Bodies from the Library 4, page 35
‘I don’t know. I wrote and asked him.’
‘Why not ’phone?’
‘I couldn’t. He is a traveller. I didn’t know where he would be.’
‘Do you expect me to believe all this? You say you have not been to the flat for four months, yet that spoon has your fingerprint, and you cannot show you were anywhere else at the time.’
At that moment there was a tap at the door. Gladys ran to it.
‘Thank goodness you’ve come, Dick! These men are detectives. Ann’s boss has been killed. Poison in his coffee. They say she did it!’
A well set-up young fellow entered the room. He had a clean, straight look and it was evident the scene that met his eyes astonished him. He went to Ann. who sat as though unable to move, and put his hand on her shoulder.
‘What does she mean?’ he asked.
‘Are you Richard Parker?’ demanded Goff.
‘I am.’
‘Did you tell Miss Yates to meet you in Shaftesbury Avenue last Wednesday evening?’
‘No. I was away. You—’
‘Dick!’ cried the girl, in anguish.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered, ‘but I was in Liverpool. I told you I was going.’
‘Her story,’ said Goff, ‘is that she could not have been in Howard’s flat because you had arranged to meet her. You say you were in Liverpool.’
‘I told her not to talk,’ said Gladys. ‘They found her fingerprints.’
‘There must be a mistake.’ Dick looked unutterably miserable, but his hand tightened on Ann’s arm.
‘Have you anything more to say, Miss? You knew he went to Liverpool. Why did you tell me he ’phoned you?’
‘Someone ’phoned me.’ Ann was persistent. though her tone was hopeless.
‘What did they say?’
‘They said—he said—he was in a hurry, but he was back sooner than he expected. Would I meet him at half-past eight in Shaftesbury Avenue, as usual. He never came, so I wrote to ask why—though I was sure I would hear in the morning.’
Dick looked puzzled. ‘I’ve just got back. I found her letter, and came round to see what had happened.’
‘You knew his voice?’ Goff was sarcastic. ‘You had no doubt who was speaking?’
‘His voice was not very distinct,’ said Ann, ‘but no one else knows where we meet, and no one else’—she coloured a little—‘no one else calls me Angel.’
‘Dick generally speaks distinctly enough,’ commented Gladys, tapping her cigarette-ash on a plate.
‘I am sure he does,’ said Goff. ‘That is good enough. Take her along, Harrold.’
‘Now, Miss Yates,’ began the sergeant, lumbering to his feet.
‘Not Miss Yates! The other one!’
‘Me?’ cried the fair girl, jumping up.
‘Yes, you! I arrest you, Gladys Fraser, for the murder of John Howard, and I warn you anything you say may be used as evidence.’
‘I didn’t do it,’ screamed the girl. ‘Dick! Dick! Don’t let them take me! It was Ann. Her fingerprint was on the spoon—not mine. I didn’t know the man!’
‘Best come quiet, Miss,’ said Harrold. ‘You can take anything you want.’
After a few painful minutes Goff was left alone with Ann and Dick.
‘Sorry if I frightened you, Miss Yates. I had to ask the questions, but I never thought it was you.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘How can it have been Gladys? Why should she do it?’
‘How did she know the poison was in his coffee? I never said so, and it hasn’t appeared in the papers. But that is a small point. It was really the ashtray and the spoon that let you out.’
‘But you said my fingerprint was on the spoon.’
‘So it is. The ashtray contained two kinds of ash. I expect you have noticed that Turkish cigarettes are oval and Virginia round. Howard smoked Virginia; so do you. Gladys smokes Turkish. The ash of a Turkish cigarette keeps its shape—look at that bit she knocked off just now. There was ash like that on the ashtray.’
‘Lots of people smoke Turkish,’ said Dick.
‘Quite true. All her cigarette ends had been thrown into the fire. Everything had been left straight and there were no fingerprints anywhere—except on that spoon. And that was left in the ashtray. Almost too easy, wasn’t it?’
‘You mean you were intended to find it?’ said Dick.
‘It was planted where we couldn’t miss it. And it was not one of Howard’s spoons. It is a fellow to this.’ He picked up one from the supper table.
‘Who but Gladys Fraser could wrap up a spoon with your fingerprint and put it there? Who but Gladys Fraser could have faked that ’phone message—knowing his pet name for you and where you generally meet?’
They could not answer. But Ann found it hard to believe her friend could be so treacherous. ‘Mr Howard did not know her. How could she go to him?’
Goff shrugged his big shoulders. ‘To go to him was easy. Perhaps she had something to say about you. He would listen to that. She was nearly caught. He collapsed after ringing for help. The doctor says death must have been almost instantaneous, and when the attendant found him his cigarette was still smouldering on the ashtray.’
‘But why should Gladys try to get Ann into such awful trouble?’ persisted Dick.
‘Perhaps you can answer that,’ said the Inspector. ‘You knew her before you knew Ann, didn’t you?’
‘About the same time. We all went together for a bit. Then I found it was Ann that I loved.’
‘And Gladys loved you! She thought if she could get rid of Ann she would have you. A jealous girl can be the very devil. I don’t know yet how she got the poison, but it won’t be long before I do. Anyway, I wish you luck. You deserve it.’
HERBERT ADAMS
Herbert Adams (1874–1958), described in his day as ‘the great thrill writer’ by the Daily Telegraph, is regarded nowadays as one of the lesser lights of the Golden Age of crime and detective fiction. He was born in 1874 in Barnsbury, North London, the son of Clara and William Adams, a senior official with the London County Council whose father had been a famous manufacturer of redware. From 1890 to 1895 he attended City of London School, where he excelled in practical subjects. After leaving, he trained with the Surveyors’ Institution (now the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors), qualifying in 1895, and moved into practice as an estate agent, auctioneer and surveyor.
In 1899, Adams published his first novel, A Virtue of Necessity, in which a young couple outwit a blackmailer. Its reception was mixed and, while a few short stories followed, he lacked the confidence that he could write on a full-time basis. In 1900, he married Jessie Louise Cooper, but funds were tight and the couple had to live initially with her mother in Paddington. Things were little better by 1911 as they were then living with her aunt in Hove.
Nonetheless, by the mid-1920s, at the age of fifty, Herbert Adams was confident enough to ‘give up work’ and become a full-time writer. Over the next thirty years he wrote more than fifty novel-length detective stories and thrillers—two under the pseudonym ‘Jonathan Gray’—as well as several lightly criminous romances including The Girl in Possession (1935) and The Lie She Lived (1936), and at least one historical novel, A Lady So Innocent (1932), about King Charles II and Catarina de Bragança. He also wrote journalism and a handful of short stories for regional newspapers like the Sheffield Weekly Telegraph and its biannual specials, as well as annuals like Summer Pie.
Adams has two main series characters. The first is Jimmie Haswell, a London lawyer and amateur detective who appears in nine novels, including The Golden Ape (1931), where a corpse is found in Haswell’s car, and The Woman in Black (1938), a superb mystery in which a man is accused of murdering his wife while he was disguised as a woman … only to be murdered himself the day after Haswell has secured his acquittal. Adams’ better known detective is Roger Bennion, a member of Britain’s Secret Service. Bennion appears in domestic mysteries like the bizarrely named Exit the Skeleton (1952), which finds him and his wife Ruth unravelling the truth behind the kidnapping of a child, as well as in wartime thrillers such as Stab in the Back (1941), featuring a double murder in a summer house, and Black Death (1939), wherein a professor’s ‘discovery to end all wars’ ends in his murder.
After the death of Jessie Adams’ aunt, the couple moved to Dorset, to Nairn Cottage in Canford Cliffs on the outskirts of Bournemouth, where Adams was something of a minor local celebrity, opening in 1935 a new library with two other crime writers, Vernon Loder and Gilbert Collins. He spent much of his free time playing golf at Parkstone Golf Course, a short drive away, and when the couple next moved it was to Wimborne Cottage, adjoining the links.
As he set out in his Who’s Who entry, Adams had two hobbies—travel, which he enjoyed with Jessie, and golf. He played regularly throughout his life and in 1935 was elected club captain at Parkstone. Golf crept into his writing too—in fact his second novel, The Secret of Bogey House (1924), begins with the hunt for a lost ball and ends with the golfer bringing about the capture of a gang of smugglers. Many of his later mysteries also have a golfing background, including The Body in the Bunker (1937), which is discovered through a badly sliced ball (and includes a debate about the ethics of the game), and The Nineteenth Hole Mystery (1939), which concerns murder in the clubhouse of a seaside golf links not unlike Parkstone. Adams also wrote The Perfect Round (1927), a very entertaining collection of amusing and sometimes ludicrous short stories about golf and golfers.
Herbert Adams died at Poole Road in Branksome, Dorset, on 24 February 1958. Jessie had died a few years earlier and he had been living alone in a Bournemouth hotel. He left over £25,000, equivalent to £600,000 or $800,000 today.
‘Too Easy’ was published in the Sunday Dispatch on 24 April 1938.
RIDDLE OF AN UMBRELLA
J. Jefferson Farjeon
This story may take you ten minutes to read, but it happened in five. In five of the most unpleasant minutes it has ever been my lot to endure.
I had missed the last train back to the sleepy village where I was trying to forget telephones and traffic, and from which I had wandered too far afield, and with a couple of miles still to go I came to a level crossing.
I was in the tired, dull mood, that pays no attention to surroundings, and my first intimation that I was anywhere near a railway was a bright red eye, high up on my left, staring unwinkingly at the pale moonlight.
‘How do you keep your eye open at this time of night?’ I asked the signal, as I passed through a little gate from the lane on to the faintly gleaming line. ‘It’s more than I can do!’
On the point of turning my head away, I saw something else. I often wonder what would have happened if I had not paused to make my idiotic remark to the unheeding red light.
What I saw looked something like an umbrella leaning at an angle against the base of the signal post.
This was not a usual place for an umbrella; so, bored to extinction, I walked a few yards along the track for the tiny interest of discovering what the object really was.
It was an umbrella.
‘How on earth did you get there?’ I inquired. Then followed a second thought. ‘Do I leave you there?’
I have lost countless umbrellas in my day, but this was the first time I had ever found one! Could human nature resist the golden opportunity?
Do not judge me too quickly if I admit that the moment beat me.
I removed the umbrella from its unnatural setting, hooked it over my arm—I still recall the queer little sensation as the curved handle gripped my sleeve—and went back along the line trying not to feel guilty.
Teasing queries revolved through my mind as I crossed the track.
‘Umbrella. Umbrella leaning against signal. How? Passing train? Fell out of passing train. Do umbrellas fall out of passing trains? Even if they do, do they land neatly on their ferrules? Not passing train.
‘Wind? Blown by wind? The umbrella would have been open. This one’s undone—untidy—but not open. And where’s the wind? Not wind.
‘Probably a pedestrian like myself just dropped it—and it bounced six yards—and pulled up at the signal with the self-control of an athlete—and its late owner never noticed anything! Why should he? It hasn’t rained for a fortnight!’
But these were not the points that teased me most and that caused me to pause at the second little gate leading into the interrupted lane.
The most teasing point was the late owner himself, whoever he might be. (The untidiness of the umbrella and its size—it was a large one—were sufficient to define the owner’s sex.)
I was walking off with his property, and I have a conscience of sorts. I do not even cheat over my income tax, though whether that is due to morality or fear of being found out I have never been able to determine.
Anyhow, I decided to replace the umbrella, and I turned back to do so.
As I turned, the red eye changed from its original colour to green.
You have probably seen signals change countless times. You may agree with me that there is a certain precision, a sense of inevitability, about the operation.
You would be surprised, for instance, if you noticed any hesitation or indecision or wavering. That is not to say that you would do anything about it.
I certainly imagined now that this signal had not quite behaved itself. I am not an expert on the subject, though I had recently had the system explained to me, yet I could have sworn that the red eye was not happy over its transformation and would have preferred to continue its ruby vigil.
The signal, as I stood with my back to the second gate, was slightly to my right.
Across the track, a short distance to my left, stood the signal box, dark below and illuminated above, like a little suspended chamber of uncertain light.
Well, of course, the signalman knew his job, so naturally I did nothing about it. My own job was to replace the confounded umbrella, and to get the silly business over as soon as possible.
Now that a train had been signalled, and the line was clear for it, I wanted to be off the track.
‘I’m developing nerves,’ I informed myself, as hurried towards the signal. ‘This won’t do!’
The green eye watched me while I replaced the property I had stolen. For some unexplainable reason, I wished it had still been the red one.
I say ‘unexplainable’ because I was not really worried about the train that was speeding towards me from some invisible source. There was as yet no sound or sign of it.
Hallo! What was that? A cat? My glance, travelling a little way along the faint streaks of track, had come to roost on a small dark object.
A little shadow that I expected to dart away as I moved towards it. But it did not dart away. Nothing tonight did what was expected of it. The cat turned out to be a cap.
I stared at it, my worry growing. Small, separate incidents seemed to be welding together with increased significance.
Umbrella against signal, cap on line. Let the signal itself go for the moment. Had the cap and the umbrella been lost by the same person? And where was the person?
The moon had slipped behind a heavy little cloud. Now it slipped out again. I looked farther along the line. And then I ran. There was no mistaking what I saw this time!
I came upon the man, face downwards, and stretched along six feet of steel, a few seconds later. Death can be deceptive, but I knew this man was dead. I knew too, when I touched him, that he had not been dead for long.
He was in his shirt-sleeves. (How did that fit with an umbrella? My distracted mind leaped from point to point without control.)
The shirt was still wet with blood. There was blood on his grey hair.
I paused for an instant and took a deep breath to steady myself. I had read about this kind of thing countless times. I enjoy good thrillers. But I had never come across it in reality. A very different matter.
The pause was only for an instant. Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed the green light. The fact that it was still green seemed a surprising blow for normality. It should have gone back to red, or moved on to purple!
Since it remained green, however, it opened the way to the invisible train that would flatten a corpse out of recognition if I did not quickly do something about it.
I gazed back along the track. Still no sign or sound of anything. I stooped once more and began my unsavoury task. I couldn’t lift the poor fellow. I am not particularly strong, and I was up against the origin of that expression ‘dead weight’.
I shoved and rolled him clear. The last part of the operation gave me a fresh shock. For a moment, in fact, I just didn’t believe it … Oh nonsense! …
But it was true. As I got the man clear of the line, I saw the length of steel he had been lying on. All of it was not bright and smooth and straight.
The man was gone, but something remained. A strip of iron, clamped to the steel rail in some devilish way.
And the signal was green.
I had raced to the man. Now I turned and raced in the other direction. I had to get back to the signal-box, and then yell to the signalman to turn the eye red again!
I started off at too great a pace, tripped and went flat. I rose with a bruise on my forehead. I also had another man’s blood on my clothing.
If anybody were wanted for murder, I was transforming myself into a perfect subject for suspicion, but I did not think of this till afterwards.
All I thought of as I clambered to my feet was a throbbing that started me running faster still—if that were possible.
I visualized the engine of the train; and the driver in the cab, unconcernedly continuing with his job; and the fireman shovelling coal, his face illuminated by the glow, and perhaps cracking a joke that would prove to be his last; and the revolving wheels that responded to the throbbing …
The throbbing that turned out to be just the throbbing of my heart.
I shouted as I ran. As the signal-box grew closer I expected to see a face behind the glass. No face appeared, though I almost broke my throat.
