A fraction over the ten minutes later, Rollison straightened his back and sighed thankfully. He tossed the tools back in the box, flung the busted wheel into the rear seat, and swung himself into the driving position.
The engine hummed to a touch on the switch. He let in his clutch gently, switched on the headlights, and as the car nosed ahead, looked right and left on the shimmering surface of the road. He did not propose to miss a thing.
A quarter of a mile dropped behind, and the gentle hum of his engine harmonized again with the quiet of the night. The moon was so bright that he switched off the headlights; the ribbon of road unwinding in front of him seemed as empty of trouble as the blue-grey sky.
And then, taking a bend slowly, Rollison caught his first glimpse of the night’s dreadful secret.
Black and grim at the side of the road were the shattered remains of a big car.
The Toff stared at it for a moment; then he tightened his grip round the steering-wheel.
‘I had a hunch,’ he reminded himself softly, ‘that there was trouble – big trouble – and I fancy I was right.’
He drew close to the wreckage. Nothing else moved; no sound came. The hush of the night seemed to whisper death – death which was hiding amidst the ruins of that smashed-up car.
As Rollison pulled in beside the wrecked car, he saw that it was a saloon Packard, with its radiator buried in the ditch at the side of the road, where it had plunged helplessly. The body was crushed and twisted; the wings ripped away, and the windscreen was smashed into a thousand pieces.
Rollison stepped out of his car, and, as he drew nearer, he realized it had been the very devil of a smash.
But he was looking more for what had caused the smash than the effect of it. But for the Daimler and the attack which had been made on him, he would have jumped to the conclusion that it had been due to the driver’s recklessness. Now no such possibility entered his mind. The Packard had been deliberately wrecked by the man with the beard and his sharp-shooting passenger – and the Toff’s car had been put out of action to give the attackers a clear get-away before the alarm could be raised.
The Toff squeezed through the narrow gap between the car and the hedge. Thorns caught his coat and scratched his fingers, but he hardly noticed them. For he caught his first glimpse of the victim of the smash – the body of a man slumped in the driving seat amidst the wreckage. And as he saw him, the Toff knew there was not a chance in a thousand of the man being alive.
The victim’s right leg was doubled back beneath him. His eyes were glazed and sightless. One arm was bent across his chest, with his hand near his chin, as though he had darted his hand upwards to ward off the sudden terror that had loomed in front of him.
The moon shimmered on blood coming from a hole in the forehead, and there was no mistaking the cause of that wound. It was a bullet hole,
The Toff knew it, and his shoe tapped the surface of the road. His nostrils were distended as his breath came softly. In his mind’s eye there sprang a picture of a bearded face and a pair of baleful yellowish eyes.
Then he found himself thinking, unreasonably, inconsequently, of a name.
‘Garrotty’s in England,’ he muttered. ‘Garrotty the Yank. And this is gunman’s work. I wonder –’
He jerked himself together suddenly and bent down, feeling for the man’s heart. It was a mere formality; there was no movement, and he had expected none.
But he felt something damp against his hand, something which shone red in the moonlight. The man had been shot through the chest as well as the head.
The Toff stayed where he was for a moment, staring down. The face of the man was arresting, even in death. Saturnine, swarthy, like that of a man who had lived for many years in hot climates, there was a sardonic twist to those still lips, as though the man had died with mockery in his eyes.
The Toff took his hand away, stood up and peered about him. There would be the deuce to pay for this brutal murder on the country road. And, without question or doubt, it had traces of gangster work; in the vernacular, the man had been put on the spot, and the killers had made a good job of it.
Then the Toff, who was not easily surprised, saw something which made his heart miss a beat.
Odds and ends of steel were strewn about the road, mixed with a few pitiful possessions of the victim. A watch dangled from its chain, which had got caught in the running-board, the glass smashed, but the mechanism was still ticking. A case, half full of broken cigarettes, was close to it; and close by a trilby hat rested on its crown.
Then, entirely out of keeping with the rest, and some distance from the wrecked car, was a woman’s shoe.
The Toff picked it up. It jerked his mind from the horror of the murder, and his lips curled.
‘Puzzle,’ he muttered, ‘find the lady.’
The shoe was a small, satin-covered creation, more suited for a ballroom than for a journey by road. There was a film of dust over the satin, and here and there it was scratched and torn. Half-way up the heel was a patch of mud – and it was the mud which made the Toff frown suddenly. For it was wet.
In five minutes the Toff had learned enough to make the owner of the shoe a central figure in the mystery. In the ditch alongside the road ran a sluggish stream of water, more mud than anything else. And there were deeply-set footprints, fitting the shoe to a T at one place, and blurred out of recognition in another, while on the thorns of the hedge the Toff found a wisp or two of finely woven cloth.
The Toff fitted the clues in quickly. The girl had been travelling in the wrecked car, he reckoned, and had managed to get out of it before the smash. But her bid for safety had failed; almost certainly she had been in the Daimler, hidden from sight by those drawn curtains. No wonder he had been blinded to make sure that he saw nothing inside!
The Toff’s eyes were very hard as he turned away, stuffing the shoe into his coat pocket. He decided to waste no more time there, and he slipped quickly into the car. The quicker the police knew of the hold-up the better, but it was possible that the shoe would help the Toff to find a short cut to the murderers, and he looked on the shoe as his own special clue.
The Toff might not have had the true citizen’s regard for the police, but he treated that body of men with a measure of respect which they rarely appreciated. For instance, he spoke over the telephone from an A.A. box half a mile from the wrecked Packard to one, Chief Inspector McNab, of Scotland Yard, who was no bosom friend of the Toff’s. He told McNab just where a man had been killed near the London-Chelmsford road, and he promised McNab he would make sure that no one interfered with the wreckage until the police arrived.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was certainly murder – gun-play, Mac.’
It took McNab, a burly, square-jawed Scot, exactly forty-four minutes to reach the scene of the crime, accompanied by three equally grim-visaged plain-clothes men. McNab found the Packard and the murdered man just as he had been told. But he did not see the Toff, although the Toff saw him. It was the kind of thing that savoured of black magic, but in point of fact it was easy.
The Toff simply ran his car to a convenient lane off the main road after telephoning the police, and then perched himself on a five-barred gate near the Packard, smoking many cigarettes and persuading occasional motorists that he had had a smash, and that they would have to go back for a bit, making a long detour, unless they cared to wait for the breakdown gang. None of them waited.
Thanks to the moon, he saw the police car coming. McNab, whom he knew well, was easily recognizable. Then the Toff slipped off the gate, hurried across the field to his bus, and started for London.
He did not expect things to happen quickly, and he was quite prepared to await developments. Yet the affair loomed prominently in his thoughts, especially because of the hush-hush attitude taken up by the police.
For when the Toff read the morning paper over the breakfast table, the murder had no front-page headlines, although it undoubtedly deserved them from a journalistic point of view. When he eventually found the report, there was nothing to suggest that there had been anything more unusual than a road smash. No mention was made at all of the gunshot wounds in the forehead and the chest.
“Funnier and funnier,’ thought the Toff, and then read the only useful piece of news in the paragraph. The dead man’s name was Goldman – Paul Goldman – and he had recently returned to England after a long sojourn in Turkey.
‘I could have guessed most of that myself,’ murmured the Toff, as he got up from the table. ‘I wonder what McNab will have to say about it?’
McNab telephoned him early, and asked him to go round to the Yard after he had given evidence against Lopez the Killer. When the Toff arrived he found the Chief-Inspector almost fussy, which was merely a device to persuade the Toff not to put up difficulties over the hush-hush business, and the Toff was not surprised.
Nor was he surprised when McNab refused to talk much. He agreed, generously, that there were a thousand Daimlers which might have answered his description of the murder car. Nor could the police be expected to put their hands on the driver of the Daimler because he had a beard and looked like an Egyptian.
But there was not a shred of doubt that the police knew more about the affair than they professed, and it gave the Toff to think, furiously.
He did not say so.
‘So we’re stuck,’ he suggested to McNab. They were in the latter’s poky office at Scotland Yard, which possessed only one comfortable chair – McNab’s – and he showed no inclination to linger.
The Scot grunted.
‘Maybe. We know Garrotty’s about, mind ye.’
‘Och aye,’ grinned Rollison, ‘and we might guess that Garrotty killed Goldman, But we don’t know anything about the man with the beard’ – the Toff’s grin widened –’and we don’t know much about Goldman himself. Or do we?’ He arched his brows inquisitively. ‘Seeing that I found him, it doesn’t seem fair to leave me out in the cold.’
McNab rubbed his chin, and then he grew talkative, which told the Toff that the Scot was giving nothing away beyond a little information which might be picked up from the later editions of the yellow Press.
‘Goldman,’ said McNab portentously, but with feeling, ‘was a damn’ fool. He meddled with things that were too big for him –’
The Toff interrupted.
‘A point for you,’ he conceded. ‘Goldman meddled – I’m meddling. Sounds like a conjugation of verbs, doesn’t it, Mac?’ He beamed, and waved his hand airily. ‘But don’t let me stop you.’
McNab bit the end off a cigar.
‘You’re getting funny,’ he growled. ‘See here, Rolleeson. The man Goldman was bad from beginning to end. He saw the inside of Pentonville before he went abroad, and then he mixed himself up with a gang of thieves. You know the result of it.’
‘Death via the said crooks?’ queried the Toff.
‘Never you mind,’ growled McNab. ‘I’m thinking that this is a big thing, Rolleeson. Ye’d better be careful.’
‘Of Garrotty?’ demanded the Toff.
McNab scowled.
‘I’m not thinking of Garrotty.’
‘Um!’ said the Toff.
Then he took a shot in the dark, with two reasons behind it. He was anxious to learn all he could and he tried to bluff McNab into speaking more plainly. And, more important, he was worried about the girl in the case. If McNab didn’t know about her, the Toff realized he was withholding information by not speaking, and that information might prove invaluable to the girl, might even save her life.
‘I know you’re not,’ he went on, and his eyes narrowed. ‘I wonder if you’re thinking of the girl in the case?’
The shot went home. McNab’s lips tightened.
‘So you know about her, do you?’
‘I do,’ said the Toff frankly.
The policeman lit his small cigar slowly.
‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘maybe you can tell us where she is, Rolleeson?’
The Toff shook his head.
‘Then,’ said McNab, ‘all I’m saying is – be careful – verra careful!’
‘Sure I will,’ said the Toff smiling. He took his leave of the Inspector. McNab had said all he was going to.
Jolly, the Toff’s personal bodyguard, grew apprehensively aware that his employer was brooding over something important. Jolly, a lugubrious soul, knew nothing of the satin shoe which was hidden in the Toff’s Gresham Terrace flat. But he saw the added gaiety in the Toff’s manner, and knew that the Toff deserted the flat more frequently than usual. Further, the Toff warned him to keep the door closed on all pipe-fitters from the Gas Company, gentlemen from the Electric Light Corporation, and representatives of the Metropolitan Water Board. The Toff did not believe in taking unnecessary chances; he even went so far as to have his food specially prepared, and, in effect, hygienically sealed. Safety was much better than poisoned soup.
The three days immediately following the murder were not entirely without incident, however, although the Toff admitted that he started the ball rolling.
On the morning of the second day the Toff, resplendent in faultless grey and driving a Sunbeam, which was a car of cars, indeed, went to Limehouse and Shadwell. He knew, as he turned in and out of the cobbled streets, that the Sunbeam was recognized, and that the word was spreading that he was about. The thought tickled his vanity. A dozen gentlemen were shaking in their shoes.
But the one man in all Shadwell who felt that he was safe from the Toff’s attention had a nasty shock.
He was sitting in his parlour above the saloon bar, looking out of the window and seeing, but not noticing, the masts of many Dutch trawlers docked alongside the Thames, and the smokeless but grimy funnels of a few idle steamers. He knew nothing of the Sunbeam, which drew up in front of the ‘Red Lion’ – the parlour was at the back – until Squinty burst into the room in a pretty state of funk.
‘What the ‘ell’s the matter with you?’ snarled Harry the Pug, who had been dreaming rosy dreams. And then he saw the card trembling in Squinty’s knuckled hand.