Death in Damascus: A 1920s Murder Mystery with Heathcliff Lennox

by Karen Baugh Menuhin

  ‘Were there any prints on the hidden magazine you found?’ Swift demanded.

  ‘No, it had been made clean.’ Fontaine didn’t glance up from writing. ‘But there were two sets of fingerprints on the magazine loaded with live rounds.’ He stopped and fixed me narrowly. ‘One was yours, Major Lennox, and the others belonged to Miss Carruthers.’

  That put me on the back foot and I paused for a second, then retaliated. ‘That doesn’t mean a damn thing. A murderer would wear gloves, or wipe it clean. Your accusations are ridiculous.’

  ‘Mademoiselle Carruthers, what is your explanation?’ He turned to stare at her, his tanned face hard and cold.

  She remained silent as moments ticked by. A bird sang in the garden.

  ‘Persi?’ I said.

  ‘I recognised the gun,’ she replied at last.

  ‘And who did it belong to?’ Fontaine nodded, the ghost of a smile crossed his lips.

  ‘Charles Langton,’ she whispered.

  That was a jolt. I glanced at Swift, thinking that he could have told me. Damn it. It was probably what they were talking about while I was at the bar.

  Fontaine muttered something in French to the sergeant and was handed the Kongsberg-Colt. He ejected the magazine and laid both items on the table, then the sergeant placed another magazine beside it.

  ‘This is an unusual gun, made in Europe under licence from Colt. It’s almost an exact replication, except for the imprint here.’ He ran a finger along the slide where the lettering had been impressed into the metal. ‘It was known Langton carried one, but it was not in his possession when he was arrested for attempting to murder Mademoiselle Belvoir,’ Fontaine stated, then stared in accusation at Persi. ‘Did you have it? Was it you who made the first attack on the lady?’

  ‘No, don’t be ridiculous,’ Persi retorted. ‘I wasn’t here, which you are quite aware of. I don’t think anyone attacked her, I think she made the whole thing up and you know it!’ Her eyes suddenly flashed and she leaned forward to shout at him. ‘You’re holding Charles under false pretences because he has information you want and he won’t give it to you.’

  He glared back, anger in his eyes. ‘There was a witness. The bath-draw boy, he was guarding Ladies Row at the moment of the attempt. He attested to seeing Langton leave the Ladies floor and run down the stairs.’

  I shifted in my seat and wondered if I should admit to his untimely demise, but decided it probably wasn’t a good moment.

  ‘Bribed or coerced!’ Persi fought back. ‘You and Josephine Belvoir set this up from the beginning.’

  Fontaine pointed a finger. ‘Is that why you arranged for her to be shot? Because you thought she had set up your fiancé?’

  ‘That’s a lie! Your accusations are absurd,’ she retaliated.

  ‘Wait.’ Swift interrupted. ‘This isn’t helping.’ He waved his hand in a placatory manner, trying to calm the argument. ‘Miss Persi, your fingerprints were only on the loaded magazine because you ejected it from the gun. Could you explain how this happened, please?’

  Persi sat back in her seat, a flush on her cheeks. She closed her eyes for a second before turning to Swift. ‘Bing had the gun all morning during rehearsals, then he left it on the fountain wall at lunch time. Vincent saw it, he was angry because he’d already had one stolen. He took it away with him.’ She paused to gather her thoughts then carried on. ‘After the afternoon break, as the camera was about to roll for the final scene, Vincent handed the gun to me, telling me to give it to Bing when he arrived. That’s when I noticed the imprint, it looked like the one Charles used to own but I couldn’t understand what it was doing there.’ She gave a slight shake of her head, the light glinting off strands of blonde hair. ‘I checked to see if it was scratched. You see, Charles puts the letter ‘C’ on his possessions, I think it was a habit from his school days. It was utterly stupid of him.’ She paused to shrug away her anger. ‘Anyway, there wasn’t anything on the gun, so I popped the magazine.’

  ‘And was there a letter ‘C’ on it?’ Swift asked a leading question.

  ‘Yes, and I realised it was his gun. I… I was so surprised,’ she stuttered.

  ‘Did you see the bullets?’ Swift asked.

  ‘No, I didn’t have time, and it didn’t even occur to me. Why would it?’ Her voice rose and she took a breath to calm herself. ‘Harry arrived as Vincent called for everyone to take their places. I closed the magazine and handed it to Bing. Then we were told to keep quiet because of the filming. They started the scene and… and Josephine was shot.’ She looked at me. ‘And that’s when you came in.’

  My shoulders slumped. I understood her reaction; I’d have done the same. It was instinctive and she could never have imagined it would be used as a murder weapon. I stifled a groan, because it was still a bloody disaster.

  Swift was talking. ‘And you are certain you didn’t see, or touch the bullets, did you?’

  ‘No.’ Persi shook her head. ‘I told you, everything happened at once and I was terribly flustered. You can check the casings, my prints won’t be on them.’

  ‘They had all been smeared, Miss Carruthers, so we cannot verify this,’ Fontaine replied.

  I shifted in my seat again. I’d rubbed the prints off the bullets, but I needed to see how this would play out before saying anything else.

  ‘Were both magazines marked with a letter ‘C’?’ Swift asked. He’d taken his notebook out and was making rapid notes in his precise hand.

  Fontaine answered. ‘No.’

  ‘And the magazines between Colt 45 automatics are interchangeable?’ Swift continued although he would have known as well as the rest of us that they were. We were a generation deeply conversant with weaponry of all kinds after experiencing the war. He was just being his usual pedantic self.

  Fontaine nodded dismissively. ‘These weapons are very common. Even we use them.’

  ‘So you could have done it,’ I put in.

  He ignored me.

  ‘Is it true you are holding Langton to obtain information from him?’ Swift asked. ‘Because that’s against the Geneva Convention and it is my intention to call on the British Ambassador this afternoon.’

  ‘There is no British Ambassador, Inspector.’ Fontaine smiled coldly. ‘He and his entourage have departed. You are all alone here.’

  That gave us pause and a bit of a cold shock.

  Persi broke in, ‘You must release Charles Langton. He patently did not kill Josephine Belvoir yesterday and he did not make the attempt on her life earlier.’

  ‘Enough!’ Fontaine slammed his hand on the table. ‘You have made your representations.’

  Swift jumped to his feet. ‘Fontaine, you have nothing but circumstantial evidence. You cannot hold Miss Carruthers.’

  ‘Ha!’ He laughed harshly. ‘Did you know she is a spy? Even your famous Geneva Convention does not protect spies.’

  ‘I am not a spy,’ Persi shouted at him.

  Fontaine ignored Persi’s outburst. ‘As is her fiancé.’

  ‘Ex-fiancé,’ I corrected him.

  ‘That is not the story Charles Langton or Mademoiselle Carruthers has supplied to me.’ He sat back to watch my reaction.

  I glanced at Persi, expecting another eruption of fury, but she bit her lip and didn’t move. I’d had enough and stood up, kicking my chair backwards to fall with a bang on the floor.

  I leaned over the colonel’s desk. ‘You believe what you bloody well like, Fontaine. But Miss Carruthers didn’t kill anyone. Leave her out of your games. And if Charles Langton is innocent, you have no right to keep him locked up either. We may be a long way from France, but your famous justice system is just as applicable here as it is in Paris.’

  He was unimpressed. ‘Venez.’ He waved a hand at his sergeant and they both escorted Persi out. We stood in impotent silence as she was marched across the g
arden and into the hotel.

  ‘They’re being held to bloody ransom, aren’t they?’ I swore as we left the folly. ‘That whole show was nothing but a damn charade.’

  ‘Well, I hope it was a charade, because it’s serious if it isn’t.’ Swift replied.

  We reached the terrace, where wicker chairs were arranged around circular tables. Simple terracotta tiles covered the floor and the usual plethora of potted plants were spread throughout. I yanked a chair out and dropped into it.

  ‘Lennox, calm down,’ Swift told me. ‘Acting like a bull in a china shop isn’t going to help anyone.’

  ‘Fine, but Persi is being held for murder and there’s a lot more to this than we’re being told.’

  ‘I’ve asked Harry Bing to meet us here at ten o’clock. We might get something out of him.’

  ‘If we pour enough whisky into him first,’ I retorted.

  A waiter arrived. ‘Coffee, sirs?’

  We both nodded and the sweet, bitter brew was served with small biscuits of crisped honey and nuts.

  We waited for him to leave, then Swift asked quietly, ‘What did she pass to you?’

  I gave a half grin, he always was sharp. ‘Tell me what Persi told you while I was at the bar first.’

  ‘She disclosed nothing more than she just told Fontaine in the interview.’

  ‘Why didn’t you let me wipe the magazine?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Because we didn’t know if any other prints were on it. Lennox, you haven’t learned even the most basic principles of detecting. You must NEVER interfere with evidence,’ he raised his voice. ‘And you handled the bullets!’

  Really, he could become ridiculously overexcited about the most trivial of things. ‘But she knew the gun belonged to Langton.’

  ‘Yes, but not how it came to be there. It was obviously a ploy.’

  ‘To what end?’ I demanded, which shut him up because he didn’t know.

  Arguing didn’t help so I dug in my pocket and pulled out a tightly folded piece of paper. I unwrapped it to drop the contents onto the glass-topped wicker table. It fell with a clunk, rolled briefly on its thick edge and rattled to land on one side of its flat surface.

  It was a bronze medallion, about two inches across and coated with grime. It had the appearance of something from antiquity. There was a hole punched through the top sector, as though it had once hung on a chain. We could make out squiggly lines engraved across the surface, enclosed within a circle of raised dots, blackened with age. I picked it up and held it to the light.

  ‘Keep it hidden, Lennox. Here…’ Swift handed me a small magnifying glass. ‘Use this.’

  We both leaned in to peer at it.

  ‘That could be a house with a dome on it,’ Swift said, pointing to an etched shape in the centre.

  ‘It could be a dead camel for all we know,’ I remarked.

  ‘Has she ever said anything about this?’ Swift asked.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘Was there anything written on the paper?’

  I gave it to him.

  He turned it around. ‘It looks to be hastily written. It’s says, ‘Find the tomb-robber; exchange this for the house of Hanno the Navigator. Keep it on the QT. Yours as ever, C. L. xx’.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Langton must have passed it to Persi. It’s a secret.’

  ‘Yes, I know what QT means, Swift.’

  He carried on. ‘The tomb-robber and Hanno the Navigator? Has she said anything to you about them?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Was that it?’

  He turned the paper over. ‘Yes.’

  I cursed to myself – damn Charles bloody Langton, he was responsible for dragging Persi into this.

  I picked the medallion up and turned it over. ‘Look!’

  Swift looked. ‘It’s the same as on Josephine’s bracelet!’

  ‘Yes.’ I could see the pattern more clearly now. I’d noticed the clasp on Josephine Belvoir’s bracelet as she’d lain by the fountain, but it had been too small to see the ‘galleon’ clearly. The engraving on the medallion was larger. It was a stylised ship with a single square sail and a cresting horse’s head on the bow.

  ‘There’s a connection,’ Swift stated the obvious as we peered through the magnifier. ‘We need to talk to Persi.’

  ‘Um.’ I nodded, and wrapped the paper back around the medallion to shove it into my top pocket.

  He continued. ‘And I think we need to question the bath-draw boy too.’

  ‘Erm, there could be a bit of a problem there, Swift.’

  He raised his brows.

  ‘I might have accidentally shot him.’

  ‘You did what?’ He almost choked on his coffee.

  ‘It wasn’t on purpose,’ I protested. ‘The gun went off when I tackled Harry Bing and he got in the way of the bullet.’

  ‘You shot the bath-draw boy?’

  Really! Swift was so excitable at times.

  ‘Yes, I just explained, it’s not that difficult to understand.’

  ‘Damn it, he was the only witness we had.’

  ‘Well, he can’t testify now, can he.’ I brushed crumbs off my lap. ‘Anyway, we’d better go and find out about this house of Hanno.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Lennox. Langton is rotting away, we must find a way to have him released.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ I argued. ‘It’s obvious Langton is being held because the French want to prise information out of him. Fontaine’s hardly going to let him die before he’s got it.’

  Swift considered that. ‘But once the secret is uncovered, there’s a risk Fontaine will leave Langton locked up in that hell hole.’

  ‘True,’ I replied, although it was a risk I was willing to take. ‘Anyway, we need to clear Persi’s name first.’

  ‘She’s not in any danger, Lennox.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ I argued. ‘We can’t leave her at the mercy of the French.’

  I could see he was wavering.

  I pressed home the point. ‘And we need her to find out who this Hanno is.’

  ‘Do you think this could be the key to why they’re all here?’ He asked.

  ‘Yes, I just said so!’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t very clear,’ he complained.

  ‘Nonsense, Swift, you just weren’t listening.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Lennox,’ he was about to argue when he paused. ‘I suppose we may be able to use the secret to negotiate his release.’

  ‘Yes, and we need to find the murderer and clear Persi’s name.’

  ‘So, we need to find the murderer and this Hanno?’ Swift said. ‘Or, find the secret and then…’

  ‘Swift.’ I interrupted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s rather confusing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Well, at least we were agreed on something.

  Chapter 9

  Harry Bing arrived with an amiable grin and slipped into a wicker chair opposite us.

  ‘I say, old chaps, how about a drink.’ His eyes were puffy, as were his cheeks, but his dark hair was neatly combed and he was dressed in a well-tailored suit.

  ‘Let’s stick with coffee,’ Swift said.

  A freshly brewed pot was served by the attentive waiter.

  ‘Spill the beans, Bing,’ I told him as he blew on his steaming coffee.

  He smiled. ‘About my deep dark sins or…’ he waved his hand indicating the hotel and inhabitants.

  ‘Just talk,’ Swift pulled his notebook from inside his jacket.

  ‘Righty ho.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Josephine Belvoir…’ His voice faded across the name. ‘The most beautiful woman I’ve ever encountered. She stole my heart, not that she cared. We met in Paris in the Spring of 1917, when I was se
nt to work making movies with the Vincents.’

  ‘There were films being made during the war?’ I interrupted in surprise.

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘When America entered the war, they sent a number of movie-making crews to shoot documentaries. The folks back home were desperate for news about their boys out in foreign fields. Anyway the powers-that-be decided these crews were the perfect cover for some covert activity.’

  That made me sit up. ’You mean, you were spies?’ I glanced at Swift who had paused taking notes to fix a hawkish gaze on Bing.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Bing replied as casually as a postman might admit to collecting stamps. ‘We were all spies, that was our job.’

  ‘But, are you still spying on… well, on…’ I tried to form a coherent question without mention of secrets or whatnots.

  ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Swift cut in. ‘Carry on, Bing.’

  He’d watched us over his coffee cup and took a sip before replying. ‘Wilko! So a few of our finer agents were fingered and sent off to join the moving-picture business. Actually, it was rather a clever move on the bods part, it allowed us access to places we’d never have got into otherwise.’

  ‘Who ordered you to join the Vincents? The Foreign Office?’ Swift questioned.

  Bing smiled. ‘Can’t help you there, old boy. Official secrets and all that.’

  ‘But what were you supposed to do?’ I asked, rather fascinated by hearing the mysteries of espionage at close quarters. ‘As a spy, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ he waved a hand vaguely. ‘Liaise with resistance groups, pick up details about troop movements and numbers, or any build-up in armaments in a new sector. It’s not about spying through peep holes, it’s about gathering information.’

  I opened my mouth to ask more questions but Swift motioned to me to shut up.

  ‘We need to know how it operated, Lennox. Go on, Bing.’

  Bing pulled out a solid gold case, extracted a slim cigarette, tapped it twice and lit it with a matching lighter. ‘Mammie ran the show. Vincent had been employed as a cameraman in the States and made a few short films of his own on the side. Then he met Mammie and, according to rumour, she fell for him, head over heels,’ he said between puffs of smoke. ‘She had money and he had ambition, so it was a match made in heaven, you see.’ He gave a wry grin. ‘Mammie is well-connected in political circles, so I suppose the American Government approached her. Anyway, Vincent promoted himself to director and they headed off to France armed with a camera and oodles of readies.’ He fidgeted. ‘We could shift to the bar, old chap. Much more convivial, you know.’