As he spoke the car crept alongside the pedestrian, and Loreto raised his voice.
‘Good morning, Steele,’ he cried, and the ‘clergyman’ turned, to reveal the startled face of the ‘Australian Caruso’, Adam Steele.
After that things happened with extraordinary swiftness. Steele jumped back, away from the car, and his hand went to his pocket. An automatic was in his fingers when Comfort sprang from his seat and knocked the madman’s weapon into the grass. The two detectives leaped to the assistance of their chief, but even then a desperate struggle ensued before the three officers could overcome and handcuff their prisoner.
There was no doubt now about Adam Steele’s madness, and his twitching face and convulsive limbs were in Loreto’s mind for many a day after. Finally, however, he was securely handcuffed, and placed between the two detectives in the back of the car. Loreto backed the Rolls on to the common, and soon she was heading towards London at forty miles an hour.
***
That night Inspector Comfort sat in Loreto’s house in Regent’s Park while the Spaniard explained the whole thing to his friend.
‘Steele gave himself away by being too clever,’ said Santos. ‘He was cunning, and a brilliant opportunist, but he relied too much on his power to outwit others. He threatened to kill Lady Frame within a week of her husband, and it was easy, once I suspected him, to make quite sure of my suspicions. I preferred to take him whilst on the way to his fresh victim because, as you found, Steele had a fresh page of his mother’s diary upon him. If he had succeeded in killing Lady Frame, that page of the diary would have been found beside the unfortunate woman’s body. Steele would have got into the nursing home under pretext of visiting the clergyman who was in the next room to Lady Frame. Once he had got into the place, Steele relied on his wits to find a way of accomplishing his purpose.’
Comfort nodded.
‘There was poison on him, as well as a knife. He would probably have got the old lady all right. Of course, the poor devil is quite mad, though no one seems to have noticed it. He will certainly never be hanged.’
‘I suspected that the man was unbalanced when I first met him,’ Loreto said. ‘Though, of course, I was far from thinking him mad. There are so many excitable, nervy people about in these days, and one can’t imagine they’re all homicidal lunatics. Steele was noisy and boisterous; he indulged in a fair amount of horseplay at Lady Groombridge’s, but no one thought much of it. After the murder, when I came to suspect Steele, I saw the significance of all his excitability. I went to London and burgled his house at Hampstead the same night. When I found the diary—it was stuffed at the back of his bookcase, and bound in a cover of The Three Musketeers—I was really not very surprised at all I read.’
‘How did you come to suspect Steele?’ asked Inspector Comfort, and Loreto smiled.
‘You know, Comfort,’ he said, ‘the easiest of all mysteries to solve are those that are considered inexplicable. I don’t want to manufacture a cheap paradox, but it is a fact that if there seems no possible way in which a thing can be done, then at least there are very few ways in which it could be done, which makes a solution all the easier.’
‘Or all the more difficult,’ growled Comfort. ‘How did Steele get into a room when the door was locked and bolted and the windows were—’
‘He didn’t,’ said Loreto. ‘He went to the door and knocked on it. When poor old careless Frame opened, Steele went in on some pretext and stabbed his victim in the back.’
‘But the door was found locked and bolted!’
‘By Steele himself,’ said Loreto. ‘It was clever. The man was a brilliant opportunist, as I have said. He was first up the stairs, and first at the door. He called out to his dead victim; he rattled the door handle; he held the handle while he flung himself against the door. It was all easy, but very effective. Finally he knocked a hole in the panel and fooled with the key and bolts. I thought somehow the snap of the bolts didn’t sound quite right, but we were all excited, and Cleta was talking to me.’
‘Snakes alive!’ exclaimed Comfort. ‘He was clever. No wonder I was taken in by the evidence.’
‘He was too clever,’ observed Santos. ‘He made things too inexplicable. I think it was Whitman who advised the young to learn all they could, but “to reject anything that insulted their intelligence”. That locked door insulted my intelligence. I had to reject that as an acceptable fact. The windows were really barred; there was really no one concealed in the room; there were actually no sliding panels. All these things I could prove for myself, but the one thing I had to take on trust was that locked and bolted door. I had to accept Steele’s word for an impossibility. I rejected Steele’s word, and began to suspect him. He was too clever, and, thank God, there will be no more “Death Diary Murders”.’
‘It was a good piece of deduction,’ said the Inspector, judicially. ‘A very pretty piece of deduction.’
Loreto shook his head moodily.
‘I wish I had been in time to save that poor old man,’ he said.
The Broadcast Murder
Grenville Robbins
Listening to the radio gained rapidly in popularity during the 1920s, and crime writers, as usual, soon identified the potential of a pleasingly topical new setting for their mysteries. Walter S. Masterman duly published 2LO in 1928—the title refers to a station which began broadcasting from Marconi House in 1922, and was transferred to the newly created British Broadcasting Company the following year. Six years after Masterman’s book appeared, two BBC insiders, Val Gielgud and Eric Maschwitz, collaborated on Death at Broadcasting House, in which a member of the cast of a radio play is strangled in a recording studio.
Grenville Robbins wrote ‘The Broadcast Murder’ in 1928, and it subsequently appeared in an anthology, Best Detective Stories of the Year: 1929, alongside tales from writers whose reputations would last, such as Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterton, and Anthony Berkeley, as well as others whose fame was fleeting. Grenville Robbins was a journalist who worked for The Times, and wrote a handful of short stories, as well as song lyrics. He did not pursue a career as a crime writer, and appears to have published no novels, but at least he achieved the feat of publishing the first locked-room mystery set in the world of radio.
***
The Oxford voice from the wireless loud speaker, to which I had been listening, suddenly stopped in the middle of a word. There was silence for a second, and then a terrifying yell rang through the room. It came from the loud speaker. I jumped up and gaped at it in frozen astonishment.
‘Help!’ gasped the voice. ‘The lights have gone out. Someone’s trying to strangle me. I—’
There was another terrible shriek, an agonising gurgle, and then all was silence. There seemed no doubt whatever that the announcer, whoever he was, was either unconscious or dead. And the whole thing had not taken more than a second. He had been strangled, alone, and with no one to save him, while hundreds of thousands of people, who were unable to help him, had been listening to every sound.
While I was still gaping at the loud speaker, I heard the sound of a scuffle come from it. Then there was a crash, as though the microphone had been upset, and then there was the sound of someone coming into the room. Help had come at last and, from the ominous silence, it had come too late. Then the machine went ‘dead,’ and I knew that the apparatus had been cut off.
I turned off my set almost automatically.
And that was how I came to be in at the beginning of the great ‘Wireless Murder.’ ‘Great,’ not because the crime and its unravelling were so out of the ordinary, but because the circumstances were so exceptional.
It was certainly the first time that so many people had been present at the beginning of a crime of this kind. Thousands and thousands of people knew about it at the very moment of its being done. Thousands knew about it before even the newspapers could tell them. Thousands, in sh
ort, had listened in to a new kind of programme, such as even the newly constituted Government Broadcasting Corporation had not contemplated.
For some months before this there had been a great outcry as to the need for more ‘reality’ in the wireless programmes. They had given us reality this time with a vengeance.
I was sitting in my lodgings at Birchester, when the thing happened. What Birchester thinks to-day, as everybody knows, London thinks to-morrow, or never thinks at all, which is sometimes just as lucky for London. Anyway, Birchester is one of our largest provincial cities and is not slow to be proud of the fact.
I, ‘James Farren, 33, hazel eyes, florid complexion, scar over—’ and so on, as the police might say if advertising for me, was in a nice, comfortable position on its leading newspaper. And everyone knows that the Birchester Mercury makes papers like The Times and the Manchester Guardian look like poorly produced pamphlets.
I was single then, and, as I was still living in lodgings, had turned on the loud speaker while I was having a lonely early dinner before I turned out to start my evening’s more or less honest toil, which was usually devoted to misinforming the minds and inflaming the passions of the inhabitants of Birchester. Throughout the meal the immaculate Oxford voice at the other end of the loud speaker had been droning on methodically. It was the time of the local news bulletin. We had already had the weather from London with its local depressions. Now we were hearing the local woes from the local studio.
A Mrs. Jones had apparently mislaid a baby while shopping. ‘Would anyone,’ the voice was saying, ‘who finds the lost child, restore it to its parents at—’
It was there that the voice stopped and the scream rang out.
Now, I am no wireless ‘fan’ myself, but I knew that most of my readers were, and that they would all want to hear more about this unusual crime on the morrow. So I rang up the office at once and had a couple of my sprightliest young men put on to it, to go into the matter as deeply as they could for the edification of the public.
A second telephone call, preceded by an unmannerly altercation with the exchange, who informed me that my number was engaged before I had mentioned it, got me into touch with the chief police station, and in another minute I was on my way there in a taxi.
I must say that I was very lucky throughout all this business in having a friend at court. He was a friend, too, in spite of being a relation. William Garland, the gentleman in question, was some vague kind of a cousin—and a jolly good fellow to boot. He was also a jolly good detective, although he was never called anything so obvious as that. He had a kind of roving commission in the Birchester police force.
I knew that, if he were about, he would be the first to be sent by the police to the scene of the crime, and, when I rang up, he was just off in answer to an urgent message from the broadcasting people. He told me to buzz round to the police station at once. I took his advice and ‘buzzed.’
He was standing on the pavement when my taxi got to the police station, and, ordering it to go on to the broadcasting studio, which was about a mile away, he jumped in and we were off again.
‘Not in the way, I hope?’ said I politely.
‘Not more so than usual,’ he answered, and I knew that he was glad to see me.
‘You might even be some faint help,’ he went on, puffing at his pipe. ‘You newspaper men are so used to inventing things that you might be able to invent a solution to a crime. Were you listening in?’
‘Yes.’
‘So was I, as it happened. Horrible row, wasn’t it? Sounded as if he were throttled to death.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Name of Tremayne,’ he answered. ‘Their principal announcer. Didn’t know him myself, except by his voice, and that wasn’t anything unusual.’
‘How is he?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered.
‘Didn’t you ask?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well. Why don’t you know?’
‘Because they didn’t know,’ he answered placidly.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ I said impatiently. ‘They must know.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he answered. ‘They don’t.’
‘But don’t you even know if he’s dead or not.’
‘No. He’s vanished.’
‘What?’
‘Yes, vamoosed from a hermetically sealed studio.’
‘Good God!’
‘And after being strangled pretty thoroughly, too.’
‘They must be all mad,’ I said.
‘I wonder,’ he said, thoughtfully puffing at his pipe.
A policeman was already stationed outside the door of the studio when we arrived, and he saluted us when he saw who my companion was. Inside the vestibule a youngish man was fidgeting. We soon found out that this was the chief of the studio. Stephen Hart was his name. He was a comparative newcomer to the establishment, and I had not met him before, but he struck me very favourably. He was probably thirty-two or thirty-three years of age, and was not only good-looking but also obviously endowed with a good deal of intelligence.
When he saw us, he came forward eagerly.
‘Mr. Garland?’ he said with a quick smile. ‘I am the chief here. I rang up the police station directly the—thing—happened. I’ve heard of you, sir. I’m so glad you were able to come.’
William introduced me, and we all shook hands.
‘I suppose,’ went on Hart, ‘that you’d like to go straight to the studio. Nothing’s been touched, except the telephone, and I answered that when the poor chap’s wife rang up. Naturally she was very frightened. I told her to stay at home, in case the police wanted to see her. Was that all right?’
‘Quite,’ answered Garland. ‘There’s a telephone actually inside the studio then, is there?’
‘Yes. It’s not often used, but occasionally, when the broadcasting isn’t actually going on, we want to get in touch with someone in the studio.’
‘I see. Well. Shall we go straight up?’
Hart led the way. We mounted a couple of flights of stairs and passed through an open door into a typical broadcasting studio. In the middle of the room was the overturned microphone and by it an overturned wooden chair. That was all the furniture. The place was brilliantly lighted, and otherwise was quite bare. The lights were high up in the middle of the ceiling, and were turned on and off by a couple of switches just by the door. On the other side of the door was the telephone. In one corner was a thing rather like a telephone box. It was, I gathered, sound-proof, and, when necessary, it was used to check the performance that was going on in the studio. There was no furniture inside it. Nothing but a pair of earphones. On the floor of the studio was a thick carpet. The walls, which were bright yellow in colour, were covered by thin curtains. That was all.
‘Would you mind shutting the door?’ said William to Hart. He did so. It closed automatically with a spring lock and fitted flush into the wall.
‘You have a key, of course,’ went on William.
‘Yes, and there are two or three others belonging to the staff. It is shut like that to prevent the possibility of any stranger barging in in the middle of a performance. Of course, it’s not likely—’
‘It seems to have happened to-night all right,’ said the other dryly.
‘Yes,’ agreed Hart. ‘I can’t understand it.’
‘Well, Mr. Hart,’ said my friend, after he had had a quick but thorough glance round the room. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?’
‘Of course not.’
‘We both of us heard what happened from our end of the wireless. I suppose that was Tremayne’s voice all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you see him come in?’
‘Yes. He came in about ten minutes before he started doing the local announcements. My office is just outsid
e, you know. He came in to say good evening, and left his hat and coat there as he usually does. They’re still there.’
‘And then he went into the studio?’
‘Yes. We chatted for a few minutes. I gave him the announcements that were to be read and then he came in here.’
‘The lights were on?’
‘Yes. I came in with him. The place was just the same as it always is.’
‘I see. And then you left him here alone?’
‘Yes. With the average performer we have someone in that box through his performance. Either I or poor Tremayne used to do that, to keep a check on the performance, but, of course, we’ve never done it with our own announcers. We always assume that they’ll be all right.’
‘Does Tremayne do all the announcing?’
‘He used to do most of it. In fact, he did it all, unless he were away on holiday. It’s not a big staff here. It’s mainly a relay station, you see.’
‘I see. And so you left him in here alone?’
‘Yes. When I went out, he was sitting at the microphone. I left him there and shut the door behind me. Then I went to my office to do a bit more work. It’s the end of the month and I was in rather a rush. I had been in my office most of the day.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘Well, I had the loud speaker in my office turned on, as usual. It provides another check on the performance. I get so used to it, too, that I scarcely pay any attention to it. At least, until to-day.’
Here he was obviously overcome by emotion.
‘After a few minutes,’ he went on at last, ‘I heard exactly what you and everyone else heard.’
‘I see. You heard Tremayne call out that the lights had gone out and that he was being strangled?’
‘That’s it.’
‘You couldn’t hear it directly, of course?’ went on the detective.
‘No. The studio’s absolutely sound-proof. I dashed to the door at once. It was still locked. My own door was open, and I can swear that no one had opened the studio door, come out, and closed it behind them. I’m sure it would have been quite impossible. Then I found that in my excitement I had left the key of the studio door on my table in the office. I dashed back and got it, opened the door—and found the place in darkness.’
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