“Stealing will pretty soon not be a crime at all, what with all you specialists,” the Colonel remarked with a sort of tart resignation.
“Not a bad theory, sir,” Grant said to Meir. “Can you make the thin tale about the coat thicker too?”
“Truth is often terribly thin, don’t you think?”
“Are you taking the view that the man may be innocent?”
“I had thought of it.”
“Why?”
“I have an excellent opinion of your judgment.”
“My judgment?”
“Yes. You were surprised the man had done it. That means that your first impression was clouded by circumstantial evidence.”
“In fact, I’m logical as well as imaginative. Mercifully, since I’m a police officer. The evidence may be circumstantial but it is very satisfying and neat.”
“Much too neat, don’t you feel?”
“Lord Edward said that. But no policeman feels that evidence is too neat, Sir George.”
“Poor Champneis!” the Colonel said. “Dreadful for him. Very devoted they were, I’m told. A nice fellow. Didn’t know him, but knew the family in my young days. Nice people. Dreadful for them!”
“I traveled up from Dover with him on Thursday,” Meir said. “I had come over from Calais—I’ve just come back from a medical conference in Vienna—and he joined the boat train with the usual Champneis lordliness at Dover. He seemed very happy to be back. Showed me some topazes he had brought from Galeria for his wife. They corresponded every day by telegram, it seemed. I found that more impressive than the topazes, if I must be frank. European telegrams being what they are.”
“Just a moment, Sir George. Do you mean that Champneis hadn’t come over on the boat from Calais?”
“No, oh, no. He came home by yacht. The Petronel. It belongs to his elder brother, but he lent it to Edward for the voyage back from Galeria. A charming little ship. She was lying in the harbor.”
“Then when had Lord Edward arrived in Dover?”
“The night before, I believe. Too late to go up to town.” He paused and looked quizzically at Grant. “Neither logic nor imagination will make Edward Champneis suspect.”
“I realize that.” Grant went on calmly to prise the stone from a peach, an operation he had suspended abruptly at Meir’s phrase about Champneis joining the boat train. “It is of no importance. The police habit of checking up.”
But his mind was full of surprise and conjecture. Champneis had distinctly let him understand that he had crossed from Calais on Thursday morning. Not in words but by implication. Grant had made some idle remark, something about the accommodation in the new steamers, and Champneis in his reply had implied that he had been on board that morning. Why? Edward Champneis was in Dover on Wednesday night, and was reluctant to have the fact known. Why? In the name of all that was logical, why?
Because an awkward pause had succeeded the revelation of Champneis’s presence in England, Grant said lightly, “Miss Erica hasn’t produced the puppies, or whatever it was I was to be shown.”
To everyone’s surprise Erica grew pink. This was so unheard-of a happening that all three men stared.
“It isn’t puppies,” she said. “It’s something you wanted very much. But I’m terribly afraid you’re not going to be happy about it.”
“It sounds exciting,” admitted Grant, wondering what the child had imagined he wanted. He hoped she hadn’t brought him something. Hero worship was all very well, but it was embarrassing to be given something in full view of the multitude. “Where is it?”
“It’s in a parcel up in my room. I thought I’d wait till you had finished your port.”
“Is it something you can bring into a dining room?” her father asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“Then Burt will fetch it.”
“Oh, no!” she cried, arresting her father’s hand on the bell. “I’ll get it. I shan’t be a minute.”
She came back carrying a large brown paper parcel, which her father said looked like a Salvation Army gift day. She unwrapped it and produced a man’s coat, of a grayish black.
“That is the coat you wanted,” she said. “But it has all its buttons.”
Grant took the coat automatically, and examined it.
“Where in Heaven’s name did you get that, Erica?” her father asked, astonished.
“I bought it for ten shillings from a stone breaker at Paddock Wood. He gave a tramp five shillings for it, and thought it such a bargain that he didn’t want to part with it. I had to have cold tea with him, and listen to what the Border Regiment did on the first of July, and see the bullet scar on his shin, before he would give up the coat. I was afraid to go away and leave him with it in case he sold it to someone else, or I couldn’t find him again.”
“What makes you think this is Tisdall’s coat?” Grant asked.
“This,” she said, and showed the cigarette burn. “He told me to look for that.”
“Who did?”
“Mr. Tisdall!”
“Who?” said all three men at once.
“I met him by accident on Wednesday. And since then I’ve been searching for the coat. But it was great luck coming across it.”
“You met him! Where?”
“In a lane near Mallingford.”
“And you didn’t report it?” Grant’s voice was stern.
“No.” Hers quavered just a little, and then went on equably. “You see, I didn’t believe he had done it. And I really do like you a lot. I thought it would be better for you if he could be proved innocent before he was really arrested. Then you wouldn’t have to set him free again. The papers would be awful about that.”
There was a stunned silence for a moment.
Then Grant said, “And on Wednesday Tisdall told you to look for this.” He held forward the burned piece, while the others crowded from their places to inspect.
“No sign of a replaced button,” Meir observed. “Do you think it’s the coat?”
“It may be. We can’t try it on Tisdall, but perhaps Mrs. Pitts may be able to identify it.”
“But—but,” stammered the Colonel—“if it is the coat do you realize what it means?”
“Completely. It means beginning all over again.”
His tired eyes, cold with disappointment, met Erica’s kind gray ones, but he refused their sympathy. It was too early to think of Erica as his possible savior. At the moment she was just someone who had thrown a wrench into the machinery.
“I shall have to get back,” he said. “May I use your telephone?”
Chapter 15
Mrs. Pitts identified the coat. She had dried it at the kitchen fire one day when a thermos bottle of hot water had leaked on it. She had noticed the cigarette burn then.
Sergeant Williams, interviewing the farmer who had identified Tisdall’s car, found that he was color blind.
The truth stuck out with painful clarity. Tisdall had really lost his coat from the car on Tuesday. He had really driven away from the beach. He had not murdered Christine Clay.
By eleven that Friday evening Grant was faced with the fact that they were just where they were a week previously, when he had canceled a theater seat and come down to Westover. Worse still, they had hounded a man into flight and hiding, and they had wasted seven days on a dud investigation while the man they wanted made his escape.
Grant’s mind was a welter of broken ends and unrelated facts.
Harmer. He came into the picture now, didn’t he? They had checked his story as far as it went. He really had made inquiries from the owner of the cherry orchard, and from the post office at Liddlestone at the times he said. But after that, what? After that no one knew anything about his movements until he walked into the cottage at Medley, sometime after eight the next morning.
There was—incredibly!—Edward Champneis, who had brought back topazes for his wife, but who, for some reason, was unwilling that his movements on that Wednesday night should be invest
igated. There could be no other reason for his desire to make Grant believe that he had arrived in England on Thursday morning. He had not come to England secretly. If you want to arrive secretly in a country, arriving in a populous harbor by yacht is not the way to do it. Harbor master and customs’ officials are a constitutionally inquisitive race. Therefore it was not the fact of his arrival that he wanted to hide, but the way in which he had occupied his time since. The more Grant thought about it, the queerer it became. Champneis was at Dover on Wednesday night. At six on Thursday morning his well-loved wife had met her death. And Champneis did not want his movements investigated. Very queer!
There was, too, the “shilling for candles.” That, which had first caught his interest and had been put aside in favor of more obvious lines of inquiry, that would have to be looked into.
On Saturday morning the newspapers, beginning to be bored with a four-day-old manhunt, carried the glad news that the hunted man was innocent. “New information having come to police.” It was confidently expected that Tisdall would present himself before nightfall, and in that hope reporters and photographers lingered around the County police station in Westover; with more optimism than logic, it would seem, since Tisdall was just as likely to present himself at a station miles away.
But Tisdall presented himself nowhere.
This caused a slight stirring of surprise in Grant’s busy mind when he had a moment to remember Tisdall; but that was not often. He wondered why Tisdall hadn’t enough sense to come in out of the wet. It had rained again on Friday night and it had been blowing a northeaster and raining all Saturday. One would have thought he would have been glad to see a police station. He was not being sheltered by any of his old friends, that was certain. They had all been shadowed very efficiently during the four days that he was “wanted.” Grant concluded that Tisdall had not yet seen a newspaper, and dismissed the thing from his mind.
He had set the official machinery moving to discover the whereabouts of Christine Clay’s brother; he had started a train of inquiries which had the object of proving that Jason Harmer had once had a dark coat which he had lately discarded and which had a missing button. And he himself took on the investigation of Lord Edward Champneis. He noticed with his usual self-awareness that he had no intention of going to Champneis and asking for an account of his movements on Wednesday night. It would be highly embarrassing, for one thing, if Champneis proved that he had slept peacefully in his bunk all night. Or at the Lord Warden. Or otherwise had a perfect alibi. For another—oh, well, there was no getting away from the fact; one didn’t demand information from the son of a ducal house as one demanded it from a coster. A rotten world, no doubt, but one must conform.
Grant learned that the Petronel had gone around to Cowes, where her owner, Giles Champneis, would live in her for Cowes’s week. On Sunday morning, therefore, Grant flew down to Gosport, and got a boat across the glittering Spithead to the island. What had been a white flurry of rain-whipped water yesterday was now a Mediterranean sea of the most beguiling blue. The English summer was being true to form.
Grant flung the Sunday papers on the seat beside him and prepared to enjoy the crossing. And then his eye caught the Sunday Newsreel’s heading: THE TRUTH ABOUT CLAY’S EARLY LIFE. And once more the case drew him into it. On the previous Sabbath, the Sunday Wire had had as its chief “middle” a tear-compelling article by that prince of newspapermen, Jammy Hopkins. The article had consisted of an interview with a Nottingham lace-hand, Miss Helen Cozens, who had, it appeared, been a contemporary of Christine Clay’s in the factory. It had dealt touchingly with Chris’s devotion to her family, her sunny disposition, her excellent work, the number of times Miss Helen Cozens had helped her in one way or another, and it had finished with a real Hopkins touch of get-togetherness. It had been the fate of one of these two friends, he pointed out, to climb to the stars, to give pleasure to millions, to irradiate the world. But there were other fates as glowing if less spectacular; and Helen Cozens, in her little two-room home, looking after a delicate mother, had had a destiny no less wonderful, no less worthy of the world’s homage. It was a good article, and Jammy had been pleased with it.
Now the Sunday Newsreel appeared with an interview of its own. And it caused Grant the only smile he had enjoyed that week. Meg Hindler was the lady interviewed. Once a factory hand but now the mother of eight. And she wanted to know what the hell that goddamned old maid Nell Cozens thought she was talking about, and she hoped she might be struck down for her lies, and if her mother drank the lord knew it was no wonder with a nagging dyspeptic piece of acid like her daughter around, and everyone knew that Christina Gotobed was out of the factory and away from the town long before Nell Cozens put her crooked nose into the place at all.
It was not put just like that, but to anyone reading between the lines it was perfectly clear.
Meg really had known Christine. She was a quiet girl, she said, always trying to better herself. Not very popular with her contemporaries. Her father was dead and she lived with her mother and brother in a three-room tenement house. The brother was older, and was the mother’s favorite. When Chris was seventeen the mother had died, and the family had disappeared from Nottingham. They did not belong to the town and had had no roots there, and no one had regretted them when they went. Least of all people who hadn’t come into the town until years afterwards.
Grant wondered how Jammy would enjoy being taken for a ride by the imaginative Nell. So the elder brother had been the mother’s favorite, had he? Grant wondered how much that meant. A shilling for candles. What family row had left such a mark that she should immortalize it in her will? Oh, well! Reporters thought they were clever, but the Yard had ways and means that were not open to the Press, however powerful. By the time he got back tonight, Christine Clay’s early life would be on his desk in full detail. He discarded the Wire and turned to the other papers in the bundle. The Sunday Telegraph had a symposium—a very dignified and conveniently cheap method of filling a page. Everyone from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Jason Harmer had given their personal view of Christine Clay and her influence on her art. (The Sunday Telegraph liked influence and art. Even boxers never described punches to it: they explained their art.) The silly little paragraphs were all conventional, except Jason’s, which had a violent sincerity beneath its sickly phrases. Marta Hallard was graceful about Clay’s genius, and for once omitted to condone her lowly origin. The heir to a European throne extolled her beauty. A flying ace her courage. An ambassador her wit. It must have cost the Telegraph something in telephones.
Grant turned to the Courier, and found Miss Lydia Keats being informative all over the middle pages on the signs of the Zodiac. Lydia’s stock had dropped a little in her own circles during the last week. It was felt that if she had foreseen the Clay end so clearly it was a little weak of her to overlook a small detail like murder. But in the public eye she was booming. There was no fraud about Lydia. She had stated in public, many months ago, what the stars foretold for Christine Clay, and the stars were right. And if there is anything the public loves it is a prophecy come true. They pushed their shuddering spines more firmly into the cushions and asked for more. And Lydia was giving it to them. In small type at the end of the article appeared the information that, thanks to the Courier’s generosity, its readers might obtain horoscopes from the infallible Miss Keats at the cost of one shilling, coupon on the back page.
Grant tucked the smaller illustrateds under his arm, and prepared to get off the boat. He watched a sailor twisting a hawser around a bollard and wished that he had chosen a profession that dealt with things and not with people.
The Petronel was moored in the roads. Grant engaged a boatman and was rowed out to her. An elderly deckhand pushed a pipe into a pocket and prepared to receive them. Grant asked if Lord Giles were on board, happily aware that he was in Buckinghamshire. On hearing that he was not expected for a week, Grant looked suitably disappointed and asked if he might come on board:
he had hoped that Giles would show him the craft. The man was pleased and garrulous. He was alone on board and had been very bored. It would be a pleasant diversion to show the good-looking friend of Lord Giles around the ship, and no doubt there would be a tip forthcoming. He did the honors with a detail that wearied Grant a little, but he was very informative. When Grant remarked on the splendid sleeping accommodation, the man said that Lord Giles wasn’t one for ever sleeping ashore if he could help it. Never so happy as on salt water, Lord Giles wasn’t.
“Lord Edward isn’t so fond of it,” Grant remarked, and the man chuckled.
“No, not Lord Edward, he wasn’t. He was ashore the minute the dinghy could be swung out or a hawser slapped on a quay.”
“I suppose he stayed with the Beechers the night you made Dover?”
The deckhand didn’t rightly know where he slept. All he knew was that he didn’t sleep on board. In fact, they hadn’t seen him again. His hand luggage had been sent to the boat train and the rest had been sent to town after him. Because of the sad thing that happened to his lady, that was. Had Grant ever seen her? A film actress, she was. Very good, too. It was dreadful wasn’t it, the things that happened in good families nowadays. Even murders. Changed days indeed.