The Murder on the Enriqueta: A Golden Age Mystery

by Molly Thynne

  Once married to her and back in the Argentine he would have had things all his own way.”

  “It would be interesting to know how he proposed to dispose of Lady Dalberry, once he had achieved his object,” put in Mellish.

  “I imagine that she, also, would have returned to the Argentine, and then conveniently disappeared.”

  “It’s amazing that he should have been able to get round the lawyers, though,” commented Dalberry. “It’s a wonder they didn’t smell a rat.”

  “Family solicitors are not quite so astute as people seem to think,” remarked Mellish dryly. “You must remember that her papers were in order and that, curiously enough, none of us had ever seen even a photograph of your uncle’s wife. On the other hand, she answered to the descriptions we had had of her, and we had absolutely no reason to suspect her.”

  “Also,” Shand reminded him, “Strelinski was peculiarly fortunate in one thing. Lady Dalberry’s parents were dead and all her other relations were in Sweden and had never seen her, so that they were hardly likely to interfere in his plans.”

  “What was his connection with the man Smith, on board the Enriqueta? I suppose there’s no doubt that he had a hand in that affair?”

  “None whatever, to my mind, though it’s an open question whether we’ll ever manage to bring the murder home to him. He’ll be convicted all right for the Conyers murder. We’ve got an excellent case for the jury there, but it’s probable that he won’t even be charged with the one on board the Enriqueta. The probability is that Smith, with whom he had undoubtedly had dealings in Buenos Aires, recognized him on board the boat, and he had no alternative but to silence him. Smith, who was both a drinker and a talker, would have made a hopeless confederate. And, by that time, Strelinski had gone too far to draw back. Smith must have blundered into him that night, and in doing so sealed his own death-warrant; but unless Strelinski makes a full confession, we shall never know exactly what happened. The fact remains that both Smith and Conyers were killed in the same manner, by strangling, and Mrs. Verrall and Miss Summers, who were both attacked by Strelinski, narrowly escaped the same fate.”

  “If he had dared he would no doubt have killed Mrs. Verrall that night at Conyers’s lodgings,” said Mellish.

  Shand nodded.

  “As it turned out, she was his undoing; but she was in touch with us, as he knew by then, and he had taken too many risks already to attempt another murder. As it was, over the Conyers affair, he had sailed nearer the wind than was pleasant. Too many people had seen him, and we have not only got the wire he sent to Conyers making the appointment with him, but the clerk at the post office at which he handed it in has identified him. He has also been identified by the taxi-driver who took Conyers to the Escatorial. His method was an extraordinarily ingenious one, and, but for sheer bad luck, he would never have been found out. During the whole time he was in England he was only seen three times without a disguise: by Conyers at the night club, when his dark wig became misplaced; by the clerk at the post office, and by the taxi-driver. Even Bond had no idea what he looked like. If it had not been for that photograph that we found among Conyers’s things, it is doubtful if we should ever have identified him.”

  “How much was Captain Bond mixed up in the whole thing?” asked Carol. “You know he tried to warn me about the Onyx. I feel I owe him something for that good turn, at least.”

  Shand turned to her.

  “He tried to warn you, did he?” he exclaimed sharply. “He came to us of his own accord after Strelinski’s arrest. He’d evidently begun to get cold feet soon after the affair at the Terpsychorean. We’re not holding him. Whatever his suspicions may have been, he seems to have known very little. He did manage to get into the flat over the Onyx shop and found some woman’s clothing there. He concluded that de Silva was meeting a woman there, and had shut off the flat as a convenient place for such assignations. Later he came to the conclusion that the woman was Lady Dalberry. If he warned Miss Summers, it was probably on account of the use to which he thought de Silva was putting the flat. As regards the will Strelinski tried to make you sign, there seems no doubt that Bond’s signature was got under false pretences. He had no suspicion as to what the paper was when he signed it.”

  “I can’t help feeling glad he’s going to get off,” said Carol. “He’s such a miserable little creature, but there’s something rather pathetic about him, all the same.”

  “There was nothing pathetic about the way he doped me,” remarked Dalberry. “Just abominably efficient, I should call it.”

  “That was the one really stupid thing Strelinski did,” said Shand thoughtfully. “He drew suspicion on himself by that drugging affair, and he must have known that he could gain nothing by it in the long run. Even now, I can’t get at his motive for doing it.”

  If he had been looking in Carol’s direction he might have seen the colour deepen in her cheeks. She knew instinctively that Strelinski’s motive had been neither more nor less than an insane jealousy of Dalberry, and that he had risked the over-setting of all his carefully-laid plans to give vent to it. She kept her own counsel, however, and the three men never knew how nearly Strelinski had come to grief through the unexpected workings of his own heart.

  “What was the nationality of the fellow?” asked Mellish. “Without that dark make-up it was easy to see he was no South American.”

  “According to his real passport, which we discovered among other papers at his flat, he was a German Pole whose parents emigrated to America when he was a boy of about sixteen. He has told us that much himself. He’s got all the vanity of the born criminal, and is ready enough to talk about himself. It wouldn’t surprise me if he ended by admitting to everything. He’s the sort that not only confesses, but boasts of what he’s done. He’s not an unusual type, though he’s cleverer than most of them. You did us a good turn, Mr. Mellish, when you blacked in the hair on that photograph. I admit I hadn’t seen the likeness.”

  “I wish I’d gone a step further and spotted the likeness to Lady Dalberry,” said Mellish ruefully. “You beat me badly there.”

  Shand turned to Carol.

  “That’s a thing I’ve been wanting to ask you, Miss Summers,” he said. “When did you realize that de Silva and Lady Dalberry were one and the same person?”

  Carol caught her breath. Even now she did not care to dwell on her vigil on the balcony outside Lady Dalberry’s bedroom.

  “I was watching through the window,” she said, “and I saw Lady Dalberry come through the opening in the wardrobe. Did you find that, by the way?”

  “Not until Lord Dalberry had given us your message,” answered Shand. “It was a clever dodge, and ridiculously easy to carry out. Where Strelinski had the wardrobes built we haven’t been able to find out, but he must have brought them to the Escatorial and then, with his own hands, hacked his way through the partition between the two flats. You see, owing to the fact that the Escatorial was originally a hotel, there were no party walls between the flats, and he had nothing but lath and plaster to deal with. The sliding doors are on the wardrobes themselves, and there is merely a rough hole through the wall behind them. He had another quite neat adaptation of a cupboard at the Onyx establishment. That, by the way, was a perfectly genuine business venture, but its real object was to provide him with a place outside the Escatorial where he could change from one impersonation to the other if the occasion arose.”

  “He used it on the night of Conyers’s murder, I imagine?” said Mellish.

  “Yes. He worked that very cleverly. He sent Bond to Paris with a view to getting him safely out of the way and leaving the coast clear at the Onyx. Then he dropped his disguise altogether and sent his wire to Conyers, meeting him later, still undisguised, at the restaurant. He entered the taxi with him, giving the driver the address of the Escatorial, strangled him, stopped the cab and got out, taking care that the driver should see him clearly. He then made straight for the Onyx, where he got into his Lady Dalbe
rry disguise, and arrived at the Escatorial just in time to view the corpse. He then slipped through the wardrobe into his own flat and was able to open the door to me in his night clothes when I called to ask him if he could identify Conyers. That was why he was never seen to come in that night, and got us all puzzled as to his alibi. The whole thing was amazingly ingenious, but the cleverest part of the performance, to my mind, was the way he manipulated his voice. Both de Silva and Lady Dalberry spoke with marked foreign accents, but whereas hers was guttural, almost German, his was clear and precise, just what you would expect in a South American. And the difference in voice was astonishingly clever. But I want your story, Miss Summers.”

  “It’s simple enough,” explained Carol. “I saw Lady Dalberry come in and sit down at the dressing-table. You can imagine my surprise when she took off her wig and began to remove the grease-paint from her face. The moment her wig was off I knew she wasn’t a woman, and a moment later, in spite of the light hair, I recognized de Silva. My one idea was then to get out of the flat, and, if I hadn’t made a noise shutting the window of my sitting-room, I should have succeeded. As it was, he heard me, and caught me just as I was getting out of the front door.”

  Dalberry stared at her in astonishment.

  “Do you mean to say that you never saw Lady Dalberry and de Silva together all the time you lived in the flat, and the fact did not strike you as extraordinary?” he exclaimed.

  “It seems incredible, doesn’t it? But, looking back, I realize that I never did see them together. You must remember that, on more than one occasion, I believed him and Lady Dalberry to be together in her sitting-room; and once, at least, I was convinced that she was in the next room all the time I was talking to him, and was very angry when I went to find her and discover that she was not there. De Silva then went over to his flat, and five minutes later she appeared. I did think it odd that he always made a point of coming to the flat when she was out, but I had my own explanation of that. I’m afraid my vanity was to blame there,” she finished, her colour deepening.

  “What beats me is how de Silva tracked Mrs. Verrall to Berrydown,” said Dalberry.

  Shand grinned.

  “He had us beat there. I’m afraid we underestimated his intelligence. The truth is, he simply used his brains. He had already caught Mrs. Verrall going into the Albany, and tracked her from there to Conyers’s old lodgings. He knew that she had been badly frightened and that she was in touch with Mr. Mellish, and, through him, with Lord Dalberry. If Mr. Mellish wanted to get her out of London, Berrydown was a fairly obvious place for him to choose. I imagine he went down there as soon as he found she was no longer at her old address and located her. The rest was easy.”

  “How did you jump at the double impersonation, Shand?” asked Mellish.

  “I didn’t till the last minute,” Shand admitted. “It was due to one of those little slips that the cleverest criminals are apt to make. When I interviewed de Silva on the night of Conyers’s murder he was wearing a rather gaudy gold and platinum watch-bracelet. He was in his night clothes, and I was naturally on the lookout for any indication that he had not really been roused from sleep as he pretended. Well, a good many people do sleep in their wrist-watches, but somehow, this one struck me as incongruous. When Lady Dalberry was flourishing her fist under my nose, I recognized the watch or one so like it that I decided to take a chance. It was a chance, I admit. Anyhow, I grabbed her hat and, sure enough, there was the flaxen-haired man I had been looking for ever since that night on the Enriqueta.”

  THE END

  About The Author

  MARY ‘MOLLY’ THYNNE was born in 1881, a member of the aristocracy, and related, on her mother’s side, to the painter James McNeil Whistler. She grew up in Kensington and at a young age met literary figures like Rudyard Kipling and Henry James.

  Her first novel, An Uncertain Glory, was published in 1914, but she did not turn to crime fiction until The Draycott Murder Mystery, the first of six golden age mysteries she wrote and published in as many years, between 1928 and 1933. The last three of these featured Dr. Constantine, chess master and amateur sleuth par excellence.

  Molly Thynne never married. She enjoyed travelling abroad, but spent most of her life in the village of Bovey Tracey, Devon, where she was finally laid to rest in 1950.

  By Molly Thynne

  and available from Dean Street Press

  The Draycott Murder Mystery

  The Murder on the Enriqueta

  The Case of Sir Adam Braid

  The Crime at the ‘Noah’s Ark’: a Christmas Mystery

  Death in the Dentist’s Chair

  He Dies and Makes no Sign

  Molly Thynne

  The Case of Sir Adam Braid

  “The blood’s coming from a cut at the back of his neck,” she said slowly. “He couldn’t have done that in falling. Some one must have—”

  Sir Adam Braid, the distinguished artist, was a cantankerous old man. Not well-liked by most of his family and associates, he was about to add one more enemy to the list by changing his will … but not before death paid a visit to his London flat, and Sir Adam was found stabbed through the neck.

  Chief-Inspector Fenn takes charge of the case and soon notices the butler seems more frightened than shocked – but what if anything, did the butler do? After all, there is a plethora of suspects, including mercenary relatives and some curious occupants of the neighbouring flats. Fenn must put the clues together, and bring a murderer to justice in this classic golden age mystery.

  The Case of Sir Adam Braid was first published in 1930. This new edition, the first in many decades, includes an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  CHAPTER I

  Sir Adam Braid rose stiffly from his comfortable seat by the fire and hobbled across the room to the massive bureau which stood against the opposite wall, well outside the radius of the heat from the glowing, heaped-up coals. And, on his way, he gave vent to his opinion of the weather, importunate relatives, his man Johnson, and life in general with the venomous gusto of an ill-tempered old gentleman who has just discovered a new, and perfectly legitimate, grievance.

  As he let himself down carefully into his swivel chair and picked up the letter which had served to disturb both his physical and mental serenity, he noted, with a certain bitter satisfaction, that the draught that played on the nape of his neck was even more piercing than he had expected—a sure sign that Johnson, as usual, had omitted to shut the door into the kitchen.

  He drew the letter from its envelope and glanced through it, in a mood that augured ill for the innocent writer, who was, even then, waiting in suspense for an answer. And as he read, his eyes gleaming maliciously under the heavy grey eyebrows and the ill-tempered lines at the corners of his thin lips cutting deeper and deeper into the thick, sallow skin, he was already, at the back of his mind, composing the letter to his solicitor which should put an end, irrevocably, to the hopes of the one relative he possessed who did not actively dislike him.

  “Damned impertinence!” he muttered, framing his thoughts aloud, after the manner of the old and self-centred. “Thinks I’m made of money, eh? Might have known it. You give an inch and they take an ell! All alike, the whole lock, stock, and barrel of them. Well, she had her chance and she’s lost it! ‘Advance the money you are leaving me,’ eh? And what if there is no money, miss?”

  He drew a sheet of paper towards him and began to write, the venom in his eyes deepening as he saw the words take form in his small, neat script, the writing of a man to whom a pen or pencil is the most natural form of expression. He had reached the bottom of the page and was about to turn it when the draught from the door smote him cruelly on that part of his scalp where the hair grew thinnest.

  He raised his head and bellowed, a surprisingly robust sound to come from so old and shrunken a figure.

  His voice had barely died away before he heard the soft click of a latch, followed by a discreet tap at the study door.
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  “Come in, confound you!” roared the old man.

  The door opened and Johnson appeared.

  “Did you call, sir?”

  His voice was smooth and his manner perfectly respectful, but beneath the surface lurked a veiled insolence that suggested that he both disliked and despised his master.

  Sir Adam swung his chair round and faced him. If Johnson had had imagination he might have compared him to an old, ill-conditioned, shaggy terrier, his few remaining teeth bared to bite; but Johnson’s mind was intent on ending the interview as soon as possible and getting out of sight and sound of his master into the congenial atmosphere of the bar of “The Nag’s Head.”

  “Of course I called! What did you think I was doing? Shut that kitchen door! This room’s like an ice-house!”

  “It is shut, Sir Adam,” answered the man blandly.

  “Exactly. I heard you shut it a second ago. God knows how long it’s been open. See that it stays shut.”

  “Yes, Sir Adam.”

  Johnson waited, his long-suffering gaze fixed on the pattern of the wall-paper over the bureau.