Detective Ben Read online

  ‘This is goin’ ter be narsty,’ decided Ben.

  It was easy to guess how the police had got on the track. The chauffeur Fred had been caught, and had given away the address.

  ‘’Ere, git busy!’ he instructed his numb mind as he stared at the door waiting for it to open. ‘Wot am I goin’ ted say when ’e arsks, “’Oo are you?”’

  He imagined the policeman putting the question. Then he imagined himself replying, ‘Bloke called Ben, see?’ As that information did not appear enough, he had to carry the conversation a little farther.

  ‘Oh, and who’s Ben?’ inquired the imaginary policeman.

  ‘Chap wot’s tikin’ on a detective’s job,’ answered the imaginary Ben.

  ‘Who’s the detective?’ asked the imaginary policeman.

  ‘Well, I don’t know ’is nime,’ said the imaginary Ben.

  ‘What’s the job?’

  ‘I can’t say ezackly. See, I’m findin’ aht.’

  ‘When did the detective give you the job?’

  ‘Lars’ night.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On a bridge.’

  ‘The detective wasn’t murdered, was he?’

  ‘As a matter o’ fack, ’e was. We was jest fixin’ things up when ’e was shot, so when the people wot shot ’im come along I pertends ter be one of ’em, like wot I was goin’ to any’ow, so’s I could git to know wot they shot ’im for. I’m pertendin’ now, lumme, yer can twig that, carn’t yer?’

  Ben tried hard to make his imaginary policeman twig, but he failed miserably. Instead of twigging, the policeman responded:

  ‘You’re pretending all right, but it won’t wash, Harry Lynch. You’ve got to come along to the station with the others.’

  ‘’Ere, don’t be silly!’ retorted the imaginary Ben. ‘’Ow can I be ’Arry Lynch? ’Arry Lynch was killed on the bridge afore the detective was!’

  ‘Oh, no, he wasn’t,’ answered the imaginary policeman. ‘The fellow called Ben was killed on the bridge before the detective was, and you killed him!’

  Ben’s brain reeled. He had imagined the conversation to the dizziest limit! Suppose the dead crook was really taken for himself—suppose he had got into the skin of Harry Lynch so tightly that there was no getting out of it? Well, in that case he would have to keep in it, until he had completed the job that would make the Big Five touch their hats to him, and could reclaim his own carcass!

  ‘Yus, that’s wot I gotter do,’ he decided. ‘I gotter go on bein’ Lynch, and Gawd ’elp me!’

  He donned a Lynch-like expression as the door suddenly opened and the policeman walked in.

  The policeman was disappointingly large in the close-up, and his own expression, aided by a bristling moustache, was quite as forbidding as Harry Lynch’s. Behind him stood Helen Warren and Stanley Sutcliffe, exchanging anxious glances.

  ‘Now, then, let’s hear your story!’ began the policeman, without ceremony.

  ‘Wot, ’ave I done somethink?’ inquired Ben, affecting innocent surprise.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  Just in the nick of time Ben saved himself from tripping over the first question. Harry Lynch would never give the police his name unless he had to. Gazing over the policeman’s massive shoulder, he raised his eyebrows and asked:

  ‘Wot’s ’e wanter know for? Ain’t yer told ’im?’

  He watched Mr Sutcliffe pull a coloured handkerchief from his pocket as the policeman exclaimed truculently:

  ‘You’ll learn what I want to know for in two ticks, and never mind what they’ve told me. What’s your name?’

  ‘Brown,’ said Ben, noting the hue of the handkerchief.

  Mr Sutcliffe blew his nose appreciatively, but Ben’s mind spun a little. He was Ben pretending to be Lynch pretending to be Brown. If Brown had to pretend to be anybody, he was lost!

  ‘Brown,’ repeated the policeman.

  ‘That’s it,’ agreed Ben. ‘Wot yer git at the seaside.’

  ‘Are you trying to be funny?’ demanded the policeman.

  ‘Yus, I feel funny,’ returned Ben, ‘bein’ hinterrupted in the middle o’ me work!’

  Was he showing the right shade of emotion, the correct degree of temper? It was a problem that would have puzzled the most acute psychologist and the cleverest actor, and Ben was neither. All he banked on was that Harry Lynch must have possessed a pretty sizable temper when it was aroused, but that Harry Lynch was smart enough to keep it under control when—like Ben—he was pretending to be somebody else. ‘Yer know, wot I really want,’ reflected Ben, ‘is a nice long ’ollerday!’ Which, unfortunately, was the very last thing he was destined to get.

  ‘Oh, so you work, do you?’ observed the policeman, glancing around.

  ‘I ’aven’t bin arst fer the weekend,’ replied Ben.

  ‘What sort of work?’

  ‘Well, seein’ we’re in a kitching, I expeck it’s shoein’ ’orses.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘’Arf-a-nour.’

  ‘Not in the kitchen, my man! Can’t you answer a thing properly? In your job!’

  ‘Well, ’ow am I ter know wotcher mean if yer don’t speak pline?’ grumbled Ben, again glancing over the policeman’s shoulder for a hint of the answer that would not conflict with previous evidence.

  He had a queer, uncanny sensation, as Miss Warren quickly raised two fingers, that he was being assisted by the spirit of Harry Lynch and that alone he would have shown less cleverness. It was a humiliating thought, although it was redeemed by the knowledge that he was using a dead man’s brains to thwart his living associates.

  ‘Take your time, won’t you?’ said the policeman.

  ‘Well, I gotter think, ain’t I?’ retorted Ben. ‘I’ve bin ’ere a cupple o’ years.’

  ‘Two years, eh?’

  ‘Two was a cupple when I was a boy.’

  ‘Since you know as much about two, let’s get on to another sort. Ever heard of two o’clock?’

  ‘Yus.’

  ‘Can you tell me something about it?’

  ‘Yus.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Comes arter one o’clock.’

  ‘Thank you. Did it come after one o’clock last night?’

  Ben swallowed softly. Now they were getting to it!

  ‘I suppose so! Wotcher mean? ’As some ’un put the clocks in reverse?’

  ‘What I mean,’ barked the policeman, ‘is this. Where were you at two last night? And not so much looking over my shoulder this time, if you don’t mind!’

  ‘’Oo’s lookin’ over wot?’ grunted Ben, thinking hard. ‘Ain’t I ter move me neck?’ The last word was not well chosen. The policeman appeared to be eyeing his neck speculatively. ‘Two o’clock, eh? Well, corse, I was in bed.’

  ‘Quite sure of that?’

  ‘Yus. Tucked up warm.’

  ‘Do you know where your mistress was?’

  ‘Sime plice. Eh? Oh! I mean, a dif’rent one.’

  ‘And—the gentleman now standing by her side?’

  ‘’E was in bed, too. Another dif’rent one. We got three.’

  Miss Warren interposed. She appeared to judge it was time.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ she said to the policeman, ‘you ought to tell him why—’

  ‘Kindly let me handle this in my own way,’ interrupted the policeman. ‘I know my job!’ He spoke sharply, and turned back to Ben. ‘Now, then, Mr—Brown! You say you were in bed last night at two o’clock.’

  ‘Yus.’

  ‘Tucked up nice and warm.’

  ‘Yus.’

  ‘Asleep.’

  ‘Yus. No.’

  ‘Which is it?’

  ‘No! I wouldn’t ’ave knowed it was two o’clock if I’d bin asleep, would I?’

  ‘You’d have known you’d been asleep if you hadn’t woken up.’

  ‘Yus, p’r’aps, but I wouldn’t ’ave knowed the others was asleep, so ’oo’s the mug, you or me?’
/>   ‘I see. Then you were awake?’

  ‘That’s wot yer are when yer ain’t asleep.’

  ‘What woke you?’

  ‘Well, fust I thort it was a stummick-ache.’

  ‘What did you think it was after?’

  ‘It wasn’t arter.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Doncher unnerstand nothink I ses? I still ’ad the stummick-ache, and it was while I was still ’avin it that it thort it was somethink helse, that’s pline enough, ain’t it?’

  In spite of the gravity of the situation, something very like a small titter emerged from the pale lips of Mr Sutcliffe.

  ‘Make it a little plainer still, my lad,’ answered the policeman frowning. ‘What happened exactly at two o’clock, and don’t waste any more time!’

  ‘I won’t if yer stop interruptin’,’ answered Ben. ‘This is wot ’appens. A noise, see? I ’ears one. So I creeps aht inter the passidge. I goes ter the lidy’s door. Orl quiet. But I couldn’t ’elp worryin’—see, I’d ’ad a nightmare, it was that wot give me the stummick-ache, they git ’old of yer—so I jest opens the door a crack ter mike sure I can ’ear ’er breathin’, and when I ’ears ’er breathin’, which I does, I ses ter meself, “She’s sife, wot abart the other one?” So then I goes ter ’is door, and then I ’ears the noise wot woke me, ’e was snorin’ with one o’ them loud clicks.’ The detective looked unconvinced, so Ben added, ‘’E always does arter tinned salmon.’

  Then a change came over the policeman. He stepped closer to Ben, and his voice tightened ominously.

  ‘Now I’m going to tell you something, and see you don’t interrupt,’ he said. ‘At 2 a.m. last night a detective was murdered on a bridge. He was shot, and a woman was seen picking someone up and driving away from the spot immediately afterward. She got clear, but we’ve been hunting all night, looking for clues, and this morning we’ve found her. Her name is Miss Warren. She is standing behind me at this moment with the man we believe she picked up. Identify him, and that will fix him as her accomplice in the crime. Naturally, smelling trouble, you did your best for your employers by inventing an alibi for them, but I don’t expect you knew how serious the trouble was. We’ve got nothing on you, of course, and maybe we won’t press you with any awkward questions if you just tell us the truth. You can’t help them,’ he concluded, ‘because they are already under arrest, and the place is surrounded.’

  Ben stared at the policeman. Then something happened inside him, and he punched the man on the jaw.

  ‘You’re a fine bobby, aincher?’ he cried indignantly, as the policeman toppled back into Mr Sutcliffe’s arms. ‘Arrested, are they? And plice surrounded, is it? And corse, when the charge is murder, yer’ve never ’eard o’ ’bricelets, ’ave yer? Not ter menshun yer mustache is comin’ orf!’

  Miss Warren smiled coolly as her chauffeur nursed his bruise.

  ‘Your round, Mr Lynch,’ she said, ‘and when I tell you that you have passed your test—and that you’ll do—perhaps you will forgive me for having made use of the disguise Fred has returned home in? I think you’d better cook some more eggs.’

  7

  The Signal Arrives

  For three days, waiting for the signal that was to start him on his mysterious journey, Ben remained imprisoned in the silent, suffocating flat.

  It was not completely silent. Their own footsteps along the soft-carpeted passages, their own voices modulated to the mood of an invisible conductor who favoured pianissimo, the occasional humming of Mr Sutcliffe (‘I like music,’ he once confided to Ben, ‘but the full blast of my song went when I came here, so now I just hum’), and the opening and closing of doors, marked the minor events of an existence pregnant with expectant monotony; and the airless atmosphere was periodically alleviated by electric fans. (‘The fans don’t generate new air,’ Mr Sutcliffe explained, ‘they just push the old air about to prevent it from standing still and dying.’) But there was a sense of stifling soundlessness. Nothing was contributed from outside. They lived in a tiny world of their own, a world of secrets, with the lid tightly screwed down lest the secrets should escape and burst.

  The inmates themselves behaved with the organised calmness of those accustomed to sieges, although behind the calmness they reflected their separate moods and individualities.

  Helen Warren’s mood was that of a queen. Her word was law, and disobedience, if it came, surprised without disturbing her. She spent the mornings lazily and luxuriously in her bedroom, sending for her companions when she wanted them, and dismissing them peremptorily when she had had enough of them. She was notably less strict with Stanley Sutcliffe than with the other two, a fact which one of the other two resented. Ben soon discovered that Fred, the chauffeur, was jealous, and he had to admit himself that the fair-haired, smooth-cheeked ‘giggerliot’ received more than his share of privileges.

  ‘Wot’s the reason?’ he asked Fred, braving the chauffeur’s surliness. Fred never ceased to smart from the blow Ben had given him, and although he had not returned the blow he seemed to be waiting for the chance. ‘I can’t see anythink in ’im. ’E’s more like a cod-fish than a man, if yer git me.’

  ‘Why be so hard on cod-fish?’ grunted Fred.

  ‘Wot’s ’e do ’ere?’

  ‘Do we inquire what any of us do here?’

  ‘So we don’t,’ nodded Ben. ‘I see wot yer mean. But I wasn’t speakin’ crimernal. Is ’e one o’ them, well, giggerliots?’

  To this Fred made no response, either because he would not or could not.

  In the afternoons there was an atmosphere of siesta, as though in reward for a morning of toil. As far as Ben could make out, the only one who toiled in the place was himself. Helen Warren reclined in the sitting-room and read French books. (French always seemed to Ben a suspicious language.) Fred sat in an armchair, smoking and scowling. Mr Sutcliffe retired to his bedroom to study his face or manicure his nails. But tea brought him out again, in a brilliant red dressing-gown. He spent most of his life in dressing-gowns. After tea, cards were produced.

  ‘Do you play cards, Mr Lynch?’ Helen Warren asked him on the first occasion.

  ‘On’y Jack o’ Clubs,’ he replied.

  ‘I don’t know that one.’

  ‘It ain’t differcult. The one ’oo draws the Jack o’ Clubs goes aht and kills somebody.’

  ‘How too, too sweet!’ murmured Mr Sutcliffe, languidly taking a pack just as the chauffeur was reaching for it. ‘Do you mind, Freddie? I lose so much when you shuffle.’

  ‘If I had flabby fingers like yours, I’d keep them hidden!’ retorted the chauffeur, viciously.

  As Ben noted the tiny tinge of colour that crept into Mr Sutcliffe’s smooth cheeks he suddenly recalled, with a little shock, a remark which this strange young man had made to him: ‘I only know two or three ways of killing people, and one of those only is a certainty … and we won’t talk about that!’ But the tinge of colour quickly faded, and the conversation ended as Miss Warren took the cards and cut for deal.

  In the evening, after a dinner ordered by Miss Warren with an intelligent awareness of the cook’s limitations, the cards were again brought out for a short game before an early retirement.

  That, assumedly, ended the activities of the day. If things happened at night they were beyond Ben’s personal knowledge, and merely lived in his imagination. They lived there a little too vividly.

  It was during the fourth night beneath this sinister, heavily-pressing roof that the vividness of his imagination became almost unbearable. He had gone to bed wondering how much longer he could stand the nerve-racking atmosphere, and he had plunged almost immediately into a string of nightmares. His efforts to wake from them merely plunged him into worse ones. Skeletons in policemen’s helmets, chauffeurs with scalping knives, a snake in a boudoir cap—all chased him in relentless succession, and when he tried to dive out of windows he found them boarded up.

  But he was himself partially responsible for the most
unpleasant nightmare of all. He heard a buzzing. The lift ascended. Out walked the Jack of Clubs. ‘Hallo, Ben,’ said the Jack of Clubs. ‘You’ve drawn me.’ Ben had fled to his bedroom. The Jack of Clubs had followed him, had dwindled to the size of a normal card, like the cards in Alice in Wonderland, and had plastered itself coldly on his forehead. It grew colder and colder, and pressed harder and harder, till suddenly Ben sat bolt upright in bed and found that the card was Mr Sutcliffe’s hand.

  ‘Gently, darling,’ whispered Mr Sutcliffe. ‘It’s only Nurse come to wake you.’

  Mr Sutcliffe looked like another nightmare. He was wearing a black dressing-gown.

  ‘Wot’s ’appenin’?’ gulped Ben.

  ‘Sh!’ answered Mr Sutcliffe, softly. ‘Someone has called.’

  The lift had not been entirely a dream, then! But, of course, the caller could not really have been the Jack of Clubs.

  ‘Oo?’ asked Ben.

  ‘I shall miss hearing you say “’Oo,”’ sighed Mr Sutcliffe. ‘You notice I am in mourning.’

  ‘’Oo’s called?’ repeated Ben.

  ‘I think I must leave somebody else to tell you that. You see, my present visit is not official. I have wakened you as a friend.’

  ‘Lumme, carn’t yer answer a bloke?’ muttered Ben. ‘Is it the pleece? The real ’uns, this time?’

  ‘It is not the police,’ replied Mr Sutcliffe. ‘Neither real or sham. The police never call here. Our hostess is much too clever. I would back her against anybody—even myself.’

  Ben regarded the soft, slim figure in funereal silk.

  ‘Beggin’ yer pardon,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t back you agin’ a flea with a toothache!’

  ‘Not now, perhaps,’ agreed Mr Sutcliffe sadly. ‘Perhaps not now. But there was a time … Tell me,’ he broke off suddenly, ‘how are you with women?’