The Chessman

by Dolores Gordon-Smith

  ‘Could the symptoms have been produced artificially, by drugs, say?’ asked Bill.

  Dr McNiece shook his head. ‘Some, yes, but not all of them. There isn’t any question about it.’

  ‘Would an exhumation throw up fresh evidence?’ said Ashley.

  Dr McNiece shook his head decisively. ‘There’d be no evidence to find. You see, gentlemen, Dr Lucas informed me privately that there had been talk about the case. I had the great advantage of examining the living patient with a view to discovering if there was any possibility of foul play. There wasn’t. I would be prepared to testify as much in court, should it be necessary.’

  ‘And that,’ said Ashley once they were outside, ‘seems to be that. I doubt if we’d get an exhumation order in any case, with Dr McNiece being so positive there wasn’t any hanky-panky.’ He sighed. ‘I’m off to see the Vardons’ solicitor. With any luck I might get something out of him that’ll give us a lead.’

  With Ashley departed to Gray’s Inn, Jack and Bill paid a visit to the White Star Shipping office on Cockspur Street.

  The White Star office couldn’t be more helpful. Sir Thomas Vardon had been a first-class passenger on the Olympic. The ship had docked in Southampton at six thirty in the morning the previous Friday. By coincidence, the A deck steward was in the building. If Chief Inspector Rackham and Major Haldean would like a word …?

  ‘Sir Thomas Vardon, sir?’ said the steward. ‘Yes, he was one of my passengers. He was a very quiet, pleasant gentleman and generous, too.’ He looked at them anxiously. ‘I do hope as how there’s no trouble.’

  ‘No, it’s just a matter of routine,’ said Bill easily. ‘Well?’ he asked Jack, once they were outside. ‘Now you’ve proved what we knew already, what now? Simon Vardon’s club?’

  ‘I’m just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s,’ said Jack with a grin. ‘As you said to the steward, it’s a matter of routine. Considering the number of times you’ve grumbled that I don’t know what routine police work is, you should be impressed. And yes, I think our next call should be to Simon Vardon’s club.’

  Simon Vardon’s club, the Courtland, was on Dover Street, between Grafton Street and Piccadilly. Behind its Georgian frontage lay a world of solidly Victorian masculine comfort, with solid Victorian leather armchairs, solid Victorian mahogany furniture and, thought Jack, glancing at the menu in a frame outside the dining room, some very solid Victorian food.

  Robert Hathaway, the secretary of the Courtland, met them at the porter’s desk. ‘Chief Inspector Rackham,’ he said reflectively as he escorted them into his little cubbyhole of an office. ‘It’s not Captain Rackham, is it? Were you at Cambrai?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bill in surprise. ‘I was with the Cheshires.’

  ‘I knew it!’ said Hathaway, tapping his empty sleeve. ‘That’s where I lost my arm. I was with the Devonshires.’ He grinned. ‘You helped us pull a tank out of the mud.’

  Bill snapped his fingers together. ‘So we did! We shared a cigarette and two cold sausages on the strength of it.’

  ‘Have another,’ said Hathaway cheerfully, sitting down and pushing the box across the desk towards them. ‘Cigarette, I mean, not sausages,’ he added with a grin. ‘Now, what can I do for you?’

  ‘It’s about one of your members. Simon Vardon.’

  Hathaway grew suddenly wary. ‘Vardon? What’s he …?’ He stopped short. Jack could’ve sworn he was going to say, What’s he been up to? Hathaway pulled on his cigarette and started again. ‘What’s the problem?’

  Bill had spotted the hesitation too. ‘Have you read about the murder in Croxton Ferriers? The body in the church?’ Hathaway nodded. ‘I’m afraid the murdered man was Vardon.’

  Hathaway gaped at them. ‘Vardon? Good God! Are you sure?’

  ‘His brother identified him,’ said Jack.

  ‘His brother? I thought he was in Hollywood.’ Hathaway broke off impatiently. ‘Of course. I’m sorry, that was stupid of me. Vardon mentioned his brother was coming home to sort out the estate.’ He looked at them in bewilderment. ‘I can hardly credit it. It never crosses your mind, when you read about something like that in the papers that it’s someone you know. So Vardon’s dead, is he? Well, I’ll be damned. The poor beggar. Fancy coming home to something like that.’

  The ‘poor beggar’ Jack noticed, was Thomas, not Simon Vardon. ‘Did you like Simon Vardon?’

  Hathaway winced. ‘You’ve just told me he was murdered. There’s a certain decency in these things, Major Haldean.’

  ‘I know,’ agreed Jack. ‘But an honest opinion as to Vardon’s character may be very valuable. His brother is obviously biased in his favour but we’d like to know what you thought of him.’

  Hathaway pulled deeply on his cigarette. ‘It’s hard to say. He had a great sense of humour and was very easy to get along with, but I was on the verge of asking him to resign his membership.’ He paused once more, clearly uncomfortable.

  ‘Was it because he used drugs?’ asked Bill, seeing Hathaway’s unease.

  Hathaway breathed a deep sigh of relief and leaned back in his chair. ‘That’s exactly it! More to the point, he brought them into the club. I had a complaint from two of our more crusty members who’d seen him in the Gents, trying to hide a syringe.’ He paused awkwardly. ‘As a general rule, I’d feel very sorry for someone caught up in that sort of thing, but he wasn’t an injured innocent, by any means. When I did some delicate investigation, he’d offered to supply Jimmy Prideaux and Archie Layton with the filthy stuff, and I’m absolutely sure he kept that poor devil, Alan Leigh, fuelled up.’

  ‘Alan Leigh?’ repeated Bill.

  ‘Yes. I don’t know if you’ve run across him, but he could tell you more about Simon Vardon than I can. He’s still officially a member, but I haven’t seen him for a couple of months. There was some sort of family connection between him and Vardon and Leigh was Vardon’s commanding officer in the war.’ He sighed deeply. ‘Leigh was a first-rate chap, a good scout. He suffered badly with shell shock after the war but recovered completely, until he was involved in a road accident last year. That broke him up, I’m afraid. He was prescribed morphine for the shell shock and it’s my guess Vardon gave him something or other after his accident. To be fair to Vardon, I imagine Leigh was pretty insistent.’

  ‘I suppose Vardon made a pretty penny out of Leigh, one way and another,’ said Bill.

  Hathaway shook his head. ‘As a matter of fact, he didn’t. Vardon was damn good to Leigh. He certainly paid Leigh’s bills here and, from what I’ve heard, helped him out with rent and so on.’ He looked concerned. ‘Quite honestly, now Vardon’s bought it, I’m not sure what Leigh’s going to do. You need to find him, Rackham. The poor beggar will find it very hard to get along without Vardon.’

  Isabelle, her eyes bright with indignation, was recounting Sue Castradon’s woes.

  Jack and Ashley had returned from London. Ashley had gladly taken up Isabelle’s invitation to take pot luck with them and come to dinner. Now, dinner over, they were enjoying coffee and a nightcap in the sitting room.

  ‘Honestly, Arthur, Sue was so embarrassed. It’s the inquest tomorrow, which is horrible, and she wanted something nice to look forward to. She wanted to welcome Sir Thomas and his wife to the village and now Ned’s made it virtually impossible for her.’

  Arthur added a splash of soda to the tumbler of whisky and gave it to Ashley. ‘To be fair to old Castradon, Thomas Vardon clearly admires Sue. I’m not surprised Castradon was bitten by the green-eyed monster.’

  ‘That’s true,’ agreed Jack, sipping his whisky.

  Isabelle turned on him. ‘So Sir Thomas took to Sue. So what? You obviously noticed her, Jack. That was very clear.’

  ‘I must learn to be more subtle,’ he said with a grin. ‘Yes, of course I noticed her, Belle. I’m not blind.’

  ‘And admired her.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ he agreed, flicking the ash off his cigar. ‘So I did, but that’s very diff
erent from being as smitten as Thomas Vardon clearly is.’

  ‘Vardon will have to watch it when his wife arrives,’ said Arthur, stretching himself out comfortably in an armchair. ‘I can’t imagine she’ll be over the moon to find her husband making eyes at Sue Castradon.’

  ‘That’s what makes it serious,’ said Isabelle. ‘The situation with Thomas Vardon and his wife, I mean. According to Sue, Sir Thomas and his wife were on the verge of splitting up – that seems a lot easier in Hollywood – when he inherited the title and she was entranced by the idea of being Lady Vardon.’ She shook her head impatiently. ‘It’s hard to believe that anyone could be so silly about a title.’

  ‘That’s because you’ve grown up in that world, Isabelle,’ said Jack. ‘A genuine title is hard to beat. It means you’re someone to be treated with respect, with deference, even. What’s Lady Vardon’s background?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Isabelle uncertainly. ‘Her stage name is Esmé Duclair, but that’s not her real name.’

  ‘And being Lady Vardon is real. Depending on circumstances, you’ve got to see how attractive that could be.’

  ‘I still think it’s all nonsense,’ said Isabelle mutinously.

  ‘How did you get on with the Vardons’ solicitor, Ashley?’ asked Arthur, changing the subject.

  Under pledge of secrecy, Jack had brought them up to date over dinner with the news and the subject of gold mines had proved so enthralling that Ashley’s investigations had been left to one side.

  ‘I was greatly honoured,’ said Ashley. ‘I saw Mr Flood himself. He’s a nice chap in a restrained, legal, without prejudice, sort of way. His firm has dealt with the affairs of the Vardon family for about the last hundred years. They never deal with criminal cases and he was appalled that one of his clients should go and get himself murdered. He couldn’t tell me anything of the day-to-day dealings of either Sir Matthew or Simon Vardon, but he did tell me how everything works out with the various wills.’

  ‘Do you think Simon Vardon was murdered for gain?’ Isabelle asked, her brow wrinkling. ‘Surely that’s not the cause. He looked as if he’d been attacked by a lunatic. That’s one reason why I was so upset. It all seemed so horribly violent and pointless.’

  ‘I tend to agree, Belle,’ said Jack, ‘but now we’ve got a sniff of some real money in the case, we have to look at who gains what.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Ashley agreed. He pulled out his notebook. ‘I’ll take Sir Matthew’s will first. There’s the house, of course, and a modest income from the let of the farms and cottages on the estate. That’s entailed, so it goes to Sir Thomas. The income works out at about three thousand a year. The non-entailed property consists of Sir Matthew’s share holdings and various mines in South America.’

  ‘That includes the mine, does it?’ asked Isabelle. ‘The gold mine, I mean?’

  Ashley nodded. ‘Yes, it does. Now, the title to this property goes to Sir Thomas but Sir Matthew left his wife the income from investments, plus a small return on two iron mines in Peru and an amber mine in Bolivia, for her lifetime. If she re-marries, she loses the lot. Well, as you can imagine, I pricked my ears up at the mention of South American mines and did a little careful questioning. At the moment she has an income of something around a thousand a year. If the mine really does come good, the sky’s the limit. She could be a very merry widow indeed.’

  ‘Could she, by jingo?’ murmured Jack. ‘Lady Vardon, eh? I wonder …’

  Ashley put his notebook down. ‘Well, I don’t know what you’re wondering. Lady Vardon isn’t a suspect. There’d be a bit of sense in it if she’d topped Sir Matthew, but there’s no advantage to anyone in Simon being killed.’

  ‘Lady Vardon might have seen off Sir Matthew, I suppose,’ said Arthur, ‘but I don’t think she did. For one thing he seems to have died of natural causes and for another, she seems to have been really fond of him.’

  ‘Never mind Sir Matthew,’ said Isabelle. ‘We know for a fact that Simon Vardon was brutally murdered. Lady Vardon thought the absolute world of him.’

  ‘You’re right,’ agreed Jack. ‘Sorry. I was just playing about with a few ideas. Go on, Ashley. Was there any provision for Simon in Sir Matthew’s will?’

  ‘Some. He was entitled to draw three hundred a year from the estate. If he predeceased his brother, the three hundred reverts to the estate. There’s various provisions in the event of his marriage, but as we know, those don’t apply. Lady Vardon has very little of her own to leave, apart from her diamonds, but she willed those to her son, Simon, together with a few other bits and pieces, amounting to a few hundred pounds in all.’

  Ashley turned over the page of his notebook. ‘Simon didn’t make a will at all, and Sir Thomas made a very brief one on his marriage. He wrote to old Mr Flood leaving everything not covered by the entail to his wife. Mr Flood prepared the will, sent it to California and Sir Thomas returned it, all duly signed and witnessed.’

  Haldean finished his whisky thoughtfully. ‘Who gets the dibs if all the Vardons go west, as the Chessman’s promising?’

  ‘Good question. I thought of that myself. If they all die without issue, then the property goes to Sir Matthew’s only surviving relative, a widowed aunt aged seventy-three by the name of Mrs Emily French of Budleigh Salterton, Devon. As things stand, the only item of any real value is Lady Vardon’s diamonds. The joker in the pack is, of course, the gold mine. As we know, it’s owned by Antilla Exploration. Sir Matthew owned a third of the shares and bought Leigh’s holdings, which gave him two thirds. However, a third of the mine is owned by Edward Castradon.’

  ‘But he couldn’t possibly know it was worth anything!’ broke in Arthur.

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Captain Stanton,’ said Ashley gravely. ‘By his own account, Edward Castradon didn’t know when Simon Vardon asked to buy his shares, that they were worth anything. However, on the share folder we found in Vardon’s flat, there was a note. It said, Castradon knows.’

  Arthur drew his breath in. ‘That’s a bit of a facer,’ he said uneasily, then shook his head impatiently. ‘I don’t believe it. Ned Castradon might have his problems, but he’s all right. You’ve been talking about money and who would benefit from Simon Vardon’s death. He didn’t have any money to leave. He was going to inherit his mother’s diamonds but, now he’s dead, she keeps them. She had them anyway – or, at least, now they’re recovered she has them – so there’s no gain to anyone there. From what you’ve said, the only beneficiary is the estate, who gain the three hundred Vardon was entitled to under his father’s will. That’s what? Five pounds a week? That doesn’t amount to anything, and it certainly doesn’t benefit Ned Castradon. There’s no reason to murder Vardon.’

  ‘On the face of it, no financial reason, certainly,’ agreed Jack. ‘The mine makes a difference, though.’

  ‘I want to know how Sir Matthew died,’ said Isabelle. ‘I know Dr Jacob McWhosits and Dr Lucas are certain Sir Matthew died from apoplexy, but the Chessman claimed to have killed him.’ She put her head on one side and gazed at her husband. ‘I hate to think Ned Castradon could be the Chessman, Arthur. For one thing, it would be so horrible for Sue, but someone’s writing those letters and someone – someone who knows and hates the Vardons – murdered Simon Vardon.’

  She looked at Ashley. ‘You said that if all the Vardons died, then the only one to benefit is this aunt in Devon, but that’s not true, is it? If all Vardons die, then Ned Castradon gets all the shares in Antilla Exploration.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and sat back in her chair. ‘He gets a gold mine.’

  The moon scudded behind thin clouds as a triumphant howl reverberated across Southampton Water from the sirens of the Blue Riband holder, the liner Mauretania.

  David Jordan glanced at his watch in the light from the deck lamps as the huge ship came to rest gently beside the quay. ‘I reckon the Captain was right, Esmé. It’s been a record-breaking run. I make it just over five days, six hours from New York to So
uthampton. Now all they have to figure out is a way of getting us through customs as fast and everyone’ll be happy.’ He paused. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of seeing you again, is there?’

  Esmé Vardon smiled. ‘I don’t think that would be very wise, do you, David?’

  ‘If you say so,’ he agreed moodily. It had been a very pleasant shipboard romance. All his experience and instincts told him that Esmé wanted to take it further, but the title – she was very insistent on her title – held her back. She had an elevated and entirely erroneous opinion of the morals and accepted behaviour of English ladies. That, thought David Jordan cynically, would wear off as soon as she’d met some of Society’s leading lights.

  ‘I may run into you in London.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. It wasn’t a complete dismissal.

  ‘I guess I can always look you up when you get back to the States.’

  ‘I’ll have Tom with me,’ she said softly.

  The presence of the husband, thought David, had never been an insurmountable problem. If anything, it added to the fun, but it wouldn’t be politic to mention it.

  ‘Point taken.’ He raised his hat before walking up the deck. ‘I’ve enjoyed the voyage.’

  Politeness and restraint could be, he knew, a heady mixture. The next time they met, he thought, some of the novelty and glamour of playing the role of Lady Vardon would have rubbed off. Esmé Duclair would be herself again. She’d probably be disillusioned and, with luck, bored. That was a very promising combination.

  The next time they met, in David Jordan’s hopeful plans for the future, should have been a couple of months from now. Instead, although he’d made up his mind to avoid her, he found himself standing next to her, first on the quay and then funnelled together through the customs sheds.