The Rynox Mystery

by Philip MacDonald

  Once—I daren’t make it more—Marsh visited the office. I chose a day when I knew both you and Woolrich would be out. You probably heard all about the visit. Marsh was extraordinarily offensive. I can tell you, when I saw Pagan looking at me as I came in I nearly passed away. I had to think very hard of how well my specially built little imperial was stuck on and how satisfyingly well the dark glasses, which were so dark that they would not allow anyone to see anything at all of my eyes, really altered me. I can tell you, Anthony, Mr Marsh’s visit, although part of this greatest of all great jokes, almost put the wind up me. Time and again I thought I’d be spotted and time and again somebody—bless ’em!—did or said something that made me realise that I hadn’t been. After all, you mustn’t forget—as I very nearly forgot at the time—that I had already planted Marsh on everyone in the office. I don’t think you saw me forcing Marsh down your throat and I don’t think the others saw me forcing him down theirs, but force him down I did; so that by the time the actual visit came along they knew that Marsh existed.

  This seems to be turning out a much more ponderous epistle than I had intended. I just wanted really to explain to you how and why—particularly how, as I know your mind works very much like mine. I hope I’m not exceeding all bounds. The best thing I can do to shorten matters is to go straight on to tell you what I am going to do to get murdered by my very much altered ego.

  Today, as I have told you, I, F. X. Benedik, have made an appointment (Miss Pagan heard me making it) with Mr Marsh, the appointment being for ten o’clock p.m. tomorrow, Friday, at my house. You will remember that I wasn’t at the office this morning. I couldn’t be at the office because F. X. Benedik was temporarily non-existent while Mr Boswell Marsh made his presence felt very considerably over quite a large portion of London. You will also remember that I wasn’t at home last night, being on one of those mysterious flying visits to what I have always supposed you to think was a ‘bird,’ but was really to Marsh’s cottage at Little Ockleton. The climax-plot began this morning, when Mr Marsh got up.

  It worked like this:

  Time. Point. Remarks.

  A. 8.45 a.m. Mr Marsh receives an unstamped letter from Mr Benedik. Mr Marsh makes a hell of a fuss with postman. Posted this letter unstamped on purpose to give Marsh a chance to show vindictiveness.

  B. 9.0 a.m. Mr Marsh makes himself unpleasant at Little Ockleton station. General principles of trail-blazing. No particular point.

  C. 11.30 a.m. Mr Marsh, more unpleasant than ever, buys three stalls at Royal Theatre. Leaves indelible impression on booking clerk. See below.

  D. 11.55 a.m. Mr Marsh enters District Messenger Office: very unpleasant. Insists on letter addressed to ‘Housekeeper and Staff, 4 William Pitt Street’ being delivered at a certain time. Certain time adopted as additional memory provoker.

  E. 12.15 p.m. Mr Marsh, upon the emergency stairs Dover St Station, becomes again F. X. Benedik.

  F. _1.30–3.30 p.m. F. X. B. lunches with A. X. B. and Peter Rickforth. F. X. B. sends A. X. B. to Paris. Thus removing A. X. B. from scene of crime and any possible implication in same.

  So much for what I have done. Now for what, tomorrow, I’m going to do. I’m going to put this in the same tabular form as today’s activities. Like this:

  Time. Point. Remarks.

  A. 9.30 a.m. I am going to give old Fairburn and the two women permission to go to the theatre. She is sure to ask me. See how bad this will look for Marsh, who presented, anonymously, the tickets.

  B. 10.0 a.m. Shall leave the house as Benedik and somewhere en route become, as I have often done before, Marsh.

  C. 11.0 a.m. As Marsh shall go and buy at Selsinger’s the gun with which I am going to be murdered. More trail blazing. (Shall probably make it a heavy German automatic, this being the most different thing I can think of from my own revolver which I am also going to use.)

  D. 12 noon to 7.30 p.m. As Benedik, shall carry on in a usual—a very, very usual—way. Anything to avoid any subsequent suspicion that I knew that anything untoward was to happen.

  E. 7.30–8.30 p.m. F. X. Benedik will dine. The house will be empty except for Prout. After dinner I shall tell Prout that a man called Marsh is coming to see me at ten; that I, in the meantime, am going down to see Rickforth; that if Marsh should come before I return he is to be let in; that once Marsh is in Prout can, as he has been in the habit doing for the last two or three centuries, ‘slip round to The Foxhound for a small one.’ See how bad it is looking for Marsh. He has got rid of the female servants and will be assumed to know that between 10 and 11 every night Prout goes out.

  F. 8.30 p.m. Shall leave for Rickforth’s. Will probably take a taxi, but will get out of taxi round about Knightsbridge and (having changed to Marsh in some convenient place) will for a moment or two—probably in some pub—behave in a most extraordinary manner. Trail-blazing.

  G. 9.0 p.m. Sam’s house and once more in my own appearance. Shall talk to Sam on business, probably using the Carruthers-Blackstone tangle as a pretext. Shan’t stay very long, but long enough to say that I’ve got to get back to settle with Marsh. Very useful. Sam will make a nice, solid, unshakable, roast-beef-and-baked-potatoes witness.

  H. 10.0 p.m. Shall enter 4 Wm. Pitt St as Marsh. Shall be (I don’t think I shall like this part much; Prout’s a good old sort) most unpleasant to Prout. Prout, you can bet your last boot, won’t forget Marsh in a hurry, but Prout, having had permission from me, is sure to go out. He doesn’t drink much but can’t do without that gossip at the Foxhound.

  I. 10.20 p.m. (or so soon as Prout has thoroughly left.) Setting stage. This, Anthony, is really damned good. Listen! Marsh is in the house, to everybody’s knowledge. Benedik, since shortly he will be found dead there, must have come in at some later time, letting himself in with his key. (Problem: how to kill Benedik, leave certain indications that Marsh has killed him and got away, and eliminate such embarrassing details of Marsh as spectacles, beard and moustache.) I shall (a) take the lenses out of the spectacles, put them into a sheet of newspaper, pound the glass into powder and scatter it out of the window, afterwards burning the paper; (b) burn until all traces of them are gone—and the smell—the moustache and imperial; (c) wash my face thoroughly to get traces of spirit gum right off it; (d) leave Marsh’s most distinctive sombrero prominently in the room; (e) get out of the window, cross the path, tie a bit of string on to a tough, long enough shoot of one of the yews on the other side of the path from the house, go back to the study and fix the bit of string so that the shoot is within my reach from the window; (f) have a lovely duel between Marsh and Benedik, leaving plenty of signs of it. (I shall stand by the window and blaze away with the mauser as Marsh. I shall then go over to the other side of the room and blaze away with my own gun as Benedik. There will be a nice lot of bullet-holes about telling their own lying story); (g) quickly, because people may come in at any moment after the shooting, I shall set the last scene! The setting will prove that Marsh, having started to run away and got through the window, shot Benedik and then escaped across the path, through the shrubbery and out at the other side of the gardens. This will be done like this, ladies and gentlemen—pure deception! I shall go to the window which will be open at the bottom. I shall take the piece of string off the yew shoot, keep hold of the shoot and slip the string into my pocket Thank the Lord, it hasn’t been raining lately and no footprints could be expected to show.

  I shall then slip the end of the shoot of yew through the trigger guard of the Mauser. I shall then take my own gun in my right hand and lean my torso out of the window. With my left hand I shall put the Mauser which has, don’t forget, the yew shoot through the trigger guard straining at it, up close to my head, but not too close, and blow out my brains. What must happen, because I’ve worked it out very carefully, is that I shall be found lying across the window with my own gun in my right hand, shot through the head with Marsh’s gun, while Marsh’s gun will be found feet—perhaps yards—away from the house bec
ause the yew shoot will have pulled it back and dropped it somewhere.

  Anyone might have a bit of string in his pocket

  Pretty snappy, what?

  And that, Anthony, is the end of Boswell Marsh and F. X. Benedik. Don’t—I know you won’t—curse me for this. In time you will even see the joke. I’m a rotten life, so I’ll make a good death of it. You wouldn’t like to find that your body was going rotten on you, would you? You’d do just the same, but you’d probably make an even better joke of it than I have of this.

  Look after yourself, boy, and Peter. And run RYNOX for all you’re damn well worth until you’re sick of it. When you’re sick of it, chuck it, but I don’t think you will get sick of it. We’ve had many good times together and I’m most grateful to you for all of them, and for a lot of other things.

  You won’t get this letter until long after you’ve done what I know you’ll do, and that is, using the money which you’ll make the Insurance wallahs pay you out as quick as you damn well can, to see RYNOX out of the bad times and into the high lights. (I’m prepared to bet you have a tough time with old Sam, who will immediately want to throw himself upon the very doubtful mercies of Carey Street without another word, but I’m equally prepared to bet that you’ll stop him from doing it.)

  You’ll get this letter in about seven months from this minute. I’m posting it tonight to Carey in the F.M.S. (I think you remember old Carey—a very good old friend of mine.) I shall tell him I want it mailed at such-and-such a time to you. He’s a stout old fellow and won’t let me down, and he’s unlikely to die. He’s as tough as I used to think I was once. When you get it, perhaps you’ll get a shock; perhaps you won’t. But anyhow you’ll realise that what I’ve done is to borrow £277,777 for RYNOX from the Naval, Military and Cosmopolitan. If RYNOX goes big, pay it back. If RYNOX doesn’t go big, you can’t and so I should forget it. But if you do repay I should give them 3½%. I leave it to you as to the manner in which you do it. I bet it will be damned funny!

  Good-bye, son, and give my love to Peter.

  Hoping this will find you as it leaves me at present (very happy),

  We remain, Dear Sir,

  Your humble and obedient servants,

  FRANCIS XAVIER BENEDIK.

  BOSWELL MARSH.

  THE END

  THE WOOD-FOR-THE-TREES

  ALTHOUGH Rynox—a book which over the years was also published as The Rynox Mystery, The Rynox Murder and The Rynox Murder Mystery—did not feature a detective, author Philip MacDonald was best known for creating the amateur sleuth Colonel Anthony Ruthven Gethryn. Making his debut in The Rasp in 1924, Gethryn featured in twelve novels, ten of them between 1928 and 1938, with a twelfth and final appearance in a much later book, widely considered to be MacDonald’s crowning glory, The List of Adrian Messenger, published in 1959. The Colonel Gethryn books were enormously popular with early Golden Age detective story enthusiasts, with five of them made into feature films.

  Philip MacDonald’s writing career was not confined to novels, however. He was perhaps best known throughout the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s as an accomplished screenwriter, and also for his short stories. Twice he won the coveted Edgar Award for best achievement in the short story field, most significantly in 1953 for a US volume of half a dozen stories entitled Something to Hide, published in the UK as Fingers of Fear. The book was also chosen by Ellery Queen for his prestigious Queen’s Quorum, a list of the 125 greatest collections of short stories in the history of mystery fiction. One of the six stories, ‘The Wood-for-the-Trees’, has the distinction of being the only short story by MacDonald to feature Anthony Gethryn, in which the Colonel, returning to England to deliver a secret document to a Personage of Extreme Importance, is challenged by the British weather, a sense of evil, and mass murder …

  THE EDITOR

  IT was in the summer of ’36—to be exact upon the fifth of August in that year—that the countryside around the village of Friars’ Wick in Downshire, in the southwest of England, was shocked by the discovery of a singularly brutal murder.

  The biggest paper in the county, the Mostyn Courier, reported the outrage at some length—but since the victim was old, poverty-stricken, female but ill favoured, and with neither friends nor kin, the event passed practically unnoticed by the London Press, even though the killer was uncaught.

  Passed unnoticed, that is, until, exactly twenty-four hours later and within a mile or so of its exact locale, the crime was repeated, the victim being another woman who, except in the matter of age, might have been a replica of the first.

  This was a time, if you remember, when there was a plethora of news in the world. There was Spain, for instance. There were Mussolini and Ethiopia. There was Herr Hitler. There was Japan. There was Russia. There was dissension at home as well as abroad. There was so much, in fact, that people were stunned by it all and pretending to be bored …

  Which is doubtless why the editor of Lord Otterill’s biggest paper, the Daily Despatch, gave full rein to its leading crime reporter and splashed that ingenious scrivener’s account of the MANIAC MURDERS IN DOWNSHIRE all across the front page of the first edition of August 8th.

  The writer had spread himself. He described the slayings in gory, horrifying prose, omitting only such details as were really unprintable. He drew pathetic (and by no means badly written) word pictures of the two drab women as they had been before they met this sadistic and unpleasing end. And he devoted the last paragraphs of his outpourings to a piece of theorising which gave added thrills to his fascinated readers.

  … can it be [he asked under the subheading ‘Wake Up, Police!’] that these two terrible, maniacal, unspeakable crimes—crimes with no motive other than the lust of some depraved and distorted mind—can be but the beginning of a wave of murder such as that which terrorised London in the eighties, when the uncaptured, unknown ‘Jack the Ripper’ ran his bloodstained gamut of killing?

  You will have noted the date of the Despatch article—August 8th. Which was the day after the Queen Guinivere sailed from New York for England. Which explains how it came about that Anthony Gethryn, who was a passenger on the great liner, knew nothing whatsoever of the unpleasant occurrences near Friars’ Wick. Which is odd, because—although he’d never been there before and had no intention of ever going there again after his simple mission had been fulfilled—it was to Friars’ Wick that he must make his way immediately the ship arrived at home.

  An odd quirk of fate: one of those peculiar spins of the Wheel.

  He didn’t want to break his journey to London and home by going to Friars’ Wick, or, indeed, any other place. He’d been away—upon a diplomatic task of secrecy, importance, and inescapable tedium—for three months. And he wanted to see his wife and his son, and see them with the least possible delay.

  But there it was: he had in his charge a letter which a Personage of Extreme Importance had asked him to deliver into the hands of another (if lesser known) P.O.E.I. The request had been made courteously, and just after the first P.O.E.I. had gone out of his way to do a service for A. R. Gethryn. Ergo, A. R. Gethryn must deliver the letter—which, by the way, has nothing in itself to do with this story.

  So, upon the afternoon of August the eleventh, Anthony was driving from the port of Normouth to the hamlet of Friars’ Wick and the country house of Sir Adrian LeFane.

  He pushed the Voisin along at speed, thankful they’d managed to send it down to Normouth for him. The alternatives would have been a hired car or a train—and on a stifling day like this the thought of either was insupportable.

  The ship had docked late, and it was already after six when he reached the outskirts of Mostyn and slowed to a crawl through its narrow streets and came out sweating on the other side. The low grey arch of the sky seemed lower still—and the greyness was becoming tinged with black. The trees which lined the road stood drooping and still, and over everything was a soft and ominous hush through which the sound of passing cars and even the singing of his own ty
res seemed muted.

  He reduced his speed as he drew near the Bastwick crossroads. Up to here he had known his way—but now he must traverse unknown territory.

  He stopped the car altogether, and peered at a signpost. Its fourth and most easterly arm said, with simple helpfulness, ‘FRIARS’ WICK—8.’

  He followed the pointing arm and found himself boxed in between high and unkempt hedgerows, driving along a narrow lane which twisted up and across the shoulder of a frowning, sparsely wooded hill. There were no cars here; no traffic of any kind; no sign of humanity. The sky had grown more black than grey, and the light had a gloom-laden, coppery quality. The heavy air was difficult to breathe.

  The Voisin breasted the hill—and the road shook itself and straightened out as it coasted down, now steep and straight, between wide and barren stretches of heathland.

  The village of Friars’ Wick, hidden by the foot of another hill, came upon Anthony suddenly, after rounding the first curve in the winding valley.

  Although he was going slowly, for the corner had seemed dangerous, the abrupt emergence of the small township—materialising, it seemed, out of nothingness—was almost a physical shock. He slowed still more, and the big black car rolled silently along the narrow street, between slate-fronted cottages and occasional little shops.