by Bruce, Leo
The case, in fact, fell somewhere between a Scandal and a Sensation and its many side-issues received publicity. Mr. Turnwright explained why he would not join the Vigilantes (“Don’t believe in that sort of thing myself”) and Mrs. Whitehill once again described Joyce Ribbing’s departure from the Bridge party.
But there is a limit to the possibilities of daily reporting on one theme and after ten days had passed there was a lull in the affairs of Crabtree Avenue until, on the morning of the fourteenth day, readers were faced with the question “Will He Strike Again?” together with details of some of the precautions taken to prevent any fresh outrage. On the fifteenth, when no new crime was reported, it was surmised that police vigilance, together with the combined action of householders, had prevented the Stabber from carrying out yet another murder.
It was at this point, when public interest seemed for the moment to have evaporated, that Carolus Deene began to interest himself in the case from a distance of sixty miles.
Perhaps some special concern came from the fact that he was, like Hester Starkey, a member of a school staff, being Senior History Master at the Queen’s School, Newminster, a small but ancient institution in a Cathedral city.
He was by no means a conventional schoolmaster. His father had left him a rich man and although not greatly interested in wealth he had found, like so many of his kind, that it accumulated rather than grew less. Leaving his affairs to a firm of stockbrokers in which a boyhood friend was partner he had the responsibility of increasing riches forced on him. He was generous to others and allowed himself his fads, including a Bentley Continental and a small Queen Anne house with a charming walled garden near the cathedral.
His girl wife had been killed in an air raid and since his own release, Carolus had been looked after by a middle-aged couple named Stick, Mrs. Stick being that phenomenon among Englishwomen of her class, an inspired and imaginative cook. The years had passed pleasantly in Newminster for Carolus, who had returned to teaching after the war rather than face the boredom of idleness, enjoyed his work at the school and enjoyed his own well-ordered private life.
The Queen’s School, Newminster, is, as its pupils find themselves under the necessity rather often of explaining, a public school. A minor, a small, a lesser-known one, they concede, but still in the required category. Its buildings are old, picturesque and very unhygienic, and one of its classrooms is a showpiece untouched from the Elizabethan age in which the school was founded.
Some years before this time the school had been given a little reflected fame, for Carolus Deene published a a successful book and did not scorn to print under his name ‘Senior History Master at the Queen’s School, Newminster’. The book was called Who Killed William Rufus? And Other Mysteries of History, and in it Deene most ingeniously applied the methods of a modern detective to some of the more spectacular crimes of the past and in more than one case seemed to have found new evidence from which to draw startling conclusions.
On the Princes in the Tower he was particularly original and perceptive and he disposed of much unreliable detail in his study of the murder of Edward II. The book was highly praised and sold a number of editions.
“It doesn’t, unfortunately, make Deene a good disciplinarian,” said the headmaster. “His class is the noisiest rabble in the school.”
Carolus Deene was forty years old. He had been a good all-round athlete with a half-blue for boxing and a fine record in athletics. During the war he did violent things, always with a certain elegance for which he was famous. He jumped out of aeroplanes with a parachute and actually killed a couple of men with his Commando knife which he supposed ingenuously, had been issued to him for that purpose.”
He was slim, dapper, rather pale and he dressed too well for a schoolmaster. He was not a good disciplinarian as the headmaster understood the word, because he simply could not be bothered with discipline, being far too interested in his subject. If there were stupid boys who did not feel this interest and preferred to sit at the back of his class and eat revolting sweets and hold whispered conversations on county cricket, then he let them, continuing to talk to the few who listened. He was popular but considered a little odd. His dressiness and passionate interest in both history and crime were his best known characteristics in the school, though among the staff his large private income was a matter for some invidious comment.
The boys were apt to take advantage of his known interest in crime both ancient and modern. A master with a hobby-horse is easily led away from the tiresome lesson in hand into the realms of his fancy. He may or may not realize this as the end of the school period comes and he finds that he has talked for three-quarters of an hour on his favourite subject and forgotten what he was supposed to be teaching.
Carolus Deene was very well aware of his weakness but he regarded his twin interests of crime and history as almost indistinguishable. The history of men is the history of their crimes, he said. Crippen and Richard III, Nero and the latest murderer to be given headlines in newspapers were all one to him, as his pupils delightedly discovered.
Some years earlier he had become involved in the solving of a local murder mystery because the detective in charge had been a friend of his whom he wanted to help, and this had led him to other cases in which, in a self-effacing way, he had been of material help to the investigating police, who rarely appreciated what looked like interference. One or two had valued his theorizing but Carolus was actuated by a passion for puzzle-solving and wanted no recognition. He tackled murders as he tackled a stiff crossword puzzle and was rarely defeated by either.
The attitude of the headmaster, Mr. Hugh Gorringer, to his researches into modern crime was a mixed one. A large and somewhat pompous man, with a vast store of old-fashioned clichés on which to draw in conversation, he had at first thoroughly disapproved of one of his assistants becoming, as he called it, ‘embroiled in such squalid matters.’ He had large red ears, hairy as a pachyderm’s, and to these, he claimed, it had come, when Carolus showed too lively an interest in an unsolved mystery. Then he would appeal to Carolus to remember the good name of the Queen’s School and not allow any ‘adverse publicity’ to touch it. On the other hand Mr. Gorringer had a very human curiosity in such matters and had frequently “lent his presence” to the closing acts of a criminal drama on the plea of protecting the reputation of his school.
During that Spring term, when the newspaper-reading public was being given the two successive shocks of the murders in Crabtree Avenue, Carolus had become aware of a certain watchfulness in Mr. Gorringer as though he feared the worst. When the headmaster’s apprehensive curiosity could be contained no longer, he fell into step with Carolus as the two crossed the quadrangle from chapel.
“Ah, Deene,” said Mr. Gorringer, “I wanted a word with you. A bird has whispered in my ear…” Carolus wondered, and not for the first time, what huge carrion hawk or vulture could have perched on that shoulder and croaked into that hairy cavern … “that you have expressed some curiosity about certain events ofa violent nature in the suburb of Albert Park.”
“Yes. Beastly case, isn’t it?”
“Tragic,” said Mr. Gorringer. “Tragic. When lunacy and crime join hands…” he shook his head expressively. “Do you think there will be further … incidents?”
“How can one possibly tell?”
“There was, alas, a certain pattern in these two brutal killings which makes an unskilled observer like me fear the worst. Yet the strictest precautions must have been taken. You have no theory, Deene?”
“Theory? No. I’ve only read the newspaper accounts.”
“I thought that with your penchant for such affairs you might have evolved some ingenious concept of your own. However, I am relieved to find you have so little interest in the matter.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t interested, headmaster. I said I had no theory.”
Mr. Gorringer stopped dramatically.
“Deene! You are not proposing to involve yourself
in such sordid and highly publicized occurrences?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it. There’s another week of term yet, and I should think it would all be cleared up during that time.”
Mr. Gorringer cleared his throat.
“I fear I must make my position absolutely clear,” he said. “I have heretofore—if not acquiesced, at least turned a blind eye when you, a senior assistant at my school, have endangered its fair name by your participation in matters best left to the police. In this case, with every newspaper crying aloud the unpleasant details, it would be disastrous, nothing short of disastrous, for you to become involved. I must, in fact, apply the veto which I feel empowered to use. I must ask you, as you value our amicable relationship, to abandon all thought of… investigation.”
“But suppose I saw a way of preventing another murder? Will you take the responsibility then?”
“Assuredly I will. As tax-payers we employ skilled public servants…”
“I know. But you can’t employ ideas. I’ll agree to this much, headmaster. If there is not another of these murders between now and the end of term I will drop the thing. But if there is, and with it a prospect of yet another, I shall really feel it my duty at least to have a try. It’s just possible that I might hit on something helpful.”
“Ah, Deene, Deene, you place me in a truly embarrassing situation. You would have me feel that blood is on my hands. But I will accept your conditions. Should there be another murder, unquestionably a sequel to the first two, during these next three weeks, I absolve you from my ban, and you must add your mite to the quota of intelligence being applied to this case. But I fervently pray that we have heard the last of Crabtree Avenue. I think I see our excellent music master approaching. I must have a word with him. Ah, Tubley …”
It was four days later that the third victim fell, on March 15. Not this time in the closely guarded Crab-tree Avenue but within half a mile of it, on the other side of Albert Park, in a similar street called Salisbury Gardens. A Mrs. Crabbett was found stabbed in precisely the same manner, by the same kind of weapon. Her body, like those of her predecessors, had been laid in the front garden of a house overshadowed by trees. Her death had taken place at approximately the same hour as Hester Starkey’s, in the region of eight o’clock. She too had been muffled by a grey woollen scarf before she was stabbed.
This time public feeling became vociferous and a leader appeared in The Times. There were no more covert sneers about the Crabtree Vigilantes but a mass meeting of residents in the whole area to consider what should be done. People went about the suburb, and the neighbouring suburb, with anxious faces, and reminded one another that you could not tell who would be next. The husband of the dead woman received hundreds of letters of condolence, and although more thoughtful people did not blame the police, popular abuse of them was unrestrained. What were they doing? Why had they not made an arrest in the first two cases? Was no woman safe in the street at night? Did the police intend to wait till this maniac grew tired or died, as Jack the Ripper had done, remaining undiscovered to the end?
The circumstances in the case were straightforward. The Crabbetts, an elderly couple, lived in Bromley where they had a flat in a new building. Mr. Crabbett was vaguely known to be ‘retired’ and Mrs. Crabbett was considered by her friends to have in common with the other two murdered women that she was a self-possessed rather masterful woman, not likely to be easily scared. Her husband was doubly distressed for apart from his loss—they had been married for over thirty years—he blamed himself for not having brought his wife home that evening as arranged. She had been to visit her married daughter, Isobel Pressley, who lived in Salisbury Gardens, and Jim Crabbett her husband had arranged to call for her in their Ford Prefect car at seven. He was however, a notoriously vague and unreliable person and had reached his daughter’s house at eight, to hear his wife had lost patience and gone home. She would walk down the road, she said, and catch a bus from the bottom which would take her to Bromley. Alarm at the Stabber’s activities had chiefly centred on Crabtree Avenue at this time and it had not occurred to her or her daughter that there might be danger so far away.
Jim Crabbett had returned to Bromley and when his wife had failed to appear at 10 o’clock had telephoned the police. Detective Superintendent Dyke had been informed, and a search had at once been ordered, both in Crabtree Avenue and Salisbury Gardens and at a little after midnight Mrs. Crabbett’s body had been found.
There was, however, in this case an important witness. A Miss Pilkin, who lived in first floor apartments of the house opposite the Pressleys had some kind of a feud with them connected with her Pomeranian dog. Like many elderly women living alone, she enjoyed this and a part of her enjoyment came from a close observation of ‘those opposite’. She knew to the moment what time Harry Pressley should arrive from the city and was prepared to believe that there was trouble behind drawn blinds across the road if he was late. If the Pressleys did not draw their curtains Miss Pilkin would creep into her dark front room and take up her position, not too near the window. As there was a streetlight fairly close to the Pressleys’ home, she was able to observe comings and goings, and knew of the occasional visits of Mrs. Crabbett.
That evening, for instance, she had seen Mrs. Crabbett arrive in time for tea and had noted that Harry Pressley came home as usual at a little before 6. She had seen Mrs. Crabbett depart at about 7:45 and Mr. Crabbett, whom she also knew by sight, arrive soon after 8 and shortly leave again. But what interested Dyke most in her evidence was her story of a man in a cloth cap and a raincoat, wearing glasses and carrying a newspaper who was ‘hanging about’ in the street that evening. She had taken note of him because he looked rather odd. Odd? Yes, his raincoat was too large for him. Time? She would say it was about y when she had seen him first but he had come back several times. He seemed to be waiting for someone.
This was at last a lead and Dyke put out further enquiries for anyone who might have seen the stranger. He sent a man to call at every house in Salisbury Gardens to make enquiries about him, but received only the usual conflicting evidence. One woman believed she had seen the man several nights ago and had thought at the time there was something she did not like about him, while another resident was sure he had sat near him on a bus that day.
Pressed for further description Miss Pilkin thought the man was of’medium height’, and, she would think, middling in age. He hadn’t given her the impression of heingyoung, but then again she wouldn’t say he was old. There was nothing much else she had noticed about him, except she was sure he had not called at the Pressleys’. She would have noticed that, she said. She had not liked the Pressleys, she admitted, but she was sorry now, because it was terrible about Mrs. Crabbett. She wouldn’t want anything like that to happen to anyone. They had been unkind to her dog, and she couldn’t forget it, because her dog would never hurt anyone and had only wanted to play with the Pressleys’ little girl. Still, that was one thing and murder was another and she wouldn’t like anyone to think she had wished it on her. As for that man she had seen, she herself was quite sure it was the Stabber, now she cams to think of it. She meant, who else could it be hanging about there? But she had not thought of it at the time because the Stabber belonged on the other side of the Park and she wasn’t one to think the worst of people. If she had, she’d have warned Mrs. Crabbett instead of letting her go straight to her death like that, poor thing. She had thought there was something unpleasant about the man she had seen. He had a bad aura, she said. But she had never connected him with the murders.
Once again there were bloodstains, but no weapon. Once again no motive could be found for anyone but a homicidal lunatic. Once again there was nothing in the dead woman’s life that was not commonplace. Once again there was nothing to suggest any dark sexual aspect of the affair. Once again there seemed to be no way of identifying the madman or preventing him from striking again.
“Well, Deene,” said Mr. Gorringer with assumed mournfuln
ess. “I suppose you will now insist on your part of our bargain. You will want your pound of flesh, if that is not too unhappily apt a metaphor to use.”
“I am certainly going to spend the holidays, or part of them, in Albert Park.”
“I feared it. But my hands are tied. Tell me, though, have you any predisposition in the matter? Any inkling of how to go about it? It is indeed a baffling problem— a lunatic at large, a creature perhaps appearing normal in his everyday life. How will you start?”
“Oh, exactly as I always do. Make a few enquiries in each case. Try to get the background.”
“But surely here, the background of the unfortunate victims is of secondary interest? It probably was not even known to the murderer.”
“That may be. But I know no other way. I shall treat each case as a case of murder.”
“You mean, you don’t think they are all the work of one madman?”
“I don’t say that. They well may be. But I don’t think that should be assumed too readily. I propose to take them one by one. I have a feeling I shall come on something. Perhaps find something a§ yet unnoticed which is common to all.”
“I trust you will preserve the strictest anonymity, Deene?”
“You needn’t worry about that. The school won’t be mentioned. In fact, I may as well tell you, headmaster, that I have never felt more doubt of myself. The only mass murderer who ever remained unidentified was Jack the Ripper and it looks as though there is a considerable similarity of action and motive. I frankly don’t see what use I can be. But I’ve got to try.”
“To that I can only say God Speed,” said Mr. Gorringer and dismissed Carolus with a headmasterly gesture.
Four
CAROLUS had never been to Albert Park and his first impressions of it were damping. Just the sort of district, he reflected, for some dirty little schizo to let himself go with a butcher’s knife, just the district to breed hatred, egomania, evil-mindedness, all the things that went to this sort of murder. The streets were unrelievedly ugly and even the houses overlooking the scrubby little park were heavy and pretentious like the people for whom they were built.
