by Roy Vickers
Personal impressions that people are telling the truth or lying or what not are rarely accepted at headquarters as a substitute for action.
‘I’m afraid I shall have to pull you in, Aggie. You can bet your sweet life those diamonds are Brendon’s. We’ll soon find out for you.’
He learnt that the Brendons would arrive at Southampton the following Tuesday night and go straight on to Brendon where they would shortly entertain a shooting-party.
Chapter Six
In a three months’ honeymoon in Europe the Earl and Countess of Brendon had about a fortnight to themselves. Brendon was a social ambassador of his country; for, even in the 1930s, that sort of thing was still considered politically important. There was a royal wedding in the Balkans, at which the Countess necessarily wore the Brendon jewels. She had to wear them again in Belgium during their last week.
Henry accepted responsibility for them. In the car that took them from Southampton to Brendon they were beside him in an attaché case. They would have to stay in the safe at Brendon until he went to London, when they would be returned to the Safe Deposit. To Henry the Brendon jewels were a nuisance and to his Countess a horror which ruined her normally delectable appearance.
On Wednesday morning Inspector Rason, accompanied by a colleague knowledgeable in precious stones, presented himself at Brendon Castle.
When he had explained his errand Brendon took him to the library and unlocked the safe.
‘It’s the collar, isn’t it? I have had to have the two diamonds replaced, as the jewels have been in use. Frankly, Inspector, I’m sorry the wretched business has cropped up again – though, of course, I appreciate the efforts of the police.’
Rason was murmuring platitudes when Detective-Sergeant Edwards interrupted:
‘These two diamonds I have in my hand could never have sat in that collar,’ he announced.
Rason controlled his disappointment. In the Department of Dead Ends, things hardly ever ran in a straight line. By the time real evidence reached him it had generally turned a somersault. In this case, it proved that Lone Jim had told the truth to Agnes Cope. Suppose Lone Jim had been telling the truth throughout?
‘Well, that lets me out, doesn’t it!’ said Brendon, good-humouredly as he returned the collar to the safe.
‘Hm! I’m afraid our people will start raking over the ashes,’ said Rason, ‘Anyhow, they won’t want you to come up to London, Lord Brendon. They’ll come down here.’
‘Good heavens! Why should I be dragged in, if those stones belong to someone else?’ The Countess knew no more than the barest outline of the Nelly Hyde affair and he was anxious to avoid forcing the details on her attention.
‘The fact that those diamonds are not yours,’ explained Rason, ‘will make our people believe that Lone Jim was telling the truth when he said the two diamonds were missing from the collar when he stole it. If you remember, it was proved that when Miss Hyde brought them into the flat that night at eleven, the collar was intact. That means that the two missing diamonds must have been detached in the flat by Miss Hyde or yourself.’
‘But that would be perfectly ridiculous behaviour on the part of either of us!’
‘So ridiculous that our people will try to find out exactly what did happen. It’s all red tape, of course, but it’s ten to one they’ll want to examine any effects you still possess which were at any time in that flat.’
‘I haven’t any effects that were at that flat – except, of course, a couple of portmanteaux and a suitcase, a map case – oh yes, and a canvas bed, army pattern.’
‘Well, it won’t take ’em long to run through those,’ said Rason, preparing to go. ‘There’s a local train at one-fifteen from Brendon station, I believe.’
‘Couldn’t you examine the stuff now and get it over?’ asked Henry. ‘The Daimler can run you to Taunton to catch the connexion and there’ll be time for lunch here first.’
Rason accepted the invitation to lunch. The butler mobilized a valet and two maids and within five minutes the library was littered with a canvas bed, a map case, a suitcase, and two portmanteaux. Rason turned his attention to the latter when the servants had gone. One was a pleasing, mellow brown; the other a harsh yellow. Rason picked up the brown one.
‘I fancy I recognize this one, Lord Brendon. Wasn’t it an exhibit at Lone Jim’s trial?’
‘No. The other one was – the yellow one.’
Rason contemplated the brown portmanteau as if he doubted Brendon’s statement. On one side was an initial. A ‘B’ between full stops. But the second full stop had been grazed off. He had recognized it from a written description in the dossier – a statement by the porter of the flats in Westminster: ‘I then carried down his lordship’s suitcase and a portmanteau. I would know the portmanteau again because I happened to notice it had a full stop on the wrong side of the initial.’
‘Was this portmanteau – this brown one – in the flat at the time when the murder was committed?’ asked Rason.
‘No,’ answered Henry. ‘I took it with me when I left the flat that night. It contained my clothes. I was going down to Maensborough with the Duke.’
‘Ah! Then we can put this on one side. It’s the yellow one we want – the one that was in the flat at the time – the one from which Lone Jim cut the straps – the one he found the diamonds in.’
He hoisted the yellow portmanteau on to the writing table.
‘Before we examine that portmanteau, Lord Brendon, I’ll tell you what’s in my mind. First – we know those two diamonds were in the collar when Jim stole it. Second – we’re going to assume that Jim was telling the truth when he said they were not in the collar when he got home. Very well! That leaves only one possibility. Those two diamonds must have left the collar at the moment when Jim was stealing them – without his knowing it! You’ll say that’s impossible, but it isn’t – because those two diamonds were loose in their setting.’ He told them what Agnes Cope had told him.
While Edwards gaped and Brendon looked bored. Rason went on:
‘If I am right, it means that, in snatching that collar out of this yellow bag, Jim caught the thing against the under-side of the lock and the two loose diamonds were wrenched off.’
Brendon raised his eyebrows. ‘Then you think they’re still in the bag – after nearly three years of packing and unpacking?’
‘Have a look, Edwards,’ ordered Rason. ‘Feel under the lock. Look for a hole in the lining under the lock.’
Edwards opened the yellow portmanteau.
‘I can’t feel anything, Mr Rason. And there’s no hole in the lining. And – I’m afraid I don’t feel anything through the lining. No, sir. I’ll swear there are no diamonds anywhere in that portmanteau.’
Rason collapsed, somewhat theatrically, into an armchair.
‘That’s the sort of thing that happens in my job, Lord Brendon. You blow off a beautiful theory and just make an ass of yourself. I was absolutely convinced that the only place on earth where those two diamonds could possibly be was in that bag where they’d been accidentally hidden. While you’re at it, Edwards, you might as well go through the other bag – the brown one.’
‘Not much point in that, is there?’ suggested Brendon. ‘As I told you, that’s the one I took out of the flat at midnight.’
‘Go through it all the same, Edwards,’ ordered Rason.
Edwards changed the position of the portmanteaux, setting the mellow brown one on the writing table.
‘Phew! There is certainly a hole in the lining just where you said, Mr Rason,’ reported Edwards.
‘Good! Just go on feeling for the diamonds and when you feel ’em, cut the lining.’ Rason sounded satisfied rather than surprised. ‘Lord Brendon, you’ve no idea what a lot of trouble crooks give us when they tell the truth. We take the line that they’re sure to be lying –’
‘I’ve got something here, Mr Rason!’ cried Edwards. A pocket knife was inserted. ‘Diamonds – two!’
We ima
gine Edwards flushed with excitement, Brendon still looking bored while Rason’s voice breaks the silence.
‘I think you said, Lord Brendon, that this was the portmanteau you took with you out of the flat at midnight. If those diamonds are yours it will prove that Lone Jim completed his robbery before you left the flat. It only remains for Edwards to tell us whether those diamonds could have “sat” – as he calls it – in the collar.’
‘By Jove! That’s a clever bit of work, Mr Rason!’ murmured Brendon. He went to the safe. But instead of producing the collar he shut the door of the safe and locked it on a combination. Then he faced Rason in silence, perfect understanding in the eyes of both men.
To the Earl of Brendon, aristocratic calm was no pose.
‘That fellow – Lone Jim – murdered a woman at Highgate, didn’t he?’
‘You can take it that he did. He’d have been hanged for that anyway. But I’m afraid that won’t save you from the charge of procuring a miscarriage of justice, resulting in the wrongful execution of Lone Jim.’
‘In plain English, I shall be charged with murdering Lone Jim and then with murdering Nelly Hyde. But not, I think, until Mr Edwards has proved that those two diamonds could – er – “sit” in the collar. It will take you twenty-four hours, won’t it, to get a judicial order to open that safe?’ As Rason nodded, Henry rang the bell.
‘These gentlemen will have lunch at once in the morning-room. And see that the Daimler takes them to Taunton in time to catch the two-thirty.’
‘Very good, my lord.’
The Order was again in peril of public contempt and must be saved. It would be hard not even being able to say good-bye to Aileen, but that would be impossible.
‘Do you think, darling, that you could amuse yourself this afternoon until teatime?’ asked the Right Honourable Henry Ashwen, Earl of Brendon, Knight of the Garter, Warden of the King’s Pleasaunces, heir to the dukedom of Maensborough. ‘I want to do a spot of work on the guns in case I don’t get time before next Tuesday. I always clean the guns myself.’
In her hearing he told the butler to tell the chauffeur to send him some petrol in an egg-cup with which to clean his hands.
Nobody outside the Department of Dead Ends had any doubt that he intended to clean his guns, and that he blew his brains out by the purest accident.
The Cowboy of Oxford Street
Chapter One
One of the curiosities of murder is that the murderer very rarely understands his own motive. ‘I did her in because I didn’t want her to make trouble with the wife.’ This has often been said, in varying forms; but it can never have been true.
We are driven to look for the real motive in some deep but unconscious emotional urge. There is the case of Andrew Amersham, a perfectly sane man in so far as a murderer can be sane – who committed the murder first and discovered his own motive afterwards.
Amersham was an amiable, rather pitiable little man. Not very likeable because he was stuffy and old-womanish in his tastes. Also, his credulity was over-developed – he would believe almost anything that was told him – a trait which, for some reason or other, the English strongly dislike.
We pick him up in the Spring of 1901 at the age of twenty-eight when he was living in a boarding-house at Islington, employed at a wage of four pounds a week by a firm of estate agents in Oxford Street. He is five-feet-four, thin, and rather sallow. He suffers badly from what would nowadays be called an inferiority complex, which is easily explained by the fact that he had long wanted to marry and that no remotely suitable girl had ever given him encouragement.
The perpetual snubbing drove him to a dream-life and in the early summer we find him going nightly to Olympia where Colonel Cody (Buffalo Bill) was beginning the final tour of his Wild West Show. Then suddenly this stuffy, old-womanish little man made an astonishing attempt to turn his dream into reality. He threw up his job in Oxford Street and signed on at the Show as a labourer for a three months’ tour of the provinces.
Here he fraternized with men who had begun life as real cowboys. One of them taught him the essentials of lasso work and rope spinning. He made sufficient headway to be put into the Show itself and to act as feeder in a rope-spinning act.
In October the tour came to an end. He appears to have made a clean breast of his motives to his former employers, who after a suitable homily gave him back his old job. By November he was again sunk in the misery of sexual loneliness. But in early December he met Constance Amelia Burwood.
She was a distinctly pretty woman of thirty-five, temporary companion to an elderly lady, whom she was helping in the choice of a house in Bryanston Square. At the estate agents’, Constance mistook Amersham for the manager of that prosperous business.
She astonished and delighted him by accepting his stammered invitation to dinner. She told him that she was the daughter of a deceased Colonel and he believed her. She told him that she had had one unhappy love affair when she was a young girl, after which she had put the thought of men out of her life – and he believed her again. The truth was that she had had anything but a dull life – that as her physical charms were beginning to fade she had run to cover and had fortunately stumbled upon a somewhat eccentric old lady who had forgotten to ask for references. Middle-age loomed ahead of her with the threat of destitution. She was perhaps unduly pessimistic, but it is none the less true that she would have married almost anyone who could afford to support her on the simplest scale.
To the unsophisticated Andrew she was full of pretty tricks and she undoubtedly knew how to make the most of what was left of her physical beauty. And so, with her tutored caresses, she healed the wounds left by innumerable snubs. Andrew Amersham was undoubtedly happy during the brief period of his courtship – so happy that he was taking no risks.
She had told him colossal lies about her past, but he was by no means straightforward with her. He let her go on supposing that he was manager, in receipt of a salary too reasonable to require definition. He sustained his deceit by drawing heavily upon his little nest-egg of some five hundred pounds left to him by his mother.
She gave him a hard-luck tale about the considerable sum of money left to her by her father, the Colonel. And another tale of a dishonest employer having robbed her of her own small savings. He believed them both and gave her eighty pounds with which to buy a trousseau. There was enough left from the nestegg to provide a comfortable honeymoon at Ilfracombe. Then came confession.
It arose quite naturally out of a discussion about taking a house and furnishing it when they returned to London.
‘We shall have to see about the furniture and try and arrange something,’ he told her. ‘And as for the house – what about Islington? You see, they only pay me four pounds a week and a small bonus at Christmas.’
Now whatever else one may say about women like Constance, it is true that society treats them somewhat harshly. In her life Constance had suffered many bitter disappointments – and she took this one very decently. There was, moreover, a bright side. Even a share of four pounds a week, with a small bonus at Christmas, and the hope of an ultimate increase, was a great deal better than the nothing to which she had fearfully looked forward.
‘All right, Andrew! Never mind about the house. We’ll live in digs. Perhaps something may turn up.’
Andrew was very doubtful about anything turning up, but Constance had ideas. One of the ideas materialized before Christmas – in the person of William Edward Harries.
Chapter Two
Harries was in the middle fifties – a business man living in partial retirement. Five years previously he had made himself responsible for the rent of Constance’s flat. He had been amongst the most loyal of her admirers but his wife had found out and brought the affair to an end. Now that his wife was dead he was delighted to renew the acquaintance and was immensely tickled by the fact that she was now a respectable married woman.
He was a big fellow, weighing some fifteen stone, old-fashioned in appearance,
for he wore long side-whiskers (Dundreary) that had been fashionable in his youth. He was very well-preserved with scarcely a touch of grey. A breezy, genial-bully type of man with tastes, one must believe, that were more than a little tainted with eccentricity. For instance, it was he who insisted on meeting Constance’s husband.
From the start he gave their acquaintanceship an atmosphere of its own. He sent a formal invitation to Mr and Mrs Amersham to dine with him at the old Café de l’Europe in Leicester Square. But not in the restaurant. In a private room, decked with flowers.
Andrew was afflicted with an incurable respectfulness. ‘So this is Andrew!’ said Harries. ‘How d’you do, Mr Harries!’ said Andrew. And ‘Andrew’ and ‘Mr Harries’ they remained thereafter.
Throughout the dinner Harries took the measure of his man and enjoyed himself immensely. He had made no definite plan, though he had found where the Amershams were living and knew all that he needed to know of their circumstances. The plan, we may take it, grew up somewhere between the soup and the coffee.
He threw off a thin enough story about his previous acquaintanceship with Constance and saw that it was believed. He felt quite unable to avoid patronizing Andrew.
‘There, Andrew, my boy, that’s a curaçao! Don’t be afraid of it – it won’t hurt you. You watch Connie – she used to know how to put it down – didn’t you, my dear?’
Harries’ conversation bristled with that kind of remark and he saw that it told Andrew just nothing. Andrew was, he decided, a unique specimen who knew nothing of the current music-hall jokes and had never been to a farce. Harries could take any liberty he liked. We are told that he was actually holding Connie’s hand across the table when he made his proposition.
‘Connie, my dear, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you happily married to a man I can respect. We’ve cracked a few jokes and we’ve had a little horseplay – and with it all we’ve found that we’re friends. Now your husband’s my sort of man and I think we understand each other, eh, Andrew?’