Crimson Snow

by Martin Edwards

  ‘It’s all Frank’s fault,’ she wept. ‘He was poor and wished to be rich. He got Percy to make his will in his favour, and wanted to kill him by a shock. He knew that Percy had heart disease and that a shock might prove fatal; so he contrived that his cousin should sleep in the Blue Room on Christmas Eve; and he himself played the ghost of Lady Joan with the burning hand. It was a steel hand, which he heated in his own room so as to mark with a scar those it touched.’

  ‘Whose idea was this?’ I asked, horrified by the devilish ingenuity of the scheme.

  ‘Frank’s!’ said Miss Laura, candidly. ‘He promised to marry me if I helped him to get the money by Percy’s death. We found that there was a secret passage leading to the Blue Room; so some years ago we invented the story that it was haunted.’

  ‘Why, in God’s name?’

  ‘Because Frank was always poor. He knew that his cousin in Australia had heart disease, and invited him home to kill him with fright. To make things safe he was always talking about the haunted room and telling the story so that everything should be ready for Percy on his arrival. Our plans were all carried out. Percy arrived and Frank got him to make the will in his favour. Then he was told the story of Lady Joan and her hand, and by setting fire to Percy’s room last night I got him to sleep in the Blue Chamber without any suspicion being aroused.’

  ‘You wicked woman!’ I cried. ‘Did you fire Percy’s room on purpose?’

  ‘Yes. Frank promised to marry me if I helped him. We had to get Percy to sleep in the Blue Chamber, and I managed it by setting fire to his bedroom. He would have died with fright when Frank, as Lady Joan, touched him with the steel hand, and no one would have been the wiser. Your sleeping in that haunted room saved Percy’s life, Dr. Lascelles, yet Frank invited you down as part of his scheme, that you might examine the body and declare the death to be a natural one.’

  ‘Was it Frank who burnt the wrist of Herbert Spencer some years ago?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes!’ replied Miss Laura, wiping her red eyes. ‘We thought if the ghost appeared to a few other people, that Percy’s death might seem more natural. It was a mere coincidence that Mr. Spencer died three months after the ghost touched him.’

  ‘Do you know you are a very wicked woman, Miss Laura?’

  ‘I am a very unhappy one,’ she retorted. ‘I have lost the only man I ever loved; and his miserable cousin survives to step into his shoes as the master of Ringshaw Grange.’

  That was the sole conversation I had with the wretched woman, for shortly afterwards she disappeared, and I fancy must have gone abroad, as she was never more heard of. At the inquest held on the body of Frank the whole strange story came out, and was reported at full length by the London press to the dismay of ghost-seers: for the fame of Ringshaw Grange as a haunted mansion had been great in the land.

  I was afraid lest the jury should bring in a verdict of manslaughter against me, but the peculiar features of the case being taken into consideration I was acquitted of blame, and shortly afterwards returned to India with an unblemished character. Percy Ringan was terribly distressed on hearing of his cousin’s death, and shocked by the discovery of his treachery. However, he was consoled by becoming the head of the family, and as he lives a quiet life at Ringshaw Grange there is not much chance of his early death from heart disease—at all events from a ghostly point of view.

  The Blue Chamber is shut up, for it is haunted now by a worse spectre than that of Lady Joan, whose legend (purely fictitious) was so ingeniously set forth by Frank. It is haunted by the ghost of the cold-blooded scoundrel who fell into his own trap; and who met with his death in the very moment he was contriving that of another man. As to myself, I have given up ghost-hunting and sleeping in haunted rooms. Nothing will ever tempt me to experiment in that way again. One adventure of that sort is enough to last me a lifetime.

  The Chopham Affair

  Edgar Wallace

  Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) was a legendary figure whose life was stranger than any fiction. A journalist who became a hugely successful novelist and playwright, he stood for Parliament, and made and spent a fortune. His was a household name—so much so that, even thirty years after his death, Edgar Wallace Mysteries became a popular and long-running television series with a theme tune that was a Top Ten hit for the Shadows. G.K. Chesterton said not long after his death that Wallace was ‘a mass-producer…a huge furnace and factory of fiction’. Subtlety was not his strongest point; as Chesterton said, ‘We have all enjoyed his ingenious plots, but there was inevitably something in his type of plotting that recalls our shyness in the presence of the Omnipresent Chinaman or the League of the Scarlet Scorpion.’

  Wallace’s contemporaries, in other words, recognized that he often relied on lurid and melodramatic scenarios to achieve his effects, but nobody could deny that he was the most popular thriller writer of his day. Vivid, engaging, and energetic, his short stories have arguably stood the test of time better than the majority of his novels. He had a knack of conjuring up a character or a setting in a couple of sentences, and in ‘The Chopham Affair’, he tackles a Christmas mystery with his customary verve.

  ***

  Lawyers who write books are not, as a rule, popular with their confrères, but Archibald Lenton, the most brilliant of prosecuting attorneys, was an exception. He kept a case-book and published extracts from time to time. He has not published his theories on the Chopham affair, though I believe he formulated one. I present him with the facts of the case and the truth about Alphonse or Alphonso Riebiera.

  This was a man who had a way with women, especially women who had not graduated in the more worldly school of experience. He described himself as a Spaniard, though his passport was issued by a South American republic. Sometimes he presented visiting cards which were inscribed ‘Le Marquis de Riebiera’, but that was only on very special occasions.

  He was young, with an olive complexion, faultless features, and showed his two rows of dazzling white teeth when he smiled. He found it convenient to change his appearance. For example: when he was a hired dancer attached to the personnel of an Egyptian hotel he wore little side whiskers which, oddly enough, exaggerated his youthfulness; in the casino at Enghien, where by some means he secured the position of croupier, he was decorated with a little black moustache. Staid, sober and unimaginative spectators of his many adventures were irritably amazed that women said anything to him, but then it is notoriously difficult for any man, even an unimaginative man, to discover attractive qualities in successful lovers.

  And yet the most unlikely women came under his spell and had to regret it. There arrived a time when he became a patron of the gambling establishments where he had been the most humble and the least trusted of servants, when he lived royally in hotels where he once was hired at so many piastre per dance. Diamonds came to his spotless shirt-front, pretty manicurists tended his nails and received fees larger than his one-time dancing partners had slipped shyly into his hand.

  There were certain gross men who played interminable dominoes in the cheaper cafés that abound on the unfashionable side of the Seine, who are amazing news centres. They know how the oddest people live, and they were very plain-spoken when they discussed Alphonse. They could tell you, though heaven knows how the information came to them, of fat registered letters that came to him in his flat in the Boulevard Haussmann. Registered letters stuffed with money, and despairing letters that said in effect (and in various languages): ‘I can send you no more—this is the last’. But they did send more.

  Alphonse had developed a well-organized business. He would leave for London, or Rome, or Amsterdam, or Vienna, or even Athens, arriving at his destination by sleeping-car, drive to the best hotel, hire a luxurious suite—and telephone. Usually the unhappy lady met him by appointment, tearful, hysterically furious, bitter, insulting, but always remunerative.

  For when Alphonse read extracts from the lette
rs they had sent to him in the day of the Great Glamour and told them what their husbands’ income was almost to a pound, lira, franc or guilder, they reconsidered their decision to tell their husbands everything, and Alphonse went back to Paris with his allowance.

  This was his method with the bigger game; sometimes he announced his coming visit with a letter discreetly worded, which made personal application unnecessary. He was not very much afraid of husbands or brothers; the philosophy which had germinated from his experience made him contemptuous of human nature. He believed that most people were cowards and lived in fear of their lives, and greater fear of their regulations. He carried two silver-plated revolvers, one in each hip-pocket. They had prettily damascened barrels and ivory handles carved in the likeness of nymphs. He bought them in Cairo from a man who smuggled cocaine from Vienna.

  Alphonse had some twenty ‘clients’ on his books, and added to them as opportunity arose. Of the twenty, five were gold mines (he thought of them as such), the remainder were silver mines.

  There was a silver mine living in England, a very lovely, rather sad-looking girl, who was happily married, except when she thought of Alphonse. She loved her husband and hated herself and hated Alphonse intensely and impotently. Having a fortune of her own she could pay—therefore she paid.

  Then in a fit of desperate revolt she wrote saying: ‘This is the last, etc.’ Alphonse was amused. He waited until September when the next allowance was due, and it did not come. Nor in October, nor November. In December he wrote to her; he did not wish to go to England in December, for England is very gloomy and foggy, and it was so much nicer in Egypt; but business was business.

  His letter reached its address when the woman to whom it was addressed was on a visit to her aunt in Long Island. She had been born an American. Alphonse had not written in answer to her letter; she had sailed for New York feeling safe.

  Her husband, whose initial was the same as his wife’s, opened the letter by accident and read it through very carefully. He was no fool. He did not regard the wife he wooed as an outcast; what happened before his marriage was her business—what happened now was his.

  And he understood these wild dreams of her, and her wild, uncontrollable weeping for no reason at all, and he knew what the future held for her.

  He went to Paris and made enquiries: he sought the company of the gross men who play dominoes, and heard much that was interesting.

  Alphonse arrived in London and telephoned from a call-box. Madam was not at home. A typewritten letter came to him, making an appointment for the Wednesday. It was the usual rendezvous, the hour specified, an injunction to secrecy. The affair ran normally.

  He passed his time pleasantly in the days of waiting. Bought a new Spanza car of the latest model, arranged for its transportation to Paris and, in the meantime, amused himself by driving it.

  At the appointed hour he arrived, knocked at the door of the house and was admitted…

  Riebiera, green of face, shaking at the knees, surrendered his two ornamented pistols without a fight…

  At eight o’clock on Christmas morning Superintendent Oakington was called from his warm bed by telephone and was told the news.

  ***

  A milkman driving across Chopham Common had seen a car standing a little off the road. It was apparently a new car, and must have been standing in its position all night. There were three inches of snow on its roof, beneath the body of the car the bracken was green.

  An arresting sight even for a milkman who, at seven o’clock on a wintry morning, had no other thought than to supply the needs of his customers as quickly as possible and return at the earliest moment to his own home and the festivities and feastings proper to the day.

  He got out of the Ford he was driving and stamped through the snow. He saw a man lying face downwards, and in his grey hand a silver-barrelled revolver. He was dead. And then the startled milkman saw the second man. His face was invisible: it lay under a thick mask of snow that made his pinched features grotesque and hideous.

  The milkman ran back to his car and drove toward a police-station.

  Mr. Oakington was on the spot within an hour of being called. There were a dozen policemen grouped around the car and the shapes in the snow; the reporters, thank God, had not arrived.

  Late in the afternoon the superintendent put a call through to one man who might help in a moment of profound bewilderment.

  Archibald Lenton was the most promising of Treasury Juniors that the Bar had known for years. The Common Law Bar lifts its delicate nose at lawyers who are interested in criminal cases to the exclusion of other practice. But Archie Lenton survived the unspoken disapproval of his brethren and, concentrating on this unsavoury aspect of jurisprudence, was both a successful advocate and an authority on certain types of crime, for he had written a textbook which was accepted as authoritative.

  An hour later he was in the superintendent’s room at Scotland Yard, listening to the story.

  ‘We’ve identified both men. One is a foreigner, a man from the Argentine, so far as I can discover from his passport, named Alphonse or Alphonso Riebiera. He lives in Paris, and has been in this country for about a week.’

  ‘Well off?’

  ‘Very, I should say. We found about two hundred pounds in his pocket. He was staying at the Nederland Hotel, and bought a car for twelve hundred pounds only last Friday, paying cash. That is the car we found near the body. I’ve been on the ’phone to Paris, and he is suspected there of being a blackmailer. The police have searched and sealed his flat, but found no documents of any kind. He is evidently the sort of man who keeps his business under his hat.’

  ‘He was shot, you say? How many times?’

  ‘Once, through the head. The other man was killed in exactly the same way. There was a trace of blood in the car, but nothing else.’

  Mr. Lenton jotted down a note on a pad of paper.

  ‘Who was the other man?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s the queerest thing of all—an old acquaintance of yours.’

  ‘Mine? Who on earth—?’

  ‘Do you remember a fellow you defended on a murder charge—Joe Stackett?’

  ‘At Exeter, good lord, yes! Was that the man?’

  ‘We’ve identified him from his fingerprints. As a matter of fact, we were after Joe—he’s an expert car thief who only came out of prison last week; he got away with a car yesterday morning, but abandoned it after a chase and slipped through the fingers of the Flying Squad. Last night he pinched an old car from a second-hand dealer and was spotted and chased. We found the car abandoned in Tooting. He was never seen again until he was picked up on the Chopham Common.’

  Archie Lenton leant back in his chair and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling.

  ‘He stole the Spanza—the owner jumped on the running-board and there was a fight’—he began, but the superintendent shook his head.

  ‘Where did he get his gun? English criminals do not carry guns. And they weren’t ordinary revolvers. Silver-plated, ivory butts carved with girls’ figures—both identical. There were fifty pounds in Joe’s pocket; they are consecutive numbers to those found in Riebiera’s pocket-book. If he’d stolen them he’d have taken the lot. Joe wouldn’t stop at murder, you know that, Mr. Lenton. He killed that old woman in Exeter, although he was acquitted. Riebiera must have given him the fifty—’

  A telephone bell rang; the superintendent drew the instrument toward him and listened. After ten minutes of a conversation which was confined, so far as Oakington was concerned, to a dozen brief questions, he put down the receiver.

  ‘One of my officers has traced the movements of the car; it was seen standing outside “Greenlawns”, a house in Tooting. It was there at nine forty-five and was seen by a postman. If you feel like spending Christmas night doing a little bit of detective work, we’ll go down and see the place.’


  They arrived half an hour later at a house in a very respectable neighbourhood. The two detectives who waited their coming had obtained the keys, but had not gone inside. The house was for sale and was standing empty. It was the property of two old maiden ladies who had placed the premises in an agent’s hands when they had moved into the country.

  The appearance of the car before an empty house had aroused the interest of the postman. He had seen no lights in the windows, and decided that the machine was owned by one of the guests at the next door house.

  Oakington opened the door and switched on the light. Strangely enough, the old ladies had not had the current disconnected, though they were notoriously mean. The passage was bare, except for a pair of bead curtains which hung from an arched support to the ceiling.

  The front room drew blank. It was in one of the back rooms on the ground floor that they found evidence of the crime. There was blood on the bare planks of the floor and in the grate a litter of ashes.

  ‘Somebody has burnt paper—I smelt it when I came into the room,’ said Lenton.

  He knelt before the grate and lifted a handful of fine ashes carefully.

  ‘And these have been stirred up until there isn’t an ash big enough to hold a word,’ he said.

  He examined the blood-prints and made a careful scrutiny of the walls. The window was covered with a shutter.

  ‘That kept the light from getting in,’ he said, ‘and the sound of the shot getting out. There is nothing else here.’

  The detective-sergeant who was inspecting the other rooms returned with the news that a kitchen window had been forced. There was one muddy print on the kitchen table which was under the window, and a rough attempt had been made to obliterate this. Behind the house was a large garden and behind that an allotment. It would be easy to reach and enter the house without exciting attention.

  ‘But if Stackett was being chased by the police why should he come here?’ he asked.