“No. Just a plain sheet of paper starting, I wish it to be known, and signed by him. It just said he killed Edwin Bunn by accident, intending to scare him.”
“Better get it and give it to me, and I’ll include it with my report.”
“You mean …?”
“Do as I ask, Aunt Sarah.”
“Aunt Sarah. That sounds very friendly of you … All right. If you want me to adopt you, I will.”
And every Christmas until her death, Littlejohn received a card and a pound of tobacco from Aunt Sarah, and when she died, Cromwell inherited a hundred pounds.
An extract from George Bellairs’
The Case of the Famished Parson
WEDNESDAY, September 4th. The Cape Mervin Hotel was as quiet as the grave. Everybody was “in” and the night-porter was reading in his cubby-hole under the stairs.
A little hunchbacked fellow was Fennick, with long arms, spindleshanks accentuated by tight, narrow-fitting trousers—somebody’s cast-offs—and big feet. Some disease had robbed him of all his hair. He didn’t need to shave and when he showed himself in public, he wore a wig. The latter was now lying on a chair, as though Fennick had scalped himself for relief.
The plainwood table was littered with papers and periodicals left behind by guests and rescued by the porter from the salvage dump. He spent a lot of his time reading and never remembered what he had read.
Two or three dailies, some illustrated weeklies of the cheaper variety, and a copy of Old Moore’s Almanac. A sporting paper and a partly completed football pool form. . . .
Fennick was reading “What the Stars have in Store.” He was breathing hard and one side of his face was contorted with concentration. He gathered that the omens were favourable. Venus and Jupiter in good aspect. Success in love affairs and a promising career. . . . He felt better for it.
Outside the tide was out. The boats in the river were aground. The light in the tower at the end of the break-water changed from white to red and back at minute intervals. The wind blew up the gravel drive leading from the quayside to the hotel and tossed bits of paper and dead leaves about. Down below on the road to the breakwater you could see the coke glowing in a brazier and the silhouette of a watchman’s cabin nearby.
The clock on the Jubilee Tower on the promenade across the river struck midnight. At this signal the grandfather clocks in the public rooms and hall began to chime all at once in appalling discord, like a peal of bells being ‘fired.’ The owner of the hotel was keen on antiques and bric-a-brac and meticulously oiled and regulated all his clocks himself.
Then, in mockery of the ponderous timepieces, a clock somewhere else cuckooed a dozen times. The under-manager, who had a sense of humour, kept it in his office, set to operate just after the heavy ones. Most people laughed at it. So far, the proprietor hadn’t seen the point.
Fennick stirred himself, blinked his hairless eyelids, laid aside the oracle, stroked his naked head as though soothing it after absorbing so much of the future, and rose to lock the main door. Then he entered the bar.
The barmaid and cocktail-shaker had been gone almost an hour. Used glasses stood around waiting to be washed first thing in the morning. The night-porter took a tankard from a hook and emptied all the dregs from the glasses into it. Beer, stout, gin, whisky, vermouth. . . . A good pint of it. . . . One hand behind his back, he drank without stopping, his prominent Adam’s-apple and dewlaps agitating, until it was all gone. Then he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, sighed with satisfaction, selected and lighted the largest cigarette-end from one of the many ash-trays scattered about and went off to his next job.
It was the rule that Fennick collected all shoes, chalked their room-numbers on their soles and carried them to the basement for cleaning. But he had ways of his own. He took a large newspaper and his box of cleaning materials and silently dealt with the footwear, one by one, as it stood outside the doors of the bedrooms, spreading the paper to protect the carpet.
Fennick started for the first floor. Rooms 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, with the best views over the river and bay. His gait was jaunty, for he had had a few beers before finally fuddling himself with the dregs from the bar. He hummed a tune to himself.
Don’t send my boy to prizzen,
It’s the first crime wot he’s done.…
He tottered up the main staircase with his cleaning-box and stopped at the first door.
Number I was a single room. Once it had been double, but the need for more bathrooms had split it in two. Outside, on the mat, a pair of substantial handmade black shoes. Fennick glided his two brushes and polishing-cloth over them with hasty approval. They belonged to Judge Tennant, of the High Court. He came every year at this time for a fishing holiday. He tipped meticulously. Neither too much not too little. Yet you didn’t mind. You felt justice had been done when you got it.
Fennick had been sitting on his haunches. Now and then he cocked an ear to make sure that nobody was stirring. He moved like a crab to Number 2 gently dragging his tackle along with him.
This was the best room, with a private bath. Let to a millionaire, they said. It was a double, and in the register the occupants had gone down as Mr. and Mrs. Cuhady. All the staff, from the head waiter down to the handyman who raked the gravel round the hotel and washed down the cars, knew it was a lie. The head waiter was an expert on that sort of thing. With thirty years’ experience in a dining-room you can soon size-up a situation.
That was how they knew about the honeymoon couple in Number 3, too. Outside their door was a pair of new men’s brogues and some new brown suede ladies’ shoes. “The Bride’s travelling costume consisted of … with brown suede shoes….” Fennick knew all about it from reading his papers in the small hours.
There were five pairs of women’s shoes outside Number 2. Brown leather, blue suede, black and red tops, light patent leather, and a pair with silk uppers. All expensive ones.
Five pairs in a day! Fennick snarled and showed a nasty gap where he had lost four teeth. Just like her! He cleaned the brown, the black-and-red and the patent uppers with the same brushes for spite. The blue suede he ignored altogether. And he spat contemptuously on the silk ones and wiped them with a dirty cloth.
Mr. Cuhady seemed to have forgotten his shoes altogether. That was a great relief! He was very particular about them. Lovely hand-made ones and the colour of old mahogany. And you had to do them properly, or he played merry hell. Mr. Cuhady had blood-pressure and “Mrs.” Cuhady didn’t seem to be doing it any good. The magnate was snoring his head off. There was no other sound in Number 2. Fennick bet himself that his partner was noiselessly rifling Cuhady’s pocket-book….
He crawled along and dealt with the honeymoon shoes. They weren’t too good. Probably they’d saved-up hard to have their first nights together at a posh hotel and would remember it all their lives. “Remember the Cape Mervin … ?” Fennick, sentimental under his mixed load of drinks, spat on all four soles for good luck…. He crept on.
Two pairs of brogues this time. Male and female. Good ones, too, and well cared for. Fennick handled them both with reverence. A right good job. For he had read a lot in his papers about one of the occupants of Room 4. An illustrated weekly had even interviewed him at Scotland Yard and printed his picture.
On the other side of the door were two beds, separated by a table on which stood a reading-lamp, a travelling-clock and two empty milk glasses. In one bed a good-looking, middle-aged woman was sitting-up, with a dressing-gown round her shoulders, reading a book about George Sand.
In the other a man was sleeping on his back. On his nose a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles; on the eiderdown a thriller had fallen from his limp hand. He wore striped silk pyjamas and his mouth was slightly open.
The woman rose, removed the man’s glasses and book, drew the bedclothes over his arms, kissed him lightly on his thinning hair, and then climbed back into bed and resumed her reading. Inspector Littlejohn slept on….
Fennick had reached the l
ast room of the block. Number 5 was the tower room. The front of the Cape Mervin Hotel was like a castle. A wing, a tower, the main block, a second tower, and then another wing. Number 5 was in the left-hand tower. And it was occupied at the time by the Bishop of Greyle and his wife.
As a rule there were two pairs here, too. Heavy, brown serviceable shoes for Mrs. Bishop; boots, dusty, with solid, heavy soles and curled-up toes, for His Lordship. Tonight there was only one pair. Mrs. Greyle’s. Nobody properly knew the bishop’s surname. He signed everything “J. C. Greyle” and they didn’t like to ask his real name. Somebody thought it was Macintosh.
Fennick was so immersed in his speculations that he didn’t see the door open. Suddenly looking up he found Mrs. Greyle standing there in a blue dressing-gown staring down at him.
The night-porter hastily placed his hand flat on the top of his head to cover his nakedness, for he’d forgotten his wig. He felt to have a substantial thatch of hair now, however, and every hair of his head seemed to rise.
“Have you seen my husband?” said Mrs. Greyle, or Macintosh, or whatever it was. “He went out at eleven and hasn’t returned.”
Fennick writhed from his haunches to his knees and then to his feet, like a prizefighter who has been down.
“No, mum … I don’t usually do the boots this way, but I’m so late, see?”
“Wherever can he be … ? So unusual….”
She had a net over her grey hair. Her face was white and drawn. It must have been a very pretty face years ago…. Her hands trembled as she clutched her gown to her.
“Anything I can do, mum?”
“I can’t see that there is. I don’t know where he’s gone. The telephone in our room rang at a quarter to eleven and he just said he had to go out and wouldn’t be long. He didn’t explain….”
“Oh, he’ll be turnin’ up. P’raps visitin’ the sick, mum.”
Fennick was eager to be off. The manager’s quarters were just above and if he got roused and found out Fennick’s little cleaning dodge, it would be, as the porter inwardly told himself, Napooh!
It was no different the following morning, when the hotel woke up. The bishop was still missing.
At nine o’clock things began to happen.
First, the millionaire sent for the manager and raised the roof.
His shoes were dirty. Last night he’d put them out as usual to be cleaned. This morning he had found them, not only uncleaned, but twice as dirty as he’d left them. In fact, muddy right up to the laces. He demanded an immediate personal interview with the proprietor. Somebody was going to get fired for it….
“Mrs.” Cuhady, who liked to see other people being bullied and pushed around, watched with growing pride and satisfaction the magnate’s mounting blood-pressure…
At nine-fifteen they took the bishop’s corpse to the town morgue in the ambulance. He had been found at the bottom of Bolter’s Hole, with the tide lapping round his emaciated body and his head bashed in.
The first that most of the guests knew of something unusual was the appearance of the proprietor in the dining-room just after nine. This was extraordinary, for Mr. Allain was a lazy man with a reputation for staying in bed until after ten.
Mr. Allain, a tall fat man and usually impurturbable, appeared unshaven and looking distracted. After a few words with the head waiter, who pointed out a man eating an omelette at a table near the window, he waddled across the room.
They only got bacon once a week at the Cape Mervin and Littlejohn was tackling an omelette without enthusiasm. His wife was reading a letter from her sister at Melton Mowbray who had just had another child.
Mr. Allain whispered to Littlejohn. All eyes in the room turned in their direction. Littlejohn emptied his mouth and could be seen mildly arguing. In response, Mr. Allain, who was half French, clasped his hands in entreaty. So, Littlejohn, after a word to his wife, left the room with the proprietor….
“Something must have happened,” said the guests one to another.
George Bellairs was the pseudonym of Harold Blundell (1902-1985). He was, by day, a Manchester bank manager with close connections to the University of Manchester. He is often referred to as the English Simenon, as his detective stories combine wicked crimes and classic police procedurals, set in small British communities.
He was born in Lancashire and married Gladys Mabel Roberts in 1930. He was a Francophile which explains why many of his titles took place in France. Bellairs travelled there many times, and often wrote articles for English newspapers and magazines, with news and views from France.
After retiring from business, he moved with Gladys to Colby on the Isle of Man, where they had many friends and family. Some of his detective novels are set on the Isle of Man and his surviving notebooks attest to a keen interest in the history, geography and folklore of the island. In 1941 he wrote his first mystery story during spare moments at his air raid warden’s post. Throughout the 1950s he contributed a regular column to the Manchester Guardian under the pseudonym George Bellairs, and worked as a freelance writer for other newspapers both local and national.
Blundell’s first mystery, Littlejohn on Leave (1941) introduced his series detective, Detective Inspector Thomas Littlejohn. His books are strong in characters and small communities – set in the 1940s to ‘70s. The books have strong plots, and are full of scandal and intrigue. His series character started as Inspector and later became Superintendent Thomas Littlejohn. Littlejohn, reminiscent of Inspector Maigret, is injected with humour, intelligence and compassion.
He died on the Isle of Man in April 1982 just before his eightieth birthday after a protracted illness.
If you’d like to hear more from George Bellairs and other classic crime writers, follow @CrimeClassics on Twitter or connect with them on Facebook.
ALSO BY GEORGE BELLAIRS
The Case of the Famished Parson
The Case of the Demented Spiv
Corpses in Enderby
Death in High Provence
Death Sends for the Doctor
Murder Makes Mistakes
Bones in the Wilderness
Toll the Bell for Murder
Death in the Fearful Night
Death in the Wasteland
Death of a Shadow
Intruder in the Dark
Death in Desolation
The Night They Killed Joss Varran
This edition published in 2016 by Ipso Books
Ipso Books is a division of Peters Fraser + Dunlop Ltd
Drury House, 34-43 Russell Street, London WC2B 5HA
Copyright © George Bellairs, 1954
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
CONTENTS
1.THE NIGHT OF THE STORM
2.SEND FOR SCOTLAND YARD!
3.HAPPY FAMILIES
4.THE MAN WHO SAID HE’D SWING
5.THE TRIBE OF JERRY BUNN
6.THE SUPERANNUATED PARSON
7.THE ARRIVAL OF AUNT SARAH
8.“WHISPERS”
9.FUNEREAL INTERLUDE
10. JUBAL’S ALIBI
11. THE AFFAIRS OF RONALD BROWNING
12. CONFESSION
13. THE ARRIVAL OF BATHSHEBA BUNN
14. THE MAN IN WHITE SPATS
15. MISS MANDER EXPLAINS
16. THE TOWN FOOL
17. THE MAN WHO READ CONRAD
18. “THROSTLES NEST”
19. CONFERENCE AT “THE FREEMASONS”
20. THE DEFEAT OF AUNT SARAH
Littlejohn Mystery)
Corpses in Enderby (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery) Page 22