Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy by Freeman Wills Crofts Page A

the door, he knocked. Two minutes later he was shaking hands with the sergeant in the latter’s room.
    “I’m sure I’m grateful to you for giving me the chance of a change from London,” French began in his pleasant, cheery way as he took the chair the other pulled forward to the fire. “Will you join me in a cigar, or do you object to smoking in the office?”
    The sergeant dourly helped himself from French’s case, and gruffly admitted he was not above the use of tobacco after office hours. French seemed in no hurry to come to business, but chatted on about his journey and his impressions of the country, drawing the other out and deferring to his views in a way that was nothing less than flattering. Before ten minutes Kent had forgotten that his visitor was an interloper sent to him over his head because his superiors imagined that he was not good enough for his own job, and was thinking that this stranger, for a Londoner and a Yard man, was not as bad as he might reasonably have been expected to be. Under the soothing influences of flattery and good tobacco he gradually mellowed until, when French at last decided the time had come, he was quite willing to assist in any way in his power.
    At French’s request he gave him a detailed account of the tragedy, together with a copy of the depositions taken at the inquest, and then went on to describe the bomb which Mr. Tarkington had dropped when he mentioned his theories to Major Valentine.
    “Chief Constable, he told me to find out what kind of safe it was in the house,” the sergeant went on. “I knew, for I had seen it at the time, but I went out again to make sure. It was made by Carter & Stephenson of Leeds, number”—he referred to a well-thumbed notebook—“ 12473. I went down to Leeds, and saw the makers, and they said the safe was twenty years old, but it was the best fireproof safe of its day. I asked them would the notes have burned up in it, and they said they wouldn’t scarcely be browned, no matter how fierce the fire might be.”
    “And what exactly was in the safe?”
    “Just paper ashes and sovereigns. No whole papers; all was burned to ashes.”
    “Could I see those ashes? Are any of them left?”
    “I think so. We took out the sovereigns and left the rest. The safe is lying in the rubbish where we found it.”
    French nodded, and for some minutes sat silent, drawing slowly at his cigar while he turned over in his mind the details he had learned. As he did so the words of Chief Inspector Mitchell recurred to him; “The people down there don’t appear to know much about it, and the whole thing may turn out to be a mare’s nest.” Now, having heard the story, he wondered if this was not going to be another of his chief’s amazing intuitions. It certainly looked as like a mare’s nest as anything he had ever handled. The only shred of evidence for foul play was the safe builder’s statement that their safe would protect papers even in the fiercest fire, and that statement left him cold. What else could the builders say? They had sold the thing as fireproof; how could they now admit they had made a false claim? And this Tarkington’s theory of the twenty-pound note was even less convincing. There was no real reason to believe that Averill had not handed it to his servant or to a visitor or sent it away by post. In fact, the whole tale was the thinnest he had listened to for many a day, and he saw himself taking a return train to St. Pancras before many hours had passed.
    But he had been sent up to make an investigation, and make an investigation he would. He rapidly planned his line of action. The first thing to be done was to get rid of this sergeant. He might be right enough for his own job, but French felt that he would be no help in an affair of this kind. Left to himself, he would go out and examine the house and then interview Tarkington. By that time he should have learned enough at least to decide whether or not to go on with the