Trent Intervenes

by E. C. Bentley

  Both men stared at him blankly; then Bradshaw, composing his features, said impassively, ‘I shall be interested to hear your reasons for thinking so. You have not a name for making absurd suggestions, Mr Trent, but I may call this an astonishing one.’

  ‘I should damned well think so,’ observed Coxe.

  ‘I got the idea originally,’ Trent said, ‘from the wine which this man chose to drink with his dinner at the Crown Inn before the disappearance. Do you think that absurd?’

  ‘There is nothing absurd about wine,’ Mr Bradshaw replied with gravity. ‘I take it very seriously myself. Twice a day, as a rule,’ he added.

  ‘Lord Southrop, I am told, also took it seriously. He had the reputation of a first-rate connoisseur. Now this man I’m speaking of had little appetite that evening, it seems. The dinner they offered him consisted mainly of soup, fillet of sole, and roast fowl.’

  ‘I am sure it did,’ Bradshaw said grimly. ‘It’s what you get nine times out of ten in English hotels. Well?’

  ‘This man took only the soup and the fish. And with it he had a bottle of claret.’

  The solicitor’s composure deserted him abruptly.

  ‘Claret!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Yes, claret, and a curious claret too. You see, mine host of the Crown kept a perfectly good Beychevelle 1924—I had some myself. But he had also a Margaux 1922; and I suppose because it was an older wine he thought it ought to be dearer, so he marked it in his list eighteenpence more than the other. That was the wine which was chosen by our traveller that evening. What do you think of it? With a fish dinner he had claret, and he chose a wine of a bad year, when he could have had a wine of 1924 for less money.’

  While Coxe looked his bewilderment, Mr Bradshaw got up and began to pace the room slowly. ‘I will admit so much,’ he said. ‘I cannot conceive of Lord Southrop doing such a thing if he was in his right mind.’

  ‘If you still think it was he, and that he was out of his senses,’ Trent rejoined, ‘there was a method in his madness. Because the night before, at Hawbridge, he chose one of those wines bearing the name of a château which doesn’t exist, and is merely a label that sounds well; and the night before that, at Wringham, he had two whiskies and soda just before dinner, and another inferior claret at an excessive price on top of them. I have been to both the inns and got these facts. But when I worked back to Candley, the first place where Lord Southrop stayed after leaving home, it was another story. I found he had picked out about the best thing on the list, a Rhine wine, which hardly anybody ever asked for. The man who ordered that, I think, was really Lord Southrop.’

  Bradshaw pursed up his mouth. ‘You are suggesting that someone in Lord Southrop’s car was impersonating him at the other three places, and that, knowing his standing as a connoisseur, this man did his ignorant best to act up to it. Very well; but Lord Southrop signed the register in his usual way at those places. He received and read a letter addressed to him at Lackington. The motor tour as a whole was just such a haphazard tour as he had often made before. The description given of him at Lackington was exact—the clothes, the glasses, the abstracted manner. The cap that was washed up was certainly his. No, no, Mr Trent. We are bound to assume that it was Lord Southrop; and the presumption is that he drove down to the sea and drowned himself. The alternative is that he was staging a sham suicide, so as to be able to disappear, and there is no sense in that.’

  ‘Just so,’ observed Lambert Coxe. ‘What you say about the wine may be all right as far as it goes, Mr Trent, but I agree with Mr Bradshaw. Southrop committed suicide; and if he was insane enough to do that, he was insane enough to go wrong about his drinks.’

  Trent shook his head. ‘There are other things to be accounted for. I’m coming to them. And the clothes and the cap and the rest are all part of my argument. This man was wearing Lord Southrop’s tweed suit just because it was so easily identifiable. He knew all about Lord Southrop and his ways. He had letters from Lord Southrop in his possession, and had learnt to imitate his writing. It was he who wrote and posted that letter addressed to L. G. Coxe; and he made a pretence of being worried by it. He knew that Lord Southrop’s notes could be traced; so he left them at the bureau to clinch the thing. And, of course, he did not drown himself. He only threw the cap into the sea. What he may have done is to change out of those conspicuous clothes, put them in a bag which he had in the car, and which contained another suit in which he proceeded to dress himself. He may then have walked, with his bag, the few miles into Brademouth, and travelled to London by the 12:15—quite a popular train, in which you can get a comfortable sleeping-berth.’

  ‘So he may,’ Bradshaw agreed with some acidity, while Lambert Coxe laughed shortly. ‘But what I am interested in is facts, Mr Trent.’

  ‘Well, here are some. A few days before Lord Southrop set out from his place in Norfolk, someone rang him up in his library. The door was ajar, and the butler heard a little of what he said to the caller. He said he was going on the following Tuesday to visit a place he called the old moor, as if it was a place as well known to the other as to himself. He said, “You remember the church and the chapel,” and that it must be over twenty years; and that he was going to make a sketch.’

  Coxe’s face darkened. ‘If Southrop was alive,’ he sneered, ‘I am sure he would appreciate your attention to his private affairs. What are we supposed to gather from all this keyhole business?’

  ‘I think we can gather,’ Trent said gently, ‘that some person, ringing Lord Southrop up about another matter, was told incidentally where Lord Southrop expected to be on that Tuesday—the day, you remember, when he suddenly developed a taste for bad wine in the evening. Possibly the information gave this person an idea, and he had a few days to think it over. Also we can gather that Lord Southrop was talking to someone who shared his recollection of a moor which they had known over twenty years ago—that’s to say, when he was at the prep school age, as he was thirty-three this year. And then I found that he had been at a school called Marsham House, on the edge of Sharnsley Town Moor in Derbyshire. So I went off there to explore; and I discovered that the church and chapel were a couple of great rocks on the top of the moor, about two miles from the school. If you were there with your cousin, Mr Coxe, you may remember them.’

  Coxe was drumming on the table with his fingers. ‘Of course I do,’ he said aggressively. ‘So do hundreds of others who were at Marsham House. What about it?’

  Bradshaw, who was now fixing him with an attentive eye, held up a hand. ‘Come, come, Mr Coxe,’ he said. ‘Don’t let us lose our tempers. Mr Trent is helping to clear up what begins to look like an even worse business than I thought. Let us hear him out peaceably, if you please.’

  ‘I am in the sketching business myself,’ Trent continued, ‘so I looked about for what might seem the best view-point for Lord Southrop’s purpose. When I went to the spot, I found two pieces of torn-up paper, the remains of a pencil sketch; and that paper is of precisely the same quality as the paper of Lord Southrop’s sketching-block, which I was able to examine at Lackington. The sketch was torn from the block and destroyed, I think, because it was evidence of his having been to Sharnsley. That part of the moor is a wild, desolate place. If someone went to meet Lord Southrop there, as I believe, he could hardly have had more favourable circumstances for what he meant to do. I think it was he who appeared in the car at Wringham that evening; and I think it was on Sharnsley Moor, not at Lackington, that Lord Southrop—disappeared.’

  Bradshaw half rose from his chair. ‘Are you not well, Mr Coxe?’ he asked.

  ‘Perfectly well, thanks,’ Coxe answered. He drew a deep breath, then turned to Trent. ‘And so that’s all you have to tell us. I can’t say that—’

  ‘Oh no, not nearly all,’ Trent interrupted him. ‘But let me tell you now what I believe it was that really happened. If the man who left the moor in Lord Southrop’s car was not Lord Southrop, I wanted an explanation of the masquerade that ended at Lackin
gton. What would explain it was the idea that the man who drove the car down to Devonshire had murdered him, and then staged a sham suicide for him three hundred miles away. That would have been an ingenious plan. It would have depended on everyone making the natural assumption that the man in the car was Lord Southrop, and how was anyone to imagine that he wasn’t?

  ‘Lord Southrop was the very reverse of a public character. He lived quite out of the world; he had never been in the news; very few people knew what he looked like. He depended on all this for maintaining his privacy in the way he did when touring in his car—staying always at small places where there was no chance of his being recognized, and pretending not to be a peer. The murderer knew all about that, and it was the essence of his plan. The people at the inns would note what was conspicuous about the traveller; all that they could say about his face would be more vague, and would fit Lord Southrop well enough, so long as there was no striking difference in looks between the two men. Those big horn-rims are a disguise in themselves.’

  Bradshaw rubbed his hands slowly together. ‘I suppose it could happen so,’ he said. ‘What do you think, Mr Coxe?’

  ‘It’s just a lot of ridiculous guesswork,’ Coxe said impatiently. ‘I’ve heard enough of it, for one.’ He rose from his chair.

  ‘No, no, don’t go, Mr Coxe,’ Trent advised him. ‘I have some more of what you prefer—facts, you know. They are important, and you ought to hear them. Thinking as I did, I looked about for any places where a body could be concealed. In that bare and featureless expanse I could find only one: an old, abandoned quarry in the hillside, with a great pond of muddy water at the bottom of it. And by the edge of it I picked up a small piece of broken glass.

  ‘Yesterday evening this piece of glass was shown by a police officer and myself to an optician in Derby. He stated that it was a fragrant of a monocle, what they call a spherical lens, so that he could tell us all about it from one small bit. Its formula was not a common one—minus 5; so that it had been worn by a man very short-sighted in one eye. The police think that as very few people wear monocles, and hardly any of them would wear one of that power, an official inquiry should establish the names of those who had been supplied with such a glass in recent years. You see,’ Trent went on, ‘this man had dropped and broken his glass on the stones while busy about something at the edge of the pond. Being a tidy man, he picked up all the pieces that he could see; but he missed this one.’

  Lambert Coxe put a hand to his throat. ‘It’s infernally stuffy in here,’ he muttered. ‘I’ll open a window, if you don’t mind.’ Again he got to his feet; but the lawyer’s movement was quicker. ‘I’ll see to that,’ he said; and stayed by the window when he had opened it.

  Trent drew a folded paper from his pocket. ‘This is a telegram I received just before lunch from Superintendent Allison, of the Derbyshire police. I have told him all I am telling you.’ He unfolded the paper with deliberation. ‘He says that the pond was dragged this morning, and they recovered the body of a man who had been shot in the head from behind. It was stripped to the underclothing and secured by a chain to a pedal bicycle.

  ‘That, you see, clears up the question how the murderer got to the remote spot where Lord Southrop was. He couldn’t go there in a car, because he would have had to leave it there. He used a cycle, because there was to be a very practical use for the machine afterwards. The police believe they can trace the seller of the cycle, because it is in perfectly new condition, and he may give them a line on the buyer.’

  Bradshaw, his hands thrust into his pockets, stared at Coxe’s ghastly face as he inquired, ‘Has the body been identified?’

  ‘The superintendent says the inquest will be the day after tomorrow. He knows whose body I believe it is, so he will already be sending down to Hingham Blewitt about evidence of identity. He says my own evidence will probably not be required until a later stage of the inquest, after a charge has been—’

  A sobbing sound came from Lambert Coxe. He sprang to his feet, pressing his hands to his temples; then crashed unconscious to the floor.

  While Trent loosened his collar, the lawyer splashed water from the bottle on his table upon the upturned face. The eyelids began to flicker. ‘He’ll do,’ Bradshaw said coolly. ‘My congratulations, Mr Trent. This man is not a client of mine, so I may say that I don’t think he will enjoy the title for long—or the money, which was what really mattered, I have reason to believe. He’s dropped his monocle again, you see. I happen to know, by the way, that he has been half-blind of that eye since it was injured by a cricket ball at Marsham.’

  XII

  THE ORDINARY HAIRPINS

  A SMALL committee of friends had persuaded Lord Aviemore to sit for a presentation portrait, and the painter to whom they gave the commission was Philip Trent. It was a task that fascinated him, for he had often seen and admired, in public places, the high, half-bald skull, vulture nose, and grim mouth of the peer who was said to be deeper in theology than any other layman, and all but a few of the clergy; whose devotion to charitable work had made him nationally honoured. It was not until the third sitting that Lord Aviemore’s sombre taciturnity was laid aside.

  ‘I believe, Mr Trent,’ he said abruptly, ‘you used to have a portrait of my late sister-in-law here. I was told that it hung in the studio.’

  Trent continued his work quietly. ‘It was just a rough drawing I made after seeing her in Carmen—before her marriage. It has been hung in here ever since. Before your first visit I removed it.’

  The sitter nodded slowly. ‘Very thoughtful of you. Nevertheless, I should like very much to see it, if I may.’

  ‘Of course.’ Trent drew the framed sketch from behind a curtain. Lord Aviemore gazed long in silence at Trent’s very spirited likeness of the famous singer, while the artist worked busily to capture the first expression of feeling that he had so far seen on that impassive face. Lighted and softened by melancholy, it looked for the first time noble.

  At last the sitter turned to him. ‘I would give a good deal,’ he said simply, ‘to possess this drawing.’

  Trent shook his head. ‘I don’t want to part with it.’ He laid a few strokes carefully on the canvas. ‘If you care to know why, I’ll tell you. It is my personal memory of a woman whom I found more admirable than any other I ever saw. Lillemor Wergeland’s beauty and physical perfection were unforgettable. Her voice was a marvel; her spirit matched them; her fearlessness, her kindness, her vigour of mind and character, her feeling for beauty, were what I heard talked about even by people not given to enthusiasm. She had weaknesses, I dare say—I never spoke to her. I heard her sing very many times, but I knew no more about her than many other strangers. A number of my friends knew her, though, and all I ever gathered about her made me inclined to place her on a pedestal. I was ten years younger then; it did me good.’

  Lord Aviemore said nothing for a few minutes. Then he spoke slowly. ‘I am not of your temperament or your circle, Mr Trent. I do not worship anything of this world. But I do not think you were far wrong about Lady Aviemore. Once I thought differently. When I heard that my eldest brother was about to marry a prima donna, a woman whose portrait was sold all over the world, who was famous for extravagance in dress and what seemed to me self-advertising conduct—I was appalled when I heard from him of this engagement. I will not deny that I was shocked, too, at the idea of a marriage with the daughter of Norwegian peasants.’

  ‘She was country-bred, then,’ Trent observed. ‘One never heard much about her childhood.’

  ‘Yes. She was an orphan of ten years old when Colonel Stamer and his wife went to lodge at her brother’s farm for the fishing. They fell in love with the child, and having none of their own, they adopted her. All this my brother told me. He knew, he said, just what I would think; he only asked me to meet her, and then to judge if he had done well or ill. Of course I asked him to introduce me at the first opportunity.’

  Lord Aviemore paused and stared thoughtfully at the port
rait. ‘She charmed everyone who came near her,’ he went on presently. ‘I resisted the spell; but before they had been long married she had conquered all my prejudice. It was like a child, I saw, that she delighted in the popularity and the great income her gifts had brought her. But she was not really childish. It was not that she was what is called intellectual; but she had a singular spaciousness of mind in which nothing little or mean could live—it had, I used to fancy, some kinship with her Norwegian landscapes of mountain and sea. She was, as you say, extremely beautiful, with the vigorous purity of the fair-haired Northern race. Her marriage with my brother was the happiest I have ever known.’

  He paused again, while Trent worked on in silence; and soon the low, meditative voice resumed. ‘It was about this time six years ago—the middle of March—that I had the terrible news from Taormina, the day after my return from Canada. I went out to her at once. When I saw her I was aghast. She showed no emotion; but there was in her calmness the most unearthly sense of desolation that I have ever received. From time to time she would say, as if she spoke to herself, “It was all my fault.”’

  At Trent’s exclamation of surprise Lord Aviemore looked up. ‘Few people,’ he said, ‘know the whole of the tragedy. You have heard that a slight shock of earthquake caused the collapse of the villa, and that my brother and his child were found dead in the ruins; you have heard, I suppose, that Lady Aviemore was not in the house at the time. You have heard that she drowned herself afterwards. But you have evidently not heard that my brother had a presentiment that this visit to Sicily would end in death, and wished to abandon it at the last moment; that his wife laughed away his forebodings with her strong common sense. But we belong to the Highlands, Mr Trent; we are of that blood and tradition, and such interior warnings as my brother had are no trifles to us. However, she charmed his fears away; he had, she told me, entirely lost all sense of uneasiness. On the tenth day of their stay her husband and only child were killed. She did not think, as you may think, that there was coincidence here. The shock had changed her whole mental being; she believed then, as I believed, that my brother inwardly foreknew that death awaited him if he went to that place.’ He relapsed into silence.