The Case of the Missing Men: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  “Not much in my line,” I told him with a smile, added that I’d be seeing him later, and then hurried back to the house. Goodman’s car had just drawn up and he and Lang were in the hall.

  “Here is Mr. Travers,” Lang said. “I was just going to report, sir, that the Inspector was on his way.”

  I took Goodman into Chaice’s room and told him what I knew and what I’d done. Just as he was about to telephone for his doctor, in came Daine.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was only going to telephone.”

  Kitty had come round and had told Constance what had happened. Then Constance had collapsed. Mrs. Edwards had got her to bed, and now Daine wanted to get the doctor to have a look at both the women. Then it happened that the Chaice doctor was Goodman’s man. Goodman got him while Daine waited, and then the three of us went upstairs.

  Kitty was sitting in a chair by the window. She had been crying, and it was a relief, perhaps, that she had.

  “How are you feeling now, my dear?” Daine asked her and put an arm round her shoulder.

  “I’m all right,” she said, and gave a last dab at her eyes.

  “Think you could answer a simple question or two?” I smiled at her.

  She said she could, so I asked her just what had happened. It was a perfectly simple account. In Constance’s room there had been a sudden shortage of material, but Mrs. Edwards had said she had a lot of odds and ends in her room and perhaps there’d be something there. So she and Constance had gone off to that room and Kitty had gone to her bedroom intending to have a private try-on of an almost completed dress. Then she heard a sudden crack like a shot. It had come from Martin’s room, so she went to explore. She remembered seeing him lying back in the chair with the bullet hole in his head, and then she shrieked. That was all she remembered till she came to in her room.

  “Just one other question,” I said. “When you first looked in that room the window was closed?”

  “It was closed,” she said. “I remember now that I thought how stuffy he was, going to sleep with the window shut.”

  We left her there with the injunction to lie quiet till the doctor had seen her, and then we went to Martin’s room. Goodman wanted Daine and me to compare times before he did any looking around.

  “Did either of you gentlemen hear the shot?” he wanted to know.

  “I did,” Daine said. “Mind you, I didn’t know then what it was, but I heard something like a sharp crack. I didn’t mention the matter because it wasn’t exactly an opportune time.” He smiled rather sheepishly as he looked at me. “We happened to be having a friendly argument as to who should use the lavatory first.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “There wasn’t exactly an argument. An unspoken one, if you like.”

  “And then you both heard the shriek?”

  We explained all that, but what we couldn’t do was calculate the precise moment at which the shot had been fired. It was while Daine and I stood in the corridor before the lavatory, that much was certain, and the nearest we could arrive at a time was five minutes past two.

  Goodman took a note or two, then had a good look round while we stayed by the door. He agreed that Martin had been writing, and he also drew out the sheet of paper and read it before replacing it.

  “Requiem. That’s a funeral poem, isn’t it?”

  “Is that what he was writing?” cut in Daine.

  “That was the title,” Goodman told him. “A bit beyond me, though. And it wasn’t finished.”

  “Might I have a look at it?” Daine asked.

  Goodman drew it out and held it for him. Daine put on those reading spectacles of his and read it. Then he shrugged his shoulders. Then he looked bewilderingly at me.

  “What was he doing? Writing it for himself?”

  “Lord knows!” I said. “But if he was, then it might have been his final comment on the futility of a life he was just about to end.” Then I gave a shrug of the shoulders. “Not that I necessarily agree with that explanation.”

  Goodman stepped over to the gun.

  “I see,” he said, and looked back at where the string ended. “When he pulled the string, the fact that it went back through the swivel made it pull the trigger. But where was the stock of the gun fastened to?”

  I said I didn’t know, unless it had been held in some way between the doors of the wardrobe.

  “We’ll test that later,” he said. “But first I’d just like to see the other rooms. Where you two gentlemen were, and so on.”

  He locked the door behind him and pocketed the key. A couple of minutes and he had a good idea of the scene which I’d described. Daine had been looking a bit worried.

  “Would you mind coming in my room for a moment, Inspector? You, too, Travers.”

  “I don’t know how this is going to work out,” he began, and none too confidently. “What I mean is, I don’t know whether he shot himself or someone else shot him. If it was someone else, then there’s something I ought to tell you.”

  He added that he was a busy man and getting in more and more of a muddle with his work on account of what had happened. So he’d rather volunteer a statement and save subsequent questioning if the facts came to light. What he then told Goodman was about Martin and the manuscript and how he’d intended to string him along. The Inspector might think it sharp practice, he added, but there it was. And it also, in a way, gave him a sort of profit out of Martin’s death.

  “I don’t think you need worry about that, sir,” Goodman told him. “You had nothing to do with the actual shooting, so why worry. Unless”—he frowned for a moment—“unless he found out what you intended to do, and that dispirited him, so to speak, and led him to killing himself.”

  “Oh, no,” said Daine grimly. “When I have in mind business of the sort I’ve described to you, nobody finds out. It’s in here,” and he tapped his skull. “I mentioned it to Mr. Travers, but that amounts to the same thing.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “I’d never have mentioned it, least of all to Martin.”

  “Well, we won’t keep you further, Mr. Daine,” Goodman said. “Thank you very much for what you’ve done.”

  He and I went down to Chaice’s room again, where he did some telephoning: I strolled out politely to the hall, but I couldn’t help knowing that he was talking to Marney-Hope. It was five minutes before he called me in, but first I showed him where the rifle had come from.

  “Three shells, were there?”

  “Either three or four,” I said.

  “Then they should be in the magazine,” he said, and closed the door of the room.

  “Tell me confidentially,” he said, “and before our people get here to test for prints and so on. Did he kill himself, or didn’t he?”

  “You know as much as I do,” I told him. “The only thing that struck me as strange was that he should have shot himself, in the act, as it were, of writing, and in the very chair.”

  He nodded. “And the fact that the poem was unfinished?”

  “I wouldn’t place too much reliance on that,” I said. “Those futurist poets, or whatever they call themselves, do queer things. Leaving the poem unfinished may have been intended as a kind of symbol. And the pencil hadn’t trailed off as if he’d been shot while the pencil was actually in contact with the paper. Also there weren’t any corrections, so we can take what he wrote as the final copy.”

  “I see that,” he said. “And he hadn’t seemed depressed to you?”

  “Far from it. After he put that fast one across Daine—as he thought he had—he seemed to me to be absolutely cock-a-hoop. And another thing. It’s a purely personal impression, by the way. I told you how this house was saturated with Austin Chaice’s work, and how he dominated it, and how work dominated him. I think Martin had inherited something of the same kind. He was just as mad about his own kind of work as his father was about his. But he couldn’t dominate anybody, and he couldn’t even get anybody, except perhaps Mr. Chaice, to regard him and his wor
k as anything but waste of time. That led to his nervous repressions, and may have ended in mania. After all,” I added, and rather feebly, “the law assumes madness in the case of suicide.”

  “It’s a damn good argument,” he told me, and I thought he was being far too generous. I’d have liked to go over it all again and to have put it more clearly.

  “But let’s look at that other side again,” he was going on. “We can’t do anything till Smith gets here. Suppose, then, he was shot. It seems to me that only two people could have done it—or three.”

  I told him what I’d done about Lang and Richard Chaice. Either could have nipped up those stairs and done the shooting for all I knew. Then I asked him who was the third.

  “Not Mrs. Chaice,” he said. “She’d gone with the housekeeper to—”

  “It may need checking,” I reminded him. “She might have made some excuse and left the housekeeper’s room.”

  “That’s so,” he said. “But Kitty is the one I was thinking of. Mind you,” he added quickly, “I don’t say she’s the type. But she might have done the shooting and then the shrieking.”

  “There’s no denying the might,” I said. “But one thing we do know now. We know someone who didn’t do any shooting, and that’s our friend G. H. Preston.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure, sir,” he told me surprisingly. “After all, we don’t know where he is. He might still be here in Beechingford.”

  Just then a car was heard outside. It was the doctor, a mild-looking, philosophic sort of chap, as many doctors are. At least he told us his first duty was to the living, and he’d have a look at the two ladies and then join us in Martin’s room. Before he was hardly upstairs, two more cars arrived. One was the Chief’s and the other Sergeant Smith with what’s often called the menagerie—two camera men and some oddments.

  Marney-Hope looked worried.

  “A damn bad business,” he told us as we went upstairs. “Bad for the town. The wrong sort of publicity.”

  He stood just inside the door with me while the photographs were being taken. I had a good look at Martin’s face. It showed neither frightened anticipation nor surprise. There was a pallor that made the eyes more dark, perhaps, but to me it was merely the face of Martin calmly asleep. Not that one can gather much from faces.

  The doctor came in, but there was nothing he could do. The time of death was established already, and all he could say was that death had been instantaneous. Goodman asked him to be good enough to get the ambulance along. The sooner the bullet was extracted and checked with the gun, the better. Then we waited till Smith had gone over the gun for prints. There seemed to be few, but in the right places. Goodman ejected the spent shell and said there were two more still in the breech. I had been giving a running commentary: telling Marney-Hope where the gun came from and so on.

  “That’s all we can do now,” Goodman said, and Smith helped him lay the body on the bed. Then, while the gun was being photographed, he went through the pockets and made an inventory. The wallet looked as if it might be interesting, for it had two letters from publishers to whom that manuscript had been submitted.

  Another ten minutes and the room was clear except for the three of us.

  “Well, what is it?” Marney-Hope said. “Suicide or what?”

  “Can’t say, sir,” Goodman told him frankly. “It all depends on whether or not he could have kept the gun rigid while he pulled the string.”

  We went over to the wardrobe and had a look. First it was agreed that if Martin had placed the gun, then he had placed it parallel with the floor and on an exact level with his head. Next we took his actual pose, a half-right turn towards the door, and so calculated that the gun must have rested on the second shelf of the wardrobe with the doors partially closed to hold it in place. As we didn’t want to mess up the gun with prints, we substituted a pincushion from the dressing-table which was about the thickness of the stock.

  But it just couldn’t be done. When we closed the twin doors there was nothing to hold them in place against the pincushion. If the doors had been a tight fit, then it might have been different, but they weren’t. And there was nothing on the shelves sufficiently solid to have been packed against the sides of the gun stock to hold it firmly enough to resist the pull of the string.

  “And yet it came out and fell on the floor,” the Chief said.

  “Not necessarily,” Goodman said. “My idea is it never was held anywhere.” He smiled rather grimly. “Unless it was by the one who shot him.”

  “Yes, but if someone came to that door and shot him, why did he leave the gun there? It’s common sense that he’d have gone off like a streak and taken the gun with him.”

  “I see your point, sir,” I said. “He daren’t have risked coming in the room and laying that gun down where it was found. But wait a minute,” I said. “Why the string then? Surely there wasn’t any need for the string? If he was shot, then the one who shot him pulled the trigger.”

  “I don’t get you,” Marney-Hope said.

  “It boils down to this,” I told him. “Since there was that string on the gun, then either Martin Chaice committed suicide or else the gun was planted to give the impression that he committed suicide. The string proves it.”

  “That’s just it,” said Goodman and then frowned. “There’s just one other possibility. He might have been experimenting in some way. An idea for a story, or something. Then the gun went off before he expected. Or he forgot it was loaded.”

  “I don’t want to be difficult,” I said, “but while that might apply to some people, it couldn’t apply to Martin Chaice. He loathed detective fiction. The last thing he’d do would be to experiment with a gun.”

  The ambulance came and the body was taken away. Goodman came upstairs again and the arguments went round and round and got us nowhere. Marney-Hope said he would have to go, and I suggested that he should send that gun to the Yard so that an expert could determine if the prints were consistent with the use to which Martin had presumably put it. Marney-Hope said it was a good idea and he’d see to it himself.

  It was then about four o’clock. I had the drawing-room to myself for tea. Harris was in a terrible state of dither.

  “What’s going to happen, sir?” he said to me. “Are we all going to be murdered in our beds?”

  I told him he was talking rubbish and he must pull himself together. Martin had committed suicide, and that was all there was to it. Bad enough, but a long way off murder.

  “It’s the women, sir,” Harris said, and mopped his brow. “And it’s a judgment on the house, sir, if you ask me. All this writing about murders. Nothing but murders.”

  Before I’d eaten more than a few mouthfuls in came, or rather looked, Orford Lang.

  “Is it true, sir, about Martin?” His eyes were bulging. Harris had obviously just taken in his tea and spread around a little more gloom.

  “That he’s committed suicide—yes,” I said.

  His eyes bulged again, and then he closed the door and I got on with my tea. I’d almost finished when the door opened again and in came Richard. He looked upset too.

  “Is it true, Mr. Travers, about Martin?” There was something infinitely pathetic about the way he asked that simple question.

  “Who told you?” I asked him.

  “Mr. Lang,” he said.

  “Yes. It is true. It’s a bad business, Richard, but it’s true.”

  He shook his head, and I thought for a moment he was going to relapse into one of those fits of abstraction. Then he said a queer thing. I can see him now as he stood there, slowly shaking his head again.

  “There was nothing I could do. . . . The other, yes. . . . But not him.”

  I went over to him. There was something he knew, and at all costs I had to know what it was.

  “Listen, Richard,” I said, and my hand was gently on his shoulder. “If there’s anything you know about Martin’s death, or Austin’s, it’s your duty to tell me.”

  “
But I knew nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all till Mr. Lang told me.” He was slowly moving back. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll be getting back to my work.”

  I grasped his arm.

  “Listen, Richard,” I said again. “The other day you told me there was something you knew. Something you might have told Austin before he died. If you hadn’t thought you were mischief-making. What was it you could have told him?”

  “Nothing,” he told me, and his voice had an unexpected asperity. He shook his head again and the tone became milder. “You mustn’t listen to all I say, sir. I’m absent-minded sometimes and I mix things up.” He nodded to himself. “That’s it. I mix things up.”

  Then he was gone. I didn’t feel like any more tea, and I was thinking that all that was needed now was for Daine to come in and ask a few questions. So I went upstairs and had a wholly unnecessary bath. I lingered it out, and just when I had finished dressing, Harris came up to tell me that Inspector Goodman would like to see me downstairs.

  Goodman had his car and wanted me to go down town for a conference with the Chief. The Chief had the wind up, he said, and thought things had gone too far for the Beechingford police to handle.

  The rest of that evening was a nightmare of argument and indecision. It was eight o’clock before Marney-Hope made up his mind to call in the Yard. Dinner was over when I got back to Lovelands, but Harris found something for me. At about a quarter to ten I was called to the telephone. It was George Wharton. His tone was dry and official.

  “You’re catching the ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” I said. “If it will help, I’ll come up by the eight from here and we can come down together.”

  “Might be an idea,” he said.

  “And another thing, George. If you’d like to read through my notes beforehand, I can get them through to you tonight.”

  “Make it my private address,” he said. “I’m going there now.” I rang Goodman, and by the time the notes had been collected it was half-past ten. I looked in the drawing-room and everyone seemed to have gone to bed. The house had an eerie and empty silence that suddenly gave me the horrors, and at once I went up too. And, for one of the few times in my life, I turned the key of my bedroom door.