The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  Now at the beginning of a new decade all seemed to be as it once had been. Yet before a single ball had been bowled after the lunch interval, murder was to splatter an ugly blot on the fair surface of the day.

  At the time that it took place none of the nine or ten thousand spectators, in whose ranks the late conflict had cut such a swathe, knew, of course, that it had happened. It was only in the days succeeding the match that the news of it came to dominate every conversation. During the interval they had, as was the custom in “the old days”, strolled about on the grass in front of the Pavilion, the gentlemen in tall shining silk hats, their womenfolk twirling bright parasols in dresses and hats as elaborate and striking as money could buy, if here and there could be seen a skirt that allowed stockinged calves to be fully in view.

  “I had hoped,” the Bishop of Cirencester, the Right Reverend Dr Pelham Rossiter, remarked, catching sight of one young lady so dressed, “that no such indication of the dreadful decline in the country’s morality would be seen here today of all days. But it was, I fear, a hope destined to perish.”

  “My dear bishop,” his companion, Wilfred Boultbee, the well-known City solicitor, replied, “I can see the day when ladies without even hats will be admitted at Lord’s, and heaven knows what depravities will go along with that.” His full grey moustache sank to an even lower angle than habitually.

  The two of them wandered on, gently digesting their shares of the lobsters and pigeon pies, the salmon mayonnaise and tender lamb that had been provided after the long years of wartime deprivation in all the abundance of the milk-and-honey days of yore. The last bubbles of champagne gently eructated behind their firmly closed lips.

  Just a few yards away a rather less elevated conversation was taking place between two other people soon to be caught up in the murder.

  “God, what a fearful bore a day like this is,” Julia Hogsnorton, daughter of the Earl, exclaimed to the Hon. Peter Flaxman, immaculate in beautifully brushed tall hat, tailcoat fitted to the twentieth of an inch over broad shoulders, pale spats just visible at the ends of black-and-white striped trousers, thin dark moustache trimmed to a nicety. “I can’t imagine how you can stand it.”

  “My dear girl, I stood it for four years before the war, and even enjoyed it then, in a way. Nice to show one is one of the world, you know. So I don’t find it impossible to enjoy it all again today. Since the fools with money are prepared to lay it on for me, and those Jewish Scotsmen are prepared to provide me with some cash, I’m happy to take advantage of their kindness. It’s better than Flanders fields.”

  “Not that you spent much time slogging through the mud there, flinging yourself down in it each time a shell landed. Or not if what you told me one drunken evening was true. An A.D.C. somewhere well behind the lines, wasn’t it?”

  “Fortunes of war, old girl. Fortunes of war. But, talking of drunken evenings, shall we go back to the tent? I seem to remember unopened bottles lurking somewhere in the background.”

  “Oh, all right. But it can’t go on for ever, you know, this relying on the gods and the moneylenders. A lady begins sometimes to feel uncomfortable in circumstances like that.”

  “Well, you’ll have to put up with circumstances like that, unless you can suggest a way I can unclasp old Boultbee’s tight fists.”

  He walked on, at a slightly faster pace than before.

  Unpleasant revelations were, too, manifesting themselves now to the older moral couple digesting their luncheon.

  “Bishop, excuse me,” Wilfred Boultbee said abruptly. “I think I really must – Well, I think I should return to the luncheon tent. My soda-mint lozenges. I had them on the table, preparatory to taking one as I customarily do after any meal, but somehow I failed to see them as I left. But now I feel the need, acutely. You know my weakness of old, since we were at school even. A digestion that – how shall I put it? – that frequently fails to digest.”

  “I remember. Indeed I do. What was it we called you? Belcher Boultbee. Yes, that was it. Old Belcher Boultbee.”

  His richly reverberant episcopal laugh rang out.

  But Belcher Boultbee was immune to it. He had suddenly spotted something, or rather someone, yet more irritating to himself than a young woman showing her calves.

  “Bishop,” he said, “let’s, for heaven’s sake, step out. I see that French fellow’s heading back to the tent, chap young Flaxman insisted on bringing to luncheon. I had hoped, once we’d eaten, he would have the decency to remove himself. It seems he has not.”

  “I’ll step out, if you want, though I must confess I found our foreign friend – What did Flaxman say he was called? The Comte de – de somewhere. I found him agreeable enough.”

  “Oh, agreeable,” the City solicitor replied. “Yes, he’s all of that. It’s what you might call his stock-in-trade. And, for all that title of his, trade is what he’s about. I happen to know rather more about the fellow than he’d like to think I do.”

  “Very well, let’s get there before him. Perhaps he’ll sheer off if he sees us. For myself perhaps I’ll take just one more glass of champagne. And you can consume your soda-mint lozenge.”

  A more modest version of the rich episcopal laugh could be heard as they hurried on.

  Equally making their slow way towards the tent where they had lunched were the last two members of the party whom the murder was deeply to concern, Peter Flaxman’s cousin, Captain Vyvyan Andrews – they were both distantly related to Bishop Rossiter, the host – with his wife, Mary. Their conversation, too, was not as placidly reminiscent of the past days of glory as it might have been. But they had better reasons for lacking in joie-de-vivre.

  “We should never have agreed to come,” Vyvyan Andrews, pale-faced to the point where his fair, once military moustache seemed almost to have vanished away, in his borrowed tailcoat and slightly stain-marked silk hat, was saying in a bitter undertone. “Never, never. I told you. But you would do it.”

  “But, darling, it was because – Well, because I hoped it would do you good, cheer you up.”

  “Cheer me up. You’re pathetic, pathetic. How can you believe all I need is to be cheered up, as if I was having a bad cold, or a bit of a belly-ache? But I’m not sniffling and snuffling. I’m ill. Ill. My whole inside’s been gassed out, and I’ll never be the same again. Never.”

  He came to an abrupt standstill, plunged his hand feverishly into the top pocket of the frayed and ancient tailcoat, pulled out, not a silver cigarette case, but a crumpled packet of gaspers, fumbled one into his mouth.

  His wife, ever alert, opened her handbag, extracted a box of matches, lit one and held it, in both hands for steadiness, to the up-and-down jiggling tip of the cheap cigarette.

  Stolidly watching the little scene some dozen yards away, PC Williams thought enviously for a moment of the man who could light up whenever he wanted. On duty, keeping a benevolent eye – an eye, to tell the truth, a good deal more benevolent than that of the Bishop of Cirencester – on the nobility and the gentry strolling in the sunshine, no hope for him of the pleasure of tobacco for many hours to come. Especially since he was also keeping a less benevolent eye on the free seats not much further off where a small number of members of the proletariat, not top-hatted though equipped with squashy low-brimmed head-wear, awaited the resumption of play.

  But then, taking in how much that feverishly puffed-at cigarette must be meaning to a man with uncontrollably trembling hands and twitching facial muscles, PC Williams abruptly found envy was not at all what he was feeling.

  “I can’t even hold down a job,” he could make out Captain Andrews’ raised voice saying. “Not even when I manage to get one. Having to depend on my wife going out to work. Yes, on you working, and working for a pittance. And you talk of cheering me up.”

  “Darling, I don’t mind going out to work. I’m only glad Mr Boultbee found me something to do in his office.”

  “Yes, a piece of charity. From that tight-fisted monster who’s our trust
ee. And what are you there? A filing clerk, a filing clerk.”

  “But, darling, Mr Boultbee – and I know he does treat the family trust as if it was his private fortune, not a penny to be spent from it except under duress – does need someone to file away the documents in that office, and it should be someone who’s responsible enough to handle things which could be terribly important. So you can’t really say I’m being paid out of charity. You know you can’t.”

  “All I know is that day after day I feel terrible. I wish to God Jerry had put me out once and for all. Yes, I do.”

  He gave his wife, in her sad imitation of the de rigueur extravagant hats and dresses of the strolling ladies of the Upper Ten Thousand, a look that was not far short of being one of hatred.

  “Darling,” she said, “let’s go in and sit down. Perhaps some champagne . . .”

  When PC Williams had safely seen Captain Andrews and his long-suffering wife, closely followed by the Hon. Peter Flaxman with his lady-of-the-moment and the dandified figure of the French count, enter the isolated little pavilion-like tent, from which earlier he had been able all too clearly to hear the clink of china, the popping of corks, he did not hear again, as he had expected, the murmur of smooth conversation and occasional discreet laughter. Instead, there was a ear-piercing shriek and then voices raised in sharp questioning.

  A moment later he found himself summoned with a single imperious gesture by Peter Flaxman. And, still helmeted, as he stooped to enter the tent in his turn, he saw Wilfred Boultbee, City solicitor, trustee of the estates of a dozen of the noblest and richest families in Great Britain, frigid moralist, lying slumped across the long-ago cleared lunch table, his right hand clutching a large white table-napkin. At the solicitor’s side there was standing, distraught and utterly unbishop-like for all his purple vest and immaculate dog-collar, the Right Reverend Dr Pelham Rossiter.

  Williams immediately took charge. He noted names, even those of the caterers. He examined the scene, as much of it as there was to be examined, an empty round table with gilt chairs still more or less in their places, a side table on which there remained four or five bottles of champagne together with a dozen or so of wide-brimmed glasses. He ascertained that Wilfred Boultbee was indeed dead and that near the hand clutching, as he was to say later, “with demonic strength” that napkin, there was a worn little tin in which there rested four flat white soda-mint lozenges. He suggested that Bishop Rossiter should sit in a chair in the corner.

  “You’ll be better off resting, your – your Grace,” he said, thereby showing he had taken in at a glance the purple vest. “It must have come as a shock to you. Quite a shock.”

  Then, looking at the deflated, trembling man, he decided that, if ever any evidence untainted by afterthoughts was to be obtained it had better be before the bishop was taken away to recover.

  “Sir, your reverence, my lord, could you just tell me what happened? You’d not been in the tent here for as much as a minute – I happened to notice you arriving with – That is, I happened to notice you arriving – before I heard that loud cry, anguished it was, yes, anguished.”

  “Very well, I–I’ll try.”

  He managed to look up.

  “I–I–I – He took one of his lozenges, soda-mint lozenges. We’d come back for . . . Old Belcher for once forgot – He took one from – from that little – that tin he has. And – and – one crunch and – and he gave that terrible cry and was dead. I-I know very well when a soul has gone to the Great Father of us all. My sad task, clergyman . . . Often at the bedside . . .”

  “Thank you, your Rev – Grace, my Lord. That was most helpful.”

  PC Williams consulted the big silver watch from his pocket, pulled out his notebook, wrote ponderously for a little. Then, stepping to the door of the tent, but not a foot further, he blew his whistle to call for assistance.

  So it was that at noon next day Detective Inspector Thompson, shrewd-faced, grey-haired, upright, found himself standing in front of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, summoned to give an account of his investigation of an affair all but dominating that morning’s newspapers from the stately Morning Post down.

  “I’m afraid it’s going to be a nasty business, sir,” he said. “Baffling, the Daily Mail called it.”

  “I dare say it did, Inspector. But you’re a Scotland Yard officer and we are not baffled at Scotland Yard. I require you to bring the matter to a conclusion in the shortest possible time. Damn it, man, from what I understand the possible suspects inside the locked gates of Lord’s cricket ground comprise almost every member of the Upper Ten Thousand, Dukes and Earls and Cabinet Ministers among them. Unless – certainly the best possible outcome – you find your man is some disgruntled person from the free seats.”

  “Not any chance of that, sir, I’m sorry to say. The luncheon tent in which the tragedy occurred was under the eye all morning of PC Williams, from the Albany Street station, a man I once had under my command. A thoroughly reliable fellow. If anyone unauthorized entered that tent at any time Williams will have see them. I can promise you that.”

  The Commissioner puffed out a huge sigh of relief.

  “Well, that would seem to eliminate the majority of the spectators,” he said. “The Cabinet Ministers along with the riff-raff from the free seats.”

  He sat in thought for a few moments. Then looked up, eyes bright with hope.

  “The waiters,” he exclaimed. “There’ll have been two or three of them at least in that tent, and you get some pretty dubious characters among such people nowadays with so many unemployed about, a good many of them resentful and undisciplined.”

  “Looking into them was one of my first tasks, sir. And I can say with assurance that both of them – they numbered only two, as a matter of fact – have been vouched for. Elderly men, in service with the catering firm in question from before the War and too old to have been called to the colours.”

  The Commissioner, who was in full uniform, picked up his leather-covered swagger-stick from the desk in front of him, appeared to give it a close scrutiny and then replaced it.

  “Tell me, Inspector,” he said. “Have I got the situation right? Mr Boultbee died as the result of – ha – ingesting what appeared to be a common soda-mint lozenge– Good God, I take the things myself on occasion – but which had been treated with a poison. Do we yet know what particular substance it was? Eh? Eh?”

  “No, sir, we don’t. None of the four remaining mints in the tin have proved to be other than what they ought to be, and – And we shan’t know precisely what was in the gentleman’s stomach until further tests have been carried out. But, as you will know, sir, it is by no means impossible for a determined murderer to get hold of what they need. A visit to some chemist’s shop at a distance, a false signature in the Poisons Book, it’s altogether too easy.”

  “Yes. Very well, Inspector. I suppose our man – Unless, by God, it’s a woman. Poison’s a woman’s weapon, you know. There were ladies present, weren’t there?”

  “Yes, sir. Miss Julia Hogsnorton, younger daughter of Earl Hogsnorton—”

  “Well, I don’t believe . . . No, perhaps we should bear that young lady in mind. Now I come to think of it, I’ve heard she’s rather wild like a lot of young women these days. What they’re calling the post-war generation. But who was the other lady there?”

  “Mrs Mary Andrews, sir, wife of Captain Vyvyan Andrews, who was also present of course.”

  “Hm. Anything known, eh?”

  “No, sir. A thoroughly respectable lady, sir. However, there is one circumstance that may be relevant.”

  “Well, let’s hear, man. Let’s hear it.”

  “Mrs Andrews is employed in the office of Mr Boultbee, sir. She works as a filing clerk. Something of a sinecure post, sir, I’ve gathered. Captain Andrews is one of the casualties of the War, sir, a victim, as I understand from his doctor, of neurasthenia arising from his experiences in the trenches and no-man’s-land.”


  “Hm. You seem to have covered a good deal of ground in the last twenty-four hours, Inspector.”

  For a moment the Commissioner looked at his comparatively junior officer with an air of interest.

  But it was for a moment only.

  “Very well. So much for the female element. Species more deadly than the male, eh? Rudyard Kipling said that somewhere just last year. We shouldn’t forget it. But who were the gentlemen present at the time?”

  “Well, sir, there is, I suppose, the Bishop of Cirencester . . .”

  “Ha. Bit of an awkward thing here. I know Rossiter pretty well. First met him, as a matter of fact, on the day of an Eton and Harrow match long ago. He was playing for Eton, a pretty fair bat, and I was, of course, an Harrovian. And, by golly, I took his wicket. Clean bowled him.”

  Inspector Thompson watched the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police chuckling.

  “I think, sir,” he said eventually, “that the Bishop can be safely discounted. He did, of course, according to PC Williams’s very thorough evidence, go into the empty tent with Mr Boultbee. But it was apparent to Williams, from the loud cry of agony he heard from where he was stationed not far away, that the poisoning occurred almost as soon as the two of them had entered. And the Bishop was certainly in a state of almost total collapse when Williams saw him immediately afterwards.”

  “Very well, I can take it then I shan’t have to bowl him out again.”

  “No, sir. I don’t think we will need to interview him further. He returned, with his chaplain, to Cirencester by the first possible train and there took to his bed at the palace.”

  “Ha, poor old Rossy, bowled over if not bowled out, eh? But let’s get on with it, Inspector. Let’s get on with it. We neither of us have time to spare today. So have you found out anything about the remaining gentlemen?”