It Couldn't Matter Less by Peter Cheyney

Author:Peter Cheyney [Cheyney, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2021-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

II

Somewhere in the house a clock struck four. Callaghan stretched out his hand and extracted another cigarette from the box on the bedside table. He lit it, relaxed on his pillow and lay, gazing at the ceiling.

He was thinking about Leonore Wilbery. When he had finished with her, he thought about Mrs. Wilbery and Chief Detective-Inspector Gringall and Santos D’Ianazzi, and Milta and Sabine Haragos. When he had thought about all of them he began to think about Lionel Wilbery.

Looking for Lionel Wilbery was going to be much more difficult than looking for a needle in a haystack. If you looked for a needle in a haystack you knew, at least, what you were looking for. You knew also that the needle was in the haystack. It was merely a matter of time.

But a person like Lionel could fly off at any angle. Might do anything. Go anywhere. Poets were damned difficult in their most normal moments. When they became abnormal they might easily be impossible, do impossible things. Go to impossible places.

The only thing about this poet was that, apparently, he had, for reasons best known to himself, decided to come back to the district, at any rate, in which his home was situated. Not that this helped. It might mean a lot and it might mean nothing at all.

It might mean nothing at all. . . . Yet at first thought it seemed odd that Lionel—if he had nothing to fear, no one to avoid—should not have gone directly to his home, in which case Callaghan’s occupation, like that of Othello, would be gone.

And it might mean a lot. Taken in conjunction with the fact that Leonore knew that Lionel was in the neighbourhood, knowing that she had suggested to her mother that a more than ample retainer should be paid to Callaghan to find him, many things might be surmised. One of these things was that Leonore, knowing that Lionel was about, would, at the opportune moment, produce him to Callaghan who, in the process of appearing to “find” him, might arrange (after all a thousand pounds was a thousand pounds) that his background during the time he had “disappeared,” and especially during the operative time of the murder of Doria Varette, was positively stiff with alibis.

Callaghan, looking at the ceiling with unblinking eyes, brought his mind to bear on Santos D’Ianazzi. The Cuban would have been moved by this time, he thought, to Brixton. He would be sitting on his slim backside regarding his pointed patent shoes and cursing the unjust fate that had managed to get him pulled in as a suspect in a murder case.

And while Gringall could not hold him for long on the murder suspicion, he could and would, hold him because he had no passport and because the Cuban Legation had said they knew nothing about him.

This point intrigued Callaghan, but not a great deal. Many Cuban nationals were, no doubt, mixed up in all sorts of funny businesses in these

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