The Rogues’ Syndicate: The Maelstrom. Frank Froest

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       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.