‘Was that the firm which moved Poinsteau’s furniture?’ I asked, rather unnecessarily as I thought. But Beef had a surprise for me.
‘No,’ he said, and closed his eyes.
When we were back he hurried to Léotard’s hotel.
‘Of course,’ was his greeting, ‘we ought to have seen it days ago. I must be slipping. You can arrest your two men. You’ll have to fill in the details, Leo, because after all I’m on holiday, but I don’t think you’ll have much difficulty.
‘I’ve just been over to see the people you told me had the order to move Poinsteau’s furniture. Well, they didn’t.’
‘Didn’t have the order?’
‘No. Didn’t move it. They got a telephone message saying the job was off. See it now? Who else had access to him that afternoon? Who could come in and out without anyone thinking twice? The two moving men, of course. I think your gatekeeper will pick them out in any identification parade.
‘Easy for them to kill Poinsteau and leave the jail as quietly and comfortably as you please. Easy for those two men to hire a van from somewhere else—or even buy one if they were in funds and determined enough. Easy job altogether.’
‘I am sure that it was,’ said Léotard. ‘No difficulty at all in cracking Poinsteau on the head. And then, I suppose,’ the Frenchman had grown very sarcastic, ‘the dead man sat in his car, passed the gatekeeper, went to the cliff and was still at the wheel when the car went over?’
Beef did not smile.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s just what happened.’
Léotard prolonged the game.
‘The gatekeeper could not see him because he was already a ghost, perhaps?’
‘No, Leo,’ said Beef seriously. ‘The gatekeeper couldn’t see him for the same reason that nobody else could. Him or his car.
‘I can’t think why I never thought of it before—perhaps it seems funny to have one car inside another. Yes, that’s what they did. Drove it, with the corpse and all, straight up a couple of planks into the pantechnicon. That’s how the governor left his prison in his own car—like Jonah in the whale’s belly.
‘Now you fill in the bits and pieces and go and catch your men. I want some prawns for tea.’
A Posteriori
Helen Simpson
Helen de Guerry Simpson (1894–1940) was an Australian-born Renaissance woman who moved to England but never lost her love of her native country, which supplied the backdrop for some of her fiction. She applied her talents effortlessly to occupations as diverse as literature, broadcasting and cookery and invariably seemed to meet with success. In collaboration with Clemence Dane (the pen name of the Academy Award-winning playwright Winifred Ashton) she wrote three detective novels, one of which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Murder!
Simpson contributed dialogue to Hitchcock’s Sabotage, and her historical novel Under Capricorn was filmed by him after her premature death from cancer. She was a close friend of Dorothy L. Sayers, whose admiration for her vivacious and warm personality was unbounded. This is one of her very few short stories, and is marked by her characteristic humour and lightness of touch.
***
At about one o’clock on the last night of her stay in Pontdidier-les-Dames Miss Charters was awakened by indeterminate noises sounding almost in her room, and a medley of feet and voices in the street. It was not the first time this had happened. Pontdidier had belied the promise, made by an archdeacon, that she would find it an harbour of calm. The fact was, the town was too near a frontier, and too unsophisticated. When politicians in Paris, to distract attention from their own misdeeds, began to roar of treason, Pontdidier believed them, and the Town Council—‘nos édiles’—set up a hue and cry for spies. Miss Charters had not failed to observe this nervousness, and to despise it a little, without ill-humour; but to be roused by other people’s unfounded terrors at one in the morning was a little too much, and she said so, in her firm French, to the landlady as she paid her bill next day.
‘Je ne suis pas sure que je puis vous recommander à mes amis. Votre ville n’est pas tranquille du tout.’
The landlady sank her head between her shoulders, then raised and swung it deplorably to and fro.
‘Las’ naight,’ said the landlady, practising English, which reckoned as a commercial asset, ‘it is a man escape from the police. A spy that makes photographies. They attrape him, but the photographies—gone! Nobody know.’
‘Un espion!’ repeated Miss Charters coldly, as one who had heard that tale before. ‘Esperons qu’il n’échappera pas.’
With that she walked upstairs to her room for a final inspection. Her hot-water bottle, as usual, had been forgotten in the deeps of the bed, and this she rescued thankfully. Going to the washstand to empty it, she set her foot on some round object, and came to the floor with no inconsiderable bump. The object, obeying the impetus she had given, rolled to rest against a chair-leg, and Miss Charters, turning to eye it with the natural resentment of one tricked by the inanimate, instantly recognised it as a spool of film.
Her mind, with a gibbon-like agility which unhappily never comes at call, leapt from the spool to the noises in the night; linked these with her own wide-open window, probably the only one in the entire façade of the hotel; and came to the conclusion that this spool had reached her floor by the hand of the suspected spy now in custody; flung as he fled. But there had been, her subconscious seemed to think, two noises in the room. She looked for another possible missile, and perceived, under the bed, a flat wallet of some kind. It was quite inaccessible, the bed’s frame hung low, she had no umbrella to rake for it, and some vague memory of criminal procedure insisted that the police must always have first cut at a clue. It was her duty to go downstairs, display to the landlady the spool, which she had picked up instinctively, and ask that the authorities should be informed.
She set foot on the stairs, and even as she did so, halted. It became apparent that she would have to give her evidence in person, swear to the noise in the night, to the morning’s discovery. This would involve missing her train, and its subsequent connection, with the expense of warning domestics and relatives by telegram. More sinister considerations succeeded these. The French were hysterical. They were spy-conscious. They would refuse to believe that she and the fleeing man were strangers. As an excuse for open windows a plea of fresh air would not satisfy.
Halting on the stairs, she rehearsed these reasons for holding her tongue, and came to the conclusion that silence, with a subsequent letter from England, would meet the case. To roll the spool under the bed till it lay by the wallet, and so depart, would be the dignified and comparatively honest course of action. But the turmoil of the morning had let loose in Miss Charters’ mind hordes of revolutionary desires, which now found a rallying ground in the fact that she had not, in her forty-odd years, had one single unusual experience. She had never held unquestioned sway as chief talker at any party; she had never come within hail of being the heroine of any incident more lively than the spoiling of a Guide picnic by rain. The spool of film, now safe in her bag, tempted her; to take it home as proof of the adventure, to hand it over in the end, perhaps, to somebody from the Foreign Office or Scotland Yard! She hesitated, and the revolutionaries in that instant had her conscience down. No word of any discovery found its way into her farewells.
At the station she became aware of two things. First, that she had twenty minutes to wait for her train; second, that amid the excitements of the morning she had omitted a visit to that retreat which old-fashioned foreign hotels leave innominate, indicating it only by two zeros on the door. She cast a prudish but searching eye about her. The word ‘Dames’ beckoned; Miss Charters bought a newspaper and, apparently purposeless, drifted towards it.
The usual uncleanness greeted her, and to protect herself from unspeakable contacts Miss Charters sacrificed a whole sheet of her newspaper. It was newly prin
ted, the ink had a bloom to it. Miss Charters, accustomed at home to entrust to newspaper the defence of musquash against moth, vaguely supposed that it might prove, on this analogy, deterrent to germs. She emerged without delay, glanced to see that her baggage was safe, and paced up and down reading what remained of Le Petit Journal. There were fifteen minutes still to wait.
Seven or eight of these had passed in the atmosphere of unhurried makeshift that pervades all minor French stations, when a commotion was heard outside, chattering of motor cycles and shouting. Through the door marked ‘Sortie’ three policemen in khaki and kepis made a spectacular entrance, followed by a miraculous crowd apparently started up from the paving-stones. The three advanced upon Miss Charters, innocently staring, and required her, none too civilly, to accompany them.
‘Pourquoi?’ she inquired without heat. ‘Je vais manquer mon train.’
They insisted, not politely; and their explanations, half inarticulate, contained a repetition of the word ‘portefeuille.’ At once Miss Charters understood; the wallet had been found. (Who would have thought the French swept so promptly under beds?) She must give her account of the whole matter, miss her connection, telegraph her relations. Bells and signals announced the train to be nearly due; with a brief click of the tongue she summoned resolution for a last attempt at escape.
‘Je suis anglaise,’ she announced. ‘Mon passeport est en ordre. Voulez vous voir?’
She opened her bag, and immediately, with a swift fatal motion, made to shut it. On top, surmounting the handkerchief, the eau-de-Cologne, the passport, lay the damning red spool, so hurriedly, so madly crammed in. The foremost policeman saw it as soon as she did. He gave a ‘Ha!’ of triumph, and caught the bag away from her. His two companions fell in at her side, the crowd murmured and eddied like a stream swollen by flood. As she was marched from the station, out of the corner of an eye she saw the train come in; and as they entered the Grande Rue she heard the chuff and chug of its departure. Hope gone, she could give undivided attention to her plight.
It became evident, from the manner of the policemen, and from the fact that she was taken to the Hotel de Ville, that matters were serious. She made one attempt to get her bag; certain necessary words lacked in the formula of defence she was composing, and the bag contained a pocket dictionary. Her request was denied. A cynical-looking man at a large desk—mayor? magistrate?—fanned away her protests with both hands and listened to the policeman. So did Miss Charters, and was able to gather from his evidence that the wallet found in her room contained papers and calculations to do with the aerodrome near by. Could anything be more unlucky? The one genuine spy that had ever frequented Pontdidier-les-Dames must needs throw his ill-gotten information into her bedroom!
The functionary asked at last what she had to say. She replied with the truth; and despite a vocabulary eked out with ‘vous savez’ told her story well. The functionary noted her explanation without comment, and having done so asked the inevitable, the unanswerable questions.
‘You found these objects at 10.45 this morning. Why did you not immediately inform the police? You insist that they have nothing to do with you. Yet you were actually attempting to carry out of this country one of the objects. How do you account for these facts?’
Miss Charters accounted for them by a recital, perfectly true, of her desire to shine at tea-parties. It sounded odd as she told it; but she had some notion that the French were a nation of psychologists, also that, being foreign, they were gullible, and sympathetic to women in distress. The cynical man listened, and when her last appeal went down in a welter of failing syntax, considered a while, then spoke:
‘I regret, mademoiselle. All this is not quite satisfactory. You must be searched.’
The French she had learned at her governess’ knee had not included the word he employed, and it was without any real understanding of his intention that she accompanied a woman in black, who suddenly appeared at her side, looking scimitars. They progressed together, a policeman at the other elbow, to a small room smelling of mice. The policeman shut the door on them; the woman in black ejaculated a brief command; and Miss Charters, horrified, found that she was expected to strip.
In her early youth Miss Charters’ most favoured day-dream had included a full-dress martyrdom, painful but effective, with subsequent conversions. She now learned that it is easier to endure pain than indignity, and amid all the throbbing which apprehension and shame had set up in her temples, one thought lorded it: the recollection that she had not, in view of the dirty train journey, put on clean underclothes that morning.
The woman in black lifted her hands from her hips as if to help with the disrobing; there was a shuffle outside the door as though the policeman might be turning to come in. With a slight scream, at speed, Miss Charters began to unbutton, unhook, unlace her various garments; as they dropped, the woman in black explored them knowingly, with fingers active as those of a tricoteuse. At last Miss Charters stood revealed, conscious of innocence, but finding it a poor defence, and ready to exchange the lightest of consciences for the lightest of summer vests.
The woman in black was thorough. She held stockings up to the light, pinched corsets; at last, satisfied, she cast an eye over the shrinking person of Miss Charters, twirling her slowly about. Now the words of dismissal should have come. Instead, at her back Miss Charters heard a gasp. There was an instant’s silence; then the one word, ominous: ‘Enfin!’
The woman in black ran to the door and shouted through it. Miss Charters heard excitement in the policeman’s answering voice, and his boots clattered off down the corridor, running. Her imagination strove, and was bested. Why? What? The woman in black, with a grin lineally descended from ’93, informed her.
‘And now, my beauty, we’ll see what the pretty message is that’s written on mademoiselle’s sit-upon!’
The next few moments were nightmare at its height, when the sleeper knows his dream for what it is, knows he must escape from it, and still must abide the capricious hour of waking. An assistant in blue was vouchsafed to the woman in black. One deciphered such letters as were visible, the other took them down, pesting against the artfulness of spies who printed their messages backwards. In deference to Miss Charters’ age and passport some decency was observed. Policemen waited outside the half-open door; there was much noise, but no threatening. The women heard her explanation (conjectural) of their discovery without conviction and did not even trouble to write it down.
At last the message was transcribed. The woman in blue compassionately gave Miss Charters back her clothes, a gesture countered by the woman in black, who refused to allow her to sit down lest the precious impression be blurred. With a policeman at her elbow and the two searchers at her back, her cheek-bones pink, and beset by a feeling that this pinkness ran through to her skeleton, Miss Charters once more faced the functionary across his table. The transcription was handed to him. He considered it, first through a magnifying glass, then with the aid of a mirror. The policeman, the two searchers, craned forward to know the fate of France, thus by a freak of Fortune thrust into their hands:
‘Et maintenant,’ they read in capital letters, ‘j’ai du cœur au travail, grâce aux PILULES PINK.’
The functionary’s eyes appeared to project. He stared at Miss Charters, at the searchers; with a start, at his own daily paper lying folded, with his gloves upon it. He tore it open, seeking. Page 7 rewarded him. ‘Maladies de Femmes,’ said the headline; underneath, the very words that had been deciphered with such pains, accompanying an illustration of a cheerful young woman, whose outline appeared in transfer not unlike the map of a town. Silently he compared; his glass was busy. At last he looked up, and Miss Charters, meeting his eye, perceived something like comprehension in his glance, a kind of gloating, a difficult withholding of laughter—‘Rabelaisian’ was the word which shot across her mind like a falling star. It was a hard glance to face, but all Englishne
ss and spunk had not been slain in Miss Charters by the indignities chance had obliged her to suffer. She had one magnificent last word:
‘Je rapporterai le W.C. de la gare aux autorités sanitaires!’
It was the best she could do. The larger threat which at first inflamed her mind, of complaints to the Ambassador in Paris, of redress and public apologies, would not do; both she and the Rabelaisian eye knew why. She could never, to any person, at any time, confide the truth of an experience so appalling. So far as vicarage conversation went, the thing was out of the question. Hateful irony! Something, after forty-odd years, had happened to her, and it had happened in such a manner that mere decency must strike her mute. In the words of a ceremony she had often in younger days read over fondly, she must hereafter for ever hold her peace.
Miss Charters held it. The relations who welcomed her a day later were of opinion that her holiday in France had not done her much good. They found her quiet, and discovered that what she wanted was to be taken out of herself. So they arranged little gaieties, at which Miss Charters listened silently, now and then pinching in her lips, to travellers’ tales of those who had been seeing life in London and by the sea.
‘But then,’ as a relative remarked, ‘poor Aggie never did have much to say for herself.’
Where is Mr Manetot?
Phyllis Bentley
Phyllis Bentley (1894–1977) was the daughter of a Yorkshire mill owner, and she is most famous for her Inheritance trilogy. These books made excellent use of the development of the West Riding textile industry as a background, and were successfully televised in the Sixties with a cast including John Thaw.
Her detective fiction is much less well known, but a string of short stories featuring Miss Marian Phipps appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine after the Second World War, although the character made her debut in 1937. ‘Where is Mr Manetot?’, published a year earlier, is rather different in mood and style, and first appeared in a long-forgotten anthology called Missing from Their Homes which contains interesting ‘missing person’ stories from writers as different as Anthony Berkeley and Graham Greene.
Resorting to Murder: Holiday Mysteries Page 23