Nigel looked at the young man with increased interest. Dale had published only two crime novels, but he was already accepted as one of the élite of detective writers; he could not otherwise have been a member of that most exclusive of clubs, the Assassins; for, apart from a representative of the Bench, the Bar and Scotland Yard, this club was composed solely of the princes of detective fiction.
It was at this point that Nigel observed two things – that the hand which incessantly rolled bread-pellets was shaking, and that, on the glossy surface of the menu-card Dale had just laid down, there was a moist finger-mark.
‘Are you making a speech, too?’ Nigel said.
‘Me? Good lord, no. Why?’
‘I thought you looked nervous,’ said Nigel, in his direct way.
The young man laughed, a little too loudly. And, as though that was some kind of signal, one of those unrehearsed total silences fell upon the company. Even in the street outside, the noises seemed to be damped, as though an enormous soft pedal had been pressed down on everything. Nigel realised that it must have been snowing since he came in. A disagreeable sensation of eeriness crept over him. Annoyed with this sensation – a detective has no right to feel psychic, he reflected angrily, not even a private detective as celebrated as Nigel Strangeways – he forced himself to look round the brilliantly lighted room, the animated yet oddly neutral-looking faces of the diners, the maître d’hotel in his white gloves – bland and uncreased as his own face, the impassive waiters. Everything was perfectly normal; and yet … Some motive he was never after able satisfactorily to explain forced him to let drop into the yawning silence:
‘What a marvellous setting this would be for a murder.’ If Nigel had been looking in the right direction at that moment, things might have happened very differently. As it was, he didn’t even notice the way Dale’s wine glass suddenly tilted and spilt a few drops of sherry.
At once the whole table buzzed again with conversation. A man three places away on Nigel’s right raised his head, which had been almost buried in his soup plate, and said:
‘Tchah! This is the one place where a murder would never happen. My respected colleagues are men of peace. I doubt if any of them has the guts to say boo to a goose. Oh, yes, they’d like to be men of action, tough guys. But, I ask you, just look at them! That’s why they became detective writers. Wish fulfilment, the psychoanalysts call it – though I don’t give much for that gang, either. But it’s quite safe, spilling blood, as long as you only do it on paper.’
The man turned his thick lips and small, arrogant eyes towards Nigel. ‘The trouble with you amateur investigators is that you’re so romantic. That’s why the police beat you to it every time.’
A thickset, swarthy man opposite him exclaimed: ‘You’re wrong there, Mr Carruthers. We don’t seem to have beaten Mr Strangeways to it in the past every time.’
‘So our aggressive friend is the David Carruthers. Well, well,’ whispered Nigel to Dale.
‘Yes,’ said Dale, not modifying his tone at all. ‘A squalid fellow, isn’t he? But he gets the public all right. We have sold our thousands, but David has sold his tens of thousands. Got a yellow streak though, I’ll bet, in spite of his bluster. Pity somebody doesn’t bump him off at this dinner, just to show him he’s not the infallible Pope he sets up to be.’
Carruthers shot a vicious glance at Dale. ‘Why not try it yourself? Get you a bit of notoriety, anyway; might even sell your books. Though,’ he continued, clapping on the shoulder a nondescript little man who was sitting between him and Dale, ‘I think little Crippen here would be my first bet. You’d like to have my blood, Crippen, wouldn’t you?’
The little man said stiffly: ‘Don’t make yourself ridiculous, Carruthers. You must be drunk already. And I’d thank you to remember that my name is Cripps.’
At this point the president interposed with a convulsive change of subject, and the dinner resumed its even tenor. While they were disposing of some very tolerable trout, a waiter informed Dale that he was wanted on the telephone. The young man went out. Nigel was trying at the same time to listen to a highly involved story of the president’s and decipher the very curious expression on Cripps’s face, when all the lights went out too …
There were a few seconds of astonished silence. Then a torrent of talk broke out – the kind of forced jocularity with which man still comforts himself in the face of sudden darkness. Nigel could hear movement all round him, the pushing-back of chairs, quick, muffled treads on the carpet – waiters, no doubt. Someone at the end of the table, rather ridiculously, struck a match; it did nothing but emphasise the pitch-blackness.
‘Stevens, can’t someone light the candles?’ exclaimed the president irritably.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ came the voice of the maître d’hôtel, ‘there are no candles. Harry, run along to the fuse-box and find out what’s gone wrong.’
The door banged behind the waiter. Less than a minute later the lights all blazed on again. Blinking, like swimmers come up from a deep dive, the diners looked at each other. Nigel observed that Carruthers’s face was even nearer his food than usual. Curious, to go on eating all the time. – But no, his head was right on top of the food – lying in the plate like John the Baptist’s. And from between his shoulder-blades there stood out a big white handle; the handle – good God! It couldn’t be; this was too macabre altogether – but it was – the handle of a fish-slice.
A kind of gobbling noise came out of Justice Pottinger’s mouth. All eyes turned to where his shaking hand pointed, grew wide with horror and then turned ludicrously back to him, as though he was about to direct the jury.
‘God bless my soul!’ was all the Judge could say.
But someone had sized up the whole situation. The thickset man who had been sitting opposite Carruthers was already standing with his back to the door. His voice snapped:
‘Stay where you are, everyone. I’m afraid there’s no doubt about this. I must take charge of this case at once. Mr Strangeways, will you go and ring up Scotland Yard – police surgeon, fingerprint men, photographers – the whole bag of tricks; you know what we want.’
Nigel sprang up. His gaze, roving round the room, had registered something different, some detail missing; but his mind couldn’t identify it. Well, perhaps it would come to him later. He moved towards the door. And just then the door opened brusquey, pushing the thickset man away from it. There was a general gasp, as though everyone expected to see something walk in with blood on its hands. It was only young Dale, a little white in the face, but grinning amiably.
‘What on earth –?’ he began. Then he, too, saw …
An hour later, Nigel and the thickset man, Superintendent Bateman, were alone in the ante-room. The princes of detective fiction were huddled together in another room, talking in shocked whispers.
‘Don’t like the real thing, do they, sir?’ the Superintendent had commented sardonically; ‘do ’em good to be up against a flesh-and-blood problem for once. I wish ’em luck with it.’
‘Well,’ he was saying now. ‘Doesn’t seem like much of a loss to the world, this Carruthers. None of ’em got a good word for him. Too much food, too much drink, too many women. But that doesn’t give us a motive. Now, this Cripps. Carruthers said Cripps would like to have his blood. Why was that, d’you suppose?’
‘You can search me. Cripps wasn’t giving anything away when we interviewed him.’
‘He had enough opportunity. All he had to do when the lights went out was to step over to the buffet, take up the first knife he laid hands on – probably thought the fish-slice was a carving-knife – stab him and sit down and twiddle his fingers.’
‘Yes, he could have wrapped his handkerchief round the handle. That would account for there being no fingerprints. And there’s no one to swear he moved from his seat; Dale was out of the room – and it’s a bit late now to ask Carruthers, who was on his other side. But, if he did do it, everything happened very luckily for him.’
&n
bsp; ‘Then there’s young Dale himself,’ said Bateman, biting the side of his thumb. ‘Talked a lot of hot air about bumping Carruthers off before it happened. Might be a double bluff. You see, Mr Strangeways, there’s no doubt about that waiter’s evidence. The main switch was thrown over. Now, what about this? Dale arranges to be called up during dinner; answers call; then goes and turns off the main switch – in gloves, I suppose, because there’s only the waiter’s fingerprints on it – comes back under cover of darkness, stabs his man and goes out again.’
‘Mm,’ ruminated Nigel, ‘but the motive? And where are the gloves? And why, if it was premeditated, such an outlandish weapon?’
‘If he’s hidden the gloves, we’ll find ’em soon enough. And – ’ the Superintendent was interrupted by the tinkle of the telephone at his elbow. A brief dialogue ensued. Then he turned to Nigel.
‘Man I sent round to interview Morton – bloke who rang Dale up at dinner. Swears he was talking to Dale for three to five minutes. That seems to let Dale out, unless it was collusion.’
That moment a plain-clothes man entered, a grin of ill-concealed triumph on his face. He handed a rolled-up pair of black kid gloves to Bateman. ‘Tucked away behind the pipes in the lavatories, sir.’
Bateman unrolled them. There were stains on the fingers. He glanced inside the wrists, then passed the gloves to Nigel, pointing at some initials stamped there.
‘Well, well,’ said Nigel. ‘H. D. Let’s have him in again. Looks as if that telephone call was collusion.’
‘Yes, we’ve got him now.’
But when the young man entered and saw the gloves lying on the table his reactions were very different from what the Superintendent had expected. An expression of relief, instead of the spasm of guilt, passed over his face.
‘Stupid of me,’ he said, ‘I lost my head for a few minutes, after – But I’d better start at the beginning. Carruthers was always bragging about his nerve and the tight corners he’d been in and so on. A poisonous specimen. So Morton and I decided to play a practical joke on him. He was to phone me up; I was to go out and throw the main switch, then come back and pretend to strangle Carruthers from behind – just give him a thorough shaking-up – and leave a blood-curdling message on his plate to the effect that this was just a warning, and next time the Unknown would do the thing properly. We reckoned he’d be gibbering with fright when I turned up the lights again! Well, everything went all right till I came up behind him; but then – then I happened to touch that knife, and I knew somebody had been there before me, in earnest. Afraid, I lost my nerve then, especially when I found I’d got some of his blood on my gloves. So I hid them, and burnt the spoof message. Damn silly of me. The whole idea was damn silly, I can see that now.’
‘Why gloves at all?’ asked Nigel.
‘Well, they say it’s your hands and your shirt-front that are likely to show in the dark; so I put on black gloves and pinned my coat over my shirt-front. And, I say,’ he added in a deprecating way, ‘I don’t want to teach you fellows your business, but if I had really meant to kill him, would I have worn gloves with my initials on them?’
‘That is as may be,’ said Bateman coldly, ‘but I must warn you that you are in – ’
‘Just a minute,’ Nigel interrupted. ‘Why should Cripps have wanted Carruthers’s blood?’
‘Oh, you’d better ask Cripps. If he won’t tell you, I don’t think I ought to – ’
‘Don’t be a fool. You’re in a damned tight place, and you can’t afford to be chivalrous.’
‘Very well. Little Cripps may be dim, but he’s a good sort. He told me once, in confidence, that Carruthers had pirated an idea of his for a plot and made a best-seller out of it. A rotten thing to do. But – dash it – no one would commit murder just because –’
‘You must leave that for us to decide, Mr Dale,’ said the Superintendent.
When the young man had gone out, under the close surveillance of a constable, Bateman turned wearily to Nigel.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it may be him; and it may be Cripps. But, with all these crime authors about, it might be any of ’em.’
Nigel leapt up from his seat. ‘Yes,’ he exclaimed, ‘and that’s why we’ve not thought of anyone else. And’ – his eyes lit up – ‘by Jove! now I’ve remembered it – the missing detail. Quick! Are all those waiters and chaps still there?’
‘Yes; we’ve kept ’em in the dining-room. But what the – ?’
Nigel ran into the dining-room, Bateman at his heels. He looked out of one of the windows, open at the top.
‘What’s down below there?’ he asked the maître d’hôtel.
‘A yard, sir; the kitchen windows look out on it.’
‘And now, where was Sir Eldred Travers sitting?’
The man pointed to the place without hesitation, his imperturbable face betraying not the least surprise.
‘Right, will you go and ask him to step this way for a minute? Oh, by the way,’ he added, as the maître d’hôtel reached the door, ‘where are your gloves?’
The man’s eyes flickered. ‘My gloves, sir?’
‘Yes; before the lights went out you were wearing white gloves; after they went up again, I remembered it just now, you were not wearing them. Are they in the yard by any chance?’
The man shot a desperate glance around him; then the bland composure of his face broke up. He collapsed, sobbing, into a chair.
‘My daughter – he ruined her – she killed herself. When the lights went out, it was too much for me – the opportunity. He deserved it. I’m not sorry.’
‘Yes,’ said Nigel, ten minutes later, ‘it was too much for him. He picked up the first weapon to hand. Afterwards, knowing everyone would be searched, he had to throw the gloves out of the window. There would be blood on them. With luck, we mightn’t have looked in the yard before he could get out to remove them. And, unless one was looking, one wouldn’t see them against the snow. They were white.’
‘What was that about Sir Eldred Travers?’ asked the Superintendent.
‘Oh, I wanted to put him off his guard, and to get him away from the window. He might have tried to follow his gloves.’
‘Well, that fish-slice might have been a slice of bad luck for young Dale if you hadn’t been here,’ said the Superintendent, venturing on a witticism. ‘What are you grinning away to yourself about?’
‘I was just thinking, this must be the first time a Judge has been present at a murder.’
The Ascham
Michael Innes
I
‘I won’t swear,’ Appleby said, ‘that we haven’t been mildly rash. But we’ll get through.’ He changed gear cautiously. ‘With luck, we’ll get through … Damn!’
The exclamation was fair enough. The car had been doing splendidly. At times, indeed, it seemed to float on the snow rather than cut through it, and when this happened it showed itself disconcertingly susceptible to the polar attractions – polar in every sense – of the bank rising steeply on its left and the almost obliterated ditch on its right. And now Appleby, steering an uncertain course round a bend, had been obliged to pull up – and to pull up more abruptly than was altogether safe. There was a stationary car straight in front, blocking the narrow road.
‘Bother!’ Lady Appleby said. ‘It’s stuck. We’ll have to help to dig it out.’
Appleby peered through the windscreen. Snow was still lightly falling through the gathering dusk.
‘It won’t be a question of helping,’ he said. ‘If you ask me, it’s abandoned. I’ll investigate.’ He climbed out of the car, and found himself at once up to the knees in snow. ‘We’ve been pretty crazy,’ he said, and plunged towards the other car.
Judith Appleby waited for a minute. Then, growing impatient, she climbed out too. She found her husband gazing in some perplexity at the stranded vehicle. It was an ancient but powerful-looking saloon.
‘Abandoned, all right,’ Appleby said, and tried one of the doors. ‘Locked, too. Not
helpful, that.’
‘What do you mean, not helpful?’
‘If we could get in, we could let the brake off, and perhaps be able to shove it aside. It’s not all that snowed up, is it?’
‘Definitely not.’ Judith peered at the wheels. ‘Engine failure, perhaps. But it stymies us.’
‘Exactly. The driver got away while the going was good. Rather a faint-hearted bolt. And some time ago. There are footprints going on down the road. They’ve a good deal of fresh snow in them.’
‘I suppose that must be called a professional observation. Let’s get back into the car. I’m cold. But why didn’t the silly ass stay put? It’s the safest thing to do. And one can be perfectly snug in a stranded car.’ She had kicked some of the snow from her feet and climbed back into her seat. She closed the door beside her. ‘It’s beautifully warm. Stupid of him to stagger off into the night.’
‘Yes, wasn’t it?’ Appleby climbed in beside his wife. Their car was rather far from being a conveyance of the most modest order; the abandoned car was markedly humbler and less commodious. Appleby refrained from pointing this out. ‘I do find it a shade puzzling,’ he said. ‘But our own course is fairly simple. We’ll reverse as far as those last crossroads. It can’t be more than a mile … Good Lord, what’s that?’
‘I rather think – ’ Turning in her seat, Judith looked through the rear window. ‘Yes. It’s something sublimely simple, John dear. An avalanche.’
Appleby looked too. ‘Avalanche’ was perhaps rather a grand word for what had happened. But there could be no doubt about the fact. The bank behind them was extremely steep; nevertheless a surprising depth of snow had contrived to gather on it; and this had now precipitated itself upon the road. Appleby had to waste little time estimating the dimensions of the resulting problem. Their car was trapped.
‘Never mind, darling.’ Judith, when cross, usually adopted a philosophical tone. ‘There’s some chocolate in the glove box. And we can keep the engine running and the heater on. It’s a good thing you filled up.’
Ten Classic Crime Stories for the Festive Season Page 6