Escapade

by Walter Satterthwait

  But the Great Man wasn’t finished. He turned back to Marsh. “And the reason, Inspector Marsh, that you did not investigate thoroughly, as you should have done, is that you are a most thoroughly incompetent Inspector Marsh.” He turned to the audience and smiled. “Ladies and gentlemen, permit me to introduce a man who is almost as inept a policeman as he is a magician.” He held out his arm. “I give you Chin Soo!”

  This was the signal. The drawing room doors burst open and what seemed like a hundred cops tumbled in, some in uniform, some not. One of them was Superintendent Honniwell. One of them was an angry-looking man who turned out later to be the real Inspector Marsh. Over against the wall, “Sergeant Meadows” reached into his coat pocket, but Doyle was ready and he grabbed the man’s hand with his own left and he popped him a very good right on the point of his chin and the man went crashing to the floor.

  Epilogue

  IT TOOK A few days to get everything straightened out. The key, as the Great Man liked to put it, was Moseley.

  Carl Moseley was the man who had been impersonating Dr. Auerbach. Questioned by Honniwell and Marsh, he broke.

  A journalist and an unsuccessful playwright, he had met Lady Purleigh in London a year ago, among a group of people who lived in Bloomsbury. It was there, he said, a month or so later, that their affair had begun. One member of the group, a poet named Sybil Prescott-Vane, knew about the affair and let Lady Purleigh and Moseley use her home for their London rendezvous. Her testimony, at the trial, was damaging to both of them.

  Lady Purleigh and Moseley had seen each other whenever she went to London, and twice he had visited Maplewhite, both times traveling out there with other members of the Bloomsbury group. They met in his room, or out by the old mill. In both cases, Lady Purleigh used the secret passageways and tunnels. Moseley said that Lady Purleigh had known about the tunnels for some time.

  According to Moseley, the original plan had been to kill Lord Bob. Lady Purleigh, he said, didn’t want any part of Lord Bob’s proletarian golfing club, and didn’t really want any part of Lord Bob either. She did want Moseley, said Moseley. The plan was changed during his most recent visit to Maplewhite, when the late Earl wandered into Moseley’s bedroom while he was amorously engaged” with Lady Purleigh. This was the same night the Earl made a grab for a woman named Dora Carrington. The Earl, who was pretty much a loony by then, agreed not to reveal what he'd seen, so long as Lady Purleigh didn’t interfere with his sport .

  That cooked the Earl, as far as Lady Purleigh was concerned. She wasn’t, she’d told Moseley (according to Moseley), going to gain control of Maplewhite “only to have it ripped from my hands by a drooling sex fiend.” This didn’t sit too well with the jury, either.

  She and Moseley worked out another plan—kill the Earl, and let Lord Bob take the blame. Even if he were never tried for the murder, she was sure she could get him locked up as a nut case.

  Moseley had met Dr. Auerbach in Vienna, while he was doing an article about psychoanalysis, and he knew that Auerbach was in Edinburgh now. It was his idea to shave his head and wear a false beard, which made him nearly Auerbach’s double. At the trial, the prosecutor asked him what would have happened if the Edinburgh police had talked to the real doctor. Moseley said he’d mentioned exactly that to Lady Purleigh, and she’d said that in that case “we should take care of Dr. Auerbach.”

  Moseley admitted to firing the shot that missed Miss Turner. As the Great Man said, he thought he’d killed her. He also admitted to a rough time an hour later, when he “examined” her, as Dr. Auerbach. It was then he realized that she was nearsighted, and that she hadn’t recognized him and Lady Purleigh. She didn’t volunteer anything about ghosts, and he didn’t ask.

  Lady Purleigh, he said, refused to believe that Miss Turner was no threat. It was Lady Purleigh who had stabbed the dagger into Miss Turner’s bed. Moseley, so he claimed, came running after her, using the secret passageway, and dragged her back to her room. In the excitement, both of them had forgotten to retrieve the knife.

  The autopsy on the Earl’s body had proved that he hadn’t committed suicide. As the Great Man had predicted, traces of fabric were found in the fatal wound. Moseley and Lady Purleigh hadn’t counted on that. No one ever found the cushion that had been used to muffle the sound of the shot. Moseley said that Lady Purleigh burned it.

  And it was Lady Purleigh, said Moseley, who had actually fired the pistol. While her husband was off talking to MacGregor, organizing his posse of tenant farmers, she used the secret passage to go up the Earl’s room. She brought along the cushion and the chunk of lumber with the prepared cartridge inside it. According to

  Moseley, she killed the old man, put the chunk of lumber into fireplace, and then come downstairs to join the others at tea. She knew when Lord Bob would be coming back—he was always punctual, as Cecily had told me—and she knew he would have no real alibi for the time the shot was fired.

  Lady Purleigh’s lawyer tried to shift the blame to Moseley. But Moseley had been in plain sight all afternoon. Lady Purleigh hadn’t. She was the only one who could’ve gone up to that room.

  From the time she was arrested, Lady Purleigh calmly denied everything. During the trial, Lord Bob told the newspapers that she’d never do such things, had never known about the secret passageways. He was convincing, but I think he realized that she had known, and that she had done all the rest.

  They were both convicted. Moseley was hanged. Lady Purleigh is still in prison, serving a life sentence. Lord Bob has given up the idea of a golfing club, and he doesn’t give weekend parties anymore.

  As for Chin Soo, his real name was Archibald Crubbs and he was English. He’d been an acrobat, a contortionist, and, for a while, a Shakespearean actor before he sailed to America and made his name as a magician. “Sergeant Meadows” was actually a man named Peter Collinson, an old friend of Crubbs’s and a former cop who still had connections to Scotland Yard. As Doyle had suggested, Chin Soo had learned on Wednesday, from the newspaper article, that Doyle would be going to Maplewhite for the weekend. Chin Soo assumed, and correctly, that Houdini would also be there. He and Collinson had been staying in Cumbermoorleigh, a village not far from Purleigh, since Thursday.

  When the two of them learned that Inspector Marsh would be arriving at Maplewhite on Sunday morning, they brought down a couple of thugs from London, and they all waylaid him. Marsh and his real sergeant, Maynard Vine, spent most of Sunday trussed up in a barn about ten miles south of Maplewhite, guarded by the thugs. They were only discovered because Miss Turner, doing a pretty good imitation of Lady Purleigh’s voice, telephoned the Amberly police and demanded that they start looking for them.

  The police wanted to move in on the phony Marsh right away, but Lady Purleigh’s voice carried a lot of weight with Superintendent Honniwell, even when it wasn’t really hers. Miss Turner persuaded them to listen to the Great Man.

  Crubbs and Collinson were tried and convicted for kidnapping and for impersonating a police officer, which in England is almost as serious. Both of them were sent to Dartmoor, but while their train was on its way to the prison, they disappeared in what the English newspapers called “the most audacious escape of the century.” Neither one of them was ever seen again.

  It’s a good word, audacious. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used it that Sunday afternoon, after all the excitement had died down, to describe Chin Soo. “It was audacious of him, really, wasn’t it? Pretending to be a policeman while an actual police investigation was going on. Wasn’t he the least bit bothered by the notion that Scotland Yard would be expecting reports from the real Inspector Marsh? Didn’t he realize that Honniwell might return here at any moment from Amberly? The Amberly police are still examining the rifle and the pistol. The autopsy on the Earl has yet to be performed. How could he possibly put himself in such a position?”

  I shrugged. “Like you said. He was audacious.”

  We were in the library, where Doyle had towed me.

 
He puffed at his pipe. “Yes, but why put himself in such jeopardy?”

  “He wanted to show Harry up. Like I said before, I don’t think he ever really wanted to kill him. He was counting coup, in a way, like a Sioux Indian. Getting close enough to kill him, and taking pride in that. Later, probably, if he’d pulled it off, he would’ve told Harry what he’d done, somehow. And I don’t think he planned to hang around long enough to get caught. He wouldn’t have stayed as long as he did, probably, if he hadn’t gotten involved in that bet with Harry. The idea of beating Harry to a solution was too good for him to pass up.”

  Chin Soo admitted as much at his trial.

  “Yes,” said Doyle, “but it was extraordinarily dangerous.” “This is a guy who catches bullets in his teeth.”

  “But that’s merely a trick, you said.”

  “Harry tells me that two magicians died trying to perform it.”

  Doyle frowned around the stem of his pipe. “Hmmm. And Lady Purleigh. She was audacious, as well.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I should never have suspected her. I’ve always believed she was a charming woman, and devoted to her husband. I very much admired her.”

  “I liked her, too,” I said. “But if murderers always looked like murderers, and always acted like murderers, we wouldn’t need cops.” I smiled. “Or mystery writers.”

  “Hmmm. Yes. Quite so.” He looked at me. “Do you suppose that Lord Reginald somehow influenced Lady Purleigh? Somehow warped her perceptions, twisted her nature?”

  “You’d have to ask Running Bear,” I said. “But he’s already been wrong once.”

  He frowned. “Not as to Mrs. Corneille’s daughter. Nor to the Earl’s imposing himself upon Miss Turner.”

  I still thought that Madame Sosostris had gotten her information from Briggs, and that the innocent woman she’d been talking about had been Darleen. But I knew that Madame Sosostris would never admit it.

  “You’d think he’d be right about everything,” I said.

  “Passing over into the next life doesn’t make one infallible, you know. One is improved, but one is still subject to human error.”

  “Then what’s the point of dying?”

  He smiled. “Still pretending to be a skeptic, eh, Beaumont? Ah well.” He stood up. “Nonetheless, it’s been a pleasure to meet you. Most instructive. I hope we see each other again at some time. I do mean that. Perhaps we can get together in London.’

  I stood up. “You’re taking off?” I asked him.

  “Taking off? Oh yes, yes, I’m returning to London with Madame Sosostris and Mr. Dempsey. We’ve work to do. Much work.”

  “Have you talked to Harry yet? About the seance?”

  He puffed at the pipe. “Briefly, yes. He isn’t as impressed as I d hoped. He claims that all the miracles she performed at the seance

  could have been performed, just as well, by a fraud.”

  “He’s right.”

  “Well, of course he is. I don’t dispute that for a moment. But as Madame Sosostris is not a fraud, the point is irrelevant. The woman is a marvel, Beaumont. She’s brought comfort and peace to literally hundreds of people. How many of us can say that?”

  “Not many.” Not me, for one.

  “I began as a doctor, you know. Medicine. I was helping people. And then I became a writer, and for years all I did was amuse them, really. Entertain them. Now, once again, I can be a part of something that helps them.” .

  I nodded. It seemed to me that being amusing and entertaining was maybe more helpful than confusing them with ghosts, but I didn’t think there was much point in bringing it up.

  “Well,” he said. “I wish you the best of luck.”

  “I wish you the same, Sir Arthur.” We shook hands and he doubled the number of creases in my palm.

  He smiled at me again and then he walked off, trailing the smell of burning burlap.

  I SAID GOODBYE to Mrs. Corneille, too, late that Sunday afternoon. She was on her way out, ready to drive back to the city with Sir David. I caught her in the Great Hall, asked her if I could talk to her for a minute.

  “I don’t see,” she said, “that we have anything to say to each other.”

  “One minute. That’s all I ask.”

  She hesitated a moment, narrowing her dark eyes, then she turned to Sir David. “Wait in the car, would you, David? I’ll be there in a moment.”

  Sir David glanced at me and frowned but he said nothing. The bruise on his jaw had become the color of stewed prunes.

  “What is it?” she said when Sir David left.

  “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about Lady Purleigh. I know she was your friend.”

  “She is innocent.”

  “She’ll get a chance to prove that.”

  “And she will do so. But you’ve ruined her name. You helped that awful little man. Houdini. You helped him build a case against her.”

  I nodded.

  “And you pretended to help that Chin Soo person. That false Inspector Marsh. You deliberately misled him.”

  I nodded.

  “You and Houdini both knew that he was no police officer.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  The Great Man had figured it out when I told him that English cops don’t carry guns. He’d felt a gun in Sergeant Meadows’s pocket when he tried to move him, up in the Earl’s room. That was what he’d told me at the old mill, and that was what had made Miss Turner gasp.

  I figured it out while I watched Chin Soo work. No cop, not even a delicate cop, makes a bet about a case with a magician.

  “And last night,” she said, “you made me promise not to talk to Alice,” she said. “Not to inform her of what Miss Turner had found in the Earl’s room. You were trying to entrap her even then.”

  “No,” I said. “But she was a suspect, like everyone else.”

  “Everyone was a suspect?”

  “Yeah.”

  She nodded. “Of course. That’s why you came to my room last night, isn’t it?”

  “I came because you asked me.”

  She shook her head. “What a fool I was. Things like honor, friendship, loyalty—they don’t mean anything at all to you, do they?”

  “They mean a lot to me. But so does the job.”

  She looked at me. “I suppose I ought to respect you for that,” she said. “But I’m not required to like you, am I?”

  “Nope.”

  She nodded. “Goodbye, Mr. Beaumont.”

  “Goodbye, Mrs. Corneille.”

  And she turned and walked away, her heels clicking on the marble floor, the muscles of her calves clenching and unclenching like fists below the snapping hem of her skirt. The scent of her perfume hung in the air.

  I could’ve reminded her that I hadn’t said anything to anyone about her daughter. In the formal garden, she’d said that she hadn’t seen her husband for ten years when he died in the war. Later, in her room, she’d let slip that her daughter was bom two years after she’d last seen him. Unless she was lying, her husband wasn’t the father of her child.

  But it was something else that I didn’t think there was much point in bringing up.

  I SAID GOODBYE to the Great Man a few minutes later. I was in the Great Hall, staring up at the wall of weapons. Everything from cudgels to semiautomatic pistols. People had been using killing tools for a long time, and the tools kept getting better. And they would keep getting better, too, so long as killing was one of the hundreds of thousands of ways we could deny, or escape, our own insignificance.

  “Phil. Are you ready to leave? Are you packed?” It was him, carrying his valise.

  “Hello, Harry. No, not yet. I talked to Mrs. Allardyce and Miss Turner. I’ll be going back to London on the train with them. It doesn’t leave till seven.” I reached into my pocket, found the key to the Lancia, handed it over.

  He looked down at it, looked back up at me. “But Phil. I thought we would be traveling together.”

  “Chin Soo’s in ja
il. The job’s finished. You don’t need me anymore.”

  Frowning, he cocked his head. “What is it, Phil? Are you upset about something?”

  “No, Harry. I’m fine. I hope you have a good trip. Maybe I’ll see you in London.”

  “You are upset, Phil. Why? I have solved the mystery. That is a cause for celebration, is it not?”

  “For who?”

  “For you and me. We can leave now. We can meet Bess at the station, and then we can share a huge breakfast, all of us. At the Savoy, I was thinking. It will be wonderful, Phil!”

  “Harry,” I said, “there were people involved in all this.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This wasn’t just a puzzle, Harry, set up so you could solve it. There were human beings involved. Lady Purleigh and this Moseley character—”

  “But they killed the Earl!”

  “I know. And they deserve to be punished. But they’ve got friends, Harry. They’ve got family. Lord Bob. Cecily. Mrs. Corneille. Even the servants. Something like this happens, it affects everyone close to it. And it keeps affecting them. Forever, maybe. You and I, we can walk away.”

  “But Phil, someone had to solve the crime.”

  “Yeah. And you did a good job. You were terrific.”

  “What is it, then?”

  I was being foolish. He was who he was.

  I put my hand on his shoulder and I said, “Forget it. You go on ahead. Give my regards to Bess. I’ll see you in London.”

  “Phil—”

  “Really. It’s okay. You go ahead.”

  “All right, Phil. If you insist.” He was beginning to work on a pout.

  And then, like the others, he turned and walked away. His back straight, his head high, he stalked across the floor.

  I called out, “Drive carefully!”

  But he didn’t hear me, or he didn’t want to, and so for once I had the last word.

  The Evening Post

  Maplewhite, Devon

  August 19

  Dear Evangeline,