The Big Book of Female Detectives

by The Big Book of Female Detectives (retail) (epub)

  “I took the West Side subway to the end of the line, and walked up the hill to Riverdale, and on down the other side towards the river. I had fixed in my mind the road that ran alongside the wall of the Whittall property. I climbed the wall, and went up the hill to the pavilion. I was in plenty of time. I took the gun in my hand and waited, hidden behind a pillar. I kept my gloves on so I wouldn’t leave any finger-print on the gun. When Mrs. Whittall came running in, I pressed the gun to her temple and pulled the trigger. She fell back outside. She never made a sound. I closed her hand over the gun as well as I could, and went back the way I came.

  “I had found out from Mr. Kreuger that he and Mr. Whittall would be dining at the Hotel Norfolk that night. I wanted to warn Mr. Whittall to secure his wife’s gun. I knew he’d be glad enough to hush up any scandal. But I was afraid to stop at Van Cortlandt for fear somebody might remember seeing me in a telephone booth. So I rode on the subway down to 145th Street, and telephoned from a pay station there. Then I rode on the subway down to Times Square, and took a taxi to the hotel. That is all I have to say.”

  DETECTIVE: SOLANGE FONTAINE

  THE LOVER OF ST. LYS

  F. Tennyson Jesse

  BORN IN ENGLAND as the great-grandniece of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse (1888–1958) studied art but turned to journalism when she was twenty, working for the London Times and The Daily Mail. In 1914, she moved to New York, became a war correspondent, and worked for the National Relief Commission, then headed by J. Edgar Hoover. She married when the war ended, and she and her husband lived in many places all around the world.

  Avowing that her special interest was in murder, Jesse wrote several articles for the highly respected Notable British Trials series. Her Murder and Its Motives (1924) is a pioneering work that explores the subject in a general sense and continues with illustrative case studies. She wrote A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934), a long novel based on a famous British murder case in which the author chose to ascribe a husband’s death to “accidental murder,” which may have been a kindness to his wife.

  Jesse’s best-known work is The Solange Stories (1931), a collection of stories about a young Frenchwoman, Solange Fontaine, who is “gifted by nature with an extra-spiritual sense that warn[s] her of evil.” The volume was selected by Ellery Queen for Queen’s Quorum as one of the 106 greatest short story collections in the history of detective fiction. Several additional Solange Fontaine stories were discovered and collected long after Jesse’s death in The Adventures of Solange Fontaine (1995).

  “The Lover of St. Lys” was originally published in 1918 in The Premier Magazine; it was first collected in The Adventures of Solange Fontaine (London, Thomas Carnacki, 1995).

  The Lover of St. Lys

  F. TENNYSON JESSE

  IT WAS IN A LITTLE GREY TOWN set high in the mountainous country behind the Riviera that Solange and her father decided to spend their summer holiday. St. Lys, seen once on a motor-tour, had enraptured them both—a town of mellow, fluted tiles, of grey walls, of steep streets that were shadowed ways of coolness even at noonday, and ramparts that circled round the mountain crest as though hacked out of the living rock, so sheer and straight they were. It was a restful place, the very townspeople, with their clear, dark eyes and rough-hewn faces, strong of jaw and cheekbone, tender with pure skins and creamy colours, seemed redolent of peace. Here was a town for tired workers, especially for workers in such dark and dragging ways as those which the Fontaines explored—the ways of crime, not taken as detectives or allies of the law, but studied as scientists, with the end always in view of throwing light on causes rather than on actual deeds. The next generation—it was to save this by greater knowledge that Dr. Fontaine laboured, assisted by Solange, and here at least they could hope to continue their new book on the detection of poisons undisturbed by those sudden irruptions of the actual, such as the affair of the negro girl at Marseilles, which so violently tore the tissues of their ordered life.

  “Besides,” as Solange said, “Terence and Raymond will be able to come up from Nice and see us, and that will be ever so much nicer than always being alone.”

  Her father glanced at her sharply, to see whether there were any change of her quiet, clear pallor, but eye and cheek were as calm as ever. Terence Corkery—the Consul from Nice—he was an old friend, and as such Solange was wont to treat him, in that affectionate yet aloof way of hers, but young Raymond Ker, with the alertness of a newer civilisation in his confident jaw and bright eyes—he was a comparatively new acquaintance, and though it was true he had been with Solange through much—the tragic affair of the “Green Parrakeet,” and the more grotesque happening at the draper’s shop in Marseilles—yet it was unlike Solange to admit any man to quite that degree of intimacy so swiftly. Therefore, Dr. Fontaine had wondered, but the clear oval of his daughter’s face gave him no clue. He resigned himself to the fact that he could read the countenance of a homicidal maniac with greater ease and accuracy than the familiar features of his daughter.

  Corkery was unable to leave Nice while the Fontaines were at St. Lys that year, but, true to his promise, Raymond, protesting that he was merely on the look-out for “copy,” arrived at the grey town in the mountains one heavenly evening in June. Solange objected.

  “How can you expect copy here, Raymond? This is the abode of innocence and peace. Nothing ever happens, except births and deaths, and the few there are of the latter are invariably from old age!”

  “You forget you are a stormy petrel, Solange,” replied Raymond, only half-jesting. “I always have hopes of something happening where you are.”

  But as Solange looked annoyed, and he remembered her distaste for crime encountered in individuals, he changed the conversation. And just at first it looked as though Raymond were out in his theory, and as though peace must always be absolute at St. Lys. Never was there a place that seemed so as though the bon Dieu kept it in His pocket, as the Fontaines’ old servant, Marie, expressed it. There were not many people to know, socially speaking, and the only family with whom the Fontaines visited on at all a society footing—though both Solange and her father cared little for that sort of thing and made friends with every butcher and baker—was that of the De Tourvilles. M. De Tourville was the lord of the manor, a moth-eaten old castle, beautiful from sheer age and fitness for its surroundings, picturesque enough to set all Raymond’s American enthusiasms alight, but shabby to an extent that made Madame De Tourville’s conversation one perpetual wail. She was a thin, feverish-looking woman, not without a burnt-out air of handsomeness in her straight features and large eyes, but looking older than her husband, though she was a year or so the younger. He was a very picturesque figure, as he went about the windy town in the long blue cloak he affected, his head, where the dark hair was only beginning to be faintly silvered, bare, and his thin, hawk-like face held high. A queer man, perhaps, said the townspeople, with his sudden tempers, his deep angers, his impulsive kindnesses, but a man of whom they were all proud. They felt the beauty of his presence in the town, though they could not have expressed it. Madame they liked less; she came from the hard Norman country, and was reported to be more than a little miserly, more so than was necessary even on the meagre income of the De Tourville family.

  It was for his sake that everyone had been glad, and not a little curious, when a very rich lady, a young lady, who was a cousin and ward of the De Tourvilles, had come to live with them at the castle. That money should come into the old place, even if only temporarily, was felt to be right, and deep in the minds of the women was the unspoken wonder as to how thin, feverish madame would fare with a young girl in the household. For though he was forty-five, M. De Tourville had the romantic air which, to some young girls, is more attractive than youth.

  So much detail about the De Tourvilles was common gossip, and had filtered from the notary’s wife, viâ the hotel-keeper’s wife, to Marie, and thence
to Solange. She herself had visited the château several times, for mutual friends in Paris had supplied letters of introduction, and she knew enough of the De Tourville household to have interested Raymond in them before she and her father took him to call at the château.

  Raymond was of opinion that Solange had not exaggerated in depicting the household as interesting. There was something about the bleak château, with its faded tapestries and ill-kept terraces, which would have stirred romance in the dullest, but when added to it was a family that to nerves at all sensitive gave a curious impression of under-currents, then interest was bound to follow. Several times during that call Raymond wondered whether Solange had got her “feeling” about this household, whether that was what interested her, or whether for once he were being more sensitive, perhaps unduly so. For Solange talked gaily, seemed her usual self.

  The De Tourville couple were as she had pictured them. The chief interest lay in the personality of Mademoiselle Monique Levasseur, the young ward. She was not, strictly speaking, pretty, but she had a force born of her intense vitality, her evident joy in life. Her dark eyes, large and soft, with none of the beadiness of most brown eyes, glowed in the healthy pallor of her face, her rather large, mobile mouth was deeply red, and her whole girlish form—too thin, with that exquisite appealing meagreness which means extreme youth—seemed vibrant with life. Yet she had her softnesses too—for her cousin, Edmund De Tourville. Her schoolgirl worship was evident in the direction of her limpid gaze, her childish eagerness to wait on him, which he was too much galant homme to allow. How much of it all did the wife see, wondered Raymond? He watched the quiet, repressed woman as she dispensed tea, and could gather little from her impassivity. Once he caught a gleam, not between man and girl, but between man and wife—a gleam that surely spoke of the intimacy that needs no words—and felt oddly reassured. The couple understood each other, probably smiled, not heartlessly, tenderly even, with the benignant pity of knowledge, at the schoolgirl enthusiasm. Doubtless that was the under-current that he had felt in the relations between the three. Yet, only a few minutes later, he doubted whether that impression were the true one. For, as they were about to leave, M. De Tourville spoke a few words low to the girl, and she got up and left the room, to reappear a moment later with a little tray, on which was a medicine-bottle and a glass. Everyone looked as they felt, a little surprised, and Edmund De Tourville, measuring out a dose of the medicine carefully, said, smiling:

  “You must pardon these domesticities, but the wife has not been well for some time, and the doctor lays great stress on the importance of her taking her drops regularly. Is it not so, Thérèse?”

  And Madame De Tourville, obediently draining the little glass, replied that it was. Nothing much in that little incident, but as the girl bore the tray away again her guardian opened the door for her, and slipped out after her; and Raymond, who was by the door, was made the unwilling, but inevitably curious, spectator of an odd little scene. The door did not quite close, and swung a little way open again after De Tourville had pulled it after him, and Raymond saw the girl put the tray down on the buffet which stood in the passage, saw De Tourville catch her as she turned to come back, and saw the hurried kiss that he pressed on her upturned brow. It was not at all a passionate kiss, though. But the girl glowed beneath it like the rose, and Raymond, with a sudden compunction, moved across the room, so that he was away from the door when his host came in. He was not surprised that Monique Levasseur did not return.

  That evening Raymond said to Solange, as they were smoking their after-dinner cigarettes in the hotel garden, which hung on the mountain side, the one word:

  “Well?”

  And Solange, looking up at him, laughed.

  “Well? You mean about this afternoon? You’re getting very elliptic, my friend.”

  “One can, with you.”

  “And—‘well’ meant do I think there is anything—anything odd?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes,” said Solange, “I do. But I can’t for the life of me say what.”

  “The girl is obviously in love with him.”

  “Oh, that—yes. That doesn’t matter. She is of the age. But a schoolgirl’s rave on a man much older than herself wouldn’t make me feel there was anything odd, not if he were married ten deep. No, it was something—something more sinister than that.”

  “What do you make of the girl?” asked Raymond.

  “A personality, evidently. But of the passive kind.”

  “Passive?” ejaculated Raymond, in surprise; “she struck me as being most amazingly vital, and vital people aren’t passive.”

  “Vital women can be. For the height of femininity is an acutely enhanced passivity. The women who made history, the Helens and Cleopatras, didn’t go out and do things, they just lay about and things happened. In the annals of crime, also, you will find frequently that women who are as wax have not only inspired crimes, but helped to commit them, or even committed them alone, acting under the orders of their lovers, as Jeanne Weiss did when she tried to poison her husband. It is a definite type. There are, of course, women who are the dominating force, such as Lady Macbeth; but the other kind is quite as forceful in its effects.”

  “You are not suggesting, I suppose, that little Monique Levasseur—”

  “No, indeed. I got nothing but what was sweet and rather pathetic and feminine with her. But the fact remains that passionate passivity may turn to anything.”

  And Solange drifted off to discussion of actual cases, such as those of the two sinister Gabrielles—she who was wife of Fenayrou, and she who was accomplice of Eyraud, and from them to that most pathetic of all the examples of feminine docility, Mary Blandy, who poisoned her father for the sake of her lover. And after that, secret poisoning, that abominable and most enthralling of all forms of murder, held them talking about its manifestations till Dr. Fontaine came out to smoke a last pipe.

  A month flew past in that enchanted city of towers, and though the Fontaines met the family from the château now and then, no greater degree of intimacy was arrived at between them; indeed, since the arrival of Raymond, the De Tourvilles seemed to withdraw themselves and Monique much more than they had before. Then one day, M. De Tourville arrived at the hotel, only a day before the Fontaines were leaving it, with a request that only intimacy or a great necessity justified. He soon proved that he had the latter to urge him. He told them that his wife, who had been ailing for a long time, as they were aware, had been ordered away, and had left the day before for Switzerland, for a sanatorium, and he asked them whether they would be so good as to take charge of Mademoiselle Levasseur, and escort her to Paris to the house of her former gouvernante, at whose school she had been before coming to St. Lys? He could not as a man alone—despite his grey hairs, he added with a smile—continue to look after Monique. But if Monsieur and Mademoiselle Fontaine would accord him this favour, he could himself come to Paris later, and make sure that all was well with his ward. What he said was very reasonable, and Solange and her father agreed willingly.

  But Raymond saw the long look that the girl turned on her guardian from the window of the train as they were starting, saw the meaning glance with which he replied, and somehow that little scene in the passage flashed up against his memory, clear and vivid. Solange said nothing much, but she was kindness itself to the girl, who was plainly depressed at leaving the god of her adoration, and not till the Fontaines had themselves arrived in Switzerland, whither they were bound—a fact she had not thought needful to mention to M. De Tourville—did Solange say anything to her father. And then it was only to express a little wonder that at the place where M. De Tourville, when she had asked him, had said his wife was staying, there was no trace of any lady of that name to be found.

  Raymond had gone over to New York by then, and this little discovery, which would so have interested him, he was not destined to know till the follow
ing spring. For in February of the next year—which is when spring begins in the gracious country of southern France, Solange somehow made her father feel that another little stay in St. Lys—which, as a matter of fact, had rather bored him—was just what he wanted, and there Raymond, once again on his travels, joined them for a fleeting week. It was less than a year since they had first met the De Tourvilles at St. Lys, yet in that time two things had happened which vitally altered life at the château. Madame De Tourville had died in Switzerland, without ever having returned to her home, and M. De Tourville was married to the ward who had so plainly adored him in the days gone by.

  * * *

  —

  Solange had enjoyed those months which had elapsed between the two visits to St. Lys. Her work had been purely theoretical during the whole of that time; any problems which the continued presence of Raymond might have evoked had been in abeyance owing to his protracted absence on business for his paper, and her father’s book had been a success in the only way that appealed to him and his daughter—a success among the savants of their particular line of work. Yet, when she heard of the new marriage of De Tourville, she went back to St. Lys, though she knew it meant for her work of the kind she liked least.

  When Raymond heard of the changes at the château his mouth and eyes fell open, and he stared at Solange, marvelling that she could tell him so tranquilly. True, she had not seen what he had, that furtive kiss, but yet, where was her gift, what had happened to her famous power of feeling evil, of being aware of dangers to society in her fellow-men, dangers even only contemplated? She had told him calmly, in answer to his questions, that the death of Madame De Tourville seemed certainly mysterious. She had never returned to the home from which she had been so secretively hurried away, no one but her husband, who had joined her in Switzerland, had seen her die—that is to say, no one who knew her in the little world of St. Lys, and as for anyone else, they had only her husband’s word to take. She had simply ceased to be, as quietly and unobtrusively as she had lived, and the graceful, passionate young girl, who, however unconsciously, had been her rival, had taken her place.