The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation by J. S. Fletcher (books to read as a couple txt) 📗

great thing, of course, will be to get hold of the woman herself. It's a most unfortunate thing that Albert Gaffney was stopped from following that cab, last night—I've no opinion, Mr. Allerdyke, of your amateur detective as a rule, but from Mr. Appleyard's account of him, this one seems to have done very well. If we only knew where those two went—"

Appleyard presently came back from the telephone with a face alive with fresh news.

"Albert Gaffney's at the warehouse now," he announced. "I've just had a word with him. He found the taxi-cab driver an hour ago, and he got the information he wanted. And I'm afraid it's—nothing!"

"What is it, anyhow?" asked the chief, with a smile. "Perhaps Albert
Gaffney doesn't know its value."

"The man drove them, all four, to the corner of Whitechapel Church," said
Appleyard. "There he set them down, and there he left them. That's all."

"Well, that's something, anyway," remarked the chief. "It carries the thing on another stage. Now we'll leave that and attend to our own business."

The Pompadour Private Hotel, like most establishments of its class in Bayswater, was a place of peace and of comparative solitude during the greater part of the day. It was busy enough up to ten o'clock in the morning, and it began to be busy enough again by six o'clock in the evening, but from ten to six more than two-thirds of its denizens were not to be found within its walls. The business man had gone to the City; the professional women had departed to their offices; nothing of humanity but a few elderly widows and spinsters, and an old gentleman or two were left in the various rooms. Everything, therefore, was quiet enough when the chief, accompanied by Chettle, drove up, entered the hall, and asked to see the manager and manageress. As for Allerdyke and Appleyard, who naturally felt considerable dislike to appearing on this particular scene of operations, they were a few hundred yards away, walking about just within the confines of Kensington Gardens, and waiting with more or less patience until the police officials came to them with news of the result of the search.

The manageress of the hotel, a smart lady who wore dignified black gowns all day long—stuff in the morning, and silk at night as if she were a barrister, gradually advancing in grandeur—gazed at the two callers with some suspicion as she ushered them into a private room at the back of her office. The chief, an irreproachably attired man, might have been an army gentleman, she thought; an instinctive wonder rose in her mind as to whether he was not some elderly man of standing who, accompanied by his valet, desired to arrange about a suite of rooms. But his first words gave her an unpleasant shock—she felt for all the world as if somebody had suddenly turned a shower of ice-cold water on her.

"Now, ma'am," said the chief, "your husband the manager is out, and you are in sole and responsible charge, I understand? Pray don't be alarmed—this is nothing that concerns you or your affairs, personally, and we will endeavor to arrange everything so that you have no annoyance. The fact of the case is, we are police officers from the Criminal Investigation Department at New Scotland Yard, and I hold two warrants, just granted by a justice of peace, which are in relation to an inmate of your hotel."

The manageress dropped into a chair and stared at her visitors. Police officers? Warrants? Justices? It was the first time in her highly respectable Bayswater existence that she had ever been brought into contact with these dreadful things. And—an inmate of her establishment!

"Oh, you must be mistaken!" she exclaimed in horror-stricken accents. "A warrant?—that means you want to arrest somebody. An inmate—surely none of my servants—"

"Nothing to do with servants," interrupted the chief. "I said an inmate.
Pray don't be alarmed. We want a young lady who is known to you as Miss
Mary Slade."

The manageress got up as quickly as she had sat down. For one moment she gazed at her visitor as if he had demanded her very life—the next her lip curled in scorn.

"Miss Slade!" she exclaimed. "Impossible, sir! Miss Slade is a young lady of the very highest respectability—she has resided in this hotel for three years!"

"I am quite prepared to believe that a residence of three months under your roof is enough to confer an irreproachable character on any one, ma'am," replied the chief with a polite smile. "But the fact remains, I have here a warrant for Miss Slade's arrest—never mind on what charge—and here another empowering me to search her room or rooms, her trunk, any property she has in this house. And as time presses I must ask you to give us every facility in the performance of our unpleasant duty. But first a question or two. Miss Slade is not at home?"

"She is not!" replied the manageress emphatically.

"And I think she did not return home last night?" suggested the chief.

"No—she didn't," assented the much perplexed woman. "That's quite true."

"Was that unusual?" asked the chief.

The manageress bit her lip. She did not want to talk, but she had a vague idea that the law compelled speech.

"Well, I don't know what it's all about," she said, "and I don't want to say anything that would bring trouble to Miss Slade, but—it was unusual. For two reasons. I've never known Miss Slade to be away from here for a night except when she went for her usual month's holiday, and I'm surprised that she should stop away without giving me word or sending a telephone message."

"Then her absence was unusual," said the chief smiling. "Now, was there anything else that was unusual, last night—in connection with it?"

The manageress started and looked at her visitor as if she half suspected him of possessing the power of seeing through brick walls.

"Well," she said, a little reluctantly, "there was certainly another of our guests away last night, too—one who scarcely ever is away, and certainly never without letting us know that he's going away. And it's quite true he's a very great friend of Miss Slade's—somebody did say, jokingly, this morning, that perhaps they'd run away and got married."

"Ah!" said the chief, with another smile. "I scarcely think Miss Slade would contract such an important engagement at this moment, she has evidently much else to think about. But now let us see Miss Slade's apartment, if you please, and I shall be obliged to you, ma'am, if you will accompany us."

Not only did the manageress accompany them, but the manager also, who just then arrived and was filled with proper horror to hear that such things were happening. But, being a man, he knew that it is every citizen's duty to assist the police, and he accepted his fate cheerfully, and bade his wife give the gentlemen every help that lay in her power. After which both conducted the two visitors to Miss Slade's room, and became fascinated in acting as spectators.

Miss Slade's apartment was precisely that of any other young lady of refined taste. It was a good-sized, roomy apartment, half bedroom, half sitting-room, and it was bright and gay with books and pictures, and evidences of literary and artistic fancies and leanings. And Chettle, taking a first comprehensive look round, went straight to the mantelpiece and pointed out a certain neatly framed photograph to his superior.

"That's it, sir," he said in a low voice. "That's what the other was taken from. You know, sir—Mr. James A. Mr. Marshall A. said she said she was going to have it framed. Odd, ain't it, sir?—if she really is implicated."

The chief agreed with his man. It was certainly a very odd thing that Miss Slade, alias Mrs. Marlow, if she really had any concern with the murder of James Allerdyke, should put his photograph in a fairly expensive silver frame, and hang it where she could look at it every day. But, as Chettle sagely remarked, you never can tell, and you never can account, and you never know, and meanwhile there was the urgent business on hand.

The business on hand came to nothing. Manager and manageress watched with interested amazement while the two searchers went through everything in that room with a thoroughness and rapidity produced by long practice. They were astounded at the deftness with which the heavy-looking Mr. Chettle explored drawers and trunks, and the military-looking chief peered into wardrobes and cupboards and examined desks and tables. But they were not so much astonished as the two detectives themselves were. For in all that room—always excepting the photograph of James Allerdyke—there was not a single object, a scrap of paper, anything whatever, which connected the Miss Slade of the Pompadour with the Mrs. Marlow of Fullaway's or bore reference to the matter in hand. The searchers finally retired utterly baffled.

"Drawn blank," murmured the chief good-humouredly. He turned to the lookers-on. "I suppose you have nothing of Miss Slade's?" he said. "Nothing confined to your care, eh?"

The manageress glanced at her husband, with whom she had kept up a whispered conversation. The manager nodded.

"Better tell them," he said. "No good keeping anything back."

"Ah!" said the chief. "You have something?"

"A small parcel," admitted the manageress, "which she gave me a few days ago to lock up in our safe. She said it contained something valuable, and she hadn't anything to lock it up in. It's in the safe now."

"I'm afraid we must see it," said the chief.

At the foot of the stairs the hall-porter accosted the party and looked at the chief narrowly.

"Name of Chettle, sir?" he asked. "You're wanted at our telephone—urgent."

The chief motioned to Chettle, who went off with the hall-porter; he himself followed the manageress into her office. She unlocked a safe, rummaged amongst its contents, and handed him a small square parcel, done up in brown paper and sealed with black wax. Before he could open it, Chettle returned, serious and puzzled, and whispered to him. Then, with the shortest of leave-takings, the two officers hurried away from the Pompadour, the chief carrying the little parcel tightly grasped in his right hand.

CHAPTER XXXI THE HYDE PARK TEA-HOUSE

Once outside the Pompadour Hotel the chief and his subordinate hurried at a great pace towards the Lancaster Gate entrance to Kensington Gardens. And when they had crossed Bayswater Road the superior pulled himself up, took a breath, and looked around him.

"No sign of them yet, Chettle," he observed. "Did he say at once?"

"Said they'd be on their way in two minutes, sir," answered Chettle. "And it wouldn't take them many minutes to run up here."

"I wonder what it's all about?" mused the chief. "Some new development since we left the Yard, of course. Well—I think we may probably find something in this parcel, Chettle, that will surprise us as much as any new development can possibly do. It strikes me—"

"Here they are, sir!" interrupted Chettle. He had lingered on the kerb, looking towards the rise of the road going towards the Marble Arch, and his quick eyes had spotted a closed taxi-cab which came out of the Marlborough Gate at full speed and turned down in their direction. "Blindway and two others," he announced. "Seems to be in force, sir, anyhow!"

The taxi-cab pulled up at the little gate leading into Kensington Gardens by the pumping-station, and Blindway, followed by two other men, hurriedly descended and joined his superior.

"Well, what is it?" demanded the chief. "Something new? And about this affair?"

Blindway made a gesture suggesting that they should enter the Gardens; once within he drew the chief aside, leaving his companions with Chettle.

"About half an hour ago," he said, "a telephone message came on from the City police. They said they'd received some queerish information about this affair, but only particularly about the death of that man down at the hotel in the Docks. Their information ran to this—that the actual murderer has an appointment with some of his associates this afternoon at that tea-house in Hyde Park, and that if the City police would send some plain-clothes men up there he'll be pointed out. So the City lot want us to join them, and I was sent along to meet you here, sir—I've brought those two men and of course there's Chettle. We're all to go along to this tea-house, not in a body, naturally, but to sort of drop in, and to wait events. Of course, sir, that last murder occurred in the City, and so the City police