The Clifford Affair (Musaicum Vintage Mysteries). Dorothy Fielding

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СКАЧАТЬ lifted each of the hands in turn.

      They were slender, beautiful hands, that looked as though they would be clever at whatever they did. Hard work had never been asked of them.

      "Wore a ring on the middle finger of the right hand. Broad, thick ring. Signet ring very likely. Cigarette smoker. Gentleman certainly from the care of the whole body."

      There were no marks of blood-stained hands either on the bath, or on the fitted basin beside it, or on any of the taps, nor finger prints of any kind.

      Pointer stepped on into a bedroom opening out of the bath-room. Then he returned to Maybrick.

      "We can wash our hands in the bedroom. The basin in there's not even been dusted. This one has been used."

      A ring came at the door. Maybrick answered it. A small, quick-stepping, alert-eyed, gray-bearded man stepped into the flat. He was of the type to pass easily for English in England, French in France, Spanish, or Eastern, according to where he was met. "Many-tongued Tindall," a great international sleuth or sleuther of sleuths, was an amateur. A man of means attached to the Foreign Office, when he was not on loan to the Home Office. In manner he was very quiet, in speech very direct.

      "I've come to see if the dead man's one of our birds," he said, after shaking hands with Pointer. "But you here?" He eyed the Chief Inspector with mock distrust. "No poaching, you know!"

      For a second Tindall too stood looking about him with swift, piercing glances.

      "Now for the story"—he turned to the Superintendent. First eyes, then ears, was Pointer's way. But Tindall was as high in his branch as Pointer was in the C.I.D., and was, moreover, a much older man. So Maybrick led them into the drawing-room, where the dust lay thick, and where the blinds still shut out the daylight.

      The story, as known to Maybrick, was exceedingly simple. The flat belonged to a Mr. Marshall, a senior clerk at Lloyds who, as usual, wished to let it furnished while he was away on a four weeks' holiday. He had left last Thursday. On Friday, about six, a man had presented himself to the head porter with a view card from the house agents, which gave his name as a Monsieur Tourcoin. The flat was shown him, and a little later the head porter was informed over the telephone by the agents that Mr. Tourcoin had taken the flat for a friend, a Captain Brown. Captain Brown would "take possession" on Tuesday or Wednesday.

      On Monday evening something went wrong with the lock of an upstairs flat. The porter thought it a good opportunity, when the locksmith arrived this morning, to have him run his eye over the front door of Number Fourteen as well. Mr. Marshall had complained of its not always catching properly when hastily shut. He also remembered a difficulty with Marshall's bathroom bolt, and took the man in there first. He had his own pass-key, of course.

      "They didn't stay to look at any bolts," Maybrick said dryly. "Nasty sight that body in there. They rushed to the telephone and called us in."

      "What body in where?" Tindall asked impatiently. He was taken to see it. His face paled as he looked carefully at it and at the room.

      "Horrible!" he muttered. "Horrible!"

      He turned to Maybrick.

      "What made you 'phone to us—made you think the crime political?"

      "This, sir." Maybrick passed into a sitting-room, which, like the bedroom, opened out of the bathroom. He pointed to a newspaper on the table. It was a Times of Friday, heavily scored at a few passages. Maybrick pointed to these. Tindall read aloud "Anti-royalist plot suspected in Madrid. I see he's underscored that 'suspected.' What's this next? King Alfonso's yacht Esmeralda to be ready by a certain date. A question mark is pencilled beside the date. Indeed! Indeed! And here's something about King Boris's coming trip to Sofia heavily marked at the side. Except for that last, the items are only Spanish..." Tindall perched on a chair in a way that suggested flight rather than rest.

      "Man's clothes missing...Papers in them gone too, of course...Head taken away...Identity to be concealed, or—Anything else made you think the murder political beyond the marked paper, Superintendent?"

      "These." Maybrick lifted up the waste-paper basket. "I screwed them up as nearly as possible as I found them. They're funny reading together with those bits in the paper and that dead body!"

      In the basket lay what looked like two crinkly eggs. They were wads of paper that had been crushed into little balls. Opened out, they showed as two sheets of plain letter-paper, headed with the address of the flat. On each were some lines of writing in a pointed, very sloping, foreign hand. The first ran:

      You have betrayed the change in the crew of the "Esmeralda." But I give you one chance to explain. Come here to-night and clear yourself if you can. If not—

      The rest of the sheet was blank. Apparently this draft had not pleased the writer. It had been screwed up and tossed away. The second was a complete note. It ran:—

      You are a traitor, but I give you one more chance to explain why you have not carried out the orders I gave you at "Iguski Aidé." Take it. Or it will be the end. Come to this address tonight. If you do not come you know the penalty. Expect it without mercy."

      The last two sentences had been scratched out. There was no signature, but a little drawing of the outline of a house with a V inside.

      "That scratched out bit about the penalty is why he copied out the note and threw this away," Maybrick explained like a showman.

      Tindall's eyes were shining. He stroked his beard with a hand that quivered a little.

      "These settle it." He spoke calmly but with the calm of one who forces a layer of composure over a seething mass of red-hot feeling.

      "It was a political crime! Or an act of justice, if you will."

      "You know what that signature stands for?" The Chief Inspector's tone made the remark a statement, not a question.

      "The V within the outline of a house? Etcheverrey, Pointer. Yes. Etcheverrey, the great anarchist. Or rather anti-royalist agitator."

      Pointer said nothing. Maybrick gave a cluck of delighted amazement. The police of every country knew, and were on the hunt for that name, that man.

      "That's his secret signature," Tindall went on. "Only used to his own men. Only known to us at the F.O. And Iguski Aide!—'Sunny Corner'! That's Etcheverrey's well-hidden Basque refuge, deep in the heart of some Pyrenees ravine, not yet located. The mere name is only known to a chosen and picked few among his followers. We at the F.O. have only just—only just learnt it."

      "He's French, isn't he?" Maybrick asked.

      "Officially, yes. But there's not a drop of French blood in his veins. Basque father. Catalan mother. Speaks all languages. Brains of the devil. And up till now his luck."

      "Do you think Etcheverrey's the killer, or the killed here, sir?" Maybrick asked again.

      "The killed. The dead man," Tindall said, after a moment's deep thought. "Etcheverrey would have taken those scraps of paper away. His slayer is not identified by them. I think that the tables were turned on the Basque for the—first and last—time in his life, by the man he summoned here. And I can make a good guess at that man's name. You know my slogan." He turned to Pointer. "What the brain can't see, the eyes can't either. Eyes won't solve this problem. Not even yours. Now what has cost Etcheverrey СКАЧАТЬ