The Mortover Grange Affair/Chapter 1
THE MORTOVER GRANGE AFFAIR
CHAPTER ONE
THE HANDEL STREET FLAT
The third house from the Hunter Street corner of Brunswick Square was distinguished from its neighbour houses by a red lamp, hanging at its entrance, and beneath this lamp, about half-past seven o'clock of a misty October evening, a woman, breathless and frightened, was frantically knocking at the closed door. Had she looked more closely at her surroundings, she would have seen a small brass plate, fixed on the wall of the house, by which attention was directed to the surgery in a side-passage, and to certain periods of attendance thereat, one of which was just then in being. But the woman was much too agitated to notice anything; either from the haste she had made to the red lamp, or from some recent shock, she was trembling all over and muttering incoherently to herself, and when, in response to her beating on the panels, the door suddenly opened, and a young man in a white jacket appeared on the threshold, she had to make a visible effort before she could gasp out two words:
"The doctor!"
"I am the doctor!" answered the young man, quickly. "What is it?—an accident!"
The woman lifted her hand towards her heart and staggered a little against the door post. Again she made an effort at self control and speech.
"A—a—I don't know!" she said, jerkily. "A man—in my flat! Dead, I think—murdered!"
The man in the white jacket stepped straight out of his door, closing it behind him.
"Where is your flat?" he asked quietly.
"Just round the corner," replied the woman. "Handel Street. This man called on me. Business. I had to leave him in my flat a few minutes alone. When I went back I found him dead! Struck down by somebody."
"Have you called the police!" asked the doctor. He was already walking quickly towards the corner of the square, the woman hurrying at his side. "Or anybody else?—your neighbours?"
"Nobody! I gave one glance at him and ran for you," she answered. "But I'm sure he's dead. I—I saw blood! And he was so—so still!"
The doctor made no remark. He turned the corner and went swiftly along to the opening into Handel Street. There beneath a gas-lamp two policemen stood, talking, and he made up to them.
"This lady says a man is lying dead in her flat in this street—she believes he has been murdered there, in her absence," he said in matter-of-fact tones. "One of you had better come to the flat with me and the other report at the police-station. If your police-surgeon is handy, send him along."
The elder of the two policemen, who had sergeant's stripes on his uniform, gave the woman a keen glance, ending in sudden recognition.
"Miss Tandy, isn't it, ma'am?" he said. "Just so—did a bit of a job for you last year, Miss Tandy. In your flat, eh, ma'am—that's Number 3 in Number 5, I recollect." He turned to the other man and said a few words. "Well?" he continued, as the man moved off towards the adjacent police-station in Hunter Street. "We'd best go up, eh?"
Miss Tandy led the two men up the stairs that gave access to her flat: the doctor, sharp of perception, noticed that the street door of that particular house was open and was apparently always left so until some fixed hour of the evening. Flat Number 3 was on the second floor; its outer door was slightly ajar, as Miss Tandy had left it when she ran to the red lamp round the corner. And as she approached it now, she shrank back.
"You go in—first," she whispered to her companions. "I—I'm still frightened about it. Such a shock———"
The police-sergeant pushed open the door and strode in, followed closely by the doctor. They crossed a neat, orderly little hall, and entered a parlour in which the electric light was turned on at the full. In its white glare they saw the dead man—that he was dead the doctor realized as soon as he set eyes on him. He lay crumpled up across the hearthrug—a white skin rug on which there was already a rapidly spreading patch of darkening red—and near him was a light chair, on which he had evidently been sitting when assailed, and now lay overturned between a centre table and the fender.
The dead man's face was full in the light, and the two men took a careful look at him. An elderly man, this—probably sixty, at least. A good-looking man, somewhat worn, and grey-haired, with a well-shaped head and broad, high forehead; a man, decided the doctor, of considerable intellectual capacities. His attire was neat and quiet; his shoes good; his general appearance that of a man in comfortable circumstances. Out of the pockets of his light overcoat protruded a quantity of papers, written as well as printed.
"All over with him, I suppose, doctor?" asked the sergeant in a hushed voice. "Gone, eh!"
The doctor nodded, and rising from his knees pointed to the dead man's head. "Whoever attacked him must have done so most savagely!" he answered. "He's been struck down from behind by some heavy weapon with something of an edge, a sharp edge on it. Dead!—oh, yes, dead enough!"
"Instantaneous affair, doctor?" asked the sergeant. "Just so! Well, I don't see any weapon about. That poker, now—Lord no, that wouldn't kill a mouse. Carried his weapon off, I should say. But when did it happen? We shall have to get Miss Tandy to give us some information———"
Just then, Miss Tandy's voice was heard in the hall; she was directing somebody to the parlour. A police-inspector came in; a police-surgeon with him. And following them was a little, inconspicuous, unassuming man in plain clothes, who might have been a grocer, a draper, or an oil-and-colour merchant, but whom the other men knew as Detective-Sergeant Wedgwood, of the Criminal Investigation Department, attached at present to the Hunter Street Police Station.
Wedgwood listened quietly while the two medical men talked, but while he listened he was looking round the room in which they were all gathered, with the dead man at their feet. He nodded a silent approval when the inspector remarked that the next thing was to hear what the occupant of the flat had to say respecting the affair, and he slipped back into the hall where Miss Tandy was regaining her composure under the ministrations of her next door neighbour.
"You won't care about going in there, ma'am," said Wedgwood, with a significant nod at the parlour door. "Perhaps you'll be agreeable to tell us all about it out here. How did it come about, now, ma'am?" he went on, after signalling the other men to join him. "How came the man here in your flat, and who is he? Of course, some of us know you—you're Miss Tandy, a professional typist and stenographer, aren't you? Just so—and you carry on your business here? To be sure. But this man, now? Do you know him?"
Miss Tandy, whom the doctor now saw to be a middle-aged spinster of such well-regulated and decorous appearance that it seemed impossible to associate romance, tragedy, crime, or mystery with her, made a movement of head and hands that seemed to indicate assent and dissent at the same time.
"Well, I do, and I don't," she answered. "That is to say, I've known him, very slightly, by correspondence, for the last year or two, but personally, not at all. He has occasionally sent me work to do for him, by post. I never saw him, however, until this evening—and I wish I hadn't seen him! This thing to happen here———"
"Just so, ma'am!" agreed Wedgwood. "Very unpleasant! Then you know the man's name, Miss Tandy? And his address?"
"Mr. John Wraypoole, 89 Porteous Road, Paddington," replied Miss Tandy, with business-like promptitude. "That's where I sent his finished work to, anyway. But sometimes he wrote his letters from the British Museum."
"What was he, ma'am? Do you know that?"
"I should say he was a professional searcher—pedigrees—family history—genealogical stuff—all that sort of thing," said Miss Tandy. "That was the kind of work I typed for him."
"Well, and how came he here to-night, Miss Tandy?" asked Wedgwood. "And—what time did he come?"
"He came here a little before seven o'clock," answered Miss Tandy. "Perhaps ten minutes to—perhaps a quarter to. Of course, I didn't know him. When I opened the door to him, he told me who he was—Mr. John Wraypoole, for whom I'd done work now and then. I asked him into my parlour, and he told me that he'd come personally to see if I could type two copies—one a duplicate—of a certain manuscript, which he'd brought with him, by three o'clock to-morrow afternoon. I said that depended on its length and nature. He showed me the manuscript. It was of the usual pedigree stuff—stiff work. I said I couldn't possibly do it in the time named. He implored me to try, and offered me double prices. He was so insistent that I said I'd see if I could get assistance. So I went out to see a friend of mine, a few doors away, who is also a professional typist. Mr. Wraypoole, of course, stayed here: I left him sitting at my desk in the parlour, reading. I went to my friend's———"
"Her name and address, ma'am, if you please," interrupted the detective.
"Miss Amy Callender, Number 6 Flat, Number 8 House," said Miss Tandy. "That's on the opposite side. I arranged with her to help me; we decided that we could manage the job by the specified time. Then I came back here—and found Mr. Wraypoole . . . as you have seen him!"
"How long were you away, Miss Tandy?" asked Wedgwood imperturbably.
"Twelve to fifteen minutes," replied the typist. "A quarter of an hour at the very outside."
"Did you see anybody leaving the flats as you entered—when you came back?"
"No—no one!"
"Are those street doors always open—as we found them just now?"
"Always—until eleven o'clock."
"Then anyone can walk in, and up the stairs?"
"Oh, certainly!"
"Did you leave your door open when you went off to Miss Callender's?"
"Yes—I left it ajar. It was like that when I came back."
Wedgwood, who had been making shorthand notes, closed his pocket-book and put it away. He suddenly turned again to Miss Tandy.
"Where," he asked sharply, "is the manuscript this man brought to you?"
Miss Tandy pointed to the door of the parlour.
"He laid it on my desk," she answered. "It should be on the blotting-pad."
Wedgwood went into the room: within a moment he was back.
"There's no manuscript there," he said.
"It was there, when I left him to go to Miss Callender's," declared Miss Tandy. "I remember seeing it, distinctly. It lay just where it had been put down—right in the middle of the blotting-pad. A manuscript in a brown paper cover, with a white label on the front."
"Not there!" repeated Wedgwood.
"There are papers in his pockets," remarked the sergeant. "A quantity———"
Wedgwood again turned back to the parlour, followed by the police-inspector; the sergeant, after an exchange of whispers with the two doctors went after them. Almost as soon as he had got into the room he was out again: Wedgwood had sent him off on an errand. A brief errand—for within ten minutes he was back in the flat again and at the detective's elbow.
"That's quite correct," he whispered. "I've seen Miss Callender. Middle-aged lady, like this. She says Miss Tandy came to her about this typing business and was at her place the best of ten minutes, perhaps. Well, it's two minutes' walk there; two minutes back. That 'ud about make the quarter of an hour Miss Tandy spoke of." He paused, cocking an eye at a mass of papers which Wedgwood and the inspector had evidently been examining. "Found it?" he asked.
"No!" replied the detective. "No manuscript at all, such as she described." He, too, paused, as with intent, glancing at the inspector. "On the face of it," he said slowly, when he saw that the inspector was not going to speak, "on the face of it, the thing looks pretty evident. This man has been followed here by somebody who had an interest in that manuscript. Somebody who for some reason or other wanted to get possession of it. That somebody watched Wraypoole enter; saw Miss Tandy go out; came up; knocked Wraypoole on the head; seized the manuscript; vanished before Miss Tandy came back. Eh?"
"Seems uncommonly like it," agreed the inspector. "Got to be sought for, that somebody. Well—there are things to be done."
Wedgwood went into the hall, where, the two doctors having gone away, Miss Tandy sat whispering dolefully to her neighbour.
"Look here, ma'am," he said. "The body will have to be removed to the mortuary. Hadn't you better go somewhere with this lady, eh?—for an hour or so, while we manage all that. Unpleasant for you, being here, while that's going on. Leave matters to me. And if you come back in an hour, you'll find me here."
"The best thing Miss Tandy can do," remarked the neighbour, "is to come home with me for the night."
'Couldn't do better, ma'am," agreed Wedgwood.
He was presently alone in the flat—alone with the dead man, to make arrangements for whose removal the other men had gone away. But Wedgwood showed no particular interest in the dead man. He scarcely looked at him. He had wished to be alone in the flat, though, and as soon as he knew himself to be so, and secure from observation, he went straight to a corner of the room in which he had seen something lying when he first entered it. Now he picked up that something—a fine diamond, escaped from a ring or a scarf-pin.