The Shop Window Murders. Vernon LoderЧитать онлайн книгу.
prominent newspapers, and every stage of the immense building progress had been reported with diagrams, portraits of the (titled) architect, and descriptions of all the eminent firms that had contributed to the material elegancies and equipment of the famous Store-to-be.
But Mr Tobias himself had remained unphotographed and unfeatured throughout the campaign, and no one from the outside world had even guessed accurately at the manner of man he was, until the Store was opened with a flourish of trumpets, and a luxurious house-warming.
To that function everyone of importance went. People who were wont privately to sneer at trade, forgot their principles, and crowded to the show; even titled actresses (notoriously exclusive) were among the throng.
When Mr Tobias Mander first burst upon the world, the world saw him as a man who might have been a prosperous stockbroker, a genial bookmaker, or a retired Smithfield merchant. He was of medium height, with a very fresh colour, and roving blue eyes; inclined to stoutness, always dressed in trousers with a very black stripe, a morning-coat and vest, with a white slip, and a monocle that never by any chance went into his eye.
The connoisseurs among the men called him a ‘cheery bounder’, but the women’s votes were mixed. Some thought him charming, if vulgar; and others vulgar if charming; while a few, who had encountered his roving blue eyes with a twinkle in them, declared themselves fascinated.
There was one detail in which he differed from most men of his kind, and that was in the fact that he lived on the premises. To call the very luxurious flat on the top floor ‘premises’ is modestly to understate facts. But undoubtedly Mr Mander had taken up his residence within the walls of the store.
One of the stunts with which he had taken London, some months after the store opened, was a new gyroplane. No one knew the inventor’s name, but there was trouble one day when it sailed over London, and landed with the greatest precision on top of the flat roof that covered the store. ‘The Mander Hopper’ it was called, yet that particular hop was frowned on by the authorities, who were not convinced that any aeroplane was quite safe among the roofs of a city. But the necessary prosecution provided further réclame for Mander and his store, and, later, those were not lacking who said they had heard aero-engines at night, and professed to believe that the great man sometimes landed after dark on his own roof.
There was no reason, beyond out-of-date regulations, why he should not have done so, for the ‘Mander Hopper’ proved to be the gyroplane for which the world had been looking, and the department which stocked and sold the ‘Plane you fold up in a room; and land in a tennis-court’ was one of the most paying in the whole Store. The ‘Hopper’ was, as one ancient pilot said, ‘The plane that put the F in safety.’
The windows of the store were enormous, and each window was changed weekly. There you did not see wax figures disposed in solitary state, but naturally disposed in a room, with an appropriate stage-setting, so to speak. And the contents of each window were announced in the Sunday papers, so that an avid public would know where to look for a novelty when the blinds were drawn up on Monday morning.
The store did not believe in a constant, all-night electric-lit display. Mr Mander, with the turn for quaint originality which had helped him so much in booming his business, explained to a reporter (and he, in turn, to a delighted world) the reason for this.
‘It’s my house, you see,’ he told the man. ‘I make it a rule to put business out of my head when business is over. At night, and during the weekends, the Store is my Store only in name, and you do not pull up the blinds, and keep the light on, in private houses during the night.’
During the first week in November, the Sunday papers had spoken of the season of fancy-dress, and the writers had artfully proceeded from the general to the particular, and mentioned that the principal window in the chief bay of Mander’s Store would ‘feature’ the next day a marvellous selection of fancy dresses, carried out by British workers, in British materials, by British designers.
There are always in London, at any hour of the day or night, sufficient people with no visible occupation, and an intense curiosity about anything novel, to form a crowd on the pavement. At five minutes to nine, there was a line of spectators three deep before Mander’s Stores, which was continuously being added to by fresh arrivals. Many of them, it is true, were not of the class likely to wear fancy-dress, but all kept intent eyes fastened on the immense blinds that cloaked the splendours within from view.
At nine precisely, a man inside set in motion the mechanism which raised the blinds, and there was the instant ‘Oo-er!’ of vulgar appreciation, mingled with the more polite enthusiasm of the cultivated.
The floor-space inside the window was dressed as a ball-room, even to a waxen band that sat in a recess at the back. The moment portrayed was a pause between dances, and at least forty couples in the most novel costumes stood about the floor, or leaned against the walls in dégagé attitudes that were almost lifelike.
But there was an exception to the rule, and, while most of the crowd outside were in ecstasies over the originality displayed, it was left to a commoner, a little bricklayer with ginger hair, on the outskirts, to discover it.
‘Lumme!’ he said contemptuously. ‘Mebbe it’s a novelty for the likes of ’im to work, but t’ain’t what I would call novel!’
‘It’s supposed to be a motor-mechanic,’ said someone next to him.
‘Wat if it is?’ he demanded firmly. ‘Moty mechanics isn’t novel!’
The figure in blue overalls to which he referred at once drew every eye. It was not elegant or elegantly disposed, as were the others in that window. And there was something else about it that provoked a sudden shriek, and a flop, from someone in the crowd.
Most of the spectators now concentrated on giving the fainting one as little air as possible. The few who remained at the window gasped and stared, or shivered. For there is a difference between even the best wax model and the appearance of a dead man beside it.
While they shuddered and debated, the bricklayer darted across the road to a policeman and spoke to him energetically. Then, with the policeman at his heels, he hurried in through the principal door of the great stores. Someone in the meantime had removed the public nuisance, who had fainted, and the rest of the crowd surged back to see the horror.
By the time a few more people had fainted and been duly removed, those next the window saw a door panel open at the back, and the blue-coated policeman pass through it. He was followed into the ‘ballroom’ by an alarmed shopwalker, and, when they had passed through, the supererogatory figure of the bricklayer was framed in the doorway.
There was a hush outside as the constable advanced to the figure in blue overalls, reached out a long arm, and gripped its shoulder. There was a scream as the figure overbalanced and fell down, while the mask came off, and where it had been there was disclosed a face that was quite white, but had no other visible relation to wax, and bore a striking likeness to that of Mr Tobias Mander.
Then the shopwalker turned and bellowed something, and, like the safety curtain at a fire in a theatre, the blinds came down with a rush, and blotted out every trace of the tragedy from the public view.
The constable was one of those very superior policemen who have joined up since the war. He recognised Mr Mander, and he recognised the nature of the wound which had put an end to that consummate commercial impresario. He unbuttoned part of the blue overalls.
‘Gunshot wound,’ he said slowly. ‘Let’s have some more of those electrics on, and get to the telephone, and ring up our people quick as you can—Mr Mander, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ said the horror stricken shopwalker, who looked as if he were going to be sick. ‘It’s murder, that’s what it is!’
‘Maybe,’ said the constable. ‘Now get your manager, and send for our people. They’ll bring a surgeon with them.’
The shopwalker rushed for the door at the back, ejected the bricklayer from it, and closed the panel behind him. The constable, left alone in that scene of empty