by Cyril Hare
The inspector here fished a notebook out of his waistcoat pocket and read as follows:
“Question: After Zbartorowski had left the Hall in the way you have described, what did you do?
Answer: I have told you. I sent Dixon off to find another clarinet.
Question: What did you do next?
Answer: I told Miss Carless not to let this affair upset her and saw her off the platform.
Question: And then?
Answer: I then sent the orchestra back to their places and carried on.
Question: You mean you carried on with the rehearsal?
Answer: Of course.
Question: Was the rehearsal successful?
Answer: It was quite satisfactory.
Question: Although the orchestra was then deficient of one player?
Answer: It wasn’t.
Question: But surely, you were then left with only one clarinet player instead of two?
Answer: I had no clarinets at all.
Question: I understood you to say that your orchestra contained two clarinets to start with?
Answer: That was the full orchestra. We had already rehearsed the Handel and the Mendelssohn concerto. All that was left to do was the symphony.
Question: Do you mean that it is possible to play a symphony without using clarinets?
Answer: Don’t be silly. I am not talking about ‘a symphony’, but this particular one.
Question: Very good, I should have said: Is it possible to play this particular symphony without using clarinets?
Answer: Really, I cannot go over the same ground continually. You already have the concert programme. We were playing Mozart’s symphony No. 38 in D, K.504, commonly called the Prague.
Question: I am aware of that. I am simply asking for a straight answer to this question: Do you use clarinets——
Answer: For goodness’ sake don’t go on talking about ‘using’ clarinets, as though they were toothpicks. The Prague symphony is not scored for clarinets. I imagined that everybody knew that.”
The inspector looked up from his notebook.
“At this point, sir,” he said, “Mr. Evans produced a large book of music, with some words on it in the German language, which he described as the score of the piece in question. I could not read it, of course, but he tendered it as evidence that clarinets are not employed in the symphony K.504. I then concluded my examination, as follows:
“Question: At the concert was there not a full orchestra on the platform?
Answer: Certainly there was.
Question: But, as it turned out, the clarinets were not called upon to play?
Answer: Not except in the National Anthem.
Question: If the organ piece had been played first would the clarinets have been wanted?
Answer: Of course. We were using Henry Wood’s arrangement. It is all in the programme.”
Inspector Trimble closed his notebook and put it away in his pocket.
“And what,” said the Chief Constable after a long pause, “what is troubling you about this case now, Mr. Trimble?”
Trimble stared at him in surprise. “But don’t you see, sir?” he said. “This means that the man we’ve been looking for all this time—this missing clarinettist—may not even have been a clarinettist at all. Nobody ever heard him play a note. He may have been just anybody. We’ve got to start all over again.”
“On the contrary,” said MacWilliam imperturbably. “Unless I am much mistaken, this is where we stop. Do you agree with me, Mr. Pettigrew?”
Pettigrew did not answer directly. His hands clasped round one knee, leaning back in his chair, he addressed nobody in particular.
“What a fool—what a doubly distilled idiot I have been!” he murmured. “The amateur all over! Here was this simple, obvious fact lying right under my nose—and I missed it. What did Evans say? ‘I imagined that everybody knew that.’ So they did—pretty nearly everybody connected with this case. Mrs. Basset knew it, Miss Porteous knew it. My own wife knew it perfectly well. I could have asked her at any time and got the simple answer. But it never occurred to me to ask, even when she offered to help me. This is a lesson to me, Inspector, to leave the business of detection to my betters.”
Trimble cast a bewildered gaze from Pettigrew to MacWilliam and back again to Pettigrew.
“Do you mean, sir,” he faltered, “that this piece of information actually helps the enquiry? When I heard it, I thought——”
“Helps!” exclaimed the Chief Constable. “Lord save us all! Here’s a chiel who goes off on his own and solves the crime of the century, and he asks if it helps!” He poured out a bumper for himself and another for Pettigrew. “This deserves a drink if anything ever did. Mr. Trimble, your very good health! But where’s your glass? Come now, I insist you should have a drop of something!”
“Thank you, sir,” said the inspector faintly. “I’ll have a small glass of soda-water, if I may. And now, sir, perhaps you or Mr. Pettigrew wouldn’t mind telling me just what I’ve done?”
19
Madam How and Lady Why
The Chief Constable looked across the room at Pettigrew.
“This is your show, I think,” he said. “You tell him.”
Pettigrew did not reply at once. “It’s easy enough to say what you have done, Inspector,” he said at last. “When I first propounded my theory to Mr. MacWilliam I told him that it led straight to an impossibility. We’ve been staring hopelessly at that impossibility ever since. You have removed it. That’s all. So long as we were looking for a man who could play the clarinet we were looking for someone who simply did not exist. Now that we know we only have to find a man who could put on a false moustache and a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and sit in the orchestra with a clarinet in his hand—well, there he is.” He indicated with his hand the little bundle of official papers which the Chief Constable had produced to him earlier in the evening. “I should have explained,” he added, “that I am alluding to my esteemed colleague, the secretary of the Markshire Orchestral Society.”
“Mr. Dixon!” exclaimed Trimble. “Do you really mean Mr. Dixon, sir?”
“None other, I assure you. Assisted, I regret to have to say, by Mrs. Dixon, who is on much better terms with her husband than she would have you believe.”
“Mr. Dixon! But I don’t understand. Why on earth should he have wanted to do such a thing?”
“As to the Why, that is where I come in. I spotted the Why some time ago, and the proof of it is in those papers over there. The really difficult problem was the How, and that you have succeeded in solving. With that done, it wouldn’t have taken you very long to get at the truth, but as it is, I can shorten your labour. There are some details that are not quite clear to me at the moment, but I have no doubt you will be able to clear them up as we go along.”
To look at Inspector Trimble at that moment, nobody would have believed that a short time before he had been on the verge of despair. With the complacent smile of success, he was sitting back to hear his assistant put the finishing touches to his work. Something very like a wink passed from MacWilliam to Pettigrew as the latter proceeded:
“Why? Why should Dixon wish to murder the woman from whom he was comfortably divorced as long ago as 1942? Both he and she had married again and they were as completely uninterested in each other’s lives—or deaths—as any two people could possibly be, to all appearances. Oddly enough, though, the motive for Dixon wanting to get rid of his ex-wife was presented to me at a very early stage in the case, in fact more than twenty-four hours before it was a case for the police at all. The person who gave me the hint, quite unconsciously, was Lucy Carless herself. I don’t know whether you are a reader of Dickens, Inspector?”
“I can’t say I am, sir. I have tried him once or twice, but I found him a bit too wordy for me.”
“Miss Carless had also tried Dickens—or rather he had been tried on her, with rather unfortunate results, it appeared. At Mr. Ventry’s famous part
y I happened to raise the subject of Dickens with her, and mentioned David Copperfield.”
“That’s one of the ones I dipped into, sir. There was a fellow in it called Micawber, I recollect, who was very comical.”
“Quite right. There were also two ladies who successively married the hero, named respectively Dora and Agnes.”
“That Dora! I think that was the bit of the book where I got bogged.”
“I can’t altogether blame you. Miss Carless held similar, and even stronger, views about that character. Now the point is this: Dora, in the story, is a charming but not altogether satisfactory wife, who conveniently dies, leaving the hero free to marry the equally charming and entirely satisfactory Agnes. As a matter of history, Dickens’s own marriage was somewhat of a failure, and he appears to have got it very firmly into his head that the girl he ought to have married was not his wife, but her younger sister. Whether things would have turned out any better if he had there is, of course, no knowing. But that being his state of mind, and since David Copperfield is obviously largely autobiographical, you can well imagine that many readers today identify Dora with Mrs. Dickens and Agnes with her sister—the convenient death of Dora and the subsequent marriage with Agnes being in the nature of what the psycho-analysts call ‘wish-fulfilment’.”
“Very interesting, sir, but I don’t quite see——”
“You will in a moment. As soon as ever I mentioned David Copperfield to Miss Carless she referred, not, as you very properly did, to Micawber, but to Dora and Agnes and to the commonplace identification of them with Dickens’s wife and sister-in-law. And she followed it up with these words—I think that I can recollect them exactly: ‘What a fuss he made about it! Nowadays he’d have simply got a divorce and married the other one!’ It struck me at the time that she seemed to be taking rather a strong personal interest in what is, after all, fairly ancient history, and I puzzled over it a good deal. Later on, a simple explanation occurred to me, which has now turned out to be the true one. Miss Carless was identifying herself with Dora—or with Mrs. Dickens, if you prefer it—and Dixon had done exactly what she suggested Dickens might have done.”
“With Mrs. Dixon, that now is, standing for Agnes?”
“Exactly.”
“But surely, sir, the two ladies weren’t sisters? Miss Carless’s father was a Polish count and Mrs. Dixon’s maiden name was Minch—or so Mrs. Basset says.”
“What Mrs. Basset says Debrett also says, and both are correct. What neither of them say, but is none the less true, is that Mrs. Minch and the Countess Carlessoff (or should it be Carlessova?) were one and the same person. Mrs. Dixon that was, and Mrs. Dixon that is, were half-sisters.”
“You still haven’t told me, sir,” Trimble reminded Pettigrew, “why Dixon should have wanted to kill Miss Carless.”
“I thought I had made it clear. It was so that he could marry her sister.”
“Marry her? But isn’t that just what he’d done, years ago?”
“He had gone through a form of marriage with her, certainly. The Chief Constable has the certificate in front of him at this moment. But it is of no legal effect whatever. You may not lawfully marry your divorced wife’s sister—and a half-sister, for this purpose, counts as a full one. That is the result of an Act of Parliament passed in the reign of Henry VIII—a gentleman who knew quite a bit about divorces. On the other hand, modern legislation has made it possible to marry a deceased wife’s sister, and that is exactly what Dixon intended to do.”
Seeing the look of incredulity on Trimble’s face, Pettigrew added: “Just to prove that this is not a piece of guesswork on my part, you will find on that table Dixon’s application to the ecclesiastical official known as the Surrogate, asking for the issue of a marriage licence to enable him to marry Nicola Minch, spinster. It is dated just a week after Lucy Carless’s death. The licence, of course, would enable him to marry without the publicity of banns, or giving notice at a register office.”
The inspector was still only half convinced.
“What beats me about the whole business is this,” he said. “Here’s a man in a good position, who, so far as anyone can tell, is comfortably married—he is married, to all intents and purposes, whatever the law may say. Why on earth should he run the fearful risk of committing a murder just to put himself right with the letter of the law, when he could have gone on as he was, and nobody any the wiser?”
“Because,” said Pettigrew, “he found himself in a position where he had to put himself right with the law, or sooner or later a great many people would be the wiser. Two unexpected events occurred just before the concert. The first was the death of the only son of Lord Simonsbath. That, as anybody within earshot of Mrs. Basset must have heard, left Dixon the next heir to the peerage, though his succession was liable to be defeated by the birth of a posthumous son to the widow. Then the posthumous child duly appeared and proved to be a girl. After that, whether he liked it or not, nothing but a miracle could prevent Dixon becoming the seventh Viscount, and, again according to the omniscient Mrs. Basset, the present peer is a pretty poor life, so that it might occur at any time.”
Pettigrew paused for a moment.
“Here,” he said, “I am obliged to speculate a little, but from what we now know happened I think I am on fairly safe ground. Whether married or living in sin, Dixon would unquestionably be Lord Simonsbath, and I don’t suppose anyone would question Mrs. Dixon’s right to call herself My Lady. But suppose he wanted to set up a family himself? Suppose—and time will very soon show if I am right—she is already in what the newspapers call ‘a certain condition’? I don’t profess to be an expert in such matters, but I fancy that before anyone can succeed to a peerage he has to take some steps to prove his right to do so. There would be a pretty kettle of fish, would there not, when Dixon’s son came to man’s estate and it turned out that after all he was what the law crudely styles a bastard. Plain Mr. Dixon could afford to let things go on in the way they always had done. Lord Simonsbath simply could not—and even if he was prepared to, the lady who had always passed as his wife was not going to let him.”
“When I was a boy,” observed the Chief Constable, “I was given a damned dull book to read. I’ve forgotten most of it, but the title has always stuck in my head. It was Madam How and Lady Why. It seems appropriate to this case, somehow.”
“I think we have disposed of Lady Why,” said Pettigrew, “and I must apologize for letting her ladyship take up so much of your time. And now, Inspector, we are waiting for you to give us Madam How.”
Inspector Trimble drew a deep breath. From the very beginning of the investigation he had been looking forward to the moment when before an admiring audience (which would certainly include the Chief Constable) he would demonstrate with telling logic and crystalline clarity the solution to the problem. Since then his confidence had wavered until, less than an hour ago, it had reached vanishing point. Now, it seemed, when he was least expecting it, his hour had struck. He was a successful detective after all! Except for one little detail—which, as Mr. Pettigrew pointed out, he would have found out for himself in due course—he had unravelled the mystery; and here was his audience, waiting breathless on his words. He could have wished for a little more time to assemble his thoughts—to assimilate the little detail which, he recognized, was not without its importance. But he would do his best. Tentatively at first, and then with growing assurance, he began his exposition.
“It’s a bit of a jig-saw puzzle, sir,” he said, “but I think that I can explain how it fits together. Let’s start at the beginning: Dixon made up his mind to kill Miss Carless in the artist’s room at the concert. In order to do that he had to impersonate a member of the orchestra, relying on the fact that players in an orchestra don’t look at each other during a performance but at the conductor, and the conductor in this case was as blind as a bat. The trouble was that he couldn’t play a note himself. But he noticed that one of the pieces to be played—this K. thing�
�didn’t use clarinets, and he decided that he would pretend to be a clarinet player for the occasion. As I see it he had three difficulties to get over before he could bring it off: One, to get hold of a clarinet; Two, to get rid of the genuine player; Three, to arrange for this K. affair to be played at the start of the concert, instead of at the end, as arranged. Am I right so far, sir?”
“In my humble opinion, absolutely right,” said Pettigrew.
“The first job was easy enough. I take it that he simply lifted Mr. Ventry’s instrument at the party. The second must have given him a bit of trouble, though. But luckily for him he was able to take advantage of the row that blew up at the rehearsal between Miss Carless and the Polish fellow.”
“There I am afraid I must disagree with you,” said Pettigrew. “There was no luck in the matter at all. The whole affair was deliberately staged by Dixon.”
“Are you sure of that, sir?”
“Looking back on the occasion—and don’t forget that I was an eye-witness—I have no doubt about it whatever. It seemed to me at the time that Dixon was showing an extraordinary lack of tact in dragging Zbartorowski up to be presented to the soloist. He was obviously reluctant to be brought forward and only wanted to be left alone. Introducing him to Miss Carless was like introducing a spark to a powder barrel.”
“How did he know that?”
“How was he not to know it? Dixon had lived in Poland. He had been given the job of vetting Zbartorowski before Evans would admit him to the orchestra. Of course he had found out all about him, and knew that if there was one name calculated to send Lucy off the handle it was his.”
“Very good, sir. Having got rid of one player in this way, of course he was given the job of finding another one. As we know, he eventually succeeded in engaging Mr. Jenkinson.”
“Here again I think I can help you. It is a lamentable fact, but I have just realized that I am going to be an important witness for the prosecution. Dixon wasted a considerable amount of time, no doubt deliberately, in trying a number of different people before he finally pitched on Jenkinson, whom he must have known to be available all along. I think this was done so that it would be too late for him to come direct to Markhampton, which was essential to his plan. Also you will note that he so arranged matters that I and not he made the first contact with Jenkinson, by way of additional proof, if necessary, that the man had been genuinely engaged. Incidentally, Evans very nearly queered his pitch at the last moment by offering to do without a clarinettist, but luckily for him the offer came just too late.”