Two Against Scotland Yard

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWOInspector Bull entered the front door of his modern semi-detached villa in Hampstead. The odour of burned mutton met him full in the face, and he wished for the hundredth time that Mrs. Bull would come back home. In the two years of his married life he had failed to learn why it was that when his wife was at home the maid was what is commonly called a treasure, and when his wife was away she became an increasing liability with every meal. He took off his heavy brown overcoat, which made him somewhat resemble a large cinnamon bear on its hind legs. Not that Inspector Bull was ungainly; he was simply of large bulk. And he always wore cinnamon brown overcoats. His wife’s tactful efforts to make him go in for contrasting instead of harmonising shades met a placid but adamant resistance. The tawny hazel of his moustache and his hair set the pitch for the colour harmony that Inspector Bull followed with some determination. There was no affectation or foppishness about it. Inspector Bull simply dressed in brown.

He deposited his coat and hat in the hall cupboard and went upstairs to the back room he liked to call his den. As a matter of fact that is pretty much what it was. It was pleasantly dim there. The green-shaded lamp on the large flat top desk (from Maple’s) made very little headway against the dark tan paper and heavy leather upholstered furniture and the red and green turkey rug (also from Maple’s). Here Bull brought and—in a sense—buried the bones of his calling as a valued member of the C.I.D. Here also came the few odds and ends of antique china that he could not resist buying from time to time. His passion for broken china had always made him the butt of the perpetual bromide about bulls in china shops. No one had ever failed to mention it. At one time Bull had smiled painfully, but that was when he was a younger man. He was now thirty-six.

He knocked out his pipe into the patented non-tipover-able ash receiver that somebody had given him and sat down in the big chair in front of his desk. He was very low. His wife was away and Scotland Yard was as dead as a door nail. Three communists and two cat burglars had constituted his entire share for two weeks. He was tired of routine, and he was especially tired of hearing about a first-rate poisoning case that Inspector Millikan had been given.

After some thought Inspector Bull reached for the telephone and called his friend, former landlord and ardent admirer Mr. Evan Pinkerton, to invite him to stay a week.

Mr. Pinkerton lived in a large dingy house in Golders Green. He was a grey mouse-like little Welshman who on one memorable occasion had emerged from his chrysalis and for a few moments had become the gaily colored butterfly, so to speak, of avenging justice. Inspector Bull had never forgot that except for the little man in Golders Green the girl who later became his wife would have been lying dead in a ravine in the mountains of Wales. In the past few years Bull had come to rely on Mr. Pinkerton’s curious, almost feminine—or so Bull thought—intuition, in hard cases. He was constantly taking all the policeman’s elaborately collected evidence, looking at it and saying, “Well, well, maybe it’s as you say. But I should have thought the fellow with the brown toupee did it.” This Inspector Bull would never admit. But he would set to work again, and with indomitable thoroughness build up another chain of evidence that led inevitably to the conviction of the man with the brown toupee. On such occasions Mr. Pinkerton would nod his head without complacency and say, “That’s what I would have thought.”

When Inspector Bull called up on this occasion Mr. Pinkerton allowed himself to hope that he was being invited to take part in another case. The cinema and Inspector Bull’s cases were the two scarlet mountain peaks on the dull grey monotonous prairie of Mr. Pinkerton’s existence. Nevertheless he carefully finished his tea of bloater and apple and plum jam before he took off his felt slippers and put on his boots. Then he washed up his dishes and left the place spotless for the woman who came in to clean for him in the mornings.

He got out the bright new suitcase the Bulls had given him for Christmas and packed his things for his visit. Next he locked all the windows, put on his brown bowler hat and his grey overcoat and took his way to Hampstead, where he found Inspector Bull sprinkling weed-killer on the lawn. People who were accustomed to read Dr. Freud would have seen an unconscious connection between the weed-killer and Inspector Millikan’s poisoning case, but Inspector Bull had never read Dr. Freud, nor had Mr. Pinkerton. They greeted each other solemnly and Inspector Bull said that dinner was ready.

The downstairs clock had just struck ten, and Inspector Bull had just yawned and thought of another day of routine on the Embankment, when the telephone on his desk jangled urgently. He looked at it expectantly. It was a private connection with New Scotland Yard.

“Bull speaking!” (“Bellowing, he means,” Commissioner Debenham had once remarked.) “Colnbrook? Bucks. Robbery? Murder? Right you are.”

He put the receiver down and turned to his guest, whose eyes were protruding with pleasurable anticipation.

“There’s been robbery and murder out on the Colnbrook Road. Chief wants me to have a look at it. He says in the morning, but I think I’ll have a look at it now. You want to come along?”

No need to ask. The little man had his brown bowler and grey overcoat on before Bull had heaved his vast bulk out of his desk chair.

“I’ll bring the car around,” said the Inspector. “You lock the door.”

In Commissioner Debenham’s room at New Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Dryden and the Commissioner himself were having what in two less moderate men might be called a decided difference of opinion.

“Our method is wrong, sir,” the Chief Inspector said flatly. “We’ve got to use modern methods for modern crime. The old tradition of the Yard is all right, but when you’ve got motor bandits you’ve got to use their own methods to get them.”

The Commissioner pursed his lips and nodded his qualified agreement.

“That’s undoubtedly true, to a certain extent,” he replied deliberately, pushing a box of cigars across the desk. “But what can we do? Look at this business tonight. I dropped in here half an hour ago. There was a call from Colnbrook. A man with a motorcycle held up George Colton’s car—the jeweller. Relieved him of a satchel of jewels, shot him dead and disappeared. Twenty minutes later we get word of it. All the motor cars in England, each one full of police, won’t help us to catch that man on that motorcycle in London tonight. As soon as we hear about it we have everyone on the lookout. This is early closing day; one-third of the shopkeepers’ assistants in Middlesex are out motorcyling.—Of course, if we’d known in five minutes, we could have done something. Now, new methods won’t help us. It’s a case of the right man on the job.”

The Chief Inspector stared at the smoke rising from the end of his cigar.

“Then why, sir,” he said with a polite impatience, “put Humphrey Bull on the case? Nobody likes Bull better than I do, or thinks more of his ability in certain lines; but it doesn’t run to gang crime.”

“Is this gang crime, Dryden?”

“Typically American, sir. The exact way it’s done. The cold brutality of the gangster. Sheer, deliberate murder.”

Commissioner Debenham shook his head.

“You have American crime and American methods on the brain. We’ll give Bull a chance at it. If it appears to be a gang of Americans, or an Americanised gang of Englishmen, you can take it yourself. I’m a little prejudiced in Bull’s favour, I must admit, since he discovered that Tito Mellema murdered that woman—what’s her name? La Mar. If I’m not mistaken, Inspector, you thought her death was a gang racket because she was connected with an American musical comedy.”

Inspector Dryden grinned in spite of himself.

“Perhaps you’re right, sir. Well, I’ll be getting home. I’m sorry old Colton’s dead.”

“So am I,” said the Commissioner. “There wasn’t much he didn’t know about precious stones, and who owns ’em, and how much they paid.”

“Or when they sold them and for how much, sir.”

“I’m afraid that’s right too, Dryden. I hope you’re not thinking, by the way, of the recent loss of Lady Blanche’s emerald collar, which rightfully belongs—or belonged—to her mother-in-law the Duchess?”

Inspector Dryden allowed himself only half a smile.

“Oh, no, sir,” he said soberly.

“Of course not, Dryden. Well, we certainly got ‘down the banks,’ as young Boyd says, for that collar. And worse luck, I have to look in on the Home Secretary tonight, and he’ll have enough to say about this business of Colton. Good-night, Inspector.”