The Case of the Magic Mirror: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  “A gentleman’s been looking everywhere for you, sir.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “Gone off in a car, sir. A police van, it was.”

  The words were more of a question but I didn’t rise to it. All I said was that I was going back to town and the gentleman would get in touch with me there. Then I made my way to a compartment; not the one in which I had come, for I’d have smelt that cyanide and thought of too many things. I thought of too many as it was.

  I felt hungry when I got back to town, and that was a good sign. I had tea in a little place near Liverpool Street and then took a taxi home. Palmer was there, and he said I was looking tired.

  “Anybody ring up for me?” I wanted to know.

  Nobody had rung, he said, and then when I was having a clean up, the telephone bell went. Wharton was on the line.

  “You’re a nice one,” he said. “What’d you go back to town for?”

  “Just something I had to do,” I said lamely.

  “And a damn nice trick you played on me,” he said. “Letting me think to the very last moment it was Sivley. But how the hell did you know it was Rupert Craigne!”

  CHAPTER XVII

  FULL CIRCLE

  I had a leisurely dinner, wrote some rough notes on what I had to tell Wharton, and then rang Frank. He was so eager to know what had happened that it was a minute before we unsorted ourselves. Then he told me he’d seen a sensational report in the evening papers about an arrest in the Brazenoak murders, and was it true.

  “It’s true enough,” I began. “But they haven’t got the really ghastly thing. Charlotte Craigne swallowed some cyanide before Wharton’s men could grab her.”

  “You should worry,” he told me cynically. “And what about meeting somewhere and you telling me all about it?”

  “I’m not going over things twice,” I said. “Wharton hopes to be here somewhere round about nine. You’re supposed to be sailing for home on Monday, so what about coming round to say good-bye? Not at nine. Make it a quarter to. By the way, Wharton says he’s got some surprises up his sleeve for me.”

  It was well before time when Frank turned up. Even before I’d given him a drink he was wondering how I could tell him all about everything in front of Wharton.

  “You won’t be here,” I said. “I’ve told Palmer that as soon as Wharton appears, you’re going in the kitchen. If the door’s ajar you’ll hear everything. Listen for a cue when he gets up to go and nip round to the door bell.”

  “Fine,” he said. “But you’ll have to skate over some thin ice, won’t you?”

  “It won’t be the first time,” I told him. “One thing I’ll bet you a couple of dinners on. Wharton’ll claim to have had his eye on Charlotte Craigne all along.”

  He hadn’t the pluck to take me on. Then before we’d time for a second quick one, the lift was heard. Out went the glasses and Frank with them, and when Palmer showed Wharton in, I was dozing in my favourite chair.

  “Hallo, George,” I said. “You’re a bit early. Have a drink.”

  “It’ll have to be a quick one then,” he said. “I’m due to start back to Brazenoak in under an hour.”

  Before Palmer could bring the glasses, he was asking me how I got on to that Rupert Craigne business. I began by telling him about that Adam mirror and the dirty trick I thought Charlotte Craigne had played on me.

  “You didn’t tell me about that,” he told me accusingly.

  “I didn’t know what it all added up to till just before I rang you up yesterday,” I said. “This is how it was. I was sitting in the lounge at the Oak and. I caught sight of Mrs. Porter in the mirror above the mantelpiece. You know that funny little trick she has of rubbing her nose? And you remember the little nervous trick Rupert Craigne had of twitching his neck, and how I called your attention to it when he did it in court at Chelmsford? Well, I began to think about mirrors and tricks, and then I suddenly wondered what Matthews had really seen. It seemed to me that after all he couldn’t have seen Charlotte Craigne and Sivley, because he’d have seen that before the Saturday. Even when Charlotte Craigne and I got back from Trimport he was reasonably all right. The tremendous fluster only occurred after he’d heard about the death of Rupert Craigne. That made me think further.

  “I thought how Rupert Craigne was socially dead and damned. He had to get money to live on, and he wanted to live with his wife. Now one of the complications of this case was that we were dealing with an accomplished and unscrupulous liar in Charlotte Craigne. We didn’t know what to credit and what to disbelieve. I thought that when she said she was still mad about Rupert she was naturally telling lies. She wasn’t. She was with him up to the hilt. She wanted money and she wanted Rupert, and Passman was in the way. When I knew that I knew that all that window-smashing and haranguing crowds was part of a perfectly organised scheme. It kept the old swindle before the public, and therefore it kept Sivley’s threat in everyone’s mind. I dare say, by the way, that it was Rupert Craigne who sent the anonymous letters about Passman. The thing is, however, that everyone still knew that if Craigne himself and Passman were killed, then only Sivley could have done it.

  “And what I also knew about Rupert Craigne was that in spite of his affectations, he was a very fine actor, and a master of make-up. Even that famous Jupiter make-up was superb, considering what he looked like before. I also remembered that for some weeks Rupert Craigne had been dormant, so this is how I began to work things out. What he did was to make his headquarters at some convenient spot for both Trimport and Brazenoak—say Ipswich or Colchester—and with his beard off and hair dyed black, to build up a wholly new character, whom we can call X. Then at the psychological moment, which was when that cricket week at Trimport was approaching, Charlotte Craigne made her prearranged approaches to me. She wanted me to be a witness to Rupert’s death, and because she had an idea that my evidence if required, would carry considerable weight. That same evidence would include her distress, her venomous anger against Sivley, and the putting firmly into my mind the fact that only Sivley could have done it, and finally alibis for both herself and Rupert, in the rare event of police suspicion, for Joe Passman’s murder.

  “Here’s a record of what she told me over the telephone that morning. I’ll go into it in detail when I make my full report, but perhaps you can follow it enough to see how all my suspicions began to be confirmed. She said she had got up early—it was about eight o’clock—became Joe might come down at any moment. As a matter of fact he never got down before half-past nine. She urged me to hurry to Brazenoak, and yet she kept me hanging about when I did get there. And why? Because Rupert’s stunt was timed for half-past eleven and she didn’t want me there before.

  “And now as to how Craigne did it. He knew when Sivley was coming out. Sivley went straight to London. Did Craigne meet him there? Or was Charlotte Craigne the go-between? I don’t know, but I think it certain that Craigne had Sivley on a string. Maybe he promised him money or a job, and of course he’d try to explain away the double-crossing in the swindling ease. After all, Craigne had been Sivley’s employer, and class will always tell. At any rate I’d say that Craigne met Sivley near Trimport and killed him. He stripped the body and then or later he put Sivley’s prints on a plate which was to be left in the bungalow. He hid the motor-bike somewhere handy, and next day he was Sivley. As Sivley he hired the bungalow. As for Sivley’s body, a search ought to find it somewhere in the neighbourhood.”

  “That’s where I’ve got a surprise for you,” Wharton cut in. “The Ipswich police got an anonymous letter—or as good as anonymous—about a pond in some old brick workings, and what do you think? Sivley’s body was found there this very afternoon, and stark naked except for an undervest.”

  “That’s really good news,” I said. “Craigne took everything off him, even to the shoes. If you remember, they were exactly the same height and build. But about the rest of it. Craigne fixed it to have a boat ready on the Saturday morning. In his charac
ter of X., the man with short black hair and a black jowl and certain other alterations, he came to Trimport by train. Under his clothes he had on a vivid emerald bathing costume. In the woods near where the boat would be, or else in his bungalow, he fixed his golden beard and a golden wig and was once more Rupert Craigne. Once in the boat he threw the clothes back to the boatman. I don’t know why he didn’t lay them in the boat. Perhaps his idea was to get into the public eye at the earliest moment, but what I do want to impress on you is this. He kept his back turned to the boatman. And why? Because the front of his bathing costume had a slight bulge in it. The bulge was an ordinary dark blue costume, and probably there was also a pistol or some contraption that would make a noise like a gun when you pulled a string. I’d been wondering, by the way, why the rifle with which Sivley was supposed to have shot Craigne was never found, and I also call your attention to something you may not know. The boatman was expecting Craigne to row out beyond the bar so as to take his swim in comparative privacy. That boatman had known Craigne well in the old days, and therefore he knew, what I didn’t, that Craigne was an exceptionally good swimmer.

  “The rest is easy. Rupert Craigne, as Rupert Craigne, rowed out to beyond the bar, pricked his finger to make a blood spot or two and then began haranguing the crowd. There he was, in that vivid bathing suit and the sun on his gold hair and beard. At a suitable moment he produced the crack of a shot, and that moment was when he saw my car draw up and Charlotte flutter the handkerchief with which she was ready to wipe her eyes. His hands went to his breast, then he fell, and if there was any contraption, he took it into the water with him. Then he swam under water for the edge of the crowd, and while under water he took off the green bathing suit and tucked it inside the breast of the blue one which he’d either put on or which was already under it. As you know, you can keep under water the devil of a time. Inside that blue costume also went the beard and wig. Maybe he put plumpers into his cheeks too, but when he bobbed up, there he was, simply an ordinary bather. Everybody’s eyes were on the boat. After that flaming vision of Rupert Craigne who’d he interested in a perfectly ordinary man with short black hair and in a blue suit?”

  “All he had to do after that was to make his way to the bungalow, and, remember, with the eyes of every man, woman and child turned towards that boat. In the bungalow he got into Sivley’s clothes and off he went on the motor-bike. Now he was Sivley again, and as Sivley he killed Passman. He wanted to be seen as Sivley, and he took care to be seen—at a distance. Probably he scouted round and saw where a gardener was. What he didn’t know was that when he was hiding in that shrubbery, Matthews must have seen him, and that would be when Matthews brought the tankard at half-past twelve. Probably Craigne was looking cautiously out of the shrubbery, and had one of those twitching fits. At any rate Matthews spotted him. It puzzled him and it worried him, and then when the news of Craigne’s death was received, Matthews knew he’d seen a ghost! Maybe that’s what he wanted to tell me that night. He was going to ask me if I believed in ghosts. He wouldn’t worry Charlotte Craigne by asking her that.

  “When I worked that out I could guess what Charlotte Craigne thought when she wormed out of Matthews what he’d intended to tell me in my private ear. She got in touch with Rupert and I could guess what he thought too. I also remembered how she’d boasted that Matthews would do anything for her, and everyone knew the old chap thought the world of her. She could spin any yarn to him. Maybe she told him that there’d been a mistake about Rupert’s death. Rupert was alive and needed help. Any such yarn would have done, and then she picked him up in her car and took him to where Rupert was waiting. I doubt if even Charlotte Craigne had the nerve to see Matthews killed. I’ll give her that credit. All the same, the killing was something that had to be done. And that reminds me of something else. She threw a real faint when she was told about Joe’s murder. I wondered why and I couldn’t make it add up right, for she must have known what Rupert intended. What I think now is that the faint was a genuine collapse. Even a hell-cat like Charlotte Craigne couldn’t last out after the strain of what had happened and what she was anticipating.

  “As for Rupert, I worked it out that he went back to Ipswich or Colchester as X. Everything had panned out beautifully. The hue and cry was out for Sivley, Charlotte had a good slab of her money, and all there was to do was to make a quiet exit from this country. I think the idea was to cross to the Continent where both would be immediately safe, and so ultimately to either North or South America when everything seemed absolutely safe. But something else happened, and clean out of the blue. Harper saw Charlotte Craigne in her car that night and he tried to put the screw on her. Perhaps you let on to her that Harper was swearing he’d seen her car or she guessed it somehow, but at any rate, there was somebody else to be removed. This time Craigne bungled it. But the pair had the wind up, and the getaway was decided on for Saturday. Craigne, I suppose, had a false passport?”

  “In a way, yes,” Wharton said. “It was a new one, made out for what you called Mr. X.”

  “Well, that’s roughly that,” I said. “I don’t think any of us can be blamed for not having rumbled Rupert Craigne. Everything was so obvious in an entirely different way. All that remains now, to clear everything up, is to find poor old Matthews’s body.”

  “Ah!” said Wharton. “I knew I’d have a surprise for you. You aren’t the only one who can produce a rabbit out of the hat. I’ve found his body.”

  “You have!”

  “Oh, yes.” He gave himself a nod of approbation. “Mind you, I’ve had my eye on that Mrs. Craigne. I don’t always let out everything I know. I’m like some people; I know when to keep things under my hat. You didn’t know that I’d made some more inquiries at the Manor, but this is what I found out. On the Saturday night Mrs. Craigne had a meal in her bedroom, and she had breakfast there the following morning, and lunch the next day. She wouldn’t let the maid clean the room up, but said she might be lying down again—of all the cock-and-bull yarns. Also on the Sunday morning she saw the head gardener and had Mr. Passman’s grave dug there and then, and dug deep. It was ready on the Monday morning, for I saw it myself, but after it was dug she had it covered with a tarpaulin to keep any possible rain out. That tarpaulin wasn’t removed till just before the coffin was lowered, and none of the gardening or other staff was at the graveside. Now do you see it?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Events prove it. She got in touch with her husband, told Matthews some yarn, picked him up in her car and merely circled round the garage again. Then Matthews was taken through the shrubbery to the lower gardens, where Craigne met him. The body was hidden and Craigne spent the night and the next day in her room. Remember that there wouldn’t be a soul near those lower gardens on a Sunday night, which was when Matthews’s body was put in the grave and some earth on top. At any rate, that’s where the body was found this evening.”

  “You got Home Office permission to remove Joe’s coffin?”

  “Oh, no. The ground slopes sharply away. We tunnelled underneath. I’m due back there now to finish the job in the early morning.”

  “Damn good work, George,” I said.

  “You were in it too,” he told me. “Remember what I said at the Oak one day? You and I haven’t lost a case yet.” Then he was frowning. “Mind you, there are two mighty queer things I can’t get to the bottom of. For the life of me I can’t work out who it was that was making those inquiries about Sivley.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” I said airily. “Probably it was Rupert Craigne, trying to throw us off the scent.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But there’s something else. You saw the mistake the papers made, saying Harper was dead. Well, what do you think? Damned if they didn’t ring me up and ask why I’d made the mistake. I, mind you! They swore blind I’d rung some agency or other from Ipswich and said he was dead. I blasted hell out of them. But what do you make of it? Damn funny, isn’t it?”

  “Probably
they got the name wrong,” I said. “But wait a minute, though. Why shouldn’t it have been Craigne impersonating you? It could have been done, you know. Yours isn’t too difficult a voice.”

  That was a bad brick to drop. George is proud of his resonant baritone, so no wonder he glared.

  “But it could be done,” I insisted. “After all, look at your own magnificent impersonation of that Belgian. Magnificent isn’t the word. It was colossal. It was a masterpiece!”

  “Well, it served its purpose,” he told me with false modesty, and got to his feet. “About time I was getting on my way. You wouldn’t like to come down with me?”

  “Don’t you remember I’m expecting Franks? He’s sailing on Monday and is coming round to say good-bye. But why all the hurry? Have another drink before you go.”

  He said he wouldn’t, but I’d made time for Frank. The bell rang and in a minute Palmer was admitting the caller.

  “Well,” said Frank, smiles wreathing his face, “this is a pleasant surprise!”

  “And for me too,” Wharton said as he held out his hand. “Mr. Travers tells me you’re leaving us.”

  “What about the three of us having a farewell drink?” I cut in. “You’re not in all that hurry, George.”

  “But I am,” he said. “I’m overdue now. You’ll excuse me, Mr. Franks, if I hurry away. Duty is duty.”

  “Sure,” said Frank, and held out his hand again. “It’s been a great privilege meeting you, Superintendent. Something I shall recall a good many times when I’m back home.”

  “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, sir,” Wharton said him. Then he looked at me and sighed heavily. “Well, the best of friends must part, as they say. . . . I wonder.”

  “Wonder what, George?”

  “Well, in the words of the immortal Bard, ‘When shall we three meet again?’”

  “I guess you’re a Shakespearian scholar, sir,” Frank said. I daren’t look at him, for if I’d caught his eye he’d probably have had the impudence to give me a wink. “Now there’s only one quotation I’ve ever remembered, and it seems to suit this occasion. ‘Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone.’”