The Case of the Magic Mirror: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  “Harper suggested that himself,” he said. “He’s too good a liar for my liking. That’s why I’d rather have him where I can keep an eye on him. It may mean putting everything forward by a day.”

  I said I thought that would be an excellent thing. When Frank went to tell Mrs Porter and to pack a bag, I was very pleased indeed about being a day ahead of the original scheme, for as the begetter of the scheme I was impatient for things to happen. And the sooner something did happen, the better for my pocket. And that reminded me. I’d never had Charlotte Craigne’s cheque, and I might do worse than give her a reminder. And then somehow I balked at the idea. A hint, if the opportunity presented itself, but hardly a reminder. To have scruples where Charlotte Craigne was concerned seemed more than quixotic and yet I couldn’t help having scruples about pestering her for that money. After all, one doesn’t charge the condemned man with the price of the rope.

  Just as Frank and I were sitting down to an early tea, Wharton appeared, and he was in a wicked temper. An afternoon wasted, he said, and all for a fool of a woman who’d claimed to have seen Sivley in Trimport the previous afternoon, whereas the Sivley of her meddling imagination had turned out to be a tramp.

  “What you’d call a hobo,” he told Frank, and then was cooling off at the sight of new-laid eggs. “Might as well have a spot of tea myself. But you’re a bit early, aren’t you?”

  Frank explained that he’d been called to town and was leaving almost at once. He hoped to be back on the Wednesday, though only for a day or two.

  “I suppose the Yard haven’t called you in by any chance?” Wharton asked with elephantine humour.

  “I guess not,” Frank said, and grinned a bit sheepishly.

  “That leg-pull’s getting a bit stale, George,” I said.

  “That reminds me,” he said. “I happened to be doing a bit of inquiry work on my own this afternoon and checking up on certain information, and what do you think? Somebody else besides the police has been making inquiries out that way about Sivley.”

  The look he gave Frank hadn’t quite enough pertness.

  “Not guilty, your honour,” Frank told him. “I owned up to that Matthews business but I give my word, Mr. Wharton, that I’ve never asked a question about Sivley.”

  “Just pulling your leg again,” Wharton told him with a chuckle. “All the same it’s extraordinarily queer. Even before we started out after Sivley, someone was ahead of us.”

  “You needn’t gloat at me, George,” I said. “I’ve got a first-class alibi.”

  “Dammit! Can’t a man make a remark without being taken seriously?” He’d have rumbled on, but his two eggs happened to appear. “And so you’re spending a few days in town, Mr. Franks. A pity I shan’t be there, or I’d have taken you round the Yard.”

  “Some other time,” Frank said, and was getting up from the table. “But I’m mighty grateful to you all the same. And now if you two gentlemen will excuse me I’ll be getting on my way.”

  “What did you think of that business of Sivley?” Wharton asked me as soon as he’d gone.

  I could only shrug my shoulders.

  “It’s one of the most curious things I’ve come up against in this case,” he was going on.

  “Surely the most curious thing is that Sivley’s still at large,” I said.

  George said I was being too impatient. People had been at large longer than Sivley, but the hunt was about to be intensified. I’d finished my tea, so I thought it best to leave him to his. At any moment the questions might become even more awkward.

  At about five o’clock we drove some six miles towards Breddley and met the Inspector in charge of inquiries. Neither he nor his man had unearthed any news about a car on that vital Saturday night, and so the four of us went into a huddle over the large-scale map. Certain ponds, two gravel pits and one stone pit were selected for examination, since they lay by the roadside. By the time Wharton and I got back to the Oak, it was nearly nine o’clock. A letter from Bernice was by my plate when I came down to the belated meal.

  It had followed hard on the heels of her previous one, and was asking if I’d mind too much if she stayed on for another week, since the people she was with had changed their plans. There was only an indirect reference to Charlotte Craigne. Had I actually got that lovely mirror I’d mentioned, or would there be an auction at the Manor and was I hoping to buy it then. I wrote by return that by all means she was to stay on, for I’d been rather uneasy at the thought of her return before the Charlotte Craigne business was definitely cleared up. A nice impasse I’d have been in if Bernice had come back to discover, perhaps, that I was still only too interested in Charlotte Craigne.

  On the Sunday morning George and I were again on the Breddley road, leading a hand in the search. We’d taken cold lunch with us, and after the meal we shifted ground to the road that circled towards Ipswich, and spent an unprofitable afternoon and early evening. I wasn’t worrying about missing anything from Frank. Nothing could have happened as yet, and we’d agreed that when there was anything to report he’d ring me at nine o’clock on the particular night.

  So to the Monday, and another full day looking for the body of Matthews. I think Wharton began to realise it was a hopeless sort of quest, for he got a bit querulous towards evening. I was in a dither myself, wondering if Frank would be ringing me that night, and what it was that he’d have to report. As nine o’clock drew near I had to keep a tight hold over myself. Then I had a brainwave and managed to get George involved in a game of darts with some of the local experts, and no sooner did I see him settled down to it than Mrs. Porter was telling me I was wanted on the phone.

  “That you, uncle?” he said. “Harold here.”

  “Uncle Tom speaking,” I said. “But the line’s clear. I’ve parked our friend Super. . . . And what’s the news? Good?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” he said. “I’d put the two disks on if I could but you’ll have to hear them later.”

  He kept his information very much guarded, but it wasn’t hard for me to gather what had happened. But since I’m writing in retrospect, and a few days later was to hear the disks that recorded the conversations, I can add details which I didn’t know that evening.

  Harper presented himself at the flat at about ten o’clock on the Monday morning. Charlotte was amazed to see him. Asked what he wanted. Harper replied that he was in a serious fix and had to put his hands on a hundred pounds at very short notice. She said nothing, but you can imagine her regarding him with an amused contempt. Then he added that he could think of no one who could lend him the money but Mrs. Craigne.

  “My dear good man,” she said with a sneering laugh, “what on earth makes you think I should lend you a hundred pounds?”

  Frank must have coached him again and again for there was a perfection in the doggedness of his tone.

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t, Mrs. Craigne. I’ve been a very good friend to you.”

  “A friend to me!”

  “Yes,” he went on. “The police have been making inquiries everywhere about Matthews and where he went to that Saturday night. I might have told them a lot of things.”

  “Indeed? And what might you have told them?”

  “About seeing you go out in your car, and Matthews with you.”

  I imagine then she got to her feet with the pose of a tragedy queen.

  “My dear man, you must be mad. The police know I never left the Manor grounds that night.” There was a moment or two of silence, and then the tone altered. “This is blackmail. The best thing I can do is ring up the police.”

  “Very well, madam,” he said resignedly. “But if you do there’s one thing you ought to know. I wasn’t alone when I saw you with Matthews. I’ve got a witness. He doesn’t know it was Matthews because he hadn’t seen him before, but he can describe him to the police if I ask him.”

  “You’re mad,” she said again, but you could detect a faint anxiety. “You and your witness! It’s sheer
blackmail, Harper, and I’m not the sort to be blackmailed. If you’re genuinely in trouble I can let you have a little money. Ten pounds, say. But it’s not because of what you’ve said. Another threat of that sort and I’ll immediately get in touch with the police. The penalties for blackmail are pretty severe.”

  “Well, I’ll take the ten pounds,” Harper said, “but it’s no real use to me, and that’s a fact. You’ll have to make it more.”

  “Have to?” she asked dangerously.

  “Well, it’s for your own good.”

  “I’m giving you the ten pounds because I don’t want any bother. I’ve had enough worry lately as it is. In fact, if you could find Matthews for me, I’d be only too pleased to give you a hundred pounds. Here you are. Here’s your money.”

  “Ten pounds is no use to me.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” she told him. “But what I will do is think it over. If you can really convince me that you need the money, then I may possibly advance it to you. Come back and see me to-morrow.”

  There was a mumble which was partly his thanks and partly an inaudible question.

  “To-morrow morning, at about this time,” she told him. “But don’t rely on anything. I shall have a lot of questions to ask.”

  “And that’s that,” Frank was telling me over the ’phone. “Except for one highly suggestive thing. Half an hour later she went out and towards the suburbs. In Hammersmith Broadway she found a chemist’s shop and bought something to kill wasps.”

  “Good God!” I said. “Have you got Harper warned?”

  “He’s wise to her all right,” he said. “And that’s all for now. I might be with you some time to-morrow afternoon.”

  I was more scared about Harper than gratified at what Frank had found out. Then I had another idea which was almost as disturbing. Perhaps the cyanide was for herself, and yet it couldn’t be, for she was expecting Harper in the morning. And one thing she would certainly have to do, and Frank knew it just as well as I, and that was to get in touch with Sivley.

  The following morning George and I were out again, but I had taken the precaution of saying that I would have to get back to the inn for lunch, as I was expecting a private call. It was actually about two o’clock when I did get back to the Oak, and it was only half an hour later when Frank arrived. He’d had a snack at a road-house, he said, and so we went straight up to his room.

  “That woman’s desperate,” he said. “You were right. We can’t prove it, but she tried to do Harper in.”

  “Get on with it, man,” I told him impatiently.

  “You’ll hear it all on the disk,” he said, “but he kept the appointment and I’d primed him carefully. She asked him why he wanted the money and he spun her a yarn about training expenses for a fight. Said if he didn’t take the chance he’d never get another.

  “Then she talked to him like a mother. Said how wrong it was of him to tell such a wicked story, and how she would lend him the money because she knew Mr. Passman would have wished it. Then she held the cheque tantalisingly in her hand, and asked him to own up that he’d invented it all. He stuck to his ground and she shifted hers. He might have made a mistake himself, she said, and indeed he must have done, for the police knew she’d never been out of the house and gardens that night; but that tale about a witness must be a deliberate fabrication.

  “Now I’d instructed Harper to hedge a bit once he’d got the cheque in his hands, and he did so. All he now claimed was that he could get a witness if he wanted one, and from that he wouldn’t budge. Then she wrote a receipt and made him sign it. I’d anticipated that, and it had all about Harper’s training expenses in it.

  “But this is the part. While Harper was reading it and signing it, she went out of the room. When she came back she had a little tray with a drink on it. ‘Now you must have a drink, Harper, to show there’s no ill-feeling.’ ‘Oh, but this is something different,’ she said. ‘Something special I brought back from France.’ But he wouldn’t touch it. Said he was grateful and so on, and then out he went. He daren’t look at her, but I guess she was looking pretty murderous. I’d told him, by the way, to cash the cheque at once, and he did. In other words, she didn’t dare stop it. I’ve just brought him back with me to the Lapwings. Told him to cling on to the hundred and keep his mouth shut, and I said he needn’t worry about the receipt she held.”

  I couldn’t say anything for a moment or two, for I’d never taken quite seriously the hint that she might even try a new murder. When I did speak I had several questions.

  “If she’d killed him, how would she have disposed of the body?”

  “Got it into one of those big trunks of hers,” he said, “and had the porter get it down to the Rolls. Maybe she was in touch with Sivley to meet her somewhere on the road.”

  “Did Smith see her telephone?”

  “You’ve got to leave a lot to chance,” he said. “When she goes into one of the big stores, for instance, it’s best to keep tag on back and front entrances. A man could lose her once she’s inside, even if she weren’t trying to drop him. And naturally she didn’t use the central ’phone at the block of flats because they have an exchange check on all calls.”

  “The whole thing makes me shudder,” I said. “But how’d you get on with her personally?”

  There was no smile on his face as he said he’d given her the Hollywood introductions. He’d also rung her up at about eleven that morning to say he’d been called unexpectedly back to Brazenoak, but hoped to be seeing her again soon. He also said he would put in the post that night some of the pictures he’d taken at the Manor.

  “You’re looking very worried,” he said. “Aren’t you satisfied with the way things have worked out?”

  I patted him on the back.

  “If you were the sort who want praise I could give you plenty. But I am worried. We’re dead sure now it was she who disposed of Matthews, or got Sivley to do it, and everything’s telling me we ought to let Wharton know. And yet we can’t. There’d be the hell of a strafe if we did.”

  “Let things be for a day or two,” he said. “That’s my hunch. Something’s going to happen. I can feel it, just as these Brazenoak grandpops can feel rain.”

  His hunch was right, though the rain was nearer than he’d thought. That very night things began to happen, and one of them was something that neither he nor I had had the sense to anticipate.

  CHAPTER XIV

  THINGS HAPPEN

  I wonder if you have ever realized the difficulties of deduction and experienced the alternate optimisms and glooms that possess any seeker after truth. Something at one moment seems crystal clear for you have based it on unassailable premises. Then something goes wrong with a premise and the structure collapses, and all the mental processes must be gone through again. And you, in this story, are better off than I was. You are being told only the essentials. We had a score of unessentials that might have been vital.

  While I was having a bath before dinner I began to have doubts of that very kind, and no sooner had I dressed than I went into Frank’s room. He was a leisurely dresser, perhaps because he still saw something worth looking at in the mirror.

  “Suppose we’re all wrong about Queenie?” I asked. “Suppose that loan to Harper was a perfectly genuine one. Suppose that drink she offered him was a genuine one too.”

  “And suppose she didn’t buy any cyanide,” he told me, still adjusting his hair in the glass.

  “Yes, but suppose she wanted that for herself in case anything happened. Harper was a danger signal, you know.”

  “You leave everything to Harold,” he told me with a grin. “Wait till you listen to those disks. There’re all sorts of little subleties that tell a whole lot.” Then he was giving me his old cynical look. “You’re not suggesting that Queenie wouldn’t have been capable of poisoning Harper?”

  “I think she’s capable of anything under the sun,” I said whole-heartedly. “She’s cashed in on big stakes, and she’ll fight li
ke a wild cat to keep other people’s hands off.”

  “Is this the first time she’s really had big money?”

  “Now I come to think of it, it is,” I said. “She was brought up in a shiftless sort of set. Her father was the kind who bilks every tradesman he can and only pays when he knows he damn well must. The Manor was mortgaged up to the last penny and it was always a mystery to me how they all kept out of the bankruptcy court. Even when Queenie married Craigne the money wasn’t a lump sum. It was what he earned as he went along, and what with racing and entertaining and keeping this place and that going, his income was mortgaged for months ahead.”

  “Ah, well,” he said, and took my arm. “Let’s give it a rest. Wonder what’s happened to the old war-horse.”

  Wharton came in while we were having a short drink and he looked tired and dispirited. I went back upstairs with him and he told me he was thinking of abandoning that search for Matthews. Every likely spot had been tried and all there seemed to do was to wait till Sivley was apprehended.

  “You get on with your dinner,” he told me. “I mayn’t be down for some time yet.”

  “We’ll wait for you,” I said. “And cheer up, George. Something’s going to happen. I can feel it in my bones.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” he said, but looked as gloomy as before. I left him to it and went down to Frank.

  “We shall have to hand Wharton out something,” I said. “He’s as miserable as hell.”

  “There’s no dope we can hand him,” Frank said. “If only we could find real justification for that Harper business, then we might. As it is, we’re liable to six months apiece for unlawful entry and God knows what.”

  We took two more drinks into the lounge and waited for Wharton. Frank told me bluntly that I was as bad as Wharton, and the quicker I snapped out of it, the quicker my brain would start functioning again. I didn’t argue with his logic. What was wrong with my brain was that it was too fertile in ideas.