THE PURPLE CABRIOLET
It was a wet night. The rain fell in torrents. The low archway leading
into Pump Yard, Saint James’s, framed a nocturne of London beneath
weeping skies. The street beyond was a shining sheet of wet, the lamps
making blurred streaks of yellow on the gleaming surface of the asphalt.
Within, on the rough cobbles of the yard, the rain splashed and spurted
like a thousand dancing knives.
On either side of the small square cars were drawn up in two long lines,
the overflow from the lock-ups of the garage set all round the yard. At
the open door of a plum-coloured cabriolet, his oilskins shining black
in the pale rays of a gas-lamp above his head, a policeman stood,
peering over the shoulder of a man in a raincoat who was busying himself
over something inside the car. Behind him a glistening umbrella almost
completely obscured the form of another man who was talking in whispers
to a gnome-like figure in overalls, a sack flung over his head and
shoulders in protection against the persistent rain.
Presently from the direction of the street came the grating of changing
gears, the throb of an engine. Blazing head-lights clove the hazy
chiaroscuro of the yard and a car, high-splashed with mud, drove slowly
in. It stopped, the hand-brake jarred, and, with a jerk, the headlights
were extinguished. A young man in a heavy overcoat laboriously
disentangled himself from behind the driving-wheel and stepped out from
under the sopping hood, stretching his legs and stamping his feet as
though stiff with cold.
On catching sight of him, the man with the umbrella fussed up. He
disclosed a face that was grey with apprehension.
“Whatever do you think has happened, Major Okewood?” he said in a hoarse
whisper. “There’s a dead man in the Lancia there!”
He jerked his head backwards in the direction of the cabriolet.
The newcomer, who was vigorously rubbing his numbed hands together,
glanced up quickly. He had a lean, clever face with very keen blue eyes
and a small dark moustache. Of medium height, he looked as fit as nails.
“What is it, Fink?” he demanded. “A fit or something?”
Fink, who was foreman of the garage, shook his head impressively.
“It’s a suicide. Leastwise, that’s what the doctor says. Poisoned
hisself. There’s a bottle on the mat inside the car!”
“Oh!” exclaimed the young man, interested. “Who is it? One of your
customers?”
“Never set eyes on him before nor yet the car. He’s a poorly dressed
sort of chap. I think he jest crawled in there out of the wet to die!”
“Poor devil!” Okewood remarked. “Who found him?”
“Jake here,” said Fink, indicating the dripping goblin at his side. “He
had to open the door of the Lancia to get by, and blessed if he didn’t
see a bloke’s boot sticking out from under the rug!”
The gnome, who was one of the washers, eagerly took up the tale.
“It give me a proper turn, I tell yer,” he croaked. “I lifts the rug and
there ’e wor, lyin’ acrorst the car! An’ stiff, Mister! Blimey, like a
poker, ’e wor! An’ twisted up, too, somethink crool! ’Strewth! ’E might
’a’ bin a ’oop, ’e wor that bent! An’ ’is fyce! Gawd! It wor enough to
give a bloke the ’orrors, strite!”
And he wiped his nose abstractedly on the back of his hand.
The young man walked across the yard to the purple car. The doctor had
just finished his examination and had stepped back. The torch-lamp on
the constable’s belt lit up the interior of the Lancia. Its broad white
beam fell upon a figure that was lying half on the floor, half on the
seat. The body was bent like a bow. The head was flung so far back that
the arched spine scarce touched the broad cushioned seat, and the body
rested on the head and the heels. The arms were stretched stiffly out,
the hands half closed.
As the old washer had said, the face was, indeed, terrible. The glazed
eyes, half open, were seared with fear, but, in hideous contrast, the
mouth was twisted up into a leery, fatuous grin. He was a middle-aged
man, inclining to corpulence, with a clean-shaven face and high
cheek-bones, very black eyebrows, and jet-black hair cut _en brosse_. He
was wearing a long drab overcoat which, hanging open, disclosed beneath
it a shabby blue jacket and a pair of old khaki trousers.
“Strychnine!” said the doctor—he held up a small medicine bottle, empty
and without a label. “That grin is very characteristic. The _risus
sardonicus_, we call it. And the muscles are as hard as a board. He’s
been dead for hours, I should say. When did the car come in?”
“Round about five o’clock, George said,” the foreman replied. “A young
fellow brought it. Said he’d be back later to fetch it away. My word!
He’ll get a nasty jar when he turns up!”
“Have you any idea who the dead man is?” Okewood asked the doctor.
“Some down-and-out!” replied the latter, dusting his knees. “There was a
letter in his pocket addressed to the coroner. The usual thing. Walking
the streets all day, no money, decided to end it all. And everything
removed that could betray his identity. Seeing that he used strychnine
he might be a colleague of mine come to grief. Somehow, for all his
rags, he doesn’t quite look like a tramp!”
He bent forward into the car again and sniffed audibly.
“It’s funny,” he said. “There’s a curious odour in the car I can’t quite
place. It certainly isn’t strychnine.”
Okewood, who had been scanning the body very closely, had already
detected the curious penetrating odour that yet hung about the interior
of the cabriolet, something sweet, yet faintly chemical withal.
But now heavy footsteps echoed from under the archway.
“It’s George back,” said Fink, looking up. “He nipped across to the
police station.”
George, who was one of the mechanics, bareheaded, his hair shining with
wet, was accompanied by a well-set-up young man with a trim blond
moustache, who wore a black bowler hat and a heavy overcoat. He had
about him that curious air, a mixture of extreme self-reliance and
rigorous reserve, which marks the plain-clothes man in every land.
“Good-evening, O’Malley!” said Okewood as the young detective came face
to face with him.
The newcomer stared sharply at the speaker.
“God bless my soul!” he exclaimed. “If it isn’t Major Desmond Okewood!
Are you on this job, too, Major? They told me you had retired!”
“So I have, O’Malley!” Desmond replied. “No more Secret Service for me!
I heard that you had gone back to the C.I.D. after you were demobbed
from the Intelligence. I’ve only blundered into this by accident. I’ve
just come up from Essex in my car. This is where I garage it when I’m in
town . . .”
O’Malley plucked open the door of the Lancia and began to examine the
dead man. The detective asked a few questions of the doctor, read and
took charge of the letter found in the pocket of the deceased, and made
some notes in a black book. Then he beckoned to Desmond.
“Anything funny struck you about this chap, Major?” he asked in an
undertone.
Desmond looked at O’Malley questioningly.
“Why do you ask that?” he said.
“Because,” O’Malley replied, “for a tramp who has walked the streets all
day, it doesn’t strike me that his trousers are very muddy. His boots
are dirty, and the bottoms of his trousers are wet. But they’re not
_splashed_. Look at mine after walking only across from the station!”
He showed a spray of mud stains above the turn-up of his blue serge
trousers.
“And see here!” he added. He bent down and undid the dead man’s
overcoat. Beneath it jacket and waistcoat were open and the unbuttoned
shirt showed a glimpse of clean white skin.
“That’s not the skin of a tramp!” the detective declared.
Again Desmond Okewood gave the young man one of his enigmatic looks.
Then he turned to the doctor.
“When a man dies of strychnine poisoning,” he said, “death is preceded
by the most appalling convulsions, I believe?”
“Quite right!” the doctor assented, blinking through his _pince-nez_.
“One would, therefore, look for some signs of a struggle,” Desmond
continued, “especially in a confined space like this. But see for
yourself! The body lies stiffly stretched out, the feet on the floor,
the top of the head touching the back of the hood, the shoulders all but
clear of the seat. Not even the mat on the floor is disturbed.”
“Very singular, I must admit,” observed the doctor.
“The man who found the body says it was covered up with the rug. Isn’t
that right, Jake?”
“Quite right, sir,” chanted the washer. “Covered up ’e wor, ’cept for
’is foot as stuck art!”
“It strikes me as odd,” remarked Desmond mildly, “that, in such ghastly
convulsions as strychnine poisoning produces, this man had sufficient
presence of mind to arrange the rug neatly over himself”—he paused and
looked round his audience—“in such a way as to delay discovery of the
body as long as possible!”
“By George!” said O’Malley excitedly—he was young enough to be still
enthusiastic—“you mean to say you think he was brought here dead!”
Without replying Desmond turned again to the open door of the car. He
took the policeman’s lamp and turned it on the distorted features of the
dead man, the jet-black eyebrows and hair.
“Do you see anything on the right ear?” he asked.
“Yes,” O’Malley replied. “Looks like soap or something!”
Desmond nodded.
“It is soap,” he said, “shaving soap,” and opened his hand in the beam
of the light. Two or three tiny blond curls and a number of short ends
of blond hair lay in the palm.
“I found these down the dead man’s collar,” he explained. “So you see,
O’Malley, that your first impression that there is ‘something funny’
about this tramp was perfectly correct!”
But the detective only looked at him in a puzzled way. Desmond pushed
him forward to the open door of the car.
“Sniff, man!” he cried.
“Rum sort o’ smell!” said O’Malley, “but I don’t see . . .”
“Hair dye!” exclaimed Desmond.
In a flash the young detective whipped round.
“Then you mean . . .” he began.
“I mean that this dead man is not a tramp, but a person of some social
standing; that in life he was not dark and clean-shaven, but fair with a
blond moustache or, more probably, a blond beard, and that he did not
crawl into this car to die, but was brought here dead in the Lancia. You
can assume, if you like, that he shaved himself, dyed his hair, and
dressed up as a tramp before taking poison, in order to conceal his
identity, but you cannot assume that he killed himself here in this car.
Someone brought the body here; therefore there was collusion in his
suicide . . . if it _was_ suicide . . .”
O’Malley pushed his hat back from his brow and scratched his head.
“Murder, eh?” he remarked, addressing no one in particular.
A light footstep sounded on the cobbles behind the group, and a voice
said:
“You’ve got my car back, then?”
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