The Chessman

by Dolores Gordon-Smith

  ‘Why d’you want to know about Ryle anyway?’ asked Mabel curiously.

  ‘Be quiet, girl,’ said Mrs Jarvis, shocked. ‘It’s none of your business what the Major’s asking questions for. The Major finds out things about nasty crimes and goings-on, don’t you, sir? I’ve heard the mistress talk about it many a time.’

  Mabel’s eyes widened. ‘Are you finding out about the man with his head battered in what was murdered in church?’

  ‘I’m hoping to find out something,’ said Jack.

  ‘And is that why you want to know about Ryle?’ asked Mabel breathlessly, then stopped, her eyes growing, if possible, rounder. ‘It is, isn’t it? That’s why you asked if we’d recognize him if we couldn’t see his face. That’s because he’s been all bashed up, isn’t it? It’s Ryle. I know it’s Ryle. My mum always said he’d come to a bad end.’

  ‘Be hushed,’ began Mrs Jarvis once more but Mabel wouldn’t be hushed. ‘It is him, isn’t it? He’s not been seen for a week. He’s the man, isn’t he? This’ll be in the papers, won’t it, sir? He’s been hideously murdered.’

  ‘It’s too early to tell,’ said Jack, but Mabel hardly heard him.

  ‘Murdered,’ she repeated with rich if ghoulish enjoyment. ‘Ryle’s been hideously murdered. Wait till I tell Mum!’

  SEVEN

  Jack parked the Spyker outside the Vicarage and helped Isabelle down from the car. As he did so, a well-dressed woman opened the gate of the adjacent house.

  ‘Hello, Sue,’ said Isabelle. ‘Are you coming to the meeting too?’

  Jack uttered a silent Wow. So this was Sue Castradon. Isabelle had said she was striking, but good grief, she wasn’t just striking, she was gorgeous. Unconsciously, he adjusted his tie and pulled his jacket straight. She had pale gold – almost silver – hair and luminous grey eyes. The words elfin and ethereal came to mind. She was so slight and her colouring so translucent, that there really did seem something otherworldly about her.

  ‘This is my cousin, Jack Haldean,’ said Isabelle.

  ‘Isabelle said she was going to ask you to stay, Mr Haldean,’ said Sue. ‘She said you’re good at working out problems. I don’t suppose you’ve got anywhere, have you?’

  Her voice was as lovely as she was. She really was a stunner. He wanted to say something memorable and devastatingly witty, but all he could think of was: ‘Not yet, Mrs Castradon, but it’s early days,’ which was hardly worth saying. He tried to make up for the banality of his words with a dazzling smile and a look which betokened enthralled interest when, rather to his chagrin, she turned her head, distracted, as a tall, clean-shaven, brown-haired man came out of the Vicarage gate.

  ‘Hello, Mr Vardon,’ she said in surprise.

  For a moment Jack, still kicking himself for not making a better first impression, didn’t take in the import of what she said. Vardon? The man who there’d been all the gossip about? He was a good-looking beggar, thought Jack, with an alert, intelligent face and vivid blue eyes. If he’d been attentive to Sue Castradon, he wasn’t surprised there’d been talk.

  Then he realized there was something wrong. Sue Castradon stopped in embarrassed confusion, the colour mounting in her cheeks as the man looked at her blankly.

  He raised his hat politely and looked at her with a well-bred stare of puzzlement. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think we’ve met.’ He smiled in undisguised admiration. ‘I’m sure I would have remembered you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sue, flustered. ‘I really am awfully sorry. I thought you were Mr Vardon.’

  The stranger laughed. ‘But I am. Or I was, until recently. I think you must have met my brother. I’m Tom Vardon. Everyone says we look very alike, although I can never see it myself. Did you want to see him? He should be here in a couple of days, Miss …?’

  ‘It’s Mrs,’ said Sue. ‘Mrs Castradon.’ Jack was privately, if uncharitably, amused to see Thomas Vardon’s face fall. ‘I saw your brother at your father’s …’ She broke off once more in embarrassment. ‘At your father’s …’

  ‘At my father’s funeral?’ finished Thomas Vardon. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be there but I only arrived in Southampton this morning. Do you live in the village?’

  ‘Yes,’ hurried on Sue, obviously glad to have the conversation steered away from the perhaps delicate subject of his father’s funeral. ‘Yes, I do. We – that’s my husband, Ned and myself – were going to invite you and your wife round for cocktails or dinner.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Sir Thomas, ‘but my wife won’t be arriving for a few days. She’s working on a picture and couldn’t get away. Excuse me for mentioning it, Mrs Castradon, but I’ve just spoken to the vicar. You are the lady who discovered the man in the church this morning?’

  Sue nodded. ‘That’s right. And this is Mrs Stanton, who was there with me.’ She rapidly completed the introductions.

  ‘It must have been a horrible discovery, Mrs Castradon,’ said Thomas sympathetically.

  His sympathy, Jack thought, seemed to be directed chiefly towards Sue Castradon. Isabelle, he noticed, had spotted that as well.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ continued Thomas, ‘I want to call on the police. Is the station still across the green?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Jack. ‘I’m going there now.’

  With a promise to Isabelle to pick her up after the meeting, (‘We’ll probably be at the Castradons,’) Jack and Thomas Vardon walked off.

  Isabelle stood by the Vicarage gate and gave a toss of her head. ‘Well! So that’s Thomas Vardon.’

  ‘I don’t know what he must have thought of me, saying hello like that, and him a perfect stranger, too,’ said Sue. ‘Then mentioning his father’s funeral right away. It was so tactless of me. He doesn’t really look that much like his brother, either. Not close to.’

  ‘Don’t you think so? I thought they were very alike. He’s darker, of course.’

  ‘I thought he was awfully nice.’

  ‘Did you?’ said Isabelle, opening the gate. She had enough self-awareness to realize she wasn’t used to being quite so thoroughly overlooked and was slightly piqued at the experience.

  Isabelle tried hard to be fair. It was very petty minded to object to the effect Sue had on men. Look at the way Jack had goggled at her, eyes wide and straightening his tie, the idiot. She was prepared to bet large sums of money that, just for the moment, his beloved Betty couldn’t have been further from his thoughts. Sue hadn’t noticed. She never did notice.

  Thomas Vardon, the handsome Thomas Vardon, had certainly noticed Sue, though, and, as they walked up the garden path to the Vicarage together, Isabelle spared an uneasy thought for Ned Castradon. She hoped there wasn’t trouble in store.

  ‘I wouldn’t have expected Mrs Castradon to be out and about after her experience this morning,’ said Thomas Vardon, as they walked across the green. ‘She must be a plucky girl.’

  ‘She must,’ agreed Jack. ‘So’s Isabelle. Mrs Stanton, I mean.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Thomas absently, clearly not remotely moved by Isabelle’s fortitude. ‘I don’t know how she’d photograph.’ He obviously wasn’t talking about Isabelle. ‘Film probably wouldn’t do her justice. It’d be difficult to catch that colouring but I’d love to try.’ He laughed. ‘I can’t imagine a girl like that in Hollywood, though. She’s too much of a lady. Hollywood calls for a different kind of toughness. Not,’ he added, ‘the kind that’s to be admired.’

  ‘Are you planning to stay in England?’ asked Jack. He, too, had spared a thought for Ned Castradon.

  ‘Eh?’ said Thomas, recalling himself. ‘It depends. I must get the estate sorted out. There’s precious little in it, but it needs work.’ His voice took on a cynical note. ‘My wife, Esmé, wants to live here. She fancies being a real English lady. We’ll have to see how it goes. I could make quite a good thing of being a commission agent. There’s plenty of people in the movie business who’d pay to use real English locations, but don’t know
how to find them. I’ve got the contacts, of course, both here and in Hollywood. I’ll have to see how Esmé settles in.’

  At least he remembered he’s got a wife, thought Jack. ‘Is she arriving soon?’

  ‘In about a week.’ He half laughed. ‘She was looking forward to quiet English life as the lady of the manor. So was I. The quiet part, at any event.’

  He stopped and looked around him. The village green in the hazy evening sunshine, bordered by the quietly gurgling Croxton Brook seemed the epitome of peace. Geese waddled along the bank of the stream, pecking at the scrubby grass. A horse and cart slowly clopped over the little humpbacked bridge, the carter hardly needing to hold the reins. A group of boys were playing cricket with a homemade bat, an old tennis ball and a propped up dustbin lid for their wicket, their shouts and laughter softened by distance. Outside the Red Lion, three elderly men sat on a bench, under the shade of a spreading oak tree, pulling contentedly at their long churchwarden pipes and nursing half pints of bitter.

  Sir Thomas gave an appreciative sigh. ‘I missed this in America. This is what I thought of when I thought of home. I’ve been promising myself a pint of home-brewed beer in the Red Lion all the way across the Atlantic, but when I arrived off the train from Southampton I seemed to have stepped straight into the pages of a dime novel.’

  He shrugged his shoulders expressively. ‘It seemed so unbelievable that I thought my stepmother must be exaggerating, but I owe her an apology. I’d just been to see the vicar, Mr Dyson, to see if it could possibly be true. I gather it is.’

  They walked into the police station together. Croxton Ferriers police station, marked out by the blue lamp above the front door, was the front room of Constable Stock’s house. Constable Stock himself had been relegated to the nether regions of the tiny sitting room and kitchen, from which issued a smell of frying onions.

  Ashley, sitting at the desk, pipe in one hand and pen in the other, glanced up enquiringly.

  Jack introduced them and, ejecting the station cat, Ashley pulled out a chair for Sir Thomas. ‘You wanted to see me, sir? If it’s anything routine, can I refer you to Constable Stock? You’ll understand if I say I’ve got my hands full with this murder.’

  ‘Murder,’ repeated Thomas Vardon thoughtfully.

  ‘Do you know anything about it?’ asked Ashley sharply.

  Thomas Vardon shook his head. ‘No, this is something else altogether. It’s certainly not routine, though. It’s a crime. Or I think it is.’ He smiled apologetically. ‘It sounds a bit melodramatic, but it might even be murder.’

  Ashley paused as he sat down, staring at Sir Thomas. ‘Can you explain yourself, sir?’

  Thomas ran his thumb round the angle of his jaw. ‘I’m not sure where to begin. As you know, my father, Sir Matthew Vardon, died.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose there were any doubts raised at the time, were there? About it being a natural death, I mean?’

  Jack felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

  ‘There’s been nothing said to my knowledge,’ said Ashley. ‘Mind you, I don’t know if anything’s been said in the village.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, Ashley, there have been rumours,’ put in Jack. ‘Isabelle – that’s Mrs Stanton, Sir Thomas – told me as much at dinner. Both she and her husband thought it was nothing more than ill-natured gossip.’

  Ashley tapped his pen thoughtfully on the desk. ‘Rumours, eh? Well, all I can say, Sir Thomas, was that nothing was reported officially. His medical attendant ought to be able to reassure you. Who was his doctor?’

  ‘He had the local man, Dr Lucas. I was going to call on him, too.’

  ‘You must have a reason for asking,’ said Jack. ‘Apart from these rumours, have you any reason to suspect it was anything other than a natural death?’

  Thomas Vardon nodded. ‘Yes, I have. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t heard any rumours. My stepmother obviously doesn’t know about them either, or I’m sure she would’ve mentioned them. No, it’s something else entirely.’

  From his inside jacket pocket he took out two letters and put them on the desk.

  ‘Before my father died, he received these letters. As you can see from the postmark, they’re posted locally.’

  Pushing them across the desk, he tapped the uppermost. ‘That’s the first one. The second arrived a week later.’

  Ashley picked up the envelope. The name and address was typed, as were the contents. The letter consisted of one typed line. ‘“You have been tried in the balance and found wanting. You will die. The Chessman.” Good grief!’

  Jack drew his breath in. He remembered reaching into that cupboard in the church and pulling out a chess piece. A black knight. A chessman.

  Ashley’s eyes met his. From his expression, he’d obviously made the connection too. He reached forward and picked up the second letter.

  ‘“I am killing you slowly. You are going to die. The Chessman.”’

  Sir Thomas looked at them both.

  ‘My stepmother showed those letters – the second one, at least – to the doctor. He told her that they must be the work of some nasty minded individual, some crank who made a practice of writing such things. He advised her to chuck them in the fire.’

  ‘I’m glad she didn’t,’ said Ashley thoughtfully.

  ‘Excuse me for asking,’ said Jack with apparent guilelessness, ‘but what do you think of the doctor’s theory, Sir Thomas?’ He had Arthur’s strictures on Sir Matthew Vardon firmly in mind, but wanted to see what his son would say. ‘Do you think they’re the work of a crank or do you think there’s more to it than that? Remember, we didn’t know your father. Was he the sort of man who would have an enemy? An enemy who would wish him real harm?’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ said Thomas with a short laugh. ‘Look, I don’t want to speak ill of the dead. He was my father after all, when all’s said and done, but he was not a nice man. It’s chiefly because of him that I went to America after the war. I certainly didn’t want to come home. My brother, Simon, perhaps got on with him better than I did, but even he knew enough to be careful.’

  ‘Careful?’ questioned Jack. It seemed an odd word to use.

  ‘Careful. He would find out anyone’s weak spot and exploit it ruthlessly. You really did have to be on your guard with him. He had enemies, all right.’

  ‘Let me get this straight, Sir Thomas,’ said Ashley. ‘What you’re actually asking is if there’s any truth in these letters? If the Chessman, whoever he is, could have killed your father?’

  ‘I suppose I am,’ said Thomas slowly. ‘That’s why I wanted to see Dr Lucas. I wanted to know if there was any doubt in his mind that my father died of natural causes. I believe he called in a second opinion, a Dr Jacob McNiece of Harley Street.’

  ‘Dr Lucas must have signed the death certificate,’ said Jack. ‘If there really was any doubt in his mind, he should’ve applied to the coroner.’

  Ashley shook his head. ‘That doesn’t always follow, Haldean. A coroner’s inquest can be very upsetting for the family. The doctor might be uneasy, but doesn’t want to rock the boat on the grounds of mere suspicion. Unless he’s certain, a doctor has to be cautious, otherwise his career will be ruined. No one wants to call in a doctor who shouts foul without very good cause.’

  He pulled the letters towards him and studied them for a few moments, drawing thoughtfully on his pipe. ‘I’ll have a word with Dr Lucas, if you like, Sir Thomas. I’ve got to see him anyway. Rumours or no rumours, these letters need explaining.’ He cocked an eyebrow at Jack. ‘I don’t suppose they suggest anything to you, do they?’

  Jack slewed the letters round on the desk. ‘Judging by their appearance, they’ve been well handled. I doubt you’ll get any fingerprints off them, Ashley. The paper’s Basildon Bond, ordinary letter paper, which you can buy at any stationer. And the typewriter is, I’d say, a Bartlett or a similar machine. It’s got a slipping ‘e’ and an elevated ‘d’ and the ribbon could do with changing.’ He glanced a
t Ashley. ‘I had a Bartlet once. They’re small, lightweight machines. It’s not a commercial typewriter. Offices tend to use big machines such as Remingtons or Olympias, which means whoever typed these probably typed them at home.’

  ‘There was another piece of mail addressed to my father,’ said Thomas. He reached in his pocket and took out a small square cardboard box. ‘My stepmother has thrown away the original wrapping, but it arrived some time ago, after the funeral.’

  He opened the box. Inside, on a bed of cotton wool, was a chessman. A black king, made of marble with crystal eyes. Jack heard Ashley’s smothered grunt of recognition. It was obviously from the same set as the chess piece they’d found in the cupboard in St Luke’s.

  ‘I don’t like this, Haldean,’ muttered Ashley.

  It was, thought Jack, downright creepy.

  Thomas looked at Ashley. ‘I don’t like it either,’ Thomas said grimly. ‘Especially when I tell you this was waiting for me when I arrived today.’

  He took out another letter with a typed envelope and pushed it across the desk. It was addressed to Sir Thomas Vardon and had been posted in Croxton Ferriers three days ago. ‘Read that. It’s from the Chessman.’

  Ashley whistled. ‘Are you the only person to have handled this letter, Sir Thomas?’

  Sir Thomas nodded.

  ‘Then we might get some prints off it.’ Ashley took a pair of tweezers from his bag and, extracting the letter, laid it open on the table with care.

  As before, the letter was typed on a machine with a slipping “e” and an elevated “d”.

  Ashley read it aloud. ‘“A short life and a merry one? Make it merry. It will certainly be short. I’m saving you until the end. The Chessman.” Good grief,’ he said again, his lip curling in disgust. ‘This bloke must be deranged.’

  ‘Are there any fingerprints on it?’ demanded Thomas.