Comes a Stranger

by E. R. Punshon

  “That made it look bad for him, and he might have been arrested if he hadn’t been murdered himself. Adams found the body, and so came under suspicion, suspicion strengthened by his previous refusal to explain who he really was or his errand here. Broast’s alibi was not too good. There remained Miss Kayne and young Virtue to consider. And there was the incident of Mrs. Somerville’s missing hand towels. Outside Winders’s study we found a mark that looked as if made by a foot wrapped in something to prevent leaving a clear print.

  “I think perhaps that was the first time I began to consider Miss Perkins seriously. Only what could be her motive? I began to think about her history. You had told me something and Mrs Somerville told me some more. Apparently her mother had left her father for another man and had been divorced. Then her father had committed suicide and her mother, deserted by the blackguard with whom she had run away, vanished entirely. A tragic sort of story altogether, and the child was left without a friend, for the father’s family would have nothing to do with her. They were people of considerable wealth and some social position, and the child, instead of being brought up with all the social advantages she might have expected from her birth, became a friendless little waifs, a maid-of-all-work in the cheap lodging-house where her mother had left her, and where the landlady saw a chance to get an unpaid servant.

  “Probably most girls in her place would have accepted it. She did not. She showed an intensity of will not many would have been capable of in fitting herself for a better position, and it began to seem to me as if Miss Perkins, with her gigglings and her footling way of talking, was hiding her true self.

  “If so, why, and was there some purpose she had it in mind to carry out?

  “I wondered. The father had committed suicide, but what had become of the mother? No one seemed to know. She had disappeared, But Miss Perkins had a photo of the missing James A. Virtue. I wondered if he could be the man with whom the mother had run away. Apparently he had a pretty loose reputation where women were concerned. However, dates and places didn’t seem to fit, so I had to give that notion up. There was nothing to suggest James Virtue had ever been to Fromavon, nor did it seem quite likely that Miss Perkins would show people, as her own fiancé, the portrait of her mother’s seducer. But we knew Virtue had visited this neighbourhood, we knew Miss Perkins had somehow got hold of a photograph of his, and it struck me the photograph might have reached her through her mother. The mother could have got it from Virtue if he had ever tried to start a flirtation with her. In that case she could have sent it on to the Fromavon lodging with other of her possessions. That was only guesswork, of course, but the possession by Miss Perkins of the photo was a fact that had to be accounted for, and if the guesses were right, it suggested that this woman, whose present whereabouts no one seemed to know anything about, had been at one time in this neighbourhood.

  “That seemed pretty important.

  “Only why was she here? Had she followed the man she had run away with and who had deserted her? and had Miss Perkins been showing the photo round in the hope of getting some more information?

  “Whether she did get any information or not, I don’t know.

  “But she seemed to be coming more and more into the picture.

  “More than ever I felt the silly, footling airs she put on were hardly consistent with the character of a girl who had spunk enough to teach herself shorthand and typing—and make herself expert at them—so as to get a better job. You have to have plenty of will and energy, more than most, if you’ve any left over after working all day as a little slavey in a cheap boarding-house. Intelligence, too.

  “Seemed Inconsistent, somehow, and I don’t like inconsistencies any more than I like coincidences.

  “I noticed other things too.

  “I noticed that she brought out her extremely unexpected and rather staggering suggestion of a secret marriage between Broast and Miss Kayne just exactly at the moment when I was wondering what she was doing near the Lodge to notice a light in Mr. Broast’s room at nine at night. There was no reason, that I could see, unless she wanted to make sure Broast had in fact returned from town. If so, why did she want to be sure of that? was it so as be sure he would have no alibi for the Winders murder? At the moment, of course, I hadn’t got all that thought out. I was only wondering why she was near the Lodge at that hour, after she had finished her day’s work and gone home, and when she brought it out about a marriage between Broast and Miss Kayne I was so surprised and the idea seemed so full of possibilities, I forgot everything else.

  “But afterwards it came back to me, and I began to wonder if she had said it when she did just to stop me from asking why she had gone back to the Lodge.”

  “But why did she want to kill poor Sir William?” Olive asked.

  “She evidently thought he was partly responsible. I think myself it’s more than likely he must have known something. He was too close with Broast not to have some idea of what was going on. I feel it is certain he had some knowledge. Very likely, if he had chosen to act, he could have prevented it all. What further information Miss Perkins got I don’t know, or whether she got any at all, but it seems certain she came to believe her mother had been murdered and her body buried here in secret. She even came to suspect the actual spot, and that is why she sent me the forget-me-nots as a hint. I suppose she couldn’t try to do the digging herself, so she put us on to it. Things were anything but clear in my mind, but I did guess what was meant, though it puzzled me at first. I began to remember what she had said about the possible marriage between Broast and Miss Kayne. So I thought, suppose the marriage, so advantageous to a man like Broast with his tastes and capacities, wasn’t valid, because of a previous marriage with another woman after that other woman had left her husband for him and been divorced?

  “It began to link up.

  “There was a possible theory, I thought. Miss Perkins’s mother might have gone to Miss Kayne and told her things, and Miss Kayne thereon had taxed Broast with the story? I had seen something of Broast’s temper. It was at least conceivable that the result of that was murder. Perhaps that is what Miss Kayne meant when she told me about having committed the perfect murder. Perhaps, though, when you think of Broast’s fits of fury, murder wasn’t intended. It may have been the result of a quarrel, manslaughter rather than murder.

  “Anyhow, he couldn’t face exposure, and the poor woman’s body was buried secretly where it lay hidden till—till we started digging.

  “Whether Winders knew, as Miss Perkins, to give her the name she went by here, evidently believed, or did not know, Miss Kayne must have known. It was that knowledge she was brooding on, that that made her seem so strange. I think she had lost any love she ever had for Broast, but he still dominated her. She was still afraid of him, I think, and dared not tell, even if she had wanted to. I think that injury to her portrait suggests that much. I can’t believe that was the result of any accident. I think it hung there as a perpetual reminder. Do you remember telling me Miss Kayne said something about knowing ‘her’ again. ‘I knew her again at once’, was what she said. I remembered that afterwards because it seemed to fit in with the idea that Miss Kayne had seen someone of whom Miss Perkins reminded her, and who could that be but her mother?”

  “Bobby,” Olive cried out, “do you mean Miss Kayne knew all the time?”

  “I don’t know about all the time—I think she did know finally,” Bobby answered. “I think recognition came to her, and an understanding of what was the girl’s errand here. I think that is what made her seem so strange, why she sat apart so much, why she tried to get rid of the girl by that rather futile accusation of theft she started to make. She told me once, too, in a challenging sort of way that Virtue had told the truth, had told a lie, when he said there had been a dead body on the library floor. She meant it was the truth because once a dead body had lain there—that of Miss Perkins’s mother—and yet it was a lie because he had not seen it.”

  “It seems almos
t the most dreadful thing of all,” Olive said slowly, “to think of Miss Kayne sitting waiting, knowing what was going to happen, waiting and brooding, and waiting like some poor soul in the condemned cell.”

  “Miss Perkins was waiting and watching, too,” Bobby went on. “That must be how she came on the scene of our digging. I shan’t forget soon the way she stood there, looking, with the skull between her feet that she knew was her own mother’s. Or how she bent down and touched it with her fingers. But it must have been a shock to Broast. He carried it off, though. It might have meant nothing to him as he watched while what was left of his victim was being brought to the light of day again after so many years. Yet he knew we knew, he must have, and we knew he knew, too, and still he as good as told us there was nothing we could do. That was his mistake, though. We could do nothing, but Miss Perkins heard his boast, and it seems it was that finally decided her.

  “She tried to get him thought guilty of the Kayne murder and she failed. She tried again to put the guilt of the Winders murder on him and that failed, too, for he had a fairly strong alibi thanks to his having stayed in town later than he had said he would; so that he could destroy one of his own forgeries he had been obliged to buy up to stop awkward inquiries.

  “Because all those forgeries by which the great Kayne library had been built up were beginning to come back. Adams had been commissioned to investigate by the American collector who bought the forged Mandeville pages. Inquiries were being made by the Virtue family. They were really aimed at finding out what had happened to James Virtue, but were misunderstood by a collector already a trifle uneasy. So he got Adams, who is really manager to a big Scottish firm dealing in rare books, to take it up, but on the strict condition that Adams wasn’t to let anyone know what was suspected. Adams thinks the American collector had some idea of himself passing the forged pages on before the forgery was generally known. In any case, though, they would have had to be pretty sure of their ground before making an accusation of that sort against a man of Broast’s standing. That is what Adams wanted the photograph for. He thought if he could get a good snap of the genuine pages and enlarge it, then comparison with the forgeries would give the proof wanted. He thinks Broast printed the fake pages on that old printing press in the cellar, possibly on blank leaves taken from other contemporary books. Most likely Broast produced his other forgeries in the same way on the same old fifteenth century press. There’s no doubt, too, that he forged a number of the autographs and inscriptions in the presentation and association books he sold. That’s what upset him so much when I spotted there was no signature of Dryden’s in the Paradise Lost he showed us. He was afraid if he sold it, duly autographed, I might turn up with my story.

  “If Miss Perkins had realized all that, and how every day he was getting deeper and deeper into troubles of all sorts so there was bound to be a smash pretty soon, she might have waited. I suppose, like a lot of other people, she couldn’t believe how things in the end work themselves out. You can’t dodge consequences. So she had to take a hand. Give Providence a leg up. What upset her in the end was Broast’s boasting that the skeleton we had found could never be identified. If he had held his tongue, perhaps she would have held her hand. But his boasting and swaggering about being safe were too much for her. She had already provided herself with strychnine, and she put some in his tea that afternoon—and then waited in the library to watch him die. I expect she told him. She was worked up to it. She came straight from his side, when the maid came for the tea cups, and she said Mr. Broast had not finished yet. Quite true. He hadn’t finished. But it wasn’t long. A death worse than hanging. I don’t know what made me give him that warning, but it turned out true enough.”

  “Why do you think she went into the library after she had tried to shoot you?” Olive asked.

  “I’ve been wondering whether she did try,” Bobby said slowly. “I have an idea she wanted chiefly to keep us off so that she could get the library door open and slip inside. I don’t know what was in her mind. She may have had some thought of escaping by the windows. She may have meant to round off what she had done by trying to shoot Miss Kayne. She may have intended to shoot herself. Probably it was just an instinct to gain time. As it turned out one of the books Miss Kayne was throwing down must have struck her on the head and stunned her, and the fire did the rest. Death was actually due to suffocation—suffocation and shock.”

  Olive said slowly:

  “I can’t help feeling sorry for her. I can imagine how she brooded on the wrong done her father, her mother, herself, till it seemed intolerable the man responsible for it all should escape punishment. It’s almost as if there were something in her that might perhaps have been great—great in other ways, not only a great criminal.”

  THE END

  AFTERWORD

  E.R. Punshon’s detective novel Comes a Stranger carries an epigraph from the seventeenth-century poet Francis Quarles: “Death has no advantage, but when it comes a stranger.” A 1657 edition of Enchiridion, the original source of this epigraph, currently is available from a Swedish rare book dealer for over 2100 US dollars. How appropriate this is readers of Comes a Stranger will surely comprehend, since in the novel Punshon’s sleuth, Detective Sergeant Bobby Owen, finds that the ambiguous origins of certain rare books in the fictional Kayne library figure centrally in the maze of mystery he enters. The Kayne library’s highly-respected librarian, revealed in the course of the novel as a charlatan forger and fraudster (not to mention a murderer), is based, as far as forgery and fraud are concerned, on a real individual, Thomas James Wise, an eminent and influential English bibliographer and book collector whose astonishing literary misdeeds were exposed a few years before his death in May 1937. With Wise’s passing, England’s restrictive libel laws became far less of a pressing concern to Punshon and his publisher, Victor Gollancz, and Comes a Stranger duly appeared sixteen months later, though not without a protective note by the author, in which he assured readers that although “[t]his story was suggested by, and is indeed founded upon, certain recent occurrences, on which, however, for good reason, little emphasis was laid in the public press…[t]here is, there never has been, any library, public or private, in any way resembling the Kayne library. The owner, the trustees, the librarian, are all equally creatures of the imagination, and have no relation to any person, living or dead.” This statement is something less than the truth, at least as concerns the librarian of the Kayne library, a certain Mr. Broast, who in the course of the novel is revealed as the malefactor behind a shocking series of crimes, including, as in the case of Thomas J. Wise, literary forgery and fraud.

  In real life, Thomas J. Wise entered the decade of the 1930s as one of Britain’s most respected bibliographers, a former President of the Bibliographical Society, an honorary Masters of the Arts at Oxford University and an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. A longtime avid collector of first editions, Wise owned an enviable private library of rare books, dubbed the Ashley Library, after the street where Wise had lived when he first started his collection. Wise funded the Ashley Library through the sale of duplicate copies and his services as a purchasing agent for wealthy book collectors in the UK and US. Ironically, given his later exposure as a forger, Wise had won for himself among bibliophiles in both countries an authoritative reputation as an exposer of forgeries. “Easy as it appears to be to fabricate reprints of rare books,” Wise once prophetically commented, “it is in actual practice absolutely impossible to do so in such a manner that detection cannot follow the event.” (For a recent convenient summary of the career of Thomas J. Wise and the investigation of the Wise forgeries, see David Thomas, Beggars, Cheats and Forgers: A History of Frauds through the Ages.)

  Wise’s edifice of probity, already viewed with skepticism by some discerning individuals, began its total collapse in 1934, upon the publication of An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, an outstanding instance of literary detective work by John Carter and
Graham Pollard, two of the twentieth century’s most renowned bibliographers and booksellers. In their Enquiry Carter and Pollard definitively established that great numbers of rare privately printed, pre-first edition nineteenth-century pamphlets, depending solely on Wise’s word for authentication, were fakes. For example, a pamphlet pre-first of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets of the Portuguese, dated 1847, was shown to have been printed not on paper made from rags, but rather on chemically-treated wood pulp, which did not become available until 1874. The spurious works authenticated by Wise included, in addition to the famous 1847 Browning Sonnets, alleged pre-firsts by such nineteenth-century literary luminaries as William Wordsworth; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Charles Dickens; William Makepeace Thackeray; Robert Browning; Algernon Charles Swinburne; George Eliot; and William Morris. Strict English libel laws restrained Carter and Pollard from accusing Wise outright of being behind the forgeries (in Comes a Stranger Punshon has an American character explain that the reason he refrained from publicly accusing Mr. Broast of fraud was fear of English libel laws), but their implication was sufficiently clear: “In the whole history of book collecting there has been no such wholesale and successful perpetration of fraud as that which we owe to this anonymous forger. It has been converted into an equally unparalleled blow to the bibliography and literary criticism of the Victorian period by the shocking negligence of Mr. Wise.”

  With the publication of Carter and Pollard’s Enquiry what had been mere whispers about Wise became the subject of polite yet pointed discourse in literary periodicals in both the UK and US. In a review of Carter and Pollard’s Enquiry in the New York Times Book Review, Philip Brooks suggestively observed that the “activities described point to the work of one forger,” a person of uncanny skill and resource. A.J.A. Symons, himself a noted bibliophile and the author of the classic biography The Quest for Corvo (and also the elder brother of E.R. Punshon’s future Detection Club colleague, the crime writer Julian Symons; see below) quickly joined the affray with a 1934 article supporting Carter and Pollard and demanding that Wise explain himself, which was published in The Book Collector’s Quarterly; and later that year he privately printed (25 copies only, under the signature “A.J.A.S.”) a three stanza poem mocking the discredited bibliographer, entitled “Is It Wise?” Faced with exposure, Wise pled that illness prevented him from responding to the allegations, though his cause was ineffectually taken up by a few loyal supporters, including the prominent American bookseller Gabriel Wells, who published his own pamphlet in defense of Wise’s integrity.