Bodies from the Library Page 14

  ‘Why, of course, Professor Wanless. I wouldn’t say—’

  ‘Are you absolutely certain these fouling were cobwebs?’ Wanless was cold and inexorable. ‘Would you swear, for instance, on oath that they were these and nothing other?’

  ‘What—what else could they be?’ Mr Blayne was troubled. ‘They appeared to me to be cobwebs, anyway.’

  ‘You also state’ (another paragraph was found) ‘you blew these “cobwebbings” out of the mechanism of the secret lock. Had they been cobwebs, Mr Blayne, could you have blown them out of that intricate and tiny machinery? I really doubt it.’

  ‘I blew out what was in the lock. That’s all I can tell you.’

  ‘Ah, that’s heaps better!’ Wanless was satisfied. He opened a little box and passed the bottom half of a padlock to the jeweller. ‘That’s an ordinary lock,’ he said, ‘but spiders’ threads are in it. Blow them out, Mr Blayne—please try.’

  After a while Blayne had to admit the feat was impossible. The Professor smiled and took back the padlock.

  ‘And now, Major Helmerdyne, prepare to sacrifice a modicum of your intelligence to the cause of pure science.’ Wanless twitted his friend and took a walnut from the box. ‘You have a blow at this: only a trifling blow, mark you.’ He pulled at the walnut and its shell came into two parts. In each was a webbing, grey and dusty, yet viscous; a webbing such as spiders make. ‘And you, Mr Blayne, might recognise this contrivance as a simple model of the cleft heart of the chiavacuore—and its contents.’

  Blayne was emphatic, without doubt, he said, he was looking once again at the stuff he had seen in the heart lock.

  ‘Now, Mayor—blow!’

  After a minute or two—‘My God,’ sighed Helmerdyne, deep with awe, ‘what an uncanny experience to undergo! Music and—and—oh, all sorts of—’

  ‘Detail is not necessary,’ Wanless curtly told him. ‘We’ll pass the test. Get yourself a drink … Maybe you’ll take one as well, Mr Blayne?’

  They were drinking when the butler magnificently announced to them: ‘Prince Erick von Hodenburg-Sturmheim.’

  ‘This,’ said Professor Wanless, coldly, ‘is His Highness the Rogue, Mr Blayne. Pray do not exert yourself to rise and batter him—sit down, Mr Blayne—sit down! With the addition of a woman’s costume, a lot of greasepaint and some veiling, here you have the lady who negotiated with you over the Hodenburg-Sturmheim chiavacuore—a girdle made for Beatrice Giola de’Medici in fifteen fifty-five. This is, also, of course, the person who stole fourteen thousand pounds’ worth of the property of Messrs Blayne, Ridley and Cowperthwaite.’

  The slight figure of the prince would have been seated. His deadly hazel eyes calculated, but his lips smiled.

  ‘Keep on your feet, young man; keep on your feet!’ Wanless was terrific. ‘How dare you?’

  ‘I believe you have the right,’ His Highness of Hodenburg-Sturmheim bowed mockingly. He spoke in perfect English. ‘By the way, about this affair of the jewels … I quite acknowledge my game has come to loss. I also appreciate I must return to this good jeweller the property of his I am—ah—detaining at present. Your rather too explicit command for me to present myself here tonight, Professor, leaves me no option.’

  ‘That, or ruin throughout Europe, Prince. There are ways and means, you know …’

  ‘I abhor details; so tedious, don’t you think?’ Self-confessed rogue as he was, the Prince did not lack for assurance. ‘However—what I should like to learn is how you managed to get on my track. I had thought my little scheme a faultless thing; disguise, action and everything.’

  ‘Every criminal makes his one mistake,’ Wanless icily stated. ‘Yours was four centuries old—it waited for you.’ Hodenburg-Sturmheim looked puzzled. ‘You never realised that your heart-lock of the chiavacuore was suggested to Cellini by your Medici ancestress’s crest, the scimitar by the Hodenburg-Sturmheim crest … The tiniest of clues, to me, but all sufficient.’

  ‘The devil take it.’ The Prince’s face worked in sheer anguish. ‘I—I certainly hadn’t dreamed of that.’ He was furiously quiet for a time, then he shot out, arrogantly: ‘I congratulate you on your patient work, Herr Professor! But how the good Blayne was trapped into opening his silly safe and into handing me part of his firm’s wealth together with my own chiavacuore—most deferentially escorting me to his shop door afterwards and bowing me out under the nose of his commissionaire—will never be told. That’s a secret trick I’ll try on the next fool I decide to loot. For loot I must, or sink.’

  Professor Wanless then showed to His Highness the Prince of Hodenburg-Sturmheim two half shells of an emptied walnut. In one half was cobwebbing. In the other, Helmerdyne had breathed his breath. ‘Would you like a dissertation?’ he asked.

  ‘Ach, nein—nein!’ The Prince was confounded into his mother tongue. ‘Das ist Sache … Herr Professor, das weiβ ich schon auswendig!’ He grasped and controlled himself: his look was grey murder. ‘I—I really must have under-estimated the profound British Intelligence Corps,’ he finally drawled.

  ‘You have travelled extensively in the Fijian Islands, Prince. You would doubtless utilise that cunning brain of yours to some evil purpose; you couldn’t help. You would not miss the kau-karo tree, the “itchwood tree” as we call it. And you would learn, trust you to do that, about the essences of the tree: so potent that a tiny drop exuded from one oblong leaf can cause intense irritation and, occasionally, blindness. And you would inform yourself all about the sap’s distillation into a drug of the mydriatic genus—a powerful hypnotic causing the mind to conceive and imagine all kinds of erotic nonsenses.

  ‘And, my scion of the Medici breed, being atavistic out of the failure of that breed,’ the listener writhed, ‘your uncanny intellect seized on the human element of the stuff. Probably you knew that medicinal men had tried it, along with atropine, and the rest, but had abandoned it because of its loathsome effect on the brain. Yet you did not scruple to employ it against an innocent subject like Mr Blayne.

  ‘The Fiji islanders crudely tap the kau-karo, whereupon its sap coalesces into a cobwebby substance which again resolves in such gases as the human respiratory system can exude. My idea is that you took this process of coalescence to its Nth degree—prepared a pure and most powerful substance, almost instantaneous in its horrible effects. I also argue that you introduced this substance to the four-fold lock of the girdle and to the razor spicule of the cabochon diamond pip. You had Mr Blayne both ways.

  ‘He did all you wanted him to do. Not only did he sit himself and so introduce the poison for a time to his bloodstream but he vaporised it and inhaled it. After that he was your helpless creature—like a drugged and dreaming Fiji islander, helpless in the undergrowth, a clod. Then you commanded him and robbed him. Whatever you told him was transmogrified into tiny ecstasies. He joyfully obeyed.’ The fascinated eyes of the Prince answered all this. ‘And now,’ snapped Professor Wanless, ‘remains your restitution.’

  ‘I have—I have no choice in the matter. Blayne will get his jewellery back in the morning, intact.’

  ‘More than that is required … Mr Blayne has suffered in many other ways,’ Wanless purred. ‘Seven days of agony of mind and business loss have passed since you visited him. You will pay Mr Blayne five hundred guineas a day for all that period—and a thousand guineas you will have to find for some charity.’ Wanless still purred. ‘It’s no use looking like that—you are still comparatively speaking, wealthy, for all your talk of poverty and sinking. You’ll do as I say.’

  Prince Erick von Hodenburg-Sturmheim drew himself up and clicked his heels together. His rodent mouth snapped like a trap.

  ‘I am a player in the game of the world,’ he said, ‘and I know how to lose.’

  ‘Good enough!’ Wanless waved him away. ‘Glad to hear it—a Merry Christmas to you and—now clear off!’ He turned to Major Helmerdyne. ‘Do you mind,’ he questioned, ‘opening the window?’

  VINCENT CORNIER

  Fro
m the late 1920s to the early 1950s short stories of crime and detection were phenomenally popular throughout the whole of the English-speaking world. As well as magazines, many daily and weekly newspapers carried fiction, and while many of those who wrote primarily for this market were no better than hacks, paid by quantity rather than quality, some stood out—and none more so than Vincent Cornier. In a career spanning over forty years Cornier produced more than a hundred puzzles of crime and the supernatural as well as some stories of romance and adventure.

  Born with the rather plainer surname of Corner in 1898 in what was then the North Riding of Yorkshire, the writer who would become Vincent Cornier started at an early age. Indeed, he once told Frederick Dannay, half of the ‘Ellery Queen’ partnership, that he had sold his first fiction while still a teenager, although none of these early works has yet been found.

  In 1915, Corner was called up and joined the Royal Flying Corps, serving in northern France. After apparently being invalided out, he married and, rather than returning to his pre-war employment as a ‘dental improver’, he joined the Yorkshire Post, one of the oldest newspapers in the country.

  Happily, an inheritance allowed him to become a freelance writer, for which he adopted the surname Cornier, and produced dozens of articles on subjects as diverse as Satanism and the impact on Britain of rising numbers of American tourists. His fiction also began to be published widely in British and Australian newspapers, with early works including ‘The Waiting House’, a lightly criminous ‘yuletide yarn’ published in an Adelaide newspaper in 1925, and a series of Secret Service Stories featuring Sir Richard Thorreston Brantyngham. More stories followed—dozens and dozens of them, some reworking the same ideas and situations—and Cornier introduced new series characters including Home Office pathologist Michael Featonby and, in the early 1930s, Barnabas Hildreth, known as ‘The Black Monk’ and, like Brantyngham, an intelligence officer. Foremost among Cornier’s sleuths is the partnership of Professor Wanless and Major Helmersdyne, who appeared in several novella-length stories including ‘The Girdle of Dreams’.

  Cornier’s unusual plots and outlandish titles suggest an eccentric turn of mind and his work is characterised by extensive knowledge of arcana and the occult as well as plots that rely on bizarre murder methods or which turn on obscure aspects of geology and other aspects of the natural world. Cornier uses out of the way knowledge to create ‘impossible’ crimes, such as a shooting inside a locked room in which no weapon can be found, or extraordinary events such as a worldwide outbreak of spontaneous combustion or the resurgence of mediaeval plagues. Often implausible, sometimes preposterously so, Cornier’s work is nonetheless always entertaining. While his career as a writer declined after the Second World War, when he took up teaching journalism, Cornier continued to produce new fiction from time to time, mainly for the American mainstay of short crime and detective stories, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He died in 1976.

  ‘The Girdle of Dreams’ was first published in the Sheffield Daily Independent’s Christmas Budget for 1933, where it was discovered by the Cornier scholar Stephen Leadbeatter.

  THE FOOL AND THE PERFECT MURDER

  Arthur Upfield

  This story was written in the late 1940s, and some characters behave in a way that reflects the prejudices and insensitivities of the period.—T.M.

  It was Sunday. The heat drove the blowflies to roost under the low staging that supported the iron tank outside the kitchen door. The small flies, apparently created solely for the purpose of drowning themselves in the eyes of man and beast, were not noticed by the man lying on the rough bunk set up under the veranda roof. He was reading a mystery story.

  The house was of board, and iron-roofed. Nearby were other buildings: a blacksmith’s shop, a truck shed, and a junk house. Beyond them a windmill raised water to a reservoir tank on high stilts, which in turn fed a long line of troughing. This was the outstation at the back of Reefer’s Find.

  Reefer’s Find was a cattle ranch. It was not a large station for Australia—a mere half-million acres within its boundary fence. The outstation was forty-odd miles from the main homestead, and that isn’t far in Australia.

  Only one rider lived at the outstation—Harry Larkin, who was, this hot Sunday afternoon, reading a mystery story. He had been quartered there for more than a year, and every night at seven o’clock, the boss at the homestead telephoned to give orders for the following day and to be sure he was still alive and kicking. Usually, Larkin spoke to a man face to face about twice a month.

  Larkin might have talked to a man more often had he wished. His nearest neighbour lived nine miles away in a small stockman’s hut on the next property, and once they had often met at the boundary by prearrangement. But then Larkin’s neighbour, whose name was William Reynolds, was a difficult man, according to Larkin, and the meetings stopped.

  On all sides of this small homestead the land stretched flat to the horizon. Had it not been for the scanty, narrow-leafed mulga and the sick-looking sandalwood trees, plus the mirage which turned a salt bush into a Jack’s beanstalk and a tree into a telegraph pole stuck on a bald man’s head, the horizon would have been as distant as that of the ocean.

  A man came stalking through the mirage, the blanket roll on his back making him look like a ship standing on its bowsprit. The lethargic dogs were not aware of the visitor until he was about ten yards from the veranda. So engrossed was Larkin that even the barking of his dogs failed to distract his attention, and the stranger actually reached the edge of the veranda floor and spoke before Larkin was aware of him.

  ‘He, he! Good day, mate! Flamin’ hot today, ain’t it?’

  Larkin swung his legs off the bunk and sat up. What he saw was not usual in this part of Australia—a sundowner, a bush waif who tramps from north to south or from east to west, never working, cadging rations from the far-flung homesteads and having the ability of the camel to do without water, or find it. Sometimes Old Man Sun tricked one of them, and then the vast bushland took him and never gave up the cloth-tattered skeleton.

  ‘Good day,’ Larkin said, to add with ludicrous inanity, ‘Travelling?’

  ‘Yes, mate. Makin’ down south.’ The derelict slipped the swag off his shoulder and sat on it. ‘What place is this?’

  Larkin told him.

  ‘Mind me camping here tonight, mate? Wouldn’t be in the way. Wouldn’t be here in the mornin’, either.’

  ‘You can camp over in the shed,’ Larkin said. ‘And if you pinch anything, I’ll track you and belt the guts out of you.’

  A vacuous grin spread over the dust-grimed, bewhiskered face.

  ‘Me, mate? I wouldn’t pinch nothin’. Could do with a pinch of tea, and a bit of flour. He, he! Pinch—I mean a fistful of tea and sugar, mate.’

  Five minutes of this bird would send a man crazy. Larkin entered the kitchen, found an empty tin, and poured into it an equal quantity of tea and sugar. He scooped flour from a sack into a brown paper bag, and wrapped a chunk of salt meat in an old newspaper. On going out to the sundowner, anger surged in him at the sight of the man standing by the bunk and looking through his mystery story.

  ‘He, he! Detective yarn!’ said the sundowner. ‘I give ’em away years ago. A bloke does a killing and leaves the clues for the detectives to find. They’re all the same. Why in ’ell don’t a bloke write about a bloke who kills another bloke and gets away with it? I could kill a bloke and leave no clues.’

  ‘You could,’ sneered Larkin.

  ‘’Course. Easy. You only gotta use your brain—like me.’

  Larkin handed over the rations and edged the visitor off his veranda.

  The fellow was batty, all right, but harmless as they all are.

  ‘How would you kill a man and leave no clues?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I tell you it’s easy.’ The derelict pushed the rations into a dirty gunny sack and again sat down on his swag. ‘You see, mate, it’s this way. In real life the murderer can’t do away with the b
ody. Even doctors and things like that make a hell of a mess of doing away with a corpse. In fact, they don’t do away with it, mate. They leave parts and bits of it all over the scenery, and then what happens? Why, a detective comes along and he says, “Cripes, someone’s been and done a murder! Ah! Watch me track the bloke what done it.” If you’re gonna commit a murder, you must be able to do away with the body. Having done that, well, who’s gonna prove anythink? Tell me that, mate.’

  ‘You tell me,’ urged Larkin, and tossed his depleted tobacco plug to the visitor. The sundowner gnawed from the plug, almost hit a dog in the eye with a spit, gulped, and settled to the details of the perfect murder.

  ‘Well, mate, it’s like this. Once you done away with the body, complete, there ain’t nothing left to say that the body ever was alive to be killed. Now, supposin’ I wanted to do you in. I don’t, mate, don’t think that, but I’s plenty of time to work things out. Supposin’ I wanted to do you in. Well, me and you is out ridin’ and I takes me chance and shoots you stone-dead. I chooses to do the killin’ where there’s plenty of dead wood. Then I gathers the dead wood and drags your body onto it and fires the wood. Next day, when the ashes are cold, I goes back with a sieve and dolly pot. That’s all I wants then.

  ‘I takes out your burned bones and I crushes ’em to dust in the dolly pot. Then I goes through the ashes with the sieve, getting out all the small bones and putting them through the dolly pot. The dust I empties out from the dolly pot for the wind to take. All the metal bits, such as buttons and boot sprigs, I puts in me pocket and carries back to the homestead where I throws ’em down the well or covers ’em with sulphuric acid.

  ‘Almost sure to be a dolly pot here, by the look of the place. Almost sure to be a sieve. Almost sure to be a jar of sulphuric acid for solderin’ work. Everythin’ on tap, like. And just in case the million-to-one chance comes off that someone might come across the fire site and wonder, sort of, I’d shoot a coupler kangaroos, skin ’em, and burn the carcasses on top of the old ashes. You know, to keep the blowies from breeding.’