The Threefold Cord

by Francis Vivian

  Sir Giles nodded. “That is true.”

  “And yet you told me that you went out for a quiet read, to pass the time until Manchester returned from Trentingham.”

  “Well, both yarns are true in a way,” Sir Giles answered. “I think she was bored with my presence, and wanted to get rid of me. She suggested that I should go to the cactus house, but I don’t think she could have expected me to stay for long, because she knows that I have strong feelings about those vines. You see, Inspector, we Tanroys have always grown dam’ fine grapes, and they have always been reserved for the local hospital. Vines, in case you don’t know it, take some rearing, and I regarded Manchester’s action as selfish, and about as sacrilegious as if he had ploughed up the lawns and planted cabbages. At the best, he was a lout and a vandal.”

  Mildred Manchester and Dana Vaughan entered the room at that moment, and Sir Giles subsided. Dana Vaughan planted herself straightly against the wall, and waited. Mildred Manchester walked dreamily to the one arm-chair and carried on with the knitting which she had brought with her, apparently uninterested in the meeting.

  “For the clarification of what follows, Mrs. Manchester,” Knollis explained, “I should tell you that I am aware that Desmond Brailsford is your brother.”

  “Oh, how interesting,” she murmured, without raising her eyes from her knitting.

  “Now, Brailsford,” said Knollis, “your father died on the fourteenth of September, nineteen-thirty-eight?”

  “I believe that is the date,” Brailsford said with a slight inclination of his head.

  “Neither your sister nor yourself attended his funeral?”

  “Not on your life,” Brailsford replied. “For my own part I had seen enough of him up to the time I left home.”

  “Yet you both called on him the day that he died!”

  Brailsford blinked. Mildred did not move a muscle.

  Brailsford shrugged. “It was Milly’s idea, not mine. She said that we ought to let bygones be bygones, and give the old man a spot of peace before he died.”

  “Before he died?” Knollis asked significantly.

  “Well, he was getting on, you know! And I never heard of him being in possession of any elixir of life! I mean, he couldn’t live for ever, could he? Anyway, I let Milly overrule me, and we went over for the day, although I spent most of it in the local.”

  “You returned to London together?”

  “No,” said Brailsford, “I went on to London, but Milly broke her journey at Trentingham to spend the night with some old friends.”

  “Can you prove that you went to London?”

  Brailsford shifted uncomfortably. “Well, have a heart! It’s about seven years ago—although I dare say that if I plough through my diaries I can find out what I did that night.”

  “And you, Mrs. Manchester,” Knollis said softly; “can you prove that you spent the night with friends in Trentingham? Who were they? Where can they be found?”

  She looked up with eyes so vacant that they startled Knollis for a second. “They are dead. Everyone is dead. I am dead. Dead people are happy.”

  She looked down at her knitting.

  “You knew that your husband was instituting proceedings for the annulment of your marriage, Mrs. Manchester?”

  She was counting stitches in a low voice. She paused to nod, and then continued her counting.

  “Fred was a beast to her!” Dana Vaughan burst out. “He killed her two pets—a mean and petty device to remind her that her father was—was what he was! He was always reminding her. He was smooth and sleek, and utterly cruel! He would sit at table and tell crude jokes about hanging. Oh, I could have killed him myself!”

  “Why did he give you five thousand pounds?” Knollis enquired, fixing her with eyes that were mere slits. The attention of all in the room was drawn to Mildred Manchester. Her eyes were wide; her face expressionless. She dropped her hands into her lap, straightened herself in the chair, and said: “You, too, Dana!”

  “You were fine friends,” said Knollis, regarding Dana Vaughan and Brailsford with contempt. “You, Brailsford, sold her secret to her husband when you could get no more from her—or not enough from her, for you were still taking her allowance. And then you blackmailed her husband! Oh yes, you didn’t call it that, but it amounted to the same thing. You, Vaughan; you learned her secret, and exploited it on the stage. Then you learned from Brailsford how easy it was to chisel Manchester.”

  Dana Vaughan put her hands over her face. “I didn’t blackmail him! Desmond told him, on the night of their wedding. Fred came to me to ask me if it was the truth. He forced the truth from me. I couldn’t say more than the truth, could I? Fred said he would never forget me for saving him from the humiliation of bringing into the world a son whose mother was the daughter of a—a hangman. But it wasn’t me! It was Desmond! And then Fred put five thousand pounds into my bank—in gratitude he said—and I didn’t know until it was too late!”

  “And included you in his will!” said Knollis.

  “I didn’t know that! I swear I didn’t!”

  “Of course you didn’t!” said Knollis. “That is why you threw up your career on the West End stage! You were altruistic all the way through. You wanted nothing better than to be by Mildred Manchester’s side. Gratitude!”

  Mildred Manchester began to rock to and fro in her chair, softly crooning to herself. Knollis gave a gasp of dismay.

  The Chief Constable, who had been restlessly changing his weight from one foot to the other, suddenly tapped Knollis on the arm. “Look here, Knollis! It looks as if my ideas have gone badly astray, but who the devil did kill Manchester? Heh?”

  Knollis glanced across the room at Sir Giles. “What was that about the threefold cord, Sir Giles?”

  “And if a man prevail against him that is alone, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not easily broken,” he quoted in a firm and resonant voice.

  “There is your answer, sir,” said Knollis. “Mrs. Manchester was only up against her brother at first, and he prevailed. Then Vaughan entered the fray, and the two withstood her. With the entrance of her husband she was up against a trio that could not be broken: a brother who sold her, a friend who betrayed her, and a husband who despised her. It was a Gordian knot that could not be untied, and so she cut it—with an axe.”

  “Mildred Manchester killed her husband!” the Chief Constable exclaimed.

  “Wasn’t it obvious?” Knollis challenged him.

  “And I thought it was Dana,” Brailsford murmured. “She killed her husband,” said Knollis. “She also killed her father!”

  “What!” Brailsford screamed in his high-pitched voice. “Killed my father?”

  Knollis looked at Mildred Manchester, now smiling placidly. There was no comprehension in her eyes of the scene that was being played out before them.

  “You did kill your father, Mrs. Manchester?” Knollis murmured in a soothing voice.

  “I pulled the rope. The door went bang! He fell at my feet. And then I said to him: That was more than a six-foot drop, you silly old man!”

  She smiled, and closed her eyes.

  “Good lord!” said Colonel Mowbray, fidgeting with his monocle.

  “Last Tuesday,” said Knollis, “she planned everything perfectly, and luck was on her side. She had witnessed the bawling-out that her husband gave Temple, and she saw Temple go to the inn for his usual after-row bout of drunkenness. She knew that her husband had an appointment with Sir Giles for five o’clock, and she wangled—I suspect—her husband into going to the Guildhall for the same time.”

  “That is correct,” Dana Vaughan said in a low voice. “She told Fred that if he didn’t go and see what the police were doing she would go down herself, and he didn’t want her to go to town in case she was recognised.”

  “Thank you,” said Knollis. “When Sir Giles arrived she encouraged him to go out to the Green Alley, probably realising that he would not stay there. You see, Sir Giles and Temple
were to be used to confuse the issue. She had arranged everything. There was a bottle of chloral in the box-room. She removed the cap from the bottle and poured some of it into the beer. She got some of it on her fingers, and that caused the inflammation—unless I have misread Glaser. She then asked her brother to deliver the bottle to Temple because she wanted to do a little to make up for her husband’s temper.”

  He glanced at Brailsford. “Correct?”

  Brailsford nodded gloomily.

  “By these devices,” Knollis continued, “she thrust suspicion on Sir Giles, Temple, and her brother. She had placed the axe in readiness, and now waited until her husband came home. It is not too much to assume that she had circumspectly watched Sir Giles, and saw him leave via the hurst. It was the hour after tea, and again we need no stretch of the imagination to conclude that she knew where everybody in the house would be at that hour—the hour, I repeat, after tea. Vaughan and Brailsford were in their rooms. Mrs. Redson was upstairs. So was Freeman. Smithy was outside the house. Right! She told her husband that Sir Giles was waiting in the Green Alley. He went out to see him, and she followed. We may never know what she said to him—”

  Mildred Manchester was sitting like a waxen figure, pale and immovable, but from her lips came her own story, in an uncanny monotone:

  “I had saved my strength. I smote him like unto the philistines, and he fell dead at my feet. I dropped the axe and went back to my knitting. . . .”

  “So you are right,” sighed Colonel Mowbray, “but how the devil you arrived at the solution is beyond me!”

  Knollis explained. “When I considered that Manchester had left all his money in trust to her, and that after her death it was to go to his nephews on the male side of the family, I was puzzled—until Sir Giles told me that she was Marlin’s daughter. It was clear then, for she told me that she was unable to bear children for him. He wanted sons—the old urge to perpetuate his name—and as he could not have them he did the next best thing—financed his brother’s sons so that at least one Manchester might have a chance to achieve fame, the fame that he so badly wanted himself.

  “Again, the significance behind the cords became obvious when I learned that she was Marlin’s daughter. Manchester’s killing of her pets was a cruel method of taunting her, and of warning her that she was to be the next. I am certain that he was going to kill her, and that the third cord found in his pocket was intended for her neck. His will, conveniently worded, gave the impression that he was fond of her and had made provision in case he died first—but it also provided for the state of affairs which would exist when she was dead.” Mildred Manchester’s monotonous voice came coldly from the waxen figure now merely propped in the chair by its back and arms.

  “I found the cord in his drawer. I knew it was meant for me. I sent him out to the Green Alley, where it was quiet and peaceful. I followed him. I told him what I knew. I upbraided him for destroying the vines as he intended to destroy me. Then I struck him, and he fell. He looked smug even as he lay dying, and I kicked him in the face. I had the cord in my hand, and I pushed it into his pocket and went back to my knitting. Madame Defarge always knitted at the foot of the guillotine. For years in my imagination I had watched my father hanging men, and each time he did so I knitted, knitted, knitted—like Defarge. . . .”

  “How the devil did you get on this thing in the first place?” muttered Colonel Mowbray to Knollis.

  “Fred Manchester supplied the clue,” said Knollis, wiping a weary hand across his brow. “He told me that his wife called him Humpty.”

  “I still don’t understand!” exclaimed the Colonel. “Mrs. Manchester does. She could see the future. She will explain—if she is capable of telling you.” Mildred Manchester smiled happily from her chair. Her thin right hand, the fingers still slightly inflamed, rose from her lap to beat out the time as she softly chanted:

  “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

  Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

  All the King’s horses.

  And all the King’s men,

  Couldn’t put Humpty together again!”

  The song ended with an eldritch shriek of laughter that echoed round the room and brought a cold shiver to Knollis’s heart.

  “They couldn’t put Humpty together again, together again, together again. He had a great fall, a very great fall. . . .”

  “For God’s sake somebody do something,” muttered the Chief Constable.

  “It’s too late,” whispered Knollis.

  Mildred Manchester slumped in the chair, a gibbering wreck, and the foaming saliva dripped from her shapeless lips.

  THE END

  About The Author

  FRANCIS VIVIAN was born Arthur Ernest Ashley in 1906 at East Retford, Nottinghamshire. He was the younger brother of noted photographer Hallam Ashley. Vivian laboured for a decade as a painter and decorator before becoming an author of popular fiction in 1932. In 1940 he married schoolteacher Dorothy Wallwork, and the couple had a daughter.

  After the Second World War he became assistant editor at the Nottinghamshire Free Press and circuit lecturer on many subjects, ranging from crime to bee-keeping (the latter forming a major theme in the Inspector Knollis mystery The Singing Masons). A founding member of the Nottingham Writers’ Club, Vivian once awarded first prize in a writing competition to a young Alan Sillitoe, the future bestselling author.

  The ten Inspector Knollis mysteries were published between 1941 and 1956. In the novels, ingenious plotting and fair play are paramount. A colleague recalled that ‘the reader could always arrive at a correct solution from the given data. Inspector Knollis never picked up an undisclosed clue which, it was later revealed, held the solution to the mystery all along.’

  Francis Vivian died on April 2, 1979 at the age of 73.

  By Francis Vivian

  and available from Dean Street Press

  1. The Death of Mr. Lomas

  Buy from Amazon.com / Buy from Amazon.co.uk

  2. Sable Messenger

  Buy from Amazon.com / Buy from Amazon.co.uk

  3. The Threefold Cord

  Buy from Amazon.com / Buy from Amazon.co.uk

  4. The Ninth Enemy

  Buy from Amazon.com / Buy from Amazon.co.uk

  5. The Laughing Dog

  Buy from Amazon.com / Buy from Amazon.co.uk

  6. The Singing Masons

  Buy from Amazon.com / Buy from Amazon.co.uk

  7. The Elusive Bowman

  Buy from Amazon.com / Buy from Amazon.co.uk

  8. The Sleeping Island

  Buy from Amazon.com / Buy from Amazon.co.uk

  9. The Ladies of Locksley

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  10. Darkling Death

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  Francis Vivian

  The Ninth Enemy

  “Inspector, it’s—it’s dastardly!”

  “Mrs. Huntingdon,” said Knollis, “your choice of words is admirable!”

  Inspector Knollis of Scotland Yard is hoping for a nice quiet weekend in the country. Instead he is embroiled in a murder case—the death by gunshot of local bigwig Richard Huntingdon.

  Jean, the dead man’s wife, discovers the body in dense woods near a river. Knollis soon learns that Jean’s previous husband also met an untimely end, not that she is the only suspect. Despite his reputation for good deeds, Huntingdon had enemies in the district, including the progressive Bishop of Northcote. And it turns out the late Mr. Huntingdon was intimately involved with a grade-A femme fatale. . . .

  Knollis, along with the redoubtable Sergeant Ellis, has to deal with a plethora of puzzling clues before solving this bucolic case of Murder most Foul. Key to the mystery is a toy yacht found floating on the river near the body—a craft almost identical to the gift recently received—anonymously—by Huntingdon’s young daughter, Dorrie.

  The Ninth Enemy was originally published in 1948. This new edition features an introduction by crime fict
ion historian Curtis Evans.

  “Francis Vivian skips all tedious preliminaries and is commendably quick off the mark; we meet his characters with lively pleasure.” Observer

  “Mr. Vivian neatly fits everything in its place.” Times Literary Supplement

  Chapter I

  The Evidence of Death

  John Bamford, inspector in charge of the Borough of Coleby’s Criminal Investigation Department, replaced the telephone receiver and slowly walked back to the lounge, where his week-end guest was idling in the depths of the settee.

  “So you are looking forward to a nice quiet week-end, Gordon.”

  “That is my earnest hope,” sighed Gordon Knollis. He glanced up with a suspicious air. “Nothing cropped up, surely?”

  Bamford perched himself on the arm of the settee. “One of the town’s leading burgesses has managed to get himself shot to death on the edge of a dam just outside the town. Bad show, too, for he was a good fellow!”

  Knollis relaxed, and pulled on his pipe. “Accidental deaths can be troublesome, especially if the coroner happens to be one of the officious breed. Ah, well!”

  Bamford shook his head. “No accident, I’m afraid.”

  Knollis grimaced. “Suicides are still worse. I used to hate them when I was in Burnham.”

  “It isn’t suicide, and it isn’t accidental death,” Bamford said slowly. “One of our mobile patrols is on the spot, and the sergeant says that the circumstances look horribly suspicious. He’s a cautious type is Drayton, and I’m fearing the worst. Anyway, I’m afraid it will break up our pow-wow. Shall I find you an armful of detective novels?”