The Department of Dead Ends

by Roy Vickers

  George was not subtle enough to humbug himself. The trumpet stirred longings that were better suppressed. So the next day he wrote out a bill for one-and-a-penny, put one-and-a-penny of his pocket money into the cash register and stuffed the trumpet into his coat pocket. Before supper that night he put it in the hot-water furnace.

  ‘There’s a terrible smell in the house. What did you put in the furnace, George?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Tell me the truth, dear.’

  ‘A rubber trumpet stuck on my counter. Fair got on my nerves, it did. I paid the one-and-a-penny and I burnt it.’

  ‘That was very silly, wasn’t it? It’ll make you short in your pocket money. And in the circumstances I don’t feel inclined to make it up for you.’

  That would be all right, George assured her, and inwardly thought how lucky he was to have such a wife. She could keep a fellow steady and pull him up when he went one over the odds.

  Three days later his employer looked through the stock.

  ‘I see that rubber trumpet has gone. Put up another. It may be a good line.’

  And so the whole business began over again. George, it will be observed, for all his unimaginativeness, was a spiritually economical man. His happy contentment with his wife would, he knew, be jeopardized if he allowed himself to be reminded of that other disorderly, fascinating side of life that had been presided over by Ethel.

  There were six dozen of the rubber trumpets, minus the one burnt at home, and his employer would expect one-and-a-penny for each of them. Thirteen shillings a dozen. But the dozens themselves were thirteen, which complicated the calculation, but in the end he got the sum right. He made sure of this by doing it backwards and ‘proving’ it. He still had twenty-three pounds left out of the eight hundred.

  Mrs Muncey had a rather nice crocodile dressing-case which she had bought for herself and quite falsely described as ‘gift of the bridegroom to the bride’.

  On the next day George borrowed the crocodile dressing-case on the plea that he wished to bring some goods from the shop home for Christmas. He brought it into the shop on the plea that it contained his dinner jacket and that he intended to change at the house of a friend without going home that night. As he was known to have married ‘an heiress’ neither Wilkins nor his employer was particularly surprised that he should possess a dinner jacket and a crocodile dressing-case in which to carry it about.

  At a quarter to one, when he was again alone in the shop, he crammed half a gross (less one) of rubber trumpets into the crocodile dressing-case. When his employer came back from lunch he said:

  ‘I’ve got rid of all those rubber trumpets, Mr Arrowsmith. An old boy came in, said he was to do with an orphanage, and I talked him into buying the lot.’

  Mr Arrowsmith was greatly astonished.

  ‘Bought the lot, did you say? Didn’t he ask for a discount?’

  ‘No, Mr Arrowsmith. I think he was a bit loopy myself.’

  Mr Arrowsmith looked very hard at George and then at the cash register. Six thirteens, less one, at one-and-a-penny – four pounds, three and fivepence. It was certainly a very funny thing. But then, the freak customer appears from time to time and at the end of the day Mr Arrowsmith had got over his surprise.

  Journeying from Walham to Battersea, one goes on the Underground to Victoria Station, and continues the journey on the main line: From the fact that George Muncey that evening took the crocodile case to Victoria Station, it has been argued that he intended to take the rubber trumpets home and perhaps bury them in the garden or deal with them in some other way. But this ignores the fact that he told his wife he intended to bring home some goods for Christmas.

  The point is of minor importance, because the dressing-case never reached home with him that night. At the top of the steps leading from the Underground it was snatched from him.

  George’s first sensation, on realizing that he had been robbed was one of relief. The rubber trumpets, he had already found, could not be burnt; they would certainly have been a very great nuisance to him. The case, he knew, cost fifteen guineas, and there was still enough left of the twenty-three pounds to buy a new one on the following day.

  Chapter Nine

  At closing-time the next day, while George and Wilkins were tidying up, Mr Arrowsmith was reading the evening paper.

  ‘Here, Muncey! Listen to this. “Jake Mendel, thirty-seven, of no fixed abode, was charged before Mr Ramsden this morning with the theft of a crocodile dressing-case from the precincts of Victoria Station. Mr Ramsden asked the police what was inside the bag. “A number of toy trumpets, your worship, made of rubber. There were seventy-seven of ’em all told.” Mr Ramsden: “Seventy-seven rubber trumpets! Well, now there really is no reason why the police should not have their own band.” (Laughter.)’ Mr Arrowsmith laughed too and then: ‘Muncey, that looks like your lunatic.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Arrowsmith,’ said George indifferently, then went contentedly home to receive his wife’s expostulations about a new crocodile dressing-case which had been delivered during the afternoon. It was not quite the same to look at, because the original one had been made to order. But it had been bought at the same shop and the manager had obliged George by charging the same price for it.

  In the meantime, the police were relying on the newspaper paragraph to produce the owner of the crocodile case. When he failed to materialize on the following morning they looked at the name of the manufacturer and took the case round to him.

  The manufacturer informed them that he had made that case the previous Spring to the order of a Miss Callermere – that the lady had since married and that, only the previous day, her husband, Mr Muncey, had ordered an exactly similar one but had accepted a substitute from stock.

  ‘Ring up George Muncey and ask him to come up and identify the case – and take away these india-rubber trumpets!’ ordered the Superintendent.

  Mrs Muncey answered the telephone and from her they obtained George’s business address.

  ‘A chemist’s assistant!’ said the Superintendent. ‘Seems to me rather rum. Those trumpets may be his employer’s stock. And he may have been pinching ’em. Don’t ring him up – go down. And find out if the employer has anything to say about the stock. See him before you see Muncey.’

  At Walham the Sergeant was taken into the dispensary where he promptly enquired whether Mr Arrowsmith had missed seventy-seven rubber trumpets from his stock.

  ‘I haven’t missed them – but I sold them the day before yesterday – seventy-seven, that’s right! Or rather, my assistant, George Muncey, did. Here, Muncey!’ And as George appeared: ‘You sold the rest of the stock of those rubber trumpets to a gentleman who said he was connected with an orphanage – the day before yesterday it was – didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Arrowsmith,’ said George.

  ‘Bought the lot without asking for a discount,’ said Mr Arrowsmith proudly. ‘Four pounds, three shillings and fivepence. I could tell you of another case that happened years ago when a man came into this very shop and –’

  The Sergeant felt his head whirling a little. The assistant had sold seventy-seven rubber trumpets to an eccentric gentleman. The goods had been duly paid for and taken away – and the goods were subsequently found in the assistant’s wife’s dressing-case.

  ‘Did you happen to have a crocodile dressing-case stolen from you at Victoria Station the day before yesterday,. Mr Muncey?’ asked the Sergeant.

  George was in a quandary. If he admitted that the crocodile case was his – wife’s – he would admit to Mr Arrowsmith that he had been lying when he had said that he had cleverly sold the whole of the seventy-seven rubber trumpets without even having to give away a discount. So:

  ‘No,’ said George.

  ‘Ah, I thought not! There’s a mistake somewhere. I expect it’s that manufacturer put us wrong. Sorry to have troubled you, gentlemen! Good morning!’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Mr Arrowsmith. ‘You did have a crocodile d
ressing-case here that day, Muncey, with your evening clothes in it. And you do go home by Victoria. But what is that about the trumpets, Sergeant? They couldn’t have been in Mr Muncey’s case if he sold them over the counter.’

  ‘I don’t know what they’ve got hold of, Mr Arrowsmith, and that’s a fact,’ said George. ‘I think I’m wanted in the shop.’

  George was troubled, so he got leave to go home early. He told his wife how he had lied to the police, and confessed to her about the trumpets. Soon she had made him tell her the real reason for his dislike of the trumpets. The result was that when the police brought her the original crocodile case she flatly denied that it was hers.

  In law, there was no means by which the ownership of the case could be foisted upon the Munceys against their will. Pending the trial of Jake Mendel, the bag-snatcher, the crocodile case, with its seventy-seven rubber trumpets, was deposited with the Department of Dead Ends.

  A few feet above it on a shelf stood the identical trumpet which George Muncey had thrown out of the window on the three-fifteen, non-stop Southend to Fenchurch Street, some seven months ago.

  The Department took one of the trumpets from the bag and set it beside the trumpet on the shelf. There was no logical connexion between them whatever. The Department simply guessed that there might be a connexion.

  They tried to connect Walham with Southend and drew blank. They traced the history of the seventy-seven Walham trumpets and found it simple enough until the moment when George Muncey put them in the crocodile case.

  They went back to the Southend trumpet and read in their files that it had not been bought by the man with the baby but by a young woman.

  Then they tried a cross-reference to young women and Southend. They found that dead end, the Ethel Fairbrass murder. They found: ‘My daughter was married to Prince at the Henrietta Street registrar’s office on November the sixteenth, 1907. He took her straight away for a honeymoon at Southend where they stayed a fortnight.’

  Fourteen days from November the sixteenth meant November the thirtieth, the day the rubber trumpet was found on the line.

  One rubber trumpet is dropped on railway line by (possibly) a young woman. The young woman is subsequently murdered (but not with a rubber trumpet). A young man behaves in an eccentric way with seventy-seven rubber trumpets more than six months later.

  The connexion was wholly illogical. But the Department specialized in illogical connexions. It communicated its wild guess – in the form of a guarded Minute – to Detective-Inspector Rason.

  Rason went down to Banbury and brought the old Fairbrass couple to Walham.

  He gave them five shillings and sent them into Arrowsmith’s to buy a hot-water bottle.

  The Lady who Laughed

  Chapter One

  To those under thirty, the name of Lucien Spengrave probably suggests nothing but one of those ‘famous crimes’ which are periodically retold. Actually, Spengrave himself was famous; his crime only so by virtue of the roundabout way in which it was uncovered by Scotland Yard.

  You may have heard that he was a successful comedian. He was a unique comedian. He played only one role – that of a circus clown. But he had never played it in a circus. For the last ten years of his life he played it in his own West End theatre – in which the cheap seats were half and the expensive seats double the prevailing prices.

  His jokes and stage business – as eminent historians of the theatre and the circus have pointed out – were literally hundreds of years old. For instance, that almost incredibly crude act in which the clown helps the Ringmaster’s attendants roll up a carpet, trips, and gets himself rolled up in the carpet. They say that, in a real circus, young children will still laugh at it. Spengrave played that act to the most sophisticated audiences in the world. From all classes he drew belly-laughs and tears from that same carpet that can be traced back to eleventh-century Bohemia.

  The clue to the mystery – as opposed to evidence of the murder – lay in the personality of the man who could evolve such a technique. When June, Spengrave’s wife, disappeared so dramatically and was later found dead, the armchair detective might well have beaten the practical man by betting blindly on Spengrave’s genius in manipulating the deadly obvious.

  She disappeared during a cocktail party on the lawn of their riverside house at Wheatbourne on the last Thursday of August, 1936. Spengrave never played during August, though he had to practise in his gymnasium five days a week, muscular control being as essential to him as to a pianist.

  There were some twenty guests, all being June’s friends. She had complained that he was never ‘matey’ with her friends – he was, indeed, rather ponderous in private life and a poor mixer; so he said he would give the guests a light version of the lecture he periodically delivered to Universities – the lecture that had brought him three honorary degrees.

  The guests felt themselves highly privileged. From the gymnasium, whose double doors gave on to the garden, six of the male guests brought the classic carpet; others, the tray with the goblet screwed down and the masks for the two-headed dog. There was brisk competition for the honour of being selected as stooges to roll the carpet for Spengrave’s demonstration.

  ‘The Clown is traditionally a sub-human, struggling to reach the level of humanity. The Clown never consciously plays the fool. He is desperately anxious to help the normal men roll the carpet in the normal way. Observe my shoulders as I approach the men at the carpet.’

  Thus he dissected the carpet act. The two-headed dog act followed. The garden sloped down to the river in three little levelled lawns. June led her guests to the second lawn, clear of the carpet.

  For some six minutes he traced the act from its origin at the court of King Henry VIII, then turned to the tray and goblet.

  ‘In this act we see anxiety expressed exclusively with the feet. I shall need more space for this. The upper lawn is wide enough, I think. Oh, the carpet is in the way!’

  ‘Shall we roll it up again and put it back in the gym, Mr Spengrave?’

  The speaker was Fred Periss, a youngish, handsome man.

  Spengrave turned and looked at him as if the offer were surprising. Then:

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Spengrave.

  There was a scramble to deal with the carpet, in which some of the girls joined. It would be something to talk about afterwards – that they had once helped the great Spengrave with the very carpet that was used on the stage.

  When they had all come back from the gymnasium, Spengrave resumed his lecture.

  ‘The Clown is proud because he has been entrusted with the dignified duty of carrying wine to the lady. To reduce this to its basic values, I shall want June to stooge for me, if she will.’ He called: ‘June, dear!’

  To keep the great man waiting – even if it was his wife who was doing it – was an outrage.

  ‘June!’ they shouted. ‘June, where are you? June!’

  The time when they were calling her was reconstructed and checked as being about six-fifty. At six-thirty she had been well in evidence, quietly magnificent in a dress of green creêpe, a trifle self-conscious over her duties as hostess.

  Her disappearance spoilt the lecture. The party began to break up. The honoured stooges returned the tray and goblet, and the masks for the two-headed dog act, to the gymnasium. By seven-fifteen the last guest had gone.

  At eight, Spengrave toyed with a lonely dinner. At eight-thirty he rang the Reading police. The Inspector came at once with a sergeant. The routine investigation revealed that there were no signs whatever of Mrs Spengrave having prepared for her departure. The possibility of her having thrown herself into the river, unobserved, was explored and dismissed.

  An hour later, because Spengrave was so distinguished, the Chief Constable appeared in person.

  ‘There’s one question I must ask in your own interest,’ Mr Spengrave –’

  ‘Has my wife bolted with a lover?’ cut in Spengrave. ‘No. If there had been a lover in the offing –
she would thoroughly have enjoyed telling me.’

  The Chief was sufficiently convinced. His eye strayed to a large photograph of a woman with a strange, cold beauty.

  ‘Is that Mrs Spengrave?’ As her husband nodded: ‘I have never had the pleasure of meeting her. But I’ve seen her somewhere.’

  ‘Perhaps in one of the many pictures of her in the Academy years ago. She used to be an artist’s model. Also, she appeared in one of my acts for four years – before we were married.’

  ‘That’s where I saw her! In The Lady Who Wouldn’t Laugh.’

  ‘Correct! She ought to be easy to find.’

  ‘If nothing happens by midday to-morrow we’ll fix a broadcast appeal,’ said the Chief, and departed.

  Close upon midnight on Friday the police rang. There had been an answer from Edinburgh, of a loss of memory case, which bore some slight resemblance to the description of Mrs Spengrave.

  ‘I’ll go by air taxi early to-morrow,’ said Spengrave. ‘I’m rehearsing my company all next week, and I don’t want to lose more time than I can help.’

  Before leaving, after a very early breakfast, he told his house-keeper:

  ‘The men should be here this morning from the theatre to overhaul my things and take some of them back. If they aren’t here by eleven, phone the theatre and tell the manager I want to know why. When they come, make things easy for them, will you, and give them all they want.’

  All that the men wanted was the loan of a vacuum cleaner.

  When they unrolled the classic carpet, they found the dead body of June Spengrave.

  Chapter Two

  Lucien Spengrave had begun as an artist. At the Slade School, where he learnt his technique, he kept his individuality in check. When he began painting he attracted a great deal of attention but very few cheques.