The Counsellor Page 14

  “A change in the wind, evidently,” said The Counsellor, with a smirk of satisfaction. “I seem to remember some people doing their best to persuade me to drop this business. And that wasn’t so long ago, either. Souvent femme varie. And what about you, Wolf?”

  “He seems a decent sort. Useful in a tight corner, by the look of him. I admit you’ve scored, Mark. Let it go at that. If we can help, then let’s help. But I’m damned if I see how we can help. And that’s a fact.”

  The Counsellor had no modesty in his triumphs.

  “Try the old prescription, Wolf. Go on ‘thumpin’ and thumpin’ at the thinkin’.’ It pays in the end. I’ve no particular use for you at the moment, so you can get on with your thumping. But let’s have no more of this defeatist talk, if you please. Don’t distract the Great Brain from its purpose by the puny criticisms of minor intellects. That means you. And the proof is that you don’t even know what the next obvious step is. Do you?”

  “No, I’m damned if I do,” confessed Standish with rueful frankness.

  “Saved, then, so far as that goes,” said The Counsellor graciously. “For you certainly don’t seem to know.” He turned to Sandra. “Now it’s up to you to make yourself useful. Any objections to playing Dalilah now? Quite a respectable job, my dear. Nothing to do with luring beery old men into corners or anything of that kind. Say Yes or No smartly.”

  “Yes, certainly,” said Sandra immediately. “I begin to think that perhaps there’s something in you as a ’tec, after all, Mark. I was a bit of an ass to discourage you. There! Are his injured feelings soothed? That’s nice. Now what am I expected to do?”

  The Counsellor rummaged among his papers and extracted a copy of the Memorandum of Association of the Ravenscourt Press.

  “Here we are,” he announced. “Jenny Lydbrook, 11, Shrewsbury Street, Grendon St. Giles, typist, one share. Likewise Doreen Wickwood, 7, Blackthorn Lane, Grendon St. Giles, one share. Each of them now holds a £1 share in the company. Your job, Dalilah, is to go down there and buy one of these two shares for me. Give my private address, of course.”

  “What price am I to go to?” Sandra inquired in a businesslike tone.

  “Anything up to £100. If they hold out for more, ’phone me. And, remember, until you’ve got a firm promise, my name doesn’t come in. In fact, it had better not come in until the actual transfer. Now, you, Wolf, will get Sandra the cash and a blank transfer to take down with her. If she pulls this off, she’ll bring that back to you, signed, and you’ll hustle like blazes to see that the transfer of the share is registered in the shortest possible time. That clear?”

  “As a direction, yes,” Standish admitted. “As a move in the game, no.”

  “Capablanca and Alekhin don’t take their pawns into their confidence” explained The Counsellor with an air. “They move them. Get a move on, both of you.”

  “Getting a bit worked up, isn’t he?” said Standish in a stage aside to Sandra. “Needs a sedative. Quinine or bromide, which do you think?”

  “Both, in big doses,” said Sandra. “You can’t pose with us, Mark. Come off that perch and tell us all about it.”

  But The Counsellor evidently preferred to tantalise them a little.

  “When you want to keep a secret, begin by keeping it under your own hat,” he declared, sententiously. “I don’t see why I should do all the thinking for the firm. Though, I suppose,” he added kindly, “it’s not your fault. No doubt you do your best with the means you have. Well, I’ll give you a hint. Helen Treverton and her uncle were the biggest shareholders in that company. They’re both off the map, the uncle permanently. And this happens just before the annual meeting of the company. If they’re not present, they can’t vote. And the remaining shareholders can do what they like, according to the agenda. I’m just a shade interested in what they do. Hence I buy myself a seat at that meeting.”

  “Rubbish!” said Standish, acidly. “Who’d want to get control of a two-penny-halfpenny £12,000 company that’s never yet paid a dividend?”

  “It’s never paid a dividend because of the lines it’s been run on,” rejoined The Counsellor. “But on sounder lines, it might pay quite well. So Whitgift said. I may see something for my money after all.”

  “Live in hope,” advised Standish, ironically.

  “Very well,” said The Counsellor, “if you don’t like the swings, try the roundabouts. Why did Treverton suicide so soon after his niece vanished? It wasn’t a broken heart at her loss. That was pretty clear from what I saw of him.”

  “H’m! I see what you’re driving at,” Standish declared. “You think he was mixed up somehow in her disappearance? Something’s gone wrong that he can’t face up to, so he takes the short way out?”

  “You don’t think the girl’s dead, Wolf!” exclaimed Sandra as the inner meaning of Standish’s suggestion dawned on her. “That would be too horrible.” She appealed to The Counsellor. “You don’t think that, do you, Mark?”

  “Blest if I know,” admitted The Counsellor, dropping pretence and speaking gravely. “All I do know is that the sooner we get on her track, the better. I’ve been worried all along, but neither of you would take it seriously. Put it at the lowest, I can’t see that girl disappearing voluntarily. We know from Querrin that she was expecting him this week. They were keen on each other. Obviously he was coming across to fix things up and perhaps take her off to the States almost immediately. No girl would leave him in this fix of her own accord, unless she was a rank wrong ’un. And everything points the other way. No, there’s no sense in it unless she was made to disappear, and disappear unexpectedly. She didn’t reach the Trulocks. I’m fairly convinced of that. And I’m fairly sure, too, that she wasn’t taken far away. It’s possible she was, of course. She could have been gagged and taken anywhere in a closed van, I admit. But we can’t follow that up, whereas we can investigate in the Grendon St. Giles neighbourhood.

  “So we’ll:

  ‘Do the work that’s nearest,

  Though it’s dull at whiles,”

  as Carlyle says.”

  “Kingsley,” Sandra corrected mechanically.

  “Well, he cribbed it from Carlyle, or vice versa. I know I’m right about that, anyhow,” declared The Counsellor testily. “Where was I? Oh, yes. We’ll comb out Grendon St. Giles to begin with. Do you remember what was on in that district on the day the girl disappeared? A country fair, of sorts. Well, what’s a country fair? A collection of gypsy vans, side-shows, merry-go-rounds, and what not. And they disperse afterwards, don’t they? Get a girl into one of these vans and you might trundle her anywhere, and nobody’d ask a question. That’s one possibility. I don’t say it’s right.”

  “Neither do I,” agreed Standish, ironically. “I’m with you there, Mark. And what do you propose to do?”

  “Go down and see my good friend the inspector, again, to-morrow,” explained The Counsellor. “About a dog,” he added.

  Sandra did not, of course, see the underlying meaning of the phrase.

  “Really, Mark, cheap jokes are a bit out of place, I think. Can’t you be serious?”

  “It’s a good joke, it you could only see it,” retorted The Counsellor. “But enough of this foolery, as you say, Sandra. Let’s get down to brass tacks. It’s past banking hours, so Wolf will give you thirty fivers out of the safe, if it holds as much. You’ll go down to Grendon St. Giles and put up at The Black Bull, in case you have to spend a day or two over your Dalilahing. That reminds me, if you see me about, kindly look the other way. We shan’t be on nodding terms, for the moment. And that reminds me further, we had better warn Querrin not to know you either. Wolf, you can fix that either by a wire or on the ’phone if you can get him at that inn. If he’s out, you’d better wire him to ring you up and speak to him over the ’phone. No use giving too much away even to the telegraph clerk there. I may have to stay at The Black Bull myself, but there’s no harm in Querrin knowing me on sight. It’s only the connection between Sandra and
me that must be kept dark till this deals through and we’ve got that share. You can start first thing to-morrow, Sandra. Your car’s O.K., not getting decarbonised or anything?”

  Sandra shook her head.

  “No, it’s on hand. But I think I’ll start to-night. I hate the idea of losing a moment, now that things have got to this stage.”

  “Your part’s quite straightforward,” The Counsellor assured her. “It just needs a bit of tact.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Treverton Bequest

  “DID a Mr. Querrin pay you a call, sir?” demanded Inspector Pagnell when The Counsellor presented himself at the police station in Grendon St. Giles, next forenoon.

  “He did,” admitted The Counsellor. “I suppose he told his tale of woe? Then that saves me going over it. Did you verify his tale in any way?”

  “No,” admitted the inspector in a surprised tone. “He seemed all right.”

  “Well, I did,” explained The Counsellor. “Just to be on the safe side—since we’ve two Querrins on our hands—I rang up the shipping people. It’s O.K. A Howard Querrin did arrive from America on Tuesday. So the gentleman with the two suitcases wasn’t that one, anyhow. By the way, there’s no word about him touring the country with his suitcases. We’ve had nothing in reply to that last broadcast on the point.”

  “I’ve got a few fresh points myself,” explained Pagnell, evidently pleased to let The Counsellor see he had not been idle. “First of all, we’ve got the results of the P.M. on Treverton’s body. There’s nothing mysterious about it. No poison in the stomach, no suspicious marks anywhere on the body, nothing but a plain case of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  “That settles the ‘How?’ of his death,” admitted The Counsellor. “But it’s the ‘Why?’ that’s worrying me.”

  “Well, while I’m on the subject of expert evidence, I’ll give you another bit,” volunteered Pagnell. “I got that dog dug up, as you suggested. I don’t know how you came to think of that, sir, but it was quite worth the trouble. It was a bit ‘gone’ by this time, naturally, after being buried all this time. But the surgeon took some trouble over it with a spectroscope thing and what not; and he’s quite definite that it died of carbon monoxide poisoning also. I still think the killing of that dog was a preliminary canter, just to see if a car running in the garage would make the place fatal. There’s no other real explanation. And of course, if Treverton had suicide in his mind, he wouldn’t leave the dog’s body in the garage for anyone to find. He must have carted it out into the fields and left it there, after he’d finished it. There was nothing to show how it died. I’ve made inquiries, and no one suggested examining it when it was found. They all say that Miss Treverton would never have had her pet cut open just out of curiosity. She was grieved enough at losing it.”

  “Probably you know best,” admitted The Counsellor. “Still, it’s always something to know what killed the beast. Anything else that’s fresh?”

  “This next bit isn’t public yet,” said the inspector, cautiously. “But it’s bound to come out when they apply for probate, so there’s no harm in telling it to you now. I went to see Treverton’s solicitor. He made something of a fuss at first, but I got over his professional scruples before long, and got a look at Treverton’s will.”

  “Yes?” said The Counsellor, with a certain eagerness.

  “If you’re looking there for your ‘Why?’, you’ll need to try again, sir,” explained Pagnell, with a touch of complacency. “He’s left half his money for the purpose of keeping this Ravenscourt Press afloat, and the other half goes to some artistic society, The British Association of Sign-Painters or some title like that. Anyhow, it’s a perfectly genuine, old-established, respectable affair with high aims about helping Art along the road one way or another. So unless you can imagine that they’ve put Treverton out of the way for the sake of his money, there’s no motive behind that will. It don’t seem likely, to me.”

  “What about the half of the estate that goes to help the Press?” asked The Counsellor.

  “Lord bless you! There’s nothing to be got out of that. It’s to be in the hands of trustees—that solicitor’s one of ’em—and nobody could touch the money in a month of Sundays, except for the purposes laid down in the will. And, after all, it don’t look as if it would amount to a fortune, anyway.”

  “No?”

  “No! Nor even as much as it might have been. Most of it was in an insurance policy on his life. I got that looked up. There’s a suicide clause in it. Felo de se barred. That may have been why he tried to stage his death to look like an accident. It may come off yet. After all, that’s a matter for the coroner’s jury to settle in their wisdom. They’ve met and viewed the body; but our coroner thought he’d best adjourn for some evidence he hasn’t got yet. If they bring it in as an accident I suppose the insurance company will pay up. Otherwise they won’t.”

  “Did anyone outside know about the purport of his will?” inquired The Counsellor.

  “I asked about that,” said Pagnell. “Unless he talked about it himself, there was no way for anyone to find out. And from what the solicitor said, Treverton wasn’t the kind of man who would talk about his will.”

  “Then if he didn’t, no one could expect to inherit. And if he did, they’d know they weren’t going to inherit,” commented The Counsellor. “Evidently you’re right, Inspector. There’s no motive in that will. By the way, I take it that you’re now officially interested in Miss Treverton’s disappearance, since it links on to Treverton’s death?”

  “Yes, I am,” said Pagnell. “But that doesn’t seem to get me any further. The only thing I’ve definitely established is that the fake Querrin with the two suitcases didn’t stay at an inn or cottage in my district before the day of the disappearance. And he didn’t reach here by any train or bus on that day, either.”

  “Then he must have stayed with a friend, or come in a car, or arrived in an aeroplane,” suggested The Counsellor. “There must have been plenty of cars about, with this fair going on. And didn’t you say there was an aeroplane doing stunts at five bob a hop?”

  “There was,” the inspector confirmed. “But it was busy at the fair all day. It didn’t bring anyone from a distance.”

  “A small affair, was it?”

  “It just held the pilot and one passenger, sir.”

  “And it was busy all the afternoon, taking people for flights?”

  “Right on till about sunset, sir, I remember. After that, it was parked for the night in the field, because there was no shed big enough to house it.”

  “What sort of person is this Nat Rabbit—that’s the name of the fellow who was running it, isn’t it?”

  “Nat Rabbit? I’ve nothing against him. Young fellow. Under thirty, I’d say. As a matter of fact, he’s engaged to a girl in the village here, and the only thing her people have against him is that he won’t settle down to a fixed job with sure pay. He prefers this sort of chancy way of picking up a living, although he could draw quite a decent screw as a mechanic. Independent nature, as he calls it. Wants to be his own master instead of drawing a weekly wage. That kind of a man, if you understand me, sir.”

  “That seems quite O.K.,” admitted The Counsellor.

  Pagnell evidently thought it was time to take the initiative in the conversation.

  “What’s your view of things?” he demanded. “Treverton’s past helping; but there’s Miss Treverton still amissing, and I’m fair worried about her, sir. I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I,” The Counsellor admitted. “But you know as much as I do, Inspector, in that affair. I’ve been quite frank with you. But I’ll tell you one thing that isn’t evidence. I’ve got a hunch, suspicion, inkling, or whatever you like to call it, that she’s not gone very far away. I haven’t a spark of evidence to prove it. I just feel it in my bones, somehow. Put that alongside the fact that the fake Querrin appears here suddenly from nowhere. Doesn’t it suggest that some resident in this district
is providing facilities?”

  “You’re thinking of Dr. Trulock, may be?” suggested Pagnell. “I’ve gone into that already. I got a list of all the people who were at Fairlawns that afternoon, and I’ve questioned every one of them, separately. Their evidence covers the whole time, one way or another, and it’s impossible that Miss Treverton ever came near Fairlawns during that tennis-party. The drive to the front door’s in view of the tennis courts, and from the place where the non-players sit to watch the sets you look right at the front door. Nobody saw her arrive; nobody saw her leave; and nobody saw her car at any time during the afternoon, if she’d parked it on the drive. No, sir, I’ve put everybody through that mill, the Trulocks themselves, the maids, every visitor that was there; and you can take it from me she never turned up. There was one girl who specially wanted to see her about a dress pattern or something like that, and she was on the alert to get hold of her and was a bit put out when she didn’t come. So there was one witness had a definite interest in looking for her. No, she never came near Fairlawns that afternoon. That’s beyond any doubt. Besides, the Trulock kids were looking out for her specially because they were fond of her. They wouldn’t have missed her, even if the grown-ups had. I questioned them, too, and they hadn’t seen her.”

  “No? Then can you suggest any other house where she might have been taken? You couldn’t get a search-warrant, I suppose? Not on the evidence, seeing there isn’t any.”

  “No, I couldn’t wangle that, sir. No magistrate would look at it, without definite information.”

  “So I supposed. And if you drew blank, there’d be the devil to pay. An Englishman’s house is his castle, and all that kind of thing, though it doesn’t apply to the men who come to read the meters or the wireless-pirate hunter, apparently. You might disguise yourself as a gas-man or an electrician and get in that way.”