Silent Nights

by Martin Edwards

  Dukes, expansive no longer, his piggy eyes sunk deep in the fat of his face, asked Stansfield who the hell he thought he was.

  “I am an inquiry agent, employed by the Cosmopolitan Insurance Company. Before that, I was a Detective Inspector in the C.I.D. Here is my card.”

  Dukes barely glanced at it. “That’s all right, old man. Only wanted to make sure. Can’t trust anyone nowadays.” His voice had taken on the ingratiating, oleaginous heartiness of the small businessman trying to clinch a deal with a bigger one. “Just went for a stroll, y’know—stretch the old legs. Didn’t see a soul.”

  “Who were you expecting to see? Didn’t you wait for someone in the platelayers’ shack along there, and smoke a cigar while you were waiting? Who did you mistake me for when you said ‘What’s the idea, keeping me waiting half an hour’?”

  “Here, draw it mild, old man.” Percy Dukes sounded injured. “I certainly looked in at the hut: smoked a cigar for a bit. Then I toddled back to the train, and met up with your good self on the way. I didn’t make no appointment to meet—”

  “Oo! Well I must say,” interrupted Miss Blake virtuously. She could hardly wait to tell Stansfield that, on leaving the compartment shortly after Dukes, she’d overheard voices on the track below the lavatory window. “I recognized this gentleman’s voice,” she went on, tossing her head at Dukes. “He said something like, ‘You’re going to help us again, chum, so you’d better get used to the idea. You’re in it up to the neck—can’t back out now.’ And another voice, sort of mumbling, might have been Mr Kilmington’s—I dunno—sounded Scotch anyway—said, ‘All right. Meet you in five minutes: platelayers’ hut a few hundred yards up the line. Talk it over.’ ”

  “And what did you do then, young lady?” asked Stansfield. “You didn’t return to the compartment, I remember.”

  “I happened to meet a gentleman friend, farther up the train, and sat with him for a bit.”

  “Is that so?” remarked Macdonald menacingly. “Why, you four-flushing little—!”

  “Shut up!” commanded Stansfield.

  “Honest I did,” the girl said, ignoring Macdonald. “I’ll introduce you to him, if you like. He’ll tell you I was with him for, oh, half an hour or more.”

  “And what about Mr Macdonald?”

  “I’m not talking,” said the youth sullenly.

  “Mr Macdonald isn’t talking. Mrs Grant?”

  “I’ve been in this compartment ever since, sir.”

  “Ever since—?”

  “Since I went out to damp my hankie for this young lady, when she’d fainted. Mr Kilmington was just before me, you’ll mind. I saw him go through into the Guard’s van.”

  “Did you hear him say anything about walking to the village?”

  “No, sir. He just hurried into the van, and then there was some havers about it’s no’ being lockit this time, and how he was going to report the Guard for it—I didna listen any more, wishing to get back to the young lady. I doubt the wee man would be for reporting everyone.”

  “I see. And you’ve been sitting here with Mr Macdonald all the time?”

  “Yes, sir. Except for ten minutes or so he was out of the compartment, just after you’d left.”

  “What did you go out for?” Stansfield asked the young man.

  “Just taking the air, brother, just taking the air.”

  “You weren’t taking Mr Kilmington’s gold watch, as well as the air, by any chance?” Stansfield’s keen eyes were fastened like a hook into Macdonald’s, whose insolent expression visibly crumbled beneath them.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he tried to bluster. “You can’t do this to me.”

  “I mean that a man has been murdered: and, when the police search you, they will find his gold watch in your possession. Won’t look too healthy for you, my young friend.”

  “Naow! Give us a chance! It was only a joke, see?” The wretched Macdonald was whining now in his native cockney. “He got me riled—the stuck-up way he said nobody’d ever got the better of him. So I thought I’d just show him—I’d have given it back, straight I would, only I couldn’t find him afterwards. It was just a joke, I tell you. Anyway, it was Inez who lifted the ticker.”

  “You dirty little rotter!” screeched the girl.

  “Shut up, both of you! You can explain your joke to the police. Let’s hope they don’t die laughing.”

  At this moment the train gave a lurch, and started back up the gradient. It halted at the signal-box, for Stansfield to telephone to Tebay, then clattered south again.

  On Tebay platform, Stansfield was met by an Inspector and a Sergeant of the County Constabulary, with the Police Surgeon. No passengers were permitted to alight till he had had a few words with them. Then the four men boarded the train. After a brief pause in the Guard’s van, where the Police Surgeon drew aside the Guard’s black off-duty overcoat that had been laid over the body, and began his preliminary examination, they marched along to Stansfield’s compartment. The Guard who, at his request, had locked this as the train was drawing up at the platform and was keeping an eye on its occupants, now unlocked it. The Inspector entered.

  His first action was to search Macdonald. Finding the watch concealed on his person, he then charged Macdonald and Inez Blake with the theft. The Inspector next proceeded to make an arrest on the charge of wilful murder…

  ***

  But who did the Inspector arrest for the murder of the disagreeable Arthur J. Kilmington? And why? Nicholas Blake placed eight clues to the killer’s identity in the text (two major clues; six minor ones); they cover motive as well as method.

  Baffled? Read the story again—or meander through the rest of the stories in the book (there’s never any hurry over Christmas) and then read it once more.

  If you still can’t identify the who, the how, and the why—turn to pages 285 to 290 at the very end of the book, where all is revealed.

  The Name on the Window

  Edmund Crispin

  Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery (1922–1958), who wrote his first detective novel, The Case of the Gilded Fly, while still an undergraduate at Oxford. Crispin’s principal influences were Michael Innes, an Oxford academic and prolific author of detective and mainstream novels, and the Anglophile American John Dickson Carr, master of the “locked room” and “impossible crime” mystery.

  Seven more novels featuring Fen swiftly followed, but after The Long Divorce was published in 1952, there was a very long silence before Fen reappeared in another novel, The Glimpses of the Moon. Crispin burned out young as a crime writer, and although he achieved success as a musician and composer of film music, his creative gifts were eventually smothered by alcoholism. His short stories display the same exuberance as his novels, and showcase his flair for plot.

  ***

  Boxing Day; snow and ice; road-surfaces like glass under a cold fog. In the North Oxford home of the University Professor of English Language and Literature, at three minutes past seven in the evening, the front door bell rang.

  The current festive season had taken heavy toll of Fen’s vitality and patience; it had culminated, that afternoon, in a quite exceptionally tiring children’s party, amid whose ruins he was now recouping his energies with whisky; and on hearing the bell he jumped inevitably to the conclusion that one of the infants he had bundled out of the door half an hour previously had left behind it some such prized inessential as a false nose or a bachelor’s button, and was returning to claim this. In the event, however, and despite his premonitory groans, this assumption proved to be incorrect: his doorstep was occupied, he found, not by a dyspeptic, over-heated child with an unintelligible query, but by a neatly dressed greying man with a red tip to his nose and woebegone eyes.

  “I can’t get back,” said this apparition. “I really can’t get back to London tonight. The roads are
impassable and such trains as there are are running hours late. Could you possibly let me have a bed?”

  The tones were familiar; and by peering more attentively at the face, Fen discovered that that was familiar too. “My dear Humbleby,” he said cordially, “do come in. Of course you can have a bed. What are you doing in this part of the world, anyway?”

  “Ghost-hunting.” Detective Inspector Humbleby, of New Scotland Yard, divested himself of his coat and hat and hung them on a hook inside the door. “Seasonable but not convenient.” He stamped his feet violently, thereby producing, to judge from his expression, sensations of pain rather than of warmth; and stared about him. “Children,” he said with sudden gloom. “I dare say that one of the Oxford hotels—”

  “The children have left,” Fen explained, “and will not be coming back.”

  “Ah. Well, in that case—” And Humbleby followed Fen into the drawing-room, where a huge fire was burning and a slightly lop-sided Christmas tree, stripped of its treasures, wore tinsel and miniature witch-balls and a superincumbent fairy with a raffish air. “My word, this is better. Is there a drink, perhaps? I could do with some advice, too.”

  Fen was already pouring whisky. “Sit down and be comfortable,” he said. “As a matter of interest, do you believe in ghosts?”

  “The evidence for poltergeists,” Humbleby answered warily as he stretched out his hands to the blaze, “seems very convincing to me.…The Wesleys, you know, and Harry Price and so forth. Other sorts of ghosts I’m not so sure about—though I must say I hope they exist, if only for the purpose of taking that silly grin off the faces of the newspapers.” He picked up a battered tin locomotive from beside him on the sofa. “I say, Gervase, I was under the impression that your own children were all too old for—”

  “Orphans,” said Fen, jabbing at the siphon. “I’ve been entertaining orphans from a nearby Home.…But as regards this particular ghost you were speaking of—”

  “Oh, I don’t believe in that.” Humbleby shook his head decisively. “There’s an obscure sort of nastiness about the place it’s supposed to haunt—like a very sickly cake gone stale—and a man was killed there once, by a girl he was trying to persuade to certain practices she didn’t relish at all; but the haunting part of it is just silly gossip for the benefit of visitors.” Humbleby accepted the glass which Fen held out to him and brooded over it for a moment before drinking. “…Damned Chief Inspector,” he muttered aggrievedly, “dragging me away from my Christmas lunch because—”

  “Really, Humbleby”—Fen was severe—“you’re very inconsequent this evening. Where is this place you’re speaking of?”

  “Rydalls.”

  “Rydalls?”

  “Rydalls,” said Humbleby. “The residence,” he elucidated laboriously, “of Sir Charles Moberley, the architect. It’s about fifteen miles from here, Abingdon way.”

  “Yes, I remember it now. Restoration.”

  “I dare say. Old, in any case. And there are big grounds, with an eighteenth-century pavilion about a quarter of a mile away from the house, in a park. That’s where it happened—the murder, I mean.”

  “The murder of the man who tried to induce the girl—”

  “No, no. I mean, yes. That murder took place in the pavilion, certainly. But then, so did the other one—the one the day before yesterday, that’s to say.”

  Fen stared. “Sir Charles Moberley has been murdered?”

  “No, no, no. Not him. Another architect, another knight—Sir Lucas Welsh. There’s been quite a large house party going on at Rydalls, with Sir Lucas Welsh and his daughter Jane among the guests, and it was on Christmas Eve, you see, that Sir Lucas decided he wanted to investigate the ghost.”

  “This is all clear enough to you, no doubt, but—”

  “Do listen.…It seems that Sir Lucas is—was—credulous about ghosts, so on Christmas Eve he arranged to keep vigil alone in the pavilion and—”

  “And was murdered, and you don’t know who did it.”

  “Oh yes, I do. Sir Lucas didn’t die at once, you see: he had time to write up his murderer’s name in the grime of the window-pane, and the gentleman concerned, a young German named Otto Mörike, is now safely under arrest. But what I can’t decide is how Mörike got in and out of the pavilion.”

  “A locked-room mystery.”

  “In the wider sense, just that. The pavilion wasn’t actually locked, but—”

  Fen collected his glass from the mantelpiece, where he had put it on rising to answer the door-bell. “Begin,” he suggested, “at the beginning.”

  “Very well.” Settling back in the sofa, Humbleby sipped his whisky gratefully. “Here, then, is this Christmas house party at Rydalls. Host, Sir Charles Moberley, the eminent architect.…Have you ever come across him?”

  Fen shook his head.

  “A big man, going grey: in some ways rather boisterous and silly, like a rugger-playing medical student in a state of arrested development. Unmarried; private means—quite a lot of them, to judge from the sort of hospitality he dispenses; did the Wandsworth power-station and Beckford Abbey, among other things; athlete; a simple mind, and generous, I should judge, in that jealous sort of way which resents generosity in anyone else. Probably tricky, in some respects—he’s not the kind of person I could ever feel completely at ease with.

  “A celebrity, however: unquestionably that. And Sir Lucas Welsh, whom among others he invited to this house party, was equally a celebrity, in the same line of business. Never having seen Sir Lucas alive, I can’t say much about his character, but—”

  “I think,” Fen interrupted, “that I may have met him once, at the time when he was designing the fourth quadrangle for my college. A small dark person, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And with a tendency to be nervy and obstinate.”

  “The obstinacy there’s evidence for, certainly. And I gather he was also a good deal of a faddist—Yogi, I mean, and the Baconian hypothesis, and a lot of other intellectual—um—detritus of the same dull, obvious kind: that’s where the ghost-vigil comes in. Jane, his daughter and heiress (and Sir Lucas was if anything even better off than Sir Charles) is a pretty little thing of eighteen of whom all you can really say is that she’s a pretty little thing of eighteen. Then there’s Mörike, the man I’ve arrested: thin, thirtyish, a Luftwaffe pilot during the war, and at present an architecture student working over here under one of these exchange schemes the Universities are always getting up—which accounts for Sir Charles’ knowing him and inviting him to the house party. Last of the important guests—important from the point of view of the crime, that is—is a C.I.D. man (not Metropolitan, Sussex County) called James Wilburn. He’s important because the evidence he provides is quite certainly reliable—there has to be a point d’appui in these affairs, and Wilburn is it, so you mustn’t exhaust yourself doubting his word about anything.”

  “I won’t,” Fen promised. “I’ll believe him.”

  “Good. At dinner on Christmas Eve, then, the conversation turns to the subject of the Rydalls ghost—and I’ve ascertained that the person responsible for bringing this topic up was Otto Mörike. So far, so good: the Rydalls ghost was a bait Sir Lucas could be relied on to rise to, and rise to it he did, arranging eventually with his rather reluctant host to go down to the pavilion after dinner and keep watch there for an hour or two. The time arriving, he was accompanied to the place of trial by Sir Charles and by Wilburn—neither of whom actually entered the pavilion. Wilburn strolled back to the house alone, leaving Sir Charles and Sir Lucas talking shop. And presently Sir Charles, having seen Sir Lucas go into the pavilion, retraced his steps likewise, arriving at the house just in time to hear the alarm-bell ringing.”

  “Alarm-bell?”

  “People had watched for the ghost before, and there was a bell installed in the pavilion for them to ring if
for any reason they wanted help.…This bell sounded, then, at shortly after ten o’clock, and a whole party of people, including Sir Charles, Jane Welsh and Wilburn, hastened to the rescue.

  “Now, you must know that this pavilion is quite small. There’s just one circular room to it, having two windows (both very firmly nailed up); and you get into this room by way of a longish, narrow hall projecting from the perimeter of the circle, the one and only door being at the outer end of this hall.”

  “Like a key-hole,” Fen suggested. “If you saw it from the air it’d look like a key-hole, I mean; with the round part representing the room, and the part where the wards go in representing the entrance-hall, and the door right down at the bottom.”

  “That’s it. It stands in a clearing among the trees of the park, on a very slight rise—inferior Palladian in style, with pilasters or whatever you call them: something like a decayed miniature classical temple. No one’s bothered about it for decades, not since that earlier murder put an end to its career as a love-nest for a succession of squires. What is it Eliot says?—something about lusts and dead limbs? Well, anyway, that’s the impression it gives. A house is all right, because a house has been used for other things as well—eating and reading and births and deaths and so on. But this place has been used for one purpose and one purpose only, and that’s exactly what it feels like.…

  “There’s no furniture in it, by the way. And until the wretched Sir Lucas unlocked its door, no one had been inside it for two or three years.

  “To get back to the story, then.

  “The weather was all right: you’ll remember that on Christmas Eve none of this snow and foulness had started. And the rescue-party, so to call them, seem to have regarded their expedition as more or less in the nature of a jaunt; I mean that they weren’t seriously alarmed at the ringing of the bell, with the exception of Jane, who knew her father well enough to suspect that he’d never have interrupted his vigil, almost as soon as it had begun, for the sake of a rather futile practical joke; and even she seems to have allowed herself to be half convinced by the reassurances of the others. On arrival at the pavilion, they found the door shut but not locked; and when they opened it, and shone their torches inside, they saw a single set of footprints in the dust on the hall floor, leading to the entrance to the circular room. Acting on instinct or training or both, Wilburn kept his crowd clear of these footprints; and so it was that they came—joined now by Otto Mörike, who according to his subsequent statement had been taking a solitary stroll in the grounds—to the scene of the crime.