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Pointer stared at the pin marks. To him they were a very odd detail, one that was quite out of keeping with the rest of the crime as known so far. Primarily they showed that the man who had been murdered was evidently not hard of hearing, since they spelled care that no snap of the catch could be heard. But they meant more than that. Those pin-pricks meant a quick job. Just as they showed that probably there had been no sounds—music, talk— during which the cautious opening of the door could pass unnoticed. It looked as though the victim had been alone. But alone or not, Etcheverrey must be always on the alert, ever suspicious. A man wanted by the police of all the world, a man with a price on his head, a man who had never yet been caught, would not have let any door pass uninvestigated, let alone one that stood half in shadow. Incongruous in any case, the tape seemed to Pointer doubly so in connection with the much sought-for, wily Basque.
It came to this, he thought, if Etcheverrey had been the man in the flat, he could have taken sufficient time to silence that door in some better way than by means of a hastily fastened-on strip. If the man was not Etcheverrey, then the anarchist would have noticed it.
A search found a bath mat in a hall cupboard. Where, apparently, a loop of tape had been sewn on, now only an end dangled; a roughly cut-off end, cut with a knife, not scissors. The piece that remained was the width indicated by tie pin pricks. So the murderer had not come provided with tape. He found a few drawing-pins in a drawer which left just such marks as those on the door. Pointer again tested each object in the room. But still only the carpet, the chair, the table edge, and the lamp-shade showed marks of blood. On none of these, moreover, had there been any effort to clean away the marks. As for the crumpled papers in the waste-paper basket, of which, each promising the other a photographic copy, Tindall had kept one, and Pointer one, the Chief Inspector found a few more sheets in a drawer. It looked as though they had been left there by Marshall. The writing had been done with a pointed fountain pen, which, like the ink—Pointer intended to have the latter tested at the Yard—seemed of quite an ordinary kind.
The lock expert arrived from the Yard at this point. A close scrutiny of the Yale lock now taken off the front door told him that though it was old and badly in need of new springs—failing entirely to catch now and then—yet it had not been forced, or picked, or opened with any other but its own rightful key. The house agent had said that he had handed Marshall's two keys to Monsieur Tourcoin.
The ambulance arrived and the body was taken away. Pointer went back to the bath and scrutinised the bottom. With what had those two deep gashes been made? The flat had no kitchen. No suitable knife or weapon hung on any of its walls.
CHAPTER 2
POINTER strolled down all the stairs and let himself up and down in all the lifts. Finally he stopped beside a couple of workmen who were doing some plastering on the ground floor, near the foot of the stairs that led up to Number Fourteen. He had noticed the bags and the tools when he arrived just now.
"I borrowed some of your plaster last night," he said pleasantly, "how much do I owe you for what I used?"
"That's all right, sir," one of the men said civilly, "me and my mate was just saying that one of the porters must have done it. Quarter of a bag, wasn't it, sir. If you like to call it a shilling, that'll be all right."
Pointer liked a half-crown better, and so apparently did the men.
"Hope I cleaned the spade off all right," Pointer chatted on, lighting a cigarette. A cigarette which he took care not to inhale.
"Lord, sir, there wasn't no call to clean it that-away! Staggered Jim here it did to see it cleaned up. We only uses it for mixin'. Why, you sharpened the thing, didn't you?"
"No. Not beyond cleaning it." Pointer's cigarette was in his hand. He flicked its ash over the handle and stood looking down at it while talking. The ash, "finger-print cigarette" ash, showed no marks except those of a gloved hand. The workmen not touched it. So some one had scraped it and cleaned it since they had used it last.
And, according to the men, some one had sharpened it as well. It certainly was quite sharp enough now to have done what Pointer believed it had done. A couple of blows from it would account for the marks on the bottom of the tub. The murderer must have found his grisly task lightened unexpectedly by the implements left in the building. Or had "Tourcoin" noticed them, and laid his plan accordingly?
"I think I put everything back as it was," he said again; "messy work, plastering. When you aren't used to it. Miss anything else?"
"Nothing, sir."
But Pointer seemed still uncertain.
"Let me see...didn't I take a tin?" He was thinking of the marks on the bathroom tiles.
"That old tin isn't no loss, sir. You're more than welcome to it. We found it on the dust-bin, and was going to throw it out again when we was finished."
"Still," Pointer reminded them, "a tin comes in handy, I expect. What size is it? I borrowed another from one of the porters."
"Seven pound biscuit tin, sir. Stove in a bit at one side. It comes in handy for plaster we've sieved and don't want to use immediate, as you say, sir. But there's no hurry!"
"I'll send it down. Did I take its lid too?" he asked, peering about him.
He was told that he must have, as the lid was kept on the box.
Pointer tipped them, "in case the tin shouldn't turn up," and went slowly out of the building, an hour after he had first entered it.
If Tindall was right, and the body found was that of Etcheverrey, then, as far as he was concerned, the case was over. Some Special Branch man at the Yard would be told off to assist the Foreign Office, and Pointer would take up another tangle. But was it Etcheverrey? Was it "political" at all?
Very great care had been taken to dispose of all personal effects. Nothing but those scraps of paper in the basket had been left to tell who the man was. And, supposing the scraps of paper to have been faked, then no clue whatever had been left. For the flat was a furnished flat, shedding no light on the character of its present occupier. As far as identity went, if the papers in the basket were what the Force calls "offers," a trail laid to deceive, then it was as if the police had found a body stripped, and without a head, lying in an empty room.
Each great case, and Pointer nowadays was concerned only with great cases, groups its facts in such a different way from any other, that it becomes an entirely new problem. Pointer had never had one like this before, where all the usual means of identification of murdered man and missile used had been taken away. Of course Tindall might be right. Probably he was. But supposing he were not, how the dickens was he, Pointer, to find out who the man had been? And above all, who the murderer had been? Somewhere there was a weak spot in the crime. There always was. There always would be. Where was it in this case?
The detective officer's every nerve tautened at the idea of a murderer escaping. Pointer never saw his work as a game of brains against brains, where, provided only that the one move was cleverer than the other, it ought to win. He was a soldier, fighting a ceaseless battle where no quarter could be asked or given. The battle of light against darkness. Right against Wrong. If the other side won, it would be all up with the world. Pointer had never failed the side of justice yet. He would not fail it now, if he СКАЧАТЬ