A Case of Suicide in St. James's

by Clara Benson

  ‘I fear you must restrain your curiosity for now, my child. Wait until tomorrow, and I’ll tell you all.’

  ‘Bother, I hate waiting.’

  ‘It’ll be worth it, I promise,’ he said, and hung up.

  The next night Freddy quite infuriatingly refused to say a word until dinner was finished—on the grounds, he said, that if he had to talk his lamb-chops would go cold—so Gertie was once again kept on tenterhooks. But after coffee had been served and he had smoked two cigarettes and was wondering aloud whether to have a digestif, Gertie could contain herself no longer.

  ‘Freddy!’ she exclaimed. ‘If you don’t tell me what this mystery is all about this instant I swear I shall throttle you with my own hands here in front of everybody.’

  ‘How impatient are the younger generation,’ he said sententiously. She glared at him. ‘Oh, very well, then. Listen, and then tell me how marvellous I am. Now, where shall I start? I’ll tell you how I reached my conclusions, and, as an extra gesture of generosity I shall also tell you that there was one thing you were right about—incidentally, have I mentioned how fetching you look in that frock? You ought to wear duck-egg blue more often.’

  ‘Get on with it, you ass.’

  ‘Some women like a compliment. All right, then: you remember the Heston air show?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, on that day I was doing my job as a hard-working press-man and mingling with the crowds, taking photographs and all that. While I was doing that I fell into conversation with a woman called Hilda Finkley, who told me at rather tedious length that she was the widow of an inventor. She was a talkative sort, so I let her rattle on and took a few notes just for the look of the thing, then forgot all about her. I later heard from Jolliffe that on that very day, not long after she’d talked to me, she was run down by a motor-car and killed.’

  ‘Goodness!’

  ‘Quite. Now, you may remember that a very similar thing happened to me on that day. I was coming home late in the evening and a car headed straight for me, and it was only by a stroke of very good luck that I wasn’t squashed to a pulp. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, and assumed it was a coincidence, but then yesterday when Jolliffe told me he was going to the inquest into Mrs. Finkley’s death, I suddenly remembered that I’d heard the name Finkley before, on the night of the dance. I remembered he was something to do with Westray Enterprises, so I called them to find out, and they said that Hector Finkley was an inventor who had worked for Westray for many years until he died. Naturally I wondered whether there was a connection, so I asked Jolliffe when he came back. He told me firstly that Hilda Finkley was Hector Finkley’s widow, and secondly that Mrs. Finkley’s death had been a hit-and-run accident, and that the driver had never been traced.

  ‘At that point all sorts of questions began springing up in my head. It couldn’t really be a coincidence that both of us had been involved in car accidents on the same day, could it? I knew that in my case it had been deliberate, so I wondered whether it was the same driver who’d run over Hilda Finkley. But why? The only thing I could think of was that Hilda Finkley knew something, that we’d been seen together, and that someone must have been afraid that she’d told me—whatever it was. The thing is, she hadn’t said anything of interest to me that I could recall. I looked at my notes and found I’d scrawled a few words that didn’t seem to mean much, except for one suggestive phrase to the effect that Mrs. Finkley’s late husband had left behind him a notebook of inventions. It probably wasn’t important, but I thought there couldn’t be any harm in looking into it. I found out from Jolliffe that the Finkleys had a married daughter, so I waited until I thought she’d had time to get home from the inquest and then paid her a visit. She told me one or two curious things, the first being that her father died last year after falling from a balcony in one of the workshops at the Westray factory, and the second being that her mother had found Finkley’s notebook among his things quite recently, and had taken it to Douglas Westray the week before he died, thinking the company might find it useful. Of course, there was no reason to suppose anything untoward had happened—except that I telephoned the Westray factory and the Westrays’ house, and found that not only did nobody know where this notebook was, nobody had even heard of its existence. It was certainly not among Douglas’s possessions.’

  ‘So where is it?’

  ‘A very good question. And there are plenty of other questions, too: what was in the notebook, for example? Also, was Finkley’s death really an accident, or was he murdered?’

  ‘Murdered! But who would want to murder him?’

  ‘Someone who wanted his ideas, presumably.’

  Gertie stared.

  ‘Do you mean—?’ she said, then stopped.

  ‘Leslie Penbrigg, yes,’ said Freddy.

  ‘That harmless idiot?’ said Gertie. ‘I know I suspected him for half a minute, but have you seen him dripping around Alida?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Freddy, ‘but I also knew him at school. He may be useless around women, but he was absolutely ruthless when it came to his contraptions—quite happy to destroy other people’s things in order to get what he wanted. I never knew such a single-minded fellow. I don’t know for certain, but I can make a guess at what happened. Finkley died last year, a few months before the Woodville Prize. What if it was he rather than Penbrigg who came up with the wing slot idea? After all, he was a good deal older and had much more experience than Penbrigg did in aeroplane design. Penbrigg saw the idea was going to be very important and lucrative, and would get him lots of credit, so he saw his chance. I read about the inquest into Finkley’s death—there were no witnesses, so who’s to say he wasn’t pushed from that balcony? By all accounts he was an absent-minded, trusting old buffer, and wouldn’t have suspected a thing. A quick shove from behind and Penbrigg could steal all the glory from his former mentor.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather far-fetched?’

  ‘Perhaps, when taken by itself. But not quite so far-fetched when taken together with all the other circumstances of the case. We know Mrs. Finkley brought a notebook to Douglas, and Douglas was murdered shortly afterwards. I suspect the notebook contained Finkley’s early designs for the wing slot, and was proof that Penbrigg hadn’t invented it himself. Presumably Penbrigg hadn’t known about Finkley’s notebook before, or he would have tried to get hold of it when he killed Finkley. I think what happened was this: Hilda Finkley found the notebook more than a year after her husband’s death and brought it quite innocently to Douglas, who forgot about it for a few days—he was away from the office that week, you remember. Then at some point he remembered it and looked through it, and discovered that it was Hector Finkley who had come up with the new wing slot design, and not Leslie Penbrigg at all. He thought about it, and came to the same conclusion I did: namely, that Penbrigg had stolen the design deliberately. He also began to wonder whether Finkley’s death had been an accident. On the night of the dance, therefore, he left the house at five o’clock and went to see Penbrigg at the Westray factory, where he let him know of his suspicions. I don’t know what Penbrigg said in reply—I expect he denied everything and tried to put Douglas off, but he must have got an awful shock to discover that there was written evidence of his theft.

  ‘After their talk, Douglas locked the notebook in his drawer, came away then went to Tom Chetwynd’s flat, because he wanted to ask his friend’s advice about what he ought to do. Westray Enterprises had already lost the credit for the wing slot invention after Dauncey stole the design, so there seemed little sense in making a big commotion about it, and attaching scandal to the Westray name. But there was still the question of Finkley. Tom was in no condition to give any advice that evening, as he’d just heard from Irene, so then Douglas went to Skeffington’s, where he got roaring drunk and confided rather incoherently in Colonel Lomas. There was no proof of murder, of course—and little chance that any proof would ever be found, since there were no witnesses to Finkley’s death—b
ut Douglas knew Penbrigg was in love with Alida, and couldn’t let his sister marry a man who was quite possibly a killer. Colonel Lomas told me his exact words. He said: “If I speak up then it’ll cause the most terrible stink—and what if I’m wrong? But if I don’t then I’m party to murder, and I couldn’t do that to the old girl.” By old girl he meant Alida. Then after his conversation with Lomas he went to the dance, and behaved just as one would expect in the circumstances.

  ‘Meanwhile, Penbrigg had realized the danger he was in even before he left the factory, and decided he had better be prepared. When he got to the dance and saw Douglas’s condition he knew the danger was even more acute, and so he got ready to put his plan into action. I think it was he who listened to the conversation between Douglas and Tatty in the smoking-room, because he wanted to be sure that Douglas hadn’t given the game away. When Douglas came out Penbrigg went into the library, took the revolver from the case and loaded it, then sought Douglas out and said he wanted to speak to him about Finkley in private. Douglas quite unsuspectingly took him upstairs to Lady Browncliffe’s dressing-room, which he knew had a bolt on it, and locked the door behind them. I expect he thought Penbrigg was going to give him some explanation or other, but instead Penbrigg shot him and escaped back through the door, using the needle and thread trick I showed you before.’

  Gertie, who had been listening open-mouthed, now shook her head, unconvinced.

  ‘But how did he plan so quickly to make it look like suicide? How could he have known there was a bolt on the door, for example, or that Lady Browncliffe had a sewing-box in the room?’

  ‘Oh, he didn’t. His first thought was to put Douglas out of the way as quickly as possible, then slip out of the room. As long as nobody heard the shot, then there was a good chance he could be at the other end of the house by the time the body was found—or even at home, if it wasn’t found until after the dance—and with any luck everybody would think Douglas had died by his own hand.’

  ‘That’s another thing: why did nobody hear the shot? I’ve been wondering about that.’

  ‘He used a home-made silencer on the gun,’ said Freddy. ‘I saw it in his pocket, but I wasn’t paying much attention and thought it was a toy whistle, so I didn’t think anything of it. When he showed me around his workshop I saw more of them. He’s been working on a new type of engine muffler, so knows all about how to make them. I think that when Douglas confronted him at the factory a desperate plan was already beginning to form in his mind. He, like everybody, knew about Lord Browncliffe’s gun collection, so he brought a silencer with him to the dance, thinking it might come in useful. The police doctor told me he thought the gun had been fired from a few inches away, and the silencer explains why. At any rate, Penbrigg shot Douglas, removed the silencer and staged the scene, and was just about to slip out of the room when he saw the sewing-box and the plate near the door, and the idea came to him to bolt the door from the inside and make it seem absolutely clear that it was suicide. This he did, and very successfully, as we know.

  ‘As soon as he could after the dance, he went to the Westray factory, broke into Douglas’s drawer and stole the notebook, and congratulated himself on a job well done. But then on the day of the air show he saw me talking to Mrs. Finkley, and shortly afterwards I asked him some asinine question about whether all the inventions on display were his own work. Later on I ran around asking everybody about Douglas’s shoes. No wonder he got the wind up—he must have thought Mrs. F. had come to me with compromising information, and decided to put us both out of the way. You said he was looking shifty when he saw us, and I dare say he was.’

  ‘Where do the shoes come in, by the way?’ said Gertie. ‘You’ve been harping on about them for weeks. Are they important?’

  ‘Yes, I believe they are. I think Penbrigg swapped them for his own after the murder. This is guess-work, mind, but I have an idea about them. I got it from a horse.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The floor of Penbrigg’s workshop is covered with metal shavings and suchlike. I think that when Douglas went there he got something stuck in his shoe—something that would have given away the fact that he’d been to the Westray factory shortly before he died. When we found his body he was sprawled in a chair, and I think Penbrigg noticed it as he was about to leave the room and realized it could give him away. If there was an investigation, and the police spotted whatever it was, then there was a chance they would realize Douglas must have picked it up that night, since the shoes were new, and that they’d then go straight to the factory and find the notebook in Douglas’s drawer before Penbrigg could get it. It wasn’t very likely, but there was no sense in running the risk. First he tried to get the thing out of the shoe using the pen nib and Lady Browncliffe’s comb, but whatever it was must have been stuck fast, so in the end he swapped his own shoes for Douglas’s before leaving the room. Then he spent the rest of the evening hobbling around in a pair of shoes that were two sizes two small for him.’

  ‘Goodness me!’ said Gertie, astonished. She pondered for some moments. ‘He’s ruthless, all right. I wonder why he didn’t try and kill you again after the first attempt failed.’

  ‘I imagine he would have tried it if he’d had the chance, although he couldn’t be absolutely sure I knew anything.’

  Gertie laughed.

  ‘He must have been sick when Westray lost the Woodville Prize after he’d gone to all the trouble of killing Finkley!’

  ‘Yes—and it’s ironic, too, that he stole a design and in turn had it stolen from him. But that also gave him an additional reason for killing Douglas, because he’d have taken all the credit for the wing slot design had Douglas not forgotten to register the patent. Now, this is the part where you flutter your eyelashes at me and tell me how clever I’ve been.’

  ‘Yes, you have been clever,’ Gertie said. ‘But you look just like Corky when you’re pleased with yourself.’

  ‘Heaven forbid!’ said Freddy in disgust. ‘Still, though, it’s all very well knowing what happened, but I don’t know what to do next. I’ve already spoken to the police about it, and they said there’s nothing they can do without evidence. The inquest is over and done with, and as far as they’re concerned it was suicide, so they’re not going to hare off on a wild-goose chase. Can one goose off on a wild-hare chase, I wonder?’

  ‘Idiot. But we must do something. We can’t just let him get away with it. Where do you think he keeps the notebook?’

  ‘I expect he’s destroyed it,’ said Freddy gloomily.

  ‘No, he won’t have destroyed it—it’s full of Finkley’s ideas, remember? He won’t be able to resist keeping it and seeing if there’s anything else he can steal for himself. I’ll bet it’s locked up somewhere in his workshop.’

  ‘By Jove, I shouldn’t wonder if you’re right! Yes, that would make much more sense. But we’ll never find out unless we can persuade the police to search the place, and how can we do that?’

  ‘We’ll just have to think of a way,’ said Gertie.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  They left the restaurant and then went on to a night-club, where they passed a pleasant hour or two. The music was lively, the place was crowded with fashionable people, and there was plenty to observe and comment upon without any thoughts of murder intruding to spoil their enjoyment. Their revelry was not destined to continue, however, for they were sitting at their table and considering a dance when Gertie’s eyes widened suddenly.

  ‘Look!’ she said.

  She nodded at something over Freddy’s shoulder. Freddy turned and saw that Alida Westray was just entering the night-club, followed, to his astonishment, by Leslie Penbrigg himself.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned! So the old chap has finally plucked up the courage to speak,’ murmured Freddy, momentarily forgetting that the ‘old chap’ in question was quite possibly a murderer.

  Alida had spotted them, and was seen in consultation with Penbrigg, and at length they were seated at the table nex
t to Freddy and Gertie’s.

  ‘We went to the theatre to see that new play, and then had a very late dinner,’ said Alida. ‘The play was rather good, wasn’t it, Leslie?’

  ‘Oh—er—rather,’ said Leslie Penbrigg, who did not appear to have become any less tongue-tied.

  Alida seemed in a chatty mood. She spent some time telling them about the play, then said, as though she had just remembered:

  ‘By the way, Freddy, I thought Father might know something about that notebook you mentioned, so I asked him this morning, but he said he knew nothing about it.’

  At her words Freddy and Gertie froze momentarily, then Gertie kicked Freddy under the table as Leslie Penbrigg looked up.

  ‘Which notebook?’ he said. He spoke in his usual pleasant manner, and his face wore an expression of mild curiosity.

  ‘You remember Mr. Finkley, don’t you?’ said Alida, with blithe unawareness that she was saying anything of importance. ‘Apparently he left a notebook full of drawings behind him, and Mrs. Finkley gave it to Douglas just before he died. Freddy was wondering what had happened to it.’

  Leslie Penbrigg regarded Freddy blandly.

  ‘A notebook of drawings, eh? I expect it’s lying around somewhere,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I expect it is,’ said Freddy.

  There was a short silence, then Gertie said:

  ‘What time is it, Freddy?’

  ‘One o’clock,’ he replied.

  She gasped.

  ‘Oh, goodness! I promised faithfully I’d be back before midnight. You’d better take me home.’

  ‘What?’ said Freddy, surprised, but she was glaring at him meaningfully. ‘Oh—er—very well.’

  The bill was settled, then they said their goodbyes to Penbrigg and Alida and rose to leave. Gertie stumbled heavily against Penbrigg’s chair as they passed.