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  Contents

  Roy Vickers

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Roy Vickers

  Murder of a Snob

  Roy Vickers

  Roy Vickers was the author of over 60 crime novels and 80 short stories, many written under the pseudonyms Sefton Kyle and David Durham. He was born in 1889 and educated at Charterhouse School, Brasenose College, Oxford, and enrolled as a student of the Middle Temple. He left the University before graduating in order to join the staff of a popular weekly. After two years of journalistic choring, which included a period of crime reporting, he became editor of the Novel Magazine, but eventually resigned this post so that he could develop his ideas as a freelance. His experience in the criminal courts gave him a view of the anatomy of crime which was the mainspring of his novels and short stories. Not primarily interested in the professional crook, he wrote of the normal citizen taken unawares by the latent forces of his own temperament. His attitude to the criminal is sympathetic but unsentimental.

  Vickers is best known for his ‘Department of Dead Ends’ stories which were originally published in Pearson’s Magazine from 1934. Partial collections were made in 1947, 1949, and 1978, earning him a reputation in both the UK and the US as an accomplished writer of ‘inverted mysteries’. He also edited several anthologies for the Crime Writers’ Association.

  Chapter One

  Samuel Cornboise was murdered because he was a snob. Not the harmless kind of snob who wants to be admitted to ever more exalted circles—indeed, it is doubtful whether he could conceive of a circle of which he was not the centre. His snobbery was of the mystical kind. He believed in “birth and breeding.” In defiance of biological science and social history, he believed that a small percentage of the population possesses the power of transmitting to its descendants certain moral qualities which make them a natural aristocracy.

  “Take my case!” he would insist. “Born in a London slum. Finished schooling at fourteen. Slipped over to Africa when I was sixteen. I was fifty-six before I found out that I was heir to a barony, and it cost me thirty thousand to establish my claim in the courts. ‘The Bell-Hop Baron’ they call me in Africa—and why not! When I really was a bell-hop I knew I was the stuff of which barons are made!”

  Bell-hop, diamond miner, steeplejack, and whatnot! Yet at thirty he was a substantial man, and at forty a millionaire. He discovered in himself a talent for finance—the most mysterious of all talents to those who do not possess it.

  Though he could never interpret a menu with any confidence, he was at one time a hotel king. In one of his own hotels—if such words have meaning—he was nearly killed by an accident to an elevator. By a process which the initiated will accept without wonder, he brought and won an action against himself, damages being inflated by the fact that, for the rest of his life, he would have to wear a wig to conceal a silver plate set in his skull.

  After his convalescence, he abandoned hotels, to become something imperial in Ladies’ Footwear. He never directed these enterprises. He never organised anything, except figures on a blotting pad—generally someone else’s blotting pad. He went into a score of trades and out again, leaving behind him, not men thirsting for his blood, as one might suppose, but an ever-widening circle of admiring friends. He even seems to have ‘gone into’ himself—Cornboise Investment Trust Limited—and strangest of all, we must believe that he went out of himself as irrevocably as if he had been Ladies’ Footwear. When he retired and returned to England he had the greater part of three million pounds, most of it already converted into Government Stock.

  To make all that money in that way without going in fear of an accountant—or of a gunman—connotes a man of remarkable enterprise, intelligence and shrewdness. Behind his financial jugglery there must have been an acute sense of economic values. But human values were beyond his power of analysis. He sacrificed his personal happiness to an adolescent dream of an aristocracy that had never existed outside melodrama—the first sacrifice being his wife.

  Before he had floated his first company he married a respectable, buxomly attractive girl, who provided the domestic background he needed but was unable to provide an ‘heir.’ He separated from her, after discovering that her religious principles forbade divorce.

  In later life, his dream-interest centred on his nephew, the son of his elder brother, head potman of the Goat-in-Flames, an historic but otherwise obscure tavern in north London. When his brother was accidentally killed, Samuel, in effect, adopted the twelve year old boy, sent him to an expensive school, thence to Oxford with a fantastic allowance and every possible encouragement to get into mischief. It was Samuel’s idea of grooming him for inheritance of Samuel’s fortune.

  No doubt, Samuel’s delusions in the matter of blue blood would have remained an amusing foible, but for his freak inheritance of a dormant barony. It was Andrew Querk, his agent in England, who discovered the thin thread of evidence—Querk who engaged a team of lawyers and lineage experts. The thin thread was doubled and re-doubled on itself until it became a cable, which hoisted Samuel Cornboise into the peerage. The romantic nonsense about birth and breeding seemed to be translated into reality.

  On his retirement, he decided to ‘go into’ aristocracy as he had gone into Ladies’ Footwear, using much the same technique.

  The result was immediate disaster. Cornboise—the hero of so many financial epics—now correctly entitled Lord Watlington—had been in England scarcely a month before he set the stage for his own murder.

  In the interval between finishing lunch and taking his afternoon doze, he made three dangerous mistakes, the first of which was a witless under-estimate of Claudia Lofting, a vivacious brunette of twenty-six engaged to marry his nephew and sole heir. She was herself a sprig of impoverished aristocracy; she possessed, in addition to physical beauty and intelligence, most of the qualities which he fondly imagined to be aristocratic. Yet he thought he could afford to tell her to her face, in the presence of his nephew and Andrew Querk, that she was not up to the standard he required—thought it safe to offer to buy her off on liberal terms.

  By way of proof, he confronted them with letters written by Claudia before she had met Ralph—letters which seemed to Watlington to destroy her reputation. So that his trustees should make no mistake, he sealed the letters in an envelope containing his Will, which stipulated that his nephew’s bride should be “a woman of reasonable education and unblemished social reputation.”

 
Hitherto, he had been successful in dealing with humanity because both associates and rivals had been dominated, like himself, by the single purpose of making money. Claudia Lofting, as it happened, was dominated by a purpose that is much older and much more relentless than the purpose of making money.

  Ralph Cornboise, the nephew and sole heir, was equally lacking in the desire to make money. He desired, primarily, to live. He believed, with slightly more justification than is usual in such cases, that his life would not be worth living without Claudia.

  Thus, his uncle’s technique, which was based on converting opponents into allies, was doomed to fail. In this case, the technique followed the usual pattern of conciliation, beginning with an invitation to Claudia, also to Ralph, to spend a weekend at Watlington Lodge, ‘with me and my old friend, Andrew Querk, and to meet a few new friends at dinner on Saturday night.’

  On Saturday night, the guests duly arrived. But there was no dinner party because, by that time, the host was dead.

  In the county police headquarters at Kingsbourne, Colonel Crisp, the Chief Constable, had been kept at his desk throughout Saturday afternoon preparing evidence in a river smuggling case. As the Town Hall clock boomed seven he touched the bell push which summoned his aide, David Benscombe, a presentable, eager junior in the early twenties.

  “Let me have what you’ve done and you can knock off now.”

  “Thank you, sir. Have you finished?”

  “No. But I shan’t need you any more tonight. Better go, boy, while the going’s good … There! You’ve lost your chance. Take that call will you?”

  Benscombe took up the receiver.

  “The Chief Constable is in conference—I’m speaking for him … Oh-h! … Are you quite sure it’s murder? … Right, we’ll come along. Who are you, please? Hullo? Damn!”

  The last under his breath as he turned to his chief.

  “Lord Watlington murdered, sir. At Watlington Lodge. He’s that South African millionaire featured in the local paper three weeks ago. Shall I call Detective-Inspector Longley? As a matter of fact, I know he’s not at home—told me he was going up river to fish. There’s Inspector Bassett?”

  “No. I’ll go myself. You’ve lost your weekend, boy. Tell Bassett to call up the team. We’ll go in my car. They can follow us.”

  Colonel Crisp had held his present post for a few weeks only. He was, as it were, a permanent temporary Chief Constable, being seconded by the Home Office to any county that had need of his services. Behind him was a distinguished military career as a leader of guerilla troops. To look at, he was unimpressive. A little above medium height, he was broad and stocky. He slouched: all the pockets of his uniform bulged, so that he barely escaped slovenliness. His hands were noticeably large and seemed to have more than the natural complement of knuckles.

  During the war years he had become one of the world’s greatest experts in leading hand-picked bands of intelligent, civilised men in the dreadful business of inflicting death and destruction. His disciplined desperadoes had consisted mainly of ex-shop assistants, bank clerks and students; for he had discovered that the tough-guy type of humanity is not even tough. He was himself mild and unassertive in manner. He would speak with the same informal friendliness to judge and criminal, to the lowest and the highest, which sometimes astonished the highest.

  At twenty past seven, piloted by young Benscombe, he turned through the scrolled gates of Watlington Lodge—a late eighteenth-century manor house, with five acres of garden, some dozen miles from London, which had belonged to the family with which Samuel Cornboise had successfully connected himself.

  The house had been unoccupied for forty years. Arriving in England a month ago, Lord Watlington had moved straight in. The caretaker was still in residence. She had been supplemented by a temporary cook and two housemaids while he postponed the tricky business of engaging a domestic staff.

  A short, semi-circular drive brought them into full view of the house, an undistinguished rectangular block, the rectangle broken on the west side by the stables, built on to the rear of the house—rococo stables of tortured design, including a chiming clock set in an irrelevant turret.

  The garden—more grandiloquently, the home park—lay to the west of the house, from which it was screened by a tangle of yew hedges, clipped here and there into conventional shapes which had gradually become grotesque under years of inexpert maintenance.

  As the car rounded the bend of the drive, young Benscombe’s attention was caught by what he saw on the terrace.

  “Good lord, sir! I believe it’s a hoax!”

  The calm of a hot summer evening hung over house and garden. On the terrace was a score or more of wicker armchairs, flanked by an outsize cocktail cabinet. Three of the chairs were occupied. Between two men—one young, the other middle-aged—Benscombe saw an attractive girl in a light evening cloak.

  He stepped out of the car and hurried to the terrace.

  “The Chief Constable is here,” he announced. He paused a moment for their reaction, noted that the girl put her hand on the young man’s sleeve. The middle-aged man, Andrew Querk, beamed on him.

  “We are only guests,” he explained. “Lord Watlington will be here in a moment. In the meantime, on behalf of our host—”

  “We have had a telephone message that Lord Watlington has been murdered.”

  “Upon my soul!” mouthed Querk. “The Chief Constable, too, you said! This is most serious. I can only suggest that there must be some confusion of names. I would hesitate to suspect a practical joke.”

  In the meantime, the Chief Constable had entered the house by the front door, which was open. Bessie, the housemaid, was waiting in the hall to announce the guests.

  “Will you please tell Lord Watlington that the Chief Constable of the county would like to see him.”

  “Yes, sir. I expect he’s still dressing.”

  Bessie, who was willing but untrained in the niceties of her calling, scampered upstairs, to scamper down again.

  “He must be in the library after all,” she puffed. She crossed the hall, tried the door of the library, knocked and rattled the handle.

  “It’s locked. You’ll have to wait, sir, while I go round by the window and tell him—p’raps he’s still asleep.”

  “Don’t bother,” said Crisp. “Does he generally lock himself in?”

  “No, sir. He wouldn’t need. No one ’ ud dare go in while he was taking his nap.”

  Crisp saw a waiter carrying a load of table silver to the dining-room.

  “What exactly is going on here?”

  “A dinner party, sir. Those waiters and cooks have come down from London, as there’s only the caretaker and me and cook and another girl in the house. There’s cocktails at seven thirty, and dinner at eight.”

  “Right! Just carry on, will you. Don’t take any notice of me.”

  Benscombe had joined Crisp.

  “Those three outside are guests. They expect Watlington in a few minutes,” he reported.

  Crisp nodded. “Don’t let anybody follow me.”

  He went to the door of the library, bent to examine the lock. From one of the bulging pockets he took a small pair of double-action pincers, which gave him a firm grip on the protruding end of the key. He turned it and entered the library, closing the door behind him.

  Watlington was sitting in the swivel chair, which had been swivelled some forty-five degrees, as if he had been turning towards the wall-safe when death overtook him.

  That he was indeed dead was obvious from the face, the left side of which was contorted into a fantastic wink, while the right side was normal. The left hand was across the breast, the fingers and thumb bent at the joints so that the whole hand had a spiderlike appearance—a nightmare spider with a signet ring. By contrast, the right hand rested on the knee, relaxed—the natural position for the hand of a man who had dozed off in his chair. The left leg was bent at knee and ankle so that the toes alone touched the floor. The right leg was normal
ly relaxed.

  Crisp’s eye travelled back to the face, which looked like the halves of two separate faces welded together by a maniac. Added was a certain gruesome rakishness, due, Crisp thought, to the fact that the scalp itself was awry—until he realised that he was staring at a wig, slightly displaced.

  There was no obvious sign of external violence.

  “Looks like some kind of seizure,” ran his thoughts. “Probably while he was asleep.”

  All the same, he would have to proceed on the assumption of murder until the doctor had given a lead.

  He took in the objects immediately surrounding the body. Long writing table: telephone: three upright chairs at the opposite side of the table, with three writing pads in front of them. A small pearl-handled penknife on one of the writing pads. The wall safe. On the mantelpiece a hand-operated die-stamp. Why on the mantelpiece instead of the writing table? Go into that later.

  Mechanically, he ticked off the small detail of the objects. Watlington’s writing pad at an angle, liberally scrawled with pencil, the pencil lying on the pad. The pencil was of ordinary pattern, except that it had a white enamelled barrel, with the South African maker’s name impressed in red. Similar pencils lay beside each of the three blotting pads on the other side of the table—no, by the middle pad there was no pencil! Yet the middle pad, alone of the three, had been touched with a pencil—incomplete geometrical patterns—the handiwork of a ‘doodler.

  Last, he observed the room itself. Three walls were lined with bookshelves, heavily curtained, in the Victorian style. There were no books behind the curtains. The furniture, like that of the hall, was not old but merely out-of-date. There was a single window frame with sash windows ten feet high and five feet wide, counterpoised so that they could be raised or lowered with a light movement of the wrist.

  “The team is arriving, sir,” called Benscombe without entering the room. He added: “And the dinner party guests too!”

  After a glance round the room, during which he noted that the window was open at the top only, Crisp returned to the doorway.