‘A few days ago the contractor received a letter from Mr. Persimmon saying that he would be here this morning and would make a further test of the apparatus. He asked them to inform Whelk and to see to the firing of the boiler.
‘Persimmon arrived first and went into the ballroom to inspect the radiators. He was there, talking to one of the clerks, when Whelk arrived and the clerk returned at once to the ante-room and shut the ballroom door behind him.
‘Five minutes later Whelk came out and told the clerks to have the cock turned on that allows the hot water to circulate in that branch of the system, and to see that the ballroom door was not opened until Mr. Persimmon came out, as he was going to test the temperature. He spoke with his usual resentment of the consultant and told the clerks that the latter had imagined that he could see a crack in one of the radiators which he thought would leak under pressure, and that that was his real reason for having the ballroom branch of the heating system connected up.
‘In the meantime he took a seat in the ante-room with the intention of waiting there to hear Persimmon’s report when he came out. Mr. Hern,’ said the inspector gravely, ‘Persimmon never did come out.’
‘Do you mean that he is still there?’ asked Hern.
‘He is still there,’ said the inspector. ‘He will be there until the ambulance comes to take him to the mortuary.’
‘Has a doctor seen the body?’ asked Hern.
‘Yes,’ said the inspector. ‘He left five minutes before you came. He went by a field path, so you did not meet him in the avenue.
‘Persimmon died of a fracture at the base of the skull caused by a violent blow delivered with some very heavy weapon. But we cannot find any weapon at all.
‘Of course the clerks detained Whelk when, Persimmon failing to appear, they discovered the body. They kept Whelk here until our arrival, and he is now detained at the police station. We have searched him, at his own suggestion; but nothing heavier than a cigarette-holder was found upon his person.’
‘What about his boots?’ asked Hern.
‘Well, he has shoes on,’ said the inspector, ‘and very light shoes too—unusually light for snowy weather. They could not possibly have struck the terrible blow that broke poor Persimmon’s skull and smashed the flesh to a pulp. Whelk had an attaché-case too. I have it here still, and it contains nothing but papers.’
‘I suppose,’ said Hern, ‘that you have made sure that there is no weapon concealed about the body of Persimmon?’
‘Yes,’ said the inspector. ‘I considered that possibility and have made quite sure.’
‘Could not a weapon have been thrown out of one of the windows?’ asked Hern.
‘It could have been,’ answered the inspector, ‘but it wasn’t. That is certain because no one could open them without leaving finger-marks. The insides of the sashes have only just been painted, and the paint is still wet; while the hooks for lifting them have not yet been fixed.
‘I have examined every inch of every sash systematically and thoroughly, and no finger has touched them. They are very heavy sashes too, and it would require considerable force to raise them without the hooks. No. It is a puzzle. And, although I feel that I must detain him, I cannot believe that Whelk can be the culprit. Would a guilty man wait there, actually abusing his victim before witnesses, until his crime was discovered? Impossible! Again, could he have inflicted that ghastly wound with a cigarette-holder? Quite impossible! But then the whole thing is quite impossible from beginning to end.’
‘May I go into the ballroom?’ said Hern.
‘Certainly,’ said the inspector.
He led the way through the ante-room, where three or four scared clerks were simulating industry at desks and drawing-boards, and we entered the great ballroom.
‘Here is poor Persimmon’s body,’ said the inspector; and we saw the sprawling corpse, with its terribly battered skull, face down, upon the floor near one of the radiators.
‘So the radiator did leak after all,’ said Hern, pointing to a pool of water beside it.
‘Yes,’ said the inspector. ‘But it does not seem to have leaked since I had the apparatus disconnected. The room was like an oven when I came in.’
Hern went all round the great bare hall examining everything—floor, walls and windows. Then he looked closely at the radiators.
‘There is no part of these that he could detach?’ he asked. ‘No pipes or valves?’
‘Certainly not, unless he had a wrench,’ said the inspector; ‘and he hadn’t got a wrench.’
‘Could anyone have come through the windows from outside?’ asked Hern.
‘They could be reached by a ladder,’ said the inspector; ‘but the snow beneath them is untrodden.’
‘Well,’ said Hern; ‘there doesn’t seem to be anything here to help us. May I have a look at Whelk’s case and papers?’
‘Certainly,’ said the inspector. ‘Come into the ante-room. I’ve locked them in a cupboard.’
We followed him and he fetched a fair-sized attaché-case, laid it on a table and opened it.
Hern took out the papers and examined the inside of the case.
‘A botanical specimen!’ he exclaimed, picking up a tiny blade of grass. ‘Did he carry botanical specimens about in his case? It seems a bit damp inside,’ he added; ‘especially at the side furthest from the handle. But let’s have a look at the papers. Hullo! What’s this?’
‘It seems to be nothing but some notes for his business diary,’ said the inspector.
‘Feb. 12. Letter from Jones. Mr. Filbert called re estimate.
‘Feb. 13. Office closed.
‘Feb. 14. Letter from Perkins & Fisher re Grumby Castle.
‘Feb. 15. Letter from Smith & Co. Wrote Messrs. Caraway re repairs to boiler. Visit Grumby Castle and meet Persimmon 10.30 A.M.’
‘February the 15th is to-day.’
‘Yes,’ said Hern. ‘The ink seems to have run a bit, doesn’t it? Whereabouts does Whelk live?’
‘He lives in Market Grumby,’ said the inspector. His house is not far from where he is now—the police-station. Market Grumby lies over there—north of the castle. That footpath that goes off at right angles from the avenue leads to the Market Grumby road.’
Hern put everything back carefully into the case—even the blade of grass—and handed it back to the inspector.
‘When do you expect the ambulance?’ he asked.
‘It should be here in a few minutes,’ said the inspector. ‘I must wait, of course, until it comes.’
‘Well,’ said Hern. ‘I suppose, when the body has gone, there will be no harm in mopping up that mess in there? There is a certain amount of blood as well as that pool of water.’
‘No harm at all,’ said the inspector.
‘Well then,’ said Hern. ‘Please have it done. And, if it is not asking too much, could you oblige me by having the hot water turned on once more and waiting until I come back. I shall not be away for long; and I think that it may help in the solution of your problem.’
‘Certainly,’ said the inspector.
Hern and I went out again into the snowy drive and found, without difficulty, the path that led towards Market Grumby, for, in spite of the covering snow, it was clearly marked by footprints.
We walked along until we saw the opening into the road. A cottage stood on one side of the path, close to the road; and on the other side was a pond.
This was covered, like every pond, with a thick covering of ice, but in one spot, opposite the cottage, the ice had been broken with a pick and here an old man was dipping a bucket.
The water in the hole looked black against the gleaming ice and the sun glinted on the edges of the fragments loosened and thrown aside by the pick.
‘Took a bit of trouble to break it, I expect,’ said Hern to the old man.
‘Took me half an hour,’ grumbled the old fellow; ‘it’s that thick.’
‘Is that the way to Market Grumby?’ asked Hern, pointing to the road.
‘That’s it,’ said the other, and went into the cottage with his bucket.
The snow in the few yards between the cottage and the hole in the ice was trodden hard by the hobnailed boots of the old man, but Hern pointed out to me that another set of footprints, of a much less bucolic type, could be seen beside them.
‘Let us go back,’ he said, ‘and see how the inspector is getting on with the heating apparatus.’
‘I’ve had it on for half an hour now,’ said the inspector when we got back to the ante-room. ‘The ambulance came soon after you went out.’
‘Well,’ said Hern. ‘Let us see how that leak is going on’; and he opened the door of the ballroom.
‘Good heavens,’ cried the inspector. ‘It’s not leaking now.’
‘It never did leak,’ said Hern.
‘What is the meaning of it all?’ asked the inspector.
‘You remember,’ said Hern, ‘that you came to the conclusion that if Whelk had been guilty he would have got away before his crime had been discovered.
‘Well, my conclusion is different. In fact, I think that, if he had been innocent, he would not have waited.’
‘Why so?’ asked the inspector.
‘I will tell you,’ said Hern. ‘Whelk had to stay or he would certainly have been hanged. He hated Persimmon and had every reason for taking his life. If he had gone away you would have said that he had hidden the weapon that killed Persimmon.
‘Don’t you see that his only chance was to stay until you had searched him and found that he had no weapon? Was not that a clear proof of his innocence?’
‘But there must have been some weapon,’ exclaimed the worried inspector. ‘Where is the weapon?’
‘There was a weapon,’ said Hern, ‘and you and I saw it lying beside the corpse.’
‘I saw no weapon,’ said the inspector.
‘Do you remember,’ said Hern, ‘that your first account of the problem made me think of a certain old riddle? Well, the answer to this problem is the answer to a new riddle: “When is a weapon not a weapon?”’
‘I give it up,’ said the inspector promptly.
‘The answer to that riddle,’ said Hern, ‘is “when it melts.”’
The inspector gasped.
‘I will tell you,’ said Hern, ‘what happened. There is a pond close to the Market Grumby road, and Whelk passed this as he was coming here this morning to meet his enemy. The thick ice on that pond has been broken so that a bucket may be dipped, and chunks of broken ice lie all around the hole. Whelk saw these, and a terrible thought came into his wicked head. Everything fitted perfectly. He had found a weapon that would do its foul work and disappear. He picked up the biggest block of ice that would go inside his case. I dare say that it weighed twenty pounds. He waited until his enemy stooped to examine a radiator, and then he opened his case and brought down his twenty-pound sledge-hammer on the victim’s skull.
‘Then he put his weapon against the radiator, had the heat turned on, told his story about a leak, and waited calmly until a search should prove his innocence.
‘But by the very quality for which he chose his weapon, that weapon has betrayed him in the end. For that jagged chunk of ice began to melt before its time—very slightly, it is true, but just enough to damp the side of the case on which it rested, to make the ink run on his papers and to set loose one tiny blade of grass that had frozen on to it as it lay beside the pond. A very tiny blade but big enough to slay the murderer.
‘If you will go to the pond, inspector, you will find footsteps leading to it which are not the cottager’s footsteps; and, if you compare them with the shoes that Henry Whelk is wearing, you will find that they tally.
‘And, if they do not tally, then you may ask your friends a new riddle.’
‘What is that?’ asked the officer.
‘“When is a detective not a detective?”’ replied my friend; ‘and the answer will be “When he is Rowland Hern.”’
The Diary of Death
Marten Cumberland
Marten Cumberland was the name under which Sydney Walter Marin Cumberland (1892–1972) built a career as a crime novelist which lasted for more than forty years. His first book, Behind the Scenes, co-written with B.V. Shann, was published in 1923, while his last pair of novels, No Feeling in Murder, and It’s Your Funeral (the latter under his other writing name, Kevin O’Hara) both appeared in 1966.
The O’Hara books featured a half-Argentinian, half-Irish private eye called Chico Brett, but Cumberland’s principal detective was the French policeman Saturnin Dax, who made his debut in a locked-room mystery novel, Someone Must Die (1940). Dax appeared in a total of thirty-four novels, and his career is discussed in A Policeman in Post-War Paris, an interesting monograph by William A.S. Sarjeant published as a supplement to CADS magazine in 2000. Apart from Dax’s first case, ‘The Diary of Death’, which was included in Best Detective Stories of the Year: 1928, appears to have been Cumberland’s only foray into the world of impossible crimes.
***
‘Confess, my brother,’ said Cleta, ‘that you are just a little bit of a crank. You refuse to help Inspector Comfort in most of his important cases, and yet I have known you give a whole week to some trumpery affair of a broken-down actor.’
She set down her empty coffee-cup upon the breakfast table, and rose to get a cigarette.
‘Your attitude towards life is paradoxical,’ she accused him.
Loreto Santos twirled round upon the music-stool and looked at his beautiful sister with laughter in his light grey eyes.
‘Paradoxical!’ he repeated. ‘Well—perhaps. But time turns our most outlandish paradoxes into truisms. When you speak of my attitude towards life you really refer to my position with regard to crime. That is very simple. Like all the best thinkers on the subject, I am concerned only with prevention, and never, or seldom, with punishment. I don’t believe in social revenge. Anyway, chiquita, my interest in crime is purely intellectual. If I can outwit and frustrate the criminal, I am interested; if the crime is already committed, I am bored. Why should I—a man of absurd wealth—play the part of policeman? No, I leave that to friend Comfort, and I go my own sweet way. As for the “Death Diary” murders, they interest me, but I want a holiday. We are due at Lady Groombridge’s next week, and Comfort must play the sleuth by himself. Voilà tout.’
He turned to the piano with a shrug of his broad shoulders, as though he dismissed the whole discussion. Soon there flowed from beneath his fingers the majestic swelling strains of a choral prelude by Bach.
Cleta Santos leant back in a deep armchair, and, whilst listening appreciatively to the music, gazed with a certain wonder at her brother’s broad back.
Loreto was continually a source of perplexity to his sister, and to most of the people who came in contact with him. Born in the Argentine of Spanish parents, Loreto had been educated in England, and on the death of his parents he had made his home in Europe.
With his sister, who was many years younger than himself, Loreto had lived in several European capitals before finally settling down in London in the big house overlooking Regent’s Park. Here his vast wealth and various gifts, intellectual and artistic, together with Cleta’s beauty, had made them welcome in certain charming circles of society.
At first Loreto had lived merely as a dilettante, a fine amateur pianist who patronised various arts; then by mere chance his attention had been drawn to a certain notorious crime, and his great gifts as a criminologist had come to light.
Subsequently he had interested himself considerably in crime—crime, that is, as a battle of wits. A kind of chess problem to be worked out—and always Santos was concerned only with the anticipation of crimina
l events.
The man, too, was a philanthropist of the highest order, and his vast scheme for aiding first offenders upon their liberation from prison had cost him thousands. His attitude towards the criminal was, in fact, most humane, though it never degenerated into the sentimental.
Cleta, listening to his music, smiled to herself. She knew that Loreto’s mind was not entirely absorbed by his playing, for upon the otherwise bare music-holder was propped a newspaper, and it was folded at the latest report of what had become known as the ‘Death Diary Murders’.
***
It was inevitable that the conversation at Lady Groombridge’s dinner-table should turn upon the ‘Death Diary Murders’. The newspapers were full of the affair at the time, and probably regretted having used up their superlatives on so many minor events.
‘Of course the murderer must be mad, and poor Lilian Hope was undoubtedly insane in her declining years,’ declared Lady Groombridge, glaring round the table.
Lady Groombridge, somehow, always had this appearance of glaring, even in her mildest moments. She was one of those strong but by no means silent women whose views are invariably decided, especially when they are incorrect.
‘These murders are the blind, unreasoning crimes of a lunatic,’ she resumed. ‘They are without motive, and that is why they have baffled the police. The very cunning of them is the cunning of a lunatic.’ Her keen eyes roved around the table, and fell upon Loreto Santos. ‘Don’t you agree with me, Mr. Santos?’ she urged. ‘You are the expert upon these dreadful matters.’
Loreto nodded gravely.
‘I think most murderers are mad,’ he said. ‘Certainly this vendetta and these killings are insensate. There is no faintest reason for such revenge. I have seen the pages torn from poor Lilian Hope’s diary, and obviously what she wrote was merely the outpourings of a bitter and disappointed woman—a woman beside herself with illness, poverty, and suffering. There was no truth in the accusations she brought against people who had always been her loyal friends.’
A little murmur ran round the table at his words, and a voice, speaking English with a slight French accent, broke out with a question:
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