The Studio Crime: A Golden Age Mystery

by Ianthe Jerrold

  Merewether shuddered and stopped abruptly for a moment.

  “She took the key and put it in the lock, muttering that nobody must see, and then prepared to open the door and go downstairs. She seemed dazed, like a sleep-walker. I told her that she could not go out that way, and flinging up the window, saw that it would be possible to help her to escape. I gave her my address and told her to go straight to my house. I do not know how I imagined I was going to hide her from the police, I had no idea at the moment but to help her escape... The rest you know.”

  There was a long pause. Merewether lay back in his chair with a sigh, as if the memory of that night were too much for him.

  “Of course,” he said, “in her unbalanced state, poor girl, she forgot my address, and I did not see her again until you brought her to me, Miss Wimpole. My God! I should not care to live through those days again!”

  He shuddered.

  “When I returned home and found that she was not there, you can imagine my state of mind. I did not know what to do, nor where to look for her, for I did not know the address at which she was staying in London. After futile wandering about the streets looking for her, it occurred to me that she might have made the attempt to regain the papers relating to her father’s misdeeds which had been the cause of the tragedy. I knew the address which Frew had given her and I went to the place on the forlorn hope of finding her there. I broke into the house, as I could get no answer to my ringing at the bell. I turned out the drawers and papers in Cold’s flat on the off-chance that documents incriminating her father might really exist, for I was afraid that such documents might tell against my poor girl if the police got possession of them. I did not find them. And that,” said Merewether, with a wry smile, “is the end of my story. You know all the rest.”

  “How is Phyllis?” asked Serafine gently, after a silence.

  The doctor roused himself to speak more cheerfully.

  “She is improving every day under my sister’s nursing,” he replied. “It will not be many weeks, I hope, before she is able to receive company. And now I must be getting on, Miss Wimpole, for I have quite a round of visits to make before returning home. I have promised Mrs. Wimpole that I will look in again tomorrow morning, though I do not think it will really be necessary. She should be feeling quite herself again by to-morrow, but I should keep her in bed for the rest of to-day.”

  “I don’t think,” said Serafine with a smile, “that force will be necessary. My aunt is one of those rare beings who enjoys obeying a doctor’s orders.”

  Merewether smiled and took his departure. Serafine watched him from the window as he went down the garden path.

  “I like Dr. Merewether,” she observed. “In fact, I was about to lose my heart to him when I discovered that his affections were already engaged. But luckily I made the discovery very early and the young buds of my affection obligingly retired. What a good thing it is, John, that affairs of the heart, in their early stages, are so easily controlled by the intellect.”

  “My dear Serafine,” replied her friend lazily, “I don’t know whether to be more shocked by the shamelessness of your confession or the lack of true romantic feeling implied in your last remark. Are you going to give me any tea? Those pictures, I find, have left me with a feeling of discouragement combined with thirst. Futurist art is like that.”

  “Afraid not, John,” said Serafine. “I promised to take my dish of tea this afternoon at Mr. Newtree’s studio. He is making a pastel study of my interesting face. You had better come along with me.”

  “I will,” replied John, with a gleam of amusement in his eyes. “Is this the forty-fifth portrait Newtree has made of you, Serafine, or only the forty-fourth?”

  Serafine laughed.

  “Somewhere about there,” she replied. “Rather a nice little man, your friend Newtree, if he does live in his studio like a hermit-crab in its shell. He amuses me.”

  “Then you’ll probably end up by marrying him.”

  “My dear John, I’d as soon marry Diogenes.”

  “Well, you can’t,” said John reasonably. “He’s dead. So powder your nose and come along.”

  THE END

  About The Author

  Ianthe Jerrold was born in 1898, the daughter of the well-known author and journalist Walter Jerrold, and granddaughter of the Victorian playwright Douglas Jerrold. She was the eldest of five sisters.

  She published her first book, a work of verse, at the age of fifteen. This was the start of a long and prolific writing career characterized by numerous stylistic shifts. In 1929 she published the first of two classic and influential whodunits. The Studio Crime gained her immediate acceptance into the recently-formed but highly prestigious Detection Club, and was followed a year later by Dead Man’s Quarry.

  Ianthe Jerrold subsequently moved on from pure whodunits to write novels ranging from romantic fiction to psychological thrillers. She continued writing and publishing her fiction into the 1970’s. She died in 1977, twelve years after her husband George Menges. She left her Elizabethan farmhouse Cwmmau to the National Trust.

  Also by Ianthe Jerrold

  Dead Man’s Quarry

  Ianthe Jerrold

  Dead Man’s Quarry

  A GOLDEN AGE MYSTERY

  “The murderer was also riding a bicycle... why, if we can trace it, we shall have the murderer!”

  On a cycling holiday in idyllic Herefordshire countryside, Nora and her friends make a gruesome discovery – the body of their missing comrade at the bottom of a quarry. But an apparently accidental fall turns out to have been murder – for the man was shot in the head.

  Fortunately John Christmas, last seen in The Studio Crime (1929), is on hand with his redoubtable forensic associate, Sydenham Rampson. Between them they shed light on an intricate pattern of crimes... and uncover a most formidable foe.

  Dead Man’s Quarry is the second of Ianthe Jerrold’s classic and influential whodunits, originally published in 1930.

  DEAD MAN’S QUARRY

  CHAPTER ONE

  TEA FOR SIX

  Nora Browning, pausing uncertainly a moment in the dim, low-ceilinged passage of the inn, wondering behind which of its closed doors she would find the waitress, experienced a slight shock on seeing her own grave face looking at her from an unexpected mirror placed in a dark corner beside the back door. The mirror was dark and old and greenish, and the appearance in it of her own face against the background of the chocolate-coloured painted wainscoting peculiar to country inns pleased and surprised her, as if somebody had paid her a compliment on her looks. Forgetful of her mission, which was to order boiled eggs for tea, she went closer to the glass and looked critically at her own reflection.

  Nora was not in the habit of noticing casual reflections of herself. She had grown up on good terms with her own face, which was indeed neither beautiful enough nor plain enough to trouble her, and until a few months ago she had paid it only sufficient attention to see that it was clean and not too unfashionably shiny. Lately, she had taken more interest in mirrors, and more time than had been her wont in pinning up her thick plaits of light brown hair, a process that often ended in a mental comparison between her own dissatisfied reflection looking back at her and another face, that of Isabel Donne. Isabel, with her fine pale skin and golden freckles, her elfish pointed chin and humorous narrow lips that made a teasing contrast with heavy-lidded dreaming hazel eyes, her fine reddish-golden hair cut straight and turning in softy like a child’s around her small white neck, was a young woman to turn many a young man’s head and to make many another young woman look with dissatisfaction at her own reflection. A committee of art professors nurtured on the Greek might have awarded the apple to Nora. But Felix Price was a modernist.

  However, Nora, having the calm philosophical temperament that usually accompanies classic features, did not intend to allow her holiday to be spoilt either by her own love affairs or those of her companions. The county of Radnorshire was glorious after six months
in London, the weather was only capricious enough to give variety to the landscape, and a bicycling tour with congenial companions was an excellent way of enjoying both. Moreover, Nora had recently sold two polychromatic and peremptory posters to the Underground Railway, and had received a commission to design two more. To a young artist, there is nothing like professional success for putting love in its proper place.

  Having communed for a few seconds with her own pleasing features, Nora took leave of them with a childish and hideous grimace; but quickly composed them to their usual serenity as she saw from the reflection in the mirror that some patron of the Tram Inn was standing in its sunny front doorway, looking down the dim tunnel-like passage towards her. Turning quickly, in some embarrassment, she was in time to see the stranger, as if equally embarrassed, move away from the door and disappear. At the same moment the waitress came out from one of the doors giving on the passage.

  “Could we have some boiled eggs with our tea, please?”

  The girl looked at her thoughtfully and replied in the soft sing-song voice peculiar to the county:

  “I expect you could.”

  She paused a moment, as if considering the possibilities of her chicken-yard.

  “How many eggs would you be wanting?”

  “Well—twelve?” suggested Nora diffidently.

  The girl looked faintly surprised, and having performed a simple division sum in her head, replied pensively:

  “That’ll be two each, I expect.”

  “One each would do,” said Nora, not wishing to appear greedy, “if eggs are scarce.”

  “Oh, there’s plenty eggs,” replied mine host’s daughter reassuringly. “I expect you could have twelve. And you’d like them soft-boiled, I expect?”

  “Please. And plenty of bread and butter.”

  She sauntered back along the passage, sniffing the peculiar cool, pleasant odour of cider, stone floors and saw-dust that permeates small country inns, and entered the low-pitched square parlour with its windows full of geraniums and pot-ferns, and its hideous chairs of yellow wood and black horsehair ranged in prim rows against its panelled walls. Isabel, who was lying on the slippery hair sofa reading a volume of The Girl’s Friend for 1885, looked up as she entered.

  “Do listen to this, Nora. They had a short way with girlish aspirations in the days of Victoria the Good.

  ‘Answers to Correspondents. Anxious: Certainly not; we make it a rule never to give young girls recipes for making themselves slimmer; be thankful, my dear Anxious, that you are not too thin. Heliotrope: Surely you are perfectly aware, without advice from us, of the impropriety of corresponding with a young man to whom you are not engaged.’ Poor darlings!”

  “At least,” said Dr. Browning mildly, looking up from a book on the flora of South Wales, “your Victorian adviser wastes no words. She comes straight to the point in an admirable manner, and writes English. Very different from the illiterate compositions I sometimes notice in the domestic papers nowadays. I may add that, as a doctor, I heartily endorse her advice to Anxious.” Isabel smiled over her dog’s-eared volume at Nora’s father.

  “What about the advice to poor romantic Heliotrope?” Dr. Browning looked around him.

  “Middle-age is in a minority in this gathering,” he remarked. “As a middle-aged man and a coward, I beg to be excused.”

  Charles Price, sitting with an air of discipleship on a stool by Isabel’s sofa, laughed, rather loudly and stridently. His laugh was in keeping with the rest of him. Just a little larger than life in every way, this new-found cousin of Felix’s. Colonials in England often had an air, thought Nora, of being too large for their surroundings. She regarded the new baronet as no ornament to his title and estate, and privately thought it a pity he had ever returned from the prairie he was so fond of talking about.

  Felix, standing by the window and putting a film-roll in his camera, laughed too, a little constrainedly. He was probably regretting now, thought Nora, the friendly impulse that had made him invite his cousin to join the party at Worcester. The carefree holiday spirit of the journey had been a little damped since the advent of Sir Charles. Perhaps it was as well that this was the last day of the holiday. It was natural that Isabel, who never lost her head or heart, should prefer a mutual flirtation with Charles to the devotion of Felix, who was a romantic and single-minded youth, incapable of flirting; but it was unfortunate for poor Felix and the rest of the party, although, to do Felix justice, his breeding rose superior to his misfortune.

  Lion, Nora’s young brother, looked up from the large and elaborate map of his own designing that was the dearest treasure of his heart. With youth’s god-like indifference to emotional storms and stresses, its wise concentration on the essential things of life, he asked severely:

  “Got the eggs?”

  “I expect so,” said Nora absently. “Yes, I’ve ordered them.”

  “Did you tell them to boil mine exactly three minutes and a quarter?”

  “No, my son, I didn’t waste my breath. I said soft-boiled and hoped for the best.”

  “There’s no harm,” murmured Lion reproachfully, “in telling people how to boil eggs properly, even if they don’t generally listen. If these eggs really turn out soft-boiled I shall mark this inn on my map in green ink, with a label, ‘Here We Had Soft-boiled Eggs for Tea.’ Nearly all the other inns are marked in black, meaning Hard. Have you got my green ink, Felix? I may as well have it ready.”

  “Optimist,” said Felix with a smile, feeling in his haversack and producing three or four little bottles of coloured ink. “How’s the map getting on? Have you got as far as where we stopped last night?”

  “Yes,” said Lion gravely. “These little purple spots are the fleas.”

  “What’s that long, eel-like thing a little lower down?”

  “That’s Charles meeting us at Worcester,” replied Lion, looking complacently at his handiwork. “It’s rather like him, I think.”

  “Living image of him,” said Isabel who had left her sofa to look over the boy’s shoulder at this painstaking record of their holiday. “What are all these little figures?”

  “Dates and times of arrival at the various villages and points of interest,” explained Lion with studied nonchalance.

  “I see, Mr. Bradshaw. When you’ve finished it we’ll all subscribe to have it framed.”

  Charles, hoisting his long limbs up from the stool by the now deserted sofa, inquired:

  “Did you remember to put in the banana you dropped and ran over this morning?”

  The others laughed, but Lion answered with dignity:“This is a small-scale map. There isn’t room in it for unimportant matters like bananas.”

  “Hard luck on the banana,” commented Isabel, “to be snubbed like that after being squashed as flat as a pancake.”

  “It didn’t suffer,” said Lion gently, removing his map from the table as the waitress came in with the tea. “It was a painless, instantaneous death.”

  With some ceremony the waitress placed an enormous cosy of Berlin woolwork over the teapot and withdrew. Nora, who was the kind of girl upon whom such duties naturally devolved, began to pour out the tea. The others drew up their chairs. Sir Charles hastened to seize Isabel’s chair out of her hand and placed it at the table with a flourish, seating himself next to her rather hastily, as if he feared that Felix would forestall him. Idiot! thought Nora irritably, watching from under her eyelashes. She liked Charles less every time she looked at him. His elaborately gallant manner to herself and Isabel, the open court he paid to her pretty friend, offended Nora’s fastidious taste. She did not consider such displays appropriate to the occasion of a country holiday, and missed the atmosphere of casual and kindly good-fellowship which had been suddenly dissipated at Worcester. Charles’s good-fellowship was something to make one put cotton-wool in one’s ears, so extremely noticeable it was.

  “Old man,” he was saying now to his cousin, “we must arrange plenty of bicycling expeditions before
you go back to town. How long are you going to be with us?”

  “Only a fortnight,” said Felix regretfully.

  “A fortnight!” echoed Charles. “I was hoping you were going to stay a month at least, and show me all the ins and outs of being an English squire.”

  “Wish I could,” returned Felix amiably, opening his egg and looking with mild surprise at its firm and solid contents. “But I can’t leave the studio so long. All the elite of London are waiting in a queue to be photographed. My dad’ll show you all the ins and outs, he’s used to them. And Blodwen’ll back you up much better than I should.”

  Nora, still studying the bold, handsome, rather large-scale features of the new squire, thought she saw a slight, almost imperceptible change of expression on them as Felix mentioned his father; so slight a change and so swiftly over that it was impossible to guess what emotion had produced it, impossible to put a name to the change itself. One could not call it a sneer, but it approached a sneer.

  “I’m looking forward no end to seeing Blodwen,” he replied. “I haven’t seen my sister for fifteen years. We were great pals as kids. I wonder what I’ll think of her?”

  “It would be more becoming,” remarked Lion, carefully and hopefully chipping at his egg, “to wonder what she’ll think of you.”

  “Lion,” said Nora reprovingly, “don’t be cheeky.” But privately she agreed with him.

  “Well, you’ll soon see,” said Felix. “She came back from France yesterday, I believe. She’ll be waiting for your inspection when we get to Rhyllan, and will present you to her miscellaneous pack of hounds.”

  “I’ve seen some of them already,” said Charles with his loud laugh. “In fact, the other day I shot one of them.”

  “Oh,” said Felix, and did not seem to find this news amusing. He added rather distantly:“How was that?”