The Case of the Platinum Blonde: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  2. In envelope marked C is a hair taken from Maddon’s house. In envelope D is one taken from another house. Are they from the same head?

  3. In envelope E is a paper bearing the prints of a man named Bernard Temple. Has the Yard any records?

  As a favour, don’t ask me the why and wherefore of all this. But believe me when I say there is no joke about it. I’m only too serious, and if the word conveyed what I really meant I’d even say I was badly scared.

  Very many thanks. Helen sends her best wishes. I’m feeling fitter already.

  Yours as ever,

  LUDOVIC TRAVERS.

  P.S. I don’t often venture to prophesy but I have an idea the Yard will be called in pretty soon. If so—and still don’t ask me why—move heaven and earth to come down here yourself.

  CHAPTER VI

  DAY OF REST

  I woke rather late the following morning but there seemed to be never a sound in the house. Then I remembered it was Sunday, the day of rest. And I told myself that it was very definitely going to be a day of rest for me.

  So I lay on for a few minutes and then Annie brought me a cup of tea, and over that and a cigarette I began thinking, and about those two hairs that were in the envelope which I was going to post that morning to Wharton. For when I came to think of it, that hair I had picked off the back of the divan might have been Mary Carter’s. Her hair had the same fair, silky length and quality, though she wore it differently. Hers was rolled up in little curls just above the base of the neck, whereas Thora Chevalle’s hung heavily, as it were, with a kind of sinuous massiveness, as if it were fine spun metal and not hair at all. Mary’s looked like hair, and lovely hair at that. Thora’s looked something dramatic, exotic and unusual; something at which to give a covert stare. It was superb and it was beautiful, but it wasn’t the kind of hair one would have wished to see on one’s own wife. To me there was in it something actually repellent, but then I may be old-fashioned in my tastes.

  As for a difference in colouring, I doubted if a layman like myself could see a trace of it in two hairs laid side by side. It was in the mass that one saw the difference: that slightly greenish tinge in Thora’s and the hard metallic sheen. And, of course, there was little Clarice’s hair. That was rather like Mary’s but shorter; cut level to follow the curve of the neck and trimmed across the forehead for a fringe. But its colouring was Mary’s, and there you are. It wasn’t exactly a question of whose was the hair from the divan. The question was that if the two hairs were different, which was different? Is that getting too involved for you? Then put it like this, and as I thought of it I had a startling theory. Suppose the hair from Five Oaks wasn’t Thora Chevalle’s at all. You say that doesn’t enter into the argument. I say that I could easily get one of her genuine hairs—indeed, if I were to pursue my private inquiries I would have to—and submit it to an expert. If it differed from the Five Oaks one, then whose hair was that?

  And so naturally we come to more of the devil’s advocate style of argument. But what about that startling theory you just mentioned, you will ask. Well, I’ll leave you to find it for yourself, and here are the thoughts that prompted it. The Chevalle household I knew none too well and I had only my observations of the previous night to go on. But the old eternal triangle was there right enough, I was dead sure of that, if in rather an unusual form. Chevalle and his wife had finished with each other, and only the child kept them together at all. That, and the fact that a man in Chevalle’s position could not possibly give his wife either genuine or faked grounds for divorce. I guessed that Chevalle was in love with Mary, and she in love with him. But I knew him to be a man of the strictest honour—his self-discipline of the previous night was an instance of that —and he would be prepared to live out his days with the help of that same discipline, and make a brave enough show. But what of Mary? Would she have been prepared to let him go on sacrificing himself and herself for the ease and comfort of a woman who had probably shown herself worthy of neither?

  Well, that is what I was thinking. If you don’t see the germ at least of a startling theory, then I’ll tell you in advance that Wharton spotted it soon enough. And when Wharton has a theory it isn’t an airy flashing thing like mine. It’s usually the genuine article.

  Breakfast was over, the Sunday papers arrived, the morning was gloriously fine, and life wasn’t so bad after all. I sat in the little summer-house in a deck-chair and watched a score and more of our planes heading for France, and then the church bells began to ring. That was a pleasant sound, in the open country. In Town they seem to me both clamant and discordant.

  The front gate opened and in came a man. I spotted him at once for Helen’s friend Commander Santon, and not only because of his game right leg. He didn’t spot me, however, and when he had rung the bell and was standing waiting, I had a good view of him. He was certainly a good-looking fellow, and by that I mean a man’s idea of what good-looking is. He had clear-cut patrician features—chin a bit weak perhaps—and sleek black hair and dark eyes. A neat slim figure too, and his age would be about thirty-five. His face was tanned almost too brown. He wasn’t wearing a hat but his clothes were just a bit too natty for my liking, especially the razor-edge to the grey worsted bags.

  Nothing seemed to be happening in the house, so I made myself visible.

  “I expect my sister’s upstairs, dollying up for church,” I said. “My name’s Travers.”

  “I’m Santon,” he said, and I liked his smile.

  Then Helen suddenly appeared.

  “Morning, lady,” he said, and gave her an exaggerated bow. “I trust I find you well.”

  Helen had evidently been used to such humorous displays of old-world courtesy, if that is what it was.

  “I thought you were away,” she told him calmly.

  “How could I stay away,” he told her. “I was back yesterday morning. Too busy to see anybody, though.”

  We cleared up the matter of introductions and then Helen was asking what the conference had been like. I gathered it had been at Southampton.

  “The usual blether,” he told her. “I expect you read all about it. Lord Kindersley made a damn good speech. The others weren’t much.”

  “You’re not going to church?” Helen said as she ran an eye over him.

  “Sorry, lady; can’t be done,” he said. “I really came to call on your brother—after seeing you, of course. Dewball told me he was here.”

  “Well, don’t lead him into any mischief,” Helen said, and moved off down the path.

  We saw her off at the front gate and then I asked Santon if it was too early for a drink. He said it was never too early or too late, so I fetched a couple of bottles of beer and placed another deck-chair. Then we got yarning about things generally, and there were two things I liked about him. He didn’t throw his weight about by telling me naval secrets—if he knew any, and doubtless he did—and he was ultra-modest about himself. He told me a lot about what other people did at Crete, but except that a lump of shrapnel hit him in the knee he mightn’t have been there at all. That he would be very popular with the ladies I had no doubt. Helen had evidently fallen heavily for his brand of humour, and the fact that he didn’t mention his wife to me was another sign.

  “Another bottle?” I said when the first two were dead men.

  “Not just now,” he said. “Tell you what, though. We’ll have a stroll to my place and then see how we feel.”

  I was taking the glasses and the two dead men to the kitchen door, and he said we might as well go by the back path. The chestnut had grown pretty tall and it would be shady. So we went that way and a delightful walk it was. As we came level with where I had judged Little Foxes would be, and a new path turned right, I happened to mention the murder of Maddon.

  “I wish I’d been here,” he said. “It must have turned the whole place upside down. A curious old boy. I suppose you never met him.”

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” I said, and told him about that evening
encounter on the path.

  “I could never quite get to the bottom of him,” he said. “He always struck me as the sort of cove who had something up his sleeve. And it was something that made him damned superior. I don’t mean he was rude. You just felt he was having a private laugh at you.”

  “That’s just how he struck me,” I said.

  “Well, he’s gone, and be damned to him,” he said unconcernedly. “All I worry about is losing a customer. He didn’t buy a single certificate till about three months ago and then he started having one every week.”

  That was interesting news and I made a mental note to question Temple more closely. But we had come through a little gate, and the now private path was leading by a small enclosure that backed into the woods behind us.

  “What’s this?” I said, waving a hand at the miniature hayfield.

  He laughed. “My God, no wonder you ask! That, my dear fellow, is a tennis court. Hasn’t been played on since the war started. My wife was awfully good,” he said, mentioning her for the first time. He waved a hand round at the ruins of perennial borders and the charming reed-thatched summer-house that overlooked the court. “She used to spend the hell of a lot of money over this sort of thing. Whole-time gardener and a couple of maids and so on. Dewball and I just do what we think we will.”

  A tall beech hedge, lovely doubtless when clipped but straggly now, shut off the tennis court from the back lawn and the house. That lawn was quite tidy and even the beds of young asters and zinnias had been weeded.

  “A nice garage you’ve got there?” I said.

  It lay well back in a shrubbery at the point of a long V. One arm of the V ran by the front of the house—with lawn between it and the front hedge—and so to the short gravelled drive and the front gates. The other arm went to the back of the house, and that had been useful for tennis guests to park their cars in the shade. As we entered the garage I caught sight of a kitchen garden and an orchard behind it.

  “Room enough here for two big cars,” I said.

  “We used to run two,” he said. “This little Morris for when I was home, and the missis’s Jaguar. Not a bad place, do you think? Water laid on here. Electric switch here. Even a pit. Dewball and I made that.”

  “As neat a garage as ever I saw,” I said. “What about petrol now? Get plenty?”

  “Just enough,” he said. “That War Savings job does me pretty well.”

  We strolled along to the back of the house and as soon as Santon was inside, he gave a holler.

  “Tom! Where the hell are you?”

  “Coming, sir,” a voice said, and Tom Dewball appeared rubbing his hands on a green baize apron. He was a cheerful soul of about fifty, and he gave me a genial, “Good morning.”

  “This is Major Travers, Mrs. Thornley’s brother,” Santon said. “Whether I’m here or not he’s to do as he damn pleases. He can even pick the ruddy strawberries.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “What about staying to lunch?” Santon asked me, suddenly thinking of it and obviously pleased at the idea.

  “Lord, no!” I said. “My sister’d have six fits.”

  “Some other time then,” he told me reluctantly. “And, Tom, get a couple of chairs out here and some beer—if you haven’t drunk it all.”

  I told him it was a good job he had all that War Savings work on his hands or he’d have been bored stiff.

  “It’s been a godsend,” he said. “Otherwise I’d have been like those whiskered old coves who think life’s heaven to sit all day with a glass glued on the Channel.”

  “Couldn’t you have had a shore job?” I asked him.

  “As a matter of fact I could,” he said. “Somehow I didn’t fancy myself with my backside polishing a chair.” Tom Dewball brought bottles of beer, a folding table and a couple of chairs.

  “An old naval man, is he?” I asked Santon when he’d gone.

  “Of sorts,” he said, whatever that meant. “His lungs went wonky and he got his ticket. They’re all right now.”

  “He looks a useful man.”

  “He has to be,” he said, and grinned. “He’s cook, housemaid, valet, gardener and the whole perishing issue. The only thing he knows nothing about is a car.”

  “Talking of War Savings,” I said, “I met another of your collectors the other evening. A chap called Temple.”

  “Temple,” he said. “My God, what a twerp!” Then he shot me a look. “You’re no friend of his, I take it?”

  “God forbid,” I said hastily.

  “He’s the oiliest ruddy specimen I ever ran across,” he said. “Always trying to nudge his way in somewhere. What little trick do you think he tried when we had our War Weapons Week? I didn’t know it till it was too late or I’d have given him a hell of a kick in the pants. He had the idea of setting aside all the big houses for himself to make a personal call. You see the idea?”

  “Trying to gate-crash Cleavesham high society,” I said. “I didn’t like the look of him a bit. In fact I preferred Maddon. And talking of Maddon, I wonder whether Chevalle’s got any ideas about who did it.”

  “Shot, wasn’t he? That’s what Dewball heard in the Wheatsheaf.”

  “I heard that too,” I said. “But something ought to be found out soon. Chevalle’s a good man, I take it?”

  “You know him?”

  “Well, he’s the friend of a friend of mine,” I said guardedly.

  “He’s a quiet old stick,” Santon said, and was frowning slightly. “I expect he’s good at his job. His military record is damn good.”

  “I met his wife last night,” I said. “She’s a good-looker.”

  “Much younger than he,” he said quickly, and then proceeded to qualify it. “I mean she looks not much more than thirty. He’s best part of fifty.”

  “Well, whatever her age she’s a damn good-looking woman,” I said.

  “All right if you like that particular type.”

  “Don’t mistake me,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of vices, thank God, but women aren’t included. My appreciation’s aesthetic so to speak.”

  “You’ve got plenty of time yet,” he told me, and asked if I was ready for another bottle. I glanced at my watch and saw it was half-past twelve, and at once was getting to my feet. I also remembered the letter in my pocket and he told me where there was a box in the hedge opposite the back Bycliffe road. In any case there was no hurry, as letters weren’t collected before three that afternoon.

  We agreed on a meeting in the near future, and I set off for home by the main road. When I got in, Helen wanted to know if I’d had a good time.

  “A most enjoyable morning,” I said. “I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed one more.”

  “You liked Commander Santon?”

  “Very much,” I said. “Mind you, he’s a generation younger than myself.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked me.

  All I had meant, in my private mind, was that I could feel closer, and that more quickly, to a man of my age—like Chevalle—than I’d ever get to Santon.

  “Young feller-me-lads of his age move too quickly for me,” I said.

  “He’s certainly a terrible flirt,” she said, and smiled to herself. And she didn’t see my quick look. Helen’s a mighty presentable woman and still well under forty.

  I had a good lunch, so good in fact that I felt like a sleep after it, so I went back to my old seat in the summer-house. I’d just got nicely off when Helen came to tell me I was wanted on the telephone.

  It was Chevalle, and though he was ringing from Porthaven, I knew somehow that he didn’t like to face me after that extraordinary question of the previous night.

  “Sorry to worry you, Travers,” he began, and his manner seemed normal. “One or two things I thought you ought to know.”

  “That’s very good of you,” I cut in.

  “The inquest,” he said. “Eleven to-morrow morning. We shan’t need you, you’ll be glad to hear. Temple’s coming clean about what he
saw and so on. A very plausible story, I should tell you.”

  “But you’re still keeping an eye on him?”

  “You bet,” he said. “If the verdict’s the usual—I don’t think it can be anything else—the funeral will be the following morning.”

  “What about the bullet?”

  “What our man calls .234. Quite small. Italian, probably. We’ve sent it up to Town.”

  “And our Pyramid friend.”

  “Nothing yet,” he said. “He took a ticket for Town and that’s all we know. There’s always a rush on that particular train. Still, we’re hoping something will turn up at the London end.”

  “His landlady?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “He told her a sister of his had been taken seriously ill, but the post office told us they didn’t deliver any telegram. And he was out the previous night, by the way. Nothing unusual, the landlady said. Now and again he went out to study the stars.”

  “The devil he did,” I said, and as there didn’t seem anything more to say at either end I thanked him again and hung up.

  But I stood there for a minute or two, polishing my glasses and trying to recapture the tone of his voice. There had been no cheery salutation, no quip and no mention of a future meeting. Everything had been perfectly polite, though I had seemed to feel something of the stilted and unnecessarily formal. In fact, as I hooked my glasses on again, I knew somehow I had been right, and that for reasons known only to us two he had preferred to telephone rather than look me straight in the eye.

  It was three o’clock, so I went up to the bathroom and had a cold splash to freshen me up. Then I thought I’d take a short stroll, but when I peeped into the sitting-room to ask Helen if she would care to come, I found her with a book on her lap and her eyes closed. So I set off alone and on a course which I thought would be largely new—through the village and along the Bycliffe road to the fork and then back by the lane that ran behind Five Oaks.

  I found I’d made a bad choice. The Green and the houses round it made a lovely picture that sunny afternoon, but beyond it came the first bungalows, and thereafter the road was more of an emetic. I thought of “Sussex by the Sea,” and the good folk of Sussex who sing their anthem with a fervour akin to tears, and I thought of Camber, and Winchelsea Beach and Shoreham and Peacehaven, of all of which that Cleavesham half-mile was a ghastly miniature.