Capital Crimes: London Mysteries

by Martin Edwards

  ‘There are fourteen taxi drivers here, littering up my office,’ said Moresby offensively. ‘They all took fares from the Strand to Piccadilly Circus at your time. What do you want me to do with ’em, Mr Sheringham?’

  ‘Keep them till I come, Chief Inspector,’ returned Roger with dignity. He had not expected more than three at the most, but he was not going to let Moresby know that. He grabbed his hat.

  The interview with the fourteen was brief enough, however. To each grinning man (Roger deduced a little heavy humour on the part of Moresby before his arrival) he showed in turn a photograph, holding it so that Moresby could not see it, and asked if he could recognise his fare. The ninth man did so, without hesitation. At a nod from Roger Moresby dismissed the others.

  ‘How dressed?’ Roger asked the man laconically, tucking the photograph away in his pocket.

  ‘Evening togs,’ replied the other, equally laconic.

  Roger took a note of his name and address and sent him away with a ten shilling tip. ‘The case,’ he said to Moresby, ‘is at an end.’

  Moresby sat at his table and tried to look official. ‘And now, Mr Sheringham, sir, perhaps you’ll tell me what you’ve been doing.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Roger said blandly, seating himself on the table and swinging his legs. As he did so, a photograph fell unnoticed out of his pocket and fluttered, face downwards, under the table. Moresby eyed it but did not pick it up. ‘Certainly, Moresby,’ said Roger. ‘Your work for you. It was a simple case,’ he added languidly, ‘once one had grasped the essential factor. Once, that is to say, one had cleared one’s eyes of the soap that the murderer had stuffed into them.’

  ‘Is that so, Mr Sheringham?’ said Moresby politely. And yawned.

  Roger laughed. ‘All right, Moresby. We’ll get down to it. I really have solved the thing, you know. Here’s the evidence for you.’ He took from his note-case an old letter and handed it to the chief inspector. ‘Look at the slightly crooked s’s and the chipped capital H. Was that typed on the same machine as the forged letter from Mason’s, or was it not?’

  Moresby studied it for a moment, then drew the forged letter from a drawer of his table and compared the two minutely. When he looked up there was no lurking amusement in his eyes. ‘You’ve got it in one, Mr Sheringham,’ he said soberly. ‘Where did you get hold of this?’

  ‘In a secondhand typewriter shop in St. Martin’s Lane. The machine was sold to an unknown customer about a month ago. They identified the customer from that photograph. By a lucky chance this machine had been used in the office after it had been repaired, to see that it was OK, and I easily got hold of that specimen of its work. I’d deduced, of course, from the precautions taken all through this crime, that the typewriter would be bought for that one special purpose and then destroyed, and so far as the murderer could see there was no need to waste valuable money on a new one.’

  ‘And where is the machine now?’

  ‘Oh, at the bottom of the Thames, I expect,’ Roger smiled. ‘I tell you, this criminal takes no unnecessary chances. But that doesn’t matter. There’s your evidence.’

  ‘Humph! It’s all right so far as it goes,’ conceded Moresby. ‘But what about Mason’s paper?’

  ‘That,’ said Roger calmly, ‘was extracted from Merton’s book of sample notepapers, as I’d guessed from the very yellowed edges might be the case. I can prove contact of the criminal with the book, and there is a gap which will certainly turn out to have been filled by the piece of paper.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Moresby said more heartily.

  ‘As for that taximan, the criminal had an alibi. You’ve heard it broken down. Between ten past nine and twenty-five past, in fact during the time when the parcel must have been posted, the murderer took a hurried journey to that neighbourhood, going probably by bus or underground, but returning, as I expected, by taxi, because time would be getting short.’

  ‘And the murderer, Mr Sheringham?’

  ‘The person whose photograph is in my pocket,’ Roger said unkindly. ‘By the way, do you remember what I was saying the other day about Chance the Avenger, my excellent film-title? Well, it’s worked again. By a chance meeting in Bond Street with a silly woman I was put, by the merest accident, in possession of a piece of information which showed me then and there who had sent those chocolates addressed to Sir William. There were other possibilities of course, and I tested them, but then and there on the pavement I saw the whole thing, from first to last. It was the merest accident that this woman should have been a friend of mine, of course, and I don’t want to blow my own trumpet,’ said Roger modestly, ‘but I do think I deserve a little credit for realising the significance of what she told me and recognising the hand of Providence at work.’

  ‘Who was the murderer, then, Mr Sheringham?’ repeated Moresby, disregarding for the moment this bashful claim.

  ‘It was so beautifully planned,’ Roger went on dreamily. ‘We were taken in completely. We never grasped for one moment that we were making the fundamental mistake that the murderer all along intended us to make.’

  He paused, and in spite of his impatience Moresby obliged. ‘And what was that?’

  ‘Why, that the plan had miscarried. That the wrong person had been killed. That was just the beauty of it. The plan had not miscarried. It had been brilliantly successful. The wrong person was not killed. Very much the right person was.’

  Moresby gaped. ‘Why, how on earth do you make that out, sir?’

  ‘Mrs Beresford was the objective all the time. That’s why the plot was so ingenious. Everything was anticipated. It was perfectly natural that Sir William would hand the chocolates over to Beresford. It was foreseen that we should look for the criminal among Sir William’s associates and not the dead woman’s. It was probably even foreseen that the crime would be considered the work of a woman; whereas really, of course, chocolates were employed because it was a woman who was the objective. Brilliant!’

  Moresby, unable to wait any longer, snatched up the photograph and gazed at it incredulously. He whistled. ‘Good heavens! But Mr Sheringham, you don’t mean to tell me that—Sir William himself!’

  ‘He wanted to get rid of Mrs Beresford,’ Roger continued, gazing dreamily at his swinging feet. ‘He had liked her well enough at the beginning, no doubt, though it was her money he was after all the time. But she must have bored him dreadfully very soon. And I really do think there is some excuse for him there. Any woman, however charming otherwise, would bore a normal man if she does nothing but prate about honour and playing the game. She’d never have overlooked the slightest peccadillo. Every tiny lapse would be thrown up at him for years.

  ‘But the real trouble was that she was too close with her money. She sentenced herself to death there. He wanted it, or some of it, pretty badly; and she wouldn’t part. There’s no doubt about the motive. I made a list of the firms he’s interested in and got a report on them. They’re all rocky, every one of them. They all need money to save them. He’d got through all he had of his own, and he had to get more. Nobody seems to have gathered it, but he’s a rotten business man. And half a million—Well!

  ‘As for the nitrobenzene, that was simple enough. I looked it up and found that beside the uses you told me, it’s used largely in perfumery. And he’s got a perfumery business. The Anglo-Eastern Perfumery Company. That’s how he’d know about it being poisonous of course. But I shouldn’t think he got his supply from there. He’d be cleverer than that. He probably made the stuff himself. I discovered, quite by chance, that he has at any rate an elementary knowledge of chemistry (at least, he was on the modern side at Selchester) and it’s the simplest operation. Any schoolboy knows how to treat benzol with nitric acid to get nitrobenzene.’

  ‘But,’ stammered Moresby, ‘but Sir William—He was at Eton.’

  ‘Sir William?’ said Roger sharply. ‘Who’s talking about Sir Willia
m? I told you the photograph of the murderer was in my pocket.’ He whipped out the photograph in question and confronted the astounded chief inspector with it. ‘Beresford, man! Beresford’s the murderer, of his own wife.’ Roger studied the other’s dumbfounded face and smiled secretly. He felt avenged now for the humour that had been taking place with the taximen.

  ‘Beresford, who still had hankerings after a gay life,’ he went on more mildly, ‘didn’t want his wife but did want her money. He contrived this plot, providing, as he thought, against every contingency that could possibly arise. He established a mild alibi, if suspicion ever should arise, by taking his wife to the Imperial, and slipped out of the theatre at the first interval (I sat through the first act of the dreadful thing myself last night to see when the interval came). Then he hurried down to the Strand, posted his parcel, and took a taxi back. He had ten minutes, but nobody was going to remark if he got back to the box a minute or two late; you may be able to find that he did.

  ‘And the rest simply followed. He knew Sir William came to the Club every morning at ten thirty, as regularly as clockwork; he knew that for a psychological certainty he could get the chocolates handed over to him if he hinted for them; he knew that the police would go chasing after all sorts of false trails starting from Sir William. That’s one reason why he chose him. He could have shadowed anyone else to the Club if necessary. And as for the wrapper and the forged letter, he carefully didn’t destroy them because they were calculated not only to divert suspicion but actually to point away from him to some anonymous lunatic. Which is exactly what they did.’

  ‘Well, it’s very smart of you, Mr Sheringham,’ Moresby said, with a little sigh but quite ungrudgingly. ‘Very smart indeed. By the way, what was it the lady told you that showed you the whole thing in a flash?’

  ‘Why, it wasn’t so much what she actually told me as what I heard between her words, so to speak. What she told me was that Mrs Beresford knew the answer to that bet; what I deduced was that, being the sort of person she sounded to be, it was almost incredible that Mrs Beresford should have made a bet to which she knew the answer. Unless she had been the most dreadful little hypocrite (which I did not for a moment believe), it would have been a psychological impossibility for her. Ergo, she didn’t. Ergo, there never was such a bet. Ergo, Beresford was lying. Ergo, Beresford wanted to get hold of those chocolates for some reason other than he stated. And, as events turned out, there was only one other reason. That was all.

  ‘After all, we only had Beresford’s word for the bet, didn’t we? And only his word for the conversation in the drawing room—though most of that undoubtedly happened. Beresford must be far too good a liar not to make all possible use of the truth. But of course he wouldn’t have left her till he’d seen her take, or somehow made her take, at least six of the chocolates, more than a lethal dose. That’s why the stuff was in those meticulous six minim doses. And so that he could take a couple himself, of course. A clever stroke, that. Took us all in again. Though of course he exaggerated his symptoms considerably.’

  Moresby rose to his feet. ‘Well, Mr Sheringham, I’m much obliged to you, sir. I shall make a report of course to the assistant commissioner of what you’ve done, and he’ll thank you officially on behalf of the department. And now I shall have to get busy, because naturally I shall have to check your evidence myself, if only as a matter of form, before I apply for a warrant against Beresford.’ He scratched his head. ‘Chance, the Avenger, eh? Yes, it’s an interesting notion. But I can tell you one pretty big thing Beresford left to Chance, the Avenger, Mr Sheringham. Suppose Sir William hadn’t handed over the chocolates after all? Supposing he’d kept them, to give to one of his own ladies? That was a nasty risk to take.’

  Roger positively snorted. He felt a personal pride in Beresford by this time, and it distressed him to hear a great man so maligned.

  ‘Really, Moresby! It wouldn’t have had any serious results if Sir William had. Do give my man credit for being what he is. You don’t imagine he sent the poisoned ones to Sir William, do you? Of course not! He’d send harmless ones, and exchange them for the others on his way home. Dash it all, he wouldn’t go right out of his way to present opportunities to Chance.

  ‘If,’ added Roger, ‘Chance really is the right word.’

  They Don’t Wear Labels

  E. M. Delafield

  E. M. Delafield was the pseudonym of Edmee Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture (later Dashwood) (1890–1943), who achieved a degree of literary immortality as the author of the witty and entertaining Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930). This semi-autobiographical journal of an upper-class woman, living in a Devon village but sometimes venturing further afield, was followed by three more books recording the Provincial Lady’s exploits.

  Although known as a humorous writer, Delafield had a deep and abiding interest in criminology, and she was the author of Messalina of the Suburbs, a study of the Thompson-Bywaters case. She was close to Anthony Berkeley Cox, who shared her fascination with true crime. There are faint echoes in this story of one aspect of the Thompson-Bywaters case, and also of a novel written by Berkeley’s alter ego, Francis Iles, Before the Fact, which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Suspicion.

  ***

  Everybody in the house, almost, liked him—and didn’t care very much about her. That was the truth of the matter. Naturally, I didn’t offer any opinion myself. A woman who takes in paying-guests has to keep most of her opinions to herself—particularly those that relate to her guests.

  There was no denying that he was very easy to get on with, very pleasant and friendly, and on the whole quite good about settling up their account promptly.

  Mrs Peverelli was ready enough to be friendly, in a manner of speaking, but her idea of being friendly was to talk about her miseries, and her poor health, and after a time people got tired of it, although one couldn’t help feeling sorry for her—she looked so white and frightened, with her great dark eyes, and rabbit mouth, and narrow, hunched shoulders.

  When they first took the front first-floor room, Mr Peverelli had explained that his wife wasn’t strong and would often want her meals upstairs, and he was quite ready to pay a little extra for the trouble.

  I agreed to that, of course, and asked if she was an invalid, or likely to get stronger.

  He looked at me with those very brown eyes—regular Italian eyes they were, though I believe only one of his parents had come from Italy, and he’d never set foot there himself—and gave me that pleasant, taking smile he had, showing splendid white teeth.

  ‘Between ourselves, Mrs Fuller, there is nothing organically wrong with my wife at all. She’s seen one doctor after another, and they’ve all told me the same thing. It’s her nerves. Mind you, I don’t mean that she’s putting it on. Far from it. She really does feel all the miseries she complains of, and of course the more she diets, and lies awake, and worries about herself, the worse she feels. It’s a vicious circle.’

  ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘something could be done to help her.’

  ‘I’ve tried everything,’ he answered sadly. ‘She doesn’t feel up to housekeeping, so we haven’t got a home, and I’ve tried various places—we’re always moving about. She seemed to like the country at first, but she’s got tired of every place in turn. And, of course, it was lonely for her while I was away.’

  He was a commercial traveller.

  ‘It’s lucky your job is what it is, though,’ I couldn’t help pointing out. ‘It isn’t everybody who can manage a change of locality.’

  ‘I know that, Mrs Fuller, and even in my case we have to keep within a certain radius of town. But now she’s got an idea that she wants to be in London, and to mix with people more. I hope she’ll make some friends here.’

  I hoped so too. I had one or two very nice permanents in the house— a widowed Mrs Gordon with her little girl, Joan, and two ladies who worked every day at the Lister Insti
tute, and a couple of single gentlemen, both middle-aged. They all got on very well together and often had a game of cards in the evenings or made up a party to go to the pictures.

  Mrs Peverelli seemed ready enough to join in with them at first, although she wasn’t much of a Bridge player.

  Mr Peverelli played a very good game and at the week-ends, when he was at home, he was always ready to make a fourth. He and his wife would be partners, and one thing we all of us liked about him was the way in which he put up with her bad play, never getting cross about it, and only pointing out, in a chaffing kind of way, some of her worst mistakes.

  Many a husband, I used to think, wouldn’t have hesitated to haul her over the coals after she’d thrown away one good game after another.

  But Mr Peverelli never did that.

  He’d wait on her, too, coming down himself to the kitchen sometimes to say she fancied a cup of something or other, and offering to get it ready and take it up himself to save trouble.

  I let him do it. He was quick and quiet, and I knew the girls had plenty to do without additional running up and down stairs.

  Then one night, when he was away, something happened.

  Mrs Gordon’s little girl, Joan, who’d been in bed three hours at least and ought to have been asleep, came running down into my kitchen in her pyjamas and dressing-gown, and said that Mrs Peverelli had sent her to ask for a cup of hot cocoa, because she couldn’t sleep.

  ‘Sent you!’ I exclaimed. ‘Why couldn’t she have rung her bell, I should like to know? Did she call out to you, or what?’

  Joan slept in a small room on the landing, next door to the Peverellis.

  ‘I heard her,’ said Joan. ‘She was crying.’

  ‘Crying!’

  ‘Yes, really she was. I’ve often heard her before, but sometimes I go to sleep. But to-night it sounded so sad, that I—I got up. I thought I’d fetch mummie.’