The Murder at Castle Deeping by Captain W E Johns

Author:Captain W E Johns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

THE PLAN

Utterly worn out, I seemed hardly to have dropped off to sleep when I was awakened by Steeley nudging me in the ribs. He was already up and fully dressed. “Get a move on,” he said. “Raymond has been on the phone. He wants to see us —says it’s urgent, so we had better get along right away.”

I looked at clock. It was still only nine-thirty. “My God! Is there no rest at all on this job?” I complained bitterly, as I dragged myself out of bed and staggered through to the bathroom. However, in half an hour I was ready, and, feeling somewhat better after coffee and a cigarette, joined Steeley in the taxi he had already called. We found Colonel Raymond in a good humour.

“Your first effort is bearing unexpected fruit,” he told us cheerfully.

“Have you got the Boss yet?” inquired Steeley. In the cold light of morning I could see that he was feeling peeved that after all our trouble the murderer of Linton Hales had managed to slip through our fingers when we had him virtually in our grasp. Without him, the case would have to be regarded as a failure—at least, so Steeley had declared on the way down, although Colonel Raymond soon made it clear that he thought otherwise.

“No, but I can tell you something about him,” was his reply to Steeley’s question.

“What is it?”

“From finger-prints found on his pistol it appears that he is an old client of ours, although until the other day we had never had the pleasure of seeing him in the flesh. His name, either real or adopted, is Paul Durant. Hitherto he has been a rather mysterious figure looming darkly in the background of what is popularly known as the Underworld; indeed, so elusive has this gentleman been that once or twice I have doubted his existence, so your action in bringing him into the daylight is likely to assume a more important aspect than the unmasking of the murderer of Linton Hales.”

“You mean you’ve hooked up the finger-prints with another case?”

“With two cases.” With a pair of tweezers Colonel Raymond picked up a piece of pasteboard that was lying on his desk. “We found this in the pocket of one Bert Loder, an old lag we hauled in a little while ago for passing spurious banknotes at race meetings. It carried half a thumb-print, which I will show you in a moment. As you probably realise, finger-prints are not much use unless you can identify the owner of them. When we arrested Loder we had no record in our archives of the man who had left his thumb-print on this piece of card, which, incidentally, appears to be no more than a corner torn off a menu, so, naturally, we did not regard it as being of any particular importance. But when, last week, we caught Charlie Timms, whose regular graft is picking pockets, with phoney notes in his possession, and two of these same notes bore the same mysterious thumbprint, it gave us reason to think.

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