The Rynox Mystery

by Philip MacDonald

  ‘Blimey!’ said Charles, in Harris’ ear, ‘just look at that arm! There’s a arm for you! He’s O.T., the Guv’nor!’

  The shapeless mouth of the figure in the doorway opened again. ‘I said buzz off back to your work. All of you except Charles. Come in here, Charles.’

  The whole lot buzzed back to their work. Buzzed is the right word, for their talk was like the storming of a thousand bumble bees. Charles, swollen with pride, entered the room. The door banged to. Charles looked round the room and a smile of unholy joy brightly illumined his whole face.

  ‘Oh, Crikey, sir!’ said Charles.

  Tony looked round and put up a hand to feel tenderly at his face. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘bit of a mess, Charles, isn’t it? But it was worth it.’

  Once more Charles looked around him. ‘But I sye, sir, where’s … where’s … Oh, Golly!’

  He had been looking for Captain James and now, quite suddenly, he saw Captain James’ feet. They were sticking out from under the overturned mahogany desk. Charles, borne upon the wings of curiosity, took three strides and a jump. He saw—stretched neatly upon his back, breathing heavily to show that he was indeed alive but otherwise with no signs of life—Captain James. He lay very tidily, his legs together, his arms stretched neat and trim by his side. He had, except for his collar, all his clothes on. But his face made Tony’s seem what Captain James himself would probably have called ‘an oil painting.’ At this wreck of Jacobean beauty, Charles gazed with awe.

  ‘Oh, Golly, sir,’ he said. ‘You ’aven’t half messed him up proper.’ He looked round at his employer with the words. His employer was seated on the window-sill, writing with a pencil on a slip of paper.

  ‘Charles!’ said Charles’ employer, ‘nip round and get all these things as quickly as you damn well like. And while you’re at it, get a taxi and tell it to wait.’ He jerked a thumb at the peaceful body of Captain James. ‘He won’t walk home, I know! … Here, take the list and pop off.’

  Charles took the list. He saw this to be headed by something to do with steak and the last item to have to do with collars and ties.

  ‘Hurry now!’ said Tony.

  Charles hurried.

  Tony, with a heave, righted the desk, sat upon its top and, with much and tender care for his smashed mouth and bleeding lips, lit a cigarette. He sat immediately above the prostrate Captain James and smoked and waited …

  At last Captain James stirred. Though he might be always half full of Holland’s Gin, he was made of hard stuff. Captain James opened an eye, with difficulty owing to its swelling. Tony watched while into this red-rimmed orb intelligence came flooding back.

  Captain James sat up. As he moved he let out a grunt like a pig in agony.

  Tony stood up. He said, looking down at Captain James:

  ‘Had enough?’

  Captain James looked up at him and said, from the orifice which had once borne resemblance to a human mouth: ‘By God, son, I have!’ His tone seemed to bear no resentment whatever. Only a dazed wonder. He got slowly and with difficulty to his feet and stood swaying a little upon them. He eyed Tony up and down, the remains of his mouth twisted in painful effort to produce a smile. ‘But I marked you, son, I marked you!’ said Captain James.

  Tony laughed. He felt, as one so often does after a fight, almost friendly towards the man he had been fighting.

  ‘You did!’ he said. ‘But have a look at yourself in some glass when you pass one, will you?’

  ‘I never,’ said Captain James, ‘look at myself in a glass, not even when I’m shaving.’ He shrugged. He bent his left arm stiffly and searched in his breast pocket. It came away holding the envelope containing the cheque which Tony had given him half an hour before.

  ‘This,’ said Captain James anxiously waving the envelope, ‘this all right, eh? This O.K.?’

  Tony nodded.

  Captain James put the envelope back in his pocket. ‘Well,’ he said with philosophic resignment, ‘that’s that!’ Once more he eyed his conqueror. ‘I must say,’ he said—there was wonder now in his voice—‘I knew they kept smart men in the City of London, but I didn’t know they kept bear-cats with brains. Where did you learn to rough-house, Mister?’

  Tony shrugged. ‘My father sent me all round the world, earning my own way, when I was eighteen.’

  ‘Well,’ said Captain James, stiffly and unsteadily trying the action of his legs, ‘I’d better be going.’

  ‘You had,’ said Tony.

  Captain James went, only to come back through the door a moment after it had closed behind him.

  ‘See here,’ said Captain James, with something of a return of his earlier manner, ‘there’s one thing.’

  ‘And what the hell,’ said Tony, ‘is that?’

  ‘Just this,’ said Captain James. ‘How in the name of God did you manage to get hold of that letter? If I don’t find out, I’ll never get any more sleep all my life and you couldn’t bear that to happen to Glassey James, now, could you, Mister?’

  Tony stood up and threw away his cigarette and went to the corner and picked up his coat. He slipped it on. He stood buttoning it and turning up the collar. He said:

  ‘You practically gave me the letter yourself. You showed me the way to it. Look here! When you were in here yesterday afternoon, you told me that the letter was with your bank. You told me what the bank was and what the branch was and you said: “And don’t you forget it!” Well, I didn’t. What I did was to talk the matter over with a friend of mine, and what happened then was that this friend of mine went to your hotel and managed to get hold of some of the hotel notepaper. We then got a messenger boy and paid him to lend his uniform to our boy here. You didn’t recognise him, did you? That will teach you something, Glassey! That’ll teach you to look at boys’ faces as well as men’s and women’s.’

  ‘God Almighty!’ said Captain James. ‘Do you mean to tell me …’

  ‘I do!’ said Tony. ‘A messenger boy, who was my boy here, went to your hotel last night with a box of cigars. He gave you the box and made you sign for it at the foot of a printed form, and underneath the form was a piece of carbon paper and underneath the piece of carbon paper was a piece of Croft’s Hotel notepaper with a typewritten letter from you on it. So that, when you signed the form, you signed a carbon reproduction on the letter. Charles brought the book back to us and with due care we inked in the signature and rubbed out the carbon. The letter was a masterpiece, I think. It was badly typed, but not too badly. It was just the sort of letter that might be typed by a man of your type who used a portable typewriter.

  ‘This morning, my friend took this letter to the bank and had no difficulty in getting your envelope out. The only risk, Glassey, was that you might have had more than one envelope in the Bank’s keeping, but I had to take that risk and it worked all right. I knew once we’d got the original letter we were all right as far as you were concerned. You couldn’t kick.’

  ‘May God,’ said Captain James, ‘strike me a beautiful, bloodstained, ruby pink!’

  3

  ‘Your poor face, darling!’ said Peter.

  ‘You,’ said Tony, ‘leave my face alone! And I might tell you, Madam, that if you want to see faces you’d better have a squint at the face of Captain Glassey James.’

  ‘But was it necessary?’ said Peter. ‘All the strong-arm stuff, I mean?’

  ‘Well, I had to do something about it!’ Tony’s expostulation came near to the querulous. ‘Didn’t I now? There was that great stiff thinking he had me on toast and pulling my clerks’ ears. Well, after I’d got what I wanted, I had to have the odd word or so with him.’ He started to grin in pleasurable retrospect, but the grin didn’t get far. It hurt to grin. ‘It was a scrap,’ he said, ‘a good scrap!’ He looked across the table of the William Pitt Street dining-room at Peter. ‘The sort of scrap,’ he said slowly, ‘that F. X. himself would have liked.’

  ‘Dear F. X… .’ said Peter. ‘Tony, I want to read that letter again. Now, dea
r. Got it?’

  Tony nodded. From the breast-pocket of his dinner-jacket he pulled the folded sheets of Captain James’ copy and handed them across the table. Peter took them and unfolded them and smoothed out their creases with a hand which treated them as tenderly as if they had been sacred things. Across the table—F. X.’s table—she looked at her lover and F. X.’s son. She raised her glass. She did not speak, but Tony raised his too. In silence they drank a toast.

  Peter set down her glass and sat back in her chair and once more began to read that letter, which is:

  PROLOGUE

  27 March, 193—

  MY DEAR ANTHONY,

  So far as I can calculate, you will receive this letter about six months after I have been murdered.

  I shall have been murdered by half-past ten tomorrow night. This will be, I daresay, distressing for me and I am sure damn painful for you and perhaps one or two other people. My one consolation about you is that I know you will be so busy with RYNOX, owing to my death, that you won’t have time to be as put out about it as you would in ordinary circumstances.

  Before I go any further, there is one thing I ought to tell you; a thing which, when I have told it to you, will make you a good deal easier in your mind and far more likely to agree with me as to the desirability of my own death. I discovered a little over eighteen months ago—do you remember the time when we were over in Vienna and I had to go to hospital with what I told you was some sort of nervous gastritis?—that I had got cancer. I have seen a good few specialists about it and they all tell me that whatever they do and however much carving and treatment they give me, the thing is bound to kill me in the end. They didn’t say as much, but that was what they meant. I am sure you will agree with me that that sort of death is most undesirable. Frankly, from the time I was first sure that nothing could be done—that was almost a year ago—I started to think of getting rid of myself in a clean and decent and orderly and untroublesome way. At the beginning, I only thought along the lines of suicide, with an explanation to you. But then—it was in February last when we decided, you remember, to go up to the neck and a bit more over Paramata—I suddenly saw that I could, if I played my cards properly, kill a whole flutter of birds with one stone. Mind you, I knew right from the beginning that to pull off Paramata was not going to be nearly such an easy job as I had told old Sam Rickforth. I’d hinted to you that we were going to have trouble but even to you I didn’t say how absolutely certain I was as to the probable extent, in terms of time and money, of that trouble. I knew, for instance, almost to a hundred pounds what we should be pushed for today. And I knew, almost as certainly, that we shouldn’t, by ordinary means, be able to get it. And I knew, quite certainly, that if we did get this money and did tide over, then we stood a very, very good chance of knocking ’em all edgeways.

  I think you know that you and RYNOX and Peter and a much over-developed sense of humour have been the four big things, almost the four only things, in my life. When, therefore, I found that life was a rotting and shaky and, from my point of view anyhow, a most unpleasing concern, I began to try and find a way by which, in ending it, I could serve the interests of the three other things. I found it like this:

  Two years before I discovered there was anything the matter with me, I had, as you know, insured my life—with that colossal endowment policy—for nearly £300,000. (What an awful job I had to get those poor Insurance fish to realise that I was serious over my sevens! If I could I’d have made the damn thing not only £277,777, but I’d have put seven shillings and seven pence on to it. Why, I couldn’t tell you. Anyhow, there it is. Seven’s always been pretty lucky for me.) I began, almost as soon as I started to plan, to see how this Insurance Policy might fit in with all requirements. I had taken it out with no ulterior motives whatsoever—save the great tax-saving ramp, which is what I did it for—but now I saw how the thing could be more than trebly useful. I saw the time coming, and not far off, when RYNOX would want—would have to have—at least a hundred and ninety thousand, and I saw how, serving all my ends, I could get that money. (It would have been hopeless to attempt to borrow it, even using the Policy. You know that as well as I do. We might have got fifty or sixty thousand, but not more.)

  My plan in rough came to this:

  To get rid of myself in such a way that the question of suicide could not enter the minds of the Insurance people or anyone else on earth. The full amount of the Insurance would then be paid to you at once and without question.

  If I could do this I knew that you would immediately put all the money into RYNOX and then proceed to run RYNOX better than it had ever been run before. I knew, in other words, that you’d weather that Paramata business until RYNOX and Paramata were rolling along on top of the world. I knew also that if I left instructions for you—leaving them in such a way that they would not too soon give away my plans—to pay back the Insurance, pay back the Insurance you would. I knew also that if I played my cards properly I could get out of life, in leaving it, one last colossal joke.

  I began to scheme. I’ve schemed, as you know, all my life, but never have I produced a better scheme than this one.

  Listen! I am going to be, as I said, murdered tomorrow night. I am going to be murdered by a man named Marsh. That makes you sit up! You’ve heard of Marsh, haven’t you? Sick of the sound of his name! And when I’ve been murdered by Marsh, the police, try as they will, are going to be completely unable, although they will know that Marsh killed me, to find Marsh. This will annoy them. Marsh is so distinctive a person—not at all the sort of needle one could lose even in the largest haystack.

  But they won’t find him! They won’t find him because at precisely the same moment and by the same means that Francis Xavier Benedik meets his death, so will Boswell Marsh meet his!

  In other words Boswell Marsh and Francis Xavier Benedik are one and the same! Marsh, whom everyone, yourself included, will be prepared quite honestly to swear was a man with whom I became acquainted many years ago in South America, actually only came into being six months ago.

  You see, Tony, apart from the joke—by the time you get this you will be in condition to see it—it was absolutely essential to make my death not an accident but a murder. Accidents, when large sums are at stake, are always viewed with suspicion by insurance companies; and when an insurance company gets suspicious, God knows what may not be revealed. They are—they have to be—damned clever at that sort of thing. A boating accident; a poisoning accident—any sort of accident was taboo. And so I created Marsh, the man who is going to kill me. It was fun, that creation. My one regret was that I couldn’t share the joke with you.

  The first thing I did was to buy the ancient diary which is going to prove that Marsh’s enmity towards me existed many years ago. Then, a little bit at a time, I began to fake it up. I covered years with that diary, writing up about five years a week. I was full of cunning—most of the stuff was actual stuff! I mean, most of it referred to actual and provable incidents. The only real fake in the whole thing was Marsh, and I did him so cleverly that after all this time it would be quite impossible for anyone to say that no man called Marsh was ever in such a place at such a time; that no man called Marsh ever quarrelled with F. X. Benedik. Quite impossible! After the diary I began to teach myself Marsh’s handwriting; very soon I had got it not only so that it was utterly different from my own but so that it could be written by me as quickly as my own. And then I set out to make Marsh in propria persona.

  It took, to make him:

  1 black sombrero,

  1 walking stick,

  1 pair 3/6d. imitation horn-rimmed green glassed spectacles,

  15/- worth of moustache and imperial,

  1 limp,

  1 guttural voice,

  2 million Latin R’s.

  1 dark-and-grey wig (for Little Ockleton use only).

  The actual delivery of Marsh was easy. He first saw the light in the lavatory at Piccadilly Circus. F. X. Benedik, that spruce, alert, free
-striding and athletic business man, went in. There came out, limping and gutturally cursing, Boswell Marsh. In Boswell Marsh’s pocket was, folded up flat, F. X. Benedik’s hat; otherwise all the clothes of Boswell Marsh were the clothes of F. X. Benedik. But clothes do not go even a small way towards making the man!

  One of the first things that Mr Marsh did, Anthony, was to take a cottage; a little cottage in a village where Mr Marsh’s eccentricity and Mr Marsh’s unpleasant ways would secure a very full measure of attention from the village gossips. Mr Marsh paid for his cottage, which he was careful to rent from an easy-going farmer, in untraceable notes at the time of signing the lease, and Mr Marsh’s visits to his country seat (after all, if you’re going to make a man, you must show him). will explain all those weekends of mine which, I know, used to make you wonder. From his cottage Mr Marsh, as you will remember, wrote insulting letters to F. X. Benedik. And F. X. Benedik, from his palatial offices, wrote back even more insulting letters to Mr Marsh. Presently the office began (and the office included yourself!) to know of Mr Marsh.

  Then Mr Marsh began to ring up. I don’t suppose—in fact I know they won’t—that any one will ever comment upon the fact that Marsh always rang up when F. X. Benedik happened to be out, but of course he did. If it should, however, come to her being questioned on this point, Miss Pagan will swear that there was one occasion upon which Mr Benedik rang up Mr Marsh from the office, because Miss Pagan heard Mr Benedik talking over the telephone to Mr Marsh. I did that today—and got a very great deal of fun out of it—rather macabre fun, doubtless, but fun nevertheless. I left the house in the morning to walk to the office as usual and on the way to the office I rang up twice, using Marsh’s voice. I wanted to speak very, very, very urgently to Mr Benedik. Mr Benedik, having delivered, as Marsh, this message, walked on to his office, and once there, not only heard about the telephone calls which Marsh had been making but appeared to make one to the telephone number which Marsh had left. How was poor Miss Pagan—who is my witness and a very good one, I should say—to see that while I, F. X. Benedik, appeared to be talking to Boswell Marsh, I had my right forefinger pressed down upon the receiver hook and was therefore talking into an unconnected telephone?