Murder in Midsummer

by Cecily Gayford

  ‘Easily. All you need is a female accomplice of similar build and age. On Saturday or Sunday this accomplice had her hair cut and dyed and assumed Iris Nyman’s clothes. I mean to find out why.’

  Dora turned her back on the sunset and fixed him with a cold and stony look. ‘No, Reg, no. I’m not being difficult. I’m just behaving like any normal woman would when she goes on holiday and finds her husband can’t leave his job at home for just two weeks. This is the first foreign holiday I’ve had in ten years. If you’d been sent here to watch these people, if it was work, I wouldn’t say a word. But it’s just something you’ve dreamed up because you can’t relax and enjoy the sun and the sea like other people.’

  ‘OK,’ said her husband, ‘look at it that way.’ He was very fond of his wife, he valued her and quickly felt guilt over his frequent enforced neglect of her. This time any neglect would be as if by design, the result of that bone-deep need of his to unravel mysteries. ‘Don’t give me that Gorgon face. I’ve said I won’t let this spoil your holiday and I won’t.’ He touched her cheek, gently rubbing it. ‘And now I’m going to have my bath.’

  Not much more than twelve hours later he was walking the path to Mirna. The sun was already hot and there was a speedboat out in the bay. Carpet sellers had spread their wares in the market place, and the cafés were open for those who wanted coffee or – even at this hour – plum brandy.

  The Bosnia, most of it mercifully concealed by pines and ranks of cypresses, looked from close to, with its floors in plate-like layers and its concrete flying buttresses, more like an Unidentified Flying Object come to rest in the woods than a holiday hotel. Wexford crossed a forecourt as big as a football pitch and entered a foyer that wouldn’t have disgraced some capital city’s palace of justice.

  The receptionist spoke good English. ‘Mr and Mrs Nyman checked out last evening, sir.’

  ‘Surely they expected to stay another three days?’

  ‘I cannot tell you, sir. They left last evening before dinner. I cannot help you more.’

  So that was that.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ said Dora over a late breakfast. ‘Have a hilarious cops-and-robbers car chase up the Dalmatian coast?’

  ‘I’m going to wait and see. And in the meantime I’m going to enjoy my holiday and see that you enjoy yours.’ He watched her relax and smile for the first time since the previous evening.

  The Nymans were at the back of his mind all the time, but he did manage to enjoy the rest of his holiday. Werner and Trudi took them to Mostar to see the Turkish bridge. They went on a coach to Budva, and the members of the taxi boat syndicate ferried them from Mirna to Vrt and out to Lokrum. It was in secret that Wexford daily bought a London newspaper, a day old and three times its normal price. He wasn’t sure why he did so, what he hoped or feared. On their last morning he nearly didn’t bother. After all, he would be home in not much more than twenty-four hours and then he would have to take some action. But as he passed the reception desk, Dora having already entered the dining room for breakfast, the clerk held out the newspaper to him as a matter of course.

  Wexford thanked him – and there it was on the front page.

  Disappearance of Tycoon’s Daughter, said the headline. Beachwear King Fears Kidnap Plot.

  The text beneath read: ‘Mrs Iris Nyman, 32, failed to return to her North London home from a shopping expedition yesterday. Her father, Mr James Woodhouse, Chairman of Sunsports Ltd, a leading manufacturer of beachwear, fears his daughter may have been kidnapped and expects a ransom demand. Police are taking a serious view.

  ‘Mrs Nyman’s husband, 33-year-old Philip Nyman, said at the couple’s home in Flask Walk, Hampstead, today, “My wife and I had just got back from a motoring holiday in Italy and Yugoslavia. On the following morning Iris went out shopping and never returned. I am frantic with worry. She seemed to be happy and relaxed.”

  ‘Mr Woodhouse’s company, of which Mrs Nyman is a director, was this year involved in a vast takeover bid as a result of which two other major clothing firms were absorbed into Sunsports Ltd. The company’s turnover last year was in the region of £100,000,000.’

  There was a photograph of Iris Nyman in black glasses. Wexford would have been hard put to it to say whether this was of the woman on the walls or the woman in Mirna.

  That night they gave Racic a farewell dinner at the Dubrovacka restaurant.

  ‘Don’t say what they all say, Reg, that you will come back next year. Dalmatia is beautiful to you and Gospoda Wexford now, but a few days and the memory will fade. Someone will say, San Marino for you next time, or Ibiza, and there you will go. Is it not so?’

  ‘I said I shall be back,’ said Wexford, ‘and I meant it.’ He raised his glass of Posip. ‘But not in a year’s time. It’ll be sooner than that.’

  Three hundred and sixty-two days sooner, as Racic pointed out.

  ‘And here I am, sitting in the vrt of your kucica!’

  ‘Reg, we shall have you fluent in Serbo-Croat yet.’

  ‘Alas, no. I must be back in London again tomorrow night.’

  They were in Racic’s garden, halfway up the terraced hill behind Mirna, sitting in wicker chairs under his vine and his fig tree. Pink and white and red oleanders shimmered in the dusk, and above their heads bunches of small green grapes hung between the slats of a canopy. On the table was a bottle of Posip and the remains of a dinner of king prawns and Dalmatian buttered potatoes, salad and bread and big ripe peaches.

  ‘And now we have eaten,’ said Racic, ‘you will please tell me the tale of the important business that brought you back to Mirna so pleasantly soon. It concerns Mr and Mrs Nyman?’

  ‘Ivo, we shall have you a policeman yet.’

  Racic laughed and refilled Wexford’s glass. Then he looked serious. ‘Not a laughing matter, I think, not pleasant.’

  ‘Far from it. Iris Nyman is dead, murdered, unless I am much mistaken. This afternoon I accompanied the Dubrovnik police out into the bay and we took her body out of the cave on Vrapci.’

  ‘Zaboga! You cannot mean it! That girl who was at the Bosnia and who came out with her husband in my boat?’

  ‘Well, no, not that one. She’s alive and in Athens from where, I imagine, she’ll be extradited.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Tell me the tale from the beginning.’

  Wexford leaned back in his chair and looked up through the vines at the violet sky where the first stars had begun to show. ‘I’ll have to start with the background,’ he said, and after a pause, ‘Iris Nyman was the daughter and only child of James Woodhouse, the chairman of a company called Sunsports Ltd which makes sports- and beachwear and has a large export trade. She married when she was very young, less than twenty, a junior salesman in her father’s firm. After the marriage Woodhouse made a director of her, settled a lot of money on her, bought her a house and gave her a company car. To justify her company fees and expenses, she was in the habit of annually making a trip to holiday resorts in Europe with her husband, ostensibly to wear Sun-sports clothes and note who else was wearing them, and also to study the success of rival markets. Probably, she simply holidayed.

  ‘The marriage was not a happy one. At any rate, Philip Nyman wasn’t happy. Iris was a typically arrogant rich girl who expected always to have her own way. Besides, the money and the house and the car were all hers. He remained a salesman. Then, a year or so ago, he fell in love with a cousin of Iris, a girl called Anna Ashby.

  ‘Apparently, Iris knew nothing about this, and her father certainly didn’t.’

  ‘Then how can you …?’ Racic interrupted.

  ‘These affairs are always known to someone, Ivo. One of Anna’s friends has made a statement to Scotland Yard.’ Wexford paused and drank some of his wine. ‘That’s the background,’ he said. ‘Now for what happened a month or so ago.

  ‘The Nymans had arranged to motor down as usual to the south of France, but this time to cross northern Italy and spend a week or ten days here
on the Dalmatian coast. Anna Ashby had planned to spend part of the summer with friends in Greece so, at Iris’s invitation, she was to accompany the Nymans as far as Dubrovnik where she would stay a few days with them, then go on by air to Athens.

  ‘In Dubrovnik, after the three of them had been there a few days, Iris got hold of the idea of bathing off Vrapci. Perhaps she wanted to bathe in the nude, perhaps she had already been on the “topless” beach at St Tropez. I don’t know. Philip Nyman has admitted nothing of this. Up until the time I left, he was still insisting that his wife had returned to England with him.’

  ‘It was your idea, then,’ put in Racic, ‘that this poor woman’s body was concealed on the isle of sparrows?’

  ‘It was a guess,’ said Wexford. ‘I overheard some words, I was later told a lie. I’m a policeman. Whether they went to Vrapci on Saturday, June 18th, or Sunday, June 19th, I can’t tell you. Suffice that they did go – in that inflatable dinghy of theirs. The three of them went but only two came back, Nyman and Anna Ashby.’

  ‘They killed Mrs Nyman?’

  Wexford looked thoughtful. ‘I think so, certainly. Of course there’s a possibility that she drowned, that it was an accident. But in that case wouldn’t any normal husband have immediately informed the proper authority? If he had recovered the body, wouldn’t he have brought it back with him? We’re awaiting the results of the post-mortem, but even if that shows no wounds or bruises on the body, even if the lungs are full of water, I should be very surprised to learn that Nyman and, or, Anna hadn’t hastened her death or watched her drown.’

  Both were silent for a moment, Racic nodding slowly as he digested what Wexford had told him. Then he got up and fetched from the house a candelabrum, but thinking better of it, switched on an electric lamp attached to the wall.

  ‘Any light will attract the insects, but there at least they will not trouble us. So it was this Anna Ashby who came to Mirna, posing as Mrs Nyman?’

  ‘According to the manager of the hotel in Dubrovnik where the three of them had been staying, Nyman checked out and paid his bill early on the evening of the 19th. Neither of the women was with him. Iris was dead and Anna was at the hairdresser’s, having her hair cut and dyed to the same style and colour as her cousin’s. The police have already found the hairdresser who did the job.’

  ‘They came here next,’ said Racic. ‘Why didn’t they go straight back to England? And now I must ask, surely they did not intend to play this game in England? Even if the two women, as cousins, to a degree resembled each other, this Anna could not hope to deceive a father, close friends, Mrs Nyman’s neighbours.’

  ‘The answer to your first question is that to have returned to England a week earlier than expected would have looked odd. Why go back? The weather was perfect. Nyman wanted to give the impression they had both been well and happy during their holiday. No, his idea was to make sufficient people here in Yugoslavia believe that Iris was alive after June 19th. That’s why he latched on to us and got our name and home town out of us. He wanted to be sure of witnesses if need be. Anna was less bold, she was frightened to death. But Philip actually found himself two more English witnesses, though, thanks to your intervention, he never kept the appointment to dine with them.’

  ‘My intervention?’

  ‘Your excellent English. And now perhaps you’ll tell me what you overheard in the boat.’

  Racic laughed. His strong white teeth gleamed in the lamplight. ‘I knew she was not Mrs Nyman, Reg, but that knowledge would not have helped you then, eh? You had seen the lady on the walls but not, I presume, her marriage document. I thought to myself, why should I tell this busybody of a policeman the secrets of my passengers? But now, to use an idiom, here goes. Reg, the lady said, “I feel so guilty, it is terrible what we have done,” and he replied, “Everyone here thinks you are my wife, and no one at home will suspect a thing. One day you will be and we shall forget all this.” Now, would you have supposed they were talking of murder or of illicit passion?’

  Wexford smiled. ‘Nyman must have thought we’d confer, you and I, and jump to the former conclusion. Or else he’d forgotten what he’d said. He has rather a way of doing that.’

  ‘And after they left?’

  ‘Anna was to travel on Iris’s passport in the hope it would be stamped at at least one frontier. In fact, it was stamped at two, between Yugoslavia and Italy and again at Calais. At Dover Anna presumably left him and caught the first plane to Athens she could get. Nyman went home, reaching there in the night of the 28th, the precise date on which he and Iris had planned to return. On the following afternoon he told his father-in-law and the police that Iris was missing.’

  ‘He hoped the search for her or her body,’ said Racic, ‘would be confined to England because he had incontrovertible proof she had stayed with him in Mirna and had travelled back with him to England. No one would think of looking for her here, for it was known to many witnesses that she left here alive. But what did he hope to gain? Surely, if your laws are like ours, and I believe all laws are alike in this, without her body it would be years before he could inherit her money or marry again?’

  ‘You have to remember this wasn’t a premeditated murder. It must have happened on the spur of the moment. So conceal the body where it may never be found or not found until it’s beyond identification, announce that his wife has gone missing in England, and he gets the sympathy of his powerful father-in-law and certainly Iris’s house to live in and Iris’s car to drive. He keeps his job which he would have lost had he divorced Iris, and very likely gets all or some of her allowance transferred to him. Anna gets her hair back to its natural colour – brown, incidentally – lets it grow out, returns home and they resume their friendship. One day Iris will be presumed dead and they can marry.’

  Racic cut himself a slice of bread and nibbled at an olive. ‘I see it all or nearly all. I see that, but for your presence here in Mirna, the conspiracy had every chance of success. What I don’t see is, if this woman made herself look so much like this woman you saw on the walls, if she had the same hair and clothes – but I am a fool! You saw her face.’

  ‘I didn’t see her face and I didn’t hear her voice. Dora and I saw her very briefly and then only from the back.’

  ‘It is beyond my comprehension.’

  ‘The legs,’ said Wexford. ‘The legs were different.’

  ‘But, my dear Reg, my dear policeman, surely the leg of one brown-skinned slender young woman is much like the leg of such another? Or was there a mole perhaps or a protruding vein?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. The only time I saw the true Iris Nyman she wore a skirt that covered her legs to mid-calf. In fact, I could see very little of her legs.’

  ‘Then I am flummoxed.’

  ‘Ankles,’ said Wexford. ‘There are two types of normal ankle in this world, and the difference between them can only be seen from the back. In one type the calf seems to join the heel with a narrowing but no distinct shaft. In the other, the type of beauty, the Achilles tendon makes a long slender shaft with deep indentations on either side of it beneath the ankle bones. I saw Iris Nyman’s legs only from behind and in her the Achilles tendon was not apparent. It was a flaw in her appearance. When I first noticed Anna Ashby’s legs from behind as she was getting off your boat, I observed the long shaft of the tendon leading up into the muscle of a shapely calf. She had no flaw in her legs, but you might call that perfection her Achilles Heel.’

  ‘Zaboga! Beauty, eh? Only two types in the world?’ Racic extended one foot and rolled up his trouser leg. Wexford’s was already rucked up. In the lamplight they peered down at each other’s calves from behind. ‘Yours are all right,’ said Racic. ‘In fact, they are fine. In the beauty class.’

  ‘So are yours, you old professor and boatman.’

  Racic burst out laughing. ‘Tesko meni! Two elderly gentlemen who should know better, airing their limbs in an ankle competition! Whatever next?’

  ‘Well, I should
n’t,’ said Wexford, ‘but next let’s finish up the Posip.’

  The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  It is a most singular thing that a problem which was certainly as abstruse and unusual as any which I have faced in my long professional career should have come to me after my retirement, and be brought, as it were, to my very door. It occurred after my withdrawal to my little Sussex home, when I had given myself up entirely to that soothing life of Nature for which I had so often yearned during the long years spent amid the gloom of London. At this period of my life the good Watson had passed almost beyond my ken. An occasional weekend visit was the most that I ever saw of him. Thus I must act as my own chronicler. Ah! had he but been with me, how much he might have made of so wonderful a happening and of my eventual triumph against every difficulty! As it is, however, I must needs tell my tale in my own plain way, showing by my words each step upon the difficult road which lay before me as I searched for the mystery of the Lion’s Mane.

  My villa is situated upon the southern slope of the downs, commanding a great view of the Channel. At this point the coast-line is entirely of chalk cliffs, which can only be descended by a single, long, tortuous path, which is steep and slippery. At the bottom of the path lie a hundred yards of pebbles and shingle, even when the tide is at full. Here and there, however, there are curves and hollows which make splendid swimming-pools filled afresh with each flow. This admirable beach extends for some miles in each direction, save only at one point where the little cove and village of Fulworth break the line.

  My house is lonely. I, my old housekeeper, and my bees have the estate all to ourselves. Half a mile off, however, is Harold Stackhurst’s well-known coaching establishment, The Gables, quite a large place, which contains some score of young fellows preparing for various professions, with a staff of several masters. Stackhurst himself was a well-known rowing Blue in his day, and an excellent all-round scholar. He and I were always friendly from the day I came to the coast, and he was the one man who was on such terms with me that we could drop in on each other in the evenings without an invitation.