Chapter 11
In the dusk, Alec drew up in the street outside Septimus Mummery’s abode.
It was not one of the mansions with acres of gardens backing onto Wimbledon Common, once a favourite haunt of highwaymen.
Nonetheless it was sizable, built of red brick, with an air of solid worth.
Judging from the extent of the front garden, separated from the street by a neat beech hedge, the house probably stood on a good half acre.
“Cor,” said Ross in dismay, disengaging long legs from the Austin Seven’s less than spacious back seat, “a house that big’s going to take forever to search.”
“Not too bad,” Piper disagreed from the vantage point of experience. “There’ll be servants, and where there’s servants there’s not many places they don’t stick their noses in. Right, Sarge?”
“Right, laddie. Doesn’t look as if Mr. Mummery’s short of a penny, Chief.”
Though Alec had not yet seen the numbers, he doubted a Natural History Museum curator earned much more than a Met Detective Chief Inspector. He himself had inherited his house from his father, a bank manager. It looked as if Mummery had money in the family, which meant there was a
chance he was living beyond his income in an effort to keep up appearances.
The garden appeared well kept, the visible part all trees and shrubs rather than labour-exacting flowerbeds. The house was in good condition too, with no sign of peeling or flaking paint on window frames or doors.
At one of the ground floor windows, a light shone behind drawn curtains. A cheerful-looking middle-aged parlourmaid answered the door—just the sort Tom Tring got on with best. While remaining devoted to his wife, Tom had a way with female servants that often provided useful information.
The maid’s eyes widened when Alec showed his warrant card. “You’ve not come to arrest the master?” she gasped.
“No, I’d like to speak to him.”
Leaving the others in the hall, he followed close on her heels as she headed towards a door at the rear. He wanted to see Mummery’s reaction to his arrival.
Unfortunately, the Curator of Fossil Reptiles was facing the other way, only his untamable mop of hair visible above his chair’s back. He was seated by a cheerful fire, with a chess board on a small table in front of him. His opponent was a young man in a wheelchair.
In spite of the scars, the black patch over one eye, and the pallor of ill-health, the round facial bone structure and mismatched hook nose revealed the relationship.
Mummery’s son had no right arm. When he turned the wheelchair to look towards the door, Alec saw his legs ended above the knee.
He had to pivot the wheelchair to see, because his head was immovably tilted towards his right shoulder.
Unfortunately, young Mummery’s condition did not alter Alec’s duty to search the house. It just made him feel like an absolute rotter.
He hoped he had at least succeeded in hiding his shock.
Mummery jumped up. He looked anxious, but no more so than any householder unexpectedly called upon by the police.
He still had on the dark suit with sagging pockets which he wore at work when he was not in a laboratory coat.
No money for evening clothes? Alec wondered.
Or did he not change for dinner in deference to his son’s difficulty in doing likewise?
“How can I help you, Chief Inspector?” he asked, surprisingly civilly.
“May I have a private word with you, sir?”
“Oh, no secrets here! This is my son, Andrew. Andy, Detective Chief Inspector Fletcher of Scotland Yard.”
“How do you do, Mr. Fletcher.” His voice was a hoarse, breathless gasp. Mustard gas, Alec guessed—a bad hit, attacking the tissues and followed by gangrene, but he must have managed not to breathe too deeply or he would be dead.
Not that he was likely to live long anyway, when a simple cold would inevitably lead to deadly pneumonia in those corroded lungs. Five years since the War ended—he must have very good care. Expensive care.
He gave Alec a crooked grin and wheezed, “My father may not look it, but he’s delighted at the interruption. I have him in check.”
Alec crossed to the board and studied it. He didn’t have time to play often or seriously, though he had taught Bel the moves, but he could see Mummery was in trouble. “So you do, sir,” he said.
“Andy had a good teacher,” Mummery observed affectionately, “though I say it as shouldn’t.”
“I shan’t keep you from your game, sir. I’m afraid I have a search warrant and I must ask you not to hinder my men in the execution of their duty.”
Mummery’s lips tightened, but instead of the expected outburst he said mildly, “Go ahead. My daughter’s upstairs but she’s not likely to take fright.”
Tom was at the hall door. Alec nodded to him, and turned back to the sitting room as Mummery asked the obvious question: “Looking for those damned gemstones, eh?—Sorry, dear. My wife, Chief Inspector.”
A woman stood in the doorway connecting with the front room.
Tall—nearly a head taller than her husband, Alec estimated—and fine-drawn, she wore a well-cut but plain navy wool dress and pearls, a circlet at her throat, not a fashionable knee-length rope.
She gave Alec a rather remote nod, her gaze going past him to her son.
Her tense shoulders relaxed a little as Andrew produced that heartbreaking, lopsided grin and said, “Excitement upon excitement, Mother. I’m beating Dad hollow, and now, to top it, a police raid!”
“Excitement upon excitement,” she echoed dryly. “Darling, perhaps the Chief Inspector would like a sherry. I know I should.”
Mummery cocked his dishevelled head at Alec, who said, “Not for me, thank you.”
“No booze in the course of duty,” said Andrew.
“I don’t know that you ought, Mother. Goodness knows what effect it will have on those lectures you’re working on.
Mother’s preparing for the Michaelmas term, Mr. Fletcher.
She’s a prof at Bedford College, if you haven’t ferreted out that tidbit for yourself. ”
“I hadn’t,” Alec admitted. Two incomes, then. “Have you a desk in there, sir?” he asked as Mummery took his wife a glass of sherry. They deliberately touched hands, Alec noticed, inferring a close relationship. “Do you mind … ?”
Mummery’s shaggy eyebrows twitched in exasperation. “Do I have a choice? Here’s the key.” He turned away. “Just you wait, Andy, I’ll escape and checkmate you yet.”
“Nothing, Chief,” Tom Tring reported when they all returned to the car. “Leastways, if he split ‘em up and hid them all separately, we could’ve missed them, but I’d’ve thought we’d find at least one, and there’d be a big risk of someone else finding them.”
“You looked at the daughter’s room?”
“Yes. There wasn’t any place she or the maids wouldn’t get into. Nice young lady, dolling herself up to go out with college friends, she being a student. She was worried her brother’d be upset about us. I told her he didn’t seem like it to me.”
“Turn left here, Chief,” said Ernie Piper from the back seat.
It was dark now, and out here in the suburbs lamp-posts were few and far between. For a few minutes, until Piper had extricated them from the winding streets around the common, Alec concentrated on driving. Then his mind returned to the Mummerys.
The curator’s desk was covered with books and journals on fossil reptiles, and a monograph in progress.
Papers in the drawers, however, revealed an adequate income, from earnings and a few minor investments, with no evidence of debts.
The house was freehold, unmortgaged. The latest quarterly bank statement had no extraordinary payments in or out.
The only unusual expenditures were for Miss Mummery’s college fees and a nurse to care for Andrew part-time during the university terms. Neither apparently strained the family budget.
But Alec had found a file of brochures and letters describing
a cure for gas-injured lungs. They came from America, land of medical miracles and quacks, and the price quoted was enormous.
At the bottom of the file was a letter from a Harley Street doctor and professor at Guy’s medical school, which mercilessly unmasked the “cure” as sheer fraud.
The sheet had been screwed up, and then smoothed out again.
Alec could not begin to guess at the emotions consequent on its receipt.
Yet Mummery had kept the papers. Did hope linger? If so, the jewels lying in their cases in the Mineralogy Gallery might have presented an irresistible temptation, and one difficult to condemn.
The last thing Alec had expected was to come away from Wimbledon full of sympathy for the choleric reptile curator.
Now he saw the man’s bad temper at work as a respite from the tight hold he must keep on his emotions at home.
And his focus on the complex details of his profession could be seen as a temporary refuge from the inescapable horror of his son’s condition.
“D’you reckon,” said Tom Tring, who had been meditating in silence while the two in the back talked quietly, “they could all be in it together, Chief? The family, that is, if it was for the young chap’s sake.” He pitched his voice too low for the constables to hear.
“It’s possible. Would you have searched differently if you had thought of that before?”
“Mebbe,” Tom admitted reluctantly.
“Forget it,” said Alec, “unless we find evidence tying Mummery to the murder.”
He drove over Richmond Bridge, and Piper directed him to Ruddlestone’s house.
Ruddlestone lived at the end of a narrow street leading down to the river. The houses were also narrow but tall, quite
substantial though joined in terrace rows of five or six.
The last three, at the lower end of the street, had low, gateless walls in front which had to be surmounted by steps—a reminder that after centuries of effort, the Thames was only partly tamed.
The coincidence of spring tides with heavy rains upstream still brought flooding.