by Various
‘Very interesting,’ said Lord Peter, when both were out of sight. ‘Hark!’
There was a sound of running feet overhead – a cry – and a general commotion. The two men dashed to the door as the bride, rushing frantically downstairs with her bevy of bridesmaids after her, proclaimed in a hysterical shriek: ‘The diamonds! They’re stolen! They’re gone!’
Instantly the house was in an uproar. The servants and the caterer’s men crowded into the hall; the bride’s father burst out from his room in a magnificent white waistcoat and no coat; the Duchess of Medway descended upon Mr Parker, demanding that something should be done; while the butler, who never to the day of his death got over the disgrace, ran out of the pantry with a corkscrew in one hand and a priceless bottle of crusted port in the other, which he shook with all the vehemence of a town-crier ringing a bell. The only dignified entry was made by the dowager duchess, who came down like a ship in sail, dragging Celestine with her, and admonishing her not to be so silly.
‘Be quiet, girl,’ said the dowager. ‘Anyone would think you were going to be murdered.’
‘Allow me, your grace,’ said Mr Bunter, appearing suddenly from nowhere in his usual unperturbed manner, and taking the agitated Celestine firmly by the arm. ‘Young woman, calm yourself.’
‘But what is to be done?’ cried the bride’s mother. ‘How did it happen?’
It was at this moment that Detective-Inspector Parker took the floor. It was the most impressive and dramatic moment in his whole career. His magnificent calm rebuked the clamorous nobility surrounding him.
‘Your grace,’ he said, ‘there is no cause for alarm. Our measures have been taken. We have the criminals and the gems, thanks to Lord Peter Wimsey, from whom we received inf —’
‘Charles!’ said Lord Peter in an awful voice.
‘Warning of the attempt. One of our men is just bringing in the male criminal at the front door, taken red-handed with your grace’s diamonds in his possession.’ (All gazed round, and perceived indeed the check-capped lounger and a uniformed constable entering with the flower-seller between them.) ‘The female criminal, who picked the lock of your grace’s safe, is – here! No, you don’t,’ he added, as Celestine, amid a torrent of apache language which nobody, fortunately, had French enough to understand, attempted to whip out a revolver from the bosom of her demure black dress. ‘Celestine Berger,’ he continued, pocketing the weapon, ‘I arrest you in the name of the law, and I warn you that anything you say will be taken down and used as evidence against you.’
‘Heaven help us,’ said Lord Peter; ‘the roof would fly off the court. And you’ve got the name wrong, Charles. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Jacques Lerouge, known as Sans-culotte – the youngest and cleverest thief, safe-breaker and female impersonator that ever occupied a dossier in the Palais de Justice.’
There was a gasp. Jacques Sans-culotte gave vent to a low oath and cocked a gamin grimace at Peter.
‘C’estparfait,’ said he; ‘toutes mes félicitations, milord, what you call a fair cop, bein? And now I know him,’ he added, grinning at Bunter, ‘the so-patient Englishman who stand behind us in the queue at Saint-Lazare. But tell me, please, how you know me, that I may correct it next time.’
‘I have mentioned to you before, Charles,’ said Lord Peter, ‘the unwisdom of falling into habits of speech. They give you away. Now, in France, every male child is brought up to use masculine adjectives about himself. He says: Que je suis beau! But a little girl has it rammed home to her that she is female; she must say: Que je suis belle! It must make it beastly hard to be a female impersonator. When I am at a station and I hear an excited young woman say to her companion, “Me prends-tu pour un imbécile” – the masculine article arouses curiosity. And that’s that!’ he concluded briskly. ‘The rest was merely a matter of getting Bunter to take a photograph and communicating with our friends of the Sûreté and Scotland Yard.’
Jacques Sans-culotte bowed again.
‘Once more I congratulate milord. He is the only Englishman I have ever met who is capable of appreciating our beautiful language. I will pay great attention in future to the article in question.’
With an awful look, the Dowager Duchess of Medway advanced upon Lord Peter.
‘Peter,’ she said, ‘do you mean to say you knew about this, and that for the last three weeks you have allowed me to be dressed and undressed and put to bed by a young man?’
His lordship had the grace to blush.
‘Duchess,’ he said humbly, ‘on my honour I didn’t know absolutely for certain till this morning. And the police were so anxious to have these people caught red-handed. What can I do to show my penitence? Shall I cut the privileged beast in pieces?’
The grim old mouth relaxed a little.
‘After all,’ said the dowager duchess, with the delightful consciousness that she was going to shock her daughter-in-law, ‘there are very few women of my age who could make the same boast. It seems that we die as we have lived, my dear.’
For indeed the Dowager Duchess of Medway had been notable in her day.
The Mystery of Home’s Copse
Anthony Berkeley
Chapter I
The whole thing began on the 29 May.
It is over two years ago now and I can begin to look at it in its proper perspective; but even still my mind retains some echo of the incredulity, the horror, the dreadful doubts as to my own sanity and the sheer, cold-sweating terror which followed that ill-omened 19 May.
Curiously enough the talk had turned for a few minutes that evening upon Frank himself. We were sitting in the drawing-room of Bucklands after dinner, Sir Henry and Lady Rigby, Sylvia and I, and I can remember the intensity with which I was trying to find a really convincing excuse to get Sylvia alone with me for half an hour before I went home. We had only been engaged a week then and the longing for solitary places with population confined to two was tending to increase rather than diminish.
I think it was Lady Rigby who, taking advantage of a pause in her husband’s emphatic monologue on phosphates (phosphates were at the time Sir Henry’s chief passion), asked me whether I had heard anything of Frank since he went abroad.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I had a picture postcard from him this morning. An incredibly blue Lake Como in the foreground and an impossibly white mountain at the back, with Cadenabbia sandwiched microscopically in between. Actually, though, he’s in Bellagio for a few days.’
‘Oh,’ said Sylvia with interest and then looked extremely innocent. Bellagio had been mentioned between us as a possible place for the beginning of our own honeymoon.
The talk passed on to the Italian lakes in general. ‘And Frank really does seem quite settled down now, Hugh, does he?’ Lady Rigby asked casually, a few minutes later.
‘Quite, I think,’ I replied guardedly; for Frank had seemed quite settled several times, but had somehow become unsettled again very soon afterwards.
Frank Chappell was my first cousin and incidentally, as I had been an only child and Ravendean was entailed, my heir. Unfortunately he had been, till lately, most unsatisfactory in both capacities. Not that there was anything bad in him, I considered he was merely weak; but weakness, in its results, can be as devastating as any deliberate villainy. It was not really his fault. He derived on his mother’s side from a stock which was, to put it frankly, rotten and Frank took after his mother’s family. He had not been expelled from Eton, but only by inches; he had been sent down from Oxford and his departure from the Guards had been a still more serious affair. The shock of this last killed my uncle and Frank had come into the property. It was nothing magnificent, falling far short of the resources attached to Ravendean, but plenty to allow a man to maintain his wife in very tolerable comfort. Frank had run through it in three years.
He had then, quite unexpectedly, married one of his own second cousins and, exchanging extravagance for downright parsimony, settled down with her to make the best of a bad job
and put his heavily mortgaged property on its feet once more. In this, I more than suspected, he was directed by his wife. Though his cousin on the distaff side, Joanna showed none of the degeneracy of the Wickhams. Physically a splendid creature, tall and lithe and with a darkness of colouring that hinted at a Spanish ancestor somewhere in the not too remote past, she was no less vigorous mentally; under the charm of her manner one felt at once a well-balanced intelligence and a will of adamant. She was exactly the right wife for Frank and I had been delighted.
It was a disappointment to me that Sylvia did not altogether share my liking for Joanna. The Rigbys’ property adjoined mine and Frank’s was less than twenty miles away, so that the three families had always been on terms of intimacy. Sylvia did not actually dislike Joanna but it was clear that, if the thing were left to her, they would never become close friends and as Frank had always had a hearty dislike for me, it seemed that relations between Ravendean and Moorefield would be a little distant. I cannot say that the thought worried me. So long as I had Sylvia, nothing else could matter.
Frank had now been married something over two years and, to set the wreath of domestic virtue finally on his head, his wife six months ago had given birth to a son. The recuperation of Moorefield, moreover, had proceeded so satisfactorily that three weeks ago the pair had been able to set out on a long wandering holiday through Europe, leaving the child with his foster-mother. I have had to give Frank’s history in this detail, because of its importance in the strange business which followed that homely scene in the drawing-room of Bucklands that evening.
Sylvia and I did get our half-hour together in the end and no doubt we spent it as such half-hours always have been spent. I know it seemed a very short time before I was sitting at the wheel of my car, one of the new six-cylinder Dovers, and pressing the self-starter. It failed to work. On such trivialities do our destinies hang.
‘Nothing doing?’ said Sylvia. ‘The wiring’s gone, I expect. And you won’t be able to swing her; she’ll be much too stiff.’ Sylvia’s grasp of the intricacies of a car’s interior had always astonished me. ‘You’d better take Emma.’ Emma was her own two-seater.
‘I think I’ll walk,’ I told her. ‘Through Horne’s Copse it’s not much over a mile. It’ll calm me down.’
She laughed, but it was quite true. I had proposed to Sylvia as a sort of forlorn hope and I had not nearly become accustomed yet to the idea of being actually engaged to her.
It was a lovely night and my thoughts, as I swung along, turned as always then upon the amazing question: what did Sylvia see in me? We had a few tastes in common, but her real interest was cars and mine the study of early civilisations, with particularly kindly feelings towards the Minoan and Mycenean. The only reason I had ever been able to get out of her for her fondness was: ‘Oh well, you see, Hugh darling, you’re rather a lamb, aren’t you? And you are such a perfect old idiot.’ It seemed curious, but I knew our post-war generation has the reputation of being unromantic.
My eyes had become accustomed to the moonlight, but inside Horne’s Copse everything was pitch black. It was hardly necessary for me to slacken my pace, however, for I knew every turn and twist of the path. The copse was not more than a couple of hundred yards long and I had reached, as I judged, just about the middle when my foot struck against an obstacle right in the middle of the track which nearly sent me flying to the ground.
I recovered my balance with an effort, wondering what the thing could be. It was not hard, like a log of wood, but inertly soft. I struck a match and looked at it. I do not think I am a particularly nervous man, but I felt a creeping sensation in the back of my scalp as I stood staring down by the steady light of the match. The thing was a body – the body of a man; and it hardly took the ominous black hole in the centre of his forehead, its edges spangled with red dew, to tell me that he was very dead indeed.
But that was not all. My match went out and I nerved myself to light another and hold it close above the dead face to assure myself that I had been mistaken. But I had not been mistaken. Incredibly, impossibly, the body was that of my cousin, Frank.
Chapter II
I took a grip on myself. This was Frank and he was dead – probably murdered. Frank was not in Bellagio. He was here, in Horne’s Copse, with a bullet-hole in his forehead. I must not lose my head. I must remember the correct things to do in such a case and then I must do them. ‘Satisfy oneself that life is extinct.’ From some hidden reserve of consciousness the phrase emerged and, almost mechanically, I proceeded to act on it. But it was really only as a matter of form that I touched the white face, which was quite cold and horribly clammy.
One arm was doubled underneath him, the other lay flung out at his side, the inside of the wrist uppermost. I grasped the latter gingerly, raising the limp hand a little off the ground as I felt the pulse, or rather, where the pulse should have been; for needless to say, nothing stirred under the cold, damp skin. Finally, with some half-buried recollection that as long as a flicker of consciousness remains, the pupils of the eyes will react to light, I moved one of my last matches backwards and forwards and close to and away from the staring eyes. The pupils did not contract the hundredth of a millimetre as the match approached them.
I scrambled to my feet.
Then I remembered that I should make a note of the exact time and this I did too. It was precisely eleven minutes and twenty seconds past twelve.
Obviously the next thing to do was to summon the police.
Not a doctor first, for the poor fellow was only too plainly beyond any doctor’s aid.
I am a magistrate and certain details of routine are familiar to me. I knew, for instance, that it was essential that the body should not be touched until the police had seen it; but as I had no one with me to leave in charge of it, that must be left to chance; in any case it was not probable that anyone else would be using the right-of-way through Horne’s Copse so late. I, therefore made my way, as fast as I dared in that pitch darkness, out of the copse and then ran at top speed the remaining half-mile to the house. As always I was in sound condition and I dare swear that nobody has ever covered a half-mile, fully clothed, in much quicker time.
I had told Parker, the butler, not to sit up for me and I, therefore, had to let myself in with my own latch-key. Still panting, I rang up the police station in Salverton, about three miles away and told them briefly what I had discovered. The constable who answered the telephone, of course, knew me well and Frank too, and was naturally shocked by my news. I cut short his ejaculations, however, and asked him to send someone out to Ravendean at once, to take official charge. He undertook to rouse his sergeant immediately and asked me to wait at the house in order to guide him to the spot. I agreed to do so – and it was a long time before I ceased to regret it. It is easy to blame oneself after the event and easy for others to blame one too; but how could I possibly have foreseen an event so extraordinary?
The interval of waiting I filled up by rousing Parker and ringing up my doctor. The latter had not yet gone to bed and promised to come round at once. He was just the kind of man I wanted, for myself rather than Frank; my nervous system has never been a strong one and it had just received a considerable shock. Gotley was his name and he was a great hulking young man who had been tried for England at rugger while he was still at Guy’s and, though just failing to get his cap, had been accounted as a good a forward as any outside the team. For a man of that type he had imagination, too, intelligence and great charm of manner, he was moreover a very capable doctor. He had been living in the village for about four years now and I had struck up quite a friendship with him, contrary to my usual practice, for I do not make friends easily.
His arrival was a relief – and so was the whisky and soda with which Parker immediately followed his entrance into the library where I was waiting.
‘This sounds a bad business, Chappell,’ he greeted me. ‘Hullo, man, you look as white as a sheet. You’d better have a drink and a stiff one at t
hat.’ He manipulated the decanter.
‘I’m afraid it has rather upset me,’ I admitted. Now that there was nothing to do but wait I did feel decidedly shaky.
With the plain object of taking my mind off the gruesome subject Gotley embarked on a cheerful discussion of England’s chances in the forthcoming series of test matches that summer, which he kept going determinedly until the arrival of the police some ten minutes later.
These were Sergeant Afford whom, of course, I knew well and a young constable. The sergeant was by no means of the doltish, obstinate type which the writers of detective fiction invariably portray, as if our country police forces consisted of nothing else; he was a shrewd enough man and at this moment he was a tremendously excited man too. This fact he was striving nobly to conceal in deference to my feelings for, of course, he knew Frank as well as myself and by repute as well as in person; but it was obvious that the practical certainty of murder, and in such a circle, had roused every instinct of the blood-hound in him: he was literally quivering to get on the trail. No case of murder had ever come his way before and in such a one as this there was, besides the excitement of the hunt, the certainty that publicity galore, with every chance of promotion, would fall to the lot of Sergeant Afford – if only he could trace the murderer before his Superintendent had time to take the case out of his hands.
As we hurried along the sergeant put such questions as he wished, so that by the time we entered the copse he knew almost as much of the circumstances as I did myself. There was now no need to slacken our pace, for I had a powerful electric torch to guide our steps. As we half ran, half walked along I flashed it continuously from side to side, searching the path ahead for poor Frank’s body. Somewhat surprised, I decided that it must lie further than I had thought; though, knowing the copse intimately as I did, I could have sworn that it had been lying on a stretch of straight path, the only one, right in the very middle; but we passed over the length of it and it was not there.