by James Lear
II
BACK AT THE HOUSE, ORDER HAD BEEN RESTORED. THE police had gone, the inner rooms were quiet, there was not a soul to be seen—in fact, you’d never know that within the last hour a dead body had been dragged out of a closet by a hysterical young woman.
It dawned on me that Leonard’s efficient seduction had been a calculated ruse to get me out of the house while whatever had to be done was done, without the inconvenience of witnesses. I cursed myself for my stupidity, for allowing lust to cloud my judgment; I felt like the typical naive, trusting New Worlder, caught in the snares of a scheming European. They would not trick me so easily again, not even with slim white bodies and man-eating anuses.
I strolled across the silent hall and took the stairs two at a time. There was the cupboard in which I had frolicked with Boy Morgan, now closed and empty. And there, along the landing, was the cupboard which, so recently, I had seen in disarray—and it, too, was as tidy as if nothing had happened. It seemed as if an army of housemaids had worked their way through the house with the speed of lightning, leaving no trace of recent disruptions. If only I had been able to examine the evidence while it was fresh! But no: I had followed my prick instead. What would Sherlock Holmes have said?
I knelt by the cupboard and looked all around it, at the wood of the door, at the paint, at the carpet in front, hoping to find a smear of blood, a sign of struggle, something that would lead me onward in what I now called my “investigation.” But it was hopeless; there was nothing. At least, nothing I could see. I cursed Sherlock Holmes for his smug sure-footedness; it always seemed so easy on the printed page. And here was “Mitch” Mitchell, would-be detective, who didn’t even know the identity of the victim. This would have to be remedied.
I was about to make my way into the study across the passage which I knew to be occupied by Sir James Eagle, and where the body had been presented to the police; I would blunder in, pretending to be lost, and see what I could see. The worst they could do was ask me, in that polite British way, to leave; the rules of hospitality would prevent worse.
My hand was practically on the doorknob when I heard a hissing noise from a few feet away. I halted, waited, and heard it again. I turned, and there was the ashen face of Boy Morgan appearing around the corner, beckoning me to follow. Surely he wasn’t that desperate for me to suck him off? I had allowed sex to get in the way of my investigations once that day; I wouldn’t let it happen again. I turned, and was about to enter Sir James’s study, when Morgan called me.
“Mitch, for God’s sake. Please!”
He sounded in distress, rather than extreme sexual arousal, and I never could resist a friend in need.
“What’s up?”
“It’s Belinda. She...she says she saw something. I can’t get any sense out of the girl, Mitch, but I’m frightened. Something’s happened here.”
His close-set eyes were pleading. It was a prospect that I found altogether delightful; the young athletic hero trembling before me, begging for assistance.
I laid a hand on his broad rower’s shoulder and squeezed. “Calm down, Morgan. I’m here now.”
“Thank God.” Then he did something that I had only ever seen girls do before: he fell into my arms. I was taken aback, but I held him nonetheless. I could feel his chest working with emotion. My embrace seemed to calm him, so I ventured a small kiss on the side of his neck—the sort of kiss that might just be explained away as a gesture of quasi-familial affection. His neck tasted delicious, of soap and sweat.
Morgan didn’t break from my grasp—in fact, he seemed content to hang there for a while, resting his head on my shoulder. And so I tried another kiss, more definite this time, and another. I moved my mouth upward to his jawline—a jawline so firm and elegant that I had longed to kiss it from the moment we’d met. This time Morgan let his head hang back, offering his throat to my mouth. I felt certain that we would be surprised at any moment, but neither of us cared, nor was able to stop. I kissed again, with real passion this time, the heat surging back into my groin, and pushed him against the wall. Our cocks crushed against each other.
For a moment, I broke for air and looked him square in the face. He had the puzzled look of a man utterly in the grip of desire; I had seen it often enough to recognize the signs. His mouth was hanging open—to be honest, he looked somewhat imbecilic at that moment—so I kissed him there. This time he returned the kiss with equal, if not greater, passion.
“I can’t stand it,” he said, when we took a breather. “I’ve got to come right away.”
There was a bathroom just along the landing; Drekeham Hall, unusually for the day, was lavishly equipped with sanitary facilities. And so I pushed him in there, bolted the door, and continued my assault on his face. He grabbed my hand and pushed it down, straight onto his hard, naked cock. He wasn’t exaggerating: within three or four strokes the thing was jumping in my hand like a motorized banana, and before I had time to step back a great long spurt of sperm had shot onto my trousers. Unwilling to see such natural bounty go to waste, I quickly dropped to a crouching position and took shots two, three, and four in my mouth. I’m sure that, under normal circumstances, Boy would have been horrified at the idea of coming in another man’s mouth (whereas mutual masturbation, for young men of his class, was not entirely unknown). Still, the poor soul was so far gone in lust that he registered only the sensation—for the time being, at least. I was delighted: I’d got the prize, and I savored every drop.
Boy was in a sort of orgasmic delirium for a while, his eyes closed, his head thrown back, exposing that beautiful column of a neck. I took the opportunity to nurse on his cock for a while, and only after I had sucked out the last of his spunk did he start to soften. As the blood flowed back to his brain, he turned back into the rather formal young man I had worked so hard to corrupt.
“Good lord...” he started, then thought better of going on, because he was not yet so accustomed to vice that he could frame the words “you swallowed my load.” But I could read his mind; this was something that, generally speaking, didn’t happen to well-bred young men in 1925. At least, not with their girlfriends.
I thought it best to get things back onto a businesslike footing, and once I had relinquished his cock from my mouth (it made a satisfying plop as it left) I stood up and began to sponge Boy Morgan’s jizz from my flannels. I stood with my back to the door; I didn’t want him bolting just yet, even though I could see from his flustered expression that he wanted to.
There was a moment’s silence, during which I’m sure he was struggling to make some kind of pronouncement. It could have gone either way. Would it be “Mr. Mitchell, what we have just done is wrong and disgusting and if you ever speak of it to a soul I will horsewhip you”? Or would it be a more tender declaration? I hoped for the latter, but couldn’t bear the former, so I spoke first.
“So, Boy, you were saying something about Belinda.”
His fiancée’s name jerked Boy back to reality, and he hurriedly stuffed his cock back into his pants, away from my hungry eyes.
“Yes,” he said, then had to clear his throat. “Er...yes. She’s not making a lot of sense. She thinks she saw something.”
At last—some evidence. Mitch Mitchell, postgraduate detective, sprung into action.
“Then,” I said, “I had better talk to her. Lead on, Mr. Morgan.”
I stood aside and allowed him to open the door. He stuck his head out, gingerly checking that there was nobody to witness two young men coming out of a bathroom that was only designed for single occupancy. While he was doing so, I took the opportunity to bump against his rear—ever so casually and accidentally, but with sufficient force that he would feel the big hard bulge against his ass. It was worth reminding him, when vulnerable, that we still had unfinished business. He moved away—eventually. Oh, I thought, roll on bedtime.
Belinda Eagle was everything a young man of the 1920s could desire. She was blonde and slender, but without attaining the entirely boyish si
lhouette to which many of her sisters aspired. (And I knew from late-night conversations with many of my Cambridge friends that they mourned the absence of tits from their female contemporaries.) She was fashionably turned out, with shingled hair and a drop-waisted dress, but she had not abandoned the art of feminine frivolity that attracted male attention. She was as fresh and fragrant as a spring morning, and as artless as an angel. If there were one person in the Eagle family who could be trusted, it was surely Belinda.
She had rallied well from her earlier hysterics, and was sitting at her dressing table combing her hair when Boy Morgan ushered me in. I hoped that the semen stains on my flannels were not too obvious, and thanked my strictly hygienic upbringing for obliging me to wash my hands after touching cock. She took my proffered hand—the very one that had brought her boyfriend to climax—and motioned me to a chair. Boy lounged on the bed, paying scant attention to what we said; his mind was elsewhere.
“Well,” Belinda said, in the jolly, sporty tones that made her such a favorite with the boys, “what a dreadful affair!”
I knew from my reading of detective fiction that it was sometimes wise to let a witness run on a little at first.
“Dreadful indeed, Miss Eagle.”
“Whoever would have thought it?”
“Thought what, exactly?”
“Well, that we had a murderer in our midst. It’s too scared-making!”
“It is.”
“Still, we can all rest easy in our beds now, thank goodness. The police have their man.”
This was the first I had heard of an arrest. Little wonder that Leonard was so eager to distance me from the house in the aftermath of the crime. I thought it best to play dumb.
“Thank God for that. Who did it?”
“It was Meeks. Isn’t that ghastly?”
“Meeks, Miss Eagle?”
“The first footman. Such a quiet chap. I would never have thought it possible.”
“Which one is Meeks?” Despite having been in England for a couple of years, I could still not distinguish between the ranks of “indoor staff.”
“Oh, you know, pale-faced character with a little Van-dyke beard. Never says boo to a goose.”
I knew immediately whom she meant, and had already admired the first footman’s tactful efficiency at the table—not to mention a beautifully rounded pair of buttocks that his short jacket and tailored trousers showed to good advantage. I like a nice backside on a man, and had noted with delight the fact that, for a man of slight build, the first footman nevertheless had something to sit upon. That aside, I had paid him little attention, being hell-bent on corrupting Boy Morgan.
“And it was him?”
“Apparently so.”
“He’s under arrest?”
“Yes. He didn’t deny it, either. The police took him away without a struggle. Isn’t it extraordinary? Just think, all that time, when he was serving the soup, or clearing away, or bringing one tea, he was scheming a foul crime like that.”
It was time, I decided, to do a little circuitous investigation.
“And how is the rest of the family taking it?”
“Oh, we’re all terribly shocked of course, but Mummy and Daddy are bearing up. They’re a great support to each other. As for Rex... Well, it’s quite wonderful, really...”
“Yes?”
“He’s just carrying on as if nothing had happened at all. That’s typical of my brother; he’s such a very serious chap. No sooner had all this blown up than he was off on some business trip to London that was frightfully important and couldn’t wait another minute. Said he’d intended to go anyway, though it was the first I’d heard of it, mind you that’s nothing new, he never tells me anything.”
I noticed Boy’s eyebrows were raised; evidently he knew nothing of it either, and he thought himself a great pal of Belinda’s older brother.
“Well good for him for not letting anything get in the way of business,” I said. “Evidently he wasn’t upset by this little incident.”
Belinda frowned for a minute. “I wouldn’t exactly say that,” she said, weighing her words and glancing up to see how much I was taking in. “He was...well, I heard him and Daddy...”
“What, Miss Belinda?” I usually found that if I turned on the American charm it worked wonders, particularly with English girls.
“They were having the most frightful row, if you must know. Then Rex came storming out of Daddy’s study with a face like thunder, and got Hibbert to drive him to the station. I only had time for the quickest of words....”
“And you’d heard nothing of this business trip before?”
“Not a sausage.”
“London’s a long way to go on a whim.”
“I don’t think Rex really has whims, Mr. Mitchell.”
“Please call me Mitch. Everyone else does. Eh, Boy?” I prodded Boy with my toe; he was off in a reverie, possibly not unconnected with what he’d felt pressing into his backside. He was, unlike me, incapable of holding two thoughts at once.
“Rather...” he said, vaguely.
“Does your brother have many friends in London, Miss Belinda?”
“I suppose he must know oodles of people. I mean, one does. And of course now he’s working....” Rex Eagle had, on graduating, taken a good position in the family import business, the profits from which had bought and maintained Drekeham Hall and earned Sir James his knighthood.
“Funny to come all the way down here for just one night if he knew he had to dash up to town again so soon, though, isn’t it? Heck of a long train ride.”
“Yes...but I suppose that’s business for you. Daddy says business must come first. I mean even Mummy daren’t disturb Daddy when he’s got business to attend to.”
“Perhaps he’s gone to see Whopper,” Boy said, brightening suddenly.
“Don’t be silly, Boy. Whopper’s on her way here from Trouville, as you well know.”
“Oh.” He sank back into abstraction.
“Who’s ‘Whopper’?” I asked. I found the English fashion for absurd nicknames strangely irritating.
“Whopper Hunt. Rex’s intended,” explained Boy.
“Otherwise known as Lady Diana Hunt, daughter of the Earl of Newington, a great friend of Daddy’s,” Belinda said. “We called her Whopper at school because she was awfully good at hockey and used to whop the ball all the way down the pitch. You didn’t want to get in the way when Whopper Hunt was on the warpath.” Belinda rubbed her shins in memory of long-faded bruises. “Frightful girl at the time, but Daddy says she’s got a good head on her shoulders. And Rex is terribly smitten.”
“So they plan to marry?”
“Oh, yes! And I’m going to be chief bridesmaid! Well, at least, if Boy doesn’t make an honest woman of me first, in which case I shall be matron of honor.”
I wouldn’t depend on your Boy turning out to be the marrying kind, I thought, and was instantly ashamed of my cruelty. Surely there was enough of Boy to share.
“Gosh, Belinda, don’t embarrass Mitch.”
“Come on, Boy, Mitch knows we’re only waiting for your parents to get back from India...”
I was in no hurry to hear more about Boy Morgan’s marriage plans, and steered the conversation back to Rex and his Valkyrie bride-to-be.
“How long have Rex and Diana been courting?”
“Oh, forever,” Belinda said. “They were childhood sweethearts. She’s the daughter of a super family in Lincolnshire, her father is terribly grand. We’ve always said they’d marry. Isn’t that lovely? Something so real and pure and true that time itself couldn’t change the way they feel.”
I wondered if this remark was directed at Boy, who was shifting around on the bed as if eager to be off.
“Is Rex very much in love?”
Boy snorted.
“Well,” Belinda said, casting him an angry look, “I wouldn’t call Rex the romantic type. He doesn’t go in for all that stuff. Nor does she. They’re quite a modern couple
in that respect. Very matter-of-fact.”
It didn’t sound like a particularly romantic union, and I suspected that business and dynastic interests may have been as important to serious Rex Eagle as any tender feelings. The sangfroid of the English upper classes never ceased to amaze me; when I was in love, nothing would come between me and the object of my desire.
“And Miss Hunt has been in France?”
“Yes. She goes over for the golf, I believe.” Belinda smirked slightly; she obviously did not consider golf a particularly ladylike pursuit. “I pity any poor soul who gets in the way of her balls.”
Boy shot me a look that absolutely forbade any jocular riposte.
“What an independent young lady she must be.”
“That’s Whopper for you.”
This was getting me nowhere—though I couldn’t help feeling that Sherlock Holmes would, by now, have picked out the vital clue from Belinda’s disjointed narrative.
“Pardon my intrusion, Miss Belinda, but Boy mentioned that you saw something earlier that...distressed you.”
“Well,” she said, with a hint of pride, “it was me that found him, you know.”
“Indeed.”
“Yes. I opened the cupboard and out he fell. I thought I was doing terrifically well, being a hunter and everything, and then I noticed that he was...well, dead.”
“Yes. And that was when we found you.”
“Thank heavens.” She beamed at Boy, who blushed and nodded, ever the modest hero.
“Was there anything you noticed at the time that seemed...unusual?”
“Apart from finding a dead gentleman in the sports cupboard, you mean? Even in our house, Mr. Mitchell, that is not quite usual.”
“I beg your pardon, Miss. I meant anything that struck you as peculiar?”
“Come on, Billie, tell Mitch what you told me.”
“I don’t know now, Boy. I think I may have been mistaken.”
“What was it, Miss Belinda?”
“I thought I saw—but now I’m wondering if, after all, I’m getting confused with what happened when.”
