“None. The man who came to Sir Malcolm Locke’s house to adjust the telephone did not come from the post office, but unfortunately he can’t be traced. The fellow who came to my flat to fix the television set did not come from the firm who supplied it—but he also cannot be traced! And so, you see—”
He paused suddenly as my phone bell began to ring. I took up the receiver.
“Hello—yes? . . . He is here.” I turned to Smith. “Inspector Gallaho wants you.”
He stepped eagerly forward.
“Hello! Gallaho? Yes—I told Fey to tell you I was coming on here.
What’s that!—What?” His voice rose on a high note of excitement. “Good God! What do you say? Yes—details when I see you. What time does the train leave? Good! Coming now.”
He replaced the receiver and turned. His face had grown very stem. Here was a sudden change of mood.
“What is it?”
“Fu Manchu has struck again. We have just twenty minutes to catch the train. Come on!”
“But where are we going?”
“To a remote corner of the Essex marshes.”
In The Essex Marshes
A depressing drizzle was still falling when amid semi-gloom I found myself stepping out of a train at a station on one of those branch lines which intersect the map of Essex. A densely wooded slope arose on the north. It seemed in some way to bear down oppressively on the little station, as though at any moment it might slip forward and crush it.
“Gallaho is a good man to have in charge,” said Nayland Smith. “A stoat on a scent and every whit as tenacious.”
The chief detective inspector was there awaiting us—a thickset, clean-shaven man of florid coloring and truculent expression, buttoned up in a blue overcoat and having a rather wide-brimmed bowler hat, very wet, jammed tightly upon his head. With him was a uniformed officer who was introduced as Inspector Derbyshire of the Essex Constabulary. Greetings over: “This is an ugly business,” said Gallaho, speaking through clenched teeth.
“So I gather,” said Nayland Smith rapidly. “We can talk on the way. I’m afraid you’ll have to ride in front with the driver, Kerrigan.”
Gallaho nodded and presently, in a police car which stood outside the station, we were on our way. It was a longish drive, mostly through narrow, muddy lanes. At last, on the outskirts of a village through which ran a little stream, we pulled up. A constable was standing outside a barnlike structure, separated by a small meadow, from the nearest cottage. He was a sinister-looking man who harmonized with his surroundings and whose jet-black eyebrows joined in the middle to form one continuous whole. He saluted as we stepped down, unlocked the barn door and led the way in. In spite of the disheartening weather a group of idlers hung about staring vacantly at the gloomy building.
“Not a pleasant sight, sir,” Inspector Derbyshire warned us as he removed a sheet from something which lay upon a trestle table.
It was the body of a man wearing a tweed jacket and open-neck shirt, flannel trousers and thick-soled shoes: the equipment, I thought, of a hiker. All his garments—from which water dripped—were horribly stained with blood, and his face was characterized by an unnatural pallor.
I checked an exclamation of horror when I realized that he had died of a wound which appeared nearly to have severed his head from his body!
“Right across the jugular,” Gallaho muttered, staring down savagely at the victim of this outrage.
He began to chew vigorously, although as I learned later he used no gum; it was merely an unusual ruminatory habit.
“Good God!” Nayland Smith whispered. “Good God! No doubt of the cause of death here! Thank you, Inspector. Cover the poor fellow up. The surgeon has seen him, of course?”
“Yes. He estimated that he had been dead for six or seven hours. But I left him just as we found him for you to see.”
“He was hauled out of the river, I’m told?”
“Yes—half a mile from here. The body was jammed in under the branches of an overhanging willow.”
“Who found it?”
“A gipsy called Barnett who was gathering rushes. He and his family are basket makers.”
“When was that?”
“Ten-thirty, sir,” Inspector Derbyshire replied. “I got straight through to Inspector Gallaho; he arrived an hour later. Doctor Bridges saw the body at eleven.”
“Why did you call Scotland Yard?”
“I recognized him at once. He had reported to me yesterday morning—”
“As I told you, sir,” Gallaho’s growling voice broke in, “he was a bit after your time at the Yard. But Detective Sergeant Hythe was one of my most promising juniors. He was working under me. He was down here looking for the secret radio station. B.B.C. engineers had noticed interference from time to time and they finally narrowed it down to this end of Essex.”
We came out of the barn and the constable locked the door behind us. Smith turned and stared at Gallaho.
“It looks,” Gallaho added, “as though poor Hythe had got too near to the heart of the mystery.”
“If you’ll just step across to the constable’s cottage, sir, I want you to see the few things that were found on the dead man,” said Inspector Derbyshire.
As we walked along the narrow village street to the modest police headquarters the group of locals detached themselves from the barn and followed us at a discreet distance. Nayland Smith glanced back over his shoulder.
“No one of interest there, Kerrigan!” he snapped.
Laid out upon a table in the sitting room I saw a Colt automatic, an electric flashlamp and a Yale key.
“There wasn’t another thing on him!” said Inspector Derbyshire. “Yet I know for a fact that he carried a knapsack and a stick. He was smoking a pipe, too; and he asked me for the name of a cottage where he could spend a night, quiet-like, in the neighborhood.”
Smith was staring at the exhibits.
“This key,” he remarked, “is the most significant item.”
“I spotted that,” growled Gallaho. “It’s the key of an A.A. call box—and the nearest is at the crossroads by Woldham Forges, a mile or so from here.”
“Smart work,” snapped Smith. “What did this important discovery suggest to you?”
“It’s plain enough. He had been watching during the night (if the doctor’s right, he was murdered between four and five) and he’d found out something so important that he was making for the nearest phone to get assistance.”
“Anything else?”
“That the phone nearest to whatever he’d discovered was at Woldham Forges—and that he was working from some base where he must have left his other belongings.”
“What did you do?”
“We’ve made a house-to-house search, sir,” Inspector Derbyshire replied. “It isn’t very difficult about here. But we can’t find where he spent the night.”
Nayland Smith gazed out of the window. Several loiterers were hanging about, but the arrival of the constable now released from his duty as keeper of the morgue dispersed them.
“I shall want a big-scale map of the district,” said Smith.
“At your service, sir!”
We all turned and stared. The sinister-looking constable was the speaker. But he was sinister no more. His remarkable eyebrows were raised in what I assumed to be an expression of enthusiasm. He was opening the drawer of a bureau.
“Constable Weldon,” explained Inspector Derbyshire, “is an authority on this area . . .”
