August Derleth - The Solar Pons Omnibus Volume 1

by August Derleth

  "Anyone wishing to do so could surely have bought it from the agents before Mrs. Ashcroft did. But, let us for the moment assume that you are correct. How then did he get in?"

  "That remains to be determined."

  "Quite right. And we shall determine it. But one other little matter perplexes me in relation to your theory. That is this —if someone were bent upon frightening Mrs. Ashcroft from the house, does it not seem to you singular that we have no evidence that he initiated any of those little scenes where he was observed?"

  "I should say it was deuced clever of him."

  "It does not seem strange to you that if someone intended to frighten our client from the house, he should permit himself to be seen only by accident? And that after but the briefest of appearances, he should vanish before the full effectiveness of the apparition could be felt?"

  "When you put it that way, of course, it is a little far-fetched."

  "I fear we must abandon your theory, Parker, sound as it is in every other respect."

  He stopped suddenly. "I believe this is the address we want. Ah, yes —here we are. 'Harwell & Chamberlin, 210.'

  We mounted the stairs of the ancient but durable building and found ourselves presently in late-nineteenth-century quarters. A clerk came forward at our entrance.

  "Good-day, gentlemen. Can we be of service?"

  "I am interested in seeing Mr. Roderic Harwell," said Pons.

  "I'm sorry, sir, but Mr. Harwell has just left the office for the rest of the day. Would you care to make an appointment?"

  "No, thank you. My business is of some considerable urgency, and I shall have to follow him home."

  The clerk hesitated momentarily, then said, "I should not think that necessary, sir. You could find him down and around the corner at the Green Horse. He likes to spend an hour or so at the pub with an old friend or two before going home. Look for a short, ruddy gentleman, with bushy white sideboards."

  Pons thanked him again, and we made our way back down the stairs and out to the street. In only a few minutes we were entering the Green Horse. Despite the crowd in the bar, Pons's quick eyes immediately found the object of our search, sitting at a round table near one wall, in desultory conversation with another gentleman of similar age, close to sixty, wearing, unless I were sadly mistaken, the air of my own profession.

  We made our way to the table.

  "Mr. Roderic Harwell?" asked Pons.

  "That infernal clerk has given me away again!" cried Harwell, but with such a jovial smile that it was clear he did not mind. "What can I do for you?"

  "Sir, you were kind enough to recommend me to Mrs. Margaret Ashcroft."

  "Ah, it's Solar Pons, is it? I thought you looked familiar. Sit down, sit down."

  His companion hastily rose and excused himself.

  "Pray do not leave, Doctor," said Pons. "This matter is not of such a nature that you need to disturb your meeting."

  Harwell introduced us all around. His companion was Dr. Horace Weston, an old friend he was in the habit of meeting at the Green Horse at the end of the day. We sat between them.

  "Now, then," said Harwell when we had made ourselves comfortable. "What'll you have to drink? Some ale? Bitter?"

  "Nothing at all, if you please," said Pons.

  "As you like. You've been to see Mrs. Ashcroft and heard her story?"

  "We have just come from there."

  "Well, Mr. Pons, I never knew of anything wrong with the house," said Harwell. "We sold some land in the country for Captain Brensham when he began selling off his property so that he could live as he was accustomed to live. He was a bibliophile of a sort —books about the sea were his specialty —and he lived well. But a recluse in his last years. He timed his life right —died just about the time his funds ran out."

  "And Howard Brensham?" asked Pons.

  "Different sort of fellow altogether. Quiet, too, but you'd find him in the pubs, and at the cinema, sometimes watching a stage show. He gambled a little, but carefully. I gather he surprised his uncle by turning out well. He had done a turn in Borstal as a boy. And I suppose he was just as surprised when his uncle asked him to live with him his last years and left everything to him, including the generous insurance he carried."

  "I wasn't sure, from what Mrs. Ashcroft said, when Howard Brensham died."

  Harwell flashed a glance at his companion. "About seven weeks ago or so, eh?" To Pons, he added, "Dr. Weston was called."

  "He had a cerebral thrombosis in the street, Mr. Pons," explained Dr. Weston. "Died in three hours. Very fast. Only forty- seven, and no previous history. But then, Captain Brensham died of a heart attack."

  "Ah, you attended the Captain, too?"

  "Well, not exactly. I had attended him for some bronchial ailments. He took good care of his voice. He liked to sing. But when he had his heart attack and died I was in France on holiday. I had a young locum in and he was called."

  "Mrs. Ashcroft's ghost sang," said Harwell thoughtfully. "Something about a 'dead man.' "

  "I would not be surprised if it were an old sea shanty," said Pons.

  "You don't mean you think it may actually be the Captain's ghost, Mr. Pons?"

  "Say, rather, we may be meant to think it is," answered Pons. "How old was he when he died?"

  "Sixty-eight or sixty-seven —something like that," said Dr. Weston.

  "How long ago?"

  "Oh, only two years."

  "His nephew hadn't lived with him very long, then, before the old man died?"

  "No. Only a year or so," said Harwell. His sudden grin gave him a Dickensian look. "But it was long enough to give him at least one of his uncle's enthusiasms —the sea. He's kept up all the Captain's newspapers and magazines, and was still buying books about the sea when he died. Like his uncle, he read very little else. I suppose a turn he had done as a seaman gave him that bent. But they were a sea-faring family. The Captain's father had been a seaman, too, and Richard —the brother in Rhodesia who inherited the property and sold it through us to Mrs. Ashcroft —had served six years in the India trade."

  Pons sat for a few minutes in thoughtful silence. Then he said, "I take it that the property has no outstanding value."

  Harwell looked suddenly unhappy. "Mr. Pons, we tried to dissuade Mrs. Ashcroft. But these Colonials have sentimental impulses no one can curb. Home to Mrs. Ashcroft meant not London, not England, but Sydenham. What could we do? The house was the best we could obtain for her in Sydenham. But it's in a declining neighbourhood, and no matter how she refurbishes it, its value is bound to go down."

  Pons came abruptly to his feet. "Thank you, Mr. Harwell. And you, Dr. Weston."

  We bade them good-bye and went out to find a cab.

  Back in our quarters, Pons ignored the supper Mrs. Johnson had laid for us, and went directly to the corner where he kept his chemical apparatus. There he emptied his pockets of the envelopes he had filled in Mrs. Ashcroft's library, tossed his deerstalker to the top of the bookcase nearby, and began to subject his findings to chemical analysis. I ate supper by myself, knowing that it would be fruitless to urge Pons to join me. Afterwards I had a patient to look in on. I doubt that Pons heard me leave the room.

  On my return in mid-evening, Pons was just finishing.

  "Ah, Parker," he greeted me, "I see by the sour expression you're wearing you've been out calling on the crotchety Mr. Barnes."

  "While you, I suppose, have been tracking down the identity of Mrs. Ashcroft's ghost?"

  "I have turned up indisputable evidence that her visitant is from the nethermost regions," he said triumphantly, and laid before me

  a tiny fragment of cinder. "Do you suppose we dare conclude that coal is burned in Hell?"

  I gazed at him in open-mouthed astonishment. His eyes were dancing merrily. He was expecting an outburst of protest from me. I choked it back deliberately; I was becoming familiar indeed with all the little games he played.

  "Have you determined," I said without a smile, "wheth
er he comes from the Catholic Hell or the Protestant Hell?"

  "Touchi!" he cried, and laughed heartily.

  "More to the point," I went on. "Have you determined his identity and his motive?"

  "Oh, there's not much mystery in that," he said almost contemptuously. "It's the background in which I am interested."

  "Not much mystery in it!" I cried.

  "No, no," he answered testily. "The trappings may be a trifle bizarre, but don't let them blind you to the facts, all the essentials of which have been laid before us."

  I sat down, determined to expose his trickery. "Pons, it is either a ghost or it is not a ghost."

  "I can see no way of disputing that position."

  "Then it is not a ghost."

  "On what grounds do you say so?"

  "Because there is no such thing as a ghost."

  "Proof?"

  "Proof to the contrary?"

  "The premise is yours, not mine. But let us accept it for the nonce. Pray go on."

  "Therefore it is a sentient being."

  "Ah, that is certainly being cagey," he said, smiling provocatively. "Have you decided what his motive might be?"

  "To frighten Mrs. Ashcroft from the house."

  "Why? We've been told it's not worth much and will decline in value with every year to come."

  "Very well, then. To get his hands on something valuable concealed in the house. Mrs. Ashcroft took it furnished —as it was, you'll remember."

  "I remember it very well. I am also aware that the house stood empty for some weeks and anyone who wanted to lay hands on something in it would have far more opportunity to do so then than he would after tenancy was resumed."

  I threw up my hands. "I give it up."

  "Come, come, Parker. You are looking too deep. Think on it soberly for a while and the facts will rearrange themselves so as to make for but one correct solution."

  So saying, he turned to the telephone and rang up Inspector Jamison at his home to request him to make a discreet application for exhumation of the remains of Captain Jason Brensham and the examination of those remains by Bernard Spilsbury.

  "Would you mind telling me what all that has to do with our client?" I asked, when he had finished.

  "I submit it is too fine a coincidence to dismiss that a heavily insured old man should conveniently die after he has made a will leaving everything to the nephew he has asked to come and live with him," said Pons. "There we have a concrete motive, with nothing ephemeral about it."

  "But what's to be gained by an exhumation now? If what you suspect is true, the murderer is already dead."

  Pons smiled enigmatically. "Ah, Parker, I am not so much a seeker after punishment as a seeker after truth. I want the facts. I mean to have them. I shall be spending considerable time tomorrow at the British Museum in search of them."

  "Well, you'll find ghosts of another kind there," I said dryly.

  "Old maps and newspapers abound with them," he answered agreeably, but said no word in that annoyingly typical fashion of his about what he sought.

  I would not ask, only to be told again, "Facts!"

  When I walked into our quarters early in the evening of the following Monday, I found Pons standing at the windows, his face aglow with eager anticipation.

  "I was afraid you might not get here in time to help lay Mrs. Ashcroft's ghost," he said, without turning.

  "But you weren't watching for me," I said, "or you wouldn't still be standing there."

  "Ah, I am delighted to note such growth in your deductive faculty," he replied. "I'm waiting for Jamison and Constable Meeker. We may need their help tonight if we are to trap this elusive apparition. Mrs. Ashcroft has sent word that the thread across the library was broken last night. . . . Ah, here they come now."

  He turned. "You've had supper, Parker?"

  "I dined at the Diogenes Club."

  "Come then. The game's afoot."

  He led the way down the stairs and out into Praed Street, where a police car had just drawn up to the kerb. The door of the car sprang open at our approach, and Constable Meeker got out. He was a fresh-faced young man whose work Pons had come to regard as very promising, and he greeted us with anticipatory pleasure, stepping aside so that we could enter the car. Inspector Seymour Jamison — a bluff, square-faced man wearing a clipped moustache — occupied the far corner of the seat.

  Inspector Jamison spared no words in formal greeting. "How the devil did you get on to Captain Brensham's poisoning?" he asked gruffly.

  "Spilsbury found poison, then?"

  "Arsenic. A massive dose. Brensham couldn't have lived much over twelve hours after taking it. How did you know?"

  "I had only a very strong assumption," said Pons.

  The car was rolling forward now through streets hazed with a light mist and beginning to glow with the yellow lights of the shops, blunting the harsh realities of daylight and lending to London a kind of enchantment I loved. Meeker was at the wheel, which he handled with great skill in the crowded streets.

  Inspector Jamison was persistent. "I hope you haven't got us out on a wild goose chase," he went on. "I have some doubts about following your lead in such matters, Pons."

  "When I've misled you, they'll be justified. Not until then. Now, another matter —if related. You'll recall a disappearance in Dulwich two years ago? Elderly man named Ian Narth?"

  Jamison sat for a few moments in silence. Then he said, "Man of seventy. Retired seaman. Indigent. No family. Last seen on a train near Crystal Palace. Vanished without trace. Presumed drowned in the Thames and carried out to sea."

  "I believe I can find him for you, Jamison."

  Jamison snorted. "Now, then, Pons —give it to me short. What's all this about?"

  Pons summed up the story of our client's haunted library, while Jamison sat in thoughtful silence.

  "Laying ghosts is hardly in my line," he said when Pons had finished.

  "Can you find your way to the Lordship Lane entrance of the abandoned old Nunhead-Crystal Palace high level railway line?" asked Pons.

  "Of course."

  "If not, I have a map with me. Two, in fact. If you and Meeker will conceal yourself near that entrance, ready to arrest anyone coming out of it, we'll meet you there in from two to three hours' time."

  "I hope you know what you're doing, Pons," growled Jamison.

  "I share that hope, Jamison." He turned to Meeker and gave him Mrs. Ashcroft's address. "Parker and I will leave you there, Jamison. You'll have plenty of time to reach the tunnel entrance before we begin our exploration at the other end."

  "It's murder then, Pons?"

  "I should hardly think that anyone would willingly take so much arsenic unless he meant to commit suicide. No such intention was manifest in Captain Brensham's life —indeed, quite the contrary. He loved the life he led, and would not willingly have given it up."

  "You're postulating that Ian Narth knew Captain Brensham and his nephew?"

  "I am convinced inquiry will prove that to be the case."

  Meeker let us out of the police car before Mrs. Ashcroft's house, which loomed with an almost forbiddingly sinister air in the gathering darkness. Light shone wanly from but one window; curtains were drawn over the rest of them at the front of the house, and the entire dwelling seemed to be waiting upon its foredoomed decay.

  Mrs. Ashcroft herself answered our ring.

  "Oh, Mr. Pons!" she cried at sight of us. "You did get my message."

  "Indeed, I did, Mrs. Ashcroft. Dr. Parker and I have now come to make an attempt at least to lay your ghost."

  Mrs. Ashcroft paled a little and stepped back to permit us entrance.

  "You'll want to see the broken thread, Mr. Pons," she said after she had closed the door.

  "If you please."

  She swept past us and led us to the library, where she turned up all the lights. The black thread could be seen lying on the carpet, away from the east wall, broken through about midway.

  "Not
hing has been disturbed, Mrs. Ashcroft?"

  "Nothing. No one has come into this room but I —at my strict order. Except —of course — whoever broke the thread." She shuddered. "It appears to have been broken by something coming out of the wall!"

  "Does it not?" agreed Pons.

  "No ghost could break that thread," I said.

  "There are such phenomena as poltergeists which are said to make all kinds of mischief, including the breaking of dishes," said Pons dryly. "If we had that to deal with, the mere breaking of a thread would offer it no problem. You heard nothing, Mrs. Ashcroft?"

  "Nothing."

  "No rattling of chains, no hollow groans?"

  "Nothing, Mr. Pons."

  "And not even the sound of a book falling?"

  "Such a sound an old house might make at any time, I suppose, Mr. Pons."

  He cocked his head suddenly; a glint came into his eyes. "And not, I suppose, a sound like that? Do you hear it?"

  "Oh, Mr. Pons," cried Mrs. Ashcroft in a low voice. "That is the sound Mrs. Jenkins heard."

  It was the sound of someone singing — singing boisterously. It seemed to come as from a great distance, out of the very books on the walls.

  "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest," murmured Pons. "I can barely make out the words. Captain Brensham's collection of sea lore is shelved along this wall, too! A coincidence."

  "Mr. Pons! What is it?" asked our client.

  "Pray do not disturb yourself, Mrs. Ashcroft. That is hardly a voice from the other side. It has too much body. But we are delaying unnecessarily. Allow me."

  So saying, he crossed to the bookshelves, at the approximate place where she had reported seeing the apparition that haunted the library. He lifted a dozen books off a shelf and put them to one side. Then he knocked upon the wall behind. It gave back a muffled, hollow sound. He nodded in satisfaction, and then gave the entire section of shelving the closest scrutiny.

  Presently he found what he sought —after having removed half the volumes from the shelving there —a small lever concealed behind a row of books. He depressed it. Instantly there was a soft thud —like the sound a book might make when it struck the carpet —and the section sagged forward, opening into the room like a door ajar. Mrs. Ashcroft gasped sharply.