The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories

by J. I. M. Stewart

  The stranger stood up. He contrived to do this in a manner that – perhaps for the sake of saving time and getting on with his job – placed him at once a good deal more clearly. Here was a man of weight, carrying responsibilities and ordering people about. At the same time, he would never get round to offering you a drink, or to taking the initiative in shaking hands. But this didn’t mean that he wasn’t capable of dealing masterfully with persons much more socially exalted than Freddie Seston and myself. He was the type of the warrant-officer raised to the nth degree … by this time, in fact, I knew exactly where he came from.

  But Freddie didn’t begin by introducing his visitor. Instead, he addressed me with unwonted incoherence. “Jonathan, I don’t at all know whether it’s proper. Because of your being a barrister, I mean. So do say, my dear fellow. There’s no doubt that it should be a solicitor. All the books have it that way, and I’m sure their writers have looked it up. Will there be a British Consul in Venice, do you think? Perhaps I’d better try to get hold of him. I’d hate to land you in any sort of trouble – particularly so soon after we’ve just met again.”

  It was only Freddie’s being in such plain distress that prevented me from laughing. Heaven knows what was in his mind: perhaps that the Lord Chancellor or the Benchers of my Inn would get wind of this Venetian occasion and admonish me for having stolen another man’s job. I glanced at the stranger, who was at least admirably poker-faced before my friend’s agitation.

  “If your visitor doesn’t object to me,” I said, “I don’t think anybody else will. So for the moment at least we needn’t worry about legal etiquette. I can certainly hear what the trouble is, and advise you on any professional assistance it may be necessary to get hold of.”

  “That’s terribly kind of you, Jonathan. This is Inspector Cuff. He comes from” – Freddie appeared to have actual physical difficulty in announcing the Inspector’s place of origin – “he comes from Scotland Yard.”

  I sympathised with Freddie. It was clearly bad enough that the real brick-and-mortar Scotland Yard should turn up on him. But that it should do so in the person of one named archetypally, as it were, straight out of Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone did seem rather a gratuitous turn of the screw. It wasn’t, as it happened, to be the last of these.

  “How do you do.” I shook hands with Cuff, who promptly took a file from his briefcase and sat down again. Although no criminal lawyer, I had already, as I have said, tumbled to the fact that the visitor came from the C.I.D. And I was now equally sure that the situation confronting us was at least not of any dreadful simplicity. Cuff hadn’t been sent to Venice to explain to Freddie the nature of extradition proceedings and suggest that much trouble and expense would be saved if he could find it convenient to return within the jurisdiction of English courts forthwith. On the other hand, whatever was in question wasn’t trivial. In the world of Freddie’s imagination, no doubt, the emissaries of Scotland Yard were perpetually on the wing about the globe with all the freedom and devotion of Mr Dulles. But in sober fact it probably didn’t happen all that often. Inspector Cuff’s trip would be quite a highlight in his year’s labour of maintaining law and order, and Mrs Cuff – if there was a Mrs Cuff, which was statistically very probable – would be fretting that she wasn’t yet allowed to tell the neighbours. There was something pretty solid behind this rude irruption upon Freddie’s agreeable communings with Carpaccio.

  But now Cuff was addressing himself to speech. “Acting on the instructions of Colonel Jenkinson,” he began with some solemnity, “I have proceeded to Venice by the first available means.”

  Being equally with Freddie the target of this exordium, I judged it tactful to look impressed. In a mild way, indeed, I was. Jenkinson was casually known to me. He was Number Two, or thereabouts, at the Metropolitan Police, and might be described as a monochrome but reliable type. He wouldn’t send the solid Cuff on his travels on a mere whim. “In fact,” I said, “you’ve come so hurriedly that it’s been unannounced? Mr Seston was given no notice of your arrival?”

  “That’s quite right, sir.”

  “You might have sent him a telegram?”

  Cuff agreed that he might have sent a telegram. I could see that he wasn’t worried by this sparring; he knew that I was engaging in it merely by way of reassuring Freddie that his interests were being looked after in proper form. Indeed, he now even smiled at me with a sort of respectful indulgence which his subsequent words went on to explain. “Of course, sir, it’s entirely natural that Mr Seston should wish to have the advice of a legal friend. But my visit, you will understand, is simply a matter of seeking a little help. It’s a serious case, of course – a thoroughly serious case. And Mr Seston is what one must call mixed up with it. But in a very rum way. And, speaking for myself, sir, I’d say there was no possibility of any blame attaching to him; no possibility of it, at all.”

  “I see,” I said. “Mixed up, but not implicated.”

  “Very happily put, sir. And I hope I’ve made it clear to Mr Seston. I’m only sorry that he’s so upset. You can see that Mr Seston is upset. It’s understandable, of course. Nobody likes being brought into any sort of contact with such an affair. Murder isn’t pretty, after all.”

  I must have been rather staggered. “Murder?” I asked.

  And at this Freddie broke in. “That’s it,” he said. “Somebody has committed a murder. And straight out of one of my books.”

  If I was again shaken – and it was certainly a queer situation – I hope I didn’t show it. “I can’t see,” I said sternly to Cuff, “what this has to do with Mr Seston. His books enjoy a very large circulation. Even if there is some reason to conjecture that one of them may have suggested an actual expedient to a criminal, which is a most improbable occurrence—”

  “It’s certainly that, sir.” Cuff interrupted me emphatically and on an impulse that I couldn’t quite place. “I’ve been through the files very carefully. There’s only one other instance of such a thing on record. And even that one is doubtful. It may be a matter of coincidence.”

  “I’ll be surprised, Inspector, if this one isn’t a matter of coincidence too. But that’s not my point at the moment. Even granted that something in a novel by Mr Seston has suggested to an intending criminal the actual method of committing his crime, there is clearly nothing whatever that Mr Seston can now do about it. I can’t see that you have any basis for approaching him.”

  But a glance at Freddie told me that this robust line of mine was doing him no good. In fact, he wasn’t much attending to it. Although he had sent for me post-haste, it hadn’t been out of the sort of alarm that legal calm has some power to assuage. Freddie wasn’t alarmed. He was horrified. To a dispassionate observer, I reflected, the real point of interest in the affair might be whether Hugo St Swithin had made his last bow.

  “It’s not quite as you think, sir.” Cuff tapped his file softly and with an effect of menace which was no doubt one of his professional assets. “There’s a crucial point to come – although I don’t think that Mr Seston quite sees the force of it as yet. Mr Seston is more concerned with what you might call the general moral outlines of the situation, as you can see.”

  “No doubt.” I had to admit to myself that Cuff was one who didn’t go far astray in sizing up a situation. “But just what, Inspector, is the point that’s still to come?”

  At this Freddie again broke in. I imagine he wanted to give the impression that he was not so sunk in his horrors as to be regardless of what we were saying. “It was about a bath, you know. The wires gave me the idea, Jonathan. And it did seem sufficiently bizarre.”

  Cuff received this with attention. It struck me that he combined with a very good understanding of Freddie something that was in the nature of unusual respect. He didn’t evince this attitude to me; I was simply an intrusive Q..C. for whom he turned on the correct manner. “It was certainly a queer idea,” he said. “But it worked.”

  The tone of this explained to me the basis o
f Inspector Cuff’s regard for Freddie. Cuff liked things that work, even if they were criminally conceived lethal machines. And Freddie had delivered the goods. Just what they had been, I had now to resign myself to discovering. “Wires?” I asked. “A bath?”

  Freddie nodded. “I don’t know whether one gets it in quite up-to-date plumbing. But certainly my house has it – and I expect, Jonathan, that yours has too. Wires clamped to some of the pipes, you know, and then disappearing through the floor. I can’t remember when the idea of exploiting them came to me. Probably it had been in my head for quite a time. But you see the obvious idea, don’t you? The wires are there – at least so I’ve always imagined – to make things generally less dangerous if the house happens to be struck by lightning. And one could easily fake up something that would look like the ordinary provision of this sort, when it was really quite different. And of course if you get electrocuted in a bath you’re done for. You see?”

  “I certainly see the broad idea.” I glanced cautiously at Freddie, and seemed to detect a faint childlike pleasure momentarily peeping through his entirely genuine distress. And this perception brought me as near, perhaps, to Hugo St Swithin as I was ever to get. “I suppose,” I asked experimentally, “that you put in a good deal of time pondering these things – the possibilities of the plumbing, and so forth?”

  “Not really.” Freddie’s brow clouded again and the glimpse of Hugo vanished. “Once a satisfactory idea presents itself, it doesn’t take much time to work out the detail. There turned out to be one other important factor in the plumbing idea. But I’ve rather forgotten it.”

  “The standing waste,” Cuff said.

  “Yes, of course. Not the ordinary plug, but the equally common affair like a long hollow cylinder that you pull up about an inch to let the water out. It turned out to be the easiest way of fixing things so that the current would be automatically turned on the moment any water was let out, and automatically turned off again the moment it had all drained away.”

  “And you have to have a knowledge,” Cuff interpolated impassively, “of the bathing habits of your victim. You have to know that he is in the habit of pulling up the standing waste before stepping out of the bath. To make quite certain of him, that is. Being all wet, he’d quite probably be done for, even if he’d climbed out on to the floor. Isn’t that right, sir?”

  “No doubt that’s right.” Freddie had turned even paler than before. “Not, of course, that I know about voltages, and that sort of thing.”

  There was a short silence. I found that for the moment a purely emotional response to the situation had got hold of me. And it was Freddie’s own response, more or less. I was revolted at the notion of this macabre rubbish from a story book actualising itself, so to speak, and claiming real blood. But this made it only the more necessary to keep a grip on the mere common sense of the matter. “Well,” I said, “Mr Seston thought up an uncommonly roundabout and ramshackle way to commit a murder. No doubt it made an entertaining story. But if somebody has actually adopted it, he’s placed himself under a pretty severe handicap, so far as his chances of escaping detection are concerned. It’s the elaborate and ingenious murderers who are most easily found out.”

  “But this one hasn’t been found out.” Cuff did his file-tapping trick again. “Not yet. And that’s why I’ve come to Venice.”

  “Which astonishes me, I confess. You know about this crime, you know about the very odd way in which it has been accomplished, and you think the idea was derived from a book. So you hurry across Europe to interview the book’s author, hoping to get at the criminal that way. I begin to fear he may have some chance of remaining undetected after all.”

  Cuff shook his head. “It’s not quite like that, sir. And, even if it were, we must leave no stone unturned.” He paused for a moment on this unexceptionable professional precept, as if to make it clear to me that he wasn’t one to be rattled by a barrister’s notion of irony. “This book of Mr Seston’s, you see, isn’t a published book. It’s at what you might call the stage just short of that. It was due to come out early next week.”

  I got up at this and took a turn round the room, pausing by a tall window giving on the Riva. The waters of the Canale di San Marco had darkened and broken into small ripples which seemed not to move and might have been applied with a brush. The campanile and the lantern of San Giorgio were a pillar and a point of light, but everything beneath was already shadowy with early evening. It was a quiet view; Venice was for the moment up to none of her spectacular tricks; yet there was somehow more irony in that prospect than in anything I could pitch at Inspector Cuff. I almost strained my ears to catch its comment – pregnant but just not audible – on the curious manner in which a ludicrous yet painful nemesis was being visited upon Freddie Seston’s long career of crime.

  “But of course the book is now being called in. It won’t appear at all.” Freddie had come up behind me, apparently anxious that my mind should be set at rest on an important point. “It was my publisher himself who luckily read the police statement about this affair, isn’t that right, Inspector, and who tumbled to what might have happened and got in contact with them. Of course the book can’t possibly go on sale now. It would be wildly indecent.”

  “Yes, Freddie – I suppose it would.” I turned back into the room and sat down again.

  “It’s a horrible thing to have happened,” Freddie pursued. “But at least it won’t be a matter of public scandal.”

  For a moment I could only be silent before this innocence. Then I looked at Cuff. “You’re not, in fact, without some suspicion of who committed this murder we’re hearing about?”

  “No, sir. We have a bit of a notion, I confess.”

  I could see that this was an understatement. “You’re looking for evidence?”

  “Just that, sir.”

  “And you’d like to find some channel by which your suspect might have had access to Mr Seston’s idea – in fact to his book, which must have gone out to reviewers and so forth, but which has not been on public sale?”

  “That’s very much in my mind, sir, I need hardly say. And of course the thing may have happened before ever Mr Seston set pen to paper. He may have discussed his plot with friends – or perhaps with somebody in his employment. There are a great many possibilities.”

  “There certainly are. And I think you will want to get as much information as you can from Mr Seston before acquainting him either with further details of the case or with the identity of the person you have reason to suspect?”

  “If Mr Seston is prepared to agree.” Cuff was at once conciliatory and weighty. “We are likely to get farthest, I think, if we first investigate the situation without directing Mr Seston’s mind towards one supposition or another- – and if we follow up that by further discussing it with him in the light of everything we know.”

  Poor Freddie, I saw, had a heavy programme in front of him. For of course he couldn’t refuse to help Cuff – nor was it remotely likely that he should want to refuse. I found myself wishing that he was quite another sort of person: one prepared to see in this fantastic situation not horror and dismay but a waving of the wand of the great goddess Publicity. Trouble, no doubt, might await the publisher who, knowingly and at this moment, pressed on with the publication of the latest Hugo St Swithin; at the best his case would make a very lucrative one for the appropriate members of my profession to argue over. Nevertheless the present situation could not be without its large opportunities. They were opportunities which Freddie would certainly reject if he could. But I already doubted whether, in fact, much power to choose lay with him. Unless Cuff were a mere madman or practical joker – and I knew perfectly well he was nothing of the sort – a good many spotlights were already seeking Freddie out. The manner of this veritable real-life murder had – doubtless for some good reason – been made public. Scores of people had by now read Freddie’s book in advance copies or while it was passing through the processes of production. The brut
al truth was that Freddie hadn’t a chance. He was booked for notoriety. The sales of any of his novels that happened to be in print would bump up quite appreciably. The early Hugo St Swithins would take on a new lease of life as paper-backs. And so on. If one could set aside the wretched crime – a near-madman’s crime, it must surely be – that had brought this singular piece upon the boards, one could no doubt contrive to view it as comedy. But it seemed unlikely that Freddie himself was open to persuading that it should be seen like that. His temperament was deplorably unsuited to the role in which he had been cast. It was true that he was in a sense a comedy character; in a very short time I had realised his instinct to play himself that way. But light comedy was his line. He wouldn’t relish the sort that had a bitter or savage twist to it.

  At the moment what it seemed to me that Freddie required was a breathing space. He had returned to his hotel and Cuff has fallen upon him. There had also been, I gathered, telegrams waiting from his publisher and his agent. It had been a pretty stiff surprise banquet to digest. And it occurred to me that I might make myself useful simply by creating a little diversionary activity. “It seems to me,” I said, “that you are asking a good deal of Mr Seston, Inspector. It may be perfectly proper – but you are inviting him to go over the whole period during which he has been composing this book, and to provide you with names and so forth which you will then follow up. Before I advise him to go ahead, I think I must hear a little more about your case. I haven’t been reading the English newspapers, but they must all by now have printed a fuller account of it than we’ve had from you so far. So I confess to feeling a little in the dark. Will you agree to a short discussion with me? There will still be time for you to have an hour or so with Mr Seston before dinner. He won’t, I’m afraid, be available after dinner; but we can consider the need for further discussion in the morning.”