The Case of the Magic Mirror: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  We’d already agreed that now Wharton was making a third, life had considerably more pep, in spite of the riskiness of the double game we were playing. In that cool morning air and clear sunlight it struck me, for instance, that I’d acted a bit precipitately in blurting out Frank’s famous theory.

  “I think you couldn’t have done better,” he assured me. “I wouldn’t be a yes-man with you, Mr. Travers, and honestly I think you did the very best thing.” Then he grinned. “And how am I doing myself?”

  “If you mean with Wharton,” I said, “then all I can say is you make me blush. In the cause of duty Wharton’s the most accomplished liar I know, and I’m not too bad at times myself, but you’ve got us both stone cold. By the way, that information you offered Wharton about Harper having been Passman’s bodyguard; was that genuine?”

  “Harper let it slip himself,” he said. “Honestly I believe I’ve got him where he’d tell me anything, and he let this out when we were talking about boxing lessons and he wanted to convince me what a hell of a lad he was. And I’ll tell you something that proves it. Harper went to see old Mrs. Sivley to try to fix up lodgings with her, didn’t he, because he’d heard Sivley had gone away. That was all boloney. What he went for was to find out if Sivley had gone and when he was due back. That’s why old man Passman wasn’t being guarded on the Saturday morning.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “But that’s the sort of dope to hand out to Wharton. Anything that’s ostensibly gossip.”

  “That’s how I’d worked things out,” he said. “No intrusion. Just sit back and let him make the moves, and you supply a little occasional publicity.”

  Then I was asking when he proposed to see Charlotte Craigne again, and again he was saying there oughtn’t to be any rush. The Monday mightn’t be too early, and he’d ring her up on the Sunday morning. He gave me a roguish look as he told me she had a telephone alongside her bed.

  “Then you’d better get those Hollywood letters of introduction written,” I suggested.

  “As a matter of fact I’ve got three or four written,” he said, and then was giving me a quizzical sort of look. “I don’t think you’re too whole-heartedly in that scheme after all.” He saw my questioning look and shrugged his shoulders. “Just something in your tone.”

  “There’s none of that about me,” I said. “Playing the game is a good old British term but it doesn’t apply to rogues. Wharton licked all that out of me years ago. But you got me wrong. I didn’t sound so enthusiastic about the scheme, perhaps, because I saw things like this. If she ever gets to Hollywood, it means she’ll have swung clear. We’ve got to pin something on her long before she gets there. Your letters of introduction are merely to suggest to her that if she wants to bolt, there’s a heaven-sent place to bolt to. If we don’t pin anything on her before she bolts, at least we shall know where to look for her when we do find something.”

  “Gosh, it’s a pity,” he said, and smiled dreamily. “Can’t you see her arriving in Hollywood and presenting those letters!”

  “It’s past eight o’clock,” I said, “and what I can see is George Wharton fuming because we’re keeping him from his ham and eggs.”

  George was at the pub door inhaling the morning air, and he was unusually happy for so early an hour. At breakfast he and Frank talked about America, with never a mention of the business we were all there for, at least, till the very end of the meal. Then he pulled Frank’s leg by referring to ‘us detectives.’ Before I could guess that the quip had purpose, the purpose was revealed.

  “And that reminds me. Looking through some notes this morning; I see that the local police report that wherever they made inquiries about Matthews, somebody else had been there before them.”

  The statement was accompanied by an arch look. My face flushed, but George wasn’t looking at me. Frank flushed too. I don’t know if he had the gift of producing a blush at will, but if he hadn’t he turned that one to good account, and he was looking as much of a fool as possible.

  “Sorry, Mr. Wharton, but I guess that was me.”

  “You!” said Wharton with a deceptive mildness.

  “Sure,” said Frank and began a modest explanation. Mrs. Craigne, as he’d explained, had been anxious about Matthews, and he’d promised to make inquiries, and the Eddie Franks who’d once taken a diploma in the arts of detection had tried to do the job in the professional manner. He’d even made himself a false moustache, and had tried to talk like the English dude of vaudeville.

  “Well, I’m damned!” Wharton said, and then guffawed. Frank looked as if his feelings were on the verge of being hurt, and George patted him on the shoulders.

  George wanted me in his room after breakfast and the first thing he told me was that he was flabbergasted when that Mr. Franks had said what he had.

  “I was only trying to pull his leg,” George said plaintively, and then gave what I always called his Colosseum smile—that of a lion who had snapped at and missed a particularly succulent Christian. “When Venter told me about someone else making inquiries I thought I was on to something.”

  “You can laugh at Franks all you like,” I said, “but he strikes me as the sort of man who’d never be likely to make a fool of himself. But there was something I was going to ask you, George. Are you having Mrs. Craigne watched?”

  George pursed his lips. “Don’t think it’s wise just yet. We’ve got to get something definite pinned on her first. Theories are no damn good.” That was for my benefit, in case the theory turned out to be a dud. “That’s why I’m concentrating on the Matthews job.”

  We both concentrated on it for the next half-hour. I did say that I’d thought he’d intended to see Mrs. Sivley, but he waved that aside. He didn’t tell me, by the way, just what Harper told him, and I had to gather that for myself as we went along. I did soon realise that when he’d made out to Frank and me that he’d been furious with Harper, that had been one of his little duplicities.

  This is what we worked out first. Harper’s evidence was that at ten minutes past ten on that Saturday night he’d seen Charlotte Craigne’s car. It was a full moon that night, and so it had never really got dark, and the particular quality of the light tallied with Harper’s admission that he’d seen the car but not its driver. As for the exact time, which was the thing that mattered, Harper said he knew it because he had strolled out for a breath of fresh air soon after closing time at the Lapwings.

  “Now for the other end,” Wharton said. “Mrs. Day has been questioned again, and the maid who saw Matthews, and they put it as at about ten when Matthews went. The trouble is that I daren’t question Mrs. Day too closely myself as to when Mrs. Craigne came downstairs with that note, but everything I got last night makes the time roughly eleven o’clock. Nobody, of course, heard Mrs. Craigne’s car come back. She simply went the back way to the garage. And nobody would hear her go upstairs because nobody but Matthews was supposed to be in the family part of the house. Matthews would have to lock up, and nobody knew just then that he’d gone and wasn’t coming back. What we must assume is that it was at about a quarter to eleven when the car got back. Say ten to if you like. That makes it forty minutes roughly that she was out. If she went straight there and back, that’s twenty minutes’ driving. Now let’s look at this large-scale map. How far would she drive in twenty minutes?”

  “Where do you think she’d drive to?” I asked, not wishing to give away what Harper had told me about Breddley Hall and the old flame. Then George was letting out that Harper had told him just what he’d told me.

  I had to shake my head at the suggestion of Breddley.

  “The lanes are terrors that way,” I said. “After all the place is only a hamlet. There’s nothing much there but the Hall. Ten miles in twenty minutes in those lanes is incredible, especially as it wouldn’t have been twenty minutes. After all she had to do something when she got to the journey’s end. She couldn’t have turned Matthews out, and driven straight back. Besides, she needn�
�t have gone towards Breddley after all. Just look here on the map. A mile after the Lapwings there’s a side lane. It circles round to the Ipswich Road.”

  That left us where we started from. George said that in any case he’d put his two men on the Breddley lanes first, in case the car had been seen there. I didn’t like to say that I didn’t think much of the idea. Up to heaven knows what hour on a Saturday night, and a hot one at that, cars would be everywhere on the roads and lanes with their drivers making for the seaside resorts along a forty-mile stretch of coast.

  At any rate Wharton went off to do some telephoning which he said should take him only a few minutes, and then we might see Sivley’s mother. While I was waiting I kept thinking of that Matthews business, and when I was gravelled for ideas I changed over to Harper about whom we’d been talking too. Then suddenly a most startling idea presented itself. At the moment I thought it one of the most apposite I’d ever had. There was a way, it seemed to me, to make Charlotte Craigne incriminate herself. Frank would have to carry it through and it would be both tricky and dangerous, and we’d both have to put ourselves into the hands of Harper. So dangerous was it, in fact, that before Harper could be approached it looked as if I’d have to find some hold over him, to bring him to the scratch and as a guarantee that he’d keep his mouth shut both then and ever after.

  The more I thought of that scheme the more I liked it, and the more dangerous it seemed. Skating over thin ice was nothing to it. The one person who must never know a thing was Wharton, and not a word would I say to Frank till the preliminaries had all been worked out. And then I was asking myself what there was that I could use to terrify Harper. Somewhere there must be something I could use as a threat, and I was almost annoyed with Wharton that he should be carting me off to Sivley’s mother instead of leaving me in the pub to think things out. A lot we should learn from Mrs. Sivley, I thought disparagingly, after she’d already had the five wits harried out of her by Venter. But there I was wrong, for we did learn something, and it was a something without which we—which is Frank and I—would never have rounded off that case.

  Wharton said he had deliberately chosen ten o’clock as the best time for that Saturday morning call, but I wasn’t sufficiently interested to ask why that particular time should be so essential. All the same he took the short cut through the churchyard which brought us to the cottage door and round to the back without meeting a soul.

  Charlotte had described Mrs. Sivley as an old hag. Perhaps she wasn’t quite in the Pond class, though Charlotte herself had never made the grade for that last lucrative reward of the unblemished complexion. But Sivley’s mother looked quite a respectable old lady to me; about the late sixties in age, shortish and dumpy, and quiet-spoken. Wharton would always boast of his skill with women witnesses, and I don’t think I have seen his technique work more brazenly or with better success than with Mrs. Sivley.

  When we came round the corner to the back garden she was shaking a heavy rug, for instance.

  “Come, come, that’s a bit too heavy for you, Mrs. Sivley,” smiled Wharton, and took the rug from her and waved a hand to me, while she stared dumbfounded. Maybe she thought we were advertising vacuum cleaners or something, for her face registered approval while we two shook that cursed rug with its perfectly abominable dust.

  “That’s better,” pronounced Wharton. “Where shall we put it, Mrs. Sivley?”

  “Here, sir, in the kitchen,” she said, and as soon as we entered: “Was there anything you might be wanting?”

  “Well, yes,” said Wharton, taking a chair and waving a hand at one for me. “Just a little chat. Don’t be alarmed, Mrs. Sivley. I don’t know that it isn’t more of a gossip. Now this is me.”

  He was handing over his credentials, and while she was looking at them and puzzling her wits, Wharton was adjusting his antiquated spectacles. From the chin up he looked like a prosperous and benevolent gnome.

  “Are you from the police, sir?”

  “In a way, yes,” he told her mysteriously, and put the wallet in his pocket again. “But the last thing I want to do is worry you. And I’m here to see you’re not worried any more.”

  He glared at me as if I’d been the villain of that piece, and then his tone took on an unctuousness.

  “This has been a bad business for a highly respected woman like you, Mrs. Sivley. Some say children are a blessing.” He let out a sigh. “They’re the ones who don’t know.”

  “Indeed they don’t, sir,” she said, and was shaking her head. “But you’ve got children of your own, that’s plain. I only had the one.”

  “Well, whatever they do we’re still their parents,” Wharton said heavily. “You and I are not excused from that. But your boy wasn’t so much to blame perhaps as people think. He got into the hands of rascals, Mrs. Sivley. Cunning rascals.”

  Her head was shaking again. “It’s a comfort to hear that, sir. All the same, sir, I’ve finished with him now, as I told the other police gentleman that came. Cheating people is one thing, I said, but murder’s another, no matter how you’re driven. For driven he was, sir, you can be sure of that. He wasn’t in his right mind. He couldn’t have been. He was like my poor sister who was put away.”

  “You’re probably right,” Wharton told her consolingly. “And when he went away that night you had no idea whatever where he was going, or why.”

  “No, sir, God’s my witness.”

  I thought for a moment she was going to cry. Then she looked at Wharton, her old eyes softening.

  “All the police aren’t like you, sir. I’ll tell you something, sir, that I didn’t tell them, nor wouldn’t have told, the way they kept shouting things at me till I didn’t know where I was. As soon as my poor boy came home, sir, I got into my head that he was going away somewhere because of how restless he was.”

  “Just a moment, Mrs. Sivley. He didn’t come straight home here. To the best of my knowledge it was three days before he came here. I think he spent those three days in London. All we know is that he took the train from Chelmsford to Liverpool Street. I just tell you that in case you didn’t know it.”

  “Some of it, I didn’t know, sir. All I knew was that he had something on his mind and I guessed he was going away again. And he hadn’t no need, sir. This was his home, till he got something to do, and I wasn’t left without a penny, sir, even if he hadn’t anything much. But I didn’t say anything to him, sir, and then it all came out that very afternoon when he went; when that boy of Widger’s brought a note.”

  “Widgers?” asked Wharton, who must have remembered what I’d told him.

  “Don Widger,” she said. “Henry Widger’s son that now have Pennygate. Him that married May Bullen that was.” She broke off here to give a sad reminiscent shake of the head. “There’s a hussy for you if there ever was one. Said it was my boy who got her into trouble. Then why didn’t she ever get an order out against him?”

  Wharton shook his head. I cut in with a question.

  “As it wasn’t your son, Mrs. Sivley, who got her into trouble, I suppose you couldn’t tell us who it actually was? You never heard your son accuse anybody?”

  “No. sir, I didn’t.”

  “It couldn’t have been Mr. Rupert Craigne, for instance?”

  She stared at me. A shake of the head and then she went on with her story, which was all ‘I said’ and ‘he said’ and only the thread of it ran in my mind while I thought back. Perhaps it had been ridiculous to suggest that Craigne was the father of May Bullen’s child, but had he been, then there was a fascinating prospect, Craigne bribing Sivley to take on the paternity; Widger learning the truth and shooting Craigne, and then completing the job on Passman to throw suspicion on Sivley. After all, everyone knew that nobody but Sivley could have killed both Craigne and Passman. A fascinating theory, I repeat, if I hadn’t happened to know that Widger had been haymaking all that Saturday.

  In a moment I was picking up the thread of what Mrs. Sivley was telling Wharton. Widger’s
messenger had said there was no reply to the note. Sivley read it, his mother watching anxiously, and then he threw it contemptuously into the kitchen fire. “I hope he won’t think I’m going away because of him,” he said with a sneer. “I’m going in any case. And I’m coming back, and no Widger’s going to stop me. And when I come back I can buy up Widger, lock, stock and barrel.”

  Mrs. Sivley asked where he’d get all that money from at which he was hinting. His reply, cryptic though it was, was illuminating. “Just on my travels.” That was all, for then he went upstairs. His mother called up that tea was ready, and he asked her to bring him up a cup. He wasn’t hungry, he said, and didn’t want anything to eat. When she went up she noticed nothing different about the room. In spite of his orders she brought up a piece of cake which he ate when she’d gone.

  She was shelling peas at the kitchen table when he came down with the small handbag.

  “Good bye, mother,” he said. “See you again, soon.”

  “Pat,” she said, “I wish you’d tell me where you’re going. Is it after a job? You were bragging, weren’t you, when you were talking about all that money. You always was a one to talk big.”

  He laughed and told her she’d see.

  “When are you coming back?” she said. “You ought to let me know.”

  “When?” he said, and thought for a bit. His lips were moving as if he was calculating something. “About Tuesday, I reckon. Perhaps Monday night.”

  Then he gave her a quick kiss and was gone. Her lips trembled as she told us that, and Wharton was quickly patting her gently on the shoulder.

  “I know, I know,” he told her. “But he may come back yet, you never know. And just one little thing more, Mrs. Sivley, and then we’ll be going. Did he ever mention Mr. Rogerley to you?”