“Good God,” I said, “and she was red-haired, I suppose?”
“Imagination,” he whispered at me. “Use it. Think. He married the girl in 1912, but this year he began to see the mother as she used to be!
“He’s been traveling round the coast for years, buying old gold. Everybody knows him and nobody notices him. Millions of women recognize him when he taps at their doors and very often they sell him little things. But he was ill last winter, had pleurisy, had to go into a hospital. Since he’s been out he’s been different. The past has come back to him. He’s been remembering the tragedy of his life.” He wiped his mouth and started again.
“In May he saw her. At first she looked like a woman he knew called Wild, but as they were talking her face changed and he recognized her. He knew just what to do. He told her he’d had a bargain he didn’t feel like passing on to his firm. Said he’d got a ring cheap, and if she’d meet him he’d show it to her and maybe sell it to her for the same money he paid for it.”
“And when he got her alone he killed her?” I whispered.
“Yes.” Chippy’s voice held an echoed satisfaction. “Paid her out at last. He went off happy as an old king and felt freed and contented and satisfied until June, when he went to Turnhill Bay and knocked all unsuspecting at a door in a back street and — saw her again.”
It was at this precise moment that the smiling drunk on the bench opened his eyes and sat straight up abruptly, as drunks do, and then with a spurt set out at a shambling trot for the door. He hit the opening with a couple of inches to spare and was sucked up by the night. I yelled at Chippy and started after him, pausing on the threshold to glance back. Chippy leaned there against the bar, looking at me with fishlike unintelligence.
I looked over my shoulder and saw Chief Inspector Tizer and the local Super, together with a couple of satellites, slip quietly across the road and come into the bar.
Then Chippy stood at the bar with Tizer on one side of him and the local man on the other. The five blown-up prints were spread out on the wood and everyone was so engrossed in them that I came back.
They were five three-quarter length portraits of the same man. Each one had been taken out of doors in a gaping crowd, and on each print a mid-section was heavily circled with process-white. In every case, within the circle was a watch-chain hung with darts medals and other small decorations, which might easily have been overlooked had not attention thus been called to them. In the first portrait the watch-chain carried two medals and a cheap silver earring In the second, a gold clasp from a chain-bracelet had been added. In the third, a small locket. In the fourth, a silver button with a crest on it. And in the fifth there hung beside the rest an ugly little tassel from an old-fashioned brooch.
“You’re trying to tell me you only noticed this yesterday and you had the astounding luck to find the earlier photographs in your file?” Tizer said.
“I am lucky,” Chippy said, “and observant.” He glanced at the bartender. “Ready, George?”
“Yes, he’s still there, Mr. Wager.”
The police moved forward in a body. Chippy turned to me.
“Poor little blob,” he said. “He’s quite happy now, you see, till the next new moon.”
“When you will be otherwise engaged, I seem to remember,” I said.
He glanced at me with a sudden smile and adjusted his camera.
“That’s right,” he said. “There’s sympathy in this business, but no sentiment. Wait just a minute while I get the arrest.”