voice was soothing, almost sympathetic. It gave Jimmie the impression, as it was, intended to, that here was a man who would be scrupulously fair. He drank the brandy which someone passed to him, and for an instant his old, wide-mouthed smile flashed out. The spirit gave him a momentary touch of confidence.
‘That’s all right, boss. James Strickland’s my name. I’m from New York. Come over in the Fortunia and landed this morning.’
‘What are you?’
‘Piano tuner.’ The trade was the first one that occurred to Jimmie. ‘Over here to see if there’s an opening,’ he rattled glibly. ‘Trade’s slack the other side.’ The shorthand writer’s pencil scratched rapidly over the paper. Whipple’s face was expressionless.
Question succeeded question, each one quietly put, each answer received without comment. Jimmie was becoming involved in an inextricable tangle of lies. Had not the horrible fear still loomed over him, he might have avoided contradictions, extraordinary improbabilities, and constructed a connected, if false, story. And he could see, not in his interlocutor’s face, but in the faces of the others, a scepticism which they scarcely troubled to conceal.
The catechism finished, Whipple began drawing on his gloves.
‘That will do. You will be detained till we have made some more inquiries.’
Jimmie shuddered. ‘You don’t really think I done this, boss? You aren’t goin’—’
‘You’re not charged yet,’ said Whipple. ‘You’re only detained till we know more about things.’
It was a poor consolation, but with it Jimmie had to be content. He was taken below, and Whipple turned an inquiring face on one of his sergeants. The man made a significant grimace. ‘Guilty as blazes, sir,’ he said emphatically. ‘What did he want to tell that string of lies for?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Whipple thoughtfully. ‘You’d be thrown a little off your balance, Newton, if you were suddenly up against it. He’s a liar, but he’s not necessarily a murderer.’
Newton grunted, but ventured no open dissent till his superior had gone. He was a shrewd man in dealing with the commonplaces of crime, but he lacked subtlety, and accordingly despised it. ‘The guvnor’s too kid-glove,’ he complained with asperity to the uniformed inspector. ‘What’s the use of mucking about? The bloke’s a Yankee crook. He admits he came over in the Fortunia, and says he don’t know Sweeney, who came over in the same boat. Why, he must have been laying for him. He must have shadowed him till he got a fair chance. Mark me, when we’ve traced those notes we took off Strickland, we shall find that they were originally paid out to Sweeney. Waste of time finicking about, I call it.’
Now some of this reasoning had been in Whipple’s mind, but he liked to feel the ground secure under his feet before he took an irrevocable step. There was no hurry—at any rate for the twenty-four hours during which he was entitled to detain Jimmie on suspicion without making a charge. But there were certain points on which he was not entirely satisfied.
He was on hand at Scotland Yard early next morning. The report of the tragedy was in the morning papers, but they had given it little prominence. From their point of view it was of little news value—just a shooting affray, with a man detained. This was the view the superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department, to whom Whipple had come to report, took of it.
‘Straightforward case, isn’t it, Whipple?’
‘There are one or two queer points about it, sir. I must admit it looks rather bad for Strickland, but somehow I don’t believe he did it. I can’t say why, but that’s my impression.’
‘You must be careful of impressions, Whipple. They carry you away from the facts sometimes.’
‘I know that. Well, the facts are these: Sweeney, the dead man, was the president of a hardware company at Detroit. I sent a cable off last night. He had come over partly on business, partly on pleasure, and was held in very good repute there. About five minutes ago I got this fresh cable.’ He smoothed out a yellow strip with his hand and read: ‘“News Sweeney’s death precipitated crash his firm. His business unsound for years. Insurance company informs us recently increased life premiums for half-million dollars. Suspect fraud. Request you will make stringent tests of identity, alternatively suspect suicide.” That’s signed by the Detroit Chief of Police.’
The superintendent stretched out a hand and took the cablegram. He read it through twice with puckered brows. ‘That’s a queer development,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t see what they’re getting at. If the murdered man is not Sweeney, that hypothesis assumes that Sweeney got someone else to impersonate him and that the second person knew he was to be killed. That’s ridiculous.’
‘So I think, sir. There’s more to the suicide end. The divisional surgeon says that the dead man’s temple was blackened by the explosion of the pistol. That shows that the weapon, when it was fired, was but a few inches from his face. Of course, when I saw the surgeon I didn’t know what this cable tells us, but luckily I put the point to him. There was no weapon found. I asked him if, supposing that Sweeney had killed himself, he could have thrown the pistol into the water after pulling the trigger—it was a distance of several yards to the parapet of the bridge. He was emphatic that it was impossible.’
‘Then it comes back to murder after all. Yes. it’s certainly curious about the insurance. Who’s the chap you’ve got in?’
Jimmie would have been interested in the reply even had he been less vitally concerned. It would have shown him how vain were his hopes of cutting away from his record. ‘A little red-haired chap with a big mouth, who gave the name Strickland—a Yankee pickpocket, Jimmie Iles, or Red Jimmie. You’ll remember, sir, New York cabled us he had sailed.’
‘Yes, I remember. We ought to have something about him then.’
‘We have. I spent part of last night picking it up. The Liverpool men spotted him in a compartment of the boat-train, alone with a man who fills the description of Sweeney. Sergeant Fuller, who was on duty at Euston, saw him when he arrived and took the number of his cab. He was not with Sweeney then. We found the cabman early this morning. He had driven him to a little hotel off the Strand. The hotel people remember him because he wanted a fire in his bedroom—a fire this weather! He went up there and stayed for over an hour. Then he went straight out.
‘At nine o’clock Tamplin of the West End saw Four-fingered Foster in the Dewville Bar, Coventry Street, with a red-haired American whom he thought was being strung. The Grape Street people recalled this when the tape report of the murder came over to them. I sent a man to rake out Foster, and sure enough his red-haired pal was Jimmie. Foster said they had parted in the Strand about eleven o’clock. Jimmie said he had an appointment at the Albert Bridge—Foster thought with a girl …
‘Those are pretty well all the facts, except this: when Jimmie was searched at the police station there were found on him three five-pound notes. These notes had been issued to Sweeney by a bank at Detroit before he left. I have the man’s own statement here, sir, if you’d care to look at it. It’s a string of lies.’
His chief waved aside the document and fiddled with his pince-nez as he considered the problem for a while. ‘You’re right to go easy, Whipple, but don’t overdo it. There’s almost enough evidence as it is to hang Red Jimmie. Intuition is good, but a jury won’t be interested in your psychology. They’d sooner read a book.’
‘Very good, sir.’ The detective-inspector went away, still far from satisfied. In view of the evidence now accumulated, he would have been inclined to believe Jimmie guilty had it not been for the singular news of Sweeney’s smash and the insurance. Coincidence is a factor in criminal investigation work, but this was straining it. If Sweeney had been murdered, the crime had come just right to provide for his family.
‘There’s some point that I’ve overlooked,’ he murmured to himself. ‘I can’t quite place it.’
He went back over the Albert Bridge