But I was glad when George said he’d like to spend the afternoon thinking things out. In any case, Mrs. Roper had promised to ring before six o’clock whether she had information or not. So I said I’d take a holiday too, and I’d have lunch in town for a change. So we dropped George at the Flagon, and Goodman took me on to the station, where I rang Harris and said I mightn’t be in all day. But I might be leaving that night and would he pack my bag in case.
I hung up before he could ask any questions, and then I went off in search of lunch. There was a matinee every afternoon at the big cinema, and two o’clock found me in the stalls. It was an appalling programme, but I hadn’t gone there to see the pictures. I was there in hiding, as it were, and because I still wanted to do some thinking.
It was nearly five o’clock when I came out, and at once I went in search of tea. I lingered it out, and it was nearly six o’clock when I made my way to the police station. Now I had all the answers, or so I thought. Goodman, I was told, had gone to the Flagon, so I asked if I might use the telephone.
It was Daine whom I called, and I had to wait a minute or two before he was on the line.
“Hallo, Daine,” I said. “I’d like to confirm, still in confidence, that I’m leaving tonight.”
“Harris said something about it,” he told me.
“Well, something has occurred to me,” I said. “I’d like your opinion about something. All this business down here has given me a few ideas and I’d like to make use of them.”
“What sort of ideas?”
“Well, I think I could write a damn good detective story about them. Well, not about them exactly. What I mean is that they’ve given me ideas which I think I could use. I’d like to put the ideas up to you.”
“But you’ve never written a detective story.”
“I know I haven’t. But I did write Kensington Gore.”
“Yes,” he said, a bit reluctantly, I thought.
“What I don’t want to do when I get back to town is to start something I can’t finish. Now you’re an authority. Perhaps the authority. . . . No, don’t protest, my dear fellow. You are the authority. You couldn’t have been associated with Chaice all these years without knowing everything that matters. In any case, the question is, will you do it?”
“Well, if you feel that way about it.”
“That’s damn good of you, Daine,” I said feelingly. “Even if you do stand to make something out of it. Half-past eight suit you? In Chaice’s room? I’m dining in town, by the way.”
So that was settled, and I telephoned Wharton. He and Goodman were at the Flagon, and Wharton seemed pretty annoyed that I hadn’t called him up before. When I asked if anything had happened he said that nothing had, except a message from Mrs. Roper. When I asked what the message was, he said it would keep till I got to the Flagon.
I looked into the drawing-room at Lovelands. Daine had just finished his coffee and was waiting for me. I thought he might suggest that we stay there, but he didn’t. It was he who said we might as well get on with our chat, especially as I might be wanting to get away.
In Chaice’s room I had a look back into the hall and then turned the key in the lock.
“We don’t want to be disturbed,” I said, and passed him my cigarette case. He said he’d have a pipe, so I filled up too.
“Made an arrest yet?” he asked me.
“You know how things are,” I told him. “You don’t make an arrest nowadays till the whole thing’s been talked over with the Public Prosecutor. If you know where your man is, you can always collect him.”
“That where Wharton is now?”
“That’s right,” I said unblushingly. “He and Goodman. I’m only a hanger-on.”
“You’re too modest,” he told me. “But about this book of yours.”
“Oh yes,” I said, and produced some notes I’d made. And I had to shake my head. “This is going to be rather difficult. I hope you won’t think I’m being personal.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I’d rather like to put my plot in a hypothetical way. Assume, for instance, that you’re the villain of the piece. Build the whole story round the murder of Chaice and Martin, but disguise the scene and the characters.”
“I see that,” he said, “but I don’t see the point of making me what you call the villain.”
“That’s what I was trying to apologise for,” I said. “I know there are crooks among every class, and any member of that class oughtn’t to take it personally if I pick a crook—a murderer, if you like—from that class. In fact,” I said with a new apologetic smile, “I want to build my story round the supposition that a literary agent was the murderer. To make it easier for us two to follow, I’m making him you.”
He was gripping the pipe stem pretty tight and looking me clean in the eye.
“You’re not proposing to bring me into this story of yours?”
“My dear fellow, I’ve just told you I’m not. The whole thing’s supposition.”
“Of course,” he told me, and not too graciously, and: “Well, tell me what you’re proposing to write.”
“I knew you’d see the point,” I said, and spread out my notes. “But I ought to explain, too, that everybody else is imaginary. Chaice, for instance, and Martin. We don’t want people reading the book and saying, ‘Oh, but this is just like that Austin Chaice murder.’”
“Certainly we don’t.”
“Right-ho then,” I said. “I’ll get on with it. Here’s the rough plot. There’s an author like Chaice, an agent like yourself, and a son and a wife and so on. Most of them are red-herrings, so we can confine ourselves to what I might call the solution of the murders.”
“More than one murder?”
“That’s it. The author and his son. Just like Chaice and Martin, only disguised. Let me make myself more clear. If Richard Chaice did the murders, then it doesn’t matter so much about my making Chaice and Martin a bit more true to life. Or the agent, for that matter. After all, the reading public couldn’t connect with the murders. If anybody should happen to say, ‘This is rather like those murders at Beechingford’, then they’d soon changing their minds, since my book gives quite a different solution. And, as I said, the setting will be disguised.”
He didn’t know why I was stalling for time, even if he did think I was talking a lot of preliminary blether.
“Sorry to be so prolix,” I said, “but here’s the plot. I’ll use the actual names of Chaice and Martin and Daine because that will make it more easy for you to follow.
“We start, then, with an author, Austin Chaice, who’s a bit of a paranoiac. He has an absolute craze for the accuracy of his local colour and would rather write of personal experience than anything else. Now he’s going to write a play, among other things, which involves a case of double identity. He happens to have been an actor himself, and that gives him the idea of himself assuming another identity. A house of which he’s the ground landlord happens to be vacant, so he hires it under the name of G. H. Preston.”
“I suppose none of this is true?” he broke in.
“It happens that it is true,” I said. “We discovered it only yesterday. Chaice used to use that out-of-bounds summerhouse as his dressing-room. He kept his make-up box there. By the way, a rather interesting thing will happen in my book about that. I happened to be near that summerhouse one night and I saw a crack of light. The murderer, and that’s you, remember,” I said with a smile, “was in the act of removing the make-up box and false whiskers and cheek pads and so on, then I happened to stumble and he got away. Unfortunately for him, he left behind a stick of grease-paint which gave us a clue.”
“Wait a minute,” he said exasperatedly. “Am I to take it that there wasn’t a G. H. Preston?”
“That’s it,” I said. “And that’s not fiction but fact. G. H. Preston was Austin Chaice.”
“I can’t believe it,” he said. I shrugged my shoulders.
“Believe it or not, it’
s true. When I’m allowed to unload some of the facts I’ll give you more details. But to get on with my plot. Chaice loved all that disguise stuff. It was like playing at Indians. I can still hear him chuckling to himself after he’d taken in Lang, and that chap at the house agents’.
“Oh, yes, and you come in too. Chaice—my Chaice—always consulted his literary agent about everything. After all, they’d been associated for years and the agent always read his manuscripts personally. So the agent must have been a pretty ingenious cove too. And, of course, when Chaice put up that double identity stunt, the agent—sorry about that—let’s call him you. When Chaice put up that scheme you daren’t put him off it. So long as he didn’t make a fool of himself as he did over that typewriter business, you didn’t mind what he did. And you intended to keep an eye on him. For instance, whereas you two used often to play chess at night at the house, now you took the chess things to Number 6, and you two used to play there instead. Rather a good point I’ve got there,” I said. “When those chess things were returned and put in the table drawer in the hall the murderer gave himself away.”
I looked up to find his eyes on mine and with a grim intensity.
“Think it’s all right so far?” I asked.
“Carry on,” he told me. “We haven’t really got to your plot yet.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ve been a bit long-winded. But about your motive for killing Chaice. We’ve got to have a motive. I’ve thought of two. Remember that night when Chaice started an argument here about everybody being a potential murder story, and quoting you as having rigged his accounts, and how Lang said there couldn’t be a dishonest literary agent unless the client was a fool? Well, I thought how an agent might swindle a client, if he wasn’t above a bit of simple forgery. It’s true that a client can get information at first-hand from his publisher about his sales, but only from an English publisher. He wouldn’t get the information these days from the owners of foreign rights.
“In Chaice’s case those rights must have amounted to a considerable sum, especially in Switzerland where the exchange is favourable from an English author’s point of view. Still, that’s only a detail. And in my story, of course, I shall make it clear that Chaice wasn’t hinting about you. He was giving you the straight tip that he’d found you out. That gives us a motive for the murder.
“The other motive is also based partly on fact. There’ll be someone in the story like Richard Chaice, who also does a bolt after the murder. It turns out that he bolted because he didn’t want to be questioned. He didn’t believe in capital punishment, shall we say. That’s why he didn’t want to tell the police that he knew for some time that you’d been carrying on with Constance. And he didn’t tell Austin because he didn’t want to make trouble.”
Daine got to his feet.
“All this is beginning to sound in—well, I’ll be frank—in very bad taste.”
“You’re too touchy,” I told him. “What you can’t get into your head is that it’s all supposition.”
He didn’t say anything, but only knocked out his pipe.
“Besides,” I said, “I do want you to hear how the murders were done. Everything else can be altered to avoid even a suspicion of what you called bad taste, but the murder methods are really original.”
“All right,” he said. “But do get to the point.”
I thought for a moment he was going to put his glasses on, but he didn’t. I should have hated talking to him with those eyes of his behind the glasses.
“We’ll come straight to the first murder,” I said. “To save time, let the circumstances be the very same ones that prevailed on that Monday night. You’ve written two anonymous letters to Constance about her husband being concerned with that liquid-squirting. You foster the plan to have Austin followed and you induce Constance to get me to help Martin. In my book you’ve warned Chaice that Martin suspects something, and so Chaice amuses himself by throwing Martin off the scent. What you’d decided—always, of course, in my book—was to arrange with Chaice for you and him to go to Number 6 that night. You’d be there first and you’d kill him in the house. Then you thought of a better scheme. You induced Constance to get Martin to pretend to be sick, and then she was to get me to persuade you to accompany me. You pretended to be reluctant, but you did it. And no wonder. Since you were always under my eye, you would have a perfect alibi. And, if necessary, you could turn suspicion on Martin.
“And so to the actual night. Either then, or some time before, you’d wheeled up to the back premises of Number 6 that rubber-tired wheelbarrow that stands behind the summerhouse, and we’ll see why in a minute. Chaice left here and we followed him to No. 6. He went up to the door as Chaice, visiting his friend or acquaintance there, Preston. He knocked at the door because you—already there, he supposed—would admit him as what a passer-by would assume to be Preston.
“Then it was suggested that we should watch both doors, and you chose the back. I suggest in my book that you entered by the back door, stunned Chaice and then strangled him. You didn’t shoot him because the shot would have been heard, and you didn’t stab him because blood might have been left on the floor. Then you got the body outside and came back to me and reported that Chaice was talking to somebody—Preston presumably—in the house. Then you put the body in the barrow and covered it with the piece of tarpaulin and took it to the summerhouse gate. You may have wheeled it or carried it to the house, and then you had to get back hurriedly to Number 6. You were, in fact, Pymme’s running man.
“Next you came out of the house wearing Chaice’s hat and cape and you took a short cut across the grass so as to be well away from where I was watching. You imitated Chaice’s quick little mincing steps and I followed you to Number 3, where you nipped through, along the lane and so to this room where you replaced the hat and cape. Then you got back to Number 6. There you were when I came back, and you’d obviously been there all the time. When we came home you deliberately went out of the way so as to prove your ignorance of the district and to give more time for the discovery of the body. And that’s about all. What do you think of it so far? Pretty ingenious, don’t you think?”
I knew I had him. He daren’t deny, for that would have shown a knowledge of things of which he was presumably ignorant. And he daren’t go out of the room in a pretended rage, for he simply had to hear what else I knew. My question was intended to exasperate him: to get him to make some admission in a sudden panic or fit of temper. But he was still too wily for that.
“I’ve heard worse,” he said, but the hands were shaking as he began filling his pipe again.
“Glad you like it,” I said, “and sorry to be so long-winded. But about the motive for the second murder. I’ve made Martin either see you bring the body here or else seeing you put it in this room. So what I say is that he approached you the following morning and blackmailed you. You and he weren’t talking in your room, you may remember, but outside. That is what gave me the idea. Not only did he insist that you should publish his book, but later, after the reading of the will, he boasted that he could get a job at five hundred a year whenever he liked, you, presumably, supplying the job. You, in my book, gave me the excuse, for publishing the book, that Martin had said his father had given orders to that effect.
“But you weren’t sitting pretty any longer. That visit of Martin’s altered the whole complexion of things. You might be Chaice’s literary executor, and so in a position not only to cover up any manipulation of the accounts but also to manipulate any posthumous pickings, and later still you could make your financial position impregnable by marrying the lady; but now all that wasn’t worth a red cent since Martin had your neck in his fingers, like this. So Martin had to go.
“It was lucky you found out about the window and were in the garage when Martin asked about the piece of wood. You saw that piece of wood and at once you hit on what looked like a fool-proof scheme. While Martin was at the bathing-pool you went up to his bedroom and tied
a piece of string to the lower id of the piece of wood that propped the window open. You knew it was there because you reconnoitred from your bedroom window. I don’t know quite how I shall make you get the other end of that string into the lavatory window which you’d opened for the purpose. It was only a short distance and it wouldn’t have to be a particularly good shot. The side curtain, by the way, hid both wood and string, and you attached your end of the string to an old nail just outside the lavatory window.
“The premature discovery of the string wouldn’t, however, have involved risk to yourself. In fact, the way you were going to work the whole scheme involved no risk. But what happened afterwards was very simple. You manoeuvred me upstairs. You went into your bedroom and took a look out of your window, and there was Martin, sitting at his open window writing. You had pretended a nasty twinge of sciatica, and when you put the gun under your coat that sciatica would have made any awkwardness look like a natural lameness.
“Then you went first into the lavatory, with gloves in your pocket. You just raised the lavatory window with its frosted glass, and at the very moment after you’d pulled the chain you shot Martin. Not a difficult shot from that short range, and you got him clean above the left temple. In the same three or four seconds you jerked away the wood, and the noise of the lavatory flush drowned both sounds. It’s a very noisy flush, by the way. You had your gloves on and you hauled in the wood and pocketed it and the string, and slipped the gun under your coat again. Then you came out of the lavatory and I went in. You waited outside, and I could hear you there all the time.
“Even if Kitty hadn’t heard the crack of the falling window—a noise she mistook for the crack of the gun—you’d have been running no risk. You were outside the lavatory and I could have heard you there. And we two were going to your room to sign that agreement, and you’d have contrived to keep me there till the body was found. I’d have sworn that you were never out of my sight. I know you’d have had to slip back the catch of the window and deposit the gun, but you could have done that by keeping me in the hall while you made an excuse to run up and see either Constance or Kitty. I’d still have sworn that you hadn’t done the shooting because I’d not have heard the sound of a shot.
The Case of the Missing Men: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 22
