by Tony Medawar
On the morning of December 2nd, they brought a telegram to his bedside, summoning him home. His wife had been taken ill suddenly in the night.
It has not occurred to Belford that there would have to be an inquest. It all passed off, however, extremely well. The deceased lady had been a sufferer from a painful complaint affecting the kidneys and had been accustomed to take each night a tablet containing 10 grains of veronal, to allay pain and induce sleep. A second medical man agreed that veronal was a powerful hypnotic and usually harmless in the pharmacopeial dose. Dr Lovett affirmed that he had repeatedly warned Mrs Belford against taking more than the prescribed dose, particularly as the disease from which she suffered made her particularly susceptible to veronal poisoning. As a matter of fact, the ordinary minimum fatal dose of the drug was 50 grains, so that, if the patient had accidentally taken two tablets instead of one, the consequences should not have been serious. He had, however, out of precaution, made it clear to her that the single tablet was not on any account to be exceeded within the 24 hours, and she had appeared perfectly to understand this.
The bottle was produced. The maid, Maggie Brown, recollected that this had been brought home by Mr Belford on the morning of October 25th. It was then intact, with its mouth sealed over with wax, just as it came from the chemist. She had seen the original wrapper with the chemist’s label lying on the bedside table. Mrs Belford had not begun to take the tablets till two days later, having still two tablets left from the former supply.
A representative of a firm of chemists in the City identified the bottle and the label. He remembered selling it to Mr Belford in person on October 25th. The mouth of the bottle had been stoppered with wax, as it had come from the wholesalers. The bottle contained 50 tablets, each containing 10 grains of veronal.
The analyst gave evidence. He had examined the body of deceased and found that she had died from taking an overdose of veronal. From the amount of the drug found in the viscera he concluded that she had taken at least 100 grains, or about twice the minimum fatal dose.
He had also analysed the tablets remaining in the bottle, and had found them to contain each exactly 10 grains of veronal. There were five tablets left in the bottle. If Mrs Belford had started taking the tablets on October 28th and had taken one each night regularly, there should have been 15 remaining. If Mrs Belford had taken ten tablets instead of one on the night of December 1st, that would account for the amount of veronal estimated to have been present in the body.
The coroner said that this appeared to be a very clear case. Deceased, who seemed to be in her usual health on December 1st, had been found dead on the morning of December 2nd of acute veronal poisoning. From the circumstance that there were 10 tablets fewer in the bottle than there ought to have been, there seemed to be no room for doubt that the unfortunate lady, failing to obtain her accustomed relief from pain and sleeplessness, had unhappily taken an overdose, the effects of which had been intensified by the kidney complaint from which she suffered. No blame could attach to Dr Lovatt who, unable to wean his patient from the drug that gave her so much relief, had frequently warned her against its misuse. There was no evidence whatever that Mrs Belford had at any time had any intention of doing herself an injury. On the day before her death, she had spoken cheerfully about the return of her husband from Germany. Mr Belford, with whom they must all feel the deepest sympathy, had testified to the uniformly harmonious relations between himself and his wife, and there was no evidence that the deceased had any domestic or financial trouble playing upon her mind.
The jury brought in a verdict of Death by Misadventure.
On December 18th, Mr Belford, having adjusted matters satisfactorily with all his creditors, came down to breakfast with a good appetite. Beside his plate lay a type-written envelope. He opened it and saw, with a curious pang of apprehension, the printed heading:
SMITH & SMITH—REMOVALS.
(There was no address.)
Dear Sir,—with reference to your esteemed order of the 25th October for a Removal from your private address, we trust that this commission has been carried out to your satisfaction. We beg you to acknowledge your obliging favour of five hundred pounds (£500) and return herewith the Order of Removal which you were good enough to hand to us. Assuring you of our best attention at all times,
Faithfully yours,
Smith & Smith
He turned curiously to the enclosure. It bore his signature, but he had no recollection of having seen it before. It ran:
I, Adrian Belford of (here followed his address) hereby confess that I murdered my wife, Catherine Elizabeth Belford, in the following manner. Knowing that she was in the habit of taking each night a tablet containing 10 gs. of veronal, a compound of diethyl barbituric acid, I opened a bottle of these tablets and removed 10 of them, substituting a single tablet, containing 10 gs. of a new barbituric acid compound which, giving a similar chemical reaction to veronal, is ten times more powerful in hypnotic effect. The result of this would be that, on taking this tablet, as she was in due course bound to do, my wife would consume a dose of 10 gs. of the new compound equal to 100 gs. of the ordinary tablets, or twice the minimum fatal dose. The fatal tablet was prepared for me, in anticipation of these events, by the Gesellschaft Schmidt of Berlin, during my visit to Germany last May, of course in ignorance of the purpose for which it was required. My reason for committing this crime was that I had misappropriated certain trust monies belonging to the Ingleborough estate, and desired to replace them from the estate to which I was entitled under my late wife’s will.
I make this confession, being troubled in my conscience.
Adrian Belford
17th December 193—
With shaking hands Belford thrust letter and enclosure into the fire.
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) needs little introduction. Though she wrote comparatively few novels and short stories, they form an impressively consistent and enjoyable body of work, second only perhaps to that by Agatha Christie.
Without Sayers, Sherlockian scholarship would not be the flourishing pseudo-academic field it is today. And the Detection Club—founded by her contemporary Anthony Berkeley—would have languished as nothing more than a dining society for crime writers without the many collaborative books and radio serials that Sayers initiated as one of the Club’s most active members and as its President. Without Sayers’ reviews and penetrating insights into the art and artifice of the detective story, the genre would surely not have developed internationally as a field of academic study. And without the protean aristocrat Lord Peter Wimsey there would almost certainly be no Campion, no Dalgliesh and no Lynley, to name but a few of the detectives whose character and approach bear some mark of Sayers’ sleuth.
Sayers also wrote widely in many genres and, for some of her admirers, her crime stories and her studies of the genre are merely a distraction from even greater achievements: her analyses of Christian doctrine and her translations of Dante. For the majority, however, the reverse is certainly true.
There is the Wimsey canon—twenty-one short stories and eleven novels, several of which were memorably televised, first with Ian Carmichael (Lord Peter Wimsey, 1972–1975), and subsequently with Edward Petherbridge (A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery, 1987). There are also the delightful stories of Montague Egg, a travelling wine salesman, and various non-series stories, the foremost being the extraordinary ‘Blood Sacrifice’. As with the best of her contemporaries, Sayers draws on tropes of the genre—the impossible crime, the invisible weapon and so on—to create puzzles that remain as entertainingly baffling today as when they were first published, in some cases nearly a century ago. And as with Charles Dickens, her work is peppered with memorable characters, not the least of whom is the detective novelist Harriet Vane, in many ways a self-portrait of Sayers.
‘Smith and Smith, Removals: I. The House of the Poplars’ by Dorothy L. Sayers is a previously unpublished manuscript held by the Marion E. Wad
e Center, Wheaton College, IL, USA, which has the largest and most comprehensive collection of published and unpublished resources by and about Sayers worldwide. The original manuscript is twenty-eight handwritten pages with revisions by Sayers; the Wade Center manuscript number is DLS/MS-187. It was the first of two stories written by Sayers in the 1920s featuring the removals firm of Smith and Smith. The other, ‘The Leopard Lady’, was collected in In the Teeth of the Evidence (1939) and filmed with Boris Karloff for the American television series Lights Out in 1950.
THE HAMPSTEAD MURDER
Christopher Bush
It can be an absorbing undertaking, when the means are available, to trace to their original sources events which have proved momentous and to discover how trivial were the small beginnings that set them in motion. Even the hydrogen bomb can be traced directly back to a murder in Sarajevo. All our lives are shot through with the most incredible of coincidences. You happen to change the direction of a walk and you meet someone who changes the direction of your life.
The Hampstead Murder was a case in point. A man in Scotland wrote a letter to The Times and, by chance, The Times found it interesting enough to print. Because of that letter, which had nothing whatever to do with murder, a woman was strangled in a London suburb. You may not recall that murder. It created no excitement and never got into the headlines. The woman was found with a noose around her neck, and the killing could have been accomplished in a matter of seconds. As murders go, it was exceptionally swift and abrupt.
Considering its ownership there was nothing unusual about the room where she was found. It smelled faintly of pot-pourri, and its charming furniture included some delightful period pieces. Its china and pictures had quality, its carpet was Chinese and its chairs were Chesterfield-soft and seductive.
Then there was the woman, in a charming afternoon frock, with a face like a surprised Madonna and hair like an aureola. She was wearing about a thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery, which would unquestionably have proved tempting, in short, to a burglar. There was no blood, no signs of a struggle. No vulgarity, but everything quiet and restrained, except for that deadly circle around her neck. Even the murderer was only a part of that general background—a quiet man, writing peacefully at a Queen Anne bureau.
Later, of course, there was to be the comparative vulgarity of a trial, even if it ended in a matter of minutes with the knowledge that the murderer was hopelessly insane. And the reason of it all—let me repeat—was a letter that was written to The Times.
To get to that letter we must leave the charm of that drawing-room in Hampstead and come nearer town to Porter Street, Mornington Crescent. In Victorian times the Crescent had dignity and aloofness. Porter Street still retained something of that dignity even if its Georgian houses had become offices and flats. It was in one of these flats that Lutley Prentisse was working on a certain June morning.
It would be more true to say that he should have been working. In front of his swivel chair were table and typewriter but he sat there with the tips of his fingers together and his brow wrinkled in thought. You would have needed no particular shrewdness to have guessed that he was a writer.
But he was a writer with a difference. His name was far from well-known. He had three novels to his credit, two having as their theme extramarital intrigue and the other concerned with one of those coteries to be found on the French Riviera. The last only had sold quite well—a matter of gratification to its author purely from pride of workmanship. Money is always useful, but his private income was about two thousand a year after taxes, and the handsome royalties he received from his publisher made no great difference.
The fact of the matter was that he had drifted into writing almost without knowing it, and primarily to escape from boredom. The first two years after his marriage had been a routine of which he had tired—Switzerland in mid-winter, the Riviera in Spring, golf in England in the summer and weekends at various house parties, with a week or two at Deauville or Le Touquet in early autumn. After that town—the club, theatres and the multitudinous rush and jigsaw fitting-in from morning till night.
All that was the life that suited Dorothy Prentisse so well. At golf Lutley was a shaky sixteen. She could give a low handicap man a good game and from the men’s tees at that. Her tennis was almost first-class. She played a really good hand at bridge—a bit aggressive, perhaps, but rarely a loser unless cards and partners were impossible. Lutley was a cautious bidder if ever there was one. He was good, however, for what he said, and never less.
But he took things less seriously. In golf the game counted, not the figures—or at least that was how things had been before his marriage. Maybe it was the almost venomous earnestness with which Dorothy did things that first began to make them pall.
In some ways you might have thought them an ill-sorted couple. He was short and sturdy, with quiet brown eyes, and a kind of intellectual shyness. She was tall for a woman, handsome in a glittering way and with qualities that would have made for attractiveness only to a man quite different from Prentisse—knowledge of the jargons and sporting chatter, and with it that shrewd judgment that knows when to be only a highly ornamental background.
At Cambridge Lutley had read history and, until his marriage, had contributed occasionally to various reviews. That particular writing had been a part of his leisure, but later, when the hectic life of his first married years had begun to seem aimless and even boring, he had thought with regret of the pleasure his earlier labours had given him. Out of it had come his attempt at a first novel, and its publication.
All this was just before the last war when money was money and life less demanding. As for his marriage, he had met Dorothy at the house of George Foster, an old Cambridge friend, and it so happened that she had been at school with George’s wife, Miriam. Dorothy’s father had just died—he had been vicar of Purfield Warren—and she had come into a reasonable sum of money.
Six months after that first meeting they were married. He was then thirty-one and she twenty-eight, though she claimed to be younger. It was a love match on his side if not on hers. Her friends agreed that he had married a most attractive woman, her enemies that she had done exceptionally well for herself. But it would have been hard to judge objectively the success or otherwise of that marriage. Lutley, one could see through: the woman he had wed was far more inscrutable. In public a softly-murmured ‘Darling!’ and a playful tap are no particular signs, especially when the other hand holds a liqueur glass drained for the eighth time.
When Prentisse at first, and almost surreptitiously, returned to his writing, his wife seemed neither to mind nor to be interested. After all, she had plenty of outside interests. On her first discovery of his new activity it had been: ‘Darling, how frightfully clever of you!’ and then, at intervals, ‘Oh, you poor dear, I hate to see you working so hard! Why don’t you stop now and rest?’ Then, on the publication of his first novel, ‘Darling, it’s too frightfully thrilling for anything!’
Thereafter it might have been said by the unkind that her tolerance or possible encouragement of his efforts was not unconnected with material considerations. But Prentisse apparently doted on her and generously provided that his earnings should be hers in the form of special presents.
But the Spring of 1947 had seen a slight deterioration in the warmth and closeness of their relationship. He was engaged on a new book which he definitely knew was good, and he refused to take his work to the Riviera. Dorothy had however kept to the routine and had gone to Menton with a small circle of friends that included Peter Claire and Miriam Foster.
Claire, a handsome, country club type man of about thirty-five, was a very old friend. Prentisse, in his own undemonstrative way, was very fond of him. The Prentisses saw a lot of him when he was in town and he often dined at the Hampstead house.
It was because he did not want to keep that house open during his wife’s absence that Prentisse had taken that Porter Street flat. Dorothy was away till the very end of May a
nd then something happened. Her only sister had been taken seriously ill and she had gone down to Carnford to be with her.
That was not so unsettling for Prentisse as it might have been, for the book was not quite finished. A few days would see it with the publisher and he stayed on at the flat. In the morning he usually put in his best work, but that particular morning he was annoyed, and worried over what seemed a very trivial thing.
Before him was the morning’s edition of The Times and it was at a certain letter that he was scowling. A policeman had written rather indignantly on the treatment of his profession by writers of detective novels. The police, he affirmed, were treated like buffoons and authors rarely troubled to make themselves familiar with the real workings of either Scotland Yard or the C.I.D. departments of provincial forces.
But it was not the police and their methods that were worrying Lutley Prentisse, but the whole principle which the letter called in question. He himself had always been careful to use in his books such local colour as had been familiar and things with which he had had at least a working acquaintance, but in that novel, now almost finished, he had brought in something with which he was not familiar at all—a private detective agency.
The chapter that dealt with it had been written and he had taken a great deal for granted, not caring much whether or not an absolute verisimilitude had been achieved. A detective agency, for instance, would have an office. Well, such offices were surely pretty much alike, and in his novel its appearance had been guessed at. And so with the head of the firm, and the conversation, and all the things that go to make what one calls local colour.
Some people would have regarded the whole thing as utterly unimportant. There could be little connection between that letter and the chapter in question. They would have argued that a private detective was most unlikely to read that particular chapter and that the man in the street, provided the book as a whole kept him reading into the small hours, would not care the proverbial tuppence about the niceties of local colour.
