‘On him,’ snapped Ronald, and we sprang forward simultaneously. The man snarled and fought like a tiger—but madman though he was he was no match for the four of us. Mansford had sprung to his feet the instant the fight started, and in a few seconds we heard the click of McIver’s handcuffs. It was Standish who went to the door and switched on the light, so that we could see who it was. And the face of the handcuffed man, distorted and maniacal in its fury, was the face of the butler Templeton.
‘Pass the handcuffs round the foot of the bed, McIver,’ ordered Standish, ‘and we’ll leave him here. We’ve got to explore upstairs now.’
McIver slipped off one wristlet, passed it round the upright of the bed and snapped it to again. Then the four of us dashed upstairs.
‘We want the room to which the speaking-tube communicates,’ cried Standish, and Mansford led the way. He flung open a door, and then with a cry of horror stopped dead in the doorway.
Confronting us was a wild-eyed woman, clad only in her nightdress. She was standing beside a huge glass retort, which bubbled and hissed on a stand in the centre of the room. And even as we stood there she snatched up the retort with a harsh cry, and held it above her head.
‘Back,’ roared Standish, ‘back for your lives.’
But it was not to be. Somehow or other the retort dropped from her hands and smashed to pieces on her own head. And a scream of such mortal agony rang out as I have never heard and hope never to hear again. Nothing could be done for her; she died in five minutes, and of the manner of the poor demented thing’s death it were better not to write. For a large amount of the contents of the retort was hot sulphuric acid.
***
‘Well, Mansford,’ said Standish a few hours later, ‘your ghost is laid, your mystery is solved, and I think I’ll be able to play in the last match of that tour after all.’
We were seated in the Old Hall dining-room after an early breakfast and Mansford turned to him eagerly.
‘I’m still in the dark,’ he said. ‘Can’t you explain?’
Standish smiled. ‘Don’t see it yet? Well—it’s very simple. As you know, the first thing that struck my eye was that right-hand canopy wire. It didn’t shine in the sun like the other one, and when I got up to examine it, I found it was coated with dried oil. Not one little bit of it—but the whole wire. Now that was very strange—very strange indeed. Why should that wire have been coated with oil—and not the other? I may say at once that I had dismissed any idea of psychic phenomena being responsible for your father’s and brother’s death. That such things exist we know—but they don’t kill two strong men.
‘However, I was still in the dark; in fact, there was only one ray of light. The coating of that wire with oil was so strange, that of itself it established with practical certainty the fact that a human agency was at work. And before I left the room that first afternoon I was certain that that wire was used to introduce something into the room from outside. The proof came the next morning. Overnight the wire had been dry; the following morning there was wet oil on it. The door was intact; no one had gone in by the window, and, further, the fan was going. Fact number two. Still, I couldn’t get the connection. I admit that the fact that the fan was going suggested some form of gas—introduced by the murderer, and then removed by him automatically. And then you came along with your mouth blistered. You spoke of feeling as if you’d been stung by a hornet, and I’d got my third fact. To get it pre-supposed a certain knowledge of chemistry. Formic acid—which is what a wasp’s sting consists of—can be used amongst other things for the manufacture of carbon monoxide. And with that the whole diabolical plot was clear. The speaking-tube was the missing link, through which carbon monoxide was poured into the room, bringing with it traces of the original ingredients which condensed on the mouthpiece. Now, as you may know, carbon monoxide is lighter than air, and is a deadly poison to breathe. Moreover, it leaves no trace—certainly no obvious trace. So before we went into the room last night, I had decided in my own mind how the murders had taken place. First from right under the sleeper’s nose a stream of carbon monoxide was discharged, which I rendered harmless by igniting it. The canopy helped to keep it more or less confined, but since it was lighter than air, something was necessary to make the sleeper awake and sit up. That is precisely what your father and brother did when they saw the phosphorescent hand—and they died at once. Mrs. Bretherton hid her face and lived. Then the fan was turned on—the carbon monoxide was gradually expelled from the room, and in the morning no trace remained. If it failed one night it could be tried again the next until it succeeded. Sooner or later that infernal hand travelling on a little pulley wheel on the wire and controlled from above by a long string, would wake the sleeper—and then the end—or the story of a ghost.’
He paused and pressed out his cigarette.
‘From the very first also I had suspected Templeton. When you know as much of crime as I do—you’re never surprised at anything. I admit he seemed the last man in the world who would do such a thing—but there are more cases of Jekyll and Hyde than we even dream of. And he and his wife were the only connecting links in the household staff between you and the Brethertons. That Mrs. Templeton also was mad had not occurred to me, and how much she was his assistant or his dupe we shall never know. She has paid a dreadful price, poor soul, for her share of it; the mixture that broke over her was hot concentrated sulphuric acid mixed with formic acid. Incidentally from inquiries made yesterday, I discovered that Staveley Grange belonged to a man named Templeton some forty years ago. This man had an illegitimate son, whom he did not provide for—and it may be that Templeton the butler is that son—gone mad. Obsessed with the idea that Staveley Grange should be his perhaps—who knows? No man can read a madman’s mind.’
He lit another cigarette and rose.
‘So I can’t tell you why. How you know and who: why must remain a mystery for ever. And now I think I can just catch my train.’
‘Yes, but wait a moment,’ cried Mansford. ‘There are scores of other points I’m not clear on.’
‘Think ’em out for yourself, my dear fellow,’ laughed Ronald. ‘I want to make a few runs to-morrow.’
The Mystery
of Horne’s Copse
Anthony Berkeley
Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893–1971), was, like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the new breed of crime writers who, from the 1920s onwards, broke fresh ground in the field. As Anthony Berkeley, he created Roger Sheringham, an amateur sleuth who was far from infallible—as in the superb “multiple solution” mystery The Poisoned Chocolates Case. Writing under the name Francis Iles, Cox wrote influential novels such as Malice Aforethought which focused on criminal psychology. Cicely Disappears, which was published under the name A. Monmouth Platts, is among the rarest and most sought-after detective novels.
“The Mystery of Horne’s Copse” was originally published as a serial in Home and County in 1931, which accounts for the short, snappy chapters and cliff-hanger endings. The story features both Sheringham and another regular Berkeley character, Chief Inspector Moresby, and its twists and turns illustrate why Agatha Christie, among others, heaped praise on the ingenuity of Berkeley’s mysteries.
***
Chapter I
The whole thing began on the 29th of May.
It is over two years ago now and I can begin to look at it in its proper perspective; but even still my mind retains some echo of the incredulity, the horror, the dreadful doubts as to my own sanity and the sheer, cold-sweating terror which followed that ill-omened 29th of May.
Curiously enough the talk had turned for a few minutes that evening upon Frank himself. We were sitting in the drawing-room of Bucklands after dinner, Sir Henry and Lady Rigby, Sylvia and I, and I can remember the intensity with which I was trying to find a really convincing excuse to get Sylvia alone with me for half-an-hour before I went home.
We had only been engaged a week then and the longing for solitary places with population confined to two was tending to increase rather than diminish.
I think it was Lady Rigby who, taking advantage of a pause in her husband’s emphatic monologue on phosphates (phosphates were at the time Sir Henry’s chief passion), asked me whether I had heard anything of Frank since he went abroad.
“Yes,” I said. “I had a picture postcard from him this morning. An incredibly blue Lake Como in the foreground and an impossibly white mountain at the back, with Cadenabbia sandwiched microscopically in between. Actually, though, he’s in Bellagio for a few days.”
“Oh,” said Sylvia with interest and then looked extremely innocent. Bellagio had been mentioned between us as a possible place for the beginning of our own honeymoon.
The talk passed on to the Italian lakes in general.
“And Frank really does seem quite settled down now, Hugh, does he?” Lady Rigby asked casually, a few minutes later.
“Quite, I think,” I replied guardedly; for Frank had seemed quite settled several times, but had somehow become unsettled again very soon afterwards.
Frank Chappell was my first cousin and incidentally, as I had been an only child and Ravendean was entailed, my heir. Unfortunately he had been, till lately, most unsatisfactory in both capacities. Not that there was anything bad in him, I considered he was merely weak; but weakness, in its results, can be as devastating as any deliberate villainy. It was not really his fault. He derived on his mother’s side from a stock which was, to put it frankly, rotten and Frank took after his mother’s family. He had not been expelled from Eton, but only by inches; he had been sent down from Oxford and his departure from the Guards had been a still more serious affair. The shock of this last killed my uncle and Frank had come into the property. It was nothing magnificent, falling far short of the resources attached to Ravendean, but plenty to allow a man to maintain his wife in very tolerable comfort. Frank had run through it in three years.
He had then, quite unexpectedly, married one of his own second cousins and, exchanging extravagance for downright parsimony, settled down with her to make the best of a bad job and put his heavily mortgaged property on its feet once more. In this, I more than suspected, he was directed by his wife. Though his cousin on the distaff side, Joanna showed none of the degeneracy of the Wickhams. Physically a splendid creature, tall and lithe and with a darkness of colouring that hinted at a Spanish ancestor somewhere in the not too remote past, she was no less vigorous mentally; under the charm of her manner one felt at once a well-balanced intelligence and a will of adamant. She was exactly the right wife for Frank and I had been delighted.
It was a disappointment to me that Sylvia did not altogether share my liking for Joanna. The Rigbys’ property adjoined mine and Frank’s was less than twenty miles away, so that the three families had always been on terms of intimacy. Sylvia did not actually dislike Joanna but it was clear that, if the thing were left to her, they would never become close friends and as Frank had always had a hearty dislike for me, it seemed that relations between Ravendean and Moorefield would be a little distant. I cannot say that the thought worried me. So long as I had Sylvia, nothing else could matter.
Frank had now been married something over two years and, to set the wreath of domestic virtue finally on his head, his wife six months ago had given birth to a son. The recuperation of Moorefield, moreover, had proceeded so satisfactorily that three weeks ago the pair had been able to set out on a long wandering holiday through Europe, leaving the child with his foster-mother. I have had to give Frank’s history in this detail, because of its importance in the strange business which followed that homely scene in the drawing-room of Bucklands that evening.
Sylvia and I did get our half-hour together in the end and no doubt we spent it as such half-hours always have been spent. I know it seemed a very short time before I was sitting at the wheel of my car, one of the new six-cylinder Dovers, and pressing the self-starter. It failed to work. On such trivialities do our destinies hang.
“Nothing doing?” said Sylvia. “The wiring’s gone, I expect. And you won’t be able to swing her; she’ll be much too stiff.” Sylvia’s grasp of the intricacies of a car’s interior had always astonished me. “You’d better take Emma.” Emma was her own two-seater.
“I think I’ll walk,” I told her. “Through Horne’s Copse it’s not much over a mile. It’ll calm me down.”
She laughed, but it was quite true. I had proposed to Sylvia as a sort of forlorn hope and I had not nearly become accustomed yet to the idea of being actually engaged to her.
It was a lovely night and my thoughts, as I swung along, turned as always then upon the amazing question: what did Sylvia see in me? We had a few tastes in common, but her real interest was cars and mine the study of early civilizations, with particularly kindly feelings towards the Minoan and Mycenean. The only reason I had ever been able to get out of her for her fondness was: “Oh well, you see, Hugh darling, you’re rather a lamb, aren’t you? And you are such a perfect old idiot.” It seemed curious, but I knew our post-war generation has the reputation of being unromantic.
My eyes had become accustomed to the moonlight, but inside Horne’s Copse everything was pitch black. It was hardly necessary for me to slacken my pace, however, for I knew every turn and twist of the path. The copse was not more than a couple of hundred yards long and I had reached, as I judged, just about the middle when my foot struck against an obstacle right in the middle of the track which nearly sent me flying to the ground.
I recovered my balance with an effort, wondering what the thing could be. It was not hard, like a log of wood, but inertly soft. I struck a match and looked at it. I do not think I am a particularly nervous man, but I felt a creeping sensation in the back of my scalp as I stood staring down by the steady light of the match. The thing was a body—the body of a man; and it hardly took the ominous black hole in the centre of his forehead, its edges spangled with red dew, to tell me that he was very dead indeed.
But that was not all. My match went out and I nerved myself to light another and hold it close above the dead face to assure myself that I had been mistaken. But I had not been mistaken. Incredibly, impossibly, the body was that of my cousin, Frank.
Chapter II
I took a grip on myself.
This was Frank and he was dead—probably murdered. Frank was not in Bellagio. He was here, in Horne’s Copse, with a bullet-hole in his forehead. I must not lose my head. I must remember the correct things to do in such a case and then I must do them.
“Satisfy oneself that life is extinct.”
From some hidden reserve of consciousness the phrase emerged and, almost mechanically, I proceeded to act on it. But it was really only as a matter of form that I touched the white face, which was quite cold and horribly clammy.
One arm was doubled underneath him, the other lay flung out at his side, the inside of the wrist uppermost. I grasped the latter gingerly, raising the limp hand a little off the ground as I felt the pulse, or rather, where the pulse should have been; for needless to say, nothing stirred under the cold, damp skin. Finally, with some half-buried recollection that as long as a flicker of consciousness remains, the pupils of the eyes will react to light, I moved one of my last matches backwards and forwards and close to and away from the staring eyes. The pupils did not contract the hundredth of a millimetre as the match approached them.
I scrambled to my feet.
Then I remembered that I should make a note of the exact time and this I did too. It was precisely eleven minutes and twenty seconds past twelve.
Obviously the next thing to do was to summon the police.
Not a doctor first, for the poor fellow was only too plainly beyond any doctor’s aid.
I am a magistrate and certain details of routine are familiar to me. I knew, for instance, that it was essential that th
e body should not be touched until the police had seen it; but as I had no-one with me to leave in charge of it, that must be left to chance; in any case it was not probable that anyone else would be using the right-of-way through Horne’s Copse so late. I therefore made my way, as fast as I dared in that pitch darkness, out of the copse and then ran at top speed the remaining half-mile to the house. As always I was in sound condition and I dare swear that nobody has ever covered a half-mile, fully clothed, in much quicker time.
I had told Parker, the butler, not to sit up for me and I therefore had to let myself in with my own latch-key. Still panting, I rang up the police station in Salverton, about three miles away and told them briefly what I had discovered. The constable who answered the telephone of course knew me well and Frank too and was naturally shocked by my news. I cut short his ejaculations, however, and asked him to send someone out to Ravendean at once, to take official charge. He undertook to rouse his sergeant immediately and asked me to wait at the house in order to guide him to the spot. I agreed to do so—and it was a long time before I ceased to regret it. It is easy to blame oneself after the event and easy for others to blame one too; but how could I possibly have foreseen an event so extraordinary?
The interval of waiting I filled up by rousing Parker and ringing up my doctor. The latter had not yet gone to bed and promised to come round at once. He was just the kind of man I wanted, for myself rather than Frank; my nervous system has never been a strong one and it had just received a considerable shock. Gotley was his name and he was a great hulking young man who had been tried for England at rugger while he was still at Guy’s and, though just failing to get his cap, had been accounted as a good a forward as any outside the team. For a man of that type he had imagination, too, intelligence and great charm of manner; he was moreover a very capable doctor. He had been living in the village for about four years now and I had struck up quite a friendship with him, contrary to my usual practice, for I do not make friends easily.
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