Paul Temple and the Tyler Mystery

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‘Perhaps it’s someone else who wants you to take cigars to her brother in Paris,’ Steve suggested lightly.

‘Then she’s going to be unlucky. Now, I’d better telephone Sir Graham. He’ll be disappointed that we’ve nothing more definite for him.’

Temple sat down beside the telephone table. He was about to lift the receiver when the bell began to ring. He picked it up and repeated his number.

The operator said, ‘Go ahead, Guildford.’

It was a girl’s voice, faint and distorted by interference on the line, but unmistakably frightened.

‘This is Temple speaking.’

‘Oh, Mr Temple. I read in the papers that you are investigating the Tyler mystery. I have some very important information. I’ve got to see you immediately.’

Jane Dallas sounded a very excitable young lady. There was a touch of hysteria in her voice.

Temple said: ‘The papers are misinformed. It’s not true that I’m investigating the Tyler mystery. Your proper course is to take this information to the police.’

‘I can’t do that, Mr Temple. I’ve got to see you. It’s impossible to explain on the telephone. Oh, can’t you understand?’

The voice was becoming more and more overwrought.

‘I’m afraid I can’t come down to Guildford, Miss Dallas—’

‘You must,’ the girl insisted. Then as if she felt the old tag would clinch matters: ‘It’s a matter of life and death. I’m at 17 Charlotte Street. I’ll expect you at nine o’clock tonight.’

Before Temple had time to object there came a click and the line was dead.

‘That,’ he told Steve, ‘was Jane Dallas.’

‘So I guessed. I could hear most of it from here. She didn’t sound to me as if she was putting on an act.’

‘You mean you think I should have agreed to see her? What are the police for if not to deal with cases like this?’

‘She may have vital information and yet be frightened, for no valid and sensible reason, of going to the police. I felt rather sorry for her.’

This time it was Temple himself who began to whistle: ‘I love Paris—’. Steve remained serious.

‘You say you’re not investigating the Tyler mystery but this morning someone tried to kill us on the Bath Road.’

Temple sat motionless for a moment, then slapped his knee and stood up.

‘All right. This evening we’ll call on Miss Jane Dallas of 17 Charlotte Street. I’ll tell Charlie we want an early dinner.’

Chapter Three (#ulink_3142352f-4544-5026-8c90-7fe96bbe06d7)

A thunderstorm passed across the Southern Counties that evening, bringing darkness on a little earlier than usual. The rain, while it lasted, was very heavy. Temple was forced to slow down at several points outside Guildford where the water had collected in hollows in the road.

He drove directly to the Police Station and left Steve sitting in the car outside whilst he went to inquire the whereabouts of Charlotte Street. He was out within three minutes.

‘I think we’ll walk,’ he said, and opened the door on Steve’s side for her. ‘The place is only ten minutes away and it’s not nine yet. I don’t want to attract attention by driving the car up to her door.’

Guildford’s steep, narrow main street was still glistening wet. The lights from those shops whose owners considered that their window display justified keeping the illuminations on till midnight sent squiggles of orange, red and green across the roadway. Temple felt Steve’s arm pulling on his as they passed a window where some new silk materials were displayed, draped round bogusly bosomed dummies. A little later she did stop dead, her arm hooked firmly in his elbow.

‘Paul, look!’

They were opposite a brand new shop on one of the most prominent street corners in Guildford. The window display was highly imaginative and for a moment Temple was at a loss to tell what kind of merchandise this establishment was offering. The theme of the display was Mediterranean travel and night life in the gayer Riviera resorts. There were travel posters from Spain, France, Italy, Portugal and Yugoslavia, photographs of the Casino at San Remo, the Negresco in Cannes, and some unidentified night-spot in Barcelona. In the middle of all this colour and gaiety was the marble bust of a very beautiful, very twentieth-century woman.

Temple followed Steve’s eyes to the sign painted in flowing letters above the window. ‘Mariano. Coiffeur de Dames.’

‘He gets around,’ Temple murmured.

Steve was enthusiastic about Mariano’s window display.

‘It’s rather dashing, don’t you think, darling? Better than that dreadful wax image with some dead person’s hair planted on it like a wig.’

In fact, Temple noticed, most of the people who emerged now that the rain was over, paused to inspect the gay posters and photographs.

A few hundred yards later they turned into Charlotte Street and crossed over to be on the right side for the odd numbers. The houses here were strictly uniform – arched porches flanked by bow windows and separated from the pavement by sad little patches of downtrodden grass. There was a light on in the hall of number 17 and the black figures stood out clearly on the crescent-shaped glass above the doorway. Temple followed Steve up the three steps and pushed the bell.

The door was opened by a plump and elderly lady who wiped her hands on her apron as she answered Temple’s inquiry. Her name, they learned later, was Mrs Hobson.

‘Is Miss Dallas in?’

‘No.’

‘This is the house, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but she’s not in.’

‘Did she leave any message for me? My name’s Temple.’

‘No. She said nothing to me.’

Mrs Hobson had begun to close the door. She regarded Temple and Steve with suspicion, as if they spelt trouble.

‘That’s odd,’ he persisted. ‘I had an appointment to meet her here at nine o’clock. Has she not been in this evening at all?’

The woman shrugged as if to imply that the movements of her lodgers were no concern of hers.

‘She may have come in and gone out again while I was out feeding my budgies. As often as not she only comes back for long enough to change her shoes or dress before hurrying off to the pictures or the Palais.’

‘Are you sure she’s not in her room now?’

‘You seem very inclined to doubt my word—’ Mrs Hobson was working herself up into a huff over Temple’s insistence.

He said politely: ‘I’ve come all the way from London to see her, so naturally I don’t want to miss her.’

‘From London, are you? Well, I can always tell whether Jane is in or not by her wireless. It switches on from the door as you go in and she’s never in that room without it’s on. I don’t complain because I think she feels the loneliness.’

‘Well, thank you very much, Mrs – er?’

‘Hobson’s my name.’

‘Mrs Hobson. Perhaps we can call back a little later?’

‘Yes. I’ll tell her as soon as she comes in.’

Temple was just turning away to go down the steps when a thought struck him.

‘By the way, Mrs Hobson, where does Miss Dallas work?’

Being called by her name seemed to make all the difference to the landlady. A little primness crept into her pronunciation but she answered more readily.

‘She’s employed at one of those hairdressing saloons. It’s a new place – I can’t remember the name just at the moment.’

‘Is it Mariano’s?’

‘That’s it. I knew it was some French name.’

Steve and Temple walked slowly back towards the main street, watching for any girl coming the opposite way who might be Jane Dallas.

‘Is this coincidence again?’ Steve asked, though she already knew the answer.

‘It can’t be. This girl mentioned the Tyler mystery on the telephone. Perhaps she too was transferred from the London branch and knew Betty Tyler when they were there together.’

‘But Betty Tyler was murdered after she left London.’

‘We don’t know that this “Harry” business didn’t begin when she was still there. I have a feeling that Jane Dallas is going to help us quite a lot.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Ten past nine. I wonder how long we should give it?’

‘Another twenty minutes,’ Steve suggested. ‘Let’s go into this hotel and have a drink. I’m rather cold after that drive.’

Temple was very much on edge and hardly gave Steve time to enjoy her brandy. They were back at the door of number 17 before the clocks started striking the half-hour.

‘She’s not back yet,’ Mrs Hobson assured them. ‘I left my kitchen door open so that I’d hear the front door and no one’s come in.’

‘Mrs Hobson, I wonder if you’d just try her room – in case her radio has gone wrong or something.’

‘Well—’ Mrs Hobson surveyed Steve doubtfully and then opened the door wider. ‘Since you’ve come all the way from London.’

They stood in the narrow hall while Mrs Hobson toiled up the worn green staircarpet to the first floor. The Monarch of the Glen stared aloofly over their heads and a faint odour of primeval cabbage leaked out from the kitchen. In a minute or two Mrs Hobson came back down the stairs, walking sideways and holding on to the banisters.

‘There’s no answer,’ she said. ‘But it’s a funny thing, her door’s locked. She never locks it when she goes out—’

Temple was already moving towards the staircase.

‘Will you show me where her room is, please?’

‘Why!’ Mrs Hobson put out a podgy hand to restrain him. ‘I’ll ask you to remember whose house you’re in.’

‘This is urgent,’ Temple snapped. ‘That girl may be in danger. Now, which is her room?’

Before the expression in his eyes, Mrs Hobson capitulated.

‘It’s the door facing you at the end of the passage.’

Jane Dallas’s door was indeed locked. Temple banged on it and called loudly. Inside there was complete silence. Behind him he could hear Steve talking soothingly to the landlady, who was horrified at the sight of a Man on her first floor landing. He stood back a few feet, raised his right leg and kicked his heel against the door just below the lock. With a splintering sound the door shuddered open. The room in front of him was in darkness. He could see his own shadow, stretched to a grotesque length in the rectangle of light cast by the lamp on the landing.

With his left hand he felt for the light switch and snapped it on. He heard Steve coming along the passage behind him. Over his shoulder he said:

‘Don’t come any further, Steve. Try and get Mrs Hobson downstairs.’

Steve had worked with Temple too often to ignore that tone of voice. Without question she turned away. Temple went into the room and with the toe of his foot pushed the door until it was almost shut. Then he stood his ground and devoted a couple of minutes to what the police call ‘giving your eyes a chance’.

The room was a small bed-sitter. It was badly proportioned and too high for its size. The wallpaper and furnishings supplied by Mrs Hobson were ugly and shabby but here and there a few defiant gestures showed where Jane Dallas had tried to create a gayer, more feminine atmosphere. A flower-patterned curtain hung across one corner, obscuring the wash-stand, there was a vase of daffodils on the mantelshelf and a framed colour photo of Capri above it. The divan bed was covered with a striped blanket of many colours which might have come from North Africa, Persia or Birmingham.

The room was scrupulously tidy. Temple guessed that Jane Dallas had not had time to change her dress that evening.

She lay sprawled across the divan bed as if she had been flung there by violent hands. Her face was turned upwards towards the light and it was not possible to tell now whether she had been plain or pretty. Without moving from where he stood Temple was able to recognise the handiwork of a strangler. Though it was practically uncreased he never doubted that the girl had been killed with the silk picture scarf which lay near her on the divan. It had fallen in such a way that he could pick out on its shiny surface the Place de la Concorde, a portion of the Palais de Chaillot and Notre Dame de Paris.

Behind him a voice, growing rapidly in volume, announced: ‘And now, in answer to many requests, Al Jacobs will sing that popular number “Lonely is the Night”.’ An unseen multitude applauded and the brass section of an orchestra went into the key of E minor.

Temple calculated that Jane Dallas’s radio took just about two minutes to warm up. He hooked his toe round the door again to pull it open, and went downstairs to telephone the police.

‘I wish to God we could get a drink,’ Sir Graham grumbled, scowling round the dark empty lounge of the Black Lion. Some time earlier the waiter had politely pointed out that unless they were residents they could not be served with alcoholic refreshment. As a great favour he had brought them lukewarm liquid in a coffee jug; it tasted as if it had been distilled from acorns. Their still half-full cups stood on the table round which Steve, Forbes and Temple were sitting on cold, slippery leather chairs.

‘Well,’ Temple reminded him. ‘It’s your people who enforce the laws.’

‘They’d better not try and turn me out,’ the older man said in his bass-drum voice. ‘As a bona fide traveller I’m entitled to call for glasses of water till the cows come home.’

It had taken Sir Graham exactly one hour from Temple’s phone call to pick up Vosper and bring him down to Guildford. The Inspector had joined the Guildford C.I.D. men at 17 Charlotte Street; Forbes and the Temples cast themselves upon the mercy of the Black Lion. While they waited for Vosper to bring back the latest information Temple briefed Sir Graham about the visit to Sonning, Jane Dallas’s telephone call and his macabre discovery at Charlotte Street.

‘She was killed, of course, to prevent her giving you this information, whatever it was.’

Sir Graham picked up his coffee cup, examined its contents and then decided against drinking any more. Temple did not feel that any comment was required from him.

‘What I don’t understand,’ Forbes went on, ‘is why this strangler should leave his visiting card each time.’

‘The picture scarf of Paris? It didn’t really tell us any more than we knew already. The link between Jane Dallas and Betty Tyler was established. We cannot assume, though, that Jane Dallas was killed because she knew something which pointed to the identity of the other girl’s murderer. She may have been killed for the same reason as Betty Tyler.’

‘That reason being?’

‘Sir Graham, when we know that we’ll be within sight of our murderer.’