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- Herausgeber: Dean Street Press
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
None of the other guests could explain what she was doing in Crooked Lane during the night… Beautiful Margaret Gask, guest at Scudamore Hall, was shot to death on the driveway of the estate. The mink coat that she should have been wearing turned out to be the first clue Scotland Yard had to work on. Then a man she knew, a receiver of stolen goods, turns up dead. Soon more shady characters are drawn into the story: receivers, jewel thieves, confidence men and convicted felons on both sides of the Channel. Richardson, now Chief Constable, orchestrates the clues concerning a murdered French senator, the theft of a famous emerald, a fake Italian prince and a mysterious priest who sought sanctuary after perpetrating thefts and felonies all over France. The case ends back in Scudamore Hall, where an ecclesiastical robe replaces a mink coat as Exhibit A. The last and arguably most entertaining of all the Richardson novels, A Murder is Arranged (1937) has action, humour and a brilliant cast of major and minor characters. This new edition, the first in many decades, includes a new introduction by crime novelist Martin Edwards, author of acclaimed genre history The Golden Age of Murder. "Few authors can claim such an intimate knowledge of Scotland Yard and criminals as Sir Basil Thomson, one-time Assistant Commissioner at the Yard. He provides subtle intrigue, clever deduction, and bright dialogue." Referee
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Basil ThomsonA Murder is Arranged
None of the other guests could explain what she was doing in Crooked Lane during the night…
Beautiful Margaret Gask, guest at Scudamore Hall, was shot to death on the driveway of the estate. The mink coat that she should have been wearing turned out to be the first clue Scotland Yard had to work on. Then a man she knew, a receiver of stolen goods, turns up dead. Soon more shady characters are drawn into the story: receivers, jewel thieves, confidence men and convicted felons on both sides of the Channel.
Richardson, now Chief Constable, orchestrates the clues concerning a murdered French senator, the theft of a famous emerald, a fake Italian prince and a mysterious priest who sought sanctuary after perpetrating thefts and felonies all over France. The case ends back in Scudamore Hall, where an ecclesiastical robe replaces a mink coat as Exhibit A.
The last and arguably most entertaining of all the Richardson novels, A Murder is Arranged (1937) has action, humour and a brilliant cast of major and minor characters. This new edition, the first in many decades, includes a new introduction by crime novelist Martin Edwards, acclaimed author of genre history The Golden Age of Murder.
“Few authors can claim such an intimate knowledge of Scotland Yard and criminals as Sir Basil Thomson, one-time Assistant Commissioner at the Yard. He provides subtle intrigue, clever deduction, and bright dialogue.” Referee
Contents
Introduction
SIR BASIL THOMSON’S stranger-than-fiction life was packed so full of incident that one can understand why his work as a crime novelist has been rather overlooked. This was a man whose CV included spells as a colonial administrator, prison governor, intelligence officer, and Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard. Among much else, he worked alongside the Prime Minister of Tonga (according to some accounts, he was the Prime Minister of Tonga), interrogated Mata Hari and Roger Casement (although not at the same time), and was sensationally convicted of an offence of indecency committed in Hyde Park. More than three-quarters of a century after his death, he deserves to be recognised for the contribution he made to developing the police procedural, a form of detective fiction that has enjoyed lasting popularity.
Basil Home Thomson was born in 1861 – the following year his father became Archbishop of York – and was educated at Eton before going up to New College. He left Oxford after a couple of terms, apparently as a result of suffering depression, and joined the Colonial Service. Assigned to Fiji, he became a stipendiary magistrate before moving to Tonga. Returning to England in 1893, he published South Sea Yarns, which is among the 22 books written by him which are listed in Allen J. Hubin’s comprehensive bibliography of crime fiction (although in some cases, the criminous content was limited).
Thomson was called to the Bar, but opted to become deputy governor of Liverpool Prison; he later served as governor of such prisons as Dartmoor and Wormwood Scrubs, and acted as secretary to the Prison Commission. In 1913, he became head of C.I.D., which acted as the enforcement arm of British military intelligence after war broke out. When the Dutch exotic dancer and alleged spy Mata Hari arrived in England in 1916, she was arrested and interviewed at length by Thomson at Scotland Yard; she was released, only to be shot the following year by a French firing squad. He gave an account of the interrogation in Queer People (1922).
Thomson was knighted, and given the additional responsibility of acting as Director of Intelligence at the Home Office, but in 1921, he was controversially ousted, prompting a heated debate in Parliament: according to The Times, “for a few minutes there was pandemonium”. The government argued that Thomson was at odds with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir William Horwood (whose own career ended with an ignominious departure from office seven years later), but it seems likely be that covert political machinations lay behind his removal. With many aspects of Thomson’s complex life, it is hard to disentangle fiction from fact.
Undaunted, Thomson resumed his writing career, and in 1925, he published Mr Pepper Investigates, a collection of humorous short mysteries, the most renowned of which is “The Vanishing of Mrs Fraser”. In the same year, he was arrested in Hyde Park for “committing an act in violation of public decency” with a young woman who gave her name as Thelma de Lava. Thomson protested his innocence, but in vain: his trial took place amid a blaze of publicity, and he was fined five pounds. Despite the fact that Thelma de Lava had pleaded guilty (her fine was reportedly paid by a photographer), Thomson launched an appeal, claiming that he was the victim of a conspiracy, but the court would have none of it. Was he framed, or the victim of entrapment? If so, was the reason connected with his past work in intelligence or crime solving? The answers remain uncertain, but Thomson’s equivocal responses to the police after being apprehended damaged his credibility.
Public humiliation of this kind would have broken a less formidable man, but Thomson, by now in his mid-sixties, proved astonishingly resilient. A couple of years after his trial, he was appointed to reorganise the Siamese police force, and he continued to produce novels. These included The Kidnapper (1933), which Dorothy L. Sayers described in a review for the Sunday Times as “not so much a detective story as a sprightly fantasia upon a detective theme.” She approved the fact that Thomson wrote “good English very amusingly”, and noted that “some of his characters have real charm.” Mr Pepper returned in The Kidnapper, but in the same year, Thomson introduced his most important character, a Scottish policeman called Richardson.
Thomson took advantage of his inside knowledge to portray a young detective climbing through the ranks at Scotland Yard. And Richardson’s rise is amazingly rapid: thanks to the fastest fast-tracking imaginable, he starts out as a police constable, and has become Chief Constable by the time of his seventh appearance – in a book published only four years after the first. We learn little about Richardson’s background beyond the fact that he comes of Scottish farming stock, but he is likeable as well as highly efficient, and his sixth case introduces him to his future wife. His inquiries take him – and other colleagues – not only to different parts of England but also across the Channel on more than one occasion: in The Case of the Dead Diplomat, all the action takes place in France. There is a zest about the stories, especially when compared with some of the crime novels being produced at around the same time, which is striking, especially given that all of them were written by a man in his seventies.
From the start of the series, Thomson takes care to show the team work necessitated by a criminal investigation. Richardson is a key connecting figure, but the importance of his colleagues’ efforts is never minimised in order to highlight his brilliance. In The Case of the Dead Diplomat, for instance, it is the trusty Sergeant Cooper who makes good use of his linguistic skills and flair for impersonation to trap the villains of the piece. Inspector Vincent takes centre stage in The Milliner’s Hat Mystery, with Richardson confined to the background. He is more prominent in A Murder is Arranged, but it is Inspector Dallas who does most of the leg-work.
Such a focus on police team-working is very familiar to present day crime fiction fans, but it was something fresh in the Thirties. Yet Thomson was not the first man with personal experience of police life to write crime fiction: Frank Froest, a legendary detective, made a considerable splash with his first novel, The Grell Mystery, published in 1913. Froest, though, was a career cop, schooled in “the university of life” without the benefit of higher education, who sought literary input from a journalist, George Dilnot, whereas Basil Thomson was a fluent and experienced writer whose light, brisk style is ideally suited to detective fiction, with its emphasis on entertainment. Like so many other detective novelists, his interest in “true crime” is occasionally apparent in his fiction, but although Who Killed Stella Pomeroy? opens with a murder scenario faintly reminiscent of the legendary Wallace case of 1930, the storyline soon veers off in a quite different direction.
Even before Richardson arrived on the scene, two accomplished detective novelists had created successful police series. Freeman Wills Crofts devised elaborate crimes (often involving ingenious alibis) for Inspector French to solve, and his books highlight the patience and meticulous work of the skilled police investigator. Henry Wade wrote increasingly ambitious novels, often featuring the Oxford-educated Inspector Poole, and exploring the tensions between police colleagues as well as their shared values. Thomson’s mysteries are less convoluted than Crofts’, and less sophisticated than Wade’s, but they make pleasant reading. This is, at least in part, thanks to little touches of detail that are unquestionably authentic – such as senior officers’ dread of newspaper criticism, as in The Dartmoor Enigma. No other crime writer, after all, has ever had such wide-ranging personal experience of prison management, intelligence work, the hierarchies of Scotland Yard, let alone a desperate personal fight, under the unforgiving glare of the media spotlight, to prove his innocence of a criminal charge sure to stain, if not destroy, his reputation.
Ingenuity was the hallmark of many of the finest detective novels written during “the Golden Age of murder” between the wars, and intricacy of plotting – at least judged by the standards of Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley, and John Dickson Carr – was not Thomson’s true speciality. That said, The Milliner’s Hat Mystery is remarkable for having inspired Ian Fleming, while he was working in intelligence during the Second World War, after Thomson’s death. In a memo to Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Fleming said: “The following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thomson: a corpse dressed as an airman, with despatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that has failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.” This clever idea became the basis for “Operation Mincemeat”, a plan to conceal the invasion of Italy from North Africa.
A further intriguing connection between Thomson and Fleming is that Thomson inscribed copies of at least two of the Richardson books to Kathleen Pettigrew, who was personal assistant to the Director of MI6, Stewart Menzies. She is widely regarded as the woman on whom Fleming based Miss Moneypenny, secretary to James Bond’s boss M – the Moneypenny character was originally called “Petty” Petteval. Possibly it was through her that Fleming came across Thomson’s book.
Thomson’s writing was of sufficiently high calibre to prompt Dorothy L. Sayers to heap praise on Richardson’s performance in his third case: “he puts in some of that excellent, sober, straightforward detective work which he so well knows how to do and follows the clue of a post-mark to the heart of a very plausible and proper mystery. I find him a most agreeable companion.” The acerbic American critics Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor also had a soft spot for Richardson, saying in A Catalogue of Crime that his investigations amount to “early police routine minus the contrived bickering, stomach ulcers, and pub-crawling with which later writers have masked poverty of invention and the dullness of repetitive questioning”.
Books in the Richardson series have been out of print and hard to find for decades, and their reappearance at affordable prices is as welcome as it is overdue. Now that Dean Street Press have republished all eight recorded entries in the Richardson case-book, twenty-first century readers are likely to find his company just as agreeable as Sayers did.
Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.com
Chapter One
IT WAS the duty of Chief Constable Richardson’s clerk to run through the morning papers and call his chief’s attention to any case in which the help of New Scotland Yard (C.I.D. Central) might be invoked. The clerk, a patrol named Walter Goodwin, brought in a number of newspaper cuttings one morning in December.
“Anything special?” asked Richardson.
“Not in the metropolitan area, sir, but there’s a case at Marplesdon in Surrey that I think you ought to read.” Richardson took up the cutting from a popular paper and read:
“MYSTERIOUS SHOOTING CASE NEAR MARPLESDON, SURREY.
“In the early hours of yesterday morning the body of a young woman in evening dress was found lying in Crooked Lane, which traverses Marplesdon Common. She has been identified as Miss Margaret Gask, one of the guests at Scudamore Hall where Mr Forge is entertaining a house party for Christmas. She had been shot through the head. None of the other guests was able to explain why she should have been in Crooked Lane during the night. Apparently she had said good night and retired to her room just before midnight. Her bed had not been slept in.”
“This is just the sort of case in which the chief constable of Surrey may ask for help from Central,” said Richardson. “Who have we got available?”
His clerk reflected. “I believe that Detective Inspector Dallas has about cleared up that case in Chelsea. His report is coming in to you, sir.”
“Very well; we must sit tight until we have an application from the Surrey chief constable.”
“Very good, sir.”
“You might tell Mr Dallas that probably he will be wanted and he must not undertake any fresh case until he has seen me.”
“Very good, sir.”
When his clerk had left the room Richardson began to run through the telephone messages received since the previous evening, marking most of them “F.P.”, signifying “former papers to be attached.” They would then go to the C.I.D. Registry and return to him a little later with bulky files tied up in bundles. He had scarcely finished his task when Constable Goodwin returned, holding one of the flimsies from the telephone room at the top of the building.
“What have you got there?” asked Richardson.
“A message from the chief constable of Surrey, sir.”
Richardson read it. It was the request for help that he had expected for the shooting case at Marplesdon.
“Ask Inspector Dallas to come round.”
Two minutes later a man of about thirty-five announced himself with a single sharp rap on the door.
“You wanted to see me, sir.”
“Yes, Mr Dallas. I have here a telephone message from the C.C. of Surrey asking for our help in a murder case at Marplesdon. He is sending over Chief Inspector Vernon to explain the circumstances. You have nothing pressing on hand at the moment?”
“No sir.”
‘Well then, you’d better take on this case. Look out for Chief Inspector Vernon and go with him. You needn’t trouble the chief inspector to come and see me unless he particularly wishes to. The case may turn out to be simpler than it appears in the newspaper report.”
Next morning Richardson found at the top of the papers on his writing table a report with a green label marked “pressing” attached to it. He knew the handwriting as that of Detective Inspector Dallas.
“In accordance with instructions I met Chief Inspector Vernon on his arrival and we proceeded together to Scudamore Hall, owned by Mr Forge. It is a large house finished only a few weeks ago. On our way Mr Vernon gave me an account of the crime as far as he knew it. The body of the woman in evening dress had been discovered by a labourer named Henry Farnell on his way to work in the morning of December twentieth, Crooked Lane being on the direct line he would take from his cottage to his place of work. He informed the police and the body was carried into the schoolhouse at Marplesdon to await the inquest. It had been identified by Mr Forge as that of a young lady, Margaret Gask, a member of his house party at Scudamore Hall. She had been shot through the head, probably by a revolver bullet which had gone through the skull from left to right, but in spite of an exhaustive search no trace of the bullet could be discovered.
“Mr Forge, the owner of the Hall, was a war profiteer and had contrived to stick to his fortune. Nothing is known against him. I gathered that Mr Forge has a habit of picking up chance acquaintances in hotel bars. It was thus that he had first made the acquaintance of the murdered woman, Margaret Gask, in a Paris hotel. He speaks no French and when he was in difficulties in the reception room at the Hotel Terminus she volunteered her help, being quite qualified to act as an interpreter, though her intervention was not really necessary, since most of the staff speak English intelligibly. During his stay in Paris she acted as guide and he invited her to come over to England as a member of his house party at Scudamore Hall for Christmas. After a slight demur she consented. She had been his guest for only four days when her body was discovered shot through the head in the road known as Crooked Lane.
“On questioning the guests and staff at Scudamore Hall, Chief Inspector Vernon ascertained that the last person to see the deceased woman alive was a young man named Gerald Huskisson, of no occupation and known to be in financial straits. He also had met the woman in Paris and though he was believed to be in love with her he had had a serious quarrel with her—a fact that was known to other guests at the Hall.
“Mr Vernon also informed me that he had made a search of the premises and had discovered in a shed at a small distance from the ordinary garage an Austin Twelve car bearing the number P.J.C.4291. The chief inspector recognised the number as that of a car which was wanted in connection with serious injuries to a woman who had been knocked down by it near Kingston. The driver had accelerated without stopping to succour the injured woman. Mr Vernon took the usual steps to discover the owner and found that it belonged to a Mr Oborn, a guest at the Hall. When questioned at Police Headquarters he denied all knowledge of the accident and said that a dent on the fender had been caused by bad steering when entering the shed. The number of the car had been supplied by two witnesses who saw the accident.
“Arriving at Scudamore Hall the door was opened by a man dressed like a butler. I recognised this man as Alfred Curtis, alias Thomas Wilson, with Criminal Record Office number 2753. He has had five or six previous convictions, always for the same kind of offence—getting himself engaged as an indoor servant with a forged character and robbing members of the house party. He seemed much disconcerted at seeing me and without disclosing his identity I put discreet questions to Mr Forge about the butler’s movements on the night of the murder. It had been a very foggy night and some of the invited guests had telephoned to say that they might arrive very late, owing to the fog. The butler had therefore had to sit up until past 3 A.M. to receive them. Thus he had a watertight alibi if Dr Treherne, who made the post-mortem, was correct in believing that the woman had been shot not later than midnight.
“The coroner intends to hold the inquest in the school-house at Marplesdon this afternoon at 2 P.M. and both Chief Inspector Vernon and I will be present. We think that it would be unwise to question any of the witnesses until they have given their evidence.
“ALBERT DALLAS, Detective Inspector.”
Richardson finished reading the report and rang for his messenger.
“Ask Inspector Dallas to come, if he is in the building.”
When Dallas presented himself Richardson said, “I’ve been reading your report. What impression did you form of the people you saw at Scudamore Hall?”
“Well, sir, besides that ex-convict mentioned in my report I saw only Mr Forge, the owner of the house. He was greatly upset by the occurrence and kept saying, ‘This has been a lesson to me not to pick up chance acquaintances in a Paris hotel.’”
“Had he any explanation to offer as to why that young woman should have gone out at or after midnight in evening dress?”
“He thought she had gone out to keep a rendezvous with someone; he did not think it could be another member of the house party because the maid who waited on the murdered woman told him that a valuable mink coat was missing from her room and she must have been wearing it on such a cold night, yet her body was found with no wrap of any kind over her evening dress: the murderer had apparently stolen the coat.”
“H’m! Then that fur coat may be a clue to her murderer.”
“Yes sir, if it can be found, but Mr Vernon tells me that according to the maid it bore no distinguishing mark by which it could be identified; it had not even the name of the maker; the maid is positive about that because she had examined it carefully.”
“Had Mr Forge nothing to tell you about the woman’s friends or relations in France or in this country?”
“Nothing at all, sir. Mr Vernon has already written to the police judiciaire in Paris asking for full enquiry to be made about her, telling them the date when she was staying at the Hotel Terminus St Lazare. A search of her papers produced nothing of interest to the police.”
“You say in your report that no trace of the bullet could be found in Crooked Lane. Were there any signs of a car having passed through?”
“Yes sir. I have been with Mr Vernon to the spot in Crooked Lane where the body was found and in spite of the ground being lightly frozen I could distinctly trace the wheel tracks of a light car which had broken through the frozen crust of mud. There is a gateway into a field a few yards from the spot and I could trace tracks of the car in the manoeuvre of turning in that gateway. There were no tracks nearer the house, but on the other side of the gate there were double tracks: the car must have returned in the direction from which it came. Since writing my report I have made enquiries at one or two cottages at the end of the lane. One woman said that she had heard a car passing in the direction of Crooked Lane and had seen through her window the glare of headlights as it returned.”
“You say that one of the guests at Scudamore Hall had left his car in a shed and not in the proper garage. Have you enquired the reason for this?”
“No sir, not yet. I was waiting until after the inquest. That car is the one that I mentioned in my report as being suspected of having knocked down and gravely injured a woman.”
“I see. Well, you will attend the inquest this afternoon and let me hear the result as soon as possible.”
“Very good, sir.”
Chapter Two
THE BREAKFAST TABLE at Scudamore Hall was set with only three places when the gong rang and the host, Walter Forge, struck a serio-comic attitude on entering the room and finding only Huskisson and Oborn present.
“Good Lord!” he said. “Is this what we’re reduced to—three hungry men and no ladies? I hope that you have appetites; I’m as hungry as a hawk. What have we here?” he went on, going to the side table where four or five dishes were sputtering over spirit lamps. “The rule of the house is that everybody helps himself. Come along, you two, and make your choice.”
When they had taken their seats Forge tried to lighten the gloom of his two guests by forced gaiety.
“This inquest this afternoon is the devil. I’ve never attended one before and I hear that the coroner is a grim bloke with a mouth set like a steel trap. I dunno what sort of figure I shall cut in a witness box. Have they summoned both of you?”
“Only me,” said Huskisson; “I suppose because I was the last person in the house party to see her alive—poor girl.”
“And I because she was staying in my house, I suppose. You’ve not had a summons?” he asked, turning to Oborn.
“No, thank God! And that’s why I’m going to attack these sausages with an unimpaired appetite.”
“Your turn will come when you’re had before the beak for knocking down that woman,” said Huskisson sourly.
“I never knocked her down,” said Oborn in his pleasant voice. He was an upstanding and rather good-looking man in the early forties; well dressed, well groomed and easy mannered.
“Funny,” said Huskisson, “that two people who saw the accident have come forward to give the number of your car.”
“Both of them women. Have you ever met a woman yet who could remember the register number of a car? The fact that they both gave the same number is the proof that they concocted the story.”
“I’m afraid that argument won’t go down with the beaks and I’m told that the Kingston Bench gives short shrift to motorists.”
Mr Forge’s forced gaiety evaporated. “This is going to be the worst Christmas I’ve spent and I’d hoped that it was going to be the liveliest. I had counted so much on poor Margaret to keep things going.”
Huskisson rose, leaving half his bacon and sausages uneaten. “I’ve just remembered that I’ve a telegram to answer if you’ll excuse me,” he said as he left the room.
He was a tall, thin, rather cadaverous-looking young man with lantern jaws.
“Our young friend seems to be taking this business very much to heart,” said Oborn.
“He is; don’t forget that he was fond of Margaret and I was beginning to think that she was fond of him, although they quarrelled.”
“That won’t sound very pretty when he’s called into the box this afternoon,” said Oborn. He changed his tone to an imitation of a coroner. “‘You quarrelled with this lady on the evening before her death and you were the last person to see her alive. What was the quarrel about?’ No, I don’t wonder that he hasn’t much appetite for breakfast.”
“Oh, enough of this kind of talk,” exclaimed Forge, whose nerves were frayed to breaking point. “Three or four of the people upstairs have sent messages that they are leaving this morning. Our party is practically broken up by this catastrophe. You won’t be able to leave until this Kingston business is cleared up.”
“No, unless they drag me off to a prison cell on the evidence of those two fools of women.”
“Well, I feel like shutting up the house and packing off to Paris again. Her death would have upset me anyway, but to have been murdered in cold blood like this…Who the devil could it have been?”
Oborn helped himself to another sausage. Forge looked at him almost with repugnance. “You seem to take the thing lightly,” he said.
“You forget I didn’t know the lady.”
“Didn’t know her? Why, she told me that she was looking forward to meeting you again. In fact that was one of the reasons why I asked you to come down.”
“Another feminine mistake. Oborn is not a very uncommon name.”
“What is your first name?”
“Douglas.”
“Oh no, that wasn’t it. It was an ordinary name like Jim or Jack that she gave me—Jim, I’m sure it was.”
“There you are,” said Oborn, shrugging his shoulders. “If you want proof of my name I can show you my motor licence, my A.A. membership card and my passport. Those ought to be good enough.”
“Have you got a second name?” asked Forge.
“I have, but it’s a guilty secret I like to keep to myself. My godfathers and godmother conferred on me the name of Cadwallader and I’ve been trying to bury the name for the past forty years.”
Forge was in no mood for flippancy. He pushed back his plate and went towards the door. “You can amuse yourself this morning, I suppose. I shall be busy.”
“Righto! I’ve got letters to write and a lot of things to see to. Have I your permission to use your telephone for long-distance calls?”
“Of course; as many as you like.”
Left to himself, Oborn picked up the morning paper and scanned the headlines. His attention was caught by a paragraph relating the facts of the Kingston accident and giving the date of the hearing. The butler slithered into the room unobtrusively, as all good butlers should. After shutting the door and looking round him he came forward and murmured, “Bad business, that accident.”
“Yes, it was unfortunate, but these things will happen.”
“It was a blasted silly thing to do. You’d better have stood your ground. Now, with your bolting like that there’ll be a lot more publicity—just what we want to avoid.”
“Don’t you jump to conclusions, my friend: they’re not healthy.” Then, with a sudden change of tone due to the entrance of the footman, he said, “Yes, you’re right; probably we’re in for snow.”
“Yes sir,” responded the butler. “It promises to be quite a Christmas card sort of Christmas.”
The morning was spent in the bustle of departures. All the guests were leaving except those whom the police had warned to remain within call. The inquest had been fixed for two o’clock. Huskisson and Forge lunched early and drove off to the coroner’s court together. The popular Press had already contrived to invest the proceedings with mystery; it is astonishing to see how many people can find time to attend any kind of public enquiry if it involves a mystery. The seats allotted to the public in the court were altogether insufficient for the number of people who sought admission, since the space available was much reduced by the presence of reporters from most of the newspapers, both morning and evening. A queue had had to be formed. To gain admission was an easy matter for Mr Forge and Huskisson, who had only to show their subpoenas. Huskisson was subjected to close scrutiny, for the rumour that he had been in love with the murdered woman had already been circulated.
The Surrey coroner was a strong man with a sound belief in the efficacy of police enquiries: he had already made up his mind to direct his jury to return an open verdict, which would leave the police a free hand in carrying out their enquiries. The first witness called was Henry Farnell. He described in laconic sentences how he was passing along Crooked Lane on his way to work when he came upon the body of the deceased lying on her side with her head towards the direction from which he was approaching. Seeing that the body showed no sign of life, he did not touch it but went to the police station to report what he had seen.
The next witness was Arthur Stove, a police constable who had been sent by his superintendent in charge of an ambulance stretcher to bring the body to the village schoolhouse. Judging from the fact that the woman was wearing evening dress, the superintendent surmised that she was one of the guests at Scudamore Hall and he sent the witness to the Hall to make enquiries. Mr Forge then came down to the schoolhouse and identified the body. The superintendent notified the coroner.
Hid you find any weapon, bullet or cartridge case on the spot?”
“No sir. I made a very careful search and found nothing.”
“You found nothing that would give a clue to the identity of the murderer?”
“Nothing, sir.”
The next witness was Dr Treherne, who had made the post-mortem examination. He testified that the woman was aged about twenty-seven or twenty-eight. The cause of death had been a bullet which traversed the brain and he judged from the state of the body that death had taken place not later than midnight.
“Could the wound have been self-inflicted?” asked the coroner.
“In my opinion, no. If that had been the case the weapon would have been found near the body; moreover, the direction of the shot would probably have been upward, whereas in fact it was horizontal.”
“Had she been shot from behind?”
“No sir; the bullet entered on the right side of the head and emerged at about the same level on the left.”
“Were there any signs of a struggle or bruising?”
“None at all.”
The next witness was Walter Forge, who spoke of having identified the body as that of one of his guests at Scudamore Hall. He had met her in a hotel in Paris but he knew nothing whatever about her family or her history.”
“Did any member of your household see her go out that night?”
“No one, but I have since learned from the maid who waited on her that her fur coat is missing.”
“At what hour on that evening did you last see her?”
“As far as I can remember she left the bridge table when I did, at about ten o’clock. I was occupied after that in receiving other guests who had been delayed by the fog.”
“Did anyone else leave the bridge table at the same time?”
“Yes; Mr Huskisson. We left one table and three new arrivals took our places.”
Gerald Huskisson was the next witness. He was essentially what lawyers would call a bad witness in the impression he left on the jury. He hesitated before answering every question as if he feared committing himself by his answer and left the impression on the minds of all who heard him that he had something to hide.
“At what hour did you last see the deceased alive?”
“I suppose that it was about eleven.”
“You left the bridge table together at ten o’clock?”
“Yes, to make room for other players.”
“Did you spend approximately the next hour with her?”
“A good part of it.”
“Where?”
“In the library.”
“Was anyone else in the library at that time?”
“No.”
“Did you have a quarrel?”
“I suppose you might call it a quarrel.”
The coroner leaned forward. “What did you quarrel about?”
“That I must decline to say. It was an entirely private matter.”
The coroner’s lower jaw advanced half an inch. He was not accustomed to evasive replies to his questions. After all, the coroner’s court, as he knew, was the oldest in the kingdom. He repeated his question. “What —did—you—quarrel—about?”
“I—decline—to—say.”
“Very well, then the jury will form their own conclusions. How long had you known Miss Gask?”
“I first met her in Paris about six months ago.”
“Were you on very friendly terms with her?”
“Y-e-s; quite friendly.”
“Did you see much of her?”
“A good deal.”
“Which of you left the library first on that night?”
Huskisson hesitated, as if trying to remember. “I think I did.”
