The Art-Music, Literature and Linguistics Forum
March 28, 2024, 06:43:56 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
News: Here you may discover hundreds of little-known composers, hear thousands of long-forgotten compositions, contribute your own rare recordings, and discuss the Arts, Literature and Linguistics in an erudite and decorous atmosphere full of freedom and delight.
 
  Home Help Search Gallery Staff List Login Register  
  Show Posts
Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6 ... 257
46  Our Library / Harold Avery - Schoolboy Pluck (1933) / 4: The "Pawns" on: March 16, 2024, 04:05:03 am
"HERE he is," called out Platen, as Fred passed through the basement doorway into the quad. "Thought you'd got lost, Maple. Allow me to introduce you---Mr. T. H. Newte of the Middle Fifth, and Mr. Farren of the Upper Fourth."

Newte was a short, sandy-haired boy, who wore what a comrade had once described as "six-horse power specs," behind which his eyes seemed constantly on the move. He grinned and nodded, while his companion bowed with mock solemnity. Fred had noticed Farren limping about the school, and imagined it to be the result of a sprained ankle; now he realised that the boy was permanently lame.

"Listen," began Platen in an impressive tone. "We---are the---'Pawns'!"

"Oh!" murmured Fred, with a faint smile.

"He doesn't seem much impressed," continued Platen, turning to the two other members of the
"young men's guild." "However, we'll give it time to sink in. Come on, let's make tracks for the merry greenwood."

When reached, the spot thus referred to proved to be the remains of what had once been a small coppice in one corner of the big playing-field, and here the quartette spread out a couple of rugs to form a resting-place beneath the shade of a tree. Barely half an hour had elapsed since dinner, and, though cricket had not yet commenced, the wide expanse of turf was already alive with moving figures whose white flannels showed up sharply against the green.

"The first item on the agenda," began Platen, who, in default of a "chair," sat with his back leaning against the tree trunk, is the election of a new member. I therefore propose that Maple become a 'Pawn.'"

"I second that," said Newte.

"I third it," added Farren.

"Carried unanimously," cried Platen. "Maple, you are now a 'Pawn'; this is the proudest moment of your life, and you will now be good enough to say so. I call upon you to make a speech."

"Oh, look here, I didn't bargain for that," laughed Fred. "I'm sure I'm very much obliged, and all that sort of thing. But what are the 'Pawns'? What's the object of this young men's guild?"

" 'Pawns,' my boy," began Platen, with the air of a grey-bearded philosopher instructing a young disciple,
"are the humblest pieces on the board. We have our little squares to fill, and that's about all. Still, if we can't leap over other people's heads like the giddy knight, there's no reason why we shouldn't make the best of life in a quiet way, and we are banded together for mutual support and amusement. You, for instance, don't play cricket----"

"Don't you?" put in Newte, peering through his heavy glasses.

"Oh---nothing much," muttered Fred in a rather uneasy tone.

"I can't either," chirped Newte quickly, as if fearing he had touched a raw spot. "Sight's too bad---couldn't see a ball till it hit me on the nose."

"When I do try to slog a ball," grumbled Farren, alluding to his game leg, "I invariably overbalance, and sit down on the wicket."

"So far as that goes we are all a set of crocks," said Platen cheerfully. Something went wrong with me after I had rheumatic fever, and I was forbidden to play games. Still, I was never any good at cricket, so I can't claim it's any loss to the school."

Fred remained silent; it dawned on him that the reason why his three companions took no part in the games was because they were physically unfit. Possibly they imagined that he was the victim of some similar infirmity. For a few moments he had an unpleasant feeling of sailing under false colours.

"Now the chief question we have met to decide is what we are going to do this term," began Platen. "Perhaps our friend here will supply the bright idea. You see," he continued, turning to Fred, "last term the 'Pawns' ran a magazine---the organ of the guild. It was immense---as long as it lasted; but this term we want some sort of hobby we can carry on out of doors."

"I've been thinking," murmured Farren, "it wouldn't be a bad idea to keep bees."

"To keep what?" cried Newte in a shrill falsetto.

"Bees, you idiot," returned Farren calmly. "Don't you know what a bee is? I saw an advertisement of a shilling book that tells you how it's done. I believe the Head would give us leave to stick up a hive in some out-of-the-way place. It needn't cost a penny, we could knock it together ourselves out of some old boxes."

"And what about the bees?" inquired Platen, with a genial grin. "We might borrow the 'Hawk's' butterfly-net, and go round catching them, eh? So the whole thing needn't cost anything."

"Oh, that's rot," protested Farren. "Of course you'd have to buy a swarm."

"Yes; get stung to death, and that would be the end of that," said Newte, with an air of winding up the discussion. "Bee-keeping's off; at any rate you won't get me to ave anything to do with it."

"Well, then, you suggest something," grumbled Farren, who still seemed to regard his own proposal as feasible.

"My idea is this," began the other; "I'd like us to go in for photography. Have a whip round among ourselves, and get a downright good camera; then try to turn out some really decent work."

"If you get a half-plate you'll find it a pretty expensive hobby," objected Platen. "Plates and printing-paper, and that sort of thing---it runs away with a lot of money. We should all be bankrupt in about a month."

"I'll tell you what you might do," began Fred, struck with a sudden idea. "Get a camera that'll take picture post cards, and sell 'em at cost price. You don't want to go in for making a profit, but it would pay expenses."

"My hat! what a good idea! exclaimed Newte. "Of course we could; if you took groups and views of the school you'd have fellows tumbling over one another to buy them. It's great! Maple, you're a genius."

All four fell to discussing the project, Platen making humorous suggestions as to subjects for views, while Farren, who was still brooding over the manner in which his bee-keeping scheme had been rejected, showed himself inclined to raise objections. He declined to believe that the united efforts of the guild would eveer result in the production of picture post cards which were fit for sale.

Fred, feeling now a fully fledged "Pawn," and quite at his ease with his companions, joined merrily in the conversation; but in time a sound, which at first he had hardly noticed, began to attract his attention. It was the subdued smack smack as, away yonder, bat met ball. His attention wandered from what Platen was saying, and he turned to watch what was happening in the field.

It was a half-holiday, and as no matches were fixed for a date so early in the season, a number of games were in progress between scratch teams, those on the Junior Ground being the result of "pick-ups" organised by the leading cricketer in each form. Now, though cricket and football were not compulsory at Rockfield, every boy was expected to join in these sports unless he had some valid exuse for absence. True, there were fellows who "shirked," among them being Scarf and Rusper; but even these two worthies thought it advisable to turn up occasionally at the practice nets, or to make an appearance in the tail of some scratch eleven. As a new boy, Fred had so far escaped notice, and been allowed to go his own way; but, though he was ignorant of the unwritten law, there began to rise in his mind some vague, instinctive feeling that he ought to be actively employed out there in the sunshine instead of lying with the "Pawns" under the shade of a tree.

"I'm not going to force myself on them and risk getting snubbed," he argued.

It would have surprised him had he been told that he himself was the snob in refusing to credit his companions with generosity and good sense, and in judging the whole crowd of them by the behaviour of one objectionable ass like Toft. He clung doggedly to his own mistaken opinion, though, as he watched the games, he was troubled with some vague sense of being in the wrong. He found himself wondering how his father would behave if transported in some miraculous manner to Rockfield College. It was easy to imagine him bowling at a practice net, repeating with infinite patience the same ball over and over again, till the batsman had perfected his stroke; not greedy for fame, but intent only on rendering useful service. Somehow it did not seem likely that the fellows would have snubbed John Maple, or poked fun at him behind his back.

"Oh, do talk sense," wailed Newte.

Rousing himself from his reverie, Fred found that Farren was now suggesting mushroom culture as what he termed a "side line" to the proposed photographic enterprise.

"Why not?" persisted Farren. "Jolly good are mushrooms. You could get a frying pan, and cook 'em over a spirit stove. Besides, they don't take any time to grow; bless you, they spring up in a night."

"Where would you plant them?" asked Platen.

"Oh, anywhere," was the vague reply.

"I'd like to see old Jason's face if he came out some fine morning when there was an important match on, and found the pitch all covered with mushrooms," chuckled Platen.

"Anyone but a born idiot," began Newte, "would know that mushrooms don't come up till the autumn. If you planted any they would not come up till about the end of August or the beginning of September, before we got back from the summer holidays. Then Locke would collar the lot, and probably make himself ill with them."

"You know nothing about it, my boy," returned Farren, whose own ignorance of the subject was complete. "I'm quite sure if you go about it the right way----"

He paused as, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of an approaching figure.

"Here's Hawkswood coming," he murmured.

The Vice-Principal was strolling round the field. On reaching the spot which the "Pawns" had chosen for a resting-place he came to a halt.

"Why are you boys loafing about here?" he began sharply. "How is that---hum---Platen---Newte---I see now. You fellows have all been excused from games?"

"Yes, sir," answered Newte readily.

The master's cold, expressionless eyes turned from one member to another of the "young men's guild," and finally rested on Fred.

"What's your name?"

"Maple, sir."

"Whose class are you in?"

"Mr. Wake's, sir."

Recalling what he had heard about the "Hawk," Fred was inclined to think that his informants had spoken the truth. There was something keen and penetrating in the master's gaze which made one feel that some misdemeanour or other was about to be remembered with unpleasant results.

"You're a new boy, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir; I came at the beginning of this term."

"If you are a new boy you could hardly have come last term or the term before," returned the other irritably. "Don't waste words when you answer a question."

The speaker stood for a moment regarding Fred with a sour look, then turned, and continued his stroll. The "Pawns" discreetly kept silent till he was out of earshot.

"He thought he was going to jump on us for loafing, and found he couldn't," chuckled Platen. "That's what riled him."

"I suppose it was a bit stupid of me to say what I did," murmured Fred.

"Oh, he always flies down your throat, whatever you say, if he's out of temper," grumbled Farren. "The only thing to do then is to stand at attention, and hold your tongue. Whatever you may feel like, for goodness' sake don't attempt to give him any back chat. That was the cause of the royal row there was between him and Scarf last term."

"What was that?" inquired Newte. "I think it must have happened while I was in the sick-room."

"Why," began Farren, "Hawkswood's gone for Scarf more than once, and this happened one morning after break, when he was taking the Upper Fifth. He said that something Scarf had written wasn't sense, and Scarf got ratty, and, like a fool, said he thought there was more sense in the answer he had given than there was in the question, which was the one the 'Hawk' had put on the blackboard. With that the band began to play. Scarf lost his wig completely; for five minutes those two shouted at each other, and made such a row that the fellows in the Middle Fifth classroom, across the corridor, wondered what on earth was up. In the end Hawkswood fired Scarf out of the room, and later on had him up before the Head on a charge of gross rudeness and insubordination. I don't know what Scarf got for it, but it was a pretty big dose, and the Head told him if he cheeked the 'Hawk' again he'd have to leave the school straight away instead of at the end of the term, when it was generally supposed he was going."

In the enjoyment of his newly-found friendship with the "Pawns" Fred Marple soon forgot his unpleasant encounter with Mr. Hawkswood, and also his misgivings with regard to cricket. It was close on tea-time before the "guild" broke up their meeting, and strolled indoors. Here Fred found a letter from his father which had come by the afternoon post.

John Maple wrote a curiously boyish hand, and there was something in his way of retailing home news which was most refreshing. Fred smiled, then, as he came to the fourth page, his face became more serious.

"Sir George," wrote Maple Senior, "is pleased to hear that you've settled down all right. He says he may have to go to Todbridge in his car before long, and if so he'll try to run on to Rockfield, to see for himself how you're getting on. Mother would like you to say in your next if you found those white flannel trouser too long."

Fred folded up the letter with a slight frown. It had served to remind him that the garments referred to in the last sentence had not yet been worn.

47  Our Library / Harold Avery - Schoolboy Pluck (1933) / 3: A Close Shave on: March 15, 2024, 12:01:04 pm
PLATEN'S mild curiosity regarding the loan of his glue would have deepened considerably could he have known what had happened during the last twelve hours.

On Tuesday evening, shortly before the bell rang for prep, he had been down in the basement trying to mend a book which had burst out of its cover. The scene of his labours was a large cement-floored room where the play-boxes were stored in wooden racks. He was using the lid of a box in the second tier as a work-table, and was too intent upon his work to notice that someone, after strolling round the room, had come to a halt close to where he stood.

"I say, I wish you'd lend me that stuff," said a voice. "I'd be much obliged if you would. It's just what I want."

Platen turned to find Scarf standing at his elbow.

"All right; I shall have finished in a minute. Don't forget to let me have it back."

"You shall have it back by breakfast-time to-morrow morning---solemn word of honour you shall," was the reply. "Thanks awfully."

From the eager tone in which Scarf spoke it might have been supposed he was in urgent need of the glue, but, having once obtained possession of the tube, he seemed to forget all about it. He made his way to the Upper Fifth classroom, and idled about, talking to one fellow and another till the bell rang for prep. But if he had lost all recollection of Platen's glue, there was something on his mind, for, more than once, as he sat at his seat in the Big School, his eyes wandered from his books, and his brows contracted with the frown of a person who is trying to solve some difficult problem.

"It's the only safe way," he said to himself, "and I've got to do it sometime."

An hour later, when he entered his cubicle in E dormitory, he stood thinking for a few moments before commencing to undress, then, on the chair by his bedside, he placed his watch, a pocket-knife, a small electric torch, and the tube of liquid glue.

"Better put 'em all together," he pondered, "then I shan't forget what I've got to take with me. Don't want to have to come back and make a second journey."

He pulled off his coat and waistcoat and hung them on some books screwed into the wooden partition, still silently taking counsel with himself, as with some confederate.

"What would be the best time?---should say about one o'clock. Every soul in the place ought to be asleep by then. You can always wake at a given time if you will yourself to do it. One o'clock---I'll wake at one o'clock."

He completed his undressing and scrambled into bed, then, finding he had no inclination for sleep, decided that it would be best to keep awake until the hour he had decided upon. Presently the prefect in charge of the dormitory retired to rest, and all became still.

For a time Scarf lay turning over in his mind exxactly what it was he meant to do, then he tried to beguile himself by taking each letter of the alphabet, and recalling every person he knew whose name began with that initial. He got as far as M, then---- He and Rusper were travelling in a railway train, though for some unknown reason they ought to have been in bed. Rusper said that if Mr. Hawkswood saw them sitting up at this late hour they would both be expelled from the College, and that the only way of escape was to go to bed in the two luggage racks, using them as hammocks. Scarf tried to scramble up into his, and the whole thing gave way under his weight. He woke with a start.

"Hullo---I've been dreaming," he thought.

He turned over on his side, reached out his hand for the electric torch, and flashed the light on the face of his watch. The hands indicated a quarter to twelve.

"Too soon," muttered Scarf, as he flung his head back on his pillow. "I won't take any risks. I must wait another hour."

He closed his eyes, and presently again lost consciousness.

"---that new kid knows everything, so what's the use of trying to keep it dark any longer," Rusper was saying. "You would tell him the whole story, though I kept trying to make you keep quiet."

Scarf roused himself with a great effort, and sat up, rubbing his eyes. He felt vexed at having dropped off a second time. Once more he reached for the torch, and looked at his watch. The time it gave him was a quarter to twelve.

"Confound it!" he whispered. "The beastly thing has stopped. I must have forgotten to wind it up."

A second discovery was made almost at the same moment. Though the blind of the big window at the farther end of the dormitory was always lowered at night, the room was no longer in darkness; the ceiling overhead and the outline of the cubicle partitions were dimly visible.

"My hat! it's getting light," thought Scarf. "I wish to goodness I'd wound that watch. What on earth's the time, I wonder?"

For some moments he sat thinking as if undecided whether to abandon his scheme or carry it through.

"I must do it," he pondered. "If I put it off now it'll only mean having to do it some other time."

He crept out of bed, and put on his coat over the jacket of his pyjamas, then drew on his socks. He took the torch in his left hand, slipped the knife and tube of glue into his pocket, then stood listening. Save for the heavy breathing of his neighbour in the next cubicle no sound broke the stillness.

"All asleep---must be," he thought.

Treading like a cat, he crept out into the alley way, and reached the door, the handle of which he turned with infinite care. Once out in the corridor, the windows of which were not provided with blinds, he realised at once that it was not far off sunrise.

"It's safe enough," he assured himself. "It's light for hours now before anyone's likely to be stirring."

In his stockinged feet he passed quickly and noiselessly along the passage. It was not until he had descended the second flight of the main staircase that he came to a halt. With its window-blinds still lowered, the big hall which lay before him was in semi-darkness, and away in a distant corner he imagined he had heard some slight sound. Not thinking what he was doing, he pressed the button of his torch, and instantly, from the direction in which he was facing, there came an answering flash!

Scarf gasped, and felt for a moment as if his legs were giving way beneath him; then he realised what had happened, and drew a deep breath of relief. The heavy outer door of the porch was closed, and about ten feet from it was a seond door, the upper half of which was glazed. It was in this darkened sheet of glass that he had seen what was merely the reflection of his own torch.

"What a fool I am!" he muttered.

There was no repetition of the noise he fancied he had heard, and, after listening for a few seconds, he continued his journey. At the end of a long corridor he reached a baize-covered door, beyond which lay ground seldom trodden by members of the school except when bidden to attend the Headmaster in his study, or to obey a similar invitation from Mr. Hawkswood who, as Vice-Principal, enjoyed the distinction of possessing a sanction of his own in this part of the building. There were fellows who, for their sins, had good reason to remember this door with its red baize and brass-headed nails, and Scarf's heart beat a trifle faster as he pushed it open. Five seconds later he had entered Mr. Hawkswood's study.

Avoiding a knee-hole writing-table, which stood in the centre of the floor, Scarf moved quickly to the window, and, pulling a cord, levelled the slats of the venetian blind. Though the place had been dark when he entered it, there was light enough now to render every object in the room clearly visible. The intruder turned, and cast a hasty glance round the study; as he did so his lower jaw dropped, and a blank look appeared on his face. Some unexpected discovery seemed to have wrecked the whole of his carefully prepared plan.

"It's gone!" he muttered.

For some moments he stood biting his lips, unwilling to own himself beaten, yet with an ever-increasing desire at the back of his mind to be safely back in bed. The very stillness of this dreaded chamber was a strain upon his nerves.

"What can he have done with it? The confounded thing must be here somewhere."

Rousing himself to action, Scarf commenced a frantic search. He drew out the drawers of the writing-table and examined their contents, opened a cupboard below the bookcases, and even removed volumes here and there from the shelves above, in the hope that something might lie hidden in the space behind them. On a side table stood a cabinet of shallow drawers, but he knew that these contained butterflies and moths captured in the green gauze net which stood leaning against the wall close by. The collection indicated what was Mr. Hawkswood's great hobby.

"It must be here somewhere," Scarf kept repeating below his breath.

From a triangular wooden shelf in one corner of the room a curtain was suspended; the boy drew it aside, only to find two black gowns and a college cap suspended from hooks, and evidently hung in this recess for protection from dust. With a grunt Scarf swung round, then, going down on his hands and knees, peered under a smal sofa, though finding nothing beyond an empty cardboard box.

He had risen to his knees, when suddenly, from away in the distance, came the sound of a short, dry cough. Scarf started as if a gun had been fired close to his ear. He sprang to his feet, and took one step towards the door, then realised that escape in that direction was impossible. He guessed instinctively what dreadful thing was going to happen, and the knowledge seemed to stimulate him to a display of unusual quickness of thought and action. He leapt back to the window, where, with a jerk of the cord, he readjusted the slats of the blind, then he dived behind the curtain in the corner.

The movement was made not a second too soon, for the next instant the door was pushed open, and someone entered the study. The newcomer was humming to himself in a low toneless growl, and the warning given by the cough was confirmed. Scarf knew that the interrupter of his search was Mr. Hawkswood himself.

"Heigh-ho-hum!"

With the shuffling tread of feet clad in loose bedroom slippers the master advanced up the room; he raised the blind, then opened the window, and stood as if enjoying the fresh morning air. Scarf drew in his lips to keep his teeth from chattering. He was cold, but his shivering fit was caused more by fright than the scanty nature of his attire. This was horrible; worse than anything he could have imagined.

Mr. Hawkswood turned from the window, and moved over to the fireplace, where he struck a match and lit a gas ring which was on the hearth. There was a small tear in the curtain, and through this peephole Scarf could watch the movement of the tall, gaunt figure which somehow looked more forbidding than usual, clad in an unfamiliar blue dressing-gown.

"What the dickens is he going to do?" thought Scarf.

The question was soon answered. Suffering as he often did from sleeplessness, Mr. Hawkswood had come down to his study to make himself a cup of tea. He put a small kettle on to boil, and, producing a cup and tiny teapot from his cupboard, placed them on his writing-table. Seating himself in an easy-chair, he picked up a paper, and began to read.

"Goodness knows how long he'll stop," thought the agonised Scarf. "He may hang about here till the bell rings."

Ages seemed to pass before the kettle commenced to sing. To Scarf it was like a nightmare; it seemed that before long some brain wave must surely inform the master that he was not alone. Was it possible that he knew already, and was acting in this way merely to prolong his victim's sufferings? But no, the "Hawk" was too great a man to stoop to conduct of that kind. It was clear that, as yet, his suspicions had not been aroused.

At last, after what seemed hours of suspense, the kettle boiled, and Mr. Hawkswood brewed his tea. He moved into the chair at his writing-table, and sat slowly stirring the contents of his cup. Some horrid fascination kept Scarf at the peephole, and once, as the master raised his head, it seemed as if their eyes met. What tended to make Mr. Hawkswood's gaze intensely disconcerting was that, at times, his face seemed to lack all expression. At that moment it was impossible to tell, from his stony glare, whether he had seen anything or not.

Apparently he still imagined himself alone. He began to sip his tea, and, in an absent-minded way, to glance at some papers that lay on his table. It seemed as if he would never empty that cup, but at last he replaced it in the saucer, and leant back in his chair in an attitude of gloomy meditation.

"I can't stand this much longer," thought Scarf. "I believe I shall scream."

The next instant he became rigid. Mr. Hawkswood's cold grey eyes were fixed on the curtain. Slowly, but without any change in the direction of that glassy stare, he rose from his chair, and came step by step towards the recess. The effect of this measured advnce on Scarf's already overwrought nerves was to reduce him to the verge of a collapse. He was sure that something must have betrayed his presence, and he almost gave vent to his feelings with a yell. Then, just as he was about to step from his hiding-place and give himself up, Mr. Hawkswood stopped, with what sounded like a grunt of disappointment, and turned his face in the direction of the window. It was not difficult to understand now what had happened. Some moth or butterfly must have flown in and settled on the curtain, then taken wing and returned to the open air.

Scarf leant back against the wall holding his breath; he heard the window shut, and when next he looked through his peephole Mr. Hawkswood was taking a volume out of his bookcase. He glanced at a few pages, then walked to the door, and passed out into the corridor, evidently on the way back to his bedroom.

For nearly a minute Scarf remained in his hiding-place, not daring to move, and scarcly able to believe that he had escaped detection. He listened, fearing lest the master should return; then, as no fresh sound broke the silence, he stepped from behind the curtain, and stood breathing heavily as if he had just run a race.

"Great Scot!" he whispered; "what a shave!"

The sun had risen, and he had no idea of the time. It seemed to him as if, every moment, he would hear the getting-up bell begin to ring, and that it would be impossible for him to regain his dormitory without encountering old Locke, or some other of the school servants who must surely be astir by now. But the state of his nerves made him feel reckless and desperate, almost indifferent as to whether he were caught or not. He hurried out of the study, on through the baize-covered door, along the corridor beyond, and up the stairs. No one was to be seen, and he gained the shelter of his cubicle without mishap.

"All for nothing," he shivered, as he slipped into bed. "I wouldn't go through the same thing again for ten pounds."

48  Our Library / Harold Avery - Schoolboy Pluck (1933) / 2: Finding a Friend on: March 15, 2024, 07:52:46 am
SEVERAL boys were giving up their tickets when Fred reached the booking office. Among them was Toft. The latter turned away his head when he saw who was approacing and speedily disappeared. His father, who was a Bank manager at Chedbury, was of an altogether different type, and would often stop for a friendly chat when he chanced to meet old John Maple.

"I don't care," thought Fred. "If he thinks I'm going to make up to him, he'll find he's mistaken."

It was an absurd display of petty snobbery, but it rankled in the newcomer's mind, and was largely responsible for his adopting a line of conduct which he would have cause to regret. Fred had no difficulty in finding his way to the College, owing to the number of blue and yellow hat-bands which were travelling the same road. On entering the gates, and viewing for the first time the imposing pile of buildings, he heaitated for a moment, then came to a stand. He felt rather like a person who, unable to swim, finds himself carried suddenly out of his depth.

"Wonder where I ought to go?" he murmured.

Instead of following the stream which was making for the boys' entrace he was wise enough to make his way to the great front door. His ring was answered by a sedate and elderly man whom the newcomer mistook for a master, but later found was merely Locke, the hall porter. The latter conducted him to a reception room in which three boys, who had seemingly arrived by the same train, were standing with an appearance not unlike that of strayed sheep who had been driven into a pound to await reclamation by their rightful owners.

After a period of awkward silence the little gathering commenced a low-voiced conversation, and Fred was relieved to find that his companions were newcomers like himself, their names Blake, Henderson and Mears. What followed proved plainer sailing, the new boys giving one another mutual support. Together they went through the ordeal of a first interview with Mr. Densham, the headmaster, and were subsequently taken charge of by Mrs. Kings, the matron. From Mrs. Kings they received a great deal of useful information, including the numbers of their dormitories and cloakroom lockers, and by her they were supplied with the school "straws" and flannel caps.

The matron was giving them some words of kindly encouragement and advice when a big bell began to ring, whereupon she hailed a passing small boy, and requested him to conduct the strnagers to the dining-hall for tea. A few minutes later they found themselves seated at the end of a table, the upper portion of which was occupied by a number of hilarious small boys, who were too intent in their brisk exchange of jokes and holiday gossip to pay any attention to the newcomers. Fred felt too nervous to take much notice of his surroundings; he was vaguely conscious of what seemed a vast array of tables, and row after row of boys. It seemed to him likely to prove as difficult a task to learn and remember their names as it would be to find his way about the maze of corridors and staircases in this huge building.

When the meal came to an end the four new boys lingered behind the crowd surging out of the dining-hall, and were presently accosted by Chase, one of the prefects.

"Don't know what to do with yourselves, I suppose?" said the big fellow, with a friendly smile.

"N---no, not exactly," stammered Henderson.

"Well, there's no prep to-night, so you can take a stroll outside, in the quad or the playing-field. When you hear the bell ring you'll have to come into Big School for prayers. There's supper down here---bread-and-butter and cocoa, though it's optional if you come for it. At nine o'clock you'll toddle off to bed."

The new boys murmured their thanks. They left the dining-hall, and, after drifting along the corridor, presently found their way down into the basement, and, through a cloakroom, out into the quad.

Fred expected to be pounced upon, and forced to answer numerous questions as to his name and origin; it rather surprised him that no such curiosity was displayed. Only once was any member of the party spoken to.

"I say, your name's Blake, isn't it?" inquired a perky-looking small boy, pausing for an instant as he hurried past. "Are you any relation of the J. T. Blake who was here, and left last term?"

The newly arrived Blake shook his head.

"Sorry---thought perhaps you were," chirped the youngster, and sped gaily on his way.

Fred's spirits rose when presently his eyes went roving over the wide expanse of the playing-field as it lay bathed in evening sunshine. As he learnt later, it was divided into what were known as the Junior and Senior grounds. The handsome pavilion, with its flagstaff and white palings, stood away on some rising ground, not far from the road.

"Why," he thought, "you could have half a dozen games going on at the same time here, and still have room for a row of practice nets."

A cheery-faced boy, whose straw hat looked rather as if it had recently been mixed up in a railway accident, strolled by at this moment. He was fooling about with an old tennis ball; then, seeming to tire of this solitary amusement, he turned and took a good-natured pot-shot at the group a few yards distant. No warning had been given, but, with a quick movement of the left hand, Fred caught the ball, and returned it to its owner.

"Well held!" exclaimed the latter. "Good man!"

He strolled forward, pocketing his ball.

"You are all new-laid eggs, aren't you?" he began. "Thought you were---saw you at tea. My name's Conway."

The new boys introduced themselves, and found Conway quite willing to answer questions. He pointed out various objects of interest, among them the position of the sacred patch of turf reserved for the First Eleven match wickets.

"There, d'you see that chap walking past the pavilion?" he inquired, pointing to a figure moving in the distance. "That's Jason, the captain of cricket. Ripping good bat. Everyone thinks that, in time, he'll play for the county."

The ice having been thus far broken, something prompted Fred to ask a question.

"Who is the 'Hawk'?" he inquired.

Conway stared for a moment, as if surprised at such a question from a new arrival in the school.

"You'd better not let him hear you say that, my boy," he returned, with a laugh. "Or you'll wish you hadn't left your happy home."

"Yes, but who is he?" persisted Fred.

"Oh, he's a terror. He'll let you know it, too, if ever you give him the chance."

A voice calling "Con-way!" came from afar, and, without waiting to offer any further explanation, the owner of the battered straw turned and ran off in answer to the hail.

"How did you know there was anyone here called 'Hawk'?" asked Henderson.

"I heard someone talking about him, coming along in the train," answered Fred. "I suppose it's a nickname. Anyway, he doesn't seem to be very dearly beloved by anyone, so far as I can make out."

+++

Fred got through his first few days at Rockfield College better than might have been expected. He was wise enough to be guided by the old adage: "When at Rome to as Rome does"; he watched the manners and customs of the school, and quickly fell into step with his companions. He was placed in the Lower Fifth, where he took an immediate liking to his form-master, Mr. Wake. Thanks to the good grounding he had received at the Grammar School, he did not find it at all difficult to keep abreast of his companions in work.

But he made one mistake. He could not rid his mind of the idea that there was little chance of his being regarded as an equal by his schoolfellows. He failed to realise that no new boy is received with open arms, and that his own shyness and reserve were largely responsible for the fact that no one took much notice of him. Cecil Toft was in the Lower Fifth, and it was easy to imagine him saying all manner of spiteful things about his fellow-townsman behind the latter's back. As a matter of fact, Toft had not so much as mentioned Maple's name.

"I'm not going to ask for snubs from anyone," thought Fred. "So long as I'm left alone they'll find me quite content to keep to myself."

With this resolve, out of school hours, he wandered about, spending a good bit of time in the reading-room. Some vague and ridiculous fear that, if he were seen handling a bat or ball, the act would bring down upon him some scornful allusions to his father's calling, caused him to avoid turning up at the practice nets on the playing-field.

Before long, however, he was dragged out of his "lonely furrow," and in a manner which, in view of subsequent events, deserves to be described.

Members of the Sixth Form owned studies, while those who had not reached the exalted rankk of Sixth, spent their slack time, when not out of doors, in their respectiv classrooms. It was Wednesday, between half-past twelve and one o'clock, and, after dismissal, the bulk of the school had trooped out into the fresh air and sunshine. Fred had lost touch with the other new boys, who had all been placed in lower forms. He mooned about the quad, wandered in and out of the reading-room, then decided he would fill up his time by writing a letter home.

He was rather glad to find the Lower Fifth classroom unoccupied; he crossed the floor to get his writing-case, and was in the act of opening his locker when he started, and turned his head. The silence had been broken by what sounded like a deep sigh.

"What was that?" he thought.

Nothing was to be seen but rows of empty desks; at the far end of the room the floor was raised a few inches, and on this shallow platform stood the blackboard and the master's desk. For some seconds all was still; then, to Fred's amazement, a leg rose slowly into view above the level of Mr. Wake's writing table. It waved aimlessly in the air, bent and straightened itself, then dropped out of sight. As it did so a hand clutched the top of the chair, which rocked so violently that its legs clattered on the bare boards of the dais. The spasm ceased, and was followed by another heavy sigh.

Fred gasped, and stood for a moment uncertain how to act. Should he go for assistance, or try what he could do himself? Someone, whose body was hidden behind the writing-table, was apparently lying across the seat of the master's chair, writhing about in some state ofphysical anguish. The wild thought which flashed into the new boy's mind was that the sufferer had fallen in a fit.

Fred's indecision lasted only for a moment, he shut his locker, and hurried up the room.

"I say," he ejaculated, "what's the matter? Are you ill?"

There was an inarticulate whoop from behind the table; over went the chair, something heavy came into violent collision with the legs of the easel, and down it came, blackboard and all, with an appalling crash. Slowly, from amidst the wreckage, rose the figure of a boy, who, as he regained his feet, stood moaning, with both hands clasped to the back of his head.

"Are you hurt?" gasped Fred, who recognised the cause of this disaster as a class-mate named Platen.

"N---no, not much---only banged my nut and bumped my funny bone. Oh, gracious!---and just look at what I've done!"

The last remark was wrung from the speaker as he caught sight of the blackboard, which, after a narrow miss of smashing Mr. Wake's inkstand, had bounded off the platform and come to rest against the front row of desks. Feeling that something had better be done without delay, Fred sprang forward; he propped up the overturned chair and easel, then hoisted the blackboard back into its usual place.

"Thanks," murmured Platen, grateful for the service rendered. "If Wake had come in and seen it, he'd have kicked up a fearful row."

"Are you ill?" inquired Fred anxiously. "I heard someone groaning and rolling about on that chair. At first I couldn't think----"

"Oh no," interrupted Platen, a wan smile appearing on his face; "I'm all right, or shall be in a minute. I was just doing a trick."

"A what?"

"A trick; I've seen it done, and wanted to try it myself."

"Glad it's nothing worse; I thought you were in a fit." Fred spoke in a tone of profound relief, then burst out laughing. There was certainly nothing of the snob about Platen. He was rather an odd-looking boy, thin, a bit round-shouldered, and with a wisp of unruly black hair always sticking up the back of his crown.

"It's just a dodge in keeping your balance," he began. "You stick a pin in the edge of the seat of a chair, just in front of one of the hind legs; then you have to sit sideways and work yourself round the back till you're able to take the pin out with your teeth. See what I mean? I'd done it all except screwing myself back again when the whole caboodle went over. If I hadn't----"

The speaker broke off short, the animated look on his face changing to one of blank dismay.

"Oh, my blessed aunt!" he groaned.

"What's the matter now?"

"I've swallowed the pin," said Platen in a hollow tone. "I must have gulped it down without thinking when I fell over. I had one end between my teeth----"

"Wait a sec," interrupted Fred.

He jumped on to the platform, searched about for a few moments, then stooped and picked something off the floor.

"Here it is," he cried. "You needn't worry."

"Oh, good man!" exclaimed Platen. "I began to think my number was up. It's beastly dangerous to swallow a pin. I say, are you really called Mabel, or is it just a nickname?"

"Maple---M A P L E," corrected Fred.

"Haw, haw!" laughed Platen. "I suppose it was because Wake had a cold in his head; couldn't for the life of me imaging why he kept calling your Mabel in class."

"Talking about nicknames," began Fred, seizing the opportunity to satisfy his curiosity, "who is it the fellows here call the 'Hawk'?"

"Why, Mr. Hawkswood, the Vice-Principal."

Fred had never spoken to the master named, and only knew him by sight from having seen him in assembly, and on the occasions when he had read morning or evening prayers in place of the Head. He was middle-aged, tall, and austere-looking. Had an artist wished to paint a picture of the king who "never smiled again" he might have chosen Mr. Hawkswood as a model.

"Rather hot stuff, isn't he?" inquired Fred. "I heard someone call him a brute, and another say he was a terror."

"They get a taste of him sometimes in the Upper Fifth," began Platen, with a chuckle. "I'm jolly glad we never do. I think he's got some idea that the discipline in schools isn't strict enough nowadays, and he'd like to lay it on thick. If you want to know what Hawkswood's like, go up and speak to him, and stand with your hands in your pockets."

"Would he punish you for a little thing like that?"

"He might not punish you, but he'd scorch you up, my boy---pour boiling lead all over you. Fellows say he takes drugs because he can't sleep, but that's all bunkum, though I know he suffers a good bit from insomnia. I will say this for him: he serves everyone alike; he'll go for a big chap the same as he would for some kid in the bottom form. All the same, I hope he'll have left before I get into the Lower Sixth, which is his happy hunting-ground."

Fred nodded; he was beginning to feel quite at his ease with Platen.

"By the way," began the latter, "you seem to keep to yourself pretty much. I saw you mooching about the field yesterday afternoon, all on your lonesome. Don't you play cricket?"

"Oh---er---just a bit," murmured Fred.

"About like me, I suppose," continued the other gaily. "Last time I played in a game I slogged my own bails nearly out of the field. Look here, you're a decent sort; you'd better become a 'Pawn.'"

"What's that?"

"It's a young men's guild, and I'm the boss," returned Platen. "It would suit you down to the ground. You'd better join."

"How can I?" inquired Fred, with a grin.

"I'll call a special meeting of the guild, and you shall be initiated this afternoon."

The classroom door was half open, and someone, passing along the corridor, seemingly heard and recognised Platen's voice. A moment later Scarf strolled into the room. There was a slght frown on his face, which seemed to deepen a little as he caught sight of Fred.

"Here's that stuff you lent me," he said, addressing Platen. "Couldn't find you after breakfast or I'd have given it back sooner. Thanks for the use."

He tossed a small tube of liquid glue to its owner, then turned abruptly on his heel, and walked out of the room.

"Wonder what he wanted it for?" muttered Platen in a casual tone as he ambled across the floor to put the tube away in his locker. "Doesn't look as if he'd used any of the stuff after all, and last night he said he wanted it badly."

49  Our Library / Harold Avery - Schoolboy Pluck (1933) / 1: Told in the Train on: March 14, 2024, 08:16:53 am
WITH an effort to "keep smiling," Fred Maple sprang into an empty third-class compartment, and threw his hand-bag down in one of the corner seats. He closed the door, then leant out through the open window to talk to his father who had come to see him off.

"I don't suppose you'll have much time for writing letters," said the latter, "but you might drop a line on a post card, as soon as you can, just to let us know how you're getting on."

The speaker was a homely-looking man, whose hair and moustache were tinged with grey. His tanned face betokened a life spent largely in the open, though it would have been difficult to hazard a guess as to his calling. He was of medium height, broad-shouldered, and wiry. The son resembled him in build, and, though rather short for a lad of fifteen, was well developed in chest and muscle. The colour and expression of their eyes increased the likeness between the pair.

"I'd like to be coming with you," said John Maple, with a smile. "But I'm getting to the wrong end of life for anything of that sort now. Beside, as you know, it would be all strange ground to me, so I shouldn't be able to give you any help."

"You needn't worry about me, Dad," murmured the boy.

"No; I know you'll do your best."

"I'll keep my end up," said Fred.

It cost him an effort to smile as he spoke the words, for he was troubled with doubts and misgivings which he had been striving all along to keep to himself. He was off to begin his first term as a new boy at Rockfield College, and he scarcely knew whether to feel glad or sorry. A moment later an incident occurred which was not calculated to ease his feelings.

"There's room in here, sir," came the voice of a porter.

"Thanks; I'd rather be nearer the front of the train," was the reply, spoken in an affected drawl. "Let's see what we can find further on."

Attended by the porter, the speaker passed along the platform. He was a light-haired, dandified-looking boy, whose straw hat was encircled with the blue and yellow band of Rockfield College. Fred Maple guessed instinctively that Cecil Toft had recognised him, and preferred not to travel in the same carriage. If this was a specimen of the treatment he was to expect from his schoolfellows it did not seem to promise him a very rosy time.

"Well, good-bye, my lad," said John Maple.

As he grasped his son's hand a serious, almost wistful, look appeared on his bronzed face.

"Fred, you'll do your best, I'm sure of that," he said in a low, earnest tone. "It's not only me and your mother you have to think of, but there's Sir George. If you were to faile---well, it would be letting us all down. But you won't do that, I'm certain."

"I'll try my best, Dad. I won't disappoint you, or Sir George either, if I can help it. You can bank on that. Good-bye."

It was not until the platform was out of sight that the boy drew in his head from the window, and settled down in his corner seat. It was a glorious afternoon, more like the height of summer than early May, but Fred found it difficult to bring himself to a frame of mind in harmony with the bright sunshine.

"Just like that young Toft," he muttered, as his thoughts drifted back to what had happened a few minutes earlier. "I suppose, when I meet him at the school, he'll pretend he doesn't know me."

He realised that if he allowed himself to fall a prey to these gloomy forebodings he would be in a state of hopeless deression by the time he reached Rockfield. To find a pleasanter occupation for his thoughts he opened the magazine he had brought with him, and was soon engrossed in a story. The train, being a fast one, did not stop at every station; nearly half an hour went by befor it began to slow down, and presently came to a halt.

"Kelbrook Junction," muttered Fred as he read the name on the nearest lamp. "Hullo----"

The ejaculation, uttered below his breath, was caused by the sight of a boy, older than himself, and wearing the Rockfield colours. He sauntered up to the compartment, and was in the act of opening the door when he was joined by a fellow with a similar hat-band, and both stepped into the train. They glanced at their solitary fellow-traveller, whose black bowler did not afford any clue as to his destination. Evidently it never occurred to them that he might be bound for the College. They planked themselves down in the two corner seats at the opposite end of the carriage, and took no further notice of Fred.

"Well, Scarf, old chap," began one of the newcomers, with a laugh. "I didn't expect to see you again. This is a pleasant surprise."

"It may be to you, Rusper, my boy," was the reply, "but I'm hanged if it is to me. Pleased to see you, of course; but it's a beastly wash-out, that's what I call it."

Fred glanced at the pair out of the corner of his eye, keenly interested in seeing two members of Rockfield College. For some vague reason, which he could not well have explained, he was disappointed. He was not favourably impressed with either of them. Scarf was a sharp-featured, rather morose-looking individual, from whom no one would have readily expected a kind word or a good turn. His companion, though neatly dressed, had the beefy face and flabby appearance of a lout not likely to win distinction either in work or games.

"I thought you'd left," said Rusper.

"So did I," answered Scarf. "I've no wish to see the rotten place again. It was the guv'nor's fault, though I suppose he couldn't help it."

"You see," the speaker continued after a pause, "he'd made all his arrangements to to back to the Cape at the end of this month, and to take me with him. Then something happened that forced him to alter his plans. An important piece of business has cropped up which he's bound to see through, and we can't leave England before September. Rather than have me kicking my heels doing nothing, he told me I must go back for another term at the College."

"Hard luck," said Rusper. "Still, you'll have to make the best of it. After all, thirteen weeks isn't much, and the summer term is the best of the year."

"Oh, the summer term isn't bad, but the question is---how much of it am I likely to see?"

Rusper, who had been glancing out of the window, turned his head quickly as if something in the last remark, and the tone in which it was uttered, had roused his interest.

"D'you mean to say you're thinking of doing a bolt from the place?" he inquired, with a laugh. "Slide down a rope made out of your bedclothes, and all that sort of thing."

"No fear," growled Scarf; "but I may be hoofed out, my boy. That's a thing which I'm inclined to think may happen."

"Get away!" muttered Rusper, with a mystified expression on his heavy face. "Why should they kick you out?"

Though he did not raised his eyes from the page of the magazine he was reading, Fred Maple was conscious that the other occupants of the carriage cast a glance in his direction. He was too interested in the conversation to wonder whether it was right for him to listen to it or not, and in any case nothing short of putting his fingers in his ears could well have prevented him from hearing what was said.

"Perhaps I'd better tell you just how the land lies," began Scarf, as if finding it a relief to unburden his mind to someone he could trust. "Now, supposing you'd been living with a man you hated like poison, and, before you said good-bye to him, you arranged one of these time-bombs that'll go on working for weeks, or months, before they explode, the idea being to blow this chap up. Well, it would be jolly unpleasant if you found you had to come back again, and live in the same house yourself."

"All you'd have to do would be to get the blessed bomb and chuck it away,"

"Yes, but suppose you found you couldn't,"

"You'd stand a good chance of getting blown up yourself, eh?"

"Of course you would, and that's about how I'm situated."

For a moment Rusper stared at his companion as if inclined to think that the latter must be joking.

"What rot you're talking," he began. "D'you mean to say you've left a box of high explosives under the Big School, with some clockwork arrangement to set it off?"

"Bless you, no; of course not," replied Scarf impatiently. "I just said that to describe what I feel like in going back to Rockfield. You know how the 'Hawk' has been down on me. He's always had a grudge against me, and I thought I'd like to do something towards squaring the account. I never dreamt I was coming back; so, at the end of last term, I left something behind me which I thought would give him a pleasant little surprise."

Rusper's grin of mild amusement disappeared, and his face became serious.

"Will he have found it by now?" he asked quickly.

"No, I don't suppose he has; but you can't be sure."

There was a short silence, broken at length by Rusper.

"What on earth have you been doing?" he inquired.

The pair leant forward in their seats, and, for a time, the talk was continued in too low a tone for Fred to catch what was being said. Once they both laughed, though in rather a mirthless manner. To judge by their faces neither of them felt in a mood for jesting. Presently their backs straightened, and they leant back in their respective corners.

"You ought to be able to stop it," said Rusper.

"That remains to be seen."

"Well, you'll be safe enough for a few weeks, and that ought to give you plenty of time to do something."

"Of course," agreed Scarf. "But, as I said before, you can't be certain---something may have happened to give the show away. It wouldn't be a great surprise to me to find the 'Hawk' lying in wait for me as soon as we reach the College, or to get a message to say the Head wishes to see me in his study."

"Oh, I don't suppose there's much danger of that," growled Rusper. "All the same, I must say I think you were a fool to do such a mad thing. I remember telling you, a long time ago, that you'd far better not try to get any change back out of the 'Hawk'. He's a brute. If once you get up against him, well---you may depend you're in for a bad time. You've found that out already."

Scarf nodded as if he realised the truth of this statement, then he opened a newspaper, and tossed another across to his friend. For a time Fred Maple sat idly wondering who was meant by the "Hawk"; whether he himself would soon be living in dread of this formidable person; and what it was Scarf could have done which seemed to threaten some disaster. By degrees he lost interest in this last question, as his thoughts turned to his own hopes and fears.

"I wonder if the fellows will treat me decently, or all be the same as Toft?" he pondered.

The reason for these anxious doubts can be explained in a few words. Fred's home was a couple of miles outside the little country town of Chedbury, on the estate owned by Sir George Loscoe. The baronet had always been an ardent lover of cricket, and had a private ground laid down in his park. He had a cricket week in the summer, when a number of well-known players would be entertained at the Hall as his guests. In addition to this he had organised a club, the members of which were chiefly his own servants and employees, and in which he took the keenest interest. John Maple was an old professional who had been engaged as groundsman and coach, while in winter he turned his hand to odd jobs of carpentry or painting. Sir George had always taken a kindly interest in the son, and had paid his fees as a day scholar at the local Grammar School. Fred had done so well there that his benefactor had decided that the boy should finish his education at Rockfield College, and had undertaken to defray all expenses. Deeply grateful as he felt towards his employer it was but natural that John Maple should have urged the lad to "do his best". It would be little short of a calamity if the latter's career at Rockfield proved a disappointment to Sir George Loscoe.

Fred himself had heard the news with mingled feelings of pride and misgiving. He would have been content to remain at the Grammar School, where he had several friends more of his own station in life than the boys he was destined to associate with at Rockfield, who mostly belonged to what might be termed the professional class. He was more sensitive than might have been imagined, and, though he believed he would find no difficulty in keeping abreast of his new form-mates in their school work, he fancied that, when his comparatively humble origin became known, he would be cold-shouldered and snubbbed.

What further conversation passed between Scarf and Rusper was of no particular interest, and at length the distant view of a square abbey tower, of which he had seen a picture, told Fred that his journey had come to an end. For a moment, as he tried to brace himself for the ordeal which now lay before him, his heart sank, and he wished himself back at Chedbury, then he set his teeth, determined to keep his promise, and play the man.

As he stepped out of the train, to his excited fancy the platform seemed to be swarming with wearers of blue and yellow bands, all seeming in the highest spirits as they formed in groups to laugh and chat, or rushed about greeting old friends. Fred lingered in the outskirts of the crowd which gathered round the guard's van, and was about the last to claim his modest luggage.

"How shall I get these things taken up to the College?" he asked a porter.

"I'll see 'em put in the lorry that takes all the young gen'elmen's traps," was the reply. "'Tain't more'n half a mile, so I suppose you'll walk, same as they all do."

Scarf, who had come back in search of a missing bag, heard both the question and reply. For a momenr he stared at Fred, then, having found and claimed his bag, he walked off and overtook Rusper.

"I say," he began, "you remember that fellow who was in the carriage with us? I just heard him asking a porter how he should get his things up to the College; he must be a new boy."

"Well, what of that?" returned Rusper.

"What of it---why, d'you think he overheard what I was telling you in the train?"

"Oh no; I don't suppose he did; he was right the other side of the carriage."

"Hope to goodness he didn't," growled Scarf. "I never thought the young blighter was coming to Rockfield, or I'd have kept my mouth shut."

50  Our Library / Harold Avery - Schoolboy Pluck (1933) / Title Matter on: March 14, 2024, 08:04:47 am
Charles Harold Avery was born in 1867 in Headless Cross, near Redditch, and educated at Eton College. His novel "Schoolboy Pluck" came out in 1933 (but the British Library says "creation date 1921"). It has twenty-four chapters:

1)    Told in the Train
2)    Finding a Friend
3)    A Close Shave
4)    The "Pawns"
5)    "Hot Stuff"
6)    A Surprise for Jason
7)    Fame
8)    The Time-Bomb
9)    Rusper's Little Ruse
10)  Second Eleven v. Bromhurst
11)  Barbed Wire
12)  A Scrap of Paper
13)  Afternoon Tea
14)  In the Tunnel
15)  Birds of a Feather
16)  Bad Blood
17)  Found!
18)  The Cat's-Paw
19)  The Okechester Match
20)  In the Soup
21)  The "Pawns" make a Move
22)  The Early Worm
23)  Great News
24)  The Last Lap

Here is a tentative list of the works Avery gave us:

    The Orderly Officer, 1894
    The School's Honour, 1894
    Frank's First Term, 1896
    The Triple Alliance, 1897
    Dormitory Flag, 1899
    Mobsley's Mohicans, 1900
    Heads or Tails, 1901
    With Wellington to Waterloo, 1901
    All Play and No Work, 1901
    Soldiers of the Queen, 1901
    Highway Pirates, or the Secret Place at Coverthorne, 1904
    Under Padlock and Seal, 1905
    Play the Game, 1906
    True to his Nickname, 1906
    A Toast Fag and Other Stories, 1907
    Manor Pool Island, circa 1907
    The Wizard's Wand, 1908
    Off the wicket, 1910
    A Week at the Sea, 1910
    Not Cricket!, 1912
    The Magic Beads, circa 1913
    The Prefects' Patrol, circa 1922
    Between Two Schools, 1923
    Thumbs Up, 1925
    Won for the School, 1927
    Schoolboy Pluck, 1933
    The Cock House Cup, 1933
    No Surrender!: The Story of Captain Scott's Journey to the South Pole, 1933
    A Close Finish and Other Stories, 1934
    Chums at Charlhurst, 1936
51  Our Library / Cyril Hare - Suicide Excepted (1939) / 21: Mallett Sums Up on: March 13, 2024, 08:07:14 am
Monday, September 4th

MALLETT was about to begin his report on the Dickinson case when the house-telephone rang.

“There’s a Mr. Dedman wants to see you,” he was told. “He says it is urgent.”

The inspector sighed. The file labelled “Re Dickinson,” now bulging with papers, yawned balefully at him. He was anxious to be rid of it once for all, and he grudged any interruption.

“Ask him if he’ll kindly come back tomorrow,” he said. “I’m very busy just now.”

There was a pause and then the voice said: “The gentleman says he must see you this morning, sir. Tomorrow will be too late. He is most insistent.” Then, in an undertone, “He seems perfectly genuine, sir.”

“Very well,” said Mallett, in a resigned tone. “Tell him to come up.”

A moment or two later Mr. Dedman bounced, rather than walked, into the room. He wasted no time in greetings but came straight to the point.

“I’m a busy man, Inspector,” he said, “and so, I have no doubt, are you. I shouldn’t be here if it wasn’t vitally necessary in my clients’ interests. My firm are the solicitors to the estate of the late Mr. Leonard Dickinson. The deceased had insured his life for the sum of----”

“Oh, Mr. Dedman, but I know all about that,” Mallett murmured.

“You do? Good! Then I needn’t waste any time explaining. The point is, that today is the last day of which I can secure any payment from the Company on the basis of suicide. I understand that you have been investigating this case. All I want from you is a clear indication---murder or suicide---which?”

“Oh,” said Mallett quietly. “Murder, undoubtedly.”

“Excellent! I’m much obliged to you. You shall hear from us if litigation proves necessary.” And Mr. Dedman shot out of his chair and made for the door.

“Good Heavens!” said the inspector in astonishment. “Do you really mean to tell me that you don’t want to hear any more? Aren’t you interested to know who murdered your client?”

“Naturally I am, but that can wait. I’m a solicitor, not a policeman. Besides, they told me downstairs that you were extremely busy.”

“I assure you, they told you the truth. All the same, in your own interests, I should advise you to make yourself acquainted with all the facts of the case before you go to see the Insurance Company. There is a little point of law which you might like to consider first.”

“A point of law?” echoed Mr. Dedman, sitting down again.

“Precisely. Do you mind telling me, how did the late Mr. Leonard Dickinson dispose of his estate?”

“One half to his widow for life, with remainder to the children in equal shares, the other half divided between the children absolutely.”

“And of that estate the insurance moneys form a part?”

“Of course---by far the larger part.”

“Is there not a rule of law, Mr. Dedman, that a murderer is not allowed to profit by the will of his victim?”

Mr. Dedman stared at the inspector silent and open-mouthed. His brisk and business-like manner seemed suddenly deflated.

“Inspector,” he said at last, “who murdered my client?”

“His son, Stephen.”

“Good God!” said Mr. Dedman, and mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. “Good God!” he repeated. “But---but---Are you serious about this, Inspector?”

“Perfectly serious.”

“But I tell you, this doesn’t make sense! Stephen! Why it was he who was so insistent all along that----”

“That his father had been murdered? Exactly. It is the only case in my experience where a murderer found himself in the position of having to prove that the crime had been committed, in order to attain the result for which he had committed it.”

Mr. Dedman looked at his watch, replaced it in his pocket, and then crossed his legs and settled back in his chair.

“Please tell me all about it,” he requested, in tones that were for him positively humble.

Mallett was only too glad to comply. If he had a weakness, it was that he loved an audience. The circumstances of the present case had compelled him to work entirely alone, and he was pleased with the opportunity. Preparing a written report was always irksome to him, but he thoroughly enjoyed an exposition by word of mouth.

“Stephen Dickinson,” he began, “was an inveterate gambler on the Stock Exchange. He was at all material times, as you lawyers say, hopelessly in debt. He was thoroughly unprincipled, like many gamblers, except, oddly enough, where sex was concerned. I haven’t been able to trace that he ever had anything to do with women. In that respect, he seems to have been positively puritan. He was, of course, extremely conceited and entirely selfish. I have yet to meet a murderer who wasn’t. In particular, he disliked and despised his father, and having met the old gentleman myself, I can believe that he must have been an extremely tiresome person to live with.”

Dedman nodded his emphatic agreement.

“About the middle of the summer,” the inspector proceeded, “Stephen, whose financial position began to be really difficult, appears to have first formed the idea of murdering his father. He was, of course, well aware of the existence of the insurance policy which had been taken out after the death of Mr. Arthur Dickinson. He was also familiar with his father’s habit of taking Medinal tablets under medical advice.”

“How do you fix the date?” Mr. Dedman asked.

“It was about this time, as I learned from the family doctor whom I saw the other day, that the father purported to write to the doctor suggesting that as an experiment he should try taking the drug in powder form. The doctor duly prescribed, and shortly afterwards received a letter saying that the powder did not suit the father, and that he would prefer to continue with the tablets. Both letters were, of course, forgeries, and the son intercepted the prescription and so secured the means of carrying out his design.

“Having done this, he waited until his father went on his annual walking tour before putting his plan into execution. There may have been some reason against attempting the murder in his own home. Perhaps he had some sentimental feeling about it. I don’t know. In any case, he decided that it should be done at Pendlebury Old Hall Hotel, where he knew that his father, a creature of habit if ever there was one, would infallibly end his holiday. He was in this difficulty, however, that he did not know precisely on what day his father would arrive there. At the same time, he had to make provision for as conclusive an alibi as possible.

“He got over it in this way: He arranged to go to Switzerland with his sister for the holidays and then at the last moment invented some excuse for not joining her at the time arranged. (We have been to some trouble over the week end to find out from the hotel details as to how his room was cancelled at short notice.) Then he went to stay at Pendlebury until such time as his father should come along. He took the name of Stewart Davitt---the initials were the same as his own, naturally enough, so that he should not be given away by his luggage, which, no doubt, was marked ‘S.D.’ more or less prominently.”

“Talking of initials,” said Mr. Dedman, “have you observed----”

“I shall come to that presently,” said Mallett. He went on: “He gave an address in Hawk Street, which, I have since ascertained, is in fact a lodging-house and was until the other day the address of a clerk in the office of the stockbrokers through whom he carried on his speculations. He was on close terms of acquaintance with this young man, who has, by the way, since been dismissed by his employers for gambling in shares on his own account. At the hotel, he selected the room next to the one which he knew his father always occupied. (I expect he was familiar, to the point of boredom, with every detail of the old man’s life at his beloved Pendlebury.) He made an excuse for keeping out of sight of all the other residents in the hotel, and bided his time.

“In due course, Mr. Dickinson came to the hotel. As he always did, he ordered a cup of tea to be sent up to his room. As he always did, when it arrived, he told the maid to leave it outside until he was ready for it. All that the son had to do was to slip out of the room adjoining, empty his packet of Medinal powder into the tea-pot (the stuff dissolves quite quickly and is almost tasteless, I am told) and slip back again. The father came out, took in the tray, added his usual dose to the already poisoned tea and went to sleep, never to wake up again. Early next morning, having made his arrangements overnight, Stephen Dickinson left the hotel, caught the express to London, took the eight o’clock aeroplane for Zürich, and met his sister in Klosters that afternoon, no doubt telling her that he had travelled out by boat and train in the usual way. He immediately carried her off on a long climbing expedition, sleeping in various mountain huts, until he knew that it would be too late for him to be in time for the inquest or the funeral, at either of which he might be recognized. (The Swiss authorities, by the way, have been very helpful in tracing the guide whom they took with them.)

“So far as he could tell, everything had gone according to plan. His father would be found dead of an overdose of his usual medicine, a sympathetic coroner would find that death was accidental and no questions would ever be asked. And that, no doubt, was what would have happened, but for three unfortunate accidents---firstly, the presence of a remarkably apt quotation by the bedside; secondly, the fact that having just come to the end of one bottle of tablets the deceased had opened another to make up his usual dose; and lastly, the very peculiar manner in which the old gentleman had talked to me on the eve of his death. And the son had put it out of his power to correct these misconceptions at the inquest! Whether he realized at once how fatal a finding of suicide was to his hopes of reaping the reward of his crime, I don’t know. At all events, he learned it soon enough. It put him in a very nasty position.” Mallett chuckled. “A very nasty position indeed! Having taken the appalling risk of committing murder, he had to take the yet more terrible risk of proving that a murder had been committed---by someone.

“And so Stephen Dickinson, the gambler that he was, decided on the greatest gamble of his life. And before taking any other step, he came round to see---me, of all people. I suppose he thought that I might be able to give him some useful facts, that would help him in disproving suicide, but I fancy that his real motive was to see whether he could get away with an interview with me without arousing any suspicion in my mind. If he could do that, no doubt he felt that he would be safe in carrying out the inquiries which he proposed. And he certainly succeeded! I never gave the matter a thought. It wasn’t until the other day, when the suicide of that man at Midchester brought the whole affair back into my mind again, that I ever seriously considered the question of whether Mr. Dickinson had been killed and if so, by whom.

“Of course when you come to look into it,” the inspector confessed with a shrug of his shoulders, “the whole affair becomes startlingly simple. There is the question of motive for one thing. But over and above that, the principal clue, as you no doubt have realized, Mr. Dedman, is the perfect knowledge that the killer must have had of his victim’s habits. Consider: he must have known, in the first place, that he would be at this particular hotel, and sleep in this particular bedroom. He must have known that he was accustomed to this particular drug, and to taking it in this particular way. He must even have been familiar with his insistence that the tea should always be left outside the door. Now who on earth could have had such a combination of knowledge except a member of the deceased’s own family?”

“Something of that sort had occurred to me,” remarked Dedman. “That was why I favored the theory that the murderer had made a mistake and that the deceased had taken the poison intended for someone else.”

“Instead of which,” Mallett rejoined, “if Vanning---whose real name is Purkis, by the way, a nasty little blackmailer---if he had slept in the room that was originally intended for him, he would have been murdered in place of Mr. Dickinson!

“Well, the rest of the story is no news to you, I think. After his interview with me, young Dickinson spent the next two weeks scouring the country trying to fix the responsibility for his own crime on to the shoulders of some innocent person, aided and abetted by his equally innocent sister and her fiancé. They investigated the antecedents of every person staying in the hotel, except, of course, the mythical Mr. Davitt.”

“He reserved the case of Davitt for himself,” Mr. Dedman put in. “And invented a purely imaginary interview with an equally imaginary landlady to account for him.”

“That is just what I expected. The attempt to find a scapegoat for his own crime was a forlorn hope, of course, but it came perilously near to success twice. The first time, was in the case of Parsons.”

“I told him that properly handled, the Parsons affair might have produced a favorable settlement from the Insurance Company,” said Mr. Dedman in vexation. “It was really pitiful to see how he and young Johnson bungled that business! I beg your pardon, Inspector, I was forgetting. Please go on.”

“The second time,” said Mallett, his moustache points twitching as he tried to suppress a smile, “the result was very nearly more serious than it had been in Parsons’ case. I think he was prepared to throw up the sponge after you had pointed out to him that he had failed to prove Parsons’ guilt; but the news that his last speculation had ruined him drove him to make one last despairing effort. And I am afraid I was really responsible. As a last resort, he tried to put the guilt upon Martin Johnson. You see, Johnson really had something to hide. He was no murderer, but he did happen to be in the hotel on the night of the murder, and he was almost recognized there by Mr. Dickinson. Incidentally, Mr. Dickinson was talking to me at the time, and I remember noticing that immediately afterwards he suddenly switched the conversation to his daughter, who had not been mentioned before. I saw the significance of that only when I had learned that Johnson was his daughter’s fiancé.”

“I knew it!” exclaimed Mr. Dedman. “Jones!”

“Exactly. The suitcase point over again.”

“But not that point only. I knew it as soon as I saw Miss Dickinson’s face when the name of Jones was mentioned in my office.”

“She knew that he had been there, gallivanting with another young lady of his choice?”

“Undoubtedly. And I am very much afraid she knows a good deal more than that.”

“I am sorry to hear it. So far as Stephen Dickinson is concerned, he does not seem to have guessed it until at our last meeting I put it into his head. I did it to test his reactions, but I confess that I did not think they would be as violent as they proved to be.”

“That is a question that is puzzling me,” said Mr. Dedman. “How did young Dickinson hope to be able to represent that Johnson was guilty, in the face of the violent denials he would be sure to make, and what was his object in getting him to drive down to Pendlebury?”

“We can only guess at that,” the inspector replied. “But I have not the smallest doubt what the true answer is. He intended to kill Johnson.”

“But this is terrible!” said Mr. Dedman.

“Why not? One murder often leads to another, and a pistol was found on him when he was picked up. I think that his design was to kill him, and represent it as suicide brought on by remorse acting on a guilty conscience. The point of taking him to Pendlebury, no doubt, was to give colour to the theory. He would be able to say afterwards that he charged him with the crime and that he had then confessed. It would have been very difficult to disprove. Possibly he did actually go so far as to accuse him. That would account for the erratic driving of the car. Johnson will be able to tell you that when he is better. How is he, by the way?”

“Almost recovered. But he has no recollection of anything that happened for half an hour before the accident. On the whole, I think it is just as well.”

“As you say. He seems to have got off very lightly. I never saw a more completely smashed car in my life. But of course the passenger’s side took the brunt of the collision.”

“And how did you come to be on the spot so very opportunely, Inspector?”

“I was going to the Old Hall myself, to see whether the people there could identify Stephen Dickinson from the photograph which I had had taken of him the afternoon before. As it turned out, I was able to get the identification from his body instead, which was much more satisfactory.”

The two men sat in silence for a few moments, and then the solicitor rose to his feet.

“Thank you,” he said. “I shall be making my claim on the Insurance Company for the full amount of the policy moneys today. So far as Stephen Dickinson’s share is concerned, I don’t think there will be any difficulty. It will naturally fall into the rest of the estate and be divided between his mother and sister. The one thing that concerns me now is to see that Mrs. Dickinson never learns the truth. Goodbye.”

The inspector turned to his writing. For an hour there was no sound in the quiet room except the gentle scratching of his pen on the paper. At last, even that ceased. The record was complete. The file of “Re Dickinson” returned for the last time to its drawer in the inspector’s desk.

+++

At his mother’s insistence, Stephen was buried in Pendlebury churchyard next to his father. There was a full attendance of the family at the funeral. It was observed by all that Uncle George was in far better humour than usual. The reason, as Aunt Lucy could have told them, was that since the settlement with the Insurance Company there was no longer any ground for fearing that he would be called upon to contribute anything to the support of his brother’s family.

THE END

52  Our Library / Cyril Hare - Suicide Excepted (1939) / 20: Return to Pendlebury on: March 13, 2024, 07:51:28 am
Friday, September 1st

“HOW’S Annie this morning?” were Martin’s first words when he arrived at Plane Street next day.

“She’s better,” said Stephen shortly. “Had her breakfast in bed and isn’t down yet. We’d better be getting off, hadn’t we?”

“You know, Steve, I’ve a sort of notion you’re not very keen on my seeing Annie this morning,” Martin remarked, peering doubtfully at him through his thick glasses.

“My good Martin, do you want a repetition of yesterday’s scene? Because if you do, I don’t.”

If Martin objected to being addressed as “My good Martin” by his prospective brother-in-law, he did not show it. He merely blinked at him and said:

“You don’t think she’d like my coming out with you on this show?”

“She’d raise hell’s delight, I should think.”

“In that case,” said Martin uncomfortably, “I think perhaps it would be best if I didn’t come after all.”

“You’re coming, all right,” answered Stephen in a tone of such unusual authority that Martin, to his own surprise, found himself submitting quite meekly.

“Where are we going?” he asked when they were settled in the car.

“Oh, go through Hemel Hempstead. I’ll explain as we go along.”

Martin nodded and said nothing until they had covered some thirty miles. From time to time Stephen gave a direction, but otherwise he remained equally silent.

“Look here,” Martin said at last, “I wish you’d tell me where we’re going.”

“Doesn’t the road seem familiar, Martin?”

“I know most of the main roads about London, as a matter of fact. I don’t know that there is anything specially familiar about this one. The last time I came down it was the day of your guv’nor’s funeral, actually.”

“Oh, yes, of course, coming back from Pendlebury. Well, as it’s on our way, we might as well look in there.”

“At the churchyard, d’you mean?”

“No, I meant at the hotel. (I wish you wouldn’t swerve all over the road like that, Martin.) That is, unless you’re nervous of going there.”

“Why should I be nervous?”

“Why, indeed? After all, if you’re investigating a murder, it’s the natural thing to go to the place where it was done, isn’t it? Are you feeling the heat, by the way?”

“No, why?”

“I thought you were sweating a bit, that’s all. As I was going to say, it’s an odd thing that all this time we’ve been hunting all over the country for clues, but none of us has ever thought to look at the hotel itself.”

“Why should we? We paid Elderson to do it for us.”

“Very true. It struck me at the time as rather odd that you were so keen not to go down there when we were first discussing this business.”

“You didn’t want to go down there yourself, for the matter of that.”

“I had a very good reason. (I wish you’d look where you’re going, Martin. You nearly had us into the ditch that time.) Your reason was, so far as I can remember, that you were afraid of being recognized by the people at the hotel---as a result of having been at the funeral.”

“Yes. That’s absolutely right. And a jolly good reason too.”

“Of course, at the funeral you’d be one of the crowd of relations. I shouldn’t have thought there was much risk. Anyway, that reason has gone now, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, if you say so.”

“I tell you another thing that has occurred to me lately, Martin. When you and Anne went off to Lincolnshire, I remember that you were very insistent that she should be the one to interview Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop and that you should merely drive her down there.”

“I don’t know what you’re driving at. You know as well as I do that I did see Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop and had a glass of sherry off her.”

“I wish you wouldn’t turn round to talk to me like that, Martin. It’s very dangerous. I can hear you quite well when you’re looking ahead, you know. Yes, you talked to Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop all right, but that was after you knew that she wasn’t the woman who stayed in the hotel. It was awfully clever of you, Martin, to spot that so quickly.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go on saying ‘Martin’ every other word. It gets on my nerves.”

“Never knew you had any, Martin. Sorry, but the name seems to have a fatal fascination for me. By the way, what do you think M stands for?”

“M?”

“Yes, M in M. Jones. In the hotel register, you know.”

“How the hell should I know?”

“I just thought you might, that’s all. You see, it has just occurred to me (funny what a lot of things keep occurring all of a sudden!) that if you are out on the loose---I think that is the accepted expression, isn’t it?---there is always the suitcase problem to be got over.”

“Now what on earth----”

“Come, come, Martin, you’re not as dense as that, you know. In fact, I’ve always looked on you as pretty smart. You were fearfully clever at Midchester, I thought. For instance, your notion of having a good look at Parsons at the meeting before you decided that it was safe to go and see him----”

“Safe?”

“But I was forgetting. We were talking about the great suitcase problem, weren’t we? What I had in mind was that if your suitcase was marked, say, ‘M.J.’ in letters large as life, it wouldn’t do to go and register as Thomas Smith, for instance. It might make the man who took it up to your room just a bit suspicious. So you’d decide that the J. stood for Jones, just for that night, and M., I suppose, would be Michael or Matthew or Melchisedeck. . . . Do you really want to stop at Pendlebury, Martin?”

“Damn you! Why shouldn’t I?”

“Just as you please. I thought perhaps you might be afraid of someone recognizing you---from having seen you at the funeral, of course. And talking of recognition, it is a bit awkward when you are recognized when you’re out on the loose, isn’t it, Martin?”

Martin did not answer, except by putting his foot down more firmly on the accelerator. The car was travelling at its highest speed now, and in the roar of the air past the wind-screen Stephen had to raise his voice to be heard.

“Of course, it would depend on who recognized you, I suppose,” he went on. “For a man who is wanting to get married I should think his prospective father-in-law is about the worst person to run into. Especially if it’s a father-in-law who doesn’t like him in any case.”

Stephen put his mouth very close to Martin’s ear so that there was no chance of a word being lost. His voice had suddenly dropped entirely the ironic tone which it had held until then.

“You wanted Anne, and you knew your chances of getting her were absolutely gone if he saw you there,” he said. “You wanted money, and you thought he had plenty to leave. You knew that life in our family was hell so long as he was alive, anyway. So you took your chance then, you murdering swine! And it’s no good your thinking you can serve me the same way you did him. I’m ready for you---there’s a gun in my pocket and if you don’t do just what I tell you---Martin!” His voice rose to a scream as his gaze shifted momentarily to the road ahead. “Look out, for God’s sake!”

But Martin was past all heeding. Red-faced, stammering, his wide eyes grotesquely magnified by his thick glasses, he turned to face his accuser. The car swung dangerously on to the offside of the road as it reached a sharp left-hand bend. The heavy lorry which was coming down the steep eastern slope of Pendlebury Hill had no chance whatever of avoiding it. It crashed into the side of the little car and rolled it completely over, a tangled heap of steel and glass.

+++

Mallett’s car had left New Scotland Yard at about the same time that Martin’s had started from Hampstead. It had to traverse the whole of Central London before getting on to the open road and consequently, in spite of its superior speed, it was some twenty minutes later that it arrived on the scene of the accident. A police constable was taking particulars from the white-faced lorry driver and an ambulance was drawn up by the roadside. As Mallett got out of his car, the first-aid men were lifting two limp bodies on to stretchers. One of them was groaning feebly and turning his heavily bandaged head from side to side. The other was ominously still. The inspector looked at them. His face expressed neither sympathy nor horror, only a mild surprise. He said a word to the driver of the ambulance and went back to his car.

“We’ll go on to Pendlebury Old Hall,” he said to his driver.

“There’s nothing we can do here, I suppose, sir?”

“Nothing at all. It’s an unfortunate business, but---perhaps it simplifies things on the whole.”

At the hotel he asked for the manager. The man was inclined to be unhelpful at first, but under Mallett’s gentle pressure soon became amenable enough. He looked with interest at the photograph which the inspector showed him but shook his head doubtfully.

“I think so, but I couldn’t be sure,” he said. “Not to swear to, I mean. I dare say some of my staff could, though. Shall I ask Miss Carter?”

“Would you know him again if you saw him?”

“Oh, yes, I’m certain of that. A photograph’s one thing but the living face is another.”

“Then if you don’t mind coming along in my car, we needn’t bother Miss Carter. I’m not so sure about the living face, though,” Mallett added, sardonically.

His premonition was right. At the hospital they were directed not to the accident ward but to the mortuary. They were conducted there by an attendant, who was as cheerful as only those whose daily business is with death and disfigurement can be.

He whistled jauntily as they walked along the echoing corridor, breaking off to observe:

“Funny things, these car crashes! Here’s this chap, multiple injuries all over the place. Simply smashed to bits. He might just as well have stopped a charge of H.E. And the other fellow sitting beside him gets away with a couple of scalp wounds and concussion. Dirty work, isn’t it? Well, here we are! You’ll find his face is O.K. luckily. It’s about the only thing that is.”

He drew aside the sheet that covered the face of the dead man. The hotel manager craned forward to see. Mallett stood in the background, anxious neither by word nor sign to influence him in any way. In silence they left the mortuary and when they were outside, Mallett said, “Well?”

“That’s him, all right,” was the answer.

Confident though he had been, the inspector breathed a sigh of relief.

“Thank you for your help,” he said. “And now I’ll drive you back to your hotel.”

“Am I likely to hear any more of this matter?” the manager asked him, as he deposited him at his door. “It’s very bad for business, you know.”

“You won’t ever be troubled with it again,” was the confident reply.

“I’m very glad to hear that. But won’t you stay to lunch as my guest, Inspector?”

“No, thank you,” replied Mallett with great emphasis.

53  Our Library / Cyril Hare - Suicide Excepted (1939) / 19: Stephen Decides on: March 13, 2024, 07:25:36 am
Thursday, August 31st

“MIND you,” Martin was saying, “that solicitor fellow was pretty definite about it. And I’m bound to say, he struck me as a pretty knowing sort of fellow. I mean, he seemed to know what he was talking about.”

Stephen groaned.

“I seem to have heard you say that at least half a dozen times since yesterday afternoon,” he said.

“We’ve all said everything over and over again,” Anne pointed out. “And we’re no nearer deciding anything than we were yesterday. My mind’s made up, anyhow. What on earth is the good of beating about the bush any longer?”

“We’ve got till Monday, anyway,” said Martin. “That gives us three clear days. Counting Sunday, of course.”

“Your arithmetic is wonderful,” Stephen remarked.

“Stop bickering,” commanded Anne. “Mother, you’re as much concerned in this as any of us. Don’t you agree with us? You’ve heard everything that’s been done, and how futile it’s all been. Don’t you think it would be sheer folly not to take what we can get now, while we can get it, in view of what Mr. Dedman says?”

Mrs. Dickinson had been a more or less silent auditor of the discussion that had raged almost without interruption the whole morning. Appealed to now, she seemed reluctant to speak.

“My dear,” she said at last in her low, musical voice, “I gave my opinion about this a long time ago, I have been poor before, and I’m not afraid to be poor again. I don’t think that either you or Stephen---particularly Stephen---would enjoy it very much. That is why I left the whole matter in your hands in the first place. Now, I understand, it is a choice between taking a small amount of money at once and gambling on getting a large sum in the future. I know quite well which I should do, if the choice was mine, but then I have never been particularly fond of gambling. You must make up your own minds about this.”

“Just a minute,” said Martin. “In point of fact, Mrs. Dickinson, you and Steve are the two executors of the will, aren’t you?”

“Yes, that is so.”

“Well, I may be wrong, but I suppose the executors are the people who will have to make the claim on the insurance chaps, if anybody does. In that case, the people who have to make up their minds about what’s to be done are you two, and not us at all.”

“And what happens if the executors don’t agree?” Stephen asked.

“Heaven knows! I suppose Dedman could tell us.”

“I don’t think that question will arise,” said Mrs. Dickinson. “As I have said, I am not making any decision about this. I shall agree with whatever my fellow executor says.”

“Then that settles it!” said Stephen resolutely.

“No, it doesn’t!” cried Anne. “Look here, Stephen, I don’t care what the lawyers may say, but we are all in this together. You’ve simply got to listen to me!”

“I seem to have done quite a lot of that lately,” was Stephen’s comment.

“You’ve not heard everything yet, by a long way.” She looked at her mother as she spoke.

Mrs. Dickinson accepted the glance as a hint and rose to her feet. “I don’t think I can help you any further,” she said. “Besides, there are two or three things I must attend to before lunch. Let me know what you have decided and I promise that I shall not quarrel with it.”

She went out. The door had hardly closed behind her, and Martin had not had time to begin filling a pipe which automatically appeared in his hand upon her departure, before Anne rounded on Stephen. She stood in the middle of the room, leaning on one arm against a table. Her fingers were trembling slightly and her face had gone quite white.

“Look here!” she began in a low voice. “This thing has got to stop! Do you understand me, Stephen? It’s got to stop!”

“You’re very earnest, all of a sudden,” said Stephen coldly.

“Earnest? My God, can’t you understand? Can’t you see what a horrible thing we’ve been meddling with all this time? And now, when there’s a chance of getting out of it you still want to go on, all for the sake of----”

“For the sake of twenty-five thousand pounds. I must say, it seems quite a consideration to me.”

“Oh, damn the money!” Anne exclaimed bitterly, stamping her foot on the floor. “It’s all you ever think about!”

“Very well, damn the money by all means, if you really feel inclined to. But what about you? Who was it who always insisted that Father hadn’t killed himself? What about your wonderful notion of putting things right with him by clearing his memory? I must say you are about the last person to----”

“Just as you like. I know I’m responsible for this as much as anybody. I didn’t know then just what a thing like this led to, that’s all. I do now. And that’s why I say we’ve got to drop it. Lord, what fools we’ve been with our bungling amateur detection. Here we’ve been talking of suspects and clues, nosing about ever so pleased with ourselves, and what’s been the result?”

“Very little, I admit.”

“Little? You’ve driven one man to his death already, and you call that little? Stephen, I tell you this. Unless we bury the whole of this business as quickly and decently as we can, something perfectly horrible is going to happen. Of that, I feel absolutely certain!”

She turned suddenly to Martin.

“You understand what I’m talking about, don’t you, Martin?” she appealed to him. “Don’t you see how fearfully important this is for all of us? Please, please help me to persuade Stephen to be sensible.”

“Just a minute, before you answer that one, Martin.” Stephen’s voice, with a raw edge to it that told of strained nerves, cut across his sister’s plea. “I don’t profess to know all about all your affairs, but just tell me this: Are you prepared to marry Anne on what you’ve got, plus her share of the insurance company’s offer?”

Martin took two deep puffs at his pipe before he answered.

“No,” he said at last. “I’m not.”

“Very well, then----”

“I don’t care,” cried Anne. “I’d rather not be married at all than go on like this!”

There was a long pause before Martin spoke again.

“I think Annie’s right,” he said.

“You mean----” Stephen left his question unfinished.

“I mean that we’ve done enough harm already. And after all, if I get on, we can always get married some time---if Annie will have me, that is.”

Anne said nothing. She was looking at Stephen. Stephen looked at neither of them. He remained for a short time staring straight in front of him, and then said slowly: “I see. Well, I suppose I must agree, then.”

“You mean it?” said Anne, all her relief showing in her face.

“Of course I mean it,” Stephen answered in an irritated tone. “Otherwise I should not have said it.”

“Will you let Mr. Dedman know he’s to accept the insurance people’s offer?”

“Certainly. I’ll do it now, if you like.”

The telephone was in the study, where this conference had taken place. Stephen went towards the instrument, and as he put out his hand to take up the receiver the bell began to ring.

“Curse!” he said perfunctorily, and answered the call.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Speaking. Who? Oh, I see. Yes. I’ll hold on. Yes. Yes, I say, this is Mr. Dickinson speaking. What? No, I hadn’t seen this morning. I say, I didn’t look to see this morning. Have they? What? But look here, that’s impossible! Oh, no, I take your word for it, but . . . Anyhow, that’s obviously only a temporary reaction. Oh, you think so, do you? Yes, of course I understand it’s pretty serious. I know, I know. But you see, just at the present moment I . . . Well, I shall have to arrange something, that’s all. But don’t you think you could . . .”

The conversation went on a good deal longer. Various words kept on recurring again and again. “Contango” was one. “Carry over” and “Account” were others. “Margin” and “options” also occurred more than once. At last, the call came to an end. Stephen put down the receiver and turned round to display a very pale face.

“And that,” he said, “is that.”

“What has happened?” Anne asked him.

“Nothing very much. Simply that I am broke, that’s all. Completely and absolutely broke. Unless”---he set his teeth---“unless I can find a very considerable amount of money in a very short space of time.”

“Rotten luck,” murmured Martin.

“Yes, isn’t it? And it’s going to be dam’ rotten luck for somebody else too, I can tell you that!”

“What do you mean?” said Anne sharply.

“I mean that I’m going on with this show.”

“But, Stephen, you can’t! Not after what you’ve just said! You promised----”

“Promised, hell! Can’t you understand plain English? I’ve got to lay my hands on more money than I’m worth by next Monday, or I shall be made bankrupt. That’s the long and short of it. And I’m not going to be jockeyed out of the chance of it by you or anyone else. That’s final.”

“Stephen---you can’t---you can’t!” Quite suddenly Anne’s self-control broke down altogether. Bursting into tears, she made for the door. Martin tried to stop her, but she pushed him on one side and ran from the room.

After she had gone, the two men looked at each other in silence for a moment or two. Then Martin said, “On the whole, I think perhaps I’d better not stay for lunch.”

“Perhaps not.”

“I’ll call round after tea. I dare say a spin in the car then might do her good.”

“Yes, do.”

In the result, Stephen lunched alone with his mother. Anne remained upstairs in her room. Consequently, she was not present when Inspector Mallett called in the afternoon. It was perhaps just as well.

+++

The inspector was at his most genial during the interview. Sitting in the big arm-chair in the study, he resembled nothing so much as a very large cat, purring contentedly in the sun. Unlike a cat, however, he seemed to be genuinely apologetic for his presence.

“I am really sorry to bother you, Mr. Dickinson,” he began. “But somebody had to do it, and in all the circumstances, I thought it had better be me. It all arises out of this event at Midchester. You were at Midchester on Monday night, were you not?”

“Yes, I was.”

“I thought it must have been you. You and a Mr. Johnson?”

“Yes, that’s my sister’s fiancé.”

“Your sister’s fiancé?” The inspector seemed surprisingly interested in this piece of information. “Your sister’s fiancé?” he repeated. “Just so. That would explain it, of course.”

“Explain what?” asked Stephen, somewhat provocatively.

“I mean, explain his presence in this affair. I suppose I am right in thinking that your visit to Midchester was in connexion with the inquiries you were proposing to make when we last met?”

“Certainly. And I suppose I am right in thinking that your visit here is in connexion with the same business?”

“Not exactly. Not in the way you might imagine, that is. You see, Mr. Dickinson, as you may know, rather an unfortunate thing happened just after you and Mr. Johnson left Midchester on Tuesday morning, and your names have been associated with it.”

Stephen sat bolt upright in his chair.

“Good God!” he said. “Does anybody imagine that Martin and I killed the blighter?”

“No, no!” Mallett assured him with a rumbling laugh. “It’s not so bad as that. The position simply is that it has been ascertained that you two had an interview with the deceased shortly before he met his death, and the coroner appears to think that you may be able to throw some light on it.”

“I see.”

“I learned that inquiries were being made for somebody of your name in London, and thought it would simplify matters if I found out whether you were the individual referred to. Now all I need do is to have the Midchester police notified, and you will get a witness summons in due course. The inquest has been adjourned for a week, I understand.”

“I see,” said Stephen again. Then he added: “I shall have to go, I suppose?”

“I am afraid so. Indeed, it would be very inadvisable for you not to go. I can see that the position may be a little difficult for you, all the same, and I dare say you might consider the possibility of being legally represented.”

“Thank you very much.” Stephen paused, and then added: “By the way, Inspector, you haven’t told me how it was that you guessed why I went to Midchester.”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly difficult. You see, after our little talk the other day, I got a friend in the Markshire police to supply me with a list of the people who had been staying at Pendlebury at the same time as your father, and I noticed the name of Parsons on it.”

“Then you were interested in the case, after all?”

“To that extent only. And I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a case, exactly.”

Stephen stroked his chin thoughtfully for a moment or two before he spoke again. Then he said: “Look here, Inspector, I’ve been a bit of a fool about this Parsons business. How much of a fool I didn’t know until it was pointed out to me yesterday. The more I think about it, the more I feel convinced that I was on the right track about Parsons. Is there any chance of the police helping me now to prove what I still believe to be the fact---that Parsons actually murdered my father?”

“Well,” said Mallett slowly, “where there has been no crime officially known to the police and where the proposed suspect is dead in any case, there’s very little we can do. All the same, in the very special circumstances here, entirely unofficially . . . Perhaps you could tell me just what your theory about Parsons is?”

Stephen plunged once more into the narration of the events which had taken place at Midchester and the theory Martin and he had built up upon their discoveries there. The inspector listened to him with grave attention. At the end of the recital he nodded slowly.

“Well, Mr. Dickinson, your theory is decidedly interesting. I wouldn’t put it higher than that, but it is interesting, and if I may say so, ingenious. I see no reason why discreet inquiries should not be made, both in Midchester and London, and if anything comes of them, I shall, of course, let you know.”

“If only the time wasn’t so desperately short!” Stephen said. “I must, I simply must, have something to go upon by Monday at the very latest.”

“I shouldn’t despair of getting information by Monday,” the inspector reassured him. “If there is any information to get, that is. We move pretty quickly in the Force, you know.”

Sitting there in his arm-chair, he looked as solid and immovable as the Sphinx.

“As you are so short of time,” he went on, “it was perhaps rather unfortunate that you didn’t investigate the position of Parsons a little earlier in the day. I suppose that was because he happened to come at the bottom of your list?”

“We left him and Vanning to the end because they seemed the least likely.”

“Just so. And before you got to them, I suppose you had sifted out all the other people on this list of mine?”

“Yes.”

“Without any results?”

Stephen hesitated. With the recollection of Mr. Dedman’s bitter sarcasm fresh in his mind, it was not surprising that he should be unwilling to expose his and Martin’s short-comings in the art of detection to a professional.

“Without any tangible results,” he said, at last. “If there had been any, I should not have bothered about Parsons, of course.”

“But there were results of a kind?”

“In two cases there was apparently something to go on, but it didn’t amount to very much when you examined it afterwards.”

Mallett shrugged his shoulders.

“This is your affair, of course, Mr. Dickinson,” he said. “But I rather gathered that you would be glad of any help, official or otherwise, that I could give you. Besides, if you have any grounds for suspicion against anybody, I’m not sure that it isn’t your duty to reveal them.”

So encouraged, Stephen put to the best of his ability the case against Mr. and Mrs. Carstairs and Mrs. March. If he feared a repetition of the contemptuous reception which he had met from Mr. Dedman the day before, he was quickly reassured. The inspector proved to be a courteous and attentive listener, although it was impossible to tell from his face what impression the story was making on him.

“I’m afraid you’ll think we have made a bad bungle of the whole affair,” Stephen concluded.

“Not at all,” Mallett assured him. “Not at all. I think, if I may say so, that you have been remarkably thorough in your investigations, all things considered. I shall remember what you have told me and follow it up so far as I can. There is only one aspect of the case which I am surprised that you have not taken into account,” he added.

“What is that?”

“I seem to recollect at our first meeting your being somewhat impressed by one little fact which I brought to your notice. I mean, the curious little incident of the man whom your father thought he recognized while I was talking to him at the hotel. Have you considered that at all?”

“No. I admit I have not.”

“Considering it now, do you think that any of the people we have been discussing could be identified with that person?”

“I don’t think so.”

“There may be nothing in it, of course, though I remember that at the time I first mentioned it to you, you seemed to attach some importance to it.”

“I’m afraid I had forgotten all about it until you mentioned it just now.”

“We are all of us liable to forget things,” said the inspector, with the air of a man who was quite confident that he, personally, never forgot anything. “But it does seem to leave rather a hole in the inquiry so far, doesn’t it? If you don’t mind taking a word of advice from me, you’ll devote a little time to filling that hole---if it can be done.”

Stephen nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I will,” he said.

Mallett looked at his watch and rose to his feet.

“This has been a very interesting little talk,” he said. “I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Dickinson, that this affair has aspects which puzzle me quite a lot---entirely unofficially, of course, but I am puzzled. How far I shall be able to help you, I can’t say, naturally. A lot depends on what, if anything, we can find out about Parsons and the gentleman who called himself Vanning. Meanwhile, have you considered the advisability of employing a private inquiry agent? They are not a class of people I care for very much, as a general rule, but there is one I know of who is quite reliable---when he is sober, that is.”

“Do you mean Elderson?”

“That’s the man. Don’t let it get out that I sent you there, though.”

“I have been to him already. In fact, it was on his investigation at the hotel that we based everything we have done since.”

“Indeed? You sent him down there and he made you a report, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“Would you mind very much if I looked at it for a moment? One never knows, it might give one some ideas.”

Stephen fetched it, and Mallett glanced through it. His inspection was a good deal less cursory than Mr. Dedman’s had been, but it was none the less quick enough. As he was in the act of handing it back his features were suddenly convulsed in a spasm of pain.

“Is anything the matter?” Stephen asked.

“It’s nothing,” said the inspector faintly. “A touch of---of indigestion, I’m afraid.” (Was it imagination, or did he blush as he made the confession?) “I think I must have eaten something poisonous,” he went on.

“You don’t look at all well,” said Stephen. “Don’t you think you should see a doctor?”

“Perhaps I should,” said Mallett. “I dare say it’s nothing to worry about, but I---I’m not used to this sort of thing. Do you know of any good doctor handy?”

“Our own man is only just down the road. He’s pretty useful.” He gave the name and address.

“Thank you. I’ll look in there on my way. Goodbye.”

He shook hands, and then added: “I had quite forgotten---Mr. Johnson will have to get a witness summons too. Will you let me have his address also?”

Stephen wrote it down for him.

“No doubt you will be seeing him soon,” Mallett said, “and can let him know what to expect.”

“I will, of course. As a matter of fact, I am expecting him here about five o’clock.”

“That’s all right then. Goodbye once more, Mr. Dickinson.”

And with the best speed he could, the inspector made his way down the street to the doctor’s house.

+++

Soon after five, Martin’s little car clattered up to the front door of the house. Stephen and his mother were finishing tea in the drawing-room.

“I’m afraid Anne won’t be able to come out with you after all,” said Mrs. Dickinson. “She seems to be in a thoroughly nervous state and I’m keeping her in bed.”

“Sorry about that,” said Martin. “Bit of a strain and all that, I’m afraid. Perhaps you’ll tell her I looked in---if you think she’d like to know, that is. No thanks, I’ve had tea. I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll be toddling off now.”

Stephen went out with him into the hall, and told him of the forthcoming summons to Midchester. Martin’s sole comment was, “Bad show.”

“Annie seems dreadfully wrought up about things,” he added.

“Yes,” said Stephen. “Do you know why, exactly?”

“No, I thought perhaps you would.”

“I should think in some ways you know her better than I do.”

“Well, she is sensitive and all that sort of thing,” said Martin vaguely.

“You can’t think of anything in particular that she should be sensitive about, so far as this show is concerned?”

“No---o, I don’t think so. All the same, I can’t help thinking it would be a good thing if you could let things drop altogether.”

“I can’t,” said Stephen with an air of finality. “And, as a matter of fact, even if I could, I wouldn’t---now.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that I’ve just got an entirely new slant on the whole affair that may make all the difference.”

“Well, I wish you luck, that’s all,” said Martin, opening the front door.

“I shall want you to help me, you know, Martin,” Stephen told him, following him on to the pavement.

“Me? But I’m with Annie on this, you know.”

“I dare say you are. But doesn’t it seem to you that the quickest way to put her mind at rest will be to finish the business in the way we’ve always wanted to?”

“’M, yes, I suppose so, in a way.”

“Anyhow, I can’t do this job properly without you. I want your car, at least. You can just be chauffeur if you like. Come round tomorrow morning. It will be the last time, Martin, I promise you that.”

“All right, then. Shall I be round about tennish?”

“Ten o’clock will do. So long!”

“So long!”

Stephen turned to go back into the house and Martin settled himself in the driving-seat of his car. On the pavement opposite stood a shabbily dressed man. Martin observed casually that he had not seen him there before, and that he was supporting a tray of bootlaces and collar-studs for sale. He could be excused for not observing that attached to his waist coat was a rather more intricate object which was not for sale.

“Full face and profile,” murmured the shabby man to himself when he was alone in the street once more. “Good enough, I think.”

As he went back to the motorcycle which he had left at the police station, he reflected that in an instant of time, by the pressure of a finger, he had done something permanent and irrevocable. It was like pulling the lever that opens the trapdoor of the scaffold.

He was, for a policeman, a dangerously imaginative man.

54  Our Library / Cyril Hare - Suicide Excepted (1939) / 18: An Inspector with Indigestion on: March 13, 2024, 07:07:35 am
Thursday, August 31st

IT would be inaccurate to say that Inspector Mallett had forgotten his interview with Stephen Dickinson. It was never safe to assert that the inspector had forgotten anything. But it was certainly the fact that since the interview had taken place he had scarcely given the matter a further thought. It was only an accident that brought it to his attention again---an accident that was to have important consequences. Admittedly it was a very rare and therefore unexpected occurrence, and as such worthy of record for its own sake. To Mallett at the time it seemed positively overwhelming.

The truth was that on this particular morning he, of all people in the world, was suffering from an acute attack of indigestion. So unfamiliar to him were the symptoms that he actually spent some time wondering what was the matter with him. He spent a good deal longer speculating in vain what could have caused the trouble. He ran over in his mind the gigantic meals which he had consumed during the past day and could find no solution. There had been nothing out of the ordinary in any of them, for Mallett, incontestably the heartiest trenchman of the force, liked his food plain and plentiful. True, the exigencies of the service had compelled him to lunch, comparatively sparingly, at noon and to postpone his enormous supper till two in the morning. But that was nothing out of the ordinary, and he had dispatched his usual breakfast at seven-thirty without a qualm. But there it was---the odious, inescapable fact that he was now reduced to as pitiful a condition as any dyspeptic that ever swelled the profits of the pill manufacturers.

By half-past ten, he could stand it no longer. Something would have to be done to stay the griping pain which was making existence unbearable and work impossible. He was, naturally, completely ignorant of the proper treatment of a malady with which he was so utterly unacquainted; and his first instinct was to turn to someone else for help. At this crisis, his mind went to one Sergeant Weekes, whose indigestion was almost as celebrated in New Scotland Yard as was Mallett’s own appetite. Weekes was a man who never went anywhere without a little box of wonder-working tablets, changing in character according to the season of the year or the vagaries of his complaint, but invariably described by their owner in confidential tones as, “The only thing that keeps me going, old man.” The inspector had often laughed at poor Weekes with all the unconscious cruelty of ignorance. Now he put his pride in his pocket and, bent double with pain, made his way to the other’s room in search of advice and assistance.

Thus it came about that the inspector was at Weekes’s elbow at the precise moment when a message was put through to the sergeant from the borough police at Midchester. If Mallett had been slightly more or slightly less stoical in his attitude to pain he would not have been there to hear it. Indeed, if the message had come through as little as two minutes earlier his intense preoccupation with his own affairs would probably not have allowed him to give it any attention. But at the critical moment it so happened that one of the famous tablets had been administered just long enough to secure, if not the instant relief claimed for them on the label, at least an intermission from agony sufficient to permit him to be conscious of what was going on around him.

The telephone conversation, from the London end at least, was not particularly interesting at first. It consisted mainly of the word, “Yes,” several times repeated, and varied at intervals---for the sergeant prided himself on being up to date---by “O.K.” Meanwhile he was jotting down notes in an illegible shorthand of his own devising on a pad. Near the end of the call, Weekes paused in his hieroglyphics and said: “Just a minute, old man. Will you repeat the names? I want to get them O.K.”

The voice at the other end evidently complied and the sergeant confirmed, writing as he spoke, in longhand capitals this time: “Stephen Dickinson and Martin Johnson. Yes, thanks, old man, I’ve got the descriptions. We’ll let you know what we can do. Yes. . . . Yes. . . . O.K. . . . ’Bye.”

He hung up and turned to the inspector with a grin.

“Feeling better?” he asked. “They’re pretty wonderful, these little fellows, aren’t they? They say it’s the charcoal in them that does the good work. Now, if you keep quiet for half an hour or so, you’ll be as right as rain, I give you my word. Of course, a big man like yourself, it might take a bit longer. Perhaps you’d like to take another one away with you, just in case. Might come in handy after lunch.” He looked at Mallett severely. “That is, if you have any lunch.”

“Thanks,” said the inspector. “I am much better already. As to lunch---we’ll see. But tell me, what was that matter you were discussing on the telephone?”

“Witnesses wanted for an inquest on one Parsons at Midchester,” said Weekes. “It seems the coroner there is getting all het up about it.”

“And one of them is called Dickinson, I gather.”

“That’s right. Stephen Dickinson of London. Useful, ain’t it?”

“It may be. I’d like to hear the description they give of him.”

Wondering at this display of interest in Midland inquests, the sergeant read from his notes a description which, vague though it was, was perfectly recognizable.

“The other individual is named Martin Johnson,” he went on.

“I don’t know him,” said Mallett. “But Stephen Dickinson I do know. This may be interesting. What has he to do with the late Mr. Parsons at Midchester?”

“That’s just what the Borough Force there would like to know. It seems that these two young men spent the night in Midchester, two nights ago. They made an appointment to see Parsons next day on the telephone. They didn’t give no names, but they were traced through the hotel afterwards. The phone call was made from the hotel, see?”

“I see. Go on.”

“Well, this man Parsons was an official of the local Gas Company, and quite an important figure in the town, see? He saw these two. He wasn’t in the room with them above five minutes, and then off they went. And an hour later he’s found in his room with his head blown to bits and a letter to explain that he’s been robbing the Gas Company right and left for donkey’s years.”

“Very interesting. Very interesting indeed.”

“D’you think so? Anyhow, the coroner seems to want to get hold of this couple. Bit of luck if you know one of them. I don’t see that there’s much chance of tracing them otherwise.”

“Stephen Dickinson,” said Mallett, “lives at 67, Plane Street, Hampstead.”

“That’s all right, then. I’ll notify the station there, and they can serve the witness summons on him.”

Mallett took two steps towards the door and then turned.

“On the whole,” he said, “I think I’ll go round and see Mr. Dickinson myself about the matter. There’s always a chance I may be mistaken.”

“Go round yourself?” said the sergeant in surprise.

“Yes. This Parsons business may be important. When is the inquest, by the way?”

“It’s been adjourned till today week.”

“Plenty of time, then. I’ll let you know if this is the right man and anything I can find out about Mr. Johnson. Meanwhile, you needn’t do anything about the Midchester police until you hear from me. Thanks for the pill.”

And the inspector returned to his room, leaving behind him a sadly puzzled Sergeant Weekes.

Back at his desk once more, Mallett pulled out the file labelled “Re Dickinson,” which had reposed there since his unconventional talk with Stephen nearly a fortnight before. During the interval it had received one addition only; namely, from the Markshire police to the letter which he had written on the same day. The only matter of interest which this letter contained was a list of the residents at the hotel on the night of Mr. Dickinson’s death and a note of the times of their arrivals and departures. This he examined afresh with rather more attention than he had done when he first received it. He ran his broad forefinger down the list until it reached the name of Parsons.

“That’ll be him,” he said to himself. “Well, it seems simple enough. The boy sets to work to trace all the possible people who could have killed his father, and in due course goes to see Parsons. Parsons has a guilty conscience, thinks he’s come after him in connexion with his embezzlements, loses his head and kills himself. I’m afraid young Dickinson will find himself in an awkward position when he has to explain all that at the inquest, though. Not to mention Mr. Martin Johnson. I haven’t heard of him before. Friend of the family, I suppose.”

In the ordinary way he might well, at this point, have put the matter from his mind altogether, but whether it was the after effect of indigestion or some other cause, his thoughts continued obstinately to revolve round the question. He remained for some time brooding over the list of names, trying to fit them to the faces which he dimly remembered having seen at the hotel.

“But did Parsons kill himself simply for fear of his thefts being exposed?” he murmured. “The confession only relates to that, it’s true, but perhaps that’s only natural. Was there something else which the lad has found out---some connexion between him and his father, for instance? Well, he’ll be able to tell me that. It can’t have been a very obvious one, or he’d have gone for him straight away, instead of waiting for nearly two weeks. Parsons’ death has made it a good deal harder to prove the case, unless he’s left something tangible behind him in the way of papers. It might be worth while asking the Midchester police. . . .”

Almost without realizing it, the inspector had completely changed his attitude of mind towards the riddle of Leonard Dickinson’s death. His talk with Stephen must have impressed him far more deeply than he had known at the time, for now that his attention was once more focused on the problem he found himself accepting almost as a matter of course the theory which he had then refused to entertain.

“Let me see, now. . . .” Mallett tilted his chair back and closed his eyes. He saw once more the face of old Mr. Dickinson, heard his low, depressed tones. He reviewed again the short and apparently conclusive evidence at the inquest. There was nothing new in what he remembered, but this time he looked at it from a different angle altogether.

“But . . .” he added. “But . . . there are objections to the son’s theory all the same. Or if not objections, limitations. If the old man was murdered in this particular place, in this particular way, that implies two or three things.” He enumerated them to himself. “Now, if I had been conducting this investigation in his place, I should have gone on those lines, in any case. It would have narrowed things down considerably. But I wasn’t conducting this investigation,” he concluded with a sigh.

Then Mallett performed a feat which was quite usual for him, but of which he was none the less justifiably proud. Taking up his pen, he proceeded to write down from memory the heads of the conversation which he had had with Stephen twelve days before. He had made no notes at the time, and during the interval his brain had been occupied with a dozen other matters, many of them of urgent importance. Nevertheless, when he had done, the salient points of their discussion were recorded on the paper before him, as accurately and completely as though they had been written down contemporaneously.

He contemplated the result with satisfaction. Then he marked with a pencil certain points in it which struck him as important. Finally, he looked from it to the type-written sheet supplied by the Markshire police and back again, tugging thoughtfully at the ends of his moustache. At last, he pulled himself together.

“This is theorizing without the facts, if you like!” he told himself. “And a most irrational theory at that. All the same, assuming that young Dickinson was right---just assuming. . . . It might be worth looking into. . . . It ought to be worth looking into. . . .”

He put the list into his pocket and returned the file to the drawer with his new page of notes as its only contents.

+++

Despite his airy assurance to Sergeant Weekes that he would look into the matter of Stephen Dickinson himself, it took the inspector some time to persuade the Assistant Commissioner who ruled his days to allow him to leave his regular work in order that he might follow an investigation of his own. But Mallett was a man who had earned the confidence of his superiors and when he had asked for an indulgence in the past it had usually been justified by the event. So it was that on this occasion he found himself free to devote at least the afternoon to an inquiry on his own lines, and thereafter, if it seemed likely to bear fruit, to pursue the matter to a conclusion.

Nothing ever pleased him more than the prospect of working on his own. He came back from seeing the Assistant Commissioner with a broad smile on his face. Sergeant Weekes, whom he encountered on the way, saw in his expression merely another triumph for the tablets.

“They’ve done the trick, I see,” he said.

“Eh?” answered Mallett, absent-mindedly.

“That indigestion of yours---it’s gone?”

“Indigestion? Oh, yes, I’d quite forgotten. I had a twinge of something, didn’t I? Yes, thanks, it’s all right now. I suppose it’s because I’ve been too busy to think about it. Well, I must hurry now, I want to get out to my lunch.”

There was, the sergeant reflected gloomily, no such thing as gratitude in the world.

55  Our Library / Cyril Hare - Suicide Excepted (1939) / 17: Mr. Dedman Speaks His Mind on: March 13, 2024, 06:49:33 am
Wednesday, August 30th

THINGS were moving in the office of Jelks, Jelks, Dedman and Jelks. Clerks came and went with an air of busy purposefulness, even on routine matters. Typewriters clicked and jangled at a speedier tempo. Office gossip was a thing of hurried half-sentences instead of long, delicious confidences. For Dedman, the mainspring of the firm, had returned to work, keyed up to a higher pitch of efficiency by his holiday, and was gathering into his capable hands all the strings that had been allowed to fall slack and tangled in his absence.

By midday he had already cleared away the mass of arrears which had accumulated on his desk and had, in addition, put straight half a dozen minor matters which the junior Jelks, now on his holiday, had left in a state of happy confusion. As the clock struck twelve he finished dictating a letter, nodded dismissal to the typist and pressed the bell on his desk.

To the clerk who answered it he said, “Is Mr. Dickinson here yet?”

“Just arrived, Mr. Dedman. Miss Dickinson is with him, and another gentleman---Mr. Johnson, I think it is.”

“Humph! I only wanted to see Mr. Dickinson. You’d better show them all in, though.”

Stephen, Anne, and Martin, ushered into the presence, found themselves confronted by a short, compact man of early middle age, with a pugnacious jaw and a round head covered with close-cropped black hair. He acknowledged their appearance with an awkward bow, plumped back into his chair and plunged immediately into business.

“Unusual, I know, for a solicitor to summon his client in this way,” he began, addressing Stephen. “For that matter, you’re not my client. Your father’s estate is. But you are one of the executors, and I want to get to the bottom of this. While I’ve been away things have been allowed to slide.”

“On the contrary,” said Stephen stiffly. “We have all been doing a very considerable amount of work.”

“The position now is,” went on Mr. Dedman, disregarding the interruption, “you have just four days in which to accept or refuse the Insurance Company’s offer. Actually, the time expires on Sunday. Mr. Jelks overlooked that fact when he made the arrangement. Sunday being a dies non, I have claimed that it should be extended to the close of business hours on Monday. I have put that to the Company and made them agree it. After Monday it will be a case of suing on the policy if you’re going to get anything. Well?”

“Of course we don’t accept,” said Stephen.

“Very good. What’s your case?”

“What it always has been. That Father was murdered.”

“Precisely. Who by?”

“Perhaps,” said Stephen, “I had better explain what we have been doing.”

“Perhaps you had.”

“In the first place, I obtained a report from an inquiry agent----”

“Have you brought it with you?”

“Yes.”

Stephen handed it across the desk into Mr. Dedman’s strong, hairy hands. It seemed to take him rather less than a minute to read it. When he had done so, he leaned back in his chair, nodded thoughtfully and said, “I presume that you have treated all the people mentioned in this as possible suspects?”

“Yes.”

“Have you found any reason to connect any one of them with this alleged crime?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Which?”

“Parsons.”

“Tell me.”

Stephen handed it across the desk into Mr. Dedman’s and, with some assistance from Martin, went through with it to the end. Mr. Dedman heard him out without interruption. Towards the end of the recital he closed his eyes, but the impatient drumming of his fingers on the desk proved that he was far from being asleep. When Stephen had finished, he opened his eyes again, and said, “Is that all?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Dedman made no further observation for a full half-minute. Then he picked up Elderson’s report again, glanced at it and said:

“These other people here---have you any suspicions against any of them?”

“Some of them, yes.”

“Which?”

“To begin with, Mr. Carstairs and his wife. Mrs. Carstairs and her husband, I should say, because she is the one that counts. Actually, he is a parson, though he hasn’t a parish.” He described his experiences at Brighton and went on: “They are not too well off, I should say, and she works as secretary to a charitable concern called the Society for the Relief of Distress amongst the Widows of Professional Men. Now it’s an odd coincidence, but that Society happens to be the one----”

“The one that your Uncle Arthur’s money goes to on your father’s death. I know the terms of the will---naturally. Well?”

“Well,” Stephen went on. It was somehow difficult to put very much conviction into his theory under Mr. Dedman’s cold gaze. “Well, it’s a fact that the Society is, or was, rather, in very low water. From what I can gather, Mrs. Carstairs’ job was in great jeopardy. If she knew the terms of the will, and after all as secretary she would be almost certain to, she had the strongest possible motive to secure this very large sum of money for the Society.”

“I see. Which are your other suspects?”

“The Howard-Blenkinsops. This is really a rather extraordinary story, and rather---rather an unpleasant one. To begin with, their name isn’t Howard-Blenkinsop at all, but March. A Mrs. March and her son.”

“Is that the Frances March to whom your father paid a weekly allowance up to some twenty years ago?”

“You know about it, then?” Stephen asked in surprise.

“Certainly. All the payments were made through this office, and I came across the receipts in clearing up your father’s papers this morning. Nothing very remarkable about it. It happens to scores of our clients. Then the son mentioned here was your father’s illegitimate child?”

“No. That’s just the point. He wasn’t. That son is dead.”

“Oh? Who told you that?”

“Actually, I wasn’t told. My sister and Mr. Johnson were. Perhaps it would be more satisfactory if they gave you the whole story.”

“Perhaps it would.”

Mr. Dedman turned to the other two and, Anne remaining silent, it was Martin who related the story of the discoveries at Bentby Grange.

“I see,” said Mr. Dedman again when he had done, and made no other comment. “There are still four other names on the list. I take it that you do not consider them as probabilities?”

“No,” said Stephen. “Vanning we have dealt with already. Mallett was a detective from Scotland Yard on holiday. Davitt turned out to be a perfectly innocent stockbroker’s clerk with a passion for literature, and Mr. and Mrs. Jones—”

“Were simply a couple out on the loose.” It was Anne who spoke, for the first time since they had come into the room. “I’ve spoken to Mrs. Jones, and I know.”

Mr. Dedman looked at her in astonishment. So did Martin and Stephen. Dedman noted that her remarks seemed to be as surprising to them as they were to him, and the fact afforded him a momentary gleam of amusement.

“Very well,” he said, and turned again to Stephen. “As to Davitt, you have seen him, I suppose?”

“No. But I had a long talk with his landlady.”

“That was even better, I dare say. Few people have any secrets from their landladies. I certainly had none in my younger days. So that represents the sum of your researches, does it?”

“Yes, it does.”

“Then,” said Mr. Dedman with a smile that seemed to make his pugnacious jaw look fiercer than ever, “I have only one piece of advice to give you. Accept the company’s offer.”

It was some time before Stephen found words.

“Do you mean to say you really think----” he began.

“Accept the company’s offer!” repeated Mr. Dedman in louder tones. “And think yourselves lucky. It’s more than you deserve, anyway.”

While his visitors remained in stunned silence at the undisguised rudeness with which he spoke, Mr. Dedman pushed his chair back from the desk, clasped his hands and crossed his legs. Had any of his staff been present they would have readily interpreted the movements as signs that he was about to “let himself go.” And they would not have been wrong.

“You people,” he began, “took upon yourselves to prove that the late Mr. Dickinson was murdered. I dare say he was. Far more people are murdered every year than the average person suspects. In any case, from my knowledge of him, I should not say that he would have committed suicide---in the first year of a life policy, at any rate. He knew that much about insurance, I have no doubt. Having adopted that course, you have gone about it in a way that I can only truthfully describe as imbecile. Your object was, or should have been, to collect evidence, evidence, that would convince a Court of law that the probability of his having been murdered was substantially higher than the probability of his having died by his own hand. By what you have done, and by what you have failed to do, you have made it virtually impossible to do anything of the kind.”

He paused to take breath. Martin opened his mouth to say something but Mr. Dedman forestalled him.

“I gather from what you have told me,” he went on, “that you have come to the conclusion that Parsons in all probability poisoned Mr. Dickinson by mistake in an attempt to rid himself of a blackmailer whom we have agreed to call Vanning. I dare say you are right. Speaking between these four walls, as an ordinary individual, I consider it quite possible that he did kill your father, in the way that you have suggested. But what have you done? You took no advice---you made no inquiries---you simply walked in on this wretched Parsons creature and killed him. And with him you killed whatever chance you ever had of proving your case. Do you imagine that it will be possible now to prove that Vanning ever had a penny from him---the very first step in your case? Of course, as the result of his death, all Parsons’ defalcations will come out---quite a sufficient motive for suicide without adding blackmail and murder to it. Can you visualize what sort of case you’ve got left now? I can, and I’ve been in charge of all the litigation in this office for fifteen years and I know what I’m talking about. You’ll be reduced to accusing a dead man of murder. That will be bad enough---‘blackening the memory of the deceased,’ and so forth. But you’ll have to do more than that---you’ll have to accuse another man of blackmail, a man very much alive and able to defend himself, without a shred of evidence to support you. You’ll simply be laughed out of Court, if you ever get there---which you won’t, so long as I’m solicitor to the estate. With Parsons alive, with a charge of embezzlement pending against him, it might have been possible to do something. Very carefully handled, I can visualize negotiations with the Company coming to a successful conclusion. As it is---the thing is a wash-out.”

He slapped his hand on the desk to emphasize his words.

“Then, the Carstairs. Your theory there, I gather, is that this parson and his wife, or the wife without the parson, encountering Mr. Dickinson accidentally in this hotel, seized the opportunity to murder him for the good of this charity and more particularly of its secretary. Well, I’ll make you a present of this---the S.R.D.W.P.M. is not one of the charities that solicitors of good standing care to advise their clients to remember in their wills. What your uncle Arthur’s motives were, I don’t know. His will was not drawn up in this office. I had occasion to look at the Society’s accounts some time ago, and I didn’t like them. I estimated that approximately thirty per cent of the money contributed by the public reaches the widows of professional men. The rest goes into the pockets of the whole-time salaried organizers---people like Mrs. Carstairs. But because the woman’s a parasite on public benevolence, does that prove that she’s a murderess? Of course the Society was hard up. That sort of concern always is. Of course the falling in of the reversion was a very useful windfall. But so far, all you’ve got is the word of Mr. Carstairs---of all people!---to support your extraordinary theory. And has it occurred to you that if this so-called charity was really in such desperate straits, they could have sold the reversion to the bequest, not for the whole amount, of course, but for a good round sum? A much safer method of raising the wind than murder, I can assure you. The whole idea is simply too preposterous for words.

“But what I simply cannot forgive you,” Mr. Dedman proceeded with unabated vigour, “is the way you have handled the March business. Here you’ve got the almost ideal suspect. A discarded mistress, with a fortune in prospect! And has it occurred to you also that she was the only person in the hotel who would have been in the least likely to penetrate into your father’s room with his knowledge and consent?”

“But,” Martin protested. “She didn’t even know who Mr. Dickinson was until after he was dead!”

“So she told her employer. Or rather, so her employer told you she had told her. And on that third-hand evidence you believed it! Well, it may have been so. I’m not suggesting that it isn’t possible. I’m looking at the possibility of using facts to persuade the Insurance Company to cough up the policy moneys. If you had gone to them and said: ‘You are proposing to rely on suicide as a defence to this action. We can prove the presence in this hotel of a woman with the opportunity of murdering the deceased, and an overwhelming motive for doing so. Now what about it?’ If you had said that---I think they would have been ready to discuss matters with you.”

“But we can still say that to the insurance people,” Stephen put in.

Anne said: “But Mr. Dedman, I believe what Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop told me. You don’t want us to accuse an innocent person, do you?”

The solicitor disregarded Anne, and answered Stephen.

“Of course you can,” he said. “But do you think they are going to listen to you after next Monday? And don’t forget, after the time limit for taking their offer has expired, you’ll have nothing to fall back on. It’ll be all or nothing then, with tremendously heavy litigation in front of you.”

“I can approach the insurance people tomorrow,” Stephen objected. “Today, for that matter.”

“Do, by all means, and see what sort of answer you get. They will say: ‘Indeed? And who was this Mrs. March? We have a list of people staying in the hotel and her name doesn’t appear there.’ What’s your answer? ‘Well, it must have been Mrs. March, because Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop told me so.’ ‘Quite so,’ they’ll say. ‘And how can you produce Mrs. March?’ And you’ll be reduced to saying: ‘As a matter of fact, Mrs. March isn’t here. I don’t know where she is, but I believe she’s abroad.’ Then the Insurance Company will look down its collective nose and inform you that it doesn’t believe a word you are saying and the offer remains open till Monday, good morning. Well, you can take the risk if you like, but if you do, you do it against my advice, that’s all.

“Incidentally,” he added, by way of afterthought, “have you troubled to test in any way the truth of the assertion that Mrs. March’s eldest son is dead? No? I thought not. For all you know this rather remarkable cook may have invented his death as an excuse for getting a couple of day’s holiday out of her employer. He may be alive still. He might have been one of the waiters at Pendlebury Old Hall. He might---oh, well, there it is,” he concluded pettishly. “I’m afraid, taking it altogether, I can’t congratulate you on your efforts at detection. And my advice remains as I have stated.”

Mr. Dedman completed his tirade, handed Elderson’s report back across the desk to Stephen and at the same instant made it clear in some indefinable but unmistakable way that he had lost all interest in the subject. So much so that when a moment later they rose to go he sounded genuinely surprised to see them there at all. It was Anne who led the retreat. Stephen seemed capable of sitting sulkily in his chair forever, and Martin was always unable to take a hint.

“Thank you so much, Mr. Dedman, for taking such trouble about our affairs,” she said in a voice of apparently sincere gratitude. “You have put everything very clearly. We will let you know what we want done in good time.”

She went out of the room, the men following meekly in her trail. Mr. Dedman gave her his jerky little bow as she went. Before she was out of the office he was dictating like mad. The letter was on a totally different subject. A fresh point had occurred to him while Stephen had been talking about Parsons. The ability to think of two things at once was what had made it possible for Dedman to get through approximately twenty-four hours of work in a normal day. It had never occurred to him to wonder why he was not popular in the office. Even he could not think of three things at once.

56  Our Library / Cyril Hare - Suicide Excepted (1939) / 16: Parbury Gardens on: March 13, 2024, 06:23:59 am
Tuesday, August 29th

ON the second day of the absence of her brother and fiancé at Midchester, Anne could stand inaction no longer. Waiting for the men to come in was all very well, but waiting prolonged over two days was too much of a good thing, particularly when the strain of waiting was aggravated by the presence of an obstinate something at the back of her mind, which refused to be exorcised. At first that something had seemed like a tiny grain of solid matter lodged somewhere in the cogs of a well-oiled machine, giving no evidence of its existence except now and then, when there would be a faint jar in the process of her thought. She could ignore it by turning her thoughts elsewhere, by letting that part of the machine lie idle. But now it had taken on a different aspect. She pictured it no longer as an inert obstruction in her smoothly working brain, but as a living, malignant growth, sending out its ramifications in every direction, proliferating, breaking down the resistances she had built against it. . . .

She went out on the Heath and walked about until she was tired. For the first time, she envied all the people who had dogs with them---quarrelsome, excitable dogs, disobedient, runaway dogs, dogs that were embarrassingly friendly with the dogs of other people, dogs that were incessantly requiring balls or sticks to be thrown for them---each one of them something that had to be called, to be whistled to, cursed, put on the lead, dragged away from somebody or something, or at least continually watched over and thought about. For the first and only time she yearned for a Scottie, six months old, guaranteed through distemper. There was, as Martin had said, something about a dog you didn’t get anywhere else.

After lunch, her restlessness persisted. She went out again, and, too tired for any more walking, got on a bus. Any bus, she told herself, would have done. Since the particular one she was on had happened to come past, there was, after all, no reason why she should have taken it. But the fact remained that she had let two go by before she finally mounted this one.

The bus rattled her down the hill, down into the sticky heat of London. She bought a sixpenny ticket---there was no point in not having a long outing while she was about it. She might have tea somewhere, or go to a flick, or look up Ruth Downing, only she would be sure to be still away. And when the bus drew up at the fare stage opposite the corner of Parbury Gardens, she told herself that she was genuinely surprised to find herself there.

She alighted and crossed the road. After all, why not? There was nothing in the least disloyal in what she was doing. She was simply checking up. It was an obvious precaution. Martin would quite understand. In fact, she meant to tell him all about it when she got home. He would probably be rather amused. None the less, though she told herself all this, she felt her knees tremble ever so slightly as she walked up to the ugly brick block of flats.

What was so particularly absurd, as she admitted in her own mind, was that she had not really any idea what she expected to find. But this circumstance did not make her relief any the less genuine when, opposite number 15, she found in the narrow vestibule the name of Mrs. Elizabeth Peabody, precisely as Martin had said. With a lighter heart and a growing sense that she had been making herself ridiculous, she walked on to No. 34. There, sure enough, was Mr. T. P. M. Jones, and the sensation of reassurance at once deepened. She walked out into the sunlight, feeling that it was hardly worth while attempting to verify the fact that Mrs. Peabody was blind, or that Mr. Jones wore a beard.

Instead of walking away at once, however, she took a turn round the square of which Parbury Gardens formed one side. Under the plane-trees shading the little green patch in the middle of the square was a perambulator. In the perambulator, presumably was a baby, and beside it a cross-eyed nurse squatted on a stool and knitted. Anne paused in her walk and watched them vacantly. The baby belonged to one of the flats, she mused. Surprising that they hadn’t sent it to the seaside at this time of the year. Perhaps they couldn’t afford to. Curious, you’d have thought they were well enough off, though---it looked a fairly expensive kind of pram. Hire purchase, very likely. . . . All the same, if it was mine, I’d have found a way to . . . But that nurse! Surely it can’t be good for a child to be looked after by any one with a squint as bad as that? I should be terrified of the baby picking it up. Of course, very likely the real nurse is on holiday and this one is only a temporary. . . .

She dragged herself away and resumed her walk. This won’t do, my girl, she said to herself. You’re a deal too scatter-brained, that’s what’s the matter with you. You didn’t come down here to moon over babies but to investigate something. Think, girl, think! And I’m going to keep you walking round this blasted square until you’ve something to show for it!

Fifteen, Parbury Gardens, Anne repeated to herself as her feet dragged slowly along the pavement. Fifteen, Parbury Gardens. That was the address the Joneses gave at the hotel, and the Joneses weren’t Joneses at all, but a couple out on the loose. So Martin said. Several times. And when you’re a couple out on the loose, you don’t put your real name and address in the book. Martin says so, and Martin knows. I suppose if I had spent the night at Bentby with Martin we’d have put . . . I wonder what sort of name and address we’d have put?

Her incorrigible mind wandered away into other paths for a moment until conscience, striding after, pulled it back with a jerk. You’re as bad as those dogs on the Heath, conscience told mind severely. Meekly, mind took up the trail again, as Anne completed her first circuit of the square.

But if you have to put down a sham address on the spur of the moment, what you put down has probably some association with you. Martin said so. No, he didn’t. I said so, and Martin just looked glum and pretended to be stupid, because he knew all about the technique of sham addresses. But he didn’t contradict, anyway. If you invented an address that didn’t exist, it might be different, though even then there would probably be some unconscious---subconscious? I never can remember the difference---some association, anyhow, which directed your mind in making that particular invention. But where you chose a real address, one that was sham only in the sense that it wasn’t yours, the odds were that you had some reason for your choice.

And that’s as far as I got three days ago, talking to Martin. And now that I am in Parbury Gardens, where do we go from here? Fifteen, Parbury Gardens means something. It’s a kind of code which we haven’t got the key to. And the key was in the mind of the Joneses, or one of them, when they wrote down those words in the book at Pendlebury Old Hall. Wait a bit. Try and picture them standing there, with the book open in front of them, and the reception clerk staring at them in that vacant superior way they always do. . . . Damn difficult to picture anyone when you don’t know what their faces are like. But there is a picture all the same, an impression anyway. Now why?

Of course! Anne stopped suddenly in her stride as she came abreast of the cross-eyed nurse for the second time. Elderson’s report said distinctly that the girl was giggling while the register was being signed. That was it! The address was a joke, then. Ha, Ha! Let’s have a good laugh, even if we can’t see it just yet. Fifteen, very funny. Parbury, an absolute scream. Gardens, we all roared! It’s enough to make you drop a stitch, isn’t it, nurse?

Anne’s mind went once more to the Black Swan at Bentby, and this time conscience made no move. She tried to imagine herself in the smelly little hall there, standing behind Martin and sniggering at the name and address he was writing. The effort made her nearly sick, but she persisted. What sort of address could have made her snigger, if she had been the sniggering kind? Obviously, there was no joke in something that didn’t mean anything to you at all. If you enjoyed cheap jokes---and ex hypothesi you did---there were two possible ones that might appeal to you. First, you put down somebody else’s address, because to your dirty mind it seemed exquisitely funny that that particular person, in all probability the pink of respectability, should be in some way connected all unconsciously with your furtive goings on. Or alternatively, in a spirit of bravado you chose one that was near your own, and got a sort of kick out of the quite imaginary risk you were running. That seemed sound psychology, anyhow.

We are getting on, Anne thought, as she came round to her starting point for the third time. Now let’s see how it works out. (a) The joke was that they knew blind Mrs. Peabody, and thought it was a real stroke of wit to put her flat, of all places, in a hotel register. If that’s the right answer, I’m sunk. I simply can’t face the prospect of rummaging into Mrs. Peabody’s private life and trying to find out which of her acquaintances might possibly play a trick like that on her. (b) The joke was that the address was as near as possible the true one. Fifteen---Parbury---Gardens. Three ingredients. And to make a really good joke of it, two of them should be genuine and one only false. So you get---Fifteen, Parbury Place, or Terrace, or Street, or whatever it may be. Or Fifteen, Something-or-other Gardens, or finally, Umpteen, Parbury Gardens.

She pondered the alternatives gravely. Between three such crass imbecilities, which to choose? On due consideration, she struck out the second. To start with, among all the scores of “gardens” in London, it would obviously be hopeless to try to find the right one. In the second place, the name of the gardens was the really essential part of the address. Change that, and you change its identity. And with the identity, the whole feeble joke disappeared. Surely the most cretinous nit-wit could not possibly have thought it funny, or risky, to say, Fifteen, Parbury Gardens, when the real address was Fifteen, Daylesford Gardens, for instance! Remained the other two possibilities. More from laziness than from any rational motive, she preferred the theory of Fifteen, Parbury Something. There could not be more than a limited number of streets in London called after Parbury, whoever he or it might be, and there were, she had noticed, one hundred and ten flats in the gardens. Following the line of least resistance, therefore, instead of completing her third circuit of the square, she turned down a side street to where she had noticed the post office.

The lady behind the grill seemed deeply incensed when Anne asked if she could see a Directory. Such things, apparently, were unknown in post offices. From her expression it might be gathered that it was more than a little indelicate to mention them. She did, however, go so far as to admit that improprieties of this nature could be seen in the local public library; and when Anne asked where that was to be found, she ejaculated: “Turn-to-y’r-right-at-bottom-of-th’-street-’n-’s-on-y’r-left,” with a speed that showed how often she must have given the direction to other seekers after the forbidden fruit.

Five minutes later, Anne was in the public library with the directory open before her. It did not need more than a glance to explode her theory. Parbury Gardens was positively the only Parbury in London, the county suburbs included. There was, it was true, one other thoroughfare with a name that closely resembled it, Parberry Street. But Parberry Street, after inspection, proved to be in the Isle of Dogs, and she felt quite positive in her mind that wherever the Joneses came from, it was not the Isle of Dogs. So that was that! It really simplifies matters a lot, she thought, exhaustion making her positively lightheaded. The answer is simply Something, Parbury Gardens. Somewhere in those flats lives or has lived Mr. M. Jones---or Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Jones, I think. So-called. I don’t know why, but I’m sure the address he chose to fake was hers and not his. Positive. Woman’s instinct and all that. And only a hundred and ten numbers to choose from. Hooray!

She set herself to read, slowly and methodically, the names of all the inhabitants of the flats as recorded in the Directory. Not one of them conveyed anything to her whatever, and there was not the smallest reason to suppose that any of them would. None the less, she ploughed grimly on, and had almost come to the end, to No. 87, to be precise, when a round-shouldered, spectacled young man approached her and said mournfully, “The library is closing now, Madame.”

Anne abandoned the book and hurried out into the sun again. She was astonished to see by the clock in the post office window that it was already six o’clock. She must have been very much longer in the library than she had imagined. She had had no tea, and was ready to drop from fatigue. All the same, her legs carried her back, seemingly of their own accord, back to Parbury Gardens, there to take up again her circumambulation of the square with the persistence and much about the enthusiasm of a convict in the exercise ground of a prison.

Fifteen, her thoughts ran. We’ve got down to that now, simply the bare numeral. Why choose fifteen, of all the numbers going? Because the proper number was five? Or twenty-five? Or for that matter, any sort of five, up to a hundred and five? Pity they didn’t go up to a hundred and fifteen. That would have been a sure guess. Think of a number and double it. That gave you thirty. She shook her head, gravely. Somehow she did not fancy thirty. Of course, there were lots of things you could do with numbers. Add, subtract, divide, transpose. . . . Transpose. Transpose! She stood still, staring across the railings at the spot where the perambulator had been and was no longer, while a wholly irrational feeling of certainty flooded in upon her. In that moment, she was convinced that she had solved the problem of the Joneses’ address in the register at Pendlebury.

Invisible trumpeters blew a triumphal march before her as she walked over to the entrance from which access was gained to number Fifty-one. Their music flagged a little when she realized that it was the top flat of all and that there was no lift. It had ceased altogether long before she had dragged herself up the long flight of stairs. The name, she had noticed before beginning her climb, was Miss Frances Fothergill. It was repeated on a rather dingy visiting card on the flat door itself. The door itself had a slightly rakish air, with its pale green paint that must have once been jaunty and was beginning to flake off where hearty Bohemian boots had kicked it. Just below the card was the knob of a bell. A decidedly violent bell. The kind that rings just inside the door and makes enough noise to wake the dead. Anne rang it three times before she gave it up.

It seemed almost more exhausting climbing down the stairs than it had been going up. It was like that in the Alps, she remembered, seeing again an endless zigzag path winding down through the woods from the hut to the valley below. She reached the ground floor at last and came out into the open air, her eyes momentarily dazzled by the sunlight. As she did so, she was aware of a strong scent of frangi-pani, a blurred vision of lipstick and silver fox, and a high-pitched voice saying: “Oo! Excuse me! But it’s Miss Dickinson, isn’t it?”

Anne prided herself on her memory for faces, but she had to blink two or three times before she recognized her. Then something familiar in the tilt of her nose and her odd, angular smile enabled her to place her. Miss Fothergill---and though Anne had never heard her name, she was quite certain she was Miss Fothergill---was the assistant who had more than once sold shoes to her in one of the big shops. It was not surprising that recognition was difficult, for dressed for the street and with her full war-paint on, this glamorous creature was altogether different from the quiet young woman whom she remembered flitting about the shoe department of Peter Harker’s.

“Oo, Miss Dickinson! It’s quite a surprise seeing you here, it reely is!” Miss Fothergill was saying.

“Yes,” said Anne faintly. “I was looking for a friend, but she doesn’t seem to be in.”

“It is always like that, isn’t it, when you’ve come a long way? So provoking, I always think. But won’t you come up to my place and have a cup of tea?”

“No, thank you very much.”

“Oo, but do, Miss Dickinson. You’ll excuse me saying so, but you look quite done up, you do reely. It’ll be no trouble at all to me, honest it won’t. I always have a cup meself when I come home. It does pull you together ever so. I’ve got the kettle and all ready and waiting on the ring. Do come up just a minute, Miss Dickinson, it’ll do you good.”

Anne did not feel equal to resisting. She allowed herself to be led once more up the stairs (with many apologies for their length and steepness) and through the battered green door into the flat beyond.

“I’m afraid it is in rather a pickle,” said Miss Fothergill with a giggle, as Anne sank gratefully on to the shabby divan which almost filled the untidy little room. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and get the tea. I won’t be half a jiffy. Do put your feet up, Miss Dickinson, if you’re feeling tired. And I expect you’d like to take your shoes off a bit,” she added with a professional glance at Anne’s footwear.

She disappeared into the kitchenette beyond and presently came back with a tray.

“I reely must apologize for the service,” she giggled. “But I never seem to be able to get them matched up somehow. You know how it is when a cup gets broken and you’ve only just time to pop round to Woolworth’s. Do you take sugar, Miss Dickinson?”

Anne gulped her tea gratefully. It was not Peter Harker’s best brand by a long way, but it was warm and invigorating. She refused the solitary slice of cake which Miss Fothergill pressed upon her.

“Oo, but do, Miss Dickinson,” she persisted. “I don’t want it meself, honest I don’t. I never eat anything with my tea. And it’s lucky to take the last bit, they always say, don’t they? I know a girl friend of mine told me before she was married she was sure it was all along of her---not that you need bother about that sort of luck now, need you, Miss Dickinson? Oo, perhaps I didn’t ought to have said that?”

“That’s quite all right,” Anne reassured her. “I expect it will be announced any time now.”

“I’m sure I hope you’ll be ever so happy. I’m sure you ought to be. You know one gets quite interested, if you know what I mean, when any of our customers get married. Any of our regulars, I mean. And of course, we’ve seen Mr. Johnson in with you lots of times. He’s ever so nice, I think.”

“Thank you,” said Anne. “And now I think I must be going. It was really kind of you to give me tea.”

“You’re welcome, I’m sure, Miss Dickinson. I dare say we shall be seeing you round our place again soon? There’s some lovely new autumn styles we’ve just got in, you would like them, reely you would. Well, goodbye, Miss Dickinson.”

“Goodbye.”

+++

Throwing economy to the winds for once, Anne went home by taxi. In spite of Miss Fothergill’s tea she felt more tired than ever, but it was the exhaustion of the mind rather than of the body. She leaned back in her seat and tried not to think, but found that she might as well have tried to prevent the taximeter ticking up the fare. But unlike the figures on the meter, her thoughts remained obstinately unprogressive. I’ve got no proof, she kept saying to herself, no proof about the matter at all. All this juggling with figures seemed very clever at the time, but meeting that girl there may have been just coincidence. May have been---if only I didn’t know in my bones that it wasn’t!

I liked her, too, she reflected. I can’t imagine why, but I positively liked her. She was vulgar and overdressed but she obviously had a kind nature. She “took to me,” as she would say. Damn you, Miss Fothergill, why can’t I hate you as I should? And where am I going to go for my shoes after this?

And all the time, at the very back of her mind, remained another thought altogether, so very much more disturbing that she preferred not to examine it at all.

57  Our Library / Cyril Hare - Suicide Excepted (1939) / 15: “Something Attempted, Something Done” on: March 12, 2024, 11:13:54 am
Tuesday, August 29th

“ARE we all set?” said Martin.

Stephen said nothing, but nodded. His face was pale, his lips drawn in a thin, straight line. Martin, on the other hand, seemed no more than pleasantly excited. He chatted happily as they left the hotel and walked the short distance that separated them from Westgate Street.

“I think with a chap like this we can afford to do a bit of bluffing, don’t you?” he said.

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“I mean, in the state he’s in already, he’ll probably cave in all at once as soon as he sees that we know something.”

“Perhaps he will.”

“Do you think we could get him to write a confession? That’d floor the insurance blighters absolutely, wouldn’t it?”

“It certainly would.”

“Well, do you think he’s the sort of chap who would make a confession?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mind you, Steve, I shall leave all the talking to you. You’re a lot cleverer at that sort of thing than I am. I shall just sit around and weigh in where I think you want any support, and so forth, but by and large I shall leave all the talking to you.”

“Then for God’s sake stop talking now, and let me think in peace for a moment!” Stephen exclaimed, stung to sudden fury.

Martin apologized as amiably as ever, and contented himself with whistling loudly to himself, until Stephen was compelled to ask him to stop.

“I’m sorry,” said Martin once more. “You see, the fact is, Steve, that I’m just as worried and excited about this show as you are, really, only it takes me differently. You go all sick inside, and pale outside, and I feel frightfully pepped up and go about feeling like one of those fellows in the advertisements. You know, the chaps who take whatever it is every morning.”

“Yes, I do know. I read the papers too, as it happens.”

And from then on Stephen gave up the attempt to silence him and let him express his excitement in his own way.

At the office Stephen asked for Mr. Parsons.

“Have you got an appointment, sir?” asked the clerk who received them.

“Yes.”

After much discussion, Stephen and Martin had decided that it would be safer to telephone and make an appointment. The nominal excuse for their visit was “a matter arising out of the meeting last night,” and this had proved sufficient to procure them an interview.

They were taken through a vast hall, loud with the clatter of typewriters, into a small waiting-room, and here, after a short delay, Mr. Parsons joined them. In the light of day his face did not look nearly so ghastly as it had done under the crude glare of the lamps in the Conservative Club, and he seemed comparatively self-possessed.

“Good morning, gentlemen!” he began. “I understand that you wanted to see me?”

“Yes,” said Stephen. His face was almost as pale as Mr. Parsons’, and he seemed in some difficulty in finding words to open the conversation. “Er---I don’t think you know my name,” he went on. “My name is Dickinson---Stephen Dickinson.”

“Yes?” Mr. Parsons smiled politely. If the name conveyed anything whatever to him, he was an uncommonly good actor.

“My friend and I wanted to ask you . . .” Stephen lost track of his sentence and stopped. Out of the tail of his eye he could see Martin drawing breath to speak, and he plunged on hastily: “I think, Mr. Parsons, you know the Pendlebury Old Hall Hotel?”

Mr. Parsons raised his eyebrows.

“Pendlebury Old Hall?” he said, in a voice that was perhaps a semitone higher than was usual for him. “Why, yes, certainly. I have stayed there.”

“That’s just the point,” said Martin loudly and unexpectedly.

Mr. Parsons spun round and looked at him in a somewhat startled manner, and indeed, Martin’s abrupt incursion into the conversation was enough to make any one jump.

“Really----” he began, but Stephen did not give him time to go on.

“As my friend says,” he proceeded smoothly, “we are interested in the circumstances of your recent stay at Pendlebury. We are making inquiries----”

“One moment!” Mr. Parsons held up a hand which Stephen observed was now perfectly steady. “You tell me you are ‘making inquiries.’ Please let me ask you before you go any further, whether from that rather official phrasing I am to take it you are connected with the police?”

Martin was about to say something, but once more Stephen forestalled him.

“No,” he said. “We are making private inquiries on behalf of---of an interested party.”

Mr. Parsons smiled. There could be no doubt of it; he positively smiled!

“Then you may take it that I am not an interested party in your private inquiries into my private affairs,” he said, and while he was speaking he pressed a bell.

Almost at once, a commissionaire opened the door of the room.

“Will you show these gentlemen out, please, Robertson?” said Mr. Parsons.

“But look here!” cried Martin. “How----”

“This way, gentlemen, if you please!” said the commissionaire. He was a very large commissionaire.

+++

If Stephen had complained of Martin’s talkativeness on the way from the Grand Hotel to Central Buildings, he would have given anything for him to have said something on the way back from Central Buildings to the Grand Hotel. As for uttering a word himself, it was out of the question. But Martin did not come to his aid. They trailed back through the loathly streets of Midchester in the silence of the utterly defeated, and though in the course of the morning some words of a sort did contrive to pass between them, it looked as if they were going to return the whole way to London without once mentioning the topic of Mr. Parsons.

It was lunch that restored them to comparative normality. Restored Martin, at all events, to the point that he was suddenly enabled to discuss the whole incident with philosophic detachment.

“Y’know, Steve,” he began abruptly, “it just shows how one can be mistaken about a chap. If ever I saw anybody who looked really beardable it was that one. And then . . .”

Stephen said nothing.

“Of course, I dare say it was a mistake trying it on in his office. My fault, I know and all that, but I didn’t fancy Chorlby Moor somehow. All the same, there aren’t any commissionaires in the suburbs.”

Stephen still remained silent, and the monologue continued:

“Not but what I dare say he’d have been a pretty tough nut anywhere. That is, if there was ever anything to the whole business. . . . It’s funny to think we never even got round to mentioning Vanning’s name to him, when you come to think of it.”

“Wouldn’t have made any difference,” Stephen muttered.

“P’raps not. Tell you what, though. If we’d bluffed a bit and said we were policemen when he asked us---I wanted to, you know----”

“I know you did. And if we had, he’d have had us both arrested straight away.”

“Good Lord, d’you think so? Well, we’re well out of that, anyhow. All the same, it’s pretty sickening to think we’ve been all this way and taken all this trouble and then got absolutely nothing to show for it. . . .”

His voice trailed away. Clearly there was no more to be said.

To add to their miseries, when about twenty miles short of London the car choked, spluttered, recovered itself, spluttered again, and finally stopped. Stephen, who knew nothing whatever about the insides of motor-cars, sat patiently inside while Martin did mysterious things to the engine with an adjustable spanner. It was quite a simple job, he explained, simply the old carburettor playing up again. He wouldn’t be half a jiffy. He knew the old bus’s tricks backwards.

In the end it took him nearly an hour and a half, and thereafter for the rest of the way their speed was reduced to a precarious fifteen miles an hour. It seemed to be the last touch necessary to make their failure complete. They had aimed at reaching home in time for tea, but it was nearly seven before they entered Hampstead High Street. Just before the turning to Plane Street, Martin pulled up with a jerk. Stephen, who had been dozing, opened his eyes and said irritably:

“What’s the matter now?”

“Look!” said Martin, and pointed across the street.

Opposite, some newspaper-sellers had their pitch. It was a day of little news, as was evidenced by the fact that each placard bore a totally different legend. The first that Stephen noticed ran:

    LIBYA TROOP
    MOVEMENT
    RUMOURS DENIED

Next to it was:

    TWO GASSED
    IN
    SWANAGE
    LOVE-NEST

Then a little farther down the street, in huge letters of black on yellow, he read:

    MIDLANDS
    GAS MANAGER
    FOUND DEAD

Before Stephen had properly taken it in, Martin was out of the car and dodging among the omnibuses across the road.

He was back, waving a paper, long before the shops and houses had ceased to be a confused blur before Stephen’s eyes. He climbed into the car, his face pink with excitement, threw the paper across to Stephen, shut the door, and engaged the gear.

“It’s him all right,” he said in a hushed voice, as if he were speaking in the very presence of the dead.

Stephen found voice to say: “Did he use Medinal, by any chance?”

“No. Shot himself. In the office.”

“Oh!”

Shortly before they reached Mrs. Dickinson’s door, Martin, looking straight in front of him, murmured, “Just as well we didn’t give our names at the office, Steve.”

“Yes.”

“Funny I was complaining just now that we hadn’t done anything on the trip.”

“M’m.”

At the house, Stephen got out and Martin remained in the car.

“Think I’ll go straight home and turn in early,” he said, apparently to the mascot on the radiator cap. “Feel a bit tired. Will you explain to Annie?”

“Right,” said Stephen, looking at his boots. “Good night. Oh, and thanks for driving me up and all that.”

“That’s all right,” answered Martin without shifting his gaze. “Good night.”

In the hall, Stephen looked at the newspaper for the first time. He was still there when his mother came out of the drawing-room to greet him.

“Well, Stephen, what sort of day have you had?” she asked him.

He did not answer. He was reading:

“The deceased leaves a wife and three children. Interviewed today in the pretty drawing-room of her Chorlby Moor home, Mrs. Parsons told our representative . . .”

“What’s the matter, Stephen? You look quite pale.”

“Oh, I’m all right, Mother. A bit tired, that’s all. It’s been rather an exhausting day. Do you think there’s any brandy in the house?”

58  Our Library / Cyril Hare - Suicide Excepted (1939) / 14: Monday at Midchester on: March 12, 2024, 10:47:08 am
Monday, August 28th

MARTIN and Stephen were having tea in the Palm Lounge of the Grand Hotel, Midchester. It was not, they agreed, a very exhilarating experience. Built in the spacious days of Queen Victoria, and redecorated in the yet more spacious days of the post-war boom, the Grand Hotel, like the rest of Midchester, had fallen on evil days. The decorations were cracked and faded, the big rooms, designed for the leisure hours of tired and prosperous business men, were an echoing emptiness. A couple of gloomy commercial travellers, evidently comparing notes on the impossibility of doing business in Midchester, were the only other occupants of the lounge.

“Rather a depressing place, don’t you think?” said Martin.

It was the third time at least that he had said the same thing or words to the same effect, since they had driven into the town that afternoon, through acres of derelict factories. Stephen this time did not trouble to reply. He was studying a local directory, and presently called for the waiter.

“Whereabouts is Chorlby Moor?” he asked him.

“About two miles south, out of town, sir,” he was told. “What you might call a suburb, sir. A tram will take you there.”

“Is that where this chap lives?” Martin asked.

“Apparently so. I can’t find any business address for him in this book.”

“We passed Chorlby Moor coming in. Just where the tramlines started. Didn’t you notice it? Rather superior little houses with gardens and garages. You know, Steve, I don’t somehow fancy bearding a chap in a suburb. They’re not inclined to be matey. Think an Englishman’s home is his castle and all that. Which,” he added solemnly, “it ought to be, of course.”

“No doubt. It’s not a very suitable article of faith for detectives, unfortunately.”

“But seriously, Steve, do you propose to go off and beard this chap?”

“I wish,” said Stephen, irritably, “that you wouldn’t use such perfectly foul expressions, or having used them, repeat them over and over again.”

Martin took off his glasses and polished them thoughtfully.

“I know I’m a lowbrow,” he observed. “All the same, I do want to know. Do you want to---do what I said?”

“I don’t know,” Stephen answered crossly.

“That’s just it. Fact is, we’ve neither of us the least notion what to do or how to set about doing it. We’ve come up to this place, which, as I said just now, is distinctly depressing, because Annie told us to, really. And now we’re here we don’t really know what to do.”

“As you’ve said once already.”

“I will say this for you, Steve, you do listen to a fellow. You always seem to spot when I say anything, even if it’s only once. Well, there we are. Short of bearding---I’m sorry, but what else can you call it?---short of that, I suppose we shall have to hang about Midchester and Chorlby Moor until we can scrape acquaintance with this Parsons person. It may take us ages. Of course, we had a great stroke of luck at Bentby yesterday, and you clicked in very quick time at Brighton, so perhaps our luck will hold, but you never can tell. Just chuck me that directory, would you?”

Stephen passed it to him.

“You won’t find anything else about Parsons in it,” he remarked. “But---I wanted to look at something else.”

Martin turned the pages over, found the entry he wanted and closed the book.

“Think I’ll go out and sniff the breeze for a bit,” he observed.

“Do,” said Stephen. “You’ll find it very enjoyable. In spite of the depression, there are two or three tanneries still working here, I fancy.”

Martin went out and Stephen was left to his own devices for nearly half an hour. He spent the time reading a guide to Midchester, published by the local Chamber of Commerce. It was two years out of date---he could well believe that they had lost heart trying to publicize that moribund town---but none the less it had some useful information. He had just come to the end of it when Martin returned, evidently highly elated about something.

“A snip, my boy, definitely a snip!” he exclaimed as soon as he entered.

“Where have you been?”

“At the Conservative Club---in Hay Street, just the other side of the Market-Place. You remember, Parsons wrote his letter to Pendlebury from there.”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“Well, I’ve found out something rather useful. He’s the secretary of the City Conservative Association.”

Nothing ever gave Stephen more pleasure than scoring off his brother-in-law elect, all the more so because the opportunity did not often arise. Nobody, however, could have divined the fact from the casual tone in which he now answered.

“Oh? Yes, I know. He’s an alderman too, or was a couple of years ago.”

Martin looked as disappointed as Stephen hoped he would.

“How did you find out?” he asked.

“It’s all in this little book here,” said Stephen indicating the guide. “Much better way of getting information, you know, Martin, than running about and calling attention to yourself by asking questions.”

“Sorry and all that,” said Martin. “But as a matter of fact, I didn’t ask any questions. Anyhow, that isn’t the real snip I meant to tell you about. The point is---there’s a meeting at the Club to-night. I found out about Parsons from the advertisement of it hanging up outside.”

“I don’t quite see where what you describe as the snip comes in,” Stephen said.

“Well, the meeting---it isn’t a meeting exactly, but a Rally---d’you think there’s much difference?---is being addressed by the Conservative candidate, and all are welcome. It occurs to me that all includes us.”

“Do you really suggest that we should go to a political meeting?”

“Well, after all, why not? It’s all in the day’s work. You went to church yesterday, didn’t you? This can’t be half as dull---in fact it might be quite amusing. Besides, I’m a Conservative myself, anyway. Everybody ought to be, I think, if he cares for his country. But that’s not the point. Don’t you see, Parsons is bound to be there, as secretary of the blooming show, and we can get a good squint at him.”

“There is something in that,” Stephen admitted. “I don’t see what good it’s going to do us looking at the fellow at a public meeting, but it will be one way of spending an evening in this God forsaken place, at all events. What time does it start?”

“Eight o’clock. It’s a foul time, I know, but I expect the chaps in these parts mostly go in for high tea. I suppose there’s quite a chance of our dropping in for a row at the meeting,” he went on hopefully. “This place must be pretty red with all the unemployment there is about.”

+++

If Martin had looked forward to grappling with embattled Bolsheviks at the Conservative Club, he was disappointed. True, Midchester was “red,” in the sense that it had returned a Labour member time out of mind, but this very fact made the majority less disposed to pay any attention to the activities of their opponents. If Sir Oswald Mosley himself had visited Midchester, he would have been greeted with not more than a few languid brickbats. The Conservative Rally proved to be a dull, decorous function. It was poorly attended, so that Stephen and Martin were able to pick seats with a good view of the platform. Evidently the good party men of the locality rated their chances of success as low as did the Socialists, and the proceedings opened with the reading of an impressive list of those who apologized for their absence. There was a sprinkling of unbelievers present, pale, shabby men in whom even the instinct of revolt had been all but extinguished by years of unemployment and what politicians have agreed to disguise beneath the polite word “malnutrition.” Quite plainly, they did not believe a word of what was being said from the platform, but they were too listless to heckle, and even an incautious reference to the Government’s work for the unemployed produced no more than a few sniggers, which were meant to be sarcastic, but sounded merely melancholy. It was difficult to understand why they should have troubled to attend a political meeting, except from sheer force of habit, so clear was it that nothing that could be said from any platform would ever raise them to hope or even credulity again.

By contrast, the men and women on the platform looked almost indecently well fed. The chairman was bald and pink and round---the eternal type of chairman all the world over. The candidate was a vigorous young man of obvious ability, who had been selected to contest this hopeless constituency on the excellent principle that reserves safe seats for those who can afford them. The others were a nondescript collection, bearing one and all the self-righteous look of those who are enduring boredom for the sake of duty. Stephen did not have to look at them long before he found the man he sought. One does not have to be an expert detective to recognize the honorary secretary at any sort of gathering.

To make sure, he said to his neighbour before the speeches began: “Is that the secretary, sitting on the chairman’s left?”

“That’s right, Mr. Parsons. And that’s the agent he’s talking to, Mr. Turner. A good sort, he is.”

“He looks ill,” Stephen remarked.

“Who, Turner?”

“No, Mr. Parsons.”

“Oh, him! Yes, he does look queer, doesn’t he? Sort of worried, he looks---has been some time. I don’t know what he’s got to worry him, considering . . .”

But at this point the chairman rose, not more than a quarter of an hour after the advertised time, and the proceedings began.

Stephen devoted most of the rest of the evening to studying Mr. Parsons. There was no doubt of his looking ill. His face was pale, as pale as those of the unemployed at the back of the hall, but it was a pallor of a different quality---the type that goes with too much work rather than with none at all. His forehead and cheeks were deeply creased and there were ugly dark patches beneath his eyes. But what was particularly striking about him was his restlessness. He seemed unable to control the movements of his hands, which were forever playing with his gold watch-chain or alternatively ruffling and smoothing his sparse grey hair, while his eyes wandered incessantly about the hall, scanning it from floor to ceiling and back again. Altogether, he appeared to be paying considerably less attention to the speeches than was becoming to the secretary of the association.

That he had his wits about him, none the less, became evident when, at the close of the candidate’s speech, and a half-hearted sputter of irrelevant questions, he was called upon by the chairman to propose a vote of thanks. This he did briefly and wittily, in the manner of an experienced public speaker. It seemed however, to one observer at least, that his mind was hardly on the task which he was accomplishing with such ease; and the instant that he sat down he resumed his former air of abstraction.

Stephen made use of the occasion to observe to his neighbour as they were preparing to go out, “Good speech, that.”

“Yes,” the man replied. “He’s not half a bad candidate.”

“I meant Mr. Parsons’ speech.”

“Oh, yes, that was good enough. But after all, it’s no wonder with all the practice he’s had. Been in politics here a long time, y’know. Well, I must be going now. Good night.”

And he took himself off, leaving Stephen’s curiosity as to Mr. Parsons’ business and position in life still unsatisfied.

Martin, meanwhile, had been following the proceedings of the meeting with every semblance of enthusiasm. He had clapped vigorously, “hear heared” loudly, and shown a face of disgust and scorn at the rare interruptions from the dissidents. When the audience dispersed, Stephen found him eagerly talking to a man at the door who was distributing forms of enrolment in the Association.

“My good Martin, what on earth----” Stephen began in disgusted tones.

“Just a minute, old chap. I’m coming,” Martin answered over his shoulder. He took two of the forms and a bundle of political pamphlets with one hand, while he warmly wrung the organizer’s hand with the other. “I say, Steve,” he went on as he rejoined his companion, “wasn’t that a grand speech? I thought he fairly gave the Socialists hell, didn’t you? Pity there wasn’t a better audience.”

“Really? I didn’t listen to it myself.”

“Great mistake,” said Martin as they made their way out into the street. “You’d have learnt something if you had; you really would. I know I did, anyway.”

“You seem to forget that we didn’t go to the meeting to learn about politics. I flatter myself that I have learnt something this evening, rather more useful than the Tory propaganda you’ve been listening to.”

“Oh, yes, of course.” Martin’s spectacles gleamed up in his direction, as if groping for enlightenment. “Did you find out much? I spotted you trying to pump the fellow on the other side of you. Rather dangerous, I thought. Chap might have been a friend of the quarry’s. Put him on his guard and all that.”

“I took very good care to do nothing of the sort,” said Stephen coldly. “In any event, one must take certain risks in an inquiry of this kind. I can’t see that offering to join the Conservative Association is going to get us any further.”

“Did you find out what sort of job Parsons has got?”

“No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t manage to get so far, but----”

“That reminds me,” Martin interrupted him. He stopped under a street lamp and held one of the papers in his hand close up to his nose.

“Damned small print,” he muttered. Then: “I’ve got it! Central Buildings, Westgate Street.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Parsons’ business address. You see, I knew they’d be bound to have the secretary’s address on the enrolment forms, or how would anyone know where to write to get enrolled? Then it was long odds that they’d put his business address, as chaps don’t care to be bothered with letters about that sort of thing in the home. At least, I was secretary of a Rugger club once and I know I didn’t. You can always sweat the office typist to do the donkey work, if you know how to manage her. So, you see, I----”

“I see. Now we might as well be going home.”

“Wait a sec. Westgate Street ought to start somewhere about here. I thought I noticed it on the way to the meeting. Might as well go and have a squint at Central Buildings, don’t you think?”

Stephen felt too humiliated to protest, and a few minutes later they found themselves opposite a tall, soot-blackened range of offices in what was evidently the business centre of the city.

“Classy-looking offices,” Martin observed. “Wonder whose they are?”

They crossed the road and read the names outside the main entrance.

“An architect, a solicitor and the local income tax extortioner,” Martin said. “All on the top floors. The rest of the palace seems to be the property of the Midchester and District Gas Company. Well, if friend Parsons is in that, he’s presumably on a fairly good thing.”

Stephen remembered the remark of his chance acquaintance at the meeting. “I don’t know what he’s got to worry about, considering . . .”

“I should think that is his job, in all probability,” he said. “And in view of his public position in the town, he’s probably fairly high up in it.”

“Humph,” said Martin as they made their way back to the hotel. “There’s something done this evening, anyway. You had a good look at him, Steve. Tell me, do you think he’s beardable, so to speak?”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Stephen, remembering Parsons’s strained and nervous manner. “We’ll sleep on it.”

But the most important discovery of the day was still to be made. They were in the lounge of the hotel, drinking a last whisky and soda before going to bed. Martin had recurred once more to the arguments which had so impressed him at the meeting and was now regurgitating them with enthusiasm and emphasis. Stephen, thoroughly bored, was only prevented from being extremely rude to him by the reflection that if he insulted him, he could hardly in decency allow him to pay for the drinks. Finding the strain of listening to Martin’s political views too much to bear, he compromised by picking up the first piece of reading matter at hand, which happened to be a copy of the Midchester Evening Star. Automatically, he turned to the City page, and was about to read the Stock Exchange closing prices when his eye caught something in an adjoining column of greater moment. He read it to the end, and then cut Martin’s periods short with an excited exclamation.

“What’s the matter?” asked Martin. “You know, Steve, I may be a lowbrow, but I do think about politics, and if you’d only listen to me, you might learn something. After all, nowadays----”

“Damn politics! Just look at this, you chump!” said Stephen, and thrust the paper under Martin’s nose.

“Oh! Sorry! Is it anything important? Look here, Steve, you’ve been had. This paper’s three days old.”

“That doesn’t matter in the least.”

“Doesn’t it? Oh, I see now what you’re getting at. ‘Annual General Meeting of the Midchester and District Gas Company.’ M’m. Extraordinary time of the year to have an Annual General Meeting. Just shows what these chaps in the provinces will do, doesn’t it?”

“What the hell does it matter? Read it!”

“Oh, Lord, have I got to read it all? It looks as dull as hell. I suppose I can skip a bit. . . . Aha! Parsons is the assistant manager, I see. Hell, that’s worth knowing, I suppose. Anything else about him in this?”

“No. But just look down at the bottom of the column.”

“What? That’s the balance sheet. No good expecting me to understand figures, you know. Not got the head for them, somehow. I can’t---Oh, wow; oh, wow; oh, wow! Steve, I apologize. This is a snip, and no mistake! I nearly missed it altogether. Right at the bottom of the page, as you said. ‘Vanning, Waldron and Smith, Chartered Accountants.’ Who’d have thought it?”

They were both silent for a moment.

“When the assistant manager of a firm in the Midlands,” said Stephen slowly, “meets a partner in that firm’s London accountants at a quiet hotel in Markshire on a Sunday just before the Annual General Meeting, what’s the inference?”

“Dirty work,” said Martin promptly, and drained his glass.

“The only question is,” Stephen went on, “do we tackle Parsons now on what we’ve got or ought we to go back to London first and reconnoitre the Vanning end of the conspiracy?”

“One thing I can tell you,” answered Martin. “You won’t find Vanning if you do.”

“Eh?”

“There’s no such person---in the office of Vanning, Waldron and Smith, anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“I looked ’em up in the official list. You remember when I suggested he might be a stockbroker, you told me I could find out by looking at the list of members. I took your tip and then thought it would do no harm if I checked up on the accountants as well. And there wasn’t a Vanning in either of them. Not a solitary one. And so far as this crowd goes, the partners now are Waldron, Smith and some one called Cohen. I take it that Vanning has been gathered to his fathers and they keep the name on the door for old sake’s sake.”

“I see. Then why---Damn it all, Martin, it can’t be simply a coincidence!”

“Not on your life! That’d be a bit too thick. Tell you another thing. Parsons couldn’t give the hotel the name of his friend until he turned up. Reason---the blighter was travelling under an alias and Parsons didn’t know what it would be. And he had the cheek to take the name of his firm’s late senior partner. Pretty cool that, don’t you think?”

“Lord, I’d forgotten that!” Stephen lit a cigarette and reflected for a moment or two before he went on. “Let’s work this out properly,” he said at last. “What is our theory about the whole affair?”

“Parsons has been monkeying with the Gas Company’s accounts,” Martin began. “The clerk or whatnot sent down to audit them smells a rat.”

“Instead of showing him up,” Stephen chimed in, “he keeps the knowledge to himself----”

“---And uses it to do a spot of blackmailing on the side.”

“Which would explain the fact that Parsons has not been sleeping too well at nights lately.”

“You bet your life it would! Then just before the accounts are due to be passed, the chap from Vanning’s summons Parsons for a nice confidential little chat about how much he’s to cough up and so on.”

“They quarrel on that all-important point. I wonder, by the way, Martin, whether Parsons has been embezzling for some time?”

“And paying tribute to the blood-sucker in Gossip Lane? (Appropriate address that, by the way!) I shouldn’t be surprised. Anyhow, a point comes when he tells him that he can’t go on. No use trying to get blood out of a stone, you know.”

“Yes, I expect that’s just the sort of expression Parsons would use on that occasion.”

“Is it? Well, I dare say you know. No offence meant, and all that. Where are we? Yes---they quarrel, as you said just now. Vanning---we’ll have to call him that---goes up to bed first. Parsons comes up later feeling pretty murderous about him, sees the tray with the pot of tea outside what he thinks is his room---sorry I laughed at your idea when you suggested it the other day, Steve, but I see there is something in it now----”

“Being a bad sleeper, he has some drugs with him,” Stephen suggested. “For that matter, a man in his position might well have been contemplating suicide.”

“Right you are! It’s all working out beautifully. He says to himself: ‘Why shouldn’t this hellhound take the medicine instead of me?’ So he pops the stuff into the tea-pot, and goes to bed feeling that he’s made everything all serene so far as Vanning is concerned.”

“And next morning----”

“Good Lord, yes! Next morning he gets a really nasty one in the eye when he finds that the corpse has quietly got up and had his breakfast and mizzled off. Steve, I really believe we’ve got to the bottom of this!”

“I wonder,” said Stephen slowly. “Somehow, it looks almost too good to be true.”

Martin rubbed his hands together gleefully.

“Rot, it looks good because it is true. What’s the catch in it?”

“Well, there’s one thing. How do we know that Parsons had any of this particular dope with him?”

“He must have. That was what your guv’nor died of, wasn’t it?”

“But that’s begging the whole question!”

“I don’t see that. If he didn’t do it, who did? Can you answer that one?”

“No, of course I can’t.”

“All right! Then so far as I can see the only question is, how do we deal with this thing tomorrow?”

“I think that’s a question we had better decide tomorrow,” said Stephen. “I don’t know about you, but I feel distinctly tired.”

“Same here. It’s been a long day, but a good one. I only wish . . .”

“Yes?”

“I wish,” said Martin regretfully, “there had been a bit of a row at that meeting.”

59  Our Library / Cyril Hare - Suicide Excepted (1939) / 13: Sunday at the Seaside on: March 12, 2024, 10:27:43 am
Sunday, August 27th

STEPHEN walked out of Brighton station among a throng of holiday makers. He allowed them to carry him with them in the direction of the front. The beach was a mass of warm, untidy humanity, the sea scarcely audible above the clamour of thousands of chattering, laughing, screaming voices. To a philanthropist the spectacle would have been a pleasing one. It made Stephen feel slightly sick. He was reminded of pictures he had seen of a colony of nesting gannets. The same ridiculous herding instinct, the same insensate noise, the same abominable mess that would be left behind them when they were gone. The only difference was that their droppings were newspapers and cigarette cartons, and in that respect the advantage seemed to him all on the side of the birds. Guano was of some use, at all events. . . .

He remained for some time staring at the crowds. He told himself more than once that he was wasting his time---that he had not come down there to watch a crowd of fools enjoying themselves. None the less, a full quarter of an hour had gone by before he could bring himself to leave the front, and when he did so he walked away with lagging footsteps. He felt a very decided reluctance towards his task, not that he had any particular qualms at invading the privacy of strangers, but simply because he felt morally certain that this particular line of inquiry would prove fruitless. But it obviously had to be investigated, and his one hope now was that Mr. and Mrs. Carstairs would prove to be at home and amenable to his blandishments. Otherwise he might find himself faced with the necessity of spending a night away from home, and he grudged the expense.

As he went, he nervously fingered the little manual on  mediæval English brasses in his pocket. The one clue to Carstairs’ interests or character was the chance reference in Elderson’s report to the fact that he had delayed his departure from the hotel in order to obtain a rubbing from Pendlebury church. Stephen remembered a contemporary at school with a passion for this odd amusement. He was the only boy in the school to possess this interest, and, being unique, was naturally enough regarded as to that extent contemptible. His study was hung with long sheets of paper, bearing smudgy black figures, the fruit of long and solitary bicycle expeditions to distant churches. Stephen had never paid the smallest attention to them, except once, when an exceptionally acute phase of dislike for the young antiquarian had inspired him and half a dozen others to smash up the study furniture and destroy most of the rubbings. Having thus spurned the opportunity to acquire knowledge, he had now been reduced to mugging up the subject as best he could in the train. If Carstairs turned out to be a real expert, his ignorance would be exposed in no time.

Ormidale Crescent proved to be a street of respectable Regency houses, not very far from the sea, but a world away in spirit from the charabancs and trippers of the front. It was a positive shock to see a bathing-dress hanging out to dry on one of the elegant wrought-iron balustrades. The thing looked as much out of place there as a clothes line in Belgrave Square. No such incongruity defaced the narrow front of No. 14. On the other hand, the house hardly came up to the standard of its neighbours in the matter of cleanliness. Its windows were opaque with dirt, its doorstep was a sooty grey, and the condition of the door-knocker showed that the household’s interest in brass did not extend to the secular work of the nineteenth century.

A sullen and slovenly maid came to the door after Stephen had rung the bell two or three times. Asked whether Mr. Carstairs lived there, she answered grudgingly that he did. Was he at home? No, was the reply, he was at the church. The tone in which this was said clearly implied that the questioner was a fool for expecting him to be anywhere else. When would he be back? The maid couldn’t say for sure. As an afterthought she observed that he would not be home for his lunch. And Mrs. Carstairs? She was at church too. And the door slammed.

Stephen walked away up the Crescent feeling decidedly annoyed with himself. He had completely failed to take account of the fact that it was Sunday, and that there were still people who went to church on Sunday mornings. Now he would have to kill time until Mr. Carstairs should have come back from his lunch, whenever that might be. He had gone some way before the significance of something said by the maid struck his mind. He had noticed at the time that she had said, “Mr. Carstairs is at the church,” and not “at church.” There might be nothing in it, but it seemed an odd phrase to employ. It had an almost proprietary air. She had said it in just the same way that a stockbroker’s servant would have told him, “Mr. Smith is at the office.” Was that the explanation? Was Mr. Carstairs at the church for the same reason that Mr. Smith would have been at the office---because it was his job? True, there was nothing in Elderson’s report to indicate that he was a parson, but it remained a possibility.

At this point he passed a telephone kiosk, and it occurred to him to do what any moderately efficient detective would have done in the first place; namely, to turn up Mr. Carstairs’ entry in the directory. Sure enough, it ran: “Carstairs, Rev. E. M. J.” So that settled the point! Clergymen were comparatively approachable people, at all events, and if he could once get into touch with this one, he had little doubt that he would be able to make him talk. But he still cursed his luck in having to hang about until the afternoon before he could begin.

A little further on a pinched Gothic façade in grey stone broke the suave frontage of stucco. Was this “the” church? he wondered. It was worth trying, at all events. With a vague idea of assuming the role of an earnest inquirer in the vestry after the service, he made his way in. At the worst, it was as good a way of getting through the next half-hour as any other.

The service had been in progress some time. He entered just as a portly old gentleman was declaiming from the lectern, “Here Endeth the First Lesson.” A verger emerged from somewhere in the shadows and propelled him into a seat as the congregation rose for the Psalms. He was placed well at the back of the church and was striving to get a view of the face attached to the surpliced figure at the other end, when he was aware that his arm was being squeezed by his neighbour in the pew. Glancing round, he found himself looking into the face of his Aunt Lucy.

“Stephen! What a surprise finding you here!” she whispered.

Stephen smiled, nodded and hastily fumbled for his place in the greasy Prayer Book which the verger had provided. Here was a complication! There was nothing particularly surprising about the meeting, now he came to think of it, for he recollected that Aunt Lucy had mentioned when they last met after the funeral that she and George were thinking of going for a few weeks to Brighton; and the chances of finding Aunt Lucy in church on a Sunday morning might be safely computed at odds on. Stephen’s private opinion was that she went there to get away from Uncle George. And if he had to meet any of his family here she would certainly have been his first choice. But he had not come to Brighton to meet her, but Carstairs. Now there would have to be explanations, chatter, and more time wasted. And Uncle George would be certain to make a nuisance of himself if he possibly could. . . .

“Will you come back to lunch with us afterwards?” hissed Aunt Lucy as the doxology ended.

He shook his head.

“Sorry. I don’t think I can manage it,” he whispered back.

“Oh, do! You’ll help me out with the Carstairs,” was the astonishing rejoinder.

“Good Lord!” Stephen exclaimed almost out loud.

Aunt Lucy shot a reproachful glance at him as she sat back in her pew, while “Here Beginneth” boomed out from the lectern.

So it came about that after all his apprehensions Stephen found himself being introduced in a perfectly normal way to Mr. and Mrs. Carstairs. He had returned with his aunt after the service to their hotel. There they had found Uncle George, hot and peevish after an unsuccessful morning’s golf. The account of his misfortunes and the catalogue of his partner’s short-comings sufficed to fill up the interval before the arrival of the guests, and Stephen was able without difficulty to stave off any inquiries as to the reason for his presence in Brighton.

The Reverend E. M. J. Carstairs proved to be a fleshy, beetle-browed man of middle age. He was not, Stephen learned from his aunt, the regular incumbent of the church which he had attended that morning, but was merely “taking duty” during the absence of the vicar on holiday. Aunt Lucy, with her passion for all things ecclesiastical, had collected him, as she always collected parsons, as naturally as a child picking wild flowers. He lived in Brighton, whither he had retired two or three years before on giving up a missionary post abroad. He was a fluent talker on many subjects, but principally about himself, and his tones were loud and self-important. Evidently in his own eyes he was a person of consequence. It was some time before Stephen so much as noticed Mrs. Carstairs. Beside him, she was not a particularly noticeable person. She was small, mousy and ill-dressed, with a thin little mouth and very bright eyes. But it soon became apparent that she was very far from being in awe of her husband. She gave a taste of her quality quite early in the proceedings.

“I’ve met you before, haven’t I?” said Mr. Carstairs to Stephen as they sat down to lunch.

Stephen denied having ever had that pleasure.

“Seen you before, anyhow.”

“I think not.”

“My husband,” observed Mrs. Carstairs to the table in general, “is always saying that sort of thing to perfect strangers. He has in fact a shocking memory for faces. It really used to be very awkward when we were living out East, where one native looks exactly like another in any case. So you mustn’t mind what he says, Mr. Dickinson.”

Mr. Carstairs looked extremely uncomfortable and said no more. Aunt Lucy shot a look of admiration at the courageous wife, who continued to eat her lunch with perfect sang-froid.

By the time they had reached coffee she had twice corrected anecdotes of her husband’s about his experiences in the missionary field, and once flatly contradicted Uncle George when he ventured on a generalization on the subject of China. Otherwise she had contributed little to the conversation. Mr. Carstairs was meekness itself under her corrections, while Uncle George was so astonished at her temerity that by the end of the meal he had become gloomily silent. Stephen derived a certain amusement from the spectacle, but apart from that it did not seem as if the afternoon was going to show much profit after all. The atmosphere, however, changed completely after lunch, when Aunt Lucy inveigled Mrs. Carstairs up to her room on some pretext or another. With undisguised relief Uncle George led the way to the smoking-room, cigars were produced, and the comfortable illusion of masculine predominance was re-established.

“What you’ll never get people to understand about China----” said Uncle George, and proceeded to restate with emphasis the fallacy which Mrs. Carstairs had exposed ten minutes before.

“I absolutely agree with you,” said Mr. Carstairs heartily.

The two he-men nodded their heads in concert, and the feast of reason proceeded harmoniously, to the complete exclusion of Stephen. Presently----

“Would you care for a liqueur, Carstairs?”

“Well---er---it’s very good of you. I hardly care to, just at present.” He fingered his clerical collar. “It was different the other day. I was in mufti then. Ha, Ha! As a matter of fact I never wear this unless I am actually----”

“Don’t talk so much. Go on, a liqueur can’t hurt you.”

“Well, well . . .”

Over his liqueur Mr. Carstairs became quite confiding.

“My wife----” he said haltingly. “I don’t think you’ve met my wife before today, Mr. Dickinson?”

“No,” said Uncle George, his cigar clenched between his teeth, “I haven’t.”

“She’s been in London all the week. I’ve been quite a grass widower down here. Ha, Ha!” For some incomprehensible reason this simple statement of fact was apparently expected to be regarded as humorous. “She’s a very remarkable woman in many ways.”

“I dare say.” George’s rudeness would have been obvious to anyone not gifted with an unusually thick skin.

“She is, I assure you. She doesn’t spend her time in London amusing herself, I can tell you that! Ha, Ha!”

From the look on George’s face it was apparent that he was quite prepared to believe it. He made no comment, and it was left for Stephen to keep the conversation going.

“What does she do, exactly?” he asked.

“She works,” replied Mr. Carstairs complacently. “Work is the very breath of her nostrils. Naturally I miss her. A house without a woman’s guiding hand is only half a home. But I am an old campaigner, and, though I say it, I make shift very well by myself.”

Stephen remembered the dilapidated aspect of the house in Ormidale Crescent and shuddered.

“My own interests are mainly of a more scholarly character,” the parson went on. “Since my retirement I have busied myself in antiquarian pursuits---of an ecclesiastical nature, of course. I don’t know whether you are at all interested in our grand old medieval brasses, sir?”

He addressed George. But George, his cigar gone out, was dozing in his chair.

“As a matter of fact, I am rather interested----” Stephen began, but Mr. Carstairs was off again.

“But my wife remains heart and soul in her work,” he went on. “Work that I am happy to say does not go unrewarded, in the material sense, I mean. And what splendid work it is! She is Organizing Secretary of the Society for the Relief of Distress amongst the Widows of Professional Men---the S.R.D.W.P.M. Rather a mouthful that, eh? We call it the R.D. for short. Perhaps the initials are more familiar to you in another connexion, my young friend? Ha, Ha!” (Stephen was furious to find himself flushing at this point. They were, indeed, sickeningly familiar.) “A wonderful organization, but ill-supported, alas! Indeed, had it not been for a fortunate windfall the other day, it might have----”

He stopped abruptly, and the sudden ceasing of the soothing flow of words awakened George, who opened his eyes and sat up.

“Where the devil’s your aunt?” said George to Stephen, crossly, struggling stiffly to get up. “Time we went out to get up an appetite for tea.”

“Dear me,” said Mr. Carstairs, “it’s getting quite late. I wonder where my wife has got to.”

Fortunately the ladies appeared at this point, and the party broke up. Stephen took his leave as soon as he decently could, and made his way back to the station. He wondered as he went why the name of the Society for the Relief of Distress amongst the Widows of Professional Men seemed familiar. It was not until his train had nearly reached Victoria that he remembered.

On the whole, he reported to Anne when they met, the day had not been completely wasted.

60  Our Library / Cyril Hare - Suicide Excepted (1939) / 12: Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop on: March 12, 2024, 08:31:09 am
Sunday, August 27th

“THAT looks like the place,” said Martin.

Anne peered through the window of the car.

It was a house of medium size, square and plain, standing back from the road, to which it was connected by a curving drive. There was nothing in the least remarkable about it---it was the type of house that might be found in almost any country district of England. One could guess that inside there were at most two bathrooms, rather antiquated, and that somewhere in the background was stabling for at least three hunters. But the very fact that it was so ordinary in appearance made it seem all the more daunting to one of the investigators at least. Anne’s heart sank as she gazed at the somewhat shabby placidity of the Grange. These people, she reflected, had been there for years, probably for generations. They barely acknowledged the existence of anybody who had not lived in the neighbourhood for at least ten hunting seasons. As for visitors from London, unknown and unannounced, they would be regarded as no better than tramps. She smiled wryly as she remembered how simple the whole arrangement had seemed when she planned it in the study at Hampstead. Only one thing remained to give her any hope of success---the brief description of Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop’s character in Elderson’s report. Obviously the woman was an eccentric, and with eccentrics anything was possible.

She had said nothing, but Martin, as usual, seemed to divine her thoughts.

“I dare say things’ll look a bit easier after a feed,” he said. “I vote we try the village pub. It’s only just down the road.”

They lunched alone in the front room of the Black Swan. The food was more than tolerable, and by the time they had finished their meal, Anne was disposed to take a more cheerful view of life, though she seemed no nearer to ascertaining anything about the owners of the Grange than before. She had made one or two efforts to get into conversation with the landlord’s wife, who served them, only to find that she was both hard of hearing and incomprehensible of speech. A Sabbath calm brooded over the village, broken only by the hum of voices from the adjacent taproom and by the intermittent barking of dogs from the opposite side of the street. This latter sound attracted Martin’s attention. Going across to the window, he stared out for some time, sucking noisily at his pipe, and then called Anne.

“Here’s something worth trying,” he remarked.

Anne saw that he was pointing at a notice which hung over a yard gate almost immediately opposite the inn. It read:

    bentby kennels
    pedigree pups for sale
    scotties, cairns, fox-terriers
    Dogs Boarded        Expert attention


“I think a puppy would make rather a nice present for you,” said Martin. “Would you like a Scottie or a Cairn?”

“Neither,” said Anne. “I’m not very fond of dogs.”

“You ought to be,” said Martin, seriously. “There’s something about a dog which you don’t get in anything else.” He puffed silently for a moment or two and then added: “Anyhow, you could always inquire about boarding a dog. That won’t commit you to anything.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“About the Kennels, of course. It’s the best place to try any snooping in we could find. To start with, it’s the only place that’s likely to be open on a Sunday, it’s almost certain to be kept by a female---these places nearly always are---and with any luck it’ll be a centre for gossip. I can look at the dogs, while you get to work on the woman-to-woman stuff. If you can get a line on the old lady up at the Grange, I can always amuse myself in the kennels while you are trying to break in there. I think it’s rather a good spec, taken all round.”

Anne had said from the first that interviewing Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop was woman’s work. Rather to her annoyance, Martin had taken her at her word, and resolutely refused to take any part in the job himself, except the highly enjoyable task of driving her to the scene of action. It was therefore quite an agreeable surprise to find him planning a campaign on her behalf.

“Of course,” Martin went on meditatively, still staring out of the window, “it may take a bit of time to get hold of la belle Blenkinsop. It’s rather a pity, in a way, we didn’t allow ourselves a bit longer. If I was on my own, I should certainly want to spend the night here, and give myself a full day tomorrow, so as not to have to rush things. Of course, as it is, that’s out of the question, I suppose---unless . . .”

He left the sentence unfinished, and looked over his shoulder at Anne with an air that was at once malicious and appealing.

“No,” she answered. “I’m sorry, Martin, but I’m not going to sleep here tonight. In the first place, I have no intention of losing my virtue without so much as a toothbrush to sustain me----”

“As a matter of fact,” said Martin with an air of unabashed innocence, “I do happen to have a few odd things in the back of the car---including, as it happens, a new toothbrush.”

“In the second place, I promised Mother I’d be home before she went to bed tonight.”

“Oh, well----”

“And in the third place, my darling, I’m not allowing any liberties until I’ve got my marriage lines. Sorry and all that, but I’m funny that way.”

“Righto!” said Martin, with the air of one who was used to taking such rebuffs in good part. “In that case, I’d better pay our bill, and then we’ll see what is to be seen across the way.”

+++

A tall young woman, dressed in a dirty kennel coat and corduroy breeches was walking across the yard when they entered. A cigarette depended from her mouth, and her short black hair would have been the better for some expert attention. She put down the pail which she was carrying and slouched in their direction, a predatory gleam in her eye.

“Good afternoon,” said Martin politely. “We wanted to look at the Kennels.”

The girl nodded.

“That’s what we’re here for,” she said. “What are you interested in? Cairns? Scotties? We’ve got rather a nice litter of Dandies you might like to look at, but---Get down, Sheila!”

The last observation was directed to a fox-terrier bitch, in the last stages of pregnancy, which was fawning round her boots.

“Well, as a matter of fact we hadn’t quite made up our minds,” said Martin. “We just thought we’d have a look round first, didn’t we, Annie?”

The girl’s interest in them waned perceptibly.

“Oh, I see,” she said. “Well, you’d better come along and see if there’s anything you’d care for.”

She led the way to a long range of kennels, the occupants of which set up a furious barking as they approached.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” Martin observed. “I wonder whether----”

“Not bad. We’re apt to have trouble about the water-supply, that’s all. Now these Scotties might interest you---six months old, guaranteed through distemper. Dogs, eight guineas; bitches, seven and a half. The sire got two reserves at Crufts and the dam was by Champion Watmough of Wakerly. You can see the pedigree if you like.”

“They look very sweet,” remarked Anne, who felt that it was about time she said something.

“Jolly little chaps,” chimed in Martin, with considerably more sincerity in his voice. “By the way, I suppose in this village----”

“Now these two are all that we’ve got left of Sheila’s last litter. House-trained. Three and a half guineas, or you can have the pair for six. It’s a bargain, really.”

“Awfully jolly,” said Martin. “I wanted to ask you, what is that house----”

“These are the Dandies I was telling you about,” the young woman went on remorselessly, and once more the proper words of non-committal appreciation had to be found. Clearly it was not going to be a simple business to get any gossip from the Kennels. The whole affair began to seem to Anne more and more unreal and nightmarish as they trailed on from one noisy, bounding family to another. At last it seemed that they had reached the end of their tour. Only one compartment remained, and this was tenanted by a solitary red setter. He had a dejected appearance, and something about him made Anne, who did not care for dogs, feel that she had found a kindred spirit.

“What a darling fellow!” she exclaimed.

“Not one of ours,” said her guide in a chilly tone. “Just a boarder. He’s been convalescing after gastritis. His coat’s pretty bad still, isn’t it? I expect he’ll be going home in a day or two.”

“Has he far to go?” Anne asked, stifling a yawn. But her boredom vanished instantly at the reply.

“Oh, no. He’s only going up to the Grange.”

Trying not to seem too excited, Anne said: “Is this Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop’s dog, then?”

“Yes. Do you know her?”

“Yes---I mean, no---that is----”

“I expect she’ll be down here directly to look at him. She looks in most afternoons.”

Here was good fortune indeed! Hardly knowing what she was saying, Anne gasped out: “Really! How awfully nice!”

Her companion looked at her in surprise.

“Well, she’s not a bad sort really,” she said. “For all that she’s my landlord.”

Pulling herself together, Anne said: “I’d like to have another look at the Scotties, if you don’t mind,” and walked back to the kennel nearest the entrance to the yard, determined at all costs to keep within the precincts until her quarry should appear. Martin had left them. From the corner of her eye she saw him half hidden by an angle of the wall, apparently engaged in deep conversation with the two young fox-terriers. Anne cursed him bitterly in her heart and grimly prepared to talk dogs for the rest of the day, if need be.

Luck was with her. She had barely reached the litter of Scotties before somebody who could only have been Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop appeared upon the scene. She was a fairly stout woman of early middle age, who looked as if she owned the earth she walked on---which in fact she did. Anne was rather taken by her face. It looked sensible. The same adjective might have been applied to everything about her. She wore sensible low-heeled brogue shoes, sensible thick stockings, and a tweed coat and skirt which could certainly only be justified by an appeal to reason, so rigorously had all the allurements of fashion been excluded. In one particular only did she show a certain lack of intelligence. She had elected to bring with her to the kennels a timid and elderly dachshund, who, evidently warned by previous experience, skulked miserably behind her skirts. This did not save him from repeated and savage assaults from Sheila, and conversation was continually being interrupted to placate or separate the unequal combatants.

“Good afternoon, Mary,” Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop began, as she hove in sight. “I came to see how my poor Rufus is getting on. (Now don’t be silly, Fritz, you know she won’t hurt you.)”

“Good afternoon,” said the young woman. “Sheila! Come away from him! I’m so sorry, Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop. I’m afraid she is rather a nuisance. Rufus is quite---Sheila! Come to heel!”

“Come along, Fritz! It’s only that she knows he’s frightened of her, you know. Of course, she’s really---I’m so sorry, Mary, I shall have to ask you to take her away. I shouldn’t have brought him with me, only he does miss his walkie-walks on Sundays, don’t you, darling?”

Rather sulkily, Mary grabbed the bitch by the scruff of her neck and dragged her indoors. Fritz, relieved of his fears, sat down and began to scratch himself. His mistress bent down to reprove him and then looked up to see Anne for the first time.

“Oh!” she said. “I must apologize. I suppose you’ve come to buy something and I’ve interrupted the deal. I didn’t see you were here.”

Face to face with the object of her coming to Lincolnshire, Anne found herself completely tongue-tied. Fortunately Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop was evidently quite accustomed to finding younger women speechless in her presence, and proceeded to put her at her ease by doing all the talking herself.

“Fond of dogs?” she inquired, as she led the way towards where the red setter was barking a welcome in the distance. “But of course you are! Every nice person is, I think. Well”---she looked over her shoulder at Mary, who was following in their wake---“Mary’s a very nice girl, though she can’t always pay her rent, and I’m out to help her all I can. All the same, don’t pay what she asks. You can always beat her down half a guinea or so! But don’t tell her I said so! Well, Rufus, my pet! Here’s your old missus come to see you! How’s the poor old fellow! There’s a poor mannie, then!” and she broke into a flood of the infantile endearments which the most intelligent people always seem to find necessary when conversing with the friend of man.

Martin appeared from nowhere and took Anne by the arm. He led her away a few paces and whispered, “Who is this?”

“Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop,” said Anne in surprise.

Martin looked puzzled.

“Surely not,” he said.

Anne stared at him for a moment before she guessed to what he was referring. Then she began to understand, and her bewilderment grew. There was no doubt that this woman was quite different to anything that Elderson’s report had led them to expect. Without any pretence to fine airs or graces, she was obviously a woman of breeding. She was of the type that might cause some amusement in Hampstead, but in a country village she was perfectly in the picture. And nobody---least of all such keen judges of social distinctions as hotel servants---could possibly say of her that she “acted unusual for a lady.”

“There must be some mistake,” she said at last.

“This wasn’t the woman at the hotel,” said Martin positively. “It couldn’t have been.”

“Perhaps she’s quite different when she’s away from home,” Anne suggested faintly.

But a moment later Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop settled the question herself. She ended her colloquy with Rufus, dusted her skirt where his eager paws had marked it, and observed: “Well, I’m a silly old woman, I suppose, to make such a fuss about him. But I can tell you this, Mary: when you’re my age and haven’t any children of your own, you get to depend a lot on your dogs.”

So that left the son also to be explained! thought Anne. She was burning with curiosity and at a loss as to how to set about satisfying it. And all the time the precious minutes were slipping away, as Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop exchanged a few last morsels of canine gossip with Mary before leaving the Kennels. Anne would have given anything to scrape acquaintance with her, and had not the least idea how it should be done.

It was Martin, unexpectedly, who came to the rescue. Evidently the mystery had whetted his appetite also, for he entirely abandoned his declared policy of leaving the investigation to her. At precisely the right moment, he injected into the ladies’ conversation a supremely shrewd piece of doggy knowledge---it was, he afterwards confessed to Anne, almost the only scrap of kennel-lore he possessed---and in next to no time he was one of the party. Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop was delighted with him, and demanded his name and Anne’s. The name of Dickinson evidently set her fumbling in her memory.

“Dickinson!” she repeated. “That reminds me of something---I heard the name lately---oh, of course!” She looked at Anne doubtfully. “Girls don’t wear much mourning nowadays,” she ventured.

“That was my father,” said Anne.

“Dear, dear!” She clicked her tongue in sympathy. “Well, it’s quite a good idea to buy a dog at a time like that. It takes your mind off things.”

How Martin managed it, Anne did not precisely know, but ten minutes later they were walking up the village street towards the Grange with her, having somehow escaped from the Kennels without having committed themselves to a purchase. She proved to be good company, and before they had reached the gates of the house Anne had learned a considerable amount about the agricultural depression, the vagaries of the vicar and the idiosyncrasies of the late Colonel Howard-Blenkinsop. But of Pendlebury Old Hall, not a word.

They were invited to stay for tea in the shabby, comfortable old house, which was much as Anne had pictured it, except, quite unaccountably, for a fine collection of Whistler etchings, probably worth as much as the rest of the contents put together. After tea they were taken out to admire what little a hot summer had left of the herbaceous border. At this point, Anne felt that they were on sufficiently good terms for her to take the plunge.

“Excuse my asking you, Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop,” she said, “but were you ever at Pendlebury?”

“Where did you say, my dear? Pembury? Where’s that?”

“No---Pendlebury. I mean Pendlebury Old Hall. It used to be in our family, but it’s an hotel now. It’s where my father---died.”

“Oh, dear me, no! What makes you think that?”

“Well, you may think it very odd of me to ask, but you see, your name and address are in the visitor’s book there.”

“God bless my soul! My name? Are you quite sure?”

“Oh, yes; there’s no doubt about it.”

“But this is most extraordinary! When am I supposed to have stayed there?”

“About the beginning of this month---for a fortnight. You and a young man who was supposed to be your son.”

“A young man!” Her face went purple. For a moment Anne thought she would have a fit. Then suddenly she cried: “A fortnight! The beginning of this month! Oh, my stars! But this is rich!”

And Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop, throwing back her head, let out peal upon peal of laughter.

“The impertinence!” she exclaimed when she could speak again. “For sheer, cool impertinence! Oh, my dear,” she went on, wiping her eyes with a man’s-sized silk handkerchief, “how I wish now I hadn’t quarrelled with the vicar! How he would have enjoyed it!”

She stuffed the handkerchief back into the pocket of the sensible coat, and said soberly: “Well, I’ll be blowed! Now come indoors, both of you. You must have seen quite enough of the garden. I’ll give you both a glass of sherry before you go, and tell you all about it.”

+++

“There’s not much to tell, really,” she said, when the sherry had been poured out. “And if you didn’t know her, you wouldn’t see the joke. That’s why I regret the vicar so. But I must tell somebody. You see, I had a cook.”

“Do you mean to say that your cook stayed at Pendlebury under your name?” said Anne.

Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop nodded.

“That’s all,” she said. “It sounds very bald, put like that, doesn’t it? But if you could only have seen her! Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop, indeed! Really, I’m very cross about it. It’s just as well she isn’t here to get a bit of my mind. But”---she began to laugh again---“she was a character! I can just see her flaunting it in an hotel in her best clothes---old clothes of mine, incidentally! She always gave herself such tremendous airs, though I will say she was a good cook.”

She sighed a tribute to the departed.

“When did she leave you?” Anne asked.

“Why, only a week ago, as soon as she came back from her holiday. It was really a most extraordinary---but I’m telling this very badly. Let me start at the beginning.”

But instead of starting at the beginning, Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop suddenly looked narrowly at her guests and said: “Really, this is a very odd situation! Why should I tell you all this? What business is it of yours?”

“Please, Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop,” said Anne. “Please tell us. It really is a matter of importance to us, though it would take much too long to explain.”

“We’ve come here the whole way from London simply to ask you about this entry in the hotel books,” Martin put in.

“What? I thought you came here to look at Mary’s dogs!”

Martin shook his head.

“Simply a blind. I don’t know much about them, and Anne here hates the sight of them.”

Anne, who saw her hostess’s brow darken ominously, hastily interjected: “Oh, that’s not true, Martin. You know I simply fell in love with poor Rufus!”

“I really don’t know whether I’m standing on my head or my heels,” said Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop. “What is all this about?”

“I can tell you this much,” said Martin. “There’s a great deal of money involved.”

“Money? You don’t mean Mrs. March’s money, do you?”

“Mrs. Who?

“Mrs. March---my cook. Of course, I forgot, you don’t know her.”

“Golly!” said Martin.

Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop looked at him with an expression so dubious that Anne felt it was time for her to intervene.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but you really must tell us all about this Mrs. March. It seems awful cheek on our part, I know, but it is most frightfully important to us. We are---we’re quite respectable people, honestly, but we’re in a great difficulty and you are the only person who can help us.”

Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop looked her up and down. Then: “Help yourselves to some more sherry,” she said. “You both look as if you needed it. I don’t know what all this is about, but if you can take Mrs. March’s money away, perhaps she’ll come back as my cook again and that will be something. Now, what do you want to know?”

“Everything,” said Martin, gulping his sherry.

“Well, then, Mrs. March has been my cook for the last ten years---ever since her husband died, in fact.”

“Oh! Then March was her husband’s name?” asked Anne.

“Certainly. He was a local man, a builder in a small way. There are a lot of Marches in these parts, you know.”

“I see,” said Anne disappointedly. “Then she wasn’t . . .”

“You don’t know her maiden name, I suppose?” Martin asked.

“Good gracious! Do you children want to go back into all that ancient history? She was a March too---she married her cousin.”

Anne breathed again. “Please go on,” she said.

“She had one son, who lived with her. She was devoted to him, but he was a little---you know, not quite right in the head. I used to give him odd jobs on the farm to do, but he was really not worth his keep. Doctors can say what they like, but cousins ought not to marry. Dogs are different, of course.”

“Excuse me, but are you quite sure he was a child of the marriage?” Martin asked.

“Really, what a question! Certainly he was. She and her husband were always---And anyhow, Philip is a March all over, and the image of his father to look at.”

“But there was another son, wasn’t there?” Martin persisted.

“Now what on earth made you say that? I really didn’t expect people from London to come down here and rake up our village scandals. It isn’t even a village scandal, for that matter. The Marches kept very quiet about it and nobody here knew anything about it, except the vicar, and he very properly told me when I proposed taking her into my service. The child wasn’t born here, you know. Her parents had moved to Markshire, and then when this thing happened they sent her to live with her uncle and aunt because she couldn’t face the people there any more. You know what they are like in villages, among the respectable classes. Then, later on, she married Fred March, who was a good deal older than she was, and a very good wife she made him.”

“But the child?” Anne asked. “What became of him?”

“He was brought up somewhere---I never asked her any questions about it, though she knew I knew about him. The father paid something for his maintenance, and I rather fancy that old Fred, who was a broad-minded sort of man, contributed a little too. She used to go and see him sometimes, and I do know that in later life he caused her a lot of anxiety with his wild ways. That didn’t prevent her making a terrible to-do when he died, though.”

There was a pause, in which Anne heard herself echoing stupidly, “When he died?”

“Yes. About six months ago. I gave her two days off to go to the funeral, I remember. It was very inconvenient, because I had arranged a dinner-party just then.”

Feeling a little dazed, Anne reached for her handbag.

“Thank you very much,” she contrived to say. “I really think that is all we wanted to know.”

“Wait a bit, though!” Martin broke in. “You haven’t told us, why did Mrs. March leave you?”

“I should have told you a quarter of an hour ago, if you hadn’t kept on interrupting,” answered Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop tartly. “She left because she had come into money. No notice---she even offered to pay me a month’s wages. Me! Well, perhaps it wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounds. I dare say she is a richer woman now than I am, though it was difficult to make head or tail of what she was saying.”

“You mean, the money seemed to come as a surprise to her?” Martin suggested.

“A surprise? For a cook when she inherits a fortune? Think, my boy, think! I never saw a woman more flabbergasted in my life. It was a bit of a shock for me too, as you can imagine. Of course, she was always a bit better off than most women of her class. Old Fred didn’t leave her penniless, and she used to give herself airs about it. But I think that most of that money went on her holidays. She had a fortnight every year, and used to take Philip away with her.”

“Yes,” said Anne. “You are reputed to have stayed at Pendlebury several years running.”

“Tchah!” snorted Mrs. Howard-Blenkinsop. “Don’t remind me of it! I suppose it tickled the old ruffian to go back there and pass as a lady, where she had been---But that reminds me. Of course! Pendlebury! Now I remember! My dear girl, why didn’t you tell me before? It was at Pendlebury that---That’s why I recognized your name. I had read about it in the Times, just a short paragraph, you know, it made no particular impression on me, and then when Mrs. March came back, in addition to all the excitement about her legacy---the lawyer’s letter was waiting for her when she returned---she had some fantastic rigmarole that I couldn’t fathom, which seemed to have something to do with it.”

“Do please try to remember what it was,” Anne urged her.

“Let me think, now. You know when you are suddenly losing a cook who has been with you ten years, you’re in no state to pay much attention to anything else. . . . Yes---I think I’ve got it. It was something to the effect that an old friend---only she didn’t put it quite like that, I forget the expression---an old friend had been staying in the same place, and she had never known it, he was so changed. And then he had killed himself, and she had been at his funeral, and now she had all this money---it was an inextricable jumble, you know, what one might expect from an uneducated woman. But that was the gist of it. Of course, I didn’t understand then that it was he who had left her all this money. . . .”

She looked inquiringly at Martin and Anne, but they kept their own counsel.

“Ah, well!” she said at last. “If you do manage to upset the will, or whatever it is that you’re after, it will be a consolation to me to have Mrs. March back, even if she did behave so badly on her holidays!”

After which, there was clearly nothing to be done but to thank her for her forbearance and drive back to London.

+++

“Well,” said Martin, as they got into the car, “that disposes of Fannyanny, anyway.”

“Yes,” said Anne. “And of Richard too. We seem to be getting through our suspects pretty quick.”

“Parsons, Vanning, and Carstairs left. I wonder whether old Steve will have brought home the bacon from Brighton?”

“The Carstairs people seemed the most innocent of the lot, so far as I could gather. But don’t forget, we haven’t really disposed of the Joneses yet.”

“Oh, them! They were nothing but a couple out on the----”

“Shut up!”

Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6 ... 257
Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum


Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy