Death Among The Sunbathers E-Book

E. R. Punshon

• Herausgeber: Dean Street Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Description The body of a brilliant woman journalist is recovered from the wreck of a burning car. It is soon discovered that the smash did not kill her; she was dead already, shot by a Browning automatic that was found near by. Superintendent Mitchell, with the help of Owen, a young University graduate turned policeman, follows the enigmatic clues backwards and forwards between a furrier, a picture dealer, and the establishment of a fanatical sunbathing enthusiast. Then dramatically the story begins to repeat itself, as the persistently recurring figure of an old lag who calls himself 'Bobs-the-boy' carries another body out into the night. Death Among The Sunbathers is the second of E.R. Punshon's acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1934 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels. This edition features a new introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans. "What is distinction? The few who achieve it step - plot or no plot - unquestioned into the first rank. We recognized it in Sherlock Holmes, and in Trent's Last Case, in The Mystery of the Villa Rose, in the Father Brown stories and in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time." Dorothy L. Sayers

Leseprobe

E.R. PUNSHONDeath Among The Sunbathers

The body of a brilliant woman journalist is recovered from the wreck of a burning car. It is soon discovered that the smash did not kill her; she was dead already, shot by a Browning automatic that was found near by. Superintendent Mitchell, with the help of Owen, a young University graduate turned policeman, follows the enigmatic clues backwards and forwards between a furrier, a picture dealer, and the establishment of a fanatical sunbathing enthusiast.

Then dramatically the story begins to repeat itself, as the persistently recurring figure of an old lag who calls himself ‘Bobs-the-boy’ carries another body out into the night.

Death Among The Sunbathers is the second of E.R. Punshon’s acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1934 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

Introduction

“It’s a place for them sun bathers,” Ashton explained. “Sit out there on the lawn without any clothes on, they do, and if there ain’t any sun, there’s rays instead. A fair scandal I call it.”

Death Among The Sunbathers

Various British naturist, or nudist, organizations, such as the Sunbathing Society, the Sunshine League and the Sun Ray Club, began forming in Britain during the Twenties. In 1927, one sunbathing enthusiast, a Captain H.H. Vincent, was arrested and fined for indecent exposure after he arrayed himself, in an Edenic eruption of enthusiasm, bare-chested in Hyde Park. A man’s exposing the upper part of his body in such a location was “likely to shock persons of ordinary sensibility,” concluded the censorious sentencing magistrate. Undaunted as well as unclothed, naturist groups carried on their activities in private; and by the 1930s, according to Philip Carr-Gomm’s A Brief History of Nakedness (2010), “nudism had reached the height of its popularity in Britain,” drawing emphatic vocal support from such reliable controversialists as Havelock Ellis and George Bernard Shaw. In 1933, as the Nazis banned nudism in Germany, George Bernard Shaw in England’s Sun Bathing Review called on individuals to rid themselves “of every scrap of clothing that can be dispensed with.”

With Death Among The Sunbathers (1934), E. R. Punshon clearly was taking timely advantage of a fad that had attained newspaper notoriety in the western world. Nor was he the only Thirties mystery author to do so. Ellery Queen’s The Egyptian Cross Mystery, which partly concerns the activities of an American nudist colony, actually preceded Death Among The Sunbathers into print by a couple of years, while Traill Williamson’s The Nudist Murder (1937) and Gladys Mitchell’s Printer’s Error (1939) followed not long afterward. Although naturism is not involved in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise, which slightly preceded into print Death Among The Sunbathers, there is a certain similarity as well between these two novels, which I will leave discerning readers to discover for themselves. One may reasonably assume, I believe, that Punshon closely read Sayers’s detective novels, the Crime Queen in 1933 having done much to boost Punshon’s own career as a writer of detective fiction with her rave review of Information Received. (See the introduction to Information Received.)

In Death Among The Sunbathers young Constable Bobby Own and his mentor, Superintendent Mitchell, confront another murder, this time that of Jo Frankland, a prominent woman journalist. When Frankland is pulled dead from a burning wrecked car, it is quickly discovered that her death was due not to crash injuries but rather a bullet fired out of a Browning automatic. Shortly before her death Frankland had visited Leadeane Grange, a property owned by a naturist group, the Society of Sun Believers. (Originally, notes Punshon wryly, the group was known as the Society of Sun Worshippers, “but the last word had been altered on the representation of some of the local clergy, who feared misunderstanding.”) Was Frankland simply seeking material at Leadeane Grange for another colorful nudism story, or was she after something else? Superintendent Mitchell and Inspector Ferris are tasked with discovering the truth behind Frankland’s brutal slaying. Constable Bobby Owen is less in evidence in this novel than he was in Information Received, though we do see a great deal of “Bobs-the-Boy,” a pugnacious old lag with a mysterious agenda of his own.

E. R. Punshon received some contemporary criticism from reviewers for incorporating thriller elements into Death Among The Sunbathers. The novel was deemed something less than a simon-pure detective story and, unlike Information Received, it was never published in the United States. Yet this was not the first time Punshon had merged two strains of mystery in his detective novels.

In Punshon’s earlier Inspector Carter and Sergeant Bell series, two of the five novels—The Unexpected Legacy (1929) and The Cottage Murder (1931)—are distinctly thrillerish. The boundaries between thrillers and true detective fiction became more firmly delineated in the 1930s, after rules distinguishing the two forms of mystery were promulgated by such authorities as Father Ronald Knox, S.S. Van Dine and Britain’s Detection Club. Among other things, true detective novels were expected to refrain from reliance on such thriller devices as untraceable poisons, supernatural manifestations, fantastic pseudo-scientific gadgetry, twins, gangs and criminal masterminds. I leave it for readers to see for themselves just what ostensibly extraneous thriller matter finds its way into Death Among The Sunbathers. For the rest of the 1930s Punshon generally would be scrupulous in abiding by these distinctions. Most modern readers, I presume, will concern themselves with such aesthetic deviations less than some of Punshon’s more absolutist contemporaries did.

With justice having triumphed in Death Among The Sunbathers due to the good offices of the law, Superintendent Mitchell informs Constable Owen at the conclusion of the novel that a copper’s job is never done. “There’ll be a little job waiting for you on the east coast,” Mitchell tells Bobby. “There’s something on there apparently that’s worrying the local people because they can’t make out what it is. So they’ve asked us to send down a youngster able to show at a country house as an ordinary guest and warranted not to give himself away by eating peas with a knife or putting his feet on the dinner table or doing anything else natural and friendly and sociable. Also required to be good-looking, smart, and intelligent. Think you fit the bill?”

“Yes, sir,” answers Bobby, evidently having shed some of his modesty in Death Among The Sunbathers. The exciting events he experiences at the east coast country house are detailed in the next E. R. Punshon detective novel, Crossword Mystery.

Curtis Evans

CHAPTER ONEThe Burning Motor-Car

A slight defect had developed. Nothing of much importance, but it needed attention, and since just here the road was dangerously narrow, since also close behind was the sharp bend they had just come round, and as, moreover, darkness was now beginning to set in, Constable Jacks, the careful driver Superintendent Mitchell always chose when he was available, decided to take precautions. Near to them was a large, imposing-looking house with a wide drive sweeping up to it, and prudently Jacks backed their car a yard or two up this drive, of which the gate fortunately hung wide open. In that way the rather narrow road itself would be left free, and if any car did happen to round the sharp bend in it at the speed at which cars do occasionally take sharp bends, there would be no risk of any accident occurring. Satisfied with the precaution thus taken, Jacks alighted, got out his tools, and set to work.

Mitchell descended, too, to stretch his legs, as he said. He was a big, generally slow-moving man, with a pale, flat face, small, sandy moustache, deep-set grey eyes, and loose, loquacious lips that at sudden, unexpected moments could set in thin and rigid lines. His companion, Inspector Ferris, followed, a big, bluff, hearty, smiling man, whose chief merit as a detective was not so much any special subtlety of mind or insight into things, but a devastating, almost awe-inspiring patience that permitted him to sit and wait for hours, and to be, to all appearance, as fresh and alert at the end of the vigil as at its beginning. He and Mitchell had been on a visit to Lord Carripore, chairman of Universal Assurances, a company somewhat badly hit by a recent series of big fires, including one on a transatlantic steamer, that Lord Carripore had personally declared to the Home Secretary could not possibly be accounted for by natural causes. As his lordship was suffering from a bad attack of sciatica, probably a result of sun-bathing, to which he was a recent and enthusiastic convert – though that that was the cause he would not have admitted for one moment – Mitchell and Ferris had been detailed to visit him at his country house. But the interview had proved of small interest. Lord Carripore appeared to have little to say, except that it was all most suspicious, and that his company had been hit to the tune of a quarter of a million, so that the annual dividend would probably have to be reduced, and the shareholders wouldn’t like that, might even hint at making changes in the directorate. As, moreover, this prospect, or the sciatica, or both together, had affected his lordship’s temper to a most unfortunate degree, the two police officers had been glad to take their leave as soon as they decently could.

‘Of course, any assistance we can give, you can depend on,’ Mitchell assured him as they were going; ‘any information we can be supplied with, we will follow up instantly.’

‘I thought it was the business of the police to get information, not to wait to have it given them,’ snarled Lord Carripore, wincing at a fresh twinge of his sciatica.

‘But we can’t get it unless someone gives it us, can we?’ Mitchell protested mildly. ‘Information received is what we always need before we can take action.’

Therewith he and Ferris took their departure, leaving Lord Carripore writhing with mingled sciatica and temper, and determined as soon as he was well enough to ask the Home Secretary to dinner for the sole purpose of telling him exactly what he thought of Scotland Yard.

Unaware, however, of this determination, Mitchell and Ferris had already forgotten all about his lordship and his more than somewhat vague complaints and doubts and suspicions. It was another subject they were debating, and, as he followed Mitchell from the car, Ferris was saying,

‘Well, sir, of course, it’s for you to say, but Owen’s young, very little experience. I would much rather have a more experienced man for the job myself.’

‘Owen’s young all right,’ Mitchell admitted, ‘though you and I were both the same age once.’

‘Not long since he was transferred from the uniform branch,’ Ferris persisted.

‘Earned it,’ said Mitchell; ‘he was quite useful in that case of the murder of Sir Christopher Clarke.’

‘Happened to be on the spot,’ commented Ferris, still unsatisfied; ‘never struck me as having any more brains than the next man – or much initiative.’

‘Educated instead,’ explained Mitchell, ‘and education just naturally chokes initiative. He’s ’Varsity and public school, you know, and you can’t expect to have an education like that and initiative as well.’

‘Don’t hold with it,’ grumbled Ferris, ‘not with all these B.A.s and M.A.s and A.S.S.s crowding into the force – changes its whole tone.’

‘It’s a changing world,’ Mitchell pointed out, ‘and mass production of criminals has got to be met by mass production of police from ’Varsities. As for brains, well, I’m not saying I’ve noticed Owen has any more than the usual ration, and it’s just as well. Too many brains is a fatal thing for any man in any line of life, though, the Lord be praised, few suffer from it. But Owen has got a kind of natural-born knack of being on the spot when he’s wanted, and a detective on the spot is worth two–’

He paused, for they could both hear a car approaching at what was evidently a very high rate of speed. A moment later it rocketed round the bend in the roadway they themselves had just passed. It must have been going sixty or seventy miles an hour. Had Constable Jacks not adopted his precaution of backing their car a yard or two off the roadway up this carriage drive, a collision could hardly have been averted. For an instant as it flew by it showed clear in the strong light of their headlamps. They had a momentary vision of a woman at the steering-wheel, her face half hidden by one of the flat, fashionable hats of the day, worn tilted so much to one side that to the uninstructed male eye it seemed such hats could only stick on by the aid of a miracle – or of glue – and by the high fox-fur collar of her coat.

It was the merest glimpse they had as the car shot by and Jacks stopped his work to stand up and shake a disapproving head at it.

‘Asking for trouble,’ he said, ‘going round a corner like that at such a speed – want talking to.’

‘Girl driving,’ remarked Ferris, rather as if that explained all.

‘Hope her life’s insured,’ commented Jacks. ‘She was doing all of sixty m.p.h. – those little Bayard Sevens can travel all right.’

‘Alone, wasn’t she?’ asked Mitchell. ‘If she breaks her neck, as she probably will, she’ll break it alone, that’s one thing. I’m glad I wasn’t in that car though – what’s that?’

They had all heard the same sound, dull, strange, and ominous, distinct in the evening quiet, where the echo of the roaring progress of the little Bayard Seven seemed still to be hanging in the air, and to it they all gave instinctively the same interpretation. Then, as they looked, they saw a sudden crimson glow develop, shining red through the trees that lined the road, and across the hedges of the fields. None of them said a word. Jacks left his tools lying there, scattered by the roadside, and leaped into the driver’s seat. Mitchell, quick enough at need, was already in his place, already had in his hands the chemical fire extinguisher. Ferris, a trifle less quick and active, tumbled after him. Jacks shot the car into the road, sent it flying along to where the crimson glow shone before them.

They came thundering at speed to where the road crossed by a bridge, a deep railway cutting. Their headlights showed them, half-way across, the railing that ran along the side of the bridge smashed clean away. Someone at a distance was running and shouting. Jacks brought the car to a standstill with a fierce grinding of tyres and brakes. Mitchell leaped out and was through the broken railing in a flash and down the steep side of the cutting to where across the rails a shapeless heap of wreckage smoked and burned. Somehow he arrived on his feet, still carrying the chemical extinguisher unharmed in his hands. Ferris, less fortunate, arrived on his back, head foremost. Jacks came last, more cautiously. He had taken time to bring the car close to the gap in the railing so that the light from its headlamps might illumine the scene. The fire was blazing furiously, but it had not yet obtained complete control, for all this had happened in two or three minutes and the chemical extinguisher was efficient. The flames spluttered, died down, smouldered a little. Presently, remained only a few tiny tongues of fire the three men beat out without difficulty. The car, or rather what was left of it, was lying on its side. Within, they could see a dark, motionless, huddled form that told them tragedy was there.

‘Lend a hand here,’ Mitchell grunted to the others, and added, for the wrecked car was lying right across the lines, ‘Hope a train doesn’t come along.’

The door of the car had jammed, but they managed to force it open. With some difficulty, and at the cost of a badly bruised hand for Ferris, they were able to disentangle a body from the wreckage. They laid the broken form on the grass at the foot of the steep embankment.

‘Past help,’ Ferris said, ‘must have been killed on the spot.’

Mitchell had taken an electric torch from his pocket. With it in his hand he knelt down by the body.

‘A woman,’ he said. ‘Young, too, poor thing.’ And then the next moment: ‘Good God,’ he said below his breath. ‘Ferris, Ferris.’

Ferris turned abruptly, startled.

‘Sir!’ he said.

‘She was alive,’ Mitchell half whispered, moved beyond his wont. ‘I’ll swear she was... just for a moment.... I saw her look at me... as if she wanted... something she wanted to say... then she was gone.’

‘Are you sure, sir?’ Ferris asked, more than a little incredulously. ‘After a fall like that... it must have killed her on the spot... going over that embankment at sixty miles an hour... and if it didn’t, then the fire would have, for it was all round her.’

‘I saw her look at me,’ Mitchell repeated, his voice not quite steady now, for though his profession had habituated him to scenes of terror and of grief, yet something in that momentary dying look had touched him to the quick, had seemed to convey to him some message he was but half conscious of. ‘Young, too,’ he said again.

‘What I can’t make out,’ observed Jacks, ‘is how it happened – a perfectly good straight road, night quite clear, no sign of any obstruction anywhere. Of course the steering might have gone wrong.’

‘Bear looking into,’ agreed Mitchell.

A voice from above asked what had happened, and then a man came scrambling down the steep embankment side. Mitchell became the brisk executive. The newcomer described himself as the landlord of a small public house, the George and Dragon, on the road just the other side of the bridge. His establishment did not boast a phone, but there was a call box close by. Mitchell sent Jacks to report to headquarters, to ask for more help, to summon the nearest doctor, to warn the railway people that the line was blocked, for the debris of the car, and part of the railing from the bridge it had carried down with it, lay right across the line. The landlord of the George and Dragon, who gave his name as Ashton, was set to work, too, while Mitchell and Ferris made as careful an examination as was possible of the half-burnt wreckage. But it was Ashton who called their attention to the smashed fragments of a bottle in what once had been the dicky of the car.

‘Whisky, if you ask me,’ he said. ‘There’s been whisky there all right – what about that?’

‘Bear looking into,’ agreed Mitchell, ‘whisky explains a lot, and maybe it explains this, too – and maybe it don’t.’

‘There’s the poor creature’s hat,’ Ferris remarked, pointing to it, where it lay, oddly uninjured, flaunting as it were its gay and fashionable self against the background of dark tragedy.

Somehow or another it had rolled to one side and had escaped both the fire and the effects of the fall.

They found a handbag, too. It was badly burned, but within were two different sets of visiting cards, comparatively slightly damaged. One set bore the name of Mrs John Pentland Curtis and an address in Chelsea, the other was inscribed, ‘Miss Jo Frankland’, with the same address, and at the bottom the legend, Daily Announcer.

‘One of the Announcer staff perhaps,’ Mitchell commented. ‘Looks as if Curtis were her married name and Jo Frankland her own name she used in journalism still. Curtis – John Pentland Curtis,’ he repeated thoughtfully, ‘seem to know the name somehow.’

‘Amateur middle heavyweight champion two years ago,’ said Ferris, who was something of a boxer himself. ‘Beat Porter of the City force in the final, fined five pounds last year for being drunk and assaulting one of our men, but apologized handsome after, and gave another tenner to our man, so he didn’t do so bad, and another tenner to the Orphanage.’

‘Wonder if it’s the same man,’ mused Mitchell.

They examined again the side of the embankment where the car had somersaulted down the steep incline, tearing earth and bushes with it, and they examined also the surface of the road. But the weather had been dry, the road surface was newly laid and in good condition; they found nothing to help them. Apparently the car had shot right across, across the pathway, through the railing, down the side of the cutting, and what had caused such a mishap on a perfectly good straight stretch of road there seemed nothing to show.

By now help was beginning to arrive. A breakdown gang had appeared to clear the line under the superintendence of Ferris. Photographers and other experts were on the scene. Mitchell was kept busy directing the operations, but when a local doctor came at last – there had been difficulty in finding one – he left his other activities to take the newcomer aside for a moment and whisper earnestly in his ear.

That the unfortunate victim of the accident was past all human aid was plain enough. Nevertheless the doctor carried out a very careful examination, and when he finished and came back to Mitchell there was a look of strange horror in his eyes.

‘There are injuries enough from the fall to cause death,’ he said; ‘the spine is badly injured for one thing. There’s the fire as well, the lower limbs are terribly burnt.’

‘The actual cause of death,’ Mitchell asked, ‘can you say that?’

‘There is a bullet wound in the body,’ the doctor answered. ‘She had been shot before the accident happened.’

CHAPTER TWOTwo Motor-Cyclists

In all such tragic occurrences, much of the work that has to be done is of a purely routine nature, and Mitchell was soon satisfied that all that custom, regulation, and experience prescribed was being correctly carried out. Now that there was nothing to be seen to here that others could not attend to just as well, he began to think of departing on errands that seemed to him more pressing. Then Ferris with a touch of excitement showing beneath his calm official manner came up to him.

‘A pistol’s been found, sir,’ he reported. ‘A point thirty-two Browning automatic. It’s been pretty badly twisted up with the heat, but it makes it look to me as if it might have been suicide. If she shot herself, going at that speed, it would account for the way the car swerved off a perfectly straight road and went down over the embankment.’

‘So it would,’ agreed Mitchell. ‘Bear looking into... only I can’t help remembering the way the poor thing looked at me just before she died. Sort of surprised she seemed and indignant, too, asking for help, protection, asking what I was going to do about it – that’s how it seemed to me. You think I’m going silly, Ferris, talking a lot of fanciful rot.’

‘Oh, no, sir,’ answered Ferris, in a tone that plainly meant, ‘Oh, yes, sir.’

‘I don’t wonder,’ Mitchell said, answering not the words but the tone. ‘All the same, Ferris, you might have felt the same if you had seen the look she gave me. Too late for help or protection we were, but anyhow I can see whoever did it don’t escape.’

‘Don’t quite see myself,’ Ferris observed, in his voice a carefully restrained note of incredulity, ‘if you don’t mind my saying so, sir, how she could possibly have been still alive – shot through the body same as the doctor says, all smashed up going over the embankment at sixty per hour, and then in the middle of that blaze till we came up. But if she was, sir, and you’re sure of it – why, that goes to show she must have been shot only just the minute or two before the thing happened. And that looks like suicide again.’

‘I don’t know that that follows,’ Mitchell objected; ‘it might have been done some time before – she might have been lying unconscious till the shock of fall and fire brought her back to life for a moment just before the end came. For life’s a rum thing, Ferris, and I’ve read stories of men having been executed by beheading and the head showing signs of consciousness afterwards, as if life still clung to it. Anyhow, I’m certain there was life and meaning in that poor creature’s eyes for just the moment when she looked at me, and I’ll swear she was asking what I meant to do about it.’

‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Ferris, slightly in the tone of one humouring a child’s fancies, while to himself he thought that after all Mitchell must be getting near the age limit and no doubt his years were telling. He went on, ‘I sent Jacks to find out at the pub up the road if they had heard anything like a shot. I thought we had better inquire before they got to know about the pistol, or half of them would most likely be ready to swear they heard the report and believe it, too. People will swear anything, you know, sir, once they let their imaginations go.’

Jacks came up and saluted.

‘No one at the George and Dragon seems to have heard anything, sir,’ he said, ‘not even the sound of the smash. Anything they did hear, they just thought was something on the railway; they seem sort of trained not to notice noises on the line. But it seems a lady driving a Bayard Seven stopped there this afternoon to ask the way to Leadeane Grange. I don’t know if you would like to speak to Mr Ashton yourself, sir.’

Mitchell nodded acquiescence. Ashton, interested and busy, was not far away. He remembered the incident clearly. He was certain the car had been a Bayard Seven. To the driver of the car, however, he had apparently given less attention. That she had been a woman, and young, was about all he could say.

‘She wanted to know if she was right for Leadeane Grange,’ Ashton said. ‘I told her all she had to do was cross the bridge and keep straight on.’

‘Leadeane Grange far? Who lives there?’ Mitchell asked.

Ashton permitted himself a grin.

‘No one don’t live there,’ he said. ‘Not more than three miles or it might be four, but there’s no one lives there.’

‘How’s that?’ Mitchell asked. ‘How do you mean?’

‘It’s a place for them sun bathers,’ Ashton explained. ‘Sit out there on the lawn without any clothes on, they do, and if there ain’t any sun, there’s rays instead. A fair scandal I call it.’

Mitchell asked a few more questions and gathered that Ashton cherished a faint grudge against the sun-bathing establishment, partly on those high moral grounds which make us all disapprove of the activities of others, and still more because, though since it had come into existence it had greatly increased the traffic passing by, none of that traffic ever stopped at the George and Dragon except to ask the way.

‘I get fair fed up,’ he admitted, ‘telling ’em to cross the bridge and keep straight on – a poor skeleton lot if you ask me, that look as if a good glass of beer would do ’em more good than sitting in the sun dressed same as when they were born. Only I will say I seem to remember she looked better than most, and so did the fellow on the motor-bike that caught her up.’

Ferris interrupted suddenly. He exclaimed:

‘Leadeane Grange? Of course, I thought I knew the name – it’s where Lord Carripore said he was the other day, where he caught his sciatica most like, though he wouldn’t admit it.’

‘That’s right, I remember now,’ agreed Mitchell. He turned back to Ashton. ‘Fellow on a motor-bike caught her up?’ he asked. ‘Do you mean he stopped her?’

‘Yes, following her he seemed,’ Ashton answered. ‘He slowed down outside my place and I was just wondering whether he would be taking something or whether he was another of ’em wanting to know the way where he could have a sun bath instead of a regular Saturday night like everyone else, when he caught sight seemingly of the Bayard Seven on the top of the rise beyond the line and went off on top speed – fair vanished he did, doing eighty or more.’

‘Did he catch her up, do you know?’

‘Couldn’t help, moving at that speed. And when he did they had a sort of row together seemingly.’

‘Did they, though?’ exclaimed Mitchell, interested. ‘Could you see them? Or hear?’

‘It wasn’t me, it was George,’ Ashton explained. ‘He was in a field close by where the fellow on the bike overtook her, and he says he could see ’em throwing their arms about, so to speak, and kind of hollering at each other.’

Mitchell expressed a wish to see the George referred to, who, when produced from the constantly augmenting collection of spectators doing their best to get in the way of the police and busily telling each other all about it, proved to be a not very intelligent, middle-aged labourer. All he had to say was that he had seen the motor-cyclist overtake the Bayard Seven, had seen the car stop, and had gathered from their gestures and their rather loud voices that the motorcyclist and the driver of the Bayard Seven were quarrelling. Finally the lady banged her car door and drove off faster than before, and the motor-cyclist returned by the way he had come. George had not been near enough, however, to catch any of the actual conversation, nor had it occurred to him to try, and of course no one had thought of taking the number of the cycle, though the make – it was a B.A.D. – had been duly noted. The description of the cyclist himself was hardly more satisfactory – full, reddish face, dark hair and eyes, small dark toothbrush moustache, was about all Mitchell succeeded in obtaining from Ashton and George together, and one of them was certain that he was wearing overalls and a cap, and the other was sure that he had been wearing a leather coat and no hat at all. It did not seem much to go on, but Ashton, a little jealous of the success of George and the attention his story had excited, remembered now that another motor-cyclist had preceded the arrival of this one. He, too, had asked the way to Leadeane Grange, but he had not proceeded there, and after sitting outside the George and Dragon for nearly an hour with a glass of lemonade he never touched, as if waiting for someone, had finally gone off back again by the way he had come in the direction of town.

‘And I wasn’t sorry we was closed except for minerals and such like,’ Ashton added, ‘for it was easy to see he had had all the drink was good for him.’

‘He could manage his cycle all right?’ Mitchell asked.

‘Oh, yes, it wasn’t that he was far gone, only you could tell all right by the funny look in his eyes and the way he tripped in his talk every now and again. In our line you soon get to know when a man’s had his whack, same as this chap had – and then some.’

‘What was he like?’ Mitchell asked.

Ashton looked worried.

‘I should know him again,’ he said, and seemed to think that a fully satisfactory reply.

About all that further questioning extracted was that the stranger had been a big man and either fair or else dark, Ashton wasn’t quite sure which. He was nearly as indefinite about everything else, and then suddenly he brightened up.

‘There was one thing I noticed,’ he said. ‘He had a bit of a thick ear, same as if he had done a bit of boxing in his time.’

‘A point to remember,’ conceded Mitchell; and saw that Ferris, too, had noticed the significance of these last words.

‘If that was Curtis and he did it,’ Ferris muttered to the superintendent aside, ‘and we went at once, we might get him red-handed so to speak.’

‘Not likely to be as easy as that,’ Mitchell answered, as he and the inspector, followed by two plain clothes men, climbed into the car Jacks was soon driving London-wards again. ‘Anyhow, we’ve made some progress. Two mysterious motor-cyclists, one of them seen quarrelling with her and one of them possibly her husband – but no proof, Ferris, remember, that that lady in that Bayard Seven was identical with this other one, and not too much chance of identifying either of the cyclists on the evidence of George – or Ashton either. But it’ll bear looking into, bear quite a lot of looking into.’

‘I don’t know if you noticed it, sir, and I dare say it’s only a coincidence,’ Ferris observed, ‘but the description of the man the lady in the Bayard Seven is supposed to have been quarrelling with would fit Mr Hunter, of Howland Yard.’

‘Why, so it would,’ admitted Mitchell. ‘I hadn’t thought of that, but then it would fit plenty of others as well – fit hundreds of other men. Bear looking into all the same. We’ll have to set Owen on to that. I rather wish Owen had been here to-night – might have proved useful.’

Ferris looked as if he did not share that opinion. He was in fact slightly jealous of Owen, a young man not long in the force who had certainly done well in the case of the murder of Sir Christopher Clarke, but probably owed his success more to luck than anything else. Mitchell, however, had certainly taken a fancy to him, and seemed inclined to think at once of him whenever any special mission needed executing. Mitchell went on as if talking more to himself than to Ferris:

‘It’s none of it clear. Whoever it was quarrelled with whoever the lady may have been, seems to have left her and gone straight back to town. And if it was Curtis who hung about outside the George and Dragon, he seems to have gone off before the Bayard Seven lady appeared, and to have gone off back to town, too.’

‘Ashton said he had been drinking,’ Ferris remarked. ‘When a man’s been drinking–’

Mitchell nodded an agreement.

‘Oh, it’ll bear looking into,’ he said, ‘and the first job indicated is an interview with Mr Curtis.’

When, however, they reached the Chelsea address they had discovered in the burning car – it proved to be on the first floor in one of those large, new blocks of flats that are springing up all over London – it was to find themselves unable to secure any answer. They knocked and rang in vain. Then they tried ringing up from an adjacent call-box without getting any reply. The porter in charge had seen both Mr and Mrs Curtis go out as usual that morning, one to his place of business, one to the office of the Daily Announcer, where, as Mitchell had guessed, Mrs Curtis was on the staff, but did not think either of them had returned. The daily woman they employed was only there in the mornings and had gone long since. There seemed nothing for it but to wait till Mr Curtis should return; and so, leaving one of the plain-clothes men there on watch to notify them the moment he appeared, Mitchell and Ferris went on to the office of the Daily Announcer.

CHAPTER THREEThe ‘Daily Announcer’

The Daily Announcer, one of those great national papers that today provide the people of this country with all their needs, from their opinions and beliefs down to their sets of standard authors in best imitation half calf, possesses, as all the world knows, offices in Ludgate Hill that for their magnificent modernity have become one of the sights of London, so modem indeed as to make those of their most up-to-date Fleet Street rival appear almost antediluvian. Nowhere in the building is any material used save rustless steel that is for ever as bright as though a regiment of charladies did nothing but polish it all day long, and glass of the new type that is warranted to keep out all those harmful rays that nature so inconsiderately mingles with its sunshine. Even the easy chairs in the waiting-room are of shining steel; and the gossip that says that those in the editor’s private sanctum are of homely wood upholstered in the style that father knew, is most likely merely malicious – but only those can tell for certain who have ever penetrated into that awesome chamber, and they are too few in number, and most likely in any case too dazzled by the splendour of the presence, for their evidence to be available. A superb house telephone system enables every member of the staff to communicate with anyone else in the building without leaving his desk, and it is often possible to ring up the man in the room across the corridor opposite yours, and then get up and go and have your talk with him, and come back again to find you have already been put through.

In fact, the Announcer is the last word in efficiency. Wherever a machine could do a man’s work, a machine was installed. As for their news service, that functioned with a really marvellous certainty and speed, and this evening for instance they had already the news of the tragedy on the Leadeane Road, though not as yet the further fact that it was murder and no accident that had occurred. But already reporters were out, gathering every detail.

The news editor, Mr Reynolds, hearing of the arrival of two high Scotland Yard officials, received them himself, for his instinct told him at once it must be more than a mere accident, however tragic. And when he heard that foul play had taken place, he was shocked as a man, distressed as a colleague, and as a news editor thrilled with the thought of the headlines with which he would be able to bring out the next morning’s issue. ‘Exclusive Announcer interview with Police Chiefs’ would be the smallest of them.

Miss Frankland, Mrs Curtis in private life, was, he said at once, a valued member of their staff. She had been with them some years, an extraordinarily capable, energetic journalist, whose heart and soul were in her profession; ambitious, too, for it was known she cherished the hope of becoming some day the first woman editor of one of the great national papers. After all, as she was accustomed to say, a woman had already been a Cabinet Minister, and why should not another woman climb to still more dazzling heights and win through even to the editorial chair of one of the great dailies? A dazzling thought, but what man has done, woman will do.

Two or three years before, she had married, a weakness in a woman with a career, but she had been wise enough to let it make no difference to her work. Indeed, it was a standing joke in the office that on the eve of her wedding she had offered to put it off for a day or two, if no one else could be found to fill a certain assignment. Fortunately so extreme a measure had not been necessary, but it showed how keen she was.

‘Not long ago,’ added Mr Reynolds, to emphasize still further this point, ‘we had to ring her up on an emergency story one night she and her husband were giving a dinner party to some friends, and she came right along and never said a word.’

‘Well, now, think of that,’ murmured Mitchell when Mr Reynolds paused for him to express his admiration, but all the same in private Mitchell wondered if husband and friends had been equally complaisant, or whether they, or at least the husband, had been tempted to say perhaps a word or two. Then he asked, ‘Is Mr Curtis the gentleman who was well known at one time as an amateur boxer?’

Mr Reynolds had no idea. The sports editor might know, but he did not. It was evident that Mr Reynolds’s interest in his staff was as entirely confined to their journalistic abilities as his interest in the universe was confined to its ability to provide headlines for his next issue – a man of one idea, in fact, which accounts for his value, his standing, and his reputation.

It appeared, however, from something else he said that Miss Frankland’s standing in the office permitted her a certain initiative, and it was at her own request she had been allowed to go that afternoon to visit the sun bathing establishment at Leadeane Grange in order to write it up.

‘Though the Daily Intelligence did it a month or two ago, added Mr Reynolds, ‘so what made her think of doing it again I’ve no idea – unless,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘she was on the track of some scandal – a lot of Society people go there.’

To Mr Reynolds, Society had but one interest – that of providing a scandal now and again. But he admitted that so far as he knew the Leadeane Grange sun bathing establishment was conducted with the utmost discretion.

‘Lot of well-known people go there – latest fad, you know. Lord Carripore goes twice a week regularly – I know that because we had to send there to interview him about the big fire that took place on one of the American liners the other day.’

‘I remember that,’ agreed Mitchell. ‘Now I come to think of it, it was there I had to send Owen to look for him with that note from the Commissioner,’ he added to Ferris, and then explained to Reynolds, ‘Owen’s one of our young men. Lord Carripore wants us to make some inquiries, but they haven’t come to anything so far. You have no idea if there was anything special that took Miss Frankland there?’

‘You might ask Miss Martin if you like,’ suggested Mr Reynolds; ‘she runs our woman’s page and was very friendly with Miss Frankland. Most likely Miss Frankland had something in her mind. She had a wonderful nose,’ he added admiringly.

‘Nose?’ repeated Mitchell, slightly puzzled.

‘For news,’ explained Reynolds. ‘She could smell out a story quicker than almost anyone I’ve ever known. Of course she went off on a false scent at times, like everyone, but I wouldn’t mind betting there was some reason she had for being keen on visiting Leadeane, though it may have been just she thought she could write it up better than the Daily Intelligence people did.’

Then in his turn he began to question Mitchell very gently, very discreetly, very thoroughly, and Mitchell answered almost like a good little boy in Sunday school, so free and frank and innocent he was, till when he rose to go, and while Reynolds was already visualizing with excited approval the splendid headlines he would splash across the issue now preparing, Mitchell launched his devastating, sledge-hammer, high-explosive knock-out.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘all that’s quite confidential, Mr Reynolds, entirely between ourselves.’

Less cruel would it have been to dash a cup of cold water from the parched lips of one dying from thirst. Mr Reynolds nearly wept. He tried to wheedle, coax, protest, but Mitchell clung to that word of power ‘confidential’, and leaving behind them as nearly heartbroken a news-editor as imagination can conceive, they made their way under the guidance of a messenger boy, through a labyrinth of passages, past a series of rabbit hutches miscalled offices and a good deal less modern than the exterior of the building promised, to the room where Miss Martin would have been waiting for them, had not the phone message warning her of their arrival somehow gone astray.

However, she was not far off. Like, by now, everyone else in the building, she had heard of what most of them still believed to be the accident to their colleague. It had evidently been a great shock to her, and she was eager for details, but she, no more than Mr Reynolds, had any idea what had made Miss Frankland suddenly desirous of writing up the Leadeane sun bathing. She admitted that in her view sun bathing had now dropped from the news class into the category of the accepted. She could only suppose that Miss Frankland had seen her way to make something of it. Anyhow, anything she wrote would always have been sure of favourable consideration. Miss Martin evidently knew more, too, than Mr Reynolds had done of Miss Frankland’s private life. She knew she had a sister, for instance, named Sybil, who lived with their mother in Ealing. She gave Mitchell the address. The father had died, she thought, many years ago. Mitchell’s further question as to whether Miss Frankland had any known enemies, either private or journalistic, evidently startled Miss Martin a good deal.