Settling Scores

by Martin Edwards

  They entered an office near the head of the stairway to find a number of police officials already present. Miss Frayle remained in the doorway, too nervous to enter. The Doctor stared down at the shape which lay near the desk and was covered by a sheet.

  His narrowed eyes shifted to where, on the desk, beside what was apparently the dead man’s grey trilby, a knife was prominently placed upon a handkerchief. He observed the handkerchief was stained red. He removed his gaze from the unpleasant sight, and was eyeing the hat when he heard Hood say:

  “Any idea how long ago death took place, Doctor?”

  “Approximately half an hour ago. The right lung is punctured, the implement which killed him was evidently used with considerable force.”

  Meanwhile Hood was surveying the knife on the desk with narrowed eyes. Beneath the glare of a powerful electric bulb, his ruddy features were grim and set. He examined the knife closely.

  “Finger-prints seem clear enough,” he observed. “Seems as though it’s a straightforward case. Probably shan’t have to take up your time after all.”

  From what the Doctor was able to ascertain, it appeared that one of the boxing stewards calling at the office to check some point about the running of the programme had found the promoter dead, and had immediately searched for Detective-Inspector Hood, whom he had previously seen in the auditorium, so conspicuous was this amiable Scotland Yard man.

  Inquiries had elicited that no suspicious person had been noticed in the vicinity of the office. But as the attention of everybody was engaged inside the hall, it would have been possible for someone to have come from almost any part of the building and make their way upstairs without attracting attention; or they could as easily have slipped in from the street. The motive for the crime was not robbery; the dead man’s well-lined notecase was untouched.

  Sounds that the last fight of the evening was over and the noise of the crowd leaving the building reached the office.

  Doctor Morelle picked up his walking-stick and beckoned to Miss Frayle.

  “As the interception of the murderer would appear to be a foregone conclusion, Inspector, owing to the finger-prints, I take it you will not require my assistance?”

  “That’s right. Sorry to have bothered you,” Hood declared. “Good night, Doctor—good night, Miss.”

  Outside the office door, Miss Frayle said:

  “I’ve never known you to walk out on a case before, Doctor. Did you really believe that it’s almost solved?” she asked quickly.

  He tapped his walking-stick on the concrete floor.

  “On the contrary, my dear Miss Frayle,” he said enigmatically. “I am quite confident that Detective-Inspector Hood will not be able to intercept the real perpetrator of the crime.”

  “Then why don’t you do something?”

  “I intend so to do,” he replied evasively, and then snapped, “as soon as you refrain from your banal interrogations!”

  He hurried down the stairs, and stood surveying the people who streamed out of the more expensive seats. He was about to turn towards the exit when he perceived the individual whom he had been informed was Joe Girotti.

  His blonde, flashily-dressed companion on his arm, he was swaggering through the crowd. He put on his hat with a dashing gesture, but instead of it slanting over his eyes it seemed to perch on the back of his black, shining head, and the girl looking up at it laughed as with a quick movement he removed it.

  Doctor Morelle unexpectedly wheeled round and pulled Miss Frayle towards a telephone booth near the entrance.

  “Kindly telephone the Fencing Club,” he directed, “and ascertain the address of Mr. William Royston without delay.”

  A question formed on her lips, but she stifled it when she saw the saturnine set of his feature in the half-light. Ten minutes later they were proceeding in a taxi to the Royston home. There seemed to be a long interval after Doctor Morelle had rung the bell before the door was opened to him by the elder Royston, whose face relaxed with obvious relief when he recognised his visitors.

  “Thank heaven it’s you, Doctor,” he exclaimed. “You are the one person who can help us. For a moment I thought it was the police.”

  “So you, too, have a latent guilt complex,” the Doctor smiled mirthlessly.

  Sonny Royston came into the room at that moment. He looked the picture of utter dejection.

  “Shall I tell the Doctor, Dad?”

  “Yes, go on, Sonny. He’ll be able to tell us the best thing we can do.”

  The young boxer hesitated, then he blurted out: “It’s Kitty’s father. He’s dead—murdered!”

  “Of that I am cognisant,” the Doctor nodded. “That is the reason I journeyed here. That reason and this—” He handed Sonny a button. “This belongs to you, I presume? I retrieved it from the late Mr. Burgess’s office.”

  Sonny Royston turned to his father helplessly. “You see, Dad,” he cried, “the police are going to think it was I who did it!”

  “All right, son, take it easy,” said his father. Doctor Morelle stared at the boy piercingly, as though he was trying to make up his mind. Young Royston choked and then, his father’s grip on his shoulder, proceeded more calmly. “Remember tonight in the dressing-room, Doctor, I joked about asking old Burgess if he’d seen me win my fight and wouldn’t he change his mind about Kitty and me? Well, after I’d left you I suddenly thought perhaps after all it wouldn’t be such a bad time to speak to him again about our engagement. So I decided to go up to his office before joining Kitty over at the café. There was no reply when I knocked, so I went in. He was on the floor and there was a knife in his back. Without thinking, I knelt down and pulled it out—” He shuddered. “It was horrible, and then some of the blood got on my hand and I wiped it off with my handkerchief. Suddenly I lost my head and rushed out.

  “When I reached the street I realised I’d left my finger-prints on the knife. I remembered people knew he and I had quarrelled. I panicked absolutely and came home—I forgot all about poor Kitty—when I got here I burnt the handkerchief and then I waited for Dad.” He glanced at his father. “You know I didn’t do it, don’t you?” he choked. “You know that what I’ve told you is true?”

  “’Course I believe you,” said the elder man. He looked across at Doctor Morelle, his face drawn and harassed.

  The Doctor walked across to the boy’s side with a purposeful air.

  “I must say I am constrained to believe you, young man—” he began.

  “I believe you, too,” Miss Frayle burst in feelingly.

  “It hardly seems consistent,” the Doctor continued, ignoring his assistant, “that after you displayed such sportsmanship in the ring you would transfix anyone in the back.”

  “All the same,” said Bill Royston after a moment, “the fact that we all believe him doesn’t mean to say that police will, does it? What ought we to do about it?”

  “Surely you’ve got a clue, Doctor,” Miss Frayle insisted frenziedly, realising that Sonny Royston’s freedom—and probably his life—depended on the Doctor elucidating this mystery.

  “Regrettably, I fear I have no constructive suggestion to make at this juncture.” He stretched out a hand to reach his hat which he had placed on the table. Then, strangely, he turned it round in his hand, gazing at it with a sardonic smile. Suddenly he wheeled round. “May I be permitted to amend my former statement? On the contrary, I can elucidate the crime, and in a few minutes put the police on to the true perpetrator.”

  “Doctor, you’re wonderful!”

  It was Miss Frayle who said it, but the others in the room evidently thought the same, judging from the relief that came over their anxious faces.

  “Now, young man, if you will kindly direct me to the telephone.”

  A short while later found the Doctor on the telephone to Scotland Yard, speaking to Detective-Inspector Hood. The latter was working late on the checking up of the finger-prints found on the knife which had slain Burgess.

  “What is it
, Doctor?” Hood asked quickly. “Found the murderer?”

  “Your powers of deduction amaze me, because your assumption is quite correct. If you will kindly assimilate the information I am about to give you…”

  The Detective-Inspector acted upon Doctor Morelle’s information forthwith, with the result that some time after midnight Joe Girotti opened the front door of his expensive flat to find himself face to face with Inspector Hood and a couple more formidable-looking officers.

  At Scotland Yard he admitted to murdering Burgess—the promoter had refused to pay for his “protection” (another name for blackmail which Girotti extorted from his victims under the threat of being beaten up by the “boys”).

  Burgess had shown him the door, and the gang-leader, in a burst of rage, had waited until his back was turned and then attacked him with his knife.

  The following day, Hood called at the house in Harley Street to thank Doctor Morelle for his assistance, and also to learn how he had so unerringly deduced the identity of the murderer.

  “I observed what was to be the vital clue before the murder was actually committed,” the Doctor explained laconically. “But, shall I say I observed it only subconsciously? You see, the real object of my presence at the prize-fight was to gather impressions which would form a sociological subject. Not being cognisant of the fact that a murder was to be perpetrated, I was not searching for details. Briefly, I must have noticed two admission tickets fixed in the band of Girotti’s head-gear. The observation immediately passed into my subconscious, and then, in Burgess’s office I perceived a hat on the table, very like Girotti’s. Two tickets were also adhering to that hat.

  “Later in the auditorium I perceived Girotti again, and I noticed then the head-gear he now possessed did not appear to fit him properly—and he preferred not to wear it. Later, when interrogating Royston and his son, it occurred to me it was Burgess’s hat Girotti had taken in error, leaving his own in the office. No doubt this happened in Girotti’s haste to depart.”

  “I see,” said Detective-Inspector Hood, through a cloud of acrid tobacco smoke. “But what was it suddenly brought these clues from your subconscious to your conscious mind, so to speak?”

  Doctor Morelle chuckled sardonically. “That occurred when I happened to reach for my head-gear which was reposing on the Roystons’ table. I observed that I, too, had inadvertently fixed the boxing arena admission tickets to my own hat, and had omitted to remove them.” He lit a Le Sphinx. “And so you have a perfect example of how the subconscious can be brought into use in the elucidation of crime.”

  “It sounds like Greek to me.”

  Doctor Morelle walked towards the door. “Now, Detective-Inspector, if you will bear with us, I wish to dictate to Miss Frayle my final notes on a thesis, entitled Hedonism and the Masses.”

  The Scotland Yard man grinned. “Work! Work! Work!” he said. “Don’t you ever think of anything else, Doctor? Don’t you ever think of—well, pleasure?”

  ‌I, Said the Sparrow

  ‌Leo Bruce

  Leo Bruce was the pen-name under which Rupert Croft-Cooke (1903–79) wrote detective stories. Croft-Cooke was an extraordinarily industrious author, who produced a book of poetry, Songs of a Sussex Tramp, at the age of nineteen and continued to write compulsively for the rest of his life. Barry Pike, a crime fiction critic who has edited a comprehensive collection of Bruce’s short mysteries, Murder in Miniature, calculates that in all he published 126 books, including thirty-one as Bruce and no fewer than twenty-seven volumes of autobiography. He had, to say the least, a full life which combined wide-ranging achievements with the misery of a prison sentence for homosexual offences and a period of self-imposed exile in Tangier.

  His eclectic interests included psychology, wine, gypsies, the circus—and darts, on which he published a book in 1936. In the same year he created Sergeant Beef, who made his debut in the superbly entertaining locked room mystery Case for Three Detectives. One of the unlikeliest yet most appealing Great Detectives of the Golden Age, Beef loved his beer and was, almost inevitably, a keen darts player. This story, however, deals with toxophily, and appeared in the Evening Standard in the 1950s prior to its inclusion in Murder in Miniature.

  “Are you a toxophilite?” asked young Thackeray.

  “No, Church of England,” said Sergeant Beef quickly as he bisected a large pickled onion.

  The CID man sighed.

  “I mean, are you any good with a bow and arrow?”

  “You trying to be funny?” asked Sergeant Beef. “It’s not that long since I retired from the Force.”

  Thackeray, who had once served as a constable under Beef, knew him well enough to show no impatience. “I ask because I’m investigating this murder out at Tryfford. You must have read about it. Man shot dead with an arrow.”

  “Let’s hear the details,” said Sergeant Beef, unable to keep the eager gleam from his eyes.

  Thackeray had got what he wanted.

  “Certainly, Ledwick Jayne was the president of the Robin Hood Club of Toxophilites which used to meet at his house once a year for their championship competition. A rich man, Jayne, a widower with one son. This son is a keen-looking type, ex-Army captain, alert and athletic, one of the best archers in the club—if you still call them archers.

  “Jayne himself was over 60, a gangling loose-jointed old man. He had a stroke some years ago and it left him not exactly paralysed but stumbling and jerky, with an impediment in his speech and a more or less permanently dropping lower jaw.

  “He no longer joined in the archery but never lost his interest in the pastime and made this annual competition a sort of house-party at his great Victorian country house.

  “On the night after the finals in which his son Dennis had won the Robin Hood Cup, Ledwick Jayne was standing out on the balcony of his bedroom at ten o’clock before turning in.

  “He had said good-night to brother Raymond, with whom he had drunk a last whisky-and-soda in his study and had gone up to bed.

  “His son, who was several hundred yards away down at the lake, says that he saw him there in the distance, illuminated by his bedroom light behind him. Dennis, the son, thought nothing of it, for his father was a creature of habit.

  “All the younger members of the party had gone down to the lake according to a plan made at dinner. It was a very warm night and they decided that it would be fun to go there and perhaps take a boat out. It was near the field in which the competition had been held, and the little pavilion where they kept their bows and arrows was beside it.

  “Ledwick’s brother tells the rest of the story. He, Raymond Jayne (an accountant who specialises in income-tax claims), had a last whisky after Ledwick had departed. He had to ring for more soda and chatted with Parkins, the manservant, while he drank it.

  “Then he went upstairs. His room was next to his brother’s, and the window was open. Suddenly he heard the sound of a fall with breaking wood and ran into Ledwick’s room to find him lying over a smashed deck-chair on his veranda.

  “It was not very light out there, and only when he had hauled his brother’s body into the room did he see the arrow. It had gone straight through the roof of Ledwick’s mouth to his brain. The older man was stone dead.”

  “Let’s hear the rest of the facts,” said Beef.

  “There aren’t many.

  “A bow, one of those which had been used by the competitors that day, was found among the bushes across the lawn. The angle of the arrow’s entry would be just right if it had been shot from there.

  “The suspects are necessarily those of the practised toxophilites who were out there in the grounds at the time of the murder.”

  “Or those of them who had any motive,” put in Beef.

  “Well, they all had, more or less, except perhaps a Mr. Newnes Drury. You see, they were relatives. The Toxophilite Club was largely a family affair and Ledwick used to ask all those related to him to stay in the house. The rest put up at the village inn a mile
or two away and were all in the bar at the time.

  “Down by the lake were Raymond’s two sons. Keith and Alec, and a girl friend of Keith’s called Nancy Maynard. There was also Ledwick’s daughter, Grace.

  “I say they are all suspects because Ledwick was a very rich man, and his will, which I have examined divides up his fortune in the way you would expect—large shares to his son and daughter, then slightly smaller equal shares to his brother and nephews.

  “Any one of them would receive enough money to start him or her in whatever career chosen, and Raymond’s share would make the rest of his life comfortable.

  “The man without any apparent motive, this Newnes Drury, may possibly have had some understanding with Ledwick’s daughter, but I can find no evidence of it. So there you are. Six people all under 30, all out in the grounds when Ledwick was shot, mostly having a motive, and all expert archers.”

  “Finger-prints?” asked Beef.

  “Gloves are worn by archers, I believe. They were by this one, anyway. The arrow hadn’t a print. The bow had been used that afternoon by Dennis and Keith, and there were good prints of each of them. Nothing else.”

  “No footprints?”

  “Rubbed out.”

  “What was the distance from the point where the murderer was believed to be and to Ledwick’s position?”

  “About 20 yards.”

  “Was it, though?” said Beef, for the first time showing animation. “Twenty yards? That’s interesting.”

  There was a long silence. Then Thackeray picked up his notes.

  “I can tell you what each of the young people claims to have been doing at the time. Of course, they’ve only got one another as witnesses. Keith and his girl friend had taken the punt and pushed out on the lake…”

  “Never mind all that,” said Beef brusquely. “Have you got someone down at Tryfford now?”

  “Yes. Coles is there.”

  “Can you phone him?”

  “I daresay. What do you want to know?”