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- Herausgeber: Dean Street Press
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
He flung open a drawer and took from it a heavy dagger in a sheath with blood-stains upon it. On the blade were engraved the words, "Blut und Ehre!" Frank Everett was a rising young press attaché at the British Embassy in Paris - until he was found dead in his Rue St. Georges apartment, a knife wound to the throat. Was it a political assassination, a crime passionnel, or possibly even suicide? The foreign office call in the redoubtable Detective Inspector Richardson, who travels to Paris and must work with the French police in solving the case. He soon discovers that a mysterious coded number is one of the primary clues - if only he can decipher its meaning and unmask Everett's assassin. The Case of the Dead Diplomat was originally published in 1935. This new edition, the first in many decades, features an introduction by crime novelist Martin Edwards, author of acclaimed genre history The Golden Age of Murder. "Good entertainment as well as a perfectly sound detective story." Daily Telegraph "The story is remarkably well written…highly entertaining reading." Birmingham Gazette
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Basil ThomsonThe Case of the Dead Diplomat
He flung open a drawer and took from it a heavy dagger in a sheath with blood-stains upon it. On the blade were engraved the words, “Blut und Ehre!”
Frank Everett was a rising young press attaché at the British Embassy in Paris – until he was found dead in his Rue St. Georges apartment, a knife wound to the throat. Was it a political assassination, a crime passionnel, or possibly even suicide?
The foreign office call in the redoubtable Detective Inspector Richardson, who travels to Paris and must work with the French police in solving the case. He soon discovers that a mysterious coded number is one of the primary clues – if only he can decipher its meaning and unmask Everett’s assassin.
The Case of the Dead Diplomatwas originally published in 1935. This new edition, the first in over seventy years, features an introduction by crime novelist Martin Edwards, author of acclaimed genre history The Golden Age of Murder.
“Good entertainment as well as a perfectly sound detective story.” Daily Telegraph
“The story is remarkably well written…highly entertaining reading.” Birmingham Gazette
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
ERIC CARRUTHERS, the first secretary at the Paris Embassy, was entertaining his fellow Scotsman, Guy Dundas, the newly joined attaché, at luncheon at a café discovered by himself, in which the cooking and the wine were both beyond criticism.
“You’ll find, I’m afraid, that officially this place is not exciting. Nothing ever happens here.”
“All the better. I shall have a better chance of learning my job,” answered the younger man, who was fresh from Oxford and felt that his foot was on a rung of the ladder up which he dreamed of climbing rapidly. “At any rate you seem to be a happy family here.”
“Oh, we don’t quarrel and that is always something.” Carruthers looked at his watch. “We ought to be getting along to the Chancery. Though nothing ever happens we must keep to official hours and it’s half-past two.”
They took a taxi back to the Embassy; the messenger was waiting on the steps of the Chancery.
“His Excellency has been waiting for you, sir,” he said to Carruthers. “He is in his room now with Mr. Stirling, if you would kindly go up.”
“Asking for me?”
“Yes, sir. His Excellency seemed very anxious to see you—told me to keep at the door and be sure to let you know as soon as you came in.”
“Very good, Chubb; I’ll go at once.”
Dundas made his way to the little room in the Chancery where he spent his working hours in what his stable-companion, Ned Gregory, the third secretary, irreverently termed “licking stamps,” but which actually consisted in such responsible duties as decoding cipher telegrams and making up the diplomatic bags for the courier. Gregory was not at his table; his voice could be heard holding forth in the next room; the Chancery seemed to be in a flutter. Dundas wondered whether the monotony of which Carruthers had complained was about to be broken.
Eric Carruthers found his chief collapsed in a deep arm-chair in the stately room where he received official visitors and signed dispatches. The Minister Plenipotentiary, Richard Stirling, was with him. Both wore an air of deep depression.
“I hope you are feeling better this morning, sir,” was Carruthers’ greeting. He knew that his chief had been brooding over his health and that the Embassy doctor, Dr. Hoskyn, was attending him daily. “They told me downstairs that you wanted to see me.”
“I did. I suppose that you have heard the news about Everett. You seem to be taking it very easily.”
“About Everett, sir? Has he been letting himself go with the native journalists?”
“He’s dead.”
There was a pause. Carruthers was trying to take in this startling intelligence; the ambassador leaned forward in his chair.
“Everett dead! Why, I saw him in the Chancery yesterday afternoon. He looked perfectly fit then and seemed in the best of spirits. What did he die of?”
“Suicide or murder, the police say. All I know is that a police commissaire from the ninth arrondissement called here three-quarters of an hour ago and gave a rambling account of the discovery of Everett’s body in his own flat with a knife wound in the throat. They did not know who he was until they found his Embassy card in his pocket-book, and they then came down here to make inquiries.”
“Who saw the commissaire, sir?”
“Maynard saw him and came upstairs to tell me, and now, I suppose, it will be in all the Paris papers and be telegraphed over to London. We don’t want the business to get into the papers at all if we can help it, but if it must go in, for goodness’ sake let it be our version and not a French reporter’s.”
“I agree with you, sir. We don’t want the French Press to report it,” said Carruthers with a frown. “But I doubt whether we can stop it now without invoking the help of the people at the Quai d’Orsay, and that would only make things worse when it came out. The next thing would be headlines in the Paris-Matin—‘SUDDEN DEATH OF A BRITISH DIPLOMATIST. SUICIDE OR A POLITICAL ASSASSINATION?’”
“Good God! Is that what they do here?” The ambassador started up from his chair with a groan and hobbled to his writing-table. He was one of those diplomats de carrière who had risen step by step to his present exalted dignity—the last post before his retirement—by doing everything he was told to do faultlessly; by making faultless little speeches on occasions when such speeches are called for; by keeping the Press at arm’s length under all circumstances. He was now a man of past sixty and looked his age. He was a hypochondriac, always fussing about his health and generally without reason.
“You see, sir, the French public has been brought up for seven or eight months to believe that every sudden death of a functionary is a political murder. It makes good copy for the sensational newspapers.”
“Look here, my dear fellow; somehow this must be stopped. Telephone to Dr. Hoskyn and go with him to the police, and if necessary be present when the post-mortem examination is made. Young Everett may have committed suicide; that would be bad enough; but whatever we do we must keep the gutter Press at arm’s length. You might ring me up and let me know how you get on.”
Eric Carruthers went down to his own room in the Chancery to use the telephone. He rang up Dr. Hoskyn, whose voice began to flutter when he learned that the call came from the Embassy.
“I hope that you have no bad news about Sir Wilfred,” he said.
“No, doctor, but I want you to take a taxi at once and come here and ask for me, Eric Carruthers. I’ll tell you why when I see you.”
While waiting for his visitor Carruthers sent for the second secretary, Percival Maynard.
“Maynard, the ambassador tells me that you were the first person to receive news of Everett’s death. Who brought the news?”
Maynard was a young man with a languid manner, who talked French more fluently than his own language. He was a welcome guest at French luncheon-tables and was a mine of information upon the intrigues in the lobbies of the Chamber and the Senate, and the latest political scandals.
“A police commissaire, who said that he came from the ninth arrondissement, came in about an hour ago. He had Everett’s Embassy card in his hand and he said that the body had been found in Everett’s flat, with some sanguinary details. I gathered that he was the man who was first called in by the concierge.”
“What did you think of Frank Everett? You saw more of him than I did.”
“Everett? Well, he seemed like any other newspaper man that one meets in Fleet Street and avoids if one can—quite a decent young man within his natural limits and, I imagine, fairly good at his job.”
Carruthers was drumming on the table with his fingers. His complaint was that one could never get a straight answer out of Maynard.
“Do you know who his friends were?”
“Do you mean here in the Embassy or outside?”
“Both. First, in the Embassy.”
“Well, I should think that Ned Gregory saw most of him. I used to hear his voice and his laugh—what a laugh he had, poor devil!—coming from Gregory’s room. Gregory’s a bit of a wag, as you know.”
“So I’ve heard,” observed Carruthers dryly. “Did Everett ever tell you about his people in England?”
“Never. I never asked him. Our intercourse was always on official matters. He was quite well informed about Paris Press matters.”
The messenger opened the door to announce Dr. Hoskyn.
Carruthers rose. “Thank you, Maynard. I’m going out with Dr. Hoskyn for an hour or two. Will you mind the baby?”
Dr. Hoskyn was a fussy little man with white hair, purpling cheeks and a soothing, bedside manner. When there was a considerable British colony in Paris, he had had a good private practice and it was natural that he should be called in by the people at the Embassy when a doctor was required.
“Sit down, doctor,” said Carruthers, pointing to the chair beside his table. “You’ve heard, no doubt, of the death of poor Everett, our Press attaché.”
The doctor’s cheeks deepened in hue. “Dead! That healthy-looking young fellow? What did he die of? An accident?”
“The police give us the choice between suicide and murder. There was a knife wound in the throat. I don’t know whether you have had any experience in police medical work, but the ambassador has great confidence in you, and he wants you to make a post-mortem examination of the body and furnish him with an opinion if you can.”
“I have never had to do anything of that kind since my old hospital training days,” said the doctor doubtfully.
The taxi was announced.
“Come along, doctor,” said Carruthers. “I don’t know how these things are done in Paris—whether they hold inquests as we do, or whether the police get busy and turn the case over to a Juge d’Instruction.”
“They will have moved the body down to the Judicial Medical School by this time,” said the doctor gloomily.
Carruthers directed the taxi-man to drive them to the police office of the ninth arrondissement. There they found a senior police officer and were ushered into his room. Carruthers made the necessary introductions. “This is Dr. Hoskyn, monsieur le commissaire, medical officer of the British Embassy, and I am the first secretary. We have called about that distressing case of M. Everett, a member of our staff.”
“Ah! You mean the case of the gentleman found dead in an appartement in the rue St. Georges this morning.” The officer touched a bell-push and a constable made his appearance. “Chairs for these gentlemen.”
Two chairs were brought in, dusted and placed at a corner of the table.
“May I inquire, monsieur, whether you have reached any conclusion?” asked Carruthers.
“Monsieur is, of course, aware that the body bore a deep wound in the throat. To judge from the state of the appartement it seemed clear that there had been a violent struggle. Furniture was over-turned; a table-lamp was broken and on the floor was lying this knife.” He flung open a drawer and took from it a heavy dagger in a sheath with blood-stain upon it; on the blade were engraved the words, “Blut und Ehre!”
“These daggers, we understand, are carried by young schoolboys in Germany when they march along the road on the German side of the frontier. You will notice the symbol in the coloured shield on the handle—the swastika in the middle. It is Hitler’s device for fostering a warlike spirit among German schoolboys.”
Carruthers examined the weapon, which was about a foot long. The blade was stained with dried blood. He passed it to Dr. Hoskyn who said, “Does this mean that young Everett was murdered by a German?”
“We do not know, monsieur. When the concierge was interrogated she said that when dusting the appartement she had often noticed this dagger lying on the table in the sitting-room. It must have belonged to M. Everett himself.”
“I believe it did,” said Carruthers. “I remember hearing that Mr. Everett had displayed a dagger like this to his colleagues in the Embassy. He said that a journalistic colleague on the frontier had sent it to him to use as a paper-knife.”
“We should be grateful, monsieur, if that could be verified. It will help us in reconstructing the case. This much we know already from the concierge: Mr. Everett had arranged with her that she should prepare his petit déjeuner every morning and bring it up to the door of his appartement; then she would knock and set down the tray. Sometimes he opened the door and took it from her; more often it stayed for some minutes on the landing before he took it in. It was so this morning. She left the breakfast on the landing and went downstairs to her other duties. When she went up to do her dusting the breakfast was still lying untouched. She knocked repeatedly but could get no answer, and on opening the door was shocked to find that her tenant was lying fully dressed on the floor. She thought at first that he had had some kind of seizure and that in falling he had pulled the table over him; but on going to the body she saw blood on the floor, and she left the body as it was and ran down to telephone to us. As I told you the room was in the utmost disorder, and so much blood on the floor that they thought Mr. Everett must have bled to death. The concierge did not think that Mr. Everett brought anyone back with him last night and she heard no one go upstairs.”
“You have formed a theory, monsieur?”
The officer spread his forearms wide. “We have not yet had time to consider theories beyond this: at some time after the poor gentleman returned to his appartement he received a visitor—a person who must have known him well or he would have had to make inquiries of the concierge. For some reason yet to be ascertained there must have been a quarrel; one of them must have attacked the other and in the struggle that ensued the visitor must have snatched up this dagger and plunged it point first into his adversary’s throat. Then he must have shut the door behind him as gently as possible and made off without awaking the concierge. At present officers are searching the appartement for finger-prints, but these seldom lead to identifications, unless they were made by some well-known criminal. I do not think that this crime was the work of any known criminal.”
“Where is the body now?”
“It has been taken to the Medico-legal School. If you desire to see it I will send one of my officers with you.”
“I should be very glad if you would. I was hoping that you would allow Dr. Hoskyn to join your medical officer in making the autopsy.”
The commissaire bowed politely. “That does not rest with me, monsieur, but with the authorities of the School; but I imagine that they would be very glad to avail themselves of Dr. Hoskyn’s good offices. I will inquire.”
“I suppose that you have not yet had time to look through the papers found on Mr. Everett’s body or in the appartement?”
“I have them all here, monsieur, including a number of notes and coins which no ordinary thief would have left behind him. I shall not fail to present a copy of my report to his Excellency the ambassador when it is complete. Now, if you are going to the School I think it might be wise for you to go there early. I will ring up our police surgeon and arrange to meet you there.”
The laboratory attached to the Medico-legal School is the most depressing spot in Paris. It seems always to be tenanted; the bodies of the unrecognized are laid on sloping slate slabs behind plate-glass windows. The public, who come to look for missing friends, pass in front of the windows, where they may find their nearest and dearest lying exposed to the general gaze like the wares in a fishmonger’s shop.
A youngish man in a black wide-awake hat, who appeared to have been waiting in the doorway, came forward as the taxi pulled up. He swept off his imposing headgear, disclosing a domed head polished like a billiard ball, and introduced himself as Dr. Audusson, a professor of the School. Leading the way into the building, the police officer explained to him the object of the visit of the two Englishmen, and they were taken straight into the room fitted up for post-mortem examinations. There, covered by a sheet, lay the body of Carruthers’ late colleague. The sheet was stripped off, disclosing the body dressed in its ordinary day clothes, which were stiffened and discoloured by extravasated blood. Dr. Audusson clicked his tongue and observed to his British colleague that the cause of death was not far to seek. He pointed to the deep incision in the throat. The two professional men consulted in an undertone, and then Dr. Hoskyn came over to Carruthers.
“I suppose that the ambassador wants a complete post-mortem. He wouldn’t be satisfied by a report that that wound in itself would account for the death?”
Carruthers had his share of Scottish caution. “The question of drug-taking or poison might arise hereafter. I think that it would be wise to cover all points.”
“Very well; my French colleague is quite willing. and we shall have the help of the public laboratory for analysing the contents of the stomach.”
“Then you won’t want me any more?”
“No. As soon as the examination is completed I will come on to the Embassy with my report.”
“You won’t forget the possibility of suicide, doctor?”
“We will not.”
Carruthers had scarcely shut the door of his room when Maynard, the second secretary, entered with care graven on his features.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he said; “I’ve had a perfectly awful time with the old man upstairs. He expects everything to be done at lightning speed—made me telegraph to Everett’s next-of-kin to announce the death, and I suppose that now we shall have a tribe of them on our backs. Then the ambassador wanted me to account for every moment of Everett’s time, and I had to tell him that I knew very little about the poor fellow, but that I would find out as much as was known about him.”
“You’re lucky not to have the place beset by reporters.”
“Oh, we’ve had them by the dozen. I refused to see them. I told Gregory to shoo them out. He must have done the job effectively, for they’ve left us alone for nearly half an hour.”
“Gregory is the man who knew Everett best, isn’t he?”
“Yes; he saw more of him than we did.”
“Let’s have him in.”
Maynard left the room and returned with the third secretary.
“Sit down, Gregory, and tell us all you knew about poor Everett.”
Ned Gregory was a curly-headed youngster with red hair. He was trying to discipline his features to the expression which he imagined to be suitable for funerals, but it was an effort; the natural levity in his vivacious eyes was difficult to subdue.
“When did you last see him?” continued Carruthers.
“Yesterday morning. I used to see him practically every morning.”
“You knew him pretty well, I suppose?”
“Fairly well. I never went out with him, but he used to tell me a lot about his job.”
“Was he sometimes depressed?”
A cloud crossed Gregory’s eyes for a moment.
“He used to confide in me a lot, but he seemed generally to be in good spirits.”
“Always?” Carruthers had not missed the momentary cloud.
“Always, except once. I don’t like betraying the poor fellow’s confidence.”
“I quite understand, but with this mystery about his death…”
“Well, he was very much in love with a French girl he had met somewhere or other. He told me that he intended to marry her. I tried to dissuade him, and then, much to my surprise, he came in yesterday morning and told me that it was all off—that he’d found out the girl was a married woman. He seemed to be very hard hit. He wanted my advice as to whether he ought to break with her entirely. I told him that if it was my case I should. He said that if he dropped her like a hot potato she would feel it acutely; she had told him that she hated her husband.”
The two secretaries exchanged glances, and Carruthers said, “Thank you, Gregory. If you remember anything else that would tend to clear up Everett’s death, please come and see me.”
“There’s one thing I should like to ask before I go. Does the French Penal Code prohibit the use of man-traps for journalists? You never saw such a crew as I’ve had here this afternoon—camera men as well as reporters. If I’m led away with gyves upon my wrists it will be because I’ve sent one or two of them to the place where they belong.”
“Maynard tells me that you’ve been very successful with them…”
Before Gregory had time to reply the messenger opened the door. “There’s some more reporters asking for you, Mr. Gregory,” he said.
Ned Gregory threw up his hands and disappeared.
“What he’s just told us, Maynard, cuts both ways. It might have been murder by an injured husband or it might equally have been a suicide.”
Chapter Two
CARRUTHERS ran upstairs to see the ambassador. He found him querulous and impatient. “I’ve been waiting all the afternoon for your telephone message and for word from someone who knows what has been happening.”
“There was really nothing to tell you, sir, that I could not do quicker by returning to the Embassy. Dr. Hoskyn and I saw the body in the Institute of Legal Medicine, which has taken the place of the Morgue, with the French police doctor. I left the two doctors to make the post-mortem examination together. I asked them to make their report as full as possible.”
“Couldn’t they say offhand what was the cause of death?”
“Yes, sir. Everett had been stabbed deeply in the throat with a German dagger—one of those Nazi weapons with which German schoolboys are armed. The police showed us the dagger stained with blood.”
“Do you mean that the crime was done by a German Nazi?”
“No, sir; the dagger belonged to Everett himself. It had been sent to him by a friend on the other side of the frontier. But just now young Gregory told me that Everett used to confide in him about an unfortunate love-affair with a French girl. He wanted to marry her and she seemed willing, but somehow he discovered that she was a married woman and that her husband was alive. Gregory says that he advised him strongly never to see her again, but it struck me as possible—”
“You mean that the murderer may have been an injured husband?”
Carruthers nodded; his chief groaned and fell back in his chair. “Why do they saddle us with newspaper men? It’s a legacy from the old bad days of the war. If the Press gets hold of this…”
A light tap on the door; Chubb entered with the latest edition of the newspapers and retired discreetly, after winking covertly at Carruthers and jerking his thumb towards the topmost journal. Chubb considered himself a privileged person. He had been an N.C.O. of exemplary character during the war, and had since served three ambassadors. He judged men as he found them, without much consideration of their official rank.
The ambassador was fidgeting in his chair. If he had been alone it was obvious that he would have pounced hungrily on the papers and scanned their headlines. It was cruel to keep him in suspense; Carruthers snatched up the topmost print and read it with curling lip.
“What do they say?” asked his chief.
“The usual sensational garbage on which these papers live. ‘British Embassy Mystery.’ ‘The Crime in the Rue St. Georges.’”
The ambassador ran his eye down the column with quick-coming breath. “Scandalous! Have they no decency, these cursed reporters? What’s this? ‘The secretary swallowed his fifth cup of tea before replying to my question. “The mysterious Mademoiselle X,” he said. “No, I can tell you nothing about her.”’ Which of the staff drinks five cups of tea?”
“Gregory saw the man, I believe, and hunted him out, and Gregory hates tea. The whole article must have been concocted in the office.”
“Yes, and it will be quoted in the English papers. Now I suppose these jackals will hunt the woman down and magnify the business into a political crime, bringing in incidentally the names of one or two French Ministers. By the way, I sent a sympathetic telegram to Everett’s father this afternoon. Maynard found the address in the boy’s papers. I suppose some of the family will come out. Of course I telegraphed also to the Foreign Office, and, talking of the F.O., how would it be to suggest to them that a man from the C.I.D. in Scotland Yard be sent over to make independent inquiries?”
“I shouldn’t do that just yet, sir. The principal commissaire that I saw seemed to be taking an intelligent line about the case, and if the French police solve the mystery we shall be glad that we kept out of it.”
“Perhaps you’re right. When Dr. Hoskyn comes in, please send him up to me.”
In his room Carruthers found another copy of the Paris-Matin spread out on his writing-table; Chubb had even taken the liberty of marking the column. It was certainly a startling testimony to the enterprise of the Paris journalist, according to whom Everett had been seen two nights before, taking leave of a maiden of astonishing beauty outside the Café Weber, and tears were coursing down the lady’s damask cheek. “Who was this fair unknown whom we will call Mademoiselle X? Had she anything to do with the crime in the rue St. Georges? Was she another Mata Hari?”
Chubb entered the room at this moment, bringing the usual cup of tea.
“You’ve been having a busy day, Chubb—with these journalists and people?”
“It’s not the reporters I mind so much—Mr. Gregory deals with them and they go out faster than they came in. It’s these camera men I object to—the saucy blokes. Fancy them holding up their cameras to take a shot of me on the doorstep. What’s the sense of it?”
“They have their living to make like everybody else,” observed Carruthers.
“If I had my way with them, sir, they’d be getting their living chained to an oar in the galleys in Cayenne with a cloud of mosquitoes gnawing at them. Why, what do you think one of them did this afternoon? Came in with a pair of opera-glasses, he did, and looked through them at the blank wall in the courtyard. ‘Ca y est!’ he said, and grinned at me. ‘What do you mean?’ I said. Then he showed me. While he was looking at the blank wall he was taking a photograph of me through a little trap-door at the side. He told me I’d be in all the papers to-morrow. There ought to be a law about it.”
“You might ask Mr. Gregory to look in here for a moment.”
“Right, sir. He’s just thrown out a gang of these reporters, but there’s more waiting to see him.”
“He can leave the others to Mr. Dundas. I shan’t keep him a minute.”
Ned Gregory looked a little dishevelled and heated when he made his appearance.
“I’m sorry to disturb you in your important diplomatic labours, Gregory, but you may not have seen this,” showing him the lines about the maiden of startling beauty at the Café Weber. “I suppose they did not get a hint about this woman from you?”
