Complete works of peter.., p.208
Complete Works of Peter Cheyney. Illustrated, page 208
Meraulton hesitated for a moment. Then he walked over to the typewriter and took the cover off. He put a sheet of paper in the machine.
'What do I say?' he said. 'How do I start?'
Callaghan got up. He was grinning. He walked over and stood behind Meraulton.
'I'll dictate,' he said, 'an' you can write it down. Now, then... "This is a confession made voluntarily by me, Paul Meraulton..."'
Callaghan's voice went on and Meraulton's fingers tapped on the typewriter keys until the thing was done. Callaghan took out his fountain pen.
'Just sign it at the bottom,' he said, 'and put the date on it.'
He watched Meraulton do this, then, taking the pen from his fingers, wrote underneath: 'Witnessed S. Callaghan, Callaghan Investigations.'
He folded the sheets of paper, put them in his pocket, then brought out his packet of cigarettes. He gave one to Meraulton, took one himself.
'I reckon you need that,' he said.
He put the cigarettes away and produced the wad of banknotes. He began to count off notes until a little pile to the value of one thousand pounds lay on the corner of the table. He put the balance of £180 back into his pocket.
'There's your money,' he said. 'Now get out, an' if you're wise you'll get out quickly.'
Meraulton picked up the money.
'Are you going to keep quiet about this for a few hours?' he asked.
Callaghan grinned.
'You're a crook, Meraulton,' he said. 'An' I never make bargains with crooks, if I can help it, that is! You get out while the goin's good. Maybe they'll get you an' maybe they won't; that's a chance you've just got to take.'
It was a quarter to twelve.
Callaghan, half-way up the stairs to his office in Chancery Lane, began to cough. Continuing on his way, he told himself that old one about cutting down his cigarettes to fifty a day.
Fred Mazin was in the outside office. Sitting on the other side of the room reading a newspaper was Jeremy Meraulton.
'You get out, Fred,' said Callaghan. 'I'll attend to Mr. Meraulton, an' another thing: you needn't come up here tomorrow. I reckon I'm through with you for a bit.'
'O.K.,' said Fred Mazin.
He took his hat, gathered up his racing edition and the form book and disappeared.
Callaghan looked at Jeremy. He was grinning.
'Come inside,' he said.
He unlocked the door of his own room, went inside, switched on the light. Then he sat down at his desk.
Jeremy stood in the doorway. His lips were twitching. He looked ominous.
'I don't want any argument with you,' he said. 'I've got to admit I've a certain respect for you, Callaghan. You turned the tables on me last night and you were lucky to get away with it!'
Callaghan was still grinning.
'I was,' he said simply. 'An' I was even luckier to find a lorry driver down on the main road who gave me a lift back to London, otherwise I'd probably be walkin' now.'
He lit a cigarette.
'Well,' he said. 'What is it you want—your money back or the will?'
'I want the will,' said Jeremy. 'I promised you the money, and you can keep it. If you've got the will, hand it over. If you haven't, I'm going to beat you into little pieces.'
'You don't say so,' said Callaghan.
He was leaning back in his chair, enjoying the situation. He stayed like that for several seconds, then:
'I'm goin' to do you a very good turn, Jeremy,' he said. 'I'm not only goin' to give you the will, but I'm goin' to give you a tip that'll do you a bit of good!'
He opened the drawer in front of him, fumbled about in the corner and produced the piece of gold copy-paper on which August Meraulton had typed his will.
He threw it across the table to Jeremy.
'Take a look at it an' you'll see that that is the old boy's signature right enough,' he said. 'Well, are you satisfied?'
Jeremy examined the paper.
'I'm satisfied,' he said.
He smiled a little.
'All right,' said Callaghan. 'Now I'll tell you what you're thinkin'. You're thinkin' that all you've got to do is to destroy that will an' that when you've done that you'll be O.K. because under the first will that the old boy made you all got an equal share.
'Well, if you're thinkin' that you're wrong. That will isn't twopennorth of good to any one. Mind you, I'm not sayin' that that isn't August Meraulton's will. I'm just sayin' that it's no durn good whether you destroy it or not!'
Jeremy was still smiling. He held the piece of copy-paper between his finger and thumb. With his other hand he produced a cigarette lighter. He set fire to August Meraulton's will and watched it burn. When he had finished he looked at Callaghan.
'That's that,' he said. 'Now just what were you saying, Callaghan?'
Callaghan lit a cigarette.
'I'm goin' to tell you something that nobody else knows,' he said. 'I'm goin' to give you something to think over. Something that's going to make you feel like nothin' on earth. Here it is:
'Everybody—the police, and you an' all the rest of you, an' probably all the rest of the country who's bothered to read the papers—have got an idea in their heads that August Meraulton was killed by somebody who wanted to get their fingers on that will.
'Well I know he wasn't! An' the reason I know that is because I'm the feller who got into the Ensell Street mortuary an' took that will out of his watch-case.
'So I know he wasn't killed because somebody wanted to take that will off him. If they killed him for the will they'd have taken it. They wouldn't have left it for me to take. Work it out for yourself, Jeremy. The old boy was lyin' there in Lincoln's Inn Fields for nearly an hour after he'd been murdered an' the will was on him the whole time, an' the murderer didn't even bother to take it.'
Jeremy looked across the desk at Callaghan. His eyes were wide. His big hands twitched spasmodically.
Callaghan began to laugh.
'All the while your lousy thugs were knockin' me about last night I was consolin' myself with the fact that the laugh was goin' to be on you,' he said.
He got up, walked round the desk.
'You're supposed to have brains, Jeremy,' he said. 'An' I thought that Mayola had 'em, too. Did you think that I was such a damn fool to come down to the Show-Down to do business with you when I could have done it on the telephone, if I hadn't had a reason?'
Jeremy put his hands in his pockets.
'Well, what was the reason?' he asked.
'I wanted to see just how far you'd go to get your hands on that will that you've just burned,' said Callaghan. 'I wanted to see if you were an accomplice in the murder of old Meraulton. Now I know you're not.
'Maybe you don't quite understand. Maybe I can make it a bit clearer. Listen: The murderer of August Meraulton didn't even bother to take the will because he knew that takin' it wouldn't do him any good. If you'd been in on the murder job you'd have known that, too. The fact that you went to the trouble of first of all beatin' me up to try an' get it an' then payin' me money to try an' get it showed me that you didn't know a damn thing about that murder.
'An' that's what I wanted to know!'
Callaghan picked up his hat.
'By the way,' he said, 'there's something else might interest you. Paul's ratted on you. Paul's told the full story about that fake company swindle you boys pulled on old August, and now made a run for it. Somebody told me tonight. So it looks as if the game's up, doesn't it, Jeremy?'
Jeremy said nothing. He had picked up his hat. He was watching Callaghan.
'If I were you,' said Callaghan, 'I'd just run along nicely and go into a huddle with your lady friend Mayola about what you're goin' to do. It looks as if life is goin' to be a bit tough for you four Meraulton fellers, doesn't it?'
Jeremy still said nothing. He turned on his heel and walked out of the office. Callaghan listened to his footsteps as he descended the stairs.
Callaghan waited for a few minutes. Then he went over and locked the door. Then he took from his pocket half a dozen closely written sheets of paper which represented his work between the time he had left Gringall in the afternoon until the time had come for him to telephone through to Darkie.
He folded up these sheets, pinned them together and placed them with the confession he had taken from Paul Meraulton in a stout envelope which he took from the drawer. He addressed this envelope to Detective-Inspector Gringall, at Scotland Yard. Then he put it back into his breast pocket, switched off the light, closed and locked the office doors and went down the stairs.
He was still grinning.
XII. — INCLUDING KIDNAPPING
CALLAGHAN turned into Chancery Lane and began to walk towards the Holborn end. It had begun to rain, and he turned up his coat collar, kept in the leeway of the wall.
As he walked he began to think of the night when the Meraulton case had started. It had been raining then. He ruminated on the question of rain, cursed quietly to himself at the thought of the nights he would spend walking up and down Chancery Lane, going to or from the office, settling a case or looking for one, bribing somebody with a fiver or trying to get his hands on a fiver for himself.
He realized with something akin to surprise that he was sick of being a private detective. Callaghan Investigations gave him a pain in the neck. He, Callaghan, gave himself a pain in the neck.
There was no ending to the business of being a private detective. He wondered what happened to them when they got old, when they were too tired to go running around town getting old ladies and gentlemen out of trouble, snooping about, talking to the lousy people, the near crooks, the complete crooks that made up the rather extraordinary panorama of the life of a private investigator.
Of course there were men who had got away with it in a big way—Pinkerton—now there was a successful man for you with a big organization, a nation-wide organization in the States where a private dick with a good reputation meant something.
William J. Burns was another. Callaghan, fumbling for the inevitable cigarette, wondered why the devil he was thinking about successful private detectives. It was all the tea in China to a bad egg that he wasn't ever going to be like that. The best he could do would be to 'get by.' If you could 'get by' you were doing pretty well, some people said. But who the hell was going to be satisfied with that?
Fumbling for a match, his fingers encountered the £180 in notes in his trouser pocket. That was a devil of a lot of good, wasn't it? One way and another he'd got £1180 out of the Meraulton case and could have stuck to it, and played along with Gringall. But he'd parted with a thousand to Paul just because it was indicated, and to tell the truth, necessary.
Darkie would want another £80 for his work, and the boys would want a bit, Fred Mazin and the other boys who'd helped. By the time he was through with the job he'd make a fifty-pound note clear—if he were lucky.
But he knew why he'd handled it the way he had. He just wasn't keen on admitting the fact that he'd fallen for a woman, and fallen hard. Cynthis Meraultons didn't come across the path of Slim Callaghans every day in the week. He'd fallen for her like a sack of coke the first time he'd seen her. She had everything that he liked in a woman and probably a lot more than he knew about or guessed. He shrugged his shoulders.
He turned off Holborn into a narrow street, walked along until he came to a dark cul-de-sac, turned in and knocked on the ramshackle door at the end. A minute later it opened and a very old and wizened face looked out.
'Hallo, Slim,' said the owner of the face. 'How's things? Want somethin'?'
Callaghan grinned.
'You didn't think I'd come round here to ask what the time was, did you, Grandpa?' he said. 'You give me one of those little bottles of easy knock-out drops an' I'll give you a pound note.'
The old man screwed up his face.
'I usually get a fiver, Slim,' he said. 'A pound don't get very far these days.'
'I'm payin' a pound,' said Callaghan. 'An' don't make the dose too stiff. I just want to use it on a handkerchief.'
'All right,' said Grandpa. 'I'll do it for you, Slim, but I wouldn't do it for anybody else. How long do you want it to work for?'
'Two hours or so,' said Callaghan.
'Then you want chloroform,' said Grandpa. 'It ain't no good me givin' you that ether mixture if you want it to go two hours. You wait, I'll get a bottle.'
Callaghan waited, drawing on his cigarette, tapping with his foot on the doorstep.
Five minutes afterwards Grandpa returned with the bottle.
Callaghan paid his pound, said good-night and walked to the garage in Lamb's Conduit Street. He paid an account of nearly four pounds against which they had been holding his car, and took possession of it with a cynical survey of its antiquity. It was a 1929 saloon with tyres worn flat and a permanent wheeze.
He got in and looked at his watch. It was a quarter to one.
He drove westwards.
Callaghan stood in the middle of the floor and looked at Cynthis Meraulton. He looked her over with the same calm appraisal that he had used on the night of their first meeting.
She had seated herself on the other side of the fireplace. She was wearing a figured crepe-de-chine day gown with black satin court shoes and beige stockings. Callaghan thought that every time he saw her she looked colder, more desirable.
Stacked up against the wall were two kit bags, ready packed. A black coat with a fur collar, a small hat and gloves lay beside them.
Callaghan grinned apologetically. His fingers in his overcoat pocket twisted the chloroform bottle, fumbled with the handkerchief with the cotton wool inside it that lay beside the bottle.
'I'm always apologizin' to you for something, I know,' he said, grinning cheerfully. 'But my business is a funny business. It doesn't always go the way you want it to go.'
She looked straight at him.
'Mr. Callaghan,' she said, 'I think that you are a liar, and not a particularly good one. You said that you would be bringing Willie with you tonight. That was a lie. You said that he was, or had been, in Edinburgh; that was another lie.'
Callaghan shrugged.
'One lie's as good as another sometimes, madame,' he said. 'But how did you know about Willie?'
'He telephoned through this evening,' she said. 'He told me that you had asked him not to contact me, but naturally he was worried. If it hadn't been for you, for your continued trickery, he would have been here before.'
'Fine,' said Callaghan softly. 'How did he know you were here? Still, I reckon I can answer that one. Gringall told him, I'll bet a quid!'
She looked amazed. Her eyes, searching, looked at him with a mixture of curiosity and contempt.
'Gringall,' she repeated. 'Isn't that the police officer in charge of the case? Isn't he the reason why you got me to come here, so that he shouldn't be able to find me. How could he have told Willie?'
'Gringall's known you've been here for some time,' said Callaghan. 'But he hasn't done anything about it. He knew he could get you if he wanted to. Gringall's no fool.'
She said quietly:
'I don't suppose he is, and I don't suppose you are, either. It seems to me that the only people who are fools are Willie and me—and possibly Bellamy—Bellamy, that poor, drink-sodden, dope-ruined person that you subjected to the indignity of arrest merely in order to get some more money for yourself. You seem to have done pretty well out of the Meraulton family, Mr. Callaghan.'
Callaghan smiled.
'Not too badly,' he said. 'By the time I'm through I shall be doin' quite well. You see I haven't rendered my final account yet. But tell me something: Where did you get that information about Bellamy? Has he been talking, too?'
'What would you expect?' she said contemptuously. 'Bellamy arrested on a charge which he knows merely conceals a serious suspicion of murder naturally talked to save himself. He was forced to talk about me, forced to throw further suspicion on me in order to obtain his freedom.'
'Maybe,' said Callaghan, 'but still you realize...'
'I realize that you're thoroughly dishonest,' she said. 'I realize that you have used all the trouble that has been brought on all of us—even the death of August Meraulton—to get money and still more money. In order to keep things going your way you have not scrupled to do anything that suited your own ends. Well, Mr. Callaghan, this is the end of you. Your little act is over.'
Callaghan smiled again. His smile was quiet, vaguely superior, almost maddening.
'No, it isn't,' he said. 'By heck it isn't! My little act isn't over by a hell of a long way. An' I'd like to tell you something else, madame, whilst I'm on the job. You seem to be damn satisfied with yourself in this business. Maybe you've got a great deal of sympathy for yourself, an' maybe you think you've been given a tough time merely because you've been kept out of the way an' not allowed to see your boy friend. Well... what of it?
'I suppose it never occurred to you that when you came around to my office to see me that first time you were startin' something that you've got to finish, even if I have to stick by you to see that you do. I didn't ask you to come to Callaghan Investigations in the first place, did I? You did it to suit your own book. Why in the name of blazes didn't you disclose the fact that you were a lily-white innocent without any brains in your head when you came round? You tell me that.'
Callaghan paused and lit a cigarette.
'You've got to realize that I'm not in the habit of receivin' visits late at night in my office from perfectly innocent young women,' he said. 'I've always reckoned that if young women were perfectly innocent they didn't have to do things like that.'
He allowed the smoke to trickle out of one nostril. His eyes never left her face. She was sitting as if petrified, speechless.
'There was just one thing I didn't think of,' he went on. 'I didn't think that any woman could be so damn brainless as you are. If I had I wouldn't have got myself in the jam that I did over you—a jam that I've been tryin' to get myself out of ever since.'
'I see,' she said, slowly and bitterly. 'So you've been thinking of Mr. Callaghan all the time. I've always disliked you from the moment I set eyes on you, but I had a faint idea that you might have one good quality, that you might be loyal; apparently I was wrong there, too.'
