The Rogues’ Syndicate: The Maelstrom

He looked a commonplace business man; he was a commonplace business man with many of the traits of his class. He hated the unexpected, and protested that he loathed with a fierce abomination those cases in which he was engaged that meant a departure from the ordinary routine. But yet in those cases when they arose, there was no man more capable of dealing with their subtle intricacies than he. He had the faculty of adjusting himself to an emergency, of ruthlessly destroying superfluous red-tape that, in twenty-three years, had carried him to within one rung of the top of the ladder.

It was shortly before midnight. He had returned from a remote suburb, where, with a corps of assistants, he had made a neat, entirely successful raid upon certain pickpockets who had been too well acquainted with the resident detectives to give them any chance. It had been a triumph of organisation and vigilance, and Menzies had gone back to headquarters to arrange that the histories of the birds he had caged should be ready before the police-court proceedings in the morning. He was struggling into his overcoat, when he was summoned to the telephone. He picked up the receiver irritably.

‘Hallo!’ he said.

A musical buzz answered him, and Menzies allowed himself an expression that should be foreign to a churchwarden. Then, far away and faint, he caught a voice.

‘That Mr Menzies?’

‘Yes,’ he answered impatiently. ‘Speak up! Who is it? What do you want?’

A prolonged buzz reached him. He was conscious of someone speaking, but only intermittently could he hear what was said.

‘Pretty done up—buz-z—come at once—buz-z—at thirtyfour—buz-z—Gardens, Kensington—buz-z.’

‘Number, please?’ said a new and distinct voice.

‘Blast!’ said Menzies simply, and put down the telephone.

This addiction to forcible language on occasions of annoyance was a constant regret to him in his more reflective moments.

Jimmy Hallett’s first impression on awakening had been that someone was swinging a sledge-hammer irregularly on to his temple. He lay still for a little, wondering why it should be. By-and-by he sat up, and tried to piece together the events of the evening. His head ached intolerably, and he found consecutive thought painful.

It was totally dark, and he could make out nothing of where he was. Then the whole thing flashed across his mind, and he staggered rather uncertainly to his feet, and, steadying himself against the wall, struck a match.

The feeble flicker showed him a blue-papered apartment, furnished as a dining-room. He had been lying just within the room, and now he tried the door. It refused to answer to his tug, and he realised how weak he was as he all but toppled backwards. The match went out, and he struck another.

Then it was that he noticed an electric-switch, and pulled it over. A blaze of light flooded the room, and he tottered to one of the Jacobean armchairs at the head of the table. The sledge-hammer was still swinging at his temples, and things swayed dizzily to and fro before his eyes. He made a resolute effort to pull himself together. His eyes roved over the room, and he noticed a pedestal telephone on a small table in the corner furthest from him.

‘What was the name of the chap Pinkerton gave me an introduction to?’ he muttered.

And drawing a bundle of papers from his breast-pocket, he sorted them till the envelope he needed lay at the top.

CHIEF DETECTIVE-INSPECTOR WEIR MENZIES,

New Scotland Yard, S.W.

Cautiously the man began to move across the hearthrug towards the telephone. Four shambling steps he took, and then something that had been hidden by the table tripped him, and he sprawled on all fours. He gave a little gasp of horror, and steadying himself on his knees, held his hands a foot in front of his face, gazing at them stupidly. They were wet—wet with blood, and the thing that had tripped him was the body of a man.

It is one thing to be brought in association at second-hand—so to speak—with a crime, as are doctors, journalists, and detectives, but quite another to be so closely identified with it as to be an actor in the drama. Hallett had seen violence and even death in his time, but never had cold horror so thrilled him as it did now. In ordinary conditions, with nerves previously unshaken, he would have been little more moved than a spectator at a play—perhaps even less so, for real life tragedies are rarely well stage-managed.

Circumstances, however, had conspired to bring home to him the last touch of terror. The sudden assault, the locked room, and now the dead man, had strung his nerves to a fine edge. He could have shrieked aloud.

He wiped his hand on his handkerchief, but the stain still remained. Carefully he stepped over the body, and made his way to the telephone. His imagination was beginning to work, and he recalled cases where perfectly innocent men had been the victims of circumstantial evidence that had convicted them of hideous crimes. The story of the cheques thrust upon him in the fog seemed to him ridiculously unconvincing. Had his mind been less overwrought, had he been able to take a calmer survey of the matter, he would probably never have given his own position a thought. He fingered the telephone-book clumsily, and his mind reverted to the coincidence that he should hold a letter of introduction to one of the senior detectives of Scotland Yard.

‘Queer that it should come in so handy,’ he grinned feebly; and then weakness overcame him.

He gave a number to the exchange, and hours seemed to elapse before he got on to Menzies. In a quick rush of words he made himself known to the detective, and recited the happenings of the evening. He was not to know that barely a dozen disconnected words had reached the detective. His strength was waning, and he wanted Menzies to know everything before he gave way. As he finished, the receiver dropped listlessly from his hand, and for the first time in his life Jimmy Hallett fainted.

At the other end of the wire Weir Menzies was left with one of those harassing little problems that he hated. It was an irregular hour—an hour when he had reckoned on being safely on his way home. For all the insistence of the voice at the telephone, it might be quite a trivial affair. Menzies did not like losing sleep for trivialities. People in trouble are apt to take distorted views of the importance of their difficulties. That is why private inquiry agencies flourish.

Menzies had once been asked to investigate a highly important West End robbery at the house of a duke. The duchess herself had demanded the services of ‘the ablest and most experienced detective possible’, and had refused to give details to anyone else. Menzies went—to discover that a pet Pomeranian had strayed.

‘Madam,’ he had remarked after a frigid five minutes, ‘at one period I should have been delighted to try to find your dog. I was then paid for such matters. I am now paid for other things. There are many men as competent as I for the investigation to which you attach such importance. I regret that it would be a breach of duty for me to undertake it. I am merely a detective, but the salary I am paid for the use of my time would be out of proportion to the result, even if successful. I must refer your Grace to the local police-station. Good-evening.’

Since then he had been very cautious of ambiguous messages. He thought of his well-aired bed, and sighed. He was almost tempted to turn over the affair to the local division of police to deal with the case, or leave it to the night staff of the Criminal Investigation Department. The fact that he had been appealed to by name ultimately swayed him.

In two minutes he had set in motion the machinery which would reveal the point from which the voice originated. It needed no complex reasoning, no swift flash of inspiration. He broke up a game of dominoes, and emerged with two men—one to extract from the Kensington directory a list of thoroughfares ending in ‘gardens’, and the names of persons who resided at the respective thirty-fours; and the other with a telephone directory to eliminate all those not on the telephone.

‘And get a move on,’ he added. ‘I don’t want to hang about all night. Ask Riddle to come up and ’phone ’em through to the local people as you check ’em off. Tell ’em they’ll oblige me by sending out as many spare men as they’ve got to ask at each address if anyone rang me up.’

He adjusted his coat with precision, lit a cigar, and sauntered over to the Underground station opposite. Barring accidents, the address would be ready for him by the time he reached Kensington.

His anticipation was not disappointed. One of the advantages which the Criminal Investigation Department has over the individual amateur detective, beloved by Magersfontein Road, is the co-operation at need of a practically unlimited number of trained men. True, the detective staff at Kensington had long since gone home, since there was no extraordinary business to detain them, but, in this case, a dozen ordinary constables served as well. Nine of them had returned when Menzies walked in. There was only one who interested him. He had reported that he could get no reply from Linstone Terrace Gardens.

‘Did you find who lives there?’ questioned the chief-inspector.

The reply was prompt.

‘Yes, sir. Old gentleman named Greye-Stratton. He lives alone. Had two servants until last week, when he sacked ’em both, because he said they had been bribed to poison him.’

‘Ah!’ Menzies nodded approval. ‘You’ve got your wits about you, my lad. Where did you get all this from?’

The constable flushed with pleasure. He was young enough in the force to appreciate a compliment from the veteran detective.

‘The servant next door, sir,’ he answered.

‘That will do. Thank you.’ Menzies rubbed his hands with satisfaction as he turned to the uniformed inspector by his side. ‘It begins to sound like a case,’ he muttered. All his petulance had gone. When it came to the point, the man was an enthusiast in his profession. ‘I’ll get you to come along with me, inspector. It sounds uncommonly like a case.’

CHAPTER III

THE eminent Tooting churchwarden, perched on the stalwart shoulders of his uniformed colleague, wriggled his way on to the roof of the porch with an agility that was justifiable neither to his years nor his weight. He was taking a certain amount of risk, if there were no serious emergency within the place, for even a chief detective-inspector may not break into a house without justification.

He worked for a while with a big clasp knife on the little landing window, with a skill that would have done credit to many of the professional practitioners who had passed through his hands, and at last threw up the sash and squeezed himself inside.

‘Wonder if I’m making a blamed fool of myself, after all?’ he muttered with some misgiving, as he struck a match and softly picked his way along the corridor.

He was peculiarly sensitive to ridicule, and he knew the chaff that would descend on his head if it leaked out that he had elaborately picked out and broken into a house empty for quite a plausible reason.

There would be no way of keeping the matter dark, for every incident of the night would have to be embodied in reports. Every detective in London is bound to keep an official diary of his work, however free a hand he is given in his methods.

He burned only one match to enable him to get his bearings. Noiselessly he descended the stairs into the hall, and his quick eye observed a splash of light across the floor. It came from under a doorway. He turned the handle and pushed. The door resisted.

‘Locked,’ he murmured, and knocked thunderously. ‘Hallo in there! Anyone about?’

Only the muffled reverberation of his own voice came back to him. Frowning, he strode to the doorway, slipped back the Yale lock, and admitted the uniformed man.

‘If I had nerves, Mr Hawksley, this place would give me the jumps,’ he observed. ‘There’s something wrong here, and I guess it’s in that room. See, there’s a light on.’

‘That’s queer,’ commented the other. ‘It could only just have been switched on. I didn’t notice it outside.’

‘Shutters,’ said Menzies. ‘Shutters and drawn curtains. Come on. I’m going to see what’s behind that door.’

There was no finesse about forcible entry this time. Half a dozen well directed kicks shattered the hasp of the lock and sent the door flying open. Menzies and his companion moved inside.

For a moment the blaze of the electric light dazzled them. Menzies shaded his eye with his hand. Then his glance fell from the overturned telephone down to the prostrate figure of Jimmie Hallett. He was across the room in an instant, and made swift examination of the prostrate man.

‘Knocked clean out of time,’ he diagnosed. ‘Help me get him on the couch. Hallo, there’s another of ’em.’ He had observed the body on the hearthrug.

He bent over the murdered man in close scrutiny, but without touching the corpse. His lips pursed into a whistle as he marked the bullet wound that showed among the grey locks at the back of the head. He was startled, but scarcely shocked.

He straightened himself up.

‘This looks a queer business altogether, Hawksley. You’d better get back to the station. Send up the divisional surgeon and ’phone through to the Yard. They’d better let Sir Hilary Thornton and Mr Foyle know. I shall need Congreve and a couple of men, and you’d better send for Carless and as many of his staff as can be reached quickly. They’ll know the district.’

The faculty of quick organisation is one of the prime qualities of a chief of detectives, and Menzies was at no loss. The first steps in the investigation of most great mysteries are automatic—the determination of the facts. It is a kind of circle from facts to possibilities, from possibilities to probabilities, and from probabilities to facts. But the original facts must be settled first, and for any person to fix them single-handed is an impossibility.

There are certain aspects that must be settled by specialists; there may be a thousand and one inquiries to make in rapid succession. Menzies had no idea of playing a lone hand.

For a couple of hours a steady stream of officials and others descended on the house, and Linstone Terrace Gardens became the centre of such police activity as it had never dreamed would affect its respectability and retirement.

Men worked from house to house, interviewing servants, masters, mistresses, gleaning such facts as could be obtained of the lonely, eccentric old man, his habits, his visitors, friends, and relations. Inside the house the divisional surgeon had attended to Hallett—‘No serious injury; may come round at any moment’—and once certain the other was dead waited till flash-light photographs of the room had been taken from various angles examining the body. Draughtsmen made plans to scale of the room and every article in it. A finger-print expert peered round searchingly, scattering black or grey powder on things which the murderer might have touched. In the topmost rooms, Congreve, Menzies’ right-hand man, had begun a hasty search of the house, that would become more minute the next day.

Menzies had occupied a morning-room at the back of the house, and was deep in consultation with Sir Hilary Thornton, the grizzled assistant-commissioner, and Heldon Foyle, the square-shouldered, well-groomed Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department. There was little likeness between the three men, unless it lay in a certain hint of humour in the eyes and a firmness of the mouth. A detective without a sense of humour is lost.

Now and again Menzies broke off the conversation to issue an order or receive a report. Thornton observed for the first time the characters in which he made a few notes on the back of an envelope.

‘I didn’t know you knew Greek, Menzies,’ he remarked.

The chief-inspector twiddled his pencil awkwardly.

‘I use it now and again, Sir Hilary. You see, if I should lose my notes by any chance, it’s odds against the finder reading them. I used to do them in shorthand, but I gave it up. There are too many people who understand it. Yes, what is it, Johnson?’

The man who had entered held out a paper.

‘Addresses of the cook and housemaid, sir. One lives at Potter’s Bar, the other at Walthamstow.’

‘Have them fetched by taxi,’ ordered Menzies curtly.

‘Couldn’t you have statements taken from them?’ asked Sir Hilary, mildly. ‘It’s rather a drag for women in the middle of the night.’

Menzies smoothed his moustache.

‘We don’t know what may develop here, sir. We may want to put some questions quickly.’

While Menzies was thus straining every resource which a great organisation possessed to gather together into his hands the ends of the case, Jimmie Hallett awoke once more. The throbbing in his head had gone, and he lay for a while with closed eyes, listlessly conscious of the mutter of low voices in the room.

He sat up, and at once a dapper little man was by his side.

‘Ah, you’ve woke up. Feeling better? That’s right. Drink this. We want you to pull yourself together for a little while.’

‘Thanks. I’m all right,’ returned Hallett, mechanically. He drank something which the other held out to him in a tumbler, and a rush of new life thrilled through him. ‘Are you Mr Menzies?’

‘No; I’m the police divisional surgeon. Mr Menzies is in the next room. Think you’re up to telling him what has happened? He’s anxious to know the meaning of all this.’

‘So am I,’ said Hallett grimly, and staggered to his feet. ‘Just a trifle groggy,’ he added, as he swayed, and the little doctor thrust a supporting shoulder under his arm.

The three in the next room rose as Hallett was ushered in. It was Foyle who sprang to assist Hallett, and lifted him bodily on to the settee, which Menzies pushed under the chandelier. The doctor went out.

‘Quite comfortable, eh?’ asked Foyle. ‘Let me make that cushion a bit easier for you. Now you’re better. We won’t worry you at present more than we can help, will we, Menzies?’

The three officials, for all that their solicitude seemed solely for the comfort of the young man, were studying him keenly and unobtrusively. Already they had talked him over, but any suspicions that they might have held were quite indefinite. At the opening stage of a murder investigation everyone is suspected. In that lies the difference between murder and professional crime. A burglary, a forgery, is usually committed for one fixed motive, by a fixed class of criminal, and the search is narrowed from the start. A millionaire does not pick pockets, but he is quite as likely as anyone else to kill an enemy. In a murder case no detective would say positively that any person is innocent until he is absolutely certain of the guilt of the real murderer.

Hallett, whose brain was beginning to work swiftly, held out his hand to the chief-inspector.

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Menzies. I’ve got a letter of introduction to you from Pinkerton. That’s how I came to ring you up. My name’s Hallett.’

Menzies shook hands.

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Hallett. This is Sir Hilary Thornton—Mr Heldon Foyle.’

‘And now,’ said Jimmie decisively, when the introductions were done, ‘do you people think I killed this man, Greye-Stratton?’

The possibility had been in the minds of everyone in the room, but they were taken aback by the abruptness of the question. Weir Menzies laughed as though the idea were preposterous.

‘Not unless you’ve swallowed the pistol, Mr Hallett. We’ve found no weapon of any kind. You were locked in, you know. Now tell us all about it. I couldn’t hear a word you said on the telephone.’

They all listened thoughtfully until he had finished. Thornton elevated his eyebrows in question at his two companions as the recital closed.

‘Where are those cheques?’ asked Foyle. ‘They may help us.’

Hallett patted his pockets in rapid succession.

‘They’re gone!’ he exclaimed. ‘They must have been taken off me when I was knocked out.’

‘H’m!’ said Foyle reflectively. ‘Can you make anything of it, Menzies?’

The chief-inspector was gnawing his moustache—a sure sign of bewilderment with him. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘There’s little enough to take hold of,’ he returned. ‘Could you recognise any of the people you saw again, Mr Hallett—the girl, the man who was running after her, or the chap in the house?’

‘I haven’t the vaguest idea of what the face of either of the men was like,’ said Hallett.

‘But the woman—the girl?’ persisted Menzies.

Hallett hesitated.

‘I—I think it possible that I might,’ he admitted. Then an impulse took him. ‘But I’m sure she’s not the sort of person to be mixed up in—in—’

The three detectives smiled openly.

‘In this kind of shemozzle, you were going to say,’ finished Menzies, ‘There’s only one flaw in your reasoning. She is.’

Wrung as dry of information as a squeezed sponge of water, Hallett was permitted to depart. The courtesy of Sir Hilary Thornton supplied him with a motor-car back to his hotel; the forethought of Menzies provided him with an escort in the shape of a detective-sergeant. Hallett would have been less pleased had he known that the before-mentioned detective-sergeant was to be relieved from all other duties for the specific purpose of keeping an eye upon him. Weir Menzies was always cautious, and, though his own impression of the young man had been favourable enough, he was taking no chances.

All through that night Weir Menzies drove his allies hither and thither in the attempt to bring the end of the ravelled threads of the mystery into his hand. No one knew better than he the importance of the first hot burst of pursuit. An hour in the initial stages of an investigation is worth a week later on. The irritation at being kept out of bed had vanished now that he was on the warpath. He could think without regret of a committee meeting of the church restoration fund the following day, from which he would be forced to absent himself.

Scores of messages had been sent over the private telegraph and telephone system of the Metropolitan Police before, at seven o’clock in the morning, he took a respite. It was to an all-night Turkish bath in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly Circus that he made his way.

At nine o’clock, spruce and ruddy, showing no trace of his all-night work beyond a slight tightening of the brows, he was in Heldon Foyle’s office. The superintendent nodded as he came in.

‘You look fine, Menzies. Got your man?’

The other made a motion of his hand deprecatory of badinage.

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got a line on him.’

Foyle sat up and adjusted his pince-nez.

‘The deuce you have! Who is he?’

‘His name is Errol,’ said Menzies. ‘He’s a prodigal stepson of Greye-Stratton, and was pushed out of the country seven years ago.’

‘Menzies,’ said Foyle, laying down his pince-nez, ‘you ought to be in a book.’

CHAPTER IV

WEIR MENZIES fitted his form to the big armchair that flanked Foyle’s desk, and dragged a handful of reports, secured by an elastic band, from his breast-pocket. Foyle snipped the end off a cigar, and, leaning back, puffed out a blue cloud of smoke.

‘It’s been quick work, though I say it myself,’ observed Menzies complacently, ‘especially considering it’s a night job. This night work is poisonous—no way of getting about, no certainty of finding the witnesses you want, everyone angry at being dragged out of bed, and all your people knocked up the next day when they ought to be fresh.’

Foyle flicked the ash from his cigar, and a mischievous glimmer shone in his blue eyes.

‘It’s tough luck, Menzies. I know you hate this kind of thing. Now, there’s Forrester—he’s got nothing in particular on. If you like—’

Menzies’ heavy eyebrows contracted as he scrutinised his chief suspiciously. Untold gold would not have induced him to relax willingly his hold of a case that interested him.