Bodies from the Library Page 9

  LAURENCE: This really is fantastic, Strangeways. If he had intended to catch me out, as you suggest, would he have been snoring away at midnight?

  NIGEL: It might have been a—pretence of snoring.

  GREER: Oh, come now, Mr Strangeways. A pretence of snoring. That’s a bit too clever, isn’t it?

  LAURENCE: (shaky) But what motive could I have had? I was sorry for Alice—well, fond of her, if you like. But to kill her husband on the strength of—damn it, that’d be carrying chivalry a bit far.

  NIGEL: Motive? There’s more than that to it, Annesley. With Sir James dead, your own position in the firm would be stronger, and you’d stand an excellent chance or marrying the widow—and the fortune which her husband leaves her.

  LAURENCE: Why, damn you, Strangeways! I—

  NIGEL: And what’s more. Just after eleven o’clock last night, you claimed to hear a scuffling noise on the deck above our cabin—

  GREER: What’s this?—

  NIGEL: Was that to give yourself an alibi? A bit unlucky for you we had that false alarm at midnight, otherwise we’d not have heard the snoring in Sir James’ cabin, and we’d have assumed he was thrown overboard at eleven o’clock, when you claimed to hear sounds of a struggle on deck—yes, and just on the spot where there are marks of a struggle, where you crept out later, when I was dead asleep, and killed him.

  LAURENCE: (shouting) Shut up! Stop it! I tell you, you’re all wrong! You—

  NIGEL: Motive. You’re the only one with a motive strong enough—

  LAURENCE: You’re wrong. Listen to me. Captain Greer—Soon after we came aboard, Alice ran out on deck. I was there. She was crying. Her husband had been bullying her again. She told me James had hired you to spy on her. She—I thought then, from something she said, that she might be going to kill herself. She said she couldn’t face it any longer, because of the baby she’s having. And her father came up, while she was talking. He may have heard everything she—

  NIGEL: Is this true, Captain?

  GREER: Aye, I heard them. That’s how I knew you were a detective.

  NIGEL: Well, I’ve got that out in the open at last. It’s taken a long time.

  MACLEAN: If ye think Captain Greer has anything to do with it, ye’re making a fool of yerself. He was on watch from midnight till four of the morning. After that, I came on watch, and he stayed on the bridge chatting with me till about half seven.

  NIGEL: Till 7.30, when I found you—looking for something on deck. Your watch didn’t end till eight o’clock. Why weren’t you on the bridge? Just what were you looking for on deck, at the spot where Sir James went overboard?

  GREER: Steady now, Mr Strangeways, steady.

  NIGEL: Was it this?

  (We hear sound of button thrown down on top of table)

  Was it a little brass button, torn off the sleeve of a uniform coat—during a struggle?

  LAURENCE: Your methods really are intolerably dramatic.

  NIGEL: Still feeling the strain a bit, Annesley? Relax, man, relax. Well, Mr Maclean?

  MACLEAN: Anyone might lose a brass button, I’m thinking. There’s three mates on this ship—

  NIGEL: And a captain. Yes. But you’ve not answered my question … very well. Leave that aside a moment. You were captain of the ‘Mary Garside’ when she foundered. At the inquiry you lost your ticket: Braithwaite’s counsel managed to fasten the blame for losing the ship on you. Right? But she went down because Braithwaite had sent her out ill found. You had a grudge against him since then. He ruined your career.

  MACLEAN: I’ll not deny it’d have been a pleasure to me to see him roasting in hell. But that doesn’t mean I murdered him.

  NIGEL: Indeed no. Tell me, what were you and Captain Greer talking about on the bridge?

  (Perceptible pause)

  MACLEAN: On the bridge? When?

  NIGEL: You said he stayed chatting with you on the bridge after his watch was over, till nearly 7.30. Three hours and a half. A longish chat. Must have been cold out on the bridge. But, if you’d gone into the wheel-house, the helmsman would have heard what you were saying, eh? What were you talking about?

  MACLEAN: (not hysterical, like Laurence: grim) Damn and blast your impertinence! By what right—

  GREER: Steady on, Donald. Maclean and I are old friends, Mr Strangeways. We just got talking about old times.

  NIGEL: Old friends? Old friends might give each other alibis.

  MACLEAN: If one of us had left the bridge, you fool, the man at the wheel would have noticed it. Just ask him.

  NIGEL: I have. I’m satisfied that, neither of you did. And the man is certain that Captain Greer was in the wheel-house with him from midnight till four a.m. You have no alibi for that period, Mr Maclean.

  MACLEAN: I’m verra well aware of that.

  NIGEL: You’ve also got a brass button missing from the sleeve of your great coat—the one you were wearing last night.

  LAURENCE: (gasps) What’s that? Is that true?

  NIGEL: You see, Mr Maclean? Motive, opportunity, and the one damning clue—they’re all against you. What have you to say?

  MACLEAN: I’m saying nothing.

  NIGEL: Well, Captain. What are we to do about it? The case is out of my hands now. It’s up to you.

  GREER: (heavily) Up to me, eh? Aye, you’re right. But have done without all this tomfoolery. I could see what you were driving at, Mr Strangeways. I’d best—

  MACLEAN: (shouts) All right, John, all right! I’ll admit it. I killed Sir James. For God’s sake stop this havering and put me under arrest!

  GREER: Nay, Donald, I’ll not let you do it.

  NIGEL: I’m sorry about this, Captain, But there it is. It had to be you or Maclean. The button is damning evidence. And Sir James would never have stirred out of his cabin for Maclean; he’d be too suspicious of him, after the ‘Mary Garside’ episode.

  LAURENCE: Look here, what is all this? Haven’t you just admitted that Captain Greer has an alibi for the period from midnight till 7.30?

  NIGEL: He has. But Sir James was killed before midnight. He was killed just after eleven o’clock. You heard it happening. That scuffle on the deck overhead.

  MACLEAN: Ah’m thinking we have got a lunatic on board now. Sir James was heard snoring in his cabin at midnight. Ye heard him yourself, Mr Strangeways.

  NIGEL: That was Captain Greer we heard snoring … I’d better start at the beginning. The escaped lunatic. It’s a captain’s responsibility to prevent panic spreading on board his ship. So why, when he got that message over the radio telephone, did Captain Greer announce it publicly, in front of two women, his own daughter one of them? He could so easily have instituted a quiet search without alarming them. But he wanted to establish an atmosphere of panic.

  LAURENCE: But why?

  NIGEL: First, because it enabled him to shift round the cabins—to put Sir James in a single cabin, with a communicating door leading to his own. Second, to get Sir James’ nerves on the jump. You’ll remember he lent him a revolver.

  GREER: Aye. Ye’re too smart for me, Mr Strangeways. I can see ye know it all.

  NIGEL: Except what went wrong with your original plan.

  GREER: I’ll tell ye. I overheard what Alice was saying to Mr Annesley before dinner last night. It was—a terrible shock to me. You see, I’d encouraged her to marry him. I wanted her to have everything I couldn’t give her. I firmly believed she was happy with him. And then to find out—well, it near broke my heart. I could see she was at the end of her tether. Aye, and it was a tether: Sir James’d never have let her go. I was afraid she meant to—end it. Then that message came through. And I saw what I could do.

  NIGEL: It was to have been an accident of some sort, wasn’t it?

  GREER: That’s right. I told him—I’d overheard Alice appointing to meet Mr Annesley on deck at eleven o’clock. I knew that’d get him out. I put on carpet slippers. It was foggy, ye remember. I was going to stalk him along the deck, make him think I was the lunatic, put t
he fear of God into him. He’d lose his nerve and fire at me with the revolver I lent him. I’d fire back … It sounds a daft sort of plan now. But I had to …

  NIGEL: You’d be able to say afterwards that you’d assumed it was the lunatic, and you’d shot him in self-defence after he’d fired at you? What went wrong?

  GREER: I’ll tell ye. It was like this …

  (Fade into sea sounds. Blast of steam-whistle. Stealthy pad of feet. We hear Sir James mutter, ‘What’s this? I can’t see … Damn this fog.’ Limping shuffle of footsteps. ‘Oh God, it’s—No, no! Keep away! Oh God, I’ … ‘It’s you, Greer. What the’—choking scream. Sound of struggle, cut off by blast of steam-whistle. Fade)

  GREER: Ye see. I meant him to lose his nerve. But not all that much. He was so frightened, he couldn’t even yell or use his revolver. When I came up with him, he was cowering behind a ventilator, frozen there, like a rabbit with a stoat after it. But he’d seen me by then. I had to go through with it. I clapped my hand over his mouth and dragged him along the deck. Then he did begin to struggle. I dragged him to the rail and tipped him over. The steam-whistle had been blowing a lot. I hoped it’d drown the noises he made, and the splash. But Mr Maclean was on deck, forward. He saw enough to—. That’s what he and I were talking about on the bridge.

  NIGEL: Yes. I see. And when we had that false alarm at midnight, you saw how it could give you an alibi. Annesley noticed that Sir James was not present. You told us to go round and knock at his cabin door. The moment we left the wheel-house, you hurried through your own cabin into Sir James’, lay down on the bed, and began to snore … Yes—‘Come, heavy sleep, thou image of true death.’

  MACLEAN: Don’t believe a word he’s said. It’s not true. He’s trying to protect me. It was I—

  NIGEL: No, Maclean, it won’t do. You’ve done your best for him. Yes, when you discovered last night a sleeve-button was missing from Captain Greer’s greatcoat, you tore one off your own. I found that coat, as you meant me to. But I also searched Captain Greer’s cabin: and I found a button had recently been sewn on his greatcoat—the thread was new. You were searching for the missing button on deck this morning, weren’t you? Well, Captain, I’m sorry about this, but there’s no help for it. I’ll have to—

  (Sharp sound of drawer being opened)

  GREER: No. Not that way. Keep back, all of you! I’ll have some use for this revolver after all … Donald, look after her, old friend. She’ll be alone now.

  MACLEAN: I will, John, goodbye.

  GREER: You’ll get your master’s ticket back now, Donald, maybe … Good luck.

  (Footsteps slowly receding during this conversation. Door slams and is locked. General movement in the saloon. Pause. A distant splash. Cry of ‘Man overboard!’ Sharp ring of telegraph and roar of reversed engine. Running of feet in deck. Orders. Boat is being swung out. All fade to sound of wind and waves)

  NICHOLAS BLAKE

  ‘Nicholas Blake’ is the pen name of Cecil Day Lewis, who was born in Ballintubbert, Ireland, in 1904. He was educated at Sherborne and at Wadham College, Oxford, where he became friends with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender.

  Day Lewis was primarily a poet. His first collection of verse, Beechen Vigil, was published in 1925, and several other collections appeared to wide acclaim over the next ten years. However, poetry paid so poorly that, to supplement his income and specifically to pay for the repair of a leaking tiled roof, Day Lewis decided to turn his hand to ‘commercial prose’ and what he later called ‘the most popular of modern blood sports’, detective fiction. His first mystery, A Question of Proof, was published in 1935 and appeared under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, the surname taken from his mother’s maiden name. The detective is Nigel Strangeways, a charismatic amateur investigator and gentleman sleuth, superficially in the tradition of Lord Peter Wimsey and Albert Campion but based, at least initially, on Day Lewis’s Oxford friend W. H. Auden. Conveniently for Strangeways, his uncle is an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard.

  His second mystery, Thou Shell of Death, was published in 1936, and in 1937 the growing stature of ‘Nicholas Blake’ was recognised by his election to the Detection Club, the writers’ dining club founded by Anthony Berkeley, who had also attended Sherbourne. Day Lewis found it very easy to write detective stories, unlike his ‘straight’ books, and the ‘Nicholas Blake’ books were immensely popular. They are characterised by strong, innovative set ups and careful, fair play detection. Moreover, as might be expected, they are very well written, with fully realised characters and insightful commentary on social mores.

  In all ‘Nicholas Blake’ wrote twenty novels and Day Lewis also used the pseudonym for reviewing detective fiction in The Spectator magazine. Fifteen of the mysteries feature Strangeways who over time became less like Auden and more like the author, although aspects of Day Lewis’s life are apparent from the outset, particularly his complicated love life. The first ‘Blake’, A Question of Proof, is set at a public school very much like Cheltenham College, where Day Lewis had been teaching at the time of its publication; so much so that the novel almost cost the author his job when the chairman of the board of governors became convinced—wrongly—that the novel amounted to a confession of adultery with the head teacher’s wife. Another of the Strangeways series, Minute for Murder, is as much a satire as a detective story and was inspired by Day Lewis’s experience working for the Ministry of Information during the Second World War. In another, Head of a Traveller, the central character is a well-known poet suffering writers’ block. Of the series, the finest is The Beast Must Die, which was inspired by an incident involving Day Lewis and one of his sons. It is an ingeniously structured novel of revenge and was filmed in 1969 as Que la Bête Meure, directed by Claude Chabrol.

  In 1951, Cecil Day Lewis was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and in 1962 he was appointed to a similar position at Harvard. On 1 January 1968 he was appointed Poet Laureate by H.M.Queen Elizabeth II, on the advice of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, but his tenure ended prematurely in 1972 with his death from cancer.

  ‘Calling James Braithwaite’ was first broadcast on the BBC Home Service on 20 and 22 July 1940 as part of a series of two-part plays by members of the Detection Club produced by John Cheatle. The script is published here for the first time.

  THE ELUSIVE BULLET

  John Rhode

  ‘By the way, professor, there’s something in the evening paper that might interest you,’ said Inspector Hanslet, handing over as he spoke the copy he had been holding in his hand. ‘There you are, “Prominent City Merchant Found Dead”. Read it, it sounds quite interesting.’

  Dr Priestley adjusted his spectacles and began to read the paragraph. The professor and myself, Harold Merefield, who had been his secretary for a couple of years, had been sitting in the study of Dr Priestley’s home in Westbourne-terrace, one fine June evening after dinner, when Inspector Hanslet had been announced. The inspector was an old friend of ours, who availed himself of the professor’s hobby, which was the mathematical detection of crime, to discuss with him any investigations upon which he happened to be engaged. He had just finished giving the professor an outline of a recent burglary case, over which the police had confessed themselves puzzled, and had risen to go, when the item in the newspaper occurred to him.

  ‘This does not appear to me to be particularly interesting,’ said the professor. ‘It merely states that on the arrival of the 3.20 train this afternoon at Tilbury Station a porter, in examining the carriages, found the dead body of a man, since identified as a Mr Farquharson, lying in a corner of a first-class carriage. This Mr Farquharson appears to have met his death through a blow on the side of his head, although no weapon capable of inflicting such a blow has so far been found. I can only suggest that if the facts are as reported, there are at least a dozen theories which could be made to fit in with them.’

  ‘Such as?’ inquired Hanslet tentatively.

  The professor frowned. ‘You
know perfectly well, inspector, that I most strongly deprecate all conjecture,’ he replied severely. ‘Conjecture, unsupported by a thorough examination of facts, has been responsible for more than half the errors made by mankind throughout the ages. But, to demonstrate my meaning, I will outline a couple of theories which fit in with all the reported facts.

  ‘Mr Farquharson may have been struck by an assailant who left the train before its arrival at Tilbury, and who disposed of the weapon in some way. On the other hand, he may have leant out of the window, and been struck by some object at the side of the line, or even by a passing train, if he was at the right-hand side of the carriage, looking in the direction in which the train was going. Of course, as I wish to emphasise, a knowledge of all the facts, not only those contained in this brief paragraph, would probably render both these theories untenable.’

  Hanslet smiled. He knew well enough from experience the professor’s passion for facts and his horror of conjecture.

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose the case will come my way,’ he said as he turned towards the door. ‘But if it does I’ll let you know what transpires. I shouldn’t wonder if we know the whole story in a day or two. It looks simple enough. Well, good-night, sir.’

  The professor waited till the front door had closed behind him. ‘I have always remarked that Hanslet’s difficulties are comparatively easy of solution, but that what he calls simple problems completely baffle his powers of reasoning. I should not be surprised if we heard from him again very shortly.’

  As usual, the professor was right. Hanslet’s first visit had been on Saturday evening. On the following Tuesday, at about the same time, he called again, with a peculiarly triumphant expression on his face.

  ‘You remember that Farquharson business, don’t you, professor?’ he began without preliminary. ‘Well, it did come my way after all. The Essex police called Scotland Yard in, and I was put on to it. I’ve solved the whole thing in under 48 hours. Not a bad piece of work, eh? Mr Farquharson was murdered by—’