Bodies from the Library 4, page 37
Lathman gasped. ‘My son Derry’, he repeated weakly.
Remaine laughed very gently.
‘Did you notice what the kid was clutching in his hand when we got him into the car, Lathman? Two White mice. Little furry toys. Telepathy—or chance?’
Lathman shook his head. ‘God knows,’ he replied.
E. C. R. LORAC
‘E. C. R. Lorac’ was the pen name of Edith Caroline Rivett (1894–1958). She also wrote under her own name and as ‘Carol Carnac’, named for her Rivett-Carnac relatives. A third pseudonym, the London-inspired ‘Mary Le Bourne’, has recently come to light and the one novel she wrote using that name—Two-Way Murder—was published by the British Library in 2021, over sixty years after her death.
Carol Rivett was born and raised in London. She attended South Hampstead High School, which she loved and where she excelled in art and design, with a particular interest in pattern. It is no surprise, then, to find that, after studying at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, Rivett became a teacher. In parallel with her career, she also took on private commissions and used her skills, particularly in calligraphy, to support good causes, whether national ones like Westminster Abbey or local ones such as the Lancaster Art Group. She also found time to write, authoring more than seventy books, most of which are mysteries, as well as a single radio play and a handful of detective stories, including some written for younger readers such as ‘Half-Term Hold-up’.
Regardless of the pseudonym under which they were published, Rivett’s novels generally conform to the so-called rules of Golden Age detective fiction. However, her detectives sometimes play fast and loose with the law, including suppressing evidence in Black Beadle (1934). Similarly, Rivett herself did not always play fair with the reader, for example in The Greenwell Mystery (1932), where a key fact is concealed until near the end of the novel. Nonetheless, her work remains very popular and first editions are much sought after, not least because many have superb jacket illustrations, in whose design it is not unreasonable to suspect that Rivett may have a hand.
Rivett’s crime fiction is characterized by a strong sense of place, and many are set in areas of Britain where she had lived or visited. These include the London suburb of St John’s Wood in The Sixteenth Stair (1942), the Sussex coast in The Affair on Thor’s Head (1932) and, in Still Waters (1949), the Fell country of Lancashire. Rivett loved Lancashire and set several books there, especially in the Lune Valley, where after retiring she lived with her sister Gladys until her death in a nursing home in 1958.
‘Two White Mice under a Riding Whip’ was published in the Sunday Dispatch on 8 May 1938.
SIGNALS
Alice Campbell
Diamond rain shivered in the headlights. Through it and the darkness the motorist peered at the small inn. Closed, or should be, in this gone-to-bed village; but was it? Surprisingly, the door gaped and the drawn curtains glowed red.
The traveller frowned upward. Then his dubious survey fell, like a bolt, to the swinging sign just above. In scarred crimson and gold, a lion pranced over the appropriate legend; but it was what writhed from the corner which chained his attention.
Fluttering in the March gale—a pale cobweb of silk—a woman’s silk stocking! He shut off his engine and stamped into the entrance.
Commotion met him—hell let loose—in the bar. Strident voices clamoured in unison, trouncing down an alien note of despair.
‘It’s not true!’ shrilled in anguish. ‘Oh, do let me go!’
Harsh yapping closed in; an angry pack at the kill.
‘What’s this?’ blazed the man at the doorway.
Six mottled faces spun round. At the seventh he stared hard.
It was young, drained of all colour, and from it glared eyes possibly grey, but now black discs of fear. Below them, an open, blanched mouth; above, torn, dusky curls.
A leaf-green coat was huddled over fragile underwear which moulded small, straining breasts. One arm was gripped by a landlord with loose paunch and hastily donned trousers.
Its mate squirmed in the clutch of a virago whose head was a barbed entanglement of steel pins. By a pulsating stove loomed a constable, ready to take over. There were three fillers-in, nondescripts all.
‘Stop! In God’s name—’
Balefully the captive cut in.
‘Need we have strangers in on this?’ she muttered defiantly.
‘Murderess!’ The steel pins shook. ‘And sneak-thief! Ruining of our ’ouse. Here, Alf Watterson, lock her up!’
The newcomer forced his gaze from the accused’s. He came forward, flung down a card.
‘I am a barrister,’ he said crisply. ‘Bletchley’s my name. Now, then! What’s the trouble?’
From the constable’s throat issued something like ‘Cor!’ In slight awe came the question, ‘Not the Mr Bletchley, sir? Guy Bletchley, is it?’
A curt nod. The landlord hitched furtively at his trousers. His wife took breath and tightened her hold. ‘Picked him up, she did,’ snarled she venomously. ‘Oh, I seen her whispering to him in the coffee-room! Cos why? The big wad of notes he showed when he was settling for his supper.
‘Proper gentleman he was, too. Missed his train, had to stop …’
‘She bashed in his head,’ explained the constable, ‘when they was all gone up. Mister and missus heard the row ten minutes ago, first in her room, then on the landing above.’
‘Just a minute,’ said Bletchley. ‘Is she staying here?’
‘Yes, she took the room next to his.’ The hostess sniffed with evil meaning. ‘A-purpose to rob ’im—after ’anging about till she’d made sure wot he was good for.
‘Well, we nabbed ’er leaning over his dead body, out ’ere at the foot of these stairs. She’d his wallet in her ’and—and she was just ’opping it for the street!’
‘No!’ wailed the girl. ‘Oh, can’t you see? The wallet had fallen …’
‘So you just picked it up tor luck, eh?’
‘I was trying to discover who he was.’ She gave A piteous gulp. ‘That is … his face seemed so familiar. I wondered if …’
‘Save that for the jury!’ muttered the landlord. ‘Or think up a better one. Well, Alf …?’
‘Quiet, please!’ Bletchley held up his hand. Still curtly he said: ‘Let the accused tell her version.’
She shrugged, running the tip of her tongue along dry lips. Then she spoke in low, terrified jerks.
‘I was on my way to—to Cornwall. I lost my train connection. So, as it was raining hard, I had to come here for the night.
‘This man—the one who’s dead—was beastly—tried to talk to me. I got away, upstairs, locked myself in—never dreaming he was stopping here too, and had the room next to mine.
‘I—I came out to find the bath. He was there, in the dark, lying in wait for me.’ Her face twisted. ‘He—he put his hand over my mouth. Pushed me back. I fought with him …’
‘We heard!’ sneered the landlady. ‘But it was a good hour after the ’ouse was quiet. Afore that I’ll bet there was whisperin’ and canoodlin’—just them two, alone on that floor.
‘When he was on to her tricks I dessay he did go for her …’
‘It’s a lie! I struck him, yes, with a candlestick. I’d have hit harder, only he was holding me, smothering me with his horrible fingers. If I have killed him, why should I care? He toppled back, down the steps.
‘When I saw him at the bottom, lying so still, I—I had to run down to see …’ Her sentence died in her throat.
Bletchley asked curtly: ‘Where is the body?’
The constable led him out into the stuffy passage.
Across the lowest stair it sprawled—a powerful form, wrapped in a tailored dressing-gown of dark brocade.
Even for death the upturned face was arrestingly leaden. Good-looking once, it had lost its contour, and the bags under the blank eyes were tinged a sickly violet.
‘That wound didn’t kill him?’
With scorn Bletchley studied the cut on the temple from which oozed a sluggish trickle of scarlet
‘Take a look at that pouched skin. You’ve sent for a doctor?’
‘Just, sir. So you think it may have been …?’
‘Heart. Fairly obvious, I’d say. Wait. Turn the lamp. Good God!’ Bletchley uttered a low whistle.
He walked back to the bar. With ascerbity he announced:
‘This man has died of a heart attack. Incidentally, I am not surprised the victim found his features familiar. Why, every paper in England has printed his picture! What was he calling himself?’
‘James Banks,’ wavered the landlord, ‘of Maidenhead.’
‘Oh? Well, five years ago I prosecuted him at the Old Bailey. He’s Vaughan Marshall—just released from Parkhurst Prison!’
A stunned hush.
The constable murmured. ‘Gor!’ Then, uncertainly, ‘fraudulent promoter, wasn’t he?’
‘And other things.’ Bletchley spoke with revulsion. ‘You’ve my word for it, he was a criminal of a singularly foul type. If it will save trouble, I’ll remain to give formal identification.’
‘Very good of you, sir,’ began the constable, and stopped.
‘Killing’s killing, I say.’ The landlady, releasing her charge, thrust forward and thumped a beer-stained table.
‘Here,’ she rasped, and lifted a weighty brass candlestick, ‘is wot she done it with. And here’—pointing to a gold-rimmed pocket-book—‘is wot she done it for. I’ve eyes, let me tell you. One wink, and she’d ’ave been off!’
Coolly the barrister took up the wallet—unmarked. He abstracted its roll of treasury notes, secured by a rubber band.
‘Rubbish!’ He tossed back the exhibit. ‘What was to stop her helping herself to this money? As you see, she made not the slightest attempt. Officer, are you preferring any charge?’
‘We’ll have to detain her, sir,’ said the constable awkwardly. ‘Leastways, till the coroner’s had his say.’
‘Right!’ Bletchley turned to the girl. ‘You quite see the necessity, of course?’
‘Y-yes … oh, certainly,’ she agreed, but for the split second she faced him her eyes were glazed with stark tragedy …
‘Anything that’s—right. Only …’ With an hysterical catch she hugged the green coat over her breast and knees. ‘I’m—not presentable. And I’m cold … If I could just have a minute in my room?’
‘More games!’ spat the landlady. ‘Clearing up traces, eh?’
Bletchley grated: ‘That will do! You’ve had my opinion—an experienced one—as to why this lecherous brute died. As for your other vile notion, why, I’ll drill a hole through it now.’
He leant over the table, compellingly, gathering eyes.
‘What woman,’ he demanded, ‘prepares for a rendezvous with a man by greasing her face for the night? Yes,’—with heavy sarcasm—‘and by washing her stockings and hanging them out to dry?’
Jaws dropped. With one accord curious gazes searched the prisoner’s cheeks—her naked, slight ankles. The landlady kept her wits. Shrewdly she fired:
‘And how’d you get this bit about washing out stockings?’
‘That’s perfectly simple! On your inn-sign outside there’s a wet stocking lodged. Evidently blown down from a window. Go, see for yourselves.’
The long shot came off. When the inquisitives thronged out, Bletchley swerved to the stove and threw wide the hot shutter.
‘Now,’ said he, softly, and followed the crowd to the door.
The girl’s hand darted to her coat-pocket. Paper crackled as she flung the letters in the stove.
‘I …’ she faltered, but Bletchley did not turn. Barring the doorway with his broad shoulders he mumbled: ‘Don’t spoil it …’
She collapsed on to a chair.
The inquest was over. As the coffee-room emptied, Bletchley waited by his car outside, listening to the comments which filtered past.
‘Heart conked out on him. Well, and why not? Bloke like that, wot had gone the pace, and done a stretch. Pop off like nothing, he would—and a good job, too!’
‘Deserved what he got—first crack out of jail getting his skin full of drink and making passes at an ’elpless girl. Good-looker, wasn’t she? And young …
She slipped forth humbly, lugging her weekend case. Bletchley bowed, hat in hand. He said:
‘So that’s cleared up. May I drop you at the station?’
Circled with stares, she hesitated.
‘Thanks,’ said she stiffly, and got into the front seat.
Upright, not speaking, they sat as the car edged down the cramped street and out of the village. Well away nestled the station. They whizzed past it at sixty. Green downland now—and no eye to see.
Bletchley slowed, bent his head, and with deep tenderness kissed the strained face at his side.
‘Tell me,’ he bade.
‘That message of his was a trick.’ Her lips formed it brokenly. ‘He guessed I would sneak off to be safe from him. So he let me think he’d be released tomorrow—in order to catch me unawares.
‘I know now that at the very moment you and I were telephoning our plans he—he was hiding in my flat. So he heard all we were saying.’
‘The swine!’
Swiftly he fitted it together—vindictive threats, follow by a surprise arrival; the released prisoner lying low, later to profit by the little private, silly signal which was to lead Bletchley to the obscure inn, where the fugitive would be sleeping, waiting to be picked up.
That had been her idea—a stocking left dangling outside a window. They had neither of them remembered the name of the inn.
‘So he changed his scheme, after the bit of eavesdropping?’
‘Naturally! It was better to catch us both—together.’
‘To work a hold-up, you mean? Absurd. Marshall must have been mad to imagine anything he could drag up out of your poor little past could matter two hoots to me. Letters you wrote, at the age of nineteen, to an oily-tongued scoundrel.
‘But there’s one thing I don’t understand—why did you pretend not to know me?’ he asked.
She spoke slowly: ‘I thought that they would not suspect you, as a stranger, of wanting to help me. And I needed help to burn those letters.’
‘But did they matter, my dear?’ said Bletchley. ‘What could they have told me that I didn’t already know? The past!—we live for the future now my decree is through.’
‘But your decree was not through,’ she answered, ‘and if those letters had not been burned there would have been no decree—and no future for us.’
Bletchley knit his brow. ‘How could your letters to Marshall have affected it?’ he asked.
‘No, my dear,’ she said bleakly, ‘your letters to me; he stole them from my flat.’
ALICE CAMPBELL
Alice Dorothy Ormond—best known in America as Alice Ormond Campbell and in Britain as Alice Campbell—was born in 1887 in Atlanta, Georgia, a city that some of her ancestors had helped to found. The youngest of four children, hers was a precocious talent. Her first poem, ‘The Story of Tallulah Falls’, was published when she was only ten and her first short story, ‘The Autobiography of a Very Old Doll’, appeared two years later. Both were published in the Atlanta Constitution, a newspaper whose city editor was her elder brother, Samuel. However coincidental (or not)that might have been, it was not long before her poems started to be reprinted in other newspapers and by 1901, the fourteen year-old was reported to be writing a ‘two volume novel’. If that was ever completed it did not find a publisher, but after graduating from Atlanta Girls’ High School, short stories did appear from time to time, including ‘White Nurse’ in the prestigious Ladies Homes Journal, ‘Roulade’ in Uncle Remus’ Magazine and ‘The Silver Lamp’ in the Topeka State Journal.
At the age of nineteen and accompanied by her widowed mother, Alice Ormond moved to New York to study music and foreign languages, and to continue writing. A year later she moved to Paris, where she renewed an acquaintance with a young Virginian whom she had first met in New York. James Lawrence Campbell was also a writer and he had ambitions to become a playwright. They were married in 1913 and their first child, named Lawrence, was born in 1914. As the First World War engulfed Europe, the couple moved to 32 Albion Road in the central London suburb of St John’s Wood where they had two more children, Florence and Robert.
Although Alice Campbell was proud of her American roots—her great grandmother had been murdered by Seminole natives—she lived most of the rest of her life in London and is usually thought of as a British writer. Her books often have European settings and a mix of American and British protagonists, while there is always a young woman confronted by danger and mystery. Her first, Juggernaut (1928), was filmed in 1936 with Boris Karloff as the central character, a doctor who is only too ready to take care of his patients. Others include The Murder of Caroline Bundy (1933), a mystery that includes a search for the Holy Grail, and They Paid the Price (1937), which features the theft of a valuable Manet painting from a Parisian gallery and was published as Death Framed in Silver (1937). Particularly noteworthy are the superb wartime thriller The Chimney Crashed (1937), published in book form as Travelling Butcher (1944, in which an air raid leads to multiple murder and an unusual treasure hunt, and A Vicious Circle (1934), published the same year as Desire to Kill and succinctly summed up by one critic as ‘murder committed in a roomful of thirteen guests at the height of a wild dope orgy’. As well as novels and short fiction, she wrote poetry and a psychological drama, Two Share a Dwelling (1935), which achieved moderate success on the London stage.
‘Signals’ was published in the Sunday Dispatch on 15 May 1938.
A PRESENT FROM THE EMPIRE
G. D. H. & M. Cole
Lady Bowland leaned back in her chair with a suppressed sigh of relief as the entrée went round and parted her for a blessed few seconds from the man on her left.
