Dead Man's Quarry (39 page)

“I know what you've so discreetly decided not to say, you old ass. You thought I was a bit hit myself. Well, so I might have been, if I'd had time. But when one's so busy keeping one's head one hasn't time to lose one's heart. Besides—match, please—girls like Nora always marry men like Felix. I've noticed it again and again. It's fate. It's part of the mysterious workings of the universe. And it's no good struggling against things like that.”

John lit his cigarette, threw the blown match gently on to his friend's expanded waistcoat and grinned.

“Don't look so sentimental, Sydenham, you'll make me weep. Some day I'll meet a Nora who hasn't got a Felix, and then there'll be a rush to the altar that will leave you gasping. Dear Nora! She'll be so surprised when her Felix brings his broken heart to her to be mended. Yet it's been written in the skies from the first day they met. You know”—John absently took up his spoon and stirred the loathsome mess in his cup with the concentration of a professor of chemistry engaged in a scientific experiment—”there's some truth in what Isabel said. People like Nora get what they want in the end. They get it just because they are so ready to do without it. They get it because they are stronger than their desires. They are the salt of the earth. They are— But if I go on in this strain you'll think I'm really leaving a broken heart among the Radnor marshes. And I'm not, truly. Only a deep admiration and a hope—a hope that's perhaps got in it a thousandth part of envy, not more—that she won't be disappointed in her Felix when she gets him. And now, let's go back to London. We'll go through to the Welsh coast some other, more peaceful time when policemen cease from puzzling and revolvers are at rest. Yes, now I come to consider it, the thought of London is quite refreshing. Let's go back to London. Waiter, the bill.”

Ianthe Jerrold was born in 1898, the daughter of the well-known author and journalist Walter Jerrold, and granddaughter of the Victorian playwright Douglas Jerrold. She was the eldest of five sisters.

She published her first book, a work of verse, at the age of fifteen. This was the start of a long and prolific writing career characterized by numerous stylistic shifts. In 1929 she published the first of two classic and influential whodunits.
The Studio Crime
gained her immediate acceptance into the recently-formed but highly prestigious Detection Club, and was followed a year later by
Dead Man's Quarry
.

Ianthe Jerrold subsequently moved on from pure whodunits to write novels ranging from romantic fiction to psychological thrillers. She continued writing and publishing her fiction into the 1970's. She died in 1977, twelve years after her husband George Menges. She left her Elizabethan farmhouse Cwmmau to the National Trust.

The Studio Crime

“He is dead. It is quite impossible that he should have killed himself. He has been murdered. About half an hour ago. By a long knife passed under the left shoulder-blade into the heart.”

On a fog-bound London night, a soirée is taking place in the studio of artist Laurence Newtree. The guests include an eminent psychiatrist, a wealthy philanthropist and an observant young friend of Newtree's, John Christmas. Before the evening is over, Newtree's neighbour is found stabbed to death in what appears to be an impossible crime. But a mysterious man in a fez has been spotted in the fog asking for highly unlikely directions...

The resourceful John Christmas takes on the case, unofficially, leading to an ingenious solution no one could have expected, least of all Inspector Hembrow of Scotland Yard.

The Studio Crime
is the first of Ianthe Jerrold's classic whodunit novels, originally published in 1929. Its impact led to her membership of the elite Detection Club, and its influence can be felt on later works by John Dickson Carr, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers among others.

“No, don't draw the curtain for a minute, Mr. Newtree. Do you mind? I like the look of a London fog, when it's fairly thin, like this one, and doesn't hide the street-lamps. That one at the corner looks like a fiery cross with its long rays cutting the fog.”

Newtree, who at Miss Wimpole's first word had let go of the curtain with a sort of startled obedience, murmured inadequately:

“Yes...” and stood at her side, peering out into the fog and trying to think of something effective to say about it. He couldn't see anything, himself, except a feeble glimmer of light over the gateway of the court and a great deal of unpleasantly yellowish darkness; but he knew that if the celebrated Serafine Wimpole found the lamp remarkable, remarkable it must be. Laurence Newtree was a shy man, especially with women, and Miss Wimpole, whom he had not met before, filled his humble heart with terrified respect. It troubled him to think that he was her host and responsible for the entertainment of her and her large, scented, placid, smiling aunt. He couldn't think why Christmas had seen fit to bring these 
two ladies to the studio, nor why he himself had allowed it. He glanced appealingly at his friend, but Christmas was sitting magisterially on the model's throne, addressing an audience which consisted of Simon Mordby, the psychologist, Mrs. Imogen Wimpole, the aunt, and a lay figure draped in a Chinese robe which gave it, with its bald, featureless head and stiffly bent arms, the look of an old bonze. All of them, except the bonze, who preserved the enigmatic calm of the East, appeared to be enjoying themselves. Laurence envied Christmas his capacity for talking about nothing.

He looked at Miss Wimpole's lamp-ward gazing profile and thought of her plays, her novels, her press-notices, her lecture-tours in the States.... These things, combined with her femininity, paralysed him into an oafish silence. Yet at the same time the imp of the perverse, that imp within him which had led him half against his will from a city desk and a competence to Fleet Street and affluence, was noting down with irreverent hilarity the strong salient line of the lady's nose, the long bony curve of the lady's jaw, the cigarette dangling gamin-wise from between unexpectedly full pale lips, the long pointed hands like a mediaeval saint's, the long pointed feet like small canoes.

While the imp was joyfully tucking away an unflattering likeness of the lady in some obscure pigeon-hole in Laurence's complex mind, Laurence himself, his racked brain suddenly perceiving a useful connection between Miss Wimpole's profession of playwright and the state of the weather, was remarking brilliantly:

“It's a bad night for the theatres.”

Miss Wimpole did not reply for a moment, but looked dreamily out through the tall studio window into the fog which seemed to move and writhe in dim, drifting shapes like living things. Then she turned and gazing intently at Laurence with her small dark eyes, leant towards him and murmured earnestly:

“It's a bad night for most things. But a good night for crime.”

Laurence started slightly at this dark and unexpected pronouncement, and the gold pince-nez to which in a world of horn-rims he was still faithful dropped from his eyes as he stared apprehensively at the lady who had uttered it. Then he saw a twinkle under her crooked black eyebrows and a little line which might once have been a girlish dimple in her thin cheek. With relief rather than mortification he thought:

“She's laughing at me.”

Serafine's twinkle became a wide and sudden smile, as jolly as a schoolboy's. She stood up and gathered her brilliant Chinese shawl around her thin shoulders.

“Seriously, Mr. Newtree,” she said, and her clear, penetrating voice cut across and stilled the chatter at the other end of the studio, “it
is
a good night for crime. Don't you often think that if you were going to commit a murder you'd choose a foggy night?”

“I—I—no, I can't say I've ever thought about it,” stammered Laurence, and was relieved to see his friend John Christmas approaching them with an amused smile.

“Personally,” said Christmas, “I should hate to murder an enemy in a fog. It seems to me a poor, half-hearted, shamefaced way of doing it. If I had an enemy to murder I should get him alone somewhere in broad daylight and tell him exactly why I was going to murder him and how. We should then part under no mis
apprehensions, and the affair would be complete, rounded-off, artistic.”

“You'd be hanged,” said Serafine briefly.

“That's the one consideration,” assented John, “that has so far kept me guiltless of blood. What do you think, Laurence? How would you dispose of your enemy?”

“I'm afraid I shouldn't dispose of him at all,” said Newtree diffidently, fidgeting with his glasses. “I—I should just keep out of his way if I didn't like him. But I like practically everybody.”

Christmas laughed. The contrast between his friend Newtree's acute impish work as a caricaturist and his gentle diffident attitude to the world in general was a constant source of delight to him. John Christmas was a young man with a gift that amounted to genius for making friends with all sorts of people. He had been born under a happy star. He had his fair share of good looks, the good humour born of perfect health, the free, natural good manners of one who delights in his fellow-creatures and that alert and sympathetic sort of mind to which the meaning of the word “boredom” is unknown. He had sought out Newtree in the first place to buy the original of Newtree's brilliant caricature of his father, Jefferson Christmas, head of the Christmas Stores, that steel and stonework colossus of the West End; and he had soon added him to his large collection of friends. Of all these, Serafine was his oldest and perhaps his dearest. In his early twenties he had frequently asked her to marry him. But her persistent refusal to take him seriously had gradually worn the romantic gilt off their friendship, and now in his thirtieth year their relationship was more like that of favourite nephew and young indulgent aunt than any other. Now, at Newtree's deprecating “I like practically everybody” their eyes met with a twinkle, and John could see that Serafine liked and appreciated Newtree just as he did.

“And you know,” went on Newtree mildly, “you're joking, John. I might say that I'm as incapable of shedding blood as you are yourself.”

I notice,” said Christmas with a smile, “that you don't include Miss Wimpole.”

Laurence blinked in embarrassment and cast an apologetic glance at the formidable Serafine.

“Oh, well,” he stammered quickly. “I don't—I mean, I haven't known Miss Wimpole very—I mean—”

Miss Wimpole gave him a kind smile which added to rather than relieved his embarrassment.

“Mr. Newtree feels quite rightly that he hasn't known me long enough to answer for me,” she said reasonably. “I must tell you, Mr. Newtree, that I don't make murder a habit. I only murder under great provocation.”

“All murders are committed under great provocation.” It was Simon Mordby who, finding the amiable Mrs. Wimpole a bit heavy in hand, had suggested joining the animated trio at the window. He uttered his dictum with the smooth, unanswerable air of his kind of practitioner. He had a good presence, a suave, creamy voice, an ornate house in Maida Vale and a very large practice, consisting almost entirely of well-to-do and little-to-do women. As he spoke he fixed his wide-apart light eyes on Serafine and smiled a smile at once ingratiating and superior.

“And you are mistaken, Newtree, in supposing yourself incapable of committing a murder. We are all potential murderers.”

Mrs. Wimpole closed her eyes like a blissful cat and nodded, as though she found a sad pleasure in this conception of her potentialities. She was a kind, lazy, middle-aged lady with a great deal of time on her hands and no training in any useful way of killing it. The study of psychology was one of her latest hobbies. Serafine, who disliked Dr. Mordby and was tired of being made a subject for amateur psycho-analysis, wished her aunt would go back to astrology or vegetarianism or one of her other more polite and impersonal fads.

“Of course,” pursued Dr. Mordby in his best lecture-room manner, “potentialities differ. Now I should say—” He looked at Serafine with his large head on one side and raised himself gently on his toes, a habit of his when talking on his own subject, “I should say that Miss Wimpole's potentialities as a criminal are ex-treme-ly low.”

Miss Wimpole's aunt opened her eyes with a slight jerk and looked rather disappointed. Serafine smiled politely. She felt, as usual in the presence of Dr. Mordby, that her murderous potentialities were, on the contrary, rather high.

“She doth protest too much,” said the eminent psychologist with a bantering smile. “Your potential murderer does not talk quite so freely about it. He is more likely to have a nervous shrinking from the subject.”

“I say,” said Laurence Newtree deprecatingly, “aren't we all being rather morbid?”

Christmas laughed, and Mordby transferred his wide fixed gaze to Newtree's face, as if he were sadly measuring that gentleman's potentialities by the nervous shrinking evidenced in his voice.

“It's the fog,” said Serafine. “I've noticed that a London fog always turns people's thoughts in a delightfully morbid direction.”

She glanced as she spoke out of the great square-paned window.

“One can imagine that it hides—all sorts of unusual things. It makes the most ordinary things look strange and threatening. At any moment one can expect something sinister to appear...”

She had a clear, flexible voice like an actor's and knew how to give value to her words. Under its spell they all glanced out of the window. And they all saw what she saw—a small patch of whiteness moving through the fog in the quiet courtyard.

Mrs. Wimpole gave a little cry of half-affected alarm and glanced at Dr. Mordby as if for reassurance. He looked out of the window with the same wide, concealing glance with which he looked at his patients, as if he knew a great deal more about the case than there was any need to say. Christmas murmured dreamily: