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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 12 (March 1, 1937)

TheThirteenth Clue or — The Story of the Signal Cabin Mystery

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TheThirteenth Clue or
The Story of the Signal Cabin Mystery

These incidents are complete in themselves, but the characters are all related.

Chapter IX.

Like hell!” snapped the Grandfather of All Detectives, Unna Lloyd. “Like hell!”

He consulted the telegram again. It was from headquarters and read:

You are recalled. Stop. Commissioner frothing with indignation. Stop. Have resignation ready. Stop. Look—Listen.

Lloyd's Hapsburg bottom lip, heavy and protruding, curled. That was like headquarters, a bunch of boneheads themselves, not one of whom had written a novel or staged a radio thriller. Psychological duds.

Far off a morepork called emotionally. Patently it was fixing a date with a lady friend on the opposite range. It was the night for such dalliance. A sunburnt passionate moon full of desire (vide Swinburne) drenched the world about Mata Hari—pardon, Matamata—with sensuous romance. Even the pines leaned one against the other caressingly. Seated by the window of the pubbedsittingroom, Lloyd fancied he could hear the snails in the cabbage patch beneath delicately wooing. “A Grace Moore Night of Love,” he said to himself.

But the G.O.A.D. was in no mood for sentimental reflection. Love was all very well in its place, but Matamata was not the place. Even if it were, his reputation (as a detective) came first. It was now under a cloud, and if the problem of the Lauder homicide were not speedily solved, his prestige would be hopelessly involved. And he loathed the idea of having to work hard for a good living.

Who had slain Lauder … stretched him out cold in the signal cabin. And why? And with what? Had the Trot-sky-ites discovered that Lauder was a natural son of Stalin surreptitiously at work communising the bucolic and incredulous Matamatoes? The publican's daughter, sweet and unsophisticated, and always anxious to help in an emergency, had made that suggestion with an ingenuousness which made him savage.

Said Lloyd to himself (for the third and last time): “Like hell!” Which indicated that he was having the devil's own time. He turned impatiently at his desk and tumbled his paperweight, a skull, to the floor. At the percussion, the chauffeur under the table ceased snoring; he was sleeping the sleep of the just—one-over-eighteen. His nose was a dissolute crimson, his tie had worked round under one ear, one hand opened and shut slowly as if feeling for a pewter pot.

“I'm in a tough spot,” remarked Lloyd to himself. “By the way—where's P.C. Fanning? I'll wager he's downstairs playing dominoes with the porter for drinks.” And all the bally-hoodlums who had led him into what were nothing else but blind streets. The crazy clues he had followed, until his soles were through and his head clanged like a chain of dredge buckets crying out for oil. He tore the flesh of another orange ravenously, wished he had relied on bloodhounds instead of morons, cursed the moon, swore at the moreporks (now in long distance touch), swallowed a pip blasphemously, and came to a sudden, almost inspirational decision. He would go round to the local mortuary and have another look at the sad cadaver. He was far from convinced that Lauder had been bumped off in any of the ways suggested. No ordinary homicidal hombre could have so cleverly covered up his tracks. No. Not even a Dorothy Sayers expert in murder could have got away with it so easily.

The G.O.A.D. grabbed his hat, his swordstick (just in case!), his sal volatile, crept cat-like down the stairs out of the pub and headed straight for the “freezer.” The assistant mortician, a fellow with soapy, unhygienic hands, and memorable side-whiskers, admitted him, took him to the pall, and drew back the grey blanket. Lloyd bent over the clay. His mind was on the step of going back to the days when Lauder and he had been foundation members of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool, when—

“Quite a nice specimen, sir, if I may say so,” genially observed the mortician, dry washing his paws.

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Unna Lloyd stood silent, serious, gazing down on what had once been a boon companion.

“A good son and a worthy father, sir, I understand,” continued the mortician chattily. “I hope and trust he was well insured.”

“Lloyd slumped down like a pithed steer.”

“Lloyd slumped down like a pithed steer.”

“Would you mind shutting and locking your face,” said Lloyd cuttingly; “I'm thinking.”

The lugubrious-looking official permitted the G.O.A.D's. cerebullum to churn for a space; then he crashed the silence with—

“My idea of it all, sir, is that the pore young man was practising levitation in the signal cabin and the concealed rope broke, concussing his brain.”

Fortunately, Lloyd did not hear him; he was busy giving the body the onceover, from the crown to the feet. It wasn't a pleasant job, but when duty called, he was never one to pretend that he was out for the day. That was his reputation. He must live up to it.

His sensitive fingers found a depression in the thick hair at the top centre of the head.

He turned his 250 candlepower torch on to it. There was a bare patch, the size of a dollar piece. Strange, most strange. When he touched it, his fingertips tingled. It was almost as though the dead man were trying to tell him something. What?

Something clattered to the floor behind him. He leapt aside with a curse, his heart pounding—to meet the squirmy eyes of the a.m.

“Sorry, sir. It was your sword-stick, sir. I was only looking at it and carelessly dropped it. Which reminds me, I forgot to take my nerve tonic after tea. Anything fresh, sir?”

Lloyd dismembered him with such a look! Then he returned to business. That curious bald, scorched spot. Probably due to trouble at the roots of the hair. He worked down the body, finding nothing new except what appeared to be a similar patch below the right knee.

Seems to me,” he said to himself. “Lauder's blood was out of order. I always thought he should have eaten more spinach.” At that, he retrieved his swordstick, brushed back his Ethyl locks, lit a cork-tip Abdullah at the wrong end and set off on the return journey back to the pub. A sense of frustration seized him. That slam from headquarters rankled. It just wasn't fair. Play the game, you cads, play the g-a-a-ame. The G-men back in Wellington were hopeless, helpless. Their big feature was chasing hairy matmen for their autographs. None of them had heard of “Father Brown,” and all of them thought that deductive methods applied only to wage “cuts.” As for Fanning—mentally he thrust his swordstick between that officer's brawny shoulder blades, just where Hemingway's matadors reach for the bull's heart.

Maurisca, who had sent out the S.O.S. from the cabin that fateful night, was dumber than a dumb-waiter, and that was praising him. And what sort of an ass was Lauder to be messing around the signal cabin at all.

“The game's wrong,” he muttered, self-pityingly. In the half-dark of the descending moon, even the shadows on the boulevard seemed alive. A black cat slid past his ankles like a lithe little sin in soundless flight. Curse it! As he rounded the corner, a rubber-tyred scooter at top speed grazed his splashboard. Lloyd jumped sideways, panting. Why didn't the blighter blow his horn? His nerve was shaken. There was evil abroad in the night. For the first time fear came to him. He felt for his gun—a sawn-off Spring-field (it cost him £80), loaded with shells at £4/10/0 a hundred, which hung in his right armpit.

He was now within a couple of hundreds yards of his bed-sitting room. The moon was nearly out of sight. When he reached the pub, the first thing he would—

Two hulking shapes moved out of a crystal gazer's shoppe door; descended upon the G.O.A.D. villainously.

“Bam!” And “Bam!” once more. Lloyd slumped down like a pithed steer, in his ears the wild Wagner music of a billion stars …

* * *

After the sleuth “came to” an hour later, he discovered that he was in a strange room, bound tightly and most professionally in a considerable chair. Of all things! A suffused baleful light filled the den. As he vainly twisted about, his aching eyes caught sight of an oleograph of King Edward VI and his missus on the wall opposite. His aesthetic soul contracted within him. A bush moth straggled along his forehead, sharpening his agony.

“Where am I?” he moaned. “Help!”

At his call a loathesome Thing emerged from nowhere and knuckled ham-like fists before him.

“Whachyer whinin’ about?” It growled.

“Oh these straps! My head! Everything! Unhand me!”

“Ain't you comfortable?” asked the Blot sneeringly. “It's a perfectly good and roomy chair, ain't it?”

Lloyd groaned. “Who are you? Why am I here?”

“'Cos we brought you here. ‘Ow's the ‘eadache? Your name's Lloyd, ain't it?”

“You'll find out later on,” said the victim. “And then watch out. You'll pay for this tomfoolery. What do you want with me? I'm parched. A whisky for the love of Mike. Even a milk-shake—Worcester sauce—anything.”

The shape snickered: “Whisky's orf. We'll give you some juice presently—our own special brand.” He began to play round with gadgets on the wall to the right of Lloyd, below the oleograph. There was a rustle on the fire-escape pendent from the window opposite.

“What's that?” said the Monstrosity, turning sharply.

The trussed-up prisoner moaned feebly. He was “all in.” He smelt death in that deadly room. “For God's sake,” he whimpered, “free me.”

(Continued on page 40).

“His nerve was shaken.”

“His nerve was shaken.”

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