Pursuit of a Parcel (22 page)

“I'm quite sure he didn't say please. What did he say?”

Parker coughed.

“He sounded like a gentleman in a hurry. I couldn't be certain of the identical words, but it was more like ‘Tell him to come back here at once!' than what I repeated. I hope it doesn't mean bad news, Mr. Antony.”

Antony hoped so too. He considered ringing Garrett up, but it was just on one o'clock. He might miss him and waste time which could be precious. He turned towards the door, and heard Parker in shocked expostulation.

“Not without anything inside you—you mustn't really Mr. Antony! There's no sense in it. If you won't stay for lunch—and I could have it on the table in ten minutes—there's sandwiches Mrs. Parker cut on purpose, and coffee she's keeping hot just in case. It won't take me any time to fill up one of the vacuums, and the sandwiches are all ready.”

Antony stopped with his hand on the door. Without turning round he said,

“All right. Thank her for thinking about it, will you.”

“And a lot of use he'd be, looking for Miss Delia on an empty stomach!” said Mrs. Parker in an angry voice which expressed her determination not to cry into the coffee she was pouring into a vacuum flask.

“Hand me the sugar, Ellen.… Yes, I said the sugar! Wake up, can't you, my girl! Rations or no rations, and if it was the last bite in the house, Mr. Antony'll get this coffee sweet the way he likes it. Put those sandwiches in that tin! There—he can't say we've kept him. And you can't get from it, there's nothing a man don't stand up to the better for getting some food inside him, and no one's going to throw it up at me that I let him go off with a sore heart, which I can't help, as well as an empty stomach, which I can.”

Ellen put down the sugar bowl and came back red-eyed and sniffing.

“Oh, Mrs. Parker, do you think they'll find Miss Delia? Where ever do you suppose she is?”

Mrs. Parker bit her head right off.

“Lord ha' mercy, girl—do you think I'd be waiting for you to ask me that if I knew? If you can't talk sense you've no need to talk at all that I can see! And if you can't stop sniffing you can get out of my kitchen and do it somewhere else!”

XVI

Colonel Garrett looked up sharply as the door opened and Antony Rossiter came in. He was expecting him, but not as soon as this. He must have fairly bucketed the insides out of the Hillman.

The door banged. Antony said,

“What is it, Frank?” And Garrett came out with,

“They've found a body.”

He might have been going to say more, or he might not. The greenish pallor of Antony's face halted him. He said on a furious growl,

“Damned young fool! It's not your Delia Thingumy. What the hell—if you'd let me finish!”

Antony came up to the chair on the other side of the desk and sat down. He moved like a man who has been hit pretty hard and doesn't quite know what he is doing. He put his head in his hands and sat there leaning forward. Presently he looked up and found Garrett glaring at him.

“Sorry, sir—you knocked me out. You said they'd found someone.”

“Might be Cornelius.”

Antony felt nothing at all. Thought, feeling, imagination were all numb. They would be normal again presently, but for the moment this was just question and answer, with nothing to touch himself. Cornelius was just a name. He said,

“What makes you think so?”

“Not me—secretary from the Dutch Ministry. Says he thinks it's Cornelius. They want you to identify him.” He pushed back his chair. “You'd better have a drink.”

“Thanks.”

“Had anything to eat?”

Antony nodded.

“Sandwiches and coffee pressed on me by the Parkers—housekeeper and butler at Fourways. Frank—do you think it's Cornelius? Where was he found?”

“River,” said Garrett.

He set down a glass at Antony's hand.

“Drowned?”

“Knocked on the head first. That would be the crash that halfwitted Marsden girl heard over the telephone. He was trying to get on to me. They caught him at it and coshed him. Yesterday morning.”

Antony drank, and set down the glass.

“About a quarter to ten, she said.”

“Put him in the river as soon as it was dark. Medical evidence quite compatible.”

Antony still had no feeling, but his brain was working furiously.

“Suppose it was this way. The people who were out to get that parcel get hold of Cornelius. They daren't do anything to him, till they've got their hands on the cylinder. They just hold him. Then they burgle the bank. They get the parcel. They think they've got the cylinder. It's just guesswork, but I should say that the people who did the burglary wouldn't open the parcel themselves. They'd be working for a bigger man, and they'd bring it to him, but they might let him know they'd got it—ring him up, or send a wire with a prearranged message. They wouldn't necessarily bring it straight to him—probably not—but they'd be bound to let him know. Don't you see how it might have been? He'd think the cylinder was safe. They were on to that parcel from the start, and sure that the cylinder was inside it. I suspect Con laid them a trail. He was deep, you know, and he liked a dangerous game for its own sake. I can imagine how he'd enjoy getting those maps out of the country and then playing up the Gestapo with a hint here and a whisper there—you know the kind of thing. They'd swallow it all right. He'd started the cylinder myth with a bang, and it would be as easy as mud to keep it going. The parcel was just the right size—he'd seen to that. When they got it they'd be quite sure they'd got the cylinder. Well then, Cornelius didn't matter any more. They'd have to get rid of him—he knew too much. The minute he lost his hold over them his number was up. I don't know how he managed to ring you up. He's crafty. He must have tricked them somehow, but they caught him, and that finished it. And how they must have cursed when they found they hadn't got the cylinder after all!”

He picked up his glass and took off what remained of his drink at a draught. Then he set it down again—rather hard—and said,

“That's my guess at it. Nobody'll ever know—not if Con's really dead.” He got up. “Well, I expect we'd better be going.”

Twenty minutes later he stood in the police mortuary and stared with hard composure at the dead man lying there. Curious how little the dead resemble the living. What a bad copy death makes of life when everything that stands for man has gone. This heavy marble was no one he had ever known. It was eternally strange—on the other side of the great gulf which lies between intelligence and non-intelligence. He was here to identify this inert flesh with a man whom he had known as you know your own kin. But what he had known was here no longer. He had a sense of repulsion, but no sense of loss. What he shared with Cornelius was intact, in the old bright days of his boyhood. He could look back and find it there. What he had lost he had lost long ago, in later years, but not by death.

He drew down the sheet and looked at the dead man's wrists. The left was unmarked. The right showed an unhealed gash.

He stepped back from the body and said in an even voice,

“It is Cornelius.”

Presently they were in a room together—Garrett and Antony—Detective Inspector Lamb and Detective Sergeant Abbott—Mr. Van der Pol of the Dutch Ministry. He was bowing politely and offering condolences to Antony in his smooth and perfect English.

“Your adopted brother, I understand, Mr. Rossiter, but he kept him own name of Roos, did he not?”

Antony came back from a long way off. It was all over and the chapter closed. Curiously enough, the wrench he felt was the old wrench of his parents' death. Cornelius had been the sole remaining link with them. He said,

“My parents adopted him when they had no child of their own. He used their name as long as my father lived, but, as you well know, he kept his Dutch nationality.”

Mr. Van der Pol nodded.

“I did not know him personally—none of us over here did. But I chanced to see him when he came in a few days ago. He wished for a permit to remain here until he could get a passage to the United States. As I say, I saw him then, but today I could not have identified him with any certainty, though I feared that it was he. I have heard of him as a very able man.”

Detective Inspector Lamb came into the conversation. Too bulky a man to be overlooked—black hair, growing thin on the top but with no grey in it—very strong black hair that would have curled if it had ever been allowed to get that length. For the rest, he had a heavy jowl and a small, shrewd grey eye. He said, “Excuse me, Mr. Rossiter—I take it that you have no doubt at all about this identification?”

Antony said, “None.”

The shrewd grey eye dwelt on him.

“I saw you look at that cut on his wrist. I take it that connects up with your statement about seeing him in Silverthorn Road on Tuesday night. I think you mentioned a cut on his wrist, but you were not really prepared to swear to his identity then.”

“No—I only thought it was Cornelius. I couldn't go farther than that. I never saw his face. When Miss Merridew told me that he had been to see her next morning, and that she was positive he had neither cut nor bandage on his right wrist, I thought I mvist have been mistaken. It would have been quite easy for me to have made a mistake. I saw him only when the street was lit up by flashes from the explosions that were going on—I never saw his face at all. But I did see that cut wrist when I turned my torch on him, and I'm prepared to swear to it.”

Inspector Lamb looked over his shoulder. He gave a kind of nod to his subordinate, whom Antony now noticed for the first time—a thin young man with an air of surprising elegance. He had colourless fair hair slicked back from a pale, high brow. Elegance and pallor were in fact the keynotes of his appearance. At the Inspector's look he produced a notebook.

Lamb had turned back to Antony.

“You are now prepared to swear that the man in Silverthorn Road was Cornelius Rossiter, alias Cornelis Roos?”

Antony flared up suddenly.

“I won't pass that alias! You've just heard me say that my parents adopted him. His legal name was, and remains, Cornelis Roos. Cornelius is the English for Cornelis—”

Lamb stopped him.

“Now, Mr. Rossiter, there's no need for you to take me up like that. The ‘alias' was just a technical expression. It wasn't meant to reflect on Mr. Roos in any way. I've been put on to this case, and what we want to do is to find Miss Merridew as quick as it can be done. I take it that's what you want too. And now perhaps you'll answer my question. Are you prepared to swear that the man you saw with a cut on his wrist in Silverthorn Road on Tuesday night was Mr. Cornelis Roos?”

“Yes, I am.”

“On the strength of that cut on his wrist?”

“Yes—it is the same cut. I shone my torch on it.”

“You're quite sure of that?”

“I'm quite sure.”

“And Miss Merridew was quite sure that the gentleman who came to see her on Wednesday morning had no cut on his wrist?”

“Yes, she was quite sure. She said he put his hat down on a chair. When he was leaving he had his gloves in his left hand, and he reached out for his hat with his right. She said his wrist came clear of the cuff, and she was quite positive that there was no cut on it.”

Detective Sergeant Abbott wrote. He had a pale, slim hand with noticeably well kept nails—well kept, and well shaped.

“Very observant young lady,” said the Inspector without any expression in his voice at all. “Then, Mr. Rossiter, there are just three possibilities. Either you are wrong, or she is wrong, or the gentleman who visited her on Wednesday morning was not Mr. Cornelis Roos.”

Colonel Garrett, who had been standing with his back to the fire surveying the scene in a sardonic silence, now broke in with a barking laugh.

“Been wondering when someone was going to tumble to that!” he said.

Lamb's gaze dwelt on him with a mixture of respect and reproof.

Garrett laughed again and kicked at the fire.

“All right, all right—I won't butt in. It's not my show—you don't need to tell me that.”

Lamb resumed.

“Had that possibility occurred to you, Mr. Rossiter?”

Antony said, “Yes.”

“Miss Merridew had never met Mr. Roos?”

“No.”

“Or seen a photograph of him?”

“I don't suppose so. There are some old groups with my parents—she might have seen those. But he would have been a boy in his teens—they wouldn't really help very much.”

“Did she say what he looked like?”

“Yes—I asked her. The description would pass. She said he was a big man, heavily built, with a large, pale face. That was after she told me there was no cut on his wrist, but I didn't give it very much weight. I was more inclined to think I must have been mistaken about the man in Silverthorn Road. You see, I never
saw
him—only a silhouette against one of those flashes.”

The Inspector nodded.

“It didn't really occur to you at the time, that someone might have been impersonating Mr. Roos?”

“Not seriously. The thought just passed through my mind.”

“But it occurs to you now?”

“I am sure of it.”

Inspector Lamb nodded again slightly.

“And can you make any suggestion as to who this someone might be?”

“I'm afraid I can't.”

“Or you, sir?” The Inspector turned to Colonel Garrett, who shook his head impatiently and kicked the fire again. The sparks rushed up.

There was a moment's silence. Then Mr. Van der Pol spoke.

“It is with diffidence that I intrude, but it is just possible that I can help you. I have, first, a little general information—what we may perhaps call a background, and against that I can pose one small thing which has come to my knowledge. It may have nothing to do with your case, or it may have a great deal.”