Bodies from the Library

by Tony Medawar

  Not unnaturally, Hilary felt thoroughly aggrieved that fate, after seeming to relent, should now be preparing to turn him adrift in the world once more. He took the obvious course for a man in his position. He chose an evening when his aunt was feeling better than usual, and then, very tactfully, raised the question of her will.

  Mrs Prothero laughed outright when the subject was mentioned.

  ‘Have I made a will?’ she said. ‘Bless you, child, yes! I left all my money to—let me see, what was it?—missions to China, I think—or it may have been Polynesia. I can’t remember, but I know it was missions of some sort. Blenkinsop, the lawyer, will tell you which. He has it still I suppose. I was very keen on missionaries when I was a girl. I nearly married one, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘You made this will when you were a girl, Aunt Mary?’

  ‘The day I was twenty-one. It was your grandfather’s idea that everyone should make a will on coming of age. Not that I had anything to leave—then.’

  Hilary’s heart, which had sunk at the mention of Polynesian missions, leaped again.

  ‘Didn’t you make another will when you married?’ he asked.

  His aunt shook her head, ‘There was no need for it,’ she said. ‘I had nothing and Johnny had everything. Then after Johnny went, I had plenty to leave and nobody to leave it to.’ She looked at Hilary deliberately. ‘Perhaps now I’d better see Mr Blenkinsop again,’ she suggested.

  Hilary assured her that there was no need for anything to be done in haste and changed the subject. A visit to the local public library next confirmed him in his belief that by marrying Mr Prothero his aunt had effectually destroyed the efficacy of her early will. As her only living relative, his future was assured.

  Within a few months, however, it was not so much the future as the problems of the present that were weighing upon Hilary. The change in his aunt’s condition foretold by the doctor had occurred. She took to her bed, and it was morally certain that she would never rise from it.

  At the same time, he was more than usually in need of cash. He had expensive tastes and presuming on Aunt Mary’s kindness he had run up some accounts which, taken together, came to a staggering sum.

  Unfortunately, with increasing illness, Mrs Prothero became more and more difficult to approach on matters of money. Racked with pain and able to sleep only with the aid of soporifics, she was positively querulous when the subject was mentioned.

  Finally, they had something approaching a quarrel over a mere matter of £10, in the course of which she accused him outright of being ‘after her money’.

  Aunt Mary, Hilary reflected, was not herself. He bore her no ill will. Her selfish attitude was the result of her sad condition. Remembering the doctor’s words, he asked himself whether it was a kindness to her to wish her to go on living.

  He slept on that problem and when, the next morning, his aunt told him that she had decided to send for Mr Blenkinsop, he came to the clear conclusion that the greatest possible kindness he could do to the poor old soul—and incidentally to himself—would be to double the strength of her sleeping draught that night.

  It proved more easy than he had dared to hope. As though anxious to fall in with his plans, Mrs Prothero herself suggested to the old servant who was nursing her that she should take the evening off to attend to her own affairs, leaving her nephew to give her the drug which the woman was to prepare before she went out.

  All that Hilary had then to do was to dissolve another two tablets in the glass which already contained the prescribed dose. lt would be simple to explain—if explanation were ever called for—that he had misunderstood the arrangement and made an unfortunate mistake. Nobody would suspect a devoted nephew.

  Mrs Prothero took the glass from her nephew’s hand with a look of gratitude.

  ‘Thank you, Hilary,’ she said. ‘I am longing for sleep. To sleep and not wake up again would be the happiest thing for me.’

  She looked at him fixedly. ‘Is that what you intend me to do, Hilary? I have given you your chance. Forgive me if my suspicions of you are wrong. Old invalids get these ideas, you know. I shall make amends tomorrow, if I am alive then. Mr Blenkinsop is coming here and I shall make my will in your favour.

  ‘If I die tonight, I am afraid you will be disappointed, and some mission or another will be the richer. You see, Johnny Prothero never married me. He had a wife who wouldn’t divorce him. That was what shocked your silly old father so much …

  ‘No, Hilary, don’t try to take the glass away. That would tell me too much, and I’d rather not be told. Good-night. Hilary …’

  Then, very deliberately, she raised the glass to her lips and drank it off.

  CYRIL HARE

  Cyril Hare, whose real name was Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, was born in 1900 in Surrey. In 1920, after graduating with a First in Modern History from Oxford, Clark was admitted to the Inner Temple, one of the prestigious Inns of Court, and he was called to the Bar in 1924. While he had written short pieces for Punch and other magazines, his first substantial criminous work was a play, Murder in Daylesford Gardens; it is unclear if this was performed but it was possibly written for a dramatic society within the Temple.

  A few years later Clark revised the play but again no details of any performances have been confirmed; and he then used it as the basis of his first novel, Tenant for Death, published in 1937 in which the detective is Inspector Mallett, a policeman drawn more realistically than most of his fictional contemporaries but with a prodigious appetite and as blunt as his name suggests.

  Tenant for Death appeared under the nom de plume of Cyril Hare, a pseudonym derived from two London addresses: his home in Cyril Mansions in Battersea, and his place of work, Hare Court Chambers. While continuing to practise as a barrister in Kingston and in London, Clark also carried on writing crime fiction. His most famous novel Tragedy at Law, was published in 1942 and drew on his pre-war experience as a judge’s marshal. The novel introduced Francis Pettigrew, a witty and capable barrister who helps to unravel mysteries in a casual and generally reluctant way. Pettigrew appears in five novels, in three alongside Mallett, and both appear alone in novels and short stories.

  The law provided Clark with background and ideas for other detective novels as did his squirearchical hobbies, hunting and fishing and one, the slyly satirical With a Bare Bodkin, draws on his wartime work in the Ministry of Economic Warfare. He wrote one radio play, Murder at Warbeck Hall, first broadcast in 1948, and he later turned this into first a novel, An English Murder, and then a stage play, The House of Warbeck, a ‘political thriller’ that had its first performance in September 1955. Clark also wrote many short stories for a variety of magazines including The Sketch and The Illustrated London News as well as for the London Evening Standard, which carried daily short stories for over forty years, and other newspapers.

  In 1946, Clark was elected a member of the Detection Club and, despite contracting tuberculosis around this time, he played an active part in its social activities, for example portraying Sherlock Holmes in a playlet by John Dickson Carr.

  In 1950, Clark was appointed a County Court Judge on the Surrey circuit, which is where he had lived as a child and was the setting for some of his books, including That Yew Tree’s Shade (1954). He died at his home in 1957.

  ‘The Euthanasia of Hilary’s Aunt’ was first published in the London Evening Standard on 4 December 1950.

  THE GIRDLE OF DREAMS

  Vincent Cornier

  The elderly lady had a withered and weasel aspect; a sandy and bloodless look. Her air and attitude engendered the curious impression that here was something out of the hedgerows’ dust, frightened and about to squeak. A narrow and beady eyed personage—the very pince-nez through which she flickered her glinting hazel glances seemed set across her nose to stridulate its bony string with a tarnished golden bow.

  Her dress was horrific comedy. She wore a gabardine and a sealskin tippet. A turmoil of saffron velvet, maybe an old-fashioned t
oque, was on her nodding head. And she had a veil; a lugubrious downfall of maroon netting spotted with grey chenille. Her face was rather alarmingly framed by its poke of rusty shadows, like something ceraceous in a cowl. Mr Lionel Blayne, senior partner of the firm Messrs Blayne, Ridley and Cowperthwaite, Court Jewellers, of New Bond Street, happily refused to believe in it …

  ‘Now my dear sir,’ he chuckled richly. ‘I am quite prepared to contribute my mite—but I can’t resist taking the wind out of your sails. You’ve just to say overdone it, my lad.’

  Rodent teeth were revealed by the elderly lady’s open mouth. She had lifted her veil to speak, and Mr Blayne was suddenly horrified. This was certainly not a man’s mouth. Those moles and that sparse hairiness of the upper lip were in no sense masculine. Mr Lionel Blayne realised he had made a frightful mistake.

  And this was a woman’s voice: ‘I beg your pardon. Am I to understand you are addressing me?’

  ‘I—I am terribly sorry, madam,’ Mr Blayne stammered and went white, ‘but—but I thought you were—’

  He stopped at that, mortified and more sick at heart than he had ever been. He could not even explain. How could he tell this eccentric dame that he had mistaken her for one of the fantastically garbed and turned out medical students who were thronging the West End, making a Christmas collection for their particular hospital? He had seen them when he arrived for business. Most of them wore operating-theatre gowns and caps, but quite a number were daubed with grease paint and decorated with false hair and decked in hideous caricatures of bye-gone fashion. He had honestly erred in thinking the elderly lady was one of these jovial masqueraders.

  Looking anywhere but into those scintillant hazel eyes, Mr Blayne saw the stolid form of Sergeant Everard, the commissionaire, standing at steady ease in the fan-lighted Georgian doorway. He had the same peculiar ‘set’ about him that he reserved completely for the duchesses, the marchionesses and the occasional ‘royals’ who patronised the discreet and sombrely quiet old shop; for these and none less. Therefore, argued the spinning mind of Mr Lionel Blayne, the elderly lady’s atrocious ensemble must have impressed Everard with its authenticity—he would have been the first to pounce on a glad-ragged student. Then Mr Blayne chanced to glimpse the magnificent drop pearl earrings worn by the elderly lady … Everard would know a pearl of price when he saw one; maybe they had convinced his sober mind.

  ‘Whoever you thought I was, Mr—Mr—?’

  ‘Blayne.’

  ‘Mr Blayne is immaterial to my purpose in coming here.’ The elderly lady talked with precision but in the magical music which must have held the wedding guest, apart from the ancient mariner’s glittering eye: a cold, light, silken voice. ‘We may discard the incident, don’t you think?’

  Now the elderly lady smiled. Smile was as voice. Mr Blayne blinked and felt a gentle caress go under his scanty hair—a lovely touch of interest. Maybe the lady was not so incongruous as he had at first supposed; maybe Sergeant Everard had no reason for amaze. He was driving at a decision that she was far better looking and far better dressed than he instantly realised …

  ‘With my apologies, madam,’ bowed Mr Blayne, ‘and in what way might I be of use to you?’

  The elderly lady looked around the simply lighted shop. Not a soul save Mr Blayne was visible. Only Mr Blayne, and great grave glowings of gold, the fierce and frozen rainbows of diamonds and the evenings of emerald and sapphire, the dawns of turquoise and of pearl, with a touch of discreet Christmas decorations. The elderly lady smiled like a warm cat. The mesmeric potency of her eyes was also feline.

  ‘I seem to have come at the wrong hour,’ she said. ‘I often heard that Bond Street has only one hour in a day for business. I’m sure this can’t be it.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Mr Blayne was very anxious to be pleasant, ‘I was about to leave for luncheon. But, of course, that doesn’t very much count—can I show you anything?’

  ‘I rather wanted to show you something,’ the elderly lady replied. ‘I would like to sell you’—she fumbled in the capacious pockets of her sizeable gabardine and pulled out a clanking line of gold—‘this.’

  Mr Lionel Blayne was so highly trained in his craft that he had the piece identified before the elderly lady had freed it from her coat. And so swiftly thinking was Mr Blayne, he had a thick chamois leather swept across the glass top of the counter to receive the careless dumping. It would never do to have a treasure of this sort injured.

  ‘A sixteenth century chiavacuore,’ he breathed, ‘of Italian workmanship, I think.’

  ‘Mr Blayne,’ the elderly lady still smiled, ‘if you are capable of such a feat of identification as that, you might also be capable of perfectly open dealings. I hope so—otherwise I must take this elsewhere. Of Italian workmanship, Indeed.’

  My Lionel Blayne picked up the bridal girdle and let its weight soothe his unsteady hands. His eyes feasted on its beauty. It was a small belt formed of intaglio medallions, all jewelled and profoundly chased, linked together by diamond-studded chainrings. Its clasp was a bulbous foam of silver-gilt and gems representing lilies and roses enshrouding a tiny heart. The heart was cloven by a trifling blade—a lean silver crescent like a scimitar—and the two parts concealed the minute engine of the cunning locks which kept the girdle closed.

  Only one man could have fashioned the exquisite work. Mr Blayne quite reverently breathed his name:

  ‘Benvenuto Cellini, without a doubt—’

  ‘And wrought when he was at the height of his powers,’ the elderly lady gently insisted, ‘after his return from the French Court. This example was probably executed in Florence, in the hey-day of Cosimo the First.’ There was a faint suggestion of ‘and that’s that’ in the lady’s otherwise impeccable survey.

  ‘A golden chiavacuore without parallel, I am beginning to believe, and, Mr Blayne, I think I’ve examined every museum piece extant.’ She laughed. ‘You see, I have been curious.’

  In the last analysis Mr Blayne was a shrewd man of business. He was slightly afraid he had trapped himself, by a devotee enthusiasm, to the detriment of the communal pocket of Messrs Blayne, Ridley and Cowperthwaite. This elderly lady was no fool. Her bargaining, he surmised, was going to be hard driven; since she knew exactly what her treasure was, it was certain she had its uttermost price in mind as well. Mr Blayne became prim and non-committal.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind going forward, madam, he insinuated, ‘I’ll run my lens over this in my private room. One cannot traffic with such rarities in the usual way, over the counter, you know.’

  ‘I quite appreciate that,’ said the elderly lady. ‘I haven’t the slightest objection to your taking up the whole day with your examination. You’ll find this girdle genuine.’

  ‘Now, madam, in here if you please.’ Mr Blayne put on his most courtly air. He opened a door and the elderly lady swept forward into the dim inner office. ‘I don’t for a second doubt but what we’ll determine the piece as a veritable Cellini,’ he hastened to say, ‘yet there remains the—er—valuation, don’t you know.’

  The elderly lady did not reply to that. She took her seat before Mr Blaine’s big desk and clasped her gloved hands.

  She watched Blayne manipulate a telescopic apparatus which centred, at last, above a grey agate slab. Then the expert touched a switch and the telescopic instrument poured green-grey and violet fire on to the chiavacuore.

  ‘Do you object’—the elderly lady suddenly asked, and startled Mr Blayne with her question—‘if I smoke while you are occupied?’

  A teaser this. Clients did not usually smoke in Mr Blaine’s sanctum … but the lady was bringing a supreme asset to the holdings of Messrs Blayne, Ridley and Cowperthwaite, an occasion when eccentricities would not matter.

  ‘Why—why not at all, madam,’ gasped Mr Blayne, ‘not the slightest objection I assure you.’ He darted to his pockets. ‘Do let me get you some matches.’

  ‘I have an automatic lighter, thank you, Mr Blayne. And I�
��m afraid I must warn you—you’ll perhaps forgive the herby smell of my cigarettes. I’m subject to asthma. I smoke stramonium.’

  Mr Blayne managed to give a smile to that. He felt very martyred, but then, he again consoled himself, it was all in the interests of the firm. The elderly lady began her stenchy smoking. Mr Blayne tried to ignore it and examined the bridal girdle under the ultra-violet radiance of the Hebbison-Caicroft light.

  It appeared that the chiavacuore had been taken from a haphazard storage place. It had not been cleaned for scores of years. This last was not surmise. Blayne knew as much about the oxygeneous faculties of gold that he was aware it had taken upwards of a century to form this sullen ‘skin’ it possessed. In the crevices of the ornamentations and chases were granulations of wood and paper; he envisaged the girdle, neglected and almost forgotten, wrapped in tissues and hidden in a wormy box. Through his optical glasses he could see more than these things magnified—the quadrified wards of the secret lock, for instance, were netted by spider threads.

  The precise ‘heart’s key’—the true ‘chiavacuore’—was the pippin hilt of the little scimitar. It was a cabochon diamond of peculiarly wicked lambency, like myrrh in water and like the chilly circles-cenele of the elderly lady’s curious eyes. It was all as cruel as the silvern sliver of that blade which menaced among the roses and the lilies …

  Mr Lionel Blayne suppressed a grave-tread shudder. He did not care for that baleful stone; it reminded him, oddly enough, of dead lips seen in morning light. He certainly did not like it, but he knew it was the master of the whole. And very much charmed by his knowledge, Mr Lionel Blayne let the two chasms of the golden heart come together. They met and lazily locked, with the sound of a kiss. Then Mr Lionel Blayne, more than ever cheered by his knowledge, magnificently rejected the obvious—did not finger the waiting blade—but revolved the evil diamond in its place. The scimitar rose and hovered and struck … and the girdle of the bride was opened.