Death in the Stocks: Merely Murder Read online

  Giles looked up. ‘What is it? Oh, that! Yes, I’ve seen it. There’s some more of that correspondence – oh, you’ve got it!’

  The Superintendent was holding a badly worded request for five hundred pounds, written in Kenneth’s nervous fist. The letter stated with exquisite simplicity that Kenneth was broke, engaged to be married, and must have funds to pay off a few debts. Appended to it was a typewritten sheet, headed Copy, stating with equal simplicity that Arnold had no intention of giving or lending a feckless idiot five hundred pence, let alone pounds. Further search in the file brought to light a second letter from Kenneth, scrawled on a half-sheet of notepaper. It was laconic in the extreme, and expressed an ardent desire on the writer’s part to wring his brother’s bloody neck.

  ‘Very spirited,’ said the Superintendent non-committally. ‘I should like to keep these letters, please.’

  ‘Do, by all means,’ said Giles. ‘Particularly the last one.’

  ‘Kenneth Vereker is, I take it, a client of yours?’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘Well, Mr Carrington, we won’t hedge. You’re no fool, and you can see as clearly as I do that his movements on Saturday night will have to be accounted for. But I’m no fool either, and we shall get along a good deal better if I tell you here and now that these letters don’t make me want to go after a warrant for this young man’s arrest at once. A man who makes up his mind to kill someone isn’t very likely to write and tell his victim that he’d like to do it.’

  Privately Giles placed no such confidence in his cousin’s level-headedness, but he only nodded, and said: ‘Just so.’

  The Superintendent folded the three letters and tucked them into his pocket-book. His eyes twinkled a little. ‘But if he’s anything like his sister – well, that alters things,’ he said. ‘Now let’s take a look at this memorandum.’

  He picked it up as he spoke and opened it. Giles began to replace the papers in the drawers. ‘Hullo!’ said Hannasyde suddenly. ‘What do you make of this, Mr Carrington?’

  Giles took the book, and found it open at a page of figures. In the first column were pencilled various dates; against these were set names, apparently of different firms; in the third column were certain sums of money, each with a note of interrogation beside it, and a counter-sum, heavily underlined. At the bottom, each line of figures had been totalled, and the difference, which amounted to three hundred and fifty pounds, not only underlined, but wholly encircled by a thick black pencil-mark.

  ‘John Dawlish Ltd,’ said Giles slowly, reading one of the names aloud. ‘Aren’t those the people who make drills? These look to me like Company accounts.’

  ‘They look to me as though someone has been monkeying around with the accounts, and Arnold Vereker found it out,’ said Hannasyde. ‘I think we’ll step round to the Shan Hills office, if you don’t mind, Mr Carrington.’

  ‘Not at all,’ replied Giles, ‘but I don’t see quite why you should want me to –’

  He was interrupted by the butler, who at that moment opened the door, and stood holding it. ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but Mr Carrington would like to speak to you on the telephone,’ said Taylor.

  Giles looked up surprised: ‘Mr Carrington wishes to speak to me?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Shall I switch the call through to this room, or would you prefer to speak from the hall?’

  ‘No, switch it through, will you?’ Giles lifted the receiver of the desk telephone, and glanced towards Hannasyde. ‘Do you mind? – It’s my father, though what he wants, I can’t imagine. By the way, it is he who is the legal adviser to Arnold’s Company. Arnold transferred his private affairs to me, partly because we were more of an age, and partly because he and my father couldn’t hit if off, but the business remained in – Hullo, sir! ’Morning. Yes, Giles speaking.’

  The Superintendent opened his note-book and began tactfully to read through the entries. He could hear a staccato quacking noise, which he rightly inferred to be the voice of Mr Carrington, Senior. It sounded irascible, he thought.

  Giles’s side of the conversation was mild and soothing. He said: ‘So sorry, sir. Didn’t I tell you I should come straight to Eaton Place?… well, never mind: what’s happened?… something to do with what?’ The lazy look faded; he listened intently to the quacking noise, which went on for quite some time. Then he said: ‘All right, sir, I’ll bring him round as soon as we’ve finished here.’ The voice quacked again, and the Superintendent was almost certain that he heard the words: ‘flat-footed policemen’. However, Giles merely said: ‘In about twenty minutes, then. Good-bye,’ and laid down the receiver. He raised his eyes to the Superintendent’s face, and said: ‘My father wants to see you, Superintendent. He tells me he found a letter from Arnold Vereker waiting for him at the office this morning, which he thinks you ought to see.’

  Seven

  The offices of Carrington, Radclyffe & Carrington were on the first floor of a house at the bottom of Adam Street, facing down the length of Adelphi Terrace. The head of the firm occupied a large, untidy room overlooking the river through a gap in the adjacent buildings. When Giles ushered Hannasyde into this apartment on Monday morning, the head of the firm was seated at an enormous desk, completely covered with papers, muttering fiercely at the shortcomings of his fountain pen. The head of the firm was a well-preserved sixty, with grizzled and scanty hair, a ruddy complexion, and the same humorous gleam which lurked in his son’s eyes. In other respects father and son were not much alike. Giles was tall and lean, and never seemed to be in a hurry; Charles Carrington was short, and of a comfortable habit of body, and lived in a perpetual state of bustle. It was a source of surprise to those not intimately acquainted with him that he should be a lawyer. Those who knew him best were not dismayed by his odd mannerisms, or his inability to find anything. They knew that although he might convey the impression of being a fussy and rather incompetent old gentleman, he had still, at sixty, a remarkably acute intellect.

  He looked up when the door opened, and, as soon as he saw his son, held up an ink-stained hand, and barked: ‘You see. What did I tell you? They always leak. What on earth should put it into your mother’s head to give me one of the infernal things when she knows perfectly well I never could stand them, and never shall – Look at this! Take the confounded thing away! Throw it out of the window – Give it to the office boy! And you needn’t tell your mother I’m not using it!’

  ‘All right, I won’t,’ said Giles, removing the pen. ‘This is Superintendent Hannasyde from Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Oh, is it?’ said Mr Carrington, carefully wiping his fingers with a piece of pink blotting-paper. ‘Good-morning. Investigating my nephew’s murder, aren’t you? Well, I wish you joy of it. Ill-conditioned young cub! Don’t stand! Don’t stand! Take a chair! Take a chair! Giles, push those deeds on to the floor, and let the Superintendent sit down.’

  He began to hunt amongst the dusty heap of documents on his desk, remarking that in this office you had only to lay a thing down for a minute for it to disappear completely. The Superintendent, surveying the general disorder with an awed gaze, made a sympathetic murmur, and wondered whether there was the least hope of discovering Arnold Vereker’s letter in the welter on the desk.

  But Mr Carrington, having thrown one bundle of papers at his son, with the Delphic utterances: ‘Section 35 of the Act; they’d better settle it out of court;’ and dropped two used envelopes vaguely in the direction of the waste-paper basket, pounced upon a sheet of closely written notepaper, and scowled at it, rubbing the tip of his nose with his forefinger. ‘This is it,’ he announced. ‘You’d better have it, Superintendent. May mean nothing; may mean a lot. Here, Giles, you take a look at it! What did the fellow think I could tell him that he didn’t know already? Arnold all over! Wasting my time with his rubbishy questions! But I don’t like to hear this about Tony; what’s the wretched child about to get herself entangled with this young waster? Read it!’

  By this time Giles was doing so. When he c