The Magic Chair Murder

by Diane Janes

  ‘Well, I expect this will sound like a strange request, but at the conference I was talking to a gentleman about poetry and he lent me a little volume of poems by Robert Frost, which I obviously intended to return. I know it’s dreadful of me, but I have forgotten his name and there is nothing in the book to indicate ownership. Of course, I know an awful lot of the members, but this was someone I haven’t come across before. I’ve been pondering how I can return the book and it occurred to me that if you could give me a list of the people who attended I might be able to work it out by process of elimination, or at least narrow down the numbers of people I need to contact. I had hoped that I might have recognized the man at the Middleham meeting last Saturday,’ Fran ploughed on. ‘But of course that wasn’t so extensively attended as the annual conference, and he may live in another part of the country entirely.’

  ‘I’m sure I have a spare copy of the delegate list,’ he said. ‘I will look it out and let you have it.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, that is so kind. One doesn’t want to purloin another member’s book.’ She could hardly believe how easy it had been. He was obviously unaware of Hugh Allonby’s latest demand that she resign or he would never have agreed – evidently the chairman was trying to keep the latest resignation request a close secret. ‘Oh, and Mr James, I hope you won’t mind me asking before I go, but I was at the unveiling of the war memorial in our village a week or so ago – the village where my brothers and I grew up – and I somehow mentioned the society, your name cropped up and my mother reminded me that my brother, Cecil, served with a John James. You did not happen to know a Cecil Ford, did you? He was in the Durham Light Infantry.’ Goodness, Fran thought, how easy it was to invent when the moment required – or as her mother would have said, to tell lies.

  ‘Not my lot, I’m afraid. Must have been a chap with the same name.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ She hesitated, wondering if there was some way of drawing him out further, but her powers of improvisation had reached their limit. ‘Well, thank you very much; I look forward to receiving the list.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I won’t forget.’

  After she ended the call, she paused for a reality check. Did she really imagine that she would be able to establish the background of every man in the right age group who had attended the conference? And suppose she was barking up the wrong tree entirely? She ran her eye down the list that she had already compiled from memory. Richard Finney, the journal editor, who according to Jennifer Rumsey was a holder of the Victoria Cross. Well, that proved that he was resourceful and daring. Gareth Lowe – he was a bit old to be Edwin Traynor and such a buffoon too, always dressing up and thereby drawing attention to himself. Surely you wouldn’t do that if you were on the run?

  She smiled at the remembrance of Hugh Allonby’s expression at the conference, when he had first caught sight of Mr Lowe’s latest effort. Of course, Gareth Lowe would probably argue that in adopting various guises he was not merely showing off but enhancing the fun for the other members. Hadn’t someone once said something of the kind? Yes, it had been dear old Miss Leonard on the morning after Linda Dexter had disappeared. A memory rose unbidden of a hitherto forgotten remark, made on the final morning at Furnival Towers, when she said that she had observed the Black Shadow climbing in through a bedroom window. ‘Oh my goodness!’ Fran exclaimed aloud. Surely not? Had sweet, dotty Miss Leonard mistaken the murderer’s return for a prank by a member in fancy dress?

  On consulting the membership list yet again, she was relieved to find that Miss Leonard was among those listed who were on the telephone, and a moment later she was through to the exchange and asking for the number. It seemed to take an age for the connection to be made, the telephone answered and the man servant on the other end of the line agreeing to fetch Miss Leonard to the telephone.

  Fran had been prepared to observe polite preliminaries, but Dora Leonard was obviously unsettled by the unexpected call and asked at once, ‘Is there anything wrong, Mrs Black?’

  ‘No, no, nothing at all.’

  ‘Oh, goodness me, I am so glad to hear it. When Hodgkiss told me who was calling, I said to myself at once that it could only be some terrible news from the committee – an accident to dear Mr Allonby, perhaps, with you calling members personally to soften the blow. So terrible to read something like that in the newspapers without prior warning. And, of course, dear Amy has a bad heart, you know, and cannot cope with sudden shocks of any kind. But it is nothing like that, you say?’

  ‘No. Nothing like that.’ Fran hesitated. ‘Though it is connected with something rather tragic which happened at the conference.’

  There was a pause, then Miss Leonard said, ‘You must mean poor Mrs Dexter.’

  ‘Well, yes … perhaps. Miss Leonard, it may be nothing at all, but do you remember, the morning after Mrs Dexter had disappeared, a group of us were talking and you mentioned that you had seen someone dressed as the Black Shadow climbing in at a window?’

  ‘I may have said something of the kind. I’m afraid that I can’t really recall.’

  ‘But you did see someone dressed up like that?’

  ‘Oh, yes, dear, I did. I assumed that it was Gareth Lowe. Mr Lowe is always the first to don a costume at the least excuse, isn’t he?’

  ‘But you don’t know that it was him?’

  ‘Oh, no. I didn’t see who it was. He would have been wearing a mask, of course, being dressed as the Black Shadow – and in any case, it was pitch-black dark.’

  ‘When was this, exactly?’

  ‘My dear, you sound like a policeman asking all these questions. I really couldn’t say when it was. I am a very poor sleeper, you see. And when I wake up, I don’t put on the light for fear of waking dear Amy, but sometimes I creep out of bed and look out of the window. There was moonlight that night, and I drew back the curtains a crack and peeped out at the stars. I was just thinking that those would have been the same hills and the same stars that Robert Barnaby looked out at when he stayed at Furnival Towers all those years before, when I saw the Black Shadow coming towards the building. As you can imagine, I thought for a moment that I was dreaming, but then I realized that it would just be one of the members having some high jinks – and naturally I thought of Mr Lowe, as it’s just the sort of thing that he would do.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Fran prompted. ‘And then you saw the Black Shadow climb in through a window?’

  ‘That’s right. It was the window right next door to ours. It wasn’t difficult, of course, because our room was on the ground floor.’

  ‘And what happened next?’

  ‘Well, nothing. I stood looking out little longer and then I went back to bed.’

  ‘You didn’t happen to mention this to anyone else, did you?’

  ‘Well, I told Amy the next morning, of course – while we were drinking our morning tea in bed. I’m afraid it wasn’t very hot. I remember saying to Amy that the girl who brought it must have dawdled. Why do you ask? Is it something important?’

  ‘Well,’ Fran said carefully, ‘it might be. Did the police ask you any questions after Mrs Dexter disappeared?’

  ‘Of course not – why ever would they? I hardly knew her.’ Miss Leonard was starting to sound flustered again.

  ‘No, of course not. It’s just that, you know, someone climbing in at a window, the very same night that Mrs Dexter disappeared from the hotel …’

  ‘I’m afraid I fail to see the connection.’ Miss Leonard’s voice had developed an edge.

  ‘There’s probably no connection,’ Fran said.

  ‘Indeed there is not. A harmless prank and a sinful act like that. What possible connection could there be?’

  ‘Please don’t upset yourself,’ Fran said quickly. ‘It was just an idea I had.’

  ‘Well, I would appreciate it if you did not mention this idea to anyone else. It was most inconsiderate of Mrs Dexter to behave in the manner that she did, mixing the society up in something so horrid.
The least said about it in the future, the better it will be for everyone.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I quite agree,’ Fran said, despising herself for taking the line of least resistance. The Barnaby Society was so universally keen to brush unpleasantness under the carpet, she thought, that it might eventually become difficult for the organization to negotiate its way over the various lumps and bumps it had created.

  The conversation with Dora Leonard left her feeling embarrassed, uncomfortable and worried, all at the same time. What exactly did she think that she was doing, telephoning harmless old ladies and quizzing them about what they had or had not seen at the conference? She recalled an earlier bruising telephone encounter with Mr James, when she had asked him about the disposition of the members’ accommodation at the conference. Who was she to imagine that she could work her way to the truth when the authorities had looked into the matter thoroughly and already reached a firm conclusion? Why was she doing it all anyway? Was it really because she believed that Linda Dexter had been murdered, or was it – as a treacherous voice in her head intervened to suggest – because it continued to provide a splendid excuse to speak regularly with Tom Dod on the telephone and to justify meeting up with him more frequently than the normal run of Barnaby Society activities allowed?

  Mo had suggested in the first place that Tom himself was only using it as an excuse, and it was noticeable that since she had rebuffed his attentions, his interest in their supposed detective work seemed to have dwindled. There had been only one telephone call this week, when he had said that he needed to talk to her face-to-face. They had agreed to meet on Friday, which was tomorrow. She wondered what it was that he wanted to say to her which could not be discussed on the telephone. Presumably it did not concern the Linda Dexter mystery.

  Her thoughts slipped back to some of their previous conversations and she abruptly heard Tom’s words again about the suspect list. I suggest you add dear old Miss Leonard and Miss Coward, because they had the room right next to mine.

  An invisible ice cube traced a sharp trajectory down her spine. What possible reason could Tom have had for dressing up as the Black Shadow and climbing in through his hotel-room window? Then again, had this person Miss Leonard had seen really been dressed as the Black Shadow at all? Pitch-black dark was the way Miss Leonard had described it. Would she have had her spectacles on, having just got out of bed? What it probably amounted to was that she had seen a figure in dark clothes, which she had assumed to be the Black Shadow. Even so, there was no legitimate reason for anyone to be entering the hotel via a bedroom window.

  Think, think … what had Tom said about rooms on that bottom corridor? Linda Dexter had occupied the room next door to the fire escape and Tom had established that this fire door, which could only be opened from the inside, could easily have been propped open and used to transport Linda, or her body, out of the building. Why, then, would anyone involved in her murder have needed to climb in or out of an open window at all?

  Got it, she thought a moment later. It was all very well to slip out for a few minutes for a pretend cigarette, but the killer must have been away for at least a couple of hours, taking the body to the railway line in Linda’s car then walking all the way back, and anything might happen in that time. Someone might come along and close the door, which would leave you stuck outside, when surely part of your plan was to return to Furnival Towers and get up for breakfast on Saturday morning, just as if you had never been away. Moreover, you could choose your time to slip out, checking that the coast was clear by peeking out of the bedroom door first, whereas re-entering the building via the fire door might mean bumping into someone on their way for a nocturnal trip to the bathroom. Climbing back into your empty bedroom, on the other hand, you did not risk bumping into anyone at all.

  By way of an insurance policy, she thought, it would actually have been a clever idea to dress up as the Black Shadow because the mask provided an effective disguise if anyone saw you returning to the hotel. It would be jolly bad luck for anyone to have been looking out anyway, and particularly bad luck for it to have been a person close enough to identify which of the many windows you had entered by. The odds against the person in the next-door room being the one to see you must have been extremely high, and yet seemingly that long shot had come in.

  But Tom … Surely it could not really have been Tom?

  THIRTY-FOUR

  She met Tom outside the same tea shop in Elephant Yard where, just over two weeks before, they had excitedly discussed the Halfpenny Landing murders and their discoveries in the library. Fran remembered clearly the wave of pleasure she had experienced on first catching sight of Tom loping towards her as she had waited on the library steps. It was different today. A barrier had come down between them and they greeted each other with the politeness of relative strangers.

  After this initial exchange, Tom said, ‘Let’s not go in for tea just yet. Will you come and sit in my motor, so that we can talk in complete privacy?’

  For a split second, she hesitated. After all, since her conversation with Miss Leonard the day before, Tom had climbed well up her list of suspects, but on the other hand it seemed both melodramatic and ridiculous to refuse. He had had her at his complete mercy in the car on several other occasions without her coming to the least bit of harm, so she said, ‘Yes, of course,’ and they walked the necessary few hundred yards down the road to where he had parked. It was turning into a warm afternoon and she slipped out of her jacket, which he took from her and laid on the back seat, the upturn in the weather providing a brief but welcome distraction on which to comment until they were both settled, he in the driver’s seat and she in the passenger’s.

  ‘I owe you an apology first and foremost,’ he said. ‘No, no, don’t try to say that I don’t. I am afraid that I made some assumptions and it was wrong of me to do so. Firstly, having realized that you lived alone, I took you to be a widow, which of course you are not, but even after you had explained your circumstances, I still assumed that you were …’ He faltered awkwardly to a halt.

  ‘Attracted to you and available for an affair,’ Fran prompted gently.

  He hesitated, then said, ‘Both of those. Yes.’

  ‘And that I would be a party to you deceiving your wife.’ She tried to be censorious, but only managed to sound sad.

  ‘That is something else that I ought to have explained. My marriage is … somewhat unusual. No, please …’ He had seen Fran pursing her lips. ‘You must allow me to explain. I will not ask for your word, because I have no right to do so, but I hope that when you have heard me out, you will understand and respect my desire that what I am about to tell you should go no further.’

  He paused and looked at her in a way which made her heart melt. A whole series of thoughts, every one seemingly more foolish than the last, chased through her mind, including both the ideas that she should open the car and run far, far away, but simultaneously that she should simply lean in and kiss him.

  ‘I think I once mentioned to you that I was one of two brothers,’ he said.

  ‘You did.’

  ‘My brother Will was five years older than me and I rather idolized him. He was a splendid chap in every way. Bright, funny, elected captain of his house and played for the first fifteen at school. He was also, of course, nineteen years old when war was declared and exactly the sort of fellow to volunteer straight off. I respected him enormously for that, as you can imagine.’

  Fran nodded, though she could not really see where this was going at all.

  ‘I was still at school through most of the war. I came to dread those morning assemblies, when one name after another would be added to the list of the fallen. The toll among the old boys was quite terrible, and sometimes it felt inevitable that one day Will would be among them, but then, at other moments, I had complete confidence in his survival. Do you see?’

  Fran nodded again. She did see, because she envisaged his brother Will as being another Tom – large, solid, invin
cible.

  ‘Will and Veronica had known each other all their lives. Her parents were great friends of my parents and for years there had been a sort of understanding that one day Will and Veronica might marry. Will finally proposed to her on his last leave at home, and they became engaged. Veronica and Will wanted to be married straight away and talked of getting a special licence, but in the end the parents persuaded them to wait. That was in the late summer of 1918, and we all hoped that the rotten war would be over very soon.’

  ‘But Will did not make it to the end,’ Fran finished for him.

  ‘He was shot by a sniper, just three weeks before the armistice. It was almost the cruellest thing of all. We were still fresh in our grief when everyone else was putting out flags and hailing a great victory at last.’

  Fran nodded. ‘My mother said it was impossible to rejoice when you had lost everything you had held dear. Of course, she still had a daughter.’ She gave a little hollow laugh. ‘But one daughter doesn’t equal two sons.’ She was looking straight up the road, watching the shoppers in their summer clothes, not meeting his eye.

  ‘I told you that the parents had persuaded Will and Veronica to wait, but in one respect, well, they had not waited … and before long Veronica was forced to confess to her mother that she was carrying Will’s child. There was consternation in the family, as you can imagine. If it had got out, Veronica would have been ruined and my brother’s child raised under the worst of stigmas. So I offered Veronica marriage.’ He paused. ‘It seemed the only honourable thing to do.’

  ‘You were … not in love with her?’

  ‘No. She knew that. There was no deception on either side.’

  ‘But you were giving up your whole life.’

  ‘Will had already given up his.’

  Fran said nothing. She understood the guilt which went with being the surviving sibling.

  ‘I had sat out the war at school,’ Tom continued quietly. ‘Only volunteering right at the end, when it was too late to see active service. I was only nineteen when we married, of course, but my parents naturally gave their consent. Veronica was not quite of age either. Luckily the baby came late, though it was given out that it had come early. Either way, my nephew is being raised as my son and will inherit the family business, just as everyone always intended that he should. When he’s old enough, I intend to tell him the truth, because I believe he has a right to know. No one apart from our immediate families knows anything about this. You are the first person outside that circle that I have ever told.’