Francis Duncan is the pseudonym for William Underhill, who was born in 1918. He lived virtually all his life in Bristol and was a ‘scholarship boy’ boarder at Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital school. Due to family circumstances he was unable to go to university and started work in the Housing Department of Bristol City Council. Writing was always important to him and very early on he published articles in newspapers and magazines. His first detective story was published in 1936.
In 1938 he married Sylvia Henly. Although a conscientious objector, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in World War II, landing in France shortly after D-Day. After the war he trained as a teacher and spent the rest of his life in education, first as a primary school teacher and then as a lecturer in a college of further education. In the 1950s he studied for an external economics degree from London University. No mean feat with a family to support; his daughter, Kathryn, was born in 1943 and his son, Derek, in 1949.
Throughout much of this time he continued to write detective fiction from ‘sheer inner necessity’, but also to supplement a modest income. He enjoyed foreign travel, particularly to France, and took up golf on retirement. He died of a heart attack shortly after celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1988.
When Mordecai Tremaine emerges from the train station, murder is the last thing on his mind. But then again, he has never been able to resist anything in the nature of a mystery – and a mystery is precisely what awaits him in the village of Dalmering.
Rehearsals for the local amateur dramatic production are in full swing – but as Mordecai discovers all too soon, the real tragedy is unfolding offstage. The star of the show has been found dead, and the spotlight is soon on Mordecai, whose reputation in the field of crime-solving precedes him.
With a murderer waiting in the wings, it’s up to Mordecai to derail the killer’s performance…before it’s curtains for another victim.
Murder for Christmas
So Pretty a Problem
Behold a Fair Woman
In at the Death
LYDIA DARE WAS dining with a murderer.
If she was afraid there was no trace of her fear in the hazel eyes which were regarding her companion across the snowy table with its scintillating burden of silver and glassware, polished and displayed, as she knew, in her honour; nor was there any tremor of the surface of the liquid to betray a nervous unsteadiness of the slender fingers in which she held the glass she was raising to her lips.
She sipped appreciatively and turned the glass against the light so that golden pin-points of reflection danced in her eyes.
‘There are people who say that champagne doesn’t deserve its reputation,’ she observed, ‘but this would make them all converts, Martin. It makes you feel light and gay as though you were walking on air. How on earth did you manage to find it?’
That the man facing her was delighted with her praise was evident, but he strove to conceal his pleasure with an exaggeratedly deprecating shrug.
‘I moved mountains,’ he returned lightly. ‘After all, champagne is for special occasions, and for very special occasions there should be a very special champagne.’
And then:
‘I can’t think, my dear,’ he added quietly, ‘of any occasion more special than this—to be here alone with you, even if for all too short a time.’
Lydia’s eyes softened. Impulsively her hand reached out to his.
‘Sometimes, Martin,’ she said, ‘I think you’re the nicest murderer I know.’
Martin Vaughan smiled.
‘It’s been fun, Lydia. I didn’t think I could have enjoyed anything so much.’
He did not have the appearance of a murderer now. Or rather, since murderers are found among all sorts and conditions of men, and are not as a rule marked out from their fellows by any definite peculiarities of form or features, he had the appearance of a very boyish and yet distinguished-looking one.
Boyish on account of the air of enthusiasm which he had momentarily acquired and which had smoothed the years from his brow; and distinguished on account of the wide proportions of that same brow and of the slightly greying although still thick and crisply curling hair which was brushed back from it.
Martin Vaughan was proud of the fact that his age was not visible in his face—unless one took account of the tiny wrinkles around the blue-grey eyes which had looked out upon forty-five years of existence—and that his thick-set frame and heavy shoulders had not degenerated into the fleshy obesity of that dangerous combination middle age and success.
Rigorous exercise and the near tropics had preserved his waist-line. Archæology and the study of ancient civilizations were his hobbies, and he had made a number of extensive tours of Mesopotamia and the Eastern Mediterranean. Several works he had published on the difficult and skilled task of locating and excavating age-old cities and burial grounds, and of extracting their story from the mists of unrecorded history, had become recognized as standard treatises and had gained for him the reputation of being an authority in such matters.
He had been able to indulge in his hobby because success had come to him early. Gold, South Africa, and a forceful, adventurer’s personality had been the rungs by which he had climbed. Not a great deal of gold as vast fortunes are reckoned, but he had sold out his holdings at a figure which had enabled him to choose his own way of life.
Something of his past was still evident in him despite the conventional evening clothes and the subdued but undoubtedly expensive comfort of his surroundings. The adventurer was lurking yet in the depths of the blue eyes which seemed to hold a hint of storm-lashed seas; in the powerful lines of a jaw which appeared to be thrusting itself forward a little more pugnaciously than was really necessary; and in the thick, confident fingers of his powerful hands.
Studying him, Lydia was lost for a brief space of time in a panorama of boom towns and lusty, crowded, tempestuous days in which a man’s fists had to act as his claims to life, and in which humanity was a raw thing pulsating near the surface of existence. She found herself thinking, as though she had not really known him before this moment of instinctive comprehension, that Martin Vaughan could be ruthless; that what he wanted he would take, and that his revenge could be a dreadful thing. Ten years in the peaceful beauty which was the south country village of Dalmering had given him background, but had merely overlain, without removing, his primitive beginnings.
Her eyes must have betrayed her thoughts. Her companion’s somewhat wry chuckle broke in upon her involuntary musings.
‘So you think I am capable of murder, my dear?’
‘Of course not,’ she said hastily, but with the very spontaneity of her answer and the quick flush of colour giving her the lie. ‘I was just—just thinking how exciting your life must have been before—before—’
She broke off uncertainly, but he was aware of her discomfort and went to her aid.
‘Before I turned myself from a rough diamond into a gentleman of leisure?’ he said, amused. ‘You blush charmingly, my dear, but you don’t lie very well. As a matter of fact, you’re quite right. I’ve been in unpleasant places where I’ve had to be a little—unpleasant—myself. At least, if I wanted to go on living—as I usually did. Perhaps,’ he added slyly, ‘that’s why I make such a good murderer!’
‘Now you’re developing the immodest ego of the successful actor,’ she returned accusingly, but her attack left him unshaken.
‘I believe I am,’ he told her. ‘And speaking of murder, I’ve an idea that Pauline Conroy was near it at yesterday’s rehearsal.’
‘She thinks you’re deliberately trying to act her off the stage and steal her thunder.’
‘Poor Pauline! As the only professional of us all she takes herself very seriously! She certainly seems to have her mind set on making a success of the play. She’ll probably have half the critics in London down for the opening night. Maybe she imagines she’ll be able to persuade them to believe that they’ve found a Sarah Bernhardt in a village hall!’
Lydia smiled.
‘When you say the “opening night” I take it you mean the only night! Seriously, though, Martin, acting in a murder play can’t really be much of a consolation for you. Don’t you get bored with living here? Don’t you find it horribly dull?’
‘Why should I?’ he countered. ‘I lead a very comfortable existence. I’ve all I want—books, music, my researches. And an occasional trip abroad when I feel in need of a change.’
‘A trip for what? To dig up mouldy old bones in a desert?’
Vaughan leaned back in his chair and his deep voice was vibrant with genuine enjoyment.
‘I believe you’re trying to prise the oyster out of his shell. I like digging up mouldy old bones in a desert. It’s my idea of enjoyment. Anyway, bones are interesting things. They can tell fascinating stories. They can tell of what the poet called “old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago.” They can tell of thieves in the night, willing to risk desecrating a tomb in order to make themselves rich, and of great kings, buried with their courts around them and all the things they might need in the after life placed ready to their hands. But don’t think, my dear, that I’m just an old fossil too, only interested in the dust and ashes of a few thousand years ago.’
He rose to his feet, and, crossing to the window, drew back the heavy velvet curtains. Through the darkness, as though they were bright stars sprinkled down out of the skies at random, they could see the lights of the little group of period houses which had been scattered—for profit, but by a builder with at least a lingering respect for the decencies—among the beauty of Dalmering.
‘No one could be dull—or even a fossil—with so much to see and hear and study. Look—behind all those lighted windows there are living people. There’s Pauline Conroy’s window, for instance—since we were speaking of her just now. I wonder what she’s doing at this moment? Perhaps she’s rehearsing her lines in front of her mirror. And there’s a light in the house to the left where Karen Hammond lives all the week—and where Philip Hammond lives at the week-end when he can get away from business. What is she doing now? Is she trying on the new hat her husband bought her in town this morning?
‘How do any of us know what strange creatures our neighbours become when they go into their houses and shut their doors upon the world? How do we know what people are thinking and saying behind all those innocent-looking façades? There’s the very stuff of drama lying all about us—a score of human beings, all loving, and hating, and laughing, and crying, just as those other humans who once animated those mouldy old bones you were decrying did in their lifetimes ages of time ago.’
Lydia was looking at him wonderingly, her lips slightly parted, held by his air of elation, deliberately half-suppressed though she could tell it to be. She had never seen him in quite such a mood before.
‘The oyster didn’t need much prising, Martin. You’re almost lyrical.’
‘It was my speech for the defence,’ he said, drawing the curtains again and turning to her. ‘The bones are only part of the story. Remember Pope—“The proper study of mankind is man”.’
‘ “The glory, jest and riddle of the world”,’ she added.
‘Not really much of a riddle, my dear,’ he said, and now his voice held a serious note which had not been evident before.
‘The same old emotions are still running around loose. You asked me if I found it dull here in Dalmering. It hasn’t been dull here for one moment. Of all the places I’ve ever known Dalmering is the loveliest. You know why, Lydia. You’ve been here. You know—you know that I’m in love with you?’
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I know. I’m sorry, Martin—’
There was a look of contrition on his face at that.
‘I don’t want you to be, Lydia. I didn’t intend to be the skeleton at the feast. It was just that—just that I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t really intend to say anything—except that I think Farrant is a lucky man and that I hope you’ll be very happy.’
‘You’re very generous, Martin.’
Vaughan made a visible effort to make his voice sound normal.
‘Nonsense, my dear. It isn’t really surprising that you preferred not to spend the rest of your life tied to an old roughneck like me. I’ve been smoothed out a little, but I’m still liable to revert to type at awkward moments! And I appreciate your coming here tonight—especially as you knew all about my hopeless passion.’
‘It was the reason I came,’ she said, admiring his attempt to speak lightly, and with a little ache at her heart because of the misery in his eyes which he could not conceal.
‘I hope Farrant won’t mind your being here.’
‘Of course he won’t. Gerald knows we’re old friends. Besides, I’m thirty-five. I’m an old woman, not an inexperienced young girl whose honour is in peril!’
The big man took her right hand in his own powerful one, and, stooping, kissed her finger-tips with a gallant little gesture which seemed oddly out of keeping with his heavy frame.
‘As long as you look as beautiful and charming as you’re looking now,’ he said, ‘you’ll never be an old woman, Lydia.’
He added, after a pause:
‘It’s the conventional thing to say on these occasions, but you know that I’m in earnest. If ever you need me, if ever there is anything I can do, you have only to ask and I’ll be there.’
It was clear that Lydia was conscious of the strained situation between them. Conscious of it and of the dangers it possessed, and anxious to bring it under control before it proved to be beyond her power.
‘I won’t hold you to it,’ she said jestingly. ‘I don’t want to embarrass you when you meet the only girl in the world.’
‘I’ve already met her,’ he responded quickly, and then, as if he, too, realized the strength of the emotions which were beginning to ride perilously near the surface, he went on, ‘I suppose it means that you’ll be leaving Dalmering?’
She nodded.
‘Yes. Gerald has to live in Edinburgh.’
‘I was afraid of it,’ he said, with mock resignation. ‘It means I’ll have to go searching for some more old bones. Lions in Africa for some, deep-sea fishing off Florida for others, and bones in the desert for me!’
But it seemed that his efforts were wasted and that Lydia was not listening to him. A queer, puzzled frown had come into her face.
‘I used to think that I would hate having to leave Dalmering,’ she said slowly. ‘But now I’m glad I’m going. Martin, have you noticed anything about this place lately? Has it seemed—different?’
Vaughan’s attention was caught by the oddly urgent note in her voice. He looked at her curiously.
‘Different?’
‘I can’t explain it,’ she said helplessly. ‘It’s just that there’s a strange feeling in the air—a horrible sort of feeling, as though everybody is frightened of everybody else, and people are watching each other, waiting for some dreadful thing to happen.’
‘Nerves,’ he told her. ‘You’ve been overdoing things—worrying about details and letting all the excitement get you down.’
But the idea had gained too firm a root in her mind for her to be so easily comforted.
‘No, it isn’t nerves. There’s something wrong. Things aren’t normal any more.’
‘You aren’t going to tell me that there’s something rotten in the state of Dalmering!’
A little to his dismay she took him literally.
‘There is, Martin! Something—something rotten. Something ugly, and horrible, and obscene. And I’m afraid. I know it sounds stupid and hysterically feminine of me, but sometimes I wake up at night panting and terrified, feeling that there’s some awful black power brooding over us all, just waiting for an opportunity to strike.’
A ragged note of fear had crept into her voice and Vaughan’s big hands went out protectingly to her shoulders.
‘Steady, my dear—we can’t have you going to pieces like this! You’ll have me beginning to blame my champagne!’
He refilled her glass and she took it from him with a half-ashamed little smile which was the product of a determined effort at self-control.
‘Sorry, Martin. I’m the skeleton at the feast now. Perhaps it is the excitement. I’ll be giving way to schoolgirl giggles next.’
The glass was part way to her lips when she shivered involuntarily.
‘Cold?’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll switch the fire on for a few moments.’
‘No, I’m not cold,’ she told him. ‘Just frightened.’
It was the truth she was speaking, for there was momentarily a sheer panic fear frozen in her eyes. She emptied her glass mechanically, as though she was not tasting the sparkling liquid.
‘There were icy fingers on my spine,’ she said, with an attempt to regain her composure. ‘I’d like another, please, Martin.’
‘Of course, my dear.’
There was a watchful, somehow guarded look upon the big man’s face as he took the glass and refilled it. He had seen that fleeting betrayal of her inward terror and it had left him disturbed and uncertain.
But despite its apparent intensity her emotion seemed to have been a transient one for it did not recur. The pallor left her cheeks. She became the gay, charming companion he had always known.
They had many things to discuss and time became of no importance—until Lydia looked down at the tiny gold watch gleaming against the white of her slender wrist, and gave an exclamation of dismay.
‘A quarter to eleven. I’ll have to fly, Martin.’
‘Does Cinderella have to be back so early?’
‘I promised Sandy I’d be in by eleven. She’ll be waiting up for me.’
‘Patient Sandra! She’s going to miss you, Lydia.’
‘Not so much as I’m going to miss her,’ returned Lydia. ‘She’s been my fairy godmother and guardian angel combined.’
Vaughan fetched the short evening cloak she had brought and placed it about her shoulders with just a touch of possessiveness.
‘I’ll see you back to the house.’
‘No, Martin,’ she said quickly. ‘I’d rather you didn’t. After all, there are the proprieties to think about—even in Dalmering. People will probably talk enough as it is about my coming here alone. Besides, it’s only a few minutes’ walk; it isn’t worth dragging you out for such a short distance.’
She saw that he was going to raise objections and her voice became coaxing.
‘Please, Martin. Just this last service—to round off a perfect evening.’
He was unwilling to acknowledge defeat, but defeat it was. He shrugged his shoulders in helpless acceptance of it.
‘When you attack me like that you leave me no defence.’
‘Thank you, Martin,’ she said softly. ‘For tonight—and everything.’
For several reasons Lydia Dare was glad that she was alone on the short walk back to the attractive half-timbered cottage she shared with Sandra Borne. Her mind was a confused tangle of impressions which she wished to sort out and label before their chaos overwhelmed her.
It was not that she had any doubts as to the wisdom of her marrying Gerald Farrant in preference to Martin Vaughan. She had known that Vaughan was in love with her before she had accepted his invitation to dine with him. As she had told him, it had been one of the reasons why she had gone.
But now she was not quite certain whether her action, which had sprung from a vague desire to make things easier for him—some kind of repressed maternal instinct she told herself wryly—had been a wise one. She had under-rated the situation. She had imagined it to be perfectly simple and easy to handle, and instead it had proved to be bristling with psychology.
Martin Vaughan was not a stranger. She had known him for so long that she could anticipate his ideas and his moods and the way in which he would react. At least, so she had believed. Now she was not sure.
She had become aware that his was a powerful personality; that although his strength might be latent, concealed beneath the veneer of a placid existence in a small country community, he could be masterful and dominant—all those things, in fact, which women are reputed to desire in men.
She was conscious of a disturbed, unsettled feeling, a sensation of disaster in the air. She hesitated and looked about her, as if to gain comfort from her surroundings.
It was a quietly peaceful early summer night. There were still odd lights dotted here and there to reveal that Dalmering was not yet wholly abed, but most of them marked the homes of the colony.
Dalmering consisted of the old village, with its tiny cluster of houses and its handful of miniature shops, lying along the main road; and a much more recent outcrop of larger houses which were the homes of its temporary residents, the weekenders and the city businessites who had discovered its unspoilt beauty. It was in these latter that the lights were to be observed. The older Dalmering, the true Dalmering, which had endured through the centuries with an impassive tranquillity, facing birth and death and the catastrophes of war and nature with equal undismay, was already enveloped in darkness and sleep.
Even the moon seemed to be aware of the division. Motionless banks of cloud hung in the sky, obscuring its rays from certain angles, so that whilst the newer houses were clearly outlined, as though to indicate that their inhabitants were in no hurry to retire, the old village was an undisturbed pool of ink in the midst of the radiance.
The sighing rustle of the waves on the shingle came plainly to her ears. The sea was no more than a mile away, and although the air was almost still, the salty tang and feel of the water was all about her.
Beauty was about her, too. Dalmering typified the real loveliness, the unbearable heartrending beauty of England—a beauty of flared sunsets and silver sea; of lonely moors and winding, dusty roads; of shady lanes, straggly roofs and scented hedgerows—a beauty which she could feel and which rose in her throat like a sweet agony and yet for which she was without words.
To reach her destination she had first to cross the open ground rather like an extended, haphazardly shaped and uneven version of the ancient village common, around which Martin Vaughan’s and the other houses were placed, and then walk along the narrow but well-worn pathway which traversed a small copse about twenty or thirty yards in depth before it made contact with the roadway leading to the old village—and, incidentally, her cottage.
She made her way at a quicker pace down the slope leading to the wooden bridge over the stream which zigzagged an apparently aimless way across the common, and in a few moments had reached the copse.
As she entered it the moonlight ceased and the shadows rushed upon her. The first few steps she took were blind and hesitant. Although she had trodden the path countless times before it was as though she had walked into an unknown world of darkness in which she was lost and alone.
Something rustled close at hand. So close that it startled her and she stopped abruptly, her heart thudding.
Her first reasoned thought was that Vaughan had followed her, after all. She knew that he had not been behind her as she had crossed the common, but although he would have had a greater distance to cover it would have been easily possible for him to have gone round by the roadway and reached the copse before her.
‘Is that you, Martin? You shouldn’t have bothered.’
She tried to speak casually, but her voice was unreal and a little desperate. It surprised her with its shrill uncertainty.
There was no sound in reply. All around her it was still and somehow dreadfully silent.
And now there was fear at her side. The darkness was becoming less intense, but the shadows which were detaching themselves from the deeper blackness were grotesque and ugly and menacing. They were no longer the shadows of friendly things, but were alien and distorted, reaching up to her, stretching out greedy fingers to drag her down.
She knew that it was a lie born of an imagination no longer under her control but momentarily she was incapable of restoring her conscious reason. She gave a stifled sob and began to run.
It might have been the signal for all the power of the evil she had been secretly fearing for so long to rise up against her. For suddenly she was no longer alone on the path.
She turned against her will to see that horror was there. A twisted, devilish horror, with insatiate eyes in the impossible mask of a fiend. An incredible horror, which paralysed her body and which her mind refused to believe.
And as she stared, incapable of movement, it resolved itself into a searing, sharp-edged pain—a pain which both pierced her through and enveloped her in its intensity. It screamed through her nerves to a fierce and terrible climax, and then there was no feeling any more—no pain, no fear, only a great, embracing silence, in the soft arms of which she lay utterly still.
EVEN IN HIS early ’sixties Mordecai Euripides Tremaine still preserved many of his boyish enthusiasms. One of them was a delight in all kinds of travel, even when the countryside through which he was passing held no undiscovered treasures for him.
It was a source of secret amusement to the other occupants of the compartment in the electric train which was carrying him swiftly southwards from Victoria to observe the eagerness with which he surveyed the rapidly changing landscape. Villages, farmhouses, green country-side–all appeared to have the same fascination for him as for a child seeing all these wonders for the first time.
His fellow travellers so far forgot the conventional reserve of the English using a public conveyance as to express their surprise at his obvious animation by exchanging glances among themselves. They would have had more surprise to express had they realized that they, too, came within the scope of his intense interest. Mordecai Tremaine had developed the valuable asset of being able to take comprehensive and sometimes devastating stock of his neighbours without giving them the least suspicion that he was at all interested in them.
It was not a gift which had descended upon him unawares, but was the result of a deliberate and often painstaking policy, sustained over a long period. To observe without being observed, and to observe accurately, had been the goal towards which he had striven with a persistence and faithfulness of purpose any potential martyr might have envied.
There was, of course, a reason for this somewhat unorthodox ambition. Within the shell of a slightly built, harmless-looking citizen, with greying hair, pince-nez and a regrettable but pronounced tendency to become garrulous, there dwelt a personality with attributes which were in violent contrast to the carpet slipper body which was displayed to the world. During the years when he had stood behind the counter of his tobacconist’s shop, dispensing packets of twenty, pipe cleaners and the brands of tobacco most favoured by his customers, Mordecai Tremaine’s mind had not been on those mundane means to a moderate livelihood. Instead, his thoughts had been travelling a darker, more savage and yet infinitely more exciting road.
Murder and Mordecai Tremaine had the sound of strange bedfellows, but nevertheless murder was his hobby. Many a night after the last customer had been satisfied had been spent in the cosy room over the shop, discussing the latest crime to horrify a public which openly decried but secretly welcomed blood with the breakfast newspaper. That his discussions had been with an acquaintance whose position as a police-surgeon brought him into intimate contact with the details of such crimes had put an edge to his enjoyment and had lent point to the rows of books on criminology which filled his bookshelves.
The days of the tobacconist’s shop were over now. When he had judged that his profits would provide enough for his moderate needs, Mordecai Tremaine had wisely retired. He had invested his capital with a careful eye to the maximum of return for the minimum of worry over the fickle variations of share prices, and had settled down to his hobby in earnest.
It was not so much the retired business man who looked out upon the world from behind the old-fashioned pince-nez which seemed to be always on the point of slipping to disaster as the keen criminologist and eager student of human nature. His relaxation was sought now not in the closely printed pages of his books after working hours, but in the study of his fellow men and the complex and fascinating emotions and passions by which they were swayed. The fact that the gods of chance had seen fit to involve him in two real-life murder cases since his retirement, and that he now numbered among his friends two inspectors of police, including one from Scotland Yard itself, had served to enslave him more.
He glanced around the compartment at his companions, thereby compelling them to make self-conscious efforts to appear as though they had not been furtively eyeing him. There seemed to be nothing of particular significance in his manner, but when he turned back towards the window his preoccupation was not with the landscape but with the mental exercise of placing the four people whom his brief examination had covered.
Three were men and one a woman. This last was middle-aged, cheerful-looking, and, judging from the filled shopping basket, returning from an expedition to the market town two stations up the line where she had joined the train. The mother of a family of healthy young animals, he decided—probably the wife of one of the local farmers, out with the object of supplementing her home-baked farmhouse fare.
Of the men, two responded equally easily to analysis. One was a parson—too easy that, he decided; the collar left no opportunity for theorizing. The second, from his neat, pin-striped suit, a little shiny at the elbows, and the leather brief-case in various papers taken from which he had been engrossed, was almost equally obviously a city business man paying an out of town call.
The third man presented more of a problem. Tremaine had been trying to affix a label to him for some while, for he had already been in the compartment at Victoria when he himself had entered.
He was a middle-aged man, whose round, bespectacled face and plump figure—enclosed in a well-cut if somewhat creased blue suit—should have suggested good humoured prosperity and yet somehow failed to do so. The cheeks which should have been smoothly aglow with well-being had a faint trace of flabbiness, and there were little lines of strain etched into their folds. The eyes behind the spectacles had a darting, worried quality, as though some urgent problem was pressing upon their owner and he was searching frantically not so much to solve as to evade it.
Mordecai Euripides Tremaine (his name was a legacy from parents in whose minds had dwelt a hazy but fervent appreciation of the Arthurian legends and the Greek classics) gave him a great deal of thought, but without the satisfaction of the said thought crystallizing into a sound theory. He had not, he told himself regretfully, achieved the skill of a Sherlock Holmes, whose agile brain and sharp eyes would have required no more than a few moments in which to give the stranger—to use a phrase from Shakespeare—both a local habitation and a name.
The next station was that at which he was to alight. As he stepped down to the platform he squared his shoulders and breathed deeply and deliberately. He fancied already that he could smell the sea—he had made up his mind that he would do so before he had left the compartment—and although he had never sailed the ocean in anything more substantial than his imagination a hint of salt in the air was always enough to set his blood racing.
He recognized the much-travelled little saloon car standing in the station courtyard in the same instant that he himself was recognized. He waved a greeting to the middle-aged couple, evidently husband and wife, who had been awaiting him, and Paul Russell came towards him and reached for his hand.
‘Glad to see you, old man,’ he said warmly.
Tremaine returned the grip, smiling into the kindly eyes in his friend’s weather-beaten face.
‘You’re looking well, Paul,’ he told him. ‘How is everything? Are all the Dalmering babies being born at a respectable hour now instead of dragging the unlucky doctor out of his bed in the middle of the night and robbing him of his beauty sleep?’
Jean Russell came round the car to join her husband.
‘Talking about babies in a public place is no fit way for a bachelor to behave,’ she said, with mock severity. ‘I can see you’re still a problem child, Mordecai, despite your grey hair!’
A busy country practice and a great deal of voluntary social work left neither Paul Russell nor his wife a great deal of time for relaxation, but Mordecai Tremaine had made their acquaintance on one of their rare holidays and he had enjoyed their friendship ever since. Tolerant and easy going, and yet with the ability to work desperately hard; very much alive to social evils and doing what they could to combat them, and yet possessed of a cheerful good humour, the Russells had made an appeal to him which he had found irresistible. Although it was several years since he had been able to spend any length of time with them they had corresponded regularly.
As he was climbing into the saloon, Tremaine saw Russell nod a greeting to someone who was just passing the car, and he saw the passer-by raise his hat to the doctor’s wife. It was the plump man in the blue suit who had puzzled him in the train.
‘One of the locals?’ he asked curiously.
‘Yes and no,’ returned Russell. ‘His name’s Shannon. He lives about half a mile up the road from our place. Why? Do you know him?’
There seemed to be just a trace of a sharper note of enquiry in the doctor’s voice than the original question had appeared to warrant, but it was so faint that Tremaine was uncertain whether it possessed any significance or not.
‘We were in the same compartment coming down from Victoria. I was amusing myself trying to guess what he was and where he was going.’
‘Did you discover the answers?’ asked Jean. ‘If you did you’ll be able to give us some information. Howard Shannon’s one of our mystery men.’
Tremaine gave her a quizzical look.
‘You sound as though he’s one of several.’
‘So he is,’ she told him. ‘Dalmering’s population is like Gaul in being divided; only it’s divided into two parts and not three. There’s what you might call the indigenous population—the people whose ancestors lived here—and the visiting population, the people who come down periodically, for week-ends and so on. They arrive one day and go back the next, and although we’re used to seeing them about we don’t really know them—not in the sense that we know who their families are and what they do for a living. Shannon comes down at all sorts of irregular intervals. He’s not a stranger, and yet where he goes when he leaves the village and what he does when he gets there we haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘You’re making Dalmering sound an interesting place,’ said Tremaine.
‘Perhaps it is,’ said Russell, and once again there seemed to be an odd note in his voice.
They drove out of the station yard and down the sunlit road leading to the village. It was early summer and the countryside—beautiful at all times in this quiet corner of Sussex—was almost poignantly lovely. Green fields with a fragrance upon them; tree-shaded roads with a copse appearing here and there to prevent any jarring suggestion of pattern or regimentation; ancient cottages intermingled with variedly modern houses, designed to blend into their surroundings as if nature had set them there and not the normally heavy hand of man, and each with its riotous blaze of colour where lupins, delphiniums and peonies bloomed—it was an enchanted land lying between the silver border of the sea and the smooth shoulder of the Downs, which rose up behind it to merge into the blue of a sky hazy with warmth and pregnant with suggestion of droning insects and long, still summer hours.
Mordecai Tremaine sat silently enthralled in the back of the saloon, avidly drinking in the scene as though he was fearful of missing some portion of its loveliness if he moved or spoke, his sentimental, romantic soul reaching towards an understanding of how it was that poets and artists throughout the centuries had been constrained to express such magic in words or in colour so that something of it should always remain.
Bordering the road on the left he saw a long, red-brick building with a low, thatched roof. There was a notice-board outside it, and Tremaine caught a glimpse of a printed poster as they passed. It was enough, brief though it was, for him to read the bolder lettering.
MURDER HAS A MOTIVE
A Play in Three Acts
By
ALEXIS KENT
‘I see you go in for drama in Dalmering,’ he remarked with a smile.
‘Yes,’ returned Russell, ‘we do.’
Once again that odd note seemed to be in his voice, but he did not offer to elaborate upon what he had said.
They turned a corner in that moment and came within sight of the village itself. It lay in a hollow a little below them, and in the brief instant in which the car was on the crest of the road before beginning the gentle run down, Tremaine thought that he had never looked upon a view so lovely.
The light summer haze gave an unreal appearance to the land. The contrasting greens of grass and trees, the pleasantly uneven common land with its winding stream and rustic bridge and with half-hidden cottages and houses spaced around it, all seemed to merge into a picture possessed of an enchantingly insubstantial air. Tremaine felt momentarily like a man who gazes into an image framed in the depths of a pool which is still and yet not quite still and who is afraid even to breathe lest he should disturb the surface of the water and destroy the vision.
The car coasted down the slope and reached the level road again. They ran through the deserted ‘square’ which was the local shopping centre, and in a moment or two were passing a copse lining the roadway which temporarily hid the common from view.
Tremaine drew a deep, sighing breath, as though reassured that now he could do so without disturbing the peace and tranquillity which lay almost tangibly about him.
‘It’s a beautiful spot,’ he said, his heart in his voice.
The doctor spoke over his shoulder, without taking his attention from the wheel.
‘It’s where they found the body,’ he remarked quietly.
So quietly that Mordecai Tremaine was not at first certain that he had heard him correctly.
‘The body?’ he echoed, a little stupidly.
‘The body,’ repeated Russell. ‘The body of Lydia Dare. She was found stabbed to death in the early hours of this morning on the path through the copse we’ve just passed.’
Tremaine looked blankly from one to the other of his friends.
‘Not—murder?’
‘Murder,’ said Jean Russell, and the hardness in her voice gave the word a flat, ominous sound which seemed to shatter the illusion of tranquillity like a steel hammer disintegrating a flawless sheet of glass into splintered fragments.
She turned in her seat so that now she was facing him from the front of the little car.
‘Lydia was a friend of ours—a dear friend. That’s why we want to do something—why we feel, Paul and I, that we must do something. That’s why we didn’t wire you not to come today although we knew that it wasn’t likely to be a holiday for you since it’s obvious that Dalmering will be full of police and newspaper reporters.’
Mordecai Tremaine tried to imagine dark, brutal murder, with all its inevitable camp-followers of endless publicity and enquiries, of screaming newspaper headlines and remorseless police investigations, of relentless, sometimes sordid, searchings for news and clues, and found that his mind refused to measure up to the task of connecting those things with Dalmering. They seemed so utterly opposed, so completely incompatible.
But it was quite clear that Jean and Paul Russell were grimly serious. He knew them too well to have any doubts as to their sincerity.
And he thought he knew, also, what had been in Jean Russell’s mind when she had told him that she had deliberately refrained from advising him not to pay his projected visit to Dalmering in view of what had happened.
He waited, not quite certain whether or not to assume his conjecture to be the right one, and the problem was solved for him.
‘You know what we’re trying to suggest, don’t you, Mordecai?’ said Jean, her eyes searching his face.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said, deliberately dull.
‘We want you to find the murderer,’ she told him bluntly.
He still fenced, although it was the reply he had expected.
‘But surely it’s a matter for the police? They don’t like amateurs getting themselves involved in these things.’
‘You’re not an amateur now,’ she persisted. ‘You can’t offer that excuse—not after all the nice things your friend Inspector Boyce said about you after the Queen’s Newbridge Murder.’
Mordecai Tremaine tried to overcome the feeling of complacency which was struggling to creep over him and endeavoured to look unimpressed.
Inspector Boyce (of Scotland Yard) had had no direct connection with the murder which had thrust the little West country village of Queen’s Newbridge into the limelight of publicity. Officially the crime had been solved by Inspector Rich of the Westport and District Constabulary. But Rich, being an honest man and knowing that Mordecai Euripides Tremaine was acquainted with Boyce, had written privately to his colleague at the Yard and had given him a full account of the part Tremaine had played in the solution of the mystery.
‘Suppose you tell me all about it when we reach the house,’ he temporized. ‘It’s a complete surprise to me. The murder must have been reported too late to be in the newspapers. I didn’t read anything about it in the Gazette.’
They had almost reached their destination by now—it was one of the smaller of the modern houses, although set, like its neighbours, in its own well-tended garden—and the doctor slowed down in order to swing over the road and drive through the gateway into the brick-built garage which was just beyond the house itself and pleasantly concealed by a rustic archway in which the roses were just beginning to appear. As he cleared the gate, with an expert certainty born of much practice, he nodded in recognition to a woman who had halted to allow him to pass.
Tremaine did not see her features clearly, for she was wearing sun glasses which created a partial effect of disguise, but she carried herself gracefully, and her superb figure was emphasized by the lines—plain but not forbiddingly severe—of the white summer frock she wore. Her hair, shoulder length, was silkily blonde to a degree which caught the attention, framing as it did a clear-featured face which was healthily suntanned. Her eyes, Mordecai Tremaine told himself, his sentimental soul in full command, would almost certainly be blue.
He realized a little guiltily that he had been openly staring, and that Jean Russell’s eyes were upon him with a quizzical air.
‘Karen Hammond,’ she told him, anticipating his question, and added, wickedly:
‘I’m afraid she’s married.’
They had come to a halt outside the garage, and Tremaine made use of the few moments it took him to climb from the car to recover his self-possession.
‘Is she one of the regulars or one of the week-enders?’ he asked, with a carelessness as assumed as he could make it.
‘Both,’ returned Jean. ‘She’s here quite a lot, but her husband is more of a bird of passage. His work appears to keep him busy in town. Sometimes we see him down here at weekends and sometimes he seems to manage to get down during the week, but he’s very erratic. You never quite know whether he’s here or not.’
‘What does he do?’ asked Tremaine, and Jean Russell smiled.
‘You’re the detective,’ she told him. ‘All that we know is that he’s something in the city—which isn’t very helpful.’
Tremaine was in the act of framing another question when they heard a step on the gravel path and a figure came from the direction of the garden at the rear of the house.
‘Hullo, Paul,’ said a new voice. ‘I just looked in to ask Jean if she—’ The voice broke off as its owner became aware of the presence of a stranger. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had visitors.’
‘That’s all right, Sandy,’ said Russell’s cheerful tones. ‘Come along and be introduced. We want Mordecai here to get to know Dalmering, and of all the people in the neighbourhood you’re one of the first we’d like him to meet. After all, you’re something of an institution!’
He ushered his visitor forward so that Tremaine and the new arrival were face to face.
‘Mordecai, this is Sandra Borne, one of our near neighbours. Most of us call her Sandy—she prefers it. Sandy—meet Mordecai Tremaine, an old friend of ours.’
Tremaine found himself shaking hands with a bright-eyed little woman over whom he appeared to tower although his own height was no more than average. He estimated Sandra Borne’s age as something near forty, but he was aware that when it came to guessing how old any woman was he was on dangerous ground, and he refrained from setting his mind upon any definite figure.
She was not by any means good-looking but there was a certain attractive vitality about her. She had the air of a capable, intensely ‘busy’ person, the kind of hard-working enthusiast who is responsible for organizing fêtes and pageants and all the numerous social activities of village life.
Her forehead was wide, and its breadth was further accentuated by the piled-up dark hair, streaked with grey, which surmounted it, so that her head seemed a little too large for her short body. A small, straight nose with flared nostrils, a wide, mobile mouth, a rounded but firm-looking chin, and brown eyes which appeared to possess just the faintest suggestion of green but which he could not assess definitely because of the horn-rimmed spectacles she wore, completed the overall impression Tremaine received in the first moments of greeting.
When the introductions had been made he had an opportunity of studying her more closely, and he saw then that her appearance of vitality was an artificial one; that she was struggling to maintain it, as though she felt it to be expected of her, but that it required a constant effort to keep up the pose.
Her eyes were not as bright as he had at first imagined them to be; there was in their depths a mixture of strain, anxiety and other emotions he could not read, and they were faintly ringed with shadows. When she was off her guard her smile took on a fixed, mechanical quality, and underneath it the lines of distress were visible.
The reason was soon made clear to him.
‘Sandy and Lydia Dare shared a cottage,’ said Paul Russell.
He gave the information almost casually—with what was, Tremaine realized a little belatedly, a deliberately assumed air of unconcern. Sandra Borne’s reaction was much swifter than his own. She glanced quickly at the mild-looking man with the old-fashioned pince-nez to whom she had just been introduced, and then back to the doctor.
‘He knows—about Lydia?’
‘Yes, he knows,’ agreed Paul Russell.
‘They’ve just told me,’ interjected Tremaine, finding his voice at last. ‘I only arrived from London a few minutes ago. There was nothing in the newspapers before I left. I take it that Miss Dare—it was Miss?’ he added, turning to Russell. The other nodded and he went on: ‘I take it that Miss Dare and yourself were very close friends? It must have been a great shock for you.’
‘It was,’ said Sandra Borne in a low voice.
It was clear from her face that discussion was painful to her and that it was taxing her self control to endeavour to remain unmoved. She turned to the other woman as if feeling the need for support from her own sex.
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to fly, Jean. ‘There’s a—there’s a lot to be done.’
‘We understand,’ said Jean Russell quietly. ‘If there’s anything we can do to help you mustn’t be afraid to let us know.’
‘That’s an order, Sandy,’ said her husband.
Sandra Borne’s eyes were a little misty.
‘You’re both awfully good,’ she said.