Bodies from the Library 2, page 17
part #2 of Bodies from the Library Series
J.J.: (Quietly in the background while the dreadful sounds continue) But when she reached the ground the chair overturned and the revolver fell out of the cushions on to the parquet. She couldn’t get back, d’you see, and had to invent the tale of hitting the stairs.
MRS MUSGRAVE: (Whispering, breathless with effort) The revolver … they mustn’t find Dad’s revolver. Where can I hide it? Where can I hide it? I can’t walk. I can’t stand. Where can I hide it? … The library box! Nell’s book box, with the letters on the chest. I can pull myself over to it, if I can only grip the lid. Yes … Yes … Yes … Now. Take out the book and hide it under the chest. Put in the revolver and close up the flap. Alice will post it. Nell will keep quiet. Nell, alone in the country reading the papers, Nell will understand. Now … The police! (Shouting, as before) Help! Help! Please! Somebody come! Help! Please! Help!
(Fade back to the November Club. Murmurs of interest and approval. Some dissent)
CHAIRMAN: Bravo, J.J.! That’s dandy. I’ll certainly hand it to you. You’ve got a grand imagination.
VOICES: Remarkable.
I concur.
Bravo!
Extraordinaire.
Ingenious, very.
Wunderbar!
Queer, damned queer.
CHAIRMAN: Curly is looking at you, J.J., as if he’s seen some sort of apparition.
MINTER: (Unsteadily) Several, several. You’ve brought it all back like an old song, J.J. It was a grey damp evening, like tonight. Same amount of fog. The girl got her boy, by the way. There was opposition from his family, but he stuck to her, and they’re very happy, somewhere up north … There’s two or three kids, I believe. Mrs Musgrave died not so long ago, and Alice is down in her old home in the country. You’re very shrewd, J.J.
CHAIRMAN: Maestro, it’s just too bad that you’re wrong.
J.J: Wrong? Eh? How’s that? Speak up, speak up.
CHAIRMAN: Just one little omission. It’s your own word, J.J. The door to the room was not only locked; it was bolted.
(Murmur of assent)
I’ve made a study of that case and I’ve read many theories. In all of them that bolt provided the one unanswerable snag. The door was firmly bolted on the inside and there were no pin-holes, no bits of string, no fancy-work around it. It could not have been fastened from the outside. No, J.J., a commendable effort. I enjoyed it, but it won’t wash. That little zero must go up. The first zero on the list!
J.J.: Humph! Excellent port, Mr Secretary. Just fill my glass, will you, Minter? Well told, my boy. Good luck to you.
(Laughter, chatter, fading into a street scene. Children)
CHILDREN: Guy, guy, guy, stick ’im in the eye, ’ang ’im on a lamp-post and there let ’im die … Sixpence for the guy, Mister. Sixpence for the guy!
LE BLANC: Sixpence! Tiens! The times deteriorate. Very well, very well, hold out your ’ands, so. Va t’en! Va t’en!
(Children scatter, run off shouting)
So you are defeated at last, eh, J.J.? Beaten by a little bolt. It is sad, but then, mon vieux, one must be philosophical. Nemesis, they say—
J.J.: (Furiously) Philosophical, my boot! I told you it was elementary. It’s obvious to a blind donkey who shot the bolt.
LE BLANC: (Surprised) How? You know?
J.J.: Le Blanc, use your thick head. Who was the only person who could have bolted that door? Who was the one person who, throughout the whole story, must have followed that wretched family’s danger and misery at every step? Who must have heard every detail of the history as it occurred? Who knew the identity of ‘Dr Charles’ and yet could do nothing to prove it? Who must have seen the whole situation in a single blinding flash the moment his eyes rested on that locked door with the pitiful key probably thrust but half under it? Who alone could have shot the bolt home to make the family safe and the story a miracle?
LE BLANC: But who? You don’t mean?—Who?
J.J.: The man who broke the window and found the body. The man who told the story in such convincing detail tonight. Our guest of honour. That soft-hearted, quick-witted young constable, Curly Minter.
LE BLANC: Mon dieu, it is possible! It is conceivable! It is true, J.J.!
J.J.: ’Course it’s true. Saw it at once.
LE BLANC: But you said nothing. Tonight when you might have triumphed you were silent. You were magnanimous, J.J. You were merciful. That is not like you. Why?
J.J.: (Briskly) Two reasons. First the feller asked me not to—all that stuff about the young people. Cry from the heart, that was. She shot in self-defence, d’you see.
LE BLANC: And the other reason?
J.J.: The port. (With reverence) Crofts’ o-four. The year of the murder, d’you see? Couldn’t spoil that. Beautiful stuff. Recognised it at once. No, Le Blanc, I may not be a gentleman, but hell’s bells! I hope I’m an artist!
MARGERY ALLINGHAM
Margery Allingham (1904–1966), one of the so-called ‘Big Four’, remains one of the best known and most popular writers of crime fiction. She was born in Ealing, West London, and, as both her parents were writers and her grandfather an editor, it was not surprising that even as a child she should enjoy writing, producing at the age of seven a journal for her family entitled The Wag-Tale, which included serial stories, poetry, a recipe and even an advertisement—for ‘sinite of potassium’ …
Allingham’s earliest short story, ‘The Rescue of the Rainclouds’, was published in April 1917 in Mother and Home, the sister magazine of Women’s Weekly, which was run by her aunt. The author was thirteen years old. By the time she was seventeen, she had written countless poems as well as several monologues and plays, including a three-act drama Dido and Aeneas, which was performed at King George’s Hall in central London. And the precocious young teenager also completed Blackkerchief Dick (1923), a story of pirates in Stuart times, which her father claimed his daughter had been inspired to write by a series of séances.
In 1927, Allingham married Philip Youngman Carter. At around the same time, she resumed her writing career with The White Cottage Mystery (1928). This novella was first published as a newspaper serial and, as an innovation in deceit, the solution stands up against other classics of the genre such as Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Given the enormous popularity of crime fiction at the time, it was not surprising that the young writer would next try her hand at a full-length mystery and, in emulation of Dorothy L. Sayers and others, create a ‘great detective’. That first book was The Crime at Black Dudley (1929) and Allingham’s sleuth was the dilettante Albert Campion who may or may not have been a viscount or a baron … or even a King-in-waiting.
Campion would go on to appear in 17 novels, numerous short stories, and another novella, The Case of the Late Pig (1937). At her death Allingham left an unfinished 18th novel, which her husband completed; he would go on to write two more Campion novels and to start a third, which was completed on his death by Mike Ripley, who has also produced four other Campion novels so far. If Campion is Wimseyesque, his manservant certainly has nothing in common with Wimsey’s Bunter; the ‘large and lugubrious’ Magersfontein Lugg is a most original creation, ‘graceful as a circus elephant’.
As well as the Campion stories, Allingham wrote many other short stories and novellas, as well as a romantic thriller The Darings of the Red Rose (1930), originally published anonymously, and the non-series mystery Black Plumes (1940). There is also the trio of thrillers that were originally published as magazine serials under her own name but, when published in book form, were credited to Maxwell March, whom Allingham described as ‘a first class hack—he makes the cash’ and went on to note that ‘Margery Allingham thinks of her reputation’. That reputation rests not only on her ability, like Dickens, to create truly memorable characters and to capture the atmosphere of a place, but also on her considerable strengths as a writer and her clever and playful approach to the construction of a mystery.
However, Allingham’s best book may be her least well-known. Written at the request of an American friend, The Oaken Heart (1941) is set in the Essex village of Auburn which, even when the book was published, was readily identified as a lightly disguised version of Tolleshunt D’Arcy, the village where Allingham made her home after leaving London with her husband. Her only published book-length work of non-fiction, the book was acclaimed by contemporary critics as an outstanding portrait of how the inhabitants of a typical English village reacted to events, from the slow burning summer before the Munich Conference through to the arrival of evacuees and the coming of the Luftwaffe.
After the Second World War, Allingham would play her part in healing D’Arcy and she would go on to write more novels, including the book that many consider to be her best, the Campion thriller Tiger in the Smoke (1952) and the final novel to be published in her lifetime, The Mind Readers (1965), which sadly reads more like a children’s thriller than a mystery.
‘Room to Let’ was first broadcast on the BBC Light Programme on 11 November 1947, produced by Martyn C. Webster. It was previously published in the journal of the Margery Allingham Society and in strictly limited editions, on the same day, by the American publisher Crippen & Landru, and the small British publisher The Pyewacket Press.
A Joke’s a Joke
Jonathan Latimer
I remember it started the night Barnes played the joke on Tony Paletta. Barnes laughed that hearty laugh of his and hung up the telephone and said, ‘Will Tony be surprised when he gets down to the morgue and finds it isn’t his wife!’ He hit his thigh with the soft palm of his hand.
‘That’s not funny,’ Stewart said. ‘It’s a damn dirty trick. Try a joke on me and I’ll beat your brains out.’
Barnes just laughed. I never could make out if he was afraid of Stewart. He hadn’t played a joke on him up to this night I am telling you about, but I think it was only because he had been waiting for the right joke. It seemed as though Barnes had been set down on the earth expressly to play jokes.
It was a year and a half ago he came to work on the copy desk—sometime in November. I didn’t have much to do with him until he was put on the dogwatch in May. Until then I saw him only a short time each day and his hands were the one thing I noticed about him. They were very soft and white, like the well-cared-for hands of an old woman.
George used to tell me about his jokes. George didn’t like him very well because of the joke he played on Emma Doyle. She did obits and interviews for the paper and her eyes watered when she looked at anybody and there was always a wisp of mud-coloured hair across her cheek. Barnes played the joke on her in January, on the day after she had interviewed Kent Porter, the motion picture star, at the Palace Hotel. She had come back to the office, George said, full of cocktails and very excited over the intimate conversation she had had with Porter. He was the kind of man she hadn’t believed existed outside novels, she told George, pushing back the wisp of hair that was like a smudge of soot across her cheek. She was so excited she couldn’t work her typewriter and when Cowles, one of the rewrite men, offered to do her story and asked her what she wanted to write, all she could say was: ‘He’s simply divine! He’s wonderful!’
The next afternoon there was a phone call for Emma. It was Barnes imitating Kent Porter’s voice. He asked Emma if she would like to go to Hollywood with him. He said she resembled his mother and was the only girl he’d seen with whom he felt safe and would she go?
‘As your secretary?’ Emma asked over the telephone.
‘As my wife,’ said Barnes in Porter’s voice.
Emma’s face got pale and her eyes filled with tears and she ran into old Bronson’s office and quit her job and took a cab over to the Palace Hotel, George said. Only Kent Porter had left for Hollywood on the morning train.
Barnes thought this was a great joke even though Emma was too ashamed to come back to work and had to go live with her folks in Vermont when she couldn’t get another job.
He did pull some good jokes. You are bound to hit upon a funny gag if you keep trying long enough. He certainly tried. He had all the small-boy tricks: electric shock machines, imitation ink wells that looked as though they had been overturned and had spilled ink over everything, exploding cigars, a water-shooting stickpin device that buzzed when you shook hands with him—I don’t remember how many other things. And the faces he’d make! Suddenly he’d stare under the copy desk with bulging eyes, pretending there was a snake or something on the floor. Or he’d pretend he was dying of a heart attack. Once he put soap in his mouth and pretended he was mad. It got so nobody would pay any attention to him.
Nobody except Stewart. lt was Barnes’s laughter that annoyed Stewart—and his slapping his thigh with that soft old woman’s hand. ‘Shut up!’ Stewart would yell when we three were together on dogwatch. ‘Shut up or I’ll beat your brains out.’ Barnes would just go on laughing.
Most of the time we three got along well enough. We’d talk after the First Final had been put to bed. Barnes would talk about the jokes he had played and about his wife. I don’t know which he thought about most. I never saw his wife, but George met her with Barnes at Jacques’ Cabaret over on Whiteacre Street one Saturday night. He said she was beautiful. He said she sat at a table with Barnes all evening, tall and slender and dark. Barnes talked and laughed that hearty laugh of his; his eyes fixed on her face like an adoring hound dog, but she didn’t look at him. Her dark, oval face was impassive, uninterested, almost sullen. She had jet black eyes, but when she looked at you there were golden specks in them, George said. He wondered how Barnes had managed to marry her until he heard she came from a little town. Barnes had probably seemed like the best she could do.
Stewart, when he wasn’t sore at Barnes, would talk about women. He was a handsome man, and a lady-killer. He had a new girl every month or so. When most of us got involved with a woman we floundered around like a fish in a rowboat. But Stewart would make a clean break. They’d call him on the telephone just once. I don’t know what he’d say to them, but they’d never call again. They’d simply disappear from his world.
That was the kind of thing they’d talk about until the night Barnes played the joke on Tony, sending him down to the morgue to identify his wife. Of course, his wife wasn’t there. She’d run away from Tony three years before and hadn’t been heard of since. It was just Barnes’s idea of a joke. It certainly upset Tony. But what I am telling you about started that same night with a woman calling Stewart. I remember Stewart looking puzzled while he talked. I heard one sentence he said: ‘But I assure you I am nice when you know me.’
When he finished he came up to the city desk.
‘More girl trouble?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That dame called me just to say she doesn’t like me.’
For a week the woman called Stewart every night to tell him how much she disliked him. He was intrigued and tried to make a date with her. Each time the conversation was longer. Then, about the tenth day, she let him take her out to supper. He came to work that night very excited, saying she was the best-looking girl he’d ever seen. But she hadn’t promised him another date; had only agreed that he might possibly take her out to supper again.
‘I don’t understand what she wants,’ Stewart said. ‘I certainly never saw her before.’
Barnes burst out laughing.
‘What’s so funny?’ Stewart asked.
Barnes just laughed.
After a couple more weeks I could see Stewart was hard hit. With all his other girls he had set the pace, dictated how often and where they’d meet. But this one was different. She dictated. He’d been able to take her out to supper twice more, but that was all. She wouldn’t tell him her name or where she lived, or when they could have another date.
‘I’ve never seen a girl like her,’ he said.
Barnes shouted with laughter and slapped his thigh with his soft hand and later that night, while Stewart was out for coffee, he told me about her.
His wife was the woman on the phone. It was all a joke on Stewart. The idea was to get him really mad about her and then have him out for dinner. ‘Imagine his surprise,’ said Barnes. ‘Finding his dream girl married to me.’
The idea was to carry it on for two more weeks. ‘I’ll give him one more date with her,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
The next day he let the rest of the office in on the secret. Everybody thought it was a good joke on Stewart, figuring it was time he took a beating from a woman. And from then on Barnes chuckled all the time. He was certainly pleased with his joke. I think he felt the night Stewart came to dinner and was introduced to Mrs Barnes would more than even the nasty remarks he had taken from him.
In fact the score was being evened right along. One night Barnes was talking about some cornbread his wife had cooked.
‘Who wants to be married to a hag who can cook?’ Stewart said. ‘You can always hire a cook.’
‘Mary Lou’s pretty,’ Barnes said. ‘I’ll bet you she’s just as pretty as the girl who’s always calling you up.’
‘Don’t be dumb,’ Stewart said. ‘No girl with looks would marry a slob like you.’
Barnes laughed and slapped his thigh.
One night shortly after Barnes had let the others in on the joke, George dropped in to see me on his way home from a party. It was Stewart’s night off, and George said he’d seen him and Barnes’s wife dancing at the 21 Club.
‘She can act,’ he said. ‘You’d think she was nuts about Stewart. They danced cheek to cheek and most of the time she had her eyes closed.’
Later I asked Barnes when he was going to hold the dinner for Stewart.
‘After he’s had the date with her,’ Barnes said.
‘I thought you told me last week you were only going to let Stewart have one more date,’ I said.
‘I did,’ Barnes said. ‘I haven’t let him have it yet.’
I didn’t say anything, but I was just as well pleased, when the time came for the pay-off, that I had to work and couldn’t accept Barnes’s invitation to the dinner. Knowing, or maybe suspecting what I did, I would have been uncomfortable. George went, though, and I heard all about it.
