Death in Fancy Dress Read online

  It was a poor argument, but it served. I beguiled Jeremy out of the station into the usual tangle of people you always find round Charing Cross. The streets were slippery with the kind of ooze you mostly associate with February; churned-up snow made the going difficult for traffic; half-frozen men in thin overcoats sold two-penny canaries and clockwork mice and bunches of violets in the gutters; the crowds pushed, with the febrile peevishness of anxious, over-worked and under-nourished men and women, along the greasy pavements or were forced into the puddles in the gutter. They complained weakly and shrilly of splashed stockings and spats and told one another in high voices that So-and-So seemed to imagine he’d bought the whole ruddy pavement; and refined voices chimed in with, “Really, some people seem to imagine they’re better than other people, but if it comes to that, some people’s manners…”

  Jeremy looked at them without pity. “Did you ever see such a rabble? All of them sick of the lives they live, but too dispirited to try and change them. Why, their very physical make-up gives them away. Look at them—spindly shanks and narrow shoulders. Hullo!” He waved authoritatively at a passing taxi, that a choleric city gentleman had assumed was his, and jumped in. This trivial conquest seemed to hearten him considerably. He said in cheerful tones, as the taxi hooted in a vicious manner at a foolish girl in a blue coat who couldn’t make up her mind whether to cross or not, “On my soul, Tony, I’m beginning to savour the delights of my own funeral. I always think a corpse must feel very supercilious by contrast with the crowd. Not,” he added, cannoning against me as the taxi skidded at a dangerous corner, “that I expect to take my last journey in anything like such gaudy state.”

  At the Club old Porteous nodded to me civilly enough, but Jeremy might have been the Prince of Wales.

  “’Tisn’t often we see you here, sir,” he said.

  Jeremy agreed. “I daren’t, Porteous. It’s a grim confession but true. This place has a Medusa-like effect upon me. If I came here more than once in a blue moon I should be turned into stone. Let’s see, the youngest member, barring Mr. Keith, who doesn’t count,” he grinned at me affably, “is eighty-four, isn’t he?”

  “You’ve forgotten, Mr. Freyne, sir, that Mr. Summerhayes had a birthday last week.”

  There were no letters for Jeremy, who hadn’t announced his arrival, but I found a batch waiting for me. Two of them were important. One came from Eleanor Nunn, who had been Percy’s wife, and the other from a fellow called Philpotts of the Home Office.

  Eleanor’s ran:

  My dear Tony,

  Will you come down as soon as you get this? A ghastly thing is happening, and I must have your assistance. Hilary needs you, too.

  Eleanor Nunn.

  Now Eleanor Nunn isn’t a hysterical woman; she doesn’t transfigure mole-hills into mountains; she faced with the most amazing courage a position that must have daunted ninety-nine women out of a hundred. And she did that without any one’s help, so I knew that if she used a word like ghastly the position was likely to be pretty grim.

  By a sinister coincidence Philpotts made use of precisely the same expression. He wrote:

  My dear Keith,

  I see from a note in one of the papers that you are coming back on s.s. Andalusia with a number of notables. If you come and see me as soon as you dock, you may be able to prevent a ghastly thing happening. It concerns your kinsfolk of Feltham Abbey. I can’t impress too strongly upon you the fact that there’s no time to lose.

  Edward Philpotts.

  Now, if Eleanor Nunn is not given to hysteria, Philpotts is one of the coolest-headed men I have ever encountered, and if he spoke of something ghastly happening at the Abbey, you could be fairly sure the position was desperate. Moreover, his letter dovetailed with Eleanor’s. Precisely what he wanted me to do I couldn’t conjecture, for Heaven knows, I’m no sleuth; and in any case I’ve heard Philpotts observe more than once that though his departmental experts may sometimes make blunders, God help the country if the amateurs had a free hand. I was still brooding over this problem when I heard Jeremy’s voice pitched on a new note, saying, “Hullo, old chap. Anything up? Not bad news, I hope.”

  Mechanically I handed him Philpott’s letter. He glanced at it, said, “Your Feltham relations? What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Eleanor—Ralph—Hilary—any of them.”

  “Philpotts isn’t the man I take him to be if he’s losing any sleep on Ralph Feltham’s account; that chap was born to be hung. But—if he means Hilary, what the devil has the girl been doing?”

  I here remembered Eleanor’s letter and showed that to him, too.

  “Neither she nor Philpotts exaggerates,” I said.

  Jeremy was frowning over the second letter. “Is happening,” he repeated. “Not going to happen, as Philpotts seems to think. Tony, I think I’m on in this, if I have the chance.”

  “Thank goodness for that. Anything Philpotts wants requires about three men where he estimates for one. He’s the most flattering chap I know, in that way.”

  “The only difficulty is that I don’t quite see how I can invade this chap Nunn’s house without an invitation. I’ve never met the fellow.”

  “Nor have I, if it comes to that.”

  “Still, the Abbey was your home during Percy Feltham’s lifetime, and Eleanor Nunn is—what?—your step-aunt? She married your uncle.”

  “My aunt proper, I suppose, though she was so much younger than he that we’ve always been on ordinary Christian name terms. Anyway, you must come. There’s so much room at the Abbey they wouldn’t notice half a dozen uninvited guests.”

  Of course, Jeremy intended to come, so long as there was a ghost of a doubt as to Hilary’s wellbeing. So we left the club and went along to the Home Office, where Philpotts saw us at once. My first sight of the man gave me a tremendous sense of shock and made me realise more than anything else the gravity of the position. You don’t shake men of his experience very easily, and you certainly don’t shake them for trivial mysteries. And unquestionably Philpotts had been badly shaken. I remembered him as a rather bulky man, with a high fresh colour and a bland assured manner. His face to-day was haggard, with an unhealthy yellowish tinge to the skin; you could make out the bones of the skull, and there were hollows in the temples; his eyes alarmed me most. They had an expression, not of fear precisely, but of a kind of bitter despair. Now, when a man of resource and cool courage changes like that, it makes the most casual stop and think. Remember, here was a man who had tackled what had caused the most notable of his contemporaries to quail and own themselves defeated; he wasn’t disturbed and he never lost his sleep. But he was disturbed now, and I should not care to hazard how much sleep he had had during the past three months.

  I introduced Jeremy, and the haggard face grew eager. “I’ve heard of you,” he said. “You’re the fellow that brought off that amazing Turkish stunt four years ago. And there have been some other rather pretty tricks whose responsibility lies at your door, if rumour’s to be believed.”

  Jeremy said at once, “If there’s a row in the offing, sir, I’m your man. I’m popularly supposed to have been an Airedale in a previous incarnation.”

  Philpotts smiled, and said, “You shall hear the story. I warn you, it’s rotten enough. Sit down, Keith. You’re an invaluable link. I’ve got to have someone down at the Abbey on an apparently unofficial basis. I’ve got one official there, but he, of course, may very well be suspect. I want another chap behind the scenes to keep his eyes skinned. Recollect, we’re working almost entirely in the dark. Of course, if there are two of you, so much the better. You’d better light your pipes; cigarettes won’t meet the case, and cigars make me sleepy rather than thoughtful.”

  We settled down, and Philpotts began, “It’s a long story and a grim one. Also it has us for the moment pretty fairly beat. And when I say that it means a lot. I’ll confess immediately that
the puzzle is a long way from being solved, at the same time assuring you that that reflects no dishonour on the police force. I’d be the last man to pretend that it’s perfect—I know it too well—but it does attain a pitch of competence of which the laity have no conception. It’s no use asking the man in the street what he thinks of the C.I.D., for example. You might as well ask an idiot child what it thinks of the Greek alphabet. There’s another thing to bear in mind, and that is that the police don’t like mysteries. The public can’t believe that; they think, if there isn’t a mystery afoot, the police force is as restless as a kitten, going round trying to scrape up trouble. It’s different for the public; murders and suchlike make amusing and exciting reading and provide an immediate topic of conversation. And the press gets a lot of free copy and generally someone receives an offer to go on the halls for a few weeks until the general excitement has died down. I’ve met men who’ve told me solemnly that the average constable would rather strike a criminal than put a year’s pay on the Derby winner. They’ll tell you it means promotion, kudos, publicity, all the rest of it. Don’t believe all that trash. In the ideal state there wouldn’t be any crime; we should prevent it. The police realise that, if the rest of the world doesn’t.”

  Then he asked me how long I had been out of the country. I said seven months, and Jeremy, in response to a questioning glance, said two years.

  “Then probably you won’t have realised what’s been going on for the last year or more. Unless you were a very assiduous and observant student of the daily papers, it’s unlikely you would have noticed much, anyway. But you may have seen from time to time what’s called a crime cycle in process. I mean, a crime of a certain type is committed and almost immediately there follows a number of other crimes, more or less approximating to the first. There are various explanations for this. Some people urge that the mere reading of a sensational murder trial, or a bank hold-up, fires the imagination of the weaker-minded members of the community, the type that generally labours under the burden of an inferiority complex, and these forthwith go out to show they’re quite as good as the next man. Unstable people, naturally, are influenced by anything bold and ostentatious. You’ll remember for yourself the case of a child murder in the U.S.A. followed by another, with no motive whatsoever, immediately afterwards. And we have cases in English crime, Thorne after Mahon is one you’ll both remember, where you can at least argue that if the first hadn’t taken place, the second wouldn’t. But that doesn’t account for all cycles of crime, and it certainly doesn’t account for a large number of suicides taking place all over the country among people of every conceivable status and profession, in a variety of ways. At the same time, it’s bound to arouse suspicion in the official mind when a wave of suicide sweeps over a country, as it has swept over this one during the past twelve months.”

  Jeremy here interrupted to recall the cases of various millionaires who had, comparatively recently, committed suicide in different ways, without anyone suggesting a linking-up of the separate occurrences.

  “I should be quite ready to say that the first explanation covers that,” Philpotts told us. “A man, himself very wealthy but liable, like everyone else, in these chaotic times, to find himself suddenly plunged into ruin, reads of someone, whom he has regarded as perfectly safe, cutting his throat or taking poison or jumping out of an aeroplane, and insensibly his imagination sets to work; he sees the colossal odds against him, realises how easily he may be crushed, allows himself to get worked up to a state that borders on mania, and then if the market does tilt a little against him, it’s more than the over-strained nerves can bear. But I didn’t mean anything precisely like that, in the present instance. What has actually been happening is that during the last year men and women have been committing suicide with alarming frequency; and it’s noticeable that they are practically all people in what we term the superior walks of life. Either they’re people of rank and position, or they’re people with money. At the various inquests, the verdict might be Death by Misadventure or Suicide while of unsound mind. Well, that kind of thing couldn’t go on indefinitely without attracting attention. We instituted inquiries in case after case, tracked down half a hundred apparently irrelevant facts, with the result that we’re prepared to say that, in almost every instance, we can show that death was due to deliberate felo-de-se. I don’t by that mean that all the people concerned were sane at the time of their death; there comes a pitch when anxiety and fear rob a man of his normal balance. But before that ground of fear arose, these people were perfectly normal. Among the people—I speak in confidence, of course—were Sir Vere Poynter, who pitched himself out of a window; Admiral Bennett, who shot himself, accidentally, while cleaning a sports gun (a man who doesn’t shoot from one season to another, and they brought it in Accidental Death, God help them); Professor Robinson-Bries, who also shot himself and made no attempt to throw dust in the eyes of the world; Lady Millican, who took an overdose of veronal; that girl of Lady Pamela Raine’s, just nineteen, who strangled herself with her own silk stockings and left behind her the most pitiful letters to her father and lover I’ve ever been compelled to read. Then there were some rather peculiar swimming and boating accidents, accidents that ought never to have happened, and that excited more gossip, until it seemed to us as if all these inexplicable deaths might be connected, but we couldn’t find the master-key. We did, however, get more and more evidence to show that there was some mysterious agency at work under the surface, and a precious malignant one at that. The devil of it was we never knew where it would strike or from what direction. I began to be nervous of opening the morning paper. It appeared that in every case mysterious telephone calls had been received shortly before the death. The victim, even if in perfect health and activity up till that time, developed nervousness, irritability, an increased jumpiness whenever the telephone rang or the post arrived, and then came the final act of despair. No question of wilful murder, you understand. The devils were too clever for that. But further inquiries yielded something more. In practically every case, money in quite large sums had been raised, sometimes to the man’s or woman’s ruination.”

  “Must have been a ticklish job learning that,” observed Jeremy, thoughtfully, “what put you on the trail?”

  “We first got the idea some weeks after Louisa Millican took veronal. Her husband was a good deal older than she, a man of mixed Spanish and English blood, who had unexpectedly inherited the title. He worshipped the ground she walked on, and was absolutely bowled over by her death. In fact, we kept a sharp eye on him, fearing he might do himself some injury. Of course, there was no thought of suicide at that time. Everyone took the affair for a most regrettable accident. It was several weeks after her death that he was persuaded to go through her belongings. In his wretchedness he swore he would have nothing that had belonged to her in the house; he gave away her clothes, sold her silver and tortoiseshell toilet set, and sent her jewellery to X—be valued. His first intimation that there was something queer about the business was when X—informed him that the diamonds he’d always been so boastful about were extremely good paste. When he’d got over that shock, he had the rest of her jewellery examined, and practically everything was fake. Millican went to the man from whom he’d bought the diamonds, but he couldn’t help him. He knew nothing of the business of the false stones. So Millican employed a private inquiry agent and some very disquieting facts came to light. The trail of the original jewellery was unearthed, and every piece accounted for. Louisa Millican had acted with a good deal of discretion. She hadn’t had more than one fake made at any one house; but she must have realised thousands, for Millican was a tremendously wealthy man and would have taken the moon out of the sky if she’d asked for it. The affair broke him completely. He didn’t know what to think, and he had practically nothing to work on. But even an idiot could realise that she’d been at her wits’ end to raise money and hadn’t dared apply to him. He hunted down every possible avenue for som
e clue to the situation, but he didn’t learn anything. Of course, he was a devil for jealousy and he’d have strangled her if he’d discovered anything in the way of infidelity or deceit. Anyhow, she’d completely covered her tracks so far as he was concerned, nor could anyone discover who was responsible for bleeding her white. She did, however, serve our purpose, by furnishing a link in our chain of evidence. By this time we were sure that there was some connection between all these mysterious deaths, and that one agency was behind them all, though no doubt it employed various principals, considering how diverse was the position of the men and women in question. And there seemed no reason why these affairs shouldn’t continue to multiply, if we couldn’t trace this devil to his lair. We’d got, somehow, to stop the rot from the start.”

  “Blackmail on a tremendous scale? I see. A dirty business.”

  “Loathsome. And the fiend behind it was as clever as the devil. There were certain facts we could determine. One, at all events, of the principals, probably the chief one, was in society himself, and not only society in the limited sense of the word, but a society covering various phases, political, artistic, professional…”

  “Wherever, in short, there was money to be picked up?” That was Jeremy again.

  “Precisely. And so far as we could learn, not only money. Do you remember the Abernethy suicide? It isn’t three months old. There was an important political appointment to be made, and everyone imagined that an obvious candidate called Probert would get the job. It was so certain that the matter was hardly discussed. Then to the universal amazement Abernethy began to talk about a second choice, a man called Fletcher. We knew all about him. He was a rich chap, competent, brassy, but no imagination, no flair, none of the diplomacy such a job would need. Quite clearly he wasn’t the man for the position, and at first people were inclined to laugh at Abernethy. They wouldn’t take him seriously. Then, when he didn’t join in the fun, they became apprehensive. Wondered if he wasn’t fooling them. What did it all mean, then? There must be something behind this, and whatever that was, this appointment mustn’t be made. It would ruin the new Governmental policy to have a chap like Fletcher in an important position, and Abernethy, being a tried and normally discreet person, he wouldn’t have put the suggestion forward if someone behind him hadn’t been pushing him pretty hard. He was looking like a ghost, anyway, and his nerves were rotten. At last a personal friend approached him and told him that whatever pressure was being exerted, he’d got to drop this crazy notion of giving the job to Fletcher. Didn’t he realise, he was asked, what his position would be if this went through? Everyone would say he’d been bribed. And Abernethy, having tried at first to bluff it out, broke down and admitted that was about the size of it. This friend didn’t get the story out of him at the time, but the whole country knew it soon afterwards. Probert’s appointment was duly announced, and within twenty-four hours Abernethy had fallen in front of an Underground train. There was plenty of evidence forthcoming that his health had been rotten, that a doctor had certified him as suffering from vertigo, but no one paid any attention to that when one of the more lurid Sunday papers came out with a yarn about some disreputable piece of crooked dealing in which he had been involved some years earlier. The thing was very cleverly done; it would have been worse than useless to attempt a libel action, and very wisely Abernethy’s widow and son allowed the matter to drop. But there was another link in our chain.”