The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  “Quite possible.” Norbert had been wondering when this would come up. “I’m a trade union official.”

  “Are you, by God? I bloody hate trade union officials.”

  “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” said Norbert, as they made their lopsided way along the landing, “but what brings a man of your eminence in the industrial world to join Comrade Boggy’s group?”

  Sir Reginald stopped, looked around him, and gestured untidily for Norbert to come closer. In a voice which he evidently imagined was a whisper, he said: “You’ve read Marx, have you? Course you have. So have I. You’re not the only one. I’ve read Lenin, too. And he’s more to the point. After the revolution – and everyone says it’s only a matter of time, half the people I do business with have moved their money to America; moved their families too, some of them – after the revolution there will be a transcription period – ”

  “Transition period?”

  “Sshh! This is between you and me. Even my secretary doesn’t know I’m here, let alone my wife. There will be a transmission period, during which the socialist state will work with chosen capitalists. Well now, if a chap happened to be able to guarantee that he would be one of those chosen catipalists, he’d be laughing. Laughing, take that from me.”

  “I see,” said Norbert, marvelling inwardly, and not for the first time in his life, at the lengths a Lancashire businessman would go to in order to secure a monopoly. Presumably the real Communist Party had turned him down; hence his affiliation with this unlikely offshoot.

  “I delivered the first instalment, in cash, to that grinning fool, Bognor, this afternoon. And I told him – I said, ‘There’s more where that came from, my Lord.’ Plenty more. There are certain things money can’t buy, and for which I will pay any amount.”

  Norbert wished Sir Reginald a “Goodnight, Comrade,” then hurried to his room to bring his notes up to date. The corpse was not discovered until after breakfast.

  “Nothing like it was before the war, of course,” said Diana Lawrence, shovelling onto her plate enough kidneys to process the urine of a small boatload of lambs. “But still, old Boggy does a lot better than most. There’s a chef, thank God, a kitchen maid, a scullery maid, between-maid, several chaps in the garden, a groom (for the motor), butler and hall boy, obviously, an odd job man, a carpenter – ”

  “Good God, there’s hundreds of them,” said Norbert, dealing himself a third helping of mushrooms to go with his second lot of scrambled eggs. He’d been a bit surprised to discover that breakfast was self-service. It reminded him rather of a works canteen – though with undeniably superior cuisine. “I’m sure I spotted a smithy yesterday. Surely Comrade Boggy doesn’t still retain his own blacksmith?”

  “Indeed he does. He currently has him making enormous hammer-and-sickle designs, with which to adorn the estate gates.”

  One by one, and with only one exception, the revolutionaries arrived to take part in the storming of the serving dishes, until most of the food had gone, and that which remained was cold. At that point, Bognor – ever the attentive host – instructed his butler to see that a tray was taken up to Sir Reginald’s room. When the butler returned to report that the gentleman was not in his bedroom, nor in his bathroom, a search was instigated. It ended in the Vitality Room.

  This was not an image the galvatronic therapy types would be likely to use in their advertisements, Norbert couldn’t help feeling, as he gently elbowed his way through the crowded doorway and knelt to check Sir Reginald Lloyd’s pulse. The industrialist was even more red-faced than usual, and his tongue seemed to hang halfway down his chest. His hair was scorched, and the metal skullcap appeared almost welded to his head. His hands resembled claws, perhaps because he had tried to free himself from a length of flexible tubing which had become entangled about his neck. Strange place for Lloyd to die, Norbert thought; he seemed hardly the health and fitness type.

  “No vital signs,” he reported. “I’m no doctor, but – I should say he has been vibrated to death.”

  “Dear God!” cried Bognor.

  “Also strangled.”

  “Oh Lord,” said Susan.

  “Electrocuted, too, I think . . .”

  “Bloody hell!” said Diana.

  “. . . and quite possibly boiled.”

  There was a silence, until Norbert looked up and nodded, to signify that he had finished.

  “One way or another,” said Giles, “he sounds quite dead.”

  “Utterly.”

  “What a beastly accident,” said Bognor. “The blasted machine must have gone rogue.” He patted his waistcoat absently, as if searching for shot.

  “Not an accident, I’m afraid,” said Norbert. “The dosage controls over there have been set to maximum – and the off switch here on the machine itself has been disabled.”

  “He’s right, you know,” said Giles, after a quick inspection. “Someone’s shoved a cigarette card in there. I reckon you’d need a penknife to free it, too. Unless this was an especially peculiar way of committing suicide, then this is undoubtedly a murder.”

  “But who – ” said Susan.

  “Any one of us could have done it.” Norbert paused; he thought the occasion demanded it. “I don’t believe any of us can alibi any of the others for the entire period during which this crime might have been committed. Rising times this morning were various and individual. As for breakfast, we all came and went without formality. Can anyone refute any of that?”

  “Could it not have been one of the staff?” Willie asked.

  Bognor shook his head. “No, no. They’d have been far too busy preparing breakfast and so on. Besides, any servant who was absent his post would be noticed by the others.”

  “Unless they were all in it together,” said Susan.

  Bognor and Diana looked at her in astonishment. “All in it together?” said Bognor. “But that would be tantamount to . . .” He couldn’t finish the sentence. A particular word hung in the air for a short time, and then, seeing it wasn’t wanted, slunk away.

  “. . . unthinkable,” said Diana.

  Bognor nodded. “Unthinkable.”

  “At least we can eliminate one suspect from your list,” said Giles.

  “Indeed? Who?”

  “Why, yourself, Comrade Norbert.” Giles smiled, and looked around at the others. “After all, you are the detective, Sergeant Whistler – and you can’t be the detective and the killer. That isn’t how these things are done, at all.”

  The late Sir Reginald Lloyd was removed to an unoccupied bedroom – in the servants’ wing, naturally – while the living comrades gathered in the Small Library.

  “It was only just now that I remembered where I’d seen Comrade Norbert before,” Giles explained. “During the 1919 police strike, wasn’t it, Norbert?”

  “Is this true?” demanded Diana. “A detective? A policeman? Sent to spy on us, I suppose!”

  “Well, yes,” said Norbert. “In a word. But never mind that now, there is a killer amongst us and he or she must be identified: that is the priority. I must ask no one to leave the house and immediate grounds until I have determined what happened.” The relief of being able to speak once again in his natural, Kentish tones almost outweighed his displeasure at being unmasked as a spy. How the lingually acrobatic Geordies ever managed to produce that extraordinary noise in the first place, let alone keep it up for hour after hour, was beyond him; they must practise constantly, perhaps in front of mirrors.

  It was agreed, nem con, that the comrades should occupy themselves upon the tennis courts, while Norbert summoned them individually for interview in the billiard room (chosen for its view over the tennis courts, and its comfortable chairs). He began with Giles.

  “Hope you don’t mind me letting the cat out of bag, Comrade Norbert,” said Giles, settling himself happily in the very chair which Norbert had intended for his own. “But I thought it better to keep this in the family, rather than involve the local coppers. We’d both soone
r this matter didn’t make the Daily Mirror, yes?”

  It pained him to do so, but Norbert was forced to agree; there was plenty of potential for embarrassment all round in this messy situation. “Besides,” he said, “I may end up arresting you for murder, and I wouldn’t want anything to complicate that.”

  Giles laughed. “My dear fellow, I don’t know what sort of things you get up to in the Met, but I can assure you that His Majesty’s intelligence services do not go about vibrating businessmen to death in stately homes. It’s simply not within our purview.”

  “You must admit you have a motive. You wouldn’t care to see a revolutionary movement getting hold of Sir Reginald’s money.” Norbert wasn’t going to be put off by any quantity of sangfroid.

  “Only the precise same motive which you have yourself as a Special Branch officer – and I don’t accuse you.”

  “Then what are you doing here? This organization is absurd, not dangerous.”

  “I could ask you the same question.” Giles sighed, as if Norbert’s silliness was at last becoming tiresome. “And I’d get the same answer – they all need watching, no matter how absurd they might appear. Brother Lenin was pretty absurd, I daresay, up until the moment he wasn’t.”

  Detective Sergeant Whistler considered this answer, and found it incomplete. With Whitehall apparently convinced that the entire country was on the verge of all-out class war, why would MI5 waste an experienced field man on a bunch of crackpots and misfits like The Bolshevist League of Urgency? He was about to say something along those lines, when Giles added: “Incidentally, old boy: was it your idea to come here, or the Yard’s?”

  Time to reassert control of this interview; past time, in fact. “All right, what do you make of the others?”

  “Are you consulting me, my dear old thing?”

  Norbert ground out his cigarette, and gave the secret agent a hard look. “No, Mr Macready, I am interrogating you. As a murder suspect. I should bear that in mind, if I were you.”

  There wasn’t a flicker of uncertainty on Giles Macready’s face. There hadn’t been such a flicker on a Macready, Norbert was sure, since the Norman Conquest. “What do I think of the others? Well, I would take a close look at Boggy himself. The man is notoriously unstable – this present passion for revolution, for instance, dates most coincidentally from the time of his wife’s departure.”

  “Eccentricity is surely natural in the aristocracy?”

  “Certainly, but his previous eccentricities centred on motor cars, aeroplanes, the usual – this is different. And believe me, he’s not the inbred, rustic idiot he appears to be.”

  “What possible motive might he have for killing Lloyd?”

  “I’ve no idea – but the way you phrase the question does rather sound as if you’ve already thought of motives for the rest of us, you clever old thing! It doesn’t stop at flanges with you, does it?” Giles stood, signalling that the interview was over. Norbert remained seated, signalling nothing more, he feared, than that he was not standing. “By the way,” Giles added, his hand on the doorknob, “a flange is a projecting or raised edge or flank, as of a wheel. It always pays to do one’s preparation.”

  The annoying thing was that Norbert knew full well what a flange was. He’d done his preparation. He always did; it had been the secret of his success throughout what had so far proved to be a quite complicated career.

  “Sir Reginald, if you’ll forgive my indelicacy, seemed to be taking rather an interest in you last night. An inappropriate interest, I mean.” He smiled, hoping to put Susan Chaplin at her ease.

  “He was a little predatory, that’s true. But I can assure you, Sergeant, that I am well used to such attention from men of his type. I take no notice of it.”

  Her words sounded like bravado, but then Norbert had no doubt that bravado was an important part of the modern working woman’s armour. “You’re a typewriter, I believe?”

  “I prefer ‘typist,’ but yes. I’m employed by a secretarial bureau in the West End.”

  “And have you ever met Sir Reginald before?”

  “No.” She smiled; the first smile she’d allowed him since the revelation of his duplicity. “I’d never met Sir Reginald – only his kind. In fact, the only person here that I knew already was Diana Lawrence. Our agency handles all her typing. She saw me reading The Clarion in the office one day, and we got talking about the revolution and so on.”

  “She’s a friendly woman, you’d say?”

  Susan shrugged. “She is to me. I admire her. But I think a lot of men find her rather terrifying.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes! Well, that’s her reputation, anyway. ‘No man dare say her nay!’ – that’s what my boss told me. Anyway, it was through her that I became involved in the League.”

  “Were you previously involved in the movement at all?”

  Susan’s posture stiffened. “I’m sure you could find out with a simple phone call, Sergeant. You keep files on us all, don’t you?”

  “Not all, Miss Chaplin, no. There are too many of you for that.” This time, she almost answered his grin; he’d have to be content with that.

  “I was a member of the Labour Party for a short time. My parents are Labour, keen Co-operators, and so on. They disapprove of communism, of militancy generally – they fear that the bosses will use the Red Bogey to drive Britain back to the right and destroy the Labour Party.”

  “You disagree?”

  “I don’t care! We have a Labour government – are we one inch closer to socialism? It’s too late for reform. Surely the war taught us that much?”

  “So why the League, rather than the established Communist Party?”

  “Frankly, I am beginning to ask myself that.” She pushed her hair out of her eyes, and made a noise halfway between a laugh and a hiccup. “If I’m honest, I think the fact the meetings take place at the house of a lord influenced me – my parents can hardly say it’s not respectable, can they?”

  Norbert smiled. “Respectability is important to them?”

  “They were both born working-class, Sergeant. They have risen, through great effort, to the very bottom-most rung of the lower middle-class ladder. They cling to it for dear life. But the poverty that’s growing in this country since the war is of a severity unseen since my grandparents’ day. The poor are getting poorer, the working classes are losing their power, and the moderately comfortable are slowly slipping back to where they started. That’s why I have no time for reform.”

  There wasn’t much Norbert could argue with in that, even had he wished to, so instead he said: “I think it’s time for lunch.”

  Champagne and sandwiches were served on the terrace. Norbert would have preferred a beer on such a hot day – or even a cup of tea, given the heavy afternoon facing him. He ate a round of cheese and pickle, and then ate three more. The sandwiches were delicious, and as he chewed he worked out why that should be so: the bread, the cheese, the butter and the pickle were probably all made here on Lord Bognor’s estate, mostly from ingredients grown on Bognor land.

  Bognor. He’d been to Bognor once, on a daytrip. Very pleasant. His aunty had been sick, and blamed the water. Not that this had anything to do with anything, of course.

  No, definitely not a champagne day. He took himself off to the kitchen, where he bought one immense mug of tea for a small amount of coppery gossip, and where he was invited to share a sit down on the back steps with a white haired gardener. Norbert employed a conversational opening which he had never known to fail with anyone over the age of forty.

  “You’ll have seen some changes around here.”

  “What! What hasn’t changed, more like. This is a fact, professors of universities will tell you this, what’s happened in the last generation – the big estates being broke up, and that – that is the biggest change in land ownership since the Norman Conquest.”

  “Norman Conquest.” Norbert made a noise between his teeth. “Get away.”

  “T
hat’s true. Mechanization. Falling prices. This is getting to be the biggest depression we’ve had in the countryside since I don’t know when.”

  “Norman Conquest?” Norbert suggested.

  “People are leaving the land in their thousands, hundreds of thousands, moving to the cities. Most of those as stay behind are unemployed.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” said a young girl – a maid of some sort, Norbert assumed – as she joined them on the steps. “He’s all for unions, he is. If you listen to him, he’s Noah and it’s started raining.” She poked the gardener with her foot, almost knocking him over, to demonstrate that her intentions were kindly.

  “You met my niece, have you?”

  “Charmed,” said Norbert, standing to shake hands with the maid.

  He was glad he had ten minutes later, when they were alone, and she put her mouth close to his ear. She had very sweet breath, like violets. “You know that lady?”

  “Which one?”

  “Older one, with the skirts. She’s a very light sleeper.” She giggled.

  “Is she?”

  “Don’t make any impression on the sheets at all, that’s how light she is.”

  Diana Lawrence, he was told, was up on the roof, sunning. That seemed reasonable.

  She’d found a nice spot: a flat area about the size of a suburban sitting-room, sheltered by the humps of windows in the servant’s rooms. Norbert settled himself so that the sun was in his eyes. Diana was wearing a bathing suit which, Norbert felt, would have looked a lot better on the gardener’s niece.

  They discussed roofs for a while. It turned out to be something they had in common. Norbert enjoyed a good roof, though he couldn’t claim to share her experience and sophistication in the matter. He had once attended a rooftop dance, complete with an American jazz orchestra, but he’d been on duty so that probably didn’t count.

  “One can see the future from a good roof. In Italy,” she told him, “there is a racing car factory which has a test track on the roof.”