Sequel to Murder: The Cases of Arthur Crook and Other Mysteries

by Anthony Gilbert

  “You say that?” I yelled. “You, the archbetrayer? Do you know what you meant to me all those years? Meeting you at that party was like my being born again. All that treadmill existence of school, school, school, and then back to my mother, and after she died back to nothing, and suddenly you, giving me life, leading me out of the fog into a sun I thought could never be extinguished. I would have died for you any time during those five years we shared, before you let me see how little I meant, less than Caro, a stupid brainless little bitch who couldn’t even settle her own bills. I didn’t understand then what you saw in me from that very first day—”

  And Vanessa said simply, “I saw a friend.”

  “A victim,” I flashed back. “I suppose it was inevitable. If you’d even consulted me, let me be your partner in that crisis—but, no, you just took my future and threw it to Caro as you’d throw a bone to a dog.”

  Vanessa looked astounded. “There was never any choice. Caro was my family.”

  “I thought I was that, the one that sticketh closer than a brother.”

  “You were my second self,” Van told me steadily. “I could never have said that of Caro.”

  “And so,” I plowed on, not daring to meet those eyes, refusing to be lured by that steadfast gentle voice, “I hated you—kowtowing to Ethel Ridgley, involving me in your humiliation. I hated you in inverse ratio to the love, the worship almost, I’d had for you. You should suffer—” My voice was hot like the breath of serpents. “I should watch you writhe, for once I’d hold the cards. Only—you won again, when I realized I wasn’t getting any pleasure out of it. I could cut my own heart out, but I didn’t break yours, did I?”

  “Broken hearts are no more use than broken china. You just throw them away. Was I right about Jackson, Ursie?”

  “Are you ever wrong?” I almost screamed. “I thought I had the upper hand, Jackson thought he had, but you’ve defeated us both. Oh, clever, clever Miss Freeman! I couldn’t even defeat Ethel. I’ll never forget her mincing away out of the lounge—I won’t say goodbye, Miss Jordan, just au revoir, I feel we may be very useful to each other in the future, you and I. Even Miss Vanessa Freeman may turn out to be less upstage, n’est-ce pas?”

  “And that’s when you decided to kill her? Oh, Ursie, do you never stop to think? All those eyes, didn’t it occur to you that someone would see? Where did Jackson come in?”

  I remembered sitting in my comfortable empty compartment fifteen minutes later. People were still milling on the platform, questions were still being asked. I hadn’t been stopped—no one, I thought, had noticed me. I’d even managed to recover the parcel that looked like lingerie and actually contained £2000.

  And then the door had slid back and there he was, dropping into the corner opposite me and saying, “Do you mind if I smoke?”—though it was a nonsmoker and without even waiting for my reply continuing, “What made you do it? Was she blackmailing you? And what exactly was in that parcel you carried away?”

  “If I’d been the topmost actress of the season I couldn’t have carried that one off,” I cried. “No cue, no hint. I did what I could. ‘I’ll pull the communication cord,’ I said, and he laughed. ‘You do just that,’ he told me.

  ‘Of course, I’d have to tell them what I saw, and they’d want to examine the parcel—but if you’ve nothing to fear, why, go right ahead.’ I almost died.”

  “Poor Ursie!” said Vanessa, and now there was no mockery in her voice, only compassion. “I think that’s what appealed to me about you that first day. You had such qualities, you cared, but you were such a muddler. Did you never wonder why the best jobs always escaped you? You had the qualifications—but you’re a muddler. I’m a natural resolver, I wanted to set you right. And then I found I wanted you the way you were, muddles and all. And I do still.”

  It was beyond belief. We needs must love the highest when we see it, the faithful heart, love’s disciple—but did even his mother love Judas Iscariot? It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a goddess. I was in Vanessa’s hands and there was no escape ...

  * * *

  It was a man searching for mussels who found the crashed car and reported it to the police. They didn’t find the driver for another two days and by that time his own father might have had doubts as to his identity. It had been a wild night and the rocks round that part of the coast are without pity.

  We met the Rectors’ wife in the village just after the news broke. She is a little brown wren of a woman, as full of romantic fancies (in spite of her dreary husband) as an egg is supposedly full of meat.

  “Another case of don’t drink and drive, I suppose,” she told us, sighing briskly. “It’s what everyone will say, and no one will ever know if he deserves a much more exotic epitaph.”

  “Exotic?” said Vanessa.

  “He could have driven off the cliff edge in the pangs of unrequited love,

  or be the victim of a revengeful cuckolded husband, like that film at the Odeon that Arthur wouldn’t sit through. It’s not often we have a mystery

  round here, and no one seems especially interested. I mean, what was he doing in this neighborhood at all? Never tell me he came just for the ride.

  Ah, well!” Conversations with Mrs. Hughes usually ended this way. “I’ve got forty women coming to a Bible tea. And, as Arthur insists on saying, the music goes round and round.”

  “I never quite know what that means,” Vanessa confessed, as the Rector’s wife got on her bicycle and shot down the hill.

  “That life never stops, not even for tea,” I suggested, “and you have to go along with it.”

  “It’s too bad we couldn’t have confided in her; I don’t think she would have given us away.” Vanessa sounded almost as though she meant what she said. “And life with the Reverend Hughes can’t be a fireball. Still, this is one of the situations where silence is golden, and we all know how important the gold standard is.”

  It was a lovely afternoon after two days of storm. Van and I came home through the woods and round the lake where the bluebells were struggling up from their drenched beds. Next month you wouldn’t be able to set your foot down without trampling them into the earth. We had the place more or less to ourselves; everyone else was out on the cliff road. “Tourists!” said Vanessa, scornfully.

  The telephone was ringing on our return. “Your turn, Ursie,” Van said, walking to the drawing room.

  I lifted the receiver. “Would that be Miss Freeman?” I didn’t know the voice from Adam’s.

  “Who wants her?” I said.

  “Oh, she wouldn’t know my name, and it’s not really important, is it?

  Shall we say Smith? I’m a friend of that fellow Jackson—his confidant, you might say. Told me everything, he did. A shocking thing, what happened to him. Such a jovial type to come to such a sticky—well, watery—end. Droll, too.

  I’ve got things to say to a dame called Freeman, and if I shouldn’t be seen around during the next few days you can send the police dogs to dig in her garden.”

  “Very droll,” I agreed.

  “Why I rang—what I mean is, do you think I should tell the police? It might be a good idea to have a meeting with Miss Freeman. I could be along this evening, if that’s convenient, and perhaps we could come to some sort of an agreement.” And the line went dead.

  How odd, I thought, that for once Peggy Hughes should have the last word. “The music goes round and round.”

  “Who was it?” Van called cosily from the drawing room.

  So I went in and told her ...

  Cul-De-Sac

  When P.C. Crane left the disused air-raid shelter under the arches to mount the steps to Bury Street he was like a man walking in a dead world. There wasn’t a living creature in sight. The fog lay

  like a curtain.

  He shivered. Who’d be a policeman? Ten years of tramping the beat, eight of hearing Carrie nag, nag, nagging of an evening—Ruby’s husband’s got his stripes she’d say. And Ellen’s mov
ing into their own house on Friday. But then Fred was always ambitious.

  Ambitious? He had had his dreams too: never thought he would be flogging a beat after ten years, coming home to a childless hearth and a wife who made no pretence of her feeling for him. A failure, that was what she thought.

  Sometimes, when he saw his life moving away from him like a tide, he would feel desperate, go out seeking any respite to create the illusion that there was still something left. No wonder that men got drunk or went after women—like those women under the arches, Lily and Ivy and Rose.

  * * *

  He was so deep in reverie that he did not hear the footsteps till they were quite close. They moved steadily but with an irregular beat. Tic-tac, Tic-tac.

  Lame, thought the constable. But sober—sober as a judge.

  They, came nearer. But the stranger did not speak. Tic-tac. Straight past he went.

  The policeman wondered. “Where was the man making for? Didn’t he know he was in a cul-de-sac?” Bury Street led only to the arches and the river.

  The policeman went on his way. There was nobody in Lovers’ Lane, on the river road, his big feet slipped in the mud, Nobody. He was almost back at the arches when a voice spoke.

  “That you, constable?”

  “What the devil ...? Who are you?” The man moved. It was the lame fellow. He was carrying a torch in his left hand: his right was concealed by a fantastic black cloak, the sort of thing you looked for in films rather than real life. He was a saturnine chap all right, with a great scar across one cheek.

  “Got a job for you,” said the stranger? “Under the arches. A woman. This is murder, constable. Isn’t that what every policeman hopes for, to give him a leg up? I’ve done you a good turn, you might say.”

  The two went off together to look.

  “What are you doing here?” said the policeman as they walked.

  “Lost my way in the fog. Anyone might. Then when I found the arches I thought I’d stop a bit, don’t get about quite so easily as I did—have a cigarette,

  I thought. I was halfway through before I saw her, Don’t know why, Just turned my head and there she was, lying in the corner.”

  “And you knew right away she was dead and, what’s more, that she’d been murdered? You knew a lot, didn’t you?”

  “I am—was a—doctor. But you don’t need to be that to see no one’s going to help her now but the undertaker.” Crane stooped as the stranger led him into the air-raid shelter. A woman’s congested face stared blindly at the roof.

  Crane knew her, of course. It was Rose.

  “You’ll come to a bad end,” he had told her not so long ago, finding her under the arches.

  “You wouldn’t be above lending me a hand. I dare say,” she had answered.

  She had been so vital then, not very young, not very pretty, but with some quality that made a man remember how valuable life had seemed once when there was no end to what he meant to do.

  * * *

  Crane turned sharply, “I’ll have to get the sergeant,” he said to the stranger. He blew a discordant peal on his whistle.

  “Oldest trick in the world,” said the lame man, thoughtfully. “Jack the Ripper knew it. Come up behind your victim, catch the two ends of the scarf she’s wearing, pull ’em tight. The odds are she didn’t even cry out. I never heard a sound.”

  “All I’ve heard since I was here last, when there wasn’t a living soul in sight, have been your footsteps going past, in the fog.”

  “And his,” suggested the other. “His?”

  “The fellow responsible for this.” He turned his torch downwards. “Someone must have gone past you on the river road. Funny, you must practically have shaken hands with a murderer.”

  “Nobody passed me.”

  “That’s queer,” said the other. “Because no one passed me, either. You see what that means. That the murderer’s here with us at this moment. Come to think of it, he must be. Look at those footprints.

  “It rained this afternoon before the fog came up. Anyone coming in here must have left traces of his arrival. And there are only three sets of prints. Hers— what ridiculous shoes women wear, don’t they? And yours. All over the place, aren’t they? And one other set, which are mine. She didn’t kill herself, so it’s a choice between you and me. And I have an unshakable alibi.”

  “Are you trying to put this on to me?” demanded Crane, as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “Why on earth should I ...?”

  “I suppose she was making trouble. Her sort generally do. Good Heavens, officer, wasn’t there any other way of shutting her mouth?”

  “I think I hear the sergeant,” said Crane, moving on to the river-road. The other man came with him.

  “What have you go in your right hand?” said Crane. “Nothing. What’s the idea? Going to jump for it?”

  Crane made a lunge at him; chap might have a cosh or even a gun. The other stepped back and his foot-must have struck a stone or some invisible obstruction, because he staggered and seemed unable to regain his balance. He clutched wildly at the policeman but Crane had stepped back and was, flashing his bulls-eye in the man’s face.

  It was all over in an instant, the splash, the faint cry. Crane moved quickly away. He had not realised until to-night how speedy death could be.

  First Rose in the shelter—and what a shock she had given him, appearing out of the fog with her demands and her threats. He must have been mad ever to get tangled up with her. He had caught the ends of the scarf, not meaning to hurt her—or had he? Anything to make her stop.

  And all in a moment she had stopped. It was done. Murder. So simple, so quiet.

  And then this lame fellow had to drop out of the sky, wreck everything, continue Rose’s threats.

  “I didn’t touch him.” Crane told himself. “He slipped.”

  He heard the sergeant’s feet ringing on the stories. “What’s up? I heard a splash.”

  “He was too quick for me, sergeant. I didn’t guess what he was going to do.”

  Suddenly he felt calm. He shone his bull’s-eye on Rose’s body.

  “You found them here together?”

  “That’s right, sergeant. Of course, he said it wasn’t him, he had an alibi, but when I blew my whistle he suddenly made for the river.”

  * * *

  They sent for him next afternoon to identify the body. It lay in the mortuary covered by a sheet.

  “That’s the man.”

  “Didn’t make any confession, I suppose?”

  “No sir. Said he’d missed his way in the dark, found her like that, but—

  well, there were the footprints. Only three sets, one hers, one mine. Only

  three people there last night.”

  “And one dead. And one with an alibi.

  “An alibi?”

  “Yes. The sort even a police-plan can’t break. A man with one hand can do a tot, constable, but he can’t throttle a woman as that one was throttled last night.”

  And turning down the sheet he revealed the body of a man with one arm amputated just below the shoulder.

  Following Feet

  Some one in the bar of the Horn of Plenty had a cold that night, I remember, and someone else suggested the time-honored cure of hanging a boot on the bedpost and drinking whisky until you saw twins—twin boots, I mean.

  From there the talk passed to other things—snakes, prawns, and fiendish shapes, half-beast, half-human, that are miraculously conjured up out of an empty glass.

  Everyone knows how the suggestion of a ghost story works on a crowd:

  every member has some contribution to make, but nothing very startling turned up to harrow us until Detective Inspector Field began his story of the Following Feet.

  * * *

  “It was in Westminster,” he said, “and I was on point duty at the time. I hadn’t got into the plain-clothes branch then, so you can see I was a pretty raw hand, and it was then, right at the start, that a ghost did me a good turn. “I
t was a misty night, with a narrow, slanting rain stinging your face, and I was keeping a sharp lookout flashing my lantern into the corners, for London wasn’t so well lighted twenty-five years ago, and conditions were a bit different, too. Anyway, it was the kind of night that you look for garroters and sneak-thieves.

  “The weather was so wretched that the poor devils who generally huddle on the benches on the Embankment had looked for shelter in doorways, crowded together to try to keep warm. It was cold enough to freeze a brass monkey. I could hardly feel my hands myself.

  “There was a certain amount of men on the Embankment, what with trams and taxis and the few people you’ll always find strolling there at any

  hour and in any weather. I turned into a cul-de-sac where rows of inferior offices faced one another, tall and narrow, a gift to a criminal if he could entice his victim, and I was examining the locks and windows when I heard the hurried sound of footsteps, and a man almost cannoned into me.

  “I couldn’t see him very well in that light, but he was bigger than I was,

  with a moustache and an odd-shaped, very prominent scar on the left side of his mouth. He carried a small attaché case, and seemed to be breathing very heavily. When he saw me he stepped back abruptly, with an odd choking sound, as if he were in mortal terror. Then I supposed he recognised my uniform, for he tried to laugh, but it wasn’t much of a success. He caught my arm and put his face close to mine.

  “ ‘Look over my shoulder, constable,’ he said, ‘and tell me if he’s turned the corner yet.’

  “I thought he was balmy or a bit the worse for drink, but I had to admit he didn’t smell of drink, and though his step was uncertain it wasn’t unsteady. “ ‘There’s no one there,’ I told him soothingly, but he wouldn’t let me go.

  “‘He’s coming after me,’ he insisted. ‘Good heavens, officer, how am I to escape him? Is this—persecution’ (and I can’t tell you what he got into that word; it made my blood freeze) to continue to my dying day? And after that? And after that?’