Crime at Christmas

by C. H. B. Kitchin

  ‘Of Mr Warren’s conduct I can wholeheartedly approve. He examined the body as well as he could to make sure that death had really taken place, and after removing articles of value from the pockets, returned at once to Beresford Lodge for help.

  ‘By the way, Mr Quisberg, I should have handed these over to you before, as Dr Green’s sole executor. Will you take them now?’

  *

  As he spoke, he pulled out of his pocket the notecase and cigarette-case which I had found on the body. Quisberg stretched out a hand mechanically and took them, laid the notecase on the arm of his chair, opened the cigarette-case, looked at it sadly, and shut it again.

  *

  ‘This,’ the Inspector said, ‘is really all my story; for we do not yet know, if we shall ever know, what exactly happened between Dr Green and the caretaker. I am convinced, as I said before, that the doctor had lured the caretaker to that lonely place with the deliberate intention of killing him. He was quite unconventional enough to feel no kind of scruple about taking the life of a blackmailer. Evidently something went wrong. Perhaps the doctor had been thrown off his mental balance by the previous struggle with Dixon. Perhaps the caretaker is unusually agile. He must certainly have been suspicious and on his guard the whole time. At all events, there was a fight, and this time it was the doctor who lost. There is no reason, of course, to suppose that his death was anything but an accident. It is a maxim, I believe, of every detective story that blackmailers do not kill their victims. I take it that the doctor had a shot at his enemy with the stick and missed, or perhaps tripped up, and that when the caretaker had wrenched the weapon from him and gave a return blow, he struck harder than he intended. It was, of course, not a situation in which one could spend much time calculating how hard one ought to hit. One thing alone really puzzles me, and I fear will continue to puzzle me. The doctor’s plan to kill the caretaker was really beautifully conceived. It had its moments of rashness, of course. The serenade on the flute was a dangerous piece of bravado, though not out of keeping with what I know of the doctor’s character. But, as a whole, granted that it was a desperate measure, it had every chance of success. It might have been two or three days, or even more, before anyone missed the caretaker. Even if inquiries had been made, there would have been no reason to suppose that he had met with any catastrophe. The agents, I think, would merely have assumed that he was an irresponsible fellow who had deserted his post. At all events, I see no cause why any search should have been made on Hampstead Heath, and in default of such a search, the body, securely buried in a damp and remote thicket, might easily have remained undiscovered for years – or at least till the trippery season. And by that time the doctor was sufficiently resourceful to make away with it altogether. One weakness alone stands out. How did the doctor propose to kill his man? He did not know that Dixon would set out for his walk carrying such a convenient weapon – still less that there would be any chance of securing it. Indeed, I am inclined to regard this walk with Dixon as an afterthought on the doctor’s part – merely as a chance of putting in some useful work before the time appointed for the real task. We might, of course, suppose that he intended to come back and fetch a weapon from home. But if that was so, why did he take the flute with him instead of fetching that, too? Perhaps, you may say, he had a weapon, but the caretaker made away with it. I do not think so; for the injury to the doctor’s head was almost certainly caused by Dixon’s stick, and there would have been no motive for the caretaker to conceal a weapon which he never used. One might advance as a tentative theory that the doctor intended to use the spade which was, of course, already hidden in the thicket, to give the fatal blow. To my mind this clumsy instrument would not have been at all to the doctor’s liking. Think, for example, how hard it would have been to take it up and get a proper grasp of it without arousing suspicion.

  ‘However, I am keeping you far too long over what is a purely professional line of inquiry, and must apologise for letting my interest run away with me like this. As I said before, my story is now told. I don’t know, before we part, if Mr Quisberg . . .’

  He paused expectantly, and we all looked at Quisberg, who with shaking hand opened the doctor’s cigarette-case again, drew out the last cigarette, lit it, and rose unsteadily to his feet. Before he spoke, he turned his tragic eyes on each one of us, till finally they came to rest on Harley.

  ‘Dr Green,’ he said at length, ‘was my very dear friend. He died for me. Your modder, Harley, was my mistress, in de old days when . . . As for de money, which dey say I stole . . .’ Here he paused pitifully and took a long pull at his cigarette. ‘. . . I never stole it. It was mine, owed to me by de company. I can’t explain dis now, but you will see . . .’

  Then, while we all thought he was pausing again to find words, he suddenly uttered a gasping cry, put a hand to his chest, tottered and fell down, dead.

  XX. Short Catechism

  Reader: Was it suicide?

  Malcolm Warren: No. Don’t be so heartless, either. Can’t you guess what it was?

  R.: I suppose the cigarette was poisoned?

  M.W.: Yes.

  R.: By Dr Green?

  M.W.: Yes. Quisberg’s death, you see, was a tragic answer to the problem that had been puzzling the Inspector.

  R.: You mean, the difficulty of supposing that the doctor had set out to kill the caretaker without providing himself with a weapon.

  M.W.: Exactly. He had provided himself with a weapon. It’s quite easy to see what the doctor’s plan was. During his talk with the caretaker, he intended to offer him the poisoned cigarette. It was all so simple.

  R.: I suppose the doctor would have had to smoke himself – as a guarantee of good faith.

  M.W.: Probably he did.

  R.: Then the cigarette-case must have contained at least two cigarettes. Suppose the caretaker had pulled out the wrong one?

  M.W.: That would have been very awkward, but I think we could trust the doctor to see that he didn’t. A little sleight-of-hand or mental suggestion would have been sufficient.

  R.: But the plan failed.

  M.W.: Yes – because, strange to say, the caretaker was a non-smoker. This came out at his trial and was fully confirmed. There was no trace, for example, of a cigarette wrapping or tobacco tin in the débris at Paragon House.

  R.: What happened to the caretaker?

  M.W.: All in good time! You ought to ask me first, what happened to the petrified little group surrounding the dead body in the terrace room. What did we all do? Did Amabel faint? Did Clarence whistle a bar of Beethoven? Did the Inspector swear? It’s easy to be flippant about it at this distance, but it was a most shocking and awful moment.

  R.: What did you do?

  M.W.: As far as I can remember – nothing. The Inspector gave orders and Harley had them carried out. Clarence and Amabel went up to Mrs Quisberg. I stayed at the far end of the room for a while, and as no one took any notice of me, opened one of the French windows and walked down the Louis Quinze staircase into the garden. I soon realised that it was still raining, and went round to the front door, feeling damp and chilly. The front door was shut, of course. I had no latchkey and was forced to ring. Edwins admitted me, fortunately without comment, and I went up to my bedroom and changed my clothes.

  R.: This is all terribly undramatic.

  M.W.: Yes, but almost more interesting than the drama, don’t you think?

  R.: I don’t know about that.

  M.W.: But surely it is. A detective story is always something of an étude de mœurs – a study in the behaviour of normal people in abnormal circumstances. By normal people, I mean people whose lives come fairly close to our own, people whose psychology we can follow and sympathise with. The theft of a coconut, however ingenious, in an island of savages, would, as such, hardly hold anyone’s attention. Similarly, a murder occurring on a battlefield would fall rather flat. You want the revolver shot, the bloodstained knife, the mutilated corpse – but largely because they bring out the
prettiness of the chintz in the drawing-room and the softness of the grass on the Vicarage lawn. You don’t follow?

  R.: Yes, I do.

  M.W.: If I may continue this digression for a moment, I would say that the excuse for a detective story is two-fold. First, it presents a problem to be solved and shares, in a humble way, the charm of the acrostic and the crossword puzzle. But secondly – and this, to my mind, is its real justification – it provides one with a narrow but intensive view of ordinary life, the steady flow of which is felt more keenly through the very violence of its interruption. I may be speaking too personally perhaps. I think I have told you already how much I am moved by contraries – that I never realise the full loveliness of the summer till the first autumn rain sets in. But I suppose this sense of contrast exists in most people.

  R.: Be careful, or you’ll become really paradoxical. Most people would say that the softness of the Vicarage lawn is only noteworthy because there’s a body lying on it. You say the body is only noteworthy because it is lying on a soft lawn.

  M.W.: Not quite. Though I don’t know. If you press me too hard and offer me yet another whisky I might try to maintain that, from a philosophical point of view, your paradox is true. After all, soft lawns are more real and permanent than dead bodies. At least, I hope they are.

  R.: I can see you’re implying that my next question should be: ‘How was your dinner served that Sunday night? Did you have dinner? And, if so, was it a good one, and had you any appetite?’

  M.W.: Very good questions, too. Imagine yourself for one moment in my circumstances. Would you expect dinner to be served an hour after the head of the household had died in such a fashion? Could you have eaten with gusto?

  R.: I don’t know.

  M.W.: You see, you’re regarding my story as something apart from any experience you might have yourself. I’m sorry, because it’s evidently a reflection on the way I’ve told it.

  R.: Not altogether. I should love to have an answer to the questions I suggested a moment ago.

  M.W.: Dinner was served. Amabel and Sheila did not come down. Where they had theirs, if any, I don’t know. There were only three of us in the dining-room – Clarence, Harley and myself. We talked quite brightly – or, rather, Clarence did – about modern art.

  R.: Let me see. Should I have talked about modern art?

  M.W.: You’d have only been too delighted to find you could talk about anything. As it was, the conversation flowed fairly smoothly, and we continued it for some time in the drawing-room, till a maid came in to say that Mrs Quisberg would like to see me. I went at once, of course. It was a very sad meeting. She was on the verge of tears most of the time, and so was I once or twice. But even then I was struck by her kindness and unselfishness. It seems that Quisberg had told her everything that afternoon and had declared himself quite ready to take whatever the consequences might be. Mrs Quisberg’s chief distress was for Harley, apart from the loss of her husband, which came to her as a terrible blow.

  R.: She had already lost two before him, hadn’t she?

  M.W.: That is a heartless remark. You know perfectly well that really devoted wives and husbands very often do marry again, quite soon afterwards, too. Besides, I gather that Mrs Quisberg’s first marriage – with Clarence’s father – was not altogether a happy one. The father, it seems, was even more difficult and wayward than the son. The Thurston marriage, I think, was happy.

  R.: You haven’t told us much about these two earlier marriages of hers.

  M.W.: I don’t know much about them. James and Thurston must have been two very different types.

  R.: Did either of them leave any money? I have gathered that Mrs Quisberg was living on her third husband.

  M.W.: I don’t think James left any. This accounts for Clarence’s poverty. Thurston did leave something, settled on Mrs Quisberg for life, with reversion to the Thurston children. His money turned out to be rather important.

  R.: Why?

  M.W.: Well, you see, Quisberg’s death, so far from clearing up everything, led to many complications. Was his money really his, or was it owed to the Cabal liquidators? The liquidation, of course, had been finished years before, but I understand the Crown has a claim in criminal cases—

  R.: What was the outcome of it all?

  M.W.: Mrs Quisberg was eager, at first, to hand over all Quisberg’s fortune. Friends dissuaded her from being so rash, and in the end a compromise was reached, by which she handed over a quarter of a million and a certain sum by way of past interest on it. It was a quarter of a million, you remember, that Quisberg was supposed to have made away with. This left her with forty or fifty thousand pounds, Beresford Lodge, which had been bought for her in her name, and, of course, the Thurston money.

  R.: Was Quisberg really a crook?

  M.W.: In the worst sense, no. There is no doubt that he had committed a criminal offence in vanishing with the securities at the time of the Cabal crash. On the other hand, a barrister told me that a fair defence could have been put up that the money was owned by Quisberg in his own right and that the company merely held it as custodians. I don’t think, either, that there was any evidence to show that Quisberg was involved in the fraudulent practices of the Chairman and Vice-Chairman – though I dare say he sailed pretty near the wind. No doubt he was less straight-laced when young than in his old age. The whole Cabal story is so involved I’ve never been able to follow it.

  R.: Well, what became of everybody? Let’s take the caretaker first. I suppose they didn’t try him for murder.

  M.W.: No, they didn’t. He was tried for manslaughter and acquitted. The prosecution, you see, couldn’t, or didn’t wish to hide the fact that Dr Green had set out with the intention of murdering him. I think some of the jury thought the doctor was a homicidal maniac. The caretaker’s attempt at blackmail was, of course, hinted at, but not pressed very strongly. The only two people who could have given first-hand evidence were both dead – the doctor and Quisberg. So the caretaker remained at large – sometimes, when I thought of him in the small hours of the night, I used to feel rather uneasy – till a few weeks ago when he was arrested for robbing a woman of her handbag and given a heavy sentence.

  R.: And what of Dixon? And Amabel?

  M.W.: Poor Amabel went through a terrible time. She had, you see, sufficient of her mother’s nature in her to feel very guilty about the way she had been behaving, and she did all she could to make amends by looking after her mother during the period following Quisberg’s death. When Quisberg had his last talk with his wife – an hour or so, I suppose, before the tragedy in the terrace room – he told her what Dixon’s record was and said he would never consent to the marriage.

  R.: How did he know about Dixon’s record?

  M.W.: The Inspector had read him the paper I had found in Dr Green’s notecase.

  R.: Why didn’t the Inspector give him the cigarette-case at the same time?

  M.W.: Because one of his assistants was examining the outside of the case for finger-prints. Or so he told me.

  R.: I expect he really forgot about it or hoped everybody would, so that he could keep it! What happened to the case, by the way?

  M.W.: Mrs Quisberg gave it to me – as a memento of her husband and Dr Green. I wear it on gala occasions. (This is not one.)

  R.: Thank you! So Amabel didn’t go chasing after her lover?

  M.W.: She wrote to him, Mrs Quisberg told me, saying that her feelings were unchanged, but that they must not meet for six months. Dixon tried twice to see her, but she avoided him. Then, for some reason or other, he gave her up – or, perhaps, she gave him up. She’s now engaged to a successful barrister a good deal older than herself.

  R.: And what of Clarence James? You made me dislike him intensely.

  M.W.: I didn’t like him myself, I confess, till that last meeting in the terrace room. And even after that, I never felt I really wanted to see him again. But I realise that many people would have thought him the only tolerable member
of the party. Like Amabel, he also rallied round his mother for a time. Then, when the period of crisis was over, he became a Communist and got a miserably paid job on a Communist paper. This lasted for about six months, and then he quarrelled with his colleagues and flirted with Fascism. The last I heard of him was that he had been made editor, at quite a good salary, of a rich magazine dealing with the applied arts and modern ‘luxury articles’. Since that time, I believe, his political views have changed a good deal.

  R.: Perhaps he realises that, though Communism might support a few painters and musicians, it wouldn’t do much to help the production of futurist chromium vases, expensive lampshades, and silk underclothes. Did he see Nurse Moon again, do you know?

  M.W.: I’m not sure, but I gathered from Mrs Quisberg that he didn’t. Mrs Quisberg had a letter from her – a very well-written letter, too – in which she protested that she had never meant to give Clarence any encouragement and regretted any trouble she might unwittingly have caused, etc., etc.

  R.: Clarence had been very quick to fall for her, hadn’t he? I suppose he first met her when Cyril began his appendicitis, and yet he was writing frightful sonnets to her a week or two later.

  M.W.: With a person like Clarence I don’t think such emotional speed would be impossible. But as a matter of fact, he’d met her some time before at Beresford Lodge when she came for a few days as night nurse to help Sheila through an operation for tonsils. He was attracted to her then, and, finding that they had some mutual friend in the artistic world, managed to see her at intervals till Cyril’s appendicitis brought them still closer together, and love reached sonnet-pitch.

  R.: How far do you think that sonnet was sincere?

  M.W.: It’s impossible to say. I think Clarence wrote it purely as an exercise – to distract himself. It was a type of poetry with which he’d have no sympathy at all. But I have no doubt he was very much in love at the time.