The Big Book of Rogues and Villains

by Otto Penzler

  Next morning Martin did a rare thing. He got up before me and was at his place at the breakfast table when I came down. In front of him was an unopened letter and I immediately recognized the writing on the envelope as his father’s.

  As Pringle brought the coffee he said with his usual apologetic cough: “When I picked up the letters from the front hall, Master Martin, I took the liberty of observing there was one for you from Sir Olin. I was wondering if he mentions the date of his return.”

  “Just give me a sec, Pringle.” Martin heaped his plate with kedgeree. “I’ll read it and tell you.”

  After the dignified withdrawal of Pringle, Martin tore open the envelope and pulled out two pages of the familiar crabbed scrawl. He scanned the first page quickly, muttering: “Just the usual pi stuff.”

  “Does he say when he’s coming back?” I asked.

  “Wait, here’s something at the end.” As Pringle’s footsteps sounded in the passage outside he handed me the first page and the envelope, saying urgently: “Here, shove those into the fire, man. I’d die rather than have Pringle see all that slosh.”

  As I speedily thrust the first page of slosh, together with the envelope, into the fire, I heard Martin’s voice, studiedly casual for Pringle’s benefit: “Here, Pat, read this. You’re better at making out Father’s writing.”

  He passed me the second sheet and I read:

  And so, beloved lad, I shall be back with you in three or four days. In the meantime I pray that His Guidance…etc….etc….

  The letter contained no hint as to his actual whereabouts.

  We imparted the gist of this to Pringle and he seemed satisfied enough, though somewhat resentful that he had not been informed personally of his master’s absence. Still more resentful and far less satisfied was Mr. Ramsbotham when he arrived at the usual hour that afternoon. No, he had not driven Sir Olin to Bridgewater or anywhere else. The talk at the reformatory had been definitely arranged for next Saturday. He had of course to accept the evidence of the letter which Martin duly presented but it was all very vexing…all very odd. It was more vexing and more odd when it came out that no one had driven Sir Olin to the station.

  I don’t know exactly when anyone became really alarmed at Sir Olin’s continued absence, but at some stage Mr. Ramsbotham must have telephoned Lady Slater to come home. Even before her return, however, I had put the missing Baronet temporarily out of my mind and given myself up to thorough enjoyment of life without him.

  To the adult it may seem odd that, in view of the circumstances narrated, I myself felt no uneasiness as to Sir Olin’s safety. I can only say that a child’s mind is not a logical one; that the events preceding the Baronet’s disappearance had no sinister shape for me then; and it is only as I look back now and place each occurrence in its proper context that I can see the terrifying inevitability of the pattern that was forming.

  The next piece of news I heard was exciting. The need to pay the staff and the monthly bills had made it essential that the vault, containing among its other riches all the Slater ready cash, be opened. Since Sir Olin alone knew its combination, arrangements were finally made to bring from London the workmen who had built it and who were to blast through the complicated lock.

  We were warned to keep away during the period of the actual dynamite blast, but nothing could have kept me from the scene of operations. I lured a curiously reluctant Martin to join me, and we had hidden behind a couch in the dust-sheeted study by the time the men came in to set the fuse.

  Even now I am able to recapture those tense moments of waiting behind the couch. I can smell the musty smell of the heavy brocade; I can hear Martin’s breath coming faster and faster as we waited; I can see his face pale and set; I can hear the whispered words of the men as they set about their dangerous job.

  And then, sooner than I had expected, came the blast. It was terrific, rocking the study and, so it seemed, rocking the very foundations of Olinscourt. Martin and I bumped heads painfully as we jumped up, but I did not notice the pain. I was watching the stream of black smoke which poured from the door of the vault. Through it we heard: “That ought to have done the trick. Here, lend a hand.”

  Martin and I watched as the men started to swing back the heavy door of the vault. Pringle was hovering fussily behind them. I could see him through the clearing smoke. I was conscious again of Martin’s heavy breathing, of the inscrutable brown eyes staring fixedly at the door of the vault as it gradually opened.

  Then I heard a smothered exclamation from one of the men, followed by the barking of Roddy who had somehow got into the room. Above it came Pringle’s voice: “Good God in Heaven, it’s Sir Olin!”

  I saw it then—saw the body of a stout man slumped over the tiny desk inside the vault. I saw the dull gleam of a revolver in his hand, the purplish bloodstain above the right temple. I saw the men moving hesitatingly toward it to lift it up—and then Pringle’s voice again, warningly: “Leave him for the police. He’s dead. Shot ’isself.”

  For a moment I stared at that slumped body with the fascination of a child who is seeing death for the first time. A vague odor invaded my nostrils. It was probably the odor of gunpowder, but to my childish mind it became the smell of death. I knew sudden, blinding terror. I pushed past Martin, running upstairs to the lavatory on the fourth floor. I was very sick.

  I don’t know how long I stayed there locked in the lavatory. I don’t remember what my thoughts were except that I had a wild desire to get home—to walk if necessary back to zeppelin-raided London—away from the horror of the thing that I had seen in the vault.

  I must have been there for hours.

  Someone was calling my name. I emerged from the lavatory rather sheepishly to see Pringle on the landing below. He said: “Master Pat, you are wanted in Lady Slater’s dressing room. You and Master Martin.”

  I found Martin hovering outside his mother’s door. He looked as if he had been sick too. Lady Slater was sitting by the window in her boudoir. The snuff-colored gabardines had given place to funereal black, but there was no sign of grief or tears on her face. Even at that cruel moment it seemed beyond her scope to become human. Through a haze of pious phraseology she told us what I already knew—that Sir Olin had taken his own life.

  “The terrible disease in his throat…we do not know how much he suffered…he explained it all in a letter to me…we must not judge him…”

  And then she was holding out a thick envelope to Martin. “He left a letter for you too, my son.”

  Martin took the envelope, and I could not help noticing that his fingers instinctively palpated it to discover the lurking presence of bank notes, just as he had always done at school.

  “And he left a parcel for you also.” Lady Slater handed Martin a square carefully wrapped package. Then she continued: “The inscription on it is the same as on the letter. They are for you alone, Martin, to open and do with as you think fit.”

  After this Lady Slater took us downstairs to the great living room. The village constable was standing by the door. A gentleman of military deportment was talking with Pringle, the butler, and Mr. Ramsbotham. A dim, drooping figure hovered at their side—the local doctor.

  From behind a bristling mustache, the military gentleman questioned Martin and myself about the day of Sir Olin’s disappearance. Martin, surprisingly steady now, told our simple story. We had both thought we heard the telephone ringing in the library. Martin believed he had caught a glimpse of Sir Olin driving off with Mr. Ramsbotham. He assumed that his father had gone to give his lecture at the reformatory. Monday morning there had been a letter from Sir Olin on Martin’s plate telling him that he would not return for several days.

  The problem of that letter which had lulled everyone into a false sense of security was next considered. The mustache pointed out that it must have been one which Sir Olin had written to his son at some earlier date and which, by accident, had become confused with the morning post on the front-door mat. It was at this mom
ent that I remembered how, in my hurry for lunch on the day after Sir Olin’s disappearance, I had snatched at the blazer which had been hanging in the hall. I remembered how the unopened letters from Sir Olin to Martin had fallen from the pocket. With the conviction of sin known only to children, I saw the whole tragedy as my own fault. And, with more confusion than courage, I was stammering out my guilty secret.

  Martin, watching me steadily, was able to corroborate my story, admitting with an awkward flush that he had not always opened his father’s letters the moment they arrived. The military eyebrows were raised a trifle and there the matter of the letter stood. “Martin’s little friend” had spilled some old unopened letters from Sir Olin out of Martin’s blazer; he had failed to pick one of them up; next morning the butler had found it on the doormat and supposed it to be part of the regular morning post….A most unfortunate accident.

  The military gentleman then turned to Lady Slater: “There is one thing, Lady Slater. Sir Olin went into the vault on Saturday evening and he was never seen again. It is to be presumed that he did not come out. Indeed, he could not have opened that heavy door from the inside even if he had wished to.”

  Martin was watching the brisk mustache now, his eyes very bright.

  “And yet, Lady Slater, Dr. Webb here tells me that your husband has actually been dead for less than twenty-four hours. Today is Thursday. This means that Sir Olin shot himself through the temple sometime yesterday. In other words he must have spent the three previous days alive in the vault.”

  He cleared his throat. “From this letter to you there is no question but that your husband took his own life, but I am wondering if you could—er—offer an explanation as to why he should have delayed so long—why he should have spent that uncomfortably long period in the vault. Why he should have waited until the oxygen must have been almost exhausted, why he should…”

  “He had letters to write. Last bequests to make.” Lady Slater’s eyes blinked. She seemed determined to reduce the unpleasantness of her husband’s death to its lowest possible terms.

  “He wanted to make the final arrangements just right.” Her voice sank to a whisper. “Such things take time.”

  “Time. Yes.” The military gentleman gave almost an invisible shrug. “But not the better part of three days, Lady Slater.”

  “I think,” replied Lady Slater, and with these words she seemed to lift the whole proceedings to a higher plane, “I think that Sir Olin probably spent the greater part of his last three days in—in prayer.”

  And indeed there was no answer to that.

  We were dismissed almost immediately. In his mother’s dressing room Martin carefully picked up the letter and the package which had been left for him by Sir Olin. He moved ahead of me toward the door.

  Now that the ordeal was over I felt the need of human companionship, but Martin seemed eager to get away from everyone. Keeping a discreet distance, I followed him out into the sunlit afternoon. He made straight for his workshop, shutting the door behind him and leaving me with my face pressed dolefully against the window.

  I don’t think he was conscious of me, but I had no intention of spying on him. The loneliness of death was still with me and contact, however remote, with Martin was a comfort. As I watched, he put the letter down on his work bench. Then, casually, he started to unpack the parcel.

  I was surprised to see that it was nothing more than an alarm clock, an ordinary alarm clock similar to the dozen or so that already stood on the workshop shelf, except for the fact that it seemed to have attached to it some sort of wire contrivance. I have a dim memory of thinking it odd that his father’s last tangible bequest should be anything so meager, so commonplace as an alarm clock.

  Martin hardly looked at the clock. He merely put it on the shelf with the others. Then he lighted one of the Bunsen burners with which his well-stocked workshop was provided. He picked up the letter his father had written him, the last of those many letters which he had received and which he had neglected to read. He did not even glance at the envelope. He thrust it quickly into the jet from the Bunsen burner and held it there until the flames must almost have scorched his fingers.

  Then, very carefully, Sir Martin Slater, Twelfth Baronet, collected the ashes and threw them into the wastepaper basket.

  —

  I remained at Olinscourt for the funeral. Of the service itself I have only the shadowiest and most childish memories. Not so dim, however, are my recollections of the funeral baked meats. I am ashamed to say that I gorged myself. I have no doubt that Martin did so too.

  The next day it was decided by my family that I should leave the Slaters alone to their grief. My reluctant departure was sweetened by a walnut cake left over from the funeral which I packed tenderly and stickily at the bottom of my portmanteau.

  I never saw Martin Slater again. For some reason it was decided that he should leave the school where we had shivered and wrestled together and go straight to Harrow. For a while I missed the hampers from Olinscourt, but soon the war was over and my family moved to America. I forgot all about my old chum.

  Not long ago a mood of nostalgia brought me to thinking of my childhood and Martin Slater again. Slowly, uncovering a fragment here, a fragment there, I found that I was able to restore this long obliterated picture of my visit at Olinscourt.

  The facts of course had been in my mind all the time. All they had lacked was interpretation. Now, thanks to a more adult and detached eye, I can see as a whole something which, to my childish view, was nothing more than a disconnected sequence of happenings.

  Perhaps I am doing an old school friend an atrocious wrong; perhaps I am cynically forcing a pattern onto what was, in fact, nothing more than a complex of unfortunate accidents and fantastic coincidences. But I am inclined to think otherwise. For I can grasp Martin Slater’s character so much more clearly now than when we were children together. I see a boy teetering on the unstable brink of puberty, who revolted passionately from any physical or spiritual intrusion into his privacy; a boy of intense pride and fastidiousness who was mature enough to know he must fight to maintain his personal independence, yet not mature enough to have learned that in the wrestling match of life certain holds are barred—the death-lock, for example.

  I see that boy stifled by the sincere but nauseating affection of a father who bombarded him with assiduous pieties that made him the laughingstock of his schoolfellows; of a father who, with his “Quiet Quarters,” his sermonizings, his full-mouthed good-night kisses, turned Martin’s home life into an incessant siege upon the sacred citadel of his privacy. I am sure that Martin’s hatred of his father was something deeply ingrained in him which grew as he grew toward adolescence. That hatred was kept in check perhaps so long as the undeclared war of love was waged unknown to the outside world. It was different when I came to Olinscourt. For I represented the outside world, and in front of me Sir Olin stripped his son naked of all the decent reserves. Those kisses on the mouth were, I believe, to Martin the kisses of Judas. Sir Olin had betrayed him forever.

  And Martin Slater was too young to know any other punishment for betrayal than—death.

  The details of that crime speak, I think, plainly enough for themselves. During one of his nightly absences from our bedroom Martin could easily have stolen into his sleeping father’s room and studied the combination of the safe in the back of the gold hunter. He could easily have slipped into the vault on the night before the crime and installed there some ingenious product of his workshop, some device manufactured from an alarm clock and set for the hour at which Sir Olin invariably entered the vault, which would either automatically have shut the heavy steel door behind the Baronet or have distracted his attention long enough for Martin to close the door upon him himself. Martin’s inventive powers were more than adequate to have created that last and most successful “burglar alarm,” just as his conversation with his father about installing the alarm, as witnessed by myself, would have provided an innocent explanatio
n for the contrivance if it had been discovered later in the vault with Sir Olin.

  From then on, with me as an unconscious and carefully exploited accessory, the rest must have been simple too—an invented glimpse of Sir Olin driving off in Mr. Ramsbotham’s car, the clever trick of the old letter, steamed open probably and checked for content, planted among the morning post to put Pringle’s mind at rest about his master’s absence and to make certain that Sir Olin would not be searched for until it was too late.

  There was genuine artistry in Martin’s use of me to cover his tracks. For it was I who innocently burned the first page and the envelope of that fatal letter whose date and postmark would otherwise have proved it to have been of earlier origin. It was I too, with my clumsy grab at the blazer, who was held responsible for that letter’s having dropped “inadvertently” into the morning mail.

  Yes, Martin Slater, at fourteen, showed a shrewd and native talent for murder. And, as a murderer, he must be considered an unqualified success. For he never even came under suspicion.

  There was one person, however, who must have been only too conscious of Martin Slater’s dreadful deed. And in that, to me, lies the real horror of the story. I try to keep myself from thinking of Sir Olin bustling into his safe to put away his papers as usual; Sir Olin hearing a little ting-a-ling like the whirring bell of an alarm clock; Sir Olin spinning round to see the great door of the safe closing behind him, shutting him into that soundproof vault; and somewhere, probably above the door, a curious amateur device composed of a clock and some lengths of wire.

  I try not to think of the nightmare days that must have followed for him—days spent staring at that alarm-clock contrivance which he must have recognized as the lethal invention of his own son; days spent hoping against hope that Martin would relent and release him from that chamber where the oxygen was growing suffocatingly scarcer; days spent contemplating the terrible culmination of his “perfect” relationship with his beloved laddie.