Murder in Piccadilly (15 page)

“Don't bother about the tea, Ruby. It's rather late, and I've something else to say. I'm in rather a fix and I want your help.”

She turned on him with the celerity of an acrobat.

“Is it a woman, Massy?” She was looking scared.

For a moment he was tempted to be truthful, but the habit of a lifetime overwhelmed him.

“If it's a woman that woman is you,” he answered with a gallantry that sounded as false as it actually was. “Ruby, I'm staying in town overnight and the reason is that I want to see you alone when we won't be interrupted. Will you lunch with me at the Berkeley tomorrow at half-past one?”

“Won't I? I'll do that easier than a duck takes to water.” Her face was alive with delight. “Why, Massy, it's years since I've been in the Berkeley or it seems years—a hundred of them. You don't know what it means to escape from a three-day joint existence.”

“I'll see if I can't change that,” he said significantly, and added a curse to himself when Bobbie reappeared.

When Massy Cheldon departed with the expressed intention of interviewing an old acquaintance who had written offering his services as private secretary—“I'm thinking of having one,” he explained—Ruby waited nearly three minutes for Bobbie to answer the question that was troubling her. It was only when his silence exasperated her that she gave voice to it.

“No, it wasn't Nancy,” he answered moodily, “I couldn't telephone to her even if I wanted to, for she's not on the phone. It was to a chap I saw in the city today.” It was the truth, for Nosey Ruslin had waylaid him as he was leaving the office for a teashop lunch and had shared it with him. But it was also more dangerous than a lie because of what it was intended to conceal and did conceal.

“I'm glad of that.” His mother's tone was, he thought, censorious, and he nearly flared up, but he recalled something exhilarating Mr. Ruslin had said to him and it rendered his temper foolish-proof.

“I'll be a bit late tonight,” he remarked when another pause had reached its limit of endurance. “No, you're wrong again, mother. It's not Nancy. She'll be elsewhere earning in half an hour four times what I get in a week from the bald-headed pleb who runs the office.”

She would have inaugurated one of their bickering duologues had it not been for memories of her brother-in-law's invitation. Remorse animated her when she compared her lunch of tomorrow's with Bobbie's. It would not be finished by the time Bobbie was back at the office poring over uninteresting ledgers.

“I'm lunching with your uncle tomorrow,” she said suddenly.

Bobbie emitted a whistle of surprise.

“And at the Berkeley!”

A gape expressed his astonishment now.

“What's happened to him? Has he inherited another fortune or is he in love with you? Don't blush, mother. I don't want to dash your hopes, but when uncle discovers that a marriage licence can cost as much as seven and six, or so I've been told, he'll scratch the fixture. Still, a lunch for two at the Berkeley and uncle paying the bill! My hat, and my whole suit and wardrobe for that matter.” He came to her side and kissed her. “Will you lay me five to one, mother, that you won't be married before me? I'll take you to all the money I've got. Come now, be a sport.” His laughter filled the room pleasantly.

Not very far away Massy Cheldon was also laughing, for it was half-past seven, his appetite for dinner was rapidly improving, the profit of the day seemed to add to the beauty of that June evening, he had banished his cares, and he did not know that he had only four hours and fifteen minutes of life left.

When the Underground propelled him into the open and he found himself in Piccadilly his exhilaration was so intense that he had to mount guard over it. But the sight of pale faces and tired bodies hurrying home after the day's labours to suburban homes and equally unlovely incomes threw his own circumstances into such strong relief that he could have voiced his satisfaction aloud. He was a free man—the others were slaves. He had the key to all the desirable and lovely things which the world produced—they had nothing except the struggle and the certainty that the struggle would avail nought.

A shadow crossed his path and materialised into Colonel Crabb, red-faced, dapper, simply impetuous when not explosive.

“Why the devil, Cheldon, do you cut your friends?” he demanded with a friendly ferocity of manner that he mistook for humour.

“Sorry, Crabb,” said the day-dreamer, smiling. “On the way to the club or is it the Carlton?”

“I never dine at the club now,” the colonel answered, falling into step. “But I don't mind being seen with you in Piccadilly, Cheldon. You look so damned prosperous that it will do my credit good.”

Massy smiled again. It was perfectly true what Crabb was saying. The old and impecunious bore with a pension, a liver and a termagant of a wife did require some shoring up of his credit.

“I was thinking of the Berkeley,” he remarked, pensively. “They have an excellent grill room there.”

“Good. I'll join you.” The colonel laughed boisterously. “But don't worry, Cheldon, I'll pay my own account.”

Cheldon took the safe and cheapest course of passing the pleasantry by, but at the same time he did some mental juggling during which he arrived at the conclusion that it would cost him at least twenty-five shillings to feed the colonel with solids and liquids.

“Can't afford it,” he muttered unthinkingly.

“Can't afford what?” barked his companion.

“Sorry, Crabb, thinking of something else. Ah, you may well pretend to envy me, but I'm not so well off as you think. Heavy taxation—”

In self-defence the colonel put on for a run of eleven minutes the story of a tiger he shot between tiffin and dinner at Simla just before the war. The animal was well and truly slain by the time they sat down at a table in the grill room of the Berkeley, which Massy Cheldon had thought of only because he had been thinking most of the time of his invitation to Ruby for the morrow.

As he was not a guest and therefore considered he was under no obligation to be polite the colonel departed before the coffee stage, having espied a fellow-campaigner of his Indian days in solitary greediness at a neighbouring table. Massy Cheldon, muttering the relief which he felt, wandered out of the building and sauntered in the direction of his club. It was only half-past eight, and he had three hours and fifteen minutes left of life, but his only worry was inability to decide whether to “see a picture” or drop in at one of the revue theatres before retiring to his hotel. On second thoughts he voted against the “pictures” and with it banished the idea of patronising any part of a theatre where a lounge suit was permissible. The gentility of the Cheldons was over one hundred years old, but it had not lost its veneer yet.

His club, situated in the most virtuous part of Piccadilly, afforded him for more than two hours the undisturbed solitude which his internal organs craved after the recent assault on them, but when at twenty minutes past eleven he left it he was feeling sleepy. The heavy air of a warm night increased his tendency to unconsciousness, but with a supreme effort he mastered himself and when the proximity of Piccadilly Circus revealed proof positive of London's teeming millions he began to take an interest in life again. He was within twenty minutes of death at that moment, but to him there appeared to be no such thing. Others might die or be dying. He had fortune in his grasp and happiness within beck.

In the Circus he stopped and watched the crowd again. It was one of his favourite hobbies, far more interesting to a thinker and philosopher, as he was wont to phrase it, and also as cheap as nothing. A pretty girl without paint attracted his attention. He recalled a girl like her he had been introduced to by Gleeson of St. John's. Poor Gleeson. A war casualty. Fine scholar. That reminded him. The international outlook was threatening and the stock markets might collapse if there was more war talk from Rome and Berlin.

Someone brushed against him and murmured an apology. Massy Cheldon looked across at the clock with the moving seconds-hand and saw that it was forty-one minutes past eleven.

“I'd better be moving,” he said to himself, and advanced down the steps leading to Piccadilly's vast Underground station. He walked rapidly through a stone-paved corridor towards beacons of light and masses of moving humanity, observing no one in particular, and in the crowd no one took any notice of him, everyone intent on getting home as quickly as possible, hope and enjoyment apparently satiated for the time being.

When Massy Cheldon left the corridor behind him he came abreast of a telephone kiosk. At the same moment another man stepped into line with him and about half a minute later a woman's scream startled the crowd, but not Massy Cheldon, who lay huddled on the ground with a knife in his heart, amid the stillness of death that is not quiet.

At the very instant of the murder of Massy Cheldon the Piccadilly Underground was a microcosm of London. At the various descents to the trains, the ticket offices and machines, the illuminated shop windows and other temporary aids to the loafer and the prowler, there were groups of men and women, small and large groups, and scattered through the arena of light and movement were hundreds of persons, any one of whom might have been an actual spectator of the deed.

But the first signal that anything unusual had happened came from a portly dame awaiting her husband's return with the tickets. She happened to be glancing towards the entrance which Massy Cheldon had just used and he came into her line of vision. There was nothing about him to attract her and she was barely cognisant of his existence, disinclined to single him out from the other human automata until he swayed to the left and fell headlong to the ground. She was positive ever afterward that the scream came before and not after the stranger's collapse, but no one believed her.

“Oh!” she exclaimed involuntarily, and for the benefit of an unaccompanied girl of artificial prettiness added, “Drunk.”

“Rather,” said the girl, and began to walk towards the group which could do nothing except surround the body.

Then there came another scream, a woman uttered a wail and tottered away, someone pointed to a streak of blood and there was a rush to satisfy excruciating curiosity.

“The police. Is there a doctor here?” The voice was impersonal.

A doctor was not required, and there was, as it happened, none. But presently a policeman forced his way through, and after him another, and as the crowd grew into a mob and the mob into a nuisance more police came, a stretcher was produced, and all that was mortal of Massy Cheldon was carried away into decent privacy.

For nearly a quarter of an hour London seemed to have stopped still. For fifteen minutes homes were forgotten, petty troubles banished, cares and difficulties ignored. Scores of men and women died daily in London, but on this day of days one of them had died in the very midst of a crowd and the cause of his death was a dagger piercing his heart. Death had become something very real.

Chief Inspector Wake, hastily summoned from his home in Chelsea, listened without emotion to a bare recital of the facts by Police Constable Sibon, who had been first on the scene.

“We have identified him, sir,” he concluded. “Name of Massy Cheldon and lived at Broadbridge Manor, near Lewes. From papers found on him, sir.”

“He was stabbed to the heart at a moment when the Piccadilly Underground was crowded and no one saw the murder or the murderer?” Chief Inspector Wake's tone was merely one of inquisitiveness. There was no surprise or anger or resentment of alleged stupidity in it.

“That's how it looks, sir,” said the constable. “Davidson, Houston and Cooper helped me to get names and addresses of men and women likely to be of use, but they all swore they had seen nothing.”

“Of course, they didn't see anything,” said Wake, quietly. “Did you ever know a London crowd that saw anything except a fallen horse or a Punch and Judy show? But it was clever, Sibon, damned clever. Somebody's discovered the art of getting away with a murder, and I didn't think anyone knew it except myself. But we can do nothing much now, Sibon. I'll see the inspector on duty.” They were in the Chief Inspectors' room in Scotland Yard. “The divisional officer will do all the needful, but it's not going to be easy. A carefully and cleverly planned murder.”

He repeated the opinion to Chief Inspector Hance, a tall, gloomy person with almost as poor an opinion of the unhanged as he had of the hanged.

“Hance, this is a teaser,” he said, breathing heavily. “Fancy, knifing a man in a crowd of at least a thousand and with a score of persons within a few feet! That's courage if you like.”

“Daring, not courage,” Inspector Hance corrected in his slow manner. “Murderers have no courage—at least, I've not met one built that way. They're cowards, all of them.”

“Well, we're up against a clever thinker this time, Hance,” said Wake in his heaviest and yet quietest manner. “It'll be a pleasure to catch him.”

“If you can,” said his colleague with the outline of a smile somewhere in the region of his lower lip.

“Only a genius could have committed such a crime.” Chief Inspector Wake was a skilled craftsman who recognised skill in others without confessing by jealousy that it was superior to his own. “Think of it, Hance, someone followed this fellow, Cheldon, until he got him in a crowd. Then he killed him, knowing that one thousand or two thousand witnesses can see nothing. I suppose they get in each other's way or something.” He yawned. “I'm going home. Can't do anything until the morning. The murderer must help us to find him or we're beaten. Good night.”

In Whitehall a plainclothes man came up to him.

“We've collected quite a bit of information about Mr. Massy Cheldon,” he said, taking a small sheet of paper from his pocket. “He left Lewes at three ten this afternoon; called to see his sister-in-law at Galahad Mansions, Fulham, about six, and dined at the Berkeley with Colonel Crabb, a member of his club. I've seen the colonel and he told me about the visit to the sister-in-law. He said that Mr. Cheldon referred to it more than once.”