The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  “Impossible,” he said, although in fact he’d seen pictures of it in a magazine.

  “Most extraordinary thing you’ve ever seen. One drives up, through the factory itself, there are ramps at each floor, and then – ”

  “You’ve driven on it?”

  “Of course. One could hardly visit such a phenomenon, and not go for a spin. Oh, you’d love it, Sergeant! The most extraordinary sensation of flying into space, as if the Alps themselves are an extension of the track.”

  “Was that how you met Lord Bognor, through an interest in racing cars?”

  “It was.”

  “And you found you shared another interest? In communism.”

  “Quite so.”

  “And if you don’t mind me asking – how did it come about that you were attracted to the revolutionary position?”

  She sighed. “I’m sorry, Sergeant, but it seems such an incomprehensible question. The answer is simple: I’ve seen the world. Anyone intelligent who has seen more than their own back garden would be communist. Except policemen, I suppose.” Norbert said nothing, and after a moment she continued. “In this country, in America, all over Europe – everything is collapsing. Everything! They are turning prisons into hostels for the homeless. Prisons, meeting halls, even opera houses. How long do you think that can continue before there’s another war?”

  “And you really believe that Britain is on the verge of revolution?”

  “Your lot do! It’s all anyone of rank talks, thinks or dreams about – will it be this year, next year, next week? They know their time is up. Workers are organising, established religion is dying away . . . whatever happened to the social unity of the war years? Are you aware that the gulf between rich and poor is actually increasing, is actually worse now than it was before the war?”

  Norbert was aware of that – of all that – and he was aware that, according to his friend the gardener’s niece, Diana hadn’t slept in her bed last night. While Susan Chaplin was running from Sir Reginald’s embrace, perhaps Sir Reginald was running from Diana’s. Perhaps he didn’t run, of course, but perhaps he did, and perhaps she spent the night on the roof, brooding about things.

  “You’re right. How very observant of you.” Willie Browning gave a resigned smile. “I worked for Lloyd’s when the Old Man still ran the place – Sir Reginald’s father. I ended my working life there, indeed. As a clerk.” He looked up at Norbert. “You do read Wells, I suppose?”

  “I have done, yes.”

  “Well, there you are then. A junior clerk, in my senior years, and a member of a socialist bicycling group. Actually, that was how I first met Boggy. I still cycle; he doesn’t, did it for a few months, bought all the equipment, gave it up and moved on to something else. Cars, perhaps, or aeroplanes or polo.”

  “And the father was not a sympathetic employer? He didn’t approve of junior clerks who bicycled with socialists?”

  “Like father, like son, from what I gather.” He slapped his hands on his thighs, and began searching his jacket pockets for his pipe. It was in the last pocket he looked in. “So there you are, Comrade Detective Sergeant: there’s my motive.”

  “Indeed. Thank you for your frankness.”

  “I can afford to be frank. I didn’t kill him.” Willie stood up, and shook hands with Norbert – for no reason that Norbert could readily deduce. “I didn’t kill him, but I did enjoy the champagne at lunchtime.”

  He hadn’t meant to leave Comrade Boggy for last; to do so looked annoyingly deliberate, either deference or studied insult. But that was how it worked out. His Lordship, for one thing, had not seemed to be available at the various times that Norbert had been looking for him. He was informed on eventually by his butler, who was fed up with the master cluttering up his pantry.

  In the billiard room, Norbert asked Bognor how he had come to know Sir Reginald.

  “Oh, you know how it is – someone at the club whose brother-in-law knew someone’s sister who dined with a chap’s secretary . . . I don’t really remember.” But his heart wasn’t in it.

  “He approached you, didn’t he? Rather than the other way about.”

  Bognor had yet to look Norbert in the eye. He did not do so now. “Well, yes, I think that might have been so.”

  “And when did you discover that his motives were not pure?” It was a fair guess, Norbert reckoned, if the lack of discretion Sir Reginald had displayed last night was habitual.

  Bognor spent a moment or so twisting his features this way and that, in various simulations of a wronged man. “When you first arrived here, I think I told you to call me Boggy. Didn’t I? Thought so. I generally do. I can’t stand all that Lordship rubbish, all that formal nonsense. Even the servants – ”

  “Really?” Norbert couldn’t help the interruption.

  “Oh, yes. Oh yes, they all call me ‘Sir,’ I simply don’t use the title. But you see, this wretched Lloyd fellow, he would keep M’lording me, as if I were a high court judge. It’s incorrect, apart from anything.”

  “How annoying.”

  “And when I asked him to stop it, he got quite unpleasant – after dinner this was, I think he’d had one too many – and he told me that when he had a proper title he’d bloody well expect people to bloody well use it, and that he’d be getting one bloody soon.”

  “I see.”

  “Bloody well thanks to me. Do you see? He’d be getting one soon, bloody well thanks to me. Well, that could really only mean one thing, couldn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so.” The sheer depth of disappointment in Lord Bognor’s eyes almost melted Norbert’s heart. Disappointment that he wouldn’t be leading a revolution after all, and disappointment at discovering that the world was full of scoundrels, whose word could not be trusted.

  “Do you know what upsets me, Comrade Norbert? Do you know what really upsets me the most? These enormous advertisements they’re erecting on the verges all over the place. Have you seen them?”

  Norbert, in his days as a walking copper, had spent many hours with madmen and alcoholics. Now he came to think of it, that was the penultimate line of a police canteen joke, but the point was that he was far too used to sudden changes in conversational direction to be thrown by them. “Billboards, sir?”

  “That’s the chaps. I mean, what is the point of them? They are disfiguring the countryside. There won’t be any countryside left, ten years from now. There’ll be nothing but billboards and motor buses.” He stood up. Sat down again. “Look, this is a bit awkward, but it has to be said. I’m the last one you’ve spoken to, is that right?”

  “Correct.”

  “And I imagine you have managed to detect possible motives for each of us, in this ghastly matter?”

  “I have.”

  “And if you don’t mind telling me – I’m afraid I really must insist, rather – what is your own?”

  Norbert blinked. “My own . . . ?”

  “Your own motive. You see, I’m wondering if perhaps we shouldn’t call the county constabulary in, after all. No offence intended, I assure you, but at the moment – looking at the thing purely from a layman’s point of view – the evidence seems to point to you being the killer.”

  Norbert said nothing. He tried to remember how blinking worked.

  Lord Bognor’s attention was suddenly taken by the clock above the scoreboard. “Oh dear, where are my manners. Would you care for a sherry?”

  He had been thinking of gathering them all in the library – the main library, this time – and going through all the evidence bit by bit before finally pointing at Giles Macready and saying “Hold him fast!” and telling everyone why Giles had killed Sir Reginald Lloyd. But he didn’t really feel like it now. The moment had passed.

  Instead he went for a bit of a stroll down past the stables and along the river, and under a sweet chestnut tree he met Susan Chaplin.

  “I know you didn’t do it,” she said.

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “It was
Giles, wasn’t it?”

  “No doubt. I’m not quite sure why, though.”

  “But it does rather look as though it was you, doesn’t it?”

  “A bit, perhaps.” He didn’t think it did, especially, even after Boggy had pointed out the supposed clues. But then, he knew it wasn’t him, so it was easy for him to see coincidence as coincidence.

  “But I think you’re being ‘framed,’ as the Americans say. Giles – he’s police too, isn’t he?”

  “MI5, actually.”

  “Similar, then. The case against you is that Sir Reginald – I think we should refer to him as Mr Lloyd, don’t you? Only crooks get knighthoods anyway – Lloyd obviously knew you from somewhere. He mentioned it to a couple of people, but you didn’t say anything about it.”

  “I was on duty at a Mansion House banquet a few months ago. Lloyd got drunk, and I had to see him home.”

  “So the idea is you killed him to prevent him blowing your cover. Then of course, it was you who didn’t want to call the local police – ”

  “No it wasn’t – it was Giles!”

  “Everyone says it was you. But . . .”

  “But?”

  She grinned at him, and made a show of looking around for eavesdroppers. There was a large dragonfly in the vicinity, but it paid them little notice. “But I know why you didn’t want to call the police. I’ve worked it out. I’ve read the signs, Comrade Norbert.”

  “Do you?” He lit two cigarettes. After a moment he remembered that one of them was for her, and passed it over. “Have you?”

  “You didn’t want to give the press ammunition for a new scare: ‘Bolsheviks Run Amok In Country House Bloodbath.’ Did you? You hoped you could sort it all out nice and quietly on your own.”

  “I’m not sure quite – ”

  “Anyway, there were a few other things, which I won’t bore you with – they’re all obvious enough if you think back. The point is, why would MI5 want to frame you?”

  “Well, yes.” He coughed, and threw his cigarette away. “That is where the whole thing falls down, isn’t it?”

  She hugged herself, and drew on her cigarette as if it were a glass of barley water. “I worked that out, too. Equally obvious, once you think about it. You’re not only a police spy, are you, but also – ”

  “What do you know about that?” He sat down. He hadn’t realised he’d stood up, and he felt a bit of a chump about it, now.

  “It was you so obviously knowing Giles that set me thinking.”

  “Oh. Was it obvious? I thought I handled that quite smartly.”

  “Well, you refrained from hanging a painted sign around your neck, saying ‘I have known and hated Giles Macready for several years in a professional capacity,’ so I suppose you deserve credit for that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But the first time you met him, supposedly, you already knew he didn’t smoke.”

  “Oh, bugger,” said Norbert. “Pardon me.”

  “I expect it’s true that he knows you from the Police Strike of 1919; but you were on opposite sides then, weren’t you? You were with the strikers. And you’re still on opposite sides today. Aren’t you?”

  Norbert’s instructions on this matter were perfectly plain: admit nothing, ever. Those who trained him probably hadn’t envisaged his being interrogated on a July riverbank by a young female typist from a Tube-station town.

  “I imagine you were approached by Special Branch after the failure of the strike, and given the choice of dismissal and blacklisting, like so many of your comrades, or of turning your coat. And when you reported that approach to the CPGB, they urged you to go along with it. You are the Party’s man amongst the political police. I wonder whether it was the Party or the Yard who first suggested you come and spy on us?”

  He thought he’d better say something, just so she wouldn’t think he was dead. “Macready asked me the same thing. I didn’t give him an answer, either.”

  “You must have worked very hard to get Special Branch to trust you. I can only guess at the price you – and, no doubt, the Party – have paid for that trust. But Giles never quite trusted you, did he?”

  How odd, Norbert was thinking: the life he led, and yet this long-haired girl who lived with her mum and dad was twice as cynical, twice as matter-of-fact about the world’s machinations, as he could ever be. The conclusion she was implying was one that had never occurred to him. “You think Giles killed Lloyd in order to incriminate me?”

  “It makes sense, doesn’t it? Perhaps he’s working on his own, or perhaps he managed to convince MI5 that you were a communist spy.”

  “Then why not simply arrest me? Or kill me?”

  Her hand gripped his wrist. She didn’t seem to know she was doing it, so Norbert thought he wouldn’t mention it. “Because this way they get rid of you, and they get a wonderful red bogey story as a bonus.”

  “They usually just make up their red bogeys. Or commission the good old Daily Mail to do it for them.”

  “But nothing as good as this one – a communist spy in the police, murdering a defenceless knight of the realm.”

  Yes, thought, Norbert; and they’d humiliate their despised cousins in Special Branch at the same time. One should never underestimate the contempt which existed between those two organs of the state, or the outrageous lengths which members of each outfit would go to in order to damage the other. Susan’s theory wasn’t impossible. There again, neither was this . . .

  “Your workings out have certainly been most productive, Comrade Susan. I wonder if you can apply the same logic to help me answer another question.”

  She removed her hand, perhaps seeing from his expression that there was no point in all that, now. “I’ll try,” she said.

  “What do you suppose Lloyd was doing in the Vitality Room in the first place? Does he seem to you the type to take an interest in exercise machines before breakfast?”

  “Curiosity, I suppose.”

  “Initially, perhaps. He heard the noise of one of Lady Boggy’s machines, wondered what it was, went to have a nose. But having seen that it was merely that young show-off pilot fellow doing some boring exercises, I’m quite sure Sir Reginald’s thoughts would have returned immediately to sausage and kedgeree and black pudding. Unless . . .”

  “Yes,” she said, and he couldn’t quite tell from her lack of inflection whether the word was a question or a statement.

  “Something must have lured him in there. Now, what would persuade him to set foot in the room, let alone to step up onto that strange machine? Only a woman, surely? Only a pretty, young woman.”

  “Yes,” she said, and this time her meaning was apparent.

  “Just as a matter of interest, where did you learn to fly?” Norbert asked Giles, thinking that life in Intelligence was very different to life in the Branch, where flying lessons were, to put it mildly, not standard issue.

  “Fly? Oh, a couple of my pals have their own planes, it’s something I mess about with now and then at weekends. I never was much good at croquet, you know, or crosswords.”

  Of course. A couple of pals. Naturally. “Giles,” said Norbert, “I’m thinking of arresting you for the murder of Sir Reginald Lloyd.”

  “I see. Although, of course, you must know by now that I didn’t do it?”

  “I don’t know who did it, but I’m not sure it matters. I’m confident I can make a convincing case against you.” To which, he hoped, MI5 would respond with a thorough whitewash. The whole business would be entombed, and forgotten.

  Giles made a sympathetic face. “Wouldn’t work, I’m afraid.”

  Earlier, under the chestnut tree, Susan had told Norbert: “I didn’t lure him.” Clearly this was a matter about which she felt strongly. “Don’t say that, please, you make me sound awful.”

  “I’m sorry,” Norbert had replied. “I withdraw the word.”

  She’d been trying out the equipment, that’s all. How could she resist? And one of the slimming machi
nes was having a . . . certain effect on her. Vitalism, you know. Sir Reginald Lloyd watched her from the doorway, watched her a while without announcing himself, which was a filthy thing to do, wasn’t it? And then when he did speak, and approach, it was evident that he misinterpreted her shortness of breath, her flushed neck. He repeated his advances of the previous night, more forcefully this time, and she suddenly saw an opportunity not to protest and plead with yet another unwelcome man, but for once to teach a lesson.

  He was easily persuaded onto the machine; she convinced him of its delights. She didn’t intend him real harm: she was going to give him a bit of a shock, make a fool of him, leave him to extricate himself or scream the house down, as he preferred. But the moment she pushed the dosage switch to maximum – Lloyd died. He gurgled, twitched, thrashed, moaned and died. It took, perhaps, five seconds. Maybe the machine was faulty; maybe the industrialist was.

  Susan was horrified, naturally. Of course. But when you think about it, one day soon they’re all going to be dead, aren’t they? Every rich man, every exploiter, every capitalist. Did it really matter that Lloyd got his reward a few months early? So Susan had a bath, and then went down to breakfast.

  And now, here they were; the policeman and the intelligence officer, discussing motives and the absence thereof.

  “Wouldn’t work,” said Giles. “My lot know I wouldn’t kill Lloyd to stop him giving his money to the dear old League of Urgency, because you see – ”

  “Because the dear old League of Urgency is your creation. Right?”

  “Well done. Knew you’d get there in the end.”

  And that was bloody annoying, because Norbert had known for a while that Giles had no motive for sabotaging the League; but he couldn’t say so now without appearing childish. “I’m sure Boggy’s lot aren’t your only unwitting useful idiots. I daresay you’re preparing all manner of phantom Bolshevist conspiracies. You intend the first Labour government to be the last, don’t you?”

  “Dead set on it,” said Giles. “This is, my dear Sergeant Whistler, a time for the choosing of sides.”

  For weeks there had been rumours – he’d heard them at the Yard and in the Party – that a mass arrest of Communist Party leaders was imminent. One way or another, Norbert’s double life was nearly over. He wondered if they needed detectives in Moscow. “This murder is a reverse for you, isn’t it?”