A Painted Devil Read online

  ‘Yes sir. Asbury had requested a call at nine o clock.’

  ‘Nine o clock?’ repeated his superior in amazement. ‘Who needs waking at nine in the morning?’

  Hollingsworth shrugged. He had enough mysteries to be worrying about, without speculating on the sleeping habits of the victim.

  ‘Unless,’ continued the superintendent, enthusiastically, ‘it was suicide, and he wanted to ensure his body would be found…’

  ‘I can only repeat what Dr Hyatt said, sir, that it categorically was not suicide.’

  Hollingsworth knew the mention of Hyatt’s name would quell the other’s excitement faster than any discussion over the complete lack of logic in the suggestion.

  ‘Anyway the front desk clerk telephoned Asbury’s room but received no reply. Then he sent up one of the maids to knock and she got no response either. She went back and told the clerk and he came and knocked too. By now they were worried and the clerk tried the door but it was locked. He tried his master key but the room key was already in the keyhole on the inside.’

  ‘Well hang it all man, if the room was locked from the inside how did the murderer get out?’

  Hollingsworth replied quickly, before the chief superintendent could return to the suicide motif.

  ‘I’m coming to that sir. The Metropole is not the kind of place where they break down doors routinely, and the clerk knew that the gentleman in the room next door, room 315, had already checked out earlier this morning. That room has a connecting door to the one used by Ronald Asbury so they thought they would try that first.’

  ‘Was room 315 locked?’

  ‘Yes sir, but from the outside, so the master key worked. The connecting door was also locked, but only on that one side, not on the side of Mr Asbury’s room. Once we slid the bolt across, we were able to open the connecting door and found Ronald Asbury’s body as you see it in the photographs.’

  ‘Well that’s it then,’ cried the chief superintendent triumphantly, as if he alone could have deduced the culprit from these facts. ‘It must have been the fellow in 315! We know who did it.’

  ‘Oh yes sir, we know who did it. We just don’t know who did it.’

  The chief superintendent asked Hollingsworth to kindly stop spouting gibberish. The latter attempted to clarify.

  ‘As you say sir, it seems clear that the murder must have been committed by the man in room 315, a man identified in the guestbook as a Mr Sidney Carter. So we investigated a little and he fitted the bill perfectly. He checked in around half past four yesterday, with no reservation; he specifically requested room 315; and he left this morning very early. If a man intending to kill Ronald Asbury followed him to the Metropole it’s pretty much exactly the behaviour you’d expect.

  ‘The address in the register was 17, Greaves St, Lincoln. Of course I’ve checked with the station in Lincoln and there is no such address; furthermore their only record of a Sidney Carter is a gentleman of seventy six who is housebound.

  ‘We have descriptions of this man calling himself Sidney Carter from the evening clerk and the morning clerk, but they are both so nondescript as to cover half the men you pass in any street. Medium height, medium build, pleasant face, brownish hair and so on. I bet even they couldn’t pick out the man if they saw him again.’

  ‘There are no other suspects I presume? I mean, no one else apart from our mystery man in 315 who could have done it?’

  ‘I really can’t see it sir. So much fits with that hypothesis. The key left in the lock of room 314 means that the murderer must have left through room 315. Dr Hyatt said Asbury had been dead about ten to twelve hours, so that puts the time of death between nine and let’s say midnight to be safe. The wake-up call was requested at quarter past nine last night, but we have no evidence that the person who made it actually was Ronald Asbury. It could just as easily been our Sidney Carter using the telephone in the dead man’s room.’

  Hollingsworth paused a moment, mentally checking he had covered everything from this theme before moving on.

  ‘Now, all the rear and side doors of the hotel are locked by eight in the evening, and not reopened until the kitchen staff arrive at five in the morning. The night clerk is certain that no one other than registered guests entered the hotel during the time that Asbury could have been killed. In other words it has to have been someone already in the hotel.

  ‘But that includes hundreds of people,’ objected the chief superintendent. ‘Can we be sure there was no one else in the hotel with a grudge? No other guest or member of staff?’

  ‘We can’t be certain, of course, although I have Sergeant Davies checking as many names as possible to see if he can find any connections with Asbury. But in all honesty sir everything points to this Sidney Carter.’

  The chief superintendent ground his coffee mug into the desk, his rotund face grimacing with impotence.

  ‘So we’ve nothing. Anyone can make up a false name and address; why didn’t the damn fool clerk ask for some identification?’

  ‘That’s not the kind of thing they do at the Metropole sir. Although it does tell us that our Mr Carter must have looked respectable. Mr Harwood assured me that the clerks are at liberty to bend the truth about the availability of rooms if a guest’s appearance does not meet a certain standard.’

  ‘Well that’s easy then. We just comb England for a respectable looking young man with brown hair. Jump to it Hollingsworth.’

  Hollingsworth was surprised it had taken this long for his superior’s legendary sarcasm to put in an appearance.

  Chapter 4

  A week later Hollingsworth trudged disconsolately back into headquarters. The chief superintendent had called him in to discuss the progress of the case, and Hollingsworth did not relish the prospect of explaining that there was none worthy of the name.

  He and Sergeant Davies had followed up every conceivable line of enquiry, and none of them led anywhere. The lack of positive results was certainly not due to any negligence on the part of the investigators, but rarely had Hollingsworth come across a case with so little evidence and so few leads. In a city with such a constant flux of travellers no one remembers anyone else, nor expects to do so. Even as far as asking around the shops and restaurants in the local area the pair had been forced to use Ronald Asbury’s passport photograph, which, like all passport photographs, was really too small and grainy to truly identify anyone. There were no other photos in the dead man’s luggage, and Sergeant Davies’ suggestion of using one of the police photographs of the corpse had been declined on grounds of taste. Hollingsworth doubted it would have mattered; there seemed no reason to suspect that Asbury had even been to any shops, pubs or other type of establishment, regardless of whether the owners would remember him. All the evidence pointed to him going directly to the Metropole and remaining there.

  Of course they had no photograph at all of Sidney Carter, and had virtually given up on finding a lead regarding him from the locals. At his lowest point Hollingsworth was making inquiries in the Lamb and Flag, a pub just down the road from the Metropole, and found himself on the verge of asking the landlord if he had served a brown haired young man of medium build at some point during the last week.

  The policeman had then switched track to focus on the victim’s past, and attempted to trace Ronald Asbury’s movements after suddenly leaving Upper Wentham. His landlady confirmed what Andrea Ketterman had already told them: that Asbury had terminated his tenancy some months ago and told her he was leaving for the continent. He left nothing behind and it seemed he never intended to return. Hollingsworth tracked down the ticket Asbury had booked to France but once the latter had disembarked in Le Havre the trail ended.

  Hollingsworth knocked on the chief superintendent’s door and the latter bid Hollingsworth enter and sit, and then gazed out of his window at the Hampshire countryside for a few moments. Hollingsworth squeezed his frame into the chair and, when asked, explained about the facts he had discovered, or more precisely the lack thereo
f.

  ‘So in summary we know hardly anything about this fellow Asbury, even less about the killer, “Mr Carter”, and absolutely nothing whatsoever about the motive.’

  The chief superintendent stared accusingly at his subordinate, but Hollingsworth refused to squirm uncomfortably as was hoped.

  ‘I think, sir, we have a little more to go on than that.’ Hollingsworth held only one card he felt had any potential, but he was determined to play it for all he was worth. ‘You see, as far as we can tell, nobody knew that Ronald Asbury was returning to England. He had proposed to Andrea Ketterman, been refused and then, it seems, cleared off to France without much ceremony. Some people in Upper Wentham knew, but even they lost touch with him afterwards. We can’t find any evidence that he told anyone of his return to England, which is not surprising if he only intended to stay a single night before taking the steamer to New York.’

  ‘He told Andrea Ketterman,’ pointed out the chief superintendent.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hollingsworth, ‘and she only knew because he called her aunt. That seems to be the key point: Miss Ketterman only knew Asbury was there because he told her. I can’t see how anyone could have known of his presence without Asbury choosing to tell them.

  ‘That leaves, as far as I can see, three possibilities about this Sidney Carter.’ He enumerated them on his fingers. ‘One, he was on the same boat as Asbury over from France, and somehow the two got into an argument. “Carter” follows Asbury to the hotel and murders him. It’s possible, but not particularly likely. At a stretch you could extend that possibility to Carter being someone Asbury met on the continent, who followed him onto the ferry and back to England.

  ‘Two, Carter knew Asbury from the past, hated him for some reason, and by coincidence spotted him in Southampton and decided to take advantage of the anonymity offered in a traveller’s city. I’m inclined to dismiss that as too far-fetched.’

  ‘What about the aunt?’ asked the chief superintendent. ‘She could have told someone in Upper Wentham that Asbury had called, who then high-tailed it down to Southampton and killed him.’

  ‘She could,’ agreed Hollingsworth through gritted teeth, since the other had just interrupted his methodical dissemination by stealing option three from under his nose. Still, at least he was one step ahead of his superior. ‘But she swears she didn’t tell a soul.

  The chief superintendent raised an expressive eyebrow, which somehow in a single movement managed to say “If I had a sixpence for every elderly lady who swears she never told something to anybody…”

  Hollingsworth nodded his agreement with this eloquent and presumably wealthy eyebrow.

  ‘She’s half-batty and could gossip for England – as you’d expect from the way our luck is going on this case – so for all we know she could actually have announced it in the village shop in full hearing of anybody, and then promptly forgotten all about it. That seems the only reasonable possibility of the three. Directly or indirectly, someone in Upper Wentham with a motive for wanting Ronald Asbury dead heard that he was back in England for a single night. They drove down, or took the train, checked into the Metropole, saw from the register that he was in room 314 and requested the room next door, taking their one opportunity to kill Asbury before he left England again.’

  The chief superintendent nodded slowly.

  ‘It sounds plausible, I suppose. But why on earth should they do that? Asbury was leaving Europe forever, so we’re told. If you don’t like a chap, surely it’s as good to have him across the Atlantic as dead?’

  ‘I agree sir. It fits the facts, but makes no sense at all. In any case the whole idea is academic. What are we supposed to do? Ask the entire village of Upper Wentham if anyone wanted Ronald Asbury dead? We’ve no leads whatsoever, there’s no actual evidence pointing to Upper Wentham, or anywhere else for that matter. It’s a dead-end in every direction.’ Hollingsworth’s manner had sunk to the point where a Russian theatre audience might have chastised him for being too melancholy.

  The chief superintendent scowled, and then brightened.

  ‘Hold up a moment. We were saying that the murder seems odd if the motive was hatred, but what about gain? Who stands to inherit?’

  ‘No one,’ replied Hollingsworth glumly, now sorry to have already anticipated this line of enquiry. ‘Asbury died intestate. Not that it matters, since his worldly goods amounted to what was left in that hotel room.’

  ‘No money?’

  ‘I checked with his bank. He liquidated all his assets before going to France. Whatever money he had, it was in cash. He may have spent it or it may be hidden somewhere. But no one will be acquiring it legally because of his death.’

  ‘So there is a possible motive after all: theft. If he’d had a lot of money with him in the room…’ The chief superintendent trailed off and sifted through his notes with a trace of excitement. ‘You didn’t find anything valuable left in the room?’

  ‘Nothing, sir. No cash or jewellery of any sort. In fact I’m starting to wonder whether robbery really was the motive after all. But of course that puts us right back where we started: it could have been anybody. Maybe it really was as simple as a passenger on board Asbury’s boat discovering his money. Although surely in that case they would just steal it there and then?’

  ‘And regardless I bet they’re not even in the country anymore.’

  The brief glimmer of hope that had passed over the chief superintendent’s day was engulfed, and a gloomy expression settled over his face.

  ‘I still have one or two ideas about tracing Sidney Carter, sir. And I received records from Ronald Asbury’s bank, listing the serial numbers of all the banknotes he withdrew prior to leaving for France. I’ve distributed a memo to banks all around the country to watch out for them.’

  The superintendent nodded his approval.

  ‘Well, you’ve done a good job in keeping the thing quiet Hollingsworth; there have been one or two mentions of a suicide but nothing about murder. We’ll keep the file open, but I don’t want you spending any more time on this unless something major comes up. The trail is cold and the facts, such as they are, point nowhere. The whole thing is utterly inexplicable. I wonder whether it wasn’t just some homicidal lunatic, or even a genuine suicide with some highly unlikely accidental evidence pointing to murder.’

  But in that the superintendent was wrong. The death in the Metropole was not due to a random lunatic, nor was it suicide.

  It was just the start.

  PART TWO

  Two months later,

  July 1936

  Chapter 5

  Deep in the confines of Cambridge University, Dr Samuel Harris was sitting at his desk, an expression of intense frustration on his face.

  To his left stood a precarious tower of exam papers, each demonstrating the precise manner in which the student author had failed to grasp the nuances of Hamiltonian mechanics. To his right was a sheaf of scribbled notes for an article he had promised to the publishers of the Journal of Kinetics, topped neatly with the latest polite reminder that the deadline for said article had passed several weeks ago.

  In front of his white beard, nestling snugly between the two paper formations, was today’s Times crossword.

  Harris fancied that the daily completion of this cryptic puzzle would “loosen up” his brain, preparing him to face the intellectual rigours awaiting him during the day in lectures, exam papers and journal articles. In practice it took him so long to plough through as much of the puzzle as he could manage – typically about four clues, two of which eventually proved to be wrong – that he ran out of time to complete any of the other tasks awaiting his professional attention. Such a routine explained the height of the pile of papers to the left, and quantity of deadline reminders buried in the right.

  Harris readjusted his lens-less spectacles and squinted at the type, his nose screwed up in a puzzled expression.

  ‘“Ruined by potential difference in impudent attitude.” Nine letters. I mean
, what in Hades is the fellow talking about?’ he asked of no one in particular. ‘It’s gibberish.’

  Harris had looked at this particular clue at least seven times and accomplished nothing except a nagging sensation that the answer might be something to do with pirates.

  ‘How is it in our modern and enlightened society,’ he continued addressing the empty room, ‘that this blackguard – who, I note with interest, consistently withholds his name – is not only legally permitted to put his delusional rantings into print, but presumably earns a living from it? In any civilised country the fellow would be locked up and the key thrown away.’

  His friend Professor Brennan had once pointed out the absence of any obligation on Harris’ part to complete the crossword (unlike the quite specific contractual requirement to impart mathematical knowledge and write journal articles), but Harris had merely thrown a pen at him.

  A knock on the door provided a welcome distraction from the clue, and Harris gruffly called out his permission to enter. It would, he presumed, be a miserable student, here to explain the unfortunate series of circumstances leading to their temporary amnesia during last week’s exam; but one look at the man who opened the door was enough to show that he was nothing of the sort.

  The visitor was still quite young, but his broad face contained a wisdom that only came from time and wide experience. His fair hair lay neatly combed and the expensive cut of his suit disguised the slightly plump nature of his frame. His eyes scanned the room before coming to rest on its occupant, taking in the prematurely white beard and wire spectacles perched on the hooked nose, despite containing no lenses.

  ‘Are you Dr Harris?’

  The don’s eye flicked to the nameplate on his open door reading “Dr S.L. Harris”, mere inches from the young man’s head.

  ‘You saw right through my cryptic subterfuge, I see,’ retorted Harris acidly. He disliked being disturbed when he was not in a sociable mood; it was bad enough when a student or fellow don came, but when the caller had no justifiable demand on his time he dispensed with manners entirely.