by Tony Medawar
‘I walked out of the house and had a cup of coffee at a stall; the chap who kept the stall noticed I was all excited—“agitated” was the word the police used afterwards.
‘You see, I was thinking that the kiddies’d be able to have their Christmas presents after all.
‘That was just 10.30 p.m. A lovely night, stars and frost twinkling, and that ten quid in my pocket.
‘So I thought I’d take a bit of a walk. I’d no idea where l was going. In the end I found myself walking up a long hill right out of the town—the Cirencester road, they told me it was later.
‘I was so elated, I didn’t particularly notice anyone I passed or what roads I took; and, believe it or not, I’d been walking for three-quarters of an hour before I realised I’d left my stick behind at Aunt Liz’s.
‘It was a nice stick—an ash-plant with a silver band and my initials on it; the wife’d given it me for my birthday. So I thought I’d call in at Aunt Liz’s and pick it up before I found a place to sleep the night.
‘Well, I’d got to the end of the street where her house was—and that’s when I saw it, in the street, in the lamplight. The orange.’
‘A nice, big, juicy orange,’ said Nigel dreamily.
‘Now, I’m an inquisitive chap, and I couldn’t help asking myself whoever could it be that went about so late at night dropping oranges. I could have sworn it wasn’t there when I’d come along this street before. I bent down to pick it up.
‘Funny, you know, for a moment I thought it might be some sort of practical joke, like leaving red-hot pennies on the pavement.’
Mr Prendergast blushed and giggled. Somehow it made us all feel very warm-hearted towards him.
‘I bent down to pick it up; and just then it struck a quarter to twelve.’
‘And what happened?’ asked Hailes excitedly.
‘Nothing. Not at the moment. I put the orange in my pocket—I noticed there were tooth-marks in the skin—and went along to Aunt Liz’s.
‘There were lights in the windows still. I thought I’d best go round to the back and ask the maid to give me my stick. I didn’t want to knock up against Aunt Liz again that night.
‘So I went quietly down the side-passage—and walked straight into a policeman. “What’s your business here?” he said. “I’m Miss Metcalfe’s nephew,” I said.
‘He took me inside. I was told my aunt had been found murdered. It knocked me over, I can tell you. I remember saying, in a dazed sort of way, “I came back to get my stick.”
‘And at that very moment the maid came in. “Why, that’s the gentleman who was here two hours ago—him I was telling you about,” she said. Two days later I was arrested.’
Mr Prendergast paused tantalisingly.
‘You’d better ask Mr Strangeways to tell you the rest of the story,’ he said at last.
‘I became interested in the case through Inspector Blount, a friend of mine,’ Nigel began crisply. ‘The case against Joe Prendergast was based on the following pieces of circumstantial evidence.
‘(1) The maid overheard a scene between him and her mistress, in the course of which he exclaimed, “I’m desperate. I’d do anything to get it!”
‘(2) After this they had lowered their voices, and the maid, losing interest, had slipped out to post some letters, met her young man, and not returned till nearly eleven o’clock.
‘(3) On her return, the maid found Miss Metcalfe in the hall, her head battered in.
‘(4) The drawers in Miss Metcalfe’s boudoir had been rifled; there were eight £5 notes and ten £1 notes missing.
‘(5) The £1 notes were discovered in Joe’s pocket-book; there was blood on one of them, of the same blood-group as the deceased’s.
‘(6) The bundle of £5 notes was found later hidden in a hedge beside the Cirencester road.
‘(7) The coffee-stall owner recognised the prisoner as the man who had come to his stall in a “highly agitated” condition on the night of the crime.
‘(8) The prisoner had endeavoured to get into the back garden, and in this garden the police found his walking-stick, bloodstained, with strands of the deceased’s hair clinging to it.
‘The theory was, of course, that Miss Metcalfe had refused Joe any assistance, that he had struck her down, stolen the money, and in his panic, flung away the stick as he left the house: that he had then gone for a walk to steady his nerves, realised that the £5 notes were traceable, and hidden them in the hedge, and returned to get the stick—the most damning evidence against him.
‘Well, it seemed a water-tight case. But there were things in it that puzzled me. I got permission to interview Joe, and he convinced me that his version of the story was the right one.
‘But it wasn’t till he told me about the orange that I saw any hope of proving it.
‘I’ll put it to you like this: Who would throw away a perfectly good orange, in which he had set his teeth, late at night, in the middle of December?’
‘We racked our brains. A number of theories were evolved, some flippant, all more or less fantastic.
‘I imagined a murderer, creeping out of Miss Metcalfe’s house with an orange he had stolen, starting to eat it, then flinging it down in revulsion.
‘But he wouldn’t do murder for an orange unless he was starving,’ said Nigel patiently, ‘and if he was starving, he wouldn’t throw it away. No, the whole point is that he’d had a surfeit of oranges.’
‘A murderer who’d had a surfeit of oranges?’ I repeated, gazing owlishly at Nigel.
‘No, you ass. Not a murderer, a carol singer—one of Hailes’ “caterwauling brats”.’
Gradually it dawned upon us. So simple. So obvious.
‘Yes,’ said Nigel, ‘those boys who go round singing carols—people don’t like sending them empty away; they give them an apple or an orange. You see, if Joe was right in saying that orange hadn’t been there when he left the house, there was a fair chance that some carol singers had been down the street after he’d left.
‘There was just a chance that they’d called at Miss Metcalfe’s house and, as the maid was out, she’d have to go to the door. Which would prove that she’d been alive after Joe had left her.
‘Of course, he might have come back later and killed her. But at least it gave us a loophole. Well, to cut a long story short, I found those two boys.
‘After the murder had come out, they’d been afraid to tell anyone they’d been to Miss Metcalfe’s house. But they had, and she’d come to the door and given them a proper ticking-off; and that was at half-past ten, when Joe was at the coffee stall.
‘They’d been given oranges at the next house, but they were so stuffed with dessert already that they couldn’t eat one of the oranges, and threw it away after one of them had set his teeth in it.
‘This made the police think again. They got the right man in the end—a burglar. He’d got into Miss Metcalfe’s house over the back garden wall just after the carol singers left. He was surprised by the old lady in the hall, and hit out at her with the first object that came to his hand—Joe’s stick.
‘Then he started rifling the drawers, but he was in such a state by then that he couldn’t go through with it properly; he just seized the bundle of notes and fled out by the back door again, throwing the stick away in the garden.
‘He walked out of the town—it was one of those coincidences that you lawyers hate to admit, Aston—by the same road that Joe had taken.
‘He found that the notes were £5 ones and traceable, so he hid them away. Then he jumped a lorry that was going to Swindon. That’s how Joe saved his life by picking up an orange.’
‘Well,’ said Hailes after a long silence, ‘I hope this will be a lesson to our lawyer friend about the dangers of circumstantial evidence.’
But Aston, as usual, had the last word:
‘And a lesson to our mediaevalist friend,’ he replied, ‘that there’s something to be said for his “dismal gangs of brats who go around caterwauling Good K
ing Wenceslas”.’
NICHOLAS BLAKE
‘Nicholas Blake’ (1901–1972) was the pen name of the Irish writer and poet Cecil Day Lewis, who was educated at Sherborne and Wadham College, Oxford. As Blake, Day Lewis wrote twenty novels, a handful of short stories and a couple of plays; he also reviewed crime fiction. Some of his novels are pure detective stories with clues to find and alibis to unravel—novels like There’s Trouble Brewing (1937) and Malice in Wonderland (1940)—but he also wrote psychological crime novels, the foremost being A Tangled Web (1956), which incidentally was the only one of his titles not published by the Crime Club.
The Nicholas Blake books were immensely popular, not least for the strictly fair-play approach to the detection of the criminal that he takes in the sixteen novels that feature Nigel Strangeways, an amateur sleuth in the classic mould. Arguably the best of the Strangeways canon is The Beast Must Die (1938), in which a man sets out to commit murder but events do not go entirely as planned, and the suitably tongue-in-cheek End of Chapter (1957), in which Strangeways investigates murder at a publishing house.
‘Mr Prendergast and the Orange’ was published by the Sunday Dispatch on 27 March 1938.
THE YELLOW SPHERE
John Rhode
Noiselessly the young man crept up the alley until he reached the window of the back parlour of the Black Swan.
Since it was now eleven o’clock at night, the doors of that excellent hostelry had been closed—officially—an hour before.
But a light shone through a chink of the curtains drawn across the window, and a sound of murmuring voices reached the sharp-set ears of the young man without.
Inch by inch he crept forward until he could see through the chink. One swift glance at the four people seated round the card-table in the centre of the room was enough.
Carrying his suitcase in his hand, he glided out of the alley into the old-fashioned and at that hour practically deserted High Street of the little port of Sandhaven.
After a swift glance in both directions, he set off at a rapid pace towards the quay, little more than a quarter of a mile distant.
It was a fine night in early spring: dark, for the moon had not yet risen. The young man, in his anxiety to avoid observation, kept as closely as possible under the shadow of the houses.
As he passed the closed door of a greengrocer’s shop, his foot came into contact with something that rolled away from him and came to rest in the centre of the pavement.
He appeared not to notice the incident, for his eyes were fixed upon the open space ahead of him. A minute later he had reached the quay.
It was even darker here than it had been in the High Street, for the waterside was illuminated only by feeble gas lamps, set at wide intervals. But the young man did not hesitate. He struck diagonally across the quay until he could see the thin pencil of a mast outlined against the skyline.
He increased his pace, reached the edge of the wharf, and stared down at the deck of the motor-cruiser Amelia, a couple of feet below the level of the quay.
At this time of year very few of the yachts belonging to the port had yet been fitted out, and the Amelia was the only craft tied up alongside the quay.
Her owner, Mr Peter Underwood, was a well-known local character. A childless widower, he was a rich man, as wealth was estimated in Sandhaven.
He lived in a rather pretentious house in the newer part of the town, where his material wants were faithfully attended by an elderly housekeeper.
But every now and then an urge for more cheerful companionship would seize him, and he would spend a convivial evening at the Black Swan or one of the other taverns in the old town.
On such occasions, if the Amelia was in commission, he preferred to spend the night on board her rather than return home. The motor-cruiser had no censorious eyes. For Tom, her one-man crew, slept ashore.
The young man seemed to be well aware that the Amelia was untenanted, for after a sharp look up and down the quay to make sure that he was unobserved, he caught hold of a shroud and swung himself lightly down upon the motor-cruiser’s deck.
He ran forward, slid back the forecastle hatch, and dropped into the darkness beneath.
The forecastle contained nothing but a bunk along one side and a lot of gear stowed in lockers on the other. The young man took an electric torch from his pocket, and balanced it so that its rays shone on the floor.
He lifted one of the floor boards revealing the ribs of the craft and the strakes of planking beneath them.
Then he opened his suitcase and took from it a two-inch auger, with which he rapidly bored a hole in the strake nearest the keel.
As he withdrew the auger, a jet of water followed it, and he surveyed this with grim satisfaction.
‘That’ll do the trick,’ he muttered. ‘She’ll fill gradually by the head in two or three hours, and Uncle Peter, damn him, asleep in the cabin aft, won’t know anything about it until she dives head-first into the harbour. And if he can manage to get to the surface after that—well, I lose, that’s all.’
He replaced the auger in the suit-case, switched off the torch, and swung himself on deck. Then, having closed the hatch, he vaulted on to the quay and disappeared.
It was roughly half an hour later that the card game in the back parlour of the Black Swan came to an end. Mr Peter Underwood drained his glass and stood up, rather unsteadily.
‘Well, I must thank you and the ladies for a very jolly evening,’ he said to Mr George Blickfield, the landlord. “Time for me to turn in now.’
‘You’re not going to sleep on board the Amelia, surely, Mr Underwood?’ Mrs Blickfield asked, a trifle anxiously.
‘Ah, but I am.’ Mr Underwood replied, with an inebriated leer. ‘And if you or that good-looking daughter of yours likes to come with me, I shan’t raise any objection.’
‘How you do go on, to be sure!’ exclaimed Mrs Blickfield. ‘George’ll show you to the door. And mind the two steps outside, they’re treacherous.’
After repeated good-nights, Mr Underwood was safely escorted out of the side door of the Black Swan. Mrs Blickfield listened to the irregular sound of his footsteps receding down the alley.
‘Do you think he’s all right, George?’ she asked her husband. ‘I shouldn’t like him to fall into the harbour or anything like that.’
‘Oh, you needn’t worry about him,’ Mr Blickfield replied. ‘He’s gone on board dozens of times when he was much worse than he is now. Come along, let’s go to bed. It’s just on a quarter to midnight.”
Mr Underwood reached the end of the alley, and turned down the High Street towards the quay.
His progress, though perhaps not in an undeviatingly straight line, was stately and dignified. Damn good chap, Blickfield. Keeps a decent drop of whisky, too. And his wife and daughter. Good sports, both of them.
Hullo, what’s that?
Mr Underwood had caught sight of an object lying in the middle of the pavement, right at his feet. He stopped and surveyed it suspiciously.
By this time the moon had risen, and by the soft light that filtered into the High Street he discovered the object to be an orange.
‘Well, I’m blest!’ he muttered. ‘Fancy leaving a thing like that where anyone might tread on it. Damn carelessness, I call it. Might break a fellow’s neck. Lucky I spotted it before …’
He bent down to pick it up, but his sense of position was none too accurate, and the orange rolled away a few inches, eluding his grasp. He made a second grab at it, which was successful.
‘Aha, got you this time!’ he chuckled as he straightened himself triumphantly. ‘Old Peter isn’t so drunk as you might think.’
And as he went on towards the quay, he absentmindedly put the orange in his jacket pocket. As he did so, the town hall clock chimed the quarter before twelve.
When Mr Underwood reached the quayside, the tide had risen, so that the deck of the Amelia was almost level with the wharf.
He stepped on board with an air o
f easy confidence, and stood for a moment looking over the unruffled waters of the harbour, shining like silver under the bright moon.
‘Fine night, and not a breath of wind,’ he muttered. Then he stepped into the cockpit and, opening the folding doors, entered the cabin which occupied the stern of the motor-cruiser.
The cabin was arranged with a centre table and a bunk on either side, at the forward end of each of which was a capacious locker. Mr Underwood made his way to the starboard locker, took from it a bottle and a glass, and poured himself out a generous tot of whisky.
‘Must have a nightcap,’ he muttered as he seated himself heavily on the nearest bunk. ‘Best thing to clear away the cobwebs. How much have I had to drink this evening, I wonder?
‘That confounded chap Blickfield would keep filling up my glass as we were playing. Well, must drown one’s sorrows sometimes. Damn that young rascal! He’s quite upset me.’
As Mr Underwood reached for his glass he became aware of the bulge in his jacket pocket. He withdrew the orange and stared at it owlishly. It was almost perfectly round, smooth-skinned and yellow.
‘Well I’m blessed!’ he exclaimed to himself softly. ‘Whatever possessed me to bring a thing like that on board now? Never mind, it’ll do for some kid or other in the morning.’
He put the orange on the cabin table in front of him and drained his glass to the last drop. Then, not without difficulty, he began to undress. He found it an unduly lengthy process for his fingers seemed to have lost their aptitude for undoing buttons and studs.
By the time he had removed his outer garments, further effort seemed hardly worthwhile. Still clad in his shirt and pants, he lay down on the bunk and rolled himself in his blankets.
But sleep refused to come to him. He could not drive from his mind the memory of the interview with his nephew that morning.
Hateful business driving out one’s own kith and kin like that. Having no children of his own, Mr Underwood had always looked upon his sister’s only son as his natural heir.
But Victor had been a ne’er-do-well ever since the time he had left school.