The Department of Dead Ends

by Roy Vickers

  Karslake was glad of the respite. His mind on the corpse, he watched Swilbey’s hand creeping, spiderlike, along the ledge by the dictaphone.

  ‘Ah, here it is!’

  For an instant the hand hovered, quivering over the case as if it were puzzled. Karslake dismissed this eerie fancy, took the offered cigarette and made his decision.

  ‘To come back to Wain for a moment,’ said Karslake, ‘you might tell me exactly what happened while he was here.’

  This was the cue for the scene in which the police were ‘hopelessly baffled’. He had but to repeat the oft-repeated words.

  ‘It was about five-thirty when he came. I was in the rehearsal theatre. I showed him the tackle for shifting the heavier pieces. Then we came back here and talked.

  ‘He told me he had committed a technical breach of the criminal law and that he was playing tig with you. Mentioned you by name and said you remembered me. I said I’d let him have the five thousand in the morning. Then he explained that he would drop in for a civil bankruptcy for fifty thousand pounds. I said bluntly I couldn’t manage that – after which things became mildly unpleasant.’

  ‘What sort of unpleasantness?’

  ‘After I’d turned down the fifty thousand idea, he said something about the five thousand being wasted – that it would be cheaper for all if he jumped off Waterloo Bridge on a dark night – the usual suicide threat that is never implemented. Between ourselves, Karslake, I don’t like that man. He financed my first play. I admit he was thundering useful to me at the time, and I’m glad to let him have the five thousand. Fifty thousand is another pair o’ shoes. So I made the excuse that I had to listen to the radio critique. And I suppose he buzzed off in a huff as well as a panic.

  ‘He’s coming here to-morrow morning for the five thousand, and he’s sure to surrender to you as soon as he’s got it, so you don’t have to worry. Have another drink?’

  ‘No, thanks. May I use your telephone?’

  Karslake dialled the Yard, asked for an internal number, then gave Swilbey’s address.

  ‘I want the whole team,’ said Karslake. ‘I’ll be here when they arrive.’ He hung up. ‘Wain is on that stage of yours, Mr Swilbey – with his neck in that scene-shifting tackle.’

  ‘My God! Doing it in my house!’ exclaimed Swilbey. ‘That’s a dirty, malicious trick, Karslake! The publicity will do me no good – no darned good at all.’

  Chapter Seven

  It was near the truth to say that Robert Swilbey was disappointed when it appeared that the police were not ‘baffled’ – that they hadn’t the wit to see that there was anything to be baffled about. On the other hand, he received, in the Coroner’s court, a severe shock which put him momentarily in fear of his life. For the Coroner described exactly how Wain had been murdered – which Swilbey had thought no one could ever guess.

  ‘Accident,’ said the Coroner to his jury, when all the evidence had been heard, ‘may be ruled out. If you are to return a positive verdict, therefore, you must decide between murder and suicide. Let us consider what evidence, if any, supports the theory of murder.’

  He dwelt on the virtual impossibility of anyone entering the drawing-room without the servants or Swilbey being aware of it – he elaborated obvious absurdities.

  ‘Apart from such absurdities, you have to postulate – to sustain the hypothesis of murder – a very powerful man who suddenly attacked the deceased, constricting his victim’s throat so that he could not cry out – or the servants, to say nothing of Mr Swilbey, would have heard him. For this purpose he used a curtain cord, an item in the fittings of the stage set. This hypothetical murderer then proceeded, in the clumsiest possible manner, to attach his victim to the hook on the pulley block.

  ‘As you have been told, the device of a noose, or slip-knot, was not employed. A curtain cord, itself a stage property securing a curtain on the stage set, was wound round the throat of the deceased in such a manner as to make four complete coils. This cord was tied at the back of the deceased’s neck with three knots – the kind of simple knot which one uses for one’s shoe laces, the difference being that this simple knot was tied three times instead of once. Through three of the coils, the hook beneath the pulley block was inserted, greatly increasing the pressure of the coils round the neck. The hands were unbound. Medical evidence as to the condition of the hands – and microscopic examination of the ropes above the pulley block – make it clear that the unhappy man attempted to free himself by reaching above his head and pulling on the ropes.

  ‘Why did our hypothetical murderer permit this attempt to frustrate his purpose? Add that this eccentric murderer must have swung the dead, or unconscious, body in such a way that the shoes could be pressed into the upholstery of the bench – and you may come to the conclusion that no such person as the murderer existed.’

  The Coroner had reconstructed the murder in order to ridicule the theory of murder. As a dramatist, Swilbey knew the danger of playing tricks like that on an audience – who would sometimes pick up an unexpected angle. But the fact of his blindness – above all, Karslake’s evidence of his behaviour in the presence of the corpse – headed off suspicion.

  Swilbey’s dread was dispelled when the Coroner went on to say what Swilbey had intended him to say.

  ‘On the hypothesis of suicide, the deceased slipped silently away when Mr Swilbey turned on the radio. After adjusting the pulley to the height he required, he wound the curtain cord round his throat, as one might wind a narrow scarf, and tied it, as described, at the back. He stood on the bench, worked the hook under the coils, then swung himself off the bench. Police measurements, on the chart before you, show that the ropes would then swing, pendulum-wise, to the centre of the stage, bringing the feet of the deceased within three and a half inches of the floor.

  ‘Like many a suicide and would-be suicide before him, he repented of his act before it had been completed, and tried to interrupt it. Had he secured himself with a noose, he would in all probability have succeeded. To free the hook from the coils of curtain cord was a great deal more difficult than loosening a slip-knot – doubly so, through the fact that his jaw was large and prominent.’

  The jury, ever ready to believe that a simple explanation must be the true one, accepted the Coroner’s interpretation. Only Chief Inspector Karslake was heard to mumble that the suicide had been clear-headed enough to measure the pendulum swing, correct to three and a half inches. After a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind, public interest in the case evaporated.

  On the evening following the inquest, Robert Swilbey resumed work on the first act of Playgirl Wanted, abandoned two years previously. The play was put on in the following autumn. It ran all through the following year.

  Eighteen months later, he was at work on another play, when the end came.

  Chapter Eight

  A junior detective from another department flung open the door of the Dead Ends office and ushered in a seedy individual with patched trousers but a very decent sports coat.

  ‘This is Mr Joe Byker, sir,’ said the detective facetiously. ‘Hensons’, the pawnbrokers, phoned us. Mr Byker was trying to pawn this.’ He laid on the table a slim gold cigarette case, with a tessellated design. ‘Mr Byker says the case is his and he bought it with his own money.’

  Among the burglaries, petty thefts, and what-not on Detective-Inspector Rason’s file were eleven missing gold cigarette cases, five with tessellated design. He opened the case in the hope of finding some identifying mark.

  ‘For remembrance,’ he read. No name. No initials.

  ‘You bought it, eh, Byker! From a man in a pub whose name you don’t know?’

  ‘No, sir. I bought it right enough, a matter o’ six weeks ago, off a respectable dealer name o’ Clawson’s, Theobalds Road.’

  ‘They’re second-hand clothes dealers, Byker.’

  ‘That’s right, sir. Matter o’ six weeks ago, I bought this ’ere sports coat as I’m wearin’ this very minute, sir, an
d I didn’t know till this morning when I was havin’ me breakfast that I’d bought that cigarette case with it. In here it was, sir.’ He took the coat off. ‘In between these two bits o’ stiffening – that’s where I cut the lining, look – at the top here is where it was worn away before the coat was sold to Clawson’s. And me walking about with it for a matter o’ six weeks.’

  Clawson, the dealer, was able to supply the name and address of the man from whom he had bought the sports coat. Interviewed by Rason, the vendor of the coat was inclined to be indignant.

  ‘Yes, I sold it to Clawson’s – and what’s the matter with that? The missis gave it to me to do what I liked with.’

  ‘And who is the missis?’

  ‘Mrs Swilbey – wife of the gentleman who writes all them plays. I’m his gardener.’

  Swilbey, a writer of plays! In a few minutes, Rason remembered the freak suicide of eighteen months ago. Byker would drop in for ‘stealing by finding’ if Mrs Swilbey would consent to prosecute, he reflected on his way to the house in St John’s Wood.

  ‘Perhaps you could tell me, Mrs Swilbey, whether this is your husband’s cigarette case?’

  ‘It looks like it. I wonder where he dropped it!’

  Mildred took the case, opened it and caught her breath.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It is not my husband’s.’

  ‘But you do know whose it is, Mrs Swilbey!’ It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘It belonged to a friend of ours who – is dead. A Mr Wain. I gave it to him myself. It is exactly like one I gave to my husband – bought at the same place. That’s why I thought at first it was his.’

  ‘Mr Wain,’ repeated Rason. ‘I remember. Very sad. You’re quite sure this is the case you gave Mr Wain?’

  ‘Quite!’ She added the name of the jeweller where she had bought both cases. ‘How did it come into your hands, Mr Rason?’

  ‘It has been stolen,’ answered Rason, and bowed himself out.

  He checked up at the jeweller’s, then decided reluctantly that he must bring Chief Inspector Karslake into it.

  ‘He was a lawyer once,’ warned Karslake, as it was Rason’s case. ‘You won’t get him to admit anything. But I’ll stooge you all I can.’

  At five-thirty that afternoon they were being shown into the ‘L’-shaped drawing-room. Karslake introduced Rason with a somewhat elaborate heartiness.

  ‘I’ve got to worry you about the estate in bankruptcy of the a late Turley Wain, Mr Swilbey,’ said Rason.

  ‘Before we start, Mr Swilbey,’ cut in Karslake, ‘d’ you mind if we smoke?’

  ‘Do! Here, have a cigarette!’ Swilbey felt in one pocket and then another, then found his cigarette case on the ledge that was flush with the dictaphone. ‘I don’t know anything about Wain’s affairs.’

  Rason observed the cigarette case. It looked exactly like Wain’s – the same tessellated design. It would feel the same to a blind man – and that was all Rason wanted to know.

  ‘What an extraordinary thing!’ exclaimed Rason. ‘That case is exactly like Turley Wain’s.’ He added carefully. ‘You may remember – that it dropped out of Wain’s pocket – on to the floor of your stage – during the poor chap’s struggles.’

  There was a tiny perceptible stiffening of the large frame. But it was the long pause that made Rason sure of his ground.

  ‘I don’t remember, because I was never told,’ said Swilbey.

  ‘You didn’t need telling! You picked the cigarette case up after you had killed him. You thought it was yours, because it feels the same. And you put it in your pocket. It was in your pocket when you were sitting in here, offering Mr Karslake a cigarette.’

  ‘Any ass can make wild assertions!’ snapped Swilbey. ‘Are you in this foolery, Karslake?’

  ‘Well, Mr Swilbey, I must say I do remember your offering me a cigarette out of a gold case.’

  ‘Then I wonder, my dear Karslake’ – Swilbey had pounced as, years ago, he would pounce on a witness – ‘I wonder whether you also remember that the case was not in my pocket, as I thought it was, but on this ledge here?’

  ‘Y-yes, I do remember, now you mention it, Mr Swilbey.’ Karslake spoke as one making a reluctant admission. ‘Rason, I think you’ll have to apologize.’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ said Rason. ‘Suppose the case on the ledge there, out of which he offered you a cigarette, was his own case? And suppose Wain’s case, which Swilbey had put in his pocket, had slipped down the lining. And suppose –’

  ‘Suppose my grandmother’s foot!’ Swilbey emitted a roar of laughter. ‘Karslake, haven’t you taught this man any evidence?’ Swilbey leant forward in the direction of Rason. ‘My good man! If you could prove that I put Wain’s cigarette case in my pocket – eighteen months ago, mark you! – we would not be talking about it. Mr Karslake would charge me with murder – wouldn’t you, Karslake?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chief Inspector Karslake. In sudden silence, the distant rumble of traffic seemed to fill the vast drawing-room. Presently Karslake added: ‘Perhaps you’d like to ring the bell, Swilbey, and tell them to pack you a suitcase?’

  Copyright

  First published in 1949 by Faber & Faber

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

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  ISBN 978-1-4472-2462-4 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-2461-7 POD

  Copyright © Roy Vickers, 1949

  The right of Roy Vickers to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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