The telephone call which Robert Grenville put through brought a police-car with four plain-clothes C.I.D. men in it. Of these, two stayed with Macdonald to assist him in searching the studio, and two were despatched on other business, one to The Knight Templar, and one to ensure that Mr. Robert Grenville did what he’d been told to do—or failed to do it, as the case might be. A variety of tools and implements were removed from the car, and the three men went into The Morgue looking equipped for duties of sexton, surveyor and plumber respectively.
Police work is always thorough and orderly, seldom spectacular, and on this occasion three experts in the detection of crime set to work as calmly—but more energetically—than the usual phlegmatic British workman. Under Macdonald’s directions, they first went round and investigated all possible exits, ensuring that locked—or blocked doors—were fool-proof. The “plumber” was left to work in the bathroom, while Macdonald and Detective James—a powerful young man in blue dungarees—set to work and rendered the escape through the coal hole useless as entry or exit. After which they cleared a space carefully on the cellar floor, ensuring that not so much as a pin escaped their attention, and then began to move the accumulation on the floor to the space they had cleared. It was no nice job. The past tenants seemed to have fed to a large extent on tinned food, and they had cast old salmon tins, sardine tins, condensed milk tins, and a variety of other malodorous receptacles to mingle with the coal dust in the cellar. Young James twitched an inquiring nose, not in disgust, but in hopefulness and the spirit of pure science.
“Smells high,” he observed. “Sulphur dioxide and similar stinks. Nitrogeneous remains somewhere. Definitely organic.”
“A dead cat, probably, or cats,” said Macdonald. “One chap here liked prawns. Losh! I hope he died of them! There’s some left in the pot!”
They were very methodical. One pile in the corner was kept for tins, one for coal and coke, one for sundries (among which was the dead cat Macdonald had expected, exhumed from a grave of coal dust). After nearly two hours of careful work, they had inspected every inch of the cellar floor, whose entire surface they could pronounce intact, disinterred a variety of mouldering canvases (“Masterpieces of the Coal Measures Period,” as young James said) and investigated the rusting remains of a one-time furnace connected with a defunct hot-water pipe system. “And that,” said Macdonald, “is definitely that. Score nil. Honours easy.”
He was clad in a suit of overalls thoughtfully provided in the police car, and looked like some engineering expert, black of face and hands, but serene of countenance. “Now we start upstairs,” he said. “I wonder if Davies is through with his job yet. He might go to the pub and get us some food—not of the tinned variety—and beer. Beer! What a good thought.”
Davies was busy plumbing, apparently, with a variety of receptacles on the floor beside him. He had been disconnecting the joints of the waste pipe, which owing to the improvised method of setting the bath in an apartment never intended for a bath, had various unusual kinks in it.
“I reckon you’ve got a true bill, Chief,” he said dryly, indicating one of the bottles which stood beside him. “Baths seem so safe—always popular. It was a neatly done job, I reckon. Bath cleaned afterwards and then mucked up a bit with rust and dust and what nots—but every kink tells a story. I reckon there’s a straight job for the analysts.”
“If that’s so, we’d better get busy upstairs, Davies,” said Macdonald. “There’s a sink in the studio. You can wash under the tap there, and so can we. After that you can go and get some food at the pub nearby. We’ll eat it in the car. I don’t fancy this place as a dining-room. Come on, James. We shall want some brooms and shovels to get that floor clear, later. We’ll give it the once over, first.”
Neither the “once over,” nor the subsequent thorough moving of everything, including lifting the grating over the old hot-water pipes, brought an enlightenment to those earnest toilers. It must have been years since that studio floor was so well swept as it was by those painstaking members of Scotland Yard. They collected everything—marble chips, clay, plaster of Paris, old paint tubes, brushes, cans, and bottles of oil and turpentine, rotted (once damp-proof) wrappings for clay models, odd tools, pliable piping for the centring of large clay figures, broken palette knives and sticks of charcoal. James it was who crept beneath the old platform and met a large rat, much confused and annoyed by the beam of an electric torch, but apart from the rat and a quantity of illustrated French volumes (mostly pornographic) his gallantry produced no result.
It was a tired, depressed, and incredibly dirty trio of investigators who at last sat upon the platform and consulted together.
“Look here, Davies,” grumbled James, “what d’you bet me it’s not rust you’ve got in those precious bottles of yours? Any chance the whole thing’s a leg-pull, sir?”
Davies shook his head. “It’s not rust. I’ll bet you any money that you like to lay that it’s blood—or diluted remains of same. I’d better be off to the labs and make sure.”
Macdonald nodded. “That’s it. I’m puzzled over the whole show. I might have believed the sportsman I had in here this morning would have had the nerve to work a leg-pull, but not Rockingham. He was dead serious. I’m willing to take Davies’ word for it that he knows what he’s up to, but the point is—what have we missed? If a murder has been committed here, the overpowering probability is that a corpse is on the premises. No one would have risked carting a body outside to dispose of it elsewhere. They’d have had to load it up into a car or van on the pavement, either in daylight, or under the light of a street lamp in a well-patrolled neighbourhood. Doesn’t make sense.”
He looked around the gaunt building which they had cleared. Everything in the studio—barring the piano—was now stacked in a heap in the centre of the floor, and the bare stained walls were clear for inspection, with every cupboard and press open wide.
“Wait a jiffy, though. I’d forgotten. Debrette was known as a sculptor. It would have been all in keeping for him to have heavy stuff moved, in crates, if he chose. This looks like being a teaser.”
“If it was big stuff he moved, he’d have needed help in handling it. Might get a lead that way,” said James hopefully.
“Might not,” growled Davies. “You bet he did it alone and unassisted. Talking of your sportsman this morning, Chief, what did you make of his little avalanche trick down there? Did he work it, or did some one else?”
“If he did it, he’s a conjurer,” said Macdonald. “I didn’t take my eyes off him. It could have been worked from outside easily enough, but by the same reasoning, a cat might have done it—jumped in from outside on the top pail and brought the rest down together.”
“What did the silly jackass think was the good of it?” grumbled Davies. “Can’t see the sense of it.”
“Oh, his mental process was clear enough,” said Macdonald, “assuming that he’s speaking the truth, that is. He’s had a glass of whisky chucked in his face, and that’s enough to put a man’s back up. He’s a big chap. He hoped Debrette—or Attleton—would come back, and he’d have the chance to use his fists. Human enough.”
“But by the time the silly juggins had got downstairs, the quarry would have legged it by the way he came in,” complained Davies, but Macdonald shook his head.
“No. You’re wrong. It’d take time to climb through that grating in the cellar. It’s too small to use your arms properly. That’s why I knew there hadn’t been anybody inside there this morning. The whole thing’s a bit of a mess at present. We’d better concentrate on following up Debrette and the Attleton trail. I’ll have another look at those walls before I leave. Meantime, Davies, get on to the lab. with your specimens and report to my office. Come on, James. You take the north and I’ll take the south. No, don’t start singing Loch Lomond, or I shall brain you.”
The walls were in a bad state throughout. Cracks and crumblings were the rule, not the exception. Damp was everywhere, and a good deal of mildew. One patch attracted James’s attention in particular—a roughened portion, in which lumps stood out like rough-cast, but Macdonald looked on it with an experienced eye.
“A painter had this place once—for a long time I’d say. He was an extravagant bloke. He scraped his palette clean every evening and put the surplus on the walls with his palette knife. Layer after layer. That’s good paint, James, gone to waste, not a pointilliste tour-de-force—though they look alike, I grant you.”
Their survey of the walls was as fruitless as their sweeping of the floor. Neither tapping nor visual inspection gave them any satisfaction.
“We shall have to leave it for the time being, James,” said Macdonald. “We’ve done everything we reasonably can. I’m going to lock up and put a man outside. There’s no other entry, unless it’s by way of the roof—and if any sportsman likes to try getting in that way, let him. He’ll give us a lead somewhere. You’ll have to stay on the premises until you’re relieved. I’ll send Wilton along.”
James stood and looked upwards at the cross beams of the roof. “A pulley?” he hazarded, “and monkey tricks?”
“Don’t believe it. Anyway, you and I aren’t going to break our necks that way. I’ll get some ladders in to-morrow. As for the tower, no one’s been through that door for a couple of years at least. London soot’s a fine indicator of passing feet, and it’s not been disturbed since the Lord knows when. Cheer up, laddie! You’re within bowing distance of a bath. Not that one, though.”
Whereupon Macdonald turned his back on the Belfry, bats and all, and returned to Scotland Yard to pick up the reports of the inquiries he had set on foot under the heading of “routine,” pertaining to Attleton’s movements when he left home, to Debrette’s tenancy of the Belfry as known to agents and neighbours, and recent movements of that enterprising sportsman Robert Grenville.
The latter, when he was so uncompromisingly shown the door of his own studio by Macdonald, did what he was told to do, and went straight home, much against his own inclinations. Grenville had, however, enough common sense to realise that if a criminal charge eventuated from Macdonald’s investigations, he (Grenville) needed to keep on the right side of the law in every detail. He had told a story concerning which there was—and could be—no outside corroboration, and uneasiness grew upon him as he travelled eastwards towards the city.
Grenville’s abode was, in its own way, as remarkable as Rockingham’s, though it boasted none of the architectural beauties of The Small House in Mayfair. In the tangled network of courts and alleys which lie between Fleet Street and Holborn, Great Turnstile and Farringdon Street, there still exist certain small houses which were built not long after the great fire of 1666. It was in one of these that Grenville had been fortunate enough to find quarters—an absurd little red-tiled house of two stories, with a grass plot in front of it and its immediate neighbours. On all sides around this ancient oasis of greenery towered enormous blocks which reverberated day and night with the roar and clatter of printing presses, of restaurant activities, with the incessant whirr of the machinery which maintains the civilisation of this bewildering epoch of ours, but in a little plot below the windows of Grenville’s sitting-room, daffodils were now bending their straight buds to unfold their golden perianths, a rose tree was putting forth brave green shoots, and “gilly flowers” blossomed surprisingly, as they might have done in the days of the Merry Monarch. Furnival’s Court was the name of this queer city survival, and the house where Grenville lived was kept by the widow of a master printer, a severe-faced matron to whom the roar of machinery was a normal accompaniment to life.
Arrived back in his own quarters, whence he had been summoned by Macdonald’s telephone call, Grenville decided to put on record the events of the last week, and to make a schedule showing how his evidence was arrived at, but he had not proceeded very far along these lines when the telephone bell rang, and the voice at the farther end banished all rational thoughts from his head.
“Look here, Robert Grenville,” began Elizabeth Leigh’s comminatory voice. “Don’t think I’m ringing you up out of pure friendliness, or anything of that nature. I’m not. You can boil in oil so far as I’m concerned, but will you kindly tell me this. What’s all the shemozzle about? Where’s Bruce, and what is he up to, what’s wrong with Neil Rockingham, and what’s it all about?”
“Darling,” began Grenville, but she snapped back:
“If you start being familiar I shall ring off. You’ve ignored my existence for a week—”
“Darling, I haven’t. Oh damn! Look here, Liza, it’s all too damned complicated for words, and the devil of it is I’ve been told to stay at home until Scotland Yard tells me I may go out again.”
“Whoops!” came from the other end, “and what on earth have you been doing to interest Scotland Yard?”
“Nothing, angel, absolutely bally-nix, I swear it. Look here, Liza. Be an angel. I can’t come to see you, or ask you out to dinner or anything until that reptile says the word go. Can’t you stretch a point and come to see me? You’ve often said you would—”
“Have I? I don’t seem to remember it. However, if I come on this occasion, don’t imagine it’s for your beaux yeux, Mr. Robert Grenville.”
“Angel, I won’t. Look here, this place is the devil and all to find. You want to come to—”
“Idiot! I’m not an imbecile, nor yet a deaf mute. If there is such a place as Furnival’s Court I shall find it, and pretty presto, too, so don’t go doing a vanishing trick before I come.”
Grenville heard the receiver banged down and the line went dead, whereupon he executed a war dance around the room. During the next half-hour he spent the time in a hectic activity of tidying his room, and equally hectic mental searchings to determine just how much he could tell Elizabeth Leigh. He was under no oath of silence, but he realised that it was not going to be easy to avoid indiscretions which he might repent at leisure.
Elizabeth, shown into Grenville’s sitting-room by a landlady whose face implied that she was past being surprised by anything anybody did in these days, came straight to the point.
“What’s happened to Bruce, Bobby? Don’t go walking round in circles. Tell me.”
“But I don’t know,” he began. “Honestly, I don’t know. Nobody does. That’s the trouble.”
She screwed up her face, saying:
“Is it anything to do with this Debrette horror?”
At the end of half an hour, Elizabeth sitting in the arm-chair, and Grenville on the floor at her feet, had threshed out all that was known between them. Grenville did his best to keep his own counsel, but he was in love, and Elizabeth was determined, and he was as wax in her hands. She learnt the actual facts concerning the Belfry Studio, the suitcase, and the excitements of the previous evening which had resulted in the bruise on Grenville’s forehead, and Rockingham’s decision to go to the police. For herself she supplied the following fact: Some ten days previously, walking home just after dusk to the Attletons’ house, where she was staying on a long visit, she had heard a man’s voice behind her inquiring if she knew where Mr. Attleton lived. Turning, she had seen a bearded man, wearing large glasses, a wide hat and a long, foreign-looking cloak. Accustomed to odd-looking visitors—for both Bruce and Sybilla had some original-looking acquaintances—she replied that Mr. Attleton lived at Little Park House. The man thanked her and hurried on, walking quickly, but he did not stop at the Attletons’ house. When she saw Bruce later in the evening she had described the gentleman in the cloak, with the curious white streak in his beard, and had been astonished to see her guardian look perfectly livid. Her disposition to rag him had passed quickly when she realised the furious temper she had aroused in him. Later, over their coffee, Sybilla had said, “Oh, that’s the Debrette man. Goodness alone knows what Bruce’s little secret is. He’s got to come clean with it sometime or there’ll be trouble. I’m not going to have queer foreigners ringing up and uttering cryptic threats over my telephone.”
Sitting by the fire in the very comfortable little sitting-room, Elizabeth and Robert looked at one another in consternation. The girl went on, with a little shiver:
“It’s beastly, Bobby. It’s all very well to joke about murders and corpses, but now I feel a bit sick. You know, I believe Sybilla had got to hate Bruce. I’ve never told you, but I felt uncomfortable whenever I was alone with them, just lately. When I left them and went to stay at my club, I swore to myself I wouldn’t go back there again.”
“Why, Liza? Just because it was beastly being with two people who scored off one another?”
She lit a cigarette, and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. “Yes, only it was worse than that. They quarrelled—not in front of me, but I’ve heard their voices—and they both implied, when they were jibing at one another, that they each knew some secret about the other. I think Sybilla wanted to get a divorce from Bruce—and he wouldn’t agree. Holy deadlock—and all that.”
“Good Lord! How foul for you—to have to know anything about that sort of muckery!”
“Oh, tosh! You can’t live among theatrical people and keep the Virginibus Puerisque touch. There’s not much I don’t know about this wicked world, Robert. I don’t mind. Illusions don’t help anybody—but I can’t help shivering when I remember Sybilla’s face after that evening when we were discussing my murder game. ‘Build him into the fabric of the establishment.’ Ugh! I thought she was just acting when she mimicked Bruce saying that, doing the sinister-female-on-the-stage touch. I didn’t think about it again until just now. How horrible.”
Grenville jumped to his feet. He couldn’t sit there at Elizabeth’s feet with that gruesome phrase echoing in his ears, “build him into the fabric of the establishment.” Ugh!
“But Liza,” he protested, “I don’t see that Sybilla fits in anywhere. What about Debrette? It’s he who is the crux of the matter.”
“Say if Sybilla put him up to blackmailing Bruce—just for a blind? Perhaps he’s some out-of-work actor, that’s what he looked like. Then there’s that odious man, Burroughs. He’s crazy over Sybilla, you know. Oh, isn’t it all beastly?”
“I should jolly well think it is!” exclaimed Robert. “Look here, darling. I expect we’re getting all het-up quite unnecessarily. Old Rockingham got cold feet, and went off to the police in too much of a hurry, and Bruce and Sybilla will be just raving mad with him when they roll up again.”
“You don’t think so, really,” groaned Elizabeth. “You know something awful’s happened, and so does Neil Rockingham, and so does the reptile whom you call Macdonald. You all know something grim has happened, and you’re just trying to be cheerful over it. Bobby, I do wish you’d never gone near that beastly Belfry place.”
“So do I,” said Grenville soberly, “and I guess old Neil R. wishes so too.”
After Elizabeth had gone, Grenville returned to his “write up” of the case, but he spent more time smoking cigarettes and chewing his pen than in making notes, and when the door of his sitting-room opened, shortly after his tea had been served by the admirably uninquisitive Mrs. Blench (the master-printer’s relict) and Macdonald walked in, Grenville was almost thankful to see him.
“Got him?” he inquired idiotically.
“Got who?” inquired Macdonald. “I’ve got a few facts, but no individuals. I want your finger-prints, if you really want to know the reason of this sociable call, also it might be a good move on your part if you’d like to write a small diary, with particular reference to your doings on the Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of last week. Just for your own good, you know.”
Grenville fairly gaped, and Macdonald went on, “In case of misunderstanding, let me assure you that I’m on an eliminating tack. The suitcase which Mr. Rockingham thoughtfully removed from the Belfry is, as you observed, of first-class material, well polished, and presenting a good surface for finger-prints. Presumably yours are on it, since you opened it and moved it. So are Mr. Rockingham’s. If Mr. Debrette moved it also, he may have been kind enough to leave a record of his own. He may have done nothing of the kind, being a shy bird—but we might as well decide which prints are yours, if you’ve no objection?”
“None,” said Grenville. “Get on with it. I thought you generally offered suspects a shiny card and asked them if they’d ever seen it before.”
“I like detective stories myself, they make me laugh, whereas real crime isn’t funny,” said Macdonald. “You’re probably well up in the procedure, so we won’t waste time.”
“And about that diary,” he continued, when he had filed Grenville’s record in a case not unlike a cigarette case. “Attleton left home at ten-five. He reached Victoria at ten-thirty, and he took a taxi to Charing Cross at ten-forty. He was then alive and well. You found his suitcase in the Belfry cellar on Saturday morning. It might be as well to let me have a record of your movements—as complete as possible, with corroboration if obtainable—between those periods, with particular reference to the Wednesday morning. Take your time over it. No hurry.”
“Then you think he has been murdered?” asked Grenville, the words sticking in his throat a little.
“I don’t know. I think a crime of violence may have been committed, but nothing is certain yet. We have collected a certain amount of evidence about your friend Debrette, from the house agents who let him the studio, the pub where he dropped in of an evening, and the tradespeople. I don’t think we shall have much difficulty in putting your little theory to the test. Whatever else a talented impersonator can do, he can’t be in two places simultaneously.”
“No,” said Grenville, “he can’t.”
Macdonald looked at the young man’s square face. Something had happened since that morning to deflate him. He was no longer full of bright ideas and cheerful back chat, but looked a very sobered edition of the Robert Grenville who had chattered away so merrily in the Belfry. On his way to the door, Macdonald came to a halt.
“If you do happen to know anything about this rigmarole, it would be much more sensible to get it off your chest,” he said, not unkindly, and Grenville looked up at him quickly.
“I don’t know anything, not in the way of facts,” he said slowly, “but I’ve had time to think things out a bit, and I don’t like the look of it. I talked a lot of hot air about Bruce this morning, but looking at it in cold blood, I don’t find it amusing. It’s all very well to talk about murder and corpses and all that, until you begin to think of some one you know corpsing people.”
“And then it ceases to be funny,” agreed Macdonald. “Who was talking about murder to you recently?”
“Look here, if I get it all off my chest, will you promise to forget about it if it doesn’t turn out to mean anything?” inquired Grenville.
Macdonald grinned. He couldn’t help it. “I think you can be quite certain of one thing,” he replied. “It’s far more sensible to lay all your cards on the table than it is to make me and my department pick up items with forceps, so to speak. Every one connected with the Attletons will be interrogated pretty thoroughly, and if there has been any talk of murder, you can bet your last sou we shall hear about it. As for the assurance you want, I can tell you this. If your remarks haven’t any bearing on the case, it will be as though they were never uttered. Now what about it? You started the ball rolling when you poked your nose into the Belfry Studio. You might as well roll it in the right direction.”
Grenville thereupon told the Chief Inspector about the murder discussion, and Sybilla Attleton’s famous brain wave and Bruce’s subsequent comment. He did not mention Elizabeth Leigh, but Macdonald was already aware of the girl’s visit to Furnival’s Court and drew his own conclusions.
When Grenville had finished what was, for him, an exceedingly tame narrative, Macdonald observed:
“If a man—or woman—is contemplating murder, they don’t generally advertise their method beforehand. If it is any consolation to you, I can assure you that no one was electrocuted in a bath or wash-hand basin at the Belfry, and no one was concreted into the bath or cellar there. Also, I should say it’s very improbable that any woman carried out the crime which we suspect may have been committed there.”
Grenville drew a deep breath. “Perhaps Sybilla’s having her face lifted after all,” he observed, “and Bruce is bird-fancying in Brussels.”
“May be,” observed Macdonald, “and you, I might point out, have had a nasty knock on the head, and though you don’t know it, your wits are wool-gathering in consequence. If I were you, I should take a couple of aspirins and go to bed and forget all about it.”
“Thanks, and all that, but I generally go out to my dinner. The old girl here doesn’t oblige. Any objection to my feeding at the Golden Cock?”
“Feed where you like,” replied Macdonald. “I’ve done with you for the moment, only don’t try butting in, and the less you talk about all this, the better.”
Grenville appeared reassured, and his wide grin was more in his old manner as he replied, “All right, uncle.”
Macdonald, wending his way out of the devious courts back to Fleet Street, decided that two items of information were worth considering in Grenville’s farrago of blether. (1) That Mr. Thomas Burroughs had taken no part in the murder discussion. (2) That that phrase, “concrete him up into the permanent fabric of the establishment” looked as though it might be prophetic.