Bello:

hidden talent rediscovered!

Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

About Bello:

www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

About the author:

www.panmacmillan.com/author/royvickers

Contents

- Roy Vickers

- Dedication

- Introduction

- The Rubber Trumpet

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- Chapter Eight

- Chapter Nine

- The Lady who Laughed

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- The Man who Murdered in Public

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- Chapter Eight

- The Snob’s Murder

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- The Cowboy of Oxford Street

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- The Clue of the Red Carnations

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- The Yellow Jumper

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- The Case of the Social Climber

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- The Henpecked Murderer

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- Chapter Eight

- Chapter Nine

- Blind Man’s Bluff

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- Chapter Eight

Roy Vickers

THE DEPARTMENT OF DEAD ENDS

Roy Vickers

Roy Vickers was the author of over 60 crime novels and 80 short stories, many written under the pseudonyms Sefton Kyle and David Durham. He was born in 1889 and educated at Charterhouse School, Brasenose College, Oxford, and enrolled as a student of the Middle Temple. He left the University before graduating in order to join the staff of a popular weekly. After two years of journalistic choring, which included a period of crime reporting, he became editor of the Novel Magazine, but eventually resigned this post so that he could develop his ideas as a freelance. His experience in the criminal courts gave him a view of the anatomy of crime which was the mainspring of his novels and short stories. Not primarily interested in the professional crook, he wrote of the normal citizen taken unawares by the latent forces of his own temperament. His attitude to the criminal is sympathetic but unsentimental.

Vickers is best known for his ‘Department of Dead Ends’ stories which were originally published in Pearson’s Magazine from 1934. Partial collections were made in 1947, 1949, and 1978, earning him a reputation in both the UK and the US as an accomplished writer of ‘inverted mysteries’. He also edited several anthologies for the Crime Writers’ Association.

Dedication

TO D.L.C.

An artist in living, whose mental and emotional courage have brought him wide knowledge and sympathetic understanding of others, including those tragic persons who drive themselves to murder.

Introduction

One of the most important books of detective short stories ever written is The Singing Bone (1912) in which the author, R. Austin Freeman, invented what is now called the ‘inverted’ detective story. Dr Freeman, a man of true scientific curiosity, posed to himself the interesting question: Would it be possible to write a detective story in which, from the outset, the reader was taken entirely into the author’s confidence, was made an actual witness of the crime and furnished with every fact that could possibly be used in its detection? In other words, reverse the usual procedure: let the reader know everything, the detective nothing. Would the reader, in possession of all the facts, be able to foresee how the detective would solve the mystery? Or would the reader be so occupied with the crime and its concomitant drama that he would overlook the evidence and still be dependent on the detective to find how the case could be cracked?

The Freeman ‘inverted’ detective stories were a monumental contribution to the development of the genre, and from them have stemmed some of the modern masterpieces of crime writing – especially those purely psychological studies in which the reader follows step by step the terrifying events leading up to the tragedy.

In the field of the contemporary detective short story the most brilliant manipulator of the ‘inverted’ method is, in my opinion, Roy Vickers. In the purest tradition of the difficult form originated by Dr Freeman, Vickers relates the full case history of his unusual murders – or as Dr Freeman explained his own innovation: Isn’t the first part of each Department of Dead Ends story ‘a minute and detailed description of the crime, setting forth the antecedents, motives and all attendant circumstances’? Doesn’t the reader of a Vickers D.D.E. story ‘see the crime committed, know all about the criminal’? Isn’t the one small item of evidence (a child’s toy, a bracelet, a faded flower) by which the Department of Dead Ends ultimately solves the case always clearly exposed, for the reader to lay hold of and pursue to its inevitable catalytic meaning?

True, the Department of Dead Ends tales are not as deductively conceived as Dr Freeman’s ‘inverted’ stories: the nature of the evidence is not as scientific or irrefutable. But compared with Dr Freeman’s earlier classics, they are even more gripping in their psychological interest and they generate a suspense that Dr Freeman never achieved.

The first Department of Dead Ends story was ‘The Rubber Trumpet’. The moment I finished that tale of the Merry Widower I realized that I had just completed a rare experience – I had read a contemporary classic in the field of the detective short story. A short time after its publication I received professional confirmation of my critical opinion. One day I travelled to Morningside Heights with Herbert Mayes, the remarkably perceptive editor of Good Housekeeping, to serve as one of his panel of ‘guest experts’ in the post-graduate course in journalism at Columbia University. Sitting next to me on the platform was Carl Van Doren, the famous author, critic, biographer, and Pulitzer Prize winner. Imagine my delight when Mr Van Doren complimented me on having published ‘The Rubber Trumpet’! He was so impressed by the story that he considered it one of the finest detective shorts he had ever read. The next day, Mr Mayes read the story and subsequently added his editorial accolade. Indeed, since ‘The Rubber Trumpet’ originally appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, I have heard nothing but extravagant praise for that first tale of the Department of Dead Ends. Such connoisseurs as Christopher Morley, Vincent Starrett, Anthony Boucher, Howard Haycroft, James Sandoe, Charles Honce, E. A. Osborne and other true aficionados, have written or spoken to me, unanimously selecting that great story for the Honour Roll Award.

Each of the stories in this volume unfolds the complete background – the situation, the characters, the motive, the modus operandi of the crime itself. Only one clue in each story, seemingly irrelevant and immaterial, keeps sticking in the craw of the Department of Dead Ends. And most of the time you will keep wondering how that apparently uninterested, apparently inefficient bureau of Scotland Yard, that slow, sluggish but elephant-memoried Department of Dead Ends will manage to see through the protective coloration surrounding a truly perfect crime. But it always does, and it is curious to note that its method is miraculously English: it muddles through.

Yet this, too, is protective coloration; for behind the muddling through and the deceptive lack of imagination in the Department of Dead Ends are a group of the world’s most patient, painstaking pursuers who never know when they are beaten, because they never dream of giving up. The English detective is like the English soldier, and both are like the English civilian: they possess bulldog tenacity and indomitable courage. How else explain why the residents of Dover never quitted their bomb-shattered homes, why the people of Britain still walk – and will always walk – the free streets of London.

These symbolically English qualities achieve an almost complete suspension of disbelief for the Department of Dead Ends stories: we forget that we are reading fiction. Enthralled by the richness and authenticity of photographic detail, we accept the D.D.E. tales as real life case histories. Whether they are or not, whether they are based on true crimes or cut out of the whole cloth of Roy Vickers’ imagination, they project a kind of realism unmatched in their field. The realism is neither drab nor prosaic: it is shot through with the credible fantasy which occurs repeatedly in real life – the peculiar touch of the unreal which somehow stamps all works of genuine imagination with the very trademark of reality.

If you have never read any of the Department of Dead Ends stories, I envy your first reading.

ELLERY QUEEN

The Rubber Trumpet

Chapter One

If you were to enquire at Scotland Yard for the Department of Dead Ends you might be told, in all sincerity, that there is no such thing, because it is not called by that name nowadays. All the same, if it has no longer a room to itself, you may rest assured that its spirit hovers over the index files of which we are all so justly proud.

The Department came into existence in the spacious days of King Edward VII and it took everything that the other departments rejected. For instance, it noted and filed all those clues that had the exasperating effect of proving a palpably guilty man innocent. Its shelves were crowded with exhibits that might have been in the Black Museum – but were not. Its photographs were a perpetual irritation to all rising young detectives, who felt that they ought to have found the means of putting them in the Rogues’ Gallery.

To the Department, too, were taken all those members of the public who insist on helping the police with obviously irrelevant information and preposterous theories. The one passport to the Department was a written statement by the senior officer in charge of the case that the information offered was absurd.

Judged by the standards of reason and common sense, its files were mines of misinformation. It proceeded largely by guess-work. On one occasion it hanged a murderer by accidentally punning on his name.

It was the function of the Department to connect persons and things that had no logical connexion. In short, it stood for the antithesis of scientific detection. It played always for a lucky fluke – to offset the lucky fluke by which the criminal so often eludes the police. Often it muddled one crime with another and arrived at the correct answer by wrong reasoning.

As in the case of George Muncey and the rubber trumpet.

And note, please, that the rubber trumpet had nothing logically to do with George Muncey, or the woman he murdered, or the circumstances in which he murdered her.

Chapter Two

Until the age of twenty-six George Muncey lived with his widowed mother in Chichester, the family income being derived from a chemist’s shop, efficiently controlled by Mrs Muncey with the aid of a manager and two assistants, of whom latterly George was one. Of his early youth we know only that he won a scholarship at a day-school, tenable for three years, which was cancelled at the end of a year, though not, apparently, for misconduct. He failed several times to obtain his pharmaceutical certificate, with the result that he was eventually put in charge of the fancy soaps, the hot-water bottles and the photographic accessories.

For this work he received two pounds per week. Every, Saturday he handed the whole of it to his mother, who returned him fifteen shillings for pocket money. She had no need of the balance and only took it in order to nourish his self-respect. He did not notice that she bought his clothes and met all his other expenses.

George had no friends and very little of what an ordinary young man would regard as pleasure. He spent nearly all his spare time with his mother, to whom he was devoted. She was an amiable but very domineering woman and she does not seem to have noticed that her son’s affection had in it a quality of childishness – that he liked her to form his opinions for him and curtail his liberties.

After his mother’s death he did not resume his duties at the shop. For some eight months he mooned about Chichester. Then, the business having been sold and probate granted, he found himself in possession of some eight hundred pounds, with another two thousand pounds due to him in three months. He did not, apparently, understand this part of the transaction – for he made no application for the two thousand, and as the solicitors could not find him until his name came into the papers, the two thousand remained intact for his defence.

That he was a normal but rather backward young man is proved by the fact that the walls of his bedroom were liberally decorated with photographs of the actresses of the moment and pictures of anonymous beauties cut from the more sporting weeklies. Somewhat naively he bestowed this picture gallery as a parting gift on the elderly cook.

He drew the whole of the eight hundred pounds in notes and gold, said good-bye to his home and went up to London. He stumbled on cheap and respectable lodgings in Pimlico. Then, in a gauche, small-town way, he set out to see life.

It was the year when The Merry Widow was setting all London a-whistling. Probably on some chance recommendation, he drifted to Daly’s Theatre, where he bought himself a seat in the dress-circle.

It was the beginning of the London season and we may assume that he would have felt extremely self-conscious sitting in the circle in his ready-made lounge suit, had there not happened to be a woman also in morning dress next to him.

The woman was a Miss Hilda Callermere. She was forty-three, and if she escaped positive ugliness she was certainly without any kind of physical attractiveness, though she was neat in her person and reasonably well-dressed, in an old-fashioned way.

Eventually to the Department of Dead Ends came the whole story of his strange courtship.

There is a curious quality in the manner in which these two slightly unusual human beings approached one another. They did not speak until after the show, when they were wedged together in the corridor. Their voices seem to come to us out of a fog of social shyness and vulgar gentility. And it was she who took the initiative.

‘If you’ll excuse me speaking to you without an introduction, we seem to be rather out of it, you and I, what with one thing and another.’

His reply strikes us now as somewhat unusual.

‘Yes, rather!’ he said. ‘Are you coming here again?’

‘Yes, rather! I sometimes come twice a week.’

During the next fortnight they both went three times to The Merry Widow, but on the first two of these occasions they missed each other. On the third occasion, which was a Saturday night, Miss Callermere invited George Muncey to walk with her on the following morning in Battersea Park.

Here shyness dropped from them. They slipped quite suddenly on to an easy footing of friendship. George Muncey accepted her invitation to lunch. She took him to a comfortably furnished eight-roomed house – her own – in which she lived with an aunt whom she supported. For, in addition to the house, Miss Callermere owned an income of six hundred pounds derived from gilt-edged investments.

But these considerations weighed hardly at all with George Muncey – for he had not yet spent fifty pounds of his eight hundred, and at this stage he had certainly no thought of marriage with Miss Callermere.

Chapter Three

Neither of them had any occupation, so they could meet whenever they chose. Miss Callermere undertook to show George London. Her father had been a cheery, beery jerry-builder with sporting interests and she had reacted from him into a parched severity of mind. She marched George round the Tower of London, the British Museum and the like, reading aloud extracts from a guide-book. They went neither to the theatres nor to the music-halls, for Miss Callermere thought these frivolous and empty-headed – with the exception of The Merry Widow, which she believed to be opera, and therefore cultural. And the extraordinary thing was that George Muncey liked it all.

There can be no doubt that this smug little spinster, some sixteen years older than himself, touched a chord of sympathy in his nature. But she was wholly unable to cater for that part of him that had plastered photographs of public beauties on the walls of his bedroom.

She never went to The Merry Widow again, but once or twice he would sneak off to Daly’s by himself. The Merry Widow, in fact, provided him with a dream-life. We may infer that in his imagination he identified himself with Mr Joseph Coyne, who nightly, in the character of Prince Dannilo, would disdain the beautiful Sonia only to have her rush the more surely to his arms in the finale. Rather a dangerous fantasy for a backward young man from the provinces who was beginning to lose his shyness!

There was, indeed, very little shyness about him when, one evening after seeing Miss Callermere home, he was startled by the sight of a young parlourmaid, who had been sent out to post a letter, some fifty yards from Miss Callermere’s house. If she bore little or no likeness to Miss Lily Elsie in the role of Sonia, she certainly looked quite lovely in her white cap and the streamers that were then worn. And she was smiling and friendly and natural.

She was, of course, Ethel Fairbrass. She lingered with George Muncey for over five minutes. And then comes another of those strange little dialogues.

‘Funny a girl like you being a slavey! When’s your evening off?’

‘Six o’clock to-morrow. But what’s it got to do with you?’

‘I’ll meet you at the corner of this road. Promise you I will.’

‘Takes two to make a promise. My name’s Ethel Fairbrass, if you want to know. What’s yours?’

‘Dannilo.’

‘Coo! Fancy calling you that! Dannilo What?’

George had not foreseen the necessity for inventing a surname and discovered that it is quite difficult. He couldn’t very well say ‘Smith’ or ‘Robinson’, so he said:

‘Prince.’

George, it will be observed, was not an imaginative man. When she met him the following night he could think of nowhere to take her but to The Merry Widow. He was even foolish enough to let her have a programme, but she did not read the names of the characters. When the curtain went up she was too entranced with Miss Lily Elsie, whom (like every pretty girl at the time) she thought she resembled, to take any notice of Mr Joseph Coyne and his character name. If she had tumbled to the witless transposition of the names she might have become suspicious of him. In which case George Muncey might have lived to a ripe old age.

But she didn’t.

Chapter Four

Altogether, Ethel Fairbrass provided an extremely satisfactory substitute for the dream-woman of George’s fantasy. Life was beginning to sweeten. In the daylight hours he would enjoy his friendship with Miss Callermere, the pleasure of which was in no way touched by his infatuation for the pretty parlour-maid.

In early September Ethel became entitled to her holiday. She spent the whole fortnight with George at Southend. And George wrote daily to Miss Callermere, telling her that he was filling the place of a chemist-friend of his mother’s, while the latter took his holiday. He actually contrived to have the letters addressed to the care of a local chemist. The letters were addressed ‘George Muncey’ while at the hotel the couple were registered as ‘Mr and Mrs D. Prince’.

Now the fictional Prince Dannilo was notoriously an open-handed and free-living fellow – and Dannilo Prince proceeded to follow in his footsteps. Ethel Fairbrass undoubtedly had the time of her life. They occupied a suite. (‘Coo! A bathroom all to our own two selves, and use it whenever we like!’)

He hired a car for her, with chauffeur – which cost ten pounds a day at that time. He gave her champagne whenever he could induce her to drink it and bought her some quite expensive presents.

It is a little surprising that at the end of a fortnight of this kind of thing she went back to her occupation. But she did. There was nothing of the mercenary about Ethel.

On his return to London, George was very glad to see Miss Callermere. They resumed their interminable walks and he went almost daily to her house for lunch or dinner. A valuable arrangement, this, for the little diversion at Southend had made a sizeable hole in his eight hundred pounds.

It was a bit of a nuisance to have to leave early in order to snatch a few minutes with Ethel. After Southend, the few snatched minutes had somehow lost their charm. There were, too, Ethel’s half-days and her Sundays, the latter involving him in a great many troublesome lies to Miss Callermere.

In the middle of October he started sneaking off to The Merry Widow again. Which was a bad sign. For it meant that he was turning back again from reality to his dream-life. The Reality, in the meantime, had lost her high spirits and was inclined to weep unreasonably and to nag more than a little.

At the beginning of November Ethel presented him with certain very valid arguments in favour of fixing the date of their wedding, a matter which had hitherto been kept vaguely in the background.

George was by now heartily sick of her and contemplated leaving her in the lurch. Strangely enough, it was her final threat to tell Miss Callermere that turned the scale and decided George to make the best of a bad job and marry her.

Chapter Five

As Dannilo Prince he married her one foggy morning at the registrar’s office in Henrietta Street. Mr and Mrs Fairbrass came up from Banbury for the wedding. They were not very nice about it, although from the social point of view the marriage might be regarded as a step-up for Ethel.

‘Where are you going for your honeymoon?’ asked Mrs Fairbrass. ‘That is – if you’re going to have a honeymoon.’

‘Southend,’ said the unimaginative George, and to Southend he took her for the second time. There was no need for a suite now, so they went to a small family-and-commercial hotel. Here George was unreasonably jealous of the commercial travellers, who were merely being polite to a rather forlorn bride. In wretched weather he insisted on taking her for walks, with the result that he himself caught a very bad cold. Eucalyptus and hot toddy became the dominant note in a town which was associated in the girl’s mind with champagne and bath salts. But they had to stick it for the full fortnight, because George had told Miss Callermere that he was again acting as substitute for the chemist-friend of his mother’s in Southend.

According to the files of the Department, they left Southend by the three-fifteen on the thirtieth of November. George had taken first-class returns. The three-fifteen was a popular non-stop, but on this occasion there were hardly a score of persons travelling to London. One of the first-class carriages was occupied by a man alone with a young baby wrapped in a red shawl. Ethel wanted to get into this compartment, perhaps having a sneaking hope that the man would require her assistance in dealing with the baby. But George did not intend to concern himself with babies one moment before he would be compelled to do so, and they went into another compartment.

Ethel, however, seems to have looked forward to her impending career with a certain pleasure. Before leaving Southend she had paid a visit to one of those shops that cater for summer visitors and miraculously remain open through the winter. She had a bulky parcel, which she opened in the rather pathetic belief that it would amuse George.

The parcel contained a large child’s bucket, a disproportionately small wooden spade, a sailing-boat to the scale of the spade, a length of Southend rock, and a rubber trumpet, of which the stem was wrapped with red and blue wool. It was a baby’s trumpet and of rubber so that it should not hurt the baby’s gums. In the mouthpiece, shielded by the rubber, was a little metal contraption that made the noise.

Ethel put the trumpet to her mouth and blew through the metal contraption.

Perhaps, in fancy, she heard her baby doing it. Perhaps, after a honeymoon of neglect and misery, she was making a desperate snatch at the spirit of gaiety, hoping he would attend to her and perhaps indulge in a little horseplay. But for the facts we have to depend on George’s version.

‘I said “Don’t make that noise, Ethel – I’m trying to read” or something like that. And she said “I feel like a bit of music to cheer me up” and she went on blowing the trumpet. So I caught hold of it and threw it out of the window. I didn’t hurt her and she didn’t seem to mind much. And we didn’t have another quarrel over it and I went on reading my paper until we got to London.’

At Fenchurch Street they claimed their luggage and left the station. Possibly Ethel abandoned the parcel containing the other toys, for they were never heard of again.

When the train was being cleaned, a dead baby was found under the seat of a first-class compartment, wrapped in a red shawl. It was subsequently ascertained that the baby had not been directly murdered but had died more or less naturally in convulsions.

But before this was known, Scotland Yard searched for the man who had been seen to enter the train with the baby, as if for a murderer. A platelayer found the rubber trumpet on the line and forwarded it. Detectives combed the shops of Southend and found that only one rubber trumpet had been sold – to a young woman whom the shopkeeper did not know. The trail ended here.

The rubber trumpet went to the Department of Dead Ends.

Chapter Six

Of the eight hundred pounds there was a little over a hundred and fifty left by the time they returned from the official honeymoon at Southend. He took her to furnished rooms in Ladbroke Grove and a few days later to a tenement in the same district, which he furnished at a cost of thirty pounds.

She seems to have asked him no awkward questions about money. Every morning after breakfast he would leave the tenement, presumably in order to go to work. Actually he would loaf about the West End until it was time to meet Miss Callermere. He liked especially going to the house in Battersea for lunch on Sundays. And here, of course, the previous process reversed itself and it was Ethel who had to be told the troublesome lies that were so difficult to invent.

‘You seem so different lately, George,’ said Miss Callermere one Sunday after lunch. ‘I believe you’re living with a ballet girl.’

George was not quite sure what a ballet girl was, but it sounded rather magnificently wicked. As he was anxious not to involve himself in further inventions, he said:

‘She’s not a ballet girl. She used to be a parlourmaid.’

‘I really only want to know one thing about her,’ said Miss Callermere. ‘And that is, whether you are fond of her.’

‘No, I’m not!’ said George with complete truthfulness.

‘It’s a pity to have that kind of thing in your life – you are dedicated to science. For your own sake, George, why not get rid of her?’

Why not? George wondered why he had not thought of it before. He had only to move, to stop calling himself by the ridiculous name of Dannilo Prince, and the thing was as good as done. He would go back at once and pack.

When he got back to the tenement, Ethel gave him an unexpectedly warm reception.

‘You told me you were going to the S.P.D. Sunday Brotherhood, you did! And you never went near them, because you met that there Miss Callermere in Battersea Park, because I followed you and saw you. And then you went back to her house, which is Number Fifteen, Laurel Road, which I didn’t know before. And what you can see in a dried-up old maid like that beats me. It’s time she knew that she’s rolling her silly sheep’s eyes at another woman’s husband. And I’m going to tell her before I’m a day older.’

She was whipping on hat and coat and George lurched forward to stop her. His foot caught on a gas-ring, useless now that he had installed a gas-range – a piece of lumber that Ethel ought to have removed weeks ago. But she used it as a stand for the iron.

George picked up the gas-ring. If she were to go to Miss Callermere and make a brawl, he himself would probably never be able to go there again. He pushed her quickly on to the bed, then swung the gas-ring – swung it several times.

He put all the towels, every soft absorbent thing he could find, under the bed. Then he washed himself, packed a suitcase and left the tenement.

He took the suitcase to his old lodgings, announced that he had come back there to live, and then presented himself at the house in Battersea in time for supper.

‘I’ve done what you told me,’ he said to Miss Callermere. ‘Paid her off. Shan’t hear from her any more.’

The Monday morning papers carried the news of the murder, for the police had been called on Sunday evening by the tenants of the flat below. The hunt was started for Dannilo Prince.

By Tuesday the dead girl’s parents had been interviewed and her life-story appeared on Wednesday morning.

‘My daughter was married to Prince at the Henrietta Street registrar’s office on November 16th, 1907. He took her straight away for a honeymoon at Southend, where they stayed a fortnight.’

There was a small crowd at the bottom of Laurel Road to gape at the house where she had so recently worked as a parlourmaid. Fifty yards from Number Fifteen! But if Miss Callermere noticed the crowd she is not recorded as having made any comment upon it to anyone.

In a few days, Scotland Yard knew that they would never find Dannilo Prince. In fact, it had all been as simple as George had anticipated. He had just moved – and that was the end of his unlucky marriage. The addition of the murder had not complicated things, because he had left no clue behind him.

Now, as there was nothing whatever to connect George Muncey with Dannilo Prince, George’s chances of arrest were limited to the chance of an accidental meeting between himself and someone who had known him as Prince. There was an hotel proprietor, a waiter and a chambermaid at Southend, and an estate agent at Ladbroke Grove. And, of course, Ethel’s father and mother. Of these persons only the estate agent lived in London.

A barrister, who was also a statistician, entertained himself by working out the averages. He came to the conclusion that George Muncey’s chance of being caught was equal to his chance of winning the first prize in the Calcutta Sweep twenty-three times in succession.

But the barrister did not calculate the chances of the illogical guesswork of the Department of Dead Ends hitting the bull’s-eye by mistake.

Chapter Seven

While the hue and cry for Dannilo Prince passed over his head, George Muncey dedicated himself to science with such energy that in a fortnight he had obtained a post with a chemist in Walham. Here he presided over a counter devoted to fancy soaps, hot-water bottles, photographic apparatus and the like – for which he received two pounds a week and a minute commission that added zest to his work.

At Easter he married Miss Callermere in church. That lady had mobilized all her late father’s associates and, to their inward amusement, arrayed herself in white satin and veil for the ceremony. As it would have been unreasonable to ask George’s employers for a holiday after so short a term of service, the newly married couple dispensed with a honeymoon. The aunt entered a home for indigent gentlewomen with an allowance of a hundred a year from her niece. George once again found himself in a spacious, well-run house.

During their brief married life, this oddly assorted couple seem to have been perfectly happy. The late Mr Callermere’s friends were allowed to slip back into oblivion, because they showed a tendency to giggle whenever George absent-mindedly addressed his wife as ‘Miss Callermere’.

His earnings of two pounds a week may have seemed insignificant beside his wife’s unearned income. But in fact it was the basis of their married happiness. Every Saturday he handed her the whole of his wages. She would retain twenty-five shillings, because they both considered it essential to his self-respect that he should pay the cost of his food. She handed him back fifteen shillings for pocket-money. She read the papers and formed his opinions for him. She seemed to allow him little of what most men would regard as pleasure, but George had no complaint on this score.

Spring passed into summer and nearly everybody had forgotten the murder of Ethel Prince in a tenement in Ladbroke Grove. It is probably true to say that, in any real sense of the word, George Muncey had forgotten it too. He had read very little and did not know that murderers were popularly supposed to be haunted by their crime and to start guiltily at every chance mention of it.

He received no reaction whatever when his employer said to him one morning:

‘There’s this job-line of rubber trumpets. I took half a gross. We’ll mark them at one-and-a-penny. Put one on your counter with the rubber teats and try them on women with babies.’

George took one of the rubber trumpets from the cardboard case containing the half gross. It had red and blue wool wound about the stem. He put it next the rubber teats and forgot about it.

Chapter Eight

Wilkins, the other assistant, held his pharmaceutical certificate, but he was not stand-offish on that account. One day, to beguile the boredom of the slack hour after lunch, he picked up the rubber trumpet and blew it.

Instantly George was sitting in the train with Ethel, telling her ‘not to make that noise’. When Wilkins put the trumpet down, George found himself noticing the trumpet and thought the red and blue wool very hideous. He picked it up – Ethel’s had felt just like that when he had thrown it out of the window.

Now it cannot for one moment be held that George felt anything in the nature of remorse. The truth was that the rubber trumpet, by reminding him so vividly of Ethel, had stirred up dormant forces in his nature. Ethel had been very comely and jolly and playful when one was in the mood for it – as one often was, in spite of everything.

The trumpet, in short, produced little more than a sense of bewilderment. Why could not things have gone on as they began? It was only as a wife that Ethel was utterly intolerable, because she had no sense of order and did not really look after a chap. Now that he was married to Miss Callermere, if only Ethel had been available on, say, Wednesday evenings and alternate Sundays, life would have been full at once of colour and comfort.… He tried to sell the trumpet to a lady with a little girl and a probable baby at home, but without success.

On the next day he went as far as admitting to himself that the trumpet had got on his nerves. Between a quarter to one and a quarter past, when Wilkins was out to lunch, he picked up the trumpet and blew it. And just before closing-time he blew it again, when Wilkins was there.

George was not subtle enough to humbug himself. The trumpet stirred longings that were better suppressed. So the next day he wrote out a bill for one-and-a-penny, put one-and-a-penny of his pocket money into the cash register and stuffed the trumpet into his coat pocket. Before supper that night he put it in the hot-water furnace.

‘There’s a terrible smell in the house. What did you put in the furnace, George?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Tell me the truth, dear.’

‘A rubber trumpet stuck on my counter. Fair got on my nerves, it did. I paid the one-and-a-penny and I burnt it.’

‘That was very silly, wasn’t it? It’ll make you short in your pocket money. And in the circumstances I don’t feel inclined to make it up for you.’

That would be all right, George assured her, and inwardly thought how lucky he was to have such a wife. She could keep a fellow steady and pull him up when he went one over the odds.

Three days later his employer looked through the stock.

‘I see that rubber trumpet has gone. Put up another. It may be a good line.’

And so the whole business began over again. George, it will be observed, for all his unimaginativeness, was a spiritually economical man. His happy contentment with his wife would, he knew, be jeopardized if he allowed himself to be reminded of that other disorderly, fascinating side of life that had been presided over by Ethel.

There were six dozen of the rubber trumpets, minus the one burnt at home, and his employer would expect one-and-a-penny for each of them. Thirteen shillings a dozen. But the dozens themselves were thirteen, which complicated the calculation, but in the end he got the sum right. He made sure of this by doing it backwards and ‘proving’ it. He still had twenty-three pounds left out of the eight hundred.

Mrs Muncey had a rather nice crocodile dressing-case which she had bought for herself and quite falsely described as ‘gift of the bridegroom to the bride’.

On the next day George borrowed the crocodile dressing-case on the plea that he wished to bring some goods from the shop home for Christmas. He brought it into the shop on the plea that it contained his dinner jacket and that he intended to change at the house of a friend without going home that night. As he was known to have married ‘an heiress’ neither Wilkins nor his employer was particularly surprised that he should possess a dinner jacket and a crocodile dressing-case in which to carry it about.

At a quarter to one, when he was again alone in the shop, he crammed half a gross (less one) of rubber trumpets into the crocodile dressing-case. When his employer came back from lunch he said:

‘I’ve got rid of all those rubber trumpets, Mr Arrowsmith. An old boy came in, said he was to do with an orphanage, and I talked him into buying the lot.’

Mr Arrowsmith was greatly astonished.

‘Bought the lot, did you say? Didn’t he ask for a discount?’

‘No, Mr Arrowsmith. I think he was a bit loopy myself.’

Mr Arrowsmith looked very hard at George and then at the cash register. Six thirteens, less one, at one-and-a-penny – four pounds, three and fivepence. It was certainly a very funny thing. But then, the freak customer appears from time to time and at the end of the day Mr Arrowsmith had got over his surprise.

Journeying from Walham to Battersea, one goes on the Underground to Victoria Station, and continues the journey on the main line: From the fact that George Muncey that evening took the crocodile case to Victoria Station, it has been argued that he intended to take the rubber trumpets home and perhaps bury them in the garden or deal with them in some other way. But this ignores the fact that he told his wife he intended to bring home some goods for Christmas.

The point is of minor importance, because the dressing-case never reached home with him that night. At the top of the steps leading from the Underground it was snatched from him.

George’s first sensation, on realizing that he had been robbed was one of relief. The rubber trumpets, he had already found, could not be burnt; they would certainly have been a very great nuisance to him. The case, he knew, cost fifteen guineas, and there was still enough left of the twenty-three pounds to buy a new one on the following day.

Chapter Nine

At closing-time the next day, while George and Wilkins were tidying up, Mr Arrowsmith was reading the evening paper.

‘Here, Muncey! Listen to this. “Jake Mendel, thirty-seven, of no fixed abode, was charged before Mr Ramsden this morning with the theft of a crocodile dressing-case from the precincts of Victoria Station. Mr Ramsden asked the police what was inside the bag. “A number of toy trumpets, your worship, made of rubber. There were seventy-seven of ’em all told.” Mr Ramsden: “Seventy-seven rubber trumpets! Well, now there really is no reason why the police should not have their own band.” (Laughter.)’ Mr Arrowsmith laughed too and then: ‘Muncey, that looks like your lunatic.’

‘Yes, Mr Arrowsmith,’ said George indifferently, then went contentedly home to receive his wife’s expostulations about a new crocodile dressing-case which had been delivered during the afternoon. It was not quite the same to look at, because the original one had been made to order. But it had been bought at the same shop and the manager had obliged George by charging the same price for it.

In the meantime, the police were relying on the newspaper paragraph to produce the owner of the crocodile case. When he failed to materialize on the following morning they looked at the name of the manufacturer and took the case round to him.

The manufacturer informed them that he had made that case the previous Spring to the order of a Miss Callermere – that the lady had since married and that, only the previous day, her husband, Mr Muncey, had ordered an exactly similar one but had accepted a substitute from stock.

‘Ring up George Muncey and ask him to come up and identify the case – and take away these india-rubber trumpets!’ ordered the Superintendent.

Mrs Muncey answered the telephone and from her they obtained George’s business address.

‘A chemist’s assistant!’ said the Superintendent. ‘Seems to me rather rum. Those trumpets may be his employer’s stock. And he may have been pinching ’em. Don’t ring him up – go down. And find out if the employer has anything to say about the stock. See him before you see Muncey.’

At Walham the Sergeant was taken into the dispensary where he promptly enquired whether Mr Arrowsmith had missed seventy-seven rubber trumpets from his stock.

‘I haven’t missed them – but I sold them the day before yesterday – seventy-seven, that’s right! Or rather, my assistant, George Muncey, did. Here, Muncey!’ And as George appeared: ‘You sold the rest of the stock of those rubber trumpets to a gentleman who said he was connected with an orphanage – the day before yesterday it was – didn’t you?’

‘Yes, Mr Arrowsmith,’ said George.

‘Bought the lot without asking for a discount,’ said Mr Arrowsmith proudly. ‘Four pounds, three shillings and fivepence. I could tell you of another case that happened years ago when a man came into this very shop and –’

The Sergeant felt his head whirling a little. The assistant had sold seventy-seven rubber trumpets to an eccentric gentleman. The goods had been duly paid for and taken away – and the goods were subsequently found in the assistant’s wife’s dressing-case.

‘Did you happen to have a crocodile dressing-case stolen from you at Victoria Station the day before yesterday,. Mr Muncey?’ asked the Sergeant.

George was in a quandary. If he admitted that the crocodile case was his – wife’s – he would admit to Mr Arrowsmith that he had been lying when he had said that he had cleverly sold the whole of the seventy-seven rubber trumpets without even having to give away a discount. So:

‘No,’ said George.

‘Ah, I thought not! There’s a mistake somewhere. I expect it’s that manufacturer put us wrong. Sorry to have troubled you, gentlemen! Good morning!’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Mr Arrowsmith. ‘You did have a crocodile dressing-case here that day, Muncey, with your evening clothes in it. And you do go home by Victoria. But what is that about the trumpets, Sergeant? They couldn’t have been in Mr Muncey’s case if he sold them over the counter.’

‘I don’t know what they’ve got hold of, Mr Arrowsmith, and that’s a fact,’ said George. ‘I think I’m wanted in the shop.’

George was troubled, so he got leave to go home early. He told his wife how he had lied to the police, and confessed to her about the trumpets. Soon she had made him tell her the real reason for his dislike of the trumpets. The result was that when the police brought her the original crocodile case she flatly denied that it was hers.

In law, there was no means by which the ownership of the case could be foisted upon the Munceys against their will. Pending the trial of Jake Mendel, the bag-snatcher, the crocodile case, with its seventy-seven rubber trumpets, was deposited with the Department of Dead Ends.

A few feet above it on a shelf stood the identical trumpet which George Muncey had thrown out of the window on the three-fifteen, non-stop Southend to Fenchurch Street, some seven months ago.

The Department took one of the trumpets from the bag and set it beside the trumpet on the shelf. There was no logical connexion between them whatever. The Department simply guessed that there might be a connexion.

They tried to connect Walham with Southend and drew blank. They traced the history of the seventy-seven Walham trumpets and found it simple enough until the moment when George Muncey put them in the crocodile case.

They went back to the Southend trumpet and read in their files that it had not been bought by the man with the baby but by a young woman.

Then they tried a cross-reference to young women and Southend. They found that dead end, the Ethel Fairbrass murder. They found: ‘My daughter was married to Prince at the Henrietta Street registrar’s office on November the sixteenth, 1907. He took her straight away for a honeymoon at Southend where they stayed a fortnight.’

Fourteen days from November the sixteenth meant November the thirtieth, the day the rubber trumpet was found on the line.

One rubber trumpet is dropped on railway line by (possibly) a young woman. The young woman is subsequently murdered (but not with a rubber trumpet). A young man behaves in an eccentric way with seventy-seven rubber trumpets more than six months later.

The connexion was wholly illogical. But the Department specialized in illogical connexions. It communicated its wild guess – in the form of a guarded Minute – to Detective-Inspector Rason.

Rason went down to Banbury and brought the old Fairbrass couple to Walham.

He gave them five shillings and sent them into Arrowsmith’s to buy a hot-water bottle.

The Lady who Laughed

Chapter One

To those under thirty, the name of Lucien Spengrave probably suggests nothing but one of those ‘famous crimes’ which are periodically retold. Actually, Spengrave himself was famous; his crime only so by virtue of the roundabout way in which it was uncovered by Scotland Yard.

You may have heard that he was a successful comedian. He was a unique comedian. He played only one role – that of a circus clown. But he had never played it in a circus. For the last ten years of his life he played it in his own West End theatre – in which the cheap seats were half and the expensive seats double the prevailing prices.

His jokes and stage business – as eminent historians of the theatre and the circus have pointed out – were literally hundreds of years old. For instance, that almost incredibly crude act in which the clown helps the Ringmaster’s attendants roll up a carpet, trips, and gets himself rolled up in the carpet. They say that, in a real circus, young children will still laugh at it. Spengrave played that act to the most sophisticated audiences in the world. From all classes he drew belly-laughs and tears from that same carpet that can be traced back to eleventh-century Bohemia.

The clue to the mystery – as opposed to evidence of the murder – lay in the personality of the man who could evolve such a technique. When June, Spengrave’s wife, disappeared so dramatically and was later found dead, the armchair detective might well have beaten the practical man by betting blindly on Spengrave’s genius in manipulating the deadly obvious.

She disappeared during a cocktail party on the lawn of their riverside house at Wheatbourne on the last Thursday of August, 1936. Spengrave never played during August, though he had to practise in his gymnasium five days a week, muscular control being as essential to him as to a pianist.

There were some twenty guests, all being June’s friends. She had complained that he was never ‘matey’ with her friends – he was, indeed, rather ponderous in private life and a poor mixer; so he said he would give the guests a light version of the lecture he periodically delivered to Universities – the lecture that had brought him three honorary degrees.

The guests felt themselves highly privileged. From the gymnasium, whose double doors gave on to the garden, six of the male guests brought the classic carpet; others, the tray with the goblet screwed down and the masks for the two-headed dog. There was brisk competition for the honour of being selected as stooges to roll the carpet for Spengrave’s demonstration.

‘The Clown is traditionally a sub-human, struggling to reach the level of humanity. The Clown never consciously plays the fool. He is desperately anxious to help the normal men roll the carpet in the normal way. Observe my shoulders as I approach the men at the carpet.’

Thus he dissected the carpet act. The two-headed dog act followed. The garden sloped down to the river in three little levelled lawns. June led her guests to the second lawn, clear of the carpet.

For some six minutes he traced the act from its origin at the court of King Henry VIII, then turned to the tray and goblet.

‘In this act we see anxiety expressed exclusively with the feet. I shall need more space for this. The upper lawn is wide enough, I think. Oh, the carpet is in the way!’

‘Shall we roll it up again and put it back in the gym, Mr Spengrave?’

The speaker was Fred Periss, a youngish, handsome man.

Spengrave turned and looked at him as if the offer were surprising. Then:

‘Yes, please,’ said Spengrave.

There was a scramble to deal with the carpet, in which some of the girls joined. It would be something to talk about afterwards – that they had once helped the great Spengrave with the very carpet that was used on the stage.

When they had all come back from the gymnasium, Spengrave resumed his lecture.

‘The Clown is proud because he has been entrusted with the dignified duty of carrying wine to the lady. To reduce this to its basic values, I shall want June to stooge for me, if she will.’ He called: ‘June, dear!’

To keep the great man waiting – even if it was his wife who was doing it – was an outrage.

‘June!’ they shouted. ‘June, where are you? June!’

The time when they were calling her was reconstructed and checked as being about six-fifty. At six-thirty she had been well in evidence, quietly magnificent in a dress of green creêpe, a trifle self-conscious over her duties as hostess.

Her disappearance spoilt the lecture. The party began to break up. The honoured stooges returned the tray and goblet, and the masks for the two-headed dog act, to the gymnasium. By seven-fifteen the last guest had gone.

At eight, Spengrave toyed with a lonely dinner. At eight-thirty he rang the Reading police. The Inspector came at once with a sergeant. The routine investigation revealed that there were no signs whatever of Mrs Spengrave having prepared for her departure. The possibility of her having thrown herself into the river, unobserved, was explored and dismissed.

An hour later, because Spengrave was so distinguished, the Chief Constable appeared in person.

‘There’s one question I must ask in your own interest,’ Mr Spengrave –’

‘Has my wife bolted with a lover?’ cut in Spengrave. ‘No. If there had been a lover in the offing – she would thoroughly have enjoyed telling me.’

The Chief was sufficiently convinced. His eye strayed to a large photograph of a woman with a strange, cold beauty.

‘Is that Mrs Spengrave?’ As her husband nodded: ‘I have never had the pleasure of meeting her. But I’ve seen her somewhere.’

‘Perhaps in one of the many pictures of her in the Academy years ago. She used to be an artist’s model. Also, she appeared in one of my acts for four years – before we were married.’

‘That’s where I saw her! In The Lady Who Wouldn’t Laugh.’

‘Correct! She ought to be easy to find.’

‘If nothing happens by midday to-morrow we’ll fix a broadcast appeal,’ said the Chief, and departed.

Close upon midnight on Friday the police rang. There had been an answer from Edinburgh, of a loss of memory case, which bore some slight resemblance to the description of Mrs Spengrave.

‘I’ll go by air taxi early to-morrow,’ said Spengrave. ‘I’m rehearsing my company all next week, and I don’t want to lose more time than I can help.’

Before leaving, after a very early breakfast, he told his house-keeper:

‘The men should be here this morning from the theatre to overhaul my things and take some of them back. If they aren’t here by eleven, phone the theatre and tell the manager I want to know why. When they come, make things easy for them, will you, and give them all they want.’

All that the men wanted was the loan of a vacuum cleaner.

When they unrolled the classic carpet, they found the dead body of June Spengrave.

Chapter Two

Lucien Spengrave had begun as an artist. At the Slade School, where he learnt his technique, he kept his individuality in check. When he began painting he attracted a great deal of attention but very few cheques.

As a person he enjoyed a kind of oblique popularity. ‘Funny thing, but I can’t help rather liking Spengrave.’ His life was blameless, yet men tended to apologize for liking him. There was the hint of a reason in the background, unexpressed because no one knew how to express it.

There was nothing odd about him physically except that, if you were to see him for the first time sitting down, you might think that he was a large, tall man, whereas he just escaped being short. That was because he had a large, long, lean face, suggesting a scholarly monk; the mouth was long and thin-lipped, but in the eyes – wide and unusually blue – the prevailing expression was that of gentleness.

When Kenfield became a Minister, he commissioned Spengrave to paint him, but refused to accept the portrait, on the ground that it was not like him. Carron James, whose plays were about to earn him a knighthood, gave Spengrave a hundred guineas for the portrait.

‘I’m buying it, Spengrave, because it’s an excellent bit o’ work. Also because I have always hated Kenfield. Gosh, he must have felt that portrait like a whip across the face! It enables me to see him as a poor, ineffectual devil like myself. And I don’t hate him any more. D’you see what I mean?’

‘No,’ said Spengrave. ‘But your cheque is a godsend.’

‘Is it! It oughtn’t to be, to a man of your talent.’ Carron James couldn’t help rather liking the fellow. ‘If you’re hard up, why not try a sideline in caricature? I’ll give you an introduction if you like.’

With a topical caricature of the Prime Minister under his arm, Spengrave kept an appointment with the editor of a leading Opposition paper. The editor looked at the caricature. He chuckled, but the chuckle died in his throat.

‘I like that! But I can’t publish it. If you care to sell it to me personally I’ll give you a tenner for it.’

‘You can have it for nothing,’ said Spengrave, ‘if you will tell me why you won’t publish it, though you obviously like it.’

‘Your picture is true. But it tells an unbearable truth. It’s – cruel! It even pulls me into a kind of nervous sympathy with him.’

‘Thank you,’ said Spengrave. ‘The drawing is yours. I’ll send you a receipt. Good-bye!’

‘Hi! I’m not going to charge you a tenner for saying that!’

‘I am content with our bargain if you are,’ returned Spengrave and left.

Spengrave walked back to his studio, wishing he could have accepted the tenner without wounding his self-respect. Things were getting very low. In three months he would be starting the round of the pawnshops. He looked at himself in one of the long mirrors.

‘You thought you were being topical and damned witty. And you were only being cruel and killing your market. Clown!’

He snatched brush and palette and began to paint a portrait of himself – became absorbed, barely conscious that the clown-theme was predominating until, four hours later, he had finished.

He stood back, looking at his self-portrait.

‘The best thing I’ve done!’ He giggled weakly and the tears ran down his cheeks. ‘But it tells an unbearable truth. It’s cruel!’

He began to pace the studio, uncertainly, like a drunkard.

‘Carron James said much the same thing. That means I must have a streak of cruelty in me without knowing it. But the others know it. However civil people are, they never accept me as one of themselves.

‘I want to be like other men. I want to eat and drink without thought and be clean and have proper clothes. I want a woman to love me terrifically and be glad to have children with me. I want to be like other men!’

Melancholia drove him to self-pity, but intelligence warned him that if he wanted something he must fight for it. He returned to the portrait.

‘If I turn the cruelty on to myself, the others will be – “pulled into a kind of nervous sympathy” with me. That’s what he said. And then I can make them laugh or cry.’

Thus he found the formula which carried him to stardom in three months and kept him there for the rest of his life.

Chapter Three

For five years he was the star turn in the music halls, touring all the capitals that could fill a large house at good prices. Always he played the circus clown in difficulties. He used the fact that a white-faced clown is not particularly funny to a modern audience – he exposed the clown’s unfunniness with a stark brutality that shocked his audience into sympathy with the clown – a twist in the story brought release and the belly-laugh. That put the audience in his pocket. He could play on all the basic emotions. The grey-white, idiot face of the clown could flash into a disconcerting sensitiveness that gave a new tang to poltroonery.

With the coming of the talkies and the decay of the music hall, he took a theatre for himself, filling out with straight musical and dramatic acts of a high class.

He met June in the course of a visit to one of his artist friends. She was tall and blonde with regular features and regular lines, handsome rather than beautiful. Her curves were artistically correct rather than voluptuous. His glance was wholly professional.

‘Let me know when you’ve finished with that girl,’ he said in an undertone.

‘I’ve finished now, if you’ve got work for her – I owe her for three sittings. June, come and meet Mr Spengrave.’

Like many an artist’s model, June was respectable to the point of prudery, educated in genteel snobbery but in hardly anything else. She was conscientious and unmercenary at this stage of her life, and would work loyally for anyone who would affect to treat her as a lady.

Her lucky physicality gave her the appearance of a solemn young queen disguised as a housemaid. Spengrave himself designed for her a dress, of red corduroy velvet, which emancipated the regal from the domestic.

On Spengrave’s stage she was required to behave exactly as she behaved in a studio – sit stock still, not utter a word and look handsomely expressionless – The Lady Who Wouldn’t Laugh.

On the first night, she virtually killed the act. For when the twist came in the story, bringing the release, June laughed too.

‘Don’t laugh, you dreadful little fool!’ he hissed with such venom that she had no difficulty in obeying. He more or less gagged his way out of the debacle, but the act was not a success that night.

Afterwards, she came tearfully to his dressing-room.

‘I’m very sorry indeed, Mr Spengrave. No wonder you were so angry! But it was suddenly all so funny!’

‘My fault for not rehearsing you enough! Be here to-morrow at ten, and we’ll go over it again.’

He was not quite sure of her after the morning rehearsal. He gave her lunch in his suite at the top of the theatre, and afterwards asked her if she felt confident.

‘I’m still worried about that bit where you fall in the carpet the second time – the funny time, Mr Spengrave!’

‘Hm! I know you’re trying hard. Perhaps too hard. Sit in that armchair and relax all you can. Now, don’t make any effort. Just let your will gently slide into your mind and tell it you mustn’t laugh. Repeat this after me … The carpet isn’t funny … The goblet and tray isn’t funny … Nothing that he does is funny … I will never laugh again.’

He left her, went to his bedroom to rest. A couple of hours later when he returned to the living-room she was still there.

‘Ooh! I must have had a nap!’ she exclaimed. She added: ‘It’s all right now, Mr Spengrave. I’ll never laugh again.’

Chapter Four

The Lady Who Wouldn’t Laugh became one of the most popular acts. It stayed in the bill for four years – and was only taken off when June contracted pneumonia. He could fairly easily have replaced her, but she had been loyal and efficient and regular, and he felt that as a decent employer he owed her some consideration.

As a decent employer, he went to see her at the nursing home when she was convalescent, bringing her the usual gift of grapes. In four years, with other members of the company, she had toured Europe and America with him; yet he had had hardly any personal conversation with her, knew nothing about her.

He exerted himself to draw her out, discovered that, when she forgot to be genteel, she was a simple, likeable person. He suspected that she had few friends and at his next visit asked her whether this were true.

‘Oh, I don’t know, Mr Spengrave! I get on well enough with most people, though I do keep myself to myself. Of course, there are always men of the wrong sort, but they don’t appeal to me. I’ll own up I’ve got the idea that ordinary people think me a bit queer. It makes you feel lonely, sometimes, if you know what I mean.’

Spengrave knew what she meant – knew it a hundred times better than she did. In those hours of self-revelation when he had painted his own portrait he had found a formula for commercial success; but he had found nothing else.

At his next call at the nursing home he asked her to marry him.

‘Ooh! Mr Spengrave!’ She was staggered. ‘Well, of course, I will, if you’re sure you want to!’

After a while, she said:

‘It’ll take a bit of getting used to. You see, I’ve always thought of you as not being like other men.’

He caught his breath as if she had stabbed him.

‘Ever since you were so kind to me that first time when I let you down by laughing, I’ve put you in a class apart. I thought you superior to all the men and women I’ve ever met. And I still think it. So, nach’ rally, it makes me a bit shy of you.’

‘Oh, my darling!’ He kissed her with love and overwhelming gratitude. ‘And I am shy of you, June – because you think that of me. We’ll help each other.’

So they did, for three years – with very different effects on their very different natures. June, who had been a conscientious stooge, became a conscientious wife, striving solemnly to serve him and to please him. She discovered that he liked her to look always as nice as possible, so she studied dress. When he did not require her presence she regarded her time as her own, and developed along her own lines. In a sense, she loved him – did not suspect that, in no sense, was she in love with him.

In an undreamed affluence, dormant traits in her character became active. She began to preen herself as the wife of a wealthy celebrity cultivated by High-ups, who were seeking neither money nor publicity nor introductions. Such people were outside her orbit, but at the local river-sailing club and the tennis club she was somebody.

She gathered a large circle of friends. Although she patronized them a little, they liked her. That she never laughed at their quips they took as her reminder that she was the wife of the world’s greatest clown. One youngish man, Fred Periss, tall and dark, handsome as a stage Guardsman, was particularly attracted to her.

Spengrave for his part was aware of partial failure, for which he blamed himself with secret humiliation. In the essentials of their life together she obeyed him as punctiliously as she had formerly obeyed a call to rehearsal. But there was a barrier he had never passed. If she did not stand in awe of him, she certainly held him in a kind of respectfulness that numbed spontaneity. Like a damp cloud the conviction settled on him that he was not regarded by his wife as other men were regarded by their wives.

He had not the leisure to go visiting with her. His appearances at her parties were perfunctory. He was glad for her sake that she had made so many friends, though he found them noisy and dull-witted.

One afternoon in the first week in August, when he was dozing in the drawing-room, he was startled by an unfamiliar sound. He sat bolt upright, fully awake. The sound came again, from the garden.

It was the sound of June laughing.

In his spine was an eerie tingling as a thought formed itself against his will.

‘I’ve never heard her laugh – since that night she killed the act.’

He ran into the garden, could not see her. He turned the corner by the laurel bushes and saw her in the arms of Fred Periss. She was not struggling.

‘Fred!’ Oh, why did you have to do that!’ she cried in distress.

‘Why pretend? You didn’t hate it, darling, did you!’

‘That makes it all the worse. I shall have to tell Lucien now. It wasn’t worth troubling him before.’

Spengrave slipped back to his chair in the drawing-room and picked up a book. Within a few minutes she came. She had smoothed her hair and shaken out her frock, where Periss had rumpled it.

‘Lucien, Fred Periss kissed me just now. Not a party kiss – the real sort, I think it was. I expect it was partly my fault.’

‘We needn’t lose our heads. Better ask him in here.’

‘He’s gone. Are you angry with me?’

Spengrave was thinking. He himself could crush her up and kiss her. But he could not draw from her that lovely rippling laugh – full of fun and games. Other men, of course, could make their wives laugh like that.

‘I’m not angry with you, June. It isn’t the sort of thing one can be angry about. Are you in love with him?’

She meditated her answer, tried honestly to clear her thought and failed.

‘Ooh! I don’t understand love.’

She meant it, but it was obviously untrue. She would very soon discover that she did understand love. Perhaps, thought Spengrave, there was still time for him.

‘Then let’s forget it, dear.’

‘I’m so glad you aren’t angry, Lucien. And I think I can forget it all right. I’ll try hard to think of other things.’

‘Try thinking of me!’ he said, rising nimbly from his chair.

Again came the delicious rippling sound that was her rediscovered laughter. Vibrant with happiness he put his arms round her. ‘You laugh because at last you’re happy?’ he asked.

‘I laughed because you looked so funny, jumping out of that chair – like a jack-in-the-box.’

It spoilt the kiss, ruined his moment. He was not disconsolate. There were kisses to come – ‘the real sort’, if he could thrust himself into her imagination.

She said she would like to go on the river before dinner. He brought the punt alongside, called to her when he was ready, steadied the boat with one foot on the landing stage. He watched her approaching, watched her with reawakened desire – and again she laughed:

‘Standing like that with that funny look on your face, you reminded me of something,’ she explained. ‘Can’t think what it was!’

‘Somebody’s pet poodle begging for its dinner?’ he suggested.

‘No, it wasn’t that.’ She had taken his question seriously. ‘I wish I could remember.’

In himself was a deep inner disturbance which he shrank from defining. Presently she was babbling about giving a cocktail party.

‘When will it be, dear?’

‘On the last Thursday of the month. It would be so nice if you could spare an hour or so. They would appreciate it so!’

He would give her anything, do anything for her, if only she would regard him as other men were regarded by their wives. And perhaps she would.

‘Darling, I’ll be there the whole time and I’ll do everything I can to make your party a riproaring success.’ When she had finished exclaiming, he went on: ‘I always feel I’m a bit of a wet blanket at parties. I just haven’t got the trick of sitting around and swapping backchat about sport and that sort of thing. How would they like it if I were to give them the lecture I gave at Oxford last year? We could get the props out on the lawn.’

They would adore it, she assured him. She knew that, though much of it might be above their heads, they would be flattered by his condescension.

Over dinner she was companionable, more light-hearted, more spirited than he had ever known her to be. She was expanding, he thought, opening like a rose in the sunshine of their new understanding. He held fast to that conception throughout the evening.

That night she laughed – she said – at his dressing-gown. It was a black silk dressing-gown, by no means new, which she had often seen before. Uncertain of himself and her, he sat on the edge of her bed and talked of anything that came into his head – became aware that she was unconscious of any strain.

‘There’s plenty of time before the party, June. Would you like us to go away for a fortnight somewhere? We might pop over to Switzerland.’

‘Well, if it’s for me I’m in no hurry to go away.’ She added: ‘I love it here.’

‘So do I!’ He touched her hand, gripped it. ‘It’s our home, yours and mine. Not a bad old place, is it? And it would be just fine if we happened to have a family. Wouldn’t it, June?’

She did not answer. Her face was hard and drawn, and he feared lest she had read into his words a reproach that she had not yet borne a child.

‘June, darling!’ He bent over her, touched her hair with his lips. ‘I only meant –’

From the back of her nostrils came the absurd noise made by a schoolboy trying not to laugh in class.

As he sprang away, she burst into open laughter. He stood at a distance from the bed, staring down at her. When she looked up at him, the laughter started afresh. He waited, standing very still, until she stopped from exhaustion.

‘Perhaps you will tell me why you laugh at me, though I think I know.’

‘I couldn’t help it!’ she gasped. ‘You, perched on the side of the bed with that dressing-gown, saying – all that! – you were so funny!’ She spluttered with the aftermath of laughter.

He strode in silence to the door.

‘Oh, Lucien, it’s not fair to be offended and angry with me! You are funny – or you wouldn’t be you – especially when you’re saying something serious. You can’t expect me to behave as if you were like other men.’

‘Yes. I thought that was why,’ he said, and left her room.

Her reasoning was slovenly, for she had forgotten that she had not thought him funny in his personal life until to-day. The man who intended to be her lover had already awakened her to full womanhood – had enabled her to see that she was in very truth married to a clown.

He went downstairs to his study, which adjoined the gymnasium, poured himself a stiff brandy. Presently, rummaging in a cabinet, he took out the portrait of himself which he had painted long ago in his Bloomsbury studio.

‘The best thing I’ve done!’ The words echoed down the years. ‘And it tells an unbearable truth. It’s cruel!’

But its cruelty was not as unbearable as the cruelty of that laughter which was as a flaming sword holding him from his human heritage – a mirror into which he must gaze and see himself ‘not like other men’.

He turned again to the self-portrait, remembered his despair.

‘Last time, I cashed in on my own misery. Can I do it a second time? Work. Thank heavens she didn’t want to go for that holiday! I can work instead of thinking.’

With nervous eagerness he grabbed a pencil and a folder. He flopped into his arm-chair and began to work up some notes he had made for a new scene – a change-ring on the classic carpet act, employing a girl stooge.

He drove up to London next day, put in a couple of hours’ desk work at the theatre, which he was re-opening in the second week in September. There was a letter from the mother of June’s successor saying the girl had had measles, but expected to be well enough to rehearse in a fortnight.

A week later, June, passing by the open garden doors of the gymnasium, saw him leaning ill-temperedly against the wall.

‘Do you want anything, Lucien?’

‘Mabel is sick. I wanted to rehearse myself rather than her. Hangs me up.’

‘Well, what’s wrong with me?’ She came in from the garden. ‘What’s the job?’

‘Nothing you’d fancy, my dear. The girl gets rolled in the carpet instead of the clown.’

‘All right. Only, it’ll ruin this dress.’ She slipped it off.

‘The carpet will scratch your shoulders. Here!’ He helped her into a dressing-gown – it happened to be the black silk dressing-gown.

‘I shall split the seams,’ she warned. ‘I’m bigger than you.’

The words made him feel as if he were a dwarf, which added a spur to rehearsal.

‘When I unroll you, sit up and stare at me; hold the stare while I do my business. You’ll want two coils of the carpet, or else you’ll show. Better do it yourself, or I may hurt you. Lie down, your middle as near dead centre as you can. You can pull one coil over you. Then use all your weight to complete another coil.’

For two hours she helped him uncomplainingly, while the idea came to her that it would be rather a lark if he would consent to doing the act at her party, with herself as the stooge. She was a little anxious lest that lecture on the theory of the clown, which appealed to the dons of Oxford, might be above the heads of her friends. She, at any rate, would give them a good laugh when she popped out of the carpet. She knew that the carpet was used in the lecture.

When she asked him, he showed no enthusiasm. But she pointed out how easily she could steal away while he was holding their attention.

‘What about your frock, though. You’ll be varnished up for the party, won’t you?’

‘I was thinking – I could nip up to my room and slip on the frock I used in our old act. No one has worn it since I dropped out. It’s still in the property wardrobe – if you’ll bring it down for me to-morrow. It’s velvet corduroy, and the carpet won’t do it any harm – being red, it’ll make a fine splash of colour.’

‘I might keep you there two or three minutes. You could breathe all right, couldn’t you?’

‘Yes – it’s a bit stuffy. And when I called out to you when you kept me waiting just now, you couldn’t hear me. Anyway, I shan’t mind.’

‘Hm! I must be careful not to suffocate Mabel. She’ll have to lie in it for upwards of ten minutes.’

When he was at the theatre the following morning, there was no dresser present. He himself collected the key from the caretaker, found the number on the list and took the velvet corduroy frock from one of the fireproof cupboards and put it in June’s suitcase.

‘She has the mind of a child,’ he reflected as he drove home. Her child mind labelled him a very clever man, strong, kind, good, rich, influential. But her adult woman’s instinct thought him funny.

Chapter Five

With the impetus given by the stage hands, the corpse of June Spengrave rolled clear of the carpet. When they had recovered from the momentary shock, the men correctly shut the gymnasium and mounted guard, while one rang the police.

The Inspector was shortly followed by the Chief Constable. He caused a telephone message, sympathetically worded, to be sent to the airfield at Edinburgh. By the time Spengrave arrived, after stopping at the mortuary in Reading to identify the body, the Chief had possessed himself of the main facts. It was assumed that June had died of asphyxia, though the later medical report established that the immediate cause of death was shock.

Spengrave’s account of the incidents of the party did not differ in any essential detail from that already obtained from some of the guests.

‘When you asked the men of the party to roll up the carpet and take it back to the gym, Mr Spengrave, I gather that they all went at the job, and some of the women joined in. D’you think it possible that poor Mrs Spengrave may have joined in the scramble, that she may have fallen down and been rolled up without anybody noticing – in fact, just as the thing happens in the circus?’

‘You ask if I think it possible. Theoretically, anything is possible. I think it very grossly improbable. There were at least six men rolling. If she fell flat on the carpet, the faces of at least three of them would have been within a few feet of her. They must have seen her.’

‘Then she must have been inside the first coil or two of the carpet when the men started to roll it?’

‘Obviously!’ agreed Spengrave.

‘The doctor is already able to say that there are no signs of violence on the body. No one knocked her out and partly rolled her in the carpet. Therefore – a hostess suddenly slips away from her guests, rolls herself in the carpet – so that her guests may unconsciously assist her to commit suicide?’

Spengrave looked tired and indifferent, as if all this were none of his business.

‘She was not happy with me, as I hinted to you yesterday. But she was not melancholic. The last person to think of suicide.’

Spengrave, thought the Chief, was no humbug. He was not pretending to be grief-stricken. But he was being very wooden, showed no desire to help.

‘Against the theory of her having rolled herself up,’ continued the Chief, ‘is the fact that she had had some stage experience under yourself. She was familiar with that carpet, knew how heavy it was, must have known she was doing a very dangerous thing.’

Spengrave snapped his fingers excitedly.

‘That’s a glimmer in the dark!’ he exclaimed. ‘She was familiar with that carpet, you said. Hold that thought, while I add something. That carpet was rolled up the wrong way – namely from right to left, standing with your back to the river. I noticed it, but did not want-to ask the guests to unroll it and start again. Now are you guessing what I’ve guessed?’

This was what the Chief had been waiting for.

‘She assumed it would be rolled up from the other end,’ said the Chief, ‘and that therefore she would be unrolled.’ As Spengrave nodded encouragingly: ‘But why – when there was no need to be there at all?’

‘To give her guests a laugh – and to guy my lecture. She had,’ he added, ‘the mind of a child.’

Thus Spengrave, for all his subtlety, had suggested a cause of death other than murder – always an unwise course when there is any chance of murder being suspected.

At the inquest Spengrave gave substantially the same answers as he had given to the Chief. The Chief Constable did not waste time studying him while he was giving evidence. Actors never betray themselves with involuntary movements of body, hands, or face. The jury returned a verdict of death by misadventure. The Chief, without any publicity, consulted Scotland Yard.

Chief Inspector Karslake was very dubious.

‘If it’s murder at all, where is the overt act?’ he asked. ‘The guests did the actual killing. And Spengrave didn’t even incite them to it.’

‘If you were to induce a drunkard to lie down on a railway track and then watched him being killed I could hang you, Mr Karslake, without proving that you had incited the engine driver,’ said the Chief Constable.

‘But the lady wasn’t drunk,’ objected Karslake. ‘And Spengrave didn’t–’

‘Yes, he did. Look here!’ The Chief spread out a chart of the garden, with all distances noted in feet and inches. ‘The woman was last seen at six-thirty-five, when Spengrave finished his demonstration with the carpet. Between six-forty and about six-forty-seven, the guests were all – here – their eyes glued to Spengrave, who was lecturing about the double-headed dog.’ He carried his pencil upwards and to the right. ‘Spengrave alone can see the carpet – he has a clear view. He would have seen his wife – must have seen her – go to that carpet.’

‘You’ve certainly got something there,’ admitted Karslake.

‘Spengrave told them he doubted whether he had enough room on the lower lawn for the tray-and-goblet business. One of the men – Periss – asked him if they should roll up the carpet at once and take it back to the gym. Spengrave said “Yes, please”. That’s incitement.’ The Chief went on:

‘As Spengrave is standing pat, it won’t matter if he knows we’re on his track. He thinks that, whatever we suspect, we can’t get any evidence.’

‘So do I!’ said Karslake gloomily. ‘But we’ll try.’

Karslake tried so hard that he came within an ace of committing homicide himself. He had his junior rolled in Spengrave’s carpet, observed that at the fourth coiling the weight of the carpet bore down the fringes so that air was excluded. The unfortunate junior had observed the same phenomenon some minutes before Karslake.

‘That Chief Constable was simply passing the buck!’ said Karslake after a month of fruitless investigation. ‘How can we prove that Spengrave induced her to get into the carpet, and that he wasn’t looking at his notes or something when she did it? I’m sick of the sight of those dossiers. Shove ’em along to Dead Ends and forget ’em!’

Spengrave sold his house by the river, warehoused his expensive furniture, and resumed residence in the suite at the top of the theatre. The act of the girl in the carpet was never put on.

Chapter Six

The Department of Dead Ends, by its nature, could not function until a new light was thrown on a case by some tangential occurrence, some chance echo, even if it were only a chance remark. When this happened and a prosecution followed, Chief Inspector Karslake always called it Detective Inspector Rason’s ‘luck’.

‘I’ve got a niece too,’ protested Karslake. ‘And I hope I’m at least as good an uncle as you are. But my niece has never yet happened to babble out the dope on a case that’s been dead meat for over a year. So I still say it’s luck.’

This, in a police car shortly before midday in October, 1937 – some fourteen months after the death of June Spengrave. They laboured the matter of Rason’s niece because they were both secretly ill at ease – for they were on their way to Spengrave’s theatre, to ask him some questions they were confident he could not answer – which is a strange state of mind for a detective. But Spengrave was a distinguished man, whom nearly everybody could not help liking.

‘She didn’t give me any dope – she gave me backchat,’ retorted Rason. ‘I told her she didn’t need a new frock, because she had a lovely one already. And she said if she went to a garden party in August in her corduroy velvet, people would be laughing over it when she was an old woman. I happened to remember the words “corduroy velvet” in the dossier – and a garden party too! I’ve put in more than two months’ work on that bit o’ corduroy velvet, and you call it luck – sir!’

‘You don’t have to “sir” me till we get back,’ chuckled Karslake. ‘This is your case, my boy, and welcome!’

The car stopped at the theatre. Rason thrust his card through the window of the box office. In due course an attendant presented himself.

‘Mr Spengrave is sorry he will have to keep you waiting for a few minutes. Will you follow me, please.’

They were led through unsuspected corridors to the back of the stage and thence, up a single flight of stairs, to Spengrave’s dressing-room. It was a very large room with more than the usual number of mirrors. Above the mirrors was a frieze, depicting the Clown throughout the ages. In one wide corner was a writing table. There were two divans. The detectives took one each.

‘Haven’t had much to do with the stage!’ remarked Karslake. ‘What’s the good of putting all those telephones over the wash basin? – to say nothing of there being a bathroom behind this curtain.’

‘They use the dressing-room as an office and a parlour as well.’ Rason’s eye travelled along the frieze, to the court jester, to the hunchback pelted by the medieval audience, to the buffoon-god of Greek comedy, to the Sacea of ancient Babylon where the King of the Revels, still wearing his mock crown, is sacrificed to the goddess Ishtar.

‘Good Lord, they’ve all got Spengrave’s face!’ ejaculated Rason. He caught Karslake’s eye and added defiantly: ‘I’m going to put the cards on the table with this bloke.’

For some minutes they sat in silence. Then the door opened. Both men gasped. Both were momentarily as confused as schoolboys.

‘I’m sorry I had to keep you waiting, gentlemen.’

Spengrave was in make-up. They stared at the grey-white, idiot face of the Clown, the splash of carmine, harsh and hideous at close quarters, the bald wig, the conical cap.

‘Perhaps we – perhaps you would rather we waited while you change, Mr Spengrave?’ faltered Rason.

‘Quite unnecessary! You don’t imagine that I’m going to make jokes and fall over carpets.’ The voice coming out of that preposterous face was both irritable and authoritative. ‘I’ve just been having stills taken of a new act. Sit down, please. What can I do for you?’

‘We’ve come on a very serious matter, Mr Spengrave. We have to put to you certain questions arising out of your wife’s death. If you refuse to answer, or if your answers are unsatisfactory, we shall have to ask you to come along with us.’

As Spengrave swung a swivel chair from his dressing-table the mirrors caught him in cross-reflection, so that Rason was compelled to contemplate the Clown face multiplied to infinity, staring into his.

‘Go ahead, Inspector!’

‘Can you describe the dress your wife was wearing at that party?’

‘No. I’ve no eye for women’s dress and no memory.’

‘That’s unusual in one of your profession, especially as you yourself were once a pictorial artist.’ Rason was opening an attaché case. He took out a mill board, on which was a painting of a woman’s dress of green crêpe.

‘Is this the dress she was wearing?’

Spengrave looked at the painting. No expression was perceptible through the clown make-up.

‘It may have been,’ he said. ‘I think it is.’

‘Quite right! It is! Five of the women who were your guests that day have identified it.’ Rason added: ‘I obtained a judge’s order to examine your furniture at the repository. That dress was in the wardrobe of the deceased. By the way, both the men and women guests remarked that they had not been allowed to see the poor lady after death.’

‘That was nothing to do with me – the local police were in charge,’ rasped Spengrave. ‘In any case it was unnecessary. I identified the body myself.’

‘Yes, of course. After you had flown down from Edinburgh. The major examination had not then taken place. The body was almost exactly as it had been found in the gymnasium.’ Rason leant forward and tapped the picture of the green crêpe dress. ‘Did you see that dress on the dead body of your wife, Mr Spengrave?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You can’t remember!’ echoed Rason. ‘Do you mean that you may or may not have seen that dress on the body?’ As Spengrave assented, Rason produced a police photograph of the corpse taken in the gymnasium.

‘That is the dress you saw in the mortuary. You can’t see the colour, but the line of that dress is quite different. And here it is in colour.’

Rason thrust at him a second mill board, a little crumpled and faded, on which was a painting of a red dress in velvet corduroy.

‘Do you recognize that red velvet corduroy dress, Mr Spengrave?’

‘No,’ snapped Spengrave. ‘I’ve told you I’ve no memory for women’s dress.’

‘But you’ve a memory for your own work, haven’t you? You designed that dress yourself. You painted the picture you have in your hand. It’s the dress she wore in her act with you – The Lady Who Wouldn’t Laugh.’

‘By Jove, you’re right!’ exclaimed Spengrave, as if surprised.

‘On August 18th last year,’ continued Rason, ‘you signed the book, in the keeping of your caretaker, for the key of the robe-room, or whatever you call it. You entered the robe-room with a suitcase. On August 21st, your chief dresser sent you a chit reporting that that dress was missing. You wrote on the chit “O.K.”, and initialled it. Why did your wife want that property dress, Mr Spengrave?’

‘I now remember the incidents you describe.’ Spengrave spoke in the same authoritative, irritable voice. ‘But I don’t remember why my wife wanted that dress.’

‘Let me suggest why you wanted her to have it, and you tell me if I’m wrong,’ pressed Rason. ‘You created an act in which a girl is rolled in that carpet of yours. You asked your wife to play the girl and said you’d put on the act for the party. You fixed it so that she could slip into that carpet without anyone seeing her but you. And you fixed it so that someone should suggest rolling that carpet up. When Mr Periss offered to do it you said, “Yes, please”, thereby procuring the death of your wife. And that means murder.’

‘You asked me to tell you if you were wrong,’ chuckled Spengrave. ‘You are.’

‘Maybe I’ve slipped up on a few details,’ said Rason. ‘But do you deny that you created an act in which a girl is rolled up –’

‘I deny it absolutely,’ thundered Spengrave. ‘It would be an utterly futile act.’

‘At the repository, I found nothing in your desk – it was practically empty,’ said Rason. ‘But under the cushion of the armchair that used to be in your study I found a manuscript in your handwriting. Here’s a typed copy. I don’t altogether understand stage directions. But there’s one bit where it says: “Clown kicks coil of carpet (laugh). Clown struggles with carpet. Fails. Walks away (laugh). Returns. Unrolls carpet. Girl sits up –”’

‘All right!’ Spengrave stood up. The figure of the clown facing destruction was not even tragic, only bizarre. ‘It will take me twenty minutes to change. Do you mind waiting in the foyer?’

‘Sorry, Mr Spengrave.’ Again Rason’s eye travelled along the frieze – to the altar of Ishtar, where the Clown is slain. ‘We shall have to stay with you.’

But, as is well known, Spengrave succeeded in shooting himself while he was changing, with the gun which he kept in a drawer for precisely that contingency.

The Man who Murdered

in Public

Chapter One

How little do you know about a man if you only know that he has committed four murders! That is all the public of his day knew of George Macartney. The papers handed out the usual thoughtless nonsense about a ‘human monster’, and reminded the public that he was the son of Henry Macartney, the fraudulent financier – and that he therefore had a tainted heredity.

Now it is impossible to inherit a tendency to falsify balance sheets (not that George ever did anything of the kind). And as to the human monster stuff, with its suggestion of morbid bloodlust, it may be remarked that George netted by his murders a little over twenty-two thousand pounds. Further, it is the essence of anything to do with morbidity that the act should be secret. George Macartney is perhaps unique amongst murderers in that each of his four murders was eye-witnessed by anything from a dozen to several hundred persons, including a policeman or two.

All the same, the fact that Henry Macartney, his father, actually received fourteen years’ penal servitude, is the key to the queer psychology of George himself. It was, however, not a matter of heredity but of objective circumstance – being the direct cause of young George receiving his first thrashing.

George was a late-grower both physically and mentally. Eventually he grew into a hefty man with plenty of pluck and intelligence. But at fifteen he was about the physical size of a boy of eleven, with much the same mental range. And a pretty dreadful little boy, too!

His mother was a very good sort but she had died when he was three. His father in his private life was amiable and undisciplined. There had been two or three schools which he had allowed the boy to leave, and two or three governesses who had been allowed to give up in despair. Unsuspected by his father, George had become a horrid little snob and a bully.

The story of the murders really starts with this boy sitting down to lunch at home in the big dining-room of their Surrey house on the last day of his father’s trial. Akehurst, the butler, and the parlourmaid, are both in the environs of the Old Bailey waiting for the verdict which is expected at any time. Elsie Natley, the first housemaid, is waiting on George and thoroughly detesting him. In fact, her fingers are itching to get at him – and she is a very muscular girl of twenty.

‘You’ve got to stand behind my chair when you wait on me. If you don’t I shan’t tell father – I shall jolly well tell Akehurst and he’ll make you cry. I’ve seen him do it.’

‘All right, Master George! I’ll stand behind your chair when I come back.’

She ran out of the house because she had seen a telegraph-boy coming up the drive.

‘Guilty. Fourteen years. Akehurst.’

The other servants had not seen the telegraph-boy coming, so they could wait. She put the telegram down on the hall table, and from a little cupboard in an elaborate fitment surmounted by a stag’s head, she took a galosh.

‘Now, Master George!’ she said. She whipped his coat over his head and dragged him on to the table, smashing the crockery. It is doubtful whether she was consciously avenging the three governesses and all that the butler and a succession of parlourmaids had endured, but there is no doubt that she laid it well in with the sole of the galosh.

We may assume that the pain to his person was no more than salutary. Nevertheless, damage was done of a more subtle nature. He knew that she was only twenty. And she was a girl. And he was fifteen and a boy. And for all his budding manhood he had been unable to offer effective resistance.

The girl cannot be blamed. She was behaving naturally, as others ought to have behaved before – with no cruelty and with no more violence than she would have used towards a young brother if she had had one. It was beyond her imagination that she could have inflicted a deep hurt that would take years to heal.

Chapter Two

After the home was broken up George did not see Elsie again until he was twenty-one and she was twenty-six, when he met her by chance at Ilfracombe.

In the meantime a sister of his mother’s had taken him over and sent him to an expensive private school run on public-school lines. He was there until he was nearly nineteen. They gave him a rudimentary education, taught him manners of a kind, but finally expelled him in spite of the fact that he had been instrumental in winning a swimming-cup for the school.

She sent him up to Cambridge but he did not last there a full term. His aunt did not turn him out – he just drifted off and eventually joined a theatrical touring company, where he was quite a useful man provided he were cast to type.

Elsie had kept herself very well and had scarcely changed at all. To George she no longer looked so dreadfully muscular – she looked rather pink-and-white and nice. He took off his hat to her and smiled, but he had to speak before she answered:

‘Well, Master George! Oh, do excuse me calling you that when I ought to say “Mr Macartney”. Who would have thought of meeting you like this!’

The conversation followed standard lines. Elsie was having a holiday in a boarding-house selected by her late mistress who had departed for America, after which she intended to look round for another job. George gave an account of himself, truthful except for a little romantic colour. He presented her with a stall for that night’s performance, and the next afternoon hired a boat and took her for a row.

(‘I wasn’t thinking about what she did to me all that time ago. Or if I was, I only thought I would wait for a chance to kiss her and sort of get even that way, like any young fellow might, as she was a good-looking girl and full of fun.’)

A muscular girl, too, and full of physical energy. George, in spite of some philandering experience, was perhaps a bit slow in making the running. For when they were about a mile off shore she became bored and suggested that she should take a turn at rowing.

Anything to please her, thought George, just like any other young man.

‘Here, I may knock this. Put it in your pocket for me, George, and don’t forget to let me have it afterwards whatever you do!’

She detached a bracelet, liberally set with big red stones. George affected to think it valuable. He put it in his pocket-case for her and she began to row. She had never rowed a sea-boat before and the inevitable happened. She lost an oar and made a grab for it. He made a grab, too, and the boat capsized.

George, as we have noted, was a crack swimmer, so here was a chance to play the hero in real life to a maiden in distress. But Elsie had not had time to consider George in the role of hero.

‘Leggo, you brute, you’ll drown me!’ she cried, and landed him a useful blow on the nose.

(‘I swear I had no thought except to rescue her, like anyone else would. But when she hit me, somehow it all came back. I let her swim a couple of strokes to the boat, which was between us and the shore, and then before I knew what I was doing I collared her by the head from behind and put her under.‘)

Fifty or sixty holiday-makers had seen the accident from the Capstan Hill. But there were no motor-boats in those days and it was some little time before a boat rowed by two seamen reached them. George was clinging to the upturned boat with one hand and with the other supporting Elsie.

But Elsie was in a vertical position, and her lungs had been full of water for something like a quarter of an hour.

At the inquest George admitted that she had been a house-maid in his father’s house and that they had met by chance. He described the incident truthfully and then:

‘I came up under the upturned boat and when I got out it was on the other side. I looked round for Elsie and couldn’t see her, for she was on the sea side. Then I wriggled round the boat and after a bit I saw her hand come up. And then I caught hold of one of the oars which was floating and splashed up to where I’d seen her and after a bit I got her. I can’t remember much about how I got her back to the boat because I’d swallowed a lot of water myself.’

He took the risk of implying that he could hardly swim at all and no one in the theatrical company could deny it. The Coroner gave him a lecture on the folly of standing up in a small boat, opined that he had had a terrible lesson which would stay with him for the rest of his life and then, like everybody else, forgot about him. There are a certain number of boating and bathing fatalities every year, and this was one of them.

The company had moved on to Plymouth before George discovered that he was still in possession of the bracelet which Elsie had asked him to hold. He had not the slightest intention of stealing it but he did not want to stir things up. So he kept the bracelet and a little later gave it to Polly, a small-part girl in the company. When they quarrelled she gave it back to him, when something she said revealed to him that it was worth about eighty pounds. He was delighted, for he intended to pawn it at once.

Then he reflected that if it was worth all that money Elsie had almost certainly stolen it – which might lead to complications. It would be safer to get rid of it or keep it out of sight for a few years. More or less out of inadvertence, he kept it.

Chapter Three

The theatre held no future for him. At the end of the tour he went back to sponge on his aunt for the few remaining months of her life. She was an annuitant with a negligible capital, but she left him some two thousand pounds with which he established himself as a motor-car agent.

Selling motor-cars in 1903 was a slow and heart-breaking process. It is incredible nowadays, but on the rare occasions when you booked a customer, some eight months would pass before you could redeem the car from the coach-builder’s and collect your cheque.

The two thousand did not last very long. Soon a more balanced concern took over the agency and employed George as part clerk, part salesman. His new employer had been one of his father’s victims but very generously felt only sympathy for George. He suggested that the name was an unfair handicap and himself paid the expenses of George changing his name by Deed Poll. Between them they constructed the name of ‘Carshaw’ as a good omen for business.

George was living fairly contentedly in lodgings in Richmond. We have no clue to his inmost thoughts at this time, but we may deduce that at the back of his thoughts was the consciousness that he had committed murder and got away with it. What fools, we imagine him reasoning, are murderers to be caught! To mess about with poison and guns and knives, which always leave clues! Whereas, if you have an accident which lots of people can witness it does not matter if you contradict yourself a bit. You are expected to be flurried. And unless they can prove that you deliberately upset the boat there is no possibility of their proving anything at all.

His evenings tended to be lonely, for he was not a very sociable young man and had no friends of his own sex. Indeed his earnings did not give him scope for much in the way of social activities, and he was already inclined to believe that the motorcar trade held no prospects.

Spring came with its insistent urge to be up and doing. If he could have Aunt Maud’s two thousand over again he would know better what to do. On Sunday afternoons he began to loaf around the more prosperous residential streets of Richmond. The connexion between this activity and the thought of two thousand pounds will not be immediately obvious to you. But it is almost certain that it was not immediately obvious to George.

Violet Laystall was a house-parlourmaid, whom he picked up one Sunday afternoon. She was reasonably good-looking and of quiet manners; and George, though he thought of himself as a gentleman, had been cured of snobbery and class-consciousness. On May 5th, 1904, he married her, a notable gift from the bridegroom to the bride being the ruby bracelet which had once belonged to Elsie.

He took her to live in his rooms, for his holiday was not yet due. On May 9th, he insured her life for £2,000. He proposed his own life for a similar amount, but the proposal was rejected by the Insurance Company on account of certain medical information he felt obliged to give the doctor about himself. And, of course, they made wills in each other’s favour.

Their deferred honeymoon took place in the middle fortnight of August. He took her to Bognor. On the first three days the sea was choppy. On the afternoon of the fourth day he hired a small rowing-boat. When they were about a mile from the shore he suggested that she might like to try her hand at rowing.

She was a docile little woman and obediently took her place on the thwart. She pulled a few strokes while he manipulated the boat broadside to the shore. There were several pleasure boats dotted about, but none of them too close for his purpose and the nearest was that of the attendant on the fringe of the bathers.

He waited for her to lose an oar but, as time was valuable, he leant forward and bumped the sea-side oar out of the rowlock. Then he stood up and capsized the boat.

The little play had already been rehearsed, and he had only to repeat his lines. Even the Coroner made very much the same little speech about its being a lesson to him for the rest of his life. When he was leaving the Court, in a suitable state of collapse, an official handed him the ruby bracelet that had been taken from the dead woman’s wrist.

Chapter Four

Even with two thousand pounds in the bank, George Carshaw, as he now was, did not lose his head. Go slow and look round, was his motto. The motor trade, it seemed, was improving of its own accord; so without any extra effort George was soon more than equalling his salary in commission. He decided to stay on, a course which presented no embarrassment. His employer did not even know that he had married; and, as George was an unsociable man, he had not confided in any of his colleagues where he had intended to go for his holiday.

There being no immediate opening for capital, George thought a fellow might as well do himself comfortably for a bit. He began to spend his evenings in the West End. Shortly before Christmas he ran across the girl with whom he had had a flirtation in the touring company. She had a one-line part in pantomime, and was now glad to be taken out to supper. Before the pantomime was actually put on she resigned and joined forces with him, without benefit of clergy, in a flat in Baker Street.

She could not be described as mercenary, but she helped to make a very large dent in the two thousand. He grudged her nothing, for she fascinated him. She was known as ‘Little Polly Flinders’, lived as Miss Flinders and would never tell him her real name. She certainly did not grab, and it was certainly he who tumbled on the original idea of replenishing their dwindling capital on the racecourse. By June she discovered that she was not good for him and left him for his own sake. She may even have meant it, for they remained friends and from time to time renewed their association.

In September he married Madge Turnham, another muscular girl, a quick-witted, suspicious Cockney. But there was nothing very much to be suspicious about. He gave her the ruby bracelet and she promptly sneaked off and had it valued. When she learnt its worth she opened her eyes. When she had assured herself that he really was employed by a respectable motor agency she thanked her stars for a mug and eagerly married him.

At this stage George was undoubtedly planning everything very carefully. He insured her life for £100 only. Again he proposed a similar policy for his own life, and again got it turned down on the ‘confession’ he made to the doctor.

Life Insurance at best is a troublesome matter; but Accident Insurance is very simple. He took out an Accident policy on both their lives for ten thousand pounds each. The policy covered death by any kind of accident – including, of course, the accident of drowning.

Chapter Five

Of his three wives Madge, who was the second, was the only really bad one. She was slovenly and quarrelsome. Her ill-nature, indeed, came near to imperilling George’s plan. For she soon became known as a termagant – the kind of woman that nearly every kind of man would very soon come to hate. They lived in the upper part of a jerry-built house in Harringay and all the neighbours knew that occasionally they came to blows, after which she would be docile and well-behaved for nearly a week.

It is probable that her detestable temperament made George speed up the programme. They had a scrap on the Thursday before Whitsun 1906. George lost his temper this time and very nearly had to call a doctor for her afterwards. After the thumping she was extra docile, and perhaps George saw his last chance of staging a reconciliation. He took her to Paignton, a growing seaside resort on the south coast of Devon.

She said that the sea made her sick and she wouldn’t go on it. But George, of course, was much more intelligent than his wife. He put up a convincing little pantomime with a five-pound note concealed at the back of his pocket-book against a rainy day – teased her and said that she should have the fiver if she could stay in a small rowing-boat with him for an hour without being seasick. And the greedy fool succumbed.

We imagine that George put to sea with a certain confidence. He had found a method of murder that was clue-proof. But on this occasion he was very nearly tripped by the element of time. For artificial respiration was applied in the boat that picked them up, and the heart was actually re-started, though it beat for a few seconds only.

But this was the only little contretemps – except that George caught a very bad cold. The inquest went off without a hitch. For neither the Coroner nor the local police kept indexed news cuttings of other boating and bathing fatalities in other years and other places.

But Dead Ends, which kept a large number of more or less useless records, used to file a cross-index of every death by violence in any form. They found that, within the space of two years, George Carshaw had lost two wives in precisely the same circumstances, detail for detail. In each case the boat had capsized about the same distance from shore. In each case he had prevented the body from sinking but not from drowning.

Then there was the cross-index (‘Fatality – Sea – Boat’). In ten minutes a clerk had found that a similar accident, detail for detail, had happened at Ilfracombe in 1903 with Elsie Natley and George Macartney.

Detective-Sergeant Martleplug, an energetic officer attached to Dead Ends, dug out the Deed Poll and identified George Carshaw with George Macartney. He found that the two wives had been insured, that Elsie Natley was not his wife and was not insured – which puzzled him.

He found George arranging for a sale of his furniture and effects in Harringay. This was a fortnight later. George had drawn the insurance, and their few sticks were not worth preserving. The only joint possession of any value was the ruby bracelet, which he had again recovered.

The detective opened in a friendly manner and George responded. Martleplug revealed his knowledge of Violet, but was keeping Elsie up his sleeve.

‘It fairly beats me, Mr Martleplug, and that’s a fact!’ said George. ‘You’d think that when a thing like that’s happened once, it couldn’t possibly happen again. It used to haunt me – and that’s why poor Madge persuaded me to go out again. And that – but why talk about it?’

‘I’ve come here to talk about it,’ said Martleplug. ‘And I want to ask you a few questions.’

‘I am sorry,’ said George, who did not make the ignorant mistake of confusing a detective with a judge, ‘but the subject is very painful to me and I cannot discuss it. If you don’t like that, why don’t you arrest me for murder? I’ll tell you why you don’t – because you haven’t got any evidence and can’t get it.’

George, as you will know, was quite right. The Public Prosecutor informed Martleplug that he quite agreed with George.

Of course, as far as commonsense goes, they were quite sure that George had murdered Madge. But George was saved by a very simple point in legal procedure. The only ground for assuming that he had forcibly drowned Madge was that he had taken part in two exactly similar ‘accidents’ before. Neither of these two earlier accidents could be put in as evidence in regard to the third accident, since there was no connexion between them except the assumed connexion in George’s mind.

Chapter Six

Ten thousand pounds enabled George to throw up his employment and start an independent agency once again himself. This time he could do it in style. He was able to buy two cars for demonstration purposes. He had a decent showroom with a well-equipped workshop in Tottenham Court Road.

One of his first customers was little Polly Flinders who came in on the arm of a prosperous broker from Newcastle. She was astonished to see him and rather pleased. In the course of the trial run he persuaded her to drop the broker. It meant losing a customer, but Polly was worth it, and he had more than half the ten thousand in reserve.

They took a flat on the unfashionable side of Regent’s Park, which was conveniently near the office. This time Polly was determined to be good for him. She put her foot very firmly down on horse-racing, and after the first week or two refused to let him give her expensive dresses – except just a few, which, she said, would be economical in the end. He must, she said, learn to be sensible with his money. He must not speculate – he must invest. And if you invested money sensibly you could get as big a return as if you had speculated with it. There was, for example, The Theatre, of which George already had too much practical knowledge to be fooled, as he had been fooled by racing tipsters.

She had, it transpired, heard of a play only the other day which contained great possibilities of profit. By the instrumentality of one of the economical-expensive frocks she obtained the script from the author. When she read the part which she would play if George should decide to go into production as a side-line, he agreed that it sounded fine.

George paid for the play to be put on and, by running a small mortgage on the agency, managed to prop it up for six weeks at one of the minor West End theatres. He had just enough left to send it on tour in the provinces – with Polly in her part. So he lost both his money and his girl – though she continued to write him most affectionate letters from the provinces until the tour collapsed.

George did quite well with the agency. He had a liking for motor-cars and put in plenty of work. But he was handling one of the smaller makes that has since perished. There was the slack first quarter of the new year in which the rent and wages of the workshop staff became a problem. He pulled up a bit in the summer but not quite enough. If the agency were to live it must have new capital.

He found May Toler outside a servants’ registry office in Piccadilly. She was thirty-two and the only one of his wives who was definitely pretty, with beautiful long hands, which she had been able to preserve; for it was more than ten years since she had been anything but a very good-class parlourmaid.

With her he had to exert all his resources and his rather crude charm. And there were several set-backs. Her family, who lived at Willesden, did not like him at first. But their hostility was killed by his gift of the ruby bracelet which they recognized to be valuable.

She married him, against her better judgement, in February 1908. He had persuaded her to cut out the still querulous family and more or less make an elopement of it. For the ceremony was performed with paid witnesses before the registrar at Camden Town.

Possibly he thought that in this way he was preventing the police from learning of his marriage. On the other hand we can be quite certain that, at this stage, his attitude to the police was one of open defiance. He was aware that they believed him to be a murderer. Well, he had invented the perfect murder that could even, as it were, be performed in public. And here we must reluctantly concede a small point to the fanatics of heredity – for his father had behaved just like this, faking his balance sheet with a system of his own when he knew the police accountants were looking for the fake.

They took out a joint-life assurance for £500. The joint-life element can hardly have been a serious attempt to throw dust into anyone’s eyes, for he used it subsequently as a means of raising a small loan for his business. They made wills in each other’s favour – and he sent her on her own to take out an Accident Policy with a different company for £10,000 against death by accident.

Their circumstances during the summer were easy enough, but the winter was a bit of a pinch. They had taken a small, noisy flat off Theobald’s Road. The very superior parlourmaid proved a very indifferent cook and a hopeless manager. Personally, too, she went to pieces very soon after the wedding. He seems to have been kind enough to her and she herself was not quarrelsome. But she missed her occupation and she would whine a good deal and drop into melancholy and latterly there is evidence that she took to drink.

It became doubtful whether George would have enough capital to take full advantage of next summer’s business. So between Easter and Whitsun he took her to Colwyn Bay in North Wales.

This time the only variation in the programme was that he rowed her farther out from shore. There was no question of her being alive when they were picked up.

He got his shock this time in the Coroner’s Court. He had just repeated his little speech as to how it had all happened when a barrister got up, representing the police.

Now the Rules of Evidence in a High Court are many and varied. But the rules of evidence in a Coroner’s Court are just exactly what the Coroner likes. It may be a legal anomaly that the man who is often an amateur is given more discretion than a judge – but there it is! And George had to make the best of it.

‘Was your wife insured, Mr Carshaw?’

‘We had a joint policy for five hundred pounds, in mortgage for my business.’

‘Any other insurance?’

‘I don’t know. She may have.’

‘You don’t know. Was your last wife insured against death by accident for ten thousand pounds?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she on June 15th, 1906, meet with an exactly similar accident at Paignton? I mean, had you rowed her out and did the boat capsize in – er – the precise manner in which you have just described in respect of your – er – latest wife?’

Point by point he brought out the details of the drowning of Madge, then of the drowning of Violet and, point by point, matched them with the drowning of May.

Three was good enough. He could not make the insurance point in respect of Elsie, so he left it alone.

It is open to the critical to take the view that this cross-examination was a definite ‘wangle’ on the part of the police. They could bring the facts out in the Coroner’s Court, though not in the High Court. But by the time the Coroner’s case was reported, every man in the country who was likely to sit on the jury would have been certain to read the facts. So the jury would know.

But the Coroner’s Court carried them a bit further than they meant to go. The jury brought in a verdict of wilful murder against George Carshaw and he was committed for trial on the Coroner’s warrant.

The Crown felt that it must go on with the case. George was brought up for trial in the following June.

In the meantime, Martleplug had traced George back to the private school where he had been instrumental in winning a swimming-cup. They had got against him now that he was a powerful swimmer, and that his thrice-repeated tale of floundering about with an oar was all nonsense.

But even so George got away with it.

Chapter Seven

It was a rising young lawyer, now well known as Sir Ernest Quilter, K.C., who saved George Carshaw from his reasonably certain fate of being hanged as the murderer of his wife, May.

Counsel for the Prosecution opened by describing in minute detail the circumstances in which May had met her death. He then paused and looked at the judge – an action which was very close indeed to being a prearranged signal. But as this was done by arrangement with the defence there could be no objection. The judge promptly ordered the jury to retire and then listened to arguments on both sides as to the admissibility of evidence of the two previously drowned wives. Owing to the absence of the money-element the Crown had come to the conclusion that the first drowning, of Elsie Natley, was a genuine accident which had given George the idea for the subsequent murders.

The Prosecution claimed admissibility of the previous accidents and quoted precedent. But Quilter scotched him.

‘In all the precedents which my learned friend has quoted, there has invariably been the prima facie assumption of guilt. In this case I submit that there is no prima facie assumption of guilt whatever. There is the overwhelming assumption of an accident – which can only be upset by consideration of the previous cases.’

A bold line – for it admitted by implication that George was a murderer.

The judge agreed and ruled that the evidence of the previous drownings was inadmissible until the Prosecution had established a reasonably strong prima facie assumption of guilt in respect of May. Each counsel seemed extremely pleased with this ruling.

At an early stage the Treasury man called George’s old schoolmaster, together with one of the staff and two men who had been pupils with George. These men proved George’s swimming prowess. The Prosecution was triumphant.

‘My lord, the deceased was drowned admittedly within a dozen or so yards of the upturned boat. Is it to be believed that the prisoner, who was a very able swimmer, was powerless to effect her rescue, as he stated? I submit that a prima facie case has been made out of the prisoner’s guilt. I shall therefore ask your lordship’s leave to introduce – other evidence.’

Mr Quilter had been waiting for this.

‘I object, my lord. It is no part of my case to deny that my client could have saved his wife from drowning had he wished to do so.’

Daring again! Sailing right into the wind! There was what the newspapers insist upon calling a sensation in Court. And Quilter went on:

‘My learned friend has forgotten more law than I ever knew, so he will not object to my reminding him of the principle enshrined in the doggerel:

Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive

Officiously to keep alive.

‘I admit that Carshaw did not strive to keep his wife alive. I am not here to defend his moral character, nor his conscience. I am still waiting for my friend to show that any action of Carshaw’s betrays evidence of felonious intent.’

Quilter scored again.

Once those two persons were in the water, the most that could be proved against George was that he had deliberately refrained from rescuing his wife. Again, the law may be at variance with the public conscience, but the law remains. And the law lays it down that you need never rescue anybody from anything if you don’t want to.

That limited the Prosecution to proving that the boat had been feloniously capsized by George – which in the nature of things was unprovable. At the judge’s direction the jury found George Carshaw ‘not guilty’.

After escaping under police escort from the mob around the Court, George showed his gratitude to Mr Quilter by briefing him to recover the ten thousand pounds from the Accident Insurance Company in respect of May’s death. And again Quilter won.

Fortunately for George, he had given his agency a fancy name and was able to resume business, equipped now with ample capital. He got in touch with Polly Flinders, but this time she shrieked when he came near her and he had to run for it.

There was, it would be safe to say, no one in the country who doubted George’s guilt. He had to take an assumed name, without Deed Poll this time. But whatever inconvenience he may have suffered in this way was compensated for by his egomaniac delight in the fact that the police knew him to be a multiple murderer and could not touch him.

Chapter Eight

In the following October there arrived at a West End hotel a Mr and Mrs Huystefan. Mrs Huystefan was an Englishwoman who had married an American. One evening, while she was dressing for dinner, she was assaulted in her bedroom and robbed of her jewellery. She was too shaken to be of much use to the police that night. But her husband, who was a methodical man, gave them an old typewritten list of the items of his wife’s jewellery.

His name, he contrived to explain, was that of an old Southern family who had arrived before the Mayflower, and on all the gold pieces the family crest, a lion couchant, would be found.

The Yard had not very much hope. A hotel job would mean crooks in a good way of business. But they sent out the drag-net and were rather surprised to get a response from a pawnbroker in Holborn, who produced a ruby bracelet with the crest stamped inside the gold mount.

‘How long have you had this?’

‘Pawned with me last February by a Mrs Carshaw. There’s the address – Theobald’s Road –’

‘Then you’re all right, because it’s not what we want. But you might leave it with us for a couple of days.’

On account of the name and address, the bracelet went to Dead Ends as a matter of routine. No purely logical detective would have wasted a moment over that bracelet. Mrs Huystefan had been in England a week and this had been pawned in London last February. And it wasn’t as though the crest were in any way an unusual design.

But a ruby bracelet was listed amongst the stolen jewellery. So Detective Inspector Rason requested Mrs Huystefan, now restored to health, to call at the Yard and identify it.

She identified it at once as her bracelet, and then became profusely apologetic.

‘I’m so sorry you’ve had this trouble with the bracelet,’ she said. ‘I forgot it was on that old list my husband gave you, or I would have notified you at once. I gave it away as a present when I was in England six years ago. I’m very sorry she had to pawn it. If you are in touch with her, I would be so glad if you would give me her address, as I would like to help her again.’

‘Help who, Mrs Huystefan?’

‘The girl I gave it to. Elsie Natley. She was one of my maids in Town here just after I married Mr Huystefan. We took a bungalow that year at Croyde, near Ilfracombe in North Devon, and she came with us as cook-general, for we were roughing it, you know. You don’t want the whole story, but I gave it to her because she saved my life. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could give a money tip for, was it? If she’s in trouble I would so like to know her address.’

‘Do you mind telling me how she saved your life, Mrs Huystefan?’

‘It was at bathing – yes, bathing! The currents round there are simply dreadful and I didn’t know it. I swam out and couldn’t get in again. It was a bit choppy and my strength was going. My husband rushed in after me, but he was a poor swimmer. Elsie spotted my trouble from the bungalow. She came rushing out, whipping off her skirt as she ran, then her shoes. She outstripped my husband and got to me just in time and brought me in. She was a magnificent swimmer – her father used to be a waterman on the River Lee.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Huystefan. You don’t think of leaving England for a few weeks?’

‘No, we’re over for six months.’

Rason thanked her again, then looked up the dossier of Elsie Natley. Elsie had died, as had the other women, of asphyxia resulting from drowning. Not of anything else.

Rason told his tale to the Chief, and soon was telling it again to a junior lawyer from the Public Prosecutor’s office.

Rason, of course, was privileged and he received the young man with a smile.

‘If you had been able to prove that Carshaw’s wife, May, had been a very strong swimmer, you’d have got a conviction, wouldn’t you?’

‘Of course we would! We could have used it to prove, what everyone knows, that he held her under! Also, it would have established a prima facie case and we could have brought in the other cases.’

‘Well, there’s a Mrs Huystefan to prove that Elsie Natley was a strong swimmer. And you’ve still got the two other cases left – Madge and Violet. And as they wouldn’t let you use them the other day you can use ’ em now.’

George was hanged on December 7th, 1909, for the murder of Elsie Natley.

The Snob’s Murder

Chapter One

One of the basic human stories, refurbished from generation to generation, is the story of the Dissolute Nobleman and the beautiful Maid of Low Degree, in which the Maid is, in modern jargon, bumped off when she becomes a nuisance. So when the whole thing seemed to re-enact itself in modern London, interest soon became world wide. The case was regarded by foreigners, quite mistakenly, as a test of British justice.

True that for every person who had heard of the existence of the Earl of Brendon probably a thousand had seen and, in a sense, loved or reprobated Nelly Hyde. But she was as indisputably the daughter of a casual labourer as Brendon was a blue-blooded aristocrat, though he was anything but dissolute.

When the scandal was at its ugliest, Sir James Harwick, of Scotland Yard, happened to be a guest of honour at a Rotary Club Luncheon. He made his stock speech without realizing that the Nelly Hyde murder had given his amiable little platitudes an electric significance. There was, he said, no such thing nowadays as an unsolved murder mystery, though Judge’s rules sometimes made it impossible to bring a known murderer to trial. At question time a bull-headed cotton-broker asked:

‘Do the judge’s rules favour suspected persons who move in Court circles? I mean – well, as this is a privileged occasion – I mean, is some influence stalling the prosecution of Lord Brendon for murdering poor Nelly Hyde? I mean, foreigners say we’re a nation of snobs, and I’d like to know if there’s anything in it when it comes to downright crime?’

Something like uproar followed. The member was expelled from the club for insulting the guest of honour. Moreover, a Rotary Club luncheon, however socially privileged, is, in law, a public assembly. Lord Brendon promptly brought a slander action for one farthing damages and an apology – alternatively for fifty thousand pounds, to be paid to the Actors’ Benevolent Fund. The bull-headed cotton-broker resented his expulsion and determined that the Club should reinstate him. Against his lawyer’s advice, he defended the action, pleading justification. In lay language, he was, in effect, betting fifty thousand pounds that he would prove Lord Brendon had murdered Nelly Hyde.

In the course of his opening, Counsel for the defence referred to the known facts of the murder. Nelly Hyde had been found dead in her flat in Westminster, in the hall, near the front door. She had been strangled with wire taken from a picture which had hung in the sitting-room of the flat. The Brendon jewels, temporarily in her possession, had disappeared, which created the assumption that robbery had been the motive for the murder. The body had been found by a service-maid when she entered the flat at eleven in the morning. Death had taken place between eight and twelve hours previously.

‘My client is not required to prove that Lord Brendon did in fact murder this woman,’ explained Counsel. ‘He is required to prove only that any reasonable man must draw the inference that Lord Brendon strangled her with the wire from the picture frame – Exhibit C – and himself secreted the Brendon jewels in order to support the theory of robbery and murder by person or persons unknown.’

Formal questions elicited that Lord Brendon had been the deceased woman’s lover for approximately three years; that on December 6th, 1928 – four days before she had met her death by violence – he had announced their forthcoming marriage, by word of mouth and by publication in The Times newspaper.

Then came cross-examination, remarkable for the fact that every answer given by Lord Brendon was wholly truthful.

‘I will remind you, Lord Brendon, of the evidence you gave in the Coroner’s court. You had lent the deceased woman the Brendon jewels. She was wearing them when she entered the flat at about eleven o’clock on the night of December 10th. She was not wearing them at about eleven-thirty when you were both entertaining the Duke of Maensborough to supper. You left the flat with the Duke about midnight. Would you have had a chance to slip away for a minute or so, without the Duke’s knowledge, and re-possess yourself of the jewels?’

‘Oh yes! I knew where the jewels were.’

‘And – in the course of the same minute or so – you could have created disorder in the bedroom so as to suggest a jewel thief in a hurry?’

‘I imagine that would have been quite possible.’

‘Thank you, Lord Brendon. I need trouble you no further with the jewels. We come to the picture. In your evidence you stated that, after the picture had fallen from its place on the wall of the sitting-room, you yourself removed the wire from the picture-frame. Why?’

‘The wire was trailing awkwardly – my uncle caught his foot in it. So I pulled the second staple from the back of the frame and rolled up the wire. I do not remember what I did with the wire.’ Questioned, he admitted that it would have been possible for him to put the wire in his pocket unobserved by the others.

In the eyes of the public the cotton-broker had already won his case. But Counsel, aware of shallows ahead, continued:

‘You are a captain in His Majesty’s Life Guards, with a distinguished record?’

‘I am an officer of that regiment, and my rank is that of captain.’

‘Am I right in believing that, in the event of your making the deceased woman your legal wife you would have been required, by a standing rule, to resign from that illustrious regiment?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the event of this marriage taking place’ – Counsel was mouthing the words – ‘would you also have sacrificed an income of some twenty thousand pounds a year?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am now going to ask you a question, Lord Brendon, which – as your counsel will doubtless assure you – you need not answer if you do not wish to.’ The last words were followed by a well timed pause and then: ‘Lord Brendon, did you ever actually intend to marry Nelly Hyde?’

That is one of the questions which we to-day can answer better than Lord Brendon himself – provided we can escape from the Dissolute Nobleman angle.

Chapter Two

Henry Ashwen, eleventh Earl of Brendon (to ignore his Scottish, Irish, and Continental titles) was as good a specimen of manhood as you would find in any country. He was class-conscious only in the sense that he accepted a social discipline for himself which he would not have demanded of those outside his own immediate circle.

When he was seventeen and a member of the tiny club of seniors that rules the social life of Eton, he administered a snub to the Emperor of Germany on the latter’s visit to the school during Coronation week, 1911. For this he neither expected nor received reproof from authority. By the rules of his caste, which he would have been temperamentally incapable of disobeying, the boy was right – as everyone knew, including the Kaiser. On the outbreak of the 1914–18 War he was given a University cadet’s commission in the Guards. The commission was confirmed at the end of his training – which means, in civil terms, that he had learnt to keep his mouth shut while being driven to the limit of physical endurance, subjected to hunger and thirst, bullied by N. C.O. instructors and insulted by officers. After four years of war service his commission was made permanent, which was military honour enough for a youngster of twenty-five.

The earldom of Brendon, in the West country, is about four times the size of London. Under the management of an able land agent, its revenue covered its costs. Brendon was entailed to the eldest son, as were the family jewels. But another estate had been free of entail. Henry’s father had sold it, with its coal and its ore. After payment of taxation Henry received some twenty thousand pounds a year, payable at the discretion of the trustee – his uncle, the Duke of Maensborough. It is of incidental importance that Henry was also heir to the dukedom of Maensborough.

He formed his intimate friendship with Nelly Hyde in 1925, some three years after Nelly’s arrival as a top line comedienne on the music halls. Good looking in a plump style, but no beauty, Nelly was one of those rare personalities who contain in themselves the genius of the common people. Her vulgarity, which was almost free of obscenity, was of spiritual stature. One of her successes, ‘Never keep the Rent on the Mantelpiece’ was quoted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his Budget speech in 1924.

When she had made up her mind to accept Henry, she dismissed her queue of lovers and took a service flat in Westminster in her own name, which he was at liberty to regard as his home.

The life of a Guards officer in peacetime was only strenuous for about three months in the year, so they saw a good deal of each other. Their relationship was unmercenary. He gave her the usual presents, and whenever he saw a bill lying about he would pay it, though she did not know this, as she was careless with her considerable income.

Each respected – and in a limited sense admired – the position which the other occupied. Henry’s room in the flat was littered with photographs of Nelly in character. Nelly, encroaching on their common territory, had adorned a wall of the living-room with a picture, painted from a photograph, of Henry at an Investiture. Nelly had withheld her cheque until the unhappy artist had distorted perspective to the point where Henry’s features were plainly recognizable.

The crisis came while they were having lunch. She had been more than usually nervy of late. From Hollywood had come the talkies to conquer the entertainment world and leave only a few pockets of resistance. Nelly had been tried in the new medium, with somewhat humiliating results. Insult had been added, she thought, by an offer of an engagement to appear in the flesh between films.

Henry had remarked that he would not be at home next Sunday and added: ‘Going down with my uncle on Friday night for a week. Probably get three days’ hunting.’

‘Hunting foxes! You in a red coat with brass buttons and a black topper! Or is it only the grooms do that? Cor, that reminds me! I meant to tell you last night, only something put it out of my head – you, I expect! Harry, old dear: I’m sorry and all that, but we gotter get married.’

‘You and I? Why? Who said so?’

‘Shy secret, stupid! – or I wouldn’t be so fussy. You needn’t get the wind up. I don’t fancy myself as Lady Lah-di-dah, I can tell you, and we won’t have any o’ that. Nelly Hyde’s good enough for me, because you can take it from me, and I oughter know, these talkies or whatever they call ’ em aren’t going to last, so you and I’ll just go on as we are. If it’s a girl I’ll take care of her. If it’s a boy I’ll keep myself to myself and you’ll bring him up as a gentleman, or get the right colleges and things to do it for you. And I can’t say fairer than that, seeing that it’s your spot o’ bother as well as mine.’

Henry was not a garrulous man. He received the information with a grunt. Nelly rattled on:

‘It’s a bargain, mind, and I’ll keep my part of it. And you needn’t start worrying about my relations turning up to disgrace you because I haven’t got any, not what you’d call relations. There’s only poor dad, and he’s been in the looney bin for nigh on twenty years, same as his father before him.’

‘What the devil is a looney bin?’

‘Lunatic asylum, of course! Fancy you not knowing! Don’t bolt your food like that or you’ll get hiccups, same as the rest of us.’

Henry pushed his chair from the table and without getting up lit a cigarette. In the official report that eventually came to the Department of Dead Ends, more than four pages are devoted to that cigarette. The first page contains an analysis of his smoking habits and proves that he habitually smoked only with coffee and after his bath. The remainder elaborates the theory that, while smoking this cigarette in total silence – in the circumstances somewhat unnatural behaviour – he was deciding that he would murder Nelly; a theory which seems to ignore that the sequence of events centring on the picture could not have been foreseen by Henry. When he had finished the cigarette she asked:

‘What are you going to do, Harry? – now I’ve told you the Glad News?’

‘Announce our engagement in The Times. I’ll be back this evening before you leave.’ It is noteworthy that he did go straight to The Times to authenticate the announcement.

Nelly was appearing at the one West End house that was still running the old type of music-hall show. Shortly before she was due to leave the flat, Henry came into her room and put the Brendon jewels on her dressing-table – a tiara, a collar, a star, and a bracelet. Nelly knew intuitively what they were, though she had never heard of them and could not guess that they occupied a tiny niche in English history.

‘Cor!’ For several seconds she was in danger of being overawed. ‘What’s the idea, Henry – you bringing that lot here?’

What was the idea? Thousands subsequently asked that very question. Even now it is difficult to assert that the jewels were being used as an ingredient in the already planned murder.

‘The law doesn’t allow me to give them to you, or I would. You have the use of them for life – or rather for my lifetime. After that, they’ll belong to our son, if we have one. Why not try them on?’

‘Not me! It’d bring bad luck. What you brought ’em here for I don’t know. I told you I wasn’t fool enough to think I could play Countess of Brendon.’

Henry said nothing. Nelly’s eyes were on the diamonds, and the diamonds won.

‘Oh, all right then! I’ll try anything once!’ Her hands looked ugly as she snatched the diamonds. When she had put them on, the effect was unexpected.

‘Well, I’m damned!’ exclaimed Henry. Her flamboyant physicality was able to absorb the preposterous illumination of all those diamonds. ‘My mother loathed them, but they suit you. Damned if they don’t!’

‘Henry!’ Nelly’s magnetism was at its highest power. ‘I believe I could pull it off as the Countess in spite of all I’ve said. I feel different somehow. It’s the jools, I expect. Oo! I’m doing Uncle Fred’s Lady Friend for my second number to-night, and these’ud look lovely “on”. D’you mind if I wear ’em?’

Henry did not mind. She wore the Brendon jewels on the stage that night while Henry discussed her future and his own with his uncle, the Duke of Maensborough.

Chapter Three

The conference between uncle and nephew can be viewed from the outside as the commiseration of a couple of snobs – or, at best, as the needless pre-occupation of two votaries of an Order which, for centuries, has stood for nothing but its own privileges and to-day has no meaning except to the idle-minded.

But this approach ignores the truism that a point of view which appears idle-minded to one man may be a religious ideal to another man which he will defend with his substance and his life and even, by a common confusion of thought, with his honour.

‘My dear fellow!’ The Duke spoke as to one bereaved. ‘I don’t know what the devil we’re going to do. It would mean you would have to leave the Regiment’ – the words hurt him for he was himself a retired lieutenant-colonel of the Guards – ‘that is, if you really intend to marry her?’

‘Can’t exactly let her down.’

‘Of course not! Everything is getting so morally complicated nowadays. There’s this young woman with her indisputable claim – I take it, it is indisputable? – and there’s Brendon, to say nothing of Maensborough, whose claims, my dear boy, are also indisputable.’

‘Vicious circle!’ contributed Henry. ‘Something’s got to snap somewhere. Don’t see how I can let her down.’

‘If she’s a bad woman she’ll accept a settlement,’ said the Duke. ‘And if she’s a good woman she won’t want to spoil your life and – and she’ll accept a settlement.’

‘She isn’t either. She’s very like us.’

‘It might have been all right but for the medical record,’ said the Duke. ‘Father and grandfather certified lunatics! Forget everything else. What the devil can we do?’ The Order, it seemed, was in peril. ‘The Socialists are rather fond of us, but the Communists are just waiting for a certified duke.’

It is in this conversation that we must look for the genesis of the murder, though it would be absurd to suppose that the Duke was consciously inciting his heir to a deed which he would have viewed with appropriate horror. Henry’s next remark was unfortunate.

‘Well, I suppose they’ll abolish us before long. We’re out of date, anyway.’

‘We may have been out of date in Victoria’s time. But we’re beginning to be useful again. Look at this feller the Germans are putting up – Hitler. Hindenburg will probably have to make him Chancellor. Then you’ll get another war – whole world in it. Everything in the melting-pot. And afterwards – science everywhere and manners nowhere. Engineer’s paradise, but nobody knowing what to do when they aren’t driving the engines. We represent social continuity. Show ’em how to keep their heads. How to get beauty and amusement out of life instead of cutting each other’s throats. What about my having a talk with the lady – in your presence, of course?’

‘She isn’t easy to talk to. Come and have supper on Friday night and you and I can go on to Maensborough afterwards. She gets back from the theatre about eleven.’

That, of course, was the night of the murder, though, guilty or not, Henry could not have been any more aware of this than the Duke himself.

In seeing his nephew out, the Duke stopped in the hall by the picture of the third Duke of Maensborough. It might almost have been a portrait of Henry in Stuart period dress.

‘He was an old scoundrel, y’know,’ chuckled the Duke. ‘Lent Charles II money and blackmailed Nell Gwynne into making him do something about the canals. Brought coal to London on a big scale – father of the industry – took his duty seriously in his own way. Charles got his own back by planting one of his ex-mistresses on him as a wife. Most unsuitable marriage, but it only lasted three weeks. The old villain got himself up as a highwayman and scuppered her.’ He patted the frame affectionately. ‘I’m writing his biography. I say, Henry, if this marriage comes off I shall have to cut off your income. Unsuitable marriage – definitely mentioned in the deed. But, of course, you can draw on me. I’ll fix something with your bank if the worst comes to the worst. But we’ll see whether I can do anything on Friday night.’

Chapter Four

On Friday night the Duke actually did nothing – which was Nelly’s fault rather than his. Normally, she had one bottle of stout after her ‘turn’. To-night this was supplemented with a couple of whiskies.

‘I was rotten to-night,’ she told Henry, who was waiting for her in the flat. ‘It’s these jools. Brought me bad luck, same as I said they would. As I got out of the taxi I saw a man slip into that sort of alleyway – you know, by the stage door – “Lone Jim” they call him because he always works by himself. And they say he was the one who did in that old girl at Highgate, strangled her with a bootlace, and then took her diamonds. And between you and I, Henry, he used to be Aggie’s fancy man. If Aggie’s been talking about those jools I’ll break her blasted neck.’

Henry disentangled it. Aggie was the dresser.

‘Did you tell Aggie they were the Brendon jewels?’

‘I may have mentioned it. And if you can’t mention a thing like that to your very own dresser, who can you mention it to? I want you to take ’em back, Henry. This minute.’ She put the collar into his hand, thrust the tiara into one of his pockets and the star and bracelet into another.

Henry went to his room, where a modern suitcase and an old fashioned portmanteau of a rich, mellow brown, stood packed in readiness for him to take to Maensborough. He unlocked the portmanteau, unstrapped it, put the jewels inside, then re-locked and re-strapped it. In the meantime Nelly was seeking to restore her nerve with a liberal gin and orange.

She had a second gin and orange when the Duke arrived, which, for a normally abstemious woman, was a great deal. It meant that she spent her last hour of life in a state of fuddled excitement. She received the Duke self-consciously, addressed him as ‘your Grace’ and asked him if he would ‘partake of supper’. Then she dropped that sort of thing, adopted him as an uncle and kept him in roars of laughter until she became maudlin.

‘Now listen to me, Uncle – I should say Duke, begging your pardon. Maybe you’ve been thinking about Henry and me. Well, I know what’s what – always have. Ask Henry if I haven’t. Why, look at that picture over there of him doing his act! Cost me forty quid and worth it. That’ll show you I wouldn’t disgrace him for the world.’

The Duke murmured assurances. It would have been useless to attempt a serious conversation with her.

‘It’s a lovely picture!’ enthused Nelly. ‘Shows you what’s what. Come and look at it, Uncle. It’ll make you feel better.’

She importuned him to an examination of the ridiculous picture at close quarters. She put her hand on a corner of the frame – no doubt with more weight than she intended, for the picture crashed.

Henry came to the rescue, shuffled the broken glass on to the skirting board, stood the picture flush with the wall. As the Duke moved away, he caught his foot in the wire and nearly tripped. Henry jerked the second staple from the back of the frame and was coiling the wire round his hand when the Duke said:

‘I think we’ll have to make a move, Henry. It’s past midnight and the drive takes nearly an hour. Can you get Marples up to take your luggage?’

‘I can ring him from the hall. I’ll bring my stuff out for him.’

‘And ask Service to come up and clear the supper things,’ put in Nelly.

On the house telephone in the hall, Henry told the porter to ask the Duke of Maensborough’s chauffeur to come up to the flat.

‘The chauffeur won’t want to leave his car, my lord. The police’ve been making a fuss about parking around here. I’ll be up meself in a couple o’ minutes.’

Henry thanked him and replaced the receiver. He did not ask Service to come up and clear the supper things. In the witness box he told Counsel that he forgot. Counsel preferred to believe that, as he intended to murder Nelly before he left the flat, he did not want Service to find the body too soon. But Counsel, of course, did not know what happened in the few minutes that followed Henry’s order to the porter.

Having replaced the receiver of the hall telephone he went to his room. But he found the door locked on the inside, so that he could not enter it from the hall.

He tried Nelly’s door, which was also locked. He went into the bathroom and through it into Nelly’s room, which he found in some disorder. Two drawers had been emptied onto the floor. A third drawer was open. Without touching anything, he went through the communicating door, which was open.

In his own room the portmanteau was gaping and he could see at once that the Brendon jewels had been taken. Nelly herself had not left the sitting-room. He remembered Nelly’s rambling about a jewel thief called Lone Jim.

His first thought was to telephone the police – his second was to close the portmanteau. Then he noticed that the straps had been cut instead of being unbuckled, and guessed that this was to avoid leaving finger-prints which would be difficult to rub out after the complicated process of unbuckling. From under the bed he dragged another portmanteau. This one had never mellowed like the other – it was still a harsh yellow. He intended to transfer the contents. But the yellow portmanteau was full of spare military kit.

Those cut straps had taught him something. He went into the bathroom, held his hands under a tap, then, while his hands were still dripping, transferred the straps. He put the lengths of cut strap through the slots of the yellow portmanteau containing his military kit, which he left in the middle of the room.

Then he strapped the mellow brown portmanteau containing his clothing and locked it, since the lock had not been damaged by whatever treatment it had received.

He left Nelly’s outer door locked. When he unlocked and opened the door of his own room, the porter was already in the flat. Nelly was standing by the outer door, one hand on the latch. The Duke, near her, was murmuring that he had had an extremely pleasant evening.

The porter took Henry’s luggage, preceded the party to the lift, a dozen feet along the landing.

‘Well, good-bye, Miss Hyde – or may I say good night, Nelly – and thanks again.’

‘Good night, Duke. Drop in any time you’re passing. S’long, Henry. I’ll try to be good till you come back next Friday.’ She lifted her face to be kissed. The Duke turned his back.

A few seconds later the Duke heard his nephew say: ‘All right, dear. I’ll shut the door.’

Then his nephew joined him and together they strolled to the lift, where the porter was waiting.

‘Between the Duke turning his back on you, Lord Brendon, and your joining him in the corridor, how much time elapsed?’

‘I don’t know.’ Henry seemed to be visualizing the scene. After a long pause he added: ‘At a guess, about ten to fifteen seconds.’

‘Ten to fifteen seconds!’ repeated Counsel. ‘In the late war, Lord Brendon, did you obtain your promotion by strangling a German sentry, thereby enabling your men to surprise a machine-gun post?’

‘No.’ With that frankness which at times seemed like sheer lunacy, Henry added: ‘But I see the drift of your question. During my period of training I was taught how to strangle a man quickly so that he would not be able to cry out.’

Counsel scowled. Brendon was throwing his own case away, giving Counsel no chance to shine.

‘By the method which you learnt as a soldier, Lord Brendon, how long would it take to strangle – let us say – a man, with – let us say – a length of picture wire?’

‘You could do it in a second or so, or not at all,’ answered Henry.

‘Thank you, Lord Brendon. I need trouble you no further.’ Counsel sat down. It was now five-thirty and the Judge adjourned to the following day. The reporters were already transmitting the copy which was to mislead the public into the belief that Brendon would not only lose his case but would inevitably be brought to trial for the murder and convicted. A shudder went round exalted circles, for the Duke of Maensborough was deeply committed. A dukedom is serious. No dukedom has ever been bought, nor even conferred for distinguished service since Wellesley was made Duke of Wellington for his share in the defeat of Napoleon.

In the corridor, Counsel told the cotton-broker that he thought it would be all right ‘bar accidents’ – in ignorance that the accident was at that moment in course of occurrence. Back in his chambers, Counsel meditated on the speech to the jury he would make on the following day. The speech, as a speech, would be fool-proof. Brendon could have strangled the girl in silence and laid her behind the door and would still have had five or six seconds in hand. The stale old trick of stealing his own jewels – the stale crudity of it – would be worked up. They were not even ordinary jewels, for they were entailed to the earldom of Brendon. No jewel thief would be such a fathead as to steal them. They would be itemized in the standard reference books. If some bungler had taken them, the fence would refuse to deal – which meant that the fence would at once tip off the police.

At six-fifteen that evening a junior Scotland Yard man, with whom he maintained friendly relations, burst into Counsel’s rooms.

‘You’re unlucky this time, Mr Manders! Lone Jim has been pinched at Southampton with the Brendon jewels in his possession – all, that is, but for two diamonds missing from the collar.’

Lone Jim pleaded guilty to the theft of the jewels, but not guilty to the murder. He had entered the flat by the fire escape, he asserted, at eleven-twenty, and had left it by eleven-thirty-five. After looking in Miss Hyde’s room and pulling out all the drawers, he had found the jewels in the adjoining room inside a locked portmanteau of which he had cut the straps and turned the lock with a skeleton key. He knew nothing of the two diamonds missing from the collar.

Lone Jim’s counsel emphasized that it was true that in Nelly Hyde’s room all the drawers had been pulled out, true that there was a portmanteau in the adjoining room, true that the straps had been cut. But in attempting to build up his client’s truthfulness he tripped, as it were, over those two missing diamonds.

Prosecuting Counsel has admitted in his memoirs that he was puzzled by those two missing diamonds. They had no relevance to the charge of theft. Feeling that they might have some round-about bearing on the murder he rattled them about in cross-examination.

‘You want the jury to believe that you are putting all your cards on the table, but you are parrying my question as to what you did with those two missing diamonds. I ask you –’

‘I’ve told you I didn’t do anything with ’em. They weren’t in the collar when I pinched it. I noticed they were missing as soon as I got home.’

‘You have heard the evidence of Lord Brendon and of Agnes Cope, the dresser. That collar had its full complement of diamonds as late as eleven o’clock. You assert that you stole the jewels some half an hour later. Do you ask the jury to believe that, in something less than half an hour, some other jewel thief entered that flat and contented himself with prising off two of the diamonds – when he might have taken the lot?’

Prisoner did not answer. Counsel had dazed him – and knew that he had made a tactical mistake in doing so. Something like a wave of sympathy for the prisoner swept over the court, carrying the impression that the prisoner was, after all, telling the truth – an impression strengthened by his outburst as he left the witness box. The descriptive reporters said that he looked more like a gutter sneak thief than a jewel robber, that he was cringing as if he had been physically pummelled.

‘You done what you’re paid to do and I know what’s coming to me,’ he shouted at Prosecuting Counsel. ‘All the same, since I been in that there witness box I haven’t uttered a word of a lie.’

Even some of the police representatives thought that this might get him off the murder charge. They were holding in reserve an indictment for the robbery and murder of an elderly lady at Highgate. But this was never used. Lone Jim was unable to produce any witness or any circumstantial evidence to rebut the contention of the Prosecution that he must have entered the flat later than midnight – that is, after Brendon and Maensborough had left it. The judge summed up against him and he was convicted of the murder of Nelly Hyde and in due course hanged.

Chapter Five

Aristocracy throughout the world sighed with relief. The Order was no longer in peril of public contempt. The pendulum swung heavily in Lord Brendon’s favour. His damaging admissions in the witness box were recognized as the uncalculating honesty of an innocent man. His generous waiver of damages against the cotton-broker proved him a sportsman. The impropriety of living with Nelly without benefit of clergy was slurred over. His reckless behaviour with the jewels was not mentioned. He retained his commission in the Guards and his hereditary footing in what is vaguely described as the highest circles.

For a year he lived very quietly. Actually he was mourning Nelly, though many maintain that this is incredible. A couple of years after the execution of Lone Jim for the murder of Nelly Hyde, Henry became engaged to Lady Aileen Jarroman, a delightful unspoilt girl of twenty-five whose father, Canon the Earl of Doucester, was a more or less impecunious country parson. They were married in June at St Margaret’s, Westminster, and went for a three months’ honeymoon in Europe.

In the meantime, contrary to poor Nelly’s prediction, the talkies had virtually assassinated the old music-halls – a fact which had a catastrophic effect upon the lives of the Earl and Countess of Brendon, though neither had ever witnessed a film.

In August, 1931, a West End pawnbroker rang up Scotland Yard. A rather seedy woman, giving the name of Agnes Cope, had asked for a loan of one hundred pounds on two diamonds of the first water. The pawnbroker had detained the diamonds on a pretext.

Scotland Yard found the name and address genuine. The woman was a respectable theatrical dresser, whose last employer of any note had been the late Nelly Hyde. As the two diamonds missing from the Brendon collar had never been found, the dossier had gone to Dead Ends. Inspector Rason lost no time in calling on Agnes Cope, who protested that she could not understand what all the fuss was about.

‘I can’t show a receipt for ’em, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stolen them. I’ve had them a long time and never meant to part with them and wouldn’t have done if it hadn’t been for these talking films upsetting things so.’

‘Yes. Bit rough on the old timers, I must say. But progress and all that, you know! The one thing I want you to tell me, Aggie, is when Lone Jim gave them to you.’

‘He didn’t give them to me! He never gave me anything in his life.’ Then as if she were too tired for further invention: ‘I lent him forty quid on them.’

‘When?’

‘A month to the day after poor Nelly was done in. He had tried to sell those two diamonds, but no one would buy. He was desperate and he came to me.’

‘So you received them knowing they were part of the Brendon jewels with a murder tied on to them? That looks bad for you, Aggie.’

‘Not if you look at it straight, it doesn’t. I thought Brendon had murdered poor Nelly and pinched his own jewels – same as you clever detective gentlemen thought. All the same, I did ask Jim straight out if they were part of the Brendon jewels, as I had a special reason for thinking they might be. But he told me they were not.’

‘And you believed him, Aggie? A month after the robbery?’

‘Yes, I believed him – and I still do.’ She added: ‘He was such a liar that you could always tell when he was telling the truth.’

Rason discounted that and harked back. ‘What was your special reason for suspecting they might be the Brendon diamonds?’ he asked.

Her answer was rambling and full of personalities. In his report, Rason compressed it, but faithfully preserved the essentials.

‘Nelly had been sort of worked up and nervy for a long time, as she knew she wasn’t getting over so well as she used to. Well, the last night of her life, poor thing, just as she was coming to the theatre she saw Jim skulking about and it frightened her. She wore the jewels in her first turn and when she came back into the dressing-room for a quick change she says: “I nearly got the bird just now – it’s these jewels – they’re unlucky.” It was the first time I’d ever seen her really nervous. While I took her dress off, she undid the jewels and she dropped the collar – not on the rug but on the parquet flooring, which is hard. We left it there while I finished changing her. When she’d gone, I picked it up, and I saw that two of the settings had been damaged. I tried ’em with my fingers. The diamonds moved a little but wouldn’t come out. So I left them. When she’d finished I says “Nelly, my dear,” I says, “you give those diamonds back to Lord Brendon the very moment you set eyes on him,” I says, “and tell him to have his jeweller run over the settings, else you’ll get trouble and plenty of it,” I says. But she must’ve forgotten until he’d gone and then put ’em in his bag – which was the sort of silly thing she would do, poor darling!’

Personal impressions that people are telling the truth or lying or what not are rarely accepted at headquarters as a substitute for action.

‘I’m afraid I shall have to pull you in, Aggie. You can bet your sweet life those diamonds are Brendon’s. We’ll soon find out for you.’

He learnt that the Brendons would arrive at Southampton the following Tuesday night and go straight on to Brendon where they would shortly entertain a shooting-party.

Chapter Six

In a three months’ honeymoon in Europe the Earl and Countess of Brendon had about a fortnight to themselves. Brendon was a social ambassador of his country; for, even in the 1930s, that sort of thing was still considered politically important. There was a royal wedding in the Balkans, at which the Countess necessarily wore the Brendon jewels. She had to wear them again in Belgium during their last week.

Henry accepted responsibility for them. In the car that took them from Southampton to Brendon they were beside him in an attaché case. They would have to stay in the safe at Brendon until he went to London, when they would be returned to the Safe Deposit. To Henry the Brendon jewels were a nuisance and to his Countess a horror which ruined her normally delectable appearance.

On Wednesday morning Inspector Rason, accompanied by a colleague knowledgeable in precious stones, presented himself at Brendon Castle.

When he had explained his errand Brendon took him to the library and unlocked the safe.

‘It’s the collar, isn’t it? I have had to have the two diamonds replaced, as the jewels have been in use. Frankly, Inspector, I’m sorry the wretched business has cropped up again – though, of course, I appreciate the efforts of the police.’

Rason was murmuring platitudes when Detective-Sergeant Edwards interrupted:

‘These two diamonds I have in my hand could never have sat in that collar,’ he announced.

Rason controlled his disappointment. In the Department of Dead Ends, things hardly ever ran in a straight line. By the time real evidence reached him it had generally turned a somersault. In this case, it proved that Lone Jim had told the truth to Agnes Cope. Suppose Lone Jim had been telling the truth throughout?

‘Well, that lets me out, doesn’t it!’ said Brendon, good-humouredly as he returned the collar to the safe.

‘Hm! I’m afraid our people will start raking over the ashes,’ said Rason, ‘Anyhow, they won’t want you to come up to London, Lord Brendon. They’ll come down here.’

‘Good heavens! Why should I be dragged in, if those stones belong to someone else?’ The Countess knew no more than the barest outline of the Nelly Hyde affair and he was anxious to avoid forcing the details on her attention.

‘The fact that those diamonds are not yours,’ explained Rason, ‘will make our people believe that Lone Jim was telling the truth when he said the two diamonds were missing from the collar when he stole it. If you remember, it was proved that when Miss Hyde brought them into the flat that night at eleven, the collar was intact. That means that the two missing diamonds must have been detached in the flat by Miss Hyde or yourself.’

‘But that would be perfectly ridiculous behaviour on the part of either of us!’

‘So ridiculous that our people will try to find out exactly what did happen. It’s all red tape, of course, but it’s ten to one they’ll want to examine any effects you still possess which were at any time in that flat.’

‘I haven’t any effects that were at that flat – except, of course, a couple of portmanteaux and a suitcase, a map case – oh yes, and a canvas bed, army pattern.’

‘Well, it won’t take ’em long to run through those,’ said Rason, preparing to go. ‘There’s a local train at one-fifteen from Brendon station, I believe.’

‘Couldn’t you examine the stuff now and get it over?’ asked Henry. ‘The Daimler can run you to Taunton to catch the connexion and there’ll be time for lunch here first.’

Rason accepted the invitation to lunch. The butler mobilized a valet and two maids and within five minutes the library was littered with a canvas bed, a map case, a suitcase, and two portmanteaux. Rason turned his attention to the latter when the servants had gone. One was a pleasing, mellow brown; the other a harsh yellow. Rason picked up the brown one.

‘I fancy I recognize this one, Lord Brendon. Wasn’t it an exhibit at Lone Jim’s trial?’

‘No. The other one was – the yellow one.’

Rason contemplated the brown portmanteau as if he doubted Brendon’s statement. On one side was an initial. A ‘B’ between full stops. But the second full stop had been grazed off. He had recognized it from a written description in the dossier – a statement by the porter of the flats in Westminster: ‘I then carried down his lordship’s suitcase and a portmanteau. I would know the portmanteau again because I happened to notice it had a full stop on the wrong side of the initial.’

‘Was this portmanteau – this brown one – in the flat at the time when the murder was committed?’ asked Rason.

‘No,’ answered Henry. ‘I took it with me when I left the flat that night. It contained my clothes. I was going down to Maensborough with the Duke.’

‘Ah! Then we can put this on one side. It’s the yellow one we want – the one that was in the flat at the time – the one from which Lone Jim cut the straps – the one he found the diamonds in.’

He hoisted the yellow portmanteau on to the writing table.

‘Before we examine that portmanteau, Lord Brendon, I’ll tell you what’s in my mind. First – we know those two diamonds were in the collar when Jim stole it. Second – we’re going to assume that Jim was telling the truth when he said they were not in the collar when he got home. Very well! That leaves only one possibility. Those two diamonds must have left the collar at the moment when Jim was stealing them – without his knowing it! You’ll say that’s impossible, but it isn’t – because those two diamonds were loose in their setting.’ He told them what Agnes Cope had told him.

While Edwards gaped and Brendon looked bored. Rason went on:

‘If I am right, it means that, in snatching that collar out of this yellow bag, Jim caught the thing against the under-side of the lock and the two loose diamonds were wrenched off.’

Brendon raised his eyebrows. ‘Then you think they’re still in the bag – after nearly three years of packing and unpacking?’

‘Have a look, Edwards,’ ordered Rason. ‘Feel under the lock. Look for a hole in the lining under the lock.’

Edwards opened the yellow portmanteau.

‘I can’t feel anything, Mr Rason. And there’s no hole in the lining. And – I’m afraid I don’t feel anything through the lining. No, sir. I’ll swear there are no diamonds anywhere in that portmanteau.’

Rason collapsed, somewhat theatrically, into an armchair.

‘That’s the sort of thing that happens in my job, Lord Brendon. You blow off a beautiful theory and just make an ass of yourself. I was absolutely convinced that the only place on earth where those two diamonds could possibly be was in that bag where they’d been accidentally hidden. While you’re at it, Edwards, you might as well go through the other bag – the brown one.’

‘Not much point in that, is there?’ suggested Brendon. ‘As I told you, that’s the one I took out of the flat at midnight.’

‘Go through it all the same, Edwards,’ ordered Rason.

Edwards changed the position of the portmanteaux, setting the mellow brown one on the writing table.

‘Phew! There is certainly a hole in the lining just where you said, Mr Rason,’ reported Edwards.

‘Good! Just go on feeling for the diamonds and when you feel ’em, cut the lining.’ Rason sounded satisfied rather than surprised. ‘Lord Brendon, you’ve no idea what a lot of trouble crooks give us when they tell the truth. We take the line that they’re sure to be lying –’

‘I’ve got something here, Mr Rason!’ cried Edwards. A pocket knife was inserted. ‘Diamonds – two!’

We imagine Edwards flushed with excitement, Brendon still looking bored while Rason’s voice breaks the silence.

‘I think you said, Lord Brendon, that this was the portmanteau you took with you out of the flat at midnight. If those diamonds are yours it will prove that Lone Jim completed his robbery before you left the flat. It only remains for Edwards to tell us whether those diamonds could have “sat” – as he calls it – in the collar.’

‘By Jove! That’s a clever bit of work, Mr Rason!’ murmured Brendon. He went to the safe. But instead of producing the collar he shut the door of the safe and locked it on a combination. Then he faced Rason in silence, perfect understanding in the eyes of both men.

To the Earl of Brendon, aristocratic calm was no pose.

‘That fellow – Lone Jim – murdered a woman at Highgate, didn’t he?’

‘You can take it that he did. He’d have been hanged for that anyway. But I’m afraid that won’t save you from the charge of procuring a miscarriage of justice, resulting in the wrongful execution of Lone Jim.’

‘In plain English, I shall be charged with murdering Lone Jim and then with murdering Nelly Hyde. But not, I think, until Mr Edwards has proved that those two diamonds could – er – “sit” in the collar. It will take you twenty-four hours, won’t it, to get a judicial order to open that safe?’ As Rason nodded, Henry rang the bell.

‘These gentlemen will have lunch at once in the morning-room. And see that the Daimler takes them to Taunton in time to catch the two-thirty.’

‘Very good, my lord.’

The Order was again in peril of public contempt and must be saved. It would be hard not even being able to say good-bye to Aileen, but that would be impossible.

‘Do you think, darling, that you could amuse yourself this afternoon until teatime?’ asked the Right Honourable Henry Ashwen, Earl of Brendon, Knight of the Garter, Warden of the King’s Pleasaunces, heir to the dukedom of Maensborough. ‘I want to do a spot of work on the guns in case I don’t get time before next Tuesday. I always clean the guns myself.’

In her hearing he told the butler to tell the chauffeur to send him some petrol in an egg-cup with which to clean his hands.

Nobody outside the Department of Dead Ends had any doubt that he intended to clean his guns, and that he blew his brains out by the purest accident.

The Cowboy of Oxford Street

Chapter One

One of the curiosities of murder is that the murderer very rarely understands his own motive. ‘I did her in because I didn’t want her to make trouble with the wife.’ This has often been said, in varying forms; but it can never have been true.

We are driven to look for the real motive in some deep but unconscious emotional urge. There is the case of Andrew Amersham, a perfectly sane man in so far as a murderer can be sane – who committed the murder first and discovered his own motive afterwards.

Amersham was an amiable, rather pitiable little man. Not very likeable because he was stuffy and old-womanish in his tastes. Also, his credulity was over-developed – he would believe almost anything that was told him – a trait which, for some reason or other, the English strongly dislike.

We pick him up in the Spring of 1901 at the age of twenty-eight when he was living in a boarding-house at Islington, employed at a wage of four pounds a week by a firm of estate agents in Oxford Street. He is five-feet-four, thin, and rather sallow. He suffers badly from what would nowadays be called an inferiority complex, which is easily explained by the fact that he had long wanted to marry and that no remotely suitable girl had ever given him encouragement.

The perpetual snubbing drove him to a dream-life and in the early summer we find him going nightly to Olympia where Colonel Cody (Buffalo Bill) was beginning the final tour of his Wild West Show. Then suddenly this stuffy, old-womanish little man made an astonishing attempt to turn his dream into reality. He threw up his job in Oxford Street and signed on at the Show as a labourer for a three months’ tour of the provinces.

Here he fraternized with men who had begun life as real cowboys. One of them taught him the essentials of lasso work and rope spinning. He made sufficient headway to be put into the Show itself and to act as feeder in a rope-spinning act.

In October the tour came to an end. He appears to have made a clean breast of his motives to his former employers, who after a suitable homily gave him back his old job. By November he was again sunk in the misery of sexual loneliness. But in early December he met Constance Amelia Burwood.

She was a distinctly pretty woman of thirty-five, temporary companion to an elderly lady, whom she was helping in the choice of a house in Bryanston Square. At the estate agents’, Constance mistook Amersham for the manager of that prosperous business.

She astonished and delighted him by accepting his stammered invitation to dinner. She told him that she was the daughter of a deceased Colonel and he believed her. She told him that she had had one unhappy love affair when she was a young girl, after which she had put the thought of men out of her life – and he believed her again. The truth was that she had had anything but a dull life – that as her physical charms were beginning to fade she had run to cover and had fortunately stumbled upon a somewhat eccentric old lady who had forgotten to ask for references. Middle-age loomed ahead of her with the threat of destitution. She was perhaps unduly pessimistic, but it is none the less true that she would have married almost anyone who could afford to support her on the simplest scale.

To the unsophisticated Andrew she was full of pretty tricks and she undoubtedly knew how to make the most of what was left of her physical beauty. And so, with her tutored caresses, she healed the wounds left by innumerable snubs. Andrew Amersham was undoubtedly happy during the brief period of his courtship – so happy that he was taking no risks.

She had told him colossal lies about her past, but he was by no means straightforward with her. He let her go on supposing that he was manager, in receipt of a salary too reasonable to require definition. He sustained his deceit by drawing heavily upon his little nest-egg of some five hundred pounds left to him by his mother.

She gave him a hard-luck tale about the considerable sum of money left to her by her father, the Colonel. And another tale of a dishonest employer having robbed her of her own small savings. He believed them both and gave her eighty pounds with which to buy a trousseau. There was enough left from the nestegg to provide a comfortable honeymoon at Ilfracombe. Then came confession.

It arose quite naturally out of a discussion about taking a house and furnishing it when they returned to London.

‘We shall have to see about the furniture and try and arrange something,’ he told her. ‘And as for the house – what about Islington? You see, they only pay me four pounds a week and a small bonus at Christmas.’

Now whatever else one may say about women like Constance, it is true that society treats them somewhat harshly. In her life Constance had suffered many bitter disappointments – and she took this one very decently. There was, moreover, a bright side. Even a share of four pounds a week, with a small bonus at Christmas, and the hope of an ultimate increase, was a great deal better than the nothing to which she had fearfully looked forward.

‘All right, Andrew! Never mind about the house. We’ll live in digs. Perhaps something may turn up.’

Andrew was very doubtful about anything turning up, but Constance had ideas. One of the ideas materialized before Christmas – in the person of William Edward Harries.

Chapter Two

Harries was in the middle fifties – a business man living in partial retirement. Five years previously he had made himself responsible for the rent of Constance’s flat. He had been amongst the most loyal of her admirers but his wife had found out and brought the affair to an end. Now that his wife was dead he was delighted to renew the acquaintance and was immensely tickled by the fact that she was now a respectable married woman.

He was a big fellow, weighing some fifteen stone, old-fashioned in appearance, for he wore long side-whiskers (Dundreary) that had been fashionable in his youth. He was very well-preserved with scarcely a touch of grey. A breezy, genial-bully type of man with tastes, one must believe, that were more than a little tainted with eccentricity. For instance, it was he who insisted on meeting Constance’s husband.

From the start he gave their acquaintanceship an atmosphere of its own. He sent a formal invitation to Mr and Mrs Amersham to dine with him at the old Café de l’Europe in Leicester Square. But not in the restaurant. In a private room, decked with flowers.

Andrew was afflicted with an incurable respectfulness. ‘So this is Andrew!’ said Harries. ‘How d’you do, Mr Harries!’ said Andrew. And ‘Andrew’ and ‘Mr Harries’ they remained thereafter.

Throughout the dinner Harries took the measure of his man and enjoyed himself immensely. He had made no definite plan, though he had found where the Amershams were living and knew all that he needed to know of their circumstances. The plan, we may take it, grew up somewhere between the soup and the coffee.

He threw off a thin enough story about his previous acquaintanceship with Constance and saw that it was believed. He felt quite unable to avoid patronizing Andrew.

‘There, Andrew, my boy, that’s a curaçao! Don’t be afraid of it – it won’t hurt you. You watch Connie – she used to know how to put it down – didn’t you, my dear?’

Harries’ conversation bristled with that kind of remark and he saw that it told Andrew just nothing. Andrew was, he decided, a unique specimen who knew nothing of the current music-hall jokes and had never been to a farce. Harries could take any liberty he liked. We are told that he was actually holding Connie’s hand across the table when he made his proposition.

‘Connie, my dear, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you happily married to a man I can respect. We’ve cracked a few jokes and we’ve had a little horseplay – and with it all we’ve found that we’re friends. Now your husband’s my sort of man and I think we understand each other, eh, Andrew?’

‘Yes, Mr Harries, and thank you, I’m sure!’ Andrew, slightly fuddled with the wine and the liqueur, rose to his feet to make a speech about it, but Harries sat him down again.

‘Of course we do, Andrew! That brings me to what I want to say. I’m getting old, Andrew, and I’m very lonely. After so many years of domestic life I can’t get used to popping about from one hotel to another. You’re living in rooms and you can’t like that very much. Now suppose you were to take a nice little place at Hampstead and I’ll come and live with you as your paying guest. Of course, the house will be yours and you’ll be master. But the rent, the rates, the servants’ wages will be mine. And Connie shall tell me what the housekeeping works out at. I like a good table and now I’ve no dependants I’m able to pay for it.’

At this stage we have no more than the bare fact that Andrew consented. One imagines him demurring a little at first, but only at the possibility of Harries paying more than his fair share, for Andrew was not greedy. His fatal credulity must have made it easy for the others to reassure him on this point. In a month the three of them were settled at Hampstead.

Chapter Three

It was one of the new houses that had been built for an artist. It was an eight-roomed house with a studio on the top floor – an elaborate affair in fake-Tudor style with oak rafters, which would greatly have offended present-day taste. The studio was by far the best room in the house and so was allotted to Harries as a bed-sitting-room. There was one other room on the top floor and that was Connie’s, the middle floor being shared by the two maids and Andrew. The furniture and equipment, for every room except Andrew’s, was provided by Harries.

To this régime Andrew was contributing three-pounds-ten per week. The odd ten shillings, together with the trifling bonus at Christmas, barely paid his season ticket and lunches. It was when he was driven to borrowing four pounds from his lodger for the purchase of a new suit that Harries decided to make another change in his host’s fortunes.

Harries, more to provide himself with a lazy occupation than with the idea of making money, had bought an agency in what he regarded as a freak enterprise. He was, in fact, the English representative of a French firm who had hit on the idea of hiring actors to perform little plays which could be photographed and subsequently rented in the film form to those music-halls that made a feature of ‘Animated Pictures’. Harries had a single room in Shaftesbury Avenue and he turned up when he felt inclined and filled what orders had arrived by post.

‘Andrew, I don’t like to see a man of your ability hard up for a few pounds. Your people don’t appreciate you. I do. I’ll give you six pounds a week with a small commission to take care of my agency. There, boy, don’t thank me – thank Connie!’

And so Harries became not only Andrew’s ‘lodger’ but also his employer. Regarded by itself, it was a fair enough arrangement. Andrew was a good and conscientious worker, who more than covered his salary by the increased attention given to the business. For a year everything seemed to work smoothly – for everyone except Andrew. For during this year a number of little conventions had sprung up which, designed nominally for Andrew’s benefit, tended to leave him in the cold.

There was, for instance, what we may call the ‘outing’ convention. Within their first month together Harries, over breakfast, had asked them both to dine with him in Town that night and go to a music-hall. But after breakfast Connie had taken Andrew aside.

‘Of course he has to ask us both – with him living in the house. But he’s done so much for us that I do feel we oughtn’t to put him to any extra expense. And with taking two of us out everything’s doubled, isn’t it! I’m only thinking of you, Andrew. You’re much too independent spirited to like having another man spending a lot of money on you, which you can’t possibly return.’

It was Andrew himself who suggested that a simple way out of the difficulty would be for him to make an excuse to cry off. Next week there was another little outing with the same little speech in different words by Connie. After it had happened twice it slipped into being an understood thing that Harries should invariably invite them both and that Andrew should as invariably make an excuse – at which Harries would express a genially-bullying regret.

Shortly after Andrew had begun to work for Harries the dinner convention was established. Andrew left the office at six and, with a longish walk from the station, was rarely in the house before seven. Connie discovered that Harries tended to lose his appetite if dinner were later than seven. She and Harries had drifted into the habit of dressing for dinner – it saved trouble if they wished to go out anywhere afterwards. And as she felt sure that Andrew would not care to sit down in morning-dress, and further as he did not possess a dinner-jacket anyway, it seemed simpler that he should have a good square meal in the middle of the day and just a light supper about eight o’clock after dinner had been cleared away.

Andrew, of course, was very blind. Even with the six pounds a week and the small commission – with three pounds ten going to the household – there was little enough left after meeting his daily expenses, in which the good square meal was included. Twenty pounds a year was the utmost he could give to his wife as a dress allowance. But he knew nothing of dress values and merely thought she did extraordinarily well with the money.

Connie gradually accumulated several pieces of jewellery. First there was a gold wrist-watch, frankly and openly a present from Harries. There was nothing to cavil at in this, for Connie had presented Harries with an exactly similar watch bought at the same shop at the same time. The two watches, indistinguishable to the naked eye, were, they said, a quaint pledge of their friendship. There was a diamond ring which she told Andrew had cost five pounds – and he believed it. She told him she had won the five pounds at the races – and he believed her again. And later he believed the several tales which accounted for the bracelet, the pendant, and the brooch.

After his solitary supper he would join them in the drawing-room and stay with them until they drove him out with the phonograph, which he detested, being a quiet little man. He took up photography, pottered about with it in the evenings. At week-ends they were always ready to pose for him. The poor little fool took over thirty photographs of them together, sitting about the garden and what not.

It was not until the second year of this régime that he began to be acutely miserable. He made the discovery that in any given week he enjoyed scarcely half a dozen hours of his wife’s company. Not since they had been at Hampstead had she favoured him with a single caress. The old inferiority complex was inflamed again. Then quite suddenly he revolted.

One Saturday night he went into her room when she was dressing for dinner and was contemptuously snubbed.

‘It’s not fair, Connie. I’ve never been given a fair chance. We don’t have any home-life. We hardly ever see each other. And it’s all Mr Harries.’

‘I can’t argue with you now –’ she glanced at the wrist-watch Harries had given her ‘– you know he doesn’t like me to be late for dinner.’

Andrew struck an attitude, looking like a pocket Napoleon.

‘Harries must go!’

‘Don’t talk so silly, Andrew! We couldn’t keep up this house without him – nor the servants nor anything.’

‘We don’t want any of it. We could get a little place of our own in Islington.’

She utterly failed to understand what had happened. So she laughed at him and dared him to speak to Harries. She must have been very surprised when he took her at her word and went straight across to Harries’ room.

Chapter Four

‘Well, Andrew, my boy, what do you want? I shall be down presently. Won’t it wait?’

At any other time this would have cowed Andrew. But he was worked up now. He looked round the studio, taking in the fake-Tudor beams, the senseless skylight, the sideboard, the incongruous bed with its heavy rails. He stood there, hating the lot.

‘You’ve been very kind to us, Mr Harries. But I’ve been thinking it over and I don’t think it quite works, if you know what I mean. Of course, this is really your house – there’s no question of asking you to leave it. But I’m taking Connie away. We’re going to have a little place in Islington all by ourselves.’

Harries was not angry. His attitude to Andrew was such that he could never feel anger towards him. He laughed, quite sincerely, for he was amused.

‘Why, Andrew, if you and I part company where are you going to get another job?’ he asked.

‘I hadn’t thought about that, Mr Harries.’

‘Of course you hadn’t! Now run away, there’s a good lad! And ask Connie if she can spare me a minute. She can slip on a wrap if she isn’t dressed.’

Andrew went away. He even obeyed the order to tell Connie that she was wanted. For part of him was still pure automaton.

But there was a part of him that was nothing of the kind. There was that inferiority complex. We have all been told that a sense of inferiority is a very dangerous thing to nurse if you do not fully understand it. If you do not even recognize that you have one, heaven knows where it may drive you! And Andrew did not know that he had one – did not even know that Connie’s coldness to him had driven his imagination to create a dream-world in which there was no Harries. As once before he had created a dream-world in which there was no office but only cowboys – who had taught him lasso-work and rope-spinning.

To-night the dream had matured. Once again the dream translated itself into reality. He crept into Harries’ room in the small hours. He reached through the back bed-rails, noosed the neck of the sleeping man and, obtaining great leverage with his feet against the head of the bed, strangled him.

Then he threw one end of the rope over the nearest fake-Tudor beam. He could not pull the body up on the rope, for he weighed less than ten stone and Harries weighed fifteen. A man cannot pull a greater weight than his own, but if he is in reasonable health he can lift one far greater.

An upright chair and a directory. With his shoulder he got the dead man’s feet on to the directory. Steadying the body with the rope he pulled the body into an erect position. He fastened the other end of the rope round the double tassel-hooks normally used for the cord of the skylight. Then he caused the heels of the corpse to knock away the chair.

He was in no hurry. He was able to observe that in the brief struggle Harries had broken a thumb-nail. A suicide should show no signs of a struggle. Andrew looked about him.

In the bed, undamaged, was a gold wrist-watch, indistinguishable from the one Connie wore. Andrew fastened it on the dead man’s wrist, then moistened his handkerchief on his tongue and wiped away his own finger-prints. The unbroken wrist-watch would kill suspicion that there had been any kind of struggle, thought Andrew – whereupon he went to bed and slept until he was awakened by the scream of the housemaid who was taking tea to Harries’ room.

Chapter Five

Though there was no apparent reason for William Harries to commit suicide – there was still less apparent reason why anyone should want to murder him. True, as the police at once recognized, it might have been done by a jealous husband – but in this case the hypothetically jealous husband weighed less than ten stone. Even if he could have overpowered a man of that size he could not have hoisted him on to the beam and secured the rope on the double tassel-hook. There was, of course, the possibility that Andrew might have strangled him first and, in short, that he might have done exactly what he did do. But what might have happened is of little interest to Scotland Yard if it cannot be proved. And in this case it could not be proved.

There was no possibility, it seemed, of Andrew paying the penalty unless he confessed. And why should he confess? The poets may believe that the Avenging Furies haunt the murderer, but police records do not bear this out. Andrew, so far from being haunted, was undoubtedly proud of his deed. The murder, we may say, made a new man of him.

The new man, on the night after the inquest, went to his wife’s room. In her anger at what she regarded as his intrusion she gave voice to those suspicions which the police had kept to themselves. Whether it was mere abuse or not, he neither admitted nor denied anything. He just took one of her silver-backed hair brushes and beat her rather brutally. She put in a good deal of screaming, but as the servants had left after the inquest there was no one to hear her.

In the course of her screaming she let fly some of the virulent abuse she had learnt in her early career. But he merely walloped her the harder. It was when her strength was failing under his repeated blows that she gasped out:

‘Will – he’s killing me! Willie – don’t let him!’

The castigation immediately ceased. Until that moment he had not known why he was beating her. It was not for anything she had said – it was just that this meek little man was turning savage – finding his release, as the psychologists would say. And now her words, which in themselves proved nothing, suddenly brought a dimly apprehended fact to his full consciousness.

‘You’ve been carrying on with him behind my back. Go on – haven’t you?’

And then the dreadful retort gasped out between sobs:

‘What if I have! You didn’t think you were getting this house and all the rest of it for nothing, and you needn’t try to kid me.’

He did not mind her accusing him of the murder, rather liked it in fact. But this was a cruel charge – the more unbearable because he seems to have understood that, though unjust, anyone but she herself would have been justified in making it. To it he made what seems to us the irrelevant answer:

‘If I can’t kid you, you can’t kid me any longer.’

He pulled her from her bed. She scratched and bit him, but he got a good grip on her hair and dragged her into the room that had been Harries’. She was terrified, because she thought that he intended to murder her too. Indeed, it may well have been his intention to do so, but the intention was never fulfilled.

He flung her on the sofa, where she lay panting, too exhausted to attempt to run from the room. He snatched up a poker and broke the door of Harries’ sideboard. Then he helped himself to a stiff tot of Harries’ brandy.

‘I’ve been a fool – and you needn’t tell me that again, because I know it. You gave him what you ought to have given me, and it’s no good your saying I was standing in on it, because you know I wasn’t. I’ve hated it here.’

He took another brandy, sipped it while he sat on the edge of Harries’ bed, and looked up at the beam on which he had hanged him.

‘You’ve broken the glass of my wrist-watch,’ she whimpered. ‘It only came back from the mender’s to-day.’

But Andrew was not in the mood to bother about a wrist-watch.

‘I’m not the first man to be fooled by a woman. We don’t want to talk any more about Harries. He’s all over. The question is, what am I going to do with you? Serve you right if I was to string you up. But that’s all over. Tell you what I’m going to do with you, Connie. I’m going to forgive you.’

Now a man, in the simple calculation of Connie’s class, was a man. Harries, she quite realized, was ‘over’ – and it would obviously be wise to take what she could get. She poured forth a fervent torrent of promises of good behaviour for the future. But the swash-buckling, brandy-drinking, wife-beating Andrew was not afflicted with credulousness and paid no attention. At the end of it all she asked him where they were going to live.

‘I dunno. I’ll think it over. Tell you in the morning. And now hop off to bed – go on! Do what I tell you or I’ll set about you again.’

By the following morning the violence had evaporated, but the meekness had not come back. As they sat together in the kitchen over a breakfast which she had prepared he gave his decision.

‘We’re going to live here. The rent is eighty and it’s five weeks to June quarter-day. I’ll be able to manage it. You’ll have to keep the place clean and have supper ready for me when I come in – at seven.’

Chapter Six

What was left of Harries’ capital went to Chancery but the Agency went to Andrew. He ran over to Paris and obtained a renewal of the contract in favour of himself. While there, he established relations with another French studio and three Italian studios. For in those days France and Italy dominated the new-born industry.

Andrew scraped together the rent by quarter-day and was safe in his possession of the house for another three months – and in that short time a great deal happened.

In those days there was not in Great Britain a single house devoted solely to the film. Some of the music-halls ran it as a cheap turn, and there were a number of individuals on the road with a small assortment, who would turn up and take a room in the town hall for a couple of nights. Quite suddenly Paul Nillsen, a Swede, started a chain of tiny theatres to be devoted exclusively to the cinematograph film. But before he had opened a single theatre a rival chain was started by George Aventaar (the father of the distinguished Royal Academician). Each had to go to Andrew for service. Each offered an ahead contract with a cash deposit. By employing an astute solicitor on the contracts, Andrew was able to accept both offers.

The dramatic picture was making a slow start. They were ten-minute affairs, most of them very crude – but some of them struck a very high level of artistic technique (which is just about to be re-discovered). But with this new fillip, production increased and within a year the two-reel drama was born. Andrew was the first renter to occupy a whole house in Wardour Street.

In the meantime his personal life was passing through a no less startling phase of reconstruction. The murder, we may assume, was ever present in his memory, though not quite in the sense that the moralist would expect. So far from being a secret horror it became a positive inspiration to a life of freedom and self-determination.

For instance, there was the occasion some five months after the murder when he turned up at seven o’clock as usual to find Connie all in a flutter because she had mistaken the time and had not prepared his supper.

From the new Andrew she had almost expected another beating for her remissness and no doubt felt some difficulty in believing her ears when he said:

‘Never mind all that, Con! I’ve given you the chance and you’ve been trying to take it. Go and put your best clothes on – and all your jewellery – we’re going out. Hurry up. And don’t forget the jewellery!’

He took her out to dinner. To a private room at the Café de l’Europe, decked with flowers.

‘Remember when we were here before, Con? … Made a bit of a mistake that night – me the same as you. That’s all over. You and I are getting along fine. Brought you something – catch hold!’

A jeweller’s box. And inside was a new gold wrist-watch. But this gold wrist-watch was set with diamond points.

‘That’s better than the one he gave you. Look at the diamonds. Put it on and chuck his in the river.’

Connie gushed with gratitude and renewed penitence.

‘I wouldn’t ever have worn his jewellery again, only you told me to, Andy. I never really cared for it. And I promise you, you won’t see any of it again ever.’

‘Rats!’ said Andrew. ‘You go on wearing that stuff every time I take you out until I can give you better.’

At intervals of a few weeks, he brought her back to the same restaurant and substituted first a better diamond ring, then a better pendant, a better bracelet, and finally, just after Christmas, a better brooch. But Connie demurred against throwing Harries’ jewellery into the river.

‘The wonderful luck you’ve been having in business might turn, Andy, and then we’d be glad of the stuff to pawn it. Let’s keep it out of sight somewhere, just in case.’

‘All right!’ he agreed. ‘It isn’t luck – it’s brains. But you can store the stuff if you like. And if ever I can’t keep you a bit better than he could, you pawn it and welcome.’

On the same principle he gradually replaced every item of furniture that Harries had bought, down to the last saucepan and corkscrew. When everything in the house was his own, bought by himself, he let Connie engage a cook-general to help her. Then a cook and housemaid – which brought him level with Harries. Then a cook, a housemaid, a parlourmaid and a whole-time gardener – and Harries was definitely beaten.

This ended the reconstruction phase, after which he seems to have settled down. Within three years of the murder he was paying income-tax on three thousand – and even so his returns were not as frank as they ought to have been. Andrew was saving money, though he gave his wife pretty nearly everything she wanted. He never beat her again – was, in fact, very kind to her.

Connie, for her part, turned into a somewhat timid but very respectable wife. She was a bad manager, having perpetual trouble with her servants. But there is no doubt that she did her best with the instinctive loyalty of her class to the paymaster.

The last of a long line of servants whom she had dismissed had known all about the cash-box under a loose board in the built-in wardrobe with its little cache of jewellery – Harries’ jewellery. After she had left, she imparted the information to a boy-friend, who called when Connie was shopping. It was not until six weeks later – August 1906 – that Connie discovered her loss. She went straight to Scotland Yard about it. By October, Scotland Yard had fished the jewellery out of four London pawnshops.

Chapter Seven

Detective Horlicks had recovered the jewellery. On a Friday evening, he showed the items to Detective-Inspector Rason, of Dead Ends.

Rason borrowed the jewellery and looked long at the gold wrist-watch. From a cabinet he produced the gold wrist-watch that had been found on Harries’ wrist after death. He noted that, in outward appearance, they were exactly the same.

‘You might bring the Amershams in here first, Horlicks. I’ll send the jewellery back to you when I’ve done with them.’

Connie was again all of a flutter, a very frequent state with her. She had visualized a respectful detective handing her back her jewellery in her own house, urging her to prosecute the horrible girl who had so basely betrayed her kind mistress. Instead, had come an anything but obsequious invitation to Scotland Yard, and she had refused to face the ordeal without Andrew.

Each item of jewellery was in a little cardboard box bearing the name of the pawnbroker from whom it had been recovered. Connie identified the ring, the bracelet, the pendant, and the brooch, and finally the gold wrist-watch.

‘That watch looks to me extraordinarily like the one found on your late lodger, William Harries, after death. Are there any special marks by which you could positively identify that watch as your property, Mrs Amersham?’

‘Yes, Mr Rason. If you open the back, you’ll find some reading inside. It says: “W.H. to C.A.” I’m C. A.’

‘And William Harries was “W.H.”?’

‘Yes. They were presents to each other, weren’t they, Andrew? I mean, I gave him one exactly like that, with the initials the other way round.’

‘Just open the watch, will you, Mrs Amersham, and see if the initials are there. Then p’raps I needn’t trouble you any further.’

It was not until that moment that Connie remembered some ‘jumbling up’ of the two watches. But she was as muddled about this as about everything else.

With a certain difficulty – for she had never done it before – Connie prised open the back of the watch. A moment later, her unease was justified. Completely ignorant of police methods, she snapped the back of the watch into position.

‘Yes, it’s my watch all right. I’m sure I’m much obliged.’

Rason held out his hand for the watch. He opened the back.

‘“C. A. to W.H.”’ he read aloud. ‘This is the watch you gave Harries. Not the watch he gave you!’

‘Oo! Well! Yes, I suppose it must be, now you mention it, Mr Rason. Fancy me not noticing the letters being that way round!’

‘So you have been in possession of Harries’ watch for the last three years. That means that the one found on his wrist was really yours. How do you account, Mrs Amersham, for your watch being on Harries’ wrist?’

‘Why, they’re as like as two peas, Mr Rason! They might have got jumbled up some time, and poor Will might have put mine on by mistake.’

‘Thank you!’ said Rason and turned to Sergeant Horlicks. ‘Perhaps Mrs Amersham would like to wait in your room, Sergeant.’

With growing discomfiture, Connie found herself accompanying Horlicks through a maze of corridors, to a room deemed to be the sergeant’s. As yet, there was nothing in her mind beyond a vague fear that she might be accused of stealing Harries’ watch.

‘I don’t know why there was all that fuss!’ she said. ‘I remember now I happened to go to Mr Harries’ room that night – to talk about something. I – I sat on his bed – and I expect my watch came unfastened and I expect he put it on absent-mindedly. His own was being mended. It was delivered at the house a day or so after his death – the day of the inquest, it was. So I thought it wasn’t worth bothering anybody, and as my own watch had been taken away with the rest of his things, it seemed simplest for me to keep his.’ She added: ‘Nach’rally, I didn’t want to say all that in front of my husband.’

‘Detective-Inspector Rason had better be told,’ said Horlicks, grasping its significance. ‘You stay here. I’ll tell him.’

In the meantime, Rason had already pointed out that Mrs Amersham’s explanation was inadequate.

‘Follow this, Mr Amersham. William Harries – died – in the small hours of May 18th, 1903.’ He fluttered a dossier. ‘We have here a statement, taken at the time, from a Mr Murfoot, jeweller Hampstead, saying that, on May 17th, William Harries brought a gold wrist-watch for repair of the glass. So he could not have mistaken your wife’s watch for his own, because he knew that his own was at the jeweller’s.’

‘Have it your own way, Mr Rason.’

‘Two days later the watch was delivered at your house. I suggest Mrs Amersham claimed it as hers to prevent our asking awkward questions – dangerous questions, Mr Amersham.’

‘Cor! She wouldn’t have it in her to think o’ that!’

‘You had better say nothing, or it may be used in evidence,’ warned Rason. ‘That watch found on Harries’ wrist had no finger-prints on it. If Harries had put it on himself, he would have been bound to leave finger traces if not finger-prints. One of you put that watch on his wrist after he was dead. The one who did this part of the job wetted a piece of thin cloth with the tongue and rubbed the whole watch and bracelet attachment. Microscopic examination at the time revealed saliva.’

Backchat, Andrew perceived, would not extricate him. Rason was getting into his stride.

‘You two crept into his room that night. You noosed him as he lay asleep. Then both of you pulled on the rope and swung him up. In his struggle to tear the rope from his neck he broke a thumb nail. To hide traces of the struggle one of you put the wrist-watch on him.’

‘You can leave her out, Mr Rason.’ Andrew had made his decision. ‘I did it all by myself. She didn’t know anything about it.’

The bare statement was of little use to Rason, even when witnessed by Horlicks, who had just come in. He wanted circumstantial detail.

‘That’s plucky of you, Amersham! But if you’re offering that as a confession, I can’t accept it. You must have been in it together. You couldn’t have pulled him up by yourself – he was too heavy.’

‘I didn’t pull him up, Mr Rason. I lifted him up – after I’d strangled him on the bed … All right, I’ll say it slowly so’s you can write it down. But let her go first.’

Sergeant Horlicks decided that it would merely be inhuman to report Mrs Amersham’s statement.

The Clue of the

Red Carnations

Chapter One

Perhaps the most dangerous and troublesome method of disposing of a murdered body is to pack it in one or more travelling trunks for deposit at a railway station: this method is commonly used in poverty areas where the corpse cannot be conveyed unobserved to an automobile.

Hugh Wakering, however, himself a well-to-do lawyer, broke most of the rules of the Trunk Murder. For one thing, the trunk was a packing-case designed to carry machinery: for another, the corpse, adequately concealed in a large Wellman car, was driven for about eighty miles under cover of darkness over long stretches of open country; for a third, the murderer, having successfully deposited the corpse, found himself compelled to carry away from the railway station a fantastic ‘clue’, six feet long and weighing exactly one hundred and forty-five pounds – namely the driving shaft of the Arbee Steam Roller.

The shaft was consigned to Messrs Tibbits of Dinton, a market town some eighty miles west of London, on a loop line from the tiny junction of Sudchester. On February 1st, 1936, the railway locomotive drivers and firemen struck work. On the morning of February 2nd, Messrs Tibbits sent a lorry the dozen odd miles to Sudchester to pick up the driving shaft, which would otherwise stay there until the end of the strike.

The packing-case arrived in their yard at nine o’ clock and was at once opened. As is known, it was found to contain, not the shaft of the Arbee Steam Roller, but the naked body of a man in early middle age, subsequently identified as that of Cuthbert Bridstowe, a prosperous coffee broker.

Medical evidence established that death, inflicted by a bullet fired at close range from behind and shattering the spinal column, had occurred within twenty-four hours.

Obviously, it was not a local murder, so Scotland Yard was at once informed. By midday, Superintendent Karslake’s men on the spot were reporting that the packing-case had arrived at the loop line junction of Sudchester at eight on the evening of January 31st. The medical evidence therefore established Sudchester as the site of the substitution.

In the packing-case, wooden rests supporting the shaft, which could have been slipped from their slots, had been clumsily smashed, suggesting a man with no mechanical training and no general handiness.

There had been no official at Sudchester station between eight at night and five the following morning. As the station stood by itself in almost open country, it would have been easy to break into the goods shed, though the latter bore no signs of a forced entry.

The driving shaft of the Arbee Steam Roller was not at Sudchester.

Further investigation drew from the porter who had opened the goods shed in the morning that the only unusual thing he had noticed was a bunch of red carnations in the yard, close to the doors of the goods shed. As the flowers had faded, he had thrown them on the refuse dump, where they were found by Karslake’s man. The carnations were wrapped in a folded poster, the size of a newspaper page, carrying propaganda for an Animal Society.

‘We want that driving shaft,’ said Karslake. ‘Send it out on the teleprinter. Pass me the makers’ description and put me through to the BBC.’

The teleprinter yielded quick results. From Whitchurch, forty miles Londonwards of Sudchester, came a report that a constable on cycle patrol had seen a Wellman car stop on the bridge at one-forty a.m. A man got out, stretched himself and leant over the parapet. Suspecting that he might be about to throw himself into the Thames, the constable approached and asked him to explain himself.

As was later obvious, the man was Wakering, the murderer. But he gave the constable the name of the victim, Cuthbert Bridstowe, producing Bridstowe’s driving licence, log, and insurance certificate, containing Bridstowe’s address, duly reported. The constable’s report added that the bucket seat had been removed to make room for a piece of machinery answering to the description of the driving shaft, though the driver had said it was part of an hydraulic lift. As there was no reason to suppose such a piece of machinery to have been stolen, the constable had made no further inquiries. On the back of the car was pasted a poster, about the size of a newspaper sheet, propagandizing for an Animal Society.

Independently, came a report from Sudchester that bloodstained clothing and a revolver – subsequently identified as the property of the deceased – had been found in a gravel pit some three miles west of Sudchester. Karslake’s men had been led there by a yokel who had been given a lift by this unusual murderer and had actually sat on the Arbee driving shaft.

With the six o’clock news, the BBC broadcast the Whitchurch constable’s description of the man, the number of the car, the details and number of the driving shaft.

Then information poured in piecemeal. When tabulated, it revealed that, after leaving Sudchester Junction, the driver had knocked up the garage in Sudchester village, shortly after eleven, had taken six gallons of petrol and had then driven on to the gravel pit, where he had dumped the clothing and the revolver, and would, no doubt, have added the driving shaft if he had not been interrupted by the yokel.

The car had then turned back and travelled straight-road through Whitchurch to London. At two-fifteen, at an all-night garage near Kew Bridge – on the western fringe of the built-up area which is London – the pumpman had supplied five gallons. He noticed the bucket seat had been moved to make room for a piece of machinery and that there was a poster on the back of the car.

Finally, the Shell Mex garage in the Strand, Central London, reported that the Wellman of that number had been garaged shortly after three a.m. But the bucket seat was in its proper position, and there was no driving shaft in the car.

‘Then he brought that spare part into London!’ pronounced Karslake. ‘And he couldn’t have allowed himself as much as ten minutes off the route for dumping it. Where could you dump a thing like that in London? Hm! Only in the parks. Ring’em all up and ask for an immediate search. Tell ’em if it’s there, it’s bound to be near the roadways.’ Karslake added: ‘If our man has still got that spare part, he’ll have to keep it until we call for it.’

‘Is anything to be done about those carnations, sir?’ asked his junior.

‘Might as well check up, as a matter of form,’ answered Karslake. ‘The poster – same as the one pasted on the car – is issued by that Hemmelman woman. Ask her if she can oblige with a list of those who have received copies. It might yield something – about the deceased, of course. A murderer doesn’t carry flowers around.’

Chapter Two

Karslake cannot be blamed for failing to guess that the clue-value of the carnations lay, not in their wrapper but in the flowers themselves – in the fact that they were in the car at the time of the murder. As an abstract clue, the carnations were, so to speak, crushed under the weight of the Arbee driving shaft. For Hugh Wakering – the murderer, as we must call him – had been ‘carrying them around’, and actually had them in his hand when he shot Cuthbert Bridstowe. Indeed, the scent of them had been a vital factor in the act of pressing the trigger.

True that the wrapper quickly brought Scotland Yard face to face with the murderer and put him in some danger. If he had been questioned about the carnations instead of about the wrapper, Wakering would have lost his nerve. This he admitted when he was dying – in his own bed, in his own house, ten years after the murder.

The second broadcast described Wakering as being about five feet nine, in the middle thirties, dark hair, dark eyes a little prominent, regular features and well-cut clothes, refined speech, probably a member of the professional classes.

He was, in fact, a solicitor. He had a small but comfortable practice, with offices off Mincing Lane, where the tea and coffee brokers predominate. The police description was valueless, for it could have been applied to thousands. It failed to explain that he had a particular kind of handsomeness, comparable with that of a film star, so that strangers who had once noticed him tended to recognize him. Yet, oddly, his appearance seems to have been wholly lacking in appeal to women. At thirty-six he was still living with his mother.

The trail of the murder begins on January 28th at nine in the morning, outside the gates of Holloway Prison. Wakering’s clientele included not a single crook, but it included that astonishing public figure, Mrs Hemmelman, a wealthy widow, the generous champion of almost any lost cause that had a crankish twist to it. Mrs Hemmelman had chosen to serve a month’s imprisonment rather than pay a fine of forty shillings imposed for failing to keep one of her dogs under proper restraint. And she had asked Wakering to meet her on discharge.

When Wakering arrived at the prison he saw Mrs Hemmelman’s Rolls-Royce parked at the kerb, its stately rear disfigured by a poster, the size of a newspaper page. For the dog incident had been elevated to a burning social question, demanding immediate legislation. A quire of the wretched posters had been sent to his office for distribution among animal fans.

After passing the time of day with the chauffeur, Wakering decided to wait by the Rolls. He waited quite a long time, unaware that Mrs Hemmelman, now a free woman, was upbraiding the Lady Governor on defects of the prison system, with special reference to the Lady Governor.

While Wakering was thus stamping to keep his feet warm, other female prisoners were emerging to freedom. And presently came Jeannie.

He stared very hard but was still uncertain, for it was twelve years and two months, he remembered, since he had last seen her. She was already walking away in the direction of the City. He ran after her.

‘Jeannie!’ Again he was short of absolute certainty. Apart from the changes in her face, her dress was all wrong. ‘Jeannie Bridstowe!’

‘Why, it’s old Hugh!’

Her voice, we must imagine, played on his nervous system and made him forget her altered appearance and her unsuitable dress – the voice that had thrilled him a dozen years ago. The shock was therefore the greater when the tone roughened as she added: ‘I saw you as I came out of stir and I said it can’t be him.’

Stir! He clutched her arm.

‘Jeannie! What were you doing in that prison?’

She wrenched her arm free.

‘Six months, if you want to know. Anything else before we say good-bye? Good-bye!’

‘Don’t dare to talk to me in that disgusting jargon!’ It was a cross between a command and a prayer, for the dream of a dozen years was being grossly profaned. ‘Does Cuthbert know you have been in prison?’

‘Cuthbert? Oo, I see what you’re getting at – you called me “Jeannie Bridstowe”. So I was, for a month or two. But we never got married. I’d almost forgotten.’

‘Never got married! But I sent you both a telegram and a wedding present!’

‘Yes, I remember now. That was nice of you, Hugh!’ Again the voice and manner of a dozen years ago, this time driving out the last flickering consciousness of his duty to Mrs Hemmelman. Jeannie went on: ‘But we couldn’t explain at the time. And there’s no sense in raking it all up now. So let’s say goodbye as friends. I can’t answer a lot of questions about everything – I can’t really.’

‘I won’t ask you a single one. But I’ve got to tell you something.’

‘All right then! I know a nice little place where we can sit for a bit. But we’ll have to take a bus, because they don’t like taxis stopping.’

They had to walk to the bus halt. On the way they passed a florist’s.

‘Red carnations!’ exclaimed Jeannie. ‘They used to be my lucky flower. D’you remember?’

Yes, he remembered. He urged her into the shop and bought her a bunch of red carnations at five shillings each. Their scent brought him unbearable memories of frustrated desire for her – for Jeannie as she used to be. He could hardly bear to look at her now. He relieved her of her canvas hold-all to enable her to carry the carnations.

She took him to a cellar bar in the neighbourhood of King’s Cross Station, where drinks were served round the clock – a resort of small crooks too stupid to realize that the police let it function solely because it acted as a sort of mouse-trap. Half a dozen couples were distributed about the bar. A fat, white-faced man, unnoticed by Wakering, gave Jeannie a furtive glance of welcome. The potman greeted her as ‘Jeannie’.

She piloted Wakering to a quiet corner.

‘Mine’s a double Scotch,’ she said.

At that time of day! But, for Wakering, the actuality of Jeannie was snowed under in a desperate determination to salvage his dream.

‘This is what I have to tell you, Jeannie. Please don’t say anything until I have finished.’

He began with a rather rose-coloured picture of the days when Jeannie Ruthen was a typist employed by the administration of London University, and the two friends, Hugh Wakering and Cuthbert Bridstowe, were law students, and Hugh was in love with Jeannie, whose attitude was correctly non-committal. Then, rather larger than real life, came the introduction of Jeannie to Cuthbert Bridstowe shortly after they had graduated.

Bridstowe obtained a post in Manchester. Jeannie joined him there, to stay for a week, as Hugh Wakering was given to understand, with an aunt of Bridstowe’s, at the end of which they would be married.

‘I meant everything I said in that telegram, Jeannie. Although I was heartbroken, I was also happy, because I honestly believed that Cuthbert was the better man, who would give you a fuller life than I ever could. And I loved you so much that I was happy for your sake.

‘I heard when Cuthbert gave up the law and stepped into his uncle’s business. For one thing, the firm’s office is almost opposite mine – so near that, for nearly every working day of the last ten years, I have watched Cuthbert arrive in the morning – watched him get into his car after the garage man has driven it round at five in the afternoon.

‘But I never approached him. I bore him no ill-will whatever. But I knew I could not endure his physical presence – that it would remind me too much that he held you in his arms. I felt it – more honourable – to keep out of the way.

‘I know all about Cuthbert. He happens to have become an animal fan; a wealthy client of mine, a well-known woman, often talks about him, though she doesn’t know I knew him once. When I heard he had a son, I thought it was your son. That was six years ago. I have been imagining you as a happy wife and mother – in a queer sort of way I’ve been sharing the happiness I believed to be yours and his. For all these years. So you see, Jeannie, you can’t just meet me in the street and say good-bye.’

‘Well, fancy!’ exclaimed Jeannie. ‘I hadn’t any idea you felt like that about me, Hugh. Makes you think, doesn’t it!’

She gave him a reasonably truthful account of herself. It was a standard story of seduction under promise of marriage – redeemed from the commonplace only by the fact that she had no particular grievance against Bridstowe – was inclined to blame her own shortcomings. In time, she had drifted into the underworld, with occasional excursions into petty larceny – mainly from parked lorries – resulting in a number of short prison sentences.

Hugh Wakering barely listened, for he had by now read the essentials of her history from her appearance and her habits and her speech. He observed that she had consumed his whisky as well as her own. She was socially, morally, and physically degraded – by the man he had thought better than himself!

To the introvert, self-dramatization is the breath of life. Hugh Wakering saw that the dream need not be salvaged – the dream in which he had figured as a saintly numbskull. This time he would play an heroic role. After his death someone would write of him as one of the great lovers of history – a man who implemented the loftiest principles in his everyday life.

‘Jeannie, my dear, Cuthbert Bridstowe’s love – if we can so call it – did nothing but hurt you. It brought you years of sordid wretchedness.’

‘Oo! Steady on! I wouldn’t blame it all on poor old Cuthbert.’

‘I do.’ He resented the interruption. ‘I was going to say that my love is unchanged by what you have been telling me. It is exactly as it was a dozen years ago. Yes, I mean it, Jeannie, with every fibre of my being. D’you know what I am going to do? I am going to take you home to my mother. I live with her. And in four days we will be married. I happen to be doing moderately well and can give you all the small comforts. And I shall devote my life to the task of making up to you for what you have suffered.’

Viewed from the angle of the poor little drab, it was a colossal bribe. But Jeannie had never cheated a man who had been kind to her.

‘I couldn’t, Hugh! Your mother wouldn’t stand for it. And, if you must know, I’ve got something here.’ She indicated her lungs. ‘The doctor in stir told me. And besides, what’s the use of pretending? I couldn’t stick your kind of life, however hard I tried.’

‘You think you couldn’t, but I know you’re wrong.’ A brave, patient smile spread over the handsome face. ‘I will never take no for an answer, Jeannie. But I will not force you to anything – I will win you. You needn’t come home with me now if you don’t want to. But you must let me give you sufficient money –’

‘Not here!’ whispered Jeannie. ‘Those others’ll see.’

Before they parted she accepted a few pounds for old times’ sake and gave him an address. Hugh Wakering was content. Not by bullying her, as others had done, but by gentleness and charm he would gain her unlimited confidence and then her abject devotion. He would build where others had destroyed. He had not exaggerated when he said that the new dream permeated ‘every fibre of his being’. When he is thus possessed by a fixed idea, an introvert becomes a fanatic.

Chapter Three

The next day he called at her lodgings with the intention of taking her out to lunch at some obscure restaurant where he could begin on her table manners. The landlady, of the kind he had more or less expected, told him:

‘It’s all her own fault. You know what a frightful night it was last night, with sleet and that east wind. She would go out, though she wasn’t short o’ cash. I told her it would bring back her coughin’, and so it did. This morning she was all hot and raving, so not wantin’ anything to happen I called the doctor to her and he popped her off to the Metropolitan Hospital.’

At the hospital, Wakering interviewed the almoner. He paid in cash for Jeannie to be moved from the ward to a cubicle and to be given every purchasable comfort. He was informed that her temperature had dropped, and that he would probably be able to see her the next day. He was not asked his name, but was tactfully addressed as ‘Mr Smith’. To the hospital authorities, anonymous interest in patients of that class was not unfamiliar.

The next day, when his typist was going out to lunch, he asked her to buy him a dozen red carnations. He himself always lunched in the office on coffee and sandwiches. At three, after signing his letters, he announced that he was going out and would not return that day. The paper wrapping the carnations was wet and came unfolded when he picked up the flowers. On a side table were the ‘wretched posters’, with photographs of Mrs Hemmelman and her slandered dog. They were at least dry. He doubled one and used it as a wrapper for the red carnations.

When he reached the hospital he was shown into the matron’s office, where he was informed, through the formula designed to convey sympathy, that Jeannie was dead. There followed a brief explanation of the reason for the sudden collapse, which he did not hear.

‘She’s dead! Thank you!’ said Wakering and walked out before the matron could raise the question of funeral expenses. He was not interested in Jeannie’s funeral. He was not, indeed never had been, interested in Jeannie herself. But his personality was hopelessly entangled in the dream, of which the person of Jeannie had provided the raw material.

He walked on, unconscious of his direction. The new, energizing dream had been violently torn from him. He would not be able to build where others had destroyed. No one would write of him as one of the great lovers of history. He would die as he had lived, a solicitor with a small practice – a man who had never had the virility to secure a woman for himself.

As he strode on, hot tears of frustration and self-pity dropped on the carnations that were to have been the banner of Jeannie Ruthen’s regeneration. His stark tragedy overshadowed the universe, brought him a wide generosity so that he forgave everybody, particularly Cuthbert Bridstowe. This thing was too big for jealousy. To know all is to forgive all. He would tell Cuthbert what had happened and they would comfort each other.

His feet, no doubt directed by his subconsciousness, were taking him to Cuthbert Bridstowe. Daylight faded into dusk as he walked. The lights were up when he found himself staring at a photograph of the preposterous Mrs Hemmelman and her dog, pasted on the back of a car. Cuthbert Bridstowe’s car. The garage man had just brought it round, and Bridstowe would turn up in a minute.

Wakering got inside the car, sat on the back seat. Jeannie herself had said poor old Cuthbert was not to blame. Their friendship could remain unchanged – could become exactly as it had been a dozen years ago. He could remember the summer evening he introduced Jeannie to Cuthbert. They had met by chance in Regent’s Park. Jeannie was wearing one of those silky, summery frocks through which you could see how lovely she was – and a red carnation. He was glad he still had the carnations with him to show Cuthbert.

He was not aware that the car was in motion until it stopped with a jerk and the dome light flashed in his eyes.

‘Get out. Don’t try anything funny or I’ll fire.’

Cuthbert Bridstowe had wheeled round and was pointing a revolver at him.

‘Cuthbert! It’s me! Hugh Wakering. You can’t have forgotten me!’

‘Well I’m damned! So it is!’ Bridstowe put the revolver in his right-hand pocket. ‘But why the devil didn’t you speak at once? I’ve only just seen you.’

‘I’m very sorry. I’ve had a shock and I’m afraid my mind wandered. Cuthbert, we must talk. I met Jeannie the day before yesterday.’

‘Jeannie? Oh, Jeannie Ruthen! I’d almost forgotten. You’d better come along to my club and tell me all about it. We can be there in ten minutes.’

The way to the club lay through comparatively quiet streets. Wakering babbled on:

‘D’you know, your office is almost opposite mine! And your friend Mrs Hemmelman is a client. I kept out of your way because I thought you and Jeannie were married.’

He had not meant to put it quite like that. It sounded a little aggressive, and he had meant to be forgiving and friendly.

‘It’s a long time ago, Hugh!’ Bridstowe slowed and stopped, feeling that the invitation to the club had been premature. He added formally: ‘How is she?’

‘I met her coming out of Holloway, where she had served six months for theft. I gather she became a prostitute some years ago.’

‘Hm! I’m sorry to hear that, but not surprised. I suppose I have a certain theoretical responsibility. What’s the proposition, Hugh?’

‘There isn’t any proposition. She died this morning.’

‘She’s dead! Then what the devil are you raking it all up for, if you don’t want me to do anything about it?’ He switched off the dome light and pressed the starter.

‘I didn’t mention it in order to accuse you, but to assure you that I bear no ill-will.’ The heroic voice tuned in. ‘I was shocked by the tragedy of her wasted life – and I thought you might like to mourn with me.’

‘Rats! I know why you told me! Where shall I put you down?’

‘Anywhere.’ His sense of inferiority to Cuthbert Bridstowe, the seducer who had scorned his forgiveness, was now inflated to the point of monomania.

Bridstowe was changing gear. Wakering leant forward, took the revolver from Bridstowe’s right-hand pocket. Wakering has said that his intention was to kill himself, but this may be doubted. Certain it is that Wakering’s left hand was still clutching the red carnations. A twitch brought their scent to his nostrils, reminded him of Jeannie’s loveliness, as descried through the silky, summery frock in Regent’s Park. He fired at Bridstowe’s back.

The car was accelerating in third. He reached over Bridstowe, steered towards the kerb and switched off. Then he crumpled back on the rear seat.

‘Jeannie – Cuthbert – and now me!’ He picked up the revolver, but decided that it would be more manly to go to the gallows with a firm tread. The whole district must have heard that bang.

Now and again cars passed in both directions, but none stopped. He found himself thinking of a gravel pit near Sudchester. He had not seen it since he was a boy on holiday. But after Jeannie had gone away with Cuthbert he had often thought of it.

‘I believe I always meant to kill Cuthbert and put his body in that gravel pit.’

His finger hooked round the lever that secured the bucket seat next the driver. He slid the seat out of its grooves.

He got out by the offside door, walked round to the near side, pushed the bucket seat against the offside door. Assured that Bridstowe was dead, he pulled the body down, so that it lay nearly full length on the floor, the head under the dash.

Then he started on his eighty-mile drive, dawdling as much as he dared, for it was now only six o’clock.

Chapter Four

It was a few minutes to ten and he had only some four miles to complete his journey when the engine missed, missed again, then stopped.

‘Good Lord! Petrol!’

He stopped and took stock. The tank was empty. There was a lever on the tank, similar to that on his own car, controlling a small emergency supply. The makers claimed that it would be good for ten miles – which probably meant five. He would just about reach the gravel pit – and stick there. Somehow, he must get more petrol before he could dump the body.

He was on the rise above Sudchester Junction. He coasted down to the junction, which was deserted and in darkness, on the chance of finding a parked lorry which he could tap.

There was nothing in the yard. The goods shed was the only hope. The nearest dwelling was at least a quarter of a mile away so the chance of interruption was small.

With a penknife he pushed back the window of the booking office, climbed in and took a bunch of keys off its hook, one of which fitted the padlock of the goods shed. He entered and switched on the light. Risky, but he had to take risks now, for he was immobilized in proximity to the corpse.

Goods had accumulated during the strike, making search difficult. When he failed to find petrol, his first idea was to leave the corpse in the shed and get away. That would mean a race with time, and if he were hurried he would be likely to make mistakes.

As soon as he spotted the packing-case, he grasped its immense possibilities. If he could get the corpse into the packing-case it would probably stay there until the strike was settled. The case was secured with wing-catches, easily opened. He had to stand astride the case to lift the metal, which he did not know to be a driving shaft. Then he went back to the car, used the reserve petrol to drive to the doors of the shed.

So far he had escaped bloodstains. He took off his light overcoat, then his suit, and worked in his underclothes. He transferred everything from Bridstowe’s pockets to his own. The longer it took to identify the body the better, so he cut away all the clothing.

When he had at length contrived to shut the lid of the case on the corpse, he faced the fresh problem of the driving shaft. If he were to leave that gleaming metal to catch the eye of the first man who entered the shed he might just as well have left the corpse exposed. By the time he had cleaned his hands and face in a fire bucket he had realized that he must take the shaft away with him.

The shaft weighed less than the corpse, but was much more awkward to carry. It took him twenty minutes to carry it as many feet to the car and stow it as he had stowed the corpse. It was while he was pressing Bridstowe’s clothing under the cushion of the back seat that he kicked the red carnations out of the car without noticing.

Having locked the goods shed and returned the key, he drove on to Sudchester village, knocked up the one garage and took on six gallons only, to avoid revealing that his tank was empty. Then four miles on to the gravel pit to dump the driving shaft where he had intended to dump Bridstowe.

The mouth of the gravel pit, which was thickly covered with brambles and weeds, reached almost to the roadway of the lane. He had dumped the clothing, had thrown the revolver after it and was about to start work on the driving shaft when the yokel came jog-trotting down the lane.

With almost hysterical anxiety the yokel begged to be driven to Sudchester to call the doctor to his wife. The safest course was to agree. Back in Sudchester, Wakering shrank from returning to the gravel pit. He would drive straight on and throw the shaft in the Thames at Whitchurch Bridge.

His encounter with the constable at Whitchurch made him realize that the shaft in itself was not dangerous to him – could not be, until the body was discovered. He could take it home and get rid of it the next night from his own car – after he had rested his already aching muscles.

From the garage near Kew Bridge, where he took another five gallons, it was but a couple of miles on to his house in Chiswick, a semi-detached building with a long narrow strip of garden in the rear, giving on to a side street; at the end of the garden was the garage. In seven minutes he had locked the driving shaft in his garage.

As he hoped that it would be at least a week before the hue and cry started, he did not abandon Bridstowe’s car in a distant street, but drove it to the biggest garage he knew and, again giving Bridstowe’s name, said he wanted to leave the car for a week. With two changes of taxi and an interval of walking, he made his way home.

Over breakfast he told his mother that he would have to go out after dinner that night and would be using the car. It had long been agreed between them that his comings and goings should never be questioned – for fear, he said, of betraying the confidence of clients.

During the morning, in the intervals of doing his normal work, he gave leisurely thought to the problem of a dumping ground for the shaft – something nearer home than the gravel pit.

He had a bad shock when the early evening papers revealed that the fact of the murder, if no more, had been discovered.

He was home in time to hear the first broadcast – to learn that every policeman in the country, every Automobile Association patrolman – every garage man and a fair percentage of the public – would be looking for a car with a bucket seat missing, carrying the driving shaft of the Arbee Steam Roller.

‘I forgot to mention,’ he said to his mother, ‘that my engagement for to-night is off.’

For the time being, the best place for the shaft was in his garage. Would it ever be safe to move it? He felt his first twinge of fear since his encounter with the Whitchurch constable.

The second twinge of fear came in the middle of the morning, when his typist announced that Detective-Sergeant Lambert wished to see him.

‘Mrs Hemmelman referred us to you, Mr Wakering,’ said Karslake’s assistant. ‘She says she sent you a quire of posters for distribution. We want you to be good enough to give us the names of any applicants for the posters.’

For a moment Wakering was puzzled. He glanced at the side table where the posters lay, and in doing so remembered he had used one as a wrapper for the carnations. He had forgotten all about the carnations – was no more alive to their clue value than Karslake himself. Anyhow, even if the shop assistant remembered about him, she could not tell the police his name and address. The twinge of fear passed.

‘I don’t think there have been any applicants. I’ll ask my typist to make sure.’ The typist knew of no applicants. Wakering had the wit to count the posters himself.

‘One short of the quire,’ he announced. ‘Unless the office cleaner has taken one, I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

They could not, Wakering perceived, make anything out of that missing poster, because there could be no certainty that Mrs Hemmelman had not sent him one short.

On the following Saturday afternoon he locked himself in the garage with his gardening tools. It had a thin flooring of cement, easily broken with a pick. Continuing his work over Sunday, he buried the shaft a foot deep. The following Saturday he cemented where he had dug. The work looked smeary and amateurish. The Saturday after that, he cemented the whole floor, so that no given area caught the eye.

His assessment of his position agreed very closely with that of Superintendent Karslake. In his Appreciation for the Chief Commissioner, Karslake wrote: ‘Unexplained possession of the driving shaft would amount to proof of guilt. Any clue, however non-evidential, that would indicate the murderer, would therefore end the case. The premises of any suspected person must be searched instantly for the shaft. In the belief that the murderer was a social acquaintance, whom Bridstowe invited to enter his car, I am checking every contact with the deceased for several weeks preceding the murder. If this line fails I fear we shall have reached a dead end.’

To Detective-Inspector Rason of the Department of Dead Ends the documents were duly passed six weeks after the murder.

Chapter Five

The Department would receive cases ranging from murder to lost dogs. It was a dead end case of theft from lorries that brought Rason to Fatty Spending, the man who had furtively welcomed Jeannie in the cellar bar. In the same cellar bar – but during licensed hours – Rason bought the other a pint of beer and a double gin to put in it. As Fatty was a very small scale operator, this was considerable hospitality.

‘Fatty, I know you gave up working the lorries years ago. All I want from you is a friendly tip from one who has watched points. We think there’s a girl in these West End jobs. Come to that, where’s your little old pal Jeannie?’

‘Ask me another, Mr Rason. I’ve only set eyes on her once since she came out o’ stir – and then not to speak to.’ As Rason registered unbelief, Fatty whined on: ‘She must’ve come straight here from stir, only she had a gentleman with her, so I no more than give her a quiet wink. And she left with the gent.’

‘Gentleman, Fatty? Are you trying to kid me Jeannie could get a gentleman?’

‘Well, her looks ’ve gone, but she’s still got a bit o’ style. It’s the truth I’m tellin’ you, Mr Rason. Ask Tim here, an’ he’ll tell you the same.’

‘That’s right, Mr Rason,’ said the potman. ‘He was a gent, all right. Quiet enough to look at, but plenty o’ dough. Blimey! He’d bought her a whole large bunch o’ red carnations, and I ’appen to know they cost five bob apiece at this time o’ year. Cost enough to keep poor ole Fatty oiled for a week, them carnations did!’

‘She hasn’t been at her kip either, Mr Rason, not these last six weeks she hasn’t. I know, ’cause I’ve taken a stroll round there once or twice.’

So far this promised to add up to the woman who was working with the lorry gang. Rason took the address of the ‘kip’ and presently was interviewing the landlady. From that garrulous slut came a torrent of information in which the words ‘hospital’, ‘Mrs Hemmelman’ and ‘the gentleman’ kept bobbing up. Rason, like a good detective, encouraged her while he tried to grab any relevant fact as it floated past.

‘An’ this Mrs Hemmelman, Jeannie says, didn’t half put the breeze up the wardresses. And the day they both came out, there was her posh car, with liveried footmen an’ all, waiting outside the stir for her.’

‘And this gentleman you spoke of – was he with Jeannie when she came back here?’

‘No, but she must ’ve come straight from him, because she had a whole lot o’ flowers, an’ if he didn’t give ’em to her, nobody else would have – lovely red carnations they was and must ’ve cost a mint o’ money at this time o’ year. What was you askin’? No, he didn’t come till the next day and as soon as I told him, he was off to the hospital – an’ I couldn’t help opening my eyes, as poor Jeannie has lost her looks – handsome feller he was too, though not my sort.’

Rason escaped to the Metropolitan Hospital, to be told, after some delay, that Jeannie had died on February 1st.

Before he had left the building, a messenger overtook him, with a request that he would see the almoner.

Apparently, certain expenses had been incurred in the attempt to save Jeannie’s life and there had not been enough left of the original deposit to cover the funeral expenses. Could Detective-Inspector Rason put them in touch with Jeannie’s anonymous benefactor?

When Rason said he would do his best if he were given a full description, the almoner took him to the matron’s office.

‘He is very difficult to describe,’ said the matron. ‘I should say he is rather a handsome man, but without any feature you can pick on. I don’t know what his concern was with the patient. When I told him she was dead he seemed to be stunned. He just stared at me and said “Dead! Thank you,” then stalked out of the room without even leaving the flowers he had brought for her.’

‘Red carnations,’ grinned Rason, who was sick of the flowers and Mrs Hemmelman and ‘the gentleman’.

‘Yes. They were red carnations! And very expensive they are at this time of year. Does that mean that you know him?’

‘No. But it means I may be able to find him for you,’ said Rason largely, and bowed himself out to a chorus of thanks.

So that was the end of the trail of the lorry gang! All he had learnt was that red carnations were very expensive at this time of year. Funny a man should want to load them on to a woman like Jeannie! It was reasonable that a man might pay her hospital expenses if he wanted her to do some crooked work for him. But no crook would buy flowers for her – still less, before she was taken ill. Moreover, Fatty and his crowd, who at least knew a crook when they saw one, were emphatic that this man was a ‘gentleman’, by which irritating word they meant a mutt with money.

And this funny gentleman, with his funny red carnations, knew enough about Jeannie to meet her when she came out of prison – knew enough, too, not to give his name when he was befriending her at the hospital.

If she were blackmailing him he would not have bought her those darned red carnations!

Red carnations, now he came to think of it, had taken up three pages of the Bridstowe murder report. Back in the office he re-read the three pages – learnt that there was no evidence that they had belonged to the deceased.

‘Suppose they belonged to the killer?’

He turned up the Whitchurch constable’s original description of the man he had questioned on the bridge. It did not help much. But in the space headed ‘General Remarks’ there was that irritating word again: ‘By speech and manner I would judge him a gentleman.’

‘So if the carnations belonged to the killer, we have two funny gentlemen behaving in a crazy way with red carnations – and on the same day! One gentleman buys them for Jeannie, which is crazy, and the other gentleman buys ’em for the man he’s going to bump off. Phew!’

He took a taxi to Holloway Prison, where he learnt that no friend had called at the prison to meet Jeannie Ruthen on her discharge. When he came out, there was no taxi in sight – which is what Karslake calls ‘Rason’s luck’, because on the way to the bus halt he saw the florist’s and walked in.

Yes, the girl remembered a very odd couple who had bought a dozen red carnations. The gentleman was what you might call good looking, but the woman wasn’t; and you could see she had just come out of prison, because she had the canvas bag they always give them when they have no luggage.

So the gentleman had met her outside the prison, not in the waiting-room! Outside the prison was Mrs Hemmelman’s chauffeur, even if there were no ‘liveried footmen’.

‘Well, the only man I noticed standing about,’ said the chauffeur, ‘was Mrs Hemmelman’s solicitor, Mr Wakering. And he suddenly darted away after some woman who had come out of the prison. And he didn’t come back, either. And madam didn’t half lead off when I told her he had been and gone, as she wanted him to help her pitch into the Lady Governor.’

Rason went back to the Metropolitan Hospital. The matron refused to leave the hospital, as she was on duty. But she consented to sit in a police car outside Wakering’s office at ten the next morning. As soon as she identified him, Rason thanked her and sent the police car back with her. From a doorway, where he had been posted, emerged the constable from Whitchurch.

‘That was the man I saw on Whitchurch bridge, sir.’

‘Good! Report back right away to Superintendent Karslake and say I’ll be along in a few minutes,’ ordered Rason. He lit a cigarette and loitered long enough to allow Wakering to settle himself in his office.

Chapter Six

‘There’s another of those detectives wants to see you, Mr Wakering. He says he won’t keep you more than a few minutes.’ The typist glanced at a card. ‘Detective-Inspector Rason.’

Wakering felt a moment’s unease, but no fear. Some more about that wretched poster, he supposed. If there had been anything to link him with Bridstowe, the police would have found it weeks ago.

He nodded and a moment later Rason came in under his customary mask of fatuous breeziness.

‘Sorry to interrupt you in the middle of your mail, Mr Wakering. I’ve got your name down as having helped us before over those dog posters of Mrs Hemmelman’s. I’m on the same case – same sort of check up, only it’s names this time.’ He opened a large notebook. ‘Man. Rothenstein, alias Albaz, slight foreign accent. Calls on City solicitors –’

‘He never called on me,’ interrupted Wakering, now wholly at ease.

‘Thank you!’ Rason ticked it off in the notebook. ‘Next. Woman. Jeannie Ruthen, alias Jeannie Spending, alias Jeannie Carmichael. …’

Wakering felt the blood sing in his ears, but he kept a tight hold on his manner.

‘It doesn’t ring a bell, Inspector. Have a cigarette before you finish the list.’

‘Thanks! Half a minute, I’ll just tick this off or we shall get muddled. You have no knowledge of the woman, Jeannie Ruthen? Thank you. Don’t bother, I have a match. I’m afraid I’ve let you in for a spot o’ bother there, Mr Wakering. The fact is this woman died some weeks ago in the Metropolitan Hospital. We had traced a very thin line between her and Bridstowe, which was rather surprising, because she was a – you know! When she was dying they asked her – using other words, I suppose – who was going to pay for her funeral and she said “Mr Wakering”, and then conked out. When the matron told me this, I happened to remember your name was on our list as a City solicitor who had helped over that dog poster, and I told her so. I fancy she’ll be dropping in on you this morning in the hope of collecting the funeral expenses.’

‘Hm! Well, thank you for warning me anyhow, Inspector. I’ll tell my typist to explain, if the matron does come here.’

‘Right!’ Rason got up. ‘If you can leave my name out of it, I’ll be obliged, because I ought to have kept my trap shut. Good morning, Mr Wakering, and thanks very much.’

There was fear now, but no panic. Again, Wakering assessed his position as clearly as Karslake. If that matron made it her business to see him she would identify him. That would expose his lie, but would still leave no logical connexion between himself and Bridstowe. But the police were not tied by logic. If they had any suspicion at all, logical or not, they might produce that constable from Whitchurch. And that would be dangerous – but only fatal if he were found in possession of the shaft. Without the shaft, the constable’s identification would fail with the jury, since the man had only seen him once, and in the dark.

He rang his mother and said that he was taking the day off to do some work on the car and would be home in an hour. Then he told his typist that his mother had been taken ill and that he would not return until the morrow. As if by an afterthought, he added instructions for stalling the matron, should she call.

Nearly seven weeks since he had killed Bridstowe! In that time the public would have forgotten about the car with the bucket seat missing, carrying a driving shaft. But would the police and the patrol men?

There was nothing for it but to take the risk of dumping the shaft after dark – anywhere – in one of the parks, if he could think of nothing better. He would have to start digging in the garage at once. As soon as he reached home he locked himself in the garage and again set about breaking the thin cement.

‘There you are, sir!’ said Rason who, with Karslake, was in the side street at the bottom of Wakering’s garden. ‘You can hear him digging. I knew if he’d still got the shaft he’d fish it out, provided we scared him – and provided we let him think he still had a chance to get rid of it.’

Fearing suicide, they waited until Wakering opened the door to let himself out for lunch and a rest.

‘Anything to say, Wakering, before we finish digging up that driving shaft?’

‘No statement,’ answered Wakering.

But he eventually made one in the witness box. The jury believed his tale about the red carnations, especially as he had entered the car without a lethal weapon. He was released for good behaviour when he had served seven of the ten years to which he was sentenced for manslaughter.

The Yellow Jumper

Chapter One

The execution of Ruth Watlington sent a shudder through respectable, middle-class Britain. If she had in some way repudiated her upbringing, by becoming a crook or a drug-addict, or a ‘bad woman’, it would have been more comfortable all round. As it was, her exposure created the suspicion that the impulse to murder is likely to seize almost anybody who has enough animal courage to see it through. It was not even a crime passionel, although scented hair, moonlight playing on running water, and a wedding became subsidiary factors – particularly the moonlight on the running water.

This is in no sense a love chronicle; but we must for a moment concern ourselves with the romantic vapourings of poor Herbert Cudden, the mathematical master at Hemel Abbey, a girls’ boarding-school in Devonshire.

At eight-thirty on May 2nd, 1934, a week before the summer term opened, he was alone in the empty schoolhouse putting the finishing touches to his syllabus. His thoughts kept sliding to a young, modern languages mistress, Rita Steevens, who had come, fresh from the University, a couple of terms ago.

An under-vitalized man, he had been astonished at his own boldness in proposing marriage to her, still more astonished when she accepted. Incidentally, he had been very grateful to his friend and colleague, Ruth Watlington, for inviting Rita to share her cottage.

Daydreaming of this young woman, he visualized her in the dress in which he had last seen her. Now, if he had simply remembered that she had looked delightful in whatever she was wearing, it would have been better for his own peace of mind in later years. He was not the kind of man who understands women’s dress.

Nevertheless, he happened to visualize Rita in what women call a pinafore dress, though he did not know the term. He visualized a pale green, sleeveless dress with a short-sleeved underbodice of yellow – the dress that was eventually produced at the trial after the police had, as it were, walked clean over it without seeing anything in it but the bloodstains.

So much for the dress. As for the moonlight – the full moon, which on that day rose at six thirty-seven in the afternoon, was already tingeing the dusk when Cudden crossed the campus and dropped the syllabus in the letter box of the headmistress’s house.

Skirting a playing-field, he crossed a spuriously antique bridge over the Brynn, a sizeable trout stream of an average depth of a dozen inches, with many a deep pool which made it dangerous to children, though the swift current would generally carry them to safety. Feeling his thirty-six years as nothing, he very nearly vaulted the stile giving on to the wood – part of the school estate – that ran down the side of the hill to the village of Hemel, where most of the teaching staff were accommodated.

He was wearing a mackintosh. A man of many small anxieties, he nearly always carried a mackintosh. Presently he turned off the track, to Drunkard’s Leap – a pool in the Brynn some ten feet in breadth and some forty feet deep. When Rita was half an hour overdue he lit a cigarette. When the cigarette was finished he was not impatient. He sat down on an old bench like a park seat. As he did so, the centre plank fell out.

‘Funny! The screws must have rotted out of the bracket.’ He ran his hand along the bench, noticed, without interest, that the bracket itself was no longer in position. Rita was later than usual.

The stream, tumbling over rocks into the pool, threw up a spray, and for the first time he saw a rainbow of moonlight. He must remember to point it out to Rita. Below the rainbow, the moon shimmered on the turbulent surface of the pool, so that the pool itself seemed to be made of liquid moonlight.

So he described it to the Coroner – liquid moonlight. Then, he said, a light cloud crossed the moon so that the rainbow and the shimmer faded out. Instead, a diffused glow enabled him to see beneath the surface of the pool. And a few feet beneath the surface of the pool, below the current, he saw Rita Steevens.

For some seconds, he supposed, he gazed at the staring eyes, at the hair lightly swaying, as if stirred by a sluggish breeze. Then the cloud passed, and he could again see nothing but the shimmering surface of the pool.

He shaded his eyes, lurched to and fro, trying to escape from the angle of light. He grabbed the loose beam of the bench, intending to bridge the rocks of the waterfall to get a new angle; but he stumbled, cutting his hand on a splinter of the beam, which splashed into the pool and was carried away.

He related that he shouted at himself as if he were someone else. ‘Pull yourself together, man! You were dazzled by the moonlight, and you’ve had an hallucination. You were thinking of Rita, and beginning to fear she had met with an accident, and you visualized your fear. How could she be sort of standing up under the water like that?’

He half believed it. The other half sent him scurrying from the pool down the track to the village.

‘Check up at the cottage anyway,’ he muttered. ‘Better not mention the hallucination – make people laugh. It’s partly that damned syllabus. Anxiety complex!’

Fortunate that Ruth Watlington’s cottage was so near! At the end of the track through the wood, he did not vault the stile; he took it slowly, regaining his breath, coming to terms with his panic. A hundred yards of scrub, then the cottage, built at right angles to the lane that wound its way to the village. Slowly across the scrub.

Already he could discern the wicket gate of the cottage garden. And there – a dozen feet away – were the yellow sleeves, the pale green dress, grey-white in the moonlight. He bounded forward. As he snatched her in his arms his nostrils were filled with the scent he had never perceived on any other woman – the scent of gardenia.

‘Oh, my darling – thank God – had a ghastly hallucination! Thought I saw you standing up drowned – in Drunkard’s Leap.’ Her head was resting on his shoulder. The scent of gardenia spurred him – he could have vaulted innumerable stiles. ‘Speak, Rita, darling!’

‘But I’m not Rita!’ cried Ruth Watlington. ‘What on earth is the matter with you, Herbert?’

He swung her round so that she faced the moon.

‘It must be this dress,’ she said. ‘Rita wore it once and didn’t like it, so I took it off her hands.’

He gaped at her, his senses in a vacuum in which his one clear impression was the scent of gardenia, almost as sharp as when, but a moment ago, her head had lain on his shoulder.

‘I thought the hallucination, or whatever it is, was about me, and you seemed hysterical, or I wouldn’t have –’

‘Then perhaps it wasn’t hallucination!’ he gasped. ‘Where is Rita?’

‘By now she’s at Lynmouth, where she is spending the night with her cousin, Fred Calder, and his wife. They’ve got a bungalow there. Mr Calder rang up before Rita came in. She had just time to catch the eight-fifty bus. She asked me to phone you, which I did. Effie Cumber – one of the kitchen-maids, in case you don’t know – took the message. I told her you’d be in your classroom. But I’m afraid I forgot till about nine.’

‘I left a little before nine. Then Rita never went near Drunkard’s Leap!’ He laughed at his own fear, though it wasn’t a wholesome laugh. ‘Yet – it was horrible! I can’t believe it wasn’t real.’

‘Well, come in first and tell me all about it. I keep a bottle of brandy for emergencies. I think you have been over-working on that syllabus … Oh, you’ve cut your hand, it’s bleeding! I’ll try and bind it up for you, though I’m very bad at anything to do with blood.’

‘It’s nothing. Must have cut it when I fell down.’

He followed her into the sitting-room of the cottage, stopping in the hall to hang up his mackintosh.

As is known, he stayed there for about an hour, leaving before eleven, slightly fuddled with brandy. Ruth’s purpose was to delay investigation. No police system, however scientific, could be expected to solve the riddle of why she should want to create the delay. The pool was obviously useless as a permanent hiding-place. Once she had made her getaway, as she had, it would not have mattered to her if the police had found the body a few minutes later.

Nor did anybody attribute any special importance to Herbert Cudden’s assertion that, in mistaking Ruth for Rita, he was misled not only by Rita’s dress, but also by Rita’s particular perfume. Yet Ruth Watlington was convicted – thanks to Detective-Inspector Rason of the Dead Ends Department – for no other reason than that she had put on the dead girl’s dress and worn her perfume.

Chapter Two

After a stiff brandy, Herbert gave Ruth details of the now supposed hallucination.

‘But the pool is forty feet deep!’ objected Ruth. ‘If there had been a body under the surface it would have been at the bottom, and you couldn’t have seen it without a strong searchlight.’

‘I know. But one doesn’t think of things like that at the time.’

He told her about it all over again, and then, his fear banished, they talked about Rita in general, an absorbing topic to both. This conversation has been grossly misunderstood by the commentators, who said that it revealed Ruth as an hysteric, titillating her own terror by talking about the woman she had just murdered. Her showing him her scrapbook of babies’ photographs was stigmatized as the height of hypocrisy – alternatively, as indicating a depth of morbid cruelty which would almost justify a plea of insanity.

Whereas the truth is that, if Ruth had been a hypocrite, she would never have committed the murder. ‘The schoolmarm who beat Scotland Yard’ would have had short shrift if the police had been able to grasp that, though she was capable of murder, she was not capable of insincerity, cruelty, or greed.

At the time of the murder, Ruth was thirty-seven; would have been physically mistakable for thirty if she had not affected a certain dowdiness of dress. She was trim and springy, athletic without a touch of thickness. A truth about herself that she did not know was that the right touch here and there would have converted her into a more than ordinarily attractive woman. When she was sixteen, a boy of her own age had kissed her at a party, to her own satisfaction. Three days later she overheard the boy laughing about it to another boy. There was a loutish reference to her own over-estimation of her charms.

The incident distressed her sufficiently for her to confide in her young stepmother, for whom, in defiance of tradition, she entertained a warm affection. It did not occur to her that Corinne Watlington, who was only seven years older, might be sexually jealous.

‘Men are rather beastly, you know,’ explained Corinne Watlington. ‘They lure you on with flattery and then laugh at you. It’s as well to be on guard, or you may find yourself humiliated where you least expect it.’

Ruth did not want to be humiliated, so she went on guard – so effectively that the young men of her generation dubbed her a prude and a codfish, and left her out – which made her manner more brusque than ever.

Following Corinne’s advice, Ruth concentrated on a career. She won a scholarship to Oxford, generously resigning the bursary, as her mother had left her some two hundred pounds a year. She represented the University in lacrosse, tennis, and fencing. She took honours in history and literature, doing so well that she was invited to read for a Fellowship, but declined, as she wished to teach the young. She was appointed to Mardean, which was then considered the leading school for girls who required genuine education.

When she was twenty-seven she found herself thinking too intensively about one of the classical masters. In this emotion there was no echo of the boys at the parties. Indeed, she hardly thought directly of the man himself. She thought of herself in a house, just large enough, with a very green lawn on which very young children – hers – were playing. Somewhere in the background, giving substance and security to the dream, was the classical master.

Ruth resigned her appointment. She went to Paris; not being analytical, she did not know why she spent six months as a volunteer worker in a crèche. But the babies here were vaguely unsatisfactory, and she started the new school year at Hemel Abbey, a praiseworthy but undistinguished replica of Mardean on a less ambitious scale.

Here began that rare association with Herbert Cudden which baffled the romantically minded commentators. From the first she was able to talk to Herbert without any artificial coldness. From a different angle, he found something of the same restfulness in her, for he had always been self-conscious with other women. Ruth, obviously, would never expect him to make love to her. There sprang up, hardly a deep friendship – rather an intimate palliness utterly untouched by romance.

In her first year she bought Wood Cottage. A few weeks after she had settled in she cut the first of the baby pictures from a magazine. In six months, when she had cut another dozen, she began to paste them into a scrapbook. During the years that followed, the number of pictures grew. There was nothing secret about it. She would snap village babies with her Kodak, explaining that she was fond of pictures of babies, though they were so difficult to take. All the same, she never showed the scrapbook to anybody until she showed it to Herbert on the night of the murder.

Herbert used the cottage almost as a club. He came at routine times, always to lunch on Wednesdays and Sundays. She allowed him to pay half the cost of the food and a few pence over in part payment of the village woman who prepared it. Thus nearly nine years slipped by before Rita Steevens came and changed Ruth’s perspective.

One evening, when the pupils were away for the half-term week-end, Ruth met Herbert and Rita together, and was astonished by the look she surprised in Herbert’s eyes. For a second she had seen him young, vigorous, commanding – definitely among ‘the men’ – in Corinne’s sense of the word. An hour later he came to the cottage and told her, as a great secret, that he had fallen in love with Rita. Ruth expressed sincere delight. A new, inner life was opened to her.

At first, Rita was cold, almost suspicious. She accepted Ruth’s offer to share the cottage with indifference, bargaining shrewdly over her share of the expenses. By the end of the term she had yielded and was accepting Ruth as mentor and general benefactor.

Ruth was determined – one might say fiercely determined – that life should give to Rita what it had denied to Ruth. She positively groomed those two for each other, and without a single back-thought of malice. In her dream life, Ruth had already elected herself an honorary auntie.

A little before six on the night of the murder, while Rita was visiting in the village, Calder had rung to ask Rita to catch the eight-fifty bus – the last – and spend the night at Lynmouth. As the bungalow had no telephone, Calder would meet the bus on the chance of Rita coming. Ruth said she would deliver the message if Rita returned in time.

But when Rita came in, shortly after seven, Ruth did not deliver the message. It was the only occasion on which she treated Rita improperly – her selfish motive being that, living by deputy in Rita, she wanted Rita to meet Herbert as arranged. Also, she had just completed her plans for the wedding present, and wanted to tell Rita, and enjoy her surprise.

‘You aren’t meeting Herbert until nine,’ she said some time later. ‘Let’s go and sit up at the pool. It’s such a lovely night, and I’ve heaps to talk about. I’ll disappear before Herbert comes.’

‘Righto! This tweed suit is a bit too schoolmarmy for Herbert. D’you think the suède belt you gave me would go with it?’

‘It would be just right. I hoped you would wear it.’

Ruth, herself dowdy, had become the arbiter of dress. Ruth had designed the pinafore dress of pale green with the under-bodice of yellow and had it made by a London-trained woman living in semi-retirement as the village dressmaker. Ruth added: ‘What do you think of my new jumper?’

‘The collar is too high for you – and I don’t like yellow!’ Remembering the pinafore dress in the wardrobe upstairs, Rita hastily amended: ‘I mean, not that mustardy yellow! You’re better at dressing me than yourself. I wonder why! Ruth – why is it?’

‘I suppose because I wish I had been like you when I was your age.’

Rita felt resentful without knowing why. She was absent-minded as they set out together, reaching Drunkard’s Leap before eight.

‘Mind, darling, you’ll tear your dress!’ There was light enough for Ruth to notice that the iron bracket of the bench had worked loose. ‘The screws have rusted away. They ought to have been painted. I’ll tell Miss Harboro.’ Ruth tugged the bracket and it came clean away, a flat iron bar three feet long with a right-angle turn of three inches. She leant it against the bench so that the estate handyman would see it. They sat down, and Ruth turned the conversation in the direction of her wedding present.

‘You and Herbert – your heads are in the clouds, as they ought to be. You haven’t thought, for instance, where you’re going to live, have you?’

‘Oh, Herbert’s looking round for something. He likes that sort of thing. And if he can’t find anything, there are lots of furnished rooms in the village.’

Though it was barely dusk, the full moon shimmered on the surface of the pool. It was a lovely spot, thought Ruth, for Herbert and Rita.

‘Furnished rooms are all right when you are single – awful when you’re married.’ Ruth paused, enjoying her moment. ‘You’re going to have Wood Cottage.’

‘But – d’you mean you’re leaving Hemel and want to get rid of it?’

‘No, dear, I don’t mean that. I mean I want you to have it. I shall take Mrs Cumber’s two rooms, and you needn’t worry about me. I shall be quite comfortable.’

Rita was not worrying about Ruth’s comfort. She was feeling that, notwithstanding innumerable small benefits, there was rather too much Ruth in her life. Again came that undefined resentment that had welled up during their dress-talk.

‘But, Ruth – of course, it’s awfully kind of you to offer to sell it to us, as I know you like it, but I doubt whether Herbert could afford –’

‘Darling, there’s nothing to afford! It’s my little wedding present. I was in Barnstaple this morning, and fixed the title deeds, and the rest of it, with a solicitor. It’s all settled bar formalities. You can talk it over with Herbert to-night.’

‘I simply don’t know what to say!’ Rita’s voice was sulky. ‘Ruth, dear, don’t you see it’s impossible! You’re only a little bit better off than we are, and – it’s accepting too much.’

What did it matter how much she gave them. Their life was hers. Her life would be fulfilled in the lives that were to come.

‘Darling, it’s not a matter of giving a present that costs a lot of money. It’s a matter of sharing happiness. You know what a lot you and Herbert mean to me. And we’ve got to look ahead. In a year’s time there may not be only the two of you to consider.’

For a moment Rita was fogged.

‘Do you mean we might have a baby?’

‘Of course I do!’ Ruth laughed happily. Rita laughed, too, but a different kind of laugh.

‘But I shan’t be having any babies.’

‘One shouldn’t say that – it might turn out to be true.’ It was no more than a mild reproof. Then sudden fear clutched at Ruth. ‘Rita – there’s nothing wrong with you physically, that way, is there?’

‘Certainly not!’ The girl bridled. ‘But there’s no need to have all that bother if you don’t want to – and I don’t want to. I’m not the type. And I loathe babies anyway – yells and mess and bother!’

Ruth had the sensation that her body had taken control of her mind. She heard her own voice from outside herself and thought it sounded shrill and venomous.

‘Is it fair to Herbert – to rob your marriage of all meaning?’

‘Oh, be your age, Ruth! That belongs in a tuppenny novelette. And I find it a rather disgusting topic, if you don’t mind.’

One may say that the twentieth-century Ruth Watlington looked on while that part of her was a thousand ages older than history obeyed a law of its own. Without her conscious volition, her muscles stiffened and she stood up. In her arms and thighs was an odd vibration, as if the corpuscles of her blood were colliding.

She heard the iron bracket whistle through the air – then heard a thud, and another. After a timeless period she felt herself going back into her body, understanding that an iris shutter in her brain had contracted until she had been able to see only one thing – that babies were a rather disgusting topic.

The iris was expanding a little. In the reflected moonlight she could see that the bench was glistening with blood. Rita had fallen from the bench and was lying, still.

‘I seem to have killed Rita!’ She giggled vacuously. ‘I wonder what Herbert will say!’ The iris expanded a little more. She became vaguely aware of an urgency of time. She looked at her wrist watch, but had to try again and again before she could concentrate enough to read that it was half past eight. Then it was easy to remember that Herbert would be there at nine.

‘I’d better put Rita in the pool. When Herbert comes to the cottage I can break it to him gently. But dead bodies float, don’t they. Oh well, we’ll manage something just for an hour or so!’ The iron bracket was ready to her hand.

There was blood at the angle of the bracket. She shuddered with a purely physical revulsion, wiped the bracket on the grass. She worked the short end of the bracket under the suède belt, then rolled the body into the pool near the waterfall. In spite of her care, there was a smear of blood on her left hand. Struggling against nausea she washed it off. The moonlight did not reveal that there was also a smear of blood on the sleeve of her yellow jumper.

In the walk back to the cottage, something approaching normality returned, and she realized what she had done. She had no thought of concealment, once she had told Herbert. She would then tell the police that she had killed Rita, but she would not tell them why, and they could not make her.

Chapter Three

As she crossed the scrub to the cottage she heard the church clock chiming nine. Perhaps Herbert had finished his work. She hurried into the cottage and rang the school. A kitchenmaid answered. ‘Will you please go over to Mr Cudden’s classroom, and tell him that Miss Steevens is sorry that she cannot keep her appointment.’

She turned on the reading lamp. Again came nausea as she saw a smear of blood on the sleeve of her yellow jumper – a smear half the size of the palm of her hand. She whipped off the jumper. She took it to her room, dropped it in the laundry basket, and put it out of her mind.

There was no moral shrinking from what she had done. She even felt a certain exultation, tinged with an unease which had nothing to do with fear of the hangman. She took it for granted that her own life was, in effect, at an end, and this gave her an immense freedom.

She went into Rita’s room. It held a faint fragrance of unknown flowers. In the wardrobe was the light green dress and the yellow bodice.

‘Oh, I wish I had been Rita!’

She took off all her clothes, put on Rita’s. Last, the yellow bodice and the light green dress. Then a spot of Rita’s scent on her hair and the merest dab behind the ears.

‘I do look nice! What a pity! It’s only waste. I wonder what was wrong with me?’

Downstairs and into the air. Her life’s history floated before her. Rita’s clothes helped her to review her past from the angle of a young woman who had no fear that men would lure her on with flattery and then laugh at her.

She was actually thinking of the classical master when Herbert’s arms closed round her. For a moment she let her head rest on his shoulder, then realized that he had mistaken her for Rita.

The need for personal explanation shattered the mood in which she had wanted to break the news to him. Besides, she saw now that it would save him so little that she was entitled to think of herself. To-morrow, when they found the body, life for her would end. To-night she would enjoy an hour of his soothing friendliness for the last time.

When she had made him believe the hallucination theory, she indulged in the child’s game of make-believe. ‘Let’s pretend’ – that things were as yesterday, and that she had not murdered Rita. She nearly told him about her gift of the cottage, but it would have meant discussion, and she wanted to ask him a question. As the minutes passed the question became more and more important to her. The answer, if it were the right one, would help her to face the gallows with a calm mind.

‘Have another brandy.’

‘Just a little one, and then I must hop off. Another thing Rita wants to do when we’re married –’

She shirked putting the question to him directly. To help her approach, she produced her scrapbook. The whole of the first page was taken by one ebullient baby who had advertised a milk food.

Herbert grinned and turned the pages. ‘Ah, I used to know one just like that – same expression and everything! And when they look like that, they grab your nose if you get too close. This is a jolly book! Why have you never shown it to me before?’

‘Herbert, are you and Rita going to have babies?’

‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t. I’ve got a bit in the stocking, and so has she.’

‘Oh, I am glad!’ There was a turbulence in her that he must have sensed.

‘And I’m glad you’re glad. Ruth, dear, you can scream for the village policeman if you like, but I’m going to kiss you.’

When he kissed her, Ruth knew what it was that had been wrong with her. She also knew that to talk of robbing a man of fatherhood did not belong in a tuppenny novelette.

‘I’m only thirty-seven – there’s still time!’ she told herself when he had gone. Murder could never be justified, and she would never so deceive herself. But a form of atonement for having taken life seemed to be open to her.

Chapter Four

On the following morning, at about seven-fifteen, Herbert Cudden’s landlady took his shoes out of doors with a view to cleaning them. It was, in a sense, unfortunate for Scotland Yard that Police-Sergeant Tottle happened to amble by on his bicycle.

‘Good morning, Mr Tottle. Your George’s garden is a credit to the family. Oo! You don’t ’appen to have had a nice murder, I suppose? Look at these!’

She held up the shoes. The rim of the sole and the back of one heel was caked with dried blood.

‘Don’t you touch ’em until I’ve seen ’em,’ barked the sergeant.

‘Don’t be silly! I was only joking – it can’t be human blood. They’re Mr Cudden’s. As if –’

The sergeant took the shoes and examined them.

‘Take me up to his room,’ he ordered.

When he had succeeded in waking Herbert Cudden, the latter’s reactions were, from the police point of view, ideal.

‘Oh, my God!’ It was almost like a woman’s scream. ‘I shall go mad.’ He leapt out of bed, thrust Wellingtons over his pyjamas. ‘You’d better come with me, Sergeant. Give me those shoes.’

‘Here, what’s it all about, Mr Cudden?’

‘Oh, shut up, please! I must see Miss Watlington at once, or I tell you I shall go mad. Hang on to the shoes if you like, but come with me.’

Ruth was startled into wakefulness by hearing her name called while Herbert and the sergeant were still fifty yards from the cottage. She was in her dressing-gown and at the doorway almost as soon as they were.

‘That hallucination!’ Herbert was out of breath. ‘Blood on my shoes – show them to her. Look! It wasn’t hallucination, Ruth. Rita was murdered on the bank and thrown in. We must drag Drunkard’s Leap.’

‘Will one of you kindly explain –’

‘Oh, all right then! I’ll tell you.’

It was Herbert who poured out the tale of the previous evening’s experiences, of his discussion with Ruth, and the reasons for their joint conclusion that he had suffered an hallucination.

‘Then as I understand it, after what you’d seen – or what you only thought you’d seen – you came to this cottage, and – is this your mackintosh by any chance?’

The mackintosh was hanging huddled on a peg in the hall. The sergeant pulled it out fanwise. The whole of the seat and part of the back were covered with congealed blood.

‘How did that blood get there? On your mackintosh and on your shoes?’

‘It must be her blood. That must have been done when I sat on the bench.’

‘And what’s the matter with your hand that you’ve got that bandage?’

‘Oh, hell to these footling questions! Sergeant, for heaven’s sake do something! Can’t you see that she has been murdered?’

The sergeant had never handled murder. This was unlike any he had read about. For one thing, the suspect was positively directing the investigation.

While Tottle, at Ruth’s suggestion, was ringing the Lynmouth police to find out whether Rita had spent the night at Calder’s bungalow, Ruth went upstairs to dress.

On a hanger on the door was the yellow underbodice. She put it in her wardrobe. Over a chair hung the pale green sleeveless dress. As she picked it up, she caught her breath. At the back, a little above the waist-line, was a distinct blood stain. For a moment she had a sense of eeriness, as if blood would meet her everywhere. Then she remembered.

‘That was done when Herbert put his arm round me before I bound up his hand.’

She dropped the dress into the laundry basket – on top of the blood-stained yellow jumper. She looked down at them, trying to assess their danger to herself. Then she shrugged her shoulders, and went on dressing. She had an almost superstitious belief that if destiny intended her to atone for her crime it would protect her from the police.

By ten o’clock they had found the body in Drunkard’s Leap, its position explained by the fact that the iron bracket had jammed between two outcrops of rock some eight feet below the surface. By midday the county police had occupied the village. Detailed statements were taken from Cudden and Ruth, covering everything, even including Ruth’s visit to her solicitor to arrange for the conveyance of the cottage to Herbert Cudden and his wife. The police took away for microscopic analysis Herbert’s mackintosh and shoes and Ruth’s yellow jumper and the pale green sleeveless dress. The analysis revealed that the blood on Herbert’s garments had been exposed to the air for at least half an hour before it had adhered – which bore out his statements about the times of his movements.

Analysis of the skirt and jumper showed that the blood was newly shed when it had adhered – which bore out the joint statement that Herbert mistook Ruth, outside the cottage, for Rita – and that he had touched her, after he had cut his hand by the pool. It might have been Rita’s blood. But only if the joint statements of Herbert and Ruth could be shown to be false – which was deemed to be impossible.

The Coroner’s jury would have censured Herbert for his over-readiness to believe he had experienced an hallucination, had not Ruth generously insisted that the blame, if any, should be wholly hers. The Court returned a verdict of murder against person or persons unknown.

Chapter Five

The school term opened in a somewhat strained atmosphere. True, that only three of the hundred and fifty pupils were withdrawn on account of the scandal. But there was an unhealthy interest in the events. The head-mistress explained that poor Miss Steevens had been killed by a madman who did not know what he was doing – a theory that was helped by a Press attempt to link the case up with a maniac murder in the North of England.

Ruth let the backwash of the murder splash round her, without giving it her attention. Scotland Yard rented all available rooms in the village inn. As there were apparently no clues they used the drag-net, checking the movements of every man within twenty miles and every automobile that could have been used. They would apply to Ruth now and again, mainly for information about the dead girl’s habits.

In three weeks they packed up, leaving a pall of suspicion over the whole countryside. In due course the mackintosh and the shoes, the pale green sleeveless dress and the yellow jumper, minutely documented, were sent to the Department of Dead Ends.

Herbert’s visits to the cottage became more frequent. At first he would sit in silence, assured of Ruth’s sympathy. In time she loosened his tongue and let him talk himself out of his melancholy.

The strong forces in her nature which had produced the brain storm at Drunkard’s Leap were now concentrated upon the purpose with which she had successfully drugged her conscience. At a moment of her choosing, Herbert Cudden was over-whelmed by those forces. The moment occurred at the end of the summer term.

Again we are not concerned with the detail of the method by which that formidable will induced a transference to Ruth of the emotion which Herbert had felt for Rita. It suffices to say that it happened according to her plan. They could write to the head-mistress after the ceremony, she said, but they need not announce their marriage until the autumn term. As they particularly wished to avoid newspaper publicity they would be married by registrar in the East End of London.

This can hardly be called a tactical blunder on Ruth’s part because, as far as the police were concerned, she had exercised no tactics. She did not know that a great many persons who wish to marry more or less in secret, particularly bigamists, regularly hit on that same idea. So the East End registrars invariably supply the police with a list of those applicants who obviously do not belong to the neighbourhood.

They each took a ‘suitcase address’ and applied for a three-day licence. Detective-Inspector Rason received the notice on the second day.

‘Oh! So it was a triangle after all!’ he exclaimed, without logical justification. ‘And now they’re getting married on the quiet. That probably means that they cooked up all the hallucination stuff together. Anything they said may have been true or may not.’

He took out the yellow jumper, the pale green sleeveless dress, and the mackintosh, which, with the iron bracket, was the only real evidence he had. In the garments there was no smell of gardenia.

‘But Herbert said the dress Ruth was wearing was Rita’s dress and that it smelt of gardenia. Well, it doesn’t! Perhaps the scent has worn off in three months. Better put a query to the Chemical Department.’

He had difficulty in finding the proper form, still more difficulty in filling it up. So instead, he sought out his twenty-year-old niece.

‘When you put scent on your dress, my dear, how long does the dress go on smelling of it?’

‘Oh, uncle! You never put any on your dress. It isn’t good for the dress and the scent goes stale – and your best friends won’t tell you. You put it on your hair and behind your ears.’

So if there had been a smell of gardenia it meant that Ruth had deliberately applied it – the other girl’s perfume. But maybe there had been no smell of gardenia. And maybe it wasn’t Rita’s dress.

Presently his thought crystallized.

‘If Ruth was really wearing Rita’s dress and Rita’s scent, Herbert is telling the truth. If not – not! Wonder how far we can check up on the dress itself.’

He searched jumper and dress for a trade mark and found none. ‘Then the dress must have been home made. Or perhaps the village dressmaker.’

Deciding to take a long shot he was in Hemel the following afternoon.

‘Yes, I made that for the poor girl,’ said Miss Amstey. ‘It was a present from Miss Watlington. She designed it and the yellow underbodice to wear with it, and I must say it looked very well.’

Journey from London for nothing, thought Rason. Out of mere politeness he asked: ‘And you made this jumper, too, to go with it?’

‘No, I didn’t! That’s a knitted line – came out of a factory. Besides, it wasn’t poor Rita’s. It was Miss Watlington’s. I saw her wearing it the very day of the murder. And I must say I thought it frightful. Apart from its being made of wool. The underbodice I made was silk.’

‘Then this jumper and this dress don’t go together – they belonged to different women? But you could wear the one with the other if you wanted to, couldn’t you?’

‘Well, you could,’ admitted Miss Amstey, ‘but you’d look rather funny. For one thing, being a polo jumper, it has a high collar. For another, there’s the length – particularly the length of the sleeves. With one thing and another, people would laugh to themselves, even if they didn’t turn round and stare.’

That left Rason with the now simple riddle of the bloodstains. The two garments worn together would produce a ridiculous effect. Yet there were bloodstains on both, deemed to have been made by Cudden’s hand, at the same time. And Cudden had identified both dress and jumper at the inquest.

Rason took it all down and got Miss Amstey to sign it.

Ruth decided that they could without impropriety arrive at the registrar’s in the same taxi – nor need they be ashamed to carry the suitcases that had established the legality of their address. In outward appearance she had changed. The talent for dress she had formerly exercised for another was now successfully applied to herself.

In the hall of the registrar’s office, Rason accosted Herbert and introduced himself.

‘I am sorry, Mr Cudden, but I must ask you both to accompany me to headquarters. A serious discrepancy has been discovered in the evidence you gave in the coroner’s court.’

They were taken to the Chief Superintendent’s room. Three others were with him. Ruth was invited to sit.

Herbert was reminded of his evidence regarding the dress. Then the pale green sleeveless dress was handed to him.

‘Is that the dress?’

‘To the best of my belief – yes.’ He turned it. ‘Yes – there’s the bloodstain.’

The yellow jumper was passed to him. After a similar examination he again answered:

‘Yes.’

‘Miss Watlington, do you agree that these two garments, formerly belonging to the deceased, were worn by you that night?’

‘Yes,’ said Ruth, though she could guess what had happened and knew that there could be but little hope.

The Chief Superintendent spoke next.

‘You will both be detained on suspicion of being concerned in the murder of Rita Steevens.’

‘No!’ snapped Ruth. ‘Mr Cudden has told the truth throughout. He knows nothing about women’s clothes except their colour. The colour of that jumper was near enough for him to think it was the same. They were passed to him separately at the inquest.’

‘Ruth – I can’t follow this!’ protested Herbert.

‘Miss Watlington is making a gallant attempt to get you out of your present difficulty,’ said the Chief. ‘But I’m afraid it will be futile.’

‘It will not be futile,’ said Ruth. ‘Will you all remain just as you are, please, and let me go behind the Chief Superintendent’s chair. And can I have that dress?’

Behind the superintendent’s chair she whipped off her fashionable walking suit. Then she put on the jumper and the pale green sleeveless dress.

Then, looking as ridiculous as Miss Amstey had prophesied, she stood where all could see her. The officials had been awed into silence.

‘Herbert, you have only to answer me naturally to clear up the whole absurd mistake. Was I, or was I not, dressed like this that night?’

‘No, of course not! Your neck was bare. So were your arms. And you looked properly dressed. That thing doesn’t seem to fit.’

Ruth turned to the Chief and his colleagues.

‘You see – he is obviously innocent.’ She added: ‘You may think I am not.’

The Case of the

Social Climber

Chapter One

In England, on the rare occasions when the present Lord Haddenham figures in the social news – and often when he does not – people will hash up the murder of the young man’s father in 1935. Some will tell you that Stentoller, the wealthy banker, was really innocent – that the gold snuff-box, inscribed with the royal cipher, was planted on an already dead body. They would have you believe that Stentoller’s confession and subsequent execution were part of a plot to deceive the public.

The objective facts were few and simple. On a spring evening, Lord Haddenham was crossing the Green Park on foot. He was on a tree-lined path, some three hundred yards from Buckingham Palace, when he was stabbed in the throat. There was no robbery from the person. After a few false scents, the trail petered out.

A year later, the Department of Dead Ends stumbled on evidence which convicted Stentoller, the head of a century-old financial house of unblemished reputation. Add that Haddenham’s son had become engaged to Stentoller’s daughter, to the satisfaction of both parents whose friendship dated from their schooldays – and you will see why the public was puzzled.

The talk outlasted the first world war. Over drinks, the locale of the murder tended to shift ever nearer to Buckingham Palace. ‘Practically in the Palace Yard and almost under the very nose of the sentry who, you can be sure, had been told to see nothing!’ Names of various foreign royalties were whispered. If Stentoller had defended himself in court, the war would have started in 1936 – for reasons, however, that would have astonished Hitler. And so on.

The fact that the Prosecution put forward no motive for the murder made the public suspect that there was something behind it. And so there was, of course. Something fundamental. But there was no mystery that could have made the front page – no foreign royalties or secret women or this-that-and-the-other. Indeed, the clue to the mystery – if such it can be called – might be sought in the preamble to the American Declaration of Rights – in the passage touching the equality of man. Or in the quaint ceremony by which, at the boundary of the original City of London, the Sovereign surrenders his sword to the Lord Mayor as a reminder that the King may not enter the City under arms, save at the invitation of the citizens.

But at the tragic moment of the murder, Stentoller was thinking of a cheque for a thousand pounds which he had given Haddenham thirty years previously when they were undergraduates at Oxford.

Chapter Two

Oxford, preceded by four important years at Charchester School, represented a revolutionary change in the Stentoller tradition. Stentoller I was a trusted agent of the Rothschilds at the time of the Napoleonic wars. When Rothschild accepted ennoblement, the friendship terminated, because Stentoller felt that the old City families, being a kind of aristocracy in their own right, should hold aloof from the nobility. In the eighteen-fifties, Stentoller III became Lord Mayor of London and was deeply offended when Queen Victoria offered him a baronetcy. Stentoller IV decided that this attitude was no longer tenable. In the late nineties, therefore, young Cuthbert Stentoller was sent to Charchester with instructions to fit himself to occupy a prominent place in what the fashion papers call Society.

In the City family tradition, in so far as it still survived, the children ‘lived soft’. At thirteen, that highly intelligent but inexperienced boy left the stately eighteenth-century mansion, left his home tutors and his personal servant, for the bear-pit of a public school – which in England means a special kind of private school. The more insular types will assure you that there are only six public schools in England, two in Scotland, and none at all anywhere else in the world.

In his first year he learnt – like the other younger sons of the nobility and gentry – the rudiments of cookery, how to clean out somebody else’s study, how to whiten somebody else’s buckskin cricket boots, how to endure injustice without making a song about it. He was comparatively ill-fed and ill-housed. He discovered that quite a number of elder boys had authority to beat him publicly for slackness at games and whatnot. In short, though he suffered no individual bullying, the system subjected his person to an indignity which, if it had been authoritatively applied to the son of a labourer, would have provoked something akin to civil war.

He made a personal friend of Charles Hendon, his ‘avunculus’ – that is, a boy senior by one year, appointed to guide a new boy through his maze of duties.

‘I say, Stentoller! My mater’s coming down on Saturday. You can come along if you like. She’ll give us a blowout at the Angel.’

‘Thank you, Hendon.’ Stentoller had not yet learnt to keep formality in its proper place. ‘Shall I join you and Mrs Hendon at the Angel?’

‘No. We’ll both meet her at the station. And I say, mind you don’t call her “Mrs Hendon”. My guvnor’s called Lord Haddenham and she’s called Lady Haddenham. Come on. We’ve got to help roll Lower Green before tea.’

Lady Haddenham perceived that Cuthbert Stentoller was more intelligent and more sensitive than the normal young public school tough. When Stentoller temporarily absented himself she asked her son:

‘I like Stentoller. Who is he?’

‘I dunno, Mother. I’ll ask him when he comes back.’

‘Don’t be silly, Charles! That would be an abominable thing to do.’

Stentoller had overheard. When the boys were returning together he asked:

‘What did your mater mean when she asked who I was? She got my name right.’

‘You’re not supposed to ask that sort of question,’ said Hendon, then relented. ‘She meant who was your mother before she married your father. Women are always totting up people’s relations.’

Stentoller was puzzled. His mother never totted up people’s relations. He was an undergraduate before he understood what Lady Haddenham had really wanted to know, and he acquired the understanding with literal tears of humiliation.

In the intervening years he had learnt a good deal – notably that the fashion papers wrote of a world that anyone could enter who had conventional manners, a respectable record, and a sufficiency of money – that the power and influence of this crowd was virtually limited to the racecourse and to the tradesmen of the West End. True that it was besprinkled with high sounding titles – but he had discovered, even in Charchester days, that a title was no index of a man’s position. Through his friend, Charles Hendon, he had glimpsed the existence of an inner core, and was surprised to learn that his own father knew much about it.

‘Winning the Derby and that sort of thing wouldn’t get you anywhere with the real people. We have been doing business with them for generations and know something about them. Now and again they enter the political Government – the Cecils, the Churchills, and a few others. But mostly they confine themselves to the Administration. Their influence is paramount in the Navy, the Army, the Civil Service, and the Diplomatic Corps. They trust our firm, in their own way, which is not the way of the City. That is why I think they might admit you to their circle.’

His father had told him too much or too little. Possibly his father had never heard of the Radlington Club – the small social club of ‘the real people’ – the inner core – at Oxford. Hendon, of course, was a member. Stentoller at first hoped, and then intended, to become one. His first academic year went by without result, then his second. He was personally popular, and was well known through his rendering of the part of Laertes in the Dramatic Society. For the duelling scene he had studied fencing seriously for six months, thereby acquiring a skill which was to be the means of destroying two valuable lives.

The Radlington incident occurred in his second year, which was Hendon’s third. Lord Haddenham had recently died. The eldest son had gone straight from Eton into the Army and had been killed in the South African War, so Charles Hendon inherited the earldom and estate, which was heavily encumbered with death duties.

Hendon had contrived that they should have the same tutor. One afternoon, when Stentoller entered the tutor’s room, he heard Hendon saying:

‘It’s the death duties, of course. The Bank doesn’t seem eager to let me have another thousand before things are straightened out, so I’ve decided I shall have to “go down” at the end of this term. Hullo, here’s Stentoller. Don’t go, old man. We’ve finished.’

Immediately after dinner that night, Stentoller went to Hendon’s rooms and found him alone.

‘I heard what you said to Wallingham about your “going down”.’

‘That’s all right. I don’t mind in the least. Only, it’s not for immediate publication. There’s a Radlington dinner next Saturday, and I shall explain then that I’m going down for family reasons. It’ll mean the Army for me instead of the Diplomatic – that’s about all, really!’

‘Hendon, let me lend you the thousand.’

‘I say, Stentoller!’

Stentoller was not certain how the other was taking it, felt his own heart thumping, and lurched on:

‘If you’re offended, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. If you were to “go down” because I hadn’t the nerve to ask you to let me help –’

‘I’m not offended, you dear old nanny-goat! You took my breath away. Sort of going to throw my arms round your neck! But I’ll tell you what’s sticking in my gizzard. If the Bank is shy, it probably means they know the estate won’t be able to pay it back for the devil of a time.’

‘I don’t want it paid back for the devil of a time.’

‘Don’t you! Oh, well then it’s all right, and thanks most awfully! And I needn’t say anything at the Radder dinner.’

Stentoller took out his cheque book. ‘Pay –’ he nearly wrote ‘Charles Hendon’ –‘– Pay Lord Haddenham One Thousand Pounds. Cuthbert Stentoller.’

He handed the cheque to his friend.

‘Thanks! The Bank’ll throw a fit to-morrow and serve ’em right!’

‘I say, Hendon!’ In those days, young men rarely used first names unless they were related. ‘How does one get into the Radlington?’

‘Oh, I dunno! When you come “up”, somebody you know asks you if you’d like to be a member, and the other members know you, or your relations have told ’em to look out for you, and then the secretary sends you a chit.’

Stentoller waited. But there was no more about the Radlington Club. ‘Pay Lord Haddenham One Thousand Pounds –’ – for nothing at all! Relations again. Back six years. ‘Women are always totting up people’s relations.’

Not only women, apparently.

Back in his own rooms, Stentoller wrote to his father, asking him to instruct the Bank to honour the cheque, giving his reason. Almost as soon as he had posted the letter, a college messenger brought him a note in Haddenham’s hand-writing:

Dear Stentoller. It was wonderfully kind of you to give me that cheque, and it is impossible to tell you how deeply this act of yours has affected me. All the same, I feel on reflection that I must let events take their own course. So I am returning your cheque herewith. Yours ever, Charles Hendon.

‘God, what a fool I am!’ Stentoller buried his face in his hands. In that first ghastly year at Charchester his courage had been

sustained, his path smoothed, by Hendon. Hendon had been waiting with a welcome at Oxford and had opened many doors. He had given and accepted favours. The friendship was genuine beyond doubt.

‘I like Stentoller. Who is he?’

Hendon was his friend. Yet sooner than propose him for membership of the Radlington, Hendon had thrown up his career.

The next morning he took a one day exeat to London to tell his father why he no longer wanted the thousand.

‘That’s where their strength lies,’ said his father. ‘The individual is always ready to efface himself to avoid imperilling the others.’

‘The peril to the others being my membership of the club?’

They were in the study, a room that could seat thirty without discomfort. On a vast chimney piece stood an ormolu clock under a glass dome. Chippendale writing table, chair, cabinets – the selection of Stentoller I.

‘Not your membership of the club, but his perception that you wanted something, in return for your loan, which touched his relationship with the others. But, my dear boy, it’s a storm in a teacup. It won’t even affect your friend’s career. The Bank have approached us on his behalf. We have dealt with the family before, and we shall give the Bank a guarantee.’

‘I don’t understand, Father. We aren’t literal moneylenders, are we? And if the Bank won’t touch it –’

‘Come here, Cuthbert.’ He opened a showcase like a showcase in a museum and took out a gold snuff-box, inscribed with the royal cipher on one side and the Haddenham arms on the other, with a legend in dog-Latin.

‘A gift, of that profligate buffoon who was unfortunately George IV of England, to your friend’s great-grandfather. Haddenham had been commanded to borrow ten thousand pounds for one of George’s disreputable little troubles. “I will not lend the King a penny, because I don’t trust him,” said your great-grandfather, “but I will gladly lend your lordship that amount.” “Your words touch the edge of treason, Mr Stentoller,” said Haddenham. But I gather there was a twinkle in his eye, because he pulled out this snuff-box and added: “I pledge the King’s honour with the King’s gift.”

‘Well, the King had no honour, which meant that we paid ten thousand for this snuff-box. But we had helped Haddenham out of a difficulty, and he told his crowd all about it. A year later we were commissioned to underwrite a Colonial loan of ten millions – and made a hundred thousand out of it in a few days. Ever since then, business of that kind has tended to drift to us without effort or expense on our part. We have probably made a couple of millions out of that snuff-box.’

At Oxford, the following evening, Haddenham burst into Stentoller’s room.

‘I say, Stentoller! Perfectly splendid news! I know you’ll be pleased! I needn’t say anything at the Radder dinner after all. Apparently, that bank manager was getting over a thick night when he was so gloomy about those death duties.…’

There was a joyous fantasy on the habits of bank managers. But, again, there was nothing more about the Radlington Club.

Chapter Three

Cuthbert Stentoller’s marriage to the daughter of one of the youngest High Court judges neither advanced nor retarded his progress to the inner core, which did not concern itself with the judiciary. For the next ten years he absorbed himself in business and family life, while keeping his eyes open. One year, to please his wife, he was seen in the royal enclosure at Ascot.

As his father had warned him, this was a waste of energy. The inner core would attend Levees, Drawing-Rooms, and State ceremonies, but had no interest in the fashion-paper aspect of royalty, which to them was purely an Office of State. Without leaders, without tangible organization, without policy except the preservation of Britain, they held aloof from domestic politics, ignored elections, but subtly coiled themselves round Governments in being.

He discovered that the equivalent of the Radlington was the Terracotta Club. It was housed in a rather dingy building off Whitehall. The servants, like most of the members, were appointed on the hereditary principle and were never discharged except for larceny which, in effect, never occurred. The fashionable world of spenders had scarcely heard of it and none had ever entered it, for it admitted no guests. But the Chancelleries of Europe knew all about it.

Stentoller intended to become a member. This time he would make no mistakes. He reckoned that it might take him twenty years to procure an invitation to join. Actually, it took twenty-three years of strenuous and successful living, unobtrusively observed and as unobtrusively approved by the inner core.

On the death of his father, he had sold the family mansion on the fringe of the City, already surrounded by offices, and transferred the furniture to a modern house, with a hundred acres of land, in the Surrey hills, some forty miles out of London. He sold a corner of this to Weslake, a young baronet in the Guards who was a member of the Terracotta. He also arranged for the building of a house for him. But he did not ask how one became a member of the Terracotta Club, because he knew.

Haddenham, who had gone into the Diplomatic Service and was nearly always abroad, kept the friendship in being and never missed seeing him when on leave. He had married about the same time. His wife had enough money for them to live without anxiety, but not enough to keep up Haddenham Castle, which was let on long lease.

‘It would be an odd twist,’ remarked Stentoller at one of their reunion dinners, ‘if your youngster and mine were to take a fancy to each other later on.’

‘Yes rather! Nothing I should like better!’ returned Haddenham, but Stentoller knew that he did not mean it.

Yet it happened ten years later, after the youngsters had been thrown together during a fortnight’s holiday on the Riviera. Stentoller had remained at home. His wife had barely told him her suspicions before Derek Hendon himself turned up.

‘I say, sir! I want to marry Gwen. She said I must ask you. Is it okay?’

‘For a budding diplomat, young man, your approach is somewhat direct,’ smiled Stentoller. ‘Adverting to your question, I have pleasure in announcing on behalf of her mother and myself that it is eminently – er – okay by us.’ A moment later he asked: ‘I take it you have consulted your father?’

‘Consult him, sir? He won’t need consulting. He’ll whoop, when he gets my cable to-morrow.’

Events in the life of Cuthbert Stentoller began to gallop. After dinner, his neighbour, Weslake, turned up on his way home. When Derek Hendon had been congratulated, the two elders drifted to the study.

‘They’ve dipped in the lucky bag and pulled me out for a Foreign Office job in Turkey,’ said Weslake. ‘That means a year out there, beginning on the twelfth. There’s a Levee on the tenth, so I shall go by air. Had a sort of farewell lunch at the Terracotta. A lot of fellers you know were present.’ He named them and became so discursive that Stentoller’s pulse quickened. Twenty-three years he had waited for this moment.

‘I wonder, Stentoller, if you’d care to join the Terracotta? I’d be glad to put you up, and Tharme would second you.’ Presently Weslake was explaining: ‘There’s a committee meeting after the Levee on the tenth. I’m not on the committee, but Tharme is. They’ll probably write you the same day.’

So it was a foregone conclusion! They had talked it over and agreed to accept him. Weslake was chattering about Turkey, in no hurry to go. The Terracotta at last! His marriage had staled after five years, and he was aware that his wife had hoped for a divorce; but she knew about the Terracotta, though he had never mentioned it. God, she was a good woman! Weslake was gaping at the showcase.

‘A lot of interesting things you’ve got here, Stentoller. I suppose they all have a history.’

‘I’ll show you something,’ said Stentoller, to break his own absorption in the Terracotta. He opened the case and took out the gold snuff-box.

‘Is that the Haddenham snuff-box mentioned in Kyle’s Life of George IV? – “I pledge the King’s honour on the King’s gift”? But, of course, I see it is!’

‘I shall celebrate Gwen’s engagement by solemnly handing that to Haddenham next time I see him,’ said Stentoller – a flourish which, indirectly, hanged him.

Gwen was a willowy blonde, springy and vital, with her share of the Stentoller sternness behind a mask of modernity – nearly everything he had wanted her to be. He meant to say something impressive to her but funked it at the last moment.

‘Rushing away from your ageing parents at the first opportunity? Nasty bit o’ work, darling, aren’t you!’

‘It’s not the first opportunity! Daddy, you do like him, don’t you!’

‘Very much! But d’you think you’re going to like stooging around one Embassy after another?’

‘I shall love it. But I’m weak in Italian and German – get me a couple of good crammers, please. And when we’re in England I wonder whether you’d let us have the cottage. Mother said the other day she wished you’d get rid of it.’

Here was the chance to say something impressive.

‘When you’re in England, I’ll let you have Haddenham Castle.’

‘But you can’t! There’s a tenant there for years yet.’

‘I know. But I’m going to make friends with the tenant.’

‘But we shan’t really need the Castle till he’s an ambassador.’ She looked up at him gravely. ‘Daddy, you aren’t going berserk, are you?’

‘I’ve been waiting all my life to go berserk. Now run off to bed, miss! I want to talk to your mother before she turns in.’

His wife had expected him and was pottering about her room – a severe room dominated by a large picture of Notre Dame.

‘It’s what you wanted, Cuthbert, isn’t it!’ Her smile was ambiguous. ‘I don’t think he has said a word to his father. If Lady Haddenham were alive she might have made difficulties. She was very old-fashioned.’

They exchanged platitudes about the engagement. A stiff and pointless conversation – irritating, too, because he had not come to talk about Gwen, as there was nothing that need be said.

‘Did you know, Hilda, that I – had a sort of idea once that I might join the Terracotta?’

‘I’ve known for years.’ She caught her breath. ‘Weslake – in the study to-night? Did he –?’

‘Yes. There were a lot of them there to-day and they talked it over. He’s proposing, and Lord Tharme is seconding. Tharme is on the committee.’

‘Oh, Cuthbert, I am so glad!’ He had not guessed that she would take it like that. She was holding him, and he could tell from her voice that she was crying. ‘Then our marriage hasn’t been – such an awful failure, after all – has it!’

Chapter Four

If Haddenham did not whoop, he did send a cordial cable, followed by a letter saying he would be in London for the Levee on the tenth, and that they must dine at the Varsity, to which they both belonged, as did Weslake. In those days it had massive premises in a cul-de-sac off Piccadilly giving on to a slip-gate into the Green Park.

Haddenham had aged more than Stentoller. He had become a tubby little man, bald, with a long, stringy throat. He had held ambassadorial rank for five years without being affected with pomposity, for he was as unimpressed with his own position as he was with that of any man. He had the air, typical of his caste, of amiable omnipotence, the air that could make kings and communists feel self-conscious and apologetic, ready to be flattered into obedience.

‘I say, Stentoller!’ He shook hands with something approaching genius. ‘D’you realize that, all being well, we’re within measurable distance of being grandfathers! I still think of you as a rather grubby little fag trying to clean out Ellerson’s study and making it a darned sight dustier than it was.’

That was the keynote of their conversation during dinner. Stentoller steered from reminiscence to the dynamic present.

‘I say, Hendon! Have you ever heard of your great-grandfather’s snuff-box?’

‘Rather! Brought up on the legend. “Your words, Mr Stentoller, touch the edge of treason” – By Jove, it never occurred to me that must mean you!’

‘I have the snuff-box here!’ said Stentoller. ‘As our families are to be linked, I want you to take it back. I – dammit, I’ve left it in my overcoat! I’ll go and get it.’

‘Thanks most awfully! But don’t bother now, old man. When we go down will do. We’ve got to talk about the youngsters. I can’t give Derek more than the five hundred a year he’s getting now.’

‘Don’t worry. I shall make a settlement on Gwen. In the meantime, I’ve bought the lease of Haddenham Castle – the tenant has contracted to vacate at three months’ notice. I shall give the lease to Derek for a wedding-present.’

‘My dear old boy, you take my breath away! I never expected we’d be back in my lifetime. The youngsters’ll probably let me have the Chichester Wing when I retire.’

‘It’ll make a foothold for them when they’re in England.’

‘Ah, I was coming to that! I think that, in view of the very happy change in Derek’s circumstances, he would be well advised to transfer to the Foreign Office – and be employed permanently at home – drop the Diplomatic branch altogether.’

Stentoller felt himself bristling, for reasons he did not yet understand.

‘Gwen will be disappointed, Hendon. She’s already cramming Italian and German – she’s practically bilingual in French. She’s looking forward to doing a round of the embassies. Means to make him an ambassador, like his father, eh!’

A minute twitch of the other’s eyebrow reminded Stentoller that members of the inner core never acknowledge personal ambition. He had said the wrong thing.

‘If she’s looking forward to being the wife of a diplomat, it’s because the dear girl doesn’t know what she’s letting herself in for. Nor does Derek, yet. The romance of it is pure nonsense. It’s deadly dull for the first fifteen or twenty years. And very parochial. You dovetail work and play inside a very small circle, who are nearly all your relations, or your wife’s relations, or relations of relations.’

So that was it! Relations again! But he was no longer an undergraduate to be frightened by the implications of that word. Anger was slowly mounting – checked by the chief steward approaching Haddenham.

‘Telephone message from Colonel Hallingburn, my lord. Can you spare him half an hour?’

‘Thanks. Don’t call me a taxi – it’s quicker to slip through the Park.’

Stentoller knew, as well as the chief steward, that this was a summons to report at the Palace.

‘I expect They want a first hand account of that Bulgarian hullabaloo,’ said Haddenham, rising. ‘But Their half an hour means just thirty minutes. I’m coming back here to collect that snuff-box from you, if you’re still here. Lord, what a day! Arrived by air at breakfast time. Reported to the Cabinet at ten: a Levee at eleven, followed by a stand-up lunch. And then a committee meeting at the Terracotta!’

Stentoller felt as if an ice block were pressing on his chest. But he managed to speak before the other had moved out of earshot.

‘Did you sit at a committee meeting of the Terracotta this afternoon?’

Haddenham turned back. His face looked drawn – and sad – and he was groping for words.

‘Stentoller, old man, I’m sorry – very sorry indeed – that you did not consult me before letting Weslake and Tharme propose you.’

‘Why, Hendon?’

‘I must go – They mustn’t be kept waiting. We’ll talk when I come back.’

Blackballed, obviously!

Control was in danger of slipping. He tried to will himself back to the moment before this moment of disaster – which his imagination was refusing to accept. He told himself that the ambition of twenty-three years had been shattered. But he was actually thinking of Hilda clinging to him, crying with happiness because her faithfulness had been rewarded with his success. He did not see how he could live that down. For the first time he experienced the suicide impulse.

Suddenly, all emotion left him. He felt as he had once felt after drinking an excessive amount of old brandy – cool, clear-headed, and determined in the pursuit of some purpose which was unknown to him.

He was certain that it was Haddenham himself who had blackballed him. Because long ago at Oxford he had tried to lever himself into the Radlington, thereby proving that he lacked the self-effacement required of the inner core.

‘I must keep faith with Haddenham. Give him his snuff-box before I demand a showdown.’ He had always thought it a little ungentlemanly of his own great-grandfather to retain that snuff-box.

That dangerous mood would have passed without doing any material harm, had not the malignant fates chosen to thrust a sword into his hand – a sword, in all preposterous literality!

He could not breathe easily in the club. He could wait for Haddenham by the slip-gate into the Park. As he approached the cloakroom he heard the voice of Weslake protesting to the attendant.

‘But what the dickens am I to do with it? I’m leaving the country by air at seven to-morrow. I’ll have to cable my wife to call here for it. Oh, hullo, Stentoller! Look here – I changed here for the Levee and my batman packed the sword under the straps of the Gladstone because it wouldn’t go inside. And the railway people have sent it back because in law it’s a lethal weapon. A dress sword a lethal weapon! It couldn’t cut a loaf of bread, and the point is about as sharp as the point of an umbrella.’

‘Give to to me!’ Stentoller spoke automatically out of the cold, white haze. ‘I’ll take it, and give it to Lady Weslake in the morning.’

While Weslake was gratefully accepting, Stentoller reclaimed his coat. In the hall, he took the sword from Weslake. The belt, in girdle form, dangled awkwardly.

‘I can slip that off and roll it up,’ said Weslake. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve room for it in your overcoat?’

There was a book in one pocket and the gold snuff-box in the other. Stentoller transferred the snuff-box to the breast pocket.

‘Oh! That’s the Haddenham one, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. But Haddenham slipped off before I could give it to him.’

Farewells and good wishes, while Stentoller wondered why Gwen’s relations should prevent Derek from being a diplomat. But he knew the answer.

Gripping, in mid-scabbard, the sword of the Order of St Severell of Antioch, supplied by the tailor who made the robes, he left the club, entered the Park by the slip-gate that gave on to the narrow tree-lined path.

It was little used as a thoroughfare and there were no seats for lovers. Moonlight shone intermittently through wind-driven clouds.

What a lot of nonsense his father had talked about the inner core! They hadn’t been able to stop the South African war. They had failed to handle the Kaiser in 1914, and now they were cold-shouldering Churchill and letting the Premier grovel to Hitler and Mussolini, to say nothing of the Japanese. The ‘real people’ indeed! As if they were some special kind of human being! The Americans had taped them a hundred and fifty years ago. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal –’ Nothing there about a man’s relations –

‘I say, Stentoller!’ Haddenham’s voice broke the interlude of reverie. ‘Aren’t you cold waiting out here?’

‘I’ve got your snuff-box. You said you would accept it.’

‘Oh – thanks most awfully!’ Haddenham put it in his pocket. ‘Shall we go back to the Club?’

‘Hendon, did you blackball me at the Terracotta?’

‘You’re not supposed to ask that sort of question. The voting is secret.’

The moonlight illumined a scowl on Haddenham’s face, illumined his long, stringy throat.

Chapter Five

The point of the sword might be little sharper than that of an umbrella: indeed, the police thought at first that an umbrella had been used – one of the thin, expensive kind, having a steel shaft – by a man who had been taught how to put weight behind a lunge.

When Haddenham was dead, Stentoller wiped the blade on the bordering grass and returned it to its scabbard. He strode back through the slip-gate to the car park on the other side of Piccadilly.

When he arrived home, shortly after midnight, his wife and daughter had gone to bed. He took the sword to his room. He drew the blade, noticed that it was stiff in the scabbard. He held it to the light at arm’s length. It was slightly bent. Better not try to correct it – it was a wonder the blade had not snapped. These tailor’s blades were made of some inferior alloy, plated over. Although it appeared to be clean, he rinsed and dried it.

‘If anyone saw me, there is nothing to be done. If no one saw me there is no reason why I should be suspected.’

As is characteristic of murderers who are not of the criminal classes, he took an individual view of the morality of his act. He did not pretend that the murder could be justified. But he seemed to himself more sinned against than sinning. For thirty years Haddenham had amused himself by pretending friendship with a man he despised – and despised for no ethical reason. He blamed Haddenham for the murder as a man will blame a too attractive wanton for his own debauchery.

While he was dressing on the following morning, Gwen came to his room. She thrust a paper at him – the Record – not trusting herself to speak. He was not taken by surprise. There was skilful restraint in his reception of the news. But the sympathy he expressed was genuine. It would mean that the wedding must be postponed. He hated Haddenham afresh for making Gwen so miserable.

When she had gone, he skimmed the account in the Record.

‘It can be stated that robbery was not the motive. In deceased’s pockets were some thirty pounds – to say nothing of a gold watch and chain and a valuable gold snuff-box.’

That snuff-box! Stentoller had forgotten all about it.

‘That’s all right. I shall say I gave it to him over dinner,’ ran his thoughts.

His eye fell on the sword of the Order of St Severell of Antioch, standing in the corner, the coiled girdle on the floor beside it.

‘Weslake saw me take the snuff-box out of my pocket. He remarked on it, and I told him that Haddenham had left the Club. Weslake will prove that I saw Haddenham after he left the Palace. And that means I shall be hanged.’

Weslake was at that moment in the air. But copies of The Times were probably in the aircraft with him, on their way, like himself, to the Embassy.

Over breakfast he looked at The Times. It gave headlines but did not indulge in speculations nor wallow in the details, like the Record. It stated merely that there had been no robbery from the person. Papers like the Record did not penetrate to Embassies. That meant there was a reasonable possibility that Weslake’s attention would never be directed to the snuff-box.

After breakfast, he took the sword to Lady Weslake, as he had promised.

‘Yes, it’s terrible about Haddenham!’ he agreed. ‘I was dining with him at the Varsity. He was called away only a few minutes before I ran into your husband.’

When he reached his office, he found waiting for him a junior detective from Scotland Yard.

‘We understand, sir, that you had dinner with Lord Haddenham last night at the Varsity Club. Was anything said which you think might help us in our investigation?’

‘Nothing at all, I’m afraid. Our conversation was purely personal. We had been friends since boyhood. Lord Haddenham’s son and my daughter had just become engaged, and we were discussing family plans most of the time.’

The young detective glanced at the list of questions he had been instructed to ask. The next was the time at which they parted company.

‘Somewhere about ten-thirty – I’m not sure of the exact time,’ answered Stentoller. ‘But you can check that. He was with me until he received a telephone message from the Palace – you know all about that, of course – the Palace officials will tell you what time they telephoned the club. The chief steward delivered the message himself. I left the club shortly afterwards.’

Everything he said was carefully written down.

‘There’s only one more question, Mr Stentoller. Can you tell us definitely whether Lord Haddenham was in the habit of taking snuff?’

‘I can tell you that he was not.’ Stentoller smiled benignly. ‘Then why that enormous gold snuff-box, eh? I can clear up that mystery for you. I gave it him myself over dinner, although it was already in a sense his – you’ll find it has his crest on it as well as the Royal cipher.’ He told the story of the snuff-box in full – gave the reference to Kyle’s Life of George IV – so that the Yard should mark it as accounted for.

Then came the newspapermen. He gave them the same account, except that he made no reference to the snuff-box, which thereafter received no publicity, as the Yard had made clear that there was nothing pinned on to it.

At home a letter was waiting for him from Lord Tharme:

‘Dear Stentoller, I am very sorry. I have resigned from the Terracotta – I may say, in a state of deep mystification.’

Four days later came an air mail letter from Weslake.

‘Dear Stentoller, I can’t think what the devil happened at the Terracotta. Nor can Tharme. I have, of course, resigned. Haddenham’s death is a shock. I read it in The Times, going over. It must have happened almost while you and I were talking – and within a couple of hundred yards of us. I was very sorry for Gwen and Derek, as it will mean postponement. Yours ever, Reginald Weslake.’

That meant that Weslake had no suspicion. The chance of the snuff-box being mentioned at the inquest or anywhere else was practically non-existent.

He received another visit from the police, who were checking on all members of the Varsity Club. Stentoller confirmed that he had left the Club about half past ten, gone straight to the car park and driven home.

The doorkeeper at the Palace had recorded that Lord Haddenham had left at ten-forty. As Haddenham had mentioned to Colonel Hallingburn that he was going back to the Varsity Club, the murder could be timed at approximately a quarter to eleven. If Stentoller had not in fact gone straight to the car park he might have committed the murder. But so might a dozen other members who left the club about that time. As no shadow of a motive could be found against anybody, nor any clue pointing anywhere, the Yard had to advance the theory of a foreign political fanatic. In six months the log of the case drifted to the Department of Dead Ends.

Chapter Six

The wedding was postponed for a year, actually for fourteen months, as Derek, now Lord Haddenham, remained in the Diplomatic Service and had to fit it in with his leave. Gwen became virtually bi-lingual in German and Italian, and Stentoller resumed his normal life.

He avoided the ordeal of telling Hilda that he had been blackballed. There was never any publicity or chatter about the Terracotta, so he decided that she need never know. Moreover, his orientation was now somewhat different. Under his guidance, the firm had gained even greater strength. He was no longer concerned to be numbered among the inner core. When the youngsters were settled, he intended to sell out and retire. The traditions of the house of Stentoller now seemed as hollow as the traditions of the inner core.

Weslake had returned from Turkey. He had called at the first opportunity, had been very friendly but had not mentioned the Terracotta incident, or anything else of an inconvenient nature.

Hilda took over the entire arrangements for the wedding. On the following day they were going for a quiet fortnight together. ‘A silver honeymoon,’ she had called it, with generous courage.

On a bright day in June the youngsters were married from Stentoller’s house, which looked over the wooded hills and green valleys of Surrey. The reception flowed from the house to the garden. The inner core was sufficiently represented, and somehow or other there was a cross-section of the fashion-paper world. Had he been a mere snob, Stentoller would have regarded that reception as the seal on a successful social career.

Gwen and her husband were receiving their congratulations in the hall at the foot of the double staircase, with Hilda and himself in support. In the dining-room, behind him on his right, the presents were laid out. He must remember to go and look at them.

‘Reggie doubts whether he’ll be able to make it,’ Lady Weslake was saying. ‘He simply had to go to a conference this morning. But he’ll come if he can.’

A pity if he didn’t turn up. Gwen had made him an unofficial uncle and liked teasing him. She would miss him on her wedding day. His thoughts roved. Children, even Gwen, had no tact with their parents. If she had any regrets at leaving him she hadn’t shown them. Now and again fragments of conversation in the dining-room reached his ears.

‘George IV gave it to Haddenham. And the original Stentoller had something to do with it. I know the King’s honour comes into it somehow – look, there’s the royal cipher!’

That snuff-box! Stentoller blinked. What on earth was it doing among the wedding presents? He slipped into the dining-room.

There it was, on a little table set apart which had a card clipped in a menu holder saying: ‘Traditional Presents Originated by the Second Earl of Haddenham, A.D. 1720.’ There was a necklace, a jewelled dagger, a Bible – never mind those things! the snuffbox had a ticket to itself: ‘Gift of George IV to Fifth Earl: Mortgaged to Albert Stentoller, 1825: Restored to Eighth Earl by Cuthbert Stentoller, 1935.’

Derek was the ninth Earl.

There was nothing to worry about. The police knew – and no doubt any other interested person – that he had given it to the ‘eighth earl’ over dinner. Weslake alone knew that he could not possibly have given Haddenham the snuff-box over dinner.

And Weslake might turn up later.

Obviously, Weslake had forgotten all about the snuff-box incident in the hall of the Varsity Club. But the sight of the box itself might awaken memory.

Better not risk it.

Covering his movements with a certain neatness, he removed both snuff-box and ticket. He scrunched up the ticket and put it in his trousers pocket. The snuff-box could just be concealed in his hand. He rejoined Hilda, and presently slipped the snuff-box into his tail pocket. Fresh arrivals were still queueing in the hall. Greeting them was automatic – one could make nearly the same remarks to each.

Suddenly Hilda was speaking to him in an urgent undertone:

‘Cuthbert! That man with his back to us in the dining-room doorway is a detective. Scotland Yard insisted on sending them to guard the presents, though I told them it was absurd. He says someone has stolen the Haddenham snuff-box. I said he mustn’t make a fuss and that you’d speak to him. Shut them up at all costs.’

Shut them up at all costs. Quite! But would they consent to be shut up? He signed to the detective to follow him into the little morning-room which was not in use. He wondered uneasily whether his tail pocket bulged.

‘I tell you what I think has happened,’ said Stentoller. ‘Someone has picked it up, to talk about it to someone else. It’ll be back in its place again presently.’

The detective was unresponsive.

‘When you were at that table about ten minutes ago, Mr Stentoller, was it there then? We can’t keep our eye on every item all the time.’

‘I didn’t notice. But I do suggest that you adopt my theory. Intrinsically, the thing is doubtfully worth a tenner. And besides, you can’t very well strip everybody – and I don’t see that anything short of that would be any good.’

‘We have ways of getting over that difficulty.’ To Stentoller the words sounded ominous. The detective added: ‘Funny thing – the thief has taken the ticket as well, saying what its history was.’

When the detective had left the room, Stentoller concealed the snuff-box behind the radiator. Then he burnt the descriptive ticket, holding it so that the ashes would drop into a bowl of flowers.

When he rejoined Hilda, he had a fresh shock.

‘One of those wretched detectives,’ she whispered, ‘has gone upstairs. They must mean to search the house.’

‘I’ll keep a tab on them,’ he said. He went back to the morning-room and reclaimed the snuff-box. That snuff-box must not be found until the reception was over. He went into the garden, made his way to the lily pond, stopped several times on the way to exchange pleasantries.

The lily pond, with fountain and goldfish, was part of a small Dutch garden, sunk out of sight of the house. Choosing his moment, he bent down and slithered the snuff-box under a water-lily, carefully noting the position of the lily. When he returned to the house Gwen slipped her arm through his.

‘In two hours, we shall be gone. I’m terribly sorry-glad – you know that, Daddy, don’t you!’ Bless her heart for saying that! She prattled on: ‘We’ve had a huge telegram from Sir Reginald, saying he can’t turn up, and full of such awfully good good-wishes that Derek has come over all shy.’

So Weslake wasn’t coming after all! Stentoller felt slightly indignant that circumstances had made a fool of him. He couldn’t go and fish that snuff-box out then and there. Anyhow, it didn’t matter now.

After dinner that night he went alone to the lily pond. He identified the lily, took off his dinner jacket and stripped to the waist. The pond was nearly two feet deep.

He groped and found nothing. In ten minutes he realized he was stirring up masses of mud to no purpose. The job would have to be tackled properly in daylight, with rakes and the rest of it. It could wait until after the ‘silver honeymoon’. Derek, on his honeymoon, would not be worrying about his heirlooms.

Chapter Seven

While Stentoller was holidaying with his wife on a Swiss lake, his gardener, working on the lily pond, found the snuff-box, which he promptly handed to the housekeeper, who locked it up, pending her employer’s return. That night the gardener talked about it in the village inn – which meant that the local constable got to hear about it. Two days later, by an obvious chain of events, Scotland Yard demanded temporary custody of the snuff-box.

It is characteristic of the Department of Dead Ends that Detective-Inspector Rason received a carbon of the report solely because the name of Haddenham figured in it.

Whenever some incident echoed on one of his filed cases Rason would produce some fantastic wild-goose theory, but this time he was stumped.

Someone had stolen a valuable snuff-box. Subsequently fearing detection, he had dumped it. No clear line to the murder of Lord Haddenham fourteen months previously! Annoyed with himself, he re-read the log of the murder, then re-read the report of the theft.

‘The ticket containing an historic note was also removed.’

‘Historic note! That must be the bit about the King being a crook. Wonder the old boy wasn’t bow-and-arrowed at dawn! Now, there’s some sense in stealing a gold snuff-box, if you’re that sort. But there’s no sense in stealing its ticket. Therefore the thief was crackers – which doesn’t help.

‘Turn it upside down, then. The thief was a wise guy. That means he stole the ticket because he didn’t want people to read it. But a lot of the guests must have read it already. That means he didn’t want some particular person to read it. Someone who hadn’t read it already. If that’s right, he was stealing the box for the same reason. Box and ticket. He didn’t want someone to see either of them.’

Back to the log of the murder. The snuff-box, most exasperatingly, proved nothing either way. Mr Stentoller had given it to the deceased over dinner. It wouldn’t have affected the murder if he hadn’t given it to him at all.

‘Never mind the thief. Try the fellow the thief had in mind. Somebody is to come into the room – a fairly late arrival – see that snuff-box, or the ticket without the box, and say: “Ah, a snuff-box! And a gift of George IV too, by Gad! That settles it. Now we know who killed Haddenham”.’ Rason stroked his hair. ‘That sort of thing always happens when I do a spot of deduction.’

Half-way through lunch, he made some sense of it.

‘Somebody, seeing that snuff-box on that table, would say: “Its presence here upsets some statement made at the time of the murder about the snuff-box.”

‘The only person who made any statement about the snuffbox at the time of the murder was Stentoller.

‘That makes Stentoller the murderer. He’s one of the thirteen who might have done it, according to the times they left the Club. He stabs Haddenham with his umbrella – then stuffs the snuff-box in his pocket – so that I can catch him out telling a lie!’

Rason was following a formula he had often found useful. Test an absurdity and you may stumble on a truth.

He went to the Varsity Club and interviewed the cloakroom attendant, to whom he handed a list of the thirteen members who had left at relevant times.

‘I want you to try to remember whether any of these gentlemen was carrying an umbrella – one of those very thin ones –’

‘Them very thin umbrellas again!’ groaned the attendant. ‘I had a bellyful o’ them at the time. And I’ll tell you the same as I told the others, that as far as I can remember not one of the lot of ’em had an umbrella.’

‘In particular,’ pressed Rason, ‘was Mr Stentoller carrying an umbrella?’

‘No, he wasn’t.’ The man sniggered. ‘He was carryin’ a sword.’

‘Carrying a what!’ gasped Rason.

‘Carryin’ a sword, I tell you! His friend, Sir Reginald Weslake, had been to a Levee in the morning.’ The details followed. ‘Nearly tripped over the belt as he was going out of here. I heard Sir Reginald say he’d take the belt off for him, as they went into the hall. About half past ten that was, as near as makes no matter.’

Rason temporarily forgot all about the snuff-box. A sword! A couple of hours later he was in Surrey, checking up with Weslake, who came in from the garden and interviewed him in the dining-room.

Rason asked if he might see the sword of the Order of St Severell of Antioch.

‘That is a very extraordinary request. What is your reason?’

‘We suspect that that sword may have been used for a felonious purpose when it was not in your possession, Sir Reginald.’

Weslake glanced again at Rason’s official card, then left the room, to return with the sword.

As Rason drew the blade he noted that it was slightly bent. He examined the point – which was scarcely sharper than the point of one of those very thin umbrellas.

‘Sir Reginald, at about ten-thirty on the night Lord Haddenham was murdered, did you hand this sword to Mr Stentoller?’

‘I believe I did!’ Weslake had obviously forgotten the incident, but now remembered. ‘Yes, definitely – I did. In special circumstances not worth relating.’

Then Stentoller could have killed Haddenham with that sword. But did he?

Rason decided to go away now. He had got confirmation of the cloakroom attendant’s statement about the sword; but, he reflected gloomily, this in itself proved nothing.

‘Well, thanks very much, Sir Reginald. I’d better give you back this sword.’ Rason took a couple of steps forward, fouled the sword belt. That reminded him of something else the attendant had said. No harm in checking up.

‘Did Mr Stentoller carry it like this,’ he asked, ‘with the – er – all this – dangling?’

‘Oh no, not at all! I took it off and rolled it. He carried it in his pocket.’

‘Hm! Good pocketful, wasn’t it!’ remarked Rason, intending only to be amiable.

‘No doubt it was troublesome,’ said Weslake, with laboured patience. ‘I happen to remember he had to make room for it, to take – something – out of his side pocket and put it into his breast pocket.’

Weslake’s hesitation had been due to a desire to avoid opening another field for tedious questioning. Rason jumped blindly on the hesitation.

‘What did he take out of his pocket, Sir Reginald?’

‘He took from his side pocket, Mr Rason, a gold snuff-box. He had intended to present it to Lord Haddenham, but something prevented him from doing so. And if you want further information about the snuff-box –’

‘I’ll find it in Kyle’s Life of George IV!’ snapped Rason. Weslake glared at him. Rason had sized up his man and deemed it prudent to break the rules.

‘You saw that snuff-box in Stentoller’s hand at ten-thirty. It was found on Haddenham’s dead body. I am afraid I must take that sword away with me. We shall want it for evidence.’

‘My God!’ gasped Weslake. ‘Then Stentoller must have found out that Haddenham –’

But he did not finish the sentence. Though no longer a member of the Terracotta, he would not drag the club’s name into the newspapers.

The Henpecked Murderer

Chapter One

The case of Crippen has been retold so often and in so many languages that the facts are known even to those students of criminal psychology who were not born in 1910, when it all happened. That he was the first murderer to be caught by wireless telegraphy, as it was then called, is to-day of less interest than the fact that police, counsel, and finally warders of the condemned cell all agreed that he was a ‘decent little man’, a ‘gentleman’, in the moral rather than the social sense of the word. Yet he buried portions of his wife under the floor-boards of the kitchen.

Alfred Cummarten had much of the mentality of Crippen. The Cummarten murder, in 1934, was a sort of tangent to the Crippen murder. As he had not read the case, Cummarten made most of Crippen’s minor mistakes, avoiding the major mistake of flight. He was not as anxious as the decent little Crippen that no one else should suffer for his sins – a moral defect which brought its own penalty.

There was even a physical resemblance to the original, for Cummarten was a shortish man, with brown, protuberant eyes, a moustache, and a waxen complexion.

Moreover, there was, to start with, exactly the same set-up. Gertrude Cummarten, like Cora Crippen, was regarded by her husband with esteem and affection, although she was shrewish, greedy, and wholly selfish. She drilled and bullied him – for Gertrude, too, was physically larger than her husband, and would sometimes strike him in anger. That her attractions were fading at thirty-seven had, really, nothing to do with the case, because the girl, Isabel Redding, appealed primarily to Cummarten’s thwarted paternal instinct.

Isabel, as is now known, was of unidentifiable origin. Someone contrived her admission to a convent school, where she acquired a certain ladylike address, if nothing else. She was twenty-two when she applied to Cummarten for employment as a stenographer. Cummarten was a shipping agent with a small but steady clientèle.

Isabel was decorative, docile, but remarkably inefficient. Cummarten saw in her an innocent child-woman who could be moulded into the kind of woman he would like his daughter to be – if he had a daughter. So he engaged another girl to be his secretary, and kept Isabel on to run the errands and stamp the envelopes.

Being a silly little man (though Scotland Yard would not agree) he asked her for the week-end to The Laurels, his modest house on the outskirts of Thadham, an old market town some twenty miles from London. He was guileless enough to suggest that his wife should elect herself an honorary aunt.

Gertrude’s marked coldness did not deter Isabel from spending three more week-ends at The Laurels during 1933, the last occasion being in July, when Cummarten took her to a flower-show and introduced her to most of his acquaintances.

He was deeply shocked when Gertrude said she did not believe a word of his angel-child nonsense, and that, if he could afford a mistress, which surprised her, he might have the decency not to humiliate his wife by flaunting the girl before the neighbours. The truth was that he himself did believe the angel-child nonsense.

Gertrude’s allegation that he was spending money on the girl was true. There was her salary, the bulk of which was a dead weight on the business. There were other expenses – not indeed for dress or for any kind of entertainment, but for a special diet, to build up her nervous system; for massage to cure her insomnia, and even for books to nourish her mind.

Gertrude’s accusation lost its horror through repetition. By the autumn of 1933, it no longer seemed outrageous to notice the physical charms of the young woman he had hitherto thought of as his spiritual daughter. In short, under some highfalutin phrase, she became his mistress in fact. In this period she betrayed a certain sophistication which compelled him to revise the angel-child theory, and to wonder what she had been doing between leaving the convent school and applying to him for employment.

By the turn of the year, his expenditure began to alarm him. This, he believed, was largely his own fault. He would discover little needs of Isabel’s, and urge her to do the buying. It was he who suggested that she needed a new bag, not expecting that she would order one in crocodile, costing nine pounds. It was he who said she must have new hairbrushes. She ordered a dressing-table set in tortoiseshell. He had admired it before she revealed that it would cost one hundred guineas.

‘You’ve been swindled, darling!’ he gasped. ‘I’ve noticed things exactly like this at Harridges – the whole layout for about a couple of pounds.’

‘But this is real tortoiseshell, darling!’ she explained. ‘It comes from Perriere’s, and they said they would always lend us sixty pounds on it if we should ever need the money. But, of course, I’ll take it back if you think I’ve been extravagant.’

By ill luck he had knocked one of the scent bottles to the floor, slightly chipping the glass and slightly denting the tortoiseshell. She had been so nice about it – so anxious to cover up the damage so that the set could be returned – that he eventually sent the cheque to Perriere’s, feeling that he had robbed Gertrude.

He was now leading a double life, which he hated. To rob it of some of its duplicity, the silly little man confided in his wife. She treated him with scorn and intensified bullying – which made him feel better, because he despised himself and felt that he ought to be punished.

In July, 1934, Isabel gave him the usual reason, true or false, for hurrying a divorce, to be followed by immediate marriage. He said he would put it to Gertrude, but did not, because he was afraid.

For an utterly miserable fortnight he stalled Isabel with palpable lies.

On Monday, August 7th, a Bank Holiday, Isabel took the matter out of his hands by turning up uninvited at The Laurels – at half past two in the afternoon – for a showdown with Gertrude.

Chapter Two

Gertrude had been visiting a cousin at Brighton and did not return until about nine o’ clock. A light rain was falling and it was getting dark – but not too dark for the neighbours to observe her return from behind their curtains. They had been, in a sense, waiting for her. They had seen Isabel arrive: they had discussed the details of her dress: in particular, a magenta scarf which was unfashionable and strident but, in her case, effective: a crocodile bag, which they opined must have cost Mr Cummarten a matter of pounds. They knew that Gertrude had been to Brighton for the day. Whatever happened now, there was certain to be a scandal or at least a rumpus.

‘As soon as I heard her footsteps I went into the hall and turned on the light,’ wrote Cummarten. ‘I meant to tell her about Isabel at once, but, of course, I had to lead up to it a bit. So in the hall I just said something ordinary, like I hoped she had enjoyed her day.’

‘Well, I did think you’d have the light on in the hall to welcome me home, even if it’d be a false welcome,’ said Gertrude. ‘But I expect we have to be careful with the housekeeping bills, now that you’re spending so much money on that girl. And since you ask, I didn’t go to Brighton for pleasure. I went to Mabel for advice and I’m going to take her advice. Come in here and sit down, Alfred.’

She took him into the little room which they called the morning-room because they had breakfast there. He obediently sat down at the table, knowing that he could not secure her attention until she had talked herself to a standstill.

‘Mabel says I’m a soft-hearted fool to put up with it and she’s right. And it’s got to be one of two things, Alfred. Either you sack that girl from the office and break off with her altogether or I’m going to divorce you.’

‘I was so surprised when she said this after all I’d been through that I said nothing but stared at her like a ninny.’

‘You needn’t pretend it would break your heart, Alfred. I’ve no doubt that you’d be glad enough to have done with our marriage altogether, after the mockery you’ve made of it. But Mabel says the judge would make an order for you to pay me at least a third of your income, and perhaps a half, and so you may want to think twice. Alfred, whose bag is that over there by the coal scuttle?’

‘As soon as she saw the bag I knew she would tell herself everything and I needn’t try to break it gently but just answer her questions.’

‘It’s Isabel’s bag,’ said Cummarten.

‘So she has been here! I suspected it from your sly behaviour. What time did she go?’

‘She didn’t go. She’s in the drawing-room.’

‘Then she’s going now. I’m going to turn her out.’

‘You aren’t,’ said Cummarten. ‘You can’t get into the drawing-room. I’ve locked the door and I’ve got the key.’

The pitch of his voice made her spine tingle. She reached across the breakfast table, upsetting a vase of flowers, and grabbed him by the lapel of his coat.

‘What’re you trying to tell me, Alfred? Go on! Say it!’

‘She’s dead,’ answered Cummarten. ‘I killed her.’

‘Oh-h!’ It was a long-drawn, whispered moan. ‘To think that this should happen to me! Oh, dear God, what have I done to deserve this!’

Characteristically, she was concerned solely with the impact of the murder on her own circumstances. She sprawled forward on the table, her face on her forearm, and burst into tears. So violent was her emotion that the silly little man went round to her side of the table to comfort her.

‘There, there, my dear!’ He patted her shoulder. ‘Don’t take on so, Gert! It won’t bring the poor girl back to life. Something goes wrong sometimes, and this sort of thing happens. Stop, Gert – you’ll make yourself ill!’

Presently she was able to speak, in a voice shaken with convulsive sobs.

‘I was twenty-four when you married me and I’m thirty-seven now. You’ve had the best years of my life. I could put up with your wanting a younger woman, though it hurt my feelings more than you know. But I did believe you’d always look after me in my old age.’

‘Thirty-seven isn’t old age, dear. Now, do calm yourself, because we’ve got to settle practical matters before I’m arrested.’

That caught her attention.

‘You haven’t got any money outside the business, have you?’

‘No. And I’m afraid you won’t get much for that. It’s largely a personal connexion.’

‘I can’t even go back to nursing. No one would employ me after this!’ Her imagination still struggled against accepting the fact of disaster to herself. ‘Are you sure you’ve killed her, Alfred? Are you sure she isn’t fooling you? How did you kill her? I don’t believe you could kill anybody without a revolver, which you haven’t got.’

‘I killed her, all right! She made out we had to have a divorce and me marry her. Even if she was telling the truth about that, I’ve good reason to believe she could have picked on others besides me. There’s one she called Len – I’ve seen him hanging about – big Spanish-looking feller. Never mind!’

‘But you didn’t have to kill her for that, Alfred!’

‘Let me finish! She came down here on her own for a showdown with you. When she offered to say nothing to you and cut out all the divorce stuff if I’d hand over a thousand pounds, I got pretty angry. After a while, she tried to coax me into a good temper by love-making. Real love-making! I suppose I softened up a bit, and then I felt what a worm I was for letting a woman like that wheedle me. I’d got my arm round her neck in some way – can’t remember quite how – and she was pretending to struggle. And I thought if I pushed her chin back it’d break her neck – sort of leverage. And I suddenly wanted to do that more than I’d ever wanted to do anything. And I did it. That’s all!’

‘I don’t believe you killed her!’ Gertrude was lashing herself into wishful disbelief. ‘Give me that key!’

She went alone to the drawing-room. Her past training as a hospital nurse saved her from the normal revulsion. When she returned she was carrying the magenta scarf.

‘You were right,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you could’ve done it, but you have.’ She went on: ‘I’ve brought this scarf, because it’s the sort of thing you would leave lying about, same as you left that bag. You’d better put them both together. The neighbours will have noticed both. And we’ll have a look round to see if there’s anything else, before I go.’

‘What’s the use, Gert! As soon as you’ve gone, I’m going to ring the police.’

‘I thought that was in your mind!’ Her self-pity was lost in fury. ‘Going to give up without lifting a finger to save yourself? And you call yourself a man!’

‘I can take what’s coming to me without squealing, anyhow!’

‘You mean you can take what’s coming to me!’ she shrilled. ‘You’re ready to kick me into the gutter where I shall be branded for life as the wife of a murderer, and all you think about is how brave you are!’

‘But what can I do? It’s no good running away!’

‘You can get rid of her if you keep your head. You can use a spade, can’t you! And who’s to know she didn’t leave the house and run off with a man who’s got more money than you – not that anyone will bother their heads about what happens to that sort!’

Cummarten had planned to give himself up, because he had not been able to imagine doing anything else. But already Gertrude had planted in his brain the idea of escape. For thirteen years he had lived under her domination. Always, after his domestic blunders, she had first bullied him and then cleared up the mess. The same process was now at work on a larger scale.

‘Suppose something goes wrong?’ he objected, in order to receive her reassurance, which promptly came.

‘Nothing will go wrong if you do as you’re told. I shall have to leave everything in your hands, because I know you wouldn’t wish me to take any risk of being dragged into it. I shan’t worry about myself. No one need know I’ve helped you. I wasn’t seen coming home to-night. It so happened that I took the bus from the junction instead of waiting for the local train, and no one else got out at the corner and there was no one about, because it was raining. I’ll get along to Ealing and spend the night with mother. You can say I went straight there from Mabel’s. You can give out that mother is ill and I’m looking after her. As soon as it’s all clear, I’ll come back.’

‘You mean we can take up our life again as if nothing had happened!’ There was awe in his voice as the idea took shape.

‘I’m quite ready to try all over again to make you happy, Alfred, now that you’ve learnt your lesson.’

But she must, of course, take care not to burn her fingers. In a few minutes she had evolved a plan by which all risk was concentrated upon Cummarten. She made him repeat his orders and then:

‘I’ll slip out to the garage now and get into the car. The neighbours will hear the engine. And if anyone asks you afterwards, which they won’t, remember to say that you were driving the girl back to her flat in London. If anyone wants to speak to me they can ring me up at mother’s.’

Chapter Three

With a course of action laid down for him, Cummarten’s nerve steadied. He made good time to London. In Holborn he dropped Gertrude at the tube station, where she was to take a train to Ealing. He himself drove on to the flatlet, which was in one of the dingier blocks in Bloomsbury. The block had no resident porter – a fact which most of the residents regarded as an advantage. He chose his moment for leaving the car, his sole concern being that no one should observe that he was alone.

The flatlet consisted of a fair-sized room with two curtained recesses. It was clean but untidy. Three large fans nailed on the walls gave it a would-be artistic atmosphere, helped by an expensively elaborate cover on the ottoman bed. For the rest, there was the usual bed-sitting-room furniture.

Acting on Gertrude’s instructions with all possible speed, Cummarten found Isabel’s suitcase. Into it he crammed her nightdress and other small oddments. Next, ‘any small articles you’ve given her that are expensive.’ The tortoiseshell dressing-table set was certainly expensive though it was not small, as it consisted of eight pieces including the scent bottles. It occupied two-thirds of the suitcase and left no room for any additions.

The magenta scarf he placed ‘carelessly’ on the folding-table. The crocodile bag, emptied at The Laurels, he put on the floor near the stove, as if the girl had flung it down after emptying its contents into another bag.

By midnight, he was back at The Laurels.

He had brought his tools from the garage and a spade and pick from the adjoining tool shed. He moved the table and chairs from the morning-room into the hall. Then he untacked the carpet in the morning-room and removed some of the floor boards.

This gave him no serious difficulty – he had finished before one. Below the beams holding the floor-boards he had expected to find soft earth. Instead, he found rubble, evenly spread to a depth of some eighteen inches. Clearing this was extremely laborious: he had to work very slowly because the rubble made a dangerous amount of noise. His courage fluctuated: while he was wielding the spade he was steady: but when he rested, which was often, he would fancy he heard footsteps on the garden path and would climb up and listen, to reassure himself.

It was half past three before he had cleared a sufficient area. Temporarily exhausted, he went into the kitchen and revived his strength with tea. When he re-started work, with the pick, he realized that his own stamina would be a major factor. Though the house had been built before cement was commonly used for the purpose, the foundations had been well laid and the earth was dry and very hard.

In an hour his strokes with the pick became feeble. By six o’clock his physical condition resembled that of a boxer who has just managed to keep on his feet for a twenty-round contest. His wrists were numb and his knees were undependable. It was all he could do to hoist himself back onto the floor of the morning-room. As he lay panting he knew that, in his present condition, he could not possibly carry the body and complete his task before eight o’ clock, when Bessie, the daily help, would arrive. If he were to make the attempt and fail he would be worse off than if he were to leave it in the drawing-room.

He was moving so slowly that when he had replaced everything in the morning-room and re-tacked the carpet with his hammer-head muffled, half past seven was striking.

Having washed, he went upstairs, got into bed for a minute in order to tumble the bedclothes, then did his best to shave as usual. When he heard Bessie arrive he came down in his dressing-gown.

The drawing-room door was locked: the blinds were down, as he had left them the previous evening: the french windows giving on to the garden were bolted on the inside. He had only to keep his head and, as Gertrude had promised, everything would be all right.

‘Mrs Cummarten,’ he told Bessie, ‘has had to go to her mother who has been taken ill. If you’ll get me some breakfast, that’ll be all. You can have another day off.’

‘All right, sir!’ Bessie was not overjoyed. After Sunday and the holiday on Monday there would be arrears of cleaning which would have to be made up later. ‘But I’d better do the drawing-room before I go.’

‘You can’t,’ said Cummarten. ‘It is locked and Mrs Cummarten has evidently taken the key with her.’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ returned Bessie. ‘The key of the morning-room fits.’

To keep his head was the first essential. But what was the use if you couldn’t think of things quickly, not being that sort of man.

‘I’d rather you didn’t, Bessie.’ With sudden misinspiration, he added: ‘Before Mrs Cummarten left yesterday morning she started to clean the china. She had to break off to catch her train – and she left the pieces all over the floor. She asked me to keep the room locked.’

Bessie stumped off to the kitchen. She heard him remove the keys from the morning-room and the dining-room. Knowing that something was being kept from her, she went into the garden and tried to look through the edges of the blind, but without seeing anything except part of a cushion from the settee lying on the floor.

Instead of leaving for the office at nine-fifteen, Cummarten stayed on in the morning-room, so that she could not clean it. Bessie left at ten. But before going home, she stepped across the road to The Cedars to tell her friend, who was help to Mrs Evershed, all about the locked drawing-room and the nonsense about the china being on the floor.

Cummarten was dozing in his chair at eleven when Mrs Evershed knocked at the front door.

‘I didn’t mean to disturb you, Mr Cummarten – I thought you’d be at the office. Can I have a word with Gertrude if she isn’t busy?’

‘Sorry, but she’s in Ealing looking after her mother. I don’t suppose it’s anything much, but the doctor says the old lady had better stay in bed for a bit. Don’t know when Gertrude will be back.’

Mrs Evershed delivered the usual polite platitudes, and then:

‘Did she leave a message for me about Thursday? She said she’d know for certain by Monday night.’

‘I haven’t seen her since yesterday morning,’ said Cummarten.

‘Oh!’ said Mrs Evershed, who was amongst those who had seen Gertrude return, ‘I thought she was coming home last night.’

‘She was, but she didn’t. On her way back from Brighton she stopped off at Ealing, then phoned me that she would stay there.’

Bessie’s friend had already repeated to Mrs Evershed the tale of the locked drawing-room. Mrs Evershed carried the tale to others. Before noon, there were two more callers for Gertrude, who received from Cummarten the same explanation.

During the afternoon he was left in peace and slept in his chair until nine. By midnight he was at work again on the grave. He was more careful of his strength this time and completed his task by four. The remains of Isabel and the contents of her crocodile bag and of the suitcase he had brought from the flatlet were buried four feet in the earth, with another eighteen inches of rubble on top. The floor boards and the furniture were replaced.

In the drawing-room, the dozen odd pieces of china had been moved from the cabinet and placed on the floor, to give substance to the tale told to Bessie. Cummarten bathed, went to bed and slept until Bessie called him.

At breakfast he was surprised at his own freshness. ‘I must be as strong as a horse, when I’m put to it,’ he reflected with pride. That he had killed Isabel Redding ranked in his mind as a tragic misfortune, over which he must not allow himself to brood. He had a moral duty to Gertrude and, so far, had made a pretty good job of it, as Gertrude herself would have to admit.

When he arrived at the office he decided to ring Gertrude and let her know that the coast was clear – was about to do so when his secretary came in.

‘Good morning, Miss Kyle; has Miss Redding been in to collect her belongings?’

‘I have not seen Miss Redding since Friday last,’ replied Miss Kyle with some hauteur, ‘and her belongings are still here.’

‘She came to my house on Monday and made it clear she would not be working for us any more. I fear,’ he added, ‘that Miss Redding has not been a success in this office.’

Miss Kyle, who was well aware of their intimacy, said nothing.

Having dealt with his mail, he rang his mother-in-law’s flat in Ealing, but could get no answer. He tried again before going out to lunch and again when he returned. Then he rang the porter of the flats – to learn that Mrs Massell, his mother-in-law, had gone away for the week-end, had not yet come back and that the flat was therefore empty.

‘Has Mrs Cummarten – my wife – been to you to make enquiries?’

‘No, sir, there’ve been no enquiries for Mrs Massell since she went away last Friday.’

Cummarten replaced the receiver and found himself badly at a loss.

‘Then where on earth is Gertrude?’

Chapter Four

Others were already asking that question – including Mrs Massell herself. On her way back from a long week-end at Salisbury she had stopped off at Thadham to have a chat with her daughter. Arriving after Bessie had left, she was unable to obtain admission to the house. Mrs Evershed popped out of The Cedars. Explanations were being exchanged in the front garden of The Laurels when Cummarten himself appeared …

‘That’s what Gertrude told me on the telephone,’ said Cummarten doggedly.

‘But she knew I had gone to Salisbury!’

‘I’m not saying what she knew. I’m saying what she told me.’

His mother-in-law walked him, by the sidepath, to the garden at the back of the house.

‘You said all that because that Evershed woman was listening. Where is Gertrude?’

‘I don’t know! That’s the maddening part of it!’ cried Cummarten in genuine exasperation.

‘When did you last see her?’

‘Monday morning when she was going off to Mabel’s.’ He added a flourish: ‘At least, that’s where she said she was going.’

Mrs Massell gave him a hostile stare.

‘Look here, Alfred, it’s no use your trying to hint that she has run off with a lover. She’s not that kind and wouldn’t need to run when she could easily divorce you, as I happen to know, though you may have thought I didn’t. If she has disappeared, something has happened. She may have lost her memory, like those people you hear about on the radio every night. Or she may have met with an accident – she might even have been murdered, for all you know or seem to care.’

A long, bitter laugh broke from him, which angered her further.

‘You may not care much about her, but I warn you that you will find yourself in a very awkward position if anything has happened to her and you doing nothing about it.’

‘But what can I do?’

‘Come straight to the police with me and start inquiries.’

‘That’s no good!’ he said sulkily. ‘The police will take no notice.’

‘Then I am going myself,’ said Mrs Massell and promptly went.

Chapter Five

In the Crippen case, the very similar lies were exposed within a few days of the murder. Nevertheless, six months passed before the police were able to take even the preliminary steps. But Crippen had no mother-in-law, nor did he employ domestic help.

Mrs Evershed’s maid, in whom Bessie had confided, was being courted by a young constable, to whom she passed Bessie’s tale and Mrs Evershed’s comments. This she did to entertain the young man, not with any idea of informing the police as such – for even at this stage there was no suspicion that a crime had been committed, in spite of the locked drawing-room.

But everyone’s sense of proportion was shattered by the arrival of Mrs Massell. When she was seen to enter the local police headquarters there was hardly anyone in the neighbourhood who was not ready to believe that Cummarten had murdered his wife. In drawing-rooms, in gardens, at the local tennis club, the case of Crippen was recalled, the younger generation tactfully pretending they had not heard it all before.

If the police did not jump to that conclusion, they would seem to have toyed with it. By half past nine, when he went to The Laurels, Superintendent Hoylock had tapped all sources and primed himself with every available fact, even to the details of Isabel Redding’s magenta scarf and crocodile bag. He wanted, he told Cummarten, confirmation of Mrs Massell’s statement, before he could ask the BBC to broadcast an inquiry.

Cummarten took him into the dining-room, which was rarely used. He heard his mother-in-law’s statement read and nodded confirmation of each item, inwardly fearing that Gertrude would be very angry at having her name called on the radio.

‘When did you last see Mrs Cummarten?’

‘About the middle of Monday morning – before she went to Brighton.’

Superintendent Hoylock folded the statement and returned it to his pocket.

‘Mr Cummarten, your wife was seen to enter this house within a few minutes of nine o’ clock on Monday night.’

It had not yet dawned on Cummarten that he was in immediate danger of anything but Gertrude’s wrath. He looked positively angry.

‘It’s all Gertrude’s fault for not telling me where she’s gone!’ he blurted out spontaneously. In spite of what Gertrude had said, he would now have to admit that she had returned on the Monday night. His anger stimulated him to a certain ingenuity in adapting the story which Gertrude had concocted.

‘I’d better begin at the beginning, Superintendent. A young lady I employ at my office – a Miss Isabel Redding – came to see us in the afternoon. She has been here often – spent several week-ends. She looked on us almost as relations. Lately, my wife became jealous, and everything was – well, not so pleasant as it used to be. Isabel came down to talk it all over. She waited until my wife came home. Words passed, and you may say there was a bit of a row. Soon we all calmed down and I drove the girl back to her flatlet. When I got back here – must have been about midnight – my wife had gone. Next morning the neighbours asked where she was. I wasn’t going to tell ’ em what I’ve been telling you, so I told ’em the first thing that came into my head. My wife may have walked out on me for all I know.’

The story held up under Hoylock’s questions, because it covered all the facts known to him – with one exception.

‘With one thing and another, Mr Cummarten, you’ve set people talking their heads off. There’s a tale about something funny in your drawing-room –’

‘That must be Bessie, our maid,’ said Cummarten. ‘You see, after breakfast on Monday, before my wife left for Brighton, she thought she’d clean the china –’

‘So I heard,’ interrupted Hoylock. ‘It wouldn’t do any harm to let me see that room.’

Cummarten produced a number of keys from his pocket, unlocked the drawing-room door. The Superintendent saw drawn blinds, and a litter of china on the floor – also on the floor, near the window, a cushion.

‘Shows what people will say!’ remarked the Superintendent. ‘Now I’ll tell you what we’ll do. If nothing develops by tomorrow morning, we’ll put it up to the BBC. People really do get lapses of memory sometimes when they’re upset. Good night, Mr Cummarten. Don’t you worry! We’ll stop people talking!’

Talking! What were they saying?

Why, of course! Why hadn’t he seen it before! They were saying that he had murdered Gertrude!

And what did they think he had done with her body?

Buried it under the floor boards?

Chapter Six

On Thursday, as Cummarten was about to leave the office for lunch, Superintendent Hoylock turned up, in plain clothes.

‘Miss Redding might be able to help us find your wife,’ he said. ‘Can I have a word with her?’

Cummarten explained. He was pleased when Hoylock asked for her address, because he wanted the police to ‘discover’ the magenta scarf and the crocodile bag.

‘It’s a bit difficult to find. It’ll save your time if I take you there.’

Outside the flatlet, Hoylock pointed to three milk bottles with the seals unbroken.

‘Tuesday, Wednesday, and this morning!’ he remarked and rapped on the door. ‘Looks as if we shan’t get an answer.’

Cummarten indicated that he was not surprised, and added: ‘I have a key – she used to like me to have one.’

Inside the flatlet, the Superintendent behaved, as Cummarten hoped he would, by immediately noticing. the magenta scarf on the folding table.

‘Is that the one she was wearing on Monday afternoon?’

‘Let’s have a look! Yes, that’s the one all right.’

Hoylock’s eye travelled to the crocodile bag lying on the floor near the stove.

‘Wonder why she hasn’t taken her bag with her!’

‘She had more than one.’ Cummarten picked up the bag and displayed the empty interior. ‘She evidently shifted her money and whatnots to another bag.’

‘So she’s disappeared too!’ exclaimed Hoylock. ‘That’s what I call a most peculiar coincidence!’

‘Not much coincidence in it, really!’ said Cummarten quickly. ‘When I was up here with her on Monday night she said she was going straight off to a feller.’

‘There and then? Without telling the man she was coming?’

‘I didn’t believe it any more than you,’ said Cummarten. ‘She started packing things before I left, but I thought she was putting on an act.’

‘What’s the man’s name?’

‘Don’t know. She used to refer to him as “Len”. I saw him hanging about outside once. Tall, dark chap, thick eyebrows and sidewhiskers. Like a Spaniard. Sort o’ chap who appeals to women. Probably a dancing partner by profession.’

Hoylock made a note of the description. Next, he opened the wardrobe, then the drawers of the dressing-table. Cummarten wished he would ask if there were anything missing from the dressing-table. But Hoylock said the wrong thing.

‘She didn’t take much with her, did she!’

‘There was very little room in her one suitcase,’ said Cummarten, ‘because she had to take her dressing-table set- brushes, combs, scent bottles – eight pieces in all. I saw her packing them.’

‘What! All that junk when she’d only got one suitcase! You’d think she’d leave that sort of thing till she came back for her clothes and furniture.’

‘It was a very valuable set,’ explained Cummarten. ‘A present from myself – with my wife’s approval, of course! It was real tortoiseshell. I paid Perriere’s a hundred guineas for it.’

‘A hundred guineas!’ Hoylock was impressed and elaborated his notes.

Everything, thought Cummarten, was going just right, though he wondered why Hoylock was showing such detailed interest in Isabel’s movements.

‘Miss Redding,’ he said, ‘is certain to turn up in a few days to collect her things. Is it your idea, Superintendent, that she and my wife have gone off together?’

‘I don’t say they have. But I do say that if Mrs Cummarten doesn’t turn up after the radio appeal we shall have to find this girl.’

Superintendent Hoylock returned to Thadham to file a detailed report – Cummarten to his office to spend the afternoon wondering what had happened to Gertrude.

After the nine o’clock news that night, Gertrude’s name was called amongst those missing from their home and believed to be suffering from a loss of memory.

Cummarten sat up until after midnight in the hope that she might turn up. It didn’t occur to him that her absence might have a wholly selfish explanation. For his peace of mind he forced himself to accept the loss of memory theory. Someone had told him that the broadcasts always found such persons, if they were alive. He saw clearly what his fate would be if the broadcast failed to produce results in a very few days.

Chapter Seven

When Cummarten entered his office the next morning he found a young man chatting to Miss Kyle.

‘Mr Cummarten,’ said Miss Kyle, ‘this gentleman is from Scotland Yard.’

Cummarten managed to say ‘good morning’. But it was a minute or more before he could understand what the young man was saying.

‘In a boarding house in West Kensington, Mr Cummarten. We can get there in twenty minutes in a taxi. If the lady is Mrs Cummarten I can then notify the BBC.’

The lady was indeed Mrs Cummarten. She was being virtually held prisoner by the proprietress of the boarding-house, who had been suspicious from the first of this visitor who had paid a deposit in lieu of luggage.

Gertrude had the presence of mind to tell the plain-clothes youngster that her memory was a blank from the moment she left Brighton on the previous Monday. While the report for the BBC was being filled in, Cummarten telephoned a telegram to Superintendent Hoylock.

In the taxi that was taking them to the station, their first moment alone, Gertrude asked:

‘Is everything all right, Alfred?’

‘Absolutely! Only it would have been everything all wrong if you hadn’t been found. I say – did you really have a lapse of memory?’

‘Of course not! In the train I suddenly remembered mother was at Salisbury. I daren’t ring you up – in case. It wouldn’t have been safe to do anything but just keep out of the way. I was getting short of money. I tried yesterday to catch you on the Tube without anybody seeing me.’

He failed to perceive her callous indifference to his own fate, contented himself with a modest grumble.

‘This time yesterday everybody thought I’d murdered you. In another day or two –’

‘Well, then, that’s the best thing that could have happened, when you come to think of it!’

In the train, in an unoccupied compartment, he gave her his account. To his surprise, she was extremely annoyed when he told her about the locked drawing-room door and the china ornaments.

‘As if anybody would believe I’d be so silly! What would be the sense of putting the china on the floor?’

‘I couldn’t think of anything else to say on the spur of the moment.’

‘The less you think about the whole thing now, the better. I shall pretend I’ve forgotten everything, and they can’t get over that.’

The neighbours did not even try to get over it. The prestige of the BBC had the illogical effect of making everyone believe that the lapse of memory must have been genuine. Police interest vanished with the return of Mrs Cummarten. In a week or so, the neighbourhood, in effect, forgot its disappointment that a major scandal had failed to materialize.

A month later, Isabel Redding’s landlord distrained on the flatlet for non-payment of rent. A dressmaker complained that Isabel had obtained a credit of forty pounds by false pretences. The Bloomsbury police, after a perfunctory attempt to find her, reported her as missing. As missing she appeared in the official police publication. Superintendent Hoylock, remembering the name, sent a copy of his report to Scotland Yard.

‘Same old story!’ grunted the inspector in charge. ‘You can never trace these girls. You may pick ’em up by chance some day. Or you may not!’

With which remark he dropped the report into the basket which would eventually be emptied in the Department of Dead Ends.

The Cummartens resumed the even tenor of their life together. Though neither was strong in logic nor in law, they knew, in general terms, that before the police can start digging up a man’s garden or lifting his floor boards, they must establish before a magistrate a prima facie case that somewhere therein he has feloniously concealed a corpse.

They knew also that it was now impossible to establish such a case.

Chapter Eight

In May, 1935, the Cummartens went to Brighton to stay for a fortnight with Gertrude’s cousin Mabel. While they were away, one Leonard Haenlin, a tall, dark, handsome scoundrel, remarkable for his sidewhiskers, was charged by a wealthy spinster with stealing her automobile and defrauding her in other ways.

The defence was that the car and the other articles and sums of money were gifts, and it looked as if the defence would succeed. The police had recognized that this man was a professional despoiler of women and were working up the case. His rooms were equipped with a number of expensive articles – including a handsome and obviously expensive dressing-table set of eight pieces, in real tortoiseshell.

When asked to account for the latter, he grinned in the face of Detective-Inspector Karslake.

‘You think they are not mine. For once, you happen to be right. They belong to a girl friend, who lent them to me. Her name is Isabel Redding.’ He added the address of the flatlet.

One of Karslake’s men went to the flatlet to check up – to be humiliated by the information that Scotland Yard had posted the girl as missing the previous September.

A chit was duly sent to Detective-Inspector Rason asking for any available light on the ownership of the tortoiseshell set. Having found the reference in Superintendent Hoylock’s report, Rason called on Haenlin, who was on bail, to see the set for himself.

‘When did you borrow it, Len?’

‘She lent it to me to pawn on July 20th, last year. If you look it up, you’ll find that on that day I was fined forty quid for a little misunderstanding in Piccadilly. Perriere’s, where it came from, said they’d always lend her sixty quid on it. But one of the bottles had a dent and a chip – the mutt who gave it her knocked it off her table – look for yourself – and they would only spring forty-five.’

‘A good tale, old man – but you’re switching this set with another,’ chirped Rason. ‘D’you know where Isabel got her set?’

‘Yes, from a funny little bloke with a pasty face called Cummarten. You been a detective-inspector long, Mr Rason?’

‘July 20th, you said,’ returned Rason. ‘Stand by for a shock! On the night of Monday, August 7th, Mr Cummarten saw Isabel packing her tortoiseshell set into her suitcase.’

‘He didn’t – he only thought he did,’ grinned Haenlin. ‘Listen! I knew I couldn’t redeem the stuff for a bit, and Pasty Face might miss it from Isabel’s table. So we went to Harridges and paid thirty-seven-and-six for an imitation set, like enough to that one for old Pasty Face not to know the difference. I redeemed the other set last month; you can check up if you want to.’

‘That’s big of you, Len. Where shall I find her to check up?’

‘Wish I knew! She’s a good kid, that!’

‘Very good not to bother you about her tortoiseshell.’

‘Can’t make out why she hasn’t been round!’ Haenlin scowled. ‘I’m not sure she isn’t holding out on me. She went down to make a row between Pasty Face and his wife, saying she must have a divorce. It’s not a sound line as a rule, but sometimes it works. She reckoned to touch for a thousand. Maybe she got it and is spending the dough on her own. Can’t think of any other reason why she has kept out of my way.’

At Perriere’s, Rason learnt that Haenlin’s tale of the purchase and the subsequent pawning was true. Therefore the tale about the imitation set, which had successfully deceived Cummarten, must also be true. But it didn’t make sense.

‘If the girl was off in a hurry with one suitcase, she wouldn’t stuff it with the whole eight pieces of doodah which she knew to be practically valueless. Even if she had pretended to Cummarten that she was taking them, she’d have unpacked ’em as soon as he left the flatlet. Hm! Probably Hoylock has muddled his facts.’

At Thadham, it soon became clear to Rason that Superintendent Hoylock had not muddled his facts. He heard Hoy lock’s full story, which included the story of the locked drawing-room and the china.

‘So all Tuesday that door was locked – and most of Wednesday? And the blinds were down?’

When Hoylock assented, Rason asked for Bessie’s address. By indirect means he contrived that the girl should show him the china, of which he noted that there were only a dozen small pieces.

On the way back he surveyed progress, if any.

‘The next check-up is whether it’s true the girl was blackmailing Cummarten for a thousand. Hm! Simplest way to do that would be to ask Cummarten.’

Chapter Nine

Two days later, when the Cummartens stepped out of the Brighton train at Victoria Station they were surprised to find that Bessie had come to meet them. And Bessie was not alone.

Rason stepped forward and announced himself, positively grovelling with apology.

‘I’m very sorry indeed to pounce on you like this, Mr Cummarten, and I hope Mrs Cummarten will forgive me. It’s about the Haenlin case – I daresay you read about it in the papers.’

Cummarten felt the pain in his breathing apparatus vanish.

‘We have a strong suspicion that Haenlin is the man you told Superintendent Hoylock last year that you had seen outside the flatlet of Miss Redding. By the way, we haven’t traced that girl yet.’

Cummarten, with something approaching graciousness, agreed to accompany Rason to the Yard to identify Haenlin. Now that the whole thing had blown over, he wished he had never mentioned ‘Len’ to the superintendent. Still, it had been a wise precaution at the time. He told Gertrude that he would come on by the one-fifteen to Thadham and his lunch could be kept hot.

‘Haenlin,’ said Rason in the taxi, ‘is charged with swindling women. But we strongly suspect that he knows something about the disappearance of Miss Redding.’

‘He struck me as a pretty rough type,’ put in Cummarten, ‘though I suppose one shouldn’t judge on appearance.’

‘You don’t have to,’ said Rason. ‘He was working with that girl to trim you, Mr Cummarten. He knew all about her coming down to try and sting you for a thousand quid – he admitted it when we started work on him. But he wouldn’t say whether you had paid her the thousand. Would you have any objection to telling us?’

‘I have no objection to telling you,’ said Cummarten gaining time to reflect that such a payment could be traced, ‘that I did not. I couldn’t afford such a sum.’

So it was true that the girl had tried. That altered the perspective of all Cummarten’s statements and all his actions. But perspective isn’t evidence. There was still a long way to go.

‘To show you how he knew all about your affairs,’ continued Rason, ‘he even mentioned that you’d given her that tortoiseshell dressing-table set and that you yourself had chipped and dented a scent bottle, thereby reducing its value.’

Cummarten was shocked at this revelation of Isabel’s treachery.

‘I’m not the first man to make that sort of fool of himself,’ he muttered. ‘But I didn’t know she was playing as low down as that.’

Rason’s room, normally a disgrace to the orderliness of Scotland Yard, to-day looked more like a store room than an office. His desk had been pushed out of place to make room for a trestle table, the contents of which were covered with a white sheet which might almost have been a shroud.

‘We shall have to keep you waiting a few minutes for the identification, Mr Cummarten,’ apologized Rason. ‘Take a seat.’

Cummarten sat down, uncomfortably close to the trestle table.

‘In the train coming up from Thadham, your maid Bessie made me laugh,’ chattered Rason. ‘Told me how she thought once you had murdered Mrs Cummarten, because the drawing-room door was kept locked. And it all turned out to be something to do with the china being on the floor.’

Cummarten, being a silly little man, took the words at their face value.

‘Yes. My wife was cleaning it when she had to run for her train, and –’

‘Why did Mrs Cummarten clean the china in the dark?’

Cummarten blinked as if he had not heard aright. Rason added:

‘Bessie says the blinds were down.’

Cummarten opened his mouth and shut it. Rason stood up, towering over him.

‘D’you know, Mr Cummarten, if a girl tried to sting me for a thousand pounds I wouldn’t see her home.’ He drew at his cigarette. ‘I’d be more likely to murder her.

‘And if I had murdered her I might sneak into her flat and plant her scarf and her bag – then carry off her expensive toilet set, to suggest that she had bolted.’

Again Cummarten had felt that pain in his breathing apparatus. It passed, as cold fear forced him to self-control.

‘I don’t begin to understand you, Mr Rason. You asked me here to identify that man –’

‘Still trying to plant the murder on him, Cummarten? You packed that tortoiseshell stuff in the suitcase yourself and took it back to your house. And you know where you put it.’

‘I deny it!’ The words came in a whispered shout.

‘You’re wasting your breath, Cummarten. Look at that white sheet in front of you, Cummarten. Any idea what’s underneath it, Cummarten? Well, lift up the sheet and see. Go on, man! It isn’t Isabel – we couldn’t bring her along.’

Cummarten sat as if paralysed. Rason tweaked the sheet, slowly raising one corner. Cummarten stared, uncertain whether he were experiencing hallucination. For he saw on the trestle table a scent bottle, with a chip in the glass and a dent in the tortoiseshell cap.

He sprang up, tore the sheet from Rason’s hand and flung it back. Spread out on the table was a complete tortoiseshell set of eight pieces.

‘You know where you put it!’ repeated Rason.

With a cough-like sound in his throat, Cummarten collapsed into his chair, covering his eyes with his hands. When he removed his hands he looked like an old man, but he was wholly calm.

‘I suppose it had to come some time,’ he said. ‘In a way, it’s a relief to get it over. I can see now what a fool I’ve been, from the first. That tortoiseshell brings it all back.’ He smiled wanly. ‘Paid a hundred guineas for that set!’

It was indeed the set for which Cummarten had paid a hundred guineas – the set which Len Haenlin had pawned and redeemed. Rason had borrowed it when he had become morally certain that Cummarten had buried Isabel – and the imitation set.

But he still had no proof – still did not know precisely where Isabel was buried – could doubtfully have obtained an order to dig at random.

‘You made a good fight of it!’ remarked Rason. ‘Weakest spot was that yarn about cleaning the china –’

‘First thing that came into my head where Bessie wanted to do the drawing-room on the Tuesday morning! You see, I couldn’t finish the job in the morning-room on the Monday night – all that rubble!’

Rason dug under the morning-room. With the remains of Isabel Redding, there was found an imitation tortoiseshell toilet set costing thirty-seven and sixpence.

Blind Man’s Bluff

Chapter One

Until he committed murder, Robert Silbey was a model citizen. Everyone admired him for one or other of his qualities – including the go-getters, who admired only his business abilities. The example of his courage under a devastating affliction helped other sufferers. Many who knew him well would speak of him almost reverently.

Yet he was, in vulgar parlance, a tough guy, with a toughness that would have frightened any gangster who had brain enough to understand it – a toughness with which even Scotland Yard was impressed.

‘That man,’ said Chief Inspector Karslake, ‘practises all the virtues as if they were vices.’ All that, from Karslake, after a single murder!

His father was a country solicitor who, perceiving Robert to be something exceptional, scraped and saved and sent him to the Bar. He died when Robert was twenty-three, leaving him about a thousand pounds. Having no influence, Robert at first secured only dock briefs in defence of impecunious criminals. Through these he soon attracted favourable attention. But as his income remained perilously low, he occupied his spare time in writing sketches for West End revues – cheeky little seven minute playlets – with enough success to enable him to carry on at the Bar without dipping into his reserve.

His knowledge of law was but little above the average, but his advocacy was of a high order, and he had the adroitness of an old hand in humouring his judges. His early success was helped, in some measure, by his magnificent physique, his full-toned voice, and his handsome face. Win or lose, he always made the most of his case. As generally happens to young defenders who show consistent ability, the Crown gave him a chance to function as prosecutor.

In his fourth year at the Bar, when he was twenty-six, he earned nearly a thousand pounds – six hundred in practice, the balance deriving from a minute share in the royalties of a revue to which he had contributed three playlets. He was already crawling along the road to success – a road along which he intended to gallop.

He had surprised himself by falling in love with Mildred Kelston, the daughter of a doctor who had attended him for a trifling ailment. Women tended to favour him: he had had his share of adventures and believed himself free from the danger of a serious entanglement. But Mildred did not appear to him as an entanglement. Tall and exquisitely shaped, with grey-green eyes and chestnut hair, intelligent and perceptive but temperamentally docile, she attracted him as he had not been attracted before. Considered impartially, he told himself, she was an ideal wife for a man such as himself. He proposed and was accepted in February: they were to be married in the Easter vacation.

In this phase he is seen only as a successful young man obviously destined for a brilliant career. He was bumptious, but no more so than any other rising barrister, and certainly no tougher. The toughness was, as it were, flashed into being, a few days before the Easter vacation, by a wretched woman called May Dinton, the associate of a burglar whom Swilbey was prosecuting.

It required no great ingenuity on Swilbey’s part to destroy the alibi the girl was trying to create for her man. But he carried on for another hour and, with some subtlety, extracted from her additional facts which aggravated the prisoner’s guilt.

At dusk, when Swilbey was returning to his lodgings, May Dinton appeared from behind a pillar box.

‘You got my boy seven years when the cops said the judge’ud only give ’im three,’ she accused.

‘My dear girl, what the cops say is nothing to do with me. I am sorry if you have been made unhappy, but you know that sort of thing is my job, and I can’t discuss it.’

‘You did more than you had to do for your pay. Twistin’ my words round like that! You’ve made Ted think I ratted on him. But he won’t think it any more – now!’

He had seen her draw a broad-stoppered bottle from under her coat: he supposed indifferently that she was about to swallow poison. He put up no guard – with the result that some three fluid ounces of vitriol splashed into his face.

On regaining consciousness after the operation, he asked when he would be likely to recover the use of his eyes. The doctor stalled, but broke down under Swilbey’s expert questioning.

‘Very well! Perhaps you’d better take the full shock while you are under our care. I am very sorry, Mr Silbey – there is no hope at all. Moreover – well, bluntly, old man, for appearance’s sake, you’ll have to wear two glass eyes.’

‘Thank you!’ said Silbey. In the time it took to utter those two words he re-planned his career. ‘I can now work out my programme.’

Inspector Karslake himself had come to the hospital. They were personally acquainted, and respected each other’s work.

‘D’you feel strong enough now, Mr Swilbey, to tell us what happened?’

‘I haven’t the least idea.’

It was not the smallest of Swilbey’s achievements that he was able to think clearly while his body was racked with pain.

‘We know it was May Dinton,’ prompted Karslake.

‘But you can’t prove it – or we shouldn’t be talking about it – you’d charge her. Sorry, Karslake! I can’t afford vengeance. Got to be very economical. Got to avoid law courts. Got to forget I was once a lawyer.’

Chapter Two

The bumptious young barrister had been drowned in three ounces of vitriol, and Swilbey’s unquenchable vitality was already creating a new personality, which had to be coddled during its infancy. He must forget May Dinton as well as the Law. The new personality must have no grievance against life, or it would not make the grade.

Through a nurse, he wrote to Mildred: ‘Please don’t come to see me until the pain has passed. Pain in your presence would confuse me.’

These words show he was aware that, no matter how much his personality might change, he would still have a normal nervous system, would still be sensitive to the charm of women, with all its disturbances. Mildred, of course, would be in charge of that side of his life. So there need be no disturbances.

Mildred’s father visited him every day. Swilbey found the visits tedious, except when they were talking about Mildred.

‘You’ll very soon feel well enough to let her come, won’t you?’

‘Practically ready now. Say the day after to-morrow.’

‘I’ll tell her!’ Dr Kelston cleared his throat. ‘There’s one thing I want to mention before then. I can safely say that Mildred will keep her promise to marry you, if she sees that you wish to – er – hold her to it.’

‘There’s no means by which a man can “hold” a woman to such a promise.’

‘Oh yes there is, my friend!’ The father was fighting for his daughter’s happiness and dared not soften his words. ‘When Mildred accepted you, you were on the threshold of a brilliant career. She must have looked forward – quite properly – to sharing fame and prosperity with you. By a tragic accident, you can now offer her only poverty and a treadmill of small services to yourself. Show that you expect her to stick to you, and she will. As would any woman of character.’

Dr Kelston had done his painful duty. The answer brought him but cold comfort.

‘You want me to humbug her with a wistful little speech about my not having the right to blight her life. Wistfulness is not in my programme. You needn’t worry. I shall not blight her life. I shall give her a square deal.’

He meant what he said. Indeed, Swilbey never lied to himself nor anyone else – except, eventually, to the police. But he failed to see that, in the matter of Mildred, he had appointed himself judge in his own case – to his own ultimate ruin.

When she came to the hospital, he was still bandaged – was in a chair on a terrace overlooking the river. A motor launch was passing and he did not hear her approach.

‘I’m here, Robert,’ she said and thrust her hand in his. The significance of having to announce herself to him upset her self-control. A tear dropped on his wrist.

‘Darling, you’ve got the wrong slant on this!’ he exclaimed eagerly. ‘To us, it won’t make any essential difference. I’ve adapted my thoughts to it and know I can manage it. Listen! Believe I’m telling the truth and not just trying to cheer you up. These last few seconds – while I’ve been holding your hand I’ve taken a great leap forward. You’ve touched some nerve or other. I can visualize!’

‘I’m glad, dear, but I don’t understand. Go on talking about it – it’ll make it easier.’

‘Darkness!’ he ejaculated. ‘At first, you’re always waiting, waiting for the light. Having breakfast in total darkness! It muddles your other senses – produces a sort of animal fear. I found difficulty in thinking of things by their shape and colour. But now – holding your hand – I can see the sun shining on your hair, making the wavy bit in front look like copper wire. I can get the angle of the sun, too. It doesn’t matter a damn if the sun isn’t actually shining at the moment. The important thing is that I can visualize the effect of light under the stimulus of an emotional urge – meaning you. That guarantees I shall be able to visualize stage lighting.’

Fascinated by the mechanism of his own brain, he pursued his thoughts in silence, which she broke.

‘While you’re here, could I come every day to teach you Braille?’

‘I’m not going to learn Braille – or anything else the blind learn. I’m not going to be a blind man. I’m an ordinary man, who can’t see.’

That which she believed to be his pathetic courage, his gallant faith in the wreck of himself, destroyed her judgement – though it is easy to see, even at this stage, that there was no pathos in his courage, and that he had not been wrecked by his blindness.

‘This is the programme. I’ve got one toe in the theatre with those sketches. I intend to plant both feet. Now, when I’ve paid up here I shall have about fourteen hundred pounds, all told. I shall want five hundred for my working expenses, which will include purchase of a dictaphone.’

He proceeded to detail a practical plan of domestic finance. ‘Allow a hundred and fifty for our honeymoon and unforeseen expenses after we move in, and we shall have a reserve of fifteen months at the rate of five hundred a year. I shall be well in the swim within six months. Have you made notes of all this?’

‘Yes, Robert.’ Prudence was awakening. Suppose he were not ‘well in the swim’ – ever?

‘If you’ll see my bank manager we’ll fix a power of attorney so that you can deal with the cheques and the contracts. Remember, I can’t sign my name. By the way, you’ll have to do a lot of reading for me at first. Shall you mind?’

She answered that she would not mind. Her tone made him ask:

‘I say, darling! The programme as a whole? Including me? I’ve been rushing on, building a new life on your shoulders. Feel like it – or not?’

She was, in the words of her father, a woman of character. To leave him in the lurch would be utterly impossible. She bent and kissed him.

‘It will be wonderful – building together,’ she said, which was exactly what he had expected her to say. He visualized the expression on her face as she said it. But the visualized expression was quite different from her actual expression of honest doubt of herself and him.

‘I shall have these bandages off in a fortnight,’ he told her – and altogether failed to visualize the shudder that followed his words.

Chapter Three

For the next few years we see Robert Swilbey as the embodiment of the virtues extolled in the literature of success. In him, character really did triumph against enormous odds. He did laugh at his set-backs. He did believe that failure was impossible. Also, of course, ‘luck came to him who earned it’. His stage plays happened to be adaptable to a certain comedian in whom Hollywood had sunk a good deal of capital, and Swilbey’s rates rose with each success.

In the first year he climbed on Mildred’s shoulders more than he realized. Indeed, Mildred herself did not know that it was she who put him so quickly into the West End. His first full-length farcical comedy was tried out in the provinces, seven months after their wedding. It was undercapitalized and badly mounted and was in some danger of collapse, when Turley Wain saw it in Liverpool.

Wain was a company promoter, mainly in the cotton market, with no expert knowledge of the theatre, who had the amateur’s belief that he could spot a winner. He was impressed by Swilbey’s dynamic drive, but he was more impressed, in a different way, by Mildred’s courage and devoted care. He could see that he was in a position to dictate terms, but in Mildred’s presence he held his hand and let Swilbey drive him. True that he eventually made money out of the play. But Swilbey made so much that he was able to finance his next play himself. Before the run had ended, Wain came to live in London and thereafter saw much of Mildred, without suspecting danger.

At the end of six years, living in affluence and with strong financial reserves, Swilbey believed that his marriage was as successful as his career. He was unaware that, after the first eighteen months of struggle, Mildred had been extremely unhappy. Even on their honeymoon, he had refused to perceive that her feeling for him had become exclusively maternal and protective. This feeling had been steadily thwarted by his progressive efficiency.

While they were still comparatively poor she had the arduous task of keeping him abreast of events and ideas by reading to him for long stretches every day. Then she had to take him for walks and, in the intervals, run the home with inadequate assistance. But the comradeship of it sustained her, gave her a sense of fulfilment.

Yet even in this first phase of their marriage, she had what one may call the first premonition of the ultimate disaster. She took her fear to her father.

‘He drives himself so hard, Daddy. And although in a way it’s all so splendid, I’m a little worried as to whether it’s quite – healthy. I know you’ll think I’m a fool – I think so myself, but – this happens. When we’re discussing plans for the week, he speaks as if he and I were making arrangements about someone else. He even says: “he must go to that rehearsal, and if we can get him back in good time we’ll let him try a re-write of that last scene before he goes goes to bed”. The frightening part is that it’s not meant to be funny. He only speaks like that when he is very concentrated.’

‘There’s nothing in that!’ said Dr Kelston. ‘I suspect you’ve been reading some stuff about split personality – without, my dear, quite understanding what you read. I’m no psychiatrist, but I can tell you that, though it does attack exceptionally clever people sometimes, there’s no fear at all with a balanced, mentally disciplined man like Robert. I’ve never met any man I admire more – for mental discipline, I mean.’

Six years later she again approached her father on the same subject.

‘He’s begun to “split” me now,’ she told him. ‘Yesterday, I read a contract to him. He said: “Ah! There’s something for him to tell his wife!” And he did tell me, last night. He always does tell me how wonderful he is. This time, he spoke as if I knew nothing about the contract.’

Dr Kelston was still unimpressed. He asked: ‘Anything else? Has he any morbid habits?’

‘Not that I know of. But I see so little of him except for business, or when others are there. He won’t go for walks any more. He “goes for a row” in that rowing contraption in the gym that makes a noise like a real boat on real water. And a bicycle-thing that can make him feel he’s going up and down hills. And he has a journalist to read to him. If anything gets in his way he invents an expensive gadget so that he need not ask me to help him. He has so built things round him – things and persons – that I don’t believe he any longer wishes he could see. Perhaps that’s morbid.’

‘You aren’t happy with him, Mildred, are you?’

‘No!’ She added: ‘What makes it uncanny is that he is happy with me. I suppose I’m beastly to him pretty often. It never hurts his feelings. He never retaliates – just cleverly makes me feel ashamed of myself. And then’ – she shuddered – ‘we make it up!’

‘Well, at least he is loyal to you. At the back of my mind –’

‘Loyal?’ It was as if she asked herself a question. ‘Women run after him. He’s so big and strong – and handsome, if you can ignore his poor, staring eyes. But I think he’s afraid they might put him out of his stride. He’s positively Victorian with them. When he’s going to rehearse a new actress he sends for me. He says to the girl: “It’s essential that I should be able to visualize you. May I touch you?” And then I have to chip in and say something pleasant.’

‘At the back of my mind –’

‘“May I touch you!”’ she repeated bitterly. ‘With me standing by to make it impersonal and uncompromising. That’s what I’m for. I’m not his wife. I’m just – women!’

‘At the back of my mind, my dear girl, there has been for some time the feeling that I ought to warn you that there are whispers about your friendship with Mr Wain. I know there can be nothing in it – but there it is!’

About the same time, the whisper reached Swilbey.

Chapter Four

Every Tuesday night, Swilbey gave a party in his house in St John’s Wood, a couple of miles from theatreland. For the rest of the week he was strictly not-at-home to anybody to whom he had not given a definite appointment.

In the lofty L-shaped drawing-room that was also his working room he would hold an inner court round his gadget-laden armchair.

Now and again he would rise and walk among his guests, who were required merely to avoid impeding his progress. His system enabled him always to know where he was standing in his house or in the theatre. On first nights he could walk unaided to the proper spot from which to take his author’s call – for which purpose he wore spectacles and a careful make-up; for he did not wish his public to know that he ‘could not see’.

It was by the bend of the ‘L’ that he overheard the whisper; and for the first time since he lost his sight he found himself shirking a reality.

For some days, he vacillated. Mildred’s behaviour to himself was the same as it had been for years. He worked out ways of asking her for details – a frank approach. But in his heart he was afraid of receiving a frank answer that would break the smooth routine of his career. On the fourth day he wrote to Wain, under a thin pretence of being able to offer him another flutter in the theatre.

He received him, as he received everybody, alone in the drawing-room.

‘I say, old man! Some infernal scandalmongers have been coupling your name and Mildred’s. I thought you and I had better get together about it. Cards on the table and all that!’

He was alarmed by the length of the pause before Wain answered.

‘Before I say anything else, Swilbey, I have nothing to confess to you. I’ve never so much as touched her hand. I can’t imagine what is being said. We have always taken care not to give the talkers a chance.’

That killed the last hope that there might be nothing in it. Wain seemed to think that Mildred had already discussed it.

‘I’d better go on.’ Wain’s voice sounded unctuous and sentimental. ‘I’ve been in love with her for years, and shall be all my life. But I doubt whether she knows it’s any more than friendship. Anyhow, if circumstances were normal I would speak to her – then ask you for a divorce. I’ve told you all there is to tell, Swilbey.’

‘I appreciate that.’ The fellow, thought Swilbey, was a mere sentimentalist, who would run from a challenge. ‘But I don’t follow that bit about “normal circumstances”. Why not speak to her? I have never regarded women as property. I stake no prior claim. How do we know she wouldn’t be happier with you?’

Sentimentalist or not, Wain shook the edifice of six years with his answer.

‘Swilbey, you asked for cards on the table. So you’ll let me say that we both know she would be happier with me – if I could retain my self-respect. But how could I? Knowing I had taken his wife from a blind man?’

In the recesses of Swilbey’s brain, a voice was speaking about Swilbey: That’ll upset him – calling him a blind man! Mind he doesn’t do anything rash.’

Through the darkness the other voice, that of Wain, penetrated.

‘To Mildred, your well-being is a sacred mission, Swilbey. Her power of attorney has more than legal significance. She stands between you and the outside world with which you could not cope, even with all your assistants and servants. You would be the first to acknowledge that you owe your career, not only to your own qualities, but also to hers.’

Again came the illusion of an inner voice speaking: ‘Look out! That’ll make him worse. Wain is telling him that he’s a blind man living on the charity of his wife’s eyes.’

‘I quite agree.’ Swilbey’s voice was calm as ever. ‘By the way, years ago – when I was starting – did you finance my play because of Mildred?’

‘N-no. At least, I don’t think so. Not altogether. Does it matter, now?’

The personality had been thumped into numbness. Only the mannerisms remained active – and some resolution he did not yet understand. Swilbey rose from his chair.

‘I’m glad we’ve had this talk. One way and another, Wain, you’ve been a factor in my life. I would like to be able to visualize you. May I touch you?’

‘Of course! I’m a shrimp compared with you.’

‘Yes, you’re shorter. And you’ve kept slim.’ The hands crept lightly to the head, crept over the features, outlining the heavy, prominent chin with a dimple in it, crept below the chin to the throat –

Don’t let him do anything rash!’

But how would it be possible to keep ‘him’ quiet? For the first time for six years, consciousness of the perpetual darkness returned, and with it the animal fear.

At six o’ clock, Menceman, the journalist, came as usual with a digest of the day’s papers. Swilbey barely heard a word throughout the hour’s reading. At seven-thirty, when he was going upstairs to prepare for dinner, he crashed into the balustrade.

The parlourmaid, who had been with him for years, gasped with astonishment. Never before had she seen him miss his direction.

‘Have you hurt yourself, sir?’

‘No, thanks. My foot slipped,’ he lied.

That evening, alone with Mildred in her little sitting-room upstairs he got up to go to bed, faltered and then:

‘Will you take me to my room, please?’

Sheer astonishment made her ask:

‘Why, Robert?’

‘Because I’m blind!’ he cried, and broke down like a child.

The next day, Mildred beat down his protests and took him for a holiday up the river where he could scull for hours while she steered. The first nervous crisis passed. She made no mention of Wain.

He evolved, during that holiday, an interim personality – an understudy to sustain the role of Robert Swilbey. All the mannerisms were faithfully copied, but the inspiration was lacking. The interim personality could not write dialogue that sparkled with clever nonsense. He was working then on Playgirl Wanted, but had to abandon it before he had completed the first act.

‘Menceman, I’m going to try my hand at straight drama. I shall have a background of police work, treated realistically. You might begin by going through the verbatim reports of trials, picking out the small points overlooked by intelligent murderers.’

Now and again, the inner voice would register a half-hearted warning. He’s planning to kill Wain. Better humour him.’

‘David Durham advised me to have a model theatre on the table beside me, as he does,’ he told Mildred. ‘Of course, my sense of touch isn’t developed enough for that sort of thing. But I could rig up a model stage at the other end of the drawing-room.’ He meant at the short end of the ‘L’. ‘Scale about one to four I should think. I could use it, too, for rehearsing special scenes.’

He spent sixteen hundred pounds on what became not a model but a miniature stage, with many of the fitments of a fullsized stage. Unable to concentrate enough for original work, he rehearsed revivals on the miniature stage.

At rehearsals he necessarily worked through a subordinate stage manager.

‘I want to be able to handle the rigging myself – get the feel of the controls,’ said Silbey, because he knew that he intended to hang Wain, thereby giving the murder the outward semblance of an execution.

Chapter Five

There is no doubt that Swilbey planned the murder of Wain in minute detail. But there is considerable doubt whether he meant to carry it out. Remember that daydreams and fancies and castles-in-the-air possess a special kind of reality to a playwright – they become as real to him as is a parcel of speculative shares to a business man.

In a sense, Swilbey soothed his wounded ego by murdering Wain every night. The taunt of being a blind man, who could only hold his woman by invoking her pity, was nightly avenged by the fatal blow that was not actually struck. Nightly, too, the heads of Scotland Yard were made to confess themselves beaten by the dazzling brilliance of Robert Swilbey – a man who, as it happened, could not see.

Certain it is that for two years he made no attempt to use the ‘engine of death’, as counsel called it – more simply, the essential parts of a gallows, disguised as rigging for shifting scenes and the heavier stage properties. Nor did he take any step to lure Wain to the house. Ironically, Wain was, as it were, put on the spot by Mildred herself.

‘I want to ask something of you, Robert,’ she began. ‘About Turley Wain. It’s two years now since he gave you an explanation. He told me at the time that you had been very kind to him.’

‘He was very kind to me. I told him I’d fix a divorce, if you wanted it.’

He hoped she would say she had never, and would never, want a divorce. But she did not. The darkness came down on him again.

‘We exchanged parting gifts. I have only seen him once since then. To-day. He is very changed. I drew from him that things have gone very badly with him, and he expects to be made bankrupt. Will you help him, Robert?’

‘Of course I will! Apart from your friendship with him, he did me a good turn when he financed Brenda Gets Married.’

He felt her approaching. The darkness vanished as he visualized her physical beauty against the background of a sun-lit flower garden. She thanked him warmly – because he had said he would help Turley Wain.

‘When shall I tell him to come and see you about it?’

In the nightly murder, Wain always arrived at five-thirty on a winter afternoon. And Mildred was always out of the house. He reminded himself now that, on Fridays, Mildred always visited her parents, who were in retirement in Canterbury.

‘Next Friday at five-thirty,’ he answered, and added: ‘February fifteenth – my birthday – good omen for Wain!’

It was about five-thirty when he came, Inspector. I was in the rehearsal theatre. I showed him the tackle for shifting the heavier pieces.’ That was part of the scene in which the police, every night, were ‘hopelessly baffled’.

On Friday, Mildred left for Canterbury after lunch; she would stay for dinner, returning on the last train.

At five-thirty precisely, the parlourmaid announced Wain. Speaking from the miniature stage, Swilbey greeted him with the opening lines composed two years ago.

‘Hullo, Wain! I’ve just finished here. You haven’t seen this little rigout before, have you?’ Swilbey could hear the parlourmaid drawing the curtains. He spoke loudly enough for her to hear. ‘It’s the engineering I’m proud of. Have to haul everything up to the flies when we want a change. With the double reduction on these pulleys, a child could manage it – designed the whole thing myself. How’s that for a blind man, eh! Have a cigarette?’

He felt for his cigarette case in one pocket and another. Like many a sighted man, he was never sure of his pockets.

‘You dropped it on that bench, sir.’ The parlourmaid left the curtains, hurried to the stage, recovered the cigarette case and handed it to Swilbey.

Wain, who did not know that the very word ‘blind’ was a danger signal, made polite murmurs. When Swilbey heard the parlourmaid draw the last curtain, he said:

‘Let’s go and sit down. I won’t bother to put the tackle away.’

Back together down the short arm of the ‘L’, a left turn into the long arm, to his armchair and the group of chairs round it. Swilbey felt the hands of his watch. Five thirty-four. Not a minute to waste.

‘Mildred told me you might go bankrupt. How much do you want?’

‘Bankruptcy is one thing. There’s another!’ Judging by his voice, Wain had gone to pieces – he was almost cringing. ‘To leave out technicalities, I got caught in a landslide, Swilbey. I swear to you I didn’t try to save myself at the expense of others. I threw in all my own resources, including even my furniture, when I need not have done so. It wasn’t nearly enough. In trying to save the investments of others I committed a technical breach of the criminal law. At this moment I am actually wanted by the police.’

‘Better give me the figures!’ Thirty-eight minutes past five. The babble must not last more than another four minutes. And he mustn’t forget Wain’s cigarette. It might set the house on fire – which would disarrange the plan.

Wain seemed to shrink from coming to the point.

‘Last week, a detective came to see me. Very decent fellow. Karslake. He knew you when you were at the Bar. I drew wool over his eyes because I didn’t want to be arrested there and then. And now I’m keeping out of his way.’

‘Wain, old man, how much do you want?’

‘The technical breach – well, five thousand pounds would cover that. But look here, Swilbey, I’ve no excuse for asking you.’

‘Yes, you have! You and Mildred together made it possible for a blind man to make a living. My career pivots on you two. She hinted that you might want a wad of ready cash. Come with me.’

Swilbey felt some squeamishness in promising money that would never be given. But there is no gentlemanly method of committing murder.

‘D’you mind putting your cigarette out, old man? Have to be careful of fire, where we’re going.’

On the way back round the turn of the ‘L’, to the rehearsal theatre, he asked:

‘And what about the bankruptcy?’

‘Astronomical! Fifty thousand pounds, if a penny!’

‘Hm! We’ll have to talk about that later. We’re going over the stage. That door at the back is still in use. All right! I can manage. In their own place, the blind can manage as if they were not blind. Mind that pulley!’

Wain, as he had himself said, was a shrimp beside Swilbey. Moreover, he did not know how to use what little weight and strength he had. So the ‘compensatory fantasy’ was translated into reality without muscular strain.

When Wain was dead, Swilbey turned on the main switch which flooded the stage with light. The room lights of the short arm of the ‘L’ had been turned on by the parlourmaid.

The parlourmaid! Half-way to the corner, he stopped. He had had a sudden mental picture of the parlourmaid handing him his cigarette case after he had dropped it on the bench.

‘If I’ve dropped anything this time –’

He went back to the stage and groped on the bench: he was leaving, when his foot touched something on the floor which ought not to have been there. He bent down.

‘That damned case again!’ Like frightened snakes, his fingers slid over the tessellated pattern of the slim gold case. ‘Phew! I had a sort of intuition. Subconscious memory. Good! It means “he” won’t make any mistakes!’

He thrust the case into his breast pocket and hurried away.

At four minutes to six Swilbey, back in his gadget-laden armchair, switched on the radio. Luck again came to him who had earned it. A drama critic was talking.

At six punctually, just as the radio critic was finishing. Menceman, the journalist, came in.

Swilbey turned off the radio and spoke as if Wain were sitting near him.

‘Wain,’ he said, ‘let me introduce Mr Menceman, who –’

‘There’s no one in the room but ourselves, Mr Swilbey.’

‘Oh, then Wain must have slipped out – I had to listen to that critique. You’ve heard of Wain – of course! My fairy godfather. Backed my first play. Badly hit in the Slump. Let’s have the Slump news first.’

There was no fear of Menceman strolling about the room, turning the bend of the ‘L’ and seeing the corpse.

Swilbey gave his full attention. The plan was fulfilling itself. Menceman would leave at seven. By domestic routine, a housemaid would discover the body of Turley Wain at seven-thirty, by which time he would be in his room, dressing for dinner.

But at nine minutes to seven the sequence of the plan was broken by the house telephone.

‘An officer from Scotland Yard, sir. Chief Inspector Karslake. He wants to speak to Mr Wain.’

For a second only Swilbey hesitated.

‘Mr Wain left a long time ago. But tell Mr Karslake I would like to see him if he can spare the time.’

With a nod he dismissed Menceman and concentrated on the problem of the detective.

Chapter Six

Swilbey held out his hand and waited, as the blind do, for Karslake to grip it.

‘It’s good to see you after all these years, Mr Swilbey. I always take the wife to one of your plays when I get the chance.’

‘And it’s good to hear your voice!’ echoed Swilbey. ‘We must have a chat sometime. At present, you’ve got something on your mind, and Wain has told me what it is. You may take it that will be settled at once – in full.’

‘Well, I’m sure I’m glad to hear it, as he’s a friend of yours. All the same, I can’t stop the machinery at this stage, as you know. Can I see him, please?’

‘He’s not here,’ said Swilbey. ‘Left about six.’

There was a short, strained silence.

‘Mr Swilbey, his coat and hat are in your vestibule.’

‘Surely not! Wait a minute.’ On the house telephone he spoke to the parlourmaid.

‘What time did Mr Wain leave?’

‘He hasn’t left, sir. I thought he was in the drawing-room with you, until you said he wasn’t.’

Swilbey repeated the girl’s words.

‘Then d’you mean to say he sneaked out of the room without saying good-bye or anything?’ asked Karslake.

‘Apparently, he did. I’d told him what I could do for him, and we’d really finished. I asked him to excuse me for a few minutes as I wanted to hear the end of a dramatic critique on the radio. At six, when Menceman came in – you saw him just now – I began to introduce them, when Menceman told me Wain wasn’t here.’

Karslake noted a half-smoked cigarette on the ash tray by his side: nothing in the tray within Swilbey’s reach. That tallied with what Swilbey was saying.

‘He left the room, then, but not the house,’ said Karslake.

‘He wouldn’t wander about my house without permission,’ asserted Swilbey. ‘It’s much more likely that he heard Menceman arrive and thought it was you coming to collect him. He was in a very nervy state.’

‘If he left the house – without his hat and coat – which way did he go?’ pressed Karslake.

Swilbey had seen that question coming – had seen, too, that he was in no danger, provided he did not shirk the logic of his position.

‘He could have got into the garden by going through the door at the back of my rehearsal stage, and along the corridor. That door was locked on this side. If he slipped out that way, it must be unlocked now.’

‘Can I have a look at that door?’

Swilbey stood up.

‘Come with me,’ he invited. ‘The stage is in this room – round the corner.’

Karslake followed Swilbey round the corner of the ‘L’. A corpse, as such, could not shake Karslake’s nerve. But his nerve was shaken this time, partly because he thought, for a second or two, that the corpse was a stage property.

Looking some thirty feet down the short arm of the ‘L’, he saw a well-lit stage-set of a saloon bar. Left back, at an angle, was the bar, with shining pump handles: left, a pin-table: right, a bench in green plush – and centre, a human form suspended by its neck in what appeared to be a noose attached to the hook of a pulley block.

Two paces nearer, he recognized the features of Turley Wain.

‘What?’ Swilbey stopped in his stride. ‘Did you speak?’

‘No. It’s all right.’ Karslake was thinking quickly. ‘Carry on, please, Mr Swilbey.’

Swilbey, a couple of feet ahead, walked on. With the steadiness of a sighted man, he stepped on to the stage. He passed within a dozen inches of the man who was obviously dead. So to the back of the miniature stage.

‘Nothing doing!’ ejaculated Swilbey. ‘The door is still locked on this side.’

Fascinated, Karslake watched Swilbey return, wondering whether, this time, he would collide with the dangling corpse. Again there were a dozen inches to spare. Perhaps, he reflected, the blind always walked in the same track in familiar surroundings.

‘Surely it isn’t worth investigating, Karslake! The charge against him is pretty certain to be dropped, after restitution. Forget it for a few minutes and have a drink.’

‘That sounds a good idea,’ said Karslake, who had meantime satisfied himself that there was no hope of saving life.

Back, with the blind man, round the corner of the ‘L’ to his chair. Swilbey sat down. Sitting gave him the range of all the gadgets. He leant forward and opened the door of a cabinet.

‘Whisky, gin or –’

‘Whisky, please.’ Karslake glanced uneasily at a row of decanters. ‘Allow me!’

‘It’s all right, thanks. You sit down.’ Swilbey’s voice had a slight edge to it. He passed his guest the whisky decanter, a tumbler and a siphon, then held out his hand for the return of the decanter.

‘Can I pour yours for you, Mr Swilbey?’

‘No, thanks!’ Swilbey’s tone barely escaped rudeness. Karslake watched Swilbey pour his own drink with a deftness that made his hands seem like independent agents, able to think and act for themselves. Meantime, he was groping for a line of action. That corpse, actually in the same room with them, presented a tricky problem in presence of mind.

‘Cigarette, Karslake?’

‘Oh – er – thanks!’

Swilbey thrust his hand into his breast pocket for his cigarette case – kept it there for seconds as if his arm were paralysed. Then he tried his side pockets.

Karslake saw a thin, tessellated gold cigarette case on the ledge, flush with the dictaphone. But he had observed that Swilbey was very touchy about being helped. So Karslake said nothing.

‘Dammit, I thought I had my case on me!’

Karslake was glad of the respite. His mind on the corpse, he watched Swilbey’s hand creeping, spiderlike, along the ledge by the dictaphone.

‘Ah, here it is!’

For an instant the hand hovered, quivering over the case as if it were puzzled. Karslake dismissed this eerie fancy, took the offered cigarette and made his decision.

‘To come back to Wain for a moment,’ said Karslake, ‘you might tell me exactly what happened while he was here.’

This was the cue for the scene in which the police were ‘hopelessly baffled’. He had but to repeat the oft-repeated words.

‘It was about five-thirty when he came. I was in the rehearsal theatre. I showed him the tackle for shifting the heavier pieces. Then we came back here and talked.

‘He told me he had committed a technical breach of the criminal law and that he was playing tig with you. Mentioned you by name and said you remembered me. I said I’d let him have the five thousand in the morning. Then he explained that he would drop in for a civil bankruptcy for fifty thousand pounds. I said bluntly I couldn’t manage that – after which things became mildly unpleasant.’

‘What sort of unpleasantness?’

‘After I’d turned down the fifty thousand idea, he said something about the five thousand being wasted – that it would be cheaper for all if he jumped off Waterloo Bridge on a dark night – the usual suicide threat that is never implemented. Between ourselves, Karslake, I don’t like that man. He financed my first play. I admit he was thundering useful to me at the time, and I’m glad to let him have the five thousand. Fifty thousand is another pair o’ shoes. So I made the excuse that I had to listen to the radio critique. And I suppose he buzzed off in a huff as well as a panic.

‘He’s coming here to-morrow morning for the five thousand, and he’s sure to surrender to you as soon as he’s got it, so you don’t have to worry. Have another drink?’

‘No, thanks. May I use your telephone?’

Karslake dialled the Yard, asked for an internal number, then gave Swilbey’s address.

‘I want the whole team,’ said Karslake. ‘I’ll be here when they arrive.’ He hung up. ‘Wain is on that stage of yours, Mr Swilbey – with his neck in that scene-shifting tackle.’

‘My God! Doing it in my house!’ exclaimed Swilbey. ‘That’s a dirty, malicious trick, Karslake! The publicity will do me no good – no darned good at all.’

Chapter Seven

It was near the truth to say that Robert Swilbey was disappointed when it appeared that the police were not ‘baffled’ – that they hadn’t the wit to see that there was anything to be baffled about. On the other hand, he received, in the Coroner’s court, a severe shock which put him momentarily in fear of his life. For the Coroner described exactly how Wain had been murdered – which Swilbey had thought no one could ever guess.

‘Accident,’ said the Coroner to his jury, when all the evidence had been heard, ‘may be ruled out. If you are to return a positive verdict, therefore, you must decide between murder and suicide. Let us consider what evidence, if any, supports the theory of murder.’

He dwelt on the virtual impossibility of anyone entering the drawing-room without the servants or Swilbey being aware of it – he elaborated obvious absurdities.

‘Apart from such absurdities, you have to postulate – to sustain the hypothesis of murder – a very powerful man who suddenly attacked the deceased, constricting his victim’s throat so that he could not cry out – or the servants, to say nothing of Mr Swilbey, would have heard him. For this purpose he used a curtain cord, an item in the fittings of the stage set. This hypothetical murderer then proceeded, in the clumsiest possible manner, to attach his victim to the hook on the pulley block.

‘As you have been told, the device of a noose, or slip-knot, was not employed. A curtain cord, itself a stage property securing a curtain on the stage set, was wound round the throat of the deceased in such a manner as to make four complete coils. This cord was tied at the back of the deceased’s neck with three knots – the kind of simple knot which one uses for one’s shoe laces, the difference being that this simple knot was tied three times instead of once. Through three of the coils, the hook beneath the pulley block was inserted, greatly increasing the pressure of the coils round the neck. The hands were unbound. Medical evidence as to the condition of the hands – and microscopic examination of the ropes above the pulley block – make it clear that the unhappy man attempted to free himself by reaching above his head and pulling on the ropes.

‘Why did our hypothetical murderer permit this attempt to frustrate his purpose? Add that this eccentric murderer must have swung the dead, or unconscious, body in such a way that the shoes could be pressed into the upholstery of the bench – and you may come to the conclusion that no such person as the murderer existed.’

The Coroner had reconstructed the murder in order to ridicule the theory of murder. As a dramatist, Swilbey knew the danger of playing tricks like that on an audience – who would sometimes pick up an unexpected angle. But the fact of his blindness – above all, Karslake’s evidence of his behaviour in the presence of the corpse – headed off suspicion.

Swilbey’s dread was dispelled when the Coroner went on to say what Swilbey had intended him to say.

‘On the hypothesis of suicide, the deceased slipped silently away when Mr Swilbey turned on the radio. After adjusting the pulley to the height he required, he wound the curtain cord round his throat, as one might wind a narrow scarf, and tied it, as described, at the back. He stood on the bench, worked the hook under the coils, then swung himself off the bench. Police measurements, on the chart before you, show that the ropes would then swing, pendulum-wise, to the centre of the stage, bringing the feet of the deceased within three and a half inches of the floor.

‘Like many a suicide and would-be suicide before him, he repented of his act before it had been completed, and tried to interrupt it. Had he secured himself with a noose, he would in all probability have succeeded. To free the hook from the coils of curtain cord was a great deal more difficult than loosening a slip-knot – doubly so, through the fact that his jaw was large and prominent.’

The jury, ever ready to believe that a simple explanation must be the true one, accepted the Coroner’s interpretation. Only Chief Inspector Karslake was heard to mumble that the suicide had been clear-headed enough to measure the pendulum swing, correct to three and a half inches. After a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind, public interest in the case evaporated.

On the evening following the inquest, Robert Swilbey resumed work on the first act of Playgirl Wanted, abandoned two years previously. The play was put on in the following autumn. It ran all through the following year.

Eighteen months later, he was at work on another play, when the end came.

Chapter Eight

A junior detective from another department flung open the door of the Dead Ends office and ushered in a seedy individual with patched trousers but a very decent sports coat.

‘This is Mr Joe Byker, sir,’ said the detective facetiously. ‘Hensons’, the pawnbrokers, phoned us. Mr Byker was trying to pawn this.’ He laid on the table a slim gold cigarette case, with a tessellated design. ‘Mr Byker says the case is his and he bought it with his own money.’

Among the burglaries, petty thefts, and what-not on Detective-Inspector Rason’s file were eleven missing gold cigarette cases, five with tessellated design. He opened the case in the hope of finding some identifying mark.

‘For remembrance,’ he read. No name. No initials.

‘You bought it, eh, Byker! From a man in a pub whose name you don’t know?’

‘No, sir. I bought it right enough, a matter o’ six weeks ago, off a respectable dealer name o’ Clawson’s, Theobalds Road.’

‘They’re second-hand clothes dealers, Byker.’

‘That’s right, sir. Matter o’ six weeks ago, I bought this ’ere sports coat as I’m wearin’ this very minute, sir, and I didn’t know till this morning when I was havin’ me breakfast that I’d bought that cigarette case with it. In here it was, sir.’ He took the coat off. ‘In between these two bits o’ stiffening – that’s where I cut the lining, look – at the top here is where it was worn away before the coat was sold to Clawson’s. And me walking about with it for a matter o’ six weeks.’

Clawson, the dealer, was able to supply the name and address of the man from whom he had bought the sports coat. Interviewed by Rason, the vendor of the coat was inclined to be indignant.

‘Yes, I sold it to Clawson’s – and what’s the matter with that? The missis gave it to me to do what I liked with.’

‘And who is the missis?’

‘Mrs Swilbey – wife of the gentleman who writes all them plays. I’m his gardener.’

Swilbey, a writer of plays! In a few minutes, Rason remembered the freak suicide of eighteen months ago. Byker would drop in for ‘stealing by finding’ if Mrs Swilbey would consent to prosecute, he reflected on his way to the house in St John’s Wood.

‘Perhaps you could tell me, Mrs Swilbey, whether this is your husband’s cigarette case?’

‘It looks like it. I wonder where he dropped it!’

Mildred took the case, opened it and caught her breath.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It is not my husband’s.’

‘But you do know whose it is, Mrs Swilbey!’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘It belonged to a friend of ours who – is dead. A Mr Wain. I gave it to him myself. It is exactly like one I gave to my husband – bought at the same place. That’s why I thought at first it was his.’

‘Mr Wain,’ repeated Rason. ‘I remember. Very sad. You’re quite sure this is the case you gave Mr Wain?’

‘Quite!’ She added the name of the jeweller where she had bought both cases. ‘How did it come into your hands, Mr Rason?’

‘It has been stolen,’ answered Rason, and bowed himself out.

He checked up at the jeweller’s, then decided reluctantly that he must bring Chief Inspector Karslake into it.

‘He was a lawyer once,’ warned Karslake, as it was Rason’s case. ‘You won’t get him to admit anything. But I’ll stooge you all I can.’

At five-thirty that afternoon they were being shown into the ‘L’-shaped drawing-room. Karslake introduced Rason with a somewhat elaborate heartiness.

‘I’ve got to worry you about the estate in bankruptcy of the a late Turley Wain, Mr Swilbey,’ said Rason.

‘Before we start, Mr Swilbey,’ cut in Karslake, ‘d’ you mind if we smoke?’

‘Do! Here, have a cigarette!’ Swilbey felt in one pocket and then another, then found his cigarette case on the ledge that was flush with the dictaphone. ‘I don’t know anything about Wain’s affairs.’

Rason observed the cigarette case. It looked exactly like Wain’s – the same tessellated design. It would feel the same to a blind man – and that was all Rason wanted to know.

‘What an extraordinary thing!’ exclaimed Rason. ‘That case is exactly like Turley Wain’s.’ He added carefully. ‘You may remember – that it dropped out of Wain’s pocket – on to the floor of your stage – during the poor chap’s struggles.’

There was a tiny perceptible stiffening of the large frame. But it was the long pause that made Rason sure of his ground.

‘I don’t remember, because I was never told,’ said Swilbey.

‘You didn’t need telling! You picked the cigarette case up after you had killed him. You thought it was yours, because it feels the same. And you put it in your pocket. It was in your pocket when you were sitting in here, offering Mr Karslake a cigarette.’

‘Any ass can make wild assertions!’ snapped Swilbey. ‘Are you in this foolery, Karslake?’

‘Well, Mr Swilbey, I must say I do remember your offering me a cigarette out of a gold case.’

‘Then I wonder, my dear Karslake’ – Swilbey had pounced as, years ago, he would pounce on a witness – ‘I wonder whether you also remember that the case was not in my pocket, as I thought it was, but on this ledge here?’

‘Y-yes, I do remember, now you mention it, Mr Swilbey.’ Karslake spoke as one making a reluctant admission. ‘Rason, I think you’ll have to apologize.’

‘Wait a minute!’ said Rason. ‘Suppose the case on the ledge there, out of which he offered you a cigarette, was his own case? And suppose Wain’s case, which Swilbey had put in his pocket, had slipped down the lining. And suppose –’

‘Suppose my grandmother’s foot!’ Swilbey emitted a roar of laughter. ‘Karslake, haven’t you taught this man any evidence?’ Swilbey leant forward in the direction of Rason. ‘My good man! If you could prove that I put Wain’s cigarette case in my pocket – eighteen months ago, mark you! – we would not be talking about it. Mr Karslake would charge me with murder – wouldn’t you, Karslake?’

‘Yes,’ said Chief Inspector Karslake. In sudden silence, the distant rumble of traffic seemed to fill the vast drawing-room. Presently Karslake added: ‘Perhaps you’d like to ring the bell, Swilbey, and tell them to pack you a suitcase?’

Copyright

First published in 1949 by Faber & Faber

This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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ISBN 978-1-4472-2462-4 EPUB

ISBN 978-1-4472-2461-7 POD

Copyright © Roy Vickers, 1949

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