Mystery of Mr. Jessop (22 page)

“It's a pretty slim chance, anyway,” Bobby told himself, as he retired from one of these unsuccessful visits. “Nothing to show the girl bought them herself, for one thing, except that a boy would most likely have bought better quality, or a half-pound box perhaps – and those bits of hair found are hardly real proof that she worked in a hairdresser's.”

However, at the next shop the luck turned. The manageress was inclined to be chatty. She admitted frankly that it was a relief to see a man when you had nothing in but ladies all day long, all fussing about their hair they would never leave alone, and a good thing, too, or where would her living be? And perhaps the gentleman meant Irene, who spent half her wages on chocolates because she said she had to have something to take the smell of hair oil away, and whose way home took her past the confectioner's mentioned. Then, too, Irene had asked to go off early on Saturday to meet her boy friend.

“Saturday's not our busy night,” the manageress explained; “the girls want to be out with their boys, and the married ladies have the shopping to do, or else all the family's going to the pictures.”

Irene, however, wasn't there that morning. She had sent round word that she had caught cold and would be away a day or two.

“I always tell my girls to stop off if they've a cold,” explained the manageress. “Ladies don't like it if assistants are sniffling all the time, or sneezing down their backs. It's all this infection,” said the manageress. “Never heard of it when I was young, and now there's nothing else.”

Bobby secretly sympathised with the manageress's customers, but murmured vague sympathy, secured Irene's address, expressed his gratitude for the help given, and went on to find Irene herself.

She was in, it appeared, when his knock was answered, but still in bed, suffering from a cold – one she had caught the other night. But she had been meaning to get up for dinner, and, if the gentleman wouldn't mind waiting a little, she would dress at once and come down to see him.

So Bobby said that would be very kind of her, and was shown into a small, stiffly furnished sitting-room, on the walls some very good photographs of the French Riviera, of Monte Carlo, and of the casino there – that “confectioner's masterpiece,” as it has been called. Even a postcard album open on the table was full of picture cards from Monaco, including several of the interior of the rooms. Another photograph, in a specially smart frame, showed a young man standing at one of the roulette tables with a croupier's rake in his hand.

The door opened and Irene herself appeared, a small, trim figure with an elaborate coiffure, a nose the redness of which a liberal use of powder served to emphasise rather than to disguise, and two red and watery eyes beneath thin, plucked, pencilled brows. He noticed she was wearing a ring on her engagement finger. Her arrival she heralded by a shattering sneeze, and Bobby hastened to express his sympathy, his apologies for worrying her while she was so unwell, and his assurances that, though he came from the police, his visit had nothing to do with her personally. Only it was just possible she might be able to give some information that would prove helpful. In fact, he let loose such a flow of consoling, reassuring platitude, nicely mingled with a tactful compliment or two, that Miss Irene was soon quite at her ease, and subconsciously began to enjoy this chat with a good-looking, upstanding young man – better fun, anyhow, than lying sneezing alone in bed – and in her turn apologised for her cold and hoped her visitor wasn't afraid of catching it. And Bobby said he wasn't, and the risk of catching cold was the worst of sitting in damp summer-houses in deserted gardens on chilly autumn evenings.

Poor Miss Irene fairly gasped; all her terrors came flooding back; she evidently became, on the spot, convinced that from Bobby's all-seeing eye there was nothing hidden.

“How did you know?” she asked breathlessly. “Did Bill tell you?” she demanded, plainly groping for a solution on this side of the miraculous.

“Bill?” repeated Bobby. “You mean Mr. –?”

“Mr. Carton,” said the girl, convinced it was useless to attempt to conceal anything when all was evidently already known. She eyed Bobby with a kind of bewildered awe. She got out her handkerchief – or, rather, one of them; prudently she had brought half a dozen – wiped her eyes, and said plaintively: “We weren't doing any harm.”

“Of course you weren't,” Bobby agreed warmly. “I'm sure I've not said you were; now, have I?” She looked a little consoled, and he showed her the photograph representing a young man standing by a roulette table with a croupier's rake in his hand. “This is Mr. Carton,” he said, risking the guess.

She nodded.

“He's a sort of cousin,” she explained, “only not exactly a cousin either.”

“Hopes to be something nearer some day, perhaps,” suggested Bobby. “Lucky chap.”

He looked significantly at the ring on her engagement finger, and she smiled and blushed and then touched the brooch she was wearing – one of three straight horizontal gold bars, crossed by a spray in emeralds and small brilliants.

“He gave me that only the other day,” she confided. “It cost seven guineas. I know; it was scratched on the back – the price, I mean.”

“Some fellows have all the luck,” said Bobby as wistfully as he could manage, and Miss Irene's renewed blush, toss of the head, and other appropriate reactions were ruined by a fresh fit of sneezing. When it was over and she a little recovered, Bobby, grown official again after this softer interlude, went on:

“You have heard a murder was committed that night in the house next door to where you were sitting?”

“Bill told me,” she admitted. “He showed it me in the paper, in the stop press yesterday. Bill said it was nothing to do with us; he thought we had better not say anything unless we had to. Really, there wasn't anything we could say, and Bill's got to go back soon, and if he has to stop on waiting for trials and giving evidence and all that, he may lose his job. Now things are so quiet, they don't want as big a staff as they did before.”

“At the Monte Carlo casino?” Bobby asked. “Has he been there long? As a croupier, I mean?”

“Oh, years and years; only, now they're slack, he comes to England in the summer to help his aunt. She has a private boarding-house at Cliftonville, and, of course, summer's the busy time with her.”

“Is he there now?”

“No: he's having a little holiday now the season's over, and it isn't time to go back to Monte. He's staying at the Bloomsbury – the big hotel just behind the British Museum. It's his holiday before he goes back, and they give him special terms at the Bloomsbury because he recommends it to people who are coming to London and don't know where to stay.”

“He's not British, then?” Bobby asked.

“Yes, he is,” she answered indignantly, “only his mother was French – only not French exactly; Monaco; it's different; and, anyhow, he couldn't help it. He was born in London, only after his father died his mother went back to her people and he was brought up there. They're all croupiers, and that's how he came to be one. It's quite respectable there.”

“Of course it is. Why not?” said Bobby.

“It's like being in the Civil Service here,” she explained.

“I suppose it is,” agreed Bobby. “Now will you tell me exactly what you saw on Saturday night?”

“We didn't see anything really,” she insisted between two fresh sneezes, “except a man jumping over the wall.”

“When was that?” Bobby asked.

“Just after we heard the shots. I thought it was a tyre gone somewhere, but Bill said no, it was a pistol. He knows about pistols; he has to have one where he works; all the croupiers don't, but he does, because they trust him.”

“That speaks well for him,” Bobby remarked. “Do you know what kind of pistol it is?”

“Ever so small. He showed it me once, and he said it would kill anyone ever so easy. It's automatic; you just press something and it goes on shooting by itself.”

“Ah, yes,” said Bobby, and remembered it was a small automatic that had been found by the side of the murdered man. Another coincidence he supposed, yet hardly a coincidence, since small automatic pistols are as common as they ought to be rare if Governments, and not private enterprise, controlled their manufacture. He put the memory aside for the moment. “After you heard the shots,” he asked, “what happened exactly?”

“We could hear running and shouting, and a man got over the wall just opposite the summer-house.”

“How soon after you heard the shot?”

“Oh, immediately. There was the shot, and then we heard him running, and then there he was over the wall. And then he just stopped and lighted a cigarette, so we could see him plainly, and he listened a moment and then he ran off across the lawn, and Bill said we had better go too. He said if there was trouble we didn't want to get mixed up in it, and, anyhow, Bill said the man we saw couldn't have been the one who fired, because it was a long way off and we saw him climbing the wall immediately after. Bill thought it might have been fired at him, though. So Bill said we had better go quick, and we did.”

“You ought to have given information,'* Bobby said sternly. “The man you saw may have been an accomplice. You have given us a lot of unnecessary trouble.”

Irene dissolved into tears at this, and said it wasn't fair to expect anyone to lose his job, mixing up in things he had nothing to do with; and Bobby, telling himself it was silly to use a stern tone to a girl from whom evidently coaxing was likely to get far more than severity, soothed her by saying he quite understood, and probably there was no harm done, and, at any rate, what she said now was very useful as tending to clear one suspect. So she grew cheerful again, and asked if it was true Miss Fay Fellows's necklace had been stolen.

“Bill was telling me about it,” she said. “He's often seen it. He knows her quite well; she used to play at his table. I've only seen it on the pictures in
Rich Man's Baby
. Did you see that? Wasn't it just lovely? Coo-o,” she said, forgetting for the moment all else in her memory of that glamorous dream. “Bill says seeing it on the pictures is nothing to seeing it when it's her own self wearing it. I wish I had.”

“When was he telling you that?” Bobby asked carelessly.

 “Just before we heard the shot and the man jumped over the wall,” she answered. “Bill said there was a lot of funny talk going on about it.”

“Gossip he had heard, perhaps?” Bobby hinted, but the girl evidently knew no more, and Bobby thought it as well not to attempt to press the point further at the moment, interesting though it seemed.

He contented himself with warning her not to attempt to communicate with Carton, told her that quite possibly neither of them would be required to give evidence, since what they had to say seemed to have little bearing either on the murder or the identity of the murderer. But of course that would depend on the course the investigation took, and certainly they both would be required to make formal statements.

“I take it,” he added, “you and Mr. Carton were sitting in the summer-house for shelter and a quiet chat?”

“That's right,” she said. “It was such a beastly evening, and there's nowhere at home you can be quiet, and at the pictures you can't as much as whisper a word to each other now without people calling ‘Hush.' We'd been there before. Bill told me about it.”

“How did he happen to know?” Bobby asked, since he thought it odd that a man who was employed at Monte Carlo in the winter, and Cliftonville in the summer, should know of empty residences and deserted summer-houses in Brush Hill.

Miss Irene at first protested she had no idea. Bobby reminded her that the police know everything and find out everything, as witness his knowledge of how she had come to catch such a bad cold. Much impressed, Irene sneezed several times, and then admitted that Mr. Carton not only helped his aunt with her private boarding-house, but also sometimes got temporary jobs as croupier at private parties in London.

“Bill says,” she explained,” you can count on the fingers of one hand the people in England who can be croupiers in a fast game and not get most awfully tied up. Bill says you have to know the job from A to Z to be sure the right people get their money and the table gets its. Bill says you wouldn't believe the way some of them try it on. And he says he doesn't know even one man in England who would stand a chance of getting a job at the ‘box' – that's the casino,” she explained. “It's ever such a lovely place really, like a picture palace or a Lyons Corner House, but they call it the ‘box.' When the swells here – real tip-top swells, too, or Bill wouldn't touch it – are getting up a big do, they are glad to have any one like Bill – beg and pray him, they do. Of course, it's all for charity, and he doesn't ask for a fee; only just a cheque afterwards for his expenses and his trouble and time.”

“Does that happen often?” Bobby asked.

“It just depends,” she answered, “only now it's not so often big affairs for charity as small private parties. It was one of the big charity do's when he came across the summerhouse. They had the do in that big empty house where the summer-house is – the only do there's ever been in Brush Hill. Bill went out at supper-time in the garden for a little fresh air, and he saw the summer-house and remembered it.”

“And thought how handy it would be, eh?” said Bobby, laughing, and Irene blushed, and Bobby asked one or two more questions, though without getting any further information.

The girl seemed to have told him all she knew, and he thanked her again, and, as he was going, asked her how she liked her work, and wasn't it difficult to get rid of bits of hairs after she had been trimming or combing customers' locks, and she said earnestly that it wasn't difficult; it was impossible.