Chapter 11 #2
One by one, the detectives tramped up the steps and down the other side, crowding the small paved forecourt already occupied by a tub of scarlet geraniums as yet untouched by frost. Alec rapped with the shell-shaped iron knocker.
No one answered, but lights glowed in windows and the sound of voices came to them. He banged again, more vigorously.
A boy in grey flannels and a Fair Isle jersey opened the door.
There was no question of his welcome—he was thrilled to death to have four Scotland Yard ’tecs requesting admittance.
As he invited them in, a small girl peered at them from behind him, then dashed off crying, “Daddy, it’s the police. There’s lots of them. Come and see.”
Through an open door on the right, Alec saw a dining table with school books spread across it. The mantelpiece beyond was crammed with shells and bits of coral—the tools of Ruddlestone’s trade, so to speak—varied by a doll and two toy motor-cars.
The boy said dismissively, “I’ll finish my homework later. Have you come to talk to my father about the museum murder?”
Alec left Tom to answer or evade the lad’s questions. As Ruddlestone did not appear, he went after the girl, towards the rear of the hall.
She popped back into sight. “Daddy says he can’t leave
the jam just now or Mummy will have his guts for garters, so will you please come in here.”
The fossil invertebrate curator was in his shirtsleeves, standing at the stove in a large kitchen.
Face and bald dome red from the heat, wooden spoon in massive hand, he stirred a huge pan from which rose steam scented with cooking blackberries.
Empty jam jars waited on the nearby table.
A girl of twelve or so was washing up at the sink, with a younger boy drying.
Ruddlestone grinned at Alec. “Good evening, Fletcher. Sorry, but if I take my eyes off this for more than ten seconds, it will infallibly boil over.”
“Undoubtedly,” Alec agreed.
“It’s a sort of corollary to Boyle’s Second Law. You know the one? Watt’s pots never Boyle.” He laughed. “My wife’s upstairs putting the little ones to bed, and this stuff gets too hot for children to handle safely. What can I do for you?”
Ruddlestone kept stirring, his eyes on the bubbling, deep red contents of his pan, as Alec explained about the search warrant. The small girl, busy cutting lengths of string and squares of waxed paper to top the pots, interrupted.
“Daddy, you’re s’posed to keep checking if it’s ready to set, or it’ll cook too much and waste all the berries we picked.”
“Quite right,” Ruddlestone said cheerfully, and dropped a splodge of jam onto a saucer. “No, still runny. All right, Fletcher, you’d better get on with it, but please try not to upset the children upstairs. James, run up and warn your mother that they’re coming, please.”
“How many more?” Alec asked.
“Let’s see, three in here; Roger doing his homework, I hope; that leaves three, if I’m not mistaken.”
“You know you’re not, Daddy,” said the dish-drying boy severely, departing with the damp tea-towel slung rakishly around his neck.
Seven children, Alec thought, as he went out to the hall to set his waiting men to work. Jovial as Ruddlestone appeared, providing decently for so large a family was no joke. A small fortune in gems would come in very handy.
When Alec returned to the kitchen, the jam had reached setting point. He was pressed into service to help fill and cover the pots.
“You must take some with you,” said Ruddlestone, “unless it would get you into trouble.”
“Bribery and corruption? I think a jar of jam would pass.”
“You might find a ruby in the bottom.”
“Fortunately, I’ve seen these filled. But since you mention it, if you have any more home-made jam in the larder, perhaps I’d better have a look.”
Ruddlestone chortled. Alec felt an utter idiot holding jars of jam up to the electric light and stirring up the contents of one or two. He found no jewels.
Nor did the others. Tom Tring had been through the curator’s papers, the few deemed worthy of keeping, chucked in an unlocked drawer along with more fossil shells and corals, because there was no room in the house for a desk.
“Nothing suspicious there, Chief,” he reported, steadying the jar of hot jam on the car’s floor, between his feet.
“Frankly, I can’t see how he’d ever have saved enough to pay for the copies. ”
“Nor can I,” Alec gladly admitted. Another suspect he didn’t want to have to arrest. “But he could have borrowed it.” Ruddlestone was still on his list.
They headed north to Ealing.
Steadman lived in a newish semi-detached, in a featureless
street full of indistinguishable newish semi-detacheds.
The front garden was too small for any trees.
The patch of lawn was shaved to near baldness, but by the nearby lamp-post Alec, who always wished he had more time for gardening, picked out the leaf-rosettes of dandelions and daisies.
In the strip of flowerbed along the shared path, a few straggling pansies struggled through the smothering yellowed foliage of long dormant daffodils.
The front door was heliotrope, as (very much) opposed to its neighbour’s canary. No knocker. Alec pressed the electric door-bell and heard it shrilling inside.
The man who came to the door looked like Steadman gone to seed. He was as tall and narrow-shouldered, his faded hair similarly thinning, but his face was jowled, his eyeballs red-tinged, his belly straining at the braces beneath his royal blue blazer.
“Mr. Steadman?” Alec said.
“That’s me. What can I do you for, gentlemen?” Taking a closer look at Alec’s companions, he exclaimed, “Uh-oh, it’s the rozzers, right? It’s my brother you want, I expect—I hope, ha ha! He’s not here.”
“Mr. James Steadman does reside at this address?” Usually Alec would have said “live here,” but the officialese sprang to his lips in reaction to the other’s loud heartiness.
“Oh yes, Jim-boy lives here all right, when he’s at home. The old man left the house to both of us, see, and I wasn’t going to sell a nice place like this, nice bit of freehold property, not with house prices …”
“Who is it, Teddy?”
A buxom blonde came up behind him. Her hair was marcelled and all too clearly peroxided. Her fringed, heavily beaded dress was in the height of fashion, yet somehow missed elegance, at least to Alec’s inexpert eye. He knew only
as much of women’s clothes as any observant detective experienced in judging their wearers. In this case it was as much the wearer as the lime-green cloth that made him suspect artificial silk rather than the real thing.
“It’s the busies, sweetie.”
“Well, don’t leave them on the doorstep for all the neighbours to see! Oh, plain clothes. All right, then. Are you after Jimmy, over that museum business? He’s out, so you can just go away again.”
“I’m afraid not, ma’am.” Alec introduced himself and explained about the search warrant.
Mrs. Steadman protested shrilly.
“Oh, shut up, Mavis,” said her husband, waving her out of the way and the detectives into the house. “They’re the law, aren’t they? It’s not like we’ve got anything to hide. Nor has Jim-boy, I’ll bet. The poor weed hasn’t got the gumption to pinch those sparklers.”
Tom and the D.C.s went about their business.
“I suppose you’d better come into the lounge,” Mrs. Steadman ungraciously invited Alec.
He followed the Steadmans into a sitting room furnished with a modern couch and easy chairs wildly patterned in jazz colours—mostly magenta, sulphur-yellow, and black—and matching curtains.
One corner was occupied by an expensive wireless set, another by a gramophone, playing a tango.
A low table held two glasses, a large glass ashtray, a fashion magazine, the pink Sporting Times, and the Evening Standard with its banner headline: MUSEUM MURDERER STRIKES AGAIN?
There were no books, and no pictures on the walls.
In spite of the bright hues, the room had a stark feeling.
Mrs. Steadman dropped sulkily into a chair. Picking up a lit, lipsticked cigarette between two crimson-nailed fingers
she puffed it back to life, then reached for a tumbler holding a liquid much the same sickly color as her dress.
“Cigar, old chap?” Teddy Steadman offered Alec, taking his own, still burning, from the ashtray. “B-and-s? Or are you a whisky man?”
“Not for me, thanks.”
“Not on duty, eh? Never could see why anyone’d want to be a copper, no offence. I’m in insurance myself, and doing very nicely, thank you. I keep telling Jimmy he could triple his income if he joined me, but he hasn’t got the gumption to switch.”
“Now that’s not fair, Teddybear. If Jimmy gets into the pictures he’ll make a packet, and all because he knows about those stupid bones.”
Alec blinked, but managed not to let his jaw drop. “The pictures?” he said weakly.
“That’s where he’s gone tonight,” said Mrs. Steadman.
“Not the cinema, but to the Dorchester to talk to Harry Hoyt, from Hollywood! Mr. Hoyt’s going to make a film of that book by Sherlock Homes, The Lost World, that’s all about dinosaurs, and he came to London to talk to our Jimmy.
He’s got Lewis Stone, who’s in The Prisoner of Zenda with Ramon Novarro, and Wallace Beery that was in The Last of the Mohicans, and Bessie Love, and … ”
“And our Jimmy won’t make a penny out of it, mark my words,” said his cynical brother. “I told him he shouldn’t even talk to this bloke without a contract in black and white, but does he listen to me? He does not!”
As the pair wrangled, Alec decided that if James Steadman took it into his head to commit murder, he would start with his brother and go on to his sister-in-law. On the other hand, he might commit theft so as to be able to escape them.