The Heel of Achilles: A Golden Age Mystery

by E.

  The Heel of Achilles is the Radfords’ homage to R. Austin Freeman and his series detective Dr John Thorndyke. Freeman is the acknowledged ‘parent’ of the scientific detective story and Edwin Radford greatly admired the Dr Thorndyke stories. Both Thorndyke and Manson are first and foremost forensic scientists, who apply their professional skills to the furtherance of detection. They are highly intelligent and knowledgeable men, possessing acute powers of logic, reasoning and judgement. It is no coincidence that the observant railway company doctor who significantly disagrees with the local Police over the cause of Canley’s death is one Dr Jervis, the same name as Dr Thorndyke’s junior scientific assistant. Thorndyke is renowned for his portable miniature laboratory, the famous ‘green square box’ used during site investigations, and similarly Manson has ‘the Box of Tricks’. Critical opinion attributes the invention of the inverted mystery story to Freeman, and particularly to his Dr Thorndyke short story collection The Singing Bone (1912), which includes the classic inverted tale ‘The Case of Oscar Brodski’. Like Manson, Thorndyke notices things which others overlook, and the police and the reader are in awe of his deductive prowess and abilities. One reviewer in 1913 wrote that reading Dr Thorndyke stories was akin to “a course of mental gymnastics conducted under the pleasantest conditions”. The author Raymond Chandler also had a high regard for Freeman’s stories and applauded their “even suspense”.

  The experimental form of the inverted mystery story was adopted and developed with success by various leading UK Golden Age authors who sought to be innovative. Some notable examples include Francis Iles (Anthony Berkeley) in Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1933); Anthony Berkeley in Trial and Error (1937), which cleverly manages to combine the inverted form of Iles’ writing with the puzzle mystery of the earlier Berkeley detective novels; Richard Hull in The Murder of my Aunt (1934) and Murder Isn’t Easy (1936); Henry Wade in Heir Presumptive (1935); Freeman Wills Crofts in Antidote to Venom (1938); the novels of Anthony Rolls; and the Roy Vickers short story collections about the Department of Dead Ends. A significant variation developed by Iles in Before the Fact was to shift the inverted perspective from murderer to victim. Today, the inverted tale remains an effective and familiar form of crime writing, helped by popular appreciation of the long-running Columbo TV drama series which used the inverted murder form as its anchor.

  Nigel Moss

  NOTE

  Achilles was, in Greek mythology, the son of Peleus and Thetis. The story goes that when he was born, Thetis took her son by one heel and dipped him in the Styx—the river of the dead—in order to make him invulnerable to death. The waters of the river washed over every part of his body except the heel in his mother’s hand.

  Achilles became the mighty hero of the Trojan War, on the Greek side. He slew Hector and other Trojan champions. But he fell before Troy was captured. An arrow, shot according to legend by Paris, pierced the heel, the vulnerable spot of his body.

  FOREWORD

  In this novel—the eighth of the cases of Dr. Manson—we have deviated from the traditional style of the detective novel. The standard mystery follows along the lines of a perpetrated crime, the details of commission and the particeps criminis of which are unknown to the reader as well as to the investigator, whether he be famous amateur or professional detective.

  The reader follows in the track of the investigator, and sees unravelled the plot of the crime, sometimes without being able to appreciate the points which are regarded by the detective as clues, because they are hidden in the detective’s mind in order that he may at the end pull one from the hat to surprise the reader!

  Sometimes—as we have always done in the ‘Manson’ stories—the clues are plainly presented, without artifice, and the reader is challenged to fit them into the jigsaw of the developing case, and name the guilty person. That constitutes the modus operandi of the normal detective story.

  In The Heel of Achilles we have inverted the procedure. The complete details of the crime are presented to the reader in advance; he (or she, for it is a striking fact that the greater readers of detective stories today are women) is, in fact, an eyewitness to the murder and has the advantage over the investigating officers striving to trace the story, and the details, through the normal channels of investigation.

  The authors hope that this ‘inversion’ will arouse as great an interest in the mind of the readers as does the traditional story of detection. They trust, too, that it will serve a useful purpose in revealing the mechanics of detection and how modern criminal investigation works in the police forces today; for there is nothing in the trail through Part Two of this story which can be said to be outside the realm of actual modern police investigation. The scientific and medical arguments given are such as are part and parcel of the C.I.D. in any case of major inquiry.

  The case of Mrs. Ruxton (so ably reconstructed by Dr. J. Glaister, of the Department of Forensic Medicine, of the University of Glasgow), the Rouse case, and one or two others of even more recent date are all examples of the harnessing of science to the detection of crime and illustrate the methods and conclusions arrived at in this story.

  Finally, the story may act as a warning to those people who may think that they can commit a crime and get away with it. They can’t! We, who know something of Scotland Yard, and its men and methods, are quite sure of that fact. The detective novel, so long as it is written without fancy thrills and after the style of actual police investigation, is not the menace which so many people would have us believe. It preaches a moral—the detective invariably ‘gets his man’!

  E. AND M.A. RADFORD

  Hampton Court,

  Surrey.

  PART ONE

  STORY OF A MURDER

  CHAPTER I

  The sun was climbing slowly to its zenith in the arched sky of periwinkle blue as the judge began his slow walk from the church to the assize court.

  He walked majestically in scarlet and ermine, but with the inevitable monotony of established habit: thus had he pilgrimaged week in and week out on his round circuit of assizes over a span of years.

  His hands, almost transparently white in their fragility—for he was an old man—clutched his robes which a desultory breeze cutting across a junction of roads blew apart, and drew them tightly round him.

  His chaplain, who had minutes before asked at the altar of the parish church that Divine guidance might be vouchsafed to the man of Justice, walked behind him; alongside him the sheriff. Police officers rode slowly in front, their horses nosing gently and delicately to the pavement edge the lines of watching people.

  In panoplied, leisurely dignity the cavalcade reached the market-place. Press photographers saw here their ‘picture’; a news-reel man with Technicolor cameras saw it, too. The ancient market-place had been a mart of commerce since before the Norman landed on our shores, as he said ‘for your good, for all your goods’. (A wit, in view of subsequent happenings, commented that he should have added ‘and chattels’.)

  City councils with a rare understanding had throughout the years preserved the ancient market-place for commerce; the latest council had even beautified it; rickety and haphazard stalls had been replaced with permanent sitings, each with a two-slope roof of pantiles in delicate shades of green, amber and blue. The tiles, struck by the sun’s shaft of light, threw off rays of shimmering white. The rays combined with the scarlet of the judge, the silver and blue of the sheriff and the colourful produce piled on the stalls themselves, to add picturesque hue to the dignity of the cavalcade.

  If the judge saw anything of this, he gave no indication; he walked with eyes looking straight ahead without a sparkle from out the face set beneath the full-bottomed wig. Only when he moved past the King’s Stone did he turn his glance aside to eye it, grey and chipped behind its guard of iron fencing; for his Lordship was a man learned and loving in the history of the past (which are good English words for the Latin word antiquarian), and he knew that Saxon kings had been cro
wned on that stone after Egbert, King of England, had been gathered to his father, and Westminster Abbey was as yet unthought of.

  Because of the stone the City had come by its Royal title and its name of Kingston. Later generations, inspired by the river flowing gently and softly past added to the name the description ‘on-Thames’. The King’s Justice eyed the King’s stone until, like history, it passed out of his sight.

  Two men intrigued by the crowd lining the pavements approached, and each paused to eye the scene. They came from varying directions, drawn from their intended course by curiosity. The curiosity of women is a much maligned characteristic; the majority of spectators drawn as though by a magnet to a hole in a road, with a couple of men working within it, were men! However, on this day two men drawn by curiosity approached the procession. Or perhaps, in the light of subsequent events it might be argued that they were drawn by Fate, and not by curiosity.

  One of them was James Canley. He lounged indolently against a convenient lamp-post and peered over the heads of those in front of him. He was a man of no more than medium height, with no characteristic to stamp his identity on the mind of an observer unless the observer was one skilled in judging men; then he might well have noticed the hard lines of the face, the shiftiness of the eyes set too closely in the head for honesty of purpose and uprightness. And he would have said that here was a man not to be confided in, not to be allied with any adventure where danger might be said to lurk—a man for the law-abiding to keep clear of.

  His prying gaze turned first to recollection, then identification, and finally to bitter sneering regard as he saw the face of the robed figure. Years before he had stood in front of a judge in court and listened to blistering words that had sent him to penal servitude. His hands now clenched in threats of revengeful violence at the remembrance. But he made no move to turn into action the promptings of his rancour. He watched the passing of the judge.

  The second man who had come to pry only in curiosity, stayed in sturdy independence, noting the pageantry and appreciating it. There was no remembrance to embitter his enjoyment of the wasted few moments of the morning. A virile-looking figure of muscle, Jack Porter had the appearance of the traditional English artisan; he was, in fact, a competent motor mechanic forging a way towards a satisfying fortune of achievement; he was as honest and industrious as Canley was insufferably idle and dissolute.

  Two men in variegated pattern from the loom of Lachesis, waiting for Atropos to cut the threads at her fancy. And the threads were running out, had the men but the gift of knowing it.

  Once in the years passed Fate had brought Canley and Porter together in a tangled web of circumstance. The result had been disaster for the one, and prison for the other. Nor had they set foot near, or eyes on, each other from that day.

  The judge reached the entrance to the courts and stood for a moment as the trumpeters sounded the fanfare of arrival. The moment was set for pageantry, but not for the drama which followed. Nor did that concourse of people ever come to a realization that drama had been played out before their eyes; drama that was to lead to murder, and to the scaffold. Only two men knew it at the time. Both were to die without telling it. Only the workings of the mind of Superintendent Dr. Manson[I] and the logic of his deductions were to seek out, months later, the pattern of the Three Sisters of Mythology, and follow it in its unwinding.

  As the fanfare sounded and the police sat stiffly to attention on their horses, a dog suddenly shot from between the legs of the people at the pavement edge and darted across the road under the legs of the horses. One of the animals, startled, reared and threw its rider. A gasp of alarm from the crowd seeing the hooves of the horse over their heads, was followed by a surge backwards. The officer, however, though falling heavily, managed to keep grip of the reins, and quieted his mount with a few words and a pat.

  The dog vanished down the street, yelping. It might well have been the spiritual descendant of that hell-hound of Cornelius Agrippa, which whisper said was a spirit incarnate: for its escapade caused James Canley to edge towards the front of the line in the wan hope that he would see that someone had succeeded in getting his own back on the figure of Justice. He glanced up at the court steps and found himself looking into the face of Jack Porter.

  His eyes passed from Porter to the judge, and then suddenly returned and again scanned the face of Porter. Puzzled wrinkles lined his brow, and he searched back in his memory for some clue to the air of familiarity which seemed to attach itself to the man opposite him. Suddenly it came. In a flash he saw in his mind’s eye a large house in the woods above Paignton, the Devonshire seaside resort built in the manner of the townships on the Côte d’Azur, with palm trees lining the front, and the gaily coloured homes set in tiers on the hillside climbing up from the waters of the sea.

  He heard again the shrill scream of police whistles, the alarming call of his companion. He recalled the climb out of a window, the dash for safety, followed by police officers, the blow with which he felled one of the men in a vain bid for escape, and the failure. He saw again the grim interior of an assize court and the face of the judge, so like that of the figure now standing on the steps of the assize court in front of him as the fanfare came to its finale.

  ‘Jack Edwins, by God,’ he said to himself. ‘Jack Edwins, found after all these years.’

  He took another sidelong look at the man, who had not as yet seen him. ‘Looking pretty prosperous, too,’ he added to his identification. ‘On my money.’

  The fanfare ended. The judge turned and entered the doors of the court. The police rode their horses slowly away, and the crowd broke its ordered line and in its individual members dispersed on the day’s lawful occasions.

  Jack Porter, his dalliance over, strode quickly down the street in the direction of the market-place. Canley, noting his direction followed a little behind until his quarry reached a less crowded street. He quickened his pace, and reaching Porter’s side, placed a hand on his shoulder, swung him round, and. . . .

  “Damned if it isn’t old Jack Edwins!” he said.

  Face to face with his past, which he had accounted for many years as dead, Porter fought desperately for recognition. He stared blankly at his accoster, and then slowly let the stare soften to a smile of pleasant regret.

  “I am afraid you must have made a mistake, sir,” he said. “My name is Porter.”

  He moved away, only for Canley to link an arm through one of his, and further to detain him. He guffawed.

  “Well, that’s as it may be,” he announced. “Porter or not Porter, what’s in a name anyway? You may be Jack Porter out here, but you’re Jack Edwins to a Devonian. Come and have a drink. There are old times we have to talk over.”

  “I tell you . . .” Porter began again.

  Canley interrupted, and with a menace in his voice. “It doesn’t matter a damn what you say. Do you think I don’t know my old pard, Edwins, even though it’s been years since I saw him? Now I know somebody who would. . . .”

  “All right.” Porter gave up in forlorn surrender. With Canley he turned into the bar parlour of an hotel.

  The stage was set for the first act of tragedy.

  It was the pre-lunch half hour, and the bar was thickly lined with appetite stimulators.

  “Can’t talk here.” Canley grumbled a protest after a drink. “And there’s lots of things we’ve got to talk about that it won’t do for anybody to overhear. Better come along to my place. It’s only a bus ride away.”

  He led the way. Ten minutes saw them alight at the entrance to the village of Thames Pagnall: and a walk of some five minutes landed them outside a small cottage hidden away in a quiet lane. For solitude at the gateway of convenience Canley’s home could hardly have been equalled. A railway station was no more than three minutes’ walk from the lane, bus routes within five minutes. Yet there was no other dwelling in sight of the house. It is true that another cottage stood some two hundred yards further up the lane, but it was complete
ly hidden from view by a high hedge bordering an orchard. Canley’s cottage, again, had a second high hedge between it and the same orchard.

  The lane itself was bordered by hedges, and a wide grass verge. It was, in fact, less a lane than a track. Originally it had been marked out, probably by the passage of feet of strollers through the grass. Then someone had dumped over the track a lot of rubble and rubbish so that it now made a track unmetalled and rough. No wheeled traffic would have made any effort to drive a way through it.

  “Nice and lonely, eh?” Canley drew the attention of his companion to the surroundings. “That’s how I am, Jack. Lonely. I haven’t a friend these days. Nobody wants to be friendly with a gaolbird, you know.”

  He leered into the face of Porter.

  “You’ve never seen the inside of a prison, have you, Jack—? A little stone room with a plank bed, and a window—A window so high up that you can’t even look out of it let alone climb through it. Wouldn’t like that, would you, Jack?”

  He leered again, and poured out a couple of whiskies. “So the cops never caught you? You got clean away?”

  Porter spoke for the first time. “That wasn’t in any way due to you,” he said. “You know that I had nothing to do with the business, that I went in all innocence, and yet you gave my name to the police. Hadn’t even the honour of a thief, had you Canley?”