‘Plenty has happened, Mr. Charton,’ said Cromwell, before Johnny could speak. ‘I’m glad we met you. I’ve got something to say to the general, and I’d like you to be present.’
‘You’re damned mysterious,’ said Gerry Charton, staring. ‘Has somebody been trying to bump you off?’ he added, with a laugh. ‘I think the general is in Ronnie’s bedroom. I asked him to take over for a bit while I dressed. Dr. Ware has been on the job most of the day, and I believe he’s gone out for a breath of fresh air.’
‘I think he’s had it,’ said Ironsides carefully.
They went into Ronnie’s room and found Johnny’s father sitting by the bedside.
‘I say, damn it, Johnny, must you go about the place half dressed?’ asked the general. ‘I’m glad you’ve come, Charton. Your brother has been restless. I think one of you should fetch the doctor.’
Cromwell bent over the patient and took a searching look into Ronnie Charton’s staring, lack-lustre eyes. The young man was only half conscious, but his eyes were very wide open and the expression in them was unnatural and frightening.
‘There’s nothing you can do, Mr. Cromwell,’ said Gerry, with a worried shake of his head. ‘Dr. Ware tells me that there’s little hope of Ronnie ever getting back to normal. You can see how his eyes reflect the disordered condition of his mind.’
Ironsides looked up.
‘I can see how his eyes reflect the filthy drugs that Ware has been feeding him on,’ he retorted in a hard voice. ‘Twenty-four hours of normal sleep and a week of cheerful society and your brother will be as healthy as ever—both in mind and body.’
‘Good God, Cromwell, what are you saying?’ demanded General Lister, while Gerry stood transfixed. ‘You’re hinting that Dr. Ware is responsible…’
‘This is no time for hints, sir,’ interrupted Cromwell bluntly. ‘It’s time to speak plainly. Last night a man not included in your list of guests was admitted into the castle. He was drugged with chloroform, left in that condition until after midnight, and then stabbed to death while he was still unconscious. Before being stabbed, however, his own clothing was removed and old-time costume substituted. I believe he was actually stabbed on the floor of the Death Room while Ronnie Charton slept in a chair. But he didn’t cry out. The cry that aroused Ronnie from his drugged sleep was uttered by the murderer. The body, as you know, was then hidden in the vault…’
‘Are you drunk, Cromwell? What fantastic story is this?’ broke in Gerry Charton in amazement. ‘Do you actually mean that Dr. Ware killed somebody?’
Ironsides turned to him squarely.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘You killed that somebody!’
For a breathless moment there was such a silence in the room that it could be felt like some heavy cloud of oppressive solidity. The first man to move was Johnny.
‘I think not!’ said Johnny softly.
He was standing right beside Gerry Charton, and his hand went like a piston to Gerry’s hip-pocket—a fraction of a second before the young man’s hand reached the same objective. The sergeant’s slim fingers closed over a small automatic, which gleamed in the electric lights.
‘Have you all gone mad?’ shouted General Lister, starting agitatedly to his feet.
Gerry Charton’s face was ashen.
‘I’ve done nothing,’ he said, the veins throbbing on his temples. ‘It was Ware who killed Nayton. He deserved to die, the blackmailing skunk! He…’ Gerry pulled himself up with a sobbing intake of breath, realizing that in his panic he was saying too much. ‘You blundering fool, Cromwell, you’ve made a crazy mistake!’
‘I’ve made mistakes in my life, I’ll admit, but this time I’ve scored a bull’s-eye,’ retorted Ironsides. ‘Sit down, Mr. Charton. No sense in getting all melodramatic. The game’s up, and you know it. Your confederate, Dr. Spencer Ware, is dead; he plunged to the bottom of the lake with your victim and Lister and I were unable to save him. I can’t compel you to say anything, and I’m not sure that I want you to say anything. After we have recovered the body of Nayton, it won’t take the Yard long to establish his identity.’
The general was looking stunned; and, indeed, he was so appalled that the flood of questions he wanted to ask became tangled up with his vocal cords, and he remained dumb.
‘You’ll pay for this, Cromwell,’ said Gerry Charton contemptuously. ‘Do you think I’d try to drive my own brother insane?’
‘The history of crime tells us that such a thing has been done before,’ replied Cromwell, nodding. ‘Furthermore, the number of brothers who have murdered their own flesh and blood is legion. While I was out of doors a short while ago, you fixed up a very nice death-trap in my bedroom, didn’t you?’
‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!’
‘No? Then perhaps you’ll suggest that Ware did it?’ snapped Cromwell. ‘You’re no professional crook, Charton. You make too many blunders. You made a bad slip on the landing, when you asked if somebody had been trying to bump me off. You knew about the death-trap, but nobody else did—because I locked the door of my bedroom, and nobody could have got in. I also happen to know that Dr. Ware was in this room with Ronnie for a full hour prior to the death-trap incident. You were the one, therefore, who set that interesting scene.’
‘If you think you can prove…’
‘But there’s something else,’ continued Ironsides imperturbably. ‘When you drugged Nayton last night you used chloroform—probably after you had made him doze with a doped cigarette. But the smell of chloroform hangs about. When I entered your bedroom this morning it fairly reeked of perfume, and a man of your stamp hasn’t much ordinary use for perfume. You pinched some from that fluffy-haired girl, didn’t you?—perhaps without her knowledge. Chloroform is hard to conceal, Charton. I was seeking for traces of it, and that helped me. You see, I know the effects of chloroform, and I saw them in the dead man.
‘When I went into my bedroom and found the light wouldn’t come I detected a very faint perfume in the air. Normally, I don’t think I should have noticed it; but I was half-expecting trouble. You came straight out of your own bedroom, Charton, and into mine. You carried with you some of that perfume—and you left that invisible clue to condemn you. I knew, then, that it was you who had monkeyed with the canopy of my bed… It couldn’t have been the girl… To turn away from that subject, it was rather a neat dodge of yours to put spikes in a pair of old boots and walk across the drive, thinking to give your brother a scare…’
‘Lies—all lies!’ said Charton contemptuously. ‘How do you know it wasn’t Ware who played that trick?’
‘Because Ware’s feet were large feet—and he could not have got them into those boots,’ retorted Ironsides crushingly. ‘Ware was a stranger to Cloon Castle, whereas you know every inch of it. You spent your childhood in the neighbourhood, and I’ll warrant you played in these very grounds—yes, and concealed yourself in that hollow tree.’
Point after point Cromwell was driving home with devastating force, and under those hammer blows Gerry Charton’s confidence was crumbling.
‘You know, at one time I was half inclined to suspect young Bayle and that Drydon chap,’ murmured Johnny. ‘Especially after they gave us such queer looks, Ironsides, as we went downstairs.’
‘A perfectly natural incident,’ said Ironsides impatiently. ‘Bayle happened to see me going into somebody else’s bedroom, and he thought it a bit queer. He saw you looking at him and he dodged down some back stairs. He was telling Drydon about my mysterious movements when we happened upon them. You mustn’t take too much notice of trifles, Johnny.’
‘Okay, Chief,’ said Johnny humbly.
It was not surprising that Gerry Charton suddenly broke down and babbled out his black part in the sordid crime. As Ironsides had said, he was not a professional criminal, and the strain on his nerves during the past twenty-four hours had been acu
te. This sudden denouement, coupled with the certain conviction that the net was tightly about him, proved too much for his self-control.
To the world at large Gerry Charton had always been a cheery fellow and a great sport, worth pots of money. But for years he had been drained by a slimy crook named Cecil Nayton, who knew something ugly in Gerry’s past. It was not generally known that Ronnie was only half-brother to Gerry, and Ronnie’s fortune was considerably larger, on account of an inheritance from his dead mother.
Gerry had played for big stakes—but the murder plot had only been evolved after he had accidentally discovered that Dr. Spencer Ware, the eminent Wimpole Street specialist, was also a victim of Nayton, the blackmailer. Gerry and Ware had got together, and it was through Gerry that the brain specialist had been invited to Cloon Castle for Christmas. Gerry knew the castle inside out; as a boy he had heard the story of the Death Room and he knew all the details. It was easy enough to duplicate that age-old crime.
So he had arranged for Nayton to come secretly to Cloon Castle, presumably to receive a large sum of ‘black’ money. He had taken Nayton upstairs by a back way; and once Nayton was in Gerry’s bedroom, he had been easily drugged—and left lying unconscious in a great old-fashioned cupboard during dinner and afterwards. Then his clothing had been changed, and the rest of the grim business had been carried out.
Before this, however, Gerry Charton had cunningly brought the talk in the library round to ghosts, and this had led up to the discussion about the Death Room. It was Gerry who had really egged Ronnie on to spending the night in the Death Room—although most of the men present at that discussion would have sworn that Gerry had done his best to persuade his brother to abandon the whole thing.
Cromwell pointed out that in spite of his apparent sleepiness, he had been very much on the alert—remembering, as he did, the curious incident on the drive. He took particular note of the fact that although it was Drydon who handed Ronnie a large drink just before he entered the Death Room, that drink had been put into Drydon’s hand by Gerry Charton. A cunning and subtle move.
But the snow had defeated the plans. The plotters had been obliged to hide the body in the crypt, instead of taking it through, and out to the lake. Ware was to have done the carrying, whilst Gerry mingled with the alarmed guests. But as they merely dumped the body into the crypt, they were able to slip up the back staircase, and mingle with the guests—both of them—within a very few minutes. It was during the later hours of the night that Gerry had used his duplicate keys to get into the crypt and unfasten Lady Julia’s casket.
The schemers had guessed that Ronnie, awakening from a drugged sleep and finding the body, would rush straight out of the Death Room—and this would give them the time they needed.
The set-up was perfect. At one blow, Gerry Charton and Dr. Spencer Ware got rid of the man who had been blackmailing them for years—and Ronnie would be sent insane. Easy enough for a man of Dr. Ware’s reputation to fool another doctor into signing a lunacy certificate—particularly with Ronnie cleverly doped into stupidity. With Ronnie safely confined in Dr. Ware’s ‘nursing home’—in other words, a private lunatic asylum—Gerry would have had control of his younger brother’s money.
And if the plan had gone as originally mapped out, no dead body would have come to light in the crypt, and thus the blackmailer—whose presence at Cloon Castle was unsuspected—would have disappeared without a trace, and it was certain that none would have mourned him or made inquiries as to his disappearance.
Cromwell was very diplomatic. He learned, by casual questions, that there were some very fine old dungeons in Cloon Castle. And he and Johnny Lister, unknown to a soul, escorted their prisoner by devious ways to the strongest of these dungeons. Here the wretched man was locked in—and later food and a bed were smuggled to him, to say nothing of a large supply of blankets. As it was impossible for Ironsides to hand over his prisoner to the Derbyshire police, he was keeping him well locked up until the roads were clear.
And General Lister’s Christmas guests went on their merry way, serenely unconscious of the grim tragedy that had been enacted under their very noses. A murdered man, and a co-murderer at the bottom of the lake, and another murderer in the castle dungeons… And the party made whoopee without a suspicion… Truly, one of the strangest situations imaginable.
Everybody believed that Dr. Ware and Gerry Charton were kept away from the merrymaking because of Ronnie’s illness, and it was not until days later, when Gerry was formally charged at the local police court, that the truth came out. And by that time Christmas was over—and Ronnie Charton, incidentally, was not only well on the way to recovery, but he was in many respects a better man.
Murder at Christmas
Christopher Bush
Christopher Bush, whose real name was Charlie Christmas Bush, was born on Christmas Day in Great Hockham, in Norfolk’s Brecklands. He was educated locally and read languages at King’s College, London, before becoming a school teacher. His first crime novel, The Plumley Inheritance, appeared in 1926, but three years passed before the publication of his second, The Perfect Murder Case. This early example of the ‘serial killer whodunit’, written long before the term ‘serial killer’ had been coined, received widespread critical acclaim, and from then on, Bush did not look back. Prolific as a mystery writer, he also produced novels of Breckland life under the name Michael Home.
Bush (1885–1973) continued to write about his detective, Ludovic Travers, until the late 1960s, and over the course of time, Travers evolved as a character, even if he did not age much. In his early days, he was a financial wizard working for an agency called the Durangos Conglomerate, and was presented as ‘a dilettante with economics as a passionate hobby’. Later, he became a more conventional private eye. In this entertaining story, he gives a first-hand account of a Yuletide puzzle.
***
I drove to Worbury on the afternoon before Christmas Eve. My wife had been called away to help nurse an aged and ailing aunt, and so I rang Bob Valence and asked if his invitation was still on for, say, the Christmas week-end. He wanted me to make it a week.
Worbury—which isn’t its real name—is a town of some 2,000 people, and Robert Valence is its Chief Constable. He and I have run up against each other a lot professionally, since I’m at odd moments what the Yard chooses to call an unofficial expert, and he seems to think he’s in my debt. In any case. I like him. He knows his job but makes no boasts, and he’s genuine all through.
I was looking forward to that holiday. There’s more futility than festivity alone in a London flat for Christmas, and, as I said, I liked Valence. He’s a bachelor, by the way, and has a very nice service flat within a few hundred yards of his headquarters.
I’d been told to bring my golf clubs. We should have played on the morning of Christmas Eve, but there’d been a burglary in Marshwell, a village nearby, and Valence was called there well before we were thinking of starting for golf. But to get to Marshwell one goes through Rendham, which is two miles from Worbury, and the golf-course is there. So our golf bags went in the car and the new plans were for an early lunch at the clubhouse and a quick getaway after it, and with the certainty of a comfortable finish before dusk and a possible fog. December was commonly open that year, and when you get sun in the day you’re almost bound to get fog at night.
That robbery at Marshwell Hall took up more of Valence’s time than we’d thought and it was getting on for one o’clock when we left. It’s three miles from there to Rendham, and as we came to the first house of the straggling village Valence suddenly slowed the car.
‘See this chap coming towards us. Know who he is?’
I had five seconds, perhaps, in which to look, and what I saw was a man of sixty or more, short and with thin, stooping shoulders. I placed him as a retired professional man.
‘Don’t know,’ I said.
‘He’s Brewse. John Bloc
k Brewse!’
My eyes popped a bit. ‘Good Lord! What’s he doing down here?’
‘He has to live somewhere,’ Valence told me dryly. ‘Suppose he thought Rendham’d be as good as anywhere else. He has that first house back there. The one with the walled garden.’
‘Any of his victims here?’
‘One at least here,’ he said, ‘and one or two in Worbury. I doubt if there’s a town in the country where there isn’t.’
I supposed he was right. Brewse was the last of the line of financial swindlers, and it says a good deal for his plausibility that even among his victims there were still those who could judge him more unlucky than guilty. But he’d been put away for eight years and, considering the misery he had brought to thousands, I thought him lucky to have had so short a sentence.
‘How long’s he been here?’
‘About a year,’ he said. ‘Almost as soon as he came out. The house, I gather, was bought beforehand in his housekeeper’s name, so Rendham didn’t guess what it was in for.’
‘There was a bit of a stir?’
He laughed. ‘“Stir” isn’t the word. A man named Allgood—has a big furniture store in Worbury—was behind it. There was writing on Brewse’s wall and his house. No jailbirds wanted, and that sort of things, and then when someone set fire to his shed, I had to step in.’
‘And all’s quiet now on the Rendham front?’
‘I think so. Rice, the local man, hasn’t reported anything lately, and Brewse lives very quietly. Just goes out for his daily walk and that’s all.’
Then suddenly he was braking the car and looking to the right. We were through the actual village and almost at the entrance to the course, and he was looking along what was little more than a metalled track that made a sort of ride in a long stretch of wood. Drawn among the trees just off that track was a van. Valence took a long squint at it. Then he smiled.
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