Trent Intervenes

by E. C. Bentley

  ‘Nothing to sit on,’ Trent observed. ‘You can’t carry a chair about the streets without exciting remark—besides, there’s nowhere for a chair to stand. No wonder he had a fondness for that arm-chair below.’

  ‘It must have taken the doctor several visits to get this place furnished,’ the inspector said. ‘Well, I’ve seen enough. I’ll have all this removed before Miss Silvester comes home. I wonder how she’ll like it when you tell her the story. It’ll be something for her to talk about for the rest of her life—how she had a young man staying in her flat for a fortnight without knowing it.’

  When they had made the descent, Trent turned to gathering up the wreckage on the floor and stowing it in a corner of the kitchen.

  ‘I shall have to get Marion a new table and bowl,’ he remarked. ‘I promised her I wouldn’t smash up the furniture.’ He laughed suddenly.

  Mr Bligh inquired what the joke was.

  ‘Why, I just remembered,’ Trent said, ‘that she told me this wasn’t one of my crime problems.’

  XI

  THE UNKNOWN PEER

  WHEN Philip Trent went down to Lackington, with the mission of throwing some light upon the affair of Lord Southrop’s disappearance, it was without much hope of adding anything to the simple facts already known to the police and made public in the newspapers. Those facts were plain enough, pointing to but one sad conclusion.

  In the early morning of Friday, the 23rd of September, a small touring-car was found abandoned by the shore at Merwin Cove, some three miles along the coast from the flourishing Devonian resort of Brademouth. It had been driven off the road over turf to the edge of the pebble beach.

  Examined by the police, it was found to contain a heavy overcoat, a folding stool, and a case of sketching materials with a sketching-block on the back seat; a copy of Anatole France’s Mannequin d’Osier, two pipes, some chocolate, a flask of brandy, and a pair of binoculars in the shelves before the driving-seat; and in the pockets a number of maps and the motoring papers of Lord Southrop, of Hingham Blewitt, near Wymondham, in Norfolk. Inquiries in the neighbourhood led to the discovery that a similar car and its driver were missing from the Crown Inn at Lackington, a small place a few miles inland; and later the car was definitely recognized.

  In the hotel register, however, the owner had signed his name as L. G. Coxe; and it was in that name that a room had been booked by telephone early in the day. A letter, too, addressed to Coxe, had been delivered at the Crown, and had been opened by him on his arrival about 6:30. A large suitcase had been taken up to his room, where it still lay, and the mysterious Coxe had deposited an envelope containing £35 in banknotes in the hotel safe. He had dined in the coffee-room, smoked in the lounge for a time, then gone out again in his car, saying nothing of his destination. No more had been seen or heard of him.

  Some needed light had been cast on the affair when Lord Southrop was looked up in Who’s Who—for no one in the local force had ever heard of such a peer. It appeared that his family name was Coxe, and that he had been christened Lancelot Graham; that he was the ninth baron, was thirty-three years old, and had succeeded to the title at the age of twenty-six; that he had been educated at Harrow and Trinity, Cambridge; that he was unmarried, and that his heir was a first cousin, Lambert Reeves Coxe. No public record of any kind, nor even any ‘recreation’ was noted in this unusually brief biography, which, indeed, bore the marks of having been compiled in the office, without any assistance from its subject.

  Trent, however, had heard something more than this about Lord Southrop. Sir James Molloy, the owner of the Record, who had sent Trent to Lackington, had met everybody, including even the missing peer, who was quite unknown in society. Society, according to Molloy, was heartily detested and despised by Lord Southrop. His interests were exclusively literary and artistic, apart from his taste in the matter of wine, which he understood better than most men. He greatly preferred Continental to English ways of life, and spent much of his time abroad. He had a very large income, for most of which he seemed to have no use. He had good health and a kindly disposition; but he had a passion for keeping himself to himself, and had indulged it with remarkable success. One of his favourite amusements was wandering about the country alone in his car, halting here and there to make a sketch, and staying always at out-of-the-way inns under the name he had used at Lackington.

  Lord Southrop had been, however, sufficiently like other men to fall in love, and Molloy had heard that his engagement to Adela Tindal was on the point of being announced at the time of his disappearance. His choice had come as a surprise to his friends; for though Miss Tindal took art and letters as seriously as himself, she was, as an authoress, not at all averse to publicity. She enjoyed being talked about, Molloy declared; and talked about she had certainly been—especially in connection with Lucius Kelly, the playwright. Their relationship had not been disguised; but a time came when Kelly’s quarrelsome temper was no longer to be endured, and she refused to see any more of him.

  All this was quite well known to Lord Southrop, for he and Kelly had been friends from boyhood; and the knowledge was a signal proof of the force of his infatuation. On all accounts, in Molloy’s judgment, the match would have been a complete disaster; and Trent, as he thought the matter over in the coffee-room of the Crown, was disposed to agree with him.

  Shortly before his arrival that day, a new fact for his first dispatch to the Record had turned up. A tweed cap had been found washed up by the waves on the beach between Brademouth and Merwin Cove; and the people at the Crown were sure that it was Lord Southrop’s. He had worn a suit of unusually rough, very light-grey homespun tweed, the sort of tweed that, as the head-waiter at the Crown vividly put it, you could smell half a mile away; and his cap had been noted because it was made of the same stuff as the suit. After a day and a half in salt water, it had still an aroma of Highland sheep. Apart from this and its colour, or absence of colour, there was nothing by which it could be identified; not even a maker’s name; but there was no reasonable doubt about its being Lord Southrop’s, and it seemed to settle the question, if question there were, of what had happened to him. It was, Trent reflected, just like an eccentric intellectual—with money—to have his caps made for him, and from the same material as his clothes.

  It was these garments, together with the very large horn-rimmed spectacles which Lord Southrop affected, which had made most impression on the head-waiter. Otherwise, he told Trent, there was nothing unusual about the poor gentleman, except that he seemed a bit absentminded-like. He had brought a letter to the table with him—the waiter supposed it would be the one that came to the hotel for him—and it had seemed to worry him. He had read and reread it all through his dinner, what there was of it; he didn’t have only some soup and a bit of fish. Yes, sir; consommé and a nice fillet of sole, like there is this evening. There was roast fowl, but he wouldn’t have that, nor nothing else. Would Trent be ordering his own dinner now?

  ‘Yes, I want to—but the fish is just what I won’t have,’ Trent decided, looking at the menu. ‘I will take the rest of the hotel dinner.’ An idea occurred to him. ‘Do you remember what Lord Southrop had to drink? I might profit by his example.’

  The waiter produced a fly-blown wine-list. ‘I can tell you that, sir. He had a bottle of this claret here, Château Margaux 1922.’

  ‘You’re quite sure? And did he like it?’

  ‘Well, he didn’t leave much,’ the waiter answered. Possibly, Trent thought, he took a personal interest in unfinished wine. ‘Were you thinking of trying some of it yourself, sir? It’s our best claret.’

  ‘I don’t think I will have your best claret,’ Trent said, thoughtfully scanning the list. ‘There’s a Beychevelle 1924 here, costing eighteenpence less, which is good enough for me. I’ll have that.’ The waiter hurried away, leaving Trent to his reflections in the deserted coffee-room.

  Trent had learned from the police that the numbers of the notes left in the charge of the hotel had
been communicated by telephone to Lord Southrop’s bank in Norwich, the reply being that these notes had been issued to him in person ten days before. Trent had also been allowed to inspect the objects, including the maps, found in the abandoned car. Lackington he found marked in pencil with a cross; and working backwards across the country he found similar crosses at the small towns of Hawbridge, Wringham, and Candley. The police, acting on these indications, had already established that ‘L. G. Coxe’ had passed the Thursday, Wednesday and Tuesday night respectively at inns in these places; and they had learned already of his having started from Hingham Blewitt on the Monday.

  Trent, finding no more to be done at Lackington, decided to follow this designated trail in his own car. On the morning after his talk with the waiter at the Crown he set out for Hawbridge. The distances in Lord Southrop’s progress, as marked, were not great by the most direct roads; but it could be guessed that he had been straying about to this and that point of interest—not, Trent imagined, to sketch, for there had been no sketches found among his belongings. Hawbridge was reached in time for lunch; and at the Three Bells Inn Trent again found matter for thought in a conversation—much like the chat which he had already enjoyed at the Crown Inn—with the head-waiter. So it was again at the Green Man in Wringham that evening. The next day, however, when Trent dined at the Running Stag in Candley, the remembered record of Lord Southrop’s potations took a different turn. What Trent was told convinced him that he was on the right track.

  The butler and housekeeper at Hingham Blewitt, when Trent spoke with them the following day, were dismally confident that Lord Southrop would never be seen again. The butler had already given to the police investigator from Devon what little information he could. He admitted that none of it lent the smallest support to the idea that Lord Southrop had been contemplating suicide; that he had, in fact, been unusually cheerful, if anything, on the day of his departure. But what, the butler asked, could a person think? Especially, the housekeeper observed, after the cap was found. Lord Southrop was, of course, eccentric in his views; and you never knew—here the housekeeper, with a despondent head-shake, paused, leaving unspoken the suggestion that a man who did not think or behave like other people might go mad at any moment.

  Lord Southrop, they told Trent, never left any address when he went on one of these motoring tours. What he used to say was, he never knew where he was going till he got there. But this time he did have one object in mind, though what it was or where it was the butler did not know; and the police officer, when he was informed, did not seem to make any more of it. What had happened was that, a few days before Lord Southrop started out, he had been rung up by someone on the phone in his study; and as the door of the room was open, the butler, in passing through the hall, had happened to catch a few words of what he said.

  He had told this person he was going next Tuesday to visit the old moor; and that if the weather was right he was going to make a sketch. He had said, ‘You remember the church and chapel’—the butler heard that distinctly; and he had said that it must be over twenty years. ‘What must be over twenty years?’ Trent wanted to know. Impossible to tell: Lord Southrop had said just that.

  The butler had heard nothing further. He thought the old moor might perhaps be Dartmoor or Exmoor, seeing where it was that Lord Southrop had disappeared. Trent thought otherwise, but he did not discuss the point. ‘There’s one thing you can perhaps tell me,’ he said. ‘Lord Southrop was at Harrow and Cambridge, I believe. Do you know if he went to a preparatory school before Harrow?’

  ‘I can tell you that, sir,’ the housekeeper said. ‘I have been with the family since I was a girl. It was Marsham House he went to, near Sharnsley in Derbyshire. The school was founded by his lordship’s grandfather’s tutor, and all the Coxe boys have gone there for two generations. It stands very high as a school, sir; the best families send their sons there.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it,’ Trent said. ‘Should you say, Mrs Pillow, that Lord Southrop was happy as a schoolboy—popular, I mean, and fond of games, and so forth?’

  Mrs Pillow shook her head decisively. ‘He always hated school, sir; and as for games, he had to play them, of course, but he couldn’t abide them. And he didn’t get on with the other boys—he used to say he wouldn’t be a sheep, just like all the other something sheep—he learned bad language at school, if he didn’t learn anything else. But at Cambridge—that was very different. He came alive there for the first time—so he used to say.’

  In Norwich, that same afternoon, Trent furnished himself with a one-inch Ordnance Survey map of a certain section of Derbyshire. He spent the evening at his hotel with this and a small-scale map of England, on which he marked the line of small towns which he had already visited; and he drew up, not for publication, a brief and clear report of his investigation so far.

  The next morning’s run was long. He had lunch at Sharnsley, where he made a last and very gratifying addition to his string of coffee-room interviews. Marsham House, he learnt, stood well outside Sharnsley on the verge of the Town Moor; which, as the map had already told him, stretched its many miles away to the south and west. He learnt, too, what and where were ‘the church and chapel,’ and was thankful that his inquiring mind had not taken those simple terms at their face value.

  An hour later he halted his car at a spot on the deserted road that crossed the moor; a spot whence, looking up the purple slope, he could see its bareness broken by a huge rock, and another less huge, whose summits pierced the skyline. They looked, Trent told himself, not more unlike what they were called than rocks with names usually do. Away to the right of them was a small clump of trees, the only ones in sight, to which a rough cart-track led from the road; and from that point, he thought an artist might well consider that the church and chapel and their background made the best effect. He left his car and took the path through the heather.

  Arrived at the clump, which stood well above the road, he looked over a desolate scene. If anyone had met Lord Southrop there, they would have had the world to themselves. Not a house or hut was in sight, and no live thing but the birds. He looked about for traces of any human visitor; and he had just decided that nothing of the sort could reasonably be expected, after the lapse of a week, when something white, lodged in the root of a fir tree, caught his eye.

  It was a small piece of torn paper, pencilled on one side with lines and shading the look of which he knew well. A rapid search discovered another piece near by among the heather. It was all that the wind had left undispersed of an artist’s work; but for Trent, as he scanned the remnants closely, it was enough.

  His eyes turned now over a wider range; for this, though to him it spelt certainty, was not what he had been looking for. Slowly following the track over the moor, he came at length to the reason for its existence—a small quarry, to all appearance long abandoned. A roughly circular pond of muddy water, some fifty yards across, filled the lower part of it; and about the margin was a confusion of stony fragments, broken and rusted implements, bits of rotting wood and smashed earthenware—a typical scene of industrial litter. With his arm bare to the shoulder Trent could feel no bottom to the pond. If it held any secret, that opaque yellow water kept it well.

  There was no soil to take a footprint near the pond. For some time he raked among the débris in which the track ended, finding nothing. Then, as he turned over a broken fire-bucket, something flashed in the sunlight. It was a small, flat fragment of glass, about as large as a threepenny piece, with one smooth and two fractured edges. Trent examined it thoughtfully. It had no place in his theory; it might mean nothing. On the other hand … he stowed it carefully in his note-case along with the remnants of paper.

  Two hours later, at the police headquarters in Derby, he was laying his report and maps, with the objects found on the moor, before Superintendent Allison, a sharp-faced, energetic officer, to whom Trent’s name was well known.

  It was well known also to Mr Gurney Bradshaw, head of the fi
rm of Bradshaw & Co., legal advisers to Lord Southrop and to his father before him. He had, at Trent’s telephoned request, given him an appointment at three o’clock; and he appeared at that hour on the day after his researches in Derbyshire. Mr Bradshaw, a courteous but authoritative old gentleman, wore a dubious expression as they shook hands.

  ‘I cannot guess,’ he said, ‘what it is that you wish to put before me. It seems to me a case in which we should get the Court to presume death with the minimum of difficulty; and I wish I thought otherwise, for I had known Lord Southrop all his life, and I was much attached to him. Now I must tell you that I have asked a third party to join us here—Mr Lambert Coxe, who perhaps you know is the heir to the title and to a very large estate. He wrote me yesterday that he had just returned from France, and wanted to know what the position was; and I thought he had better hear what you have to say, so I asked him for the same time as yourself.’

  ‘I know of him as a racing man,’ Trent said, ‘I had no idea he was what you say until I saw it in the papers.’

  The buzzer on the desk-telephone sounded, and Bradshaw put it to his ear. ‘Show him in,’ he said.

  Lambert Coxe was a tall, spare, hard-looking man with a tanned, clean-shaven face, and a cordless monocle screwed into his left eye. As they were introduced he looked at the other with a keen and curious scrutiny.

  ‘And now,’ Bradshaw said, ‘let us hear your statement, Mr Trent.’

  Trent put his folded hands on the table. ‘I will begin by making a suggestion which may strike you gentlemen as an absurd one. It’s this. The man who drove that car to Lackington, and afterwards down to the seashore, was not Lord Southrop.’