Weekend at Thrackley

by Alan Melville

  Mr. Carson looked hurt.

  “You are still my guest, Henderson. And, after all, what have I done to you since you came to Thrackley? Haven’t I kept up what you choose to term the perfect host attitude as far as you are concerned? There may, perhaps, be room for complaint with the other members of this little party, but I don’t think that you can have anything against me.”

  “You haven’t snaffled my dress studs, if that’s what you mean. I can’t understand why the hell you asked me here, seeing I haven’t anything worth stealing.”

  The little man at the desk looked a shade more hurt than before.

  “Really, Captain Henderson—” he began.

  “Oh, for God’s sake stop trying to fool me. Let’s get down to brass tacks.”

  “By all means. What is the reason for this visit, Captain Henderson? Some complaint about the food or the servants? Or are you merely homesick like the others?”

  “Ronnie—I mean Burroughs—your chauffeur…”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s dead. I suppose you killed him.”

  Edwin Carson gripped the edge of the desk and leaned forward towards Jim. For a moment Jim dallied with the idea of landing what is commonly referred to as a sock on the jaw. Then he dismissed the proposition, attractive though it was. For what good, after all, would a sock on Edwin Carson’s jaw do to him? In any case, Carson probably had a brace of his servants ready behind the desk to deal with sockers. Which was very nearly true, for, in the corridor outside, Jacobson was on the point of opening the study door and taking a hand in the proceedings. He had only a limited view of Mr. Henderson’s back through the keyhole, but he did not like the look of that back at all. A nasty, purposeful, hundred-per-cent action back. And if Mr. Henderson’s back view looked as bad as that, what (thought Jacobson to himself) would Mr. Henderson’s front view be like at the moment?

  “Well?” said Jim. “Do you deny killing Burroughs?”

  Edwin Carson did not answer. Instead, he reached forward to an oblong box of ebony wood which lay on the desk. He drew out a Turkish cigarette and tapped it on the desk-top, rather to Jim’s disappointment, for he had expected the ebony box to contain something more melodramatic than a hundred cigarettes. A revolver, perhaps, or a dangerous-looking dagger. He watched Carson light his cigarette in silence.

  “Will you have one?” said Carson, pushing the box over to Jim.

  “No, thanks,” said Jim. A few thousand magazine stories and films and stage plays in which the hero had been drugged by one of the villain’s special brand of cigarettes loomed up in his mind. And then, telling himself to be not quite such a damned fool, he said: “Yes, I think I will.”

  “Splendid,” said Edwin Carson. “Now, I’ll tell you quite frankly. I did not kill Burroughs. But I told Jacobson to kill him. He was dangerous. He knew too much. You others—the guests, I mean—you are so helpless in the matter. You don’t know enough. But Burroughs—he was different. He knew everything. I’m afraid I trusted him completely. The only man, I think, who ever fooled me. And so he had to go.”

  “You’re a little swine, Carson.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I suppose you knew that Burroughs was a detective?”

  “Only recently. He told me so himself.”

  “He told you?”

  “Well, not exactly. But he told you, when you and Mr. Usher met him and had your charming talk on your old schooldays in the garage. I had to fit the microphone installation in the garage myself… Burroughs could not see the necessity for one there. And he was so thorough about the other installations all over the house… did the whole thing without a single mistake. Even when you found the microphone in your bedroom, Captain Henderson, he was the first to suggest a more suitable hiding-place for it. Yes, I knew Burroughs was a detective… not a very good detective, do you think? Really good detectives do not employ stray guests at house-parties for their assistants.”

  “Never mind that. Burroughs is dead. What are you going to do about it?”

  “About what? About the body?… that will be disposed of quite easily, Captain Henderson. No need to worry yourself on that account. And the rest is in your hands. The question is—what are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m going to get you hanged,” said Jim.

  “I don’t think so. Just consider the situation. When you get out of here I shall be safely on the Continent. It is very easy to get lost on the Continent. One lies low for a week or so, and grows a beard perhaps, and then one may walk down the Rue de Rivoli and ask the way to the Gare de Lyons from any gendarme without the slightest fear. And you… what will you be doing?”

  “We,” said Jim, “will be making a hell of a row. Especially Catherine Lady Stone. We’ll have every newspaper giving your pedigree, every police force in Europe learning your description by heart, every jewel merchant and fence in England and the Continent ready for you and your rotten collection of sparklers.”

  “Interesting. Very interesting. But I wonder?… When you leave Thrackley, what will you do? Go and tell the police, and perhaps the newspapers. And they will come to corroborate this fantastic tale of yours. And what will they find? An old house, deserted. A very ordinary cellar with none of the cunning machinery for converting old stones into new which you will have described. And certainly,” said Edwin Carson, “they will find no dead bodies at Thrackley.”

  “I sincerely hope,” said Jim, “that they will have the pleasure of finding yours.”

  “I wonder if you would have said that thirty years ago?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing… nothing at all. Good morning, Captain Henderson. I have a great deal of work to do. Passport to arrange… ’plane to charter… everything to get ready for leaving this delightful spot. Good morning.”

  “Of all the bloody little swine I’ve met,” observed Jim as he walked to the door of the study, “you are the bloodiest.”

  “And probably the littlest,” said Edwin Carson, reaching for another of his excellent cigarettes.

  Jim slammed the door noisily behind him. He had not got the best of that interview, he thought.

  “Now what the hell do you want?” he asked.

  Jacobson, the butler, smiled his very distressing smile and picked up a tray which lay on the table beside him.

  “I was on my way, sir,” he said, “to sound the gong for luncheon. Any objections, Mr. Amateur Detective?”

  “None whatever, Mr. Professional Murderer,” said Jim.

  The company which gathered for lunch was in very much the same state of mind as that which had collected itself round the breakfast-table. Catherine Lady Stone still monopolized the conversation. She had, it appeared, remembered an intimate friend at Broadcasting House who would be the very man to help them out of this dreadful affair. Though, when pressed on the subject, Catherine Lady Stone had to admit that she had not the slightest idea how any official, high or low, of the British Broadcasting Corporation could be of much practical value in getting the Thrackley guests out of Thrackley: Freddie Usher and Henry Brampton still looked on the affair as a temporary tragedy to which a solution was bound to turn up sooner or later. And Raoul and Marilyn Brampton were both frankly frightened. Raoul because she saw herself out of favour with Mr. Cyrus T. Crammstein, whose latest venture, Soft Sugar, was just recovering from a rather unfavourable first night and could certainly not be expected to stand the absence of any of its principals on more than two consecutive evening performances. And Marilyn because she had unfortunately happened to go to the garage shortly after Jim and Mary had left it and had seen Burroughs, the chauffeur, lying dead over the bonnet of the Lagonda.

  Two of the house-party were absent from the dining-room, Jim noticed. The host (“Thank God that little rat has had the decency to stay away from this meal,” as Lady Stone put it) and Mary.

 
“Well,” said Freddie Usher, “do we squat the bodies? No sense in waiting for Santa Claus, is there?”

  “He’s probably foraging among my cuff-links at the present moment,” said Henry Brampton.

  “Let’s start.”

  “Where’s Mary?” asked Jim.

  “You ought to know, if anyone does, Captain Henderson,” said Lady Stone. “Haven’t you been in the garden with her all morning?”

  “Yes… she left me about an hour ago to go to her room.”

  “Probably assisting with my cuff-links,” suggested Mr. Brampton.

  “If it weren’t for the fact that we were just starting lunch, I should kill you quite cheerfully, Brampton.”

  “Well, we are just starting lunch, so that’s quite out of the question,” said Lady Stone. “And we’ve got quite enough to put us off our food without anything more. Come along—let’s sit down.”

  “Perfectly right, Lady Stone. The Geneva attitude every time,” murmured Freddie Usher. “There, now, boys, behave yourselves. Jim, pass Mr. Brampton the salt, there’s a good fellow.”

  The five guests at Thrackley sat in their places around the big table. Jim unfolded the serviette which lay on his plate. It crackled as he did so. Yes, crackled: no doubt about it. He prodded it on his lap… the thing crackled again. And (being unaccustomed to serviettes which behaved in this way whenever you touched them) he felt in its folds and brought to light a half-sheet of notepaper. He laid it out on his knees and read:

  I’m down in the cellars, Jim, safely locked in. Don’t worry about me, and please don’t do anything or tell anyone about me. I’ve found that Carson is making a bolt for it to-night—either he’s got all he wants in the way of jewels or else he’s got the wind up. Keep a look-out from your bedroom window, Jim, but don’t do anything until you see Carson get out of the grounds. I think with me down here we’ve got a pretty fair chance of coming out top in this after all. Don’t let anyone see this note—tear it up after you’ve read it.

  Mary.

  Jim looked up from the note into the unpleasant face of Jacobson, the butler, poising plates around the back of his chair.

  “Soup, sir?” Jacobson inquired.

  “Yes, damn you,” said Jim.

  XXI

  At seven o’clock Edwin Carson removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. There was a great deal to be done and none too long a time in which to do it. He hung the jacket neatly over the back of one of the chairs in his study (for on even the busiest of busy evenings there is no need to spoil a perfectly good jacket by flinging it on the floor) and he telephoned to the kitchen of Thrackley and asked Jacobson to present himself immediately. When the butler arrived, Edwin Carson pointed to the jacket… and Jacobson smiled, took off his own rather antiquated tail coat, detached the detachable cuffs from his shirt, and rolled up his sleeves to the same businesslike heights as those of his master. And Edwin Carson locked the door of the study, put the key in his pocket, crossed to the shattered panels which had once hidden so effectively the entrance to his cellars, said “Come on, then!” and both he and the butler disappeared from view.

  And from seven-five, when the lift deposited them in the cellar, until a quarter to two on the following morning, Edwin Carson and Jacobson worked extremely hard.

  “We’ll close up the machinery first,” Carson had said. And within an hour the door which led to the little room at the end of the cellar was giving a very creditable impersonation of a substantial stone wall. There is no better way of closing a gap in a wall than that of using the stones you have removed to make that gap. Edwin Carson realized this. When he had had that door knocked through the thick wall of his cellar (“Just a little storeroom… I shall be keeping bulbs and things like that here,” as he had explained to the two well-paid and consequently uninquisitive workmen who had done the job) he had given very definite orders that the stones should not be removed from the cellars… no necessity at all to drag them all the way up through the house and into the garden:a much more simple matter to lay them neatly in a corner of the little-room. So, after an hour’s fairly heavy loss of perspiration, the entrance to the little room had almost disappeared. Only a couple of the big stone slabs to go into position now at the top of the opening… and then the apparatus on which Edwin Carson had worked so long, the clever little lathes and polishers and cutters which had turned out a twin to so many precious stones… all lost from view, perhaps for ever. Preferably for ever, thought Edwin Carson. He stood on tiptoe on one of the remaining stones and peered into the room… the square of light which was all that now filtered through fell on one of the benches. A tiny file and a few coloured pearls lay in the light. A pity that he had had to leave everything in such disorder, but that could not be helped. He stepped down from the stone and helped Jacobson to hoist it in its place. The last slab fitted exactly into the space behind it. “Now,” said Edwin Carson, “if you will just touch up those little spaces between the stones, Jacobson… not too much, you understand?… just a little bit, to give the impression of old cement that has worn away… that’s right… and remember to sweep the floor round here, won’t you?… all this dust off the stones might make people think, mightn’t it?” He was rather enjoying the evening already; rather revelling in the thought that, where almost every other man would have left some clue or have forgotten some tiny but important thing… he, Edwin Carson, was going to make another perfectly flawless exit.

  He crossed to the desk, pulled out its many drawers, ran his fingers through their contents. Then he pulled towards him, one after the other, the switches which lay in the panel at the side of the desk. The oblong cases all around the cellar walls came slowly into view… the brilliant electric lights reflected once again on the different stones lying in their beds of velvet. And Edwin Carson took the stout Gladstone bag which he had brought down from the study, and went slowly round the walls, stopping at each case. He produced a ring of tiny keys from his pocket, opened first the wire protection and then the plate glass covering of each case. He ripped the pale blue velvet cloth out of the first case, arranged it at the foot of the Gladstone bag, spilled the dozen diamonds which had lain on it into a corner of the bag much as though they were the beginnings of a weekend’s packing. In half an hour the Gladstone bag was filled with a sparkling collection of jewels… and the cases around the walls seemed particularly dull and lifeless without their contents. Another length of velvet from the last of the cases folded neatly on top of the bag’s contents, a minute’s searching for another ring of keys, and the double lock of the Gladstone bag fastened with two satisfying clicks. Edwin Carson walked back to the desk. He pushed back the switches in the panel… the wall was once again just a wall.

  “Now, Jacobson,” he said, “you’ll remove this panel of switches, please… be very careful not to damage the desk while you’re taking it out… you have your tools?… that’s right… an ordinary screwdriver will do the turn, I think… and I’ll attend to the wiring while you’re busy with that.”

  The wiring of the cellar took rather longer than Carson had expected. It had been, after all, very thoroughly wired. Wires to each of the cases in the walls, electric light wiring to nearly a dozen bulbs in the main cellar and the little rooms which led off it, wiring to the machinery in the ante-room which was now blocked up, ordinary telephone wiring to the house and the garage. Edwin Carson perspired a great deal more freely than ever before, swore at the pair of pliers in his hands, cursed the idiots who had stapled down the wires so firmly in position. But, for all the swearing and the perspiring, he made fairly steady progress and by midnight only the electric lights in the main cellar remained to be disconnected.

  “What d’you want to take them down for?” said Jacobson. “Nothing suspicious in having electric light in a cellar, is there?”

  “Something very suspicious in having twelve high-powered points, don’t you think, Jacobson?… and besid
es, if ever anyone does investigate this part of the house, I should prefer them to have as little light as possible to help the investigation… get on with your work, Jacobson, and talk a little less… you can burn all the papers in the desk, if you’ve nothing better to do… put them in the middle of the floor and set a light to them… all except those in the pigeon-hole at this end… this end, mind you… and bring me that other case across to put this damned wire into…”

  “You’re not taking all that much away with you?”

  “What do you think?… leave it all here in a heap in the middle of the floor for the first person who comes down here to trip over and start asking questions?… really, Jacobson, you have no imagination… none at all.”

  The unimaginative Jacobson shrugged his shoulders and turned to the heavy oak desk. He emptied each of the many drawers and pigeon-holes until there was quite a satisfactory pile of papers lying on the stone floor of the cellar. Only the little bundle in the pigeon-hole at the left of the desk remained untouched.

  “Got a match?”

  Edwin Carson tucked the last strand of wire into the case at his feet, brought a booklet of matches from his waistcoat pocket, struck one and threw it on the pile of papers. The match hesitated for a minute, decided to go out, thought better of it, and in a very short time the cellar was lit up with the flames. Carson looked at the fire as it lowered.

  “You haven’t touched anything in that end pigeon-hole?” he asked.

  “Not a thing.”

  “Good.” He crossed to the desk, putting his hand to shield the eyes behind the heavy spectacles as he passed the fire. “No… all here. I’ll take care of this little bundle myself, Jacobson. A very important bundle… very important indeed.”

  He untied the string around the papers in his hand and laid them out on the top of the desk. A photograph of a young, attractive-looking man. Three diaries, held together in a rubber band. A very long typewritten letter. Another long document, a legal one by the look of it, witnessed and sealed on its last page. He stood for quite a while gazing at the photograph of the young man… and then he remembered that there was still a great deal of work to be done, and that this was neither the time nor the place for becoming sentimental…