The Toff and the Fallen Angels

CHAPTER 6

Missing—Or Dead?

ROLLISON placed his hand on the arms of his chair and levered himself to his feet. He had another mental image of Angela, and he felt sick. Seeing his expression, Lumley and Grice exchanged glances again, and Grice spoke in an almost long-suffering way.

“What have you been up to? What haven’t you told us, yet?”

“Didn’t you once meet my niece—Angela Pax-Elliott?” asked Rollison.

“The pretty, roly-poly girl?”

“You’ve met her,” said Rollison.

“She plagued me for an hour, asking if there were any short cuts to becoming a woman member of the C.I.D.,” said Grice. “What—my God! Is she a resident there?” Grice was filled with great alarm, and with surprise if not astonishment. After a brief pause, he went on : “And if she was in trouble, why didn’t she go to Lady Gloria at the Marigold Club?”

“In your cynical sense, she is not in trouble,” Rollison replied. “She is satisfying her craving to play detective.”

“Well I’m damned!” exclaimed Lumley.

“Your idea?” Grice asked Rollison, grimly.

“Yes,” admitted Rollison. He moved to the window and looked down into the open space where the cars were parked—and he saw an ambulance move off. This was the one carrying the body, of course: what an end for a man like Webberson. “Yes’ he repeated, “it was my idea, and at the time it seemed a good one. At least I arranged for Angela to telephone me once a day, and immediately if there is any sign of emergency.”

“Did you speak to her tonight?”

“Yes—and she told me Webberson hadn’t been to his normal classes at the hostel, that really sparked me off. Bill—have you any reason to suspect other residents are in danger?”

“No,” said Grice. “But I wouldn’t like a daughter of any friend of mine to be there.”

“Have you any reason to believe that Naomi Smith knows that the girls are missing?”

“She reported them missing,” answered Grice. After a moment, watching the emotions chasing one another over Rollison’s face, he went on : “So she didn’t tell you that.”

“She just said they’d left,” answered Rollison.

It wasn’t really a lie, but how could Naomi Smith have any doubt that by keeping this grave aspect of the problem back, she had been deceiving him? He could see and hear her in his mind’s eye : that beautiful voice and those lovely eyes and the earnestness of pleading. Why hadn’t she told the whole truth? Hadn’t she realised that if she had even hinted that the two girls were missing, he would have been more likely to agree to help? And why hadn’t she told him when she had learned that Angela was going to take up residence—good God! How could any woman with decent instincts allow such a thing to happen?

“Getting angry?” inquired Grice, mildly.

“Simmering,” Rollison said. “But as all good policemen say, first get all the facts. You won’t raise any objection to my looking for the facts, will you?”

“No—if you undertake to pass on any you find,” said Grice.

“I’ll pass them on,” promised Rollison grimly. He was seething rather than simmering, but at the back of his mind hovered the realisation that he was probably enraged as much because Naomi Smith had fooled him as because of the danger to Angela.

He wasn’t really troubled for Angela : he could go and fetch her away now.

“One thing,” he went on.

“Yes?” asked Grice.

“What makes you think one of the missing girls is dead?” asked Rollison.

“A body was taken out of the Thames last night,” answered Grice. “It had been there for ten or fourteen days and recognition under these circumstances isn’t easy. But measurements match up with a Winifred de Vaux—D-E capital V-A-U-X,” he spelt almost mechanically. “A dentist will check her teeth tomorrow morning, and we shall then know for certain.”

“And the cause of death?” asked Rollison.

“A savage blow on the back of the head,” answered Grice.

Rollison didn’t need to say : like Webberson. He clenched his teeth, returned Grice’s even gaze, and then asked:

“Do you need me any more just now?”

“No,” answered Grice. “Unless you have the slightest idea why Webberson was killed, or know of anyone who might have owed him a grudge.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Rollison answered him. “All right, Roily,” said Grice. “We’ll keep in touch.” His attitude, now, could not have been friendlier. Rollison went out, aware that he was being watched by photographers and fingerprint men and the other detectives who were busy and intent. The lift was at this floor, a uniformed man opened it for him.

“Goodnight, sir.”

“Goodnight.”

It was quite dark, now—a quarter-past-eleven. How much could happen in an hour and a half. He remembered the Press would be outside but he hadn’t prepared for the mass of them, twenty at least, crowded into the foyer of Packham House. The moment he appeared halfa-dozen flash-lights dazzled him, and others flashed as he closed his eyes to try to get rid of the dots of vivid white light in front of him.

“Did you find the body, Mr. Rollison?”

“Is this something new, or a development in a case you’re already working on, Toff?”

“Do the police know who it was?”

“How was he killed?”

They flung question after question at him, and he answered most and parried some, unaffected by insistence. The sum total of what he told them was the sum total of what he had told Chief Inspector Lumley, and the police statement would certainly coincide. After five minutes and a breathless : “Shan’t keep you two minutes Mr. Rollison!” from a man who had just arrived with a television camera, Rollison pushed his way through the crowd, his expression unsmiling, though amiable enough.

He took his car out of its parking place, and switched on the lights, then turned into St. John’s Wood Road, then into Finchley Road. A few people passed, walking. Two buses lumbered by, while private cars sped back and forth, their shiny roofs reflecting the light from the tall street lamps. He turned left, towards Swiss Cottage, and away from central London, and saw a motor-cyclist behind him, one who had been waiting near the block of flats. Thinking nothing of it, at first, he continued up the hill, towards the Pond.

The motor-cyclist still followed him.

He made a complete circuit of the block, and then headed back towards central London. In ten or at most twenty minutes he could be at Smith Hall. He drove slowly, and once past the brooding walls of Lord’s cricket ground turned into a side street.

Rollison pulled into the side of the road, hesitated at the wheel, then put on the offside parking light, and got out. He was opposite a block of flats, and walked straight in. There was a hall, a staircase in the middle, a door marked EXIT on the right. He slipped behind this door but kept it ajar; and waited.

He heard footsteps, very light, almost stealthy.

A small figure appeared, topped by a white crash helmet, face half obliterated by goggles. Walking softly, this person crept to the stairs, looking to right and left. Rollison went out by the side door and strode quickly round to the front, re-entering the hall. The motorcyclist was standing near the stairs, obviously at a loss. Rollison went straight up to him, shot out his hands and gripped him by the collar.

“Looking for me?” he demanded.

He was prepared for a kick, prepared for a twist or a wriggle, but not prepared for the startled gasp and the sudden, terrified stillness, And when he pulled the crash helmet off he was not prepared for the lovely cascade of fair and rippling hair.

“What—what are you doing?” the motor-cyclist gasped. “Le—let me go!”

“Soon,” said Rollison. “When you’ve taken off those goggles and let me have a good look at you.”

The girl put her hands up to her head and eased the goggles off slowly. The light was too dim for him to see the colour of her eyes but he could see she was young, perhaps no older than Angela. She was trembling a little but she did not try to dodge or run away, only stared at him in defiance.

“Why did you follow me?” he demanded.

“I—I didn’t know you’d spotted me.”

“A blind man would have spotted you. Who are you?”

“I’m—I’m Gwendoline Fell,” she stated.

The name was vaguely familiar but did not immediately ring a bell. He let her go.

“You’re lucky I didn’t break your neck, Gwendoline Fell.”

As he repeated the name, he realised why it was familiar. She had a column in the Daily Globe, one of the most popular of the dailies, and also had a reputation for scathing comment and vitriolic personal attacks.

The realisation of her identity made him laugh.

“So you’ve realised who I am,” she said in a tart voice.

“Yes,” he said. “I can’t wait to read your column tomorrow. Is the Globe short of crime reporters, or did you just happen along?”

“I never ‘happen along’,” stated Gwendoline Fell, dryly.

“So you went with malice aforethought.”

“Will you tell me why?” asked Rollison.

At the back of his mind there was the thought that she might have been puzzled by Webberson’s disappearance, even that she might have some knowledge of the trouble at Smith Hall. She was just the columnist to sniff out any kind of scandal, and if there was one at Smith Hall she would make a righteous best of it, for she was a great champion of the young and the poor and the defenceless. “Yes, I’ll tell you why,” she said. “I think you’re a parasite.”

“You think I’m a what?” asked Rollison, and stared open-mouthed.

“You see, you can hardly believe your ears,” she said sardonically. “You’re so accustomed to your special kind of inherited divine right that when anyone tells you the truth about yourself, you don’t even recognise it. You are a parasite, Mr. Rollison. You feed off the lives of others. You put on a cloak of altruism but in fact you’re a—”

“Parasite,” interjected Rollison, recovering.

“That time I was going to say, an anachronism.”

“Oh. Out of date, you mean.”

“You know exactly what I mean. And when I heard you were at Packham House I couldn’t get there soon enough. I’ve been waiting for a chance to put you under the searchlights. You have no right to usurp the duties of the police, for your own self-aggrandisement. Tell me—have you ever done a full day’s work in your life?”

“Er—” began Rollison.

“Have you?”

“Er—”

“You know perfectly well that you haven’t. You live off inherited money, you dabble in a few good deeds and make a few donations to good causes, you employ a fully able-bodied man who has pampered you all your life. You are a—”

“I cooked my own supper tonight,” stated Rollison, defensively.

“As I was about to say, you are an anachronism and a parasite in today’s world.”

“Until you told me, I didn’t realise it,” Rollison assured her. “Tell me, do you always interview your victims this way? And do you always gather your evidence from hearsay and unreliable sources and then add a few fancy touches and consider the subject damned?”

“In the two years since I left university,” said Gwendoline Fell, with great deliberatio, “I have done more work and helped society—people, human beings—more than you have done in your whole life. And you must be in the middle forties.”

“Do you know,” said Rollison. “You’ve actually got one thing right. Don’t forget to include that in your column, will you?”

“You no doubt think that’s funny,” said Gwendoline, in an acid voice. “I don’t. Any man who seizes upon the murder of a friend to help him win more cheap popularity with people whom he has fooled for years is incapable of amusing me. I—what are you doing?”

“Proving how funny I can be,” said Rollison, con-trolling his sudden anger. He slid one arm at the back of Gwendoline’s waist, and bent her double over his knee: and then six times in slow, deliberate succession, he spanked her with the flat of his hand—hard enough, he knew, to sting but not hard enough to hurt. She was taken so much by surprise that not until the fifth spank did she begin to wriggle, and at the sixth he picked her up and placed her on her feet again.

“But that in your column, Gwendoline,” he said. “And if you ever sneak up on me again, I’ll repeat the dose!

“My God!” she breathed in a voice choked with rage, “I’ll make you pay for this. I’ll make you pay!”

She spun round and almost ran out of the foyer, and he stood staring after her, smiling, half-glad that he had acted so; but already half-sorry.

Then it came to his mind that for ten minutes or more she had made him forget all about Angela.

At least she hadn’t been able to follow him to Smith Hall.