The Notched Hairpin (13 page)

“The next evening he sent me a message that he'd like me to come over after dinner. I did, and found him in a nervous state that seemed to rise to a point when, after some hints and a certain amount of not-too-good-natured banter, he seemed on the point of taking me into his confidence; then he sank back into a suspicion that became more and more veiled and sullen. All the while he was smoking heavily.”

“And Latakia is not the tobacco indicated—to use the medical term—for that mood.”

“How do you know he smoked Latakia?” Millum asked, turning to Mr. Mycroft.

Before he could reply, I intervened. “Mr. Millum, when you know Mr. Mycroft well, you will never ask that question. He will reply, ‘Just by using my eyes,' which leaves you, and is meant to leave you, in the dark.”

“Not quite so bad nor quite so simple as that,” Mr. M. chuckled. For some reason, in spite of the sordidness of the story, he seemed in rising spirits. “I'd prefer to say, ‘By cross-examining all the senses and, as a good cross-examiner should, separately.' But more of that later. Meanwhile, we must get on with your story.”

“Finally,” said Millum, resuming, “Sankey got up without a word and left the room. He tried to slam the door behind him but it bounced off the latch and stood ajar. I therefore could hear him calling for Jane, and when she came I could not help hearing that he was ordering her to get her hat and cloak and go out with some letters—letters which he must have had in his pocket when he left the room.

“It was an unpleasant night—one of those nights when the west gales from the Atlantic meet the eastern wind from the steppes, and on this borderground we have slush and sleet and a wind both boisterous and piercing, a rain both soaking and freezing. It was not the night to send anyone out, but there was a small mailbox on the main road half a mile away that was cleared first thing in the morning, and evidently Sankey had made up his mind that he must catch that mail. Now I am sure some die had been cast in his mind and he was going to act quickly and secretly. I heard Jane say, ‘Well, Sir, I'll have to change my shoes and things,' and pause, hoping he'd relent. But all he said was ‘Well, hurry up.' With that, he came back into the room.

“I didn't stay for more than five minutes after that. I was feeling both sore and uneasy. He paid no attention, huddled over the fire—didn't turn his head or say anything as I said a short good night. I shut the door and had just wrapped myself up in my coat and opened the hall door when Jane came into the hall from her side of the house. It was a shame to send her out in this, for the wind blew in like ice, making a sound like a trumpet. Without a word I took the letters from her hand, left her standing there, and closed the door behind me.

“Then it crossed my mind: why should I, any more than she, tramp in the mud and slush just to catch an earlier mail for a selfish beast? There was a fanlight you have seen over this door, and, as the hall lamp was hung high, you could see to read as you stood on the top step. Just to assure myself that the letters didn't look too urgent—say an overdue income-tax return or something of that sort—I looked them over, deciding that if they appeared to be simply social letters they could wait stormbound till tomorrow. I ran them through my hands. There were only three: the first two were addressed to the two young men I had met just previously in this house; the third was to an address in Africa, a postal station given as being on the upper Congo. Perhaps it was totally insufficient evidence to go on. Pretty certainly, I should have done better to have left possible ill alone.

“I went down the steps, and by the time I was at the bottom, my mind was made up. I went across the road and straight into my own house. My Mrs. Sprigg had left a kettle steaming on the hob by my sitting-room fire. I held the envelope backs one by one in the jet of mist, and one by one the gummed flaps curled back. I put them down carefully, drew out the letters, and read them over. The first two were almost identical in what they said. You have guessed. He was asking them to come in on the Upper Congo Agency which had been reconstituted, and he was demanding that, as he had put them on to so profitable a thing, they should purchase for him a considerable block of shares. Evidently he had sounded them out enough to know they would close with his offer, and the certainty that they knew he had put them in the way of making big money was shown by the size of the commission slice he demanded for himself.

“The third letter, therefore, was no surprise. It said that he had obtained further capital, that he would require at least a considerable percentage of liquidation profits for his past shares which had gone with the old company, and that on a commission basis and at what might be called a disgracefully handsome figure, he would be ready to raise more capital. So that explained his shifting behavior with me! He wanted more money still, and, as he could not believe I was other than the sneak he'd always known, he still thought I might yield another substantial sum. But, like most amateur interceptors of mail and other such subterfugists, having got my information and had my worst suspicions confirmed, I found that I had not thought out what my next steps would be.”

Mr. M. nodded. “That's always the point, if you would like to know, where a good detective looks for his breakthrough. To start with, he can seldom be as wise as the man who first thought out the first steps of the crime. It is where the criminal begins extemporizing that his tracker finds the gaps in his defenses and the holes in his tunnel. The ‘tangled web we weave, when we practice to deceive' is not, as the moral poem says, at the first step, but at about the dozenth, when the variables begin to get out of hand.”

“Well, I hurried and felt I ought to cover my tracks. Besides, I should have felt a beast if I had got Jane into a row. So, on that kind of impulse, choosing to convenience the person we know, at the much worse cost of thousands we don't, off I went in the snow and rain, at least feeling I was doing what I didn't want to.”

“Which is also,” chimed in Mr. M., “far from the best of guides.”

A sentiment with which I could concur.

“As soon as they were dropped into the mail,” Millum went on, “and I couldn't get at them, all safely re-sealed and in the sacred keeping of the postmaster general, I had the natural revulsion. But the matter was out of my hands, however heavily it was on my mind. And Sankey, having determined not to try whether I would come in on the racket again, evidently had as little wish to see me as I him.

“Soon, too, I had signs that the abominable thing was working. I realized that he was spending money far more freely than the handsome allowance he took from me could cover, and when I made discreet inquiries, I found it was not on credit, but on cash. One of the young men turned up also. I was not, I am glad to say, asked over. But whereas the two of them had come the first time in a nice enough sports car, now this one appeared in a large Rolls-Royce, with a sealskin-and-gray-liveried chauffeur, and even a similarly clad footman—all the possible evidences of a sudden rise in what we used to call the standard of living. I felt a rising disgust at the sheer ostentation.”

Then he added, after some hesitation, “I expect you'll think that I can't be giving you a straight report here and that I'm becoming, at best, subjective—trying to make out consciously or subconsciously that things just ran into me and not that I planned them.”

“No, not necessarily,” Mr. M, reassured him. “Indeed, I'll say for your encouragement that I am now sure that, when we are on the lookout for something, it will, more often than the law of chances can explain, come part of the way to meet us.”

That seemed to reassure Millum, and he went on. “That's exactly what I found. I found I couldn't get this beastly business out of my mind or see any way out of it. I wasn't prepared to go to court and make
a
clean breast of my part and go to jail for a long stretch just to get Sankey there. I didn't want him in jail, really. I only wanted this thing to stop. Besides, said my bewildered mind to itself, if you put yourself and the other three in jail, would that stop what is going on on the upper Congo? Pretty certainly O.K. Johnstone is now keeping well out of the hands of European police.

“And, as it happened, the first step out of the deadlock and on to a new problem took place when I was trying to take my mind off this worry which now engrossed a great part of my time and made me often hate Sankey with something like loathing. I used to go up to the big curio sales in London, at Christie's and Sotheby's, for I had found a real anodyne in art collecting. I did not buy nearly as often as I went, for those places were great educational centers in their way. You could learn the cultural history of most of the West and a good deal of the East if you went regularly, and the study did take the mind off the present, which to me was now almost uniformly unpleasant. For to my moral worry was added the further one that I did not know how long Sankey would allow me even my present immunity and would not push me to go in with him. I had become convinced that he was now of that unpleasant, very dangerous, and none-too-uncommon class, the mad-and-bad, the cads who think they can always win, and that their power of damaging others gives them complete immunity from counterattack.

“It was one of those big mixed sales—several remarkable collections from small but good collectors had come into the market. There were a number of small examples of the great second-rate Baroque artists' works, some fine ironwork, a couple of really good tapestries, a fine set of majolica, and a half dozen pieces of early Murano crystal; and with it the usual pieces of brocade, stamped leather furniture, and some fine weapons—the usual equipment of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Italian houses of the rich.

“Everything went for good prices till one piece came up and, to my surprise, didn't seem to rise. It looked to my eyes as good, if not a better, museum piece than most of them. But the bidding began to fail at a ridiculously low figure. I turned to the dealer who used to handle the bids I made and whispered ‘Why?'

“‘Reconstructed,' he whispered back.

“But it was a lovely piece of work in line and finish and inlay and—” Mr. Millum faltered a moment for a word and then said lamely, “though an instrument, as decorative as any piece of furniture. As the auctioneer said for the second time ‘Going,' I nudged my professional friend, and he nodded, making the bid only ten shillings above the last. Once again the auctioneer went through his threefold ritual, but this time was the last for that, and it was knocked down to us.

“My agent remarked as we took it over at the end of the sale: ‘Worth the price, of course, though it would have fetched ten times that, if sound all through. The trouble is that some old fool a generation ago replaced the original working part with another. Why can't people leave things alone? He surely can't have wished to use it.'

“But I am not sure, myself.

“Of course, such playing about with toys can't stop a real worry. It only suppresses it for the time being—and it really didn't do even that for me.”

“No,” said Mr. M., rising to the surface of the conversation like a large trout at a fly. “No; this incident comes under the category you mentioned a little earlier. It wasn't a sedative, but one of those mysterious irritants. Like taking an aspirin and finding that by mistake we've taken
nux vomica.
”

I had no idea of what they were talking about, but Mr. Millum nodded and went on.

“You're right. And what's more, after that everything went—I almost said smoothly—but perhaps I ought to say … inevitably.”

“‘Facilis decensus Averno?'”

“Yes, Vergil knew human nature, even if he was ignorant of vulcanic geology. The down gradient took a sudden dip by my making two discoveries—no, observations. The first was over here, at Sankey's. After a considerable period of sulking, he suddenly called me over. I guessed the interview wouldn't' be pleasant. It wasn't. He wanted to know whether he could come over whenever he liked and use part of my place. Why? Absurd reason: this bower, in which it was his habit to sit whenever it was fine, had now become too overgrown, dank, and dark—it kept the sun from him and yet did not screen him from the house. So he had come to think that he'd like my garden better—though, in fact, he'd hardly ever caught sight of it.

“For a moment I thought the whole thing could be disposed of—all this arbor needed was pruning; it was hopelessly overgrown. I pointed that out. No, he couldn't have a man fussing round. Besides … besides … I gave up trying to persuade him and cleared out. He was fool, knave, and egoistic paranoiac. I wasn't going to have an outbreak with him—as I knew he was really only trying to pick a quarrel—over some goddam silly little thing such as pruning a hedge. When things are on edge with the unstable, anything may make the break, and I still had enough good sense, caution, and a general notion that I didn't know where I was going to know that, when the break came, it must come on a clear issue and one I had thought out.

“But he wouldn't let me alone. I ought to have known that. Just sidestepping the particular point was not even treating the symptom. Back he came—or, to be exact, I was again sent for. Now he was demanding that I sell or give him part of my garden, so that he could cut it off, build a wall across it, and make it part of his—a complete fool's fancy anyway, for that lane that runs between the houses is a right of way. If he was so insane about his privacy, he would have to build a covered bridge, or make a tunnel underneath the road—like the absurd eccentrics of the eighteenth century used to do.

“On getting back to my house, I ran up to the roof, just to see how his insane notion could possibly work out if he forced me to it—like Naboth when Ahab was after his vineyard—and, glancing over in this direction, I could see how the spreading of the latticed branches of this arbor had spoiled it as a ‘sun trap,' and how easily even unskilled pruning could put it right. As I was standing there, my foot struck against some object that was lying in the small parapet way that runs between the tiles themselves and the actual parapet. It was obviously something which the roof repairers must have left behind when they finished their job. A little while before I had had to have some tiles replaced. I picked it up idly and began to fiddle with it, wondering, with the surface part of my mind, what it actually was, and how it had been used—while my deep mind was just worried to exasperation by feeling that I was really being trapped.