The Case of the Missing Men: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  The Chief Constable, Goodman told me, would at once get in touch with what Wharton would call The Powers That Be, and probably that broadcast would be put out as early as six o’clock. And that seemed all that could be done about G. H. Preston.

  “One thing struck me as very peculiar when I was making those enquiries,” I said to Goodman. “Not so much the limited range of people with whom he came into contact, as the fact that the range was so limited.”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “Well, take the average person who might take a furnished house here or anywhere. There’s rationing and a ration card, and that means an identity number. There’d be things off the ration like a newspaper and milk and fuel.”

  “I get you,” he said. “He went out of his way to dodge the whole lot. Didn’t have a paper, got all his meals out, and used an electric fire.”

  “As against that,” I said, “we must set the fact that he was largely driven to it. If he’d been able to get a woman to do for him—and we know he tried—then he’d probably have changed all that.”

  “Well, for better or worse, he’s our sheet-anchor,” Goodman said resignedly. “I’d give a ten-pound note to have him here.”

  “All the same,” I said, “he must have been an ingenious devil if he killed Chaice. Take the facts as far as we’ve been able to prove them facts. No. 6 was under observation from me in the front and Daine in the back. When Chaice left, Preston was still there, but he couldn’t have got out. I followed Chaice, and if he’d come out of the front door and followed me, then I’d have seen him pass me while I waited at No. 3. If he came out at the back, then Daine would have seen him. Therefore he didn’t come out till after both Daine and I left. If Harris’s evidence is correct, that there was a light in Chaice’s room at that very time, then Preston couldn’t have done the strangling.”

  “Wait a minute,” Goodman said. “What about that man that Pymme heard running past?”

  “He was running the wrong way,” I said. “If he’d been running towards Lovelands, and not away from it, I admit we’d have had a good case for thinking the runner was Preston. And another thing. The time was wrong. Work it out and you’ll see that the house was still under observation when Pymme heard the runner.”

  “Yes,” he said slowly, and then brightened up. “There is, of course, one other thing.” He brightened still more. “In fact I think we’ve got something. What about this? Preston knew the lay-out of all those houses and gardens. He knew that if you went in the front gate of any of them you could walk right past the garage and on to the back gate. Chaice knew that and nipped through the gate of No. 3. But why shouldn’t Preston have come behind you and nipped in at the gate of No. 4 or 5 and so got to the back lane at the same time as Chaice? All he had to do then was follow Chaice across the lawn, hit him on the head, put his body in the room, fake the room and get back to No. 6 at his leisure. Then he packed up and made his getaway.”

  “Yes,” I said, my tone an agreement, though there were holes in that theory that made a slab of Gruyere look solid by comparison. Knowledge of the house and the habits of its occupants, for instance, and the cutting of the telephone wires.

  “Let’s look on the worst side,” I said. “Suppose we don’t get Preston or he can prove himself in the clear. Then who’s our man?”

  He gave me a cautious look and asked if it need necessarily be a man.

  “Kitty’s definitely not a suspect,” I said. “Mrs. Chaice, perhaps. But do you honestly think she could have strangled her husband?”

  “Frankly, I don’t,” he said. “As for the men, Harris couldn’t. He hadn’t the strength, even if Chaice was hampered by that cloak he was wearing.”

  I didn’t point out that no great strength was needed. To strangle a conscious Chaice—yes. But Chaice had first been knocked out by a crack on the skull, and Harris could certainly have been capable of that.

  “I think we can leave Harris out,” I said. “That legacy of his wasn’t a motive. If Harris hasn’t got far more than that salted away, then I’m a Dutchman.”

  “Lang doesn’t strike me as the type either,” Goodman said, but still as if inviting comment.

  “You never know,” I said. “That legacy might have come in handy too. It mightn’t be a bad idea to find out his financial circumstances.”

  “And the brother—Richard. A harmless, inoffensive-enough old gentleman.” Then he frowned. “Unless, of course, he’s liable to brainstorms. There seems to have been a considerable amount of hushing-up about his mental condition.”

  “True enough,” I said. “That’s a line that might be followed. You can be in the company of people like that for months and never suspect homicidal tendencies.”

  “That leaves Martin,” he said. “Plenty of motive in his case.” He leaned forward.

  “You think he’s a little . . .?” He tapped his skull significantly for the rest.

  “If you want my candid opinion,” I said, “I think all those—what shall I call them?—symptoms of egomania are nothing of the sort. Oxford abounds with poseurs, attitudinisers, and young fools who think the outré is the only wear.”

  “You mean it’s a disease of the young and he’ll grow out of it.” Then he grinned. “And what about Cambridge?”

  He certainly had me there. In any case we didn’t do any more speculating. He had a busy afternoon before him, and as I didn’t want to go back to the house, I proposed spending the afternoon at a cinema. In fact I wasn’t actually to see Goodman again till the next afternoon, and then under circumstances so extraordinary that if the Archangel Gabriel had revealed them beforehand I’d have told him to go and swallow his trumpet.

  CHAPTER X

  EXIT A SUSPECT

  I would like to tell you, extremely briefly, the general lay-out at Lovelands on that Thursday morning. Kitty and Constance were in Constance’s room with Mrs. Edwards, the housekeeper, and the three were busy over the adapting of certain black or dark-coloured garments to be worn by the two women at the cremation service the following day. Daine and Martin were to go too, but Richard was definitely not going.

  Lang had told me that he would be spending all his time in near future in the workshop, and that’s where he did spend that morning. Within a month, according to the terms of Chaice’s outstanding contract, the publishers had to be in possession a manuscript. Doubtless they would have waived their right in view of the special circumstances, but Lang didn’t want that and neither did I, for if a right can be waived, then a privilege can be claimed, and in less than no time a wagon and horses might have been driven through a contract. Moreover, Lang was on his mettle. He thought he could complete that unfinished novel on time, and if not he was prepared to kill himself in the attempt. As far as he was concerned, a lot depended on it, as he told me at breakfast.

  Daine spent the morning in his office, for with the cremation due the following day, and the previous day having been spent in town, he had work to anticipate and arrears to overtake. Richard spent the morning putting glass in one of the greenhouses that had been damaged by blast. It was an urgent job, for chrysanthemums were going into it, and nothing spoils the blooms more quickly than the dripping of rain from gaps in the glass-work.

  Martin was busy upstairs over his additions to that volume of poems. He broke off for a swim not long before lunch. I was there in time to see him come out. It hadn’t been much fun, he said. It was an overcast morning and the water had been a bit cold. But his brain had been a bit tired, he told me wearily, and as he was proposing to go on working all day, he thought a spot of swimming might help. He also told me in confidence that composing was like concentrated chess, only worse. I said I could very well believe it.

  I thought for a bit that morning, then I wrote up some notes on the Case and then read one of Chaice’s own books. I found I’d read it before and yet I enjoyed it the second time. Chaice, I thought, was certainly an ingenious devil and the last word in mastery of suspense. In fact I stopped rea
ding because I didn’t want to finish that book too quickly, so I saved it up in case of a lazy afternoon.

  Then I got Goodman on the telephone and asked if there was any news. He told me—what I already knew from Harris—that that broadcast had been put out at nine o’clock the previous night and had since been repeated. He also told me that nothing whatever had been discovered about the kind of transport Preston had used for his getaway. Questioning had also revealed that Preston had no season ticket, nor did anybody at the booking office remember a man of his description. He added that he’d be seeing me at Lovelands some time in the afternoon.

  One other thing remains to do—to show you the lay-out of some of the upstair rooms. The sketch is a very rough one made for my own use, and, I should guess, considerably out of plan. But good enough for its purpose, which is to show you where various people slept, or where they happened to be spending their time that vital afternoon.

  And so the afternoon itself. Daine came into lunch, and very tired he looked. He had had a harassing day in town, he told me, and that further business of the cremation had made him late. Martin had lunch upstairs and Lang had his in the workshop. It was a cold meal in any case, and so there wasn’t all that extra work. Constance and Kitty made the four at the table, but they went upstairs again as soon as the meal was over, and I gathered that the dress alterations weren’t going any too smoothly. One other thing I remember is that the sun chose to come out, and as Daine and I sat over coffee it felt positively hot, and even Daine seemed suddenly to become more cheerful. He had had a twinge of sciatica that made him limp slightly, and I told him, I remember, that he ought to have a short swim and then treat the sciatica to a sunbath.

  What was to happen was such a bolt from the blue that I can bring the suddenness of it home to you only by telling the trivialities that preceded it. As Daine and I got up from our coffee, he remarked that he’d seen Parsley the previous day and perhaps I’d like to know what had already been done about the reprints of my books. There was also the agreement which I might as well sign, and that would save posting it to me in town.

  We went up the stairs together and Daine said he wouldn’t be a minute, and he wasn’t. I had thought of nipping into the lavatory, but he beat me by a short head.

  “Carry on,” I told him, and went into my room till he should emerge. Then I went in and he waited for me. It was less than half a minute later when I heard the shriek.

  A woman was shrieking and I heard the quick patter of Daine’s feet and his startled, “Hallo! . . . Hallo!” as if he expected some answering explanation. I couldn’t move for a moment or two, and all the time I was trying to puzzle out the direction from which that shriek had come. It had seemed curiously near and yet away from the house. And there had been no identifying of a voice, for it had been no more than a shriek, and then another, and then nothing.

  It was perhaps half a minute before I was out of the door and making my way back to the stairs. Then Daine appeared, and he looked scared out of his life. He beckoned frightenedly and disappeared just round the corner. The door of Martin’s room was open. Kitty was on the floor and Daine was hoisting her in his arms. Sprawled out in a chair by the window was Martin.

  “Good God, what’s happened?” I said.

  Daine nodded back at Martin as he picked up Kitty.

  “He’s dead,” he said. “You’d better try and get hold of that Inspector.”

  I wriggled by him as he went through the door. Martin lay in that chair, one hand loosely across his body and the other drooping by his side. At the angle of his forehead, just above the left temple, was a neat hole and round it a tiny seepage of blood. The window at his left was closed and fastened, and that shot must have come from the door through which Daine had just carried Kitty.

  I looked round the room. There was a companion window farther back, but that was closed and fastened too. Then I saw something on the carpet beneath it, and at the foot of a huge old-fashioned mahogany wardrobe whose doors were partially ajar. It was a rifle.

  I moved carefully across and had a look at it, and then I knew where I had seen it before—in that showcase of crime souvenirs in the hall. It was of French or Belgian make: a wicked-looking weapon with a stubby barrel, the whole thing not two feet in length. And then I saw something else. A string was tied round the trigger and ran back through a swivel attached to the bottom of the butt, and that string ended not far from the hand that flopped by the side of the chair.

  I heard Daine calling, and the call was coming from Kitty’s room. She was on the bed, propped up with pillows, and he had been bathing her face.

  “She’s just coming to,” he said. “Do you think we ought to question her?”

  Then we heard voices coming from the direction of the hall. Constance and someone were coming up the stairs. I nipped out and closed Martin’s door. Constance looked surprised at the sight of me. I recognised the housekeeper, though I’d seen her only once before and at a distance.

  “It’s Kitty,” I said. “She’s fainted. Daine is looking after her in her room.”

  “Fainted? What on earth for?”

  The housekeeper turned back to Constance’s bedroom. Constance went on towards Kitty’s room. I nipped into Martin’s room and closed the door.

  It was suicide then, I told myself, though why the devil he should have wanted to make away with himself was utterly beyond me. For the last day or two nobody could have been on better terms with life and himself than Martin Chaice. And under the window was a table on which was paper and his manuscript. There on the carpet was a pencil and an old magazine. What was the magazine for? Then as soon as I moved it carefully I saw a sheet of paper beneath it. That magazine had been used as a writing pad. He had been sitting at that window, the light well behind him, trying to compose one of those poems he had wanted for the completion of his volume.

  I used my handkerchief for a glove and gently drew that sheet of paper out. It was a poem, as I had thought. Your ideas about poetry and mine may differ or coincide. Perhaps you will think I was generous to call it a poem.

  REQUIEM

  Grass and flesh grass

  effulgent, horrific, flesh

  voluptuous, abhorrent.

  Life’s integer and element.

  the ultimate of death.

  me and my own element

  logic and illogic

  and then nothing.

  noth . . .

  I frowned over it for a moment or two and then put it carefully back. Maybe my lip had a slight ironic curl. What it all meant I had only the haziest notion. But if what it all amounted to was that all flesh, as the Burial Service has it, is grass, and life ends in nothingness, then Martin Chaice had ended his career as a poet in a way that was not only singularly macabre, but also uncommonly apposite.

  I opened the door. Faint voices were coming from Kitty’s room, so I hurried down the stairs. In the hall I stopped for a minute at that showcase. There was the space where the rifle had been, and there was the little saucer that had contained the three stubby cartridges. They had gone, but the little slip of white cardboard still had its explanatory notice.

  The rifle with which Emile Krantz killed Madame Decroy and her daughter at Lille.

  July 27th, 1938

  I went on to the workshop; gave a quick tap at the door and entered. Lang was at his usual place beneath the window, and so busy was he at his typewriter that he didn’t hear my knock or my entry. I coughed and he looked round. Then he gave his usual shy smile and got to his feet.

  “Be a good fellow and do something for me,” I said. “I have an appointment here with Inspector Goodman. Just ring the station and see if he’s on his way. If not, tell him I want him urgently.”

  I had walked across to his machine.

  “You type at a terrific speed,” I said. “Don’t you make mistakes?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “But not when I’m wound up as I am now. It’s only when you’re stumped for words that you’re
liable to be wool-gathering.”

  “Just my experience,” I said. “Do that little job for me, will you? I’ll be back in a couple of minutes to hear the result.”

  I nipped out by the front door and went round the house in search of Richard, and I was thinking how perfectly normal everything had been in that workshop. Never a sign of fluster on the part of Lang, and a complete absorption in his work. Not that Martin hadn’t killed himself. Still, it was just as well to make sure just where people had been at the time of the firing of the shot.

  I went through the gate to the walled garden and the greenhouses, but there was no sign of Richard there. An elderly gardener was working fairly near and I hollered to him. He said I might find him in the garage.

  He was there sure enough, and he was deep in one of his fits of abstraction. I watched him as he stood there with his back to me, arms before him on the carpenter’s bench, and then I gave a loud cough and went in. He seemed to blink his eyes for a moment before he recognized me, and then he gave me that gentle smile of his.

  “No work for you today, sir, I’m afraid.”

  “What are you doing yourself?” I asked him.

  He showed me. He had used up most of his small keg of putty and what was left was a bit hard, so he was remaking it with linseed oil and rubbing it to the right consistency with his hands.