Bodies from the Library

by Tony Medawar

  DARRAGH: (sardonically) Perhaps after all we shall profit by the experience.

  CARRADOS: (shaking him warmly by the hand) You put it so admirably! (this in an admiring tone)

  (CARRADOS shakes hands with KATO, and HULSE, following him, shakes hands with both the men)

  DARRAGH: Violet, will you go down?

  (VIOLET nods and prepares to escort the men out. HULSE opens the door for her, and she passes out. He follows. CARRADOS, in the act of going out, turns round at the door and seems to look sadly at the window)

  CARRADOS: (shaking his head) Dear, dear me. (He sighs heavily and exits)

  (DARRAGH and KATO stand for a moment listening to the retiring footsteps)

  KATO: Now to reap the reward of industry (goes to where he has concealed his own coat, takes it out and changes)

  DARRAGH: And intelligence, Kato. It was my plan.

  KATO: It wasn’t bad plan. I always say so. Of course all depended on me though.

  DARRAGH: It was a perfect plan, It couldn’t go wrong.

  KATO: So long as I did my part. (preparing to rip open the sewn pocket of what he thinks is the coat Hulse has left behind)

  DARRAGH: (restraining him) Wait a minute, Katty. They have to get their things, remember. We mustn’t risk Hulse coming up again for anything.

  KATO: No, well. But we must all be clear out from here in half an hour now.

  DARRAGH: That’s just it, we mustn’t dawdle counting the notes and things like that. For Heaven’s sake, man, let’s get on with necessary matters.

  KATO: Quite well so. But it will take a minute only to make sure. I like not this way of yours, Darragh?

  DARRAGH: Oh nonsense, Katty. You don’t think that I want to bolt, do you? A third is yours and you shall have it (KATO meanwhile has been picking open the sewn pocket and is about to withdraw the packet) Look here, take the packet and put it in this drawer and you shall have the key.

  KATO: No, I like not that either, Darragh. There are two keys.

  DARRAGH: (angrily) That’s an infernal insulting thing to say. If you weren’t a Jap I should take it seriously. Kindly remember that in details of management I give orders and you obey.

  KATO: (holding the coat away from Darragh) Oh, no, I think—(he has his hand on the packet now) But this is strange. We seem to have done ours up in exactly the same paper as the real one.

  DARRAGH: How on earth—? (They disclose the packet fully and stand regarding each other blankly with the packet between them. Words and wild incoherencies tremble on their lips but they cannot frame the horrible misgivings possessing them both. Then with an effort DARRAGH pulls the packet out of Kato’s hands and rips off the outer covering. An evening newspaper is displayed!):

  DARRAGH: Damnation! Our Dummy! (a moment’s pause of mutual satisfaction) What have you done, you fool?

  KATO: Me? I? A fool? Oh, good, good. Why, you are the fool, you muddle up the coats yourself—

  DARRAGH: I see it! That blind humbug Carrados, when he had us in the dark—when you were fool enough to be led into showing off with your wretched ju-jitsu again—he re-changed the coats. I might have known the Government would shepherd young Hulse till those despatches were safe—(breaks off, recollecting that he is on dangerous ground, turns round and affects to be occupied with things on the table).

  KATO: (sharply) What, what is that Darragh? Government despatches—What despatches you say of?

  DARRAGH: (offhand) Oh, nothing, Katty. Lend a hand, there’s a good fellow. We have to clear out all the same, you know.

  KATO: No. I think not until I know more. You speak of Government despatches to be made safe—from us. I liked not your way about the packet just now—I think there is something funny, queer in this business, Darragh. Hulse is an American, going to Paris. America is an ally and sending troops to France. (with rising excitement) And who was that fellow Krantz you used to meet?

  DARRAGH: Kindly mind your own business, Kato. What the devil has it got to do with you?

  KATO: Of me, myself, it matters nothing, but of my country and my Emperor and my country’s Allies—everything. Can you deny that this Krantz was a German spy and that your business was to sell him those plans? (DARRAGH is silent) It is easy to guess—a man who is faithless to his wife and treacherous to his friends would be a fitting tool to betray his country.

  DARRAGH: (with venom) You yellow dog—

  KATO: (advancing threateningly) You dare to call me that, you who—

  DARRAGH: (drawing pistol) Keep off, you fool, keep off or I’ll—

  (KATO knocks Darragh’s wrist and the pistol drops. Then he seizes his wrist in a lock grip and with one hand begins to push back his head slowly but irresistibly)

  DARRAGH: (in a strangled voice) Stop—stop, Katty, my neck—

  KATO: (grimly) It is you who are going to stop—Darragh—to stop forever.

  (The door opens and VIOLET enters)

  VIOLET: (suppressing a scream) Kats—Hugh—what is it? (To someone beyond the open door) Do—do come and stop them.

  (Enter a CONSTABLE very deliberately)

  CONSTABLE: Here, what’s this all about?

  (KATO releases DARRAGH who stumbles back into a chair)

  KATO: (pleasantly) Only a little friendly ju-jitsu, officer.

  CONSTABLE: Jug-itsu? Can’t say I know much about it, but I do understand the Lighting regulations. Now, a short time ago, there was a light coming through that window—

  DARRAGH: The lighting now! The light Carrados bluffed us over—and you want to fine me for it! Go on, ask anything—do anything. This is the limit.

  (The CONSTABLE takes out a large notebook and opens it leisurely, looking at Darragh the while)

  CONSTABLE Now, about that there light that was a comin’ thro’ that window—

  ERNEST BRAMAH

  Ernest Bramah Smith was born in 1868 and brought up in Lancashire where he attended Manchester Grammar School. After leaving school in 1884 he worked on a farm, an experience that provided the material for his first book, published that year as by Ernest Bramah. Smith next took up journalism, first working alongside Jerome K. Jerome at Today Magazine. He also started writing short stories, and in the late 1890s he created the character that was to make him famous, Kai Lung, an itinerant storyteller whose tales and proverbs help him to outwit brigands and thieves in ancient China. While many modern readers would dismiss these stories as literary yellowface, they were immensely popular and, although Smith never visited China, his portrayal of the Chinese and their customs was accepted as a guide to a country about which most of his readers and contemporary reviewers knew very little. However, the character has dated badly and Smith’s purple prose, replicating what he and others considered ‘Oriental quaintness’ and ‘the charm of Oriental courtesy’, means that the Kai Lung stories are seldom read today.

  In 1913, Smith created his other great character, Max Carrados the blind detective, for a series of stories for the News of the World. Carrados was immediately hailed as something new and the stories were extremely popular. While he owes something to Sherlock Holmes, Carrados’s nearest contemporary would be the preternaturally omniscient Dr John Thorndyke, the creation of R. Austin Freeman, and there are many similarities between the characters of Carrados’s household and their equivalents in Freeman’s Thorndyke stories. More than one contemporary critic also suggested that Carrados might have been inspired by the career of Edward Emmett, a blind solicitor from Lancashire, who achieved some celebrity towards the end of the nineteenth century. As well as Carrados, Smith’s stories feature some economically drawn but memorable characters, such as the detective’s amanuensis, Parkinson, who has an eidetic but erratic memory, and the self-described ‘pug-ugly’ Miss Frensham, once known as ‘The Girl with the Golden Mug’. And the stories often feature contemporary concerns like nationalist terrorism, Christian Science and suffragacy. However, Carrados’s hyper-sensory brilliance can sometimes appear unconvincing, no more so than when he is able to detec
t by taste traces of whitewash on a cigarette paper that has been fired from a revolver.

  A little after the outbreak of the First World War, in 1916 Smith enlisted in the Royal Defence Corps. This led to his writing non-fiction pieces for various magazines on a wide range of subjects but he continued to write stories about Kai Lung and Carrados and also completed a few stage plays, including adaptations of two of the Carrados stories as well as an original play, Blind Man’s Bluff, written in 1918 for the actor Gilbert Heron. The previous year Heron had had great success with his own adaptation of another Carrados story; In the Dark had been very successful not least for its ‘great surprise finish’ when the final scene was performed in absolute darkness. Both plays originally featured on a variety bill and, as well as detection, Smith’s play accommodates an on-stage demonstration of ju-jitsu.

  The final stories about Max Carrados appeared in the 1920s, followed by a single full-length novel, The Bravo of London, in 1934—but Smith would continue to write from time to time about Kai Lung, up to his death in Weston-super-Mare, in 1942.

  Blind Man’s Bluff was first performed at the Chelsea Palace of Varieties on 8 April 1918. This is its first publication.

  VICTORIA PUMPHREY

  H. C. Bailey

  The Pumphreys came over with the Conqueror and did very well out of it. For many centuries they continued to prosper. Then they became respectable. The cause of this unfortunate change in the character of the family is not known. The result was that the estate which had made the fourteenth Baron Pumphrey the richest man in the Midlands dwindled till the eighteenth (and last) Lord Pumphrey left his only daughter nothing but her name.

  Priddle, Finch and Pollexfen did not come over with the Conqueror. Probably they were here before. Other lawyers who have had to do business with them declare that their methods were formed in the Stone Age. They have been family solicitors as long as families have had solicitors. Young Mr Pollexfen (he is not much turned sixty) had a great battle with Mr Eldon Finch before he was allowed to bring a woman typist into the office.

  You are now to behold Miss Pumphrey wondering why she ever asked for the job. A large, fair, benign girl, she sat doing nothing in the corner of a musty room, also inhabited by three aged clerks and a small boy. It was her usual occupation after lunch. She looked very inappropriate. The firm is not of those which spend money on premises or furniture. In the precincts of Gray’s Inn there is no office more decrepit. And the Hon. Victoria Pumphrey is rather like an apple-tree flowering in sunshine.

  Into that office came a grave man, who said mournfully that he was Mr Wilson Ellis. He had little grey whiskers; he wore a frock-coat as if he was born in it; he might have been a statesman of Queen Victoria’s bright youth. He saw the Hon. Victoria Pumphrey and was deeply affected. He blushed like a nice boy, but horror seemed to be what he felt most. He gobbled a little. And Miss Pumphrey smiled upon him and he was led away to the presence of young Mr Pollexfen and stayed till closing-time.

  But when he came out he looked still more unhappy. Victoria, emerging in her hat from the cupboard which she used as a cloakroom, gave him another smile of consolation. This sort of thing makes some women nasty about her. Mr Wilson Ellis murmured and made way for her and opened the door for her.

  Upon the dark and creaking stairs he coughed, as one who humbly desires attention. Victoria waited for him. ‘I beg your pardon, Ma’am,’ he purred. ‘If quite convenient, could I speak to you?’

  ‘Do speak, Mr Ellis,’ said Victoria.

  Mr Ellis bowed and murmured and held up his cane to a taxi. He crowded himself into one corner, giving Victoria all the seat. He looked at her with deferential devotion and sighed.

  Mr Wilson Ellis has been called by an employer mourning his retirement the last of the butlers. Others may have as much of the technique; none so much of the spirit of that noble profession. While he was making the Marquess of Gloucester the happiest of men, Lord Pumphrey and his daughter were often at the house and won that devotion which Mr Ellis always had to offer to an old title and a fine woman.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Ma’am. I don’t exactly know how to begin. I have got something in my mind, but I don’t quite see my way. If you wouldn’t mind taking tea in my little place—’

  The taxi stopped at a large new stone building behind Piccadilly, a block of service flats. Victoria was escorted into a room on the ground floor which was a copy of Lord Gloucester’s famous Adam library. She gazed about her with big, wondering eyes, and turned them on Ellis, and Ellis murmured that his gentleman had always been very kind and perhaps he had been a little fortunate, and it was drawn out of him that he managed the whole place—in fact, he owned it. He gave her tea—very much the butler. And Victoria, who had not been so beautifully served for years, shone upon him and wondered what on earth the old fellow had up his sleeve.

  So, after the last of the potted char sandwiches: ‘I didn’t know you were a client of Mr Pollexfen’s, Ellis,’ said she.

  ‘Rightly speaking, I’m not, Ma’am.’

  ‘Did you come there to look for me?’ Victoria smiled.

  ‘No, Ma’am. I had no idea. It gave me quite a turn.’ He wrung his hands. ‘If I may say so, it don’t seem right to me.’

  ‘One must live, Ellis.’

  ‘You and that Mr Pollexfen—begging your pardon, Ma’am!’

  ‘But he’s quite a harmless little man.’

  Ellis sighed. ‘I put him down as having no feelings, Ma’am. No fine feelings.’ He shook a mournful head.

  Victoria laughed. ‘Well, what are you going to do about it, Ellis?’

  ‘I should judge there could be something more fitting,’ he coughed, ‘and more remunerative.’

  ‘My dear man, do you want a typist?’

  ‘I wouldn’t suggest it, Ma’am.’ Ellis was horrified. ‘I don’t rightly see my way. But I’d be very thankful for your advice. And I don’t know but what something might lead to something. Maybe you happen to remember the Madans, Ma’am? The Hereford Madans. Very old family.’

  ‘I thought they were extinct.’

  ‘Oh, no, Ma’am, not at all. Mr Oliver Madan, he must be quite an old gentleman now—matter of seventy; he’s always been a kind of hermit, so to speak. He’s never had his health. A martyr to rheumatoid—rheumatoid arthritis: a kind of gout, so I understand, Ma’am.’

  ‘I remember! Very gouty indeed. Twisted and peppery. He’s the only Madan extant, isn’t he?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, Ma’am. He’s the head of the family, and he never married. But there is a young lad who comes of a younger branch, such a nice boy, son of a naval officer who was killed at Jutland. His mother died giving him birth. He’s quite alone, poor child, and the father left him very little.’

  ‘What’s Mr Oliver Madan doing about it?’

  Ellis shook his head. ‘It’s been very difficult to approach Mr Madan. I’m afraid he’s rather hard, Ma’am. He wrote that he could admit no claim.’

  ‘Dear fellow. And who’s looking after the boy, Ellis?’

  Ellis looked profound. ‘After all, he’s generally thought the heir to the Madan property. I consider it in the light of a speculation, Ma’am.’

  ‘Where is the boy?’ said Victoria. Ellis murmured the name of a most exclusive and expensive preparatory school. ‘You do the thing handsomely, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, no, Ma’am, I assure you. It’s just business with me—strictly business.’

  ‘Then let’s come to it.’

  ‘Well, Ma’am, the trouble is there’s another Madan cropped up, as you might say. Last month there was a gentleman came to Mr Oliver Madan and said he was his grand-nephew from Australia.’ Ellis’ put his finger-tips together and looked at them sadly, and over them at Victoria. ‘That is what I went to see Mr Pollexfen about Ma’am.’

  ‘Help!’ said Victoria. ‘It’s like a telegram sent by someone saving money. I suppose it means something, but it doesn’t make sense. You’ve left out too many w
ords, Ellis. First question: where does Oliver Madan live? Secondly: how on earth do you know about this man coming to him? Thirdly and lastly, my brethren, what do you want to do about him?’

  Ellis smiled. ‘So kind of you to take an interest, Ma’am,’ he murmured. ‘Mr Oliver Madan has a house at Babraham Hoo, near Peterborough, in the Fen country, I understand.’

  Victoria said: ‘My hat!’

  ‘Quite a fine old house, I’m told. There is a friend of mine with Lord Thornley in the neighbourhood who is so good as to let me know if anything occurs.’

  ‘Deeper and deeper yet. You’ve been having him watched?’

  Ellis shifted in his chair. ‘In a manner of speaking. Just in the interests of the boy, you understand, Ma’am. Now, you see, if this gentleman from Australia who says he is Frank Madan, really is, then he would be the heir and—’

  ‘And that’s an end of your little speculation.’

  ‘Exactly so, Ma’am. You see, there certainly was a Madan who went to Australia. Quite a while ago, in the gold rush. And, of course, he may have married and—’

  ‘And this man may be his lawful descendant, as right as rain. Bad luck, Ellis.’

  ‘Very bad luck for the boy.’ Ellis looked at her. ‘Such a nice boy, Ma’am.’

  ‘Ellis,’ said Victoria sternly, ‘don’t be sentimental. I am not, but far otherwise. Has old Mr Madan accepted this heir from Australia?’

  ‘My information is that he has received him.’

  ‘Well, what about it? If the head of the family is satisfied, that’s that.’

  Ellis coughed. ‘Mr Oliver is a very old gentleman and an invalid. I couldn’t say I’d take his judgment. There’s been claimants to estates before, Ma’am, and from Australia, too. And old folks have accepted them.’

  ‘What, like the Tichborne claimant? He came from Wagga Wagga or somewhere, didn’t he? Deeper and still deeper.’

  ‘Just so, Ma’am. That was why I called on Mr Pollexfen. His firm are the lawyers to the Madan family. They have been for generations.’