Mr Campion and Others

THE CASE OF THE WIDOWThe second prettiest girl in Mayfair was thanking Superintendent Stanislaus Oates for the recovery of her diamond bracelet and the ring with the square-cut emerald in it, and Mr Campion, who had accompanied her to the ceremony, was admiring her technique. She was doing it very charmingly; so charmingly, in fact, that the Superintendent’s depressing little office had taken on an air of garden-party gaiety which it certainly did not possess in the ordinary way, while the Superintendent himself had undergone an even more sensational change. His long dyspeptic face was transformed by a blush of smug satisfaction and he quite forgot the short lecture he had prepared for his visitor on The Carelessness Which Tempts the Criminal, or its blunter version, Stupidity Which Earns Its Own Reward. It was altogether a most gratifying scene, and Mr Campion, seated in the visitor’s chair, his long thin legs crossed and his pale eyes amused behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, enjoyed it to the full. Miss Leonie Peterhouse-Vaughn raised her remarkable eyes to the Superintendent’s slightly sheepish face and spoke with deep earnestness. ‘I honestly think you’re wonderful,’ she said. Realizing that too much butter can have a disastrous effect on any dish, and not being at all certain of his old friend’s digestive capabilities, Mr Campion coughed. ‘He has his failures too,’ he ventured. ‘He’s not omnipotent, you know. Just an ordinary man.’ ‘Really?’ said Miss Peterhouse-Vaughn with gratifying surprise. ‘Oh yes; well, we’re only human, miss.’ The Superintendent granted Mr Campion a reproachful look. ‘Sometimes we have our little disappointments. Of course on those occasions we call in Mr Campion here,’ he added with a flash of malice. Leonie laughed prettily and Mr Oates’s ruffled fur subsided like a wave. ‘Sometimes even he can’t help us,’ he went on, encouraged, and, inspired no doubt by the theory that the greater the enemy the greater the honour, launched into an explanation perhaps not altogether discreet. ‘Sometimes we come up against a man who slips through our fingers every time. There’s a man in London today who’s been responsible for more trouble than I can mention. We know him, we know where he lives, we could put our hands on him any moment of the day or night, but have we any proof against him? Could we hold him for ten minutes without getting into serious trouble for molesting a respectable citizen? Could we? Well, we couldn’t.’ Miss Peterhouse-Vaughn’s expression of mystified interest was very flattering. ‘This is incredibly exciting,’ she said. ‘Who is he?—or mustn’t you tell?’ The Superintendent shook his head. ‘Entirely against the regulations,’ he said regretfully, and then, on seeing her disappointment and feeling, no doubt, that his portentous declaration had fallen a little flat, he relented and made a compromise between his conscience and a latent vanity which Mr Campion had never before suspected. ‘Well, I’ll show you this,’ he conceded. ‘It’s a very curious thing.’ With Leonie’s fascinated eyes upon him, he opened a drawer in his desk and took out a single sheet torn from a week-old London evening paper. A small advertisement in the Situations Vacant column was ringed with blue pencil. Miss Peterhouse-Vaughn took it eagerly and Mr Campion got up lazily to read it over her shoulder. Wanted: Entertainer suitable for children’s party. Good money offered to right man. Apply in person any evening. Widow, 13 Blakenham Gardens, W.1. Leonie read the lines three times and looked up. ‘But it seems quite ordinary,’ she said. The Superintendent nodded. ‘That’s what any member of the public would think,’ he agreed, gracefully keeping all hint of condescension out of his tone. ‘And it would have escaped our notice too except for one thing, and that’s the name and address. You see, the man I was telling you about happens to live at 13 Blakenham Gardens.’ ‘Is his name Widow? How queer!’ ‘No, miss, it’s not.’ Oates looked uncomfortable, seeing the pitfall too late. ‘I ought not to be telling you this,’ he went on severely. ‘This gentleman—and we’ve got nothing we can pin on him, remember—is known as “The Widow” to the criminal classes. That’s why this paragraph interested us. As it stands it’s an ad. for a crook, and the fellow has the impudence to use his own address! Doesn’t even hide it under a box number.’ Mr Campion eyed his old friend. He seemed mildly interested. ‘Did you send someone along to answer it?’ he inquired. ‘We did.’ The Superintendent spoke heavily. ‘Poor young Billings was kept there singing comic songs for three-quarters of an hour while W—I mean this fellow—watched him without a smile. Then he told him he’d go down better at a police concert.’ Miss Peterhouse-Vaughn looked sympathetic. ‘What a shame!’ she said gravely, and Mr Campion never admired her more. ‘We sent another man,’ continued the Superintendent, ‘but when he got there the servant told him the vacancy had been filled. We kept an eye on the place, too, but it wasn’t easy. The whole crescent was a seething mass of would-be child entertainers.’ ‘So you haven’t an idea what he’s up to?’ Mr Campion seemed amused. ‘Not the faintest,’ Oates admitted. ‘We shall in the end, though; I’ll lay my bottom dollar. He was the moving spirit in that cussed Featherstone case, you know, and we’re pretty certain it was he who slipped through the police net in the Barking business.’ Mr Campion raised his eyebrows. ‘Blackmail and smuggling?’ he said. ‘He seems to be a versatile soul, doesn’t he?’ ‘He’s up to anything,’ Oates declared. ‘Absolutely anything. I’d give a packet to get my hands on him. But what he wants with a kids’ entertainer—if it is an entertainer he’s after—I do not know.’ ‘Perhaps he just wants to give a children’s party?’ suggested Miss Peterhouse-Vaughn and while the policeman was considering this possibility, evidently the one explanation which had not crossed his mind, she took her leave. ‘I must thank you once again, Mr Oates,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you how terribly, terribly clever I think you are, and how awfully grateful I am, and how frightfully careful I’ll be in future not to give you any more dreadful trouble.’ It was a charming little speech in spite of her catastrophic adjectives and the Superintendent beamed. ‘It’s been a pleasure, miss,’ he said. As Mr Campion handed her into her mother’s Daimler he regarded her coldly. ‘A pretty performance,’ he remarked. ‘Tell me, what do you say when a spark of genuine gratitude warms your nasty little heart? My poor Oates!’ Miss Peterhouse-Vaughn grinned. ‘I did do it well, didn’t I?’ she said complacently. ‘He’s rather a dear old goat.’ Mr Campion was shocked and said so. ‘The Superintendent is a distinguished officer. I always knew that, of course, but this afternoon I discovered a broad streak of chivalry in him. In his place I think I might have permitted myself a few comments on the type of young woman who leaves a diamond bracelet and an emerald ring in the soap-dish at a public restaurant and then goes smiling to Scotland Yard to ask for it back. The wretched man had performed a miracle for you and you call him a dear old goat.’ Leonie was young enough to look abashed without losing her charm. ‘Oh, but I am grateful,’ she said. ‘I think he’s wonderful. But not so absolutely brilliant as somebody else.’ ‘That’s very nice of you, my child.’ Mr Campion prepared to unbend. ‘Oh, not you, darling.’ Leonie squeezed his arm. ‘I was talking about the other man—The Widow. He’s got real nerve, don’t you think?—using his own address and making the detective sing and all that. . . . So amusing!’ Her companion looked down at her severely. ‘Don’t make a hero out of him,’ he said. ‘Why not?’ ‘Because, my dear little hideous, he’s a crook. It’s only while he remains uncaught that he’s faintly interesting. Sooner or later your elderly admirer, the Superintendent, is going to clap him under lock and key and then he’ll just be an ordinary convict, who is anything but romantic, believe me.’ Miss Peterhouse-Vaughn shook her head. ‘He won’t get caught,’ she said. ‘Or if he does—forgive me, darling—it’ll be by someone much cleverer than you or Mr Oates.’ Mr Campion’s professional pride rebelled. ‘What’ll you bet?’ ‘Anything you like,’ said Leonie. ‘Up to two pounds,’ she added prudently. Campion laughed. ‘The girl’s learning caution at last!’ he said. ‘I may hold you to that.’ The conversation changed to the charity matinée of the day before, wherein Miss Peterhouse-Vaughn had appeared as Wisdom, and continued its easy course, gravitating naturally to the most important pending event in the Peterhouse-Vaughn family, the christening of Master Brian Desmond Peterhouse-Vaughn, nephew to Leonie, son to her elder brother, Desmond Brian, and godson to Mr Albert Campion. It was his new responsibility as a godfather which led Mr Campion to take part in yet another elegant little ceremony some few days after the christening and nearly three weeks after Leonie’s sensational conquest of Superintendent Oates’s susceptible heart. Mr Campion called to see Mr Thistledown in Cheese Street, E.C., and they went reverently to the cellars together. Mr Thistledown was a small man, elderly and dignified. His white hair was inclined to flow a little and his figure was more suited, perhaps, to his vocation than to his name. As head of the small but distinguished firm of Thistledown, Friend and Son, Wine Importers since 1798, he very seldom permitted himself a personal interview with any client under the age of sixty-five, for at that year he openly believed the genus homo sapiens, considered solely as a connoisseur of vintage wine, alone attained full maturity. Mr Campion, however, was an exception. Mr Thistledown thought of him as a lad still, but a promising one. He took his client’s errand with all the gravity he felt it to deserve. ‘Twelve dozen of port to be laid down for Master Brian Desmond Peterhouse-Vaughn,’ he said, rolling the words round his tongue as though they, too, had their flavour. ‘Let me see, it is now the end of ’36. It will have to be a ’27 wine. Then by the time your godson is forty—he won’t want to drink it before that age, surely?—there should be a very fine fifty-year-old vintage awaiting him.’ A long and somewhat heated discussion, or, rather, monologue, for Mr Campion was sufficiently experienced to offer no opinion, followed. The relative merits of Croft, Taylor, Da Silva, Noval and Fonseca were considered at length, and in the end Mr Campion followed his mentor through the sacred tunnels and personally affixed his seal upon a bin of Taylor, 1927. Mr Thistledown was in favour of a stipulation to provide that Master Peterhouse-Vaughn should not attain full control over his vinous inheritance until he attained the age of thirty, whereas Mr Campion preferred the more conventional twenty-one. Finally a compromise of twenty-five was agreed upon and the two gentlemen retired to Mr Thistledown’s consulting-room glowing with the conscious virtue of men who had conferred a benefit upon posterity. The consulting-room was comfortable. It was really no more than an arbour of bottles constructed in the vault of the largest cellar and was furnished with a table and chairs of solid ship’s timber. Mr Thistledown paused by the table and hesitated before speaking. There was clearly something on his mind and Campion, who had always considered him slightly inhuman, a sort of living port crust, was interested. When at last the old gentleman unburdened himself it was to make a short speech. ‘It takes an elderly man to judge a port or a claret,’ he said, ‘but spirits are definitely in another category. Some men may live to be a hundred without ever realizing the subtle differences of the finest rums. To judge a spirit one must be born with a certain kind of palate. Mr Campion, would you taste a brandy for me?’ His visitor was startled. Always a modest soul, he made no pretensions to connoisseurship and now he said so firmly. ‘I don’t know.’ Mr Thistledown regarded him seriously. ‘I have watched your taste for some years now and I am inclined to put you down as one of the few really knowledgeable younger men. Wait for me a moment.’