Ghosts & Gallows (10 page)

Ernest Dyer, also in his twenties and originally from Brighton, had worked as a plumber fitting gas appliances before emigrating to Australia, where he followed an eclectic career path that included short-lived stints as a fruit farmer, a pearl fisherman and a horse breeder. In 1914, he enlisted as a sapper in the Australian Engineers but was wounded at Gallipoli and returned to England where, following a period of recovery, he became an officer in the Royal West Surrey Regiment and was later transferred to the Royal Engineers. Dyer saw action in France but was wounded a second time and, like Tombe, became invalided into the Civil Service, where his engineering background made him an ideal administrator, overseeing aircraft production for the RAF. Another common trait he shared with Eric Tombe was a desire not to survive the Great War a poor man and both men were not averse to breaking the law to achieve this aim. In his
Drink and Ink
, published posthumously in 1979, Dennis Wheatley gives a pen portrait of Eric Tombe which goes some way to likening him to a kind of ‘gentleman thief’ along the lines of Ernest Horning’s Raffles. ‘He never robbed people,’ Wheatley reminisced, ‘but swindled insurance companies and the government out of considerable sums.’ In this he was adequately aided by Ernest Dyer and soon after the Armistice of November 1918 the two conspirators put their bold and ‘nefarious’ plans into action.

With the cessation of fighting, Dyer’s role at the Air Ministry changed from supervising aeroplane production to vetting invoices from suppliers and engineering firms, both large and small, for the cancellation of aircraft parts already in manufacture, and authorising legitimate claims for payment. Tombe was quick to realise that by setting up a number of phoney small-part businesses it would be possible to submit claims for compensation for non-existent work that Dyer could simply approve for payment with little or no chance of detection. To these ends Tombe quit his job early in 1919 and soon began putting the scam into practice: cheap office space was rented, bank accounts opened and stationery printed; the illusion was completed by installing one of Tombe’s mistresses to act as a secretary, answering telephone calls and typing out letters. Soon these phantom companies were invoicing the Air Ministry for several hundred pounds worth of aborted work which Dyer promptly approved for payment; once a cheque had been banked, Eric Tombe withdrew the cash and soon after the company quietly closed down and left no forwarding address. ‘It entailed extraordinary organizing ability and brought the two conspirators many thousand pounds,’ Wheatley later commented, but there was a limit to how long such a scheme could operate without detection and the following year Dyer resigned from the civil service and both he and Tombe began looking around for alternative means of making money.

Ernest Dyer had been interested in horses and horse racing since his time several years before working on a stud farm in Australia. A contemporary story reported in a number of newspapers after his death stated that in 1920 he successfully gambled his entire war gratuity at odds of 33-1 on a horse called Furious which came home first in the Lincoln Handicap, and as a result received a payout of £15,000. In his
The Devil is a Gentleman
(2009), Dennis Wheatley’s biographer Phil Baker concedes that there may be some truth to this but notes that a more likely explanation is that it was a cover for money laundering activities, possibly involving some of the proceeds of the recent Air Ministry scam. When a venture with Tombe selling motor cars in Harlesden in north-west London folded, despite Eric Tombe’s experience in the motor trade, the two men decided to invest in Dyer’s expertise with all things connected with the race track and set themselves up as gentlemen horse trainers.

The Welcomes was a large detached house in substantial grounds with its own stable block located in Hayes Lane, Kenley, a Surrey village three and a half miles south of Croydon. Dyer bought it from Percy Woodland, a noted jockey and trainer, in 1920 for £5,000 and, moving in with his wife and children, both he and Tombe quickly built up a small operation breeding and training race horses on the nearby Downs. At this time Eric Tombe was living on the proceeds of his involvement with the Air Ministry fraud in a serviced flat on the Haymarket, but on the occasions when business called him down to the stud farm he would stay just over eleven miles away in an hotel at Dorking on the North Downs. Despite the investment, both Tombe and Dyer seemed fated to only reap the rewards of deceit as, despite starting out as a legitimate business, albeit financed with crooked money, ultimately nothing but tragedy would come out of their association with The Welcomes.

The truth was that both young men were equally capable of spending money faster than they could earn it, and in the early months of 1921 it became clear to Dyer and Tombe that The Welcomes was a financial liability that neither of them could sustain for much longer. True to form, rather than attempting to sell the estate as a going concern, Dyer’s solution was more immediate and devious and one in which Eric Tombe was a willing participant. ‘Neither I nor his mistress-in-chief knew anything of his nefarious activities until after his death,’ Wheatley stated towards the end of his life, claiming that this was due to Tombe being able to create ‘a succession of cul-de-sacs which prevented any of his associates, girl friends or men, learning anything about the others.’ The reality was that Wheatley knew far more about Tombe’s crooked career during the time that he knew him than he was prepared to set down fifty years later in his memoirs, particularly where the fate of The Welcomes was concerned. The property was insured for £12,000 and Dyer’s answer to their cash flow problems was to arrange for the house to conveniently burn down.

Around the beginning of the second week in April 1921, Dyer sent his family off for a short break to Scotland and planned to join them a day or so later after concluding some business in Brighton. With his wife and children out of the way, he spent most of Tuesday 12 April soaking The Welcomes with petrol before catching a late afternoon train down to the south coast. With Wheatley providing a suitable alibi – the future thriller writer would later confirm that he and Eric Tombe, together with two female friends, had been dining together all evening at Tombe’s Haymarket flat –Tombe made his own way (in full evening dress) to Kenley and proceeded to set the house on fire before returning to London where he joined the party shortly after midnight. When Ernest Dyer was summoned from Brighton the next day he found The Welcomes a burnt-out shell and, suitably traumatised, was soon filing a claim with his insurers.

Despite their best laid plans, the two fraudsters were to be disappointed. A sharp-eyed insurance assessor sent to Kenley to vet Dyer’s claim noticed a number of petrol cans that Tombe had either inadvertently failed to clear out of the way in his haste to get back to London or assumed would be incinerated in the blaze, with the result that the company refused to pay out and Dyer had little option but to drop his claim. With The Welcomes now a blackened ruin (Dyer’s wife was able to live in the one part of the building that had been untouched by the flames) Dyer and Tombe were forced in the ensuing months to fall back on what they hoped would be more successful scams to make ends meet.

Almost a year to the day after the burning of The Welcomes, on 19 April 1922, Wheatley met Tombe in London. He was in the process of buying a flat in Earls Court and was keen to get Tombe’s opinion on the property. By this time Dyer was virtually bankrupt and in order to restore himself to funds was setting up a potential swindle on an unsuspecting investor. In order to see the fraud through, Tombe was obliged to act as a guarantor by transferring £2,000 of his own money into Dyer’s bank account. ‘I’m going down to Purley to fix it up tomorrow night,’ he told him as they parted at the entrance to Earl’s Court station. Wheatley was to be one of the last people who would see him alive. They had one last telephone conversation the following day: it was the same day that Gordon Eric Gordon Tombe simply vanished.

Tombe was to be missing for many months. For Wheatley and his clique of friends, which included several of Eric Tombe’s mistresses and girlfriends, each assigned to their own particular ‘cul-de-sac’ and unaware of each other’s existence, suspicion quickly fell on Ernest Dyer. Wheatley knew much about Tombe’s illegal activities and although the most likely explanation for his absence was that he had been forced to lie low after one of his shady deals had got too hot to handle, even he as a privileged insider felt that Dyer was involved. Wheatley was inclined to believe that Tombe was being held against his will and made to sign over money to Dyer who, once he had got what he wanted, would vanish, leaving his former business associate free but unable to go to the police for fear of incriminating himself in their past misdeeds of glory together. This view was reinforced after Wheatley visited Tombe’s bank manager who confirmed that a large sum of money had recently been transferred, at Tombe’s request, to his account in Paris and that Dyer had now been given power of attorney over Tombe’s affairs.

Wheatley was sure that Tombe was alive and would surface eventually, but one of his mistresses, the wife of a wealthy industrialist from Huddersfield who Tombe had met during his time working at the Air Ministry, was certain he was dead. Central to her belief was the wording of a telegram, said to have been sent to Dyer by Tombe, in which he said he had gone abroad for a few days:
‘Going overseas back in Seven Days, look after things while I’m away, Eric’
– Tombe would never have used the word ‘overseas’. The telegram was a fake and Dyer a murderer. The deadline of a week was soon up and still there was no sign of Eric Tombe. Wheatley continued to procrastinate but eventually gave in to pressure and as a gesture hired a private detective but the investigation lead nowhere, partly because Wheatley was economical with his information due to not wishing to incriminate both Tombe and himself in a number of his mentor’s dodgy deals, including the torching of The Welcomes. When after several weeks a mutual woman friend of Tombe’s who had just returned from abroad told the young wine merchant she had seen him in Madrid alive and well, Wheatley, somewhat relieved, lost interest and began concentrating on other things.

The Revd George Gordon Tombe was vicar of the small Oxfordshire parish of Little Tew, eight miles south-west of Banbury and a world away in every respect from the hedonistic London lifestyle of his son, the distress of whose continued silence eventually resulted in his giving up the living of St John the Evangelist and moving to Sydenham near Crystal Palace, where he and his wife began a concerted effort to track him down. George Tombe’s involvement has been described as ‘one of the romances of the crime’ as, like a living embodiment of G.K. Chesterton’s literary detective Father Brown, the clergyman began a systematic search to find some evidence of Eric Tombe’s whereabouts.

Tombe had last seen his father at the beginning of January 1922 at the Strand Palace Hotel in London, shortly before taking a trip to Sicily. Around the middle of April he had written to the Revd Tombe mentioning a forthcoming trip to Paris and some new suits he had had made specifically for the visit. George Tombe visited the tailor in Albermarle Street and found the clothes had not been collected. He also visited the branch of Lloyd’s Bank where Tombe held his account and spoke with the manager, who reassured him that they had been receiving regular correspondence from his son for some time, the last letter being dated 22 June 1922. Whereas Dennis Wheatley had felt the jagged signature on the deed granting Dyer power of attorney showed the writer had been forced against his will to sign, the Revd Tombe was more forthright and declared it and all the letters to be forgeries. Eric Tombe’s account had been fleeced and was now substantially overdrawn.

Now certain that someone impersonating his son was also clearly connected with his disappearance, the elderly clergyman visited Eric Tombe’s barber, who kept a list of new customers introduced by regular clients. One of these was Ernest Dyer and he had made a note of his address: The Welcomes, Kenley. George Tombe made a trip out to Surrey and found the stud farm a dilapidated ruin; there was no sign of Dyer but he met his wife, who told him her husband was dead – he had been killed in a car accident earlier in the year. This was palpably untrue, but at the time George Tombe had no idea of the violent events at Scarborough; Dyer’s death had been ruled a suicide and his widow was no doubt unwilling to reveal the truth to strangers. Despite seemingly at a dead end, as he surveyed the derelict estate, the Revd Tombe felt that something about The Welcomes was forbiddingly familiar.

Like the Murder in the Red Barn almost exactly 100 years before, the evidence for paranormality in the Tombe/Dyer case revolves around the eerie prophetic dreams of Eric Tombe’s mother who, over the course of several months, had numerous nightmares in which she saw her son dead. ‘In my dream I heard Eric say, “Oh, let me out.” I felt he was shut in somewhere and could not get free’ she later told reporters. As the weeks passed this recurring dream gradually changed and became far more sinister: Mrs Tombe saw a dark damp place like some enclosure or chamber in the ground in a remote rural location, again from which the voice of Eric Tombe continued to plead for release. Haunted by these experiences, she urged her husband to go to the police again, now certain that somewhere in the wilderness of The Welcomes her son lay dead at the bottom of a well. Finally, in September 1923, like Robert Lees before him, George Tombe went to Scotland Yard.

Francis Carlin, together with Albert Hawkins, Arthur Neil and Frederick Wensley, was one of a group of Superintendents at the Metropolitan Police headquarters at Whitehall Place known as the ‘Big Four’. Carlin had recently been promoted from Chief Inspector and his illustrious career at Scotland Yard later spanned over thirty years, the highlights of which he recalled in a set of memoirs titled
Reminiscences of an Ex-Detective
(1927). To the Superintendent, there was no doubting the sincerity with which the elderly cleric stated his belief in the strange dreams of his wife concerning his missing son and the lonely and derelict Surrey stud farm. Despite his earnestness, to a London policeman, the results of George Tombe’s amateur investigations may have been more impressive than stories of supernatural visions and, secure in the knowledge following the events at Scarborough that through his possession of his son’s cheque books and suitcase, Ernest Dyer may well have been involved in some way in Eric Tombe’s disappearance, Carlin decided to act on the information.