Valence was in the flat when I got back. In the morning, he said, he’d be meeting his Watch Committee and recommending calling in the Yard. Just to take his mind off things, I told him what I’d unearthed about Prowse.
‘Where’s it get us?’ he said, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘We know he couldn’t have killed Brewse. Besides, he had to change his name and dig himself in anonymously down here on account of the Brewse business. He wouldn’t want his wife’s name, or his own, connected in any way.’
Of course he was right, and yet again I couldn’t help thinking. He had to go out after dinner and that left me to the thoughts, and when they’d circled so as almost to drive me mad, I suddenly remembered something. So I got through to the Yard.
Brewse’s clothes had gone there for a laboratory check, and all I wanted was an answer to a certain question. I was promised it by the morning—and early. Then I rang Mayne and asked him a question, and after that I began to feel as if I might get a good night’s rest.
It was during breakfast that the call came for me from the Yard, and it gave me just what I wanted.
‘I wonder if you’d like to try a gamble before you see your Watch Committee,’ I said to Valence. ‘Let’s run out to Rendham at once and see Prowse.’
‘But why?’
‘Just to try out a hunch,’ I said. ‘It won’t cost a thing. And let me do the talking.’
‘You really think—?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think we might get something out of Prowse. Better take a couple of men with us. One for Prowse’s back door and the other for his garage.’
He didn’t ask any more questions, though he was hard put to it while we were making for Rendham.
Prowse looked mightily surprised at the sight of us at that early hour.
‘Just a thing or two you might help us about,’ Valence said, Prowse was ushering us in.
‘Sorry I can’t offer you coffee. Unless you’d wait a minute or two while I make it.’
‘We’ve just had breakfast,’ I replied. ‘All we want is some information.’
‘Not about poor old Mayne again?’
‘Not this time,’ I said. ‘What Valence is really here for is to arrest you for the murder of Brewse.’
He stared incredulously. ‘You mad? Or am I? You know as well as I do that I couldn’t have been within a mile of Brewse.’
I said that we were running the risk of arresting him all the same, and I duly intoned the caution.
‘If you insist,’ he said. ‘But I warn you that you’ll look a couple of fools when Mayne gets on the stand.’
‘Let me change your mind for you,’ I said. ‘Listen to me for a minute or two while I tell you just what happened. But, starting from the beginning, your name’s Palfrey. Your late wife was Brewse’s niece.’
That shook him, if only for a moment. Then he was telling me to carry on, but his lips had clamped together just a bit too tight.
‘It was one of those tremendous coincidences, Brewse’s coming here,’ I said. ‘Just the last straw. I think you regarded him as the murderer of your wife and, what’s more, you and he couldn’t live in the same village. You might have found another name, but sooner or later he’d meet you, and you wondered what he’d do. So you planned things out. You yourself fixed that game of golf with Mayne, and because Mayne didn’t like Brewse either. In the event of any unforeseen slip-up over that alibi of yours, he’d keep his mouth shut or swing things your way.
‘But you’d rung Brewse and told him who you were, though I doubt if you let him know you were living in Rendham under another name. You fixed an interview for Frog’s Lane at three o’clock and your golf was timed accordingly. At just before three o’clock you were at the thirteenth. He didn’t realize that you, as a golfer of the first rank, could put your ball virtually where you liked and that you really did deliberately drive into the wood.
‘You told him you know just where the ball dropped, and he needn’t bother to help you find it. So you went into the wood, with its holly undergrowth, and you found Brewse waiting. You knocked him out and strangled him and hid his body in a holly clump. Then you doubled back to the fairway showing a ball as if you’d found your own, and Mayne was prepared to swear he hadn’t really had you out of his sight all that afternoon.
‘Then at dusk you took the body to where it was found and you faked your voice and rang the police. You wanted the body found quickly so that there should be no doubt about when he died. Your alibi depended on that. But we know Brewse wasn’t killed in Catley Wood. There’s no holly there. But there was a holly-berry in the turn-up of Brewse’s trousers, and it fell out on the floor of Valence’s room. And Scotland Yard have found minute holly tears in his clothes and even a couple of thorns.’
‘Clever,’ he said. ‘As a fairytale, it’s clever.’
‘It’ll be clever enough to hang you,’ Valence told him grimly.
‘Two other little things,’ I said. ‘Brewse never went out of a morning, but he did go out that morning, and because, after that telephone conversation, he had to make sure where Frog’s Lane actually was and the spot where you’d told him to meet you. The other thing is this.’
I held my clenched hand towards him. ‘No holly in this house, so you didn’t carry any from anywhere in your car. And yet in your car were these.’
I opened the hand and showed him a couple of holly leaves and a few berries. He stared, and then suddenly he was on his feet and through the side door.
Valence gave a yell and was after him. But he needn’t have worried. Clare had him, and that was when we heard the shot. But Prowse made none too good a job of shooting himself, and it was not till two days later that he died in a hospital.
‘I didn’t know you had a crack at his car and found those holly berries,’ Valence told me as we were leaving the hospital.
I sort of grinned and left it at that. I couldn’t very well admit that I’d never seen the car.
Off the Tiles
Ianthe Jerrold
Ianthe Jerrold (1898–1977) published a book of verse in her teens, while ‘The Orchestra of Death’, an entertainingly macabre story, appeared in the Strand Magazine when she was just twenty years old. Jerrold was a versatile writer whose career as a novelist stretched from the early 1920s to the mid-1960s. Two detective novels, with well-evoked settings in London and the England-Wales border country respectively, were successful enough to earn her membership of the Detection Club, yet she promptly abandoned her pleasant if rather unmemorable amateur sleuth John Christmas.
Under the pen-name Geraldine Bridgman, Jerrold produced Let Him Lie (1940) and There May Be Danger (1948); the former is a stand-alone whodunit with a female amateur detective, while the latter veers into thriller territory. Her plotting of a mystery was never less than competent, but she seems to have found more satisfaction in writing mainstream fiction. In the 1950s, however, she did publish a handful of short mystery stories in The London Mystery Magazine, of which this is one.
***
November gloom had descended on London when, at 1752 hours (5.52 p.m. on unofficial clocks), a telephone call was received at the Pine Road, Chelsea, police station. The speaker, a Mrs. Flitcroft, of 33 Chain Street, said that her next-door neighbour, a Miss Lillah Keer, had been killed by falling from the roof of her house on to the pavement. Inspector James Quy ordered an ambulance, and went at once by car to Chain Street, accompanied by P.C. Baker.
Quy knew Chain Street well, for he had recently investigated a burglary there. The houses were terrace-built, old-fashioned, stucco-faced, single-fronted, consisting each of three storeys above the ground-floor, and a basement below, with a narrow area railed off from the pavement, and several steps up to the front door. The roofs, he remembered, were of the mansard type, with small windows opening upon a leaded gutter and a low parapet. It would not be possible to fall accident
ally out of such a window, and Quy therefore anticipated a case of suicide, for ladies do not usually walk about on roofs unless their nerves are disturbed and their intentions self-destructive. However, when he arrived in Chain Street, he found that the matter was by no means so simple.
Light streamed from the open front doors of Numbers 33 and 31, and there was a little knot of people gathered on the pavement at a spot almost exactly between the two houses. Looking up, Quy saw that, as he had supposed, a continuous parapet ran outside the mansard windows all along the terrace. He had time to note also that the mansard window in Number 31 was of the casement type, that in Number 33 of the sash, before three people started speaking to him all at once as he got out of his car. One was a pale young man with dark hair and a nervous blink behind horn-rimmed glasses, who said: ‘Oh, Officer! If only I hadn’t had my wireless on! If only I’d heard!’ The second was a pale, grey-haired woman who looked pinched and wretched in a thin silk blouse, and had obviously been weeping, who said tremulously: ‘I’m Mrs. Flitcroft—I rang you up!’ And the third was a tall, square-faced woman in a red coat and a necklace of huge amber beads, who cried passionately: ‘I’m her sister—I’ve only just got back! It couldn’t have been an accident! I’ve done it myself often!’
Quy paused to ask:
‘Done what?’
‘Why, walked along the roof-gutter!’ she replied. ‘It’s nothing, it’s perfectly safe, whatever that old fool says! And so have other people done it—you couldn’t fall off if you tried!’
She then glared with hatred at the other woman, and broke into tears, and Inspector Quy heard the word ‘murder’ as she turned aside.
‘All right,’ said Quy. ‘Just stand by, will you? I’ll want you later.’ And the onlookers falling back before his uniform, he found himself facing a very old gentleman over the prone body of a middle-aged woman with a fur coat spread over her. A stethoscope dangled from the old gentleman’s neck.
‘The poor lady’s dead,’ said the old gentleman crossly.
‘Did she say anything, Doctor?’
‘Not to me! Broken skull, spinal injuries, and goodness knows what else! Crawling about on roofs at her age!’
‘There’s a lady here says it’s quite safe and she’s often done it herself.’
‘Imagine it! Women of fifty and sixty crawling about roofs to pay calls by the attic windows, like cats! Never think of their blood-pressure, I suppose—never heard of vertigo! Heart-failure, stiff joints, poor eyesight—couldn’t happen to them, oh no! That’s what’s the matter with the world to-day, if you ask me! Nobody knows his place! Insane, there’s no other word for it… Well, there’s nothing more I can do, so I’ll be getting home, Inspector, I’m freezing! You know where to find me if you want me.’ And the very old gentleman went off, stiffly but energetically, swinging his stethoscope.
Inspector Quy turned back the fur coat that covered the body of Miss Lillah Keer, who was a slightly smaller, slightly younger, version of her sister Miss Rachel, now weeping noisily against the area railings. It was not, however, at the poor lady’s face that Quy first looked, but at her hands. They were grimy, as might be expected. In a broken finger-nail on the left hand, a small piece of very dirty cotton-waste was caught. Inspector Quy took it out and carefully examined it. It had a faint scent reminiscent of turpentine. There were traces of the same kind of cotton fluff under the other nails on the left hand. Inspector Quy saw the other Miss Keer standing beside him, and asked:
‘Was your sister left-handed?’
‘No!’ she replied fiercely. ‘And she wasn’t a clumsy ass, either! And I tell you, it wasn’t an accident! It was murder, and I know who did it!’
‘You can tell me about that later—in fact, you’ll have to!’ said Quy. ‘But meanwhile, your sister was right-handed?’
‘She could use both her hands pretty well, like most artists,’ said Miss Keer, more quietly.
‘Oh, your sister was an artist?’
‘She painted with her right hand, of course, but she often used her left to mix her colours, or to clean her palette.’
‘With turpentine, I suppose?’
‘Yes, or some patent stuff artists’ colourmen sell.’
‘And cotton waste?’
‘Or household rags.’
‘I see,’ said Inspector Quy. Further investigations were interrupted by the arrival of the ambulance and the police surgeon. When they had departed again, and the small crowd of onlookers had lingeringly dispersed, Quy took down the evidence and particulars of the inmates of the two houses. Mrs. Flitcroft of Number 33, a widow living with her son and daughter; Peter Crangley, aged twenty-four, nephew to Mrs. Flitcroft, a Civil Servant, who occupied the top floor of his aunt’s house; and Miss Rachel Keer, elder sister of the deceased, a schoolteacher, who had shared Number 31 for many years with the dead lady.
‘Whose fur coat is this?’ asked Quy. They were standing in the ground-floor room of Miss Keer’s house.
‘Mine,’ said Mrs. Flitcroft. ‘I took it off and put it over her…’
As Quy passed it to her, there was a distinct jingle in one of its pockets. Mrs. Flitcroft heard it, and a sudden look of fright came to her careworn face.
‘What is it?’ asked Quy.
She said with difficulty and distress:
‘The keys! Oh, they were in my coat pocket all the time!’
From one of the pockets of the fur coat she brought out with a shaking hand a small bunch of keys. ‘But I’m sure I felt in my pockets!’ she exclaimed, with tears.
‘You knew they were there!’ cried Miss Rachel Keer, her face distorted with hatred. ‘There, Inspector! I told you! This woman murdered my sister! It was just an excuse to get Lillah out on the roof and push her over the parapet! I tell you, Inspector, this woman hated my sister; she’s hated her ever since—’
‘I didn’t!’ protested Mrs. Flitcroft tearfully. ‘I don’t hate people! I’m not like you!’
‘No, you’re the sly kind that never says what she thinks, but waits for an opportunity to hurt—stab in the back—push off the roof! You know you’ve hated Lillah ever since she started taking an interest in Peter—’
‘Me?’ exclaimed young Mr. Crangley with dramatic surprise.
‘One thing at a time, please!’ said Quy, as P.C. Baker, sitting at the dining-table with his helmet on a chair beside him, began to look worried over his short-hand notes. ‘Tell me about the keys. What happened?’
It appeared that Mrs. Flitcroft, on returning to her house at about half-past five, had discovered that her keys were not in her hand-bag— ‘though I can’t think why not! I never keep them anywhere else! I thought they weren’t in my pockets, either! I’m sure I felt in my pockets!’—and had rung her bell and banged on her knocker to attract the attention of her nephew, whose light she could see in the top window. She had also called to him, but he had not heard her.
‘It was the damned wireless!’ groaned the young man.
Mrs. Flitcroft’s son and daughter were going straight from their businesses to a theatre, and would not be back until late; and since her nephew lived his own domestic life in his top flat and would not miss her, she was faced with the alternatives of staying out of her house until ten o’clock, or swallowing her pride and going next door for help. She admitted that she had had a serious quarrel with Miss Lillah Keer a month or two ago, over—over Peter, she said, glancing at that young man. She had thought it very wrong of Miss Keer to encourage her nephew in his desire to be a painter.
‘Oh, you’re a painter, too?’ said Quy. ‘I thought you said you were a Civil Servant?’
‘I work in the Post Office because I have to earn my living, unfortunately.’
‘That’s a misfortune that occurs to a good many people,’ said Quy, smiling. ‘You’re not at work today?’
‘No, I—’
�
�Exactly!’ said Mrs. Flitcroft with tremulous indignation. ‘He doesn’t stick to his work! And there she was, poor Miss Keer, telling him he had talent for art, giving him free lessons and quite turning his head! He has to earn his living, and his mother asked me to look after him; and even if he could paint, there’s no living in art!’
There was no love, either, in the look exchanged between aunt and nephew.
‘What happened next?’ asked Quy.
Mrs. Flitcroft had asked Miss Lillah Keer if she would kindly allow her to return home via the mansard windows and the roof-gutter. It was a perfectly—well, almost perfectly, safe proceeding, and she and others had done it before. One had only to get out of the top window and walk along the gutter between the roof and the parapet. There was a narrow party wall of the same height as the parapet at the junction of the two houses, but there was plenty of room for a normally agile person to scramble over this without any danger of falling.
At this point, Inspector Quy asked to be conducted to the top floor so that he might judge for himself. He leant out of the small casement window of the bedroom, noted that the parapet was about two and a half feet high, and observed that the only obstacles to a walk along the gutter from end to end of the terrace were the low party walls between house and house. He also noted that a person travelling from Number 31 to Number 33 would have the roofs and the windows on his left hand.
‘It certainly doesn’t look very dangerous,’ he commented.
‘And it isn’t!’ said Miss Keer scornfully. ‘Whatever that old fool Doctor Pellett may say! Poor Lillah couldn’t have fallen! Somebody pushed her over!’
‘How dare you?’ said Mrs. Flitcroft, in angry tears.
‘Why didn’t you go yourself, then? It was you who wanted to get home!’
Inspector Quy awaited with interest the answer to this question.
‘Well, of course I meant to go myself!’ replied Mrs. Flitcroft tearfully. ‘But I’d been out to tea and had my best things on, and Miss Keer was in her working clothes! It was very kind of her—she insisted!’
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