So Many Doors, page 26
Bobby had been thinking of a way quite other than that leading through Plymouth. But he said nothing, and, turning away from the map, he sat down again. The ’phone rang. Now the car had been seen flying past Crowan Beacon.
“Round and round like a squirrel in a cage,” complained the inspector. “Silly, I call it. Most likely it’s Falmouth now.”
But the next report came from Townshend. Here again a summons to stop had been ignored, and here again the officer making the stop signal had been driven straight at, and had only saved his life by a last-minute leap aside.
Quickly came the next report, this time from St Erth. On the bridge there a man had been seriously hurt. Trying to avoid the car’s reckless rush, he had received a glancing, fortunately not a direct, blow, that had knocked him down. He had broken ribs, a broken leg and other injuries, and had been taken to hospital, lucky to be still alive.
“Must be clean off their heads,” said the inspector. “Do they want to kill people?” he asked.
“It may be that,” Bobby said.
“Looks like it,” agreed the inspector, though he did not understand a certain gravity he thought he heard in Bobby’s voice. “Going the right way to do it, anyhow. Why are they driving like that?” he demanded. “No one’s chasing ’em.”
The ’phone rang. This time it was to say that a motorcyclist from Hale was in pursuit.
“Some one chasing ’em now,” said the inspector. “High time, too.”
They waited. The ’phone rang. It was a direct report from the motor-cyclist. He said he was still alive, but he didn’t know why. The car he was following had, by a tricky manœuvre at cross roads and a complete disregard of all traffic rules, been turned and driven straight at him. He and his cycle alike had been thrown into the air. The cycle had been smashed, but he himself, by good luck or an act of Providence, whichever you liked, had come down on a haystack and had suffered only bruises. But he was out of the chase.
“No one chasing ’em now,” said the inspector. “We’re bound to get ’em in the end. They don’t think they can go on like this for ever, do they?”
Once more there they waited, silent and apprehensive. Once more the ’phone rang. The car had been seen. The speed was terrific. The driving reckless in the extreme. One of the occupants was standing up and shouting.
“Got something to shout about,” said the inspector. “Bound to crash sooner or later, and that ought to mean a broken neck or two. What do you think, sir?” he asked Bobby. “Can’t go on like this for long. Bound to crash.”
“Unless they get first to where they may be going,” Bobby said.
“Where’s that?” the inspector asked. “Any idea, sir?”
“I think perhaps it may be Gurnards Head,” Bobby said.
“Gurnards Head,” the inspector repeated, not sure he had heard correctly. “There’s nothing there. Only cliff and sea, that’s all.”
“Yes, I know,” Bobby said.
“Well, then,” said the inspector.
The ’phone rang. This time the report was from near Towed-much. There a hasty barricade had been erected. The car had charged it and smashed through. The speed was again described as terrific. It had been observed that the man passenger was not now standing up, but had apparently collapsed on the back seat. A woman was bending over him. She was wiping his face, as far as could be seen. The woman in the driving-seat and another woman by her side were taking no notice.
“Warn Zennor,” Bobby said. “Say that car must be stopped at all costs.”
The message went through. Zennor reported that a barricade was being placed across the road.
“It’ll stop ’em or kill ’em,” said Zennor, with cheerful confidence.
Zennor rang up again. The fugitive car had simply crashed through the barricade, scattering it in splinters all over the roadway. As additional precaution, a chain had been stretched across the road a little farther on. The car had simply leaped it, rising high in the air, and somehow or another preserving its equilibrium and coming down uninjured on its own four wheels. By special grace of the devil, in Zennor’s considered opinion.
“Getting near Gurnards Head, only two or three miles now,” the inspector said. “What made you think that’s what they were aiming for? Why?”
“Recovery work still going on there, isn’t it?” Bobby asked. “Aren’t they still trying to get up that crashed car?”
“That’s right,” said the inspector.
“Can’t get in touch with them, then,” Bobby said. “No ’phone. Most likely they know already.”
Some time before this he had asked that a police car should be in readiness. He went out to where it was waiting. To the chauffeur-constable, he said:
“Gurnards Head. About twenty miles, isn’t it? Get there just as quickly as you know how.”
The inspector had come out with him, and would have liked to accompany him in the car, had duty permitted. Bobby said to him:
“Could you ring them up all along the way to Gurnards Head? Tell them you are sending a car, tell them it’s urgent, ask them to try to keep the road clear.” To the chauffeur, Bobby said again:
“Gurnards Head. Full speed.”
“Gurnards Head?” repeated the chauffeur. “Very good, sir. Fine view there, sir.”
“Is there?” Bobby said. “Well, get me there to admire it as soon as you can. Go all out.”
The chauffeur thought to himself that the view would not run away. He wondered if the Chief Constable would approve the use of a police car to take this Londoner to admire even one of the grandest views in Cornwall, or in the British Isles, for that matter. But the driver has not yet been born whose soul does not leap to the injunction: “Full speed. Go all out.”
Nor was this driver any exception. True, he did not crash traffic lights or charge barricades; but, then, there were no barricades, and only a few traffic lights. On the long, straight, empty stretches of road both sides of St. Ives he did his best to match the speed at which Vea Burden had driven. Indeed, the memory of that Sunday morning’s drive still brings a happy smile to his lips.
Even his driving, however, hardly matched Bobby’s impatience, and the car had not stopped before Bobby had leaped out and was running up the steep and rough incline to the cliff’s edge where men stood in groups, pale, silent, or talking to each other in low tones, still shaken and awestruck by the sudden, dreadful thing that they had seen. One man said to him as he ran up:
“Straight it went, straight and fast, straight over and down into the sea, and one of them was screaming. God Almighty! I never saw the like.”
Another man said:
“There was two as jumped first.”
The first man said:
“Her that was screaming wanted to, but she wasn’t let.”
At a little distance, Bobby saw Maggie half sitting, half reclining, on the ground. She had apparently been trying to get to her feet, but hadn’t quite been able to manage it. David Pope was lying near by. One leg was crumpled under him, and his face was bleeding. Maggie got her handkerchief and began to dab at it in a feeble, bewildered way, as if not altogether certain what she was doing or why. Neither of them spoke. Not far off another man lay at full length, complaining and groaning loudly. The little scattered group of bystanders seemed all too aghast, too bewildered by the suddenness and the terror of what they had seen, to be capable for the moment of either speech or movement. It was as if they all were held in a common paralysis of overwhelming horror. Bobby ran across to Maggie. He said:
“Are you hurt?”
“I’m all right,” she answered, though she did not look it. “It’s David.” Then, as if abruptly realizing the need for action, she called out loudly: “Oh, please, won’t some one get some water?”
One of the men near, apparently galvanized into action by her cry, called: “Right-o, miss,” and set off running towards some vehicles stationed near. To Bobby, Maggie said: “I saw them go. I shall dream of it ever more. He won’t die, will he?”
“Who? Pope? Bless you, no,” Bobby answered. “Bad shake up and a broken leg. Bad enough, but might be worse. What about you?”
“I’m all right,” she repeated. “It was Vea. She wanted us to go, too, she wanted us as well. Oh, why should she? David tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t, and she threw pepper in his face—at least, I think it was pepper, or something.”
The man who had gone hurrying to the parked vehicles came running back. He had a first-aid box with him. He said:
“There’s a chap gone off to ring up for an ambulance. It won’t be long.”
He and Bobby did what was possible to make Pope comfortable and warm. When they had done what they could, Bobby went across to the other man who was lying on the grass near, still groaning and complaining loudly. Bobby did not think he was much hurt—to judge, at least, by the volume and energy of his groans. A man standing by said:
“It’s poor old Billy Tompkins; he copped it fair and square when them two jumped. Broke their fall when Billy caught them, though not wanting to or meaning same.”
Bobby left the suffering Billy in the care of his companions and went back to Maggie, who was giving Pope some hot tea one of the men had managed to produce. She looked up as Bobby approached and said:
“Vea took Bella. Did you know? Why did she? Vea, I mean. She wanted to take us, too. What for? And her own self? All of us, all. Why? And Bella. She said it was Bella killed him. Did she? Oh, why are people so wicked? What makes them do such things—Bella and Vea, too?”
“Not so much wicked, perhaps,” Bobby said thoughtfully, “as driven by forces they did not understand. Vea could not bear to think of life and love for others when she had lost the man she loved and knew she had to die so soon. She grudged you what she knew was not for her. She told me once it was not just. Bella played with love as a child plays with fire, knowing nothing of the power she was letting loose till it destroyed her.”
He turned away. He had seen many strange and dreadful things, but somehow this had shaken him more than he quite realized. He went to the cliff edge and stood there, looking out and down into that awful void into which Vea Burden and Bella Winlock had vanished only a few minutes before. He thought of the vivid and strong personality of Vea, so full of a force she had known so little how to direct. He thought of Bella Winlock, who had used her charm and powers of fascination to such ill ends, and he had grief for them both. The foreman of the gang joined him. The foreman, too, was pale and shaken. He said, as he, like Bobby, gazed down into that tremendous emptiness where nothing showed but rock and sea:
“I saw it all. I think no man has ever seen the like. Lickety lick it come down the road, and we all stared. So then it swung round, and before we knew, aiming straight it was for the cliff edge. Slowed a bit—it had to, along of the ground getting steep and rough-like near the edge—so those other two had their chance to jump; but straight on the car went, bumping a bit, but fast as could be, and over, deliberate. Deliberate,” he repeated, “and one of them screamed as they went, but the other held her fast, and then they were gone, and may God have mercy on their souls.”
THE END
E.R. PUNSHON – CRIME FICTION REVIEWER
E.R. Punshon was for many years a reviewer of crime fiction for the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. The following nine reviews by Punshon were published in The Guardian between 1935 and 1936.
Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers (1935)
The Garden Murder Case, S.S. Van Dine (1935)
The Wheel Spins, Ethel Lina White (1936)
Trent’s Own Case, E.C. Bentley and H. Warner Allen (1936)
The Penrose Mystery, R. Austin Freeman (1936)
The Man Who Murdered Himself, Geoffrey Homes (1936)
The Talkative Policeman, Rupert Penny (1936)
Fair Warning, Mignon Eberhart (1936)
Death at the President’s Lodging, Michael Innes (1936)
Gaudy Night
by Dorothy L. Sayers
(13 November 1935)
“Gaudy Night,” Miss Dorothy L. Sayers’s new story, has the advantage of a novel and interesting environment, that of a woman’s college at Oxford, with which she herself is intimately acquainted but that will be new ground for most of us. In the college there has broken out a plague of anonymous letters, threatening to drive nervous students to suicide, to bring disgrace upon the whole community, even upon scholarship itself, if scholarship shall prove a soil from which such ill can spring. That the guilt must rest upon some inmate of the college is clear, and excitement steadily grows as suspicion flickers to and fro from don to student, to staff, then back to student and don again. Miss Harriet Vane, a writer of mystery stories, and then our old friend Lord Peter Wimsey are called in to solve the mystery, and neat and clear and logical is the solution at which Lord Peter arrives after the lady has failed, though it is doubtful whether Miss Sayers intends this as an allegorical demonstration of the innate superiority of the masculine mind. But this detective work, however much the author’s admirers may demand it, is so little the real theme of the book that it seems inadequate indeed to class the story under the heading of the detective novel—it is larger and escapes from any neat classification. There is in it a threefold cord the author has woven to hold fast reader’s interest: the strange events that throw the college into a turmoil; the psychology of the teaching staff under the stress of a loathsome suspicion creeping closer to them every day; the slow breaking down of the barrier Harriet Vane has erected between Peter Wimsey and herself; and of this triple cord one may say that study of the inmates of the senior common room, more especially Miss Lydgate, the English tutor, is the most successful strand and the love scenes the least so. For this is not only a detective story, not only a psychological study of a learned community under the strain of sensational events, it is also a love tale, and since it is laid in academic surroundings one may borrow from the schools a metaphor and award Miss Sayers a double first, honours in the detective tale class, honours in the orthodox-novel class as well. Incidentally, Miss Sayers has, in her stride as it were, slain half a dozen superstitions connected with the detective novel, as, item, that a detective story must have a murder in it; item, that it must have no love interest; item, that there is something immoral about writing it in good and scholarly English; item, that the characters must be puppets; item, that it of necessity must be a kind of “Who’s Who,” to be read only to discover Who Did It. But the worst of superstitions is that the more often they are slain, the more immortal they prove themselves; the more deeply they are buried, the more swiftly they run about the world.
The Garden Murder Case
by S.S. Van Dine
(18 September 1935)
In “The Garden Murder Case” Mr. Van Dine is neither classical nor romantic, but purely “Philovantic,” to use a word current, one understands, in the United States, where Mr. Philo Vance holds much the same position as that achieved here by Lord Peter Wimsey, though with this difference, that we all love our Wimsey, whereas about Philo Vance ribald songs have been made advocating for him that extreme form of sanctions known as a kick in the pants [i.e., “Philo Vance/needs a kick in the pance”—Ogden Nash]. Certainly Mr. Vance’s way of imparting information does strongly resemble forcible feeding, and, as the knowledge pumped this time into the more or less patient reader is chiefly concerned with American [horse] racing, its appeal to English readers may be limited. But Mr. Vance’s intellectual powers are as remarkable as ever. He is even able to explain the hidden significance (page 21) of certain words in a message he received, though in that message (page 16), no such words occur. Proudly indeed may the United States cry, “Where’s your Wimsey now?” After such a feat of intuition it is no wonder that he solves with accustomed neatness, accuracy, and dispatch a somewhat conventional mystery beginning on the roof garden of a New York apartment house. The scheme of the story brings its author face to face with the detective novelist’s peculiar difficulty and paradox—that of presenting vividly to the reader the personality of the guilty individual and yet letting the identity come as a surprise. But Mr. Van Dine does not make much effort to deal with it.
The Wheel Spins
by Ethel Lina White
(12 May 1936)
More than all other practitioners of the protean art of fiction is the writer of tales of sensation and of crime bound to observe to laws of probability. The necessity is imposed upon him by the very fact that he deals with happenings outside the range of ordinary life, since how can he hope to make his tale significant unless he can succeed in relating it to actuality? Even in such fantasies as “Frankenstein” or “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” it is their underlying and eternal truth that has made them live.
Neglect of this law explains the failure to attain the first rank of Miss Ethel Lina White’s excellent new story “The Wheel Spins,” a tale of strange happenings on a transcontinental train running from some vague East European country to Trieste. On the train a little English governess, Miss Froy, mysteriously disappears. She was and she is not. A fellow-passenger, Iris Carr, wonders what has become of her, inquires, and is met on every side by blank denial that any such person as Miss Froy has been on the train at all or even has any real existence. Iris is almost driven to believe she has suffered some strange hallucination, but she persists to the exciting and well-planned climax of the story. It is clear, however, that in fact nothing more would have been necessary than to appeal to the conductor, on these long-distance international trains an important and responsible official, and so at least to have ensured sufficient publicity to prevent even the most reckless conspirators from proceeding with their plans. Few intending murderers care to put their names and addresses on official record before committing their crimes. And for that matter if the conspirators had chosen to tell Iris, an entirely casual train acquaintance, that the missing woman had met a friend and changed her seat to the other end of the crowded train, Iris would never have given her disappearance a second thought. Considering how slight the story is, little more than an anecdote, Miss White succeeds in extracting from it a most creditable amount of excitement and suspense, qualities on which the book depends, since its scope allows no problem to be posed to baffle the reader or challenge him to find it for his own solution.
