Slade drove fast through the wild night. There was not a soul about in those lonely lanes. He knew the way by heart, for he had driven repeatedly over that route recently in order to memorise it.
The car bumped down the last bit of lane, and Slade drew up on the edge of the sands.
It was pitch dark, and the bitter wind was howling about him, under the black sky. Despite the noise of the wind, he could hear the surf breaking far away, two miles away, across the level sands. He climbed out of the driver’s seat and walked round to the other door. When he opened it the dead man fell sideways, into his arms.
With an effort, Slade held him up, while he groped into the back of the car for the plough chain and the iron weights. He crammed the weights into the dead man’s pockets, and he wound the chain round the dead man’s body, tucking in the ends to make it all secure. With that mass of iron to hold it down, the body would never be found again when dropped into the sea at the lowest ebb of the Spring tide.
Slade tried now to lift the body in his arms, to carry it over the sands. He reeled and strained, but he was not strong enough—Slade was a man of slight figure, and past his prime. The sweat on his forehead was icy in the cold wind.
For a second, doubt overwhelmed him, lest all his plans should fail for want of bodily strength. But he forced himself into thinking clearly—forced his frail body into obeying the vehement commands of his brain.
He turned round, still holding the dead man upright. Stooping, he got the heavy burden on his shoulders. He drew the arms round his neck, and, with a convulsive effort, he got the legs up round his hips. The dead man now rode him pig-a-back. Bending nearly double, he was able to carry the heavy weight in that fashion, the arms tight round his neck, the legs tight round his waist.
He set off, staggering, down the imperceptible slope of the sands towards the sound of the surf. The sands were soft beneath his feet. It was because of this softness that he had not driven the car down to the water’s edge. He could afford to take no chances of being embogged.
The icy wind shrieked round him all that long way. The tide was nearly two miles out. That was why Slade had chosen this place. In the depth of winter, no one would go to the water’s edge at low tide for months to come.
He staggered on over the sands, clasping the limbs of the body close about him. Desperately, he forced himself forward, not stopping to rest, for he only had time now to reach the water’s edge before the flow began. He went on and on, driving his exhausted body with fierce urgings from his frightened brain.
Then, at last, he saw it: a line of white in the darkness which indicated the water’s edge. Farther out, the waves were breaking in an inferno of noise. Here, the fragments of the rollers were only just sufficient to move the surface a little.
He was going to make quite sure of things. Steadying himself, he stepped into the water, wading in farther and farther so as to be able to drop the body into comparatively deep water. He held to his resolve, staggering through the icy water, knee deep, thigh deep, until it was nearly at his waist. This was far enough. He stopped, gasping in the darkness.
He leaned over to one side, to roll the body off his back. It did not move. He pulled at its arms. They were obstinate. He could not loosen them. He shook himself, wildly. He tore at the legs round his waist. Still the thing clung to him. Wild with panic and fear, he flung himself about in a mad effort to rid himself of the burden. It clung on as though it were alive. He could not break its grip, no matter how hard he tried.
Then another breaker came in. It splashed about him, wetting him far above his waist. The tide had begun to turn now, and the tide on those sands comes in like a race-horse.
He made another effort to cast off the load, and, when it still held him fast, he lost his nerve and tried to struggle out of the sea. But it was too much for his exhausted body. The weight of the corpse and the iron with which it was loaded overbore him. He fell.
He struggled up again in the foam-streaked, dark sea, staggering a few steps, fell again—and did not rise. The dead man’s arms were round his neck, throttling him, strangling him. Rigor mortis had set in and Spalding’s muscles had refused to relax.
The Swimming Pool
H. C. Bailey
The literary career of Henry Christopher Bailey (1878–1961) lasted about half a century, but his heyday as an exponent of detective fiction was during the ‘golden age of murder’ between the two world wars. Bailey began as an author of historical and romantic fiction; his first book, My Lady of Orange, appeared in 1901, and later titles included The Lonely Lady (1911) and The Sea Captain (1913). Reggie Fortune, the character who made Bailey’s name, appeared in the half a dozen longish short stories in Call Mr Fortune (1920), and during the 1920s Bailey was regarded as one of Britain’s leading detective writers.
Bailey was an unorthodox crime writer, whose work shows a passionate loathing of evil, especially when manifested in crimes against young people. There is a seriousness at the heart of his best stories which distinguishes them from many other vintage mysteries. Following the Second World War, readers’ tastes changed, and Bailey’s idiosyncratic prose style ceased to have widespread appeal. In the twenty-first century, there has been something of a revival of interest in his work; Barry Pike has written a long series of articles for the magazine CADS which discuss the Fortune saga, while 2017 saw the publication of Laird R. Blackwell’s H. C. Bailey’s Reggie Fortune and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. This story first appeared in Windsor Magazine in April 1936, and was included in A Clue for Mr Fortune, published in the same year.
It was the case of the swimming-pool which made the newspapers put Mr Fortune into headlines. But that is not his only reason for lamentation over the result. He says it was an awful warning.
The late Joseph Colborn made a million or so out of small groceries. His ideas of spending it were old-fashioned. He did not buy a place in society but in the suburbs. Though outer London now stretches far beyond the green ridge of Tootle Heath, on the slopes about that open space some of the houses with which the modest business wealth of last century was content still stand secluded in what are advertised for sale as park-like surroundings half an hour from Piccadilly.
Joe Colborn bought the biggest—Heath Hall, a lump of grey brick with renaissance towers. Whether he made it more hideous by painting it all white has been vainly disputed by the cultured of Tootle. He did nothing else which changed the place, and he died and his nephew Sam Colborn reigned in his stead.
On a sultry afternoon of July, Mr Fortune drove out to Heath Hall with the Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department. Others had come before them. They sat and sweltered in a slow procession of cars along a shadeless road. Reggie opened damp eyelids. ‘Where are we?’ he groaned. ‘Oh, my hat! What a crush! Way to hell, I presume.’ Crowds he loves little and a crawling car less.
Lomas smiled. ‘That’s the spirit, Reginald.’
Their car stopped, and they got out of it into green gloom. The grounds of Heath Hall are encircled by a remnant of the old forest of the London heights, oak and beech. Within that girdle of woodland, the lawns and gardens look as if they were out in the country.
Arch females, giving no change, sold programmes of the delights which, by permission of Samuel Colborn, Esq., Heath Hall offered that afternoon to the philanthropic. The Guild of Grace—President, Her Highness Princess Somebody, who would receive the philanthropists; Chairman, J. Harvey Deal, M.D.—had arranged a tennis fête with the most fashionable foreigners on show. The famous gardens would also be thrown open. Band of the Green Dragoons. Tea. Buffet.
With enquiring eyes Reggie followed Lomas from the shade of the old trees through which a brown brook flowed to the blaze of the gardens. ‘Not so bad, what?’ Lomas encouraged him.
‘Like dining with grandfather,’ Reggie answered. ‘He had to have everything.’
Heath Hall had a craggy
range of rock garden and a Dutch garden and an Italian rose garden and what its maker might have meant for a Japanese garden, and arbours and pergolas and statues spattered among them, and, farther on, borders of lilies and perennials led up to carpet bedding and beds of geraniums and calceolarias.
‘“Let me face the whole of it,”’ Reggie sighed, ‘“fare like my peers, the heroes of old.” Yes. There’s dahlias. I felt he’d grow dahlias. Now we know the worst.’
Resolutely he marched Lomas round the windings of the path which led to the lawn in the shade of the white house. Her Highness the Princess Whatnot, a Mongolian face above a girlish frock, was receiving the charitable guests with the help of a dapper, officious man. ‘Is that Deal or Colborn?’ Lomas whispered.
‘Oh, my dear chap! Observe that ingratiatin’ manner. Dr J. Harvey Deal, the eminent physician.’
As they approached, Dr Deal came out of his bowing and smiling with a jerk of attention, then he glanced behind him, but had a smile ready for them by the time Lomas was taking the Princess’s hand.
‘One of our busiest men, ma’am,’ he explained. ‘Mr Lomas is responsible for the public safety.’ The Princess said something guttural, and Dr Deal’s urbane voice flowed on: ‘My dear sir, it’s most kind of you to spare an hour for us. Believe me, we do appreciate that. I know what the sacrifice is to a man under such stress of duties. But really it is of the greatest value that someone of your eminence should show his interest in our little work.’
Lomas laughed. ‘I hope it may be. I have been interested in your work, Dr Deal.’
‘So good of you. I do think the Guild is doing great things.’ Dr Deal side-stepped to explain to the Princess that Mr Fortune was one of the most brilliant of the younger men in the profession. ‘Will it be surgery or this—er—criminal work, Fortune? A fine future in either, I am sure. So glad to have you here. Do you know Colborn, Mr Lomas?’ He looked behind him again. He beckoned to a slouching young man with a sullen, bony face and a shock of red hair. ‘Really rather a noble fellow.’ He lowered his voice confidentially. ‘Takes his great fortune as a duty.’
Reggie slid away, remarking to himself: ‘“The carpenter said nothing but: The butter’s spread too thick.”’ He sat down in the shade of a cedar and watched the conversation of Lomas with Deal and Colborn… Colborn was sulky and fidgety… Other people took chairs near Reggie, and he got into talk with them, about the gardens, about Colborn, about his deceased uncle… It appeared that uncle had been popular in Tootle, the most genial, the most hospitable of men, till he had that dreadful illness… Tootle had not made up its mind about the nephew: nobody knew him, he wouldn’t go anywhere; never opened the house; didn’t seem to have found himself—of course he’d been as poor as a church mouse till his uncle’s death. This gossip faded out into looks of silent mysterious meaning…
Colborn had escaped from the triple conversation. Dr Deal was conducting Lomas on a tour. Reggie wandered away, avoided with a shudder the tennis-courts on which the foreign champions were bounding—he objects to modern tennis as a ballet without art—and also Colborn was not stopping there. He made a circuit round the spectators; he vanished.
Taking the same direction, Reggie arrived at the stream which flowed from the wood through the lower level of the laboured gardens in a comparatively natural condition. Willows shaded it; white crowfoot rose from the water above swaying green ribands of vallisneria; the banks were spangled with the gold of St John’s wort.
The sound of talk made him stop; a man’s voice sulky, a woman’s cajoling: ‘It’s all right, Ann. What’s the odds?’—‘Oh, silly! Such a funk!’—‘Not funking. I’ve done my stuff.’—‘But you haven’t. You must show.’—‘Dam’ all!’—‘Me too?’—‘You minx’—sounds which were not of talk, movement, a rustle of clothes, a gasp—‘Oh, Sam, you bear!’
Reggie stood on a piece of dead wood, made a crack, and, after a pause of discretion, moved on. He saw Sam Colborn, red of face, departing quickly with a small, dark woman. She had a buxom shape; she had a chin; her walk declared assurance. ‘Bear has a leader,’ Reggie was thinking, when he saw them come upon another woman.
She did not go well with Ann. Slim and severe in grey silk coat and skirt, which looked like mourning against Ann’s abundant apple green, she wore a bob of golden hair, and the tired, pretty face had a complexion so fair that against Ann’s bright colour it seemed marble white.
‘Hallo! Fancy meeting you,’ said Colborn, with no pretence of pleasure.
Ann did much better. ‘My dear! How jolly! I haven’t seen you for donkey’s years. What’s the best with you? Come along and have tea and talky.’
‘Thanks very much, Miss Deal’—the answering voice had no expression—‘I can’t stay.’
‘Oh, come on, nurse,’ Colborn growled.
‘No, thank you, Mr Colborn. I only came to look at the place again. Dear place, isn’t it? I must go.’
‘All right. Sorry. See you again some time.’ Colborn marched on.
‘But of course we shall.’ Ann laughed. ‘All the best!’ She waved a jaunty farewell and followed him.
The woman in grey stood still for a moment, using her handkerchief, then went on along the stream. Though Ann hung possessive on his arm, Colborn looked back at her. She vanished into the dark of some aged yew-trees.
Reggie strolled that way too. Beyond the yews the stream broadened to make a swimming-pool from which the overflow splashed down a cascade among ferns into the encircling woodland again. The woman stood on the bank looking up at the gardens and the white house, and her pretty face was miserable. As Reggie appeared she turned and hurried into the wood. He saw her go like a grey ghost through the shade to a gate in the palings and let herself out.
‘Well, well,’ he murmured, and wandered round the pool. It had been elaborately made, with concrete bed and spring-board and diving-stage. It was ill-cared for. On the concrete, greenish slime was thick; through cracks in it weeds grew, and in the glittering yellow water floated scum and leaves and petals. The space within the close boughs of the old yews had been fashioned into two dressing-places, but the seats were dirty and lichened.
‘Not swimmers, the Colborns, dead or livin’,’ Reggie reflected. ‘Prehistoric trees.’ He was guessing their age over a twisted hollow trunk when he heard brisk footsteps, and turned to see the living Colborn.
‘Hallo!’ Colborn looked impatient hostility. ‘I say, your Mr Lomas is getting peeved with you. He wants to go.’
‘Fancy that,’ Reggie drawled. ‘Wonder why?’
‘Bored stiff, by the looks of him. You don’t seem to be leading the revels yourself.’
‘Not revellin’, no. But very interested, thanks.’
‘You’re easy pleased.’
‘Yes. A simple mind. Yes. Lead me to him.’
‘He’s up there.’ Colborn jerked his head towards the house.
‘Thanks very much.’ Reggie strolled away and left him.
Lomas was found on the outskirts of the tennis crowd with Dr Harvey Deal. ‘What, Reginald, you have to go?’ He cut through Deal’s flow of talk. ‘Of course. A most interesting afternoon, Dr Deal. Good-bye. Well, au revoir.’
Deal went with them a little way, gushing still. They left him and proceeded to their car in silence.
‘Quite interesting, yes,’ Reggie murmured, as they drove away. ‘Did you send the living Colborn to fetch me? No, I thought you didn’t. But he said so.’
‘The deuce he did! Why?’
‘Because I was where he didn’t want me. Which was by a decayed swimmin’-pool.’
‘What has that to do with anything?’ Lomas frowned.
‘Difficult question. The provisional hypothesis is that he wanted somebody else there.’ Reggie described the proceedings of Colborn with the two women.
Lomas gave a coarse chuckle. ‘Caught by Deal’s daughter, is
he? Suggestive. And with another girl on his hands. That may be very useful.’
‘How happy could he be with either were t’other dear charmer away! Yes. You have a low mind. However. He called the unknown “nurse.”’
‘What did she look like? Children’s nurse?’
‘My dear chap!’ Reggie moaned. ‘I don’t know. People don’t look like anything. She didn’t nurse Colborn’s innocent childhood. Or Ann Deal’s. Too young. And they both knew her well. I should say she was a hospital nurse. Might have nursed the deceased uncle.’
‘Good gad!’ said Lomas. ‘Devilish suggestive.’
‘Yes, it could be. What did you do in the Great War, daddy?’
‘You saw the reactions, didn’t you? Deal was rattled, badly rattled. And Colborn couldn’t be civil. Colborn fled and Deal kept at me with stories of what fine fellows old Colborn and young Colborn were, and how they loved each other and how old Colborn suffered and what a hopeless case it was—and then young Colborn hustled us off the premises. Not bad stuff, Reginald. Better than I expected. But it’s generally a sound move to break in on people and shake ’em up over this sort of case. Now we have to consider the next move.’
‘Oh, no. No. I want my tea.’ Reggie was plaintive. ‘I haven’t had any tea, Lomas.’ He leaned forward and told the chauffeur to stop at his house in Wimpole Street.
Behold him recumbent there, eating a compilation of cream and quince jelly, while Lomas stood before the pots of lilies which filled the fireplace and lectured.
‘Now what have we really got? Old Colborn died six months ago, and Deal certified that the cause of death was cancer of the stomach. Colborn left nearly a million: the bulk of it to this nephew Samuel; £5,000 to Deal, and £1,000 to his devoted nurse, Sybil Benan. Will made shortly before death. Two weeks ago the Tootle police received this anonymous letter telling ’em that Mr Joseph Colborn would be alive now if he had been properly treated, and suggesting he was poisoned. Letter in printed letters on common paper, posted in Tootle. Of course we often get that sort of thing when a wealthy man dies. The divisional inspector reported local scandal over old Colborn changing from the local doctor to Harvey Deal. Well, we’ve had rumours about Deal before. And you confirmed them.’
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