Bleeding Hooks Page 23

  Mr. Weston stood in posed immobility, thinking deeply. Then, as if he had suddenly made up his mind on a matter of vital importance, he felt in his pocket and brought out a cigarette-case of a type much in favour amongst fishermen, in which the cigarettes are bounced upwards, singly, by small springs. He slid back the top, took the exposed cigarette between his lips, replaced the case in his pocket, and took out a nickel-plated lighter. During the whole process, his right hand remained by his side, and Mr. Winkley marvelled at the amazing dexterity of the other.

  Mr. Weston inhaled slowly, then turned a grave face to Mr. Winkley.

  “Claude is my only son,” he said, “the only thing in life I live for. I’ve brought him up since he was a baby, and shielded him from anything sordid or unhappy. I very much doubt whether you can have any proof for your suspicions, but I can’t risk having him dragged into this.”

  “I thought you’d probably feel like that,” said Mr. Winkley, nodding a wise head.

  Mr. Weston flung his cigarette into the fire with an air of decision.

  “I suppose you know that I killed her,” he said in a casual voice.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Winkley.

  Mr. Weston shrugged his shoulders.

  “There’s nothing for me to say, then. You’re a damned good fisherman, Winkley. You know to a second when to tighten on a fish and land him, and you used the only bait I was likely to take.”

  Mr. Winkley stretched his legs, and got up, standing a good head and shoulders above his victim.

  “On the contrary,” he said, “there’s a great deal for you to say. If you want to prevent proceedings being taken against Claude, you’ll have to give me a signed confession.”

  “Oh, I’ll do that,” replied the other, “but” – holding up his crippled hand – “I’m not so handy at writing with my left hand as I am at casting.”

  “In that case –” began Mr. Winkley.

  He broke off as he heard the sound of squeals outside, and opened the door in time to see Pussy skidding to a standstill in the hall, while Gunn menaced her from the door of the billiard room. He caught her by the arm.

  “You said you’d taken a course in shorthand and typing,” he said urgently. “Can you make use of yourself for once in a while?”

  Pussy looked completely taken aback.

  “Yes, but –” she began.

  Mr. Winkley did not wait for her to finish, but propelled her forward into the smoking-room, and locked the door. He waved her to a chair which was drawn up at an oak writing-table, and placed paper and a fountain-pen in front of her.

  “You don’t mind?” he asked Mr. Weston, who shook his head in reply.

  “Mind? It’s I who mind!” exclaimed Pussy as soon as she had recovered her wits. “Sitting behind locked doors with two men, treated like a blooming secretary... what’s the little game?”

  “You said you’d like to be in at the death,” said Mr. Winkley. “It was Mr. Weston who killed Mrs. Mumsby. I want you to take down his confession.”

  Pussy’s eyes nearly dropped out of her head.

  “Claude’s father!” she cried. “Oh no! It can’t be true!”

  Mr. Weston walked across to the little table, and smiled down at her.

  “Yes, Claude’s father,” he said. “You’re Claude’s friend, aren’t you? I’m sorry I frightened you that night, but I never meant to hurt you. I hope your throat wasn’t too sore.”

  “Then it’s – it’s really true?” murmured Pussy. “You really did – murder her?”

  “I’m afraid so,” was the reply. “I’m not sorry, but I wish I could keep the truth from Claude.”

  He sighed, moved over to the large, centre table, and perched himself on the corner, arms folded.

  “Take this down, Miss Partridge,” ordered Mr. Winkley, as if she were indeed his secretary.

  “But I –” objected Pussy.

  “Don’t worry. He’ll speak slowly, won’t you, Weston?” said Mr. Winkley, anticipating the question. “Ready?”

  Pussy shrugged her shoulders, French-wise, and took up the pen.

  Chapter 39

  “Mrs. Mumsby was no more entitled to be called Mrs. Mumsby than you or I,” began Mr. Weston, with no more emotion than if he were describing a new fly. “If she married Mumsby, she was a bigamist. Her legal name was Weston. She was my wife, and Claude’s mother.”

  Pussy could not hold back the little squeal of astonishment which came to her lips, but neither of the men took any notice of her, and she bent her blonde head again over the table.

  “When I first met her, she was parading, under the name of Ruby Lavalle, in the back row of the chorus in a third-rate music-hall show. Her real name was Gladys Clew. She was very slim and pretty, and in those days she had auburn hair.”

  “She didn’t look very pretty on the day she died,” remarked Mr. Winkley.

  “She didn’t deserve to,” replied Mr. Weston. “By that time, she had destroyed one man’s soul, and was getting ready to sharpen her talons on another’s... I was doing a Chinese illusionist’s turn at the time, and was just beginning to make a success of it. It was my last engagement in that class of hall, for I had been booked for a turn of the best halls in the larger provincial towns. I had ideas for improving my act, and thought it would go down well with a lady assistant. I offered the job to Gladys, and she jumped at it. Everything went well, and I began to receive offers from managers of London halls.” He paused, as if some dim echo of the applause he had earned had come to his ears. Then he shook his head ruefully. “For a time I was a rage, my name was on everyone’s lips, but fame on the boards is proverbially fickle. I don’t imagine that you would find a single person nowadays who remembers me.”

  Mr. Winkley looked up.

  “The Great Hei-Wei!” he cried.

  Mr. Weston jumped to his feet, and acknowledged the tribute by placing his finger-tips, first on his forehead, and then on his breast, in a gesture which was more bastard-Arab than Chinese.

  “Even so,” he said. He pressed his left forefinger against the outer corner of his eye and pushed the skin upwards. “You can see that it didn’t need much make-up to turn me into a celestial. A little sticking-plaster hidden beneath a Chinaman’s wig, and a few strokes with a grease stick, gave me what I suppose this young friend” – he emphasized the word – “of Claude’s would call ‘glamour’. In those days, China was a glamorous country to all who didn’t live there. You remember Chu Chin Chow, of course, Winkley, which looked as if it would beat Johnny Walker’s record. Well, well, all I need say is that my act was a great success, and after I had made a bit of money, I married Gladys. I was madly in love with her, and thought she loved me. It wasn’t until afterwards that I found out that she really loved my success. I suppose you couldn’t blame her. She’d been dragged up with ten brothers and sisters in a London slum. She was –”

  “A gold-digger,” suggested Pussy.

  “Yes. And the tragedy was that I loved her. Early in 1921, she found that she was going to have a baby, and then I saw her worst side for the first time. Before telling me, she went to every quack doctor she could hear of, and nearly killed herself with the stuff she took to prevent it. Then she cursed me for ruining her figure, and said I was envious of her success in the act. I put it down to her condition, and somehow managed to appease her. Luckily, I had money to buy her presents, and after a time, she rather enjoyed playing the part of an interesting invalid, reclining on a divan in satin negligees all day, eating chocolates. After Claude was born, she started nagging me again. She never got back her slim figure, and never forgave me for it. Of course, it was her own fault, but you couldn’t make her see that. You’d have thought that it was really her act, from the way she went on, but all she had to do was to look pretty and bring on the apparatus, and take away the things I produced by my sleight-of-hand. Mine was really a one-man-show, like Claude’s.”

  “When I first saw her,” remarked Pussy quietly, “I imagined her dresse
d in pink tights and a sequined tunic, rather bulgy.”

  Mr. Weston smiled.

  “That was the idea,” he said, “but it was a red velvet tunic, trimmed with gold braid. Am I saying too much?” he added, turning to Mr. Winkley.

  “No,” he replied. “Just keep on as you’re going.”

  “I wish I could have done,” sighed Mr. Weston. “The stage is a grand life, and as long as I had money, Gladys would have stayed with us. But when Claude was two months old, my right hand began to get stiff after my performance. I tried massage and exercises, but it got steadily worse, until one night, I failed in my best trick. I managed to cover it up, but both the manager and Gladys noticed it, of course. She accused me of being drunk, but I knew it wasn’t that. A conjuror can’t afford to get drunk; his living depends on steady hands. I was seriously alarmed. I went to the best specialist in London, and he found some atrophy of the muscles, which he said was incurable. I tried every possible kind of treatment, but all to no purpose. By the time that Claude was six months old, my name had been erased from every playbill in the country. It was then that Gladys left me.”

  He paused, as if savouring again the bitterness of that moment, then continued.

  “According to her, I had ruined her life. I, who had taken her from a career which would almost certainly have ended on the streets for her; who had kept her in luxury, given her a good home, and a son! She ran away with the manager of a touring revue company, named Robins. I don’t know where she picked up Mumsby, nor how many men’s lives she has ruined in the last seventeen years. But I do know that she won’t ruin Claude’s.”

  “I used to think that Claude wasn’t really your son,” remarked Pussy. “You see, you’re always emphasizing the fact that he is, and when people do that, it’s usually to hide the truth.”

  Mr. Weston smiled. His smile was so genuine and friendly, that it suddenly seemed preposterous to Pussy to think that he was a self-confessed murderer.

  In a moment, she thought, I shall wake up and find it has all been a dream. Things like this can’t possibly happen in real life.

  “He is my son, that I do know,” said Mr. Weston. “I suppose the reason why I’m always talking about it is that he means so much to me. He’s the rock I rebuilt my faith on, the only thing that kept me sane during those awful, lonely weeks. He was so small and helpless, and he depended on me so much. I vowed then that he should always have me at hand to help him as long as he needed me. I swore that I would never fail him as she had failed me. Everyone I knew tried to persuade me to send him to an orphanage, but he was all I had left in the world, and I clung to him. How I managed to make enough for us to live on, I don’t know, but somehow I got through the nightmare of those early months. All that I knew was connected with the stage, and I naturally tried to pick up a living there. I got a job as a scene-shifter while there was still enough use in my hand, and it was then that I strained my heart. Then I became a stage-doorkeeper, and, after that, I even hired myself out to parade outside a cinema in fancy dress to advertise a film. There were times when Claude and I nearly starved. You see, I’d had no chance to save any money; I’d spent it all on Gladys. When things were at their worst, some friend got the Actors’ Benevolent Society interested in me. They found a good job for me with plenty of opportunity, and now, thanks to them, I’m the manager of the Oleander Cinema in one of the provincial towns, and Claude and I can afford to take a fishing holiday.”

  “It seems poetic justice that her money should go to that Society,” said Mr. Winkley. “But why did you kill her?”

  Mr. Weston began to pace up and down the carpeted room.

  “Can’t you see why? I must have explained it all very badly then. From the day that she left me until the day that Claude and I walked into this hotel, I had had no word from her, nor set eyes on her. She had inherited all that money from Mumsby, and had grown into a rich, lonely, discontented woman. As soon as she saw Claude, and realized that the baby she had deserted had grown into a good-looking, talented boy, she determined to get him away from me, and take him for her own constant companion.”

  “Didn’t Claude guess that she was his mother?” asked Pussy. “It was queer that he should call her Mother Mumsby.”

  Mr. Weston shook his head emphatically.

  “I’m quite sure that he didn’t know,” he said. “He isn’t very good at keeping things to himself, as you know, and he would have said something about it if he had guessed. He just called her that because she mothered him and that monkey of his. She wasn’t a bad actress when she liked, and she made a dead set at him. They say that blood’s thicker than water, but I never believed it until I saw the attraction between those two.”

  “It was certainly rather uncanny,” remarked Mr. Winkley.

  “Uncanny?” repeated Mr. Weston. “It was horrible to me. It was almost obscene to see her putting a caressing hand on his arm and smiling at him, when I knew how callously she had deserted him when he was a helpless baby.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Claude all about it?” asked Pussy. “Surely he would never have left you if he had known how badly she had treated you.”

  “I daren’t risk it,” replied Mr. Weston, still pacing up and down the room. “There was that great sympathy between them, and it would have been only my word against hers. She would have stopped at nothing to get her own way. Oh, I knew her so well! My only hope was to stave her off until I could work out some plan for getting rid of her. That suited her well enough because it gave her time to worm her way further into his affection. Things came to a head one evening when we walked back from the lake together and she told me that she was making a new will, leaving all her money to Claude, and mentioning him as her son. She dangled the will in front of my eyes, and I snatched it from her. She had filled in Claude’s name but not her own.”

  “That was the will that Claude found today, then,” remarked Mr. Winkley.

  “Yes. You are a witness to the fact that I filled it up in my own name instead. She only laughed at me when I told her to leave her money elsewhere, and we had a violent quarrel.”

  “That was the evening when she caught more fish than usual, and never came to see them put down in the hall.” said Mr. Winkley.

  Mr. Weston nodded.

  “I knew then that I must kill her.” he said.

  Chapter 40

  “But why?” Pussy sounded bewildered. “Why should you deprive Claude of all that money? He would have been rich. He need never have done any more work. He –”

  “Why?” Mr. Weston swung round, and glared at her. “Why? Because there are other things in this world of greater value than money. Character, goodness, a man’s soul. Can’t you see what kind of a man Claude would have become if he had become dependent on that woman, who would have treated him like a new toy to be taken about and exhibited everywhere? A boudoir lizard! A human lapdog! I heard Major Jeans call him a gigolo once when they were together. Can’t you see how much like her he could have become, and how easily she could have ruined my long years of careful rearing? Can’t you see what a wonderful future he has in front of him, with those clever young hands of his, and all the tricks of prestidigitation I have taught him? Already he is nearly as good as I was at the height of my career. And surely he owes me something. We Westons have been conjurors of one kind or another for generations. My grandfather took lessons from Trewey, and specialized in shadow pictures. Besides, Claude has no idea of the value of money. When that fortune came to him, he would have run through it at Monte Carlo or somewhere, and supple fingers can be a temptation when things go badly. Can’t you see how he might have ended? As a light-fingered thief. No! She destroyed my soul and my faith in human goodness; I daren’t risk her destroying his. She deserved to die, and may her soul rot in hell!”

  There was silence in the room after he had finished speaking, although Pussy, emulating all the ranks of Tuscany, barely restrained a cheer.

  Then Mr. Winkley spoke.

  “I
’m sorry, Weston, but however much sympathy one may have with the ‘eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ philosophy, it doesn’t give one the right to take the law into one’s own hands. I shall have to pass this information on to the police, and there’s only one thing they can do.’’

  “Hang me, I suppose,’’ replied Mr. Weston cheerfully. “Well, let’s get the preliminaries over.’’

  “It’s all most irregular,” frowned Mr. Winkley. “I didn’t caution you, for one thing, although you certainly knew that all this was being taken down in evidence.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” was the reply. “I’m not going to question the truth of my own words.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Winkley, still looking worried, “in that case, Miss Partridge had better read what she has written, and then it can be written out and you can sign it.”

  Pussy looked confused.

  “You mean – read it aloud?” she asked incredulously.

  “Yes, yes. I can’t let him sign it without hearing if you’ve put it down correctly, and I don’t suppose he can read your shorthand.”

  “I’m damned sure he can’t,” returned Pussy. “I can’t even read it myself!”

  “This is no time for joking,” said Mr. Winkley sternly. “Please do as I say.”

  “But I – I can’t...” stammered Pussy.

  “Miss Partridge,” said Mr. Winkley, “this man is a murderer. He deliberately took the life of Mrs. – er – his wife. Even if you think that she deserved it, you can do nothing to save him from the consequences of that act. Even if you threw that confession into the fire, I should only get someone else to take down another copy. Please be sensible about it.”

  “Oh, it isn’t that at all,” explained Pussy. “I just can’t read it because I haven’t put anything down.”

  “You – what?” shouted Mr. Winkley.

  “Well, it was your own fault,” retorted the girl, reacting at once to his tone. “I tried to tell you that I couldn’t do it, but you wouldn’t listen. You just stuck me in this chair, and gave me a pen, and ordered me to do as I was told.”