The Collected Works. Josephine Tey
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neither had recognized it. Yes, their names and addresses had been taken and were lying on his desk now. There was also a report from the laboratory.
“Good!” said Grant, jammed the earpiece on the hook and sprang out of bed, his sense of foreboding dispelled by the clear light of reason. Over his cold bath he whistled, and all the time he was dressing he whistled, so that his landlady said to her husband, who was departing to catch an eight o’clock bus, “I’m thinking it won’t be very long now before that horrible anarchist is caught.” “Anarchist” and “assassin” were synonymous terms to Mrs. Field. Grant himself would not have put it so optimistically perhaps, but the thought of that sealed package waiting on his desk was to him what a lucky packet is to a small boy. It might be something of no importance and it might be a diamond. He caught Mrs. Field’s benevolent glance on him as she set down his breakfast, and it was like a small boy that he said to her, “This my lucky day, do you think?”
“I don’t know about luck, Mr. Grant. I don’t know as I believes in it. But I do believe in Providence. And I don’t think Providence’ll let a nice young man like that be stabbed to death and not bring the guilty to justice. Trust in the Lord, Mr. Grant.”
“And if the clues are very thin, the Lord and the C.I.D.,” Grant misquoted at her and attacked his bacon and eggs. She lingered a moment watching him, shook her head in a gently misgiving way at him, and left him scanning the newspapers while he chewed.
On the way up to town he occupied himself by considering the problem of the man’s non-identification, which became momentarily more surprising. True, a few persons every year are thrown up by London to lie unclaimed for a day or two and then vanish into paupers’ graves. But they are all either old or penniless or both—the dregs of a city’s being, cast off long before their deaths by their relations and friends, and so, when the end came, beyond the ken of any one who might have told their story. In all Grant’s experience no one of the type of the dead man—a man who must have had the normal circle of acquaintances if not more—had remained unidentified. Even if he had been a provincial or a foreigner—and Grant did not think he was; the man’s whole appearance had proclaimed the Londoner—he must have had a dwelling in London or near it; hotel, lodgings, or club, from which he must now be known to be missing. And the appeals from the Press that the fact of a missing person should be communicated to Scotland Yard without delay would most certainly have brought some one hurrying to report it.
Then, granted that the man was a Londoner—as Grant most heartily believed—why did his people or his landlord not come forward? Obviously, either because they had reason to think the dead man a bad lot, or because they themselves had no wish to attract the attention of the police. A gang? A gang getting rid of an unwanted member? But gangs didn’t wait until they got their victim into a queue before dispensing with his services. They chose safer methods. Unless—yes, it might have been at once a retribution and a warning. It had had all the elements of a gesture—the weapon, the striking down of the victim while in a place of supposed safety, the whole bravado of the thing. It eliminated the backslider and intimidated the survivors at one and the same time. The more he considered it the more it seemed the reasonable explanation of a mystery. He had scouted the thought of a secret society and he still scouted it. The vengeance of a secret society would not prevent the man’s friends from reporting his loss and claiming him. But the defaulting member of a gang—that was a different thing. In that case all his friends would either know or guess the manner and reason of his death, and none would be fool enough to come forward.
As Grant turned into the Yard he was revising in his mind the various London gangs that flourished at the moment. Danny Miller’s was cock of the walk, undoubtedly, and had been so for some time. It was three years since Danny had seen the inside, and unless he made a grievous error, it would be still longer before he did. Danny had come from America after serving his second sentence for burglary, and had brought with him a clever brain, a belief in organization that was typically American—the British practitioner is by nature an individualist—and a wholesome respect for British police methods. The result was that, though his minions slipped occasionally and served short sentences for their carelessness, Danny went free and successful—much too successful for the liking of the C.I.D. Now, Danny had all the American crook’s ruthlessness in dealing with an enemy. His habit was a gun, but he would think no more of sticking a knife into a man than he would of swatting the fly that annoyed him. Grant thought that he would invite Danny to come and see him. Meanwhile there was the packet on his table.
Eagerly he opened it and eagerly skipped the slightly prosy unimportances with which it opened—Bretherton of the scientific side was inclined to be a pompous dogmatist; if you sent him a Persian cat to report on, he would spend the first sheet of foolscap in deciding that its coat was grey and not fawn—and picked out the salient thing. Just above the junction of the handle with the blade, Bretherton said, was a stain of blood which was not the blood on the blade. The base on which the saint stood was hollow and had been broken at one side. The break was merely a cut which did not gape and was almost invisible owing to the bloodstain. But when the surface was pressed, one edge of the rough cut was raised very slightly above the other. In gripping the tool the murderer had made the fracture in the metal gape sufficiently to injure his own hand. He would now be suffering from a jagged cut somewhere on the thumb side of the first finger of the left hand, or finger side of the thumb.
Good so far, thought Grant, but one can’t sift London for a left-handed man with a cut hand and arrest him for that. He sent for Williams.
“Do you know where Danny Miller is living now?” he asked.
“No, sir,” said Williams; “but Barber will know. He came up from Newbury last night, and he knows all about Danny.”
“All right, go and find out. No, better send Barber to me.”
When Barber came—a tall, slow man with a sleepy and misleading smile—he repeated his question.
“Danny Miller?” Barber said. “Yes, he has rooms in a house in Amber Street, Pimlico.”
“Oh? Been very quiet lately, hasn’t he?”
“So we thought, but I think that jewel robbery that the Gowbridge people are busy with now is Danny.”
“I thought banks were his line.”
“Yes, but he has a new ‘jane.’ He probably wants money.”
“I see. Do you know his number?”
Barber did.
An hour later, Danny, who was performing a leisurely and painstaking toilet in the room in Amber Street, was informed that Inspector Grant would be very much obliged if he would have a short talk with him at the Yard.
Danny’s pale grey, wary eyes surveyed the plain-clothes man who had brought the message. “If he thinks he has anything on me,” he said, “he has another guess coming.”
The plain-clothes man did not think that the inspector wanted anything but some information from him.
“Oh? And what is the inspector inspecting at the moment?”
But that the plain-clothes man either did not know or would not tell.
“All right,” said Danny. “I’ll be along right now.”
When a portly constable led him into Grant’s presence Danny, who was small and slim, indicated the departing one with a backward jerk of the head and a humorous lift of an eyebrow. “It isn’t often any one troubles to announce me,” he said.
“No,” said Grant, smiling, “your presence is usually announced after your departure, isn’t it?”
“You’re a wit, Inspector. I shouldn’t have thought you’d need any one to jog your brains along. You don’t think you’ve got anything on me, do you?”
“Not at all. I thought you might be of some use to me.”
“You’re certainly flattering.” It was impossible to tell when Miller was serious or otherwise.
“Did you ever