The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  “Right,” he said. “I may be seeing you in the morning. Or it may be in the afternoon. In the morning I may be busy.”

  George didn’t know how busy he was going to be, neither did I. I slept rather badly that night as it was, but if I had known that in the morning I was going to survey a corpse, I doubt if I’d have slept at all.

  CHAPTER XII

  Murder?

  IT was just before breakfast when I was called to the phone. Wharton’s voice came impatiently.

  “Is that Major Travers? Am I through to Major Travers?”

  “Speaking, George,” I said.

  I heard him let out a breath of relief, then he was asking if I could be at the Hall in a few minutes. Something pretty bad had happened.

  “Mrs. Brende?” I blurted out before I knew I had spoken.

  “What made you say that?” he was asking at once.

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “She’s a personal friend, the only one I have there.”

  I could hear him snort, then he was saying he’d expect me inside a quarter of an hour. I was asking for more news, but he had rung off.

  What I felt like I can’t quite say. You might say I was knocked all of a heap, but there was more to it than that. I was genuinely fond of Mrs. Brende, and I believed she had a considerable liking for myself, so there was something personal about the shock. Then there was the worry about what she had told me the previous day, and all at once I was telling myself that she had committed suicide—and with my automatic. That put me in a further dither. I would have to own up to what had happened, George Wharton would think I had been holding back information, and he might even claim that if I had told him what was in the wind, Mrs. Brende would be still alive.

  I swallowed some toast and a scalding cup of coffee, and then was off. An ambulance, and a private one by the look of it, was standing at the front door of the Hall. Ledd admitted me, and he looked lugubrious enough without having to act.

  “What’s the matter with you, Ledd?” I asked him.

  “I’m a bit upset, sir,” he said, and shook his head. “This way if you please, sir.”

  He evidently expected me to know what the tragedy was, but when we got to the top of the stairs he turned away from the direction of Mrs. Brende’s room and past the Colonel’s rooms, and it was the door of Penelope Craye’s room at which he tapped. Someone spoke and Ledd was showing me in.

  It was a much larger room than I had imagined. A curtain on stout runners divided it into sitting-room and bedroom, and each was ample in size. The sitting-room part had its fireplace and looked most comfortable. As for the other part, the curtain had been drawn back and there was the bed. Wharton and a stranger were standing by it, and when Wharton moved to meet me, I saw on the bed the body of Penelope Craye.

  “She’s dead,” I said.

  Wharton merely nodded. Then he was introducing the doctor. He had his own nursing home with a resident staff, and the body was going there at once for a P.M.. I moved across to have a look at it.

  I find the examination of a corpse the most trying part of a case. The sight of blood, for instance, upsets me physically, and I can’t help that overwhelming urge to turn away. Wharton is hardened enough, and corpses to him are twopence a bundle like radishes, but I had no reason to wince as I looked down at the body of Penelope Crave, for she might have been asleep. Her pyjama suit was unstained, and it looked as if she had died peaceably in her sleep.

  “What was it?” I said. “Heart failure?”

  The doctor shot a look at me.

  “Major Travers is all right,” Wharton told him. “All this is being kept dark by the way, till I get a ruling from the Powers-that-be. What we think from a cursory examination is that these caused it.”

  He was pointing to a small bottle of sleeping tablets on the side table. There was a wineglass too, I noticed, and then my eye caught a half-bottle standing on the floor close by the bed. It was almost certainly a champagne bottle. I also noticed her clothes neatly folded on an easy chair at the foot of the bed; except for a frock that hung from a hanger on the handle of the door of the wardrobe. Everything, in fact, seemed natural. The frock, a biscuit coloured semi-evening affair, and not the office garment of dove grey, had been put there when she had undressed, and— my wife does the same thing—she was intending to put it away in the morning.

  There was a tap at the door and Newton looked in.

  “Come in,” Wharton told him. “Just witness these two statements, will you, and then the doctor can go.”

  The statements were lying on the open flap of a desk at the sitting-room window. Wharton, I thought, must have been at the Hall for some considerable time. Probably the body had been discovered by a maid or someone who had brought early morning tea. Probably Ledd had brought it, which was why he was upset. Just then Ledd looked in.

  “Two men at the gate, sir,” he said to Wharton. “The sergeant says are they the ones who’re to be let through.”

  Wharton clicked his tongue annoyedly.

  “Tell him to get ’em here quick. You bring them up at once.”

  Wharton and the doctor and Newton went on with the reading or mumbling over of the statements, and I had another look round. This time I saw the wet on the carpet by the bedside, where something had been spilt. Wharton had evidently considered it important, for he had drawn a chalk mark round it. I also noticed that on a shelf under the side table was a carafe of water and a glass. It looked as if Penelope had been accustomed to taking the sleeping tablets in water, but that night she had treated herself to a half-bottle instead. I gave my glasses a polish and had another look, and then I saw that Wharton had been testing the carafe and various other things for fingerprints.

  Wharton was coming over with the other two.

  “Just witness this,” he said to them, and was kneeling by that wet mark on the carpet. With his knife he cut out a rough circle of the carpet, then placed it in an envelope, sealed it, and the other two wrote their signatures across the flap. Then his two men arrived, and one was carrying a camera. What happened then was something that utterly bewildered me.

  First Wharton removed the pyjama jacket. It was of pale green material, I remember, and embroidered with little sprigs of flowers. An expensive suit, it looked to me, but quiet and in admirable taste. But the trousers were perfectly plain. My wife doesn’t wear them, and it was the first time I had seen a woman’s pyjama trousers, which was why I was surprised to see they had no front opening but were all of one piece, as it were, and with elastic round the waist.

  But for that attitude of repose, what happened next would have been gruesome enough, for after a general photograph of the body and its position, it was held up and a photograph taken of the lower half. Then it was reversed and another taken of the back. Then there were two close-ups of something I could not see, after which all the plates were sealed, and again the two affixed their signatures.

  “Get these off at once,” Wharton told his man. “They are expecting them.”

  “They” would be experts at the Yard, that much I knew, but for the rest I was in as thick a fog as ever. Then the statements seemed to have been completed, for Newton was asking if there was anything else. Wharton asked him to wait till the doctor had gone. Then he told me that according to Mrs. Brende, young Howard Crave was Penelope’s nearest surviving relative. While under the circumstances it was not necessary to obtain his permission for anything, it might be as well to let him know what had happened—in strict secrecy, of course.

  I didn’t want to miss anything, so I made it pretty quick. All I did, in fact, was to ask Harrison to send Craye to the Hall. He wasn’t to enter, but only to ask for me. As I left the phone the body was going through to the ambulance, so I sprinted upstairs to hear what Wharton might be saying to Newton. Nothing seemed to have been happening, but as soon as I came in, Wharton asked how Mrs. Brende was.

  “She was very upset when I saw her,” Wharton said. “How is she now?”
>
  “Quite composed again,” Newton said. “I don’t wonder at her being upset. It upset me pretty badly too. And what makes it worse for Mrs. Brende, Miss Craye was having tea with her only yesterday, afternoon. She didn’t often have time for that lately.”

  Wharton nodded consolingly, then brisked up.

  “Now then, about things generally, and always in the strictest confidence. Assume she was killed—murdered if you like. A wild hypothesis perhaps, but at my game, you’ve got to take no chances. Why should she be murdered? What did she know?”

  “How can I tell?” Newton said with a shrug of the shoulders. “Didn’t she claim that she knew nothing?”

  Wharton smiled cynically.

  “What she claimed and what she knew mayn’t be the same thing. Would you call her a snooper, for instance?”

  “Snooper?”

  “Busybody, Paul Pry, Nosey Parker,” gabbled Wharton impatiently.

  “Well, she certainly was—” He broke off. “I don’t know how to put it. She used to come down, perhaps, and pass on certain instructions from Colonel Brende. I didn’t like that at all, at first, but I’m a man of peace and I didn’t like to protest. Also she was so charming in her manner.”

  “You knew she was making the most of her position and you didn’t like to interfere,” Wharton summed up bluntly.

  “Well, yes—perhaps.”

  Then Wharton was nodding mysteriously, and his voice lowered.

  “Look here now, Newton, we’re all three men of the world. Everything we say is secret as the grave, but just between our three selves, was there anything—well, romantic, between her and the Colonel?”

  Newton’s face went a rosy pink. Wharton’s oily description of the Professor as “a man of the world” had tickled my fancy at the time.

  “Well, I don’t know,” he said, and was nervously rubbing his chin. “After all, they were relatives by marriage.”

  “Marriage, my foot!” Wharton said. “He was a man and she was a woman, and I’d say she had a pretty coming-on disposition. I’m not calling her a tail-swisher, mind you, but you’re a man of the world and you can put two and two together. Now then what about it?”

  “I still wouldn’t like to say,” Newton said nervously. “There were times perhaps when I did have ideas of the sort, but, as you see, it wasn’t really my business.”

  “But weren’t you sorry for Mrs. Brende?”

  Wharton had so hustled him off his feet with that, that he could only stammer. Then all at once he was assuming something of that dignity with which he had rebuked that too anticipatory questioner at the conference. Wharton mustn’t put words into his mouth. The subject was a distasteful one and he would rather not discuss it. As far as he knew there was nothing improper in the relationships between the Colonel and his secretary.

  “That’s all I want to know,” Wharton told him placatingly, and bestowed a surreptitious wink on me. “What I was driving at was this, as you’ve probably seen. If they should have happened to be close friends, shall we say, then he might have told her a good deal he never told anyone else. In other words, to get back to where we started from, we arrive at something serious. Suppose the Colonel’s kidnappers can’t make him talk, then they might have killed her so that she shouldn’t talk. If they haven’t got what they wanted, they’re taking good care nobody else shall have it.”

  Newton had been nodding gently, but at those last words his face took on a sudden alarm.

  “Then what about myself, and Wissler, and Riddle?”

  Wharton shrugged his shoulders.

  “An attack on you is feasible, of course. But not an attack, though. An attempt at attack. You’ll all be far too well protected from now on, so you needn’t have the least worry about that.”

  Except to request once more the most implicit secrecy, Wharton had no further immediate need of Newton. As soon as he’d gone, George was making exasperated noises.

  “Where do they dig these fellows up from! No wonder you read about all these rags that go on with students and professors. Did you ever know a chap like him? Why the devil can’t he give a plain answer to a plain question?”

  “Because your questions were far from plain,” I said. “Your technique isn’t adaptable enough. You’re getting careless. Newton won’t be hot-stuffed by those old tricks of the trade.”

  He glared indignantly, then was nodding to himself and chuckling.

  “What’s it matter either way? The Colonel was too thick with her, and he knew it. Look at that bottle, for instance. Do you know that she had permission to go down to the cellar here and help herself? Do you know that she had the keys and she availed herself of it pretty freely? Are those included in the privileges of a secretary?”

  “But, dammit all, George, what’s it matter? He was a full-blooded specimen and she was what she was. We’re not concerned with morals. Mind you,” I said, just as he was about to cut in, “I saw what you were driving at. Did she know any details of his discovery or the lines on which he was working? If so—”

  “She did,” he said.

  I stared.

  “The proof is that note-book,” he said. “He had lent it to her, or she’d taken it. When he was missing, she got the wind up and burnt it.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that. All the same, if Newton thought that note-book stiff going, how could she understand what was in it?”

  “Listen,” he said, and held up an avuncular hand. “There’s more to this case than meets the eye. Why shouldn’t she have been in the habit of taking that note-book, and copying what’d been written, and then passing it on to someone outside.”

  “You mean she was a kind of spy?”

  Once more he was shrugging his shoulders.

  “You told me she was hard up. You couldn’t guess how she’d ever got in here. Well, isn’t that an answer? That, and her physical charms? And I’ll go further.”

  He did, by coming nearer to me and breathing hoarsely.

  “That Newton. Why’s he all over the place? Why shouldn’t that nervousness be for the same reason?”

  “Good God, George! you can’t imagine anyone of his standing and reputation—”

  He cut me off at that.

  “I’ve got to imagine everything, haven’t I? And what about her standing and reputation? Two of those Big Bugs the other day were calling her by her Christian name. One called her Penny. Penny, my foot!”

  I glanced at my wrist-watch.

  “George, I ought to slip back to the Camp. But about this murder theory. What’s in it? What was the carpet business, and the photographing?”

  It was all very simple when he explained it. The pyjama trousers had been put on the wrong way round!

  “The way I know is this,” he said. “My wife wears the damn things, and night after night she’ll say, ‘Oh, bother it! If I haven’t put them on the wrong way round.’ I get fed up because I’m waiting in the cold to draw the curtains when the light’s out, so that we can get some air in the night, and I have to wait while she changes them round. I asked her more than once why she couldn’t put a bit of embroidery or something on the front, so she’d know at a glance. You know what women are? You couldn’t do a thing like that. Couldn’t be blowed! Then I had a look at them on my own one morning, and I couldn’t tell back from front till after quite a time. But what I want to tell you is this. She knows at once, the very minute she has them on, whether she’s been in too much of a hurry and put them on the wrong way round. Also she’s said more than once, as part of the argument, that no woman could sleep if she knew they were on back to front.”

  “In other words, Penelope Craye didn’t put her own trousers on last night.”

  “That’s it. Mind you, she may have been very tired or in a great hurry. That champagne may have fuddled her, but I’m taking no chances. If someone slipped into that champagne enough tablets to send her to sleep for good, then that somebody undressed her and put the trousers on the wrong
way round. And that somebody must have been a man.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And I think I’m beginning to see about the carpet. Some of the champagne was spilt. If it has the drug in solution, then we’re dealing with murder. If it hasn’t, then we’re back where we were.”

  Ledd looked in again to say I was wanted on the phone. I was surprised he didn’t follow me downstairs.

  “About Craye,” Harrison told me. “We can’t find him anywhere in Camp.”

  “Can’t find him?” I said. “But he was Orderly Officer yesterday, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. He came off duty at reveillé.”

  “Well, then, he shouldn’t be out of Camp.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Wait a minute, Harrison,” I said. “I’m not blaming you. It’s no fault of yours if these young officers dodge the regulations. You can’t have your eves everywhere.”

  “That’s true enough,” he said. “What shall I do? Send him to you when he turns up?”

  “Too late, I’m afraid,” I said. “I’ll see him there, later.”

  When I got upstairs again, Ledd was just leaving the room. Wharton gave me one of those peering looks from over the tops of his spectacles.

  “Is that chap Ledd a drinker?”

  “Probably,” I said. “But he’d hardly start as early as this. Why’d you ask?”

  “Something he just told me. He and the other batmen sleep in that barn place, just across the yard, as you know. He says they all get up pretty early, and he’s the earliest bird of the lot. Now listen to this. Miss Craye used to be valeted by Annie when she first came here, then the housemaid did it, and then Ledd. All it means is bringing early tea, and meals, and cleaning any shoes there are. The shoes are sometimes put outside the door as in hotels. Ledd says he asked her to do that so that he could clean them early. Well, up he comes this morning for the shoes, and he says it was about six o’clock. He came up the back stairs, and who should he catch sight of but Mrs. Brende. She was coming from this way, and carrying something. Ledd says he didn’t want her to see him—he doesn’t know why—so he ducked down. And what do you think he says she was carrying? A dust-pan and brush!”