The Magic Chair Murder

by Diane Janes

  ‘May I come in? I have something to show you.’

  ‘No. No, you can’t. Please go away.’

  ‘I won’t take up much of your time. And I did call ahead. It isn’t as if it’s bath night …’

  ‘Go away!’ she yelled. ‘Just go away.’

  She plunged down the bracket, which cut off the call, and dropped the receiver on the sofa before racing across to double-check that the front door was locked. Then she dragged the sitting-room curtains across the window, plunging the room into premature darkness, before charging into the kitchen to check the back door and pull down the blinds. After that she took the stairs two at a time before entering the bathroom. She knew that the window was open at the top and the frosted glass would hide her. She kicked off her shoes, climbed into the bath in her stocking feet and adopted a half-crouching position in order to bring her eyes on a level with the opening. Was his car still sitting out there on the main road or not? The hedges were in the way and she couldn’t tell.

  The police. That was it, she would ring the police. She ran back down the stairs then paused in the doorway, conscious that she was shaking. How could she justify calling the police? What on earth could she say? That a man had parked out on the main road and called her on the telephone? That she had declined to invite him in and asked him to go away – which presumably he had done. There was no law against any of that.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Fran and Tom met by prior arrangement on the front steps of the Carnegie Library in Kendal on Thursday morning. The battery had gone flat in the wireless at the cottage, but she had learned by reading a morning paper over the shoulder of a fellow passenger on the bus that Ramsey McDonald was to form the new government, propped up by Lloyd George and the Liberals. She was still pondering what this might presage for the country when, from her slightly elevated position, she spotted Tom approaching from the direction of the town hall. He had a distinctive loping gait, and in any case stood out from the crowd, being head and shoulders taller than almost every other shopper.

  As he greeted her and his brown eyes locked on to hers, a doubt crept into his smile. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine. I just didn’t sleep very well.’

  In fact, she had not slept very well for the past four nights. She kept waking from uneasy dreams, then having to restrain herself from slipping out of bed to peer through the window and check if there was a car parked outside in the lane. She had heard nothing more from Stephen Latchford, but that had not prevented him from becoming a constant presence in her thoughts.

  One of the librarians conducted them to a quiet room on the upper floor of the library in order to examine the old newspapers. It appeared that demand for this kind of material was not high, so they had the place virtually to themselves and chose a table under the window, where it was possible to place two chairs side by side. Tom tossed the folder he had brought on to the table, removed his jacket and draped it over the back of the right-hand chair. He appeared almost childishly eager to get started.

  ‘I went to the Vester House Museum yesterday.’ He spoke in a loud stage whisper, which instantly earned a glare from a fat woman with greying hair dragged into a bun, who was hunched over a hefty ledger at a corner table. The only other occupant of the room, a middle-aged man who was poring over a reference book, also looked up and stared.

  I’ll tell you later, Tom mouthed – overdoing it so much that Fran had to stifle a giggle.

  The newspapers for 1914 had been bound into four huge ledgers, and as they did not have a precise date for the murder they decided to split the year between them, with Fran taking the January to March volume, while Tom started on July to September. The fifteen-year-old papers already felt flimsy with age and needed to be turned with considerable care. After a couple of false starts, they both found that it was easier to work standing up, and Fran soon discovered too that the distractions of old, half-remembered news items slowed her down considerably. She was still in January when Tom’s hand closed on her upper arm, and she looked up to find him gesturing at the headline Terrible Fire Claims Two Lives at Windermere. The momentary presence of the hand was distracting, and in her imagination she continued to feel its lingering warmth long after it had been removed.

  The initial story was brief and vague, the copy rushed in to meet a deadline, no doubt, but by the following day’s edition the initial supposition of an accident had been replaced by speculation that there had been foul play and, by the third day, the headline was ‘murder’. The inquest had been opened and adjourned after evidence of identity had been given, and by day five the paper had announced beneath yet more banner headlines that a local man, Edwin Edgar Traynor, had been arrested, charged with the double murder, appeared before local magistrates and been refused bail.

  As they leaned over the table, reading the columns word by word, Fran tried not to be distracted by the way Tom’s upper arm rested lightly against hers, his shirt sleeve brushing against her skin. For the first week or so after the fire, each edition of the Westmorland & District Messenger had been virtually devoted to the murders. The paper ran very few pictures, but one front page was dominated by a photograph of the burnt-out house. It was scarcely more than a shell, Fran thought sadly, like a cruel parody of the framed photograph which she had rescued from Linda Dexter’s house. Windows gaped like sightless eyes in the face of a well-loved friend. The roof was gone and the interior looked like the end of a hideous game of Jack Straws, just a collapsed mass of blackened beams where there had once been an ordered structure of walls and ceilings. On an inside page, there were pictures of Andrew Chappell and his daughter, Penelope, both carefully posed studio shots, with him dressed in a morning suit, top hat in hand, while she had pearls at her neck and her hair piled up with what looked like real flowers woven into it – incongruous images when juxtaposed against the grim wreckage of their erstwhile home. The accompanying text had been provided by a local reporter, whose favourite adjectives appeared to have been terrible, shocking and mysterious.

  In spite of the hyperbole, it was easy enough to piece the story together. Halfpenny Landing stood in extensive grounds on Windermere’s eastern shore, at some distance from its nearest neighbours and protected from the road by mature laurel hedges which rendered the house invisible from the road. None of the servants lived in the main house, though the chauffeur had a room above what had originally been the stable block and was now the garages, while the cook and her husband inhabited the tiny lodge which sat just inside the front gates. On the night of the fire, none of these individuals had seen or heard anything amiss, and indeed all three remained soundly asleep until a passing motorist both saw and smelt the blaze at around half past two in the morning, and hammered on the front door of the lodge cottage to rouse the occupants. As a result, the fire had taken a good hold before the alarm was raised.

  While the reporter on the Westmorland & District Messenger may have been stylistically suspect, he evidently had good local contacts, writing within seventy-two hours of the tragedy that according to a ‘police source’, the post-mortems had revealed no signs of smoke inhalation, which meant that both Andrew Chappell and his daughter must have been dead by the time the fire began, having presumably been murdered while they slept. The paper had even managed to get hold of the information that Mr Chappell had been in the habit of taking pills to help him sleep.

  It was the biggest thing to happen on the Westmorland & District Messenger’s patch in years and they had milked the story for all it was worth. The details of the incident itself were almost lost among the columns devoted to local reaction. Residents who had never even met the Chappells queued up to say what a tragedy it was – how mysterious and shocking. There was even speculation about whether the double murder would deter tourists from visiting the area (in fact, it had the opposite effect, with ghouls blocking the Bowness to Newby Bridge road in their enthusiasm to get a closer look at the scene of the crime).

  ‘We’d better co
py all this down,’ said Tom. He didn’t need to raise his voice. They were standing so close together that she felt his breath stirring her hair. One millimetre to the right and her shoulder would be resting against his.

  ‘There’s nothing at all here about Linda,’ she whispered.

  ‘We need to keep following the story.’

  Though it was time-consuming, they went back to the beginning and, by unspoken agreement, Fran began to neatly transcribe all the important details. Only when they had got further into the following week, by which time Edwin Traynor had been arrested and charged with the ‘Halfpenny Landing Murders’, as the paper was now calling the case, did the first reference to Linda appear.

  ‘Here she is,’ Fran whispered. ‘Andrew Chappell leaves one surviving daughter, Miss Belinda Chappell, who is staying at an undisclosed location and is said to be too upset to talk to representatives of the press … It is understood that Miss Belinda Chappell had previously enjoyed a close friendship with the accused man, Edwin Traynor, a well-known local athlete who took two medals at last year’s Grasmere Sports …’

  Though the Westmorland & District Messenger did its best to keep the story alive for as long as possible, as the days passed the murder became old news. Apart from reporting that a guard had been mounted over the wreckage of the ‘burned-out mansion on the shores of Windermere’ in order to deter sightseers and souvenir hunters, they could find little to add except for some grumbling on the part of local businessmen about visitors going into the shops and hotels around Bowness, solely to ask for directions to the murder site.

  ‘We need to find the trial,’ Fran hissed. ‘There will be a lot more about what actually happened when people start giving evidence.’

  ‘Bound over to the December assizes, it said.’ Tom’s deep voice emerged in a loud stage whisper and earned them an irritable, ‘Shush.’ After making a face at Fran, he turned to the volume which covered the final quarter of the year and began to turn over the pages in large chunks, pausing every so often to check the dates. When he reached the editions covering December they pored over page after page in vain. There were some references to the various cases heard that session at Appleby but nothing at all about the Halfpenny Landing murders.

  Fran shook her head. ‘We must have missed it.’

  Tom obediently returned to the edition which covered the arrival of the judges and the opening of the assizes, this time reading carefully through the list of cases which were scheduled to be heard. ‘Not here,’ he murmured. ‘It must have been moved to another district.’

  ‘No!’ Fran made a small excited noise, which she instantly stifled, while pointing to a tiny item at the bottom of the page. ‘Now I know why I remembered the Halfpenny Landing case.’

  Tom swiftly took in the words shadowed by her pointing finger. ‘Crikey,’ he said. The exclamation was greeted by the sound of a book being thumped down on a desk behind them, coupled with an irritated, ‘Harrumph!’

  ‘Let’s have a break,’ she whispered. ‘I know somewhere nearby where we can get a cup of tea.’

  They collected their things together in silence, trying not to incur any further overt disapproval from their fellow researchers. It was a relief to get outside and be able to talk in normal voices. Fran led him to her favourite tea shop on the corner of Elephant Yard, where they found a corner table and ordered a pot of tea.

  ‘I can’t believe I had forgotten all this until now,’ she said. ‘The whole thing made such a huge stir at the time. We only lived about thirty miles away and of course everyone was beside themselves at the idea of there being a dangerous murderer on the run. Surely you remember it now?’

  ‘I can’t say that I do. Don’t forget that I was still away at school in 1914. We didn’t often get to read the newspapers, and when we did it was mostly for the cricket scores.’

  ‘Not in December.’

  ‘Of course not in December. The chap didn’t escape in December, though, did he?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. It was while they were taking him to and fro from the prison for some reason or another, so far as I can recall. Probably to attend the police court, or the inquest, or something.’

  ‘I say, though, it’s pretty rare for anyone to escape, and specially someone who’s up for murder.’

  ‘You don’t say. But the point is that after his “daring escape”, as the papers put it, I don’t think he was ever caught. And look here.’ Her voice rose excitedly. ‘I’ve just spotted the very person who would know.’ She began tapping energetically on the window, then leapt up and hurried across to open the door, lest her quarry should escape.

  Tom watched from their table and then stood up politely as Fran, having brooked no refusal, ushered Christina Harper over to join them. ‘No, no,’ she was saying. ‘I insist. We can easily get the waitress to bring us a fresh pot. I don’t know if you remember Mr Dod, who came to your sister’s funeral with me?’

  After pleasantries had been exchanged, another cup and saucer procured and the tea pronounced perfectly fine following the addition of some hot water, Fran said, ‘I know it sounds awfully morbid, but I’m afraid I was just telling Mr Dod about how Linda’s father and sister were the people murdered at Halfpenny Landing. Is it true that the case against the man who was suspected never came to court?’

  ‘That’s right. Escaped the noose, he did, though they reckon that fate caught up with him eventually.’

  ‘Really?’ Fran smiled encouragingly. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, of course, after he did a runner, they hunted high and low for him, and then, roundabout Christmas-time, there was a rumour that he’d been killed at the Front. The tale went that after war was declared, he joined the army under a false name.’

  ‘But surely,’ Tom said politely, ‘he wouldn’t have broadcast his whereabouts. And if he was serving under an assumed name …?’

  ‘There’s always some folk that are willing to shelter a friend, however bad the things he’s done,’ Mrs Harper said disapprovingly. ‘It was said that he’d managed to get word back to his mother that he’d gone into the army, though whether she knew under what name and so forth … well, I don’t know about that. The police went round to his mother’s time and again, but she wouldn’t never tell them nothing. She believed that he was dead, right enough mind, because after that first Christmas of the war she started putting flowers in the churchyard, regular as anything.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t have been buried in the churchyard,’ Fran demurred.

  ‘No. She put them on her husband’s grave, of course, but she was putting them there more often than before, and on Eddie’s birthday and that type of thing. A lot of folk felt sorry for her, losing her only son like that, for all that he should have been hung.’

  ‘Well,’ said Fran, when Mrs Harper had finished her cup of tea and gone on her way. ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘Rumours aren’t the same as hard facts,’ Tom mused. ‘Then again, it would have made a lot of sense for a man on the run to enlist. If he chose another part of the country and a common enough name, he could easily have got away with it, especially in that first rush to join up, when everyone was saying that it would be all over by Christmas.’

  ‘What about word getting back to his mother that he had died? How would that work?’

  ‘Most chaps in the services have pals,’ Tom said. ‘He could have arranged some sort of code, whereby if anything happened to him, some other fellow could get word back – probably not directly to his mother – more likely to some innocent-sounding third party, who could have passed the information on to her.’

  ‘So if Mrs Harper’s right, justice was done in the end.’

  ‘Mmm. I wouldn’t be too sure about that. There are all kinds of stories about people going missing presumed dead and even swapping pay books with the fallen. The war was absolute carnage, of course, but it was also a godsend to anyone who wanted to enter the army under one name and come out at the end with another.’
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br />   ‘But surely,’ Fran objected, ‘he wouldn’t have sent word to his own mother that he had died – she would have been devastated.’

  ‘Someone who’s ruthless enough to murder two people, then set fire to their house, may not be too worried about upsetting his mother. Think about it – it would have been a whole lot safer for him if she had believed him to be dead, and the best possible way of ensuring that the police lost interest in him. It was his mother’s behaviour with the flowers that convinced Mrs Harper, don’t forget, so it might have worked with the authorities too. No, here, let me get the bill.’

  ‘So we’re not going to be able to find out what happened from the witness statements at the trial after all.’

  ‘Not from the trial, no,’ Tom said. ‘But there will have been preliminary hearings in the magistrates’ court and at the coroner’s inquest. We skipped past all that because we thought we’d find out everything from the trial, but as there was no trial, we’d better see what was said during the other proceedings.’

  It was only as they left the little tea shop and re-crossed the road to return to the library that Tom told her about his experiences the day before at the Vester House Museum.

  ‘They have a reading room there. You fill in a slip and shove it through this little arched window to a chap sitting in the next room, and then you sit and wait. I ordered the Barnaby diaries, and I’d scarcely been waiting five minutes when none other than Sarah Ingoldsby appeared from her lair, somewhere in the back of the building, and asked why I wanted to see them. I said I was doing some research and she asked what about. I felt like telling her to mind her own damned business, but I said “Robert Barnaby, obviously”. She looked at me as if I was something she’d found on the bottom of her shoe and said that the diaries were an “irreplaceable resource”’ – here Tom mimicked Mrs Ingoldsby’s whiney voice – “and very rarely made available to anyone”.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Fran exclaimed. ‘They’re not even fifty years old! Anyone would think you were asking for the original copy of the Domesday Book.’