The Glass Alibi: A Case for Superintendent Slade, page 1
The Glass Alibi
Leonard Gribble
© 1952 Leonard Gribble*
*Indicates the year of first publication.
FOR
MARK GOULDEN
FRIEND OF THE AUTHOR
AND ANTHONY SLADE
CONTENTS
I
Pink Toes
II
Double Death
III
Exit and Entry
IV
Towards Clarity
V
Find the Ladies
VI
Temporary Escape
VII
Armed Sally
VIII
Melodrama or Otherwise
IX
A Man Named Lavender
X
Strange Developments
XI
Return Visit
XII
Aunt Clarissa
XIII
Private Expedition
XIV
River Sequence
XV
Slade Calls a Halt
XVI
An Incredible Hoax
XVII
Home Ground
XVIII
Anti-climax
XIX
In Camera
XX
Out of Focus
XXI
Fresh Venture
XXII
The Dark House
XXIII
Timely Conclusion
CHAPTER I
PINK TOES
I WAS picked up by the police at precisely 10.38 on that Friday evening. I had just turned the corner of my road, and was wondering whether the first spots of rain would fall before I reached my front door, when two plain-clothes men ranged up, one on each side of me.
They were experts. I realised that afterwards. They were on me almost before I was aware of their presence. Dressed in a strange civilian uniform of belted raincoats and soft hats with tugged-down snapbrims, they were as efficient as marionettes on supple strings.
I know the time was 10.38 because I later heard it given in evidence. Which, come to think of it, is a hell of a way of remembering such an event in one's life.
They were both clean-shaven, and the one with the husky voice said, "You're Clifford Felling." Just like that, the words and a full-point. No tonal mark of interrogation. Nothing fancy.
I said yes, I was, and began to think whether any of my past misdemeanours could warrant this late call. I decided they didn't, which didn't make me feel any easier. Any moralist reading this can make what he likes of the fact.
Then the one with the crack in his voice said, "We're police officers, Mr Felling. We should like to ask you a few questions. You have no objection?"
This time the tonal interrogation mark was there, but one had to listen for it. They were smooth and cautious, and were as much on the job as an eight-day clock that had just been wound.
"I'm no law-breaker," I said, "if that's what you mean."
They didn't even smile, so I couldn't tell whether it was what they meant or not. They kept step with me, and when one looked at me the other watched ahead. They were so part perfect they could have done it to music.
"Do you know a person named Jennifer Wade?" the husky voice asked me.
I stopped, and they stopped, and I tried genuinely hard to find a Jennifer Wade pigeonholed in my brain, and drew a blank. I confessed as much, and my voice pitched higher when I realised I was being vaguely apologetic. I was getting angry with myself, and for no good reason. I wasn't even easy in my mind, which was bad. That shows the effect they had on me.
"You're sure, Mr Felling?"
This was the other putting in his twopennyworth, and I'd have got the question mark behind the words had I been deaf.
"Of course I'm sure."
"Why of course?"
No, they weren't obstinate or dumb, just a hundred and fifty per cent. careful. I began to get the idea that I'd be smart to copy them.
"Because I know nothing about such a person." I tried to make myself sound patient. "Who is this Jennifer Wade?"
At that they shied like mettlesome colts doing a sister act.
"We'd like you to come to Scotland Yard, Mr Felling," said the husky voice.
They weren't ignoring my question because they hadn't heard it or because they didn't know how to be polite. They were not sure of me, and they couldn't forget to be cautious. Well, some of my taxes were going to pay their salaries, so there was no sense in getting pettish about it.
"That's all right," I nodded.
"Thank you, Mr Felling." They perked up. I wasn't going to be difficult. "We have a car."
I could have recited a whole list of things they had, but didn't bother. I told them of something I hadn't got.
"I've run out of cigarettes," I explained. "It's too late to buy any. Would you mind if I collected some from my flat?"
"Very well. We'll come along with you."
They must have known how lonely I was feeling.
I don't want to get arch about this legal pick-up, but by this time the novelty was wearing thin. I was back to wondering about who Jennifer Wade could be. The fact that Scotland Yard wanted her gave her a sinister fascination although I had no idea how she looked, whether her hair was blonde or brunette or red. I felt myself becoming curious about her. But that was with only half my mind. The other half was thinking of myself. It was a habit with me.
"I've only your word that you're police officers," I pointed out reasonably as we came to another stop, this time before the block of flats where I lived in a ground-floor apartment at the rear.
They were reasonable in turn. They produced warrant cards. We entered the building, turned along the corridor, and I opened my front door and switched on the light. I didn't have to press them to enter. In three seconds flat they had taken in every observable object in my living-room and compared notes.
"I shan't be a moment."
I entered the bedroom. They stood grouped in the doorway, making sure I didn't palm a gun or hide the Crown Jewels. I keep several packets of cigarettes in the drawer of the side-table by the head of my bed. I opened the drawer and took one out, and as I closed the drawer half turned.
I am not usually a particularly observant person. I can normally see what is under my nose, but on most occasions rely on my sense of smell, which is probably just laziness. As I turned my glance swept the end of the carpet up to the curtains covering the window. I had drawn them before I went out. They were tall curtains, reaching to within an inch or so of the polished surround of floorboards. At the moment I saw them a pair of shiny black shoes with peek toes filled one small section of the gap between curtain and floor.
Through sheer nylon two pink toenails stared back at me with rosy intentness.
A lump formed in my throat. Of course the name Jennifer Wade was pounding like drumfire in my brain. Curiosity swept over me in a tidal wave. It drowned my caution. If I had drawn the attention of those two plain-clothes men to the surprising decoration at the foot of my window curtain I might have saved myself a great deal of grief. On the other hand, I would have to endure their blundering attempts to refrain from smirking.
At least, I believe that is why I foolishly said nothing. I pocketed my cigarettes and walked out of the bedroom with a dizziness blurring my eyes.
"You forgot the light, Mr Felling."
"Oh, sorry. Thanks."
I switched off the light and we left the flat. I was asking myself who was she? She must be Jennifer Wade. But why?
Then, because I try to be at least normally logical, I told myself I might learn more at the Yard. After all, I need not have seen those rosy toes. Had my eyes been glancing two inches higher I should certainly have missed them. So that, in effect, I was not practising a deception.
Except on myself, and anyone who does that is a fool. So I had always maintained, and here I was proving myself a heretic at the first opportunity.
We climbed into a police car parked in a side-street, I produced my cigarettes, and we smoked. It passed the interval before we reached Westminster and the driver turned down Derby Street.
As a fairly consistent reader of thrillers, I had always wondered what Scotland Yard was like inside. When I arrived with my escort I didn't give the place a thought. Those tinted toenails were two rather large motes on what Mr Wordsworth calls the "inward eye." But when he called it the "bliss of solitude" he was generalising, and that is always a risky business.
Almost before I knew it I was in a lift, then walking down a corridor and being ushered into a scantily furnished office. I received my first positive reaction to the place, and, if you know what I mean, it was rather negative. I thought if this is the best the taxpayers can provide the nation's crime fighters the police had better do a spot of black marketing on their own.
A silly fancy, admittedly, but the product of a new tension that was beginning to build inside me. I felt taut and wire-drawn, and would have been grateful for a drink.
"Please sit down, Mr Felling."
They were almost pleasant now they were home, and presumably had me where they wanted me.
I sat down and twirled my hat in my hands. I remember the sweatband inside the crown was clammy to my touch. I wiped it over with my handkerchief.
One of them sat writing in a notebook while the other disappeared. The one engaged making notes had no furth
I was startled when Big Ben boomed over the night pressing against the windows, and for once my reaction was so slow I forgot to glance at my watch. I suppose you can say I was scared and not be telling a lie. Certainly my thought processes were muzzy. I had a feeling of guilt and was annoyed with myself for having it. Even such minor mental exertion had the strange effect of making me feel vaguely like a champion of this unknown Jennifer Wade.
The door opened, and the plain-clothes man stood back to allow a man in early middle age, with crisp brown hair and lean features lit with steely blue eyes, to enter. I recognised the intelligent face and hard lean strength of Superintendent Anthony Slade, one of Scotland Yard's top detectives. I had seen his picture often in the newspapers, and had read of his cases from the time when he was an inspector working with the Yard's famed "Murder Squad."
Seeing him didn't help to calm me down.
"Mr Felling?"
He didn't have to ask, but it was gesture. I nodded.
"Sorry to bring you out at this late hour, but it's quite possible you can help us."
Maybe he was clairvoyant. I stifled that one, and tried to look as though I had been waiting all evening to help them
"Anything I can do, Mr. Slade."
The damfool things we say when we're trying to think of two hundred separate things at the same time.
Well, he reached the desk under the window and sat down and I pulled up my chair and put my hat on the floor. The two noises off distributed themselves between me and the door. The one was still frowning over his notebook. To look at him you'd have thought he had just discovered he had the wrong kind of nib in his pen. The other draped himself over a spare chair and contrived to make it issue sundry creaks and squeaks throughout the interview. We don't have third degree in Britain, but I wonder under which degree squeaky chairs at past eleven at night are listed.
"Mr Felling," said Slade, and manner and voice were both calculated to put me at ease, which of course made me instantly suspicious, "tell me, have you seen this evening's paper?"
"No," I said. "One a day is enough for me, with the B.B.C. news in the evening."
"I see," he said.
I felt as though I had removed a great darkness from his mind, and that the least he could do was reciprocate.
"I think you had better see this before we say any more, Mr Felling."
As he picked up an evening journal and unfolded it he gave me the impression that he was withholding judgment. I could imagine I heard the crackle of ice forming round my feet. I took the paper from him.
There was a bold black headline that announced: "Yard anxious to interview Jennifer Wade." Below, in smaller type, was: "Clue in Airport Hotel Murder."
Something soggy turned a somersault in my stomach, and I felt as though without my knowing my spine had been painlessly removed. Rigidity left me and I went slumping against the back of my chair.
If they'd had the sense to put me on a stool I should have been flat on the floor.
The truth was desperately near being too much for me. At 10.38 that evening I had somehow walked into a murder case without a thought in the world of two pink toes that were strangers to my bedroom.
Or were they?
CHAPTER II
DOUBLE DEATH
I HAD only the vaguest impression of the airport hotel murder. I had glanced over a report in the morning's paper while consuming my coffee and toast, which is no way to digest the grim fact of murder.
A man had been dining at the hotel at West London Airport. His companion had been a woman. They had been seated at a table in a corner of the dining saloon. A waiter chanced to glance at the table, saw the man collapsed in his chair. The woman had gone.
The man had been poisoned with cyanide, but the glass from which he had been drinking was missing. Presumably it and the woman had vanished together.
Those pink toes now assumed a terrible although unexplained significance to me. Obviously the police would not be waiting to pick me up unless they had a lead that pointed directly to me.
And yet that was unthinkable, the wildest of crazy notions. I had been miles from the airport at the time the man was poisoned. I knew of no one who had intended dining there.
It was purest fantasy.
At least, it was all save those painted toes.
Slade took the newspaper from me, firmly but gently. I realised I hadn't read a word below the headlines. My constructive thought processes were numbed and horribly inefficient. In my heart was growing despair for fear I should make a complete fool of myself and bring the police to suspect me.
Slade was a good detective. He was clever and had the reputation of working like a beaver. No man at the Yard had a better record sheet. Heaven alone knew how many times he had been commended by judges and magistrates up and down the country for his integrity and skill. I knew that he wouldn't be satisfied until he had found the murderer, and I knew I was not the man he sought. If indeed he sought a man.
But circumstances had led his two assistants to my door, and that fact didn't wear a healthy complexion. Somewhere, I felt, someone was having a damned good laugh at my expense.
Well, I prided myself I could join in the average laugh against me, but not when three Yard men were more interested in me than in catching the last train back to their beds, and when they were hunting a murderer. I'd have to fill the bill a lot better than I did to get a laugh out of the present situation.
"We have reason to believe Jennifer Wade was the woman who dined at the airport hotel last night," said Slade, with a look on his face that gave me less than no hint about his thoughts. "Now you know why we want to ask you some questions."
Either Slade was being foolish, and I knew he wasn't that, or he was trying to trip me, which annoyed me, and I knew, equally well, I couldn't afford to get annoyed and lose my sense of proportion—what little of it was left to me.
"I'm sorry," I said, "but I don't. I've never heard of this woman. I don't know who she is, and I don't know why you think I should."
Slade digested this. Anyway, he gave me the impression of doing so. He was probably working some ten moves ahead. I could have told him he didn't have to be so smart. I couldn't see one ahead, and until someone replaced my missing backbone I couldn't make it even if the way was clear.
"Mr Felling, I think I had better tell you something. Jennifer Wade is known to be missing from her home. That is something we know. She was noticed to-day and followed. She led detectives to a block of flats. They went after her, and found her apparently leaving your flat."
That shook me, and I shook the chair under me. Slade gave me a slow glance that was about as compassionate as a Kreig arclight. But I was sitting upright, and my spine was again in place. I could feel the constricting steel bands holding it in position.
"I can't believe it."
Only someone who wasn't using his head would say that to the police on their home ground. Slade smiled thinly, but he wasn't selling me the idea he was amused.
"I can understand how you feel, Mr Felling." He was smoothing me down ready for the next body blow. "Of course, when I say she was apparently leaving your flat, I mean just that. She could have been trying to get in. We can't be sure. We can't even be sure that she held a key in her hand, which was certainly stretched out to the lock. She saw our men"—he shrugged it off as a hazard that had to be accepted—"and darted away. She reached the street, and was followed down a side-road, and there she was lost. That was shortly after nine this evening. I received a phoned report, and my men waited to have a word with you. After," he thought to add, "they had made some inquiries about you and obtained your description. It was done very circumspectly."
Well, what could I say to that? He had spiked my bluster before I could make it. He had told me sufficient to make my ignorance of the whole affair dreadfully abysmal.
I said, "This is very bewildering, Mr Slade. I don't know what to say. It's a complete mystery to me."
