The Case of the 100% Alibis: A Ludovic Travers Mystery by Christopher Bush

Author:Christopher Bush [Bush, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2018-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IX

RE-ENTER HULE

AT two-thirty there was still no message from Scotland Yard, and Wharton left Beece to cool his heels and work himself into a hot sweat for another quarter of an hour. Then Wharton said he would wait no longer. He had enough information and bluff could do the rest.

Tempest, Carry and Travers entered the room at his heels. Wharton took the desk seat and Carry took the door. Beece was already like a jelly. His lips were drooling into his beard and his hands were all a-twitch. Wharton looked at him with a long, cold sneer before he spoke.

“A blackmailer, eh? Made a regular business of it, did you? And put us off with lies.” He surveyed his colleagues. “He didn’t know anything about Lewton, gentlemen. He was just a friend who came to play cribbage. He didn’t open Lewton’s safe—oh dear, no!”

The irony was wasted. Beece was beaten, and it was plain to see it. Scaring him further might have kept him from talking, and the blubbered tears were not far off.

“Don’t start that snivelling again,” Wharton told him. “We’re used to that sort of thing. We’ve got hearts like flint when we’re dealing with rats like you. And we’ve got two excellent witnesses and we expect more at any minute. Still, we’ll confine ourselves to what we’ll call your middle cut of salmon; the lady who was indiscreet at the Assisi Hotel, and the opportune presence of a maid and a waiter. Perhaps you’d prefer, however, to make your own statement, and if so I’ll just read you over the official caution.”

“I don’t know what statement you want me to make,” was Beece’s last show of defence.

Wharton sprang up in a rage. “Let’s get out of this. Charge him and lock him up. Get an appeal printed in to-night’s papers for anybody else he’s blackmailed—or used—to come forward. Go down to his precious domestic agency and seal the place up. Search it under a warrant, and his house too.”

That was the end of Beece, and Wharton grudgingly sat down again. Then, while they waited for the stenographer to come in, the telephone bell went and Wharton heard a few things about Albert. From what he let fall and from what he invented, Beece knew precisely where the wind lay. But it took over an hour’s catechizing to arrive at what Wharton felt something near the truth.

According to Beece, he had met Lewton in a bar parlour one night just after Lewton’s return to Seaborough, and had got into conversation. The two became friendly, and it had been Lewton who had suggested a further use for that servants’ employment agency which Beece owned, and which was then in rather a bad way.

All the time Beece was slavering and slobbering and as good as on his knees.

“I didn’t want to do it, gentlemen; God’s my witness I didn’t, only he made me. He got me in such a hole I couldn’t get out of it.”

“All right,” sneered Wharton. “We know all that.

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