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Source ISBN: 9780008318758

Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008318765

Version: 2020-10-23

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

NO FACE

Christianna Brand

BEFORE AND AFTER

Peter Antony

HOTEL EVIDENCE

Helen Simpson

EXIT BEFORE MIDNIGHT

Q Patrick

ROOM TO LET

Margery Allingham

A JOKE’S A JOKE

Jonathan Latimer

THE MAN WHO KNEW

Agatha Christie

THE ALMOST PERFECT MURDER CASE

S. S. Van Dine

THE HOURS OF DARKNESS

Edmund Crispin

CHANCE IS A GREAT THING

E. C. R. Lorac

THE MENTAL BROADCAST

Clayton Rawson

WHITE CAP

Ethel Lina White

SIXPENNYWORTH

John Rhode

THE ADVENTURE OF THE DORSET SQUIRE

C. A. Alington

THE LOCKED ROOM

Dorothy L. Sayers

Acknowledgements

Also available

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

‘A great many crime short stories continue to be written with nothing but entertainment in mind.’

Julian Symons

As with the first volume of Bodies from the Library (HarperCollins, 2018), the aim of this volume is to bring into the light more lost or previously unknown short fiction by some of the best-known writers active during the Golden Age of crime and detective fiction, a period that can be loosely defined as starting in 1913 and ending in 1937. These dates mark the publication of two major titles: Trent’s Last Case, in which the journalist E. C. Bentley provided an antidote to Sherlock Holmes; and Busman’s Honeymoon, described as ‘a love story with detective interruptions’ by its author Dorothy L. Sayers.

For our purposes, there is also a loose definition of crime and detective fiction and in this volume, as well as stories that conform to S. S. Van Dine’s requirement that ‘there simply must be a corpse’, there is a story that sets out merely to deceive the reader by only appearing to be criminous, one that blurs the distinction between fact and fiction and another that was published after the end of the Golden Age but playfully tweaks its tail …

Enjoy!

Tony Medawar

February 2019

NO FACE
Christianna Brand

They sat in their silent ring in the darkened room and their touching fingers trembled and jerked apart and touched again … He was trying frantically to get through to them. ‘Listen to me! Listen! They were wrong, warn them, they’d got it all wrong!’ But they did not hear him; over his voice the sweet piping treble was burbling on of the peace and sunshine over here on the Other Side, and all the flowers. No ear for his soundless screaming: ‘It’s all going to begin again …’

Ringing up the police—Miss Delphine Grey. ‘Mr Joseph Hawke to speak to Superintendent Tomm.’

The weary voice. ‘Yes, Mr Hawke?’

He was half hysterical, gibbering with excitement. ‘You know, Superintendent, Joseph Hawke, famed clairvoyant. I sent you that article I published after the last time. The man is a lunatic—’

The murderer killed apparently at random, anyone, any time, any place. The swift incapacitating stab in the back, the body turned over and stabbed and stabbed and stabbed again. A plastic sheet would be throw down, which had protected the killer from the spurting blood; and for the rest, no sign left, ever, no clue for a police force stretched to its limit, on the edge of desperation. And every crank in the country ringing up, writing in, with their crack-pot theories. ‘Well, so, Mr Hawke—’

‘—helpless, a psychotic, I showed that in my articles. Some childhood experience? Witnessed a killing? A stabbing? No face!—he told you that he had no face …’ (The ghastly, gobbling, whispering ’phone calls to the police, taunting them, daring them, and yet perhaps with an inherent cry for help. ‘You’ll never catch me. How would you know me?’ And the terrible choking cry, ‘I have no face.’) ‘Now, a man who says he has no face, Superintendent, he’s a psychopath, he looks in the mirror and he dares not see himself. A man who has no face—’

‘—is a man who wears a stocking-mask. Now, Mr Hawke—’

‘Yes, but one moment! This time I have something positive to tell you. I’ve seen him. In the crystal—scrying, we call it. A small man, five foot six or less, clerk type, regulation suit, knee-length mackintosh—’

‘Strikingly different from half the male population of this town. Including for example, yourself. Now, I’m frantically busy—’

‘But there’s more—’

‘—so goodbye and thank you.’ He could not forbear from adding: ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’

He fell into one of his terrible rages, hunched like a monkey in the big séance room armchair, and for a moment lost consciousness, blacked out as of late he so often did, sometimes for hours at a time, coming to spent and exhausted, deeply troubled by forgotten dreams. But Delphine was with him now, gently dabbing with a damp cloth at the haggard, narrow white face. ‘What does it matter, Mr Hawke? A dumb policeman!’

‘I could have told them—the man has red hair. But they’ll never believe in me, in my Gift—’

‘I believe in you,’ she said. ‘I know.’

Coming up to her in the crowded store, a total stranger. ‘Don’t be afraid, I only want to help you.’ But she had been afraid. Other shoppers had gathered protectively about her: was there not a mass murderer abroad? He introduced himself to them. ‘Joseph Hawke—famed clairvoyant, you’ll have heard of me. And I’ve had this vision, you see, in the crystal, I know that she’s in deep trouble.’ She had cried out—how could he possibly have known?—gone with him and confided, ashen-faced, ‘I’ve had a telephone call from him. From No Face, slopping and gobbling. It was terrifying. He said—he said, “You’re next!”’ But she was incredulous. ‘How could you know?’

He knew because he had watched her an hour ago, praying in the church before the statue of St Jude, Refuge of the Despairing. He learned a good deal from watching in churches—the widow in her mourning dress at the foot of the crucifix, the woman before the altar of St Antony of Padua who would help you to find lost things.

Horn-rimmed spectacles, mac turned inside out, a nylon wig, perhaps—he was adept at disguises, simple or elaborate: follow the victim to some busy spot where your revelations will attract potential clients for future séances. His current assistant would follow up the clues in old newspapers, parish registers, graveyards, even; and they would be duly astounded at how much he could tell them of themselves.

Delphine, frightened, without family or friends, had fallen a natural prey and in time replaced the latest helper to have departed, faith eroded by so much of fraudulence; grateful and trusting, Delphine had accepted sensibly the need of any practitioner to pad out for the credulous, trivialities unworthy of the true psychic gift. Pretty, sweet and blessedly naïve Delphine!—he might have come to love her if he could ever have felt love for anyone, poor squinny little orphanage boy, looking only inward, unto himself; but he felt only that she was caring and kind. He had never known that either.

Now she suggested: ‘Never mind the police. Tell the media.’

The media seized with joy, as ever, upon anything hinting of the occult. And here was Joseph Hawke, famed clairvoyant, describing a vision of a small man, white-collar type, and with red hair …

Two mornings later, the police issued a statement; the victim of last night’s murder had clutched, as though torn out in the struggle, a curl of black nylon: and mixed in with the nylon, two short red hairs.

Mr Joseph Hawke was a famed clairvoyant indeed.

The public were ripe for exploitation. Terror stalked in their midst. The authorities seemed helpless. But now—a Saviour! Queues formed to attend his scrying séances. He saw what they wanted him to see—the chances, he said to Delphine, were high against any of them falling victim to No Face. And of course very often, it was a genuine vision.

‘You never see me in the crystal?’ she asked, wistfully.

‘I’d have told you, wouldn’t I?’ He knew that she longed to stay with him in safety, but with this upsurge of fame he must be circumspect and she was nightly packed off to creep back to her lonely flat at the other end of town. ‘Use different exits from here, keep him guessing. You’ll be all right.’ He was impatient to get on with the affairs of Joseph Hawke. His correspondence was growing enormously. ‘If only we dared bring in some secretarial help!’

‘There’s so much stuff in the flat.’ The wired-up séance room, the rolls of fine plastic for the ectoplasm during mediumistic trance; the disguises for the follow-ups, the painted gas balloons looking down from the ceiling with dear Father’s fine features or mother’s sweet smile—it was incredible what people would believe when, in grief and anxiety, they wanted to believe. He agreed: ‘No, it’s too dangerous. We’ll have to make do with tricks, the slates and all that, and meanwhile I’ll train you in the scrying.’ He said sharply: ‘Did you hear what I said? You seem very distrait today.’

‘Yes, well … I’ve been trying to pluck up courage to tell you. The police have been questioning me. They asked how you could have known that the man has red hair. If I thought you had ever dyed your hair.’

‘Oh, my God!’ It had never occurred to him. ‘They think I know, because I’m No Face myself!’ His voice grew shrill, hysteria rose up in him like a scream. ‘They’d kill me—if such a rumour got around, the people would lynch me!’ And he began casting about, his head moving this way and that as though he might literally see a way out. ‘I’ll have to somehow prove … What proof can I show them …?’ And the darkness grew, and the swimminess, the build-up to unconsciousness; and sharply into the darkness and swimminess, a bell pealed. ‘Oh, Christ!’ he cried out. ‘They’ve come for me!’

‘It’s the people for the séance,’ she said.

By the time she had led them in, awed and silent, he was sprawled back in the chair, his hands lying flaccid on the table-top, the crystal abandoned. ‘He’s already in trance. Very quietly—sit down, join your hands in a ring. His two neighbours—just put your hands on his hands.’ In the ordinary way there would be noise, music, spirit movements all over the darkened room; if he wanted to be free, he simply jerked his hands, let his neighbours, groping in the dark, find each other’s hands, leaving him outside the ring. But this time was going to be different. She stood quietly aside, looking, herself, a little frightened. And he began to speak.

Or through him, someone began to speak. The police had published recordings, every soul in the room clearly recognised that voice—the horrible, gasping, half-whispering voice with its slurring of consonants, slobbering out the words. A woman shrieked, hands jumped apart, scrambled to re-form the circle; but the voice gabbled on. ‘Must have it! Must have it! Killed … The smell of their death … Must have it again …’ And the terrible cry: ‘They can’t stop me—they can’t find me: I have no face!’ An incomprehensible muttering and then: ‘But you know me! You described me! My name, tell them my name!’ The mumbling died away, glottic as the plops in a bubbling saucepan; died into silence …

Broken at last by a different voice, the voice of the medium. Strangely quiet after the hubble-bubble of that terrible voice. Spelling out—letters. An F. A pause and then an O; and then without interval, C-A-N-E. His name, he had said: and his name was F. O. Cane.

Into the stillness, Delphine said quietly: ‘Rearrange the letters and it spells—No Face.’

He got rid of them all, rushed to the telephone. The wooden voice tinged with exasperation. ‘Yes, Mr Hawke?’

‘His name,’ he said triumphantly. ‘I can tell you his name. And it is not my name.’

‘Oh, that. I never very seriously thought it was.’

His mind shook. To have offered this precious secret on a plate, which all the time might have been saved for some world-shattering revelation when the time was ripe!—and to find that after all, he needed no such proof of his innocence. But he had blurted it out already. ‘His name is F. O. Cane.’

A moment’s silence, and then: ‘You’ve been playing at anagrams, Mr Hawke, you and that pretty young lady of yours. F. O. Cane—No Face. But why not A. F. Cone? or C. O. Fane? Or F. Ocean, that would be rather a jolly name, F. Ocean. The Red Sea, perhaps, considering his fondness for blood?’

The narrow, hatchet face grew pinched with fury, he clung to the receiver with a juddering hand. ‘All right! You’ll be sorry! I’ll tell you nothing more, let him kill and kill and kill, you’ll get no more help from me!’ And to reclaim something at least from disaster, he broadcast widely that during a mediumistic trance, the murderer himself had come through and revealed his name. It would be safest not yet to make this public but he would deposit it in a sealed envelope, and one day the world would know that he had been right.

And indeed that night, the voice called the police—they had arranged code words with him to save themselves from hoaxers—and his name was F. O. Cane.

Delphine was uncertain about it, uneasy. ‘He’ll know that you know—and that probably I do too. Tonight; he may know tonight, if they get it on the nine o’clock news.’ She looked very pale and drawn. ‘I feel a bit scared going home. I suppose, just for once—?’

But he was tired, exhausted. ‘You’ll be all right, he doesn’t know yet, get back and lock yourself in, you’ll be perfectly safe.’ After all, what else was there to do about it? Give her shelter here? But he simply could not risk scandal now. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m totally worn out by the séance. And then that fool of a policeman—’ At the thought of it his voice began to rise, he felt sick with it, physically sick with the rage and the despair. ‘Real—this time it was real. But they’ll never believe …’ And the darkness descending, and the blackness …

But at four o’clock in the morning, he was wide awake and dialling her number. ‘Delphine—he’s rung me up!’

‘Oh, Mr Hawke—!’

‘About you! He says he’s going to … He says—tonight!’

She gave a sort of scream, broke into terrified sobbing. ‘His voice came through again, Delphine. It was real, it was genuine, believe me! I came to and found myself by the telephone. Now, look—lock yourself in, bar the door, put something against it.’

‘Oh, God,’ she sobbed, ‘I’m so frightened! He—he stabs them and stabs them. I can’t stay here, I can’t be alone—’

‘Don’t go, don’t leave your flat, I’ll call the police—’

‘Please come,’ she cried, imploring. ‘Please come, please come!’

‘Yes, but I can’t remember—Delphine! Your address?’ But her voice said, ‘I’m going to … Passing out …’ and there was the clatter of the dropped receiver. He called her name urgently, but there was no reply.

When he got through to the police station, it was from a call-box. A night-duty officer this time. Cagily. ‘He rang you? Any code word?’

‘Code? I don’t know. I was in trance—’

‘Oh, in trance, sir, were you?’

‘Some word did keep coming through. Silver?—could it be—?’ All caginess vanished. The voice snapped: ‘Name and address?’

Her name, yes. ‘But I can’t remember—’

‘Telephone?’

‘You can try but she seems to have fainted. And it’s a rented flat, the ’phone’s not in her name.’ And time passing, time passing. ‘Anyway, you find it, I can’t wait—I’ll have to try and remember the way. He could be there at this minute.’

He allowed himself only the smallest delay but it was almost an hour before he appeared at her flat. The police were there, the Superintendent himself. He gasped out: ‘Delphine?’

Superintendent Tomm in his level way. ‘The young lady’s not here.’

‘Oh, God, he hasn’t—?’

‘He’s been here. The window was forced, he’d got in over the roofs.’

‘But Delphine?’

‘She heard him at the window. Tore open the door and escaped. There’s a call-box just outside the flats, she rang us from there. We’ve got her safe. But meanwhile, of course, he’d been here and gone.’ He remarked coolly: ‘You took your time.’

‘There’s thick fog—’

‘We noticed. Still—an hour! You started out from home?’

‘Well, of course.’

‘I ask, because you rang the station from a call-box.’

‘She didn’t replace her receiver. That disconnected my ’phone. I got lost, I’ve been driving round and round, hardly knowing what I was doing.’

‘Yes, well … We’ll keep the girl for the night, she’s in a pretty bad way …’

She had pulled herself together by the time she came to him next morning, but she still looked terrible, pale as death and with dark arcs beneath her eyes. He was sitting collapsed in his chair and did not even look up at her. She knelt at his side. ‘Don’t be so upset! I’m all right now. I got away safe.’

He said dully: ‘Before I started, I rang round the media. I told them there’d be another killing. Last night, I said. A girl. In her own home. It’s been broadcast everywhere. And now I shall be proved wrong.’

She got to her feet, stood staring down at him. ‘Oh, my God—Mr Hawke! You’d rather I had been killed. Killed, murdered, slaughtered—if it would keep them believing in your powers!’

‘Oh, no!’ he cried out. ‘No, no!’ And he fell on his knees, caught at her hand, holding it against his worn face, clammy and cold. ‘Of course I wouldn’t sacrifice one hair of your head, Delphine!’ And yet … ‘It means so much to me. I have the gift, you know that: it’s so terrible to me that nobody will believe. Last night—the ’phone call: that was a genuine experience, I swear to you that it was. And now, if I’m proved wrong—’

She slid away her hand, stepped back, looking down at him. The horror seemed to fade away from her face, pity took its place. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You’re safe. He did kill again last night.’

Now it was Superintendent Tomm’s turn to call on Joseph Hawke. ‘This time you weren’t quite so bang on. A girl was killed, yes. In her home, yes. But a man was killed too, the boy friend, visiting. You didn’t foresee that?’

‘Well, but …’ He said quickly: ‘That would be fortuitous. He meant to kill a girl—well, he meant to kill Delphine. But the man appeared, he had to kill him too.’

‘You’re still offering this as a psychic revelation?’ said the Superintendent, curiously.

‘I was in trance. I have these—well, what you would call dreams, very troubled, I wake up exhausted as though—’

‘As though you’d been walking in your sleep, perhaps?’

‘In this case as though I’d had the telephone call. A psychic revelation: yes, just the right phrase. How else could I have known the code word?’

‘You had a genuine ’phone call from No Face and he mentioned it?’

He fell back in despair. ‘You’ll never believe me, will you? No one will ever recognise my powers. Did he ring me, those earlier times, and describe himself to me? Did he ring and tell me that he has red hair? Did he ring and give me his name?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Superintendent Tomm. ‘You tell me.’

He fought against the old inevitable rise of hysteria. ‘Are you suggesting that I’m nothing but a fraud?’

‘Well, as to that—people do talk, you know.’

‘Oh, yes, I’m sure. Dismissed assistants. Who would listen to them?’

‘I would. Because you see, we have three choices. If, as you insist, you’ve had no actual ’phone calls—and if, as they insist, you have no true psychic powers—then there’s only one way that you would know as much as you do about this murderer.’

‘You mean—? Oh, my God!’ Fear rose up, choking him, darting questions scuttled about in his mind like rats. ‘You think I’m him? You believe I’m the killer? You suspected it once before …’

‘And you immediately came across with a ‘proof’ of your innocence. You gave us his name.’

‘Well, there you are then!’

‘But after all, that could have been yourself ringing up and confirming yourself.’

‘How could I, if I didn’t know the code word?’

‘Ah, but, Mr Hawke,’ said Superintendent Tomm, ‘what does that make you, if you did?’

He sat for a long time saying nothing, and slowly the hysteria ebbed away, leaving his mind cold and clear. He said at last, slowly: ‘If I tell you something, will you swear—?’

‘I’ll swear to nothing. But I won’t unnecessarily give away your secrets.’

‘Well, then. I see now that I have to convince you that I am not No Face; whatever conclusion you in the end might come to—if such a rumour got about—God help me! So I must tell you. I saw him. Not in the crystal—I saw him in a church. I noticed this man go into the confessional box. He was there a long time and when he came out he flung himself down on his knees and buried his face in his hands. And the priest came out of the box and went away quickly and he was as pale as death. I followed, I saw the priest kneeling out of sight of the rest, before a side-altar, with his hands clasped, looking up at the crucifix, tears pouring down his face. I knew then that he had heard something terrible, but he couldn’t break the seal of the confessional, he was powerless to do anything about it. And there was a mass murderer abroad.

‘I went back down the aisle. I touched the shoulder of the kneeling man and spoke some name. He shook me off, muttering, “No, no. Go away!” I gave him a sort of apologetic pat on the head and said, “Sorry, mate!—I thought you were someone I knew!” But in those two moments—we’re trained in these tricks, Superintendent, that’s how we get our information—I’d flicked the handkerchief out of his breast pocket and seen the name printed across the corner; and I’d gently shuffled back the nylon wig and got a glimpse of the red hair underneath. And that’s all there was to it.’ He gave a small, despairing shrug. ‘So now you know. But at least it proves that to know what I knew about him, I didn’t have to be the killer.’ He shrugged again. ‘I suppose if, after that, I swear to you that I do sometimes exercise the true psychic gift, you will simply think me a fool.’

‘A fool?’ said the Superintendent. ‘No, no, on the contrary. I think you are a very clever man.’ He fell to musing upon it. ‘A very, very, very clever man,’ he said.

Delphine appeared in the doorway. ‘Oh—I’m sorry—’

‘No, no, Miss Grey. It was really you I came to see. This may be just a little to your comfort. After you’d left this morning, we had one of his calls. Out of the usual horror emerged the fact that he was gloating over the two people murdered last night. In his childhood, he’d witnessed a double killing—a fight between his parents. With knives—so one up to you, Mr Hawke, you always suggested something of the kind!—and recently, I suppose, something triggered off the reaction. He has a craving, like a drug, for what he calls the smell of death.’

‘Yes—he said that to Mr Hawke, during last night’s séance.’

The Superintendent did not look at Mr Hawke. ‘He didn’t mention the word “surfeit”? No, the séance took place before the double killing. But he said it this morning, over and over. I’m hoping it just may mean that he’s satisfied. All the same …’ He suggested to Delphine: ‘You’ve had a bad time—this is twice he’s threatened you. You wouldn’t consider getting out of town for a bit?’

‘Oh, she can’t do that,’ said Joseph Hawke. ‘I need her here.’

She remained but now she was given police protection indeed, with safe-conduct to and from her home, a man posted all night on duty at her block of flats, even prowling the corridors outside of Joseph Hawke’s apartment. The work was ever-increasing, but they had been able to rent, from people fleeing from danger, a flat in the same building and there install a couple of secretaries. Three months passed by: No Face, appetite apparently appeased, struck no more. Gradually she seemed to forget her terrors, gave herself over to her study of the crystal ball. A success; she invented a little gimmick of her own, allowing the sitter to peer over her shoulder down into the wavery depths of the globe on its bed of black velvet then, once they were sufficiently mesmerised, slipping under the crystal a picture or photograph—by that time, almost anything more would do—and with a little guidance soon having them in amazed recognition of the dear old homestead complete with lost loved ones right down to dead doggie, Rover. But she herself proved somewhat too susceptible to the hypnotic effect—like gazing into deep, deep water, she would dreamily say, moving gently to a cloudy turbulence. An evening came when, after a particularly long, hard day’s work, he found her apparently unconscious, sitting nursing the glittering ball in her hands. ‘Delphine?’

No flicker of response. He was about to bring her round, gently, when she began to speak, to mutter in the high, bird-like voice she affected for her professional sessions. ‘Something moving. In the crystal—moving.’

To be clever at interpreting nonsense was one thing; a genuine rivalry in scrying was quite another. ‘What do you mean?’ he said sharply. ‘Moving?’

She seemed not to hear him. ‘Shadowy … All swirling … A picture of, a picture of …’ And she cried out suddenly: ‘It’s my flat! I can see the clock. The clock says midnight. It’s midnight. It’s tonight. There’s a girl—’ The high voice faltered. ‘There’s blood, there’s blood!’ and she gave a sharp scream and cried out ‘No! No! NO!’ and her hands dropped away from the crystal globe, she fell across the arm of the chair and lay there, still.

Oh, dear God—Delphine! His gentle and loyal Delphine, the only true friend that in all his life he had ever known—butchered to death by a maniac come alive again to his craving for blood! But it’s all right, he thought; there’s masses of time to warn the police, she can stay in the office flat, she needn’t go back home …

On the other hand …

He sat for a long, long time, watching her. Almost certainly what she had seen in the crystal would be obliterated from her mind. Let her go, then; and then inform the police, let them set a trap and—maniac caught red-handed in a murder attempt, and all through his own amazing predictions.

And yet, again …

She had seen in the crystal the spilled blood of a deed accomplished. She had seen into the future. What use, after all, to interfere, to protect, to warn?—only to have the prediction of the crystal come true; to be seen to have failed. Should not one simply ‘foresee’ what inevitably must be?

But foreseeing, why not have warned in advance? I must leave it to the last moment, he thought, pretend to have just come out of trance, rushed to the telephone. Then immediately call the media and … The maniac caught, not in the attempt but actually in commission of the deed: a small man, red-headed, whose name would prove to be F. O. Cane. Just dare the very universe, after that, to question the psychic powers of the great Joseph Hawke!

If in his heart he recognised that here was an infamy beyond the imagination of any decent man—his mind over-rode the thought. Within him the passion to be accepted for what he knew himself indeed to be had grown like a weed, to suffocate all other caring. At five minutes to midnight, call the police, call his contacts; and meanwhile let her, in happy ignorance, go home.

She stirred at last, opened her eyes, looked mildly astonished. ‘Oh, dear—did I pass out? This thing—I fall for it far too easily. Like staring down into a pool, into swirling water.’

He said: ‘Did you see anything in the water?’

‘Well—I seem vaguely to remember something—something rather horrid, like waking up from a nightmare one’s forgotten. I didn’t say anything?’

He dragged out the words. ‘No, you didn’t say anything.’

‘Goodness, how late it is! I must get home. Would you like me to get you something to eat before I go?’

‘No, no,’ he said, almost violently. Even he could not accept kindness from her, could not share with her such a meal as this. The last supper, he thought: she and Judas.

The last supper. He knew, then, didn’t he?—deep in his consciousness he had known all along—that he was sending her out to die.

12 Keying.

Bodies from the Library 2

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