The Case of the Platinum Blonde: A Ludovic Travers Mystery
Page 1
Christopher Bush
The Case of the Platinum Blonde
“It’s about a murder. . . . Here. Five Oaks, they call it. . . . A man, he’s murdered. . . . Oh, no, it isn’t a joke. I wish it was. . . . I said I wished it was. . . . You’ll send someone at once?”
Ludovic Travers, still in the army, is obliged to combine his military duties with being an invaluable private sleuth on behalf of Scotland Yard. Now Inspector Wharton has asked Ludo to track down a man in a village rife with blackmail and skulduggery. A problem soon arises however—murder, and that of the very man Travers was sent to find. Travers eventually faces a moral quandary about what to conceal and what to reveal about his discoveries—which could lead to someone’s execution.
This classic English village murder mystery involves a large number of suspects, and a breathtaking series of twists, some if not all involving the Chief Constable’s wife—the novel’s “platinum blonde”.
The Case of the Platinum Blonde was originally published in 1944. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.
“Readers who have asked ‘Why?’ impatiently at the beginning of this book will be twice shy.” Times Literary Supplement
TO
WALTER WYNNE
WITH GRATITUDE AND GOOD WISHES
Contents
Cover
Title Page/About the Book
Dedication
Contents
Introduction by Curtis Evans
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Epilogue
About the Author
Titles by Christopher Bush
The Case of the Corporal’s Leave – Title Page
The Case of the Corporal’s Leave – Chapter One
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
Winding down the War and Taking a New Turn
Christopher Bush’s Ludovic Travers Mysteries, 1943 to 1946
Having sent his series sleuth Ludovic “Ludo” Travers, in the third and fourth years of the Second World War, around England to meet murder at a variety of newly-created army installations—a prisoner-of-war camp (The Case of the Murdered Major, 1941), a guard base (The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel, 1942) and an instructor school (The Case of the Fighting Soldier, 1942)--Christopher Bush finally released Travers from military engagements in The Case of the Magic Mirror (1943), a unique retrospective affair which takes place before the outbreak of the Second World War. In the remaining four Travers wartime mysteries--The Case of the Running Mouse (1944), The Case of the Platinum Blonde (1944), The Case of the Corporal’s Leave (1945) and The Case of the Missing Men (1946)--Bush frees his sleuth to investigate private criminal problems. Although the war is mentioned in these novels, it plays far less of a role in events, doubtlessly giving contemporary readers a sense that the world conflagration which at one point had threatened to consume the British Empire was winding down for good. Yet even without the “novelty” of the war as a major plot element, these Christopher Bush mysteries offer readers some of the most intriguing conundrums in the Ludo Travers detection canon.
The Case of the Platinum Blonde (1944)
“I suppose you haven’t heard our local sensation?” I said.
“No,” she said, and, “I didn’t know there could be a sensation in Cleavesham. What was it? An air raid?”
“Only a murder,” I told her.
The Case of the Platinum Blonde (1944)
After having had his series detective, Ludovic “Ludo” Travers, become involved in a couple of investigations concerning highly nefarious activities in wartime London, The Case of the Magic Mirror (1943) and The Case of the Running Mouse (1944), Christopher Bush in The Case of the Platinum Blonde sends Travers vainly for a break to the lovely and seemingly placid little village of Cleavesham, Sussex. There Ludo learns that there is something of the truth in Sherlock Holmes’s famous declaration (in the short story “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”) that “the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
Travers has come to Cleavesham to rest and to visit his charming younger sister, Helen Thornley, who for the duration of the war has let Pulvery, her and her husband Tom’s Sussex country house (familiar to devoted Bush readers), and with her “old maid” Annie taken Ringlands, “what she calls a cottage,” while Tom is in military service in the Middle East. Soon Ludo encounters in Cleavesham a number of inhabitants who will play parts in the upcoming murder drama that afflicts the village, including Major Chevalle, the chief constable; his wife, Thora, young daughter, Flora, and Thora’s poor relation, Mary; village warden Bernard Temple; Lieut.-Commander Santon, wounded in the knee at Crete and now retired, and Tom Dewball, his manservant; Herbert Maddon, “quite a superior old man,” and his daily, Mrs. Beaney; and odd duck “Augustus Porle,” a devout believer in harnessing the power of the Great Pyramid.
Like any amateur sleuth worth his salt, Travers has not been long in Cleavesham when he runs across a dead body, in this case that of the seemingly inoffensive Mr. Maddon, who has been shot to death at his cottage, Five Oaks. Evidence points overwhelmingly to the suspicious presence that day at Five Oaks cottage of a headily-scented, chain-smoking platinum blonde—and the seeming identity of this blonde proves most problematic indeed for Ludo Travers and Superintendent George Wharton, whom Scotland Yard has sent to investigate the case at the behest of Major Chevalle. This is but the intriguing opening to one of the most ingenious mysteries Christopher Bush ever penned, one that in the final pages will leave the reader facing the same moral dilemma as Ludovic Travers (who finds himself increasingly playing his own hand in the series, in the independent manner of an American private eye): now that I know the truth, just what do I do about it?
Reviewing The Case of the Platinum Blonde in the Times Literary Supplement, author and expert on Victorian melodrama Maurice Willson Disher commented on the “exasperating” tendency of amateur detectives in crime fiction to conceal “incriminating evidence from the police.” Yet Disher concluded that in this case Ludovic Travers so thoroughly justified his fancy for obstructive behavior “that in future amateur detectives will be able to continue the bad habit [of obstruction] without objection. Readers who have asked ‘Why?’ impatiently at the beginning of this book will be twice shy.” Will modern readers react to the outcome of The Case of the Platinum Blonde as Disher predicted? You, dear reader, will have to read on for yourself and see.
Curtis Evans
Part One
FIND THE LADY
CHAPTER I
A JOB FOR WHARTON
I have got to write this book more quickly than I ever wrote one in my life. A highly efficient stenographer whom I implicitly trust is to take it straight on the machine at my dictation, and I have bargained with myself that the job shall take a fortnight, and no more.
In order to run no risks whatever, I am disguising the names of places and people; except three of the people—George (Superintendent) Wharton, my sister Helen, and myself. And I’m also writing this foreword myself and am incorporating it in this first chapter unknown to the s
tenographer. She will think that everything is just fiction, but when the book is finished, and if I think she has been intrigued, I may ask her what she thinks, for that may help me to make the vital decision.
But all this must be mystifying you. What decision, you may ask, and why all the hurry to get the book finished? To that I would say that it isn’t a question of hurry for hurry’s sake. I am certainly not looking forward to the end of the fortnight and the making of that vital decision, for there is little real satisfaction in putting off an evil day when that day is inevitable. Conscience insists even now that a decision could be made before I dictate a single word, but one cannot reconcile divided loyalties as easily as that. As for the decision, it will affect someone’s life; perhaps I should say death, and a death by hanging at that.
In writing the book, then—setting down the facts of the case, if you prefer it—I am throwing out a kind of challenge to myself. I am keeping conscience at arm’s length by solemnly swearing that after a fortnight’s respite the decision shall definitely be made. In other words I have a fortnight in which to make up my mind.
When you get to the end of this book, you may find yourself in something of the same dilemma. But you will not have a decision to make. All you may have are sympathies and hostilities, but I have got to make up my mind. I shall have to act or not act, and either way it’s going to be tough. Maybe at the last moment I shall choose the coward’s way, and the one to be let down will be myself. And that’s that, and all that remains is to get on with the story.
That story begins on a June morning of 1943, when I called at the Yard and asked if Wharton was in. They told me he was in his room, so I went straight up. They know me well enough at the Yard—possibly as either George’s shadow or his stooge—and my six-foot three and horn-rims are recognisable enough and proof against impersonation.
George was sitting at his desk, poring over some papers, and he stared at me over the tops of his antiquated spectacles as if I were a ghost. Maybe he thought I was one, for the last time he had seen me was in hospital, after an operation which had found me remarkably near the pearly gates.
Then his wrinkled old face beamed and he was getting to his feet, hand held out.
“Well, well, well. This is a surprise. And you’re not looking too bad, either.”
“I’m pretty well all right now,” I told him. “A fortnight in the country will put me clean on my pins again.”
He fussed round me and actually put a cushion on my chair.
“Well, it’s good to see you,” he said, and I think he meant it. George and I spar like fighting cocks when we aren’t pulling each other’s legs, and yet I suppose that somehow our fifteen years’ association has become a something which we should be horrified to disrupt.
“And what’s it feel like to be out of the Army?” he wanted to know.
“I don’t know yet,” I told him. “But after four years of red tape and routine I think it’s going to be pretty good.”
“Maybe,” George said dubiously, and then I switched the conversation to what he himself was doing, and then we got to talking about old times. Then I said I’d have to be going, for my train left in an hour.
“Give my best wishes to your sister,” George said, “and to her husband. Some time I’d like to go down to Pulvery again myself.”
“It isn’t Pulvery,” I said. “My brother-in-law’s been in the Middle East for the last couple of years, so Helen let the Pulvery place and has taken what she calls a cottage, at Cleavesham. That’s about two miles from Porthaven.”
“Porthaven,” he said, and pursed his lips till that walrus moustache of his looked like the half of a fringed sunshade. “I know the Chief Constable there, if you’d like to meet him. A very nice fellow indeed. Chevalle’s his name. Major Chevalle, D.S.O., M.C., and gawd knows what else. I think you’ll like him. He’s a really good chap.”
The upshot was that he sat down there and then, and wrote me a letter of introduction!
“Mind you,” he warned me as he tucked in the flap of the envelope, “I’m not giving you this so that you can go poking that nose of yours into his office. This is what you might call social. He knows everybody there is to know.”
“Very good of you, George,” I said. “As soon as I get settled in I’ll look him up. But what about your running down for a day or so? There’d be tons of room for you, and a holiday’d do you good.”
“Impossible,” he said, but I knew he was wavering. “They tell me that country round Cleavesham is some of the loveliest in Sussex,” I went on. And then something peculiar happened. He had been replacing the spectacles in their battered case, and then all at once he was goggling at me and thrusting the spectacles under my nose.
“Cleavesham,” he said. “I didn’t catch it at first. About two miles north of Porthaven.”
“But not on the London road,” I said. “The main road is a bit more east.”
“I know,” he told me impatiently. “But it’s a good road, though, and you can dodge the traffic if you know the lanes. That’s what I was doing.”
“What is this, George?” I said. “Some lurid episode from your past?”
“It’s something you can do for me,” he said. “Did you ever know me forget a face?”
“I wouldn’t go so far as that,” I said, “but I will admit you have a staggering memory.”
“Well, I saw a face at Cleavesham that I ought to have remembered,” he told me. “Sit down again. You’re not in all that hurry for a minute.”
This was his story. He had been to Porthaven on business, and as the main road was full of military traffic, Chevalle advised him to take the Cleavesham route. George was driving his own car and just as he was approaching Cleavesham his near hind tyre went flat. So he drew in on the wide grass verge and prepared to put on the spare. There was a stile in the hedge right against where he was working, and as he was manipulating the spare into place he saw a man getting over the stile, and had a first-class view of him.
“You know how I am,” he said. “I collect faces, the same as you collect china and all that rubbish you fill your place up with. And this cove’s face was one I ought to have known. I tell you I knew it as if it was my own, and yet I couldn’t put a name to it. That was about a year ago and if I’ve thought of it once I’ve thought of it fifty times. It worries me. It’s a face I know and yet I can’t place it.”
“Describe the cove and I’ll see what I can do,” I told him. “Mind you, he mayn’t be a local inhabitant.”
“Then that’ll be bad luck,” George told me philosophically. “But he was an elderly man. Between sixty and seventy, we’ll say. He’d a grizzled sort of beard and a face with those purple markings on it as if he suffered from blood pressure. He was about five foot eight and thinnish. Not that we all aren’t these days. And he limped the slightest bit, as if he had arthritis in his knee.”
“And his social class?”
“Oh, a retired sort of cove. Quite neatly dressed, I remembered. Might have been a retired anything. School-master or bank cashier for example.”
“And his voice?”
“There you’ve got me,” George said, and grimaced. “I spotted him before he saw me and as soon as I knew I knew him—so to speak—I kept my head down. He didn’t speak and neither did I. He kept on walking towards Porthaven once he was over the stile. That’s when I noticed his lameness.”
“Well, I’ll do what I can for you, George,” I said as I got to my feet again. “But just one little thing. The sort of faces you pride yourself on remembering are criminal faces. Those you’ve seen on trial or had up yourself. So tell me. Did you place this particular man in that category?”
“Damned if I know,” he told me bluntly. “It was a sort of intuition, if you know what I mean. I said to myself, I know that fellow!’ Just as quick as that. Then I started puzzling my wits. I tell you it worried me. It’s gone on worrying me. Once when I was down that way I nearly went a few miles off the road to m
ake some inquiries for myself. I shouldn’t have felt like that if it hadn’t been something important.”
It was important to him and I’ll tell you how I knew. George calls me the world’s prize theorist. Throughout our long association he’s been living on and profiting by my theories, though he has never stopped pouring scorn on them at their initial propounding. I admit frankly that my average is one theory right in every three, and I claim that that average is remarkably good. George forgets the happy one, or annexes it as his own, and instances the other two. But now when I began to theorise, all he did was to listen attentively.
“An old criminal,” I said. “And with a beard. That’s why you can’t place him, George. You knew him years ago when he hadn’t that beard, or that limp, and maybe he wasn’t thin then, either. Think of all that when you search your memory again.”
“I reckon you’re right,” he said. “All the same I’d very much like to know just who he is.”
“Right,” I said. “When I run him to earth I’ll send you his finger-prints.”
“My God!” George said, and tried to look horrified. “They’d have the coat off my back if they found out that.”
“You’re a damned old humbug,” I told him. “But you leave it to me. Tell you what. I’ll bet you a new hat we know inside a week who he is.”
“No you don’t,” he said, and gave what was meant to be a look of infinite wiliness. “But I will bet you a couple of drinks.”
And on that amusing note we left it. Amusing because it was generally I who paid in any case unless George saw a way clear to wangling the expenses account.