Silver Bullets

by Douglas Greene et al.

  “What there isn’t,” Rose said drily, “is one shred of proof. But let’s say you’re right. Which of them is the more likely to be our man?” A long pause. “Fancy a day at the seaside tomorrow, Auguste?”

  * * *

  Brighton. The playground for London, originally patronised by royalty and the aristocracy but now for everyone to enjoy, thanks to railway trains. Despite his mission and the time of year, Auguste was enjoying the sea air and the famous pier. Outside the Metropole Hotel stood several motor cars ready for their owners to depart after the excitements of yesterday, but Henri’s and the Baron von Merkstein’s vehicles were not amongst them. Their owners and the baron’s passenger were with Inspector Egbert Rose in a room inside the hotel.

  Auguste, however, had seen Bella returning from a morning stroll with a different but even more charming hat perched on her golden hair, and had instantly stopped to talk to her in the foyer before joining the inspector.

  She was looking worried. “What’s all this about, Auguste? Should I be in there with Henri?”

  “As you travelled here by train for the whole journey it hardly seems necessary.” Then he changed his mind. “Perhaps you should be present, Bella. Did you leave the train at Red Hill to purchase refreshments or for any other reason, and if so did you see anyone that could have been Colonel Pilkington on the platform?”

  “No,” she replied, but she looked uneasy, to Auguste’s concern. “When we boarded the train, Henri told me to go straight through to Preston Park. He is always so considerate.”

  “We, Bella?” Auguste’s heart sank. “You both boarded the train? If so, you must be present when the inspector interviews Henri.”

  She realised what she had said and what it might mean. “Henri would not hurt a fly,” she cried indignantly. “He’s so kind.”

  “What about the Baron von Merkstein?”

  “Nor would he,” she said equally indignantly. “He is so generous.”

  Auguste smiled, despite his dismay. “Oh, Bella. Both gentlemen are your friends?”

  She giggled. “Why not?”

  It was with a heavy heart that he escorted her past two stalwart police constables into the room where Inspector Rose was about to begin. His eye went from Auguste to Bella and an eyebrow lifted slightly. Auguste ignored it, still thinking about the enormity of what Bella had revealed. Henri was attempting to look at his ease by lounging on an eighteenth-century chair – a difficult task and he avoided Bella’s eye. The baron sat stiffly on another such chair, while the jolly-looking German mechanic sat comfortably on a Chesterfield sofa.

  “Colonel Pilkington,” Egbert Rose began formally, “was found on the path leading from the Church Street entrance to the rear of the grounds of the White Hart Inn. I’m told the official route that the motor cars took was to the west of the grounds of Reigate castle and along the High Street, which once past this inn becomes Church Street. The motor cars could either remain in the roadway outside the inn or continue to Church Street and a little way along turn into the coaching yard at the rear of the pub. That turn comes well before the path where the colonel was found.”

  The baron yawned. “How can this be of interest to us?”

  The inspector ignored him. “With the exception of the young lady here, you all approached the inn on motor cars along the High Street. Is that so?”

  “Certainly,” the baron assured him.

  Henri immediately agreed. “I too, monsieur.”

  “Neither of you alighted from a railway train?”

  The baron leapt to his feet. “Do you doubt my word, Englishman?”

  “Sit down if you please,” the inspector said grimly.

  The baron must have seen the police constables enter the room for he reluctantly obeyed.

  Henri had said nothing, but was very pale.

  He went even paler when Rose turned to him. “My sergeant tells me that a motor car resembling yours, with an owner resembling yourself, travelled from London Bridge to Red Hill Junction yesterday, arriving at 12.47 pm.”

  “Not mine—” Henri attempted to bluster.

  Bella interrupted. “It’s no use, Henri. I let it out that you were on the train with me and that was only as far as Red Hill. That doesn’t mean you killed that old man though, does it?”

  “I know nothing of him,” Henri moaned.

  The baron was quickly on his feet again. “You cheated, Monsieur le Comte. You dared to attempt to cheat me by driving your French toy only half the distance with half the risk of breakdown. Sir, you are a disgrace to the world of gentlemen. And, I would remind you that you still owe me two thousand pounds.”

  From the look on Henri’s face it was clear that he was in no position to pay it. “I did travel with Miss Parker, but I am no cold-blooded murderer, inspector. Look elsewhere, if you please. Why should I kill a stranger?”

  “Because he was no stranger,” Auguste said sadly. “He overheard your bet in Plum’s that evening.”

  The baron remained on the attack. “He murdered this colonel because he was caught cheating.”

  “I never saw him!” Henri shrieked. “I drove my motor car from Red Hill straight to the inn and left it in the coach yard.”

  “The colonel,” Rose pointed out, “could have been travelling on your train or waiting for the Reigate connection at Red Hill, and you offered to drive him to the White Hart.”

  “Non. The colonel did not like cars.”

  “He told you that, did he?” Rose asked.

  “Arrest him,” the baron demanded before Henri could reply. “I shall now leave.”

  “Not quite yet, sir,” Egbert said quietly. “When did you arrive at the inn?”

  The baron gave Rose a disdainful look. “I, sir, was already at the White Hart when Colonel Pilkington arrived at Reigate Station.”

  Auguste stiffened and glanced at Egbert Rose, who nodded. “And how would you know what time that was,” Rose asked, “if you drove from London in a motor car?”

  The baron looked disconcerted, but his passenger took it upon himself to reply. “Because,” he explained, “that is the time he told me to leave the motor car outside the railway station for him. Three minutes after one o”clock.”

  “The Benz motor car?” Rose quickly forestalled the Baron before he could shut his helpful mechanic up.

  “Ja,” the mechanic said proudly. “I leave it, then I walk to the inn where I have luncheon as the gnädiger Herr instructs me so that it will seem we are both there.”

  “Dummkopf!” yelled the baron.

  Auguste saw Henri’s head shoot up in hope. “You travelled by train too?” he asked the baron. “You also cheated? The Benz was taken there to meet you?”

  “Oh,Wilhelm,” Bella said reproachfully. “You as well. Why?”

  “Cheat? Nein,” the baron replied. “The Benz is the superior motor car. It had to win so I sent it down by train last evening in this

  Dummkopf’s care.”

  Egbert Rose had had enough. “It’s murder, not cheating that concerns me, if you please.You, Monsieur Henri, could have unloaded your vehicle at Red Hill junction, the colonel could have seen you whether he travelled on the London Bridge train or the train for Reigate that had stopped at Red Hill a few minutes later. He would have left the train to protest because he knew about that bet. I’m thinking the Reigate train pulled out without him, so you told him you’d drive him to the White Hart. Then you killed him at a handy spot. You couldn’t afford to lose that bet.”

  “No, no,” Henri moaned. “Yes, yes,” shouted the baron.

  “As for you, Baron,” Rose continued, “you travelled on the same train through to Reigate as the colonel would have taken. He could have seen you climb on to your motor car outside the station, realised your little game and objected. You said you would drive him to the White Hart inn, but you drove not along the London Road and the High Street where the other vehicles in the race might have seen you, but on the road that would lead you east of the castle
grounds and down to Church Street. There you saw a track that would be deserted enough to ensure he wouldn’t be able to spoil your victory over the count here.”

  The baron was beside himself with rage, but Henri was delighted. “And now I owe you nothing, Baron. We neither of us completed the race.”

  “Only because both of you cheated.” Bella began to laugh, then stopped when she saw Egbert Rose’s stern expression.

  “I demand my money,” the baron shouted at Henri.

  “And I demand attention,” Rose roared. “Which of you killed Colonel Pilkington?”

  “Not I,” Henri cried.

  “Nor I,” said the baron. He hesitated, then added, “I did notice someone resembling the colonel at Reigate station. He refused to drive on my motor car. He did not like these vehicles, he told me. He preferred to walk.”

  “One of you killed him,” Rose said grimly. “And, believe me, I’ll find out which one.”

  * * *

  “It shouldn’t be there.” Auguste reflected on the colonel’s last words as he looked out over the promenade to the sea. A matter of cheating. As gamblers, both men knew how serious that was. Only five years ago, the Tranby Croft affair in which the Prince of Wales had been involved had ruined Sir William Gordon Cumming’s career and social life although he was undoubtedly innocent of cheating. Now Egbert Rose had to work out which of these two men had committed the worst sin of all, murder. And for what reason? Because of an addiction to gambling or the amount of money involved or because of a need to win?

  In that they were not alone. Auguste remembered the mud, the cars, the sheer dismal experience of the drive and yet many of those in the race barely noticed it, so determined were they all to win the gold medals of life. Gradually, Auguste began to see his way through the maze of information before him, and only when he was sure of his ground did he go to find Egbert Rose.

  “Egbert,” he began. “I have one more theory as to what happened.

  One for which I now believe the recipe will work.”

  “Go ahead. Happy to taste it.”

  “When Colonel Pilkington died on the pathway, he murmured the words ‘it shouldn’t be there’. Let us assume that the ‘it’ refers to a motor car. It could have been the Léon Bollée at Red Hill Junction, or the Benz at Reigate station. But he would have seen both of these cars much earlier than the time of the attack on him. Neither of them fits those words. When he spoke those words, he was near to death. He had seen something that puzzled him and was trying urgently to convey that.”

  “Go on.”

  “Suppose he saw a motor car on that track that struck him as strange even though he knew there was a gathering of motor cars nearby.”

  “What would that be?”

  “If the baron was speaking the truth, and the colonel did walk from Reigate station rather than drive in a motor car, he could well have come through the castle grounds or down its eastern side which would bring him to Church Street. And there suppose he saw a motor car he recognised driving into that track and someone he knew driving it. He’d go over to have a word with him – especially if it was his cousin, the Earl of Sattersfield.”

  “Possible. Go on.”

  “He would have followed the motor car into the track to have a word with his cousin and –” Auguste drew a deep breath, for here lay the motive for murder – “there he saw an identical car and his cousin preparing to drive off in it, perhaps grasping the crank to start the engine. Two identical motor cars side by side, one that had driven from London bearing traces of mud and muck, the other much cleaner. The earl lives not far from Reigate so the other motor car could have been driven there by his coachman to await the earl’s arrival. The colonel would have realised what was going on. His cousin was cheating. The family name was in danger.”

  “And he attacked him?” Rose was incredulous.

  “I believe he did so in panic. His dreams of medals and glory were at stake. It was a crime of passion, Egbert. Not a passion for ladies but for gold medals.”

  A long pause. “It’s time I met the Earl of Sattersfield,” Rose said grimly. “How did you work that one out, Auguste?”

  “A recipe, inspector. I thought of a chocolate soufflé. I always make two in case the first one fails.”

  “Rising to the occasion as usual, Auguste?”

  A RUN THROUGH THE CALENDAR

  by Jon Breen

  I first learned of Doug Greene’s ambitious plan to establish Crippen & Landru in a letter dated November 21, 1993. Of course, I was delighted to encourage the project, but could it actually happen, even with one of the mystery field’s premiere scholar-historians at the helm? Previous publishing lines had been devoted to single-author mystery short-story collections: the Ellery Queen edited newsstand series of volumes by Dashiell Hammett and others in the 1940s; the earliest volumes from Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press; a few books under the Mycroft & Moran imprint of August Derleth’s Arkham House, most by Derleth himself. But none of these was close to what Doug envisioned.

  Now we all know Doug and his wife Sandi pulled it off. I was proud to be included in the list with Kill the Umpire: The Calls of Ed Gorgon, and over the past quarter century I’ve reviewed nearly every Crippen & Landru title in “The Jury Box” column in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Since turning over the main job to Steve Steinbock in 2011, I’ve continued to do a column or two a year with single-author collections as a specialty. In that time, the quality control of Crippen & Landru has never faltered.

  When Curtis Evans requested a piece for a volume of original essays in celebration of Doug’s 70th birthday, I thought about all the series characters whose cases had been gathered for the first time in Crippen & Landru volumes. But what about those series, some of them outstanding or historically important, that didn’t have enough stories for a full book? I was able to salute at least a few of them in my contribution to Mysteries Unlocked: Essays in Honor of Douglas G. Greene (McFarland, 2014). And when asked for a story for the present volume, I chose something from a series that does not have a book’s worth of stories and quite likely never will.

  My series novels and stories have concerned amateur detectives (a baseball umpire, a racetrack announcer, a book dealer, a film critic on a college campus, a long-lived movie studio problem solver), but I had never written a mystery, apart from a couple of parodies, that was centered on official police.

  While much of the detective fiction I admire is in the police procedural category, a lack of first-hand knowledge or special interest in the fine details of real police work kept me from writing one. Like many mystery writers, concocting artificial plots that have nothing to do with real life but need to seem real to the reader, I have gathered bits of authentic detail to sprinkle into the narrative, but my police characters were seldom on stage for long. Inventing Berwanger and Foley, detectives on an unspecified city force, gave me an opportunity to check off the police procedural box on my resumé.

  The Berwanger and Foley stories belong to a short-story category (seldom if ever found in novels): the tall tale. Are their presentations to writers, school classes, and community members based on real cases or are they making them up? The reader must decide. Or not worry about it.

  Detectives Berwanger and Foley enjoyed speaking to groups, and the Department enjoyed letting them. They put a human face on law enforcement, and they could adjust their delivery to any audience, from grade-school kids to college students, from service clubs to writers’ groups. Eventually, their presentation, set up like a two man comedy act, became so locally famous that they were in constant demand. “We’d like to schedule a police speaker for our next meeting,” callers to the Department’s community relations desk would say. “But only if it’s Berwanger and Foley.” The Chief had offered more than once to let them switch full-time to PR duties, but the longtime partners demurred, insisting that unless they continued to work cases on the street, they could no longer claim to be cops.

  “Keeps the act fre
sh,” Foley said.

  Berwanger was the lead talker, Foley the designated interrupter. Their favorite kind of audience, next to the school kids, was published and prospective mystery writers who wanted the real lowdown on police procedure. On this particular evening, before an eager group of thirty such, they were in top form.

  “Every cop knows there’s no such thing as a whodunit in real life,” Detective Berwanger pontificated. “There are cases where you don’t know who did it, sure. There are cases, too many of them, where you never find out who did it, but not cases where you have four or five equal suspects to choose among like in a story.”

  “There was the Fitzgerald case,” Foley said, poker-faced. Berwanger looked at his partner as if annoyed by the interruption,

  then smiled at the audience as if to say, look what I have to put up with. “Well, that was close I’ll grant you, but not really a whodunit for long. I mean, we wrapped it up pretty fast, didn’t we?”

  Foley shrugged, and his partner took it as permission to continue. “Now another thing you don’t get in real life is the so-called dying message. I don’t mean to suggest there haven’t been cases where somebody gets to the victim just as he’s popping off and he manages to gasp out the name of the person who killed him, or even to write something down with his last ounce of energy. Sure, that’ll happen, not very often, but it stands to reason it’ll happen sometimes. But in a case like that, the victim wants to make it clear, or what’s the point? Cases where the victim leaves some kind of cryptic message you have to puzzle out—well, let’s just say I’ve never known it to happen.”

  “Except in the Fitzgerald case,” Foley said.

  Berwanger paused and glared at his partner in mock irritation. “Technically, that wasn’t really a dying message. The point I’m making, ladies and gentlemen, is when you write your fiction and guys like us are reading it, we can accept the conventions of the genre you’re writing in—”