Inspector French's Greatest Case (11 page)

If so, it was a fiendish trap to set for the unfortunate dupe. French thought he could see how it was intended to pan out. Vanderkemp, while on these mysterious journeys—certainly when he reached Mr. Duke's agent in Constantinople—would learn of the murder, and he would at once see how he had been victimised. The more he learned of the details, the more he would realise how completely he was in the toils. He would recognise that if he went home and told his story he would not have a dog's chance of clearing himself, and he would turn his apparent flight into a real one, and so permanently fasten upon himself a tacit admission of guilt. It was an ingenious scheme, and if it really were the explanation of these mysterious happenings, it gave an indication of the character and mentality of the man who had devised it.

French was by no means decided as to the truth of the matter, but on the whole he thought that though he undoubtedly had evidence to justify him in applying for the arrest and extradition of the traveller, he would prefer to avoid this step if possible. If the man tried to give him the slip, the local police would get him in no time. Accordingly he turned once more to Vanderkemp.

“Mr. Vanderkemp,” he began, “I am strongly inclined to believe your story. But as a man of the world you will readily see that it must be more completely examined before it can be fully accepted. Now the question is, Are you willing to come back with me to London and give me your assistance towards finding out the truth? I can make you no promise that you will not be arrested on reaching British ground, but I can promise you that you will be fairly dealt with and get every chance and assistance to prove your innocence.”

Vanderkemp did not hesitate in his reply.

“I will go,” he said promptly. “I am aware that you can have me arrested here, if you want to, by applying to the Spanish authorities, so I have no choice. But I think I should go in any case. I have done nothing contrary to the law, and I have done nothing to be ashamed of. I cannot now rest until my innocence is admitted.”

French nodded gravely.

“Once again, sir, I think you are doing the wise thing. Let us go to-night by the Paris express. In the meantime come with me to the post office and help me to send a wire to the Yard.”

Two mornings later they reached London. Mr. Duke was naturally amazed at his subordinate's story, and on hearing the evidence, gave it as his opinion that Vanderkemp was the dupe of some person or persons unknown. What was more to the point, Chief Inspector Mitchell, French's immediate superior, took the same view, and Vanderkemp, therefore, was not arrested, though he was shadowed night and day. French undertook an investigation into his life and circumstances, which showed that these had been painted in somewhat darker colours than appeared justifiable, but which revealed no evidence about the crime. Furthermore, none of the jewels could be traced to him, nor any of the stolen notes other than those he had spoken of.

Once more the days began to slip past without bringing to light any fresh fact, and as time passed French grew more worried and despondent, and his superior officers more querulous. And then something occurred to turn his attention to a completely different side of the case, and send him off with fresh hope and energy on a new clue.

When Inspector French felt really up against it in the conduct of a case, it was his invariable habit to recount the circumstances in the fullest detail to his wife. She, poor woman, haled from the mysterious household employments in which her soul delighted, would resignedly fetch her sewing and sit placidly in the corner of the Chesterfield while her lord and master strode up and down the room stating his premises, arguing there from with ruthless logic and not a few gestures, sifting his facts, grouping them, re-stating them. … Sometimes she interjected a remark, sometimes she didn't; usually she warned him to be careful not to knock over the small table beside the piano, and invariably she wished he would walk on the less worn parts of the carpet. But she listened to what he said, and occasionally expressed an opinion, or, as he called it, “took a notion.” And more than once it had happened that these notions had thrown quite a new light on the point at issue, a light which in at least two cases had indicated the line of research which had eventually cleared up the mystery.

On the second evening after his return from Spain, the Inspector was regaling her with a by no means brief
résumé
of the Hatton Garden crime. She had listened more carefully than usual, and presently he found she had taken a notion.

“I don't believe that poor old man was out to do anything wrong,” she declared. “It's a shame for you to try to take away his character now he's dead.”

French, stopping his pacing of the room, faced round.

“But I'm not trying to take away his character, Emily dear,” he protested, nettled by this unexpected attack in the rear. “I'm only saying that he's the only person we know of who could have got an impression of the key. If so, it surely follows he was out to rob the safe.”

“Well, I believe you're wrong,” the lady affirmed, continuing with a logic as relentless as his own, “because if he was out to rob the safe, he wasn't the sort of man that you described, and if he was the sort of man that you described, why, then, he wasn't out to rob the safe. That's what I think about it.”

French was a trifle staggered. The difficulty he had recognised from the beginning, but he had not considered it serious. Now, put to him in the downright, uncompromising language in which his wife usually clothed her thoughts, it suddenly seemed to him overwhelming. What she said was true. There was here a discrepancy. If Gething really bore the character he was given by all who had known him, he was not a thief.

He ceased his restless movement, and sitting down at the table, he opened his notebook and began to look up what he had actually learned about the dead man. And the more he did so, the more he came to believe that his wife was right. Unless all this cloud of witnesses were surprisingly mistaken, Gething was innocent.

His mind reverted to the other horn of the dilemma. If Gething were innocent, who took the impression of the key? It was not obtained from that in the bank, therefore it was copied from that in Mr. Duke's possession. Who had done it?

No one at the office, at least not unless Mr. Duke was greatly mistaken. And he did not believe the principal could be mistaken on such a point. The breaking through of his regular custom in a matter of such importance would almost certainly be noted and remembered. No, French felt that he might rely on Mr. Duke's statement so far.

But with regard to his assertion that no one in his house could have tampered with the key, the Inspector saw that he was on more shaky ground. In the nature of the case, the diamond merchant would be less alert in dealing with the members of his own household than with his business acquaintances. Believing he was surrounded by friends, he would subconsciously be more ready to assume his precautions adequate. Was Mr. Duke's belief that no one would touch the key not the real basis of his statement that no one had done so?

It seemed to French that here was a possibility that he had overlooked, and it was in the nature of the man that the moment he reached such a conclusion he began to consider a way of retrieving his error.

At first he thought of taking Mr. Duke into his confidence and asking him to assist him in some subterfuge by which he could enter the house. But presently he saw that it would be better if the old gentleman knew nothing of his plan, lest he might inadvertently warn a possible criminal.

For the same reason—that Mr. Duke might get to know of it—he decided he would be wiser not to undertake the business in person. But he knew the man for the job—a certain detective-sergeant named Patrick Nolan. This man was something of a Don Juan in his way, and had a positive genius for extracting confidences from the fair sex. If he could scrape acquaintance with the maids of the establishment, it would not be long before he knew all they had to tell.

Accordingly next morning he sent for Sergeant Nolan and explained his idea, and Nolan, who, where his superiors were concerned, was a man of few words, said, “Yes, sir,” and withdrew.

The following day he returned with his first report. It seemed that, changing into the garb of a better-class mechanic and taking a small kit of tools with him, he had called at Mr. Duke's in the character of an electrician who had been sent to overhaul the light fittings.

Miss Duke happened to be out, and the rather pretty housemaid who opened the door, charmed with the newcomer's manner, admitted him without hesitation. He had gone all over the house, paying particular attention to Mr. Duke's bedroom. In the middle of the day he had asked and been granted leave to heat his can of soup at the kitchen fire, and to such purpose had he used the opportunities thus gained that before he left he had prevailed on the pretty housemaid to go with him to supper and pictures on her next evening out. “Once I get a drop of spirits into her I'll get all she knows,” he concluded, “though I doubt if it'll be much.”

“That's all right so far as it goes,” French admitted, “but what have you actually found out?”

“Well, there's first of all the family. It's a small one; there's only the father and the daughter, Miss Sylvia. The mother's alive, but she has been in a lunatic asylum for years, quite incurable, they said. Miss Sylvia is a nice-looking young lady and well liked, by what Rachael says—that's the housemaid. Then there's the servants; this Rachael, and another girl, Annie, and Sarah, the cook, and there's a shover they call Manley. I didn't see him, but the girls seem all right—not the kind that would be after the keys of jewel safes anyway.”

“What's the house like?”

“It's a middling big house, and the furniture'll have been good when it was bought, though it's getting a trifle shabby now. Mr. Duke's bedroom is at the end of the left wing, and Miss Duke's is in the front of the house, so anybody could go through Mr. Duke's room without being seen. Anybody could get a mould of that key if he left it in his room, say, while he was having his bath.”

“Did you find out any possibilities; any tradesmen in, like yourself, or any one staying in the house?”

The Sergeant shook his head.

“I did not, sir,” he admitted. “I thought I had maybe done enough for one day. I didn't want to be after starting them wondering about me. But I'll get that out of Rachael to-morrow night.”

“Better see that Manley, the chauffeur—or no, I shall see him myself. You stick to what you're at. Anything else?”

“No, sir, I think not. What the girls talked most about was Miss Sylvia's engagement. It seems she was engaged to some friend in the City and they were to have been married at the end of the month, and now they've had some bust up and the whole thing's postponed, if not off altogether.”

“That so? They didn't tell you the reason?”

“They did not, sir. But I can likely find out from Rachael if you want to know.”

“I don't suppose I do,” French returned, “but you might as well find out what you can—on spec. You know who the young man is?”

“No, sir. They didn't say.”

French looked up his notebook.

“I seem to know a deal more about it than you do,” he grumbled. “He is a clerk in Mr. Duke's office, name of Harrington—Stanley Harrington. I interviewed him with the others in the office on the day after the murder, and he told me about the engagement. It seemed to be going strong then. When did they postpone it??”

“They didn't say that either, sir.”

“Well, find that out, too. That'll do for the present.”

That evening French, in the guise of an out-of-work mechanic, took up his stand near Mr. Duke's house, and presently saw the old gentleman arrive back from business in his car. An hour later he followed the chauffeur from the garage to a house in a small street off Esther Road. There French hung about for perhaps another hour, when he had the satisfaction of seeing the quarry emerge again, pass down the street, and disappear into the Rose and Thistle bar. This was just what the Inspector had hoped for, and after a few minutes he followed him in.

To scrape acquaintance was easy enough. French, as a motor mechanic out of work, was provided with a ready introduction to any chauffeur, and over a couple of glasses of beer he learned first of the chances of jobs in the district, and secondly, by skilful pumping, many details of his new companion's work and of the Duke menage. But he heard nothing that seemed in the slightest degree suspicious or interesting. The man himself, moreover, seemed of an honest, harmless type, and much too stupid to be concerned personally in enterprises with keys of safes.

For a day the inquiry hung fire, and then Sergeant Nolan brought in a report which turned the Inspector's thoughts into still another channel. Nolan had, it appeared, taken the pretty housemaid, Rachael, first to the pictures and then to supper at a popular restaurant. The girl had what the Sergeant called “the gift of the gab,” and it had only been necessary for him judiciously to supply an occasional topic, to have a continuous stream of more or less relevant information poured into his receptive ears.

First, he had tried to ascertain whether any one had recently had access to Mr. Duke's dressing-room during the night or early morning, and he soon learned that, prior to his own visit, no tradesmen had been in the house for many months. Moreover, the only visitor who had stayed overnight for a considerable time was Mr. Stanley Harrington, Miss Duke's
fiancé
. The two young people had been feverishly engaged in rehearsals for a play given by a local amateur dramatic society, and for the four nights previous to the entertainment Miss Duke had refused to allow her swain to waste time in going to and from his rooms, and had insisted on his putting up with them. This occurred about a month before the murder, and Harrington had slept in a room just opposite to Mr. Duke's. It was obvious, therefore, that had the key been left in the dressing-room at any time, Harrington could have taken the necessary impression.