‘The Sergeant had to do that, he didn’t want to,’ Coverdale said gently. The wounded eyes looked at Amies, who appeared ready to repeat the slap. ‘And let’s be frank about this, there’s no proof of what we’re saying. We know it’s true, mind you, because of what happened afterwards, but there are no pictures of Mellon, and the only ones we’ve got of Tubbs are the prison pictures. So Eversholt can’t help, and though we’ve shown the shots to people where Mellon had his office the results – I’m being frank – are inconclusive. Of course they’re old pictures. We’ve got no positive identification. This is conjecture.’
‘But it’s impossible.’
Brownjohn looked as if he were about to giggle again, stopped when Amies asked sharply: ‘Why?’
‘We don’t have any doubt that Mellon killed your wife, but we can’t prove that you were an accessory. Can we, Sergeant?’ Amies muttered something, got up from his chair and rubbed his bottom. ‘But what we can prove is that you knew Mellon years before your wife’s death, knew him well enough to give him a reference. And that he visited you here.’
‘That he what?’ Brownjohn took his hand away from his cheek. ‘You must be mad.’
‘The evidence, Sergeant.’
‘Couple named Brodzky, live just up the road. They were walking past one evening – not September 30th, a few days earlier – and saw this man in the garden. Very good description they gave, brownish or reddish hair, beard, ginger tweed suit. They realised who it might be at the time, being interested in the case, and they made a report to the local police.’
Coverdale coughed. ‘Unfortunately it was ignored.’
‘They were mistaken.’
‘Oh no, they weren’t. Mellon, or Tubbs whichever you like to call him, was here. You disposed of his clothes, didn’t you, got rid of that ginger suit. Or you thought you’d got rid of it. You’ve got the doings in your briefcase outside, Sergeant, haven’t you?’
While Amies was out of the room Arthur stared at the face of the Inspector as if he were examining the physical features of some unknown country which held the secret of his fate. Below thick dark-silvery hair a low forehead and then that worn knobbly face with its shallow bloodshot eyes, cheeks and chin full of unexpected promontories, the whole a mottled red in colour and bordered by a pair of ears so incongruously small, neat and pale that they might have been made of wax. Was it possible that this coarse and clumsy figure – the body below such a face would be clumsy, the feet certainly clodhoppers – could be in charge of his future? When he tried to move his left leg he was alarmed to feel that it was paralysed. He had the sensation, common to those who have lost a limb, of making an attempt at movement and at the same time being aware of its impossibility. He bent down so that he could look under the table. His leg was moving when he gave it instructions! It moved quite definitely, made a little twirl in the air, twitched as though a jumping bean were inside it. Why did he feel that it was not moving at all, why was it dissociated from him?
‘The Sergeant took a bit of a liberty. While you were out on your painting expeditions I mean.’ That was Coverdale, his mouth opening and closing like a dummy’s. He did not hear the next words properly because he was conscious of the fact that his leg was still moving although he had given it instructions to be still. He caught the last phrase: ‘…in your incinerator.’
It startled him. ‘What is that? What did you say?’
To his bewilderment they did not answer. Instead the Sergeant, with a smile like a shark’s, drew something slowly out of a black briefcase. He watched fearfully until the thing was right out and then relaxed. It was only a sheet of paper! Then with a pounce Amies had put the thing in front of him and asked if he recognised it.
He stared at it, seeing a large photograph of what appeared to be some kind of medal, with a fragment of a flag (was it a flag?) adhering to it. He looked up questioningly.
‘Come on now.’ That was Amies, a nasty customer. ‘Look at it, man, look.’
The thing he had taken for a medal was a button. There were letters on it and he spelt them out soundlessly. I-N-C-H-&-B-U. What did the ampersand mean? Then he looked up.
‘I see you’ve got it. Corefinch and Burleigh. High class firm, they put their name on the fly buttons. And the material, recognise that? High class again, they knew the customer it was made for. Guess who? Easonby Mellon.’
‘Fly buttons,’ Coverdale said meditatively. ‘Old-fashioned now, everyone wears zips, but they’re old-fashioned tailors.’
‘You know where it came from.’ That was Amies, and it was not a question. ‘Look at me.’
He looked, at Amies’ dead sallow face and Coverdale’s bumpy one, and saw no help in them. Then he glanced down. Below the table his leg kept up its jigging without prompting from him. He put a hand to his face and felt nothing, although he knew that finger must have touched cheek.
Amies had his hand in the briefcase again. Another photograph was put in front of him. He turned his face away and refused to look, until Amies raised a menacing fist like a parent threatening a child. Then he did not understand what he saw.
‘Bit of sacking,’ the Sergeant said. ‘From the incinerator. Careless you were, just a few inches not burned, but enough. Stain on it – there – look.’ He did not look. ‘Marvellous what the boys can do now. They say it’s blood, group AB, very unusual. Know what Tubbs’ blood group was? AB.’
Sacking, sacking? He remembered the sacking in the car, but it belonged to another time. He glanced down again. His leg had stopped twitching, his limbs were dead.
‘Let’s recapitulate,’ Coverdale said. ‘We believe you hired Mellon to kill your wife and that afterwards he tried to blackmail you. We believe that, but we can’t prove it. This is what we can prove. You knew Mellon years before your wife’s death, and you lied about it. You paid Mellon or Tubbs, whichever you like to call him, money for a completely useless invention. Mellon came here to see you – we’ve got witnesses to that. You were seen to meet him in Brighton on the night of September 30th. You burned the clothes Mellon was known to wear in your incinerator, and you burned the sacking with bloodstains that are the same blood group as Tubbs’ on it. Your car was positively identified a mile from where Tubbs went into the river, and almost as positively identified at the very bridge. Mellon and Tubbs have both been here, we can prove it. There’s a strong presumption they were the same person. If you say they’re not, you’ve got to answer one question. Where is Easonby Mellon?’
The Sergeant echoed the question, and he knew he could not answer it. Beyond Amies, directly behind his head, was one of the little thin paintings on the wall, but it gave him no help. There was no way out.
He opened his mouth. ‘I –’ He was unable to go on. He felt the paralysis creeping up his body.
‘I think he’s ready to make a statement now, sir.’
His hand clasped his throat, plucked at it to release the words that at last came up. ‘I killed Easonby Mellon.’
Coverdale let out breath in a sigh and said gently, ‘Come along with us.’ They lifted him, but when they tried to stand him up he slipped sideways like a rag doll. In the end they had almost to carry him out to the car. He appeared to have lost the use of his legs.
Arthur Brownjohn did not stand trial. He was found unfit to plead under the McNaughten Rules on insanity and this, as Coverdale said to Amies, was just as well, because the medical evidence about the blow and some of the other evidence too was distinctly shaky. The temporary hysterical paralysis he had suffered from soon passed away, and in Broadmoor he was a quiet tractable inmate who spent a great deal of time in painting. Most of his paintings were watercolours of imaginary Sussex landscapes, and some of them were displayed in prisoners’ art shows. His work in oils, however, was quite different. It depicted scenes in which a lusty naked man with thick hair and curling beard, rather like a Rubens satyr, stabbed or strangled a naked woman who limply submitted to her fate. These pictures obviously excited him considerably,
and they interested the doctors, but they were not thought suitable for exhibition. As time passed he painted fewer of them, and at length he stopped asking for oil paints. He ate voraciously, grew fat and seemed quite happy.
Inspector Bland Titles
(in order of first publication)
These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels
1. The Immaterial Murder Case 1945
2. A Man Called Jones 1947
3. Bland Beginning 1949
Inspector Crambo Titles
(in order of first publication)
These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels
1. The Narrowing Circle 1954
2. The Gigantic Shadow also as: The Pipe Dream 1947
Joan Kahn-Harper Titles
(in order of first publication)
These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as standalone novels
1. The Man Who Killed Himself 1967
2. The Man Who Lost His Wife 1967
3. The Man Whose Dreams Came True 1968
4. The Players & The Game 1972
5. The Plot Against Roger Rider 1973
Sheridan Haynes
1. A Three Pipe Problem 1975
Novels
(in order of first publication)
1. The 31st of February 1950
2. The Broken Penny 1953
3. The Paper Chase also as: Bogue’s Fortune 1956
4. The Colour of Murder 1957
5. The Progress of a Crime 1960
6. The Killing of Francie Lake also as: The Plain Man 1962
7. The End of Solomon Grundy 1964
8. The Belting Inheritance 1965
Non-Fiction
1. Horatio Bottomley 1937
2. Buller’s Campaign The Boer War & His Career 1974
3. Thomas Carlyle The Life & Ideas of a Prophet 1954
4. England’s Pride General Gordon of Khartoum 1954
5. The General Strike 1987
6. The Thirties 1954
7. Tell-Tale Heart The Life & Works of Edgar Allen Poe 1954
Synopses of Symons’ Titles
Published by House of Stratus
The 31st February
Anderson was a bored, unhappy sales executive longing for something to liven up his monotonous life. But perhaps he wished too hard because it was not long before he found his wife lying dead at the bottom of the cellar stairs. An accident of course - so why wouldn’t the police believe him?
The Belting Inheritance
When a stranger arrives at Belting, he is met with a very mixed reception by the occupants of the old house. Claiming his so-called ‘rightful inheritance’ the stranger makes plans to take up residence at once. Such a thing was bound to cause problems amongst the family - but why were so many of them turning up dead?
Bland Beginnings
A purchase at a second-hand bookshop seems an innocent enough event. Tony Shelton hadn’t expected it to be anything but that - and he certainly hadn’t expected it to throw him head first into the world of violence, blackmail and robbery. For it becomes clear that the book has a rather higher price than he paid for it - a price that was to lead to murder..
The Broken Penny
An Eastern-block country, shaped like a broken penny, was being torn apart by warring resistance movements. Only one man could unite the hostile factions - Professor Jacob Arbitzer. Arbitzer, smuggled into the country by Charles Garden during the Second World War, has risen to become president, only to have to be smuggled out again when the communists gained control. Under pressure from the British Government who want him reinstated, Arbitzer agreed to return on one condition; that Charles Garden again escort him. The Broken Penny is a thrilling spy adventure brilliantly recreating the chilling conditions of the Cold War.
Buller’s Campaign
A powerful and invaluable reassessment of the life of General Buller and of the part he played in British military history. Beginning with his struggle for the position of Commander-in-Chief of the Army in 1895, it goes on to portray his role in the Boer War, and on its path, reveals many of the Victorian Imperialist attitudes of the day. A man of numerous failures, General Buller has been treated unkindly by history but Symons here seeks to paint a more rounded picture. Whilst never attempting to excuse the General’s mistakes, he portrays Buller as a complex and often misunderstood character and reveals the deep ironies that surrounded so much of what he achieved. An exceptional book and an outstanding contribution to military history.
The Colour of Murder
John Wilkins was a gentle, mild-mannered man who lived a simple, predictable life. So when he met a beautiful, irresistible girl his world was turned upside down. Looking at his wife, and thinking of the girl, everything turned red before his eyes - the colour of murder. Later, his mind a blank, his only defence was that he loved his wife far too much to hurt her.
The End of Solomon Grundy
When a girl turns up dead in a Mayfair mews, the police want to write it off as just another murdered prostitute, but Superintendent Manners isn’t quite so sure. He is convinced that the key to the crime lies in ‘The Dell’, an affluent suburban housing estate. And in ‘The Dell’ lives Solomon Grundy. Could he have killed the girl? So Superintendent Manners thinks.
England’s Pride
General Gordon, charged with the task of defending Khartoum, was stabbed to death on 26 January 1885 when the Mahdi’s forces took the town by storm. Two days later, the Expeditionary force arrived to relieve Gordon but found the town firmly in the hands of the Mahdi. In England’s Pride, Julian Symons tells the story of the disastrous and tragic failure of this mission. Analysing events from both a political and military stance, and consulting a wide range of sources, he questions why the Gladstone Government had not acted sooner in the first place, and then, once orders had been given, what contributed to the complex chain of events that was ultimately to thwart the relieving force. Capturing in brilliant detail all the glory of Victorian times, England’s Pride is a vivid and dramatic book on a sorely neglected subject.
The General Strike
In May 1926, Britain was gripped by what became known as the General Strike. This downing of tools lasted for nine days, during which time it divided the people, threatened the survival of the government of the day and brought the country nearer to revolution that it perhaps had ever been. In this accurate and lively account, Symons draws on contemporary press reports, letters and oral sources, along with TUC records to provide an invaluable historical account of the remarkable event and the people and places that featured so prominently in it.
The Gigantic Shadow
Bill Hunter, TV personality, made his living by asking the rich and famous difficult and highly personal questions. But when the tables were turned and he found himself being asked about his own rather murky past, he wasn’t quite so sure of himself. Out of a job and little hope of finding another, he teamed up with the reckless Anthea to embark upon a dangerous and deadly plan that was to have murderous consequences.
Horation Bottomley
Horatio Bottomley was one of the most flamboyant characters of the twentieth century. From his inauspicious beginnings as a child in an orphanage, he made a series of extremely shrewd financial investments, went on to achieve Parliamentary success, and was reputed to have a mind to equal the finest legal brains in the country. From these dizzy heights he fell to sudden bankruptcy and the remainder of his life proved to be an eternal repeat of the cycle - huge success (he was nearly included in the post-war cabinet) to complete ruin. In this superb biography, Julian Symons brilliantly captures all the irony and drama in the life of this remarkable man, and creates a very readable, and all-too-poignant story of success and failure.
The Immaterial Murder Case
‘Most immaterialists are a little mad. If you ever meet one, you should be most careful to keep your fingers crossed.’ American-born John Wilson and his troop of distinguishe
d friends were well known in the fashionable parts of London. And at their social gatherings the very latest fad was ‘immaterialism’, and the quest for the perfect immaterial work of art - but what they hadn’t expected to find was the perfect immaterial murder.
The Killing of Francie Lake
Octavius Gaye, founder and creator of the hugely successful magazine empire, Plain Man Enterprises, saw himself as the original ‘plain man’. The truth however was rather different as Gaye was an unscrupulous tycoon with a strangely captivating nature who surrounded himself by a series of weak-willed puppets that he manipulated to his heart’s content. One such puppet was Francie Lake and as the plot unfolds, Symons reveals how and why Francie simply had to die.
Tell-Tale Heart: The Life & Works of Edgar Allen Poe
This biography strips away the myths that have grown up around the life of Edgar Allen Poe, and provides a completely fresh assessment of both the man and his work. Symons reveals Poe as his contemporaries saw him - a man struggling to make a living out of hack journalism and striving to find a backer for his new magazine, and a man whose life was beset by so many tragedies that he was often driven to excessive drinking and a string of unhealthy relationships. Fittingly written by another master in the art of crime writing, The Tell-Tale Heart brilliantly portrays the original creator of the detective story and reveals him as the genius, and unashamed plagiarist, that he was.
A Man Called Jones
The office party was in full swing so no one heard the shot, fired at close range through the back of Lionel Hargreaves, elder son of the founder of ‘Hargreaves Advertising Agency’. The killer left only one clue; a pair of yellow gloves, but it looked almost as if he had wanted them to be found. As Inspector Bland sets out to solve the murder, he encounters a deadly trail of deception, suspense, and two more dead bodies.
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