The Crime at the ‘Noah’s Ark’: A Golden Age Mystery

by Molly Thynne

  Stuart observed that he had fallen instinctively into the role of spokesman to the little party, which had now advanced to within earshot of the table at which he sat. He also noticed that the old man inquired first after the cheapest accommodation, and that it was not until the boy in the shabby overcoat had been catered for that he engaged a large front room for himself.

  The landlord conducted them upstairs. On his way down, a few minutes later, he paused at Stuart’s table.

  “Luncheon will be served in a few minutes now, sir,” he said. “You’ll find the coffee-room on the right there.”

  “You’ve got a mixed bag this time,” remarked Stuart, with a smile. “Who’s the old gentleman with the white hair?”

  “Name of Constantine. It sounds foreign to me, but he speaks English all right. Very pleasant gentleman to deal with.”

  “Constantine!” repeated Stuart. “I’ve seen that name somewhere! I remember wondering whether it was Greek, but I can’t get the connection at the moment.”

  He was still worrying over it as he entered the coffee-room five minutes later, and it was not till he was eating his soup that he remembered where he had seen it. He thrust his hand into his pocket and brought out the elaborately got up pamphlet issued by the syndicate that was responsible for the magic transformation of the obscure little fishing village of Redsands. It had certainly left no stone unturned in its efforts to cater for the various tastes of its guests. Among the less frivolous of the entertainments arranged for Christmas week was a chess tournament, and among the names of the various champions who had been persuaded to take part was that of Luke Constantine.

  Lunch had already begun when Stuart took his seat at the table, and he had had little time in which to observe his neighbours. He was tucking the little book away in his pocket when the man on his right addressed him.

  “I see you’re one of the lucky ones,” he remarked genially.

  Stuart failed to get his meaning, and, as was his way when caught at a disadvantage, immediately became absurdly shy.

  “I’m afraid—” he stammered.

  “Bound for Paradise like the rest of them,” explained his neighbour. “Except for those two waiters there, I believe I’m the only poor devil in this room that isn’t, or rather wasn’t, going to Redsands for Christmas. When I saw you come in I had a kind of hope that you might be just an ordinary human being like myself. Then I looked round and there you were, complete with book and all!”

  There was something disarming in the man’s friendliness; something engaging, too, in the rueful voice with its Cockney twang. It dissolved Stuart’s shyness, and, in the reaction, he was moved to candour.

  “To tell you the truth, this is my first visit to Redsands,” he said. “I’ve never been able to afford anything of the sort before, and I don’t suppose I ever shall again. But I thought I’d like to see what it was like.”

  “And you’ll pay through the nose for it by the time you’re through. And what’s more, you’ll get just about the same sort of thing that you’d find at Blackpool, if you waited till next August, only served with a gold spoon, as it were.”

  Stuart laughed.

  “At this rate it doesn’t look much as if I was going to get anything at all,” he said. “It’ll be a queer Christmas if we’re hung up here.”

  “Queerer for me than for you,” was his neighbour’s gloomy rejoinder. “You’ll melt in all right after a day or so, but I see myself sitting alone in the bar. Have you cast an eye on that crowd over there?”

  He jerked his head in the direction of a smaller table placed in the bow window overlooking the street. Stuart glanced at it, and with difficulty suppressed a chuckle, for a more inaccessible little group of people he had seldom seen.

  At one end of the table he recognized the two Misses Adderley. But they had become very different beings from the shivering derelicts he had picked up in the snow. He could only imagine that they had reverted to their Tunbridge Wells manner. Very erect, and icily unconscious of the other occupants of the coffee-room, they were silently lunching. If they had been able to converse in low refined voices they no doubt would have done so, but Miss Connie’s inevitable ear-trumpet made this impossible.

  Before he had time to remove his eyes, Miss Amy saw him and treated him to a bow, so graciously distant that it was all he could do to keep his countenance. He turned his attention hastily to the other occupant of the table. He was seated by himself, facing Miss Connie Adderley, but apparently completely unconscious of her existence. A middle-aged man, whose muscle had run to fat, with a bull neck and an obstinate jaw. He wore a regimental tie, but it was difficult to imagine his slack, bulky figure in uniform.

  “There’s a worse crowd upstairs,” vouchsafed Stuart’s neighbour, with relish. “But they’re so blooming proud that they have their meals in their own sitting-room. Name of Romsey. There’s the old boy and his son and two daughters. And that’s the lot, so far. But it doesn’t look as if we were in for one of those old-world Christmases—parlour games, hunt the slipper, snap dragon, and that sort of thing! Can’t you see them at it?”

  Stuart laughed in spite of himself. He was easily disconcerted, and was already beginning to feel out of things himself, and there was something refreshing about the man’s good-tempered vulgarity.

  “Who’s the fat man, do you know?” he asked.

  His companion snorted.

  “A proper bounder, if you ask me. Major Carew, he signs himself. A War major, I’m willing to bet, demobbed in 1918 and stuck to his rank ever since. He’s the sort that would. Come to that, I could call myself Captain Soames, if I cared to, but I leave that to the regulars. I don’t know who the old ladies are. They’ve only just come, but they don’t seem what you might call pally, exactly.”

  “Their name’s Adderley,” said Stuart. “I’m afraid I’m responsible for them. I picked them up in the snow, and brought them along. They’re harmless enough, really.”

  “All I can say is that you must have a nerve! I’d as soon pick up a nettle! I’m not complaining, and I’m not one to push in where I’m not wanted, but if I’ve got to be here over Christmas, I’d like to find some one I can talk to. I hope this snow lets up and we can get away, that’s all.”

  “We shall get off all right. It can’t go on like this for ever. Anyway, we’re not going to be dependent on them for company. A motor bus came in just now with a load of three. Two of them look decent enough.” Soames gave a groan.

  “Good lord, only two? What’s the matter with the third?”

  “I’ll leave you to judge,” answered Stuart, as the door opened to admit the occupants of the motor coach.

  He waited with glee for his companion’s first trenchant comment, as the young exquisite, even more beautifully tailored than before, now that he had shed his outer garments, strolled up to their table. But none came. He glanced at his neighbour. Soames’s face had lost its habitual look of cheerful effrontery, and there was an expression almost of awe in his eyes as he watched the oldest member of the little party take his seat on the opposite side of the table at which they sat.

  For a while they ate in silence. Then suddenly, as though he could contain himself no longer, Soames leaned forward.

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said. “But aren’t you Dr. Constantine?”

  “That is my name,” answered the older man, with a ready courtesy that relieved Stuart. He realized suddenly how much he would have disliked to see his neighbour snubbed.

  “I knew you as soon as you came in,” went on Soames eagerly. “That was a great game you played against Zilitzky at the Caxton Hall, if you’ll allow me to say so.”

  The old man’s eyes lit up with interest.

  “If I had dreamed that I was going to meet a chess enthusiast I should have taken my misfortunes more philosophically,” he said. “You play, of course?”

  Soames’s jolly face grew a shade redder.

  “I’m no match for any tournament player, sir,�
� he answered. “It’s just a hobby with me, as it were, and being always on the road, I don’t get much chance of playing. There’s a little chess club I belong to, but it isn’t often I manage to get down there.”

  The old man gave a sigh of relief.

  “Then two of us, at least, are independent of the weather,” he announced with conviction. “It may go on snowing till doomsday for all I care. That is to say, if you will take pity on a marooned chess maniac and play with me!”

  Soames’s face was a study in pleasure and gratification.

  “I should count it an honour, sir,” he stammered; and thus it was that two of the most incongruous figures in that mixed caravanserai entered into a partnership that was to outlast all the strange happenings of that Christmas week.

  After that the conversation became general. Gradually each member of the party revealed himself. The genial Soames was, as Stuart had suspected, a commercial traveller, bound for the Station Hotel at Thorley, a house of call much more to his liking than the one in which he found himself. The shy boy, a chartered accountant’s clerk, had been on his way to a village some twenty miles off, where he had intended to spend his brief holiday.

  Stuart noticed that it was the old man, Constantine, who deftly evoked these particulars. His interest and sympathy seemed so genuine as to rob the questions that dropped from him casually in the course of conversation, of all offence.

  As they rose from the table he made a characteristic suggestion.

  “I have a suspicion,” he said, “that we are only the forerunners of quite a procession of refugees. Also, it is beginning to look as if we should be obliged to spend several days, at least, in their company. Look at that!”

  He pointed to the window, through which the snow could be seen falling heavily.

  “That being the case,” he went on, “I propose to take up my position as near as possible to that very pleasant fire in the lounge, and gratify my insatiable curiosity by watching the rest of the party arrive. Incidentally, there seems nothing else to do!”

  Stuart was only too ready to join him. Soames and the boy, Trevor, disappeared to their rooms.

  “Talking of curiosity,” remarked Constantine, as he settled himself as comfortably as was consistent with the vagaries of his rather battered wicker chair, “I am afraid I have been pumping the landlord! He told me your name, and, unless I am mistaken, you are a very fortunate person. What is a vice in me is a sacred duty to you. Observation, which after all is only another name for curiosity, is your trade. You are the Angus Stuart who wrote The Appian Way?”

  Stuart blushed.

  “I’m afraid I must plead guilty,” he answered.

  “Why? It is a very good book. Rather a remarkable book for a man of your age. It is a great thing to have learned so much, without bitterness, in so short a time. All of which speaks well for curiosity,” he concluded, with an infectious twinkle in his dark eyes.

  Upon which, as he had no doubt intended, Stuart promptly told him all about himself.

  “Well, you are in luck’s way,” was the old man’s comment when he had finished. “By nightfall this inn should be teeming with material for a novelist, and it may be that we shall be as completely isolated from the outside world as the inhabitants of the original Noah’s Ark. You will have your copy thrust at you, so to speak. I was once snowed up for a fortnight in Canada, years ago, and it is a very curious experience, I can assure you. Men become very primitive when they are bored, and with the exception of ourselves and our friend Soames, who I hope is going to play chess with me, everybody is going to be bored to extinction.”

  Stuart laughed.

  “If the worst comes to the worst, I’ve got a pile of proofs with me. I may as well correct them here as at Redsands.”

  Soames rejoined them, and Constantine immediately began to draw out all that was best and most interesting in the commercial traveller. It was part of Soames’s job to gauge the psychological reactions of his customers, and he was an expert in his own line. His shrewd comments on men and things showed him in quite a new light, and Stuart, as he sat and listened to the two older men, felt in little danger of succumbing to boredom.

  They had been talking for nearly an hour when an icy blast from the front door heralded the arrival of a fresh batch of derelicts.

  Now we shall see,” murmured Constantine contentedly, settling himself deeper in his chair.

  This time the predominating note of the party that entered was unmistakably that of affluence. It was easy to imagine the type of car which had discharged the litter of Bond Street gilt and lizard skin that was being borne by a chauffeur in the wake of a large, perfectly upholstered lady, whose voice immediately proclaimed her American origin. She was followed by a fair, quietly dressed girl—evidently a dependent of some sort—and an obvious lady’s-maid, carrying a green morocco dressing-case.

  As she threw open the front of her perfectly matched sable coat and drew off her gloves, she positively burst into scintillation. Stuart was irresistibly reminded of a newly-lit chandelier. Emeralds flashed on her plump white hands, and a bevy of little brooches, dotted here and there over her expansive bosom, vied with the diamonds in her ears. A more incongruous figure had probably never before graced the dingy lounge of the old inn.

  “Well, I guess we’ll just have to make the best of it!” was her comment, as her disparaging glance swept her surroundings, and, coming to rest on the little group at the foot of the stairs, dismissed them as completely negligible.

  “And we’ll just have to make the best of you,” murmured the irrepressible Soames, as she swept upstairs, followed by her retinue.

  “Curiously enough,” remarked Constantine when she was out of hearing, “I can tell you a good deal about that lady. She has been pointed out to me several times. She is a Mrs. van Dolen, the widow of a rich American banker, and is chiefly remarkable for two things: the number of husbands she has tried and found wanting, and a certain emerald girdle that forms part of the regalia—I gather there is no other word for it—that she has been amassing for the last twenty years.”

  “It must be an uncommonly large girdle,” was Soames’s irreverent comment.

  “I am told that it has increased with the years,” Constantine informed him gravely. “Every stone in weight that she has put on has cost her thousands of pounds. As you may have guessed from my name, I am half Greek, and the Greeks of London are not only lovers but connoisseurs of precious stones. I have heard that girdle exhaustively discussed in the Greek colony, and from all accounts it is a very lovely piece of workmanship. The emeralds are linked together by a narrow, very flexible, gold and platinum band. An Italian firm in Paris made it.”

  An excited monologue broke out at the head of the stairs. Soames, whose seat was the only one that commanded a complete view of the staircase, grinned delightedly.

  “I can tell you what that is,” he announced. “Your American friend has clicked with the noble lord!”

  “Hence the paean of triumph,” murmured Constantine. The chances are that she has sat on some charitable committee with him, and has never relinquished her grasp on him since. I am told that her pertinacity is amazing.”

  “Does she live in England?” asked Stuart.

  “She lives in hotels—anywhere—provided the hotel is expensive enough. During the London season she takes a furnished house and entertains lavishly. From all accounts she is an amazing creature. The story goes that her first husband took her from behind the bar of a public-house in Deptford, and that she has only acquired her American accent of late years. Her enemies say that she is apt to revert to Cockney in moments of stress.”

  He shifted his seat and peered round the corner of the oak stair-rail, only to give a gasp of dismay.

  “Lord Romsey!” he exclaimed. “I know him, and, what’s more unfortunate still, he knows me.”

  Stuart, following his example, caught a vision of a portly figure; above it, a pale, expressionless face, surmounting a mass
ive double chin, and then Lord Romsey was upon them.

  “Ha, Constantine!” he exclaimed, advancing with ponderous affability. “On your way to Redsands, of course!”

  “I suppose you may call it that,” admitted Constantine. “Though it seems a somewhat optimistic way of putting it.”

  Lord Romsey’s pale, rather protruding eyes fastened themselves suspiciously on Constantine’s face. He did not like jokes, and he had a dim idea that the older man had endeavoured to perpetrate one.

  “Ah, the weather,” he ejaculated, his seriousness unmarred. “We can only hope it may mend. As a matter of fact, I came downstairs to see if there was any possibility of a short stroll before tea. Our sitting-room is a little cramped. Do you feel inclined to come with me?”

  Constantine smiled and shook his head.

  “I detest exercise for its own sake,” he said. “And I have at last reached an age at which I dare say so; besides which, it is still snowing very heavily.”

  Lord Romsey’s heavy face looked slightly perturbed.

  “My son and daughter are out in it,” he said. “I was thinking of joining them.”

  He strolled through the open door into the coffee-room. They watched him, a dark, majestic figure, standing by the window, gazing out into the falling snow.

  Constantine smiled.

  “The greatest bore in Christendom,” he murmured. “And it has paid him well. They gave him a Colonial appointment to get him out of the House of Commons, but he made such a hash of that that they simply had to recall him. Then he wormed his way back into the House, and was so insufferable there that they made him Baron Romsey of Romsey and sent him to the House of Lords.”