POINTER strolled down all the stairs and let himself up and down in all the lifts. Finally he stopped beside a couple of workmen who were doing some plastering on the ground floor, near the foot of the stairs that led up to Number Fourteen. He had noticed the bags and the tools when he arrived just now.
"I borrowed some of your plaster last night," he said pleasantly, "how much do I owe you for what I used?"
"That's all right, sir," one of the men said civilly, "me and my mate was just saying that one of the porters must have done it. Quarter of a bag, wasn't it, sir. If you like to call it a shilling, that'll be all right."
Pointer liked a half-crown better, and so apparently did the men.
"Hope I cleaned the spade off all right," Pointer chatted on, lighting a cigarette. A cigarette which he took care not to inhale.
"Lord, sir, there wasn't no call to clean it that-away! Staggered Jim here it did to see it cleaned up. We only uses it for mixin'. Why, you sharpened the thing, didn't you?"
"No. Not beyond cleaning it." Pointer's cigarette was in his hand. He flicked its ash over the handle and stood looking down at it while talking. The ash, "finger-print cigarette" ash, showed no marks except those of a gloved hand. The workmen not touched it. So some one had scraped it and cleaned it since they had used it last.
And, according to the men, some one had sharpened it as well. It certainly was quite sharp enough now to have done what Pointer believed it had done. A couple of blows from it would account for the marks on the bottom of the tub. The murderer must have found his grisly task lightened unexpectedly by the implements left in the building. Or had "Tourcoin" noticed them, and laid his plan accordingly?
"I think I put everything back as it was," he said again; "messy work, plastering. When you aren't used to it. Miss anything else?"
"Nothing, sir."
But Pointer seemed still uncertain.
"Let me see...didn't I take a tin?" He was thinking of the marks on the bathroom tiles.
"That old tin isn't no loss, sir. You're more than welcome to it. We found it on the dust-bin, and was going to throw it out again when we was finished."
"Still," Pointer reminded them, "a tin comes in handy, I expect. What size is it? I borrowed another from one of the porters."
"Seven pound biscuit tin, sir. Stove in a bit at one side. It comes in handy for plaster we've sieved and don't want to use immediate, as you say, sir. But there's no hurry!"
"I'll send it down. Did I take its lid too?" he asked, peering about him.
He was told that he must have, as the lid was kept on the box.
Pointer tipped them, "in case the tin shouldn't turn up," and went slowly out of the building, an hour after he had first entered it.
If Tindall was right, and the body found was that of Etcheverrey, then, as far as he was concerned, the case was over. Some Special Branch man at the Yard would be told off to assist the Foreign Office, and Pointer would take up another tangle. But was it Etcheverrey? Was it "political" at all?
Very great care had been taken to dispose of all personal effects. Nothing but those scraps of paper in the basket had been left to tell who the man was. And, supposing the scraps of paper to have been faked, then no clue whatever had been left. For the flat was a furnished flat, shedding no light on the character of its present occupier. As far as identity went, if the papers in the basket were what the Force calls "offers," a trail laid to deceive, then it was as if the police had found a body stripped, and without a head, lying in an empty room.
Each great case, and Pointer nowadays was concerned only with great cases, groups its facts in such a different way from any other, that it becomes an entirely new problem. Pointer had never had one like this before, where all the usual means of identification of murdered man and missile used had been taken away. Of course Tindall might be right. Probably he was. But supposing he were not, how the dickens was he, Pointer, to find out who the man had been? And above all, who the murderer had been? Somewhere there was a weak spot in the crime. There always was. There always would be. Where was it in this case?
The detective officer's every nerve tautened at the idea of a murderer escaping. Pointer never saw his work as a game of brains against brains, where, provided only that the one move was cleverer than the other, it ought to win. He was a soldier, fighting a ceaseless battle where no quarter could be asked or given. The battle of light against darkness. Right against Wrong. If the other side won, it would be all up with the world. Pointer had never failed the side of justice yet. He would not fail it now, if he could help it.
But could he help it? Tindall was working at the case from his end. Pointer was not sure that he wanted to follow the other's track. He must make his own path therefore. If Tindall were right, the Chief Inspector's road and that of the F.O. man would meet in due course, the two ends of a well-dug tunnel.
He went up to his rooms at Scotland Yard and did some telephoning. By that time the analyst's report, on the bottles which had been sent in, was ready. One contained nothing but plaster mixed with water. The plaster was a very coarse kind used by plumbers for certain face-work. The other contained the same plaster, some water, and a mixture of blood.
Pointer walked up and down his room. He was not the Chief Inspector now, but a man who had committed a murder; a man to whom it was absolutely vital that the corpse should not be recognised, or that the weapon used should not be identified. Pointer had an open mind as to which of the two reasons compelled the taking away of the head. The clothes might have been taken for the purpose of confusing the issue.
"Yes," he murmured to himself, "I've put the head in a biscuit tin, mixed and poured in plaster to keep it from rolling around, and now what?"
In the absence of all known hiding-places, he finally, after a short chat over the wire with the Home Office, sent a coded message to every post office throughout the United Kingdom that all wrongly-addressed or uncalled-for parcels were to be reported to him at once. He thought it very possible that the murdered man's clothes, and the towels used by his murderer, had been made into small, convenient parcels, and sent to various fictitious names and non-existent streets in some home-town. Abroad would be out of the question.
All omnibus headquarters, taxi stands, garages, and railway stations were warned to keep an eye out for similar but unmarked parcels which either had been left in vehicles some time last night or might be left in the near future.
Similar instructions reached the L.C.C. dustmen and all parcel deposit offices. The river police were not forgotten. They had found nothing so far which could interest Pointer, but they promised to be even more on the alert than usual, if possible. Then he telephoned to the police surgeon who had first seen the body. He learnt that nothing had been found to explain the cause of death. There were no signs of a struggle. Death had been absolutely instantaneous. The doctor thought that a bullet through the head would account for the facts. "But, of course, as Mr. Tindall suggests, a blow might be equally swift." At any rate, the head had been certainly severed after death. But not long after it. The death itself had taken place somewhere around midnight on Monday night. Pointer put down the telephone and went to the mortuary chapel, a grimly sanitary place.
The finger prints had already been taken, and definitely not identified at Scotland Yard, as those of any known criminal.
Flashed by wireless photographs to the continent, the same answer had come from each capital in turn. So the body was still nameless. And as long as it remained so, the murderer was safe.
Pointer looked the body over very carefully yet once again. Especially the beautifully shaped hands. Hands that in life must surely have done many things well. In whose life? What things had they done?
As he studied them, he remembered their quick examination by the doctor. He knew that on the arrival of an unconscious patient at any hospital, the medical men run their eyes over the