuchuns broke out, it was every native for himself.

An uproar from the family end of the sampan brought Mrs. Pym from under the reed-matted mid-structure, and there was Klara, large, Nordic, and beautiful, sitting gracefully in the stern of a dinghy, drifting superbly on the muddy, littered current.

The dinghy was gaffed. Mrs. Pym craned over to have a look, with the help of my pocket torch.

“Klara Dimmick,” I said, “wife of——”

“All right, son, I know Dimmick of China Oil. H’m…that looks like a dagger wound in her front.”

“Murder?”

“Could be.” She snapped at the chattering sampan family in Shanghai dialect which, naturally, none of them understood; but her tone promoted something like silence. “Showy piece, isn’t she?” Mrs. Pym’s sniff was loud. A violent woman herself, she dislikes physically ostentatious human beings. “Lug her to the bank and we’ll have a look-see.”

You can’t keep anything quiet in China. Every idler on the Bund had gathered round when we checked over Klara on the edge of the Customs’ Wharf. The Chinese spectators were I-told-you-so-ing for all they were worth because, they maintained, her red hair was the unluckiest thing that could happen to her. I suggested the dagger wound was more immediately so. Mrs. Pym grimaced.

“Don’t be childish, boy.” She picked out an intelligent looking coolie and told him to nip along the Dzing-boo-vaung for help—the very mention of the police station scared him off. Finally, a stout Chinese who looked like, and admitted he was, a compradore agreed to do the job if she paid for a rickshaw on a generous basis—a Scot has nothing on a Chinese when it comes to money.

Mrs. Pym, wearing a camel’s hair overcoat which gave her an impressive heaviness, crouched on the edge of the Wharf, studying the corpse. I knelt beside her, focusing the torch.

“That’s a good coat she’s wearing, though it’s the wrong shade of mauve for a redhead, and she’s too big for the double-breasted style.” Her blue-grey eyes glanced at me with faint malice. “One of her earrings has fallen off—see it, caught in the coat folds? Not there, you blind young ass—on the left side, where it’s buttoned.” I saw the gewgaw and nodded my comprehension. “I doubt if it means anything much. Oh, we-tsen, we-tsen!” The encroaching crown moved back at the order. “Haul that painter up and let’s see.” Mrs. Pym paused. I had grabbed the rope, pulling its sodden, clammy length. At the end, attached with a bit of baling wire, was a bunch of ordinary red poppies, though the river had washed many of the heads away.

Mrs. Pym’s snort was terrific.

“Is that supposed to be significant? Our thoughtful murderer! A coffin would have been more useful—here; give me those flowers.” She wrapped them in the man’s handkerchief she always carried, for though she was not that major horror, a masculine woman, she loathed the frail, feminine fripperies women are said to prefer.

“Won’t there be trouble if you take those flowers?”

“Son, I’ve had trouble all my life. This is my case and I’ll damn’ well handle it Pym fashion. I’m sick of chasing birds who sound their hooters after midnight—this time I’m having my own way.” She turned at the tramp of feet on the road. Inspector Gaylor, that big, amiable police officer from Wicklow, was there with his squad. “Oh, it’s you, Inspector, somebody stabbed a hole in Klara Dimmick, chucked her in this dinghy, and I’m handling the case—and no loopy S.M.C. councillor is going to stop me!”

Gaylor waved protestingly.

“Why, ma’am, would you have me comment?” His smile was infectious—at least, I smiled back. “I’m only a poor cop, doing his duty. Now why would I be wanting to take the case away from you?”

When the examination was over, Gaylor said: “Sort of thing a native would do.”

“Native my foot!” Mrs. Pym gestured irately. “You never came across one of them with that kind of imagination—betcha million dollars you never did! No,” she added, shaking the orthodox Gaylor to the roots, “we’ll find the beginnings of this somewhere in our own sacred upper crust, and when I’ve finished, I’ll teach that socially-elect jellyfish to swing something out of Nick Carter on me!”

Ernest Dimmick was roused from bed at two o’clock in the morning. He lived in a very respectable house opposite the French Club. It did not matter a row of native beans to Mrs. Pym that she was in the French Concession on her official occasions; she administered the law as it stood, and when it didn’t, she made personal adjustments.

The Number One boy brought him down, and Dimmick received us in the florid sitting-room. He was a gentle little man, with brown hair and brown eyes behind thick-glassed spectacles. You could almost see Mrs. Pym wondering why meek, small men always marry massive women, seemingly chosen from the front row of the Valkyrie chorus.

“Good evening,” said Dimmick, as politely as if he were receiving expected guests. The Shanghai papers had made a sensation out of Mrs. Pym’s appointment to the S.M.P., so he knew his visitor. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“I came about Mrs. Dimmick.”

“Klara? Oh, yes. Er—perhaps there’s something I can do—you see, my wife is at the Light Horse Ball.”

“I see. Alone?”

“Oh, no. Won’t you sit down? Drinks, perhaps?” Dimmick glanced at me helplessly in face of uncompromising refusals. “Mrs. Dimmick went with Mr. Thrane and his party. I felt somewhat unwell, so I did not go with them.”

“Anything serious?”

“Serious?” Dimmick’s brown eyes were anxious. “Oh, I see what you mean. No, nothing. A touch of dysentery, I think. I foolishly ate some Chinese melon two days ago. It was that, I imagine.”

“What time did Mrs. Dimmick leave?”

“At six, I’m told. They were dining at the Palace, and going on to the Astor House for the ball. Is there anything wrong?”

“I’m afraid there is.” Bluntly, but not unkindly, she told him what had happened. Dimmick took it badly. He sank into an armchair and covered his eyes with one hand, a gesture that would have looked theatrical in a more positive man.

“Mrs. Pym, I don’t know what to say. I can’t—can’t think who would have done such a dreadful thing. And I never even saw her!”

“What do you mean?”

“I did not get home from the office till seven. She had already left. I haven’t seen her since yesterday morning, and to think I might have spent the day…” There was nothing more we could do. We left little Dimmick with his grief.

Mrs. Pym owned a noisy red Bugatti, fast predecessor of the mechanical bullets she was to favour in later life. On the way back to the Settlement she drove with her customary violence.

“Went to a ball in a dark blue dress and a double-breasted coat!” Her sniff was devastating. “Dimmick’s being taken for a sucker, if you ask me, son”—she paused to bang the horn at a dawdling rickshaw coolie, cursing him liberally as she went by—“son, there’s more in this than meets a blind cat’s eye. Know anything about Klara?”

“Social, or otherwise?”

“Otherwise.”

“Not much. She was a Klara Zimmermann before she married. Came from Tsingtao, where the Germans are. She’s about thirty, I think. Got a good reputation. She’s on the board of the Rickshawmen’s Mission. I’ve never heard anything but good about her.”

“Huh! That tells me what I want to know.” The uncharitable remark was typical. “No children?” I shook my head. “My friend, if you ever want to be suspicious, then suspect a good German girl with a nice little husband when she has no children.” She braked the Bugatti in front of central police headquarters. “Come on in. I’ll see the dogs don’t bite you.”

Lights were burning and there was an air of excitement. A murdered European was something apart from routine—the police station felt like my office when an exclusive story comes in. The Shanghai Municipal Council, in the form of the chairman, a tubby little man named Belper—he made half a million when he started the omnibus service—was there, throwing his weight about.

“This has got to be cleared up, and cleared up quick,” he was telling gentle old Superintendent Laystall as we entered the general office. “Who the devil said that woman was to be in charge?”

“I said so.” Mrs. Pym tramped across the boards, her eyes bleak and her hands deep in her pockets. Though she is of middle height, she made Belper look small. “I found the body, and I’m in charge.”

“Says who?” Belper wanted to know. “You haven’t got your superior officer’s permission, and the Council won’t stand for it.”

“The Council can lump it. Police procedure——”

“Police fiddlesticks!” Belper looked as if he would dance with rage. “This is a serious matter. I’m not going to——”

“No?” Her strong mouth became a thin line; I felt for Belper when her hands went on her hips. “Mr. Belper, I am a properly constituted law-enforcement officer. I was there when the body of Klara Dimmick was found, and as a ranking C.I.D. detective I’m taking charge.” She moved forward, Belper skipped towards Laystall, who was trying not to smile. “I don’t give a minor hoot in Hades for the S.M.C. I’m handling this case until I’m officially taken off it. You’re chairman of the Council, but in this office at this time you’re an ordinary citizen. Take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it. I’ll call a meeting tomorrow and have you thrown out.” Belper was livid. “I opposed your appointment in the first place, and I’m not going to stand for this!” He stormed towards the door, ridiculously like a cockerel. But he came to a halt and we saw his ears become bright red as Mrs. Pym said mildly:

“If you want to borrow my car, you may. You’ll never get a taxi to Nadja Sheridan’s little flat in Jessfield Park at this time of morning.”

Belper went out quietly. Even Laystall laughed, later in the day, when we heard Belper had gone up-country on urgent business for a week. But now the superintendent was not laughing.

“Mrs. Pym, you know that’s no way to behave.”

Her slight smile was frosty.

“No, sir. We girls get our tantrums.” Her bleak eyes dared him to laugh at the feeble jest. “What about Klara?”

“Dr. Swann has seen the coroner and he’ll be at work in the hour. We agreed on that, rather than wait till a more reasonable hour.”

“What about identification, sir?”

“Her Number One boy is coming down. I spoke to Dimmick. He’s upset—and you can’t blame him. He thought the world of her. By the way, what were you doing in the French Concession?”

“Our friend here,” Mrs. Pym waved to me without hesitation, “is a journalist and wanted to interview Dimmick. The least I could do was give him a lift.” She nodded as if pleased. “I’m not officially on duty, y’know.”

“Aren’t you?” Laystall was surprised. “I thought…”

“According to Belper, we don’t think, sir, we’re S.M.C. puppets. However, that’s not important. D’you know anything about Klara Dimmick? Had she any lovers, or that sort of thing?” Mrs. Pym looked down her nose: she is no puritan, but she is a fastidious woman.

“Klara Dimmick!” Laystall was shocked. “Good Lord, no! Don’t you go asking things like that or there really will be trouble. Why, she gave a thousand dollars to the Police Charity last November.”

“Our friend here,” she waved to me again, “told me she’s the goddess of the Rickshawmen’s Mission as well—a spreader of sweetness and light.” Her eyes were sardonic. “Where does she get that much money—on Dimmick’s pay?”

“He’s Number Three man in China Oil,” Laystall protested.

“He still wouldn’t have that much to spare, not in Shanghai with a wife who wears imported Paris models.”

“What about asking Stein? She banks with him,” I suggested.

Mrs. Pym never wastes time asking how you know things. She got on the phone and routed Stein out of bed, which, as president of the New York–Oriental Banking Corporation, he resented.

“I’m sorry to spoil your beauty sleep.” She briefly explained what had happened. “I’m asking you, unofficially, to tell me Klara Dimmick’s position. Eh? A rich woman, is she?” Mrs. Pym listened and put down the receiver, turning to us. “Worth more than a hundred thousand, he says: usually banks about ten thousand a few times every year, in cash.”

I whistled. “Smelly?”

Laystall was offended.

“I don’t think you should talk like that about her. I’ve never heard a thing to her discredit.”

Mrs. Pym shrugged.

“Superintendent, you’ve got a nice mind; I haven’t. True virtue, as our native friends insist, shelters behind a polite palm; a parade of good works is intended to distract the eye from other, less virtuous, things.”

There was nothing more to be done then. Mrs. Pym ran me home to my digs in Yangtzepoo, telling me I could tag along with her if I was at her flat not later than eight-thirty—that meant turning my story early. I didn’t mind.

“It looks good,” I said, climbing out of the Bugatti into the chill, faintly hot-oil-and-garlic atmosphere which is pure Shanghai background. “As a rule, you don’t get out-and-out thrillers in China.”

Mrs. Pym wrinkled her nose.

“Go to bed and dream, or do a little research, son. Shinaingan was writing first-class thrillers here—with fingerprints and all—when Edgar Allan Poe’s ancestors were being seasick on the Mayflower. Night-night.”

Mrs. Pym’s office was a small room at the top of police headquarters from which, if she felt like looking, she had a nice view of the S.M.C. building. Enthroned behind her neat, ancient desk, she permitted me to stay on the condition I took notes and kept my mouth shut. Her net had been cast ruthlessly, and before me was a list:

Johnnie Thrane
Elise Sartoris
Benjamin Cudworth
Lily Rogers
Ernest Dimmick
Fu Chwang
Dr. Swann
Morris Stein

The system of interviewing them was equally ruthless. Johnnie Thrane was first, and when he sat down it was as if a breath of Bond Street had entered the drab office.

“Mr. Thrane, you will have seen the morning papers. I want you to tell me what happened last night.”

Thrane bowed.

“There is so little to say, dear lady. Mrs. Dimmick, Mrs. Sartoris, Mrs. Rogers, Mr. Cudworth, and myself were a small dinner party. We dined at the Palace and reached the Astor House just before nine.”

“You were in evening dress?”

“But naturally!” Thrane was shocked. “It was a most formal affair.”

“I know my manners, too. Okay, carry on.”

“We—ah—did the usual things.” Thrane went on in a hurt voice. “At ten Mrs. Dimmick was called to the telephone, and excused herself rather hurriedly.”

“Why?”

“One of her protégés was ill. The dear lady was a great one for good works. We simply could not induce her to stay, and off she went.”

Elise Sartoris, blonde and languid, substantiated the story, and so did the impeccable Lily Rogers, the Settlement’s social leader. Little Benjamin Cudworth, who was always broke but whose connections were blue-blooded, added that Mrs. Dimmick had mentioned she would have to “pop home and change.”

Ernest Dimmick admitted he had gone over to the French Club to look at the snooker, and must have missed his wife when she came in.

“I’m not surprised to hear your story,” he told Mrs. Pym during his second interview. “Klara had only two passions in life—her benevolent institutions and the works of Richard Wagner. I am not being disloyal but they were, perhaps, almost more important than our—ah—married life…”

Fu Chwang, his Number One houseboy, admitted that since his master was out, he was out too—an old China custom.

“Master and mississy no have got. My pay talkee my mama.”

“What side mama b’long?” Mrs. Pym wanted to know.

“B’long amah, Tracey Terrace–side. My go maybe one hour.”

“You saw your mississy?”

Fu Chwang shook his head. “My cousin b’long rickshaw-coolie. Talkee me mississy ride him rickshaw. Catchee house ten o’clock. Catchee diff’runt clothes, then she go.”

“What side?”

“Zeh-lok-phoo, Zikawe Creek-side.”

“The end of the French Bund at Siccawei Creek?” Mrs. Pym was surprised. “How fashion what thing?”

“No savvy.” Fu Chwang shrugged. “Catchee tall blown house that side. My cousin he talkee me mississy pay him small money. He say, no good, fare one dollah Mex. Wanchee big money. Mississy say ‘yeu-tse, yeu-tse!’ Very unkind.”

“She’d paid enough, had she?” Mrs. Pym turned to me. “Gave the poor devil dimes, obviously.”* She dismissed Fu Chwang when she found that his cousin had not followed Klara Dimmick, after the usual fashion of a swindled coolie.

In the time-honoured way of all police surgeons, Swann bustled in as if devils were after him.

“Got an appointment,” he announced, leaning heavily on his brown leather work-case placed on the edge of the desk. “The corpse was well nourished and all that. Died of a knife thrust. Dead very few hours when I saw her.” He twinkled because he liked Mrs. Pym.

“No exciting news?”

“No. With exposure to cold, then being messed about and brought into hot places—well, how can I give any time?”

“No, I see that.”

“Nice of you.” Swann nodded cheerfully. “Well-built, full-blooded German wench with years of life in her—her mortal twain was neatly cut and now she’s buried in a rut…or soon will be.” Swann beamed. He was given to those appalling, homemade couplets. Mrs. Pym smiled in a sour manner and sat back to wait for Morris Stein.

He was the most unhelpful of the lot. Private bankers in the Far East, then, had never made up their minds if they equalled God, or a mere archangel. Stein belonged to the former school.

He answered Mrs. Pym’s questions guardedly. No, he did not know where she got those sums of regular cash she deposited. They were always in twenties, fifties, and hundreds.

Mrs. Pym glared at the stout and impatient banker.

“Look here, Stein, I don’t give a copper cash if you’re the biggest gun in the Settlement—and there isn’t one of your lot who wouldn’t steal the wool off the Lamb of God, if he got the chance. I want to know where Klara got that money!”

Stein purpled.

“Mrs. Pym, I’ll have you——”

“Oh, bosh. Bankers know everything about their clients. Where did she get it?”

“If I knew, I couldn’t reveal professional secrets.”

“Professional twiddle! This is a police office and I want your help. Look, friend, shall I tell this lad here—he’s a reporter—that you cleared a million running guns up to Mukden for Chang Tso-lin?”

The banker gestured hurriedly.

“Rank libel! I told you I don’t know anything. Mrs. Dimmick married an important man. Maybe it wasn’t the best of marriages; he’s only a runt, after all, and she’s a fine woman, or was. There’s not a breath of scandal associated with her name.”

She let Stein ramble on and dismissed him, ignoring his threats.

“We’re nowhere, son,” she told me. “Problem is, who killed that lily-white child? I don’t believe in white-wash, and, if nothing else, swindling that coolie out of a few dimes convinces me. She’s hiding something, and that something is big. Wait a tick.” She grabbed the phone and talked to Lorrie Bala, head of China Oil.

Lorrie, who was an Armenian, believed in nothing that was not good legal currency.

“Yes, I know about Dimmick,” he said. “Klara? A nice woman. Yes. Did lots of good, wasting money, too, on tramps. Happy? Well, you might say, but she played him around a bit. He is a frustrated little perisher, but Ernie adored her. I don’t think she’d risk a lover, but it puzzles me. You know these—well…but I never heard anything wrong about her.”

Slightly pink, Mrs. Pym told me the story, adding:

“I just don’t get it.”

“Maybe she was a good woman? Maybe it was robbers, or something?”

“Laid her out in a dinghy and hung flowers on it? Don’t be so damn silly. It was a man, and a white man.”

“It might’ve been a woman, surely?”

“It was a man and you’re blind if you can’t see that. The answer’s—hell, I’m slipping! Get a wiggle on—we’re going to be busy.”

The Bugatti went hurtling through the crowded streets. Mrs. Pym always drives as if she’s one minute ahead of death. This time she rounded the Bund corner on two wheels, dodging rickshaws, great barrows with their “hi-yah”-ing coolies, and cars, with inspired directness. We raced across the French Concession and reached Siccawei Creek in nine minutes flat from police headquarters, which was impossible.

She walked to a gaunt brown house in Seh-lok-phoo with a little painted sign of a bunch of red poppies over the door. I thought all sorts of things in puzzled wonder.

She spent, she told me, thirty minutes interviewing a stout and unpleasant man named Chow Ling, a typically squat Cantonese. He was not prepared to talk, and once, waiting outside, I heard a muted yell. It worried me. She is never gentle with people who keep their mouths shut when she wants information.

“He wouldn’t talk,” she explained, when we were haring back to the Settlement. Her eyes were hard. “So I made him.”

“How?”

“Proposed to light a little fire on his chest. When that didn’t work, he’d spiked my guns. So I found a kitchen knife and made big play that I’d cut off one of his arms.” Her eyes were icy. “I’d have been in a hell of a mess if he kept holding out on me! But he talked—there never was a Chinese who’d stand up to the idea of going to his eventual grave with an incomplete body.”

“Ah! Did you get anything?”

“What d’you think?”

Superintendent Laystall saw her in his office. He was nice enough to let me be present, on the condition that he saw my story when I’d written it.

Mrs. Pym was cock-a-hoop, even though her face was stony.

“Dirty, filthy case, every bit of it.” She frowned at me as if she didn’t like my being there. “You and your angelic Klara!” She seemed to be addressing the whole of Shanghai. “A cold and frigid woman to that poor little husband of hers, and as moral as an alley cat outside the house!”

Laystall was shocked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Granted. Do you know what? Klara Dimmick owned Chow Ling’s calling-house! Yes, my gullible and credulous friends—a brothel! That’s where she got the cash.”

I was shaken. I knew of Chow Ling’s only by hearsay—a discreet, exclusive establishment where all the girls were white and desperately expensive. Its watchword was complete anonymity and, being in the Chinese City, it could not be touched by the law, for it obviously paid plenty of local cumshaw.

“She owned it?” Laystall was almost incoherent.

“And she was the highest-priced article there.” Mrs. Pym glowered awfully. She is a nice-minded woman, and I could see that she hated telling this story. “It’s all been kept very quiet.” She told us something of the place.

When Laystall had recovered he asked another question.

“You’ve found out who killed her?”

“Easily. I told our friend here it was a man when I saw her coat buttoned up, man-fashion.”

“And the man?”

“One of her intimate circle—one of those who, like this whole damned town, thought she was an angel.”

“Yes?”

“What would you do,” she asked Laystall in a different voice, “if you brought yourself to go to one of those places, telephoned, ordered the best in the house”—Mrs. Pym frowned heavily—“and then found yourself in the room with your own wife?”