Murder in Wax

by Peter Baron

“The thin lips of the mask open mechanically when he speaks, but for the rest his face might be of carven stone. He speaks in a soft suave voice—obviously camouflaged and underlying its sweetness is the sibilant hiss of the snake.” He paused to light another cigarette, and Jimmy noticed that, despite this emotion, his hand was firm.

  “I don’t think I’ll say any more now. Leslie will be down any minute and—well, I want to spare her the truth. It’s all over now and there is no reason why an old wound should be reopened—festering this time. If she guessed at the real cause of John’s death—I—well, you see she loves him rather more than any of us thought possible. It was weeks, months, I was going to say years, before she reconciled herself to the fact that she would never see him again. I suppose really I might have helped her more in that difficult time, but I—well, it hit me hard too, and I went and buried myself in the country amongst my dogs.”

  He paused to listen for a moment.

  “I think that is she,” he said, swiftly. “Come over and have dinner with me tomorrow night if you’re still interested. Erb and Freddie are coming and I’ll give you the full story. Leslie is visiting a girl school friend at Esher.”

  “Who’s Erb, by the way?” asked Jimmy.

  Before Sir Marcus could reply a cheerful girlish voice broke in:

  “Hallo, Jimmy, you old fraud!”

  The reporter jumped to his feet and, turning, found Leslie at his elbow.

  Unnoticed by either of them, her guardian rose to his feet and made an unobtrusive exit.

  Leslie was at length forced to disengage her hand from Jimmy’s cordial—almost too cordial—clasp.

  “Collar a pew,” she invited lightly, dropping gracefully into the chair her guardian had just vacated. “Marky’s the essence of tact, isn’t he?” She smiled up at him and Jimmy realized that his host had gone.

  “He’s my ideal of the perfect guardian,” sighed Jimmy fervently, seating himself in a chair and pulling it close to hers. “But I don’t want to talk about guardians. I’m more interested in wards just now.”

  “Thank you, sir, she said,” smiled Leslie.

  “Where were you at lunch time?” continued Jimmy. “I rang you up, but your maid said you were out.”

  “Did she say with whom?”

  “No, just that you were out.”

  Leslie eyed him from beneath long lashes.

  “Tact seems to be a byword in this house,” she mocked.

  “You haven’t told me whom you lunched with yet,” he challenged.

  “Perhaps I don’t intend to,” she said provokingly.

  “Please!”

  “What inquisitive beings men are,” she sighed. “I lunched with two friends at the Rivoli.”

  “You said ‘friends?” said Jimmy, morosely.

  She nodded.

  “Must have been men then,” he continued, ruefully. “Who were they, old thing?”

  “Friends of yours,” she answered banteringly. “At least one was. I wasn’t going to sit and die of starvation while you made up your mind whether to take me out to lunch or not.”

  The butler, wheeling in tea at the moment, interrupted further conversation.

  “Is Sir Marcus about, Fenton?” Leslie asked.

  “No, Miss Leslie. He went out a few moments ago.”

  “Just like Marky,” she sighed. “He spends half his time down at Faversham and the other half in musty old bookshops. I never knew such a man. I’ve hardly seen him at all since he got back and now I suppose he’s off again on his rambles. Sugar? I don’t suppose he’ll be in to tea then, Fenton. That will be all.”

  “Thank heaven!” murmured Jimmy.

  “Sorry, I didn’t quite catch?” she said sweetly.

  “I said you had not yet answered my question,” lied Jimmy. “Who were they?”

  “If you must know, one was Freddie Leicester.”

  “I shall have to drop that man,” grumbled Jimmy. “A man who collars the girl I want to lunch with is no friend, but a viper who stings the hand that feeds him.”

  “On the contrary,” she teased, “he was very nice. He took compassion on a poor starving girl, agonizedly wondering where her next meal was coming from.” Then reading the question in his eyes, she said hastily: “All right. Don’t ask. The other was Freddie’s uncle, Erb.”

  “Never knew he had one. Erb? What is he?”

  “A very nice old gentleman,” she replied. “Toast?”

  “Thank you. I don’t like old gentlemen.”

  “He may not like you,” Leslie retorted. “You must meet him soon. We’ll fix up a date for lunch together. He’s the most perfect old dear there is. Marky and he are old friends.”

  “Marky shows bad taste,” grumbled Jimmy.

  “Fortunately,” she agreed, “or he wouldn’t allow me to have anything to do with jealous reporters.”

  Jimmy grunted morosely.

  “How about dinner tonight?”

  “Impossible, mon enfant,” she said definitely. “I am going to a highbrow concert, but if you behave as a well-brought-up reporter should, you shall motor me home from Esher tomorrow night. Fm going out there to see Maisie Winterton.”

  “To-morrow night is as far off as Esher.”

  “It is,” she agreed. “Ill give you a ring tomorrow.”

  “A most unprecedented procedure,” mocked Jimmy, rising to his feet. “Now if I were to give you a ring—one of Cartier’s, say——”

  “Don’t be rash,” she retorted, pushing him back in his seat. “I never listen to proposals—before, during, or after meals.” Jimmy sat back obediently and thoughtfully appropriated more toast. To motor Leslie home the next night was certainly an attractive proposal, but it was going to clash with his dinner engagement, and for obvious reasons he could not tell her anything about that.

  He sat and chewed toast and the cud reflectively.

  VI. THE CIPHER

  “Dinner is served, sir,” announced Fenton from the doorway.

  Sir Marcus consulted his wrist watch and looked at his two guests.

  “What do you think, Freddie,” he asked, “shall we wait for Erb?”

  Freddie Leicester grinned vacantly.

  “Better not,” he advised, “He had a yelping match with me over the phone and I gathered that he was detained. Let’s trickle in and put it across the soup. He’s only got himself to blame if Jimmy here naffles it all before he arrives.”

  The Baronet smiled faintly and, nodding to Jimmy, led the way into the dining room. It was a good dinner. The wine, food and liqueurs were excellent and the cigars left nothing to be desired. In a decidedly mellowed frame of mind the three men sat smoking at its conclusion.

  Loseley broke the long silence.

  “I am going to tell you a story, Freddie,” he said, “that till now I have kept to myself. Jimmy heard the outline of it yesterday and I was hoping that Erb would have been here. I am taking the opportunity that Leslie’s absence offers because—she has never heard the story and I don’t want her to.”

  “Mum as an oyster,” said Freddie somberly, and Sir Marcus knocked the ash off his cigar and sat back.

  “The main details of what I am going to tell you are of course known to the police, although the case was kept out of the papers. Tonight I am going to tell you about one little detail which has never come into their hands.”

  “The undivided Leicester attention is at your disposal,” bleated Freddie encouragingly. “Unleash the mystery, dear heart.”

  “You recollect the newspaper report of the death of my friend, John Richmond, Leslie’s father, some years ago?”

  “Four to be exact,” nodded Freddie. “Heart failure, wasn’t it?”

  “That was the version circulated by the newspapers,” answered Sir Marcus gravely, “but it was not the correct one. John Richmond was murdered!”

  Freddie sat up with a startled expression and stared blankly at him.

  Jimmy made no comment.

  “Murdered by the
Squid,” continued Sir Marcus and, noticing Freddie’s start, “I see you’re familiar with the name.”

  “Well—yes—rather,” mumbled Freddie, “but I say, Marky—er, that is, let’s have the rest, old hoss.”

  “There were not many people who knew just exactly what John was,” pursued the baronet, “but I was one of them. He was a King’s Messenger—at all times a dangerous position—and his death was the result of the successful carrying out of a mission with which he had been entrusted.”

  He paused again to remove the white ash from his cigar.

  “The Squid was interested in that mission, the precise nature of which I do not know myself, and with a view to possessing himself of something that John knew or was carrying with him, the Squid followed him here to England from Venice. That would be just about the time that he opened the campaign of crime that has since swept England and the Continent.”

  He paused and looked away into the fire. Neither of his hearers ventured to break the silence and it was some time before he picked up the threads of the story again.

  “John was followed from Dover to this house and was congratulating himself on having eluded his pursuers—was in fact standing on the doorstep, when a shot was fired that wounded him in the back. When Fenton opened the door, John fell into his arms almost unconscious.”

  “Did Fenton see the johnny who fired the shot?” asked Freddie with wide eyes.

  “It was dark and poor Fenton was too horrified to notice anything. He closed the door and summoned me at once. Between us we carried John upstairs to my study and I dressed his wound. At his own request I left the room for a few moments to telephone the doctor and it was during my absence that the tragedy occurred.”

  His tone hardened a trifle and it seemed almost as though he were speaking to himself. He glanced neither to right nor left and his listeners waited silently and intently, Jimmy bending slightly forward, Freddie sitting back with his eyes and mouth wide open.

  “I was in the act of coming upstairs,” continued Sir Marcus, “when I heard two shots fired in the room in which John lay. I jumped to the conclusion that his enemies were making a second attempt on his life, although God alone knows how they obtained entrance without being seen or heard.”

  He passed his hand over his face and his eyes looked heavy and weary. When he resumed speaking it was still in the same far-away vacant voice.

  “I rushed to the door and flung it open. God!—I shall never forget the sight to my dying day! John lay sprawled back in his chair, with a second ugly wound in his chest and a pistol dangling from his limp hand. Not two feet from him stood a man clad entirely in black, his face hidden by a huge hairless, waxen mask, the most repulsive thing I have ever encountered, and devoid of all movement save for the two snake-like eyes that watched me. I remember he was holding John’s ebony stick in his hand, but I did not wait to take much notice of the man, I just flung myself at him.”

  He shuddered, and for a moment it seemed as if he were going to discontinue his story.

  “And then?” suggested Jimmy gently.

  The baronet ‘pulled himself together with a visible effort. “I remember a flash and a report as the fiend fired at me,” he muttered, “and as I fell backwards, Fenton caught me—he had followed me upstairs—and I suppose it was only the instinctive shifting of my head that saved me from having my brains blown out. However, be that as it may, the bullet merely grazed my temple, and I must have regained consciousness a few minutes after.”

  He fingered the scar on his right temple absentmindedly and, leaning forward, courteously held a lighted candle to the cigar that Jimmy had allowed to go out. Freddie, regarding his host with rigid and unswerving interest, inadvertently applied the lighted end of his own cigar to his mouth with results which may be imagined, as may also the expletives that followed.

  Their host, still fingering his scar, listened unmoved. It was doubtful if he had heard.

  “When I came to myself,” he continued, “I was lying on the floor and the room was empty. Downstairs I could hear Fenton shouting for help at the top of his voice. The Squid had apparently escaped by the window which was open, and I—I—staggered to my feet and walked dizzily to John’s chair. He was dead!”

  He paused deliberately and his listeners saw that he was regaining something of his normal composure.

  “And now I come to the detail of which the police know nothing,” he pursued quietly. “That detail was a piece of paper on which John had evidently been writing before his death. It was crumpled up in his hand and for some reason or other I removed it and slipped it into my pocket. I had no reason for so doing, and somehow or other I omitted to hand it to the police. Discovering it later, I was not altogether sorry I had retained it. It was only a collection of jumbled, meaningless words and I have never tried to understand it, although sometimes I have wondered if it had any real importance or was merely the rambling of an unhinged mind.”

  Freddie took an eyeglass from his pocket, polished it, inserted it in his eye and then, thinking better of it, returned it to his pocket again.

  “The arrival of the police naturally was a difficult time. I explained to them that it was probably the stick that he was after and the fact that I had seen it in the Squid’s hand and never set eyes on it again seems to support that idea. Though why anyone wanted the stick—a very ordinary ebony one—I am at a loss to understand. Fenton, when he returned, told a rather curious tale. He was accosted by a young man, whose face he could not see, driving a motor. The man asked only one question apparently. It was, ‘Did he get Richmond?’ Fenton blurted out a few details and the man drove away. I have sometimes wondered who the fellow was. His question seemed to hint at firsthand knowledge of the tragedy and I think the police would have done well to have furthered inquiries about him.”

  He rose to his feet.

  “We may as well go up to my study. The cipher is up there in the safe.”

  He led the way and, opening the door, stood aside and ushered his guests into the warm cozy room at the head of the stairs.

  “This is the only room in the house I really like,” said Sir Marcus. “It’s something like my room at Faversham and pleasantly doggy.”

  Freddie, a more frequent visitor than Jimmy and more familiar with the “doggy room,” smiled cheerfully. There had been an Alsatian in that room once with whom Freddie had had a difference of opinion. Yes—decidedly doggy!

  “Make yourself at home,” said the baronet cordially, indicating comfortable hide chairs, deep and inviting.

  The other two drew their chairs up and Freddie proffered his cigarette case. Sir Marcus strolled to the mantelshelf and stood with his back to them for a moment. When he turned round they caught a glimpse of a square aperture in the paneling beneath the shelf.

  Dropping into a chair he offered a slip of paper to Jimmy.

  “That’s the cipher,” he said, and the reporter studied it thoughtfully. He read:

  PRAY PHEER INST CLOD NICE ELAN LEES DO INNS

  LOOK STEP LIES YE TRIBAL READ.

  The words were written in block lettering, presumably in the hand of John Richmond. Turning the message this way and that, Jimmy read and reread it for about five minutes with a blank expression on his face and then stared blankly at his host.

  “What the dickens does this gibberish mean, sir?”

  “As I say, I have never found out,” answered Sir. Marcus.

  “Give it to little Fred,” suggested that gentleman brightly. “Meantersay I’ll probably think of something or other. Used to be dashed smart at cross-words and finding animals in pictures as a kid, you know. Fearful brain. Awfully hot stuff.”

  Jimmy smiled faintly and passed the slip of paper to his friend with a covert wink at Sir Marcus.

  “Go to it, chief inferior defective,” he chaffed, and to Sir Marcus: “It certainly looks like bosh, sir, but then, John wasn’t given to writing bosh, was he?”

  “No,” the baronet admitted, “decided
ly not. As I say, I have wondered if it was a code intended for someone or other and yet—you see, John was badly wounded and he was talking rather wildly and disjointedly a little while before the tragedy occurred. I don’t say his mind was unhinged, but well, really I suppose I had no reason other than a suspicion that he was over-excited for retaining this piece of paper. As a matter of fact I have decided to take it up to the Yard and see if they can make anything out of it.”

  “Elveden’s the man,” said Jimmy. “Inspector Elveden. Awfully cute cuss.”

  Sir Marcus nodded and turned to Freddie, still poring vacantly over the message.

  “Deciphered it, Freddie?” he asked.

  “Er—no,” murmured Freddie, “not exactly, but I have come to a decision. This,” he tapped the paper, “is either sheer bilge or else a jolly old code.”

  Jimmy grinned: “Anything else suggest itself to the Leicester brain?” he gibed.

  “Yes,” answered Freddie, “the whole beastly business is a bit of a mystery. I meantersay—dashed mysterious, what?”

  “Mysteries, you poor fish,” said Jimmy, distinctly, “usually are mysterious.”

  Freddie, fiddling absentmindedly with his cigarette case, nodded.

  “Er—yes,” he agreed cheerfully, “Looking at it in that jolly old light I suppose they are, you know. Funny I never thought of that before. I can see it now—sort of mysterious, what?” Jimmy gave him a withering glance, but the dauntless Freddie babbled on.

  “I shall probably think of something quite clever, if I have enough rope, Marky. Bound to unearth the old solush sooner or later and all that sort of rot.”

  He returned the paper and devoted himself again to balancing his case on the arm of his chair.

  Jimmy checked his derisive laughter to glance at the clock. “Gosh!” he gasped. “Nine o’clock, I shall have to shift some if I’m going to collect Leslie at Esher.”

  “Is that the arrangement?” asked Loseley, with an understanding smile. “I thought she was using her car.”

  “She was,” agreed Jimmy, rising, “but I persuaded her that there was a magnificent train service to Esher. Fine things, trains—comfortable—fast—er—warm, you know.”