The Department of Dead Ends

by Roy Vickers

  She never went to The Merry Widow again, but once or twice he would sneak off to Daly’s by himself. The Merry Widow, in fact, provided him with a dream-life. We may infer that in his imagination he identified himself with Mr Joseph Coyne, who nightly, in the character of Prince Dannilo, would disdain the beautiful Sonia only to have her rush the more surely to his arms in the finale. Rather a dangerous fantasy for a backward young man from the provinces who was beginning to lose his shyness!

  There was, indeed, very little shyness about him when, one evening after seeing Miss Callermere home, he was startled by the sight of a young parlourmaid, who had been sent out to post a letter, some fifty yards from Miss Callermere’s house. If she bore little or no likeness to Miss Lily Elsie in the role of Sonia, she certainly looked quite lovely in her white cap and the streamers that were then worn. And she was smiling and friendly and natural.

  She was, of course, Ethel Fairbrass. She lingered with George Muncey for over five minutes. And then comes another of those strange little dialogues.

  ‘Funny a girl like you being a slavey! When’s your evening off?’

  ‘Six o’clock to-morrow. But what’s it got to do with you?’

  ‘I’ll meet you at the corner of this road. Promise you I will.’

  ‘Takes two to make a promise. My name’s Ethel Fairbrass, if you want to know. What’s yours?’

  ‘Dannilo.’

  ‘Coo! Fancy calling you that! Dannilo What?’

  George had not foreseen the necessity for inventing a surname and discovered that it is quite difficult. He couldn’t very well say ‘Smith’ or ‘Robinson’, so he said:

  ‘Prince.’

  George, it will be observed, was not an imaginative man. When she met him the following night he could think of nowhere to take her but to The Merry Widow. He was even foolish enough to let her have a programme, but she did not read the names of the characters. When the curtain went up she was too entranced with Miss Lily Elsie, whom (like every pretty girl at the time) she thought she resembled, to take any notice of Mr Joseph Coyne and his character name. If she had tumbled to the witless transposition of the names she might have become suspicious of him. In which case George Muncey might have lived to a ripe old age.

  But she didn’t.

  Chapter Four

  Altogether, Ethel Fairbrass provided an extremely satisfactory substitute for the dream-woman of George’s fantasy. Life was beginning to sweeten. In the daylight hours he would enjoy his friendship with Miss Callermere, the pleasure of which was in no way touched by his infatuation for the pretty parlour-maid.

  In early September Ethel became entitled to her holiday. She spent the whole fortnight with George at Southend. And George wrote daily to Miss Callermere, telling her that he was filling the place of a chemist-friend of his mother’s, while the latter took his holiday. He actually contrived to have the letters addressed to the care of a local chemist. The letters were addressed ‘George Muncey’ while at the hotel the couple were registered as ‘Mr and Mrs D. Prince’.

  Now the fictional Prince Dannilo was notoriously an open-handed and free-living fellow – and Dannilo Prince proceeded to follow in his footsteps. Ethel Fairbrass undoubtedly had the time of her life. They occupied a suite. (‘Coo! A bathroom all to our own two selves, and use it whenever we like!’)

  He hired a car for her, with chauffeur – which cost ten pounds a day at that time. He gave her champagne whenever he could induce her to drink it and bought her some quite expensive presents.

  It is a little surprising that at the end of a fortnight of this kind of thing she went back to her occupation. But she did. There was nothing of the mercenary about Ethel.

  On his return to London, George was very glad to see Miss Callermere. They resumed their interminable walks and he went almost daily to her house for lunch or dinner. A valuable arrangement, this, for the little diversion at Southend had made a sizeable hole in his eight hundred pounds.

  It was a bit of a nuisance to have to leave early in order to snatch a few minutes with Ethel. After Southend, the few snatched minutes had somehow lost their charm. There were, too, Ethel’s half-days and her Sundays, the latter involving him in a great many troublesome lies to Miss Callermere.

  In the middle of October he started sneaking off to The Merry Widow again. Which was a bad sign. For it meant that he was turning back again from reality to his dream-life. The Reality, in the meantime, had lost her high spirits and was inclined to weep unreasonably and to nag more than a little.

  At the beginning of November Ethel presented him with certain very valid arguments in favour of fixing the date of their wedding, a matter which had hitherto been kept vaguely in the background.

  George was by now heartily sick of her and contemplated leaving her in the lurch. Strangely enough, it was her final threat to tell Miss Callermere that turned the scale and decided George to make the best of a bad job and marry her.

  Chapter Five

  As Dannilo Prince he married her one foggy morning at the registrar’s office in Henrietta Street. Mr and Mrs Fairbrass came up from Banbury for the wedding. They were not very nice about it, although from the social point of view the marriage might be regarded as a step-up for Ethel.

  ‘Where are you going for your honeymoon?’ asked Mrs Fairbrass. ‘That is – if you’re going to have a honeymoon.’

  ‘Southend,’ said the unimaginative George, and to Southend he took her for the second time. There was no need for a suite now, so they went to a small family-and-commercial hotel. Here George was unreasonably jealous of the commercial travellers, who were merely being polite to a rather forlorn bride. In wretched weather he insisted on taking her for walks, with the result that he himself caught a very bad cold. Eucalyptus and hot toddy became the dominant note in a town which was associated in the girl’s mind with champagne and bath salts. But they had to stick it for the full fortnight, because George had told Miss Callermere that he was again acting as substitute for the chemist-friend of his mother’s in Southend.

  According to the files of the Department, they left Southend by the three-fifteen on the thirtieth of November. George had taken first-class returns. The three-fifteen was a popular non-stop, but on this occasion there were hardly a score of persons travelling to London. One of the first-class carriages was occupied by a man alone with a young baby wrapped in a red shawl. Ethel wanted to get into this compartment, perhaps having a sneaking hope that the man would require her assistance in dealing with the baby. But George did not intend to concern himself with babies one moment before he would be compelled to do so, and they went into another compartment.

  Ethel, however, seems to have looked forward to her impending career with a certain pleasure. Before leaving Southend she had paid a visit to one of those shops that cater for summer visitors and miraculously remain open through the winter. She had a bulky parcel, which she opened in the rather pathetic belief that it would amuse George.

  The parcel contained a large child’s bucket, a disproportionately small wooden spade, a sailing-boat to the scale of the spade, a length of Southend rock, and a rubber trumpet, of which the stem was wrapped with red and blue wool. It was a baby’s trumpet and of rubber so that it should not hurt the baby’s gums. In the mouthpiece, shielded by the rubber, was a little metal contraption that made the noise.

  Ethel put the trumpet to her mouth and blew through the metal contraption.

  Perhaps, in fancy, she heard her baby doing it. Perhaps, after a honeymoon of neglect and misery, she was making a desperate snatch at the spirit of gaiety, hoping he would attend to her and perhaps indulge in a little horseplay. But for the facts we have to depend on George’s version.

  ‘I said “Don’t make that noise, Ethel – I’m trying to read” or something like that. And she said “I feel like a bit of music to cheer me up” and she went on blowing the trumpet. So I caught hold of it and threw it out of the window. I didn’t hurt her and she didn’t seem to mind much. And
we didn’t have another quarrel over it and I went on reading my paper until we got to London.’

  At Fenchurch Street they claimed their luggage and left the station. Possibly Ethel abandoned the parcel containing the other toys, for they were never heard of again.

  When the train was being cleaned, a dead baby was found under the seat of a first-class compartment, wrapped in a red shawl. It was subsequently ascertained that the baby had not been directly murdered but had died more or less naturally in convulsions.

  But before this was known, Scotland Yard searched for the man who had been seen to enter the train with the baby, as if for a murderer. A platelayer found the rubber trumpet on the line and forwarded it. Detectives combed the shops of Southend and found that only one rubber trumpet had been sold – to a young woman whom the shopkeeper did not know. The trail ended here.

  The rubber trumpet went to the Department of Dead Ends.

  Chapter Six

  Of the eight hundred pounds there was a little over a hundred and fifty left by the time they returned from the official honeymoon at Southend. He took her to furnished rooms in Ladbroke Grove and a few days later to a tenement in the same district, which he furnished at a cost of thirty pounds.

  She seems to have asked him no awkward questions about money. Every morning after breakfast he would leave the tenement, presumably in order to go to work. Actually he would loaf about the West End until it was time to meet Miss Callermere. He liked especially going to the house in Battersea for lunch on Sundays. And here, of course, the previous process reversed itself and it was Ethel who had to be told the troublesome lies that were so difficult to invent.

  ‘You seem so different lately, George,’ said Miss Callermere one Sunday after lunch. ‘I believe you’re living with a ballet girl.’

  George was not quite sure what a ballet girl was, but it sounded rather magnificently wicked. As he was anxious not to involve himself in further inventions, he said:

  ‘She’s not a ballet girl. She used to be a parlourmaid.’

  ‘I really only want to know one thing about her,’ said Miss Callermere. ‘And that is, whether you are fond of her.’

  ‘No, I’m not!’ said George with complete truthfulness.

  ‘It’s a pity to have that kind of thing in your life – you are dedicated to science. For your own sake, George, why not get rid of her?’

  Why not? George wondered why he had not thought of it before. He had only to move, to stop calling himself by the ridiculous name of Dannilo Prince, and the thing was as good as done. He would go back at once and pack.

  When he got back to the tenement, Ethel gave him an unexpectedly warm reception.

  ‘You told me you were going to the S.P.D. Sunday Brotherhood, you did! And you never went near them, because you met that there Miss Callermere in Battersea Park, because I followed you and saw you. And then you went back to her house, which is Number Fifteen, Laurel Road, which I didn’t know before. And what you can see in a dried-up old maid like that beats me. It’s time she knew that she’s rolling her silly sheep’s eyes at another woman’s husband. And I’m going to tell her before I’m a day older.’

  She was whipping on hat and coat and George lurched forward to stop her. His foot caught on a gas-ring, useless now that he had installed a gas-range – a piece of lumber that Ethel ought to have removed weeks ago. But she used it as a stand for the iron.

  George picked up the gas-ring. If she were to go to Miss Callermere and make a brawl, he himself would probably never be able to go there again. He pushed her quickly on to the bed, then swung the gas-ring – swung it several times.

  He put all the towels, every soft absorbent thing he could find, under the bed. Then he washed himself, packed a suitcase and left the tenement.

  He took the suitcase to his old lodgings, announced that he had come back there to live, and then presented himself at the house in Battersea in time for supper.

  ‘I’ve done what you told me,’ he said to Miss Callermere. ‘Paid her off. Shan’t hear from her any more.’

  The Monday morning papers carried the news of the murder, for the police had been called on Sunday evening by the tenants of the flat below. The hunt was started for Dannilo Prince.

  By Tuesday the dead girl’s parents had been interviewed and her life-story appeared on Wednesday morning.

  ‘My daughter was married to Prince at the Henrietta Street registrar’s office on November 16th, 1907. He took her straight away for a honeymoon at Southend, where they stayed a fortnight.’

  There was a small crowd at the bottom of Laurel Road to gape at the house where she had so recently worked as a parlourmaid. Fifty yards from Number Fifteen! But if Miss Callermere noticed the crowd she is not recorded as having made any comment upon it to anyone.

  In a few days, Scotland Yard knew that they would never find Dannilo Prince. In fact, it had all been as simple as George had anticipated. He had just moved – and that was the end of his unlucky marriage. The addition of the murder had not complicated things, because he had left no clue behind him.

  Now, as there was nothing whatever to connect George Muncey with Dannilo Prince, George’s chances of arrest were limited to the chance of an accidental meeting between himself and someone who had known him as Prince. There was an hotel proprietor, a waiter and a chambermaid at Southend, and an estate agent at Ladbroke Grove. And, of course, Ethel’s father and mother. Of these persons only the estate agent lived in London.

  A barrister, who was also a statistician, entertained himself by working out the averages. He came to the conclusion that George Muncey’s chance of being caught was equal to his chance of winning the first prize in the Calcutta Sweep twenty-three times in succession.

  But the barrister did not calculate the chances of the illogical guesswork of the Department of Dead Ends hitting the bull’s-eye by mistake.

  Chapter Seven

  While the hue and cry for Dannilo Prince passed over his head, George Muncey dedicated himself to science with such energy that in a fortnight he had obtained a post with a chemist in Walham. Here he presided over a counter devoted to fancy soaps, hot-water bottles, photographic apparatus and the like – for which he received two pounds a week and a minute commission that added zest to his work.

  At Easter he married Miss Callermere in church. That lady had mobilized all her late father’s associates and, to their inward amusement, arrayed herself in white satin and veil for the ceremony. As it would have been unreasonable to ask George’s employers for a holiday after so short a term of service, the newly married couple dispensed with a honeymoon. The aunt entered a home for indigent gentlewomen with an allowance of a hundred a year from her niece. George once again found himself in a spacious, well-run house.

  During their brief married life, this oddly assorted couple seem to have been perfectly happy. The late Mr Callermere’s friends were allowed to slip back into oblivion, because they showed a tendency to giggle whenever George absent-mindedly addressed his wife as ‘Miss Callermere’.

  His earnings of two pounds a week may have seemed insignificant beside his wife’s unearned income. But in fact it was the basis of their married happiness. Every Saturday he handed her the whole of his wages. She would retain twenty-five shillings, because they both considered it essential to his self-respect that he should pay the cost of his food. She handed him back fifteen shillings for pocket-money. She read the papers and formed his opinions for him. She seemed to allow him little of what most men would regard as pleasure, but George had no complaint on this score.

  Spring passed into summer and nearly everybody had forgotten the murder of Ethel Prince in a tenement in Ladbroke Grove. It is probably true to say that, in any real sense of the word, George Muncey had forgotten it too. He had read very little and did not know that murderers were popularly supposed to be haunted by their crime and to start guiltily at every chance mention of it.

  He received no reaction whatever when his employer said to him
one morning:

  ‘There’s this job-line of rubber trumpets. I took half a gross. We’ll mark them at one-and-a-penny. Put one on your counter with the rubber teats and try them on women with babies.’

  George took one of the rubber trumpets from the cardboard case containing the half gross. It had red and blue wool wound about the stem. He put it next the rubber teats and forgot about it.

  Chapter Eight

  Wilkins, the other assistant, held his pharmaceutical certificate, but he was not stand-offish on that account. One day, to beguile the boredom of the slack hour after lunch, he picked up the rubber trumpet and blew it.

  Instantly George was sitting in the train with Ethel, telling her ‘not to make that noise’. When Wilkins put the trumpet down, George found himself noticing the trumpet and thought the red and blue wool very hideous. He picked it up – Ethel’s had felt just like that when he had thrown it out of the window.

  Now it cannot for one moment be held that George felt anything in the nature of remorse. The truth was that the rubber trumpet, by reminding him so vividly of Ethel, had stirred up dormant forces in his nature. Ethel had been very comely and jolly and playful when one was in the mood for it – as one often was, in spite of everything.

  The trumpet, in short, produced little more than a sense of bewilderment. Why could not things have gone on as they began? It was only as a wife that Ethel was utterly intolerable, because she had no sense of order and did not really look after a chap. Now that he was married to Miss Callermere, if only Ethel had been available on, say, Wednesday evenings and alternate Sundays, life would have been full at once of colour and comfort.… He tried to sell the trumpet to a lady with a little girl and a probable baby at home, but without success.

  On the next day he went as far as admitting to himself that the trumpet had got on his nerves. Between a quarter to one and a quarter past, when Wilkins was out to lunch, he picked up the trumpet and blew it. And just before closing-time he blew it again, when Wilkins was there.