CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Margery Allingham
Map
Dedication
Title Page
1. ‘Reward for Finder?’
2. Little Pink Cakes
3. The Fairy Tale
4. Brush with the County
5. Penny: For Your Thoughts
6. The Storm Breaks
7. Death in the House
8. The Professional Touch
9. The Indelicate Creature
10. Two Angry Ladies
11. Mr Campion Subscribes
12. Holding the Baby
13. ‘I. Melchizadek Fecit’
14. Fifty-seven Varieties
15. Pharisees’ Clearing
16. Phenomenon
17. The Stack Net
18. Survival
19. ‘What Should A Do?’
20. Trunk Call
21. The Yellow Caravan
22. The Three-Card Trick
23. ‘Madame, Will You Talk?’
24. Bitter Aloes
25. The Window
26. Mr Campion’s Employer
27. There were Giants in those Days
Also available in Vintage Murder Mysteries
Vintage Murder Mysteries
Copyright
About the Book
Finding himself the victim of a botched kidnapping attempt, Val Gyrth suspects that he might be in a spot of trouble. Unexpected news to him – but not to the mysterious Mr Campion, who reveals that the ancient Chalice entrusted to Val’s family is being targeted by a ruthless ring of thieves.
Fleeing London for the supposed safety of Suffolk, Val and Campion come face to face with events of a perilous and puzzling nature – Campion might be accustomed to outwitting criminal minds, but can he foil supernatural forces?
About the Author
Margery Allingham was born in London in 1904. She attended the Perse School in Cambridge before returning to London to the Regent Street Polytechnic. Her father – author H.J. Allingham – encouraged her to write, and was delighted when her first story was published when she was thirteen in her aunt’s magazine, Mother and Home.
Her first novel was published when she was seventeen. In 1928 she published her first detective story, The White Cottage Mystery, which had been serialised in the Daily Express. The following year, in The Crime at Black Dudley, she introduced the character who was to become the hallmark of her writing – Albert Campion. Her novels heralded the more sophisticated suspense genre: characterised by her intuitive intelligence, extraordinary energy and accurate observation, they vary from the grave to the openly satirical, whilst never losing sight of the basic rules of the classic detective tale. Famous for her London thrillers, such as Hide My Eyes and The Tiger in the Smoke, she has been compared to Dickens in her evocation of the city’s shady underworld.
In 1927 she married the artist, journalist and editor Philip Youngman Carter. They divided their time between their Bloomsbury flat and an old house in the village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex. Margery Allingham died in 1966.
ALSO BY MARGERY ALLINGHAM IN THE ALBERT CAMPION SERIES
The Crime at Black Dudley
Mystery Mile
Police at the Funeral
Sweet Danger
Death of a Ghost
Dancers in Mourning
The Case of the Late Pig
The Fashion in Shrouds
Mr Campion and Others
Black Plumes
Traitor’s Purse
Coroner’s Pidgin
The Casebook of Mr Campion
More Work for the Undertaker
The Tiger in the Smoke
The Beckoning Lady
Hide my Eyes
The China Governess
The Mind Readers
A Cargo of Eagles
To
Orlando
CHAPTER 1
‘Reward for Finder?’
—
‘IF you’ll accept this, sir,’ said the policeman, pressing a shilling into the down-and-out’s hand, ‘you’ll have visible means of support and I shan’t have to take you along. But,’ he added with a delightful hint of embarrassment, ‘I’ll have to ask you to move on; the Inspector is due round any minute.’
Percival St John Wykes Gyrth, only son of Colonel Sir Percival Christian St John Gyrth, Bt, of the Tower, Sanctuary, Suffolk, reddened painfully, thrust the coin into his trouser pocket, and smiled at his benefactor.
‘Thank you, Baker,’ he said. ‘This is extraordinarily kind of you. I shan’t forget it.’
‘That’s all right, sir.’ The man’s embarrassment increased. ‘You gave me five pounds the night you was married.’ He opened his mouth as though to continue, but thought the better of it, and the young man’s next remark indicated clearly that he was in no mood for reminiscences.
‘I say, where the devil can I sit where I shan’t be moved on?’
The policeman glanced nervously up South Molton Street, whence even now the dapper form of the Inspector was slowly approaching.
‘Ebury Square – just off Southampton Row,’ he murmured hastily. ‘You’ll be as safe as houses there. Good night, sir.’
The final words were a dismissal; the Inspector was almost upon them. Val Gyrth pulled his battered hat over his eyes, and hunching his shoulders, shuffled off towards Oxford Street. His ‘visible means of support’ flopped solitarily in the one safe ‘I pocket of his suit, a suit which had once come reverently from the hands of the tailor whose shop he was passing. He crossed into Oxford Street and turned up towards the Circus.
It was a little after midnight and the wide road was almost deserted. There were a few returning revellers, a sprinkling of taxicabs, and an occasional late bus.
Val Gyrth chose the inside of the pavement, keeping as much in the shadow as possible. The summer smell of the city, warm and slightly scented like a chemist’s shop, came familiarly to his nostrils and in spite of his weariness there was an impatience in his step. He was bitterly angry with himself. The situation was impossible, quixotic and ridiculous. Old Baker had given him a shilling to save him from arrest as a vagrant on his own doorstep. It was unthinkable.
He had not eaten since the night before, but he passed the coffee-stall outside the French hat shop in the Circus without a thought. He had ceased to feel hungry at about four o’clock that afternoon and had been surprised and thankful at the respite. The swimming sensation which had taken the place of it seemed eminently preferable.
The pavement was hot to that part of his foot which touched it through the hole in an expensive shoe, and he was beginning to limp when he turned down by Mudie’s old building and found himself after another five minutes’ plodding in a dishevelled little square whose paved centre was intersected by two rows of dirty plane trees, beneath which, amid the litter of a summer’s day, were several dilapidated wooden benches. There were one or two unsavoury-looking bundles dotted here and there, but there were two seats unoccupied. Val Gyrth chose the one under a street lamp and most aloof from its fellows; he sank down, realizing for the first time the full sum of his weariness.
A shiver ran through the dusty leaves above his head, and as he glanced about him he became obsessed with a curious feeling of apprehension which could not be explained by the sudden chill of the night. A car passed through the square, and from far off beyond the Strand came the mournful bellow of a tug on the river. None of the bundles huddled on the other seats stirred, but it seemed to the boy, one of the least imaginative of an unimaginative race, that something enormous and of great importance was about to happen, or was, indeed, in the very act of happening all
round him; a sensation perhaps explainable by partial starvation and a potential thunderstorm.
He took off his hat and passed his fingers through his very fair hair, the increasing length of which was a continual source of annoyance to him. He was a thick-set, powerful youngster in his early twenties, with a heavy but by no means unhandsome face and an habitual expression of dogged obstinacy; a pure Anglo-Saxon type, chiefly remarkable at the moment for a certain unnatural gauntness which accentuated the thickness of his bones.
He sighed, turned up his coat collar, and was about to lift his feet out of the miscellaneous collection of paper bags, orange skins and cigarette cartons on to the bench, when he paused and sat up stiffly, staring down at the ground in front of him. He was conscious of a sudden wave of heat passing over him, of an odd shock that made his heart jump unpleasantly.
He was looking at his own name, written on a battered envelope lying face upwards among the other litter.
He picked it up and was astonished to see that his hand was shaking. The name was unmistakable. ‘P. St J.W. Gyrth, Esq.’ written clearly in a hand he did not know.
He turned the envelope over. It was an expensive one, and empty, having been torn open across the top apparently by an impatient hand. He sat staring at it for some moments, and a feeling of unreality took possession of him. The address, ‘Kemp’s, 32a Wembley Road, Clerkenwell, EC1’, was completely unfamiliar.
He stared at it as though he expected the words to change before his eyes, but they remained clear and unmistakable: ‘P. St J.W. Gyrth, Esq.’
At first it did not occur to him to doubt that the name was his own, or that the envelope had been originally intended for him. Gyrth is an unusual name, and the odd collection of initials combined with it made it impossible for him to think that in this case it could belong to anyone else.
He studied the handwriting thoughtfully, trying to place it. His mind had accepted the astounding coincidence which had brought him to this particular seat in this particular square and led him to pick up the one envelope which bore his name. He hunted among the rubbish at his feet in a futile attempt to find the contents of the envelope, but an exhaustive search convinced him that the paper in his hand was all that was of interest to him there.
The hand puzzled him. It was distinctive, square, with heavy downstrokes and sharp Greek E’s; individual handwriting, not easily to be forgotten. He turned his attention to the postmark, and the bewildered expression upon his young face became one of blank astonishment. It was dated the fifteenth of June. Today was the nineteenth. The letter was therefore only four days old.
It was over a week since he had possessed any address. Yet he was convinced, and the fact was somehow slightly uncanny and unnerving, that someone had written to him, and someone else had received the letter, the envelope of which had been thrown away to be found by himself.
Not the least remarkable thing about a coincidence is that once it has happened, one names it, accepts it, and leaves it at that.
Gyrth sat on the dusty seat beneath the street lamp and looked at the envelope. The rustling in the leaves above his head had grown fiercer, and an uncertain wind ricocheted down the square; in a few minutes it would rain.
Once again he was conscious of that strange sensation of being just on the outside of some drama enacted quite near to him. He had felt it before tonight. Several times in the past few days this same uneasy feeling had swept over him in the most crowded streets at the height of noon, or at night in the dark alleyways of the city where he had tried to sleep. Experienced criminals recognise this sensation as the instinctive knowledge that one is being ‘tailed’, but young Gyrth was no criminal, nor was he particularly experienced in anything save the more unfortunate aspects of matrimony.
He looked again at the address on the tantalizing envelope: ‘32a Wembley Rd, Clerkenwell.’ This was not far from where he now sat, he reflected, and the impulse to go there to find out for himself if he were not the only P. St J. W. Gyrth in the world, or, if he was, to discover who was impersonating him, was very strong.
His was a conservative nature, however, and perhaps if the experience had happened to him in ordinary circumstances he would have shrugged his shoulders and taken no further active interest in the matter. But at the moment he was down-and-out. A man who is literally destitute is like a straw in the wind; any tiny current is sufficient to set him drifting in a new direction. His time and energies are of no value to him; anything is worth while. Impelled by curiosity, therefore, he set off across the square, the storm blowing up behind him.
He did not know what he expected to find, but the envelope fascinated him. He gave up conjecturing and hurried.
Clerkenwell in the early hours of the morning is one of the most unsavoury neighbourhoods in the whole of East Central London, which is saying a great deal, and the young man’s ragged and dishevelled appearance was probably the only one which would not have attracted the attention of those few inhabitants who were still abroad.
At length he discovered a pair of policemen, of whom he inquired the way, gripping their colleague’s shilling defiantly as he did so. They directed him with the unhurried omniscience of their kind, and he eventually found himself crossing a dirty ill-lit thoroughfare intersected with tramlines and flanked by the lowest of all lodging-houses, and shabby dusty little shops where everything seemed to be second-hand.
Number 32a turned out to be one of the few establishments still open.
It was an eating-house, unsavoury even for the neighbourhood, and one stepped down off the pavement a good eighteen inches to reach the level of the ground floor. Even Val Gyrth, now the least cautious of men, hesitated before entering.
The half-glass door of the shop was pasted over with cheap advertisements for boot polish and a brand of caramel, and the light from within struggled uncertainly through the dirty oiled paper.
Gyrth glanced at the envelope once more and decided that there was no doubt at all that this was his destination. The number, 32a, was printed on a white enamelled plaque above the door, and the name ‘Kemp’s’ was written across the shop front in foot-high letters.
Once again the full sense of the absurdity of his quest came over him, and he hesitated, but again he reflected that he had nothing to lose and his curiosity to appease. He turned the door-handle and stepped down into the room.
The fetid atmosphere within was so full of steam that for a moment he could not see at all where he was. He stood still for some seconds trying to penetrate the haze, and at last made out a long dingy room flanked with high, greasy pew seats, which appeared to be empty.
At the far end of the aisle between the tables there was a counter and a cooking-stove from which the atmosphere obtained most of its quality. Towards this gastronomic altar the young man advanced, the envelope clutched tightly in his coat pocket.
There was no one in sight, so he tapped the counter irresolutely. Almost immediately a door to the right of the stove was jerked open and there appeared a mountain of a man with the largest and most lugubrious face he had ever seen. A small tablecloth had been tied across the newcomer’s stomach by way of an apron, and his great muscular arms were bare to the elbow. For the rest, his head was bald, and the bone of his nose had sustained an irreparable injury.
He regarded the young man with mournful eyes.
‘This is a nice time to think about getting a bit of food,’ he observed more in sorrow than in anger, thereby revealing a sepulchral voice. ‘Everything’s off but sausage and mash. I’m ’aving the last bit o’ stoo meself.’
Gyrth was comforted by his melancholy affability. It was some time since an eating-house keeper had treated him with even ordinary humanity. He took the envelope out of his pocket and spread it out on the counter before the man.
‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Do you know anything about this?’
Not a muscle of the lugubrious face stirred. The mountainous stranger eyed the envelope for some time as if he had never seen such
a thing before and was not certain if it were worth consideration. Then, turning suddenly, he looked the boy straight in the eyes and made what was in the circumstances a most extraordinary observation.
‘I see,’ he said clearly, and with a slightly unnecessary deliberation, ‘you take the long road.’
Gyrth stared at him. He felt that some reply was expected, that the words had some significance which was lost upon him. He laughed awkwardly.
‘I don’t quite follow you,’ he said. ‘I suppose I am tramping, if that’s what you mean? But I came to inquire about this envelope. Have you seen it before?’
The big man ventured as near a smile as Gyrth felt his features would permit.
‘Suppose I ’ave?’ he said cautiously. ‘Wot then?’
‘Only that it happens to be addressed to me, and I’m anxious to know who opened it,’ said Gyrth shortly. ‘Can you tell me who collected it?’
‘Is that your name?’ The big man placed a heavy forefinger upon the inscription. ‘I suppose you couldn’t prove it, could yer?’
Gyrth grew red and uncomfortable. ‘I can’t get anyone to identify me, if that’s what you mean, and I haven’t got a visiting-card. But,’ he added, ‘if you care to take my tailor’s word for it there’s the tab inside my coat here.’
He unbuttoned the threadbare garment and turned down the edge of the inside breast pocket, displaying a tailor’s label with his name and the date written in ink across it. In his eagerness he did not realize the incongruity of the situation.
The sad man read the label and then surveyed his visitor critically.
‘I suppose it was made for yer?’ he said.
Gyrth buttoned up his coat. ‘I’ve got thinner,’ he said shortly.
‘Awright. No offence,’ said the other. ‘I believe yer – some wouldn’t. Name o’ Lugg meself. Pleased to meet yer, I’m sure. I got another letter for you, by the way.’
He turned round ponderously, and after searching among the cups and plates upon the dresser behind him, he returned bearing a similar envelope to the one which Gyrth had put down upon the counter. It was unopened.
Look to the Lady Page 1
