Inspector French and the Sea Mystery

by Freeman Wills Crofts

  He had accepted the identification of the remains; but on whose testimony? On that of the criminals, Mrs Berlyn and the man whom he had thought was Jefferson Pyke. Of course, at the time at which he interviewed them he had no idea of their connection with the crime and, therefore, no reason to doubt their statements, but his error came in just here; that by the time he began to suspect them the identification was so firmly fixed in his mind that he overlooked the fact that it depended on them. If he had remembered that supremely important point, he would have questioned the dead man’s identity. This would have led him to investigate, even more closely than he had, the movements of the Pykes, and, no doubt, he would have thus discovered the impersonation which had been carried out.

  The first question, then, which demanded solution was: If the man whom he had thought was Jefferson Pyke was really his cousin, where was Jefferson himself?

  Like a man in a dream French went back to Kepple Street. Was Mrs Welsh absolutely sure that the Mr Pyke who had engaged her rooms on the 22nd July was the same man who had occupied them ever since? Mrs Welsh, when at last she had been made to understand the question, was absolutely sure.

  If she were right, Stanley’s impersonation of Jefferson must have begun on that 22nd of July. They had both been at the Houston in the morning. By the evening Jefferson, the real Jefferson, apparently had vanished.

  Then suddenly French remembered the episode of the broken basin. It had not occurred to him before, but now he wondered if there was not more here than met the eye. The accident was unlikely. Had the basin been deliberately broken to help on some trick?

  He went back to the Houston and once again interviewed the reception clerk. But she could add nothing to her former statement. Then he re-examined the chambermaid. From her, at last, he obtained a new fact, an apparently trifling fact, but what a difference it made in his conclusion!

  The girl had stated that the gentleman who broke the basin had told her that he had overslept himself and had asked her to see that his friend in No. 351 was awake. She had gone and found that the friend was already up. Now, French learned that by ‘up’ she had meant that the man was up and dressed and had left his room.

  At this a light shone into French’s mind. He retired to a corner of the smoking-room, and after half an hour’s hard thinking he reached a detailed solution.

  He saw that it would be possible for Stanley to arrive at the hotel and engage two rooms, ostensibly for himself and his cousin. He would go to his own room after explaining that his cousin would arrive later in the day. After impressing his personality on the staff he would go out, make up as Jefferson, return with more luggage and occupy the second room which had been engaged. He would sleep in Jefferson’s room and in the morning ring early for shaving water, get up, dress, take his luggage down, pay his bill, and leave the hotel. Then, hurrying back, he would slip into his own room unobserved, go to bed and ring again for hot water, giving the maid the message about his friend. Lest the incident should be forgotten in the event of future inquiries, he would smash the basin, thus impressing his identity on all concerned.

  That was what Stanley had done, French was now pretty sure, and he despatched wires to the French and Italian police asking if the same trick had been carried out in Paris and at Grasse and San Remo. After some time, there were replies. It had been carried out in Paris, but not at the other two places. At the latter there was no doubt that both men had been present.

  Jefferson Pyke had therefore disappeared at some point between Grasse and Paris, and French soon saw that there was nothing for it but to go to the Riviera and himself inquire into the men’s movements. Accordingly, after consultation with his chief, he obtained a letter to the French police, and travelling to Marseilles, began work. Slowly and painfully he traced the two from Marseilles to San Remo, to Monte Carlo, to Grasse, and finally to Nice. And there, in the pleasure city on the shores of the Mediterranean, he came on the explanation he sought.

  For at Nice, Jefferson Pyke had died. At first, knowing what he did, French had suspected foul play. But in this he found he was mistaken. Jefferson had been taken ill at his hotel and had at once been moved to a hospital. There he had been operated on for appendicitis. French saw the doctor who had had charge of the case and learned the details. There had been complications and the operation could not save him.

  French was deeply chagrined at his failure to learn so essential a fact at an earlier stage in his investigation. He swore great oaths to his gods that never, never again should he fail to follow up to the very end every clue which presented itself, whether he thought it likely to prove valuable or not.

  With identity of murderer and victim established, a comparatively short further inquiry sufficed to clear up the details of the affair which were still in doubt. And dreadful reading they made.

  It seemed that soon after Phyllis Considine came to Ashburton as the bride of Charles Berlyn she found she had made a terrible mistake in her marriage. The feeling which she had imagined was love died away and she saw herself tied for life to a man whom she disliked. A mutual coldness inevitably, resulted, which rapidly widened as the husband also found himself disillusioned. On Phyllis’s side less than a year sufficed to turn it into a bitter hatred.

  Under these miserable circumstances she began to look elsewhere for companionship, and Stanley Pyke, who found himself strongly attracted to his former playmate, was only too ready to fill the breach. They saw a good deal of each other and the inevitable happened. Before long, both were deeply in love.

  Though they were careful to act discreetly when under observation, they were not careful enough, and Berlyn became aware of what was going on. He at once remonstrated with his wife, finally telling her in no ambiguous terms that, if given cause, he would not hesitate to divorce her. If this had been all Phyllis would, no doubt, have eagerly seized so complete a solution of her difficulty, but both she and Pyke saw that it was by no means all. Berlyn, as joint owner of the business, would certainly have dismissed Pyke as well as cutting Phyllis out of his will. The couple would therefore have been without money or prospects. This she was not prepared for, and while admitting unwise behaviour, she denied that there was anything serious in her relations with Pyke and undertook that Berlyn should have no further cause of complaint. Then she began to meet Pyke secretly, and gradually the terrible solution which they afterwards adopted grew subconsciously in both their minds. If Berlyn should die the whole situation would be straightened out.

  From that time the idea of murder was never far from the thoughts of either. But they could see no way in which the dreadful deed could be safely accomplished. Pyke, however, was sufficiently callous and far-seeing to suggest the flirtation with Domlio, partly as a proof that the lady’s feeling for himself was a thing of the past, and partly lest a scapegoat should afterwards be wanted in connection with the murder.

  Then came Jefferson’s visit and the cousins’ holiday and Jefferson’s unexpected death. Pyke was about to give up the tour and come home, when it suddenly struck him that here was the solution for which he and Phyllis had been looking. He travelled up to Paris and there spent a few days in working out his plan.

  The idea of diverting suspicion from the murder of Berlyn by staging the accident on the moor had already occurred to him. But this plan had the objection that it involved his own disappearance as well as Berlyn’s. If, however, he disappeared, the whole fruits of the murder would be lost, as he was committing it simply to enable him to marry Phyllis. Jefferson’s death showed him how he might escape this dilemma.

  He would, in brief, murder Berlyn, stage the accident on the moor and disappear—as Stanley Pyke. He would immediately reappear—as Jefferson. By impersonating Jefferson he could marry Phyllis and get all his cousin’s money as well.

  In this scheme there was a risk of course, but the chances of anyone learning of Jefferson’s death were, he thought, sufficiently remote to make the scheme practicable. As soon as he could without suspici
on, he would go abroad, where Phyllis could presently follow him.

  At first the plan seemed full of snags, but as he thought over it he saw ways of overcoming one difficulty after another until the whole ghastly affair grew coherent and feasible. When he returned to Ashburton the scheme was cut and dry and he had only to get Phyllis’s approval and promise of help.

  Jefferson, the real Jefferson, had already visited Ashburton, but he had only been seen closely by the landlady, Mrs Billing, the Berlyns and their servants, Domlio, and one or two others. Of these the only one Stanley need interview was Mrs Billing, and he felt sure he could deceive her. Sergeant Daw, with whom in his inquiries about the tragedy he would have most to do, had only seen Jefferson in the distance. Personation would therefore be possible.

  The first thing necessary was to prove Jefferson still alive. Stanley found it easier than he had expected. From a theatrical supplies shop he bought shoes with false internal heels to increase his height, padded underclothes to give him the necessary girth, rubber discs to wear inside his cheeks to alter the shape of his face, and glasses. When in addition to these he wore Jefferson’s clothes and copied, as best he could, Jefferson’s walk, speech and deportment, it was not surprising that the unsuspecting and unobservant persons at Ashburton should be taken in.

  On his way home he carried out the tricks at the hotels, then taking the room in Kepple Street. For some hectic weeks he managed to live at Kepple Street as Jefferson and at Ashburton as Stanley. His continual absences from Ashburton, travelling for his firm, enabled him to put in the necessary appearances in Kepple Street, where he gave out that in the intervals he was making business trips in England and France.

  He saw that, by a judicious interview with the clerk of the Tavistock Urban District Council, he could arrange for the evening journey across the moor. His first idea had been to dispose of Berlyn’s body on the way back by throwing it into one of the small mires close to the road. But when he considered this in detail he realised that the difficulties were overwhelming, just as had been suggested to French by Sergeant Daw. He therefore devised the episode of the duplicator in order to provide a means for its removal from the district. He thought that if he could throw it into some estuary from which it would be carried out to sea, he would be safe. At first, he proposed doing so from the bridge at Teignmouth, then he saw that this would be too near home. If by some chance the body were discovered it might be connected with a local disappearance. The Burry Inlet, which also he knew, next occurred to him. This seemed to meet all his requirements and the date of a suitable tide became the foundation on which the rest of the plan was built.

  In London he bought the second-hand typewriter and wrote the letters ordering the duplicator and crane-lorry on paper he had obtained from the L.M.S. hotels. These letters he handed to the tobacconist, Ganope, who for a consideration undertook to post them on the proper dates. Neither he nor Phyllis were therefore in London when they were sent out, though he called in person at the hotels for the replies. He similarly obtained the duplicate magneto. This he handed to Phyllis and she damaged it and ran it on the car until it gave up, then replacing the original.

  On the fatal night every movement of each conspirator was carefully timed and cut-and-dry to the last detail. When near the works on the return journey Stanley called out to Berlyn to stop, saying that he had seen a man lying on the road. He jumped out and ran round the car, and on Berlyn following him he slipped behind his victim and sandbagged him. Hastily throwing the body into the car, he drove to the works’ gate. There he was met by Phyllis, who two hours earlier, in the interval of her party, had already drugged Gurney’s tea in the way French had surmised.

  At the works, Phyllis helped Pyke to carry the body to the packing shed. After replacing Gurney’s drugged tea with fresh, she put her bicycle in the tonneau of the car and drove out to the selected spot on the moor. She changed the magneto and made the two lines of footmarks by putting on shoes of Berlyn’s, which she had brought for the purpose. Then, mounting her bicycle, she returned to the works. The bicycle and the magneto she hid in a clump of shrubs, waiting until Pyke came out to say that the ghastly job in the works was complete. She then went home, silently let herself in, replaced Berlyn’s shoes in his room, changed her clothes, wakened the maid and called up Sergeant Daw.

  In the meantime Stanley Pyke rode on the bicycle to Colonel Domlio’s, dropped the clothes and other objects into the well and continued on his way to Plymouth. There he left the bicycle in a dark entry in the lower part of the town where he was sure it would speedily be found and annexed. He took the first train to London, returning to Ashburton in the character of Jefferson on receipt of Daw’s wire about the tragedy.

  Such was the plan, and had the conspirators been sure their actions would have remained unquestioned they would have stopped there. But both were afraid that in some unforeseen way suspicion might be aroused, and they took several other steps in the hope of turning such possible suspicion on to other persons.

  First, they considered it necessary that, should the crate be discovered, the body therein should be taken as Stanley Pyke’s. This would effectually prevent a doubt arising as to Jefferson’s identity. Pyke therefore changed his own underclothes with those of the dead man and dropped his own suit down the well, while both he and Phyllis stated that the birth-mark on Berlyn’s arm was really on Pyke’s.

  To carry on the same deception, Pyke decided to make up as Berlyn while disposing of the crate. In height and build he was, in his disguise, not unlike Berlyn. The chief difference between them was their colouring, both the Pykes being dark and Berlyn fair. Stanley, therefore, dyed his hair and lightened his complexion before going to Wales.

  The episode of the blackmailing letter was designed with a similar object. Phyllis Berlyn had staged the farce of the twisted ankle. She had fallen into Domlio’s arms in such a way that a photograph might have really been a profitable investment to a blackmailer. Pyke, had of course, forged the letter. The confederates hoped that the taking out of the car which they believed would result, together with the finding of the articles in the well, which they thought a competent detective might achieve, would throw the suspicion on Domlio.

  With regard to money, Pyke had resolved on a bold stroke. French found that he had instructed a firm of solicitors in London to get in touch with Jefferson’s lawyers in the Argentine for the purpose of arranging the sale of Jefferson’s property there. He had forged Jefferson’s signature to the necessary documents, and the matter was well advanced.

  This piece of greed had prevented Stanley from leaving London and had caused him to rent the Victory Place flat as a refuge in case Kepple Street got too hot to hold him. Flight thither under such circumstances had been decided on, and therefore when danger threatened, only the time and method of reaching it remained to be settled.

  As all Berlyn’s property went to Phyllis under the deceased’s will, she also would have been well off, so that when the two took up their abode in a rather out of the way part of Algeria, as they had intended, they would have been comparatively rich.

  But thanks to Evan Morgan’s desire for a fishing expedition on the last day of his holidays, together with Inspector French’s steady pegging away at a puzzling and wearisome case, these evil hopes were frustrated. Some three weeks after the next assizes both Stanley Pyke and Phyllis Berlyn paid for their crime with their lives, leaving the ownership of Jefferson’s money as a juicy morsel on which the lawyers of England and the Argentine could pile up fees to their hearts’ content.

  For French the case had not been an unmixed triumph. Though in the end he had taken the criminals and added to his reputation with his superiors, in his heart of hearts he knew that he had been saved by the skin of his teeth alone, and that he had had a lesson in the danger of neglecting to follow up unlikely clues to the very end which would last him for his life. But, on the whole, he was satisfied.

  About the Author

  Freeman Wills C
rofts (1879–1957), the son of an army doctor who died before he was born, was raised in Northern Ireland and became a civil engineer on the railways. His first book, The Cask, written in 1919 during a long illness, was published in the summer of 1920, immediately establishing him as a new master of detective fiction. Regularly outselling Agatha Christie, it was with his fifth book that Crofts introduced his iconic Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Joseph French, who would feature in no less than thirty books over the next three decades. He was a founder member of the Detection Club and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1939. Continually praised for his ingenious plotting and meticulous attention to detail—including the intricacies of railway timetables—Crofts was once dubbed ‘The King of Detective Story Writers’ and described by Raymond Chandler as ‘the soundest builder of them all’.

  Also in this Series

  Inspector French’s Greatest Case

  Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery

  Inspector French and the Starvel Hollow Tragedy

  Inspector French and the Sea Mystery

  Inspector French and the Box Office Murders

  Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey

  By the same author

  The Cask

  The Ponson Case

  The Pit-Prop Syndicate

  The Groote Park Murder

  Six Against the Yard*

  The Anatomy of Murder*

  *with other Detection Club authors

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