Murder at the Manor

by Martin Edwards

  The man’s voluble answer left no doubt of his liking for the idea. Sylvia arranged the details with him there and then.

  “My darling,” I said, when at last we were seated in a café a few streets away and could talk properly, “what on earth is it you’re doing and how did you know the man with Joanna wasn’t Frank at all?”

  She gave me a superior smile. “It didn’t strike you as curious, Hugh, that both those men remembered Frank so well, what with his temper and his scar, about which he was so confidential, and the rest? It didn’t occur to you to wonder whether they remembered all the visitors at their hotels quite so thoroughly? It didn’t strike you as though Frank had almost gone out of his way to be remembered at those two places so clearly?”

  “Go on. Rub it in. No, it didn’t.”

  “Poor lamb! Well, why should it have? You haven’t got such a suspicious mind as I have. But all those things struck me. Also the fact that it was Joanna who signed the register. Very fishy, I thought. So I wrote off to Mr. Sheringham to get hold somehow of a photograph of Frank and send it to me poste restante at Rome. That’s why I insisted on staying so long on the lakes, to give it time to arrive.”

  “Well, well,” I said. “I’m quite glad I married you. So what is our programme now?”

  “I must write to Mr. Sheringham at once and tell him what we’ve discovered and that we’re bringing the witness back with us in two or three days’ time.”

  “But why are we doing that?”

  “I’m not going to let him go off on his holiday where we can’t get hold of him,” Sylvia retorted. “Besides, aren’t there things called affidavits that he’ll have to swear? Something like that. Anyhow, Mr. Sheringham will know, so to Mr. Sheringham he’s going.”

  And to Mr. Sheringham, three days later, the man went. I think I have already hinted in this chronicle that when Sylvia makes up her mind to a thing…

  Sheringham seemed scarcely less pleased to see him than us. He handed him over to Meadows with as much care as if he had been made of glass and might fall into pieces at any moment.

  As soon as he had gone and Sylvia had received Sheringham’s congratulations on her perspicacity, I asked eagerly whether anything further had come to light at this end of the affair.

  Sheringham smiled, as if not ill-pleased with himself. “I think I’ve made some progress, but I’d rather not say anything just at the moment. I’ve arrived at one decision, though, Chappell, and that is that you must now come out in the open.”

  “Stop skulking?” I said. “I shall be only too pleased. I’ve nothing to hide and I dislike this hole and corner atmosphere I’ve been living in.”

  “But is it safe?” Sylvia asked anxiously.

  “On that we’ve got to take a chance,” Sheringham told her. “Personally, I think it will be. In any case, since getting your letter I’ve arranged a conference here this evening. I’m going to do my best to bring everyone into the open and with any luck developments may result.”

  “Who’s coming?” I asked, a little uneasily. I was not sure that I cared for the sound of the word “conference.”

  “Well, Mrs. Chappell, for one.”

  “Joanna? Really, Sheringham, do you think it advisable—”

  “And her brother, for another,” he interrupted me. “You know him, I expect?”

  “Well, very slightly. I met him at the wedding. That’s all. I’ve heard of him, of course. Rather a—a—”

  “Bad egg?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, bad egg or not he’s coming to support his sister in my omelet.”

  “Yes, but what have you found out, Mr. Sheringham?” Sylvia insisted. “What have you been doing these last ten days?”

  “What have I found out?” Sheringham repeated whimsically. “Well, where to buy ice in your neighbourhood, for one thing. Very useful, in this hot weather.”

  Sylvia’s eyes dilated. “Mr. Sheringham, you don’t mean that Frank was killed right back in May and—and—”

  “And kept on ice till August?” Sheringham laughed. “No, I certainly don’t. The doctor was quite definite that he hadn’t been dead for more than a couple of hours at the outside when he was found. And now don’t ask me any more questions, because I’m determined not to spoil my conference for you.”

  It was by then nearly dinner time and Sheringham, refusing to satisfy our curiosity any further, insisted on our going off to dress. We had to take what heart we could from the fact that he certainly seemed remarkably confident.

  Joanna and her brother, Cedric Wickham, were to arrive at nine o’clock. Actually they were a minute or two early.

  The meeting, I need hardly say, was constrained in the extreme. From the expression of acute surprise on their faces it was clear that the other two had had no idea that we were to be present, a fact which Sheringham must have purposely concealed from us. Recovering themselves, Joanna greeted us with the faintest nod, her brother, a tall, good-looking fellow, with a scowl. As if noticing nothing in the least amiss, Sheringham produced drinks.

  Not more than three minutes later there was a ring at the front door bell. The next moment the door of the room was opened, a large, burly man was framed in the doorway and Meadows announced: “Detective Chief Inspector Moresby.”

  Expecting as I did to be arrested on the spot, I put as good a face on the encounter as I could, though I had a task to appear altogether normal as the C.I.D. man, after a positively benevolent nod to the others, advanced straight towards me. But all he did was to put out a huge hand and say: “Good evening, Mr. Chappell. And how are you, sir? I’ve been wanting to meet you for some time.” His blue eyes twinkled genially.

  I returned his smile as we shook hands—a proceeding which Joanna and her brother watched decidedly askance. They too, I think, had been expecting to see me led off, so to speak, in chains.

  “Now,” said Sheringham briskly, “I’m glad to say I’ve got news for you. A new witness. No credit to me, I’m afraid. Mrs. Hugh Chappell is responsible. We’ll have him in straightaway, shall we, and hear what he’s got to say.” He pressed the bell.

  The Chief Inspector, as it were casually, strolled over to a position nearer the door.

  I think our little Italian thoroughly enjoyed his great moment, though his English suffered a little under the strain. He stood for a moment in the doorway, beaming at us and then marched straight up to Cedric Wickham.

  “Ah, it is a pleasure to meet antique faces again, non è vero? Good evening, Mr. Frank Chappell!”

  Chapter XII

  Joanna, her brother and Chief Inspector Moresby had gone.

  Almost immediately, as it seemed, after the little Italian clerk’s identification of Cedric Wickham as the impersonator of Frank at Bellagio and Rome the room had appeared to fill with burly men, before whom the Chief Inspector had arrested Joanna and Cedric, the latter as the actual perpetrator of the murder and the former as accessory to it both before and after the fact. My own chauffeur, whose real name I now learned was Harvey, not that under which I had engaged him on poor Frank’s recommendation, was already under arrest as a further accessory.

  It was a terrible story that Sheringham told Sylvia and myself later that evening.

  “There were two plots in existence,” he said when we were settled in our chairs and the excitement of the treble arrest had begun to calm down. “The first was invented by your cousin himself, who called in his wife, his brother-in-law and Harvey to help him carry it out. The second was an adaptation by these three aimed against the originator of the first. Both, of course, were aimed against you, too.

  “This was the first plot. I’m not quite clear myself yet on some of its details, but—”

  At this point the telephone bell in the hall rang and Sheringham went out to answer it.

  He was away a considerable time and when he returned
it was with a graver face even than before.

  “Mrs. Chappell has confessed,” he said briefly. “She puts all the blame on the other two. I have every doubt of that and so have the police, but I can give you her whole story now. It fills up the gaps in my knowledge of the case.” He sat down again in his chair.

  “The first plot, then,” he resumed, “was aimed against you, Chappell, by your cousin. It did not involve murder, although it was designed to put your possessions in his hands. To put it shortly, Frank had worked hard for two years and he didn’t like it; what is more, he did not intend to work any longer. He determined to anticipate his inheritance from you. But, rotter though he was, he drew the line at murder. To get you shut up in a lunatic asylum for the rest of your life, with the result that he as your heir and next-of-kin would have the administering of your estate, was quite enough for his purpose.

  “To achieve this result he hit on the idea of causing you several times to come across his apparently dead body, knowing that you would give the alarm and then, when the searchers and the police came, have no body to show for it. When this had happened three or four times, the suspicion that you were mad would become a certainty and the rest would follow. I think it only too likely that if the plan had been left at that it would almost certainly have succeeded.”

  “The devil!” Sylvia burst out indignantly.

  “I’m quite sure it would,” I agreed soberly. “The police were taken in and Gotley too and, upon my word, I was ready to wonder myself whether I wasn’t mad. But what I can’t understand is how he copied death so well. I hadn’t the slightest suspicion that he wasn’t dead. He not only looked dead, he felt dead.”

  “Yes—in the parts you did feel, which were the ones you were meant to feel. If you’d slipped your hand inside his shirt and felt his actual heart, instead of only the pulse in his wrist, you’d have felt it beating at once.

  “Anyhow, the way he and Harvey went about it was this. About an hour before you were expected, Frank gave himself a stiff injection of morphia. They couldn’t use chloroform, because of the smell. Harvey meantime was watching for you to start, having, of course, already put the car out of action so as to ensure your walking and through Horne’s Copse at that. As soon as you set out or looked like doing so, Harvey ran on ahead at top speed for the copse, which he would reach about ten minutes before you.

  “Ready waiting for him there was a tourniquet, a bottle of atropine drops and a block of ice fashioned roughly to the shape of a mask and wrapped in a blanket. He clapped the ice over your cousin’s face and another bit over his right hand and wrist and fastened it there, put the tourniquet on his right arm above the elbow and slipped off the ice mask for a moment, when his hand was steadier, to put a few of the atropine drops into Frank’s eyes to render the pupils insensible to light. Then he arranged the limbs with the dead pulse invitingly upwards and so on, waited till he could actually hear you coming, and then whipped off the ice blocks and retreated down the path. After you’d gone to give the alarm, of course, he cleared the ground of your traces, match sticks and so on and carried Frank out of the way, coming back to smooth out any footprints he might have made in so doing.

  “In the meantime, Joanna’s brother was impersonating Frank abroad, just in the unlikely event of your making any enquiries over there, though, as your wife very shrewdly spotted, he overdid his attempts to impress the memory of himself on the hotel staff. And, of course, she answered your telegrams. By the way, as an example of their thoroughness I’ve just heard that your cousin engaged two single rooms instead of one double one through the whole tour, so that the fact of it being done at Bellagio and Rome, where it was necessary, wouldn’t appear odd afterwards. Well, that’s the first plot and, as I say, it very nearly came off.

  “The second was, in my own opinion, most probably instigated by Joanna herself, or Joanna and Harvey. Frank didn’t know, when he brought into his own scheme a man who would help because he was in love with Frank’s wife, that Frank’s wife was in love with him. You told me yourself that the Wickhams are rotten stock, though you didn’t think that Joanna was tainted. She was, worse than any of them (except perhaps her own brother), but morally, not physically. To take advantage of Frank’s plot by having him actually killed in the hope that you (if the evidence was rigged a little on the spot, which Harvey was in a position to do) would be hanged for his murder, was nothing to her.”

  “Is that what was really intended?” Sylvia asked, rather white.

  Sheringham nodded. “That was the hope, in which event of course her infant son would inherit and she would more or less administer things for him till he came of age, marrying Harvey at her leisure and with a nice fat slice of the proceeds earmarked for brother Cedric. If things didn’t go so well as that, there was always Frank’s original scheme to fall back on, which would give almost as good a result, though with that there was always the danger of your being declared sane again.”

  “And the police,” I exclaimed, “were for a time actually bamboozled!”

  “No,” Sheringham laughed. “We must give Scotland Yard its due. I learned today that, though puzzled, they never seriously suspected you, and what’s more, they knew where you were the whole time and actually helped you to get abroad, hoping you’d help them to clear up their case for them, and in fact you did.”

  “How silly of them,” Sylvia pronounced. “When we were out of the country they lost track of us.”

  “Yes?” said Sheringham. “By the way, did you make any friends on the trip?”

  “No. At least, only one. There was quite a nice man staying at Cadenabbia who was actually going on to Rome the same day as we did. He was very helpful about trains and so on. We took quite a fancy to him, didn’t we, Hugh?”

  “He is a nice fellow, isn’t he?” Sheringham smiled.

  “Oh, do you know him? No, of course you can’t; you don’t even know who I mean.”

  “Indeed I do,” Sheringham retorted. “You mean Detective Inspector Peters of the C.I.D., though I don’t think you knew that yourself, Mrs. Chappell.”

  The Perfect Plan

  James Hilton

  Born in Lancashire and educated at Cambridge, James Hilton (1900–1954) published his first novel at the age of twenty, and was an established author by the time his solitary detective novel, Murder at School (also known as Was it Murder?), appeared in 1931, under the pen-name Glen Trevor. Two years later came Lost Horizon, filmed famously by Frank Capra and decades later as a 1970s musical. Goodbye, Mr Chips, Random Harvest, and We are Not Alone soon followed, and the film versions also became box office hits. Hilton moved to California, and won an Academy Award for his contribution to the screenplay for Mrs Miniver.

  Hollywood’s gain was detective fiction’s loss. Hilton’s rare ventures into the crime genre show a distinctive talent in the making. Murder at School was a soundly crafted story, and “The Perfect Plan” is an accomplished take on the familiar concept of the perfect criminal scheme that might just turn out to have a fatal flaw.

  ***

  Every public man has his enemies, but few of these enemies would wish to murder him, or are in a position to do so in any case. Sir George Winthrop-Dunster, however, was unfortunate in these respects. He had his enemies, and one of them, his secretary, both wished to murder him, and did so.

  Sir George, as chairman of the Anglo-Oceanic group of companies, was what is called “a well-known figure in the City.” He belonged to the modern school of financiers who instead of being fat, heavy-jowled, gold-ringed, and white-spatted, look more like overgrown public-school prefects. He was fifty-five, played energetic squash-rackets, wore neat lounge suits, and as often as not lunched in a pub off a glass of sherry and a ham sandwich.

  Scarsdale, his private secretary, was not unlike him in physique, but nearly a quarter of a century younger. With a First in Greats at Oxford and a B.Sc. Econ. of London, he was
well equipped to deal with the numerous complications of Sir George’s affairs, and for five years he had given every satisfaction. Well, almost. Just one little rift had once appeared—in 1928, when Scarsdale had rashly bought Amal. Zincs in greater quantities than he had cash to pay for. He had not exactly pledged Sir George’s credit in the transaction, but he had made use of Sir George’s stockbroker, and when the account finished with Amal. Zincs well down, it was to Sir George that he had perforce to confess the little mishap. A hundred pounds more than covered everything, and Sir George wrote a check instantly. He did not lecture, or even rebuke; he merely specified arrangements by which the sum could be repaid out of Scarsdale’s monthly salary.

  This amounted to three hundred a year, and within two years the debt had been fully repaid, plus interest at 5 per cent. No other unfortunate incident had occurred, and the relations between the two men seemed as good as ever. Then, in 1930, Scarsdale received a tentative offer of a better post. It was an important one, and his prospective employer, purely as a matter of routine, wished to effect a fidelity insurance for which a testimonial from Sir George would be necessary.

  When Scarsdale approached Sir George about this, the financier talked to him with all the suavity he usually reserved for shareholders’ meetings. “My dear Scarsdale,” he replied, in his curiously high-pitched voice, “I have no objection whatever to your leaving me, but I have, I admit, a certain reluctance to putting my name to any statement that is not absolutely correct. Take this question, for instance: ‘Have you always found him to be strictly honest and reliable while in your service?’ Now, my truthful reply to that would be: ‘With one exception, yes.’ Do you think that would help you?”

  Obviously it would have been worse than no reply at all, and in default of the required testimonial the offer of the job fell through, and Scarsdale remained Sir George’s secretary. Sir George, no doubt, congratulated himself on having secured a permanently good bargain. He was that kind of a man.

  But had he known it, he was really much less to be congratulated. For just as Sir George was that kind of a man, so Scarsdale was another kind, equally rare perhaps.