Trent Intervenes and Other Stories

by E. C. Bentley

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it,’ Trent said. ‘Should you say, Mrs Pillow, that Lord Southrop was happy as a schoolboy – popular, I mean, and fond of games, and so forth?’

  Mrs Pillow shook her head decisively. ‘He always hated school, sir; and as for games, he had to play them, of course, but he couldn’t abide them. And he didn’t get on with the other boys – he used to say he wouldn’t be a sheep, just like all the other something sheep – he learned bad language at school if he didn’t learn anything else. But at Cambridge – that was very different. He came alive there for the first time – so he used to say.’

  In Norwich, that same afternoon, Trent furnished himself with a one-inch Ordnance Survey map of a certain section of Derbyshire. He spent the evening at his hotel with this and a small-scale map of England, on which he marked the line of small towns which he had already visited; and he drew up, not for publication, a brief and clear report of his investigation so far.

  The next morning’s run was long. He had lunch at Sharnsley, where he made a last and very gratifying addition to his string of coffee-room interviews. Marsham House, he learned, stood well outside Sharnsley on the verge of the Town Moor; which, as the map had already told him, stretched its many miles away to the south and west. He learned, too, what and where were ‘the Church and Chapel’, and was thankful that his inquiring mind had not taken those simple terms at their face value.

  An hour later he halted his car at a spot on the deserted road that crossed the moor; a spot whence, looking up the purple slope, he could see its bareness broken by a huge rock, and another less huge, whose summits pierced the skyline. They looked, Trent told himself, not more unlike what they were called than rocks with names usually do. Away to the right of them was a small clump of trees, the only ones in sight, to which a rough cart-track led from the road; and from that point, he thought an artist might well consider that the Church and Chapel and their background made the best effect. He left his car and took the path through the heather.

  Arrived at the clump, which stood well above the road, he looked over a desolate scene. If anyone had met Lord Southrop there, they would have had the world to themselves. Not a house or hut was in sight, and no live thing but the birds. He looked about for traces of any human visitor; and he had just decided that nothing of the sort could reasonably be expected, after the lapse of a week, when something white, lodged in the root of a fir tree, caught his eye.

  It was a small piece of torn paper, pencilled on one side with lines and shading, the look of which he knew well. A rapid search discovered another piece nearby among the heather. It was all that the wind had left undispersed of an artist’s work, but for Trent, as he scanned the remnants closely, it was enough.

  His eyes turned now over a wider range; for this, though to him it spelt certainty, was not what he had been looking for. Slowly following the track over the moor, he came at length to the reason for its existence – a small quarry, to all appearance long abandoned. A roughly circular pond of muddy water, some fifty yards across, filled the lower part of it; and about the margin was a confusion of stony fragments, broken and rusted implements, bits of rotting wood and smashed earthenware – a typical scene of industrial litter. With his arm bare to the shoulder Trent could feel no bottom to the pond. If it held any secret, that opaque yellow water kept it well.

  There was no soil to take a footprint near the pond. For some time he raked among the debris in which the track ended, finding nothing. Then, as he turned over a broken fire-bucket, something flashed in the sunlight. It was a small, flat fragment of glass, about as large as a farthing, with one smooth and two fractured edges. Trent examined it thoughtfully. It had no place in his theory; it might mean nothing. On the other hand…he stowed it carefully in his note-case along with the remnants of paper.

  Two hours later, at the police headquarters in Derby, he was laying his report and maps, with the objects found on the moor, before Superintendent Allison, a sharp-faced, energetic officer to whom Trent’s name was well known.

  It was well known also to Mr Gurney Bradshaw, head of the firm of Bradshaw & Co. legal advisers to Lord Southrop and to his father before him. He had, at Trent’s telephoned request, given him an appointment at three o’clock; and he appeared at that hour on the day after his researches in Derbyshire. Mr Bradshaw, a courteous but authoritative old gentleman, wore a dubious expression as they shook hands.

  ‘I cannot guess,’ he said, ‘what it is that you wish to put before me. It seems to me a case in which we should get the Court to presume death with the minimum of difficulty; and I wish I thought otherwise, for I had known Lord Southrop all his life, and I was much attached to him. Now I must tell you that I have asked a third party to join us here – Mr Lambert Coxe, who perhaps you know is the heir to the title and to a very large estate. He wrote me yesterday that he had just returned from France, and wanted to know what the position was; and I thought he had better hear what you have to say, so I asked him for the same time as yourself.’

  ‘I know of him as a racing man,’ Trent said. ‘I had no idea he was what you say until I saw it in the papers.’

  The buzzer on the desk-telephone sounded, and Bradthaw put it to his ear. ‘Show him in,’ he said.

  Lambert Coxe was a tall, spare, hard-looking man with a tanned, clean-shaven face and a cordless monocle screwed into his left eye. As they were introduced he looked at the other with a keen and curious scrutiny.

  ‘And now,’ Bradshaw said, ‘let us hear your statement, Mr Trent.’

  Trent put his folded hands on the table. ‘I will begin by making a suggestion which may strike you gentlemen as an absurd one. It’s this. The man who drove that car to Lackington, and afterwards down to the seashore, was not Lord Southrop.’

  Both men stared at him blankly; then Bradshaw, composing his features, said impassively, ‘I shall be interested to hear your reasons for thinking so. You have not a name for making absurd suggestions, Mr Trent, but I may call this an astonishing one.’

  ‘I should damned well think so,’ observed Coxe.

  ‘I got the idea originally,’ Trent said, ‘from the wine which this man chose to drink with his dinner at the Crown Inn before the disappearance. Do you think that absurd?’

  ‘There is nothing absurd about wine,’ Mr Bradshaw replied with gravity. ‘I take it very seriously myself. Twice a day, as a rule,’ he added.

  ‘Lord Southrop, I am told, also took it seriously. He had the reputation of a first-rate connoisseur. Now this man I’m speaking of had little appetite that evening, it seems. The dinner they offered him consisted mainly of soup, fillet of sole, and roast fowl.’

  ‘I am sure it did,’ Bradshaw said grimly. ‘It’s what you get nine times out of ten in English hotels. Well?’

  ‘This man took only the soup and the fish. And with it he had a bottle of claret.’

  The solicitor’s composure deserted him abruptly.

  ‘Claret!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Yes, claret, and a curious claret, too. You see, mine host of the Crown kept a perfectly good Beychevelle 1924 – I had some myself. But he had also a Château Margaux 1922; and I suppose because it was an older wine he thought it ought to be dearer, so he marked it in his list eighteen pence more than the other. That was the wine which was chosen by our traveller that evening. What do you think of it? With a fish dinner he had claret, and he chose a wine of a notoriously bad year when he could have had a wine of 1924 for less money.’

  While Coxe looked his bewilderment, Mr Bradshaw got up and began to pace the room slowly. ‘I will admit so much,’ he said. ‘I cannot conceive of Lord Southrop doing such a thing if he was in his right mind.’

  ‘If you still think it was he, and that he was out of his senses,’ Trent rejoined, ‘there was a method in his madness. Because the night before, at Hawbridge, he chose one of those wines bearing the name of a château which doesn’t exist, and is merely a label that sounds well; and the night before that, at Wringham,
he had two whiskies and soda just before dinner, and another inferior claret at an excessive price on top of them. I have been to both the inns and got these facts. But when I worked back to Candley, the first place where Lord Southrop stayed after leaving home, it was another story. I found he had picked out about the best thing on the list, a Rhine wine, which hardly anybody ever asked for. The man who ordered that, I think, was really Lord Southrop.’

  Bradshaw pursed up his mouth. ‘You are suggesting that someone in Lord Southrop’s car was impersonating him at the other three places, and that, knowing his standing as a connoisseur, this man did his ignorant best to act up to it. Very well; but Lord Southrop signed the register in his usual way at those places. He received and read a letter addressed to him at Lackington. The motor tour as a whole was just such a haphazard tour as he had often made before. The description given of him at Lackington was exact – the clothes, the glasses, the abstracted manner. The cap that was washed up was certainly his. No, no, Mr Trent. We are bound to assume that it was Lord Southrop; and the presumption is that he drove down to the sea and drowned himself. The alternative is that he was staging a sham suicide, so as to be able to disappear, and there is no sense in that.’

  ‘Just so,’ observed Lambert Coxe. ‘What you say about the wine may be all right as far as it goes, Mr Trent, but I agree with Mr Bradshaw. Southrop committed suicide; and if he was insane enough to do that, he was insane enough to go wrong about his drinks.’

  Trent shook his head. ‘There are other things to be accounted for. I’m coming to them. And the clothes and the cap and the rest are all part of my argument. This man was wearing Lord Southrop’s tweed suit just because it was so easily identifiable. He knew all about Lord Southrop and his ways. He had letters from Lord Southrop in his possession, and had learned to imitate his writing. It was he who wrote and posted that letter addressed to L G Coxe; and he made a pretence of being worried by it. He knew that Lord Southrop’s notes could be traced; so he left them at the bureau to clinch the thing. And, of course, he did not drown himself. He only threw the cap into the sea. What he may have done is to change out of those conspicuous clothes, put them in a bag which he had in the car, and which contained another suit in which he proceeded to dress himself. He may then have walked, with his bag, the few miles into Brademouth, and travelled to London by the 12.15 – quite a popular train, in which you can get a comfortable sleeping-berth.’

  ‘So he may,’ Bradshaw agreed with some acidity, while Lambert Coxe laughed shortly. ‘But what I am interested in is facts, Mr Trent.’

  ‘Well, here are some. A few days before Lord Southrop set out from his place in Norfolk, someone rang him up in his library. The door was ajar, and the butler heard a little of what he said to the caller. He said he was going on the following Tuesday to visit a place he called the old moor, as if it was a place well known to the other as to himself. He said, “You remember the church and the chapel,” and that it must be over twenty years; and that he was going to make a sketch.’

  Coxe’s face darkened. ‘If Southrop was alive,’ he sneered, ‘I am sure he would appreciate your attention to his private affairs. What are we supposed to gather from all this keyhole business?’

  ‘I think we can gather,’ Trent said gently, ‘that some person, ringing Lord Southrop up about another matter, was told incidentally where Lord Southrop expected to be on that Tuesday – the day, you remember, when he suddenly developed a taste for bad wine in the evening. Possibly the information gave this person an idea, and he had a few days to think it over. Also we can gather that Lord Southrop was talking to someone who shared his recollection of a moor which they had known over twenty years ago – that’s to say, when he was at the prep. school age, as he was thirty-three this year. And then I found that he had been at a school called Marsham House, on the edge of Sharnsley Town Moor in Derbyshire. So I went off there to explore, and I discovered that the Church and Chapel were a couple of great rocks on the top of the moor, about two miles from the school. If you were there with your cousin, Mr Coxe, you may remember them.’

  Coxe was drumming on the table with his fingers. ‘Of course I do,’ he said aggressively. ‘So do hundreds of others who were at Marsham House. What about it?’

  Bradshaw, who was now fixing him with an attentive eye, held up a hand. ‘Come, come, Mr Coxe,’ he said; ‘don’t let us lose our tempers. Mr Trent is helping to clear up what begins to look like an even worse business than I thought. Let us hear him out peaceably, if you please.’

  ‘I am in the sketching business myself,’ Trent continued, ‘so I looked about for what might seem the best view-point for Lord Southrop’s purpose. When I went to the spot, I found two pieces of torn-up paper, the remains of a pencil sketch; and that paper is of precisely the same quality as the paper of Lord Southrop’s sketching-block, which I was able to examine at Lackington. The sketch was torn from the block and destroyed, I think, because it was evidence of his having been to Sharnsley. That part of the moor is a wild, desolate place. If someone went to meet Lord Southrop there, as I believe, he could hardly have had more favourable circumstances for what he meant to do. I think it was he who appeared in the car at Wringham that evening; and I think it was on Sharnsley Moor, not at Lackington, that Lord Southrop – disappeared.’

  Bradshaw half-rose from his chair. ‘Are you not well, Mr Coxe?’ he asked.

  ‘Perfectly well, thanks,’ Coxe answered. He drew a deep breath, then turned to Trent. ‘And so that’s all you have to tell us. I can’t say that – ’

  ‘Oh no, not nearly all,’ Trent interrupted him. ‘But let me tell you now what I believe it was that really happened. If the man who left the moor in Lord Southrop’s car was not Lord Southrop, I wanted an explanation of the masquerade that ended at Lackington. What would explain it was the idea that the man who drove the car down to Devonshire had murdered him, and then staged a sham suicide for him three hundred miles away. That would have been an ingenious plan. It would have depended on everyone making the natural assumption that the man in the car was Lord Southrop. And how was anyone to imagine that he wasn’t?

  ‘Lord Southrop was the very reverse of a public character. He lived quite out of the world; he had never been in the news; very few people knew what he looked like. He depended on all this for maintaining his privacy in the way he did when touring in his car – staying always at small places where there was no chance of his being recognised, and pretending not to be a peer. The murderer knew all about that, and it was the essence of his plan. The people at the inns would note what was conspicuous about the traveller; all that they could say about his face would be more vague, and would fit Lord Southrop well enough, so long as there was no striking difference in looks between the two men. Those big horn-rims are a disguise in themselves.’

  Bradshaw rubbed his hands slowly together. ‘I suppose it could happen so,’ he said. ‘What do you think, Mr Coxe?’

  ‘It’s just a lot of ridiculous guesswork,’ Coxe said impatiently. ‘I’ve heard enough of it, for one.’ He rose from his chair.

  ‘No, no, don’t go, Mr Coxe,’ Trent advised him. ‘I have some more of what you prefer – facts, you know. They are important, and you ought to hear them. Thinking as I did, I looked about for any places where a body could be concealed. In that bare and featureless expanse I could find only one: an old abandoned quarry in the hillside, with a great pond of muddy water at the bottom of it. And by the edge of it I picked up a small piece of broken glass.

  ‘Yesterday evening this piece of glass was shown by a police officer and myself to an optician in Derby. He stated that it was a fragment of a monocle – what they call a spherical lens – so that he could tell us all about it from one small bit. Its formula was not a common one – minus 5; so that it had been worn by a man very short-sighted in one eye. The police think that as very few people wear monocles, and hardly any of them would wear one of that power, an official inquiry should establish the names of those who h
ad been supplied with such a glass in recent years. You see,’ Trent went on, ‘this man had dropped and broken his glass on the stones while busy about something at the edge of the pond. Being a tidy man, he picked up all the pieces that he could see; but he missed this one.’

  Lambert Coxe put a hand to his throat. ‘It’s infernally stuffy in here,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll open a window, if you don’t mind.’ Again he got to his feet, but the lawyer’s movement was quicker. ‘I’ll see to that,’ he said, and stayed by the window when he had opened it.

  Trent drew a folded paper from his pocket. ‘This is a telegram I received just before lunch from Superintendent Allison of the Derbyshire police. I have told him all I am telling you.’ He unfolded the paper with deliberation. ‘He says that the pond was dragged this morning, and they recovered the body of a man who had been shot in the head from behind. It was stripped to the underclothing and secured by a chain to a pedal bicycle.

  ‘That, you see, clears up the question how the murderer got to the remote spot where Lord Southrop was. He couldn’t go there in a car, because he would have had to leave it there. He used a cycle, because there was to be a very practical use for the machine afterwards. The police believe they can trace the seller of the cycle, because it is in perfectly new condition, and he may give them a line on the buyer.’

  Bradshaw, his hands thrust into his pockets, stared at Coxe’s ghastly face as he inquired, ‘Has the body been identified?’

  ‘The superintendent says the inquest will be the day after tomorrow. He knows whose body I believe it is, so he will already be sending down to Hingham Blewitt about evidence of identity. He says my own evidence will probably not be required until a later stage of the inquest, after a charge has been – ’