by Leo Bruce
Beef paused to lower half his tankard.
“You’ll see the house tomorrow, so I won’t go into that,” he went on. “Gloomy great place. Ridley lived there with only two servants, a man and his wife. I wouldn’t trust either further than I could see. Then there’s a young secretary, young fellow of about twenty-five. A bit nancified, he seemed to me. That’s all the household. Ridley was found by the manservant hanging from a beam in the large room which he used as a study and for his books. That was about six o’clock in the morning. The body was quite stiff and cold then. He rushed out and roused the secretary. He took one glance at the body and phoned the police. Death must have occurred about six hours before the body was found, so all this took place around midnight of the tenth of September. That, if you remember, was the day your aunt was poisoned.”
Beef paused. Then slowly that expression of amusement came into his face that I knew so well—amusement at some piece of human pretention or frailty.
“And the joke of it is,” he said, “that if the Reverend Alfred Ridley hadn’t been quite so eager, he would have saved his hundred and fifty quid because by the next day it had been established on medical evidence that Edwin Ridley was already dead, strangled, before he was strung up on a rope. Suicide never came into it, and as far as the reverend was concerned I never had to lift a finger. ’Course he was wild as soon as he heard. He wrote me at once, apologising for giving me the unnecessary trouble of a journey to Gloucestershire and saying that he was sure I would agree that my services were no longer required in view of the doctor’s decision. Fortunately, seeing what sort of bird he was, I’d made him sign one of my contract forms, so he can’t get out of it. Funny, wasn’t it?”
I suggested moving into the bar now, as the green-plush tablecloth, the bronze bowls of ferns, and the fading photographs of early relations of the innkeeper were beginning to depress me. There Beef continued.
“It looked like an outside job. Ridley kept some valuable books in his library and there was some nice stuff in the house. Two people benefited by his Will. First there was the clergyman, but apart from his calling me in he had his alibi vouched for that night by a dozen people apart from his family. Then his niece. She gets the bulk of the money—which is quite a lot, I believe. She, I understand, is a frail little thing nearly forty who spent that night with the Dean of Fulham and, anyway, hadn’t the strength to string Ridley up from a beam.”
“What I can’t understand, Beef,” I said, “is why you are going on with this case now.”
“I told the Reverend Alfred I was going to probe it to the depths, and probe it I will. Besides, there are one or two strange things in this case that interest me. Interest me very much indeed.”
“Also,” he had added with a twinkle, “there’s that fifty quid expenses. I’m going to spend every penny of it.”
Next morning we set out after breakfast for Bampton Court, which was the name of Ridley’s house.
The rain that had begun to fall the night before still persisted, and the country looked cold and colourless. We came to some rather fine wrought-iron gates and drove in. The drive was little more than a rutted cart-track overgrown with weeds, and the fields on either side looked equally untended. We passed through a small wood, and round a bend we came on the house. Even to my untutored eye it was obviously a beauty—as fine a piece of seventeenth-century architecture as you could meet. Yet curiously, as Beef had said, it was a great gloomy place. As I looked around I realised why it should seem to be so. The garden had been allowed to grow quite wild, the grey Cotswold stone was covered with moss where it was visible at all, for trees and creepers had invaded terrace, lawn and drive, all around the house entirely unchecked and seemed to be eager to overwhelm and strangle the shapely beauty of window and eave. Only the tall slim Tudor chimneys rose still free from those green, engulfing tentacles.
“Gloomy, isn’t it?” Beef said. “Can’t understand anyone living in a place like that.”
I nodded. Yes, I thought, but the gloom was due to decay and neglect, and must to a certain extent reveal something of the man who had lived here. I could imagine the house a hundred and fifty years ago in the time of Jane Austen, the home of a large family, the gardens laid out, and the stables full of horses and carriages. It would not have been gloomy then.
Beef went up to the front door, a fine piece of old oak, and pulled at the bell. An unprepossessing figure of a man of about forty-five appeared, untidy and dirty and looking as if he could do with a shave.
“Oh, it’s you back, is it?” he said to Beef morosely.
Beef paid no attention but pushed into the house, saying he wanted to speak to Mr. Lovelace, the secretary. “That’s the manservant I told you about,” Beef said, as the man stumped off to find the secretary. We were standing in a large hall and I could see that, although everything seemed worn and undusted, there was some valuable furniture there, rugs and chairs and a particularly fine gate-legged table. I had little time to observe everything before a tall willowy figure appeared.
“I’m so glad to see you, Mr. Beef. I’m going positively crazy in this house alone. Well, alone except for those two revolting servants, who are quite out of hand now that there’s no master in the house. We haven’t met,” he said pleasantly enough, but I was conscious of two very blue, very shrewd eyes fixed on me.
“This is Mr. Lionel Townsend,” Beef said. “He helps me with most of my cases and then writes them up. This is the late Mr. Ridley’s secretary, Mr. Lovelace.”
“Yes. I’m Adrian Lovelace. How do you do? So you’re the Doctor Watson, are you, or is it the Captain Hastings, of the ménage? I’ve always wanted to meet one of those faithful recorders. Such nice, dependable men, so loyal and not too fashionably subtle. We must have a long talk about the writing of detective stories. I’m an absolute glutton for them, and I’ve some wonderful theories.”
I could see that Beef was getting impatient while the young man prattled on in a pleasant but rather high-pitched voice. Though too thin and pale, his features were arrestingly well-formed, but there was something displeasing to me about him. Whether it was the slightly petulant mouth or the closeness of his very pale-blue eyes, I could not decide. His clothes, too—the pale-grey suit, lavender tie and grey suede shoes—though all expensive and beautifully made, did not seem right in this house. They were more suited to Maidenhead or a theatrical garden party.
“I’d like to have another look at the room where the old boy was found dead,” Beef said, and Lovelace led the way down a long stone corridor at the end of which was a stout oak door set in a stone arch.
“This room was built on much later,” Lovelace said, turning a huge key. “It’s less than a hundred years old. It was used as a private chapel by the family who lived here. They died out in the 1914 war and the house was empty until Edwin Ridley bought it about 1930. It’s an ugly barn of a place, as you see.”
I gazed around and wondered how anyone could so misuse the stone of the Cotswolds. There were tall Victorian gothic windows with clear leaden panes, except at the far end where stained-glass windows in hideous garish colours gave a ghoulish nineteenth-century version of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac. There was a lot of fumed oak and a door leading out into the garden crowned with the inevitable gothic arch. The roof was open and beams ran from side to side. Everywhere the plain dignity of the stone had been spoilt by a fussy foliated design. Most of the walls were lined with bookshelves, and books of every kind and shape filled them.
“Yes,” Lovelace said, as he saw me looking at them, “he was a bibliophile. A real honest-to-god collector—about the only honest thing about him, I’m afraid.”
I looked around at the old calf folios and quartos, at the sets in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century morocco, and at the rows of three-volume novels, the gilt lettering still bright even in this dim-lit room.
“Must be a valuable collection,” I said.
“Valued at about twenty thousand for probate a few
years ago, but he’s added quite a bit since.”
Beef showed me the beam from which Edwin Ridley had been found hanging.
“How did the murderer get him up there?” I asked.
“He must have used one of the ladders we keep for fruit-picking,” Lovelace replied. “But would you like to hear the whole story? I almost know it by heart now, I’ve told it so often.”
Beef had opened the door into the garden and was busy examining both inside and out, so I agreed.
“Well, the last time I saw my employer alive,” he began, “was at dinner that night. We dined together, as usual. Perhaps the only slightly strange thing was that he sent Fagg—that’s the unshaven creature who let you in—for a bottle of red wine. We were having duck, I remember, and he particularly wanted a bottle of Burgundy. It wasn’t unheard of for him to open a bottle, though he was as mean as hell, but it was almost always when he had some guest who was useful to him or when he had picked up cheap some unusual bargain for his collection.”
Lovelace noticed that Beef had joined us. “Oh, Mr. Beef, you don’t want to hear all my story over again, do you?” he said, but he seemed pleased at the addition to his audience.
“I was always free after dinner, as Ridley invariably took his cigar into this room and spent the evenings with his beloved books. I would sometimes hear him go to bed about twelve, but often the whole household was asleep before he retired. Fagg used to leave a glass and a siphon of soda for him on the side there. He had his own bottle of whisky locked in a cabinet after he had found the bottle an inch and a half lower than he had left it, so he said. Quite a fuss there was. It must have been Fagg, because I wouldn’t touch the beastly stuff. I don’t mind an occasional gin and lime, but whisky. Eugh!”
I caught Beef’s eye, and it was all I could do to suppress a chuckle.
“So you see he was never disturbed at night. I went off on my motor-cycle to play bridge with the doctor at Cold Slaughter. I got back about twelve. The lights were still on in this room, I could see as I put my bike away. There was nothing unusual inside the house. I drank my glass of hot milk and went straight to bed. The next thing I knew was a fearful banging at my door. There was the creature Fagg, looking even more dishevelled and repulsive than ever, shouting that the master had hanged himself and screeching to me to come down quickly. I threw on a few clothes and followed Fagg to this room. Oh, it was quite awful. It was still not yet light and there was that thing dangling on the end of a rope. I nearly fainted. However, the Fagg creature seemed to have quite lost his head so I had to do everything myself. There was a chair upset below the body. I picked it up and stood on it. I could touch the body from there. It was quite cold and stiff. I went straight to the hall and telephoned the police. Then I was sick.”
He paused and looked round at us both as if he expected a round of applause.
“What I want to know,” Beef said, “is why Fagg was up and about the house at six o’clock. That was when he found him, I think. I’m sure it’s not usual for either of them to get up at that hour.”
“I asked him that,” Lovelace replied. “He said he couldn’t sleep and got up to make a cup of tea. Then he thought he’d have a look at the paper. Of course the paper of the day before. We don’t get a paper delivered in this place before midday. He knew that his master always took the papers into his book-room after dinner so he came down to that door.” He pointed to the door leading from the corridor. “It was locked and he could see the key was inside. This really surprised him, as he knew his master was always in the habit of turning the key from the corridor side on his way to bed. He went into the garden and round the side of the house to see if the garden door was open by any chance. Well, it was, and that’s how he came to be banging and shouting at my door.”
“Do you do the cataloguing of these books?” I asked Lovelace.
“For my sins,” he said, showing me a large cabinet full of cards. “Here they all are, neatly typed. A4,” he quoted. “That’s the shelf. Milton, John . . . . You see there’s a separate card for each book. Every time he got a new lot, he used to dictate to me a description of each book and I’d type a card.”
“Then you’d know if anything was missing?” I asked.
“You are a Doctor Watson,” he replied impatiently. “That was one of the first questions your friend Beef and the Superintendent asked me. Well, as I told them, I couldn’t check the whole library, but he kept his really valuable books locked in a special case. That one over there. The cards were also in a tray of their own. It was easy to go through them, and I soon found that none of his really valuable books had disappeared.”
He paused and turned to Beef.
“One rather curious thing I noticed. You see that bundle of books over there. About half a dozen of them. The paper they were wrapped in is still there. I’ve never seen them before and I’m pretty sure they weren’t here the afternoon before Ridley was murdered. I would have noticed them.”
10
Beef did not show any great interest in the books, saying, “We’ll have another look at them presently. I’m more interested in the packing. The books are more in your line,” he said, turning to me.
“Now, Mr. Lovelace, I want to get some real idea about the late Mr. Edwin Ridley. We’re all agreed that he was murdered, that the murder took place about midnight, that he was strangled by hand first and then strung up with a new piece of rope. If it wasn’t you or Fagg, it must have been the work of someone outside. Do you know any likely reason anyone had for bumping him off? Any special enemies?”
Lovelace thought for a moment.
“It’s like this, Sergeant. While he was alive and my employer, I never said anything against him, but now he’s dead I feel free to speak. I think he was the hardest and meanest man I’ve ever met. Mind you, it didn’t affect me. He paid me a good salary. We lived well and, though he worked me hard, I had entire freedom to do what I liked when he didn’t want me.
“I should think in an area of fifteen miles there are a dozen people who hated the sight of him for one reason or another, but I can’t say that any of them would take their dislike as far as murder. It’s been one long series of local rows since I’ve been here, and that’s over two years. Would you like to hear the local gossip? If you would I suggest we move out of here into my sitting-room. This place gives me the shivers. I’ll make you some coffee.”
He led the way on to a half-landing and showed us into his room. After the cold bleakness of the rest of the house it was pleasant to find this bright little oasis. A fire was burning in a Queen Anne grate, there were bright curtains and rugs, and on the walls well-framed prints of the French impressionists. Rows of modern books of the more esoteric type lined his bookshelves, and the whole effect rather reminded me of the room of a female student at Oxford in the early ’thirties.
“Do you like it?” he asked me, as he began to toy with a percolator and a coffee grinder.
“I must say it’s very different from the rest of the house,” I replied, noncommittally. “It’s pleasant to see a fire.”
Beef was making violent signs behind Lovelace’s back, which I gathered meant that he was not keen on the idea of coffee, but wanted a drink.
“Beef doesn’t care for coffee,” I said to Lovelace. “What he’d really like is a glass of beer, if you have one in the house?”
“You’d like my coffee, Sergeant,” he replied. “But if you prefer beer I’ll go and get a bottle or two from the cellar.”
As soon as the door had shut behind him, Beef said in a hoarse whisper:
“See what I mean when I said ‘a bit nancified’. But he’s no fool and we may get something from him. I don’t think much went on here that he didn’t know about. Regular old woman for his gossip, I should say.”
He came back with a few bottles of beer and poured out one for Beef.
“I don’t really know where to begin,” he said, as he busied himself with preparing the coffee. “I think the first row he h
ad was when he stopped the village cricket team playing their matches on five-acre. The Cold Slaughter team had played there for years and it was the only decent flat piece of ground in the district. But it was his ground, and though they offered to pay rent he wouldn’t alter his decision. Some of the lads had annoyed him, and the local grocer, he considered, had overcharged him. That led to a lot of unpleasantness. Some of the chaps even came up here one Saturday night and covered everything with green paint. The next trouble I think was with the Hunt. Old Colonel Lethbridge is the M.F.H. He lives about seven miles away. Nice old boy, but a bit eccentric and irascible. Ridley claimed five pounds from the Hunt for the loss of some chickens, which he said a fox had had. The Hunt sent him two guineas, saying they were very short of funds, so Ridley closed his grounds to the Hunt. There are about six hundred acres belonging to Bampton Court. The old colonel came to see him, thinking he could settle the whole dispute with a few words. Ridley threatened to have him thrown out, and the colonel, whose temper was never very good, called him a usurious ill-mannered paper-merchant. Ridley was a publisher, you know. I thought the colonel was going to strike Ridley with his riding-crop, but he managed to control himself. He jumped on his horse and rode off, uttering the most blood-curdling threats and oaths I’ve ever heard.”
