Dead Man’s Quarry: A Golden Age Mystery

by Ianthe Jerrold

  “When I first met Gavin Marshall, Clytie was keeping a boarding-house in Montreal. I was staying there in the intervals of finding loathsome jobs and losing them again. Oh, it was beastly! Gavin had had rather the same sort of life as mine—he’d been an actor, and a tram-conductor, and a farmer. It was when he was farming that he fell in with Charles Price. They bought a bit of land between them, on borrowed money, and went into partnership trying to farm it. But Gavin couldn’t stick to anything long, and I should think Charles was a pretty hopeless sort of person. And they came a cropper. And then Charles got pneumonia, and Gavin cleared out and left him.”

  “Left him alone?”

  “Yes. I didn’t know that at the time. This is what I’ve heard during the last few days. Yes, we’ve been extremely frank with one another during the last week, Gavin and Clytie and I. Lord, I’m glad it’s over! Gavin just told us at first that he knew Charles had been living under another name and was dead. But apparently he wasn’t dead when Gavin scooted with their joint possessions, only nearly. Unfortunately for everybody he recovered. You know the rest. Oh, Lord!”

  Isabel suddenly sprang to her feet and stretched her arms above her head with a laugh.

  “Oh, Lord! If Clytie could hear me sitting here and telling you all this! Well, she’ll know soon enough, I suppose.”

  She yawned ostentatiously, dropped her arms and picking up her coat shook it carefully and began to put it on.

  Nora said huskily:

  “When you and—and he caught me up beyond Hereford, I was frightened of you as well as of him, Isabel. But you saved my life, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel pensively. “I suppose so. I can’t help liking you, Nora. But it wasn’t only because of that. I really do draw the line at murder. Besides! What good could it have done? When the game’s up, it’s no use making a fuss and doing unnecessary damage. And anybody but a fool could see that the game was up then. The game’s up, now.”

  Nora rose to her feet with cheeks that slowly paled again and a sudden foreboding in her eyes.

  “Isabel,” she murmured, going hesitatingly closer to the other girl, “you won’t—you don’t intend—”

  The two looked at one another. Isabel laughed then, and put out her hand with a maternal gesture as though to touch Nora’s pale cheek, and dropped her hand and laughed again.

  “No, child. Nothing would induce me to. I’ve told you—I don’t know the meaning of the word despair. Besides”—she glanced at John—“I’m not as handy with poisons as my delightful Cousin Clytie. Oh, but I’m almost glad the game is up! It was never worth the candle! Clytie and Gavin! Whatever happens to me now, I’m free of them for ever. When I go to—whenever they put conspirators and accessories after the act of murder, I shall be free—free of everything except myself. And I shall never be free of that. But don’t worry about me, Nora. Sometimes I hate, I hate, I hate my self. But most of the time, oh, how my self amuses me!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  LET’S GO BACK TO LONDON

  “And now,” said Rampson, “do, John, let’s go back to London. It’s been a nice holiday, a peaceful, refreshing change of scene, but I seem to remember that I’ve got work to do.”

  They were sitting in the pleasant dining-room of the Feathers in Penlow, looking out on the narrow High Street and smoking after-lunch cigarettes.

  “I did want to get through to the Welsh coast,” said John regretfully, with an amused eye on his friend’s anxious face. “I say, is this a specially comfortable and peaceful inn, Sydenham, or is it only the change from the electrical atmosphere at Rhyllan Hall? I’m beginning to recuperate nicely.”

  “Oh, it’s a very decent pub,” said Rampson firmly, “but we’re not going to recuperate here. London’s the place to recuperate in after a holiday. You know,” he went on pensively, “I’m awfully glad you were right over that affair, but you had no business to be. I still maintain that your methods were hopelessly unscientific. I wonder what’ll happen to Isabel. Think she’ll get off lightly?”

  John sighed.

  “Depends what you call lightly. She’ll get a stretch, no doubt, though her counsel will probably manage to persuade the judge that she was under Clytie’s thumb.”

  “She ought to have informed the police at once,” said Rampson, shaking his head, “instead of making herself an accessory in that idiotic fashion.”

  John stirred restlessly and sighed again.

  “Of course she ought to,” he agreed. “And yet—to give a man away when he comes to you for shelter—a man you know—a fellow-conspirator—there’s something horrible to the feelings in such behaviour, however much it may appeal to reason. One can only go back to the beginning and say she ought never to have got herself in such a position. She ought never to have touched the scheme at all. Which is only to say that there’s something in her too good for such dingy, silly things. I can think of Clytie and the wretched Marshall with equanimity. But—I’m a sentimentalist, I suppose—the thought of Isabel hurts and depresses me. I hate to see a fine character stultified. She has brains. She has what’s rarer, courage. Need she have made such a mess of things as this? We shall probably have to give evidence at the trial, you know, when it comes off. I hope she’ll get off lightly, and do something sensible with the rest of her life. But don’t let’s talk of it now.”

  “I suppose,” said Rampson, in contemplative after-luncheon mood, “Felix and Nora will make a match of it, eh?”

  “Sure to,” said John, carefully dropping his cigarette-end in his coffee-dregs and watching it sizzle.

  “Do you know—” began Rampson, and stopped, looking curiously at his friend.

  “I don’t. Enlighten me.”

  “I thought for a moment—nothing.”

  With deep interest John watched his cigarette-end swelling and beginning to disintegrate.

  “I know what you’ve so discreetly decided not to say, you old ass. You thought I was a bit hit myself. Well, so I might have been, if I’d had time. But when one’s so busy keeping one’s head one hasn’t time to lose one’s heart. Besides—match, please—girls like Nora always marry men like Felix. I’ve noticed it again and again. It’s fate. It’s part of the mysterious workings of the universe. And it’s no good struggling against things like that.”

  John lit his cigarette, threw the blown match gently on to his friend’s expanded waistcoat and grinned.

  “Don’t look so sentimental, Sydenham, you’ll make me weep. Some day I’ll meet a Nora who hasn’t got a Felix, and then there’ll be a rush to the altar that will leave you gasping. Dear Nora! She’ll be so surprised when her Felix brings his broken heart to her to be mended. Yet it’s been written in the skies from the first day they met. You know”—John absently took up his spoon and stirred the loathsome mess in his cup with the concentration of a professor of chemistry engaged in a scientific experiment—”there’s some truth in what Isabel said. People like Nora get what they want in the end. They get it just because they are so ready to do without it. They get it because they are stronger than their desires. They are the salt of the earth. They are— But if I go on in this strain you’ll think I’m really leaving a broken heart among the Radnor marshes. And I’m not, truly. Only a deep admiration and a hope—a hope that’s perhaps got in it a thousandth part of envy, not more—that she won’t be disappointed in her Felix when she gets him. And now, let’s go back to London. We’ll go through to the Welsh coast some other, more peaceful time when policemen cease from puzzling and revolvers are at rest. Yes, now I come to consider it, the thought of London is quite refreshing. Let’s go back to London. Waiter, the bill.”

  About The Author

  Ianthe Jerrold was born in 1898, the daughter of the well-known author and journalist Walter Jerrold, and granddaughter of the Victorian playwright Douglas Jerrold. She was the eldest of five sisters.

  She published her first book, a work of verse, at the age of fifteen. This was the start of a long and
prolific writing career characterized by numerous stylistic shifts. In 1929 she published the first of two classic and influential whodunits. The Studio Crime gained her immediate acceptance into the recently-formed but highly prestigious Detection Club, and was followed a year later by Dead Man’s Quarry.

  Ianthe Jerrold subsequently moved on from pure whodunits to write novels ranging from romantic fiction to psychological thrillers. She continued writing and publishing her fiction into the 1970’s. She died in 1977, twelve years after her husband George Menges. She left her Elizabethan farmhouse Cwmmau to the National Trust.

  Also by Ianthe Jerrold

  The Studio Crime

  Ianthe Jerrold

  The Studio Crime

  A GOLDEN AGE MYSTERY

  “He is dead. It is quite impossible that he should have killed himself. He has been murdered. About half an hour ago. By a long knife passed under the left shoulder-blade into the heart.”

  On a fog-bound London night, a soirée is taking place in the studio of artist Laurence Newtree. The guests include an eminent psychiatrist, a wealthy philanthropist and an observant young friend of Newtree’s, John Christmas. Before the evening is over, Newtree’s neighbour is found stabbed to death in what appears to be an impossible crime. But a mysterious man in a fez has been spotted in the fog asking for highly unlikely directions...

  The resourceful John Christmas takes on the case, unofficially, leading to an ingenious solution no one could have expected, least of all Inspector Hembrow of Scotland Yard.

  The Studio Crime is the first of Ianthe Jerrold’s classic whodunit novels, originally published in 1929. Its impact led to her membership of the elite Detection Club, and its influence can be felt on later works by John Dickson Carr, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers among others.

  Chapter I

  A Party at Newtree’s

  “No, don’t draw the curtain for a minute, Mr. Newtree. Do you mind? I like the look of a London fog, when it’s fairly thin, like this one, and doesn’t hide the street-lamps. That one at the corner looks like a fiery cross with its long rays cutting the fog.”

  Newtree, who at Miss Wimpole’s first word had let go of the curtain with a sort of startled obedience, murmured inadequately:

  “Yes...” and stood at her side, peering out into the fog and trying to think of something effective to say about it. He couldn’t see anything, himself, except a feeble glimmer of light over the gateway of the court and a great deal of unpleasantly yellowish darkness; but he knew that if the celebrated Serafine Wimpole found the lamp remarkable, remarkable it must be. Laurence Newtree was a shy man, especially with women, and Miss Wimpole, whom he had not met before, filled his humble heart with terrified respect. It troubled him to think that he was her host and responsible for the entertainment of her and her large, scented, placid, smiling aunt. He couldn’t think why Christmas had seen fit to bring these two ladies to the studio, nor why he himself had allowed it. He glanced appealingly at his friend, but Christmas was sitting magisterially on the model’s throne, addressing an audience which consisted of Simon Mordby, the psychologist, Mrs. Imogen Wimpole, the aunt, and a lay figure draped in a Chinese robe which gave it, with its bald, featureless head and stiffly bent arms, the look of an old bonze. All of them, except the bonze, who preserved the enigmatic calm of the East, appeared to be enjoying themselves. Laurence envied Christmas his capacity for talking about nothing.

  He looked at Miss Wimpole’s lamp-ward gazing profile and thought of her plays, her novels, her press-notices, her lecture-tours in the States.... These things, combined with her femininity, paralysed him into an oafish silence. Yet at the same time the imp of the perverse, that imp within him which had led him half against his will from a city desk and a competence to Fleet Street and affluence, was noting down with irreverent hilarity the strong salient line of the lady’s nose, the long bony curve of the lady’s jaw, the cigarette dangling gamin-wise from between unexpectedly full pale lips, the long pointed hands like a mediaeval saint’s, the long pointed feet like small canoes.

  While the imp was joyfully tucking away an unflattering likeness of the lady in some obscure pigeon-hole in Laurence’s complex mind, Laurence himself, his racked brain suddenly perceiving a useful connection between Miss Wimpole’s profession of playwright and the state of the weather, was remarking brilliantly:

  “It’s a bad night for the theatres.”

  Miss Wimpole did not reply for a moment, but looked dreamily out through the tall studio window into the fog which seemed to move and writhe in dim, drifting shapes like living things. Then she turned and gazing intently at Laurence with her small dark eyes, leant towards him and murmured earnestly:

  “It’s a bad night for most things. But a good night for crime.”

  Laurence started slightly at this dark and unexpected pronouncement, and the gold pince-nez to which in a world of horn-rims he was still faithful dropped from his eyes as he stared apprehensively at the lady who had uttered it. Then he saw a twinkle under her crooked black eyebrows and a little line which might once have been a girlish dimple in her thin cheek. With relief rather than mortification he thought:

  “She’s laughing at me.”

  Serafine’s twinkle became a wide and sudden smile, as jolly as a schoolboy’s. She stood up and gathered her brilliant Chinese shawl around her thin shoulders.

  “Seriously, Mr. Newtree,” she said, and her clear, penetrating voice cut across and stilled the chatter at the other end of the studio, “it is a good night for crime. Don’t you often think that if you were going to commit a murder you’d choose a foggy night?”

  “I—I—no, I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it,” stammered Laurence, and was relieved to see his friend John Christmas approaching them with an amused smile.

  “Personally,” said Christmas, “I should hate to murder an enemy in a fog. It seems to me a poor, half-hearted, shamefaced way of doing it. If I had an enemy to murder I should get him alone somewhere in broad daylight and tell him exactly why I was going to murder him and how. We should then part under no misapprehensions, and the affair would be complete, rounded-off, artistic.”

  “You’d be hanged,” said Serafine briefly.

  “That’s the one consideration,” assented John, “that has so far kept me guiltless of blood. What do you think, Laurence? How would you dispose of your enemy?”

  “I’m afraid I shouldn’t dispose of him at all,” said Newtree diffidently, fidgeting with his glasses. “I—I should just keep out of his way if I didn’t like him. But I like practically everybody.”

  Christmas laughed. The contrast between his friend Newtree’s acute impish work as a caricaturist and his gentle diffident attitude to the world in general was a constant source of delight to him. John Christmas was a young man with a gift that amounted to genius for making friends with all sorts of people. He had been born under a happy star. He had his fair share of good looks, the good humour born of perfect health, the free, natural good manners of one who delights in his fellow-creatures and that alert and sympathetic sort of mind to which the meaning of the word “boredom” is unknown. He had sought out Newtree in the first place to buy the original of Newtree’s brilliant caricature of his father, Jefferson Christmas, head of the Christmas Stores, that steel and stonework colossus of the West End; and he had soon added him to his large collection of friends. Of all these, Serafine was his oldest and perhaps his dearest. In his early twenties he had frequently asked her to marry him. But her persistent refusal to take him seriously had gradually worn the romantic gilt off their friendship, and now in his thirtieth year their relationship was more like that of favourite nephew and young indulgent aunt than any other. Now, at Newtree’s deprecating “I like practically everybody” their eyes met with a twinkle, and John could see that Serafine liked and appreciated Newtree just as he did.

  “And you know,” went on Newtree mildly, “you’re joking, John. I might say that I’m as incapable of shedding bloo
d as you are yourself.”

  I notice,” said Christmas with a smile, “that you don’t include Miss Wimpole.”

  Laurence blinked in embarrassment and cast an apologetic glance at the formidable Serafine.

  “Oh, well,” he stammered quickly. “I don’t—I mean, I haven’t known Miss Wimpole very—I mean—”

  Miss Wimpole gave him a kind smile which added to rather than relieved his embarrassment.

  “Mr. Newtree feels quite rightly that he hasn’t known me long enough to answer for me,” she said reasonably. “I must tell you, Mr. Newtree, that I don’t make murder a habit. I only murder under great provocation.”

  “All murders are committed under great provocation.” It was Simon Mordby who, finding the amiable Mrs. Wimpole a bit heavy in hand, had suggested joining the animated trio at the window. He uttered his dictum with the smooth, unanswerable air of his kind of practitioner. He had a good presence, a suave, creamy voice, an ornate house in Maida Vale and a very large practice, consisting almost entirely of well-to-do and little-to-do women. As he spoke he fixed his wide-apart light eyes on Serafine and smiled a smile at once ingratiating and superior.

  “And you are mistaken, Newtree, in supposing yourself incapable of committing a murder. We are all potential murderers.”

  Mrs. Wimpole closed her eyes like a blissful cat and nodded, as though she found a sad pleasure in this conception of her potentialities. She was a kind, lazy, middle-aged lady with a great deal of time on her hands and no training in any useful way of killing it. The study of psychology was one of her latest hobbies. Serafine, who disliked Dr. Mordby and was tired of being made a subject for amateur psycho-analysis, wished her aunt would go back to astrology or vegetarianism or one of her other more polite and impersonal fads.

  “Of course,” pursued Dr. Mordby in his best lecture-room manner, “potentialities differ. Now I should say—” He looked at Serafine with his large head on one side and raised himself gently on his toes, a habit of his when talking on his own subject, “I should say that Miss Wimpole’s potentialities as a criminal are ex-treme-ly low.”