Black Eye (A Johnny Black Mystery)

by Neville Steed

  I also jotted down a note about Deborah’s teddy bear, dolls and personal effects. For somehow, I just did not believe they were, in fact, the reason for Seagrave’s visit to Diana Travers the previous morning — or at least not the sole reason. She had been too jittery. And the way Seagrave had been charging out of her drive in his Alvis indicated he was not exactly in a cool and balanced frame of mind either. But then maybe he never was.

  So much for the question marks over my employer. The remainder of my jottings were about Seagrave himself and what courses of action I might follow. Number one on the list was to try and fabricate a natural reason for meeting the man, so that I could make some kind of judgment for myself about his character and capabilities. Tracy had never met him. Ted Shilling and Bobby Briggs were one step ahead of us in that regard. So the scrapyard king had an asterisk against his name. I could quiz him about Seagrave whilst ostensibly reporting back on his wife’s seemingly dreary round. At this stage, I didn’t want to come out in the open as to my motives, for South Devon is a tight little community and, like all such, tends to have big ears and mouths where you least expect them.

  I took out the wedding photograph once more and propped it up against the steering wheel. Deborah had certainly been a very striking-looking girl, like something out of Vogue, only with character. But it was not her I was interested in; it was her husband. I looked intensely at his face. A matinee idol looked back out at me. He had the dark, too-good-to-be-true looks of a Tyrone Power with features as regular as a Dick Tracy. He was, indeed, handsome to the point where character was replaced by anonymity. Stare as I might, I could not read anything but a smile in his face. I decided the sooner I met him, the better. That is, as long as he wasn’t a murderer or, if he was, did not realise the real reason for my interest in him.

  I put the photograph back in my pocket and opened my side window a little to prevent the La Salle steaming up totally. I could feel the horizontal rain starting to spray my hair and the cold wind to comb it, but I had to be able to see out, just in case Mrs Briggs decided to go on an expedition or admit an Errol Flynn by the side door. I wondered how experienced private eyes coped with two cases at once. I guessed they could afford a lowly-paid assistant to take care of the Mrs Briggses of this world whilst they reserved themselves for the crème de la crème of the criminal fraternity. I thought of Tracy. Trouble was, I could hardly ask such a silver-spoon sport to watch ironing, black-leading, white-washing, line hanging, tub thumping and shop tripping all day.

  I sighed and went back to Michael Seagrave and how I could arrange a seemingly natural meeting. It took me at least quarter of an hour to hit upon a stratagem and even then I wasn’t sure it was a good one: that I should pose as a Frazer-Nash fanatic, who just wondered whether, after the unfortunate tragedy, Mr Seagrave might just feel like disposing of the car involved to a worthy enthusiast. After all, how was anyone to know he had already sold it to Bobby Briggs? Except Briggs and his cronies, of course. And Seagrave wouldn’t realise that I was, vaguely, a crony.

  I was busy plotting my exact words of introduction after knocking at the Seagrave door, such as, ‘I’m sorry to intrude at this time of grief, but I would like a word or two with Mr Seagrave about a rather personal matter ... No, he doesn’t know me, but if he is free I would appreciate just a moment or two of his time. Let me introduce myself. My name is White. Jack White. I am secretary of the British Sports Car Association and ...’, when I was abruptly woken out of my fantasy by a sharp, staccato rapping at my passenger window. It scared me to death.

  I peered across and through the misting, to my horror, saw the unmistakably round and rubicund face of my quarry, Mrs Briggs. What could I do? I leaned across and wound down the window.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir,’ she said in a Devonian accent as rich as could be, ‘but I thought, seeing as how it’s a mite damp and chill out here, you might like to pop inside and have a warm cup of tea. I’ve just put a kettle on the hob.’

  It was lucky I was sitting down. Otherwise, the first passing feather would have felled me.

  ‘Er ... oh ... er, thank you,’ was my brilliant reaction to a cover blown. Dashiel Hammett would obviously never use me as a model for a hero. Splendid lady. She understood my embarrassment and went on, ‘Don’t feel you have to, like. But you’ve spent so many hours over the last few days in and around here, that I just felt I had to invite you in.’ She held a work-worn finger to her lips. ‘Sail right. Won’t breathe a word to my hubby. It’s he who’s employing you, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry —’ I began, but she cut in.

  ‘Don’t you go being sorry, my love. I’m pleased as punch you’ve been watching me. Shows me old man bothers about me. What’s more, proved my plan worked, didn’t it?’

  I couldn’t reply because I hadn’t the slightest idea to what she was referring. I’m afraid I just got out of the car like a lamb, locked it and followed her in to her spick and span home.

  *

  Two steaming cups of tea later, I had the whole story. And, what’s more, the solution to my problem of keeping two balls in the air at the same time. It was all very simple, really, and my admiration for Mrs Briggs knew no bounds.

  It transpired that while Bobby Briggs might well be the king of the south-western scrapyards and look after his business interests with a wily devotion, his attitude towards his personal and domestic affairs left a lot to be desired, (My choice of the last word is very deliberate.) As Mrs Briggs so neatly put it, ‘I don’t know why he bothered marrying. Instead of going to the altar, he should have gone to the ironmonger. Doormats are cheaper there.’

  So after eleven years of grunts and neglect, Mrs Briggs had decided she had had enough. ‘Not that I’d leave him, mind. Just give him a shock, like. See if that would do any good.’ So she invented a lover. Persuaded her sister-in-law to write an affectionate letter, signed Bill, which she left around the house in the hope her husband would come across it. To hasten proceedings, she bribed the errand boy (Boy? He was at least twenty-eight, apparently) at the local shop to drop by around the times Bobby was expected home, so that a furtive figure could just be seen leaving the house or environs, as if to escape apprehension by an irate husband. I had always left the scene by the time I thought Briggs would be home, so I had missed this phantom Casanova entirely. But Bobby Briggs hadn’t and indeed, from Mrs Briggs’ gleeful account, had once almost caught the errand boy, but a Frazer-Nash proved no match for a push-bike over muddy fields.

  On being challenged about having a lover, Mrs Briggs had parried the whole question by informing her husband, in no uncertain terms, that life with him was so downright boring and affectionless, that it was a wonder she didn’t have three hundred and sixty-five lovers, one for every day of the year he ignored her. I asked if her decoy Don Juan campaign was bearing any fruit. She laughed and blushingly informed me that things were generally starting to look up, but all she would allow herself to admit to was being taken last Monday to the Gaumont to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Shall We Dance?

  ‘First time Bob’s taken me to the pictures for donkey’s years. Since Red Dust, I think it was. That Clark Gable. Now there’s a real man. He wouldn’t neglect no lady of his ...’

  I really took to Mrs Briggs. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have done the deal. It went as follows: I would pretend to continue my surveillance until her husband’s ten pounds’ credit was exhausted. She would corroborate my story, as far as she could, were it to become necessary. The problem of her husband not seeing my La Salle around would be covered by my stated decision to use ever differing cars borrowed from my friends for this particular assignment, as the big cream American number was, to put it mildly, a little conspicuous in any rural setting.

  As I drove away, I told myself I really wasn’t betraying old Bobby Briggs just to free myself up for the Seagrave case. I was — how could I put it without sounding too pompous? — helping mend a marriage? Giving a leg up to love? Bringing back d
omestic bliss? Spreading a little happiness as I go along life’s highway?

  By the time I reached home, I felt quite ill with all that sentiment. Relieved, but certainly a trifle dicky.

  *

  ‘What was that organisation again?’ the housekeeper queried, cupping her ear with a liver-spotted hand.

  ‘British Sports Car Association.’ I didn’t know if such an organisation existed, but if it did, it would embrace Frazer-Nash.

  She thought for a moment, then looked me in the eye, as if to check if my old pupils were telling the truth. I forced myself not to blink, which obviously worked with her as a sure sign of sincerity. She was gone the next second to inform her employer.

  I waited nervously until she returned, taking in the house and scenery. Deborah Seagrave’s godfather’s gold strike must have been akin to a ‘mother load’, for the house and estate were the far side of impressive, situated in a tightly rolling Devon landscape, all rises and dips that eventually flattened away to give a superb view of the distant sea from the front of the Elizabethan mansion. This was veritably a stone wonder of gargoyles and multi-mullions that spoke of minstrels’ galleries, suits of armour and hot and cold running ghosts to go with them. I came to the instant conclusion that the house alone, let alone the remainder of the fortune that had bought it, could well have proved a powerful motive for murder.

  A moment later and I was ushered into a vast drawing-room, where there was enough space to land a Tiger Moth. Standing by the windows, with his back to me, was a figure far taller than I had been expecting. He must have been at least four inches over grave depth. The housekeeper announced me, but still Seagrave did not turn round. It was not hard to detect the actor in him.

  ‘Mr Seagrave?’ I tried.

  ‘A Yes’ filtered round the back of his head.

  ‘I’m sorry to intrude, but I wondered if you could spare me a minute.’

  ‘Go on.’.

  This was proving even more difficult than I had been expecting.

  ‘Well, I’m from the British Sports Car Association —’

  ‘Go on, go on,’ his back rapped impatiently. ‘I know that.’

  I tried to spin it out. ‘Well, Mr Seagrave, it’s like this. Every member of our association is fanatical about the kind of sports car we in Britain make so well. In these days, when imported sports cars seem to be making some inroads into the British market — I refer, of course, to makes such as BMW from Germany, Salmson and Delahaye from France, Auburn and Cord from America, and so on ...’

  My rambling worked. He turned round impatiently and I glimpsed his face for the first time. It was somewhat of a disappointment. Not that he wasn’t handsome. He was. His matinee idol looks were even more striking than the wedding photograph had managed to capture. And though he was tall, his head and figure were in perfect proportion to each other. My disappointment came from the mask-like anonymity of his handsomeness, at which the photograph had hinted. What lay behind the mask, I suspected I would only learn from Seagrave’s actions, rather than expressions. I was none too keen on that way of picking up knowledge, just in case ...

  ‘Mr White, I am not a car fanatic, so I neither wish to hear an appraisal of the current sports car situation in the United Kingdom, nor have I any desire to join your association. I only agreed to see you because my housekeeper told me you wished to see me on a personal matter. Now, if you would be so kind, get down to the “personal” part of your patter right away and save me from all the rest.’

  I cleared my throat.

  ‘Well, you see, Mr Seagrave, it’s like this. I am — personally — more a “one make” fanatic than most members of our association. That make is ... er, Frazer-Nash.’ I watched his eyes. They didn’t blink but I, for one, did not necessarily take it as a sure sign of sincerity.

  ‘So?’ Seagrave queried and moved across me to fold himself into a tapestry-covered chair that looked as valuable as it looked uncomfortable.

  ‘So I, er, wondered if, by any chance, you might have come to any conclusions about your own particular vehicle — the one that was involved in that most tragic of accidents. How can I put it?’

  ‘Easily, Mr White,’ he said icily. ‘It is clear as daylight now why you have come. You read about my wife’s death and instantly made a note in your mind that sooner or later I might get round to disposing of said Frazer-Nash, due to its calamitous connection, not really caring what price I got for it, as long as it went out of my sight. You waited until a decent interval had passed, then came knocking at my door in the avid hope that I would let you have an expensive British sports car at a knock-down price.’ He wagged a manicured finger at me. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? In black and white.’ He laughed and added, ‘Especially White.’ At least I was relieved he did not repeat ‘Black.’

  I shuffled my feet. I thought it would look good. Two can act, and I’d had a little experience.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Seagrave, for coming round about such a matter —’

  ‘You’re not sorry, Mr White. But you will be now.’

  I feigned incomprehension. ‘What — what ...?’ I began and I could have written his next lines for him.

  ‘Simple,’ the matinee mask smiled. ‘The car has gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Sold. To a scrapyard dealer.’

  I added ‘horror’ to my actor’s repertoire.

  ‘You mean you sold an almost new Frazer-Nash for scrap?’

  ‘No. I didn’t say that. I sold an almost new Frazer-Nash to a scrapyard dealer who, I dare say, is as much a Nash fanatic as you are, Mr White. He’s using it as his personal transport, I believe.’

  Seagrave reached across to a silver cigarette box, removed a ‘Passing Cloud’ and inserted it carefully into a silver and tortoiseshell cigarette holder. For a moment, he looked as if he were playing in Private Lives.

  ‘I see what you mean about my feeling sorry,’ I muttered, as he exhaled a Turkish aroma towards me.

  ‘I’m so glad,’ he smiled and rose from his chair. ‘Now, if that’s all you came about, Mr White ...’

  He moved towards me and the three-inch difference in our heights showed rather dramatically.

  ‘Yes, well. That, I suppose, was all I really came about.’

  ‘Good.’ He moved past me and pulled a tasselled cord alongside the door. Somewhere in the house a distant bell clanged.

  ‘Mrs Sayers will see you out. Goodbye, Mr White.’

  I extended a hand but it wasn’t grasped. A moment later, his housekeeper saw me briskly to the door. I crunched off down the drive to where I had left the La Salle, well out of sight of the house. After all, a British sports car fanatic could hardly be seen arriving in a flashy American vehicle. As I did so, a formation of Hawker Fury fighters flew overhead in a perfect V, their biplane wings glinting silver in the sun. For a second, the sight took my mind off my disappointing visit to Seagrave, but it was hardly a consolation. It simply reminded me of all the current war talk in the papers and the urgent expansion schemes announced for the RAF, which would soon replace these Furies with monoplane fighters such as the Hurricane and Mitchell’s even more advanced Spitfire design. What was, in a way, worse, was that I knew if the dreaded happened and war came, the quacks would never allow me to get behind the controls of any machine, let alone an eight-gun fighter that could top an incredible three hundred and fifty miles an hour.

  That evening I spent a therapeutic and reflective few hours at an old hobby of mine — making flying models of planes. After all, these I was still qualified to fly. At that time, I was putting the finishing touches to the balsa skeleton of a Hawker Hart, which is a bomber version of the Fury. That done, I started the tricky operation of covering the skeleton with gossamer-thin tissue paper, which later I would shrink with water, then dope silver for strength and final finish. It was while I was applying the tissue across the stringers of the rear fuselage that the telephone interrupted my thoughts. I answered it, my fingers still covered in balsa-w
ood cement.

  It was Tracy. With the inevitable question and an unexpected invitation. I duly answered the first by recounting my more or less fruitless visit to Seagrave and reacted to the second with pleasure — an invitation to lunch at Burgh Island Hotel on the morrow, Saturday, where she anticipated we might be joined by Peter Courtenay and his enamorata, Priscilla (Prissy) Wagstaff. So by the time I threw a cloth over Groucho’s cage and went up to bed, I was feeling much more Al; and looking forward to a few hours by the seaside like a kid with a new bucket and spade.

  *

  The showers of the morning had given way to unbroken sunshine and Bigbury Bay scintillated in its warmth. I drove down towards the beach and parked my car in the huge garage built opposite Burgh Island to house both the cars and the chauffeurs of the hotels guests. The tide had only just started to ebb, so I had to wait a while for the hotel’s unique form of ferry — a caterpillar tracked chassis upon which is built a passenger-carrying platform and driver’s position held by stilts some fifteen feet or more off the ground or water. This contraption, however Heath Robinson, serves admirably as a means whereby, at high tide, hotel guests can be transported to and fro across the short distance to the mainland without the wetting of so much as a plus-four or a dancing pump, or the risk of a queasy tummy that water-borne transport might induce. At low tides, of course, the Island is readily reached across the sand bar that the receding waves reveal.