The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries

by E. X. Ferrars

  “Luckily they were all in the bar, having a drink before lunch, and I thought it was going to be easy to see if either man had only partial use of his left hand; but you need only one hand to lift a mug of beer or a martini to your mouth, and that’s normally the right hand too.

  “So, as I sat there at the bar with them and chatted about cathedrals, I began to think of ways of finding out if the American could use his left hand properly or not.

  “The man with the beard gave me my first idea. At the same time he more or less cancelled himself out as a suspect. He put one hand into his pocket and brought out a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches and then he used both hands to strike a match.

  “Right away I took out my cigarettes and offered them to the American and his wife. They each took one, then waited for me to light them. I let them wait. But I might have known that wasn’t going to work, because as soon as he saw what I was doing, the man brought out a lighter and snapped it on. And for that, of course, he needed only one hand.

  “Well, I thought, I’ll watch him at lunch. If his wife cuts up his meat for him, I’ll know who was Bardell.

  “Presently we all went into the dining room. Something happened then that started me suspecting the bearded man again. He looked at the menu, decided he didn’t like what he saw, and ordered a sandwich. Then he propped a book up in front of him and when the sandwich came, he absent-mindedly picked it up with his right hand and actually stuck his left hand in his pocket. It could have been a very nicely staged little scene. If I hadn’t seen him using both hands to strike a match, I’d have decided there and then that he was Bardell.

  “But I realized soon that watching the American eat wasn’t going to help me either. First he had soup. That’s a one-handed job at all times. Then came steak and kidney pie. Now an Englishman attacks that with a knife and fork, but an American goes at it with a fork only, and it’s only if he strikes a very stubborn bit of steak that he takes his knife to it. The steak in that pie was fairly manageable, and it all went into the American without having to be cut up. Then came crême caramel – one-handed again – and he said no to cheese.

  “So all I had at that point was that I hadn’t actually seen him use his left hand – I did not know he couldn’t use it; and by then I’d found out that he and his wife were leaving immediately after lunch for the airport. Did I dare act on the small amount I’d discovered?

  “There were just two things left which I thought might settle the matter one way or the other. The Americans’ luggage, several big suitcases, was in the hall and their car was at the door. If the man carried the cases out one by one, or let his wife carry them, or if he drove his car one-handed, he’d definitely give himself away.

  “So when they left the dining room, I followed and watched them. “It wasn’t any good. He tipped the porter to carry out the luggage,

  and his wife drove the car off – both perfectly natural things to happen. And there was I, wondering whether to jump in my own car and follow them, or stay behind and keep an eye on the bearded man – or give up and go home.

  “Then thinking of the bearded man, it suddenly occurred to me that it might not actually be too difficult to hold a box of matches in a partially paralyzed hand, so I went back to the dining room.

  “And there I saw something which settled the whole matter.

  “On the Americans’ table, beside the place where the man had sat, was a small plate with a half-eaten roll on it – and it was on the right-hand side. That was something that I hadn’t noticed while I was watching him eating.

  “He’d moved that plate over from the left hand to the right, which is something that neither an American nor an Englishman would have done unless there’d been a very good reason for it.

  “We got him at the airport. And when he started shooting, everyone was very much taken aback, because he’d seemed a nice quiet, courteous man whom you’d have taken for a doctor or a lawyer or a university professor – in fact, just the kind to interest you, my dear, for one of your stories.”

  INVITATION TO MURDER – ON THE PARTY LINE

  Minds innocent and quiet, like mine, hearing mention of a party line, think of a telephone, more or less conveniently shared with a neighbour, and not of the policy prevailing at that moment in Communist countries. All the same, when Jonas P. Jonas, as always with his mind on my ghosting his memoirs for him, started talking to me about a party line, I assumed that I was in for a thrilling spy drama.

  I interrupted with more than usual emphasis.“Listen, Uncle Jonas,” I said, “whatever else I may write about from time to time. I never, absolutely never, write about spies. That isn’t my sort of story at all I simply shouldn’t know where to begin.”

  He looked bewildered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I was just going to tell you about a crazy old woman who came to me once and told me she’d been listening to a murder being plotted on the telephone. I should have thought that was just up your street. I wonder what you’d have done, though, if it had been you she’d come to with her story. She was so obviously crazy, you see.

  “She was a little thing, with watery blue eyes and a twitch down one side of her face, and she was very genteelly dressed in clothes that might have belonged to her grandmother, and she began her story right in the middle, as such people usually do, telling me how the police only laughed at her, and how she’d like to see their faces when the murder happened.

  “It took me some time to get things sorted out, but what she had on her mind was more or less this. She lived alone in a house about three-quarters of a mile from a village. Her only near neighbours were some people who lived just across the road, and some people in another house about a hundred yards nearer the village. This was the house she was on a party-line with, but the owners were away now, having let their house furnished to some other people. When she mentioned these other people her face got red, and she shook her umbrella at me as if it was somehow all my fault. It was one of these, I understood, who was plotting murder. She knew about it because whenever anybody rang up that house, her own bell gave a tinkle, and then, as she told me without any embarrassment, she picked up her telephone and listened in. And the conversation was all about how someone called Harry was laying for someone called George, and was going to do him when he got the chance. Well now...” Uncle Jonas cocked an eyebrow at me. “What would you have done about a story like that?”

  “I suppose I’d have thought she’d dreamed it all,” I said, “or else that the neighbours were having a little joke with her, to pay her out for eavesdropping.”

  “Which is exactly what I thought,” he said. “And what the police thought. She’d been to them after discussing the affair with the people who lived opposite, a London jeweller and his wife, who’d advised her to go to the police. But for some mysterious reason, when the police came to listen on her telephone, nothing ever happened. And so they think I’m mad,” she said. “They think I hear things.”

  “Well, as I said, I thought so too, but there’s something about murder. . . You can’t take risks with it. So I told her I’d come down to her village and see what I could do.

  “ ‘But don’t tell anyone I’m coming – don’t tell anyone at all,’ I said.

  “I went down next day, and I knew at once, from the twitch of a net curtain over a front window, that she was on the watch for me. I thought she probably spent a good deal of time at that window.

  “She had the door open almost before I’d got to it, and she almost cried, she was so pleased I’d taken her seriously enough to come. We went into the sitting-room, with its fine view up and down the road, and right over the garden of the house opposite, and she gave me tea, and then we sat and waited for the telephone to give its little tinkle. She was in a fever of anxiety that it mightn’t.

  “But after about half an hour it did and she rushed out of the room, calling to me to follow. The telephone was in a room at the back of the house. She picked it up and
thrust it into my hand, shaking with excitement. I put it to my ear. Quite distinctly. I heard a voice say, ‘This idea of shooting him, Harry, I’m not sure it’s so good. A gun makes such a noise. Myself, I favour a razor.’

  “ ‘Messy,’ Harry answered, ‘too much blood.’

  “ ‘But nice and quiet,’ the first voice said.

  “ ‘That’s only if he doesn’t have time to scream,’ said Harry. ‘You can let out an awful blood-curdling scream when you’re having your throat cut.’ ”

  Uncle Jonas paused and again raised an inquiring eyebrow at me. “There you are now,” he said. “She hadn’t imagined those voices. What would you have done about them?”

  “Gone straight round to the new people in the other house,” I said, “and told them a joke’s a joke, but that they were overdoing it.”

  “I thought of that,” Uncle Jonas said.

  “All right then,” I said, “what did you do?”

  “I rushed straight out of the house, straight across the road, straight into the garden opposite, and when I found the front door locked, I busted straight in at a window. And there I found the nice-looking jeweller’s wife, who’d given the sensible advice about going to the police, in the arms of a certain well-known jewel thief called Alfie Peters. She’d decked herself out, for his delight, in almost every bit of jewellery her husband had ever given her, and what she hadn’t got on was there in the safe, which she’d obligingly left open. She got mad with rage, of course, when she saw me, until Alfie pulled out a knife and she began to understand what had really been happening. Alfie could be pretty mean with a knife, and it might have been nasty for us both if that crazy old woman hadn’t followed me in and launched her umbrella, like a guided missile, straight at Alfie’s middle, making him drop the knife before he could get to business with it. You know, that was one of the fastest bits of thinking I ever did in my life. It was suddenly seeing the way all the bits fitted together.

  “There was the old woman, always snooping at her window, so that she’d have been certain to know all about anyone who made a habit of calling on the jeweller’s wife. And Alfie hadn’t wanted to hurry that bit. He was quite an artist in his way, and always liked to prepare the ground with care. But the old woman’s telephone was in a back room, so if she could be kept at it, he could slip into the house opposite without being seen. Getting away was never any problem, because he used to stay almost till the unsuspecting husband got home, and that was after dark. The jeweller’s wife was in the know, of course, about the talks on the telephone, and warned the gang when the police would be there to listen to them. Not that she knew it was a gang. She thought it was just attractive Alfie Peters and some obliging friends of his.

  “The old woman never paid me any fee for what I did. She thought she’d solved the whole case herself, in spite of the obstructive stupidity of everyone else, and when I tried to reason with her, she just gripped that umbrella.”

  Uncle Jonas’s eyebrow went up once more.

  “I wonder what you’d have done about that,” he said.

  A LIPSTICK SMEAR POINTS TO THE KILLER

  “I expect you’ve noticed something about all these stories I’ve been telling you,” Jonas P. Jonas said, “which, by the way, you’re quite at liberty to use, so long as you just mention my name occasionally, though perhaps I might accept a small percentage on them too...

  “Well, I expect you’ve noticed there’s been one thing that’s made the difference every time, and that’s an eye for detail. If you haven’t got an eye for detail, don’t ever think of becoming a detective.”

  “I should never think of it anyhow,” I answered.

  “I don’t see why not,” he said. “But let me just try you out. What would you have made of this little collection of details? A rich old man with a faithful housekeeper. A loving niece and a not so loving grandson. The old man found dead in a chair by the fire, with a coffee-cup on the arm of the chair, with a half-moon of lipstick on the rim. It’s his after-lunch coffee, and he’s been sitting there dead for a number of hours when he’s discovered. He’s got a book on his knee and his reading-glasses on, but the light isn’t on in the room.

  “Now what would you say all that adds up to?”

  “Since you’re telling me the story, Uncle Jonas – murder,” I said. “Also I’d say the faithful housekeeper was a sloppy washer-up, and the old man was too shortsighted to notice.”

  “The book on his knee happened to be in very fine print, and his reading-glasses were quite weak,” Uncle Jonas said. “For his age, his eye-sight was excellent.”

  “Then I’d say he was too frightened of offending his housekeeper to raise objections to a little thing like lipstick on a coffee-cup. Whose lipstick was it anyway?”

  “The loving niece’s. But the old man was much too rich, with much too much money left to his housekeeper in his will, for him to have to worry about offending her. And as for her being what you call a sloppy washer-up, everything else in the house was as bright and polished as it could possibly be.

  “Let me give you a few more of the facts. It was the grandson who discovered the body. He was living with his grandfather, and only that morning, before the young man set off to the office, they’d had a row about his not working hard enough, and in traditional fashion the old man had threatened to cut him out of his will. That was why as soon as it came out that his grandfather hadn’t died naturally, but of an overdose of barbiturates, the young man came to me for help. He said the first thing the housekeeper had done was tell the police about the row, and that unluckily, though he’d been in the office most of the day, he’d gone to a crowded pub for lunch, and no one there seemed to remember having seen him. What the police seemed inclined to suspect, he said, was that he’d actually returned to the house at lunch-time and doped something that the old man had eaten.”

  “Do you mean the drug wasn’t in the coffee-cup?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t in that coffee-cup,” Uncle Jonas said, “or in anything else they could find. So it seemed clear that whatever it had been in had been washed up, and that suggested some dish the old man had had at lunch.

  “You see, it was the housekeeper’s afternoon off, and as she always did on an afternoon off, she’d given him his lunch, then taken his coffee into the sitting-room and left him to take as long as he liked over it, while she washed up the lunch things, then set off to visit her married sister. She didn’t get back to the house until late that evening, a couple of hours after the young man had come in and found his grandfather dead. Of course, the poison could have been in the coffee, and the young man been the person who’d rinsed out the cup and the coffee-pot. But in that case, why should he have substituted that cup with the lipstick on it?”

  “A clumsy attempt to incriminate the niece,” I suggested. “By the way, when had the lipstick got on to the cup?”

  “That morning. The niece had called on her uncle at 11 o’clock, and they’d had coffee and biscuits together.”

  “And did she stand to inherit anything from him?”

  “Oh, yes, they all did, the niece, the grandson, and the housekeeper.”

  “Then I think it was the niece who murdered him,” I said.

  “Why?” Uncle Jonas asked.

  “I just feel it in my bones,” I said.

  “The only thing a good detective ought to feel in his bones is the weather,” he said. “Before jumping to conclusions like that, you ought to have asked me a lot more things about her. For instance, what had she been doing all the rest of the day? Then I’d have told you that after having coffee with her uncle, she’d caught a train for Newcastle, and that she didn’t own any magic carpet on which she could suddenly get back to London to switch the coffee-cups.

  “But there’s really only one question you needed to ask me to solve the whole thing. You should have asked me if the niece’s fingerprints were on the cup, as well as her lipstick,” Uncle Jonas said.

  “And were they?”


  “Yes.”

  “Well. I don’t see how that helps.” I said, “if she was in Newcastle.”

  “You don’t?” His eyes gleamed with satisfaction. “You see, it meant that that cup she’d drunk out of had never been washed up at all. It wasn’t just a case of a smear of lipstick being overlooked. For some reason, that very meticulous housekeeper had put that cup aside, instead of washing it up with the lunch things. It had to be the housekeeper who’d done that. No one else would have had the chance to stop her washing it up if she’d wanted to.

  “And why hadn’t she washed it up? It was because, when she cleared away the tray of coffee-things that the old man and his niece had used in the morning, she’d realised that she had there a coffee-pot with the remains of some ordinary coffee in it, and a cup that the old man had actually used. There were dregs in it, with a lot of sugar, just as he always drank his coffee, and his own fingerprints on the cup. She thought, this good, devoted woman, that all she’d have to do, when she slipped back into the house an hour or so before the grandson was due home from the office, when her married sister swore she was having tea with her, was switch the pot and the cup with the drug in them with the innocent ones he’d used in the morning. That was to stop any questions being asked. Heart failure, poor old gentleman, so wonderful for his age, but it comes to us all sooner or later, doesn’t it? That was to be the verdict. But she hadn’t dared turn on a light anywhere in the house, in case someone should realise that she’d come home, so she’d had to switch the trays just by the light of the street-lamp shining outside the window. In that light, the red smear of lipstick didn’t show up, and she’d taken the cup the niece had used, instead of the old man’s, and put it on the arm of the chair, where the grandson found it. If she’d taken the trouble to wash up the niece’s cup with the lunch-things, she wouldn’t have made that mistake in the dark,” I said.