Feathers for the Toff
Copyright & Information
Feathers for the Toff
First published in 1945
© John Creasey Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1945-2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of John Creasey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2014 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
EAN ISBN Edition
0755135628 9780755135622 Print
0755138953 9780755138951 Kindle
0755137299 9780755137299 Epub
0755154908 9780755154906 Epdf
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
www.houseofstratus.com
About the Author
John Creasey – Master Storyteller - was born in Surrey, England in 1908 into a poor family in which there were nine children, John Creasey grew up to be a true master story teller and international sensation. His more than 600 crime, mystery and thriller titles have now sold 80 million copies in 25 languages. These include many popular series such as Gideon of Scotland Yard, The Toff, Dr Palfrey and The Baron.
Creasey wrote under many pseudonyms, explaining that booksellers had complained he totally dominated the ‘C’ section in stores. They included:
Gordon Ashe, M E Cooke, Norman Deane, Robert Caine Frazer, Patrick Gill, Michael Halliday, Charles Hogarth, Brian Hope, Colin Hughes, Kyle Hunt, Abel Mann, Peter Manton, J J Marric, Richard Martin, Rodney Mattheson, Anthony Morton and Jeremy York.
Never one to sit still, Creasey had a strong social conscience, and stood for Parliament several times, along with founding the One Party Alliance which promoted the idea of government by a coalition of the best minds from across the political spectrum.
He also founded the British Crime Writers’ Association, which to this day celebrates outstanding crime writing. The Mystery Writers of America bestowed upon him the Edgar Award for best novel and then in 1969 the ultimate Grand Master Award. John Creasey’s stories are as compelling today as ever.
Chapter One
The Red-Haired Lady
“The truth is,” began Sheila O’Rourke, then paused, drawing in her breath as if she were too angry to go on. “The truth is,” she said again, raising a clenched fist and glaring at Richard Rollison with her green eyes afire and her red, unruly hair aquiver as if stirred by a frolicsome wind, but actually because she was trembling, “the truth is—”
“Could there be some doubt about the truth?” asked Rollison, mildly.
“That I dislike you intensely! I hate you! I abhor you! I—” She paused for breath.
“Detest me?” inquired Rollison.
“All you can do is to stand there and make fun of me,” she stormed. “I hate the sight of your silly face, I think you’re abominable, you pretend to be a friend but you do everything you can to make the situation worse, you won’t even listen to me, you don’t believe in Danny, judging from the way you act you think he’s done this beastly thing, and—and—”
When she broke off again tears were glistening on her long, curled lashes, and her lips were quivering. Absently, Rollison wished that it were possible for an artist with a spark of genius to paint her as she was now, with her hair gleaming beneath the soft electric light of his flat, her cheeks flushed and her teeth glistening against lips which looked as if she had daubed lipstick on without glancing into a mirror. The collar of her waist-length coat of black velvet was rucked up, and the three top buttons of her green silk blouse were undone, of which fact she was blissfully unaware. Her figure was worthy of Botticelli and her face of Gainsborough, and the wild Irish which she had inherited from her father had won a tempestuous battle with her English mother’s placid restraint and the veneer of school and college.
Rollison wore a silk dressing-gown exquisitely decorated with lilies of the valley, his feet were thrust into leather slippers of a pale pink hue, and his dark hair was ruffled at the back, although to Sheila it presented an immaculate appearance.
“All you do is sleep!” cried Sheila, returning to the attack. “Whenever I come, you’re either just going to bed or just getting up or—”
“A lot of people are in bed by half-past one in the morning,” said Rollison, “and as you’re such a stickler for the truth tonight, I told you a white lie when I said that I was about to turn in—I’d been asleep for an hour.”
“You’re impossible! Look at you! Look!” She pointed to his left breast. “Flowers! Look!” Her accusing finger moved downwards. “Pink slippers! I thought you were a man, not a twentieth century Beau Brummel!”
“Brummel is a very much misunderstood figure of history,” said Rollison judicially. “I always thought he deserved a better fate than to die in a French garret. He—”
“I don’t want to talk about Beau Brummel!”
“I’m sorry,” murmured Rollison, “I thought you did.”
“Are you going to do anything?”
“If I thought a visit to the police would do the slightest good tonight I would go, but—”
“Then if you won’t go, I will!” cried Sheila.
She turned on her heel and stepped swiftly to the door, pulled it open and stormed across the tiny hall of the flat in Gresham Terrace, where a soft light glowed. Rollison went after her, seizing her arm before she opened the front door.
“Let me go!”
“I—”
“Just because you’re too tired to exert yourself to save him, that’s no reason why I should stand by and do nothing! Let me go!” Her voice rose.
“Hush!” exhorted Rollison, “you’ll make the people next door think that I’m a roué who—”
“I expect they’d have good reason!” cried Sheila. “You’re not the man I thought you were. Let me go!”
“If you’re determined to go to Scotland Yard, I won’t stop you,” said Rollison, “but before you go you must get rid of the smut on your nose.”
“Damn the smut!”
“I speak figuratively,” said Rollison. “Look.”
On the wall above a small radiator was a mirror, and he led her to it, protesting. She took one look, flushed a deeper red, and turned her back on him. A moment later she strode to the door, tightlipped, but relaxed enough to fling at him: “You’re insufferable!” before she marched across the landing and down the stairs.
By Rollison’s side there appeared a man with a solemn face who was clad in black; it was Jolly, his manservant.
“Do you require me to follow Miss O’Rourke, sir?”
“Hallo,” said Rollison, as if surprised. “Are you up?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You excel yourself. Yes, go after her, Jolly, and make sure that she doesn’t lean too far over the embankment when the Yard has sent her away.”
“I don’t think the young person is likely to do that, sir,” said Jolly, and he slipped unobtrusively out of the flat, going down the stairs without making a sound.
“But you never can tell,” murmured Rollison.
Danny Bond was a man of whom Rollison had not heard until a few days before, when a report in an evening paper said that he was being questioned by the police about the Chelsea robbery. The ‘Chelsea robbery’ had aroused much public indignation and much heart-searching and frantic endeavour at Scotland Yard, where panic was a rare thing. An old lady named Fotheringay had been violently attacked in her home, robbed of several hundred pounds and some oddments of jewellery, and left for dead. She was not dead, but she had not yet regained consciousness.
Danny Bond rented two rooms in the old lady’s house.
He had been missing since the night of the attack, which was a week old on the occasion of Sheila’s tempestuous visit, and found in a Hampshire town under an assumed name. Rollison had taken it for granted that the police had once again found their man, and been astonished when Sheila had stormed into his flat on the previous day and implored him to help her Danny. Sheila was a friend of a friend, and, it appeared, she had an exaggerated notion of his influence with Scotland Yard. In vain Rollison had assured her that although he was persona grata at police headquarters, Danny would not be released at his peremptory demand.
He had been to the Yard and seen the Inspector who had charge of the case. Bond had been in possession of twenty-one pounds which had certainly been taken from the victim, had refused to give any explanation of his flight from London, but had declared that he had left London some hours before the robbery. There was no supporting evidence and he had not arrived in Winchester, the Hampshire town, until the following afternoon. The accused, said the police, was in an agitated frame of mind, sometimes truculent, sometimes sullen, and sometimes appealing.
There was little the police could say in his favour. He was a spendthrift young man who had run through a small inheritance, had no inclination to work, and was accused by some people of malingering. He was good-looking, his friends and acquaintances admitted that he was popular, likeable, with a ready wit and a quick tongue. Except for his good-looks, however, none of his qualities was in evidence after his arrest.
Rollison had traded on his acquaintance with the police to ask to see him, but at the interview Bond had been in a truculent mood and done nothing to endear himself. In short, he had told Rollison to mind his own business, and when Rollison had spoken of Sheila, had gone pale and said fiercely: “Don’t bring her into this! Do you understand me?”
Because of Sheila’s importunities, Rollison had gone to some trouble to find a weakness in the police evidence; the only chink he could find was in the fact that Danny Bond had not been seen in Chelsea on the night of the attack – but nor had he been seen anywhere else. He persisted in his refusal to say where he had been; the police took that as an indication of his guilt, and Rollison did not blame them.
Bond was the kind of young man who patronised night-clubs, especially those where a little flutter was encouraged, and Sheila had urged Rollison to seek out witnesses from the clubs, for she was quick to see that the only way to save her Danny was by proving that he had been somewhere other than Chelsea at the time of the robbery. That had been at half-past eleven, a time when Danny was likely to be disporting himself, at the Dernier Cri, the Black Dart, or the Kim-Kam, or else at similar clubs. Sheila had shown sound common-sense.
Rollison had not only agreed to try, but had persuaded friends to make inquiries; but Sheila herself had made the first ‘discovery’, if discovery it was. At the Kim-Kam, one of the more respectable clubs, she had met a man who thought he had seen Danny at one club or other during the early part of the night in question; ‘early’ in this instance meaning between eleven and one o’clock. Unfortunately the informant could not remember which club, could not be sure that he had seen Danny at all, and was barely sober; all these things Sheila had admitted after she had thundered on the front door and rushed past Rollison, who had woken up at the first knock. She had demanded an immediate visit to Scotland Yard, with instructions for the police to seek out her witness and to make him sober-up and give the precious testimony.
Rollison had advised waiting until morning, when the witness would be sober and Scotland Yard more inclined to take the trouble; that advice had led to the storm which had blown up with gale force and carried Sheila out of the flat and Jolly in her wake.
“I wonder whether I ought to try to find the chap?” mused Rollison, now wide-awake and lighting a cigarette. “I suppose he’s worth finding. The truth is—” he smiled, a little ruefully—“the truth is that I haven’t much time for Danny Bond and I’m inclined to think that the Yard have the right man. However, that’s passing judgment, and it won’t do.” He looked wistfully at his bed, and began to dress.
The Kim-Kam was a small club, patronised chiefly by officers of a remarkable variety of nations, a gay and merry place without much vice, as far as Rollison could find out, except that it pandered to a desire for gambling on the part of youthful officers; the police would probably raid it within a week unless its gaming rooms were closed or its patrons persuaded to stop boasting about their winnings or their losses.
When Rollison entered, at half-past two, ducking to get through the doorway leading from the narrow passage to the main room, it looked as if the peak of the night’s entertainment had passed. Revellers in uniform or evening-dress were sitting listlessly about a large, low-ceilinged room, and the band, consisting mostly of middle-aged or elderly men, looked exhausted. Only two couples were dancing, and both without enthusiasm.
Henderson, the manager, who called himself the host, was a portly, middle-aged man with a beaming smile belied by his weary eyes. He admitted freely that he made a fortune out of the follies of youth but claimed that he did not take undue advantage of those follies; up to a point, that was true. The prices at the Kim-Kam were lower than those prevailing at similar clubs, and except for a stiff entrance fee to the gaming rooms, he made no profit out of poker, chemin-de-fer and any other games of chance which it pleased his patrons to choose. He provided only the accommodation and the means. In fact Henderson, in his way, was a benevolent host, superior to most of the kind. He had been a figure in London’s lesser night-life for as long as Rollison could remember, and his habitual smile widened when Rollison entered.
“This is an unexpected pleasure, Mr. Rollison.”
“Nice of you,” murmured Rollison.
“But you are a little late for the excitement!”
“I ought to be in bed,” said Rollison. “I’m looking for a patron of yours.” He gave the impression that it was not a pleasant mission.
“I see,” said Henderson, sympathetically. “You are the most benevolent of kind uncles.”
“What!” gasped Rollison.
“I do not mean it literally,” said Henderson, stifling a yawn, “but your thoughtfulness for young friends who spend more than they can afford, and for others who drink more than they can carry, and—”
“Don’t go on,” pleaded Rollison. “Have I sunk to being regarded as Uncle Richard and his wilful wards?” He took out his cigarette case, looking sad.
Henderson struck a match. “Who is it you want, Mr. Rollison?”
“A man named Whittering.”
“Whittering?” echoed Henderson, half-closing his eyes. “Whittering, I—Whittering!”
“We’re both very tired,” said Rollison, but Henderson’s eyes looked less weary and his smile had quite gone.
“Samuel Whittering?” he asked.
“So I am told.”
“Is he here?”
“He left half an hour ago. That is to say, I had him ejected.”
“Drunk?”
“And abusive.” Henderson put his hand on Rollison’s arm and led him towards a corner, where there was less chance of being overheard. The band continued its interminable tango and the patrons continued their weary shuffling. The room was hot and the air thick with a blue haze of tobacco smoke. “If you’re looking for Sam Whittering,” Henderson went on, “it means that you’re on serious business.”
“Why?” asked Rollison.
“Whittering mixes with an unpleasant crowd,” said Henderson, and went on quietly: “Do you know Miss Sheila O’Rourke?”
Rollison smiled. “So you’re in a sleuthing mood.”
“You mean you are,” said Henderson. “Have you come about her fiancé?” When Rollison nodded, the night-club manager went on: “That boy has gone to pieces in the past six months, and I haven’t liked to watch it. He is in serious trouble now, isn’t he?”
“Very serious.”
“I know one thing,” said Henderson, “if he did attack the old woman, he was drunk. I know that he’s heavily in debt, in fact he owes me fifty pounds, but I haven’t pressed him for repayment, although I have made him pay for everything he’s had here lately. Miss O’Rourke was talking to Whittering about him earlier in the evening and went out in a hurry. Of course I put two and two together.”
“You’re quite a mathematician! What kind of crowd does Whittering mix with?”
Henderson shrugged. “You ought to know, Mr. Rollison.”
“Pretend that I’m as innocent as a new-born babe,” said Rollison.
Whittering, it appeared, was one of a small clique of men and women who specialised in forcing acquaintance with foreigners on leave in London, and fleecing them mercilessly. In the last few days he had been on bad terms with the clique, and only that night had quarrelled with one of them, who had left him in anger. Thereafter Whittering had drunk steadily until he was hardly able to stand. It was a sordid story but not a new one, and only one point aroused Rollison’s interest.