“I had a good many people who might have superficially fitted the bill,” said Solar Pons. “They included Dr. Strangeways and a farmer on the marsh; our man might even have been concealed in a party of walkers who descended on the village. But I was looking for a young and active man; one who had a strong motive for treating old Grimstone so; one who had mastered all the paths and tracks of the marsh.”
I looked at Pons in rising irritation.
“But how on earth could you have reasoned all this, Pons? We hardly knew Mr. Knight.”
Solar Pons smiled, sending out a stream of aromatic blue smoke toward the ceiling.
“All this came to me very slowly, Parker. And there was not a great deal of data to go on. But when I inspected the hotel register and found that Mr. Knight had come to The Harrow in September, only a few weeks before Mr. Grimstone’s ghostly manifestations began, my suspicions began to crystallize. Then, when Mr. Knight boldly introduced himself and I was able to study him close at hand, I immediately saw light. It was a masterstroke, Mr. Knight, to make such a dramatic entrance, though there was some risk that Dr. Strangeways might have examined your supposedly injured ankle.”
To my astonishment young Knight gave a low chuckle.
“There is no getting around you, Mr. Pons. I reasoned, quite correctly, as it turned out, that Dr. Strangeways would not want to be bothered with anything so trivial, especially as he was enjoying a social evening at the hotel. Where did I go wrong?”
Solar Pons smiled thinly.
“When you came into the saloon bar you were limping with the right leg. The following morning, when we saw you just after breakfast, you limped on the left.”
I looked at Pons thunderstruck and even Miss Grimstone had to smile.
“But why all this masquerade and why the limp, Pons?”
“To provide an alibi, Parker,” said my companion patiently. “An injured man could not leap agilely about the marsh in that fashion. The solution came to me rather late. It was the facial resemblance, you see.”
“Facial resemblance, Pons?”
Solar Pons nodded dreamily, his eyes half-closed.
“Unless I miss my guess, Mr. Knight is a close relative of Silas Grimstone. I would hazard his nephew.”
Miss Grimstone closed her eyes and appeared much moved by the disclosure.
She breathed heavily.
“You are perfectly right, Mr. Pons.”
“But why would Grimstone’s nephew want to drive him out of his wits, Pons?” I cried somewhat wildly.
“One of the oldest motives known to mankind, Parker. Revenge. Miss Grimstone herself supplied the missing fragments of my pattern on the marsh this morning. She said that Jethro Grimstone, the partner in the firm, went to Australia many years ago. It can never be proved now but I submit that his body is lying out there in the depths of the marsh somewhere. Mr. Knight—or rather Mr. Grimstone here—had come back from Australia and decided to take the law into his own hands to obtain a confession from his uncle. He would need an accomplice for that, Miss Grimstone, would he not?”
Our hostess drew herself up, tiny spots of red burning on her cheeks.
“I know how it must look, Mr. Pons, but there was great justification for what young John Grimstone did.”
She looked across at him as though for silent corroboration. Grimstone stirred himself and stared at us with sombre eyes.
“It is an old story, Mr. Pons, and goes back many years but I want you to know the truth. My father was a good man; he built the family firm, though there was always bad blood between the brothers. Old Silas Grimstone was a dreadful and miserly man. My mother told me a great deal about the situation as I grew older. As I have said, I was only a child when the events I am referring to occurred. My family were well-off and we lived at Grimstone Manor here in some style. All that was soon to change. My father told my mother a good deal about his suspicions but she was never able to prove anything.
“To bring a long story to a speedy end, Mr. Pons, my father simply disappeared one day. He was out on the marsh and never returned. Neither was his body recovered. A man resembling Silas Grimstone was seen at the nearest railway station, but my uncle maintained that he was in London all that day. He told us that my father had to go to Australia on business suddenly. The idea was ridiculous, particularly as he and mother were very close. He would never have gone off like that without discussing it beforehand. In any case he had taken neither clothing nor luggage. It is my firm belief that Silas Grimstone waylaid my father on a lonely path in the marsh, attacked him from behind, perhaps with a heavy stone as a weapon, and then threw him into the quicksand.”
The young man paused and stared at us with a haggard face.
“But a strange thing happened. A letter eventually came from Australia. It is my belief it was a forgery, committed at Grimstone’s instructions. It was from a hotel in Adelaide and said father had to go out there on business for the firm; that we were not to worry; and that he would return eventually. My mother showed the letter to a number of friends but the forgery had been skillfully done and everyone said it was father’s hand. Grimstone then put it about that the firm’s affairs were in disorder and that father had fled to avoid being compromised in unscrupulous conduct.
“The final bombshell was a will, drawn up in Silas Grimstone’s favour and apparently signed by my father. It left the house and the business to his brother. Of course, my mother fought the matter in the courts, but after some years the decision went against us. She was penniless and had to give up the house. Eventually she scraped some money together and we sailed to a new life in Australia. But mother was broken in mind and body and she herself hardly knew what to believe. She had some hope that we would be reunited with father in Adelaide but of course there was no such hotel as that in the letter and we never did find him. She had told me of her suspicions as I grew older, and I progressed to manhood with a burning desire for revenge. Mother died a few months ago and I felt free to return, the remainder of the family being settled, and myself a bachelor. I heard that Silas Grimstone still lived, made my way to Kent and perfected my plan. It seemed perfectly apposite to me. I modelled the phosphorescent hood on an old photograph of my father’s features. I met Miss Grimstone on the marsh from time to time. She recognized the family likeness and I confided in her.”
There was a long and deep silence, broken only by Pons knocking out his pipe in the fireplace.
“What have you to say to that, Miss Grimstone?”
“It is true, Mr. Pons. My uncle, by his manner, and furtive behaviour over the years regarding his brother had aroused my suspicions. He was pathologically frightened of anything to do with the marsh, though paradoxically, he felt compelled to go out at night on occasion.”
“Perhaps he wished to make sure the body of this young man’s father remained undisturbed in its burial place on the marsh,” said Solar Pons sombrely.
Miss Grimstone shuddered and her face changed colour.
“Perhaps, Mr. Pons. But with this background, rightly or wrongly, my sympathies were with John Grimstone, once I had heard his story. I have suffered a good deal under my uncle’s regime here all these years. I am afraid I am not at all sorry at how it has turned out. But I must make it clear I did not know anything of the apparition, or exactly what John Grimstone intended.”
“I did not say I condemned either of you,” said Solar Pons quickly. “And Silas Grimstone would certainly have killed young Mr. Grimstone had not the marsh claimed him at an opportune moment.”
“I helped John Grimstone to his revenge,” said Miss Grimstone slowly and deliberately. “I informed him of the old man’s movements and when he might be going out. We hoped for a full confession.”
“You need say no more,” said Solar Pons. “I think we might leave it there.”
Both Miss Grimstone and the young man turned surprised faces toward my companion.
John Grimstone cleared his throat.
“I am not quite
sure I understand you, Mr. Pons.”
“I am not a moral judge, Mr. Grimstone,” said Solar Pons. “I think we will leave the dead to bury the dead. I am convinced of the truth of your story and that rough justice has been done.”
Miss Grimstone let out her breath in a long sigh.
“You are a good man, Mr. Pons.”
Solar Pons chuckled.
“Let us just say, Miss Grimstone, that little would be served by further scandal. We will inform the police when they arrive that Silas Grimstone has disappeared on the marsh. There will be a search but nothing will be found. It will be a nine-day wonder and nothing more.”
There was silence for a moment and then Miss Grimstone gave Solar Pons her hand.
“I will myself settle your fee, Mr. Pons.”
There was an awkward silence.
“It was providence, Mr. Pons. This young man has been robbed of his patrimony. We cannot recompense him for the death of his father or the injustices he has suffered. But I feel free, as Silas Grimstone’s beneficiary, to offer him his rightful half-share in the company and a place here at the Manor with me. On my death the property and the business would revert to him, as I have no other kin.”
“Justice, indeed, Parker,” said Solar Pons softly. “Providence moves in mysterious ways.”
And he said no more on the subject.
The Gumshoe
SEVEN STARS EPISODE THREE
THE TROUBLE WITH BARRYMORE
by KIM NEWMAN
This PI narrator works in the mean streets of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. He’s not quite Philip Marlowe—less Humphrey Bogart or Dick Powell and more Ed Bishop (who played Marlowe on BBC Radio 4 in the 1970s).
The character first appeared in the ‘The Big Fish’ (originally written for Shadows Over Innsmouth [1994] but first published in Interzone #76 [1993]), which also featured the versions of Edwin Winthrop and Geneviève Dieudonné who appear in ‘Seven Stars’. The Gumshoe is also featured in ‘Castle in the Desert’ (Anno Dracula: Johnny Alucard, 2013), while Special Agent Finlay turns up again in the forthcoming ‘Red Jacks Wild’. Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe first appeared in the novel The Big Sleep (1939).
The anecdote about Errol Flynn and John Barrymore’s corpse is told with several different supporting casts. The author first came across it in Otto Friedrich’s book City of Nets (1986). Special Agent Finlay previously appeared in the stories ‘The Big Fish’ and ‘The McCarthy Witch Hunt’ (The Original Dr. Shade and Other Stories, 1994).
Anyone interested enough in psychic detectives to read this book will recognise the little group gathered at Winthrop’s house.
“YOU ARE A private detective?” asked the little pop-eyed man with the Peter Lorre voice. “Yes?”
“That’s what the sign says,” I quipped.
My caller stepped nervously around the office door, and giggled the way he did in the movies. He was Peter Lorre.
“Can you be trusted with a confidential matter?”
“If I couldn’t, I might be tempted to fib about it.”
His giggle became a laugh. The laugh you usually heard when he was torturing someone. It made a person nervous.
“I should have thought of that. You are an astute fellow.”
“In my business, it sometimes helps to be honest. If I weren’t, would my office look like this?”
Lorre looked at my filing cabinet, and took in the fizzing neon sign out in the street too close to my window. The sun was just down, and night people were rising from their murphy beds and coming out of their holes. My place of business did not look much like the elegant suite Bogart has in The Maltese Falcon. Then again, Sam Spade was a San Francisco dick.
“You were recommended to me by Janey Wilde.”
That figured. They had been in a Mr. Moto movie together, two years ago when Hollywood could make films with Japanese good guys. I hadn’t seen Janey since I handed back her missing child three months ago. She had called me in on a case I didn’t like to think about, a case that didn’t jibe with the way I had always assumed the world went.
If she had sent the talking screen’s premier sadist to my office, I had a suspicion that the world was about to take another kink. I’d crossed that line once, from the place where mysteries can be wrapped up and the bodies stayed buried, into Weird Tales country.
“She impressed upon me your abilities at locating and returning missing persons.”
Besides everything else, I had got her back her baby. That made me a hero, I guess. She’d given me a big bonus but, what with the war and everything, the town had forgotten to throw a parade and give me the key to the girls’ locker-room.
“Who’s walked away?” I asked, hoping to jog Lorre out of his circumlocutory flirtation.
“‘Walked’ is not such an apt expression. You have heard, of course, of the Great Profile, John Barrymore.” He pronounced it ‘profeel’, which—judging by what I had heard of Prince Jack—was not inappropriate.
“He died last week,” I said.
I was sorry as hell about it. I’d never met the man, but he had great talent and had drank it away. It was hard not to feel something about that.
“I hope you don’t want me to investigate a murder. That’s the cops’ business and they’d rather I left them to it. Besides, I understand Mr. Barrymore succumbed to what might best be called ‘natural causes’.”
Lorre shrugged.
“John Barrymore is dead. There is no doubt about that. As dead as Sessue Hayakawa’s career prospects. But he is also a missing person. I want you to find him, and bring him back to the Pierce Brothers Mortuary on Sunset Boulevard. For this, I will pay one hundred dollars.”
“For this, you will pay twenty-five dollars a day. Plus expenses. My fees are not on a sliding scale.”
Lorre spread his hands and hunched his shoulders, accepting my terms.
“Someone has snatched Barrymore’s body?”
“Regrettably, that is so. I am ashamed to confess that I am that someone. Do not think me callous. I am a European as yet unused to the brutalities of this frontier culture. I was suborned into the act by a well-respected father figure, the director Raoul Walsh.
“As an amateur of psychology, I have been conducting extensive self-analysis for years. I recognise in myself a lamentable need to accept the authority of a patriarch. It is a common European failing, most tragically represented by the general adulation of Hitler. He offered me a high position in the Reich film industry, despite my ‘mongrel’ Hungarian background. I wired him that Germany had room for only one mass murderer of his talents and mine.
“I digress. I’m sorry. It is through embarrassment. Mr. Walsh, a forceful individual who is in a position to advance my career should he so choose, suggested I join him in a cruel practical joke at the expense of his friend, Mr. Errol Flynn.”
Lorre wandered around my tiny office as he spoke, picking up and putting things down, as if given bits of business by the director. I wondered if, after years of self-analysis, he realised he was repeating his act from The Maltese Falcon.
“Mr. Flynn was greatly upset by the passing of Mr. Barrymore. He also has a tendency to idolise father figures, and saw in Barrymore perhaps the end result of his own dissolution. He organised a wake at the Cock and Bull, a bar catering to the more theatrical type of alcoholic. John Carradine recited speeches from Hamlet.
“David Niven recounted anecdotes of dubious provenance. A great deal of liquour was consumed. Flynn himself told stories of Barrymore’s genius and tragedy. He became extremely intoxicated and was struck with a fit of melancholy. At that point, Mr. Walsh suggested a somewhat macabre practical joke, which we hurried to put into action.”
Lorre paused. I was following the story. Working in Hollywood, you get used to the namedropping.
“At the end of the evening, Flynn was incapable of returning to his home unassisted. A taxicab was arranged. With drunken difficulty, he opened the front door of his house and switched on th
e lights, to be confronted with John Barrymore, unembalmed, sprawled in a chair in his hallway. The effect must have been considerable.
“You see, while Flynn was drinking, Walsh and myself surreptitiously left the Cock and Bull and made our way to the mortuary, where we bribed an attendant. We borrowed the body and transported it across town in Walsh’s car, broke into Flynn’s house, and propped up the corpse where he would find it. Imagine the ghastly sight it presented. Corpses have an unhealthy, pale glow in the moonlight. And Barrymore’s face, empty of life, was a puffy mask of his former self. A truly grotesque thing.”
This sort of thing happens more than you’d think. As Lorre said, Hollywood is a frontier town. Nobodies are elevated to positions of wealth and power in a few short months and then transformed back into nobodies again. Every prince has his court of hangers-on, jesters, assassins, freaks, witch doctors and courtesans.
“So Barrymore is at Flynn’s house?” I deduced. “Why don’t you just go over there and snatch him back? Flynn must be out cold by now.”
Lorre smiled again. His teeth were not good.
“Naturally, that was our plan. But when we returned at dawn this morning, we found Flynn’s front door hanging open, the chair knocked over, and no sign of either Flynn or the corpus. Various of our party have been searching the predictable sinkholes of vice and depravity all day, but we have reached the end of our resources. It has been decided that you are to be commissioned to bring this regrettable matter to a swift, happy and most of all unpublicised conclusion.”
I sensed that under all the irony and his mysterioso screen image, Lorre was pretty much disgusted at what he had done. Then again, ninety-nine out of a hundred actors in this town would French-kiss a leper if a big-shot director like Walsh suggested it. Father figures and idolatry aside, it made sense to keep happy someone who could turn you from a drunken Tasmanian pretty boy into Errol Flynn.
“You think Flynn still has the corpse?”
Dark Detectives Page 23
