Trent Intervenes and Other Stories

by E. C. Bentley

  The man was instantly dragged from the ladder. There followed a furious and wordless struggle, during which a small hall-table and the bowl of flowers upon it were smashed to pieces, and a panel of the entrance-door was cracked by a boot-heel. At last the handcuffs snapped, and George Jackson was formally acquainted with the reason for his arrest as he stood glowering and panting in the secure grasp of Sergeant Borrett.

  Jackson’s broad, high forehead and over-developed jaws made his face almost square; his lips were thin, his chin was short, his narrow-lidded eyes were much too far apart, and he was villainously unshaven.

  Mr Bligh jerked an automatic pistol from the captive’s breast-pocket.

  ‘You see,’ he remarked to Trent, ‘there couldn’t have been a better way of getting him. If he’d had his hands free, somebody might have been hurt with this Betsy before he could be stopped. If we had tried to get him in that loft, somebody would have been killed pretty certainly, and he could have stood the whole Force off up there, so long as he had food and ammunition. But if he was making use of the flat, there had to be a rope or a ladder of some kind; and while he was coming down he was helpless.’

  He went to the window opening on the street, put his head out and waved a hand. The car at the corner rolled gently up to No. 43.

  ‘Take him along, Borrett,’ Mr Bligh said, opening the entrance door. ‘I’ll be over when I have had a look round up above.’

  The sergeant twined one fist scientifically into Jackson’s collar, the other into a sleeve, and propelled him at arm’s length through the doorway and down the stairs. From first to last he had not spoken a word.

  ‘First we’ll have a look at his travelling outfit,’ Mr Bligh said, as he slipped the catches of the suitcase on the floor. ‘Good idea, that – saved a lot of climbing up and down. What have we here? Toothbrush, soap, and towel, brush and comb – he has nice, clean habits, anyhow, and didn’t like to use anything of Miss Silvester’s more than he had to. He was able to wash regularly and leave no traces – have a bath, too. No shaving tackle – as you might expect from the look of him.’

  ‘That was the notion, I think,’ Trent said. ‘To lie low – or rather high – until the hunt for him had cooled off, and meanwhile grow a beard and moustache that would be a better disguise than anything else. What’s that you’ve got there?’

  The inspector held it up, eyeing it appreciatively. ‘Boned chicken in glass – none of your vulgar tins. Tomato soup in bottle. Biscuits, butter – his old man was doing him well, I must say. Salt and pepper, packet of tea. Two cloths – for washing up, I suppose, so as not to use Miss Silvester’s. He must have made free with her plates and knives and forks and kitchen things, though; there’s none of them here. By the way, she may notice a rise in her gas-bill, if Jackson has been using the cooker as well as the kitchen and bathroom geysers, and the gas-fire in the sitting-room. I should say he was very comfortable here, making himself quite at home for eight hours or so a day.’

  ‘And at intervals the doctor would look in with fresh supplies,’ Trent remarked. ‘That would be when he was supposed to be attending patients at their own homes, no doubt.’

  The inspector closed the suitcase and rose from his knees. ‘I’m glad his old man supplied a ladder. It will be easier than a rope for anybody my size.’

  ‘It will certainly be easier than the way Jackson first got up into the loft,’ Trent remarked, ‘if I am right in thinking they dragged the living-room table on to the landing and put a chair on top of it. Jackson would only just be able to push up the trap-door with his fingers, and hauling himself up required some strength. The scratches made by the feet of the chair gave me an idea almost at the start.’

  ‘But that wasn’t all you had to go on?’ suggested the inspector.

  ‘No. Before that I thought the doctor must have some reason for manufacturing a job for a girl he didn’t know, and keeping her safe in his own house all day. What he did know was that she lived in a top-floor flatlet; and he visited her once to see if the usual loft and trap-door were where they could be made use of. When she started work with him, he borrowed the keys from her bag at the first opportunity, took a squeeze of them, and filed duplicates from a couple of Yale blanks – he’s quite a craftsman, I’m told. Then he laid in the necessary stores, and one evening when Miss Silvester was at the theatre with his daughter he met Ladislas, brought him here, and left him settled in under the roof. That’s my story, anyhow. I’ve thought over it a lot since yesterday, and that’s how I fill in the outlines.’

  Mr Bligh grunted. ‘It must have been something like that. Of course he knew his son was released as soon as it happened. Probably he got the doctor on the phone and arranged a meeting somewhere. He may have told him what he meant to do to Whimster. He must have told him he was going to be wanted by the police again, and must have a safe hide-out. Then the doctor was struck by a notion, and he began working on the plan for making a hide-out of the loft over his daughter’s friend’s place. A good plan too.’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t need to be told what a lad like that was going to do to the man who put him away,’ Trent remarked. ‘If you’re a Pole, as well as a wrong ’un, you are apt not to have a forgiving nature. If it was a question of saving his son from a hanging, I suppose he was ready for anything.’

  ‘Well, he’ll get plenty, I daresay – though there’ll be sympathy for him, too. Now will you hold on to the foot of this ladder while I go up? If you want to come, you’ll have to manage by yourself, as Jackson did.’

  ‘If I want to come!’

  By the light of the inspector’s big electric torch they surveyed the sleeping quarters of the soi-disant George Jackson. Between two of the roof-beams a light canvas hammock was slung, folded blankets within it. Some sheets of pasteboard had been laid over the ceiling-joists in one corner, and on them stood an array of preserved foods, a tin of biscuits, a carton of eggs, a packet of candles, and other household necessaries. In another corner was a pile of newspapers.

  ‘Nothing to sit on,’ Trent observed. ‘You can’t carry a chair about the streets without exciting remark – besides, there’s nowhere for a chair to stand. No wonder he had a fondness for that armchair below.’

  ‘It must have taken the doctor several visits to get this place furnished,’ the inspector said. ‘Well, I’ve seen enough. I’ll have all this removed before Miss Silvester comes home. I wonder how she’ll like it when you tell her the story. It’ll be something for her to talk about for the rest of her life – how she had a young man staying in her flat for a fortnight without knowing it.’

  When they had made the descent, Trent turned to gathering up the wreckage on the floor and stowing it in a corner of the kitchen.

  ‘I shall have to get Marion a new table and bowl,’ he remarked. ‘I promised her I wouldn’t smash up the furniture.’ He laughed suddenly.

  Mr Bligh inquired what the joke was.

  ‘Why, I just remembered,’ Trent said, ‘that she told me this wasn’t one of my crime problems.’

  XI

  The Unknown Peer

  When Philip Trent went down to Lackington, with the mission of throwing some light upon the affair of Lord Southrop’s disappearance, it was without much hope of adding anything to the simple facts already known to the police and made public in the newspapers. Those facts were plain enough, pointing to but one sad conclusion.

  In the early morning of Friday, the 23rd of September, a small touring car was found abandoned by the shore at Merwin Cove, some three miles along the coast from the flourishing Devonian resort of Brademouth. It had been driven off the road over turf to the edge of the pebble beach.

  Examined by the police, it was found to contain a heavy overcoat, a folding stool, and a case of sketching materials with a sketching-block on the back seat; a copy of Anatole France’s Mannequin d’Osier, two pipes, some chocolate, a flask of brandy, and a pair of binoculars in the shelves before the driving-seat; and in the pockets a number of
maps and motoring papers of Lord Southrop, of Hingham Blewitt, near Wymondham, in Norfolk. Inquiries in the neighbourhood led to the discovery that a similar car and its driver were missing from the Crown Inn at Lackington, a small place a few miles inland; and later the car was definitely recognised.

  In the hotel register, however, the owner had signed his name as L G Coxe; and it was in that name that a room had been booked by telephone early in the day. A letter, too, addressed to Coxe, had been delivered at the Crown and had been opened by him on his arrival about 6.30. A large suitcase had been taken up to his room, where it still lay, and the mysterious Coxe had deposited an envelope containing £35 in banknotes in the hotel safe. He had dined in the coffee-room, smoked in the lounge for a time, then gone out again in his car, saying nothing of his destination. No more had been seen or heard of him.

  Some needed light had been cast on the affair when Lord Southrop was looked up in Who’s Who – for no one in the local force had ever heard of such a peer. It appeared that his family name was Coxe, and that he had been christened Lancelot Graham; that he was the ninth baron, was thirty-three years old, and had succeeded to the title at the age of twenty-six; that he had been educated at Harrow and Trinity, Cambridge; that he was unmarried, and that his heir was a first cousin, Lambert Reeves Coxe. No public record of any kind, nor even any ‘recreation’, was noted in this unusually brief biography, which, indeed, bore the marks of having been compiled in the office, without any assistance from its subject.

  Trent, however, had heard something more than this about Lord Southrop. Sir James Molloy, the owner of the Record, who had sent Trent to Lackington, had met everybody, including even the missing peer, who was quite unknown in society. Society, according to Molloy, was heartily detested and despised by Lord Southrop. His interests were exclusively literary and artistic, apart from his taste in the matter of wine, which he understood better than most men. He greatly preferred Continental to English ways of life, and spent much of his time abroad. He had a very large income, for most of which he seemed to have no use. He had good health and a kindly disposition; but he had a passion for keeping himself to himself; and had indulged it with remarkable success. One of his favourite amusements was wandering about the country alone in his car, halting here and there to make a sketch, and staying always at out-of-the-way inns under the name he had used at Lackington.

  Lord Southrop had been, however, sufficiently like other men to fall in love, and Molloy had heard that his engagement to Adela Tindal was on the point of being announced at the time of his disappearance. His choice had come as a surprise to his friends; for though Miss Tindal took art and letters as seriously as himself, she was, as an authoress, not at all averse to publicity. She enjoyed being talked about, Molloy declared; and talked about she had certainly been – especially in connexion with Lucius Kelly, the playwright. Their relationship had not been disguised; but a time came when Kelly’s quarrelsome temper was no longer to be endured, and she refused to see any more of him.

  All this was quite well known to Lord Southrop, for he and Kelly had been friends from boyhood; and the knowledge was a signal proof of the force of his infatuation. On all accounts, in Molloy’s judgement, the match would have been a complete disaster; and Trent, as he thought the matter over in the coffee-room of the Crown, was disposed to agree with him.

  Shortly before his arrival that day, a new fact for his first dispatch to the Record had turned up. A tweed cap had been found washed up by the waves on the beach between Brademouth and Merwin Cove, and the people at the Crown were sure that it was Lord Southrop’s. He had worn a suit of unusually rough, very light-grey homespun tweed, the sort of tweed that, as the head waiter at the Crown vividly put it, you could smell half a mile away; and his cap had been noted because it was made of the same stuff as the suit. After a day and a half in salt water it had still an aroma of Highland sheep. Apart from this and its colour, or absence of colour, there was nothing by which it could be identified; not even a maker’s name; but there was no reasonable doubt about its being Lord Southrop’s, and it seemed to settle the question, if question there were, of what had happened to him. It was, Trent reflected, just like an eccentric intellectual – with money – to have his caps made for him, and from the same material as his clothes.

  It was these garments, together with the very large horn-rimmed spectacles which Lord Southrop affected, which had made most impression on the head waiter. Otherwise, he told Trent, there was nothing unusual about the poor gentleman, except that he seemed a bit absent-minded like. He had brought a letter to the table with him – the waiter supposed it would be the one that came to the hotel for him – and it had seemed to worry him. He had read and reread it all through his dinner, what there was of it; he didn’t have only some soup and a bit of fish. Yes, sir; consommé and a nice fillet of sole, like there is this evening. There was roast fowl, but he wouldn’t have that, nor nothing else. Would Trent be ordering his own dinner now?

  ‘Yes, I want to – but the fish is just what I won’t have,’ Trent decided, looking at the menu. ‘I will take the rest of the hotel dinner.’ An idea occurred to him. ‘Do you remember what Lord Southrop had to drink? I might profit by his example.’

  The waiter produced a fly-blown wine list. ‘I can tell you that, sir. He had a bottle of this claret here, Chateau Margaux 1922.’

  ‘You’re quite sure? And did he like it?’

  ‘Well, he didn’t leave much,’ the waiter answered. Possibly, Trent thought, he took a personal interest in unfinished wine. ‘Were you thinking of trying some of it yourself, sir? It’s our best claret.’

  ‘I don’t think I will have your best claret,’ Trent said, thoughtfully scanning the list. ‘There’s a Beychevelle 1924 here, costing eighteen pence less, which is good enough for me. I’ll have that.’ The waiter hurried away, leaving Trent to his reflexions in the deserted coffee-room.

  Trent had learned from the police that the numbers of the notes left in the charge of the hotel had been communicated by telephone to Lord Southrop’s bank in Norwich, the reply being that these notes had been issued to him in person ten days before. Trent had also been allowed to inspect the objects, including the maps, found in the abandoned car. Lackington he found marked in pencil with a cross; and working backwards across the country he found similar crosses at the small towns of Hawbridge, Wringham, and Candley. The police, acting on these indications, had already established that ‘L G Coxe’ had passed the Thursday, Wednesday, and Tuesday nights respectively at inns in these places; and they had learned already of his having started from Hingham Blewitt on the Monday.

  Trent, finding no more to be done at Lackington, decided to follow this designated trail in his own car. On the morning after his talk with the waiter at the Crown he set out for Hawbridge. The distances in Lord Southrop’s progress, as marked, were not great by the most direct roads; but it could be guessed that he had been straying about to this and that point of interest – not, Trent imagined, to sketch, for there had been no sketches found among his belongings. Hawbridge was reached in time for lunch; and at the Three Bells Inn Trent again found matter for thought in a conversation – much like that which he had already enjoyed at the Crown Inn – with the head waiter. So it was again at the Green Man in Wringham that evening. The next day, however, when Trent dined at the Running Stag in Candley, the remembered record of Lord Southrop’s potations took a different turn. What Trent was told convinced him that he was on the right track.

  The butler and housekeeper at Hingham Blewitt, when Trent spoke with them the following day, were dismally confident that Lord Southrop would never be seen again. The butler had already given to the police investigator from Devon what little information he could. He admitted that none of it lent the smallest support to the idea that Lord Southrop had been contemplating suicide; that he had, in fact, been unusually cheerful, if anything, on the day of his departure. But what, the butler asked, could a person think? Especially, the hous
ekeeper observed, after the cap was found. Lord Southrop was, of course, eccentric in his views; and you never knew – here the housekeeper, with a despondent head-shake, paused, leaving unspoken the suggestion that a man who did not think or behave like other people might go mad at any moment.

  Lord Southrop, they told Trent, never left any address when he went on one of these motoring tours. What he used to say was, he never knew where he was going till he got there. But this time he did have one object in mind, though what it was or where it was the butler did not know; and the police officer, when he was informed, did not seem to make any more of it. What had happened was that, a few days before Lord Southrop started out, he had been rung up by someone on the phone in his study; and as the door of the room was open, the butler, in passing through the hall, had happened to catch a few words of what he said.

  He had told this person he was going next Tuesday to visit the old moor; and that if the weather was right he was going to make a sketch. He had said, ‘You remember the church and chapel’ – the butler heard that distinctly; and he had said that it must be over twenty years. ‘What must be over twenty years?’ Trent wanted to know. Impossible to tell: Lord Southrop had said just that.

  The butler had heard nothing further. He thought the old moor might perhaps be Dartmoor or Exmoor, seeing where it was that Lord Southrop had disappeared. Trent thought otherwise, but he did not discuss the point. ‘There’s one thing you can perhaps tell me,’ he said. ‘Lord Southrop was at Harrow and Cambridge, I believe. Do you know if he went to a preparatory school before Harrow?’

  ‘I can tell you that, sir,’ the housekeeper said. ‘I have been with the family since I was a girl. It was Marsham House he went to, near Sharnsley in Derbyshire. The school was founded by his lordship’s grandfather’s tutor, and all the Coxe boys have gone there for two generations. It stands very high as a school, sir; the best families send their sons there.’