by John Creasey
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Author’s Note
First Came a Murder was my fifth book. When it was published in 1935 I was proud of it indeed. Dorothy L. Sayers, then the crime book critic of the Sunday Times, injured that pride considerably when she said in her inimitable style: ‘Here we have the thriller with all its gorgeous absurdities full blown... It is characteristic of the genre that the son of a dope-sniffing baronet should be an Honourable….’
When the time came to revise the story for a 1967 paper-back edition the (to me) astounding changes in my own style almost made me decide to close the book and forget it. Perhaps I should have done just this. But I confess to a positive liking for those ‘gorgeous absurdities’, and I could not bring myself to remove any of them—nor even to turn my son of a baronet into the son of a peer or else take out his ‘Hon’!
JOHN CREASEY
1
Tragedy at the Carilon Club
Anthony Barr Carruthers sat in the reading-room of the Carilon Club, Pall Mall, London West, and stared morosely at the Morning Star, which he held in front of him.
He had been some time locating the single line of information which he wanted, for although familiar with the sporting page, he was a complete stranger to that controlled by the City editor.
His trouble was simple. On the recommendation of a man who should have known better, he had recently purchased ten thousand one-pound shares in Marritaba Tin. Within a week of the deal, his ten thousand had sunk to five, in ten days it had been shaved to two and a half, and now it was somewhere in the region of one thousand seven hundred.
Carruthers glanced again at the damning figures in the City column, then tossed the newspaper to the floor.
His back was towards the door of the Carilon Club’s reading-room, and he heard it open, but did not trouble himself to look round. Even had he done so, he would have seen only the sober figure of Rickett, the Carilon Club’s secretary, and would not have been conscious of any immediate danger.
Rickett was a typical club secretary, a shadowy individual who was never obvious but always present, rarely speaking, but always having the last word.
As Anthony Barr Carruthers sank back in his armchair and cursed the name of the man who had advised him to buy Marritaba, Rickett moved silently across the room. His suede shoes made no sound on the thick pile carpet, and his breathing was soft and regular. His right hand was in his trouser pocket.
A sudden breeze, coming through the wide-open windows of the reading-room, carried a blast of sultry air into Carruthers’s face, and jerked him into irritable motion. He snapped his fingers viciously.
‘Damn Riordon!’ he muttered aloud. ‘I reckon he fleeced me.…’
Had he turned at that moment and seen the strange, unquestionably evil smile on Rickett’s face, he might have saved himself from the undreamed-of peril. For Rickett was within a yard of him now, moving silently, furtively, towards Carruthers’s chair. His right hand was half out of his pocket, and the slanting rays of the sun, coming through the open window, glinted on steel.
As he drew nearer, Rickett stretched out his hand. If Carruthers had thrown his head backwards, he would have felt the sharp prick of a needle in his scalp, and might yet have saved himself. But he kept still, unthinking, unsuspecting.
Then Rickett thrust his hand out, sharply, stabbing the needle of the hypodermic syringe into the fleshy part of Carruthers’s neck, pressing his thumb firmly on the lever.
Carruthers gave a sharp cry, and swung round in his chair. In his last moment of consciousness he saw the face of Rickett, twisted in that strange smile.
‘What the devil!’ gasped Carruthers.
He tried, desperately, to jump to his feet, but his limbs were paralysed—then, with one convulsive shudder, he slumped back in the chair.
Rickett moved quickly over the prostrate body of his victim. He felt Carruthers’s pulse, and found only the stillness of death. Without a second glance he turned away and hurried out of the room.
2
Hugh Devenish is Thoughtful
‘I—I mean,’ stammered Aubrey Chester, glancing nervously round the crowded lounge of the Carilon Club, ‘this place gives me the creeps, old son. It’s like a bally graveyard. If I hadn’t promised to meet you here, Hughie, I don’t think I could have turned the old toes towards the golden gates. I—I mean...’
He broke off as a waiter bore down on the table at which he sat, together with Hugh Devenish.
‘You wouldn’t have been able to turn the old toes,’ laughed Devenish, ‘towards the golden gates. Did you know Carruthers well?’ he added more seriously.
Chester shrugged his shoulders.
‘Well enough,’ he said, ‘and yet not so well as I might, Hughie. A nice bird, don’t you think? Sport and all that, never said no if you wanted to raise the stakes. The last man in the world,’ Chester went on with a puzzled frown, ‘you’d have thought anyone’d want to bump off. I can’t understand it, really I can’t.’
The waiter slid away from the table, and as soon as he was out of earshot, Chester leaned forward, peering expectantly into Hugh’s eyes.
‘I s-say,’ he stammered—he always stammered more under the stress of a new idea—‘you don’t know anything, do you, old scout?’
Hugh Devenish grinned lazily.
‘If you mean anything about Carruthers,’ he said, ‘I don’t know a thing. Apart,’ he added, ‘from what I read in the morning papers.’
‘That’s where I got it from,’ said Chester, with the air of a man who obtains his information straight from the horse’s mouth. ‘Killed within half a minute, they say, while he was sitting in the reading-room.’ Aubrey shivered. ‘I don’t think I shall ever be able to go in there again, Hughie. Every time I sat down I’d wonder whether I was going to get up again.’
Devenish chuckled, and lit his friend’s cigarette.
‘You want a nice long sea trip,’ he advised, ‘to get your nerves back to normal. But joking apart, I had a nasty jar when I read about the murder. I wonder why they picked on Tony?’
Aubrey shrugged his shoulders, suddenly tiring of the subject.
‘I don’t know,’ he allowed. ‘B-but you’d better finish your drink, old man. I o-ordered dinner for eight. C-coming?’
The two men strolled across the lounge towards the dining-room, while a dozen or so others nodded a greeting.
Both Devenish and Chester were well-known members of the Carilon, but for some months past Devenish had been abroad. He spent a great deal of time in some unnamed country, wherein he did many things, according to his narrations, which made Aubrey, amongst others, suspect that ‘abroad’ covered a multitude of activities concerning which Devenish resolutely refused to talk seriously.
Those who knew him well accepted his casual explanation of his numerous disappearances from the social round, and guessed, shrewdly, at the nature of them. Those who knew him slightly dubbed him ‘rake’ and regretted that they were never invited to sample his amusements.
On the day of Anthony Barr Carruthers’s murder, Hugh Devenish had actually been in Paris. The following day he had travelled on the morning train to London, and his first intimation of the murder was the flaring headlines of the overseas Morning Sun. On his arrival he had e
ndeavoured to forget the tragedy, and had occupied himself in unpacking his trunks—he had been away for three months, but had luggage enough for three years, according to the unvoiced opinion of Pincher, his man-of-many-duties—and generally settling in at his Clarges Street flat.
A week later he telephoned Aubrey Chester, arranging to meet him at the Carilon Club.
In appearance, they were an ill-matched couple. Chester was a tall, pale, straggly-looking individual, with a small head, thin, sloping shoulders, and a slouch of a walk.
Hugh Devenish, on the other hand, was solidly-built, loose-limbed and broad-shouldered, his skin tanned bronze by a life which rarely kept him indoors for more than a few hours at a stretch, his face rugged rather than handsome.
It had been due to a mutual interest in sport that the two men had, in their early days, first met. But whereas Chester was an excellent tennis-player, Devenish had concentrated almost entirely on cricket.
The friendship, despite Devenish’s lengthy absences from London, had lasted well.
• • • • •
They were at the fish course when a short, rotund little man descended upon them like a private tornado and dragged a chair to their table.
Devenish smiled a greeting. ‘Marcus, my dear fellow. And how is the modern Croesus standing the strain?’
There was a certain accuracy in his quip; the Hon. Marcus Riordon had a remarkable aptitude for making money.
Riordon chuckled, and stuck a cigarette into a long holder.
‘Always busy, Hughie, always showing folk how to make a fortune—don’t mind if I smoke, do you?—and how’s the traveller? Have a good time?’
‘You know Paris,’ smiled Devenish.
Riordon smiled back. It was said that he was the best connoisseur of attractive women in London.
Throughout the meal, which he eyed with the envy of one whose appetite is regulated by the outside measurement of his waistband, all three men maintained an irregular flow of conversation.
Rickett, who occasionally unbent from his hauteur to render direct service to his more favoured members, served coffee.
Without appearing to do so, Devenish looked hard at the secretary of the Carilon Club. The murder of Tony Carruthers had created a sensation in London, and the Carilon Club was now the most talked-of place in town. As its secretary, Charles Rickett had been marked down for more publicity than he had ever had in his life. No daily paper had appeared without its short history of ‘M’sieu Rickett’—the ‘M’sieu’ was inspired by the fact that Rickett’s parentage was partly French—and the horde of reporters which had engulfed the Club for the past week had been equalled only by the number of detectives, great and small, who had interrogated its staff.
It must, Devenish thought, have been a difficult time for the secretary.
Rickett was a well-built man of medium height. His dark hair was brushed back from his forehead, the set of his shoulders suggesting both physical fitness and strength. Looking at him now, Devenish wondered if he imagined that flicker of fear in the man’s eyes—normally so inscrutable.
As the secretary moved away, with a murmured hope that they had found everything to their satisfaction, all three men looked after him.
‘There’s a man,’ commented Riordon, ‘who’s having a rough time of it, poor devil—don’t you think so, Hugh?’
Devenish grinned cheerfully.
‘He’ll get through it and forget it, Marcus. I shouldn’t put Rickett down as a victim of nerves or sentiment.’
Riordon cocked an inquiring eye.
‘Why—don’t you like him?’
‘My poor ass,’ drawled Devenish, ‘why the blazes should I dislike him? Rickett’s the right man for the job; it’d take more than a crowd of flatfoots to put him off his stroke. By the way, Marcus—did you know Carruthers well?’
The question came unexpectedly, and took the Hon. Marcus Riordon off his guard. For a fraction of a second there was a gleam of uncertainty in his eyes, but it disappeared quickly—though Devenish noticed that as he answered he lit a fresh cigarette, without putting it into his holder.
It was part of Devenish’s ‘business’ to notice things. At that particular moment he noticed that the Hon. Marcus Riordon was nervous.
He was interested, chiefly because there appeared to be no reason for nervousness.
‘Well,’ puffed Riordon, ‘I couldn’t say I knew him well, if you know what I mean, Hughie—but he told me he’d been losing a lot of money lately—races and whatnot, the idiot—and to tell you the truth I rather wondered at first whether he hadn’t killed himself.’
Aubrey Chester swallowed hard and excitedly.
‘Th-that’s an idea!’ he agreed. ‘D-do you think th-there’s any chance of it, Hugh?’
Devenish lit a cigarette, and waited until the first coil of smoke had wafted upwards before he answered. He appeared to be looking quizzically at his friend, but actually he was observing the bright face of Marcus Riordon.
‘I would say there wasn’t a chance in a thousand,’ he answered at last. ‘Tony couldn’t have killed himself with a hypodermic syringe without leaving the thing somewhere—’
Riordon picked him up rapidly.
‘You can’t say that,’ he protested. ‘Carruthers might have jabbed the thing in his neck and then thrown it out of the window for anyone to come along and pick it up—it isn’t impossible.’
Devenish puckered his forehead.
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ he said. ‘Point to you, Marcus. But someone would have to find the thing.’
Chester leaned forward excitedly.
‘A k-kid might have picked it up,’ he reasoned, ‘and n-not think there was anything in it. C-couldn’t he, now? Or s-someone who didn’t know what it was?’
Devenish shrugged his shoulders.
‘The mystery solved,’ he said dryly. ‘You’d better double along to Scotland Yard while you can remember it all, Marcus. And on the way you can think of a reasonable explanation why Carruthers, if he killed himself, stuck the needle in his neck, instead of in his wrist.’
Aubrey Chester gaped as a remarkable thought occurred to him. He stared at Devenish in astonishment.
‘I-in his ...’ he began, then winced as Devenish kicked him deliberately on the shin. ‘I-in his wrist would have been much easier,’ Aubrey improvised hastily, ‘b-but you can never t-tell, Hughie. I-I say! I-it’s turned h-half past-time! We’ll have to b-be shifting—’
Ten minutes later, Devenish and Chester left the golden gates of the Carilon Club and turned right, towards the Admiralty Arch. Devenish said nothing as they walked briskly along. Chester, unusually silent too, wondered why his friend had stopped him from commenting on the fact that Carruthers had been poisoned by an injection in the neck.
They reached Trafalgar Square before Devenish spoke. Then he punched Chester deliberately in the ribs, and grinned tantalisingly.
‘Go home and think it out,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a date. Thanks for the steak and onions, and come round to me in the morning if you’re not playing with that soft ball of yours. Bye.’
It was, Chester said afterwards, much nearer goodbye than either of them dreamed. For a few seconds the tennis player had a dreadful vision of his friend lying stretched out in the road, sent flying by the car which roared suddenly along the Mall and flashed madly beneath the Admiralty Arch.
It was on top of Hugh Devenish as he stepped off the pavement into the road. Only the sudden opening of the car’s throttle warned him in time to avoid the fierce rush. With a bigger effort than he had ever made in his life, Devenish leapt desperately for the pavement. The car roared past him. The handle of the door struck him in the small of the back, sending him flying against Aubrey’s figure, and the two men went sprawling to the ground!
When they picked themselves up, bruised, dazed and shaken, the car had merged with the cluster of traffic which swung round towards Haymarket, and had disappeared.
3
&nb
sp; Department ‘Z’ at Whitehall
After convincing his friend that the blow in the back had left nothing but a painful bruise, Hugh Devenish waved a cheery hand, and sent Chester homewards, muttering to himself on the iniquity of the owner of this particular car and the need for the death sentence on every driver convicted of passing the thirty mile per hour mark in London. Aubrey, in fact, was annoyed by the incident.
Had he known what was in Hugh’s mind, his annoyance would have been drowned in a sea of consternation. Unlike Hugh, he had caught no glimpse of the driver who had so nearly caused a tragedy—he had not, in other words, recognised, or thought he recognised, the heavy features of the ex-prize-fighter who earned a profitable living as the Hon. Marcus Riordon’s chauffeur.
Devenish crossed Trafalgar Square warily.
He was not only puzzled; he was perturbed. For unless he was backing the wrong horse, the Hon. Marcus Riordon knew something about Tony Carruthers’s death.
Devenish turned into Whitehall, crossed the road to Scotland Yard, and took the first turning to the right beyond it. The narrow street along which he walked was bordered on both sides by towering precipices of bricks and mortar, stone-faced buildings with countless windows and an occasional heavy oak door approached by a flight of grey stone steps.
As he reached one of these doors, Devenish took a quick glance behind him. Satisfied that he was unobserved, he walked quickly up the steps and entered the building, opening the door with a key of a peculiar design. There were only seven such keys in existence.
Walking quietly along the wide passage of the house, from which a dozen doors opened into a dozen apartments set apart for the duties of civil servants working for the Foreign Office, he came to a narrow flight of stairs leading from a recess which a stranger would have passed without a second glance. Climbing these stairs, he reached a small landing, empty of everything but a single oak-faced door. Devenish stopped and pressed his finger on a slight protuberance in the centre of the door.
For a moment he stood quite still, enveloped by the unnatural silence of the deserted building. Then, without a sound, the door slid to the right, disappearing into a hollow in the wall.
