Red Snow at Darjeeling, page 4
“The whole truth?”
“If they ask for it. Don’t mention my name unless they find out from some other source that I’m somehow involved. Don’t say anything about my encounter with Stiller, either. Just tell them the facts of your uncle’s disappearance, of Hubertson’s phone call, and of your trying to get in touch with Stiller. That will give them plenty to go on. Is it all clear?”
“Quite.”
“Then go home.”
The girl walked slowly away. At the door she paused, turned, looked at Woodring for a long moment. Then she walked quickly out the back way.
Woodring bent down, started looking through the papers on the rug.
Inspector Leonidas M. Prike, C.I.D., was reading the Rig-Veda with his early-morning tea. A small man, prematurely bald, he gave the impression of a mild-mannered scholar, rather than a man of action. Who else would seek relaxation in classic Sanskrit, at least to the extent of absorbing Brahmanic ethics and cosmogony before breakfast?’ Yet, as Prike turned his face to the light, the shadow beneath the strong line of his determined chin indicated that he was nevertheless endowed with some of the Spartan qualities his parents had in mind when they named him after the hero of Thermopylae. And the keen, quick vitality in his steel-grey eyes as he looked up to greet Deputy-Inspector Robbins hinted at characteristics other than intellectual curiosity which made him one of the Criminal Investigation Department’s most relentless investigators.
Deputy-Inspector Robbins, the twisted ends of his small moustache freshly waxed, was making his routine early-morning call at Prike’s office in Lower Circular Road. During the hot weather, Prike was addicted to these daily conferences with his subordinate, to plan the day’s strategy before the thermometer had climbed to stultifying heights.
The inspector closed his Rig-Veda with a snap, as he said:
“Well, Robbins, what forces of evil are challenging our professional skill to-day?”
“That German plant-catcher is in the compound again,” said Robbins, taking off his sun helmet. “He’s still crying about his lost camera.”
“Dr. Adolf Feurmann,” said Prike, half to himself. He stood up promptly, slipped on a black alpaca jacket. “Tell him to come in.”
Dr. Feurmann bowed sharply from the waist as he entered. He was a round-faced Teuton, with prominent ears that stood out from his head. He wore thick glasses, and his blond hair was clipped short in back and rose in a stiff brush above his low forehead.
“I have no news for you, Dr. Feurmann,” said Inspector Prike. “But I asked you to come in because I want you to explain to my colleague here exactly why you consider the loss of your camera so important.”
Dr. Feurmann was glad to explain—and volubly. He talked rapidly in reasonably correct English. His voice was shrill, but descended curiously at times to thick, Germanic gutterals. He was a poor botany professor, he said, who had lost his job in a German university during the Nazi purge of education. When he had refused to serve on a committee for reclassifying plants and flowers named after non-Aryan botanists, he was forced to flee to Switzerland. Luckily he was employed immediately by a Swiss botanical society to go to India on a specimen-gathering expedition. However, he felt he was still being persecuted for his defection from the Nazi party.
“I am now afraid,” he said, “that my camera was stolen by my enemies, to maybe incriminate me.”
“How?” asked Inspector Prike.
“Ach, I don’t know how. It will be found in suspicious circumstances. It will have maybe incriminating films. It will have pictures of maybe fortresses. Battleships. It will make me out a spy.”
“There is one question I forgot to ask you yesterday, doctor,” Prike interrupted. “Exactly how long has this camera been missing?”
“Three weeks,” said Feurmann.
“Three weeks? And you’ve just come to me now?”
“I have just found out about the reputation of this Count Vaznilko who has been so friendly with me.”
“I fancy I know more about Count Vaznilko than you do,” said Prike. “But he hasn’t got your camera. I searched his room and his luggage at the Great Eastern last night during his absence. You’d better come and see me again to-morrow, doctor.”
“But to-morrow I will not be here. I must go back to Darjeeling to-night. My orchids—”
“Yes, of course,” said Prike, in a conclusive manner that indicated the interview was over. “Then I shall keep you informed of any developments. Goodday, Dr. Feurmann.”
When the German had left, Prike asked:
“Anything else, Robbins?”
“One more thing,” said the Deputy-Inspector. “Mr. Alexander Blenn seems to have disappeared.”
“Blenn? Of Blenn Engineering Works?”
“That’s him. I sent Jenkins over to—”
“Jenkins,” snapped Prike, “has a genius for obliterating more essential clues than any detective in Bengal. Come along. Robbins.” Prike clapped on his topi. “We’d better get there quickly.”
Prike and Robbins did not stay long at Camac Street. They listened while pale, overwrought Ruth Ingram repeated her story. The girl spoke calmly, despite her obvious fatigue and taut nerves. She answered questions with apparent frankness. And when she made it plain that Basil Stiller, too, was missing, Prike departed immediately for Elysium Row.
Two minutes after his arrival in Stiller’s flat, he discovered the sticky puddle of drying blood.
The discovery brought about an instant transfiguration in Inspector Prike. Gone was the last vestige of academic aura, swept away by the surge of new forces. The long muscles of his jaw were springs under tension, springs coiled for prompt, decisive action.
With a dozen curt commands he organised his first moves, and in a few moments his subordinates were rounding up the servants from the neighbouring houses. They begin to congregate in the compound; bearded khansamas, lean dark-skinned cooks, dignified bearers, bheesties with their goatskin water bags, pantry boys, a mali with his rake and pruning shears. Prike questioned them one by one, putting each through the same cross-examination in Hindustani. He had questioned ten before he got his first illuminating answers—from the patriarchal Bengali khansama to the family next door.
Why were there no servants at Stiller Sahib’s flat? That was simple, the aged khansama replied. The sahib had given them all a week’s holiday, since he was going to Darjeeling. All of them? Well, all except the sweeper. The sahib’s meta was dead.
“Dead? When?” Prike demanded.
“This night,” the khansama replied. “He died of stoppage of the heart in the Sahib’s own kitchen.”
“How do you know this?”
“The men told me,” was the reply.
“What men?”
“The men from the burning ghat. They came with a bullock cart to take him away just before daybreak. I saw them.”
“Then you are sure it was the meta who was dead, khansama?”
“They said it was. He was wrapped in a chaddar.”
“But you did not approach to see his face?”
“I?” The venerable butler was scornful. “Does the Inspector Sahib think that I, a member of the Vaishya caste, would debase myself by approaching the corpse of a meta, a vile sweeper of ordures?”
“Bas!” Prike dismissed the khansama. Then, with a single gesture from the doorway he dispersed the waiting crowd of brown servants and summoned Deputy-Inspector Robbins.
“Robbins,” he said bluntly, “this is murder. But we’ll have to work rapidly to prove it, because the murderer is using a diabolically clever scheme to destroy the corpus delicti. The body is probably at this very moment being cremated as a Hindu in some burning ghat. So get to the telephone, Robbins, and—No, not that phone. There may be fingerprints. Send men at once to every burning ghat in Calcutta. All cremations are to be stopped until our men certify that the corpse in question is not European. Afterward, join me at the burning ghat on Tolley’s Nallah, just beyond the Kalighat temple. That’s the closest to Elysium Row. Move, Robbins!”
Robbins moved. So did Prike, when he had given routine instructions to Jenkins, who remained in charge of Stiller’s flat. In a short minute his motor-car was careering through the lumbering ox-cart traffic on Russapugla Road.
When the inspector arrived at the burning ghat four men were carrying a bamboo litter through the entrance. The body on the litter was covered with a bright orange sari and sprinkled with rice and plantain leaves. Prike stopped the rude cortege, lifted the cloth, looked into the wrinkled brown face of an old Hindu woman. He waved on the bier.
The inspector stood for a moment in front of a sign which announced the cost of cremation: Adults, three rupees, four annas; Brahmins, three annas extra; children under ten, half price. He watched several menials piling cord wood in a shallow trench. Another bamboo bier lay on the ground nearby. Prike walked over to examine it. The body was that of a thirteen-year-old Hindu girl.
On a wooden bench against a wall, a group of mourners were sitting, waiting for some eldest son who was squatting by the bank of a muddy creek while an itinerant barber shaved off his hair and manicured his finger and toe-nails.
Another eldest son, shaved and half naked, was marching round a fourth and unlighted pyre, holding a flaming torch of reeds above his head as he made the prescribed seven circuits.
Inspector Prike asked the head attendant:
“How many cremations this morning?”
“Only those you see, Sahib. The three women who are almost finished. The fourth which is just starting—”
“You are sure they are women?”
“Yaquin, Sahib. I myself saw the sandalwood dust sprinkled on their bodies, the ghi and gold-dust put into their mouths.”
“And that corpse there?” Prike pointed to another unlighted pyre across the enclosure.
“Another woman, Sahib. We have only women this morning.”
“You are certain?”
“I did not see that one, Sahib. She was brought here first thing after daylight, and she should be finished. However, she had no relatives, so I sent for a Brahmin to light the pyre. He has not come yet, Sahib, so—”
“Take off the wood,” Prike ordered, “I must see the corpse.”
“But Sahib—”
“Jeldi karo!”
“Achcha, Sahib.”
The attendant crossed the compound at a lope, began removing the sawed lengths of wood. Impatiently Prike brushed him aside, jolted the key supports from the corners of the pyre. The logs rolled and rattled to the ground. The entire stack shifted and settled, and the cloth-wrapped figure inside stirred with macabre restlessness. Prike reached down, pulled the cloth from the face of the corpse.
His lips tightened—an unusual display of emotion for Inspector Prike. He was startled—not because the face of the corpse was European, but because the features were not those he expected to find.
He found himself staring at the beaked nose, the deep rictus furrows, the glassy eyes of Basil Stiller.
Stanley hubertson called at the Blenn house half an hour after Inspector Prike had left for Elysium Row. The soft-spoken, white-haired engineering superintendent was deeply concerned as he came to offer his services to Ruth Ingram, genuinely sympathetic when he learned that nothing had yet been heard from Alexander Blenn.
“I have been thinking, Miss Ingram,” he said, “that perhaps the police should be notified.”
“They have been notified,” said the girl. “Inspector Prike was here this morning. I’m glad you approve.”
Hubertson nodded gravely.
“I do, indeed,” he said. “I should have suggested it last night, were it not for the fact that your uncle was anxious to avoid police interference.
“I know. But Mr. Woodring himself decided that it was time the police be informed.”
Again Hubertson nodded. “Then young Woodring is going to Darjeeling, regardless of—of last night’s mysterious developments?”
“Certainly. Mr. Woodring received his final instructions-just before Uncle Alex disappeared.”
“Stout fellow, this young Woodring,” Hubertson declared. “I doubt if we could find a better man for this mission to Darjeeling. Right, Miss Ingram?”
“My uncle has a genius for choosing capable men,” the girl said. “By the way, Mr. Hubertson, I carefully avoided mentioning Mr. Woodring to Inspector Prike.”
“Good girl,” Hubertson patted Ruth’s hand gently, paternally. “Very wise. You have some of your uncle’s shrewdness. You have—” He paused, moved to the window. “Prike has come back,” he announced.
The sound of a running motor was broken by the slamming of a car door. Footsteps tramped up the outside stairs. An instant later Prike, Robbins and two constables entered.
“Glad you’re here, Hubertson,” said Prike, nodding to the engineer. “I’d just sent for you.”
“Then you have news of Mr. Blenn?’
“Not of Blenn,” said Prike. He was looking at Ruth Ingram. For an instant his eyes softened with a blur of compassion, but the incongruous touch of humanity immediately disappeared from his grimly businesslike expression. “Miss Ingram,” he said, “I believe you were engaged to marry Basil Stiller.”
“Were? I am …” The girl suddenly sank into a chair. She sat tensely on the very edge, leaning forward with dread expectancy. At last she managed to ask: “Has something happened to Basil?”
“Stiller,” the inspector announced quietly, “has been murdered.”
The girl did not move. Stunned, she stared silently at Prike. Her lips parted, as the gradual realisation of his words entered her understanding. Yet the emotion that widened her clear blue eyes was not grief; shock, certainly, but no sorrow.
“Murdered,” she repeated, half to herself.
“Shot through the heart,” Prike continued. “Killed in his own drawing-room.”
“When—when was this, inspector?” asked Hubertson in horrified tones. He removed his pince-nez to wipe the humidity from the lenses.
“Before midnight,” Prike replied. “The police surgeon says the condition of the body indicates that death occurred between ten and twelve o’clock last night. When did Blenn telephone you, Hubertson?”
“At ten o’clock, approximately.”
“And he told you that he was telephoning from Stiller’s flat?”
“That’s what he said, yes. I had no reason for doubting it—although when I tried to telephone Stiller at about midnight, I got no answer. I admit my suspicions should have been aroused, particularly in view of the quarrel yesterday afternoon …”
“What quarrel?” Prike demanded sharply.
Hubertson hesitated. He fumbled with his eye-glasses in an effort to cover his embarrassment at having made a slip. He avoided the girl’s eyes.
“Why it was nothing, really,” he murmured. “Mr. Stiller and Mr. Blenn had a spirited discussion of a business matter.”
Ruth Ingram asked: “Have you any clue to the murderer, inspector?”
Prike shook his head. “Stiller was shot at close range,” he said. “The fatal wound was ringed with powder particles blasted into the skin. The only clue I have as yet is an empty .32 calibre cartridge found in Stiller’s rooms. Of course, the autopsy surgeon will recover the bullet itself, from which our ballistic experts should be able to tell us much. I hope, also, to locate the Hindus who smuggled the body away from Elysium Row in an effort to dispose of it at the burning ghat on Tolley’s Nallah.”
“Burning ghat! How ghastly!”
“And now, Miss Ingram, I shall ask your permission to examine the apartments and belongings of Mr. Blenn,” said Prike.
“No,” the girl arose pale and defiant. “You have no right, inspector—”
“I have every right,” interrupted Prike. “If you insist, I shall of course, be forced to secure the proper warrants from the courts. However, I should think you would be anxious to co-operate with me in uncovering any evidence which might clear your uncle of the suspicion which present circumstances seem to cast upon him. Do you insist upon a warrant, Miss Ingram?’
The girl did not reply. Prike accepted her silence as resignation. He nodded approvingly.
“Thank you,” he said. “Come along, Robbins.”
The girl climbed the stairs behind the dapper little inspector and his large, beefy deputy. She stood in the doorway while Prike began his examination of Alexander Blenn’s study.
After a general survey, Prike picked up a heavy trash container of Burdwan bell-metal, and carefully sorted the contents. He discarded everything except a folded copy of The Times, from one page of which a rectangular piece of paper had been cut. After frowning at the newspaper a moment, he devoted his attention to the sandalwood desk. He tried the drawers, found them locked.
“Have you the keys, Miss Ingram?” he asked.
“My uncle always carried his keys with him. I doubt if there are any duplicates,” was the reply.
“Then I’ll smash open the drawers, inspector,” Robbins volunteered.
“You’ll do nothing of the kind, Robbins,” said Prike reprovingly. “I refuse to ruin such a magnificent specimen of Travancore marquetry. Look at the superb carving of the plantain-blossom motif at the corners. Fetch a locksmith, Robbins.”
“Right off, inspector.”
“Hurry it along, then. And on your way back, Robbins, get me a copy of this number of The Times, which apparently came in with the last mail from London. I’m curious to know just what Mr. Blenn has cut out of this one.”
During the next half-hour, Prike busied himself with an examination of Blenn’s wardrobe and personal effects. He had found nothing of apparent importance by the time Robbins returned with the locksmith and the home newspaper.
The inspector turned immediately to the page from which Blenn had cut an article and read:
“Metropolitan Police have been asked to aid in the search for one Christopher Jericho, who has been missing for ten days from a private nursing home in Thornton Heath.
“Jericho, a former mechanical engineer and inventor, suffered a mental breakdown fifteen years ago following a long and arduous career in India. He was adjudged insane and committed to an asylum. However, last year he was believed partly cured and asylum officials authorised his transfer to the nursing home from which he escaped.
