Murder Must Advertise

Chapter XX. Appropriate Exit of an Unskilled Murderer

“Is Lord Peter Wimsey at home?”

The manservant raked his questioner with a swift glance, which took in everything from his hunted eyes to his respectable middle-class boots. Then he said, inclining a respectful head:

“If you will be good enough to take a seat, I will ascertain if his Lordship is at leisure. What name shall I say, sir?”

“Mr. Tallboy.”

“Who, Bunter?” said Wimsey. “Mr. Tallboy? This is a little embarrassing. What does he look like?”

“He looks, my lord, if I may so poetically express myself, as though the Hound of Heaven had got him, so to say, cornered, my lord.”

“You are probably right. I should not be surprised if a hound of hell or so were knocking about the neighborhood as well. Take a squint out of the window, Bunter.”

“Very good, my lord… I can observe nobody, but I retain a distinct impression that, when I opened the door to Mr. Tallboy, I overheard a footstep on the floor below.”

“Very likely. Well, it can’t be helped. Show him in.”

“Very good, my lord.”

The young man came in and Wimsey rose to greet him.

“Good evening, Mr. Tallboy.”

“I have come,” began Tallboy, and then broke off. “Lord Peter-Bredon-for God’s sake, which are you?”

“Both,” said Wimsey, gravely. “Won’t you sit down?”

“Thanks, I’d rather… I don’t want… I came…”

“You’re looking rather rotten. I really think you’d better sit down, and have a spot of something.”

Tallboy’s legs seemed to give way under him, and he sat down without further protest.

“And how,” inquired Wimsey, pouring him out a stiff whisky, “is the Whifflets campaign getting on without me?”

“Whifflets?”

“It doesn’t matter. I only asked to show you that I really was Bredon. Put that straight down. Is that better?”

“Yes. I’m sorry to have made a fool of myself. I came to you-”

“You came to find out how much I knew?”

“Yes-no. I came because I couldn’t stick it out any longer. I came to tell you all about it.”

“Wait a minute. There’s something I must tell you first. It’s all out of my hands now. You understand? As a matter of fact, I don’t think there’s very much you can tell me. The game’s up, old man. I’m sorry-I’m really sorry, because I think you’ve been having a perfectly bloody time. But there it is.”

Tallboy had gone very white. He accepted another drink without protest, and then said:

“Well, I’m rather glad in a way. If it wasn’t for my wife and the kid-oh, God!” He hid his face in his hands, and Wimsey walked over to the window and glanced at the lights of Piccadilly, pale in the summer dusk. “I’ve been a bloody fool,” said Tallboy.

“Most of us are,” said Wimsey. “I’m damned sorry, old chap.”

He came back and stood looking down at him.

“Look here,” he said, “You need not tell me a thing, if you don’t want to. But if you do, I want you to understand that it won’t really make any difference. I mean, if you feel like getting it off your chest, I don’t think it will prejudice matters for you at all.”

“I’d like to tell you,” said Tallboy. “I think you might understand. I realize that it’s all up, anyhow.” He paused. “I say, what put you on to this?”

“That letter of Victor Dean’s. You remember it? The one he threatened to write to Pym. He showed it to you, I fancy.”

“The little swine. Yes, he did. Didn’t he destroy it?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“I see. Well, I’d better begin at the beginning. It all started about two years ago. I was rather hard up and I wanted to get married. I’d been losing money on horses, as well, and things were not too good. I met a man in a restaurant.”

“What restaurant?”

Tallboy gave the name. “He was a middle-aged, ordinary sort of person. I’ve never seen him since. But we got talking about one thing and another, and how tight money was and so on, and I happened to mention where I was working. He seemed to be thinking a bit after that, and asked a good many questions about how advertisements were put together and sent to the papers, and so on, and whether I was in a position to know beforehand what the headlines were going to be. So I said, of course, that there were some accounts I knew all about, such as Nutrax, and others I didn’t. So then he mentioned the Morning Star half-double, and asked when I knew about the headlines of that, and I said, on Tuesday afternoon. Then he suddenly asked me if I could do with an extra thousand a year, and I said, ‘Couldn’t I? Lead me to it.’ So then he came out with his proposal. It sounded pretty innocent. At least, it was quite obviously a dirty trick, but it wasn’t criminal, the way he put it. He said, if I would let him know, every Tuesday, the initial letter of the headline for the following Friday, I should be well paid for it. Of course, I made a fuss about breach of confidence and so on and he raised his terms to twelve hundred. It sounded damned tempting, and I couldn’t see, for the life of me, how it was going to harm the firm in any way. So I said I’d do it, and we fixed up a code-”

“I know all about that,” said Wimsey. “It was very ingenious and simple. I suppose he told you that the address was simply an accommodation address.”

“Yes. Wasn’t it? I went to see the place once; it was a tobacconist’s.”

Wimsey nodded. “I’ve been there. It’s not exactly an accommodation address, in the sense you mean. Didn’t this man give you any reason for this rather remarkable request?”

“Yes, he did, and of course I oughtn’t to have had anything to do with him after that. He said he was fond of having a bit of a bet with some friends of his about one thing and another, and his idea was to bet on the initial letter of each week’s headline-”

“Oh, I see. And he would be betting on a certainty as often as he liked. Plausible; not criminal, but just dirty enough to explain the insistence on secrecy. Was that it?”

“Yes. I fell for it… I was damned hard up… I guessed that there was more to it than that. But I didn’t want to guess. Besides, at first I thought it was all a leg-pull, but I wasn’t risking anything, so I buzzed off the first two code-letters, and at the end of the fortnight I got my fifty pounds. I was heavily in debt, and I used it. After that-well, I hadn’t the courage to chuck it.”

“No, it would be rather hard, I should think.”

“Hard? You don’t know, Bredon-Wimsey-you don’t know what it means to be stuck for money. They don’t pay any too well at Pym’s, and there are heaps of fellows who want to get out and find something better, but they daren’t. Pym’s is safe-they’re kind and decent, and they don’t sack you if they can help it-but you live up to your income and you simply daren’t cut loose. The competition is so keen, and you marry and start paying for your house and furniture, and you must keep up the instalments, and you can’t collect the capital to sit round for a month or two while you look for a new job. You’ve got to keep going, and it breaks your heart and takes all the stuffing out of you. So I went on. Of course, I kept hoping that I might be able to save money and get out of it, but my wife fell ill and one thing and another, and I was spending every penny of my salary and Smith’s money on top of it. And then, somehow, that little devil Dean got hold of it; God knows how!”

“I can tell you that,” said Wimsey, and told him.

“I see. Well, he started to put the screw on. First of all he wanted to go fifty-fifty, and then he demanded more. The devil of it was, that if he split on me, I should lose my job as well as Smith’s money, and things were getting pretty awful. My wife was going to have a baby, and I was behind with the income-tax, and I think it was just because everything seemed too utterly hopeless that I got mixed up with the Vavasour girl. Naturally, that only made things worse in the long run. And then, one day I felt I couldn’t stand it any longer and told Dean I was chucking the whole show and he could do as he damn well pleased. And it wasn’t till then that he told me what it was all about, and pointed out that I might easily get twelve years’ penal servitude for helping run the dope-traffic.”

“Dirty,” said Wimsey, “very dirty. It never occurred to you, I suppose, to turn King’s Evidence and expose the whole system.”

“No; not at first. I was terrified and couldn’t think properly. And even if I’d done that, there’d have been awful trouble. Still, I did think of it after a bit, and told Dean that that was what I would do. And then he informed me that he was going to get his shot in first, and showed me that letter he was sending to Pym. That finished me, and I begged him to hold off for a week or two, while I thought things over. What happened about that letter exactly?”

“His sister found it among his things and sent it on to Pym, and he engaged me, through a friend, to enquire into it. He didn’t know who I was. I thought there probably wasn’t much in it, but I took the job on for the experience.”

Tallboy nodded.

“Well, you’ve had your experience. I hope you haven’t paid as heavily for it as I have. I could see no way out of it-”

He stopped speaking, and glanced at Wimsey.

“Perhaps I’d better tell you the next bit,” said the latter. “You thought it over, and decided that Victor Dean was a wart and a scab, and would be no great loss to the world. One day, Wedderburn came along to your room, chuckling because Mrs. Johnson had caught Ginger Joe with a catapult and had confiscated it and put it in her desk. You knew you were a wonderfully good shot with any sort of missile-the kind of man who could spread-eagle a wicket from the other end of a cricket-field-and you realized how easily a man could be plugged through the skylight as he went down the iron staircase. If the blow didn’t kill him, then the fall might, and it was well worth trying.”

“You really do know all about it, then?”

“Nearly. You pinched the catapult, opening the drawer with Mrs. Johnson’s keys during the lunch-hour, and you did a few practice shots from day to day. You left a pebble there once, you know.”

“I know. Somebody came along, before I could find it.”

“Yes. Well, then, the day came for putting Dean away-a nice bright day, when all the skylights were open. You dodged about the building a good bit, so that nobody should know exactly where you were at any particular minute, and then you went up on the roof. How, by the way, did you ensure that Dean would do down the iron staircase at the right moment? Oh, yes, and the scarab? It was a very good idea to use the scarab, because if anybody found it, they would naturally think it had tumbled out of his pocket as he fell.”

“I’d seen the scarab on Dean’s desk after lunch; I knew he often kept it there. And I had The Times Atlas in my room. I sent Wedderburn down to the Vouchers for something or other, and then I rang up Dean on my telephone. I said I was speaking for Mr. Hankin from the Big Conference Room, and would Mr. Dean please come down about the Crunchlets copy and bring The Times Atlas with him from my room. While he went for it, I pinched the scarab and slipped up on to the roof. I knew it would take him a bit of time to find the atlas, because I’d buried it under a whole heap of files, and I was pretty sure he’d go by the iron staircase, because that was the nearest way from my room to the Conference Room. As a matter of fact, it might have gone wrong at that point because he didn’t come that way at all. I think he must have gone back to his own room for something after getting the atlas, but of course, I don’t know. Anyway, he came along all right and I shot at him through the skylight when he was about four steps down the staircase.”

“How did you know so exactly where to hit him?”

“Curiously enough, I had a young brother who was accidentally killed by being hit in just that place with a golf-ball. But I went and looked it up in a book at the British Museum to make sure. Apparently he broke his neck as well; I hadn’t expected that. I stayed up on the roof till the fuss was over, and then came down quietly by the stairs. I didn’t meet a soul, of course, they were all holding post-mortems and hanging round the corpse. When I knew I’d succeeded, I didn’t care. I was glad. And I tell you this, if I hadn’t been found out, I shouldn’t care now.”

“I can sympathize with that,” said Wimsey.

“They asked me for a shilling for the little beast’s wreath.” Tallboy laughed. “I’d gladly have given twenty shillings, or twenty pounds even… And then you came along… I didn’t suspect anything… till you started to talk about catapults… And then I got badly frightened, and I… and I…”

“We’ll draw a veil over that,” said Wimsey. “You must have got a bit of a shock when you found you’d slugged the wrong man. I suppose that was when you struck a light to look for Pamela Dean’s letter.”

“Yes. I knew her writing-I’d seen it in Dean’s room-and I knew her writing-paper, too. I really came round to find out whether you knew anything or whether you were just drawing a bow at a venture-that’s rather appropriate, isn’t it? Drawing a catapult at a venture would be better. When I saw that letter I felt sure there must be something in it. And Willis, too-he’d told me that you and Pamela Dean were as thick as thieves. I thought the letter might be telling you all about Dean and me. I don’t know quite what I thought, to tell you the truth. Then, when I’d found out my mistake, I got frightened and thought I’d better not try again.”

“I was expecting you. When nothing came of it, I began to think it hadn’t been you at all, but somebody else.”

“Did you know by then that the other thing was me?”

“I didn’t know it was you; you were one of several possibles. But after the Nutrax row and the £50 in notes-”

Tallboy looked up with a shy, fleeting smile.

“You know,” he said. “I was horribly careless and incompetent all through. Those letters-I ought never to have sent them from the office.”

“No; and the catapult. You should have taken the trouble to make your own. A catapult without finger-prints is something very unusual.”

“So that was it. I’m afraid I’ve made an awful mess of everything. Couldn’t even do a simple murder. Wimsey-how much of this will have to come out? Everything, I suppose? Even that Vavasour girl…?”

“Ah!” said Wimsey, without replying to the question. “Don’t talk about the Vavasour girl. I felt a cad about that. You know. I did tell you not to thank me.”

“You did, and it frightened me badly, because you sounded as if you meant it. I knew then that it hadn’t been an accident about the catapult. But I hadn’t an idea who you were till that infernal cricket match.”

“I was careless then. But that damned fellow Simmonds rapping me on the funny-bone got my goat. You didn’t fall for my impressive arrest then?”

“Oh, yes, I did. I believed in it implicitly and put up the most heartfelt thanksgivings. I thought I’d got off.”

“Then what brought you round here tonight?’

“Miss Meteyard. She got hold of me last night. She said she’d believed first of all that you and Bredon were the same person, but now she thought you couldn’t be. But she said that Bredon would be dead sure to split on me by way of currying favour with the police, and I had better get out in time.”

“She said that? Miss Meteyard? Do you mean to say she knew all about it?”

“Not about the Nutrax business. But she knew about Dean.”

“Good God!” Wimsey’s natural conceit received a shattering blow. “How in Heaven’s name did she know?”

“Guessed. Said she’d once seen me look at Dean when I didn’t know she was there-and apparently he had once let out something to her. Apparently she’d always thought there was something odd about his death. She said she’d made up her mind not to interfere either way, but after your arrest she decided you were the bigger crook of the two. She could stand Lord Peter Wimsey doing a proper investigation, but not Mr. Dirty Bredon squealing to save his skin. She’s an odd woman.”

“Very. I’d better forget about all this, hadn’t I? She seems to have taken the whole thing very coolly.”

“She did. You see, she knew Dean. He tried to blackmail her once, about some man or the other. You wouldn’t think it to look at her, would you?” said Tallboy, naively. “There was nothing much in it, she said, but it was the kind of thing old Pym would have been down on like a sledgehammer.”

“And what did she do?” asked Wimsey, fascinated.

‘Told him to publish and be damned. And I wish to God I’d done the same. Wimsey-how much longer is it going to hang on? I’ve been in torment-I’ve been trying to give myself up-I-my wife-why haven’t I been arrested before this?”

“They’ve been waiting,” said Wimsey, thoughtfully, for his mind was pursuing two trains of thought at the same time. “You see, you aren’t really as important as this dope-gang. Once you were arrested, they would stop their little game, and we didn’t want them to stop. I’m afraid you’re being the tethered kid, left there to trap the tigers.”

All this time, his ear was alert to catch the tinkle of the telephone, which would tell him that the raid on the Stag at Bay had succeeded. Once the arrests were made and the gang broken, the sinister watcher in the street would be harmless. He would fly for his life and Tallboy would be able to go home to whatever awaited him there. But if he were to go now-

“When?” Tallboy was saying urgently, “when?”

“Tonight.”

“Wimsey-you’ve been frightfully decent to me-tell me-there’s no way out? It isn’t myself, exactly, but my wife and the kid. Pointed at all their lives. It’s damnable. You couldn’t give me twenty-four hours?”

“You would not pass the ports.”

“If I were alone I’d give myself up. I would, honestly.”

“There is an alternative.”

“I know. I’ve thought about that. I suppose that’s-” he stopped and laughed suddenly-“that’s the public school way out of it. I-yes-all right. They’ll hardly make a headline of it, though, will they? ‘Suicide of Old Dumbletonian’ wouldn’t have much news-value. Never mind, damn it! We’ll show ’ em that Dumbleton can achieve the Eton touch. Why not?”

“Good man!” said Wimsey. “Have a drink. Here’s luck!”

He emptied his glass and stood up.

“Listen!” he said. “I think there is one other way out. It won’t help you, but it may make all the difference to your wife and your child.”

“How?” said Tallboy, eagerly.

“They need never know anything about all this. Nothing. Nobody need ever know anything, if you do as I tell you.”

“My God, Wimsey! What do you mean? Tell me quickly. I’ll do anything.”

“It won’t save you.”

‘That doesn’t matter. Tell me.”

“Go home now,” said Wimsey. “Go on foot, and not too fast. And don’t look behind you.”

Tallboy stared at him; the blood drained away from his face, leaving even his lips as white as paper.

“I think I understand… Very well.”

“Quickly, then,” said Wimsey. He held out his hand.

“Good-night, and good luck.”

“Thank you. Good-night.”

From the window, Wimsey watched him come out into Piccadilly, and walk quickly away towards Hyde Park Corner. He saw the shadow slip from a neighbouring doorway and follow him.

“-and from thence to the place of execution… and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul.”

Half an hour later, the telephone rang.

“Bagged the whole crew,” said Parker’s cheerful voice. “We let the stuff go up to town. What do you think it went as? Traveller’s samples-one of those closed cars with blinds all round.”

“That’s where they made it into packets, then.”

“Yes. We watched our man into the Stag; then we pulled in the motor-boat and the car. Then we kept our eye on the pub. and let the birds hop out into our arms, one after the other. It went off beautifully. No hitch at all. Oh, and by the way-their code-word. We ought to have thought of that. It was just anything to do with Nutrax. Some of them had the Morning Star, showing the ad., and some of them just mentioned Nutrax for Nerves. One chap had a bottle of the stuff in his pocket, another had it written on a shopping-list and so on. And one frightfully ingenious chap was bursting with information about some new tracks for greyhound racing. Simple as pie, wasn’t it?”

“That explains Hector Puncheon.”

“Hector-? Oh, the newspaper fellow. Yes. He must have had his copy of the Morning Star with him. We’ve got old Cummings, too, of course. He turns out to be the actual top-dog of the whole show, and as soon as we collared him he coughed up the whole story, the mangy little blighter. That doctor fellow who shoved Mountjoy under the train is in it-we’ve got definite information about him, and we’ve also got our hands on Mountjoy’s loot. He’s got a safe-deposit somewhere, and I think I know where to find the key. He kept a woman in Maida Vale, bless his heart. The whole thing is most satisfactory. Now we have only got to rake in your murderer chap, what’s his name, and everything in the garden will be lovely.”

“Lovely,” said Wimsey, with a spice of bitterness in his tone, “simply lovely.”

“What’s the matter? You sound a bit peeved. Hang on a minute till I’ve cleared up here and we’ll go round somewhere and celebrate.”

“Not tonight,” said Wimsey. “I don’t feel quite like celebrating.”