August Derleth - The Solar Pons Omnibus Volume 1

by August Derleth

  "A sound like that, Mrs. Ashcroft," said Pons.

  "What on earth is that, Mr. Pons?"

  "Unless I am very much mistaken, it is a passage to the abandoned right-of-way of the Nunhead-Crystal Palace Line —and the temporary refuge of your library ghost."

  He pulled the shelving further into the room, exposing a gaping aperture which led into the high bank behind that wall of the house, and down into the earth beneath. Out of the aperture came a voice which was certainly that of an inebriated man, raucously singing. The voice echoed and reverberated as in a cavern below.

  "Pray excuse us, Mrs. Ashcroft," said Pons. "Come, Parker."

  Pons took a torch from his pocket and, crouching, crept into the tunnel. I followed him. The earth was shored up for a little way beyond the opening; then the walls were bare, and here and there I found them narrow for me, though Pons, being slender, managed to slip through with less difficulty. The aperture was not high enough for some distance to enable one to do more than crawl, and it was a descending passage almost from the opening in Mrs. Ashcroft's library.

  Ahead of us, the singing had stopped suddenly.

  "Hist!" warned Pons abruptly.

  There was a sound of hurried scuttering movement up ahead.

  "I fear he has heard us," Pons whispered.

  He moved forward again, and abruptly stood up. I squeezed out to join him. We stood on the permanent way of the abandoned Nunhead-Crystal Palace Line. The rails were still in place, and the railbed was clearly the source of the cinder Pons had produced for my edification. Far ahead of us on the line someone was running.

  "No matter," said Pons. "There is only one way for him to go. He could hardly risk going out to where the nearby Victoria line passes. He must go out by way of the Lordship Lane entrance."

  We pressed forward, and soon the light revealed a niche hollowed out of the wall. It contained bedding, a half-eaten loaf of bread, candles, a lantern, books. Outside the opening were dozens of empty wine bottles, and several that had contained brandy.

  Pons bent to examine the bedding.

  "Just as I thought," he said, straightening up. "This has not been here very long —certainly not longer than two months."

  "The time since the younger Brensham's death," I cried.

  "You advance, Parker, you advance, indeed!"

  "Then he and Narth were in it together!"

  "Of necessity," said Pons. "Come."

  He ran rapidly down the line, I after him.

  Up ahead there was a sudden burst of shouting.

  "Aha!" cried Pons. "They have him!"

  In ten minutes of hard running, we burst out of the tunnel at the entrance where Inspector Jamison and Constable Meeker waited — the constable manacled to a wild-looking old man, whose fierce glare was indeed alarming. Greying hair stood out from his head, and his unkempt beard completed a frame of hair around a grimy face out of which blazed two eyes fiery with rage.

  "He gave us quite a struggle, Pons," said Jamison, still breathing heavily.

  "Capital! Capital!" cried Pons, rubbing his hands together delightedly. "Gentlemen, let me introduce you to as wily an old scoundrel as we've had the pleasure of meeting in a long time. Captain Jason Brensham, swindler of insurance companies and, I regret to say, murderer."

  "Narth!" exclaimed Jamison.

  "Ah, Jamison, you had your hands on him. But I fear you lost him when you gave him to Spilsbury."

  "The problem was elementary enough," said Pons, as he filled his pipe with the abominable shag he habitually smoked and leaned up against the mantel in our quarters later that night. "Mrs. Ashcroft told us everything essential to its solution, and Harwell only confirmed it. The unsolved question was the identity of the victim, and the files of the national press gave me a presumptive answer to that in the disappearance of Ian Narth, a man of similar build and age to Captain Brensham.

  "Of course, it was manifest at the outset that this motiveless spectre was chancing discovery for survival. It was not Jenkins but the Captain who was raiding the food and liquor stocks at his house. The cave, of course, was never intended as a permanent hiding-place, but only as a refuge to seek when strangers came to the house, or whenever his nephew had some of his friends in. He lived in the house; he had always been reclusive, and he changed his way of life but little. His nephew, you will recall Harwell's telling us, continued to subscribe to his magazines and buy the books he wanted, apparently for himself, but obviously for his uncle. The bedding and supplies were obviously moved into the tunnel after the younger Brensham's death.

  "The manner and place of the ghost's appearance suggested the opening in the wall. The cinder in the carpet cried aloud of the abandoned Nunhead-Crystal Palace Line which the maps I studied in the British Museum confirmed ran almost under the house. The Captain actually had more freedom than most dead men, for he could wander out along the line by night, if he wished.

  "Harwell clearly set forth the motive. The Captain had sold off everything he had to enable him to continue his way of living. He needed money. His insurance policies promised to supply it. He and his nephew together hatched up the plot. Narth was picked as victim, probably out of a circle of acquaintances because, as newspaper descriptions made clear, he had a certain resemblance to the Captain and was, like him, a retired seaman with somewhat parallel tastes.

  "They waited until the auspicious occasion when Dr. Weston, who knew the Captain too well to be taken in, was off on a prolonged holiday, lured Narth to the house, killed him with a lethal dose of arsenic, after which they cleaned up the place to eliminate all external trace of poison and its effects, and called in Dr. Weston's locum to witness the dying man's last minutes. The Captain was by this time in his cave, and the young doctor took Howard Brensham's word for the symptoms and signed the death certificate, after which the Brenshams had ample funds on which to live as the Captain liked."

  "And how close they came to getting away with it!" I cried.

  "Indeed! Howard Brensham's unforeseen death —ironically, of a genuine heart attack—was the little detail they had never dreamed of. On similar turns of fate empires have fallen!"

  The Adventure of the Aluminium Crutch

  DURING THE EARLY years of our association, a rare few of the problems laid before my friend, Solar Pons, were brought through the offices of our good landlady, Mrs. Johnson. One of them was a curious affair that appeared to be little more than a case of illegal entry, but proved to be one that took on an added dimension which perhaps no one but Pons could have foreseen.

  Among the ladies who came to visit Mrs. Johnson from time to time was a widow of some sixty years of age, Mrs. Fiona Porteous. On that October day, Mrs. Porteous arrived at No. 7B, Praed Street coincidentally with the arrival of Inspector Seymour Jamison, who came for no other purpose than to stop for an idle, purposeless visit, which was uncommon for him. Mrs. Porteous vanished into our landlady's quarters, and the Inspector mounted to ours and sat down. He customarily occupied an hour or two of Pons's time with vaunting successes or asking Pons's advice in matters under investigation; but on this day he had come rather to give vent to his disappointments.

  He inquired whether Pons were at work at some criminous matter, and seemed to be aggrieved that Pons was not.

  "I take it, however," said my companion, "that you are busy, as usual."

  "You may say so," said Jamison in a voice laden with dissatisfaction. "We have several problems on which we're not making any significant progress. Oh, we caught Alfred Fletcher, the forger — though it took us seven months; and we managed to collar Rodney Stanyan, that effete young poet who had been plagiarizing his betters. Nothing much to either one —more or less simple matters of searching until we found them. And we'll convict the Russell Street murderer. But we haven't made any progress on the Midlands murder—or the thefts and substitutions at the galleries and museums —and we're as far as ever from a solution to the murder of Sidney Lowell, that crippled artist, in Bessborough Street, or
the Aylesbury triple murder."

  "You were looking for the son-in-law, I believe," said Pons.

  "Yes, since he was estranged. But last night we found his body, too —miles away, and clearly murder too, not suicide. But once we uncover a motive, we might be able to solve Lowell's murder."

  "Beaten to death with his crutch, was he not?" asked Pons. "I recall reading about the affair."

  "Perhaps. Perhaps not." Jamison did not elaborate. "The crutch was all bent up and torn apart —that is, the ends were torn off and the middle part looked as if it had been used to beat Lowell to death, but it hardly seemed heavy enough for that, and Spilsbury's not inclined to agree that it alone was used, though some hairs adhered to it."

  "Then it was not of wood," observed Pons.

  "No, of aluminium — and rather light for a weapon."

  He went on at some length, while Pons sat quietly listening. Inspector Jamison was manifestly making no appeal for suggestions from Pons, and Pons made none, only asking a question now and then in the interests of clarification. I noticed, however, that he had one ear cocked, as it were, on the premises beyond Jamison; every little while a sound came up from below —the opening and closing of a door, I made it; undoubtedly it was this that had divided Pons's attention.

  The Inspector finished at last, and, having said all he meant to say, he made his departure, looking relieved, though Pons had offered little in the way of advice, scrupulously maintaining his own counsel unless asked —and Inspector Jamison had not asked. The door had hardly closed behind him when Pons turned to me, his eyes alight.

  "I fancy Mrs. Johnson will look in on us within minutes. It was certainly her door that opened and shut several times."

  "I heard it."

  "Perhaps some trifling matter is troubling her visitor this afternoon," ventured Pons.

  The outer door opened and closed. Almost immediately Mrs. Johnson's door opened, and her familiar steps sounded on the stairs, followed by other, heavier steps. Pons glanced at me and smiled.

  Mrs. Johnson reached the landing. "Mr. Pons?" she asked beyond the door.

  "Come in, Mrs. Johnson," invited Pons.

  He strode across the room and opened the door. Behind our landlady loomed the imposing figure of her friend, Mrs. Fiona Porteous.

  "It's not me, Mr. Pons, begging your pardon. It's Mrs. Porteous would like to talk to you, if you can spare the time."

  Mrs. Porteous was already engaged in pushing our landlady into our quarters; her buxom figure was so formidable that she needed only to lean forward to impel Mrs. Johnson across the threshold. It was evident that a consultation with Pons had been suggested by Mrs. Porteous, and not by our landlady, whose diffident reluctance was only too patent.

  Mrs. Johnson introduced us all around, forgetting that she had done so on a previous occasion, and ended with, "Mrs. Porteous has had a spot of trouble, Mr. Pons. She would be obliged to you if she could mention it."

  "By all means," said Pons, with whimsical enthusiasm. "Pray sit down, ladies."

  "Good of you, I'm sure," said Mrs. Porteous in a deferential tone of voice which was, however, immediately lost as she continued. "It's this way, Mr. Pons, somebody's been in my house. Twice! Mrs. Johnson says to me I'd ought to talk to you about it — " this she quickly revised at sight of Mrs. Johnson's quick expression of dismay to " — or I says to her maybe you'd look into it for me." She smiled ingratiatingly.

  Pons's smile was somewhat less than enthusiastic. "What was taken, Mrs. Porteous?"

  "Oh, nothing was took —that's it. And mine wasn't the only house in the street, either, that was entered."

  Pons's interest quickened as readily as it had waned. His eyes lit up. "Ah, how then did you learn that your home had been entered?"

  "Well, Mr. Pons, you may know how it is with people who live alone. You get used to everything in its place. You know just how the umbrella stands in the vestibule, and how you left the book lying face down you were reading, and which way every chair faces, and which door was open and which was shut." She glanced down apologetically. "A bit fussy, you may say, but that's how it is. Maybe it's for lack of anything else to do. The one time the door to my late husband's room was standing open; it was never open before. The next time —well, I mentioned the umbrella because it was the umbrella that was moved. I left it in its stand, with two canes that belonged to John.

  "Two nights ago, when I came in from a card party, I found the umbrella lying on the chair nearby. So somebody's been there, taken it out, and forgot to put it back. I know where it was when I went out, and I know where I found it when I got back; there's no use trying to tell me I did it myself and just forgot about it." Her implication clearly was that Pons had better not try to do so. "Besides, the one back window I'd left open was pulled shut—as if somebody came in that way and shut it going out."

  "So what did you do, Mrs. Porteous?" asked Pons.

  "Well, sir, I says to myself, when I saw the umbrella, if there's somebody been here, he might still be here, so, Fiona, my girl, I says, I'll just have a look around. I took John's leaded cane and I went from one room to another, I turned on all the lights and I looked under and behind everything. Nobody. Nobody was there. But two of the chairs in my parlour had been moved, and a sofa was out of line. Oh, somebody'd been there, all right.

  "Then I looked around to see if anything was took. Nothing was. Somebody'd been in the large drawers, but not the small ones. And next day when I asked Emma Jaggers — she's on my right —had she seen anybody about? —I found out that her house had been entered, too —and the house across the street, that's Mr. Harvey Bertrand's —had been got into. Each the one time. And like my own house, nothing was took. I've got the feeling whoever it was will be back, Mr. Pons. What I want is for you to look into it. I can't pay much, but I can pay some."

  Pons sat for a few moments in silence, his eyes closed, his fingers tented before him. It was impossible to divine from the passivity of his features what he might be thinking. Presently, however, he opened one eye and fixed it on our client.

  "And where do you live, Mrs. Porteous?"

  "At Number 127 Lupus Street. I own my house. John left it to me. It's early Victorian. We bought it just five years ago."

  Something in her prosaic account had plainly quickened Pons's interest. "And the umbrella, Mrs. Porteous —had it been opened?"

  "Opened. The umbrella?" Mrs. Porteous was manifestly disconcerted. She flashed an indignant glance at Mrs. Johnson. "Why, I never. ..." she began, ruffled, then composed herself and said instead, "I never looked. It's bad luck to open an umbrella in the house, Mr. Pons."

  "I see," said Pons, the hint of a smile on his thin lips. "But I am not adept in arcane beliefs, Mrs. Porteous. When you reach home, pray examine the umbrella attentively, take it outside if need be, and open it. I am on the telephone. Call me promptly and let me know what you find, if anything."

  "Am I to look for something?" Mrs. Porteous asked, with another glance at Mrs. Johnson.

  "You are positive nothing was taken from your premises. Are you equally as certain that nothing was left?"

  "Left, Mr. Pons? And what would be left?"

  "Only you could know that, Mrs. Porteous. You know your premises. I do not."

  "Humph!" said Mrs. Porteous expressively. "If anything was left there, I'd know it. Nothing was left. Everything in that part of the house John lived in mostly is the same as the day he died; from the hour he came in last time from the Tate and hung up his crutch a year ago, nothing's been disturbed there except for the dusting. And so with my part of the house."

  Pons's eyes were now positively dancing with delight, whether at our client's delivery or for some other reason I was unable to ascertain.

  "Your late husband was disabled, Mrs. Porteous?" he asked.

  "He was that, Mr. Pons. Bad lame in his left leg. He came home that way from the war. Walked with a crutch the last years of his life. We lived on his pension. And I had a little inheritan
ce of my own from an uncle. John used to like to go to the galleries and study the paintings. He once dabbled a bit in painting himself. Oils and watercolours."

  "I will look into the matter, Mrs. Porteous."

  "There now," said our client, with a glance of triumph in the direction of Mrs. Johnson. "I knew Mr. Pons was a gentleman!" She turned again to Pons. "And what am I to do, Mr. Pons?"

  "Examine the umbrella," he answered.

  She blinked. "And then?"

  "Nothing more. We will call on you in good time."

  So saying, Pons came to his feet. Clearly dismissed, Mrs. Porteous rose also. She extended a well-muscled arm and shook Pons's hand firmly. Our landlady favoured Pons with an apologetic glance, which Pons answered with a reassuring smile.

  "You are surely not going to spend your time looking into a case of ordinary illegal entry!" I protested, when the ladies were descending the stairs.

  " 'Ordinary'? I think not. I submit there were some points of interest that escaped you, Parker."

  "I saw none. And that matter of the umbrella! You don't mean to say you meant it?" "On the contrary, I did. It is relative, however; it will give Mrs. Porteous something to do."

  "What on earth difference does it make if it was opened or not?"

  "Umbrellas have been known to conceal small articles," said Pons enigmatically.

  "You don't really believe that something was left in that umbrella," I said indignantly. "If so, wouldn't it follow that something was left in each of the other houses entered?"

  Pons smiled. "That is presumptive, certainly, but I would be inclined to doubt it."

  "What is it then?"

  "You have all the facts, Parker. A few trifling deductions should present you with a tenable solution."

  "You are surely striding far ahead," I said.

  "Say rather that I am making a daring assessment of coincidence. You know my feeling about coincidence. We have heard one so glaring that I cannot understand your failure to see it at once."

  "Enlighten me."

  "My dear fellow, within an hour we have had propounded to us two mysteries. ..."