‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’

Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929

Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.

Copyright

COLLINS CRIME CLUB

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Thomas Nelson and Sons 1938

‘Meet Trent’ first published by George Allen & Unwin Ltd 1935

‘The Ministering Angel’ first published in The Strand 1938

Introduction first published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1953

Copyright © Estate of E. C. Bentley 1935, 1938

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1938, 2020

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008216290

Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008216306

Version: 2020-06-24

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

PREFACE: MEET TRENT

I. THE GENUINE TABARD

II. THE SWEET SHOT

III. THE CLEVER COCKATOO

IV. THE VANISHING LAWYER

V. THE INOFFENSIVE CAPTAIN

VI. TRENT AND THE FOOL-PROOF LIFT

VII. THE OLD-FASHIONED APACHE

VIII. TRENT AND THE BAD DOG

IX. THE PUBLIC BENEFACTOR

X. THE LITTLE MYSTERY

XI. THE UNKNOWN PEER

XII. THE ORDINARY HAIRPINS

XIII. THE MINISTERING ANGEL

Footnote

The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

A LITTLE more than four decades ago, in the dear, dead year of 1910, when world wars were still unknown and the Edwardian age was dying with its king, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a journalist on the staff of London’s Daily News, surveyed the state of the detective story and found it foul. But perhaps foul is too strong a word to use in connection with a polite man and a polite era; perhaps it would be better to say, simply, that Bentley found the state of the detective story unsatisfactory. He was not alone. As early as 1905 a contributor to the Academy had declared that ‘the detective in literature’ was ‘passing into decay’ and was carrying ‘with him the regret of a civilized world’.

Conan Doyle, the old master, was still very much alive as a man, with twenty years to go; but, although he was to produce three more volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories, he was pretty well done as a writer, and his imitators, who came swarming into print after 1891, had proved themselves far better able to copy the master’s faults than to match his virtues. Hence E. C. Bentley’s disgust. Hence his determination to do something about it.

Others, indeed, were already doing something in their several ways. R. Austin Freeman’s detective, Dr John Thorndyke, making his debut in The Red Thumb Mark (1907), had introduced genuinely scientific methods of detection into fiction. Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner had already taken his seat in the ABC tea shop and begun to unravel crimes while his fingers knotted and untied a piece of string. One of the Sûreté’s most famous sleuths, Monsieur Hanaud, creation of A. E. W. Mason, was just beginning his career. And Bentley’s dear friend, Gilbert K. Chesterton, had already started Father Brown on his amazing, fantastic journeys of detection, in which improbably brilliant guesses were destined repeatedly to cut straight to the core of quite impossible mysteries.

But Bentley had ideas of his own. He wished to write a full-length detective novel in which the protagonist would be ‘recognizable as a human being’. He wished also to get away from the solemnity that would have made Holmes himself insufferable, had it not been for his creator’s ingenuity, and that did make insufferable the imitations of Holmes. After all, why shouldn’t a fictional detective have his lighter side? ‘Even Mr Gladstone,’ the Fleet Street journalist reminded himself, ‘had manifested, at rare intervals, something that could only be described as a sense of humour.’

Bentley knew what he wanted to do, but he wondered if he could do it. He was a writer who had reached the age of thirty-five without writing a single narrative longer than a short sketch. He had written much light verse for Punch. He had written ballades, and had helped to establish a vogue for the verse form that Austin Dobson, years earlier, had managed so perfectly. He had written numberless leaders and middles and fillers for the Speaker and the News. In the latter periodical he was now proving himself a pioneer by writing a something that was as yet nameless—a something that some day, soon, would be known as a ‘column’. Under the name of E. Clerihew he had written a little book called Biography for Beginners (1905), illustrated by Chesterton, and composed of delightful, irregular quatrains that nonsensically celebrated famous lives and deeds with a wit that caused all such quatrains to be referred to thenceforward as ‘clerihews’. A fair specimen of the genre is one of the first that popped into Bentley’s head.

Sir Humphry Davy

Detested gravy.

He lived in the odium

Of having discovered sodium.

This, then, was the sum of Bentley’s literary achievement when he was making what proved to be one of the major decisions of his life—the decision to write a detective novel, at a time when such books were not being written, as they were soon to be—according to his own auctorial catalogue—by ‘University professors, poets, critics, playwrights, ecclesiastics and non-detective novelists of the first rank’. Had he chosen to sum up his other qualifications and background for the task ahead, he might have done so briefly as follows.

He was an English gentleman, born on July 10, 1875, in Shepherd’s Bush, London. Educated at St Paul’s School and Merton College, he had captained his College boat club at Oxford, gone in for literature, and been president of the Oxford Union in 1898. A year later, while reading in barrister’s chambers, he had begun to write regularly for the Speaker, a Liberal weekly that was to become the Nation, where his fellow contributors included Barrie, Chesterton and Belloc. Shortly after being called to the Bar, in 1901, he had abandoned the law for a permanent place on the staff of the Daily News, where he was to remain until he removed himself to the staff of the Daily Telegraph, in 1912. On the News—owned by George Cadbury, the famous millionaire, chocolate-making, Quaker philanthropist—Bentley found himself part of a team composed of the most distinguished Liberal journalists of the day; a team that played an active part in the fights to strip power from the House of Lords and to give Home Rule to Ireland. (Readers who are about to meet the estimable Inspector Murch of Trent’s Last Case, may be interested to learn that the head of the composing room of the Daily News was a paragon named Murch, ‘one of the best and most imperturbably efficient of men’.) In 1902 Bentley had married Violet Boileau, daughter of General N. E. Boileau, Bengal Staff Corps, and had become the father of two sons. So, when he thought of improving the state of the detective story he was also thinking, like many a writer before him, of improving his family’s fortunes. But if he were to succeed in this enterprise, he told himself, he must build on a sound foundation. In his volume of reminiscences, Those Days (1940), he tells us how he built.

It was his long daily walks between his house in Hampstead and his office in Fleet Street that gave him the leisure to work out his plot. ‘But no writing was done,’ he informs us, ‘until I had the first skeleton complete in detail; and that must have taken a long time—it may have been six or eight weeks. I made notes, however. One day I drew up a list of the things absolutely necessary to an up-to-date detective story: a millionaire—murdered, of course; a police detective who fails where the gifted amateur succeeds; an apparently perfect alibi; some fussing about in a motor car or cars, with at least one incident in which the law of the land and the safety of human life were treated as entirely negligible by the quite sympathetic character at the driving-wheel … Besides these indispensables there had, of course, to be a crew of regulation suspects, to include the victim’s widow, his secretary, his wife’s maid, his butler, and a person who had quarrelled openly with him. I decided, too, that there had better be a love-interest, because there was supposed to be a demand for this in a full-length novel. I made this decision with reluctance, because to me love-interest in novels of plot was very tiresome.’

When one scans this list of ‘indispensables’ one realizes that John Carter was speaking without exaggeration and with perfect justice when he described Edmund Clerihew Bentley as ‘the father of the contemporary detective novel’. To count the number of times that his chosen elements have been manipulated by his successors would require the best efforts, for at least a minute, of the latest mechanical monster produced by the new and terrifying science of cybernetics. But Bentley’s most original contribution to the detective story is one that will not be mentioned here; for mere mention of it would be unfair to those who have not read Trent’s Last Case. At the proper moment, and not an instant sooner, they will discover this contribution for themselves.

With his plot complete, the novice novelist sat down to the business of putting verbal flesh, and some decorative clothing, on his skeleton. But he did not yet realize that he was writing Trent’s Last Case. He was, he believed, writing Philip Gasket’s Last Case; and when we compare the attractiveness of these two titles we are moved to consider anew the validity of the old saw about a rose by any other name.

Bentley was also writing with one eye firmly fixed on a prize of fifty pounds that was being offered for the copyright of the winning novel in a competition sponsored by Duckworth, the London publisher. After about six months the manuscript was ready. Off it went to compete for the vast sum, and the author sat back to wait. But fortunately, while he was waiting, in January, 1912, he found himself fatefully seated at dinner beside Mr Henry Z. Doty of the Century Company, New York City. Now it is common knowledge that when an author and a publisher are gathered together it takes the latter a little less than a split second to discover whether or not the former has any available and attractive merchandise for sale; and so it was in this instance. Mr Bentley innocently confided to Mr Doty his hopes regarding the fifty pounds, and Mr Doty sniffed at mention of so inadequate, so un-American a figure. To sell the copyright of a promising book for any such amount would be an act of folly. The thing for Mr Bentley to do was to let Mr Doty see the manuscript, let him take it aboard ship with him. Then, if the book was half the book it sounded, business could be done on the proper level.

What author would have resisted? Having learned through a private grapevine that Philip Gasket’s Last Case had no chance of winning the prize, Bentley withdrew it from the competition and gave it to the American publisher. A few weeks later he received a cablegram that offered him a five hundred dollar advance against royalties. But Century wished to change the names of both hero and title. Philip Gasket promptly became Philip Trent. As for the second change, Bentley has recorded his opinion of it. ‘I wrote to them that they could call it what they liked if they didn’t like my title; so they called it The Woman in Black; which I thought a silly name. I am glad to say that when Alfred Knopf took over the American rights eighteen years later he issued the book under its proper title.’ All of us, I think, can share Bentley’s gladness.

The book that was to endure as Trent’s Last Case was published in the United States and in England, under equally favourable terms, in March 1913. Swedish, Danish, Italian, and French versions quickly followed. After these came German, Polish, and Jugoslav translations. A refugee Russian edition was issued in Berlin, and the book was put into Gaelic for such honest Irishmen as were bravely attempting to turn back the linguistic clock.

Philip Trent was a huge success, and it was obvious that neither public nor publishers would be satisfied to have his last case his one and only case. But, if his creator yielded to popular demand, he did so sparingly. Another author might have settled down to live off Trent for the rest of both their lives, but E. C. Bentley, Liberal journalist of Fleet Street, chose to expend the best part of his energies in giving readers of the Daily Telegraph the benefit of his knowledge of foreign affairs, and other matters, through the vigorous, characteristic leaders that he contributed to that journal for twenty-two years.

However he was not entirely hard-hearted towards Trent’s admirers. As time went by he consented to write a dozen short stories in which the genial, loquacious painter exercised his highly original powers of detection; and he also consented to write one more Trent novel, in collaboration with H. Warner Allen, who was interestingly enough author of a book named Mr Clerihew: Wine Merchant. The short stories were collected and published, in 1938, under the title of Trent Intervenes.fn1 The novel, Trent’s Own Case, appeared in 1936.

It would be pointless for me to add my mite to the mountain of praise that has been heaped on Trent’s Last Case—a book that Dorothy Sayers has roundly declared to be the one detective novel of its era that is sure to endure—but Trent’s Last Case and Trent’s Own Case are alike in that they both get better and better as they proceed. They are also alike in that they are the work of a writer who believed that in detective fiction the solution is not all, that it is the author’s duty to provide entertainment along the way—as great a variety of entertainment, verbal and otherwise, as possible. In the second novel, for example, we are entertained in diverse fashions by Trent’s journey to Dieppe and the strange story of the Count d’Astalys and the Pavillon de l’Ecstase, by the remarkable tale of the Tiara of Megabyzus, and by the search for a bottle of Felix Poubelle 1884 and the authoritative remarks of ‘William Clerihew, the renowned and erudite wine-merchant of Fountain Court’. But the patterns of the two books are quite different. Trent’s Last Case is a beautiful example of the false-bottomed chest; and it is something even better, for once the false bottom has been revealed there is, still, a final, secret compartment to be discovered. (Perhaps at this point, without giving anything away, I may quote Bentley’s own remark that ‘it does not seem to have been generally noticed that Trent’s Last Case is not so much a detective story as an exposure of detective stories’.) Trent’s Own Case, on the other hand, is a fine example of an expanding, divaricating narrative—it is, we may say not too fancifully, a veritable tree of a mystery that is, as we read, constantly putting out new branches before our eyes.

In the short stories both author and detective are in their most light-hearted mood and most ingenious vein. Indeed, in one or two instances, readers who are unwilling or unable to follow Coleridge’s famous advice, by momentarily engaging in ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’, may feel that both author and detective are too ingenious and too light-hearted in their cavalier disregard of plausibility. But one should, I think, bear in mind while reading the short stories that Bentley was by nature a humorist with a strong liking for the preposterous. One might remember, too, that he was a close friend of Chesterton, and read his tales with the idea that he may well have been tempted to make some of Trent’s exploits rival Father Brown’s most fantastic triumphs in the realms of improbability. However, I am sure that even his most captious reader will have to admit that in the field of the detective short story, as in that of the detective novel, Bentley has produced at least one masterpiece. ‘The Genuine Tabard’ will take a lot of beating.

Here then is a body of writing that is not only enjoyable for its own sake but important in literary history. Edmund Clerihew Bentley—whose last book was a ‘shocker’ called Elephant’s Work, published in 1950—bears a heavy responsibility for the course taken by the detective story during what has surely proved its period of greatest glory. It is hardly necessary to add that he bears no responsibility at all for the moronic mixture of sex and sadism that is now masquerading under the ancient and honorable name of detective fiction. Readers who are looking for that kind of thing must go to another shop.

BEN RAY REDMAN

1953

PREFACE
MEET TRENT

I FEEL a little embarrassment in writing about the character of Philip Trent, because the poor fellow has made his appearance in only one single book. But it is a book which, I am glad to say, has had an extensive sale for many years past. I don’t say this out of boastfulness at all, but simply because it is my only excuse for holding forth on this occasion. The story called Trent’s Last Case was published in 1913. That is a long time ago. It takes us back to a day when the detective story was a very different thing from what it is now. I am not sure why Sherlock Holmes and his earlier imitators could never be at all amusing or light-hearted; but it may have been because they felt that they had a mission, and had to sustain a position of superiority to the ordinary run of mankind. Trent does not feel about himself in that way at all, as a short passage of dialogue from the book may indicate. The story is concerned with the murdering of a millionaire at his country place in Devonshire—one of the earliest of a long, long line of murdered millionaires. Trent makes his appearance at a country hotel near the scene of the crime; and there, to his surprise, he finds an old gentleman whom he knows well—Mr Cupples his name is—just finishing an open-air breakfast on the verandah. Trent gets out of his car and comes up the steps.

TRENT: Cupples, by all that’s miraculous! My luck is certainly serving me today. How are you, my best of friends? And why are you here? Why sit’st thou by that ruined breakfast? Dost thou its former pride recall, or ponder how it passed away? I am glad to see you.

CUPPLES: I was half expecting you, Trent. You are looking splendid, my dear fellow. I will tell you all about it. But you cannot have had your own breakfast yet. Will you have it at my table here?

TRENT: Rather! An enormous great breakfast, too. I expect this to be a hard day for me. I shan’t eat again till the evening, very likely. You guess why I’m here, don’t you?

CUPPLES: Undoubtedly. You have come down to write about the murder for the Daily Record.

TRENT: That is rather a colourless way of stating it. I should prefer to put it that I have come down in the character of avenger of blood, to hunt down the guilty, and vindicate the honour of society. That is my line of business. Families waited on at their private residences.

One of the most hackneyed of quotations is that from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, about the man who said he had tried being a philosopher but found that cheerfulness would keep breaking in. Philip Trent has the same trouble about being a detective. He is apt to give way to frivolity and the throwing about of absurd quotations from the poets at almost any moment. There was nothing like that about the older, sterner school of fiction detectives. They never laughed, and only rarely and with difficulty did they smile. They never read anything but the crime reports in the papers, and if they ever quoted, it was from nothing but their own pamphlets on the importance of collar-studs in the detection of crime, or the use of the banana-skin as an instrument of homicide. They were not by any means blind to their own abilities or importance. Holmes, for instance, would say when speaking of his tracking down of Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, such words as these:

‘You know my powers, my dear Watson, but I am forced to confess that I have at last met an antagonist who is my intellectual equal.’ Or, again, Holmes says, when he is facing the prospect of losing his life: ‘If my record were closed tonight, I could still survey it with equanimity. The air of London is the sweeter for my presence. In over a thousand cases I am not aware that I have ever used my powers on the wrong side.’

If I used to feel, as probably very many others used to feel, that a change from that style might not be a bad thing, it was certainly not in any spirit of undervaluing that marvellous creation of Conan Doyle’s. My own belief is that the adventures of Sherlock Holmes are likely to be read at least as long as anything else that was written in their time, because they are great stories, the work of a powerful and vivid imagination. And I should add this: that all detective stories written since Holmes was created, including my own story, have been founded more or less on that remarkable body of work. Holmes would often say, ‘You know my methods, Watson.’ Well, we all got to know his methods; and we all followed those methods, so far as the business of detection went.

The attempt to introduce a more modern sort of character-drawing into that business was altogether another thing. It has brought into existence a rich variety of types of detective hero, as this series of talks is showing. My own attempt was among the very earliest; and I realize now, as I hardly did at the time, that the idea at the bottom of it was to get as far away from the Holmes tradition as possible. Trent, as I have said, does not take himself at all seriously. He is not a scientific expert; he is not a professional crime investigator. He is an artist, a painter, by calling, who has strayed accidentally into the business of crime journalism because he found he had an aptitude for it, and without any sense of having a mission. He is not superior to the feelings of average humanity; he does not stand aloof from mankind, but enjoys the society of his fellow creatures and makes friends with everybody. He even goes so far as to fall in love. He does not regard the Scotland Yard men as a set of bungling half-wits, but has the highest respect for their trained abilities. All very unlike Holmes.

Trent’s attitude towards the police is frankly one of sporting competition with opponents who are quite as likely to beat him as he is to beat them. I will introduce here another scrap of dialogue from Trent’s Last Case that illustrates this. Trent and Chief Inspector Murch have just been hearing the story of Martin, the very correct butler in the service of the man who had been murdered on the previous day. Martin has just bowed himself impressively out of the room, and Trent falls into an arm-chair and draws a long breath.

TRENT: Martin is a great creature. He is far, far better than a play. There is none like him, none. Straight, too; not an atom of harm in dear old Martin. Do you know, Murch, you are wrong in suspecting that man.

MURCH: I never said anything about suspecting him. Still, there’s no point in denying it—I have got my eye on him. He’s such a very cool customer. You remember the case of Lord William Russell’s valet, who went in as usual in the morning, as quiet and starchy as you please, to draw up the blinds in his master’s bedroom a few hours after he had murdered him in his bed. But, of course, Martin doesn’t know I’ve got him in mind.

TRENT: No; he wouldn’t. He is a wonderful creature, a great artist; but in spite of that, he is not at all a sensitive type. It has never occurred to his mind that you could suspect him. But I could see it. You must understand, Inspector, that I have made a special study of the psychology of officers of the law. It’s a grossly neglected branch of knowledge. They are far more interesting than criminals, and not nearly so easy. All the time we were questioning him I saw handcuffs in your eye. Your lips were mutely framing the syllables of those tremendous words: ‘It is my duty to tell you that anything you now say may be taken down and used in evidence at your trial.’

That is a fair specimen of Trent, and I found that people seemed to like it for a change.

I found another thing: that the building up of a satisfactory mystery story was a very much more difficult affair than I had ever imagined. I had undertaken the writing of a detective story with a light heart. It came of a suggestion—I might call it a challenge—offered by my old friend, G. K. Chesterton, and I did not suppose it would be a very formidable undertaking. But I did not realize what it was that I had set my hand to. Once the plot was started it began to grow. It got completely out of hand. It ought to have ended at a point a little more than half-way through the book as it stands. But not at all; the story wouldn’t have that. It insisted upon carrying the thing to a conclusion entirely different from the quite satisfactory one, as I thought, reached in Chapter XI; and then it had to go on to still another at the very end, in Chapter XVI.

So, being then engaged in earning my living by other means, I formed the opinion that writing detective stories was not, so far as I was concerned, an ideal way of occupying one’s spare time. And that is why the novel was called Trent’s Last Case.

E.C. BENTLEY

1935

THE CHARACTERS AND SITUATIONS in this work are wholly fictional and imaginary, and do not portray and are not intended to portray any actual persons or parties.

I
THE GENUINE TABARD

IT was quite by chance, at a dinner party given by the American Naval Attaché, that Philip Trent met the Langleys, who were visiting Europe for the first time. During the cocktail time before dinner was served, he had gravitated towards George D. Langley, because he was the finest looking man in the room—tall, strongly built, carrying his years lightly, pink of face, with vigorous, massive features and thick grey hair.

They had talked about the Tower of London, the Cheshire Cheese, and the Zoo, all of which the Langleys had visited that day. Langley, so the attaché had told Trent, was a distant relative of his own; he had made a large fortune manufacturing engineers’ drawing-office equipment, was a prominent citizen of Cordova, Ohio, the headquarters of his business, and had married a Schuyler. Trent, though not sure what a Schuyler was, gathered that it was an excellent thing to marry, and this impression was confirmed when he found himself placed next to Mrs Langley at dinner.

Mrs Langley always went on the assumption that her own affairs were the most interesting subject of conversation; and as she was a vivacious and humorous talker and a very handsome and good-hearted woman, she usually turned out to be right. She informed Trent that she was crazy about old churches, of which she had seen and photographed she did not know how many in France, Germany, and England. Trent, who loved thirteenth-century stained glass, mentioned Chartres, which Mrs Langley said, truly enough, was too perfect for words. He asked if she had been to Fairford in Gloucestershire. She had; and that was, she declared with emphasis, the greatest day of all their time in Europe; not because of the church, though that was certainly lovely, but because of the treasure they had found that afternoon.

Trent asked to be told about this; and Mrs Langley said that it was quite a story. Mr Gifford had driven them down to Fairford in his car. Did Trent know Mr Gifford—W. N. Gifford, who lived at the Suffolk Hotel? He was visiting Paris just now. Trent ought to meet him, because Mr Gifford knew everything there was to know about stained glass, and church ornaments, and brasses, and antiques in general. They had met him when he was sketching some traceries in Westminster Abbey, and they had become great friends. He had driven them about to quite a few places within reach of London. He knew all about Fairford, of course, and they had a lovely time there.

On the way back to London, after passing through Abingdon, Mr Gifford had said it was time for a cup of coffee, as he always did around five o’clock; he made his own coffee, which was excellent, and carried it in a thermos. They slowed down, looking for a good place to stop, and Mrs Langley’s eye was caught by a strange name on a signpost at a turning off the road—something Episcopi. She knew that meant Bishops, which was interesting; so she asked Mr Gifford to halt the car while she made out the weatherbeaten lettering. The sign said SILCOTE EPISCOPI ½ MILE.

Had Trent heard of the place? Neither had Mr Gifford. But that lovely name, Mrs Langley said, was enough for her. There must be a church, and an old one; and anyway she would love to have Silcote Episcopi in her collection. As it was so near, she asked Mr Gifford if they could go there so she could take a few snaps while the light was good, and perhaps have coffee there.

They found the church, with the parsonage near by, and a village in sight some way beyond. The church stood back from the churchyard, and as they were going along the footpath they noticed a grave with tall railings round it; not a standing-up stone but a flat one, raised on a little foundation. They noticed it because, though it was an old stone, it had not been just left to fall into decay, but had been kept clean of moss and dirt, so you could make out the inscription, and the grass around it was trim and tidy. They read Sir Rowland Verey’s epitaph; and Mrs Langley—so she assured Trent—screamed with joy.

There was a man trimming the churchyard boundary-hedge with shears, who looked at them, she thought, suspiciously when she screamed. She thought he was probably the sexton, so she assumed a winning manner and asked him if there was any objection to her taking a photograph of the inscription on the stone. The man said that he didn’t know as there was, but maybe she ought to ask Vicar, because it was his grave, in a manner of speaking. It was Vicar’s great-grandfather’s grave, that was; and he always had it kep’ in good order. He would be in the church now, very like, if they had a mind to see him.

Mr Gifford said that in any case they might have a look at the church, which he thought might be worth the trouble. He observed that it was not very old—about mid-seventeenth century, he would say—a poor little kid church, Mrs Langley commented with gay sarcasm. In a place so named, Mr Gifford said, there had probably been a church for centuries farther back; but it might have been burnt down, or fallen into ruin, and been replaced by this building. So they went into the church; and at once Mr Gifford had been delighted with it. He pointed out how the pulpit, the screen, the pews, the glass, the organ-case in the west gallery, were all of the same period. Mrs Langley was busy with her camera when a pleasant-faced man of middle age, in clerical attire, emerged from the vestry with a large book under his arm.

Mr Gifford introduced himself and his friends as a party of chance visitors who had been struck by the beauty of the church and had ventured to explore its interior. Could the vicar tell them anything about the armorial glass in the nave windows? The vicar could and did; but Mrs Langley was not just then interested in any family history but the vicar’s own, and soon she broached the subject of his great-grandfather’s gravestone.

The vicar, smiling, said that he bore Sir Rowland’s name, and had felt it a duty to look after the grave properly, as this was the only Verey to be buried in that place. He added that the living was in the gift of the head of the family, and that he was the third Verey to be vicar of Silcote Episcopi in the course of two hundred years. He said that Mrs Langley was most welcome to take a photograph of the stone, but he doubted if it could be done successfully with a hand-camera from over the railings—and of course, said Mrs Langley, he was perfectly right. Then the vicar asked if she would like to have a copy of the epitaph, which he could write for her if they would all come over to his house, and his wife would give them some tea; and at this, as Trent could imagine, they were just tickled to death.

‘But what was it, Mrs Langley, that delighted you so much about the epitaph?’ Trent asked. ‘It seems to have been about a Sir Rowland Verey—that’s all I have been told so far.’

‘I was going to show it to you,’ Mrs Langley said, opening her handbag. ‘Maybe you will not think it so precious as we do. I have had a lot of copies made, to send to friends at home.’ She unfolded a small, typed sheet, on which Trent read:

Within this Vault are interred

the Remains of

Lt. Gen. Sir Rowland Edmund Verey,

Garter Principal King of Arms,

Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod

and

Clerk of the Hanaper,

who departed this Life

on the 2nd May 1795

in the 73rd Year of his Age

calmly relying

on the Merits of the Redeemer

for the Salvation of

his Soul.

Also of Lavinia Prudence,

Wife of the Above,

who entered into Rest

on the 12th March 1799

in the 68th Year of her Age.

She was a Woman of fine Sense

genteel Behaviour,

prudent Oeconomy

and

great Integrity.

‘This is the Gate of the Lord:

The Righteous shall enter into it.’

‘You have certainly got a fine specimen of that style,’ Trent observed. ‘Nowadays we don’t run to much more, as a rule, than “in loving memory”, followed by the essential facts. As for the titles, I don’t wonder at your admiring them; they are like the sound of trumpets. There is also a faint jingle of money, I think. In Sir Rowland’s time, Black Rod’s was probably a job worth having; and though I don’t know what a Hanaper is, I do remember that its Clerkship was one of the fat sinecures that made it well worth while being a courtier.’

Mrs Langley put away her treasure, patting the bag with affection. ‘Mr Gifford said the clerk had to collect some sort of legal fees for the crown, and that he would draw maybe seven or eight thousand pounds a year for it, paying another man two or three hundred for doing the actual work. Well, we found the vicarage just perfect—an old house with everything beautifully mellow and personal about it. There was a long oar hanging on the wall in the hall, and when I asked about it the vicar said he had rowed for All Souls College when he was at Oxford. His wife was charming, too. And now listen! While she was giving us tea, and her husband was making a copy of the epitaph for me, he was talking about his ancestor, and he said the first duty that Sir Rowland had to perform after his appointment as King of Arms was to proclaim the Peace of Versailles from the steps of the Palace of St James’s. Imagine that, Mr Trent!’

Trent looked at her uncertainly. ‘So they had a Peace of Versailles all that time ago.’

‘Yes, they did,’ Mrs Langley said, a little tartly. ‘And quite an important Peace, at that. We remember it in America, if you don’t. It was the first treaty to be signed by the United States, and in that treaty the British government took a licking, called off the war, and recognized our independence. Now when the vicar said that about his ancestor having proclaimed peace with the United States, I saw George Langley prick up his ears; and I knew why.

‘You see, George is a collector of Revolution pieces, and he has some pretty nice things, if I do say it. He began asking questions; and the first thing anybody knew, the vicaress had brought down the old King of Arms’ tabard and was showing it off. You know what a tabard is, Mr Trent, of course. Such a lovely garment! I fell for it on the spot, and as for George, his eyes stuck out like a crab’s. That wonderful shade of red satin, and the Royal Arms embroidered in those stunning colours, red and gold and blue and silver, as you don’t often see them.

‘Presently George got talking to Mr Gifford in a corner, and I could see Mr Gifford screwing up his mouth and shaking his head; but George only stuck out his chin, and soon after, when the vicaress was showing off the garden, he got the vicar by himself and talked turkey.

‘Mr Verey didn’t like it at all, George told me; but George can be a very smooth worker when he likes, and at last the vicar had to allow that he was tempted, what with having his sons to start in the world, and the income tax being higher than a cat’s back, and the death duties and all. And finally he said yes. I won’t tell you or anybody what George offered him, Mr Trent, because George swore me to secrecy; but, as he says, it was no good acting like a piker in this kind of a deal, and he could sense that the vicar wouldn’t stand for any bargaining back and forth. And anyway, it was worth every cent of it to George, to have something that no other curio-hunter possessed. He said he would come for the tabard next day and bring the money in notes, and the vicar said very well, then we must all three come to lunch, and he would have a paper ready giving the history of the tabard over his signature. So that was what we did; and the tabard is in our suite at the Greville, locked in a wardrobe, and George has it out and gloats over it first thing in the morning and last thing at night.’

Trent said with sincerity that no story of real life had ever interested him more. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if your husband would let me have a look at his prize. I’m not much of an antiquary, but I am interested in heraldry, and the only tabards I have ever seen were quite modern ones.’

‘Why, of course,’ Mrs Langley said. ‘You make a date with him after dinner. He will be delighted. He has no idea of hiding it under a bushel, believe me!’

The following afternoon, in the Langleys’ sitting-room at the Greville, the tabard was displayed on a coat-hanger before the thoughtful gaze of Trent, while its new owner looked on with a pride not untouched with anxiety.

‘Well, Mr Trent,’ he said. ‘How do you like it? You don’t doubt this is a genuine tabard, I suppose?’

Trent rubbed his chin. ‘Oh yes; it’s a tabard. I have seen a few before, and I have painted one, with a man inside it, when Richmond Herald wanted his portrait done in the complete get-up. Everything about it is right. Such things are hard to come by. Until recent times, I believe, a herald’s tabard remained his property, and stayed in the family, and if they got hard up they might perhaps sell it privately, as this was sold to you. It’s different now—so Richmond Herald told me. When a herald dies, his tabard goes back to the College of Arms, where he got it from.’

Langley drew a breath of relief. ‘I’m glad to hear you say my tabard is genuine. When you asked me if you could see it, I got the impression you thought there might be something phony about it.’

Mrs Langley, her keen eyes on Trent’s face, shook her head. ‘He thinks so still, George, I believe. Isn’t that so, Mr Trent?’

‘Yes, I am sorry to say it is. You see, this was sold to you as a particular tabard, with an interesting history of its own; and when Mrs Langley described it to me, I felt pretty sure that you had been swindled. You see, she had noticed nothing odd about the Royal Arms. I wanted to see it just to make sure. It certainly did not belong to Garter King of Arms in the year 1783.’

A very ugly look wiped all the benevolence from Langley’s face, and it grew several shades more pink. ‘If what you say is true, Mr Trent, and if that old fraud was playing me for a sucker, I will get him jailed if it’s my last act. But it certainly is hard to believe—a preacher—and belonging to one of your best families—settled in that lovely, peaceful old place, with his flock to look after and everything. Are you really sure of what you say?’

‘What I know is that the Royal Arms on this tabard are all wrong.’

An exclamation came from the lady. ‘Why, Mr Trent, how you talk! We have seen the Royal Arms quite a few times, and they are just the same as this—and you have told us it is a genuine tabard, anyway. I don’t get this at all.’

‘I must apologize,’ Trent said unhappily, ‘for the Royal Arms. You see, they have a past. In the fourteenth century Edward III laid claim to the Kingdom of France, and it took a hundred years of war to convince his descendants that that claim wasn’t practical politics. All the same, they went on including the lilies of France in the Royal Arms, and they never dropped them until the beginning of the nineteenth century.’

‘Mercy!’ Mrs Langley’s voice was faint.

‘Besides that, the first four Georges and the fourth William were Kings of Hanover; so until Queen Victoria came along, and could not inherit Hanover because she was a female, the Arms of the House of Brunswick were jammed in along with our own. In fact, the tabard of the Garter King of Arms in the year when he proclaimed the peace with the United States of America was a horrible mess of the leopards of England, the lion of Scotland, the harp of Ireland, the lilies of France, together with a few more lions, and a white horse, and some hearts, as worn in Hanover. It was a fairly tight fit for one shield, but they managed it somehow—and you can see that the Arms on this tabard of yours are not nearly such a bad dream as that. It is a Victorian tabard—a nice, gentlemanly coat, such as no well-dressed herald should be without.’

Langley thumped the table. ‘Well, I intend to be without it, anyway, if I can get my money back.’

‘We can but try,’ Trent said. ‘It may be possible. But the reason why I asked to be allowed to see this thing, Mr Langley, was that I thought I might be able to save you some unpleasantness. You see, if you went home with your treasure, and showed it to people, and talked about its history, and it was mentioned in the newspapers, and then somebody got inquiring into its authenticity, and found out what I have been telling you, and made it public—well, it wouldn’t be very nice for you.’

Langley flushed again, and a significant glance passed between him and his wife.

‘You’re damn right, it wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘And I know the name of the buzzard who would do that to me, too, as soon as I had gone the limit in making a monkey of myself. Why, I would lose the money twenty times over, and then a bundle, rather than have that happen to me. I am grateful to you, Mr Trent—I am indeed. I’ll say frankly that at home we aim to be looked up to socially, and we judged that we could certainly figure if we brought this doggoned thing back and had it talked about. Gosh! When I think—but never mind that now. The thing is to go right back to that old crook and make him squeal. I’ll have my money out of him, if I have to use a can-opener.’

Trent shook his head. ‘I don’t feel very sanguine about that, Mr Langley. But how would you like to run down to his place tomorrow with me and a friend of mine, who takes an interest in affairs of this kind, and who would be able to help you if anyone can?’

Langley said, with emphasis, that that suited him.

The car that called for Langley next morning did not look as if it belonged, but did belong, to Scotland Yard; and the same could be said of its dapper chauffeur. Inside was Trent, with a black-haired, round-faced man whom he introduced as Superintendent Owen. It was at his request that Langley, during the journey, told with as much detail as he could recall the story of his acquisition of the tabard, which he had hopefully brought with him in a suitcase.

A few miles short of Abingdon the chauffeur was told to go slowly. ‘You tell me it was not very far this side of Abingdon, Mr Langley, that you turned off the main road,’ the superintendent said. ‘If you will keep a lookout now, you might be able to point out the spot.’

Langley stared at him. ‘Why, doesn’t your man have a map?’

‘Yes; but there isn’t any place called Silcote Episcopi on his map.’

‘Nor,’ Trent added, ‘on any other map. No, I am not suggesting that you dreamed it all; but the fact is so.’

Langley, remarking shortly that this beat him, glared out of the window eagerly; and soon he gave the word to stop. ‘I am pretty sure this is the turning,’ he said. ‘I recognize it by these two hay-stacks in the meadow, and the pond with osiers over it. But there certainly was a signpost there, and now there isn’t one. If I was not dreaming then, I guess I must be now.’ And as the car ran swiftly down the side road he went on, ‘Yes; that certainly is the church on ahead—and the covered gate, and the graveyard—and there is the vicarage, with the yew trees and the garden and everything. Well, gentlemen, right now is when he gets what is coming to him. I don’t care what the name of the darn place is.’

‘The name of the darn place on the map,’ Trent said, ‘is Oakhanger.’

The three men got out and passed through the lych-gate.

‘Where is the gravestone?’ Trent asked.

Langley pointed. ‘Right there.’ They went across to the railed-in grave, and the American put a hand to his head. ‘I must be nuts!’ he groaned. ‘I know this is the grave—but it says that here is laid to rest the body of James Roderick Stevens, of this parish.’

‘Who seems to have died about thirty years after Sir Rowland Verey,’ Trent remarked, studying the inscription; while the superintendent gently smote his thigh in an ecstasy of silent admiration. ‘And now let us see if the vicar can throw any light on the subject.’

They went on to the parsonage; and a dark-haired, bright-faced girl, opening the door at Mr Owen’s ring, smiled recognizingly at Langley. ‘Well, you’re genuine, anyway!’ he exclaimed. ‘Ellen is what they call you, isn’t it? And you remember me, I see. Now I feel better. We would like to see the vicar. Is he at home?’

‘The canon came home two days ago, sir,’ the girl said, with a perceptible stress on the term of rank. ‘He is down in the village now; but he may be back any minute. Would you like to wait for him?’

‘We surely would,’ Langley declared positively; and they were shown into the large room where the tabard had changed hands.

‘So he has been away from home?’ Trent asked. ‘And he is a canon, you say?’

‘Canon Maberley, sir; yes, sir, he was in Italy for a month. The lady and gentleman who were here till last week had taken the house furnished while he was away. Me and Cook stayed on to do for them.’

‘And did that gentleman—Mr Verey—do the canon’s duty during his absence?’ Trent inquired with a ghost of a smile.

‘No, sir; the canon had an arrangement with Mr Giles, the vicar of Cotmore, about that. The canon never knew that Mr Verey was a clergyman. He never saw him. You see, it was Mrs Verey who came to see over the place and settled everything; and it seems she never mentioned it. When we told the canon, after they had gone, he was quite took aback. “I can’t make it out at all,” he says. “Why should he conceal it?” he says. “Well, sir,” I says, “they was very nice people, anyhow, and the friends they had to see them here was very nice, and their chauffeur was a perfectly respectable man,” I says.’

Trent nodded. ‘Ah! They had friends to see them.’

The girl was thoroughly enjoying this gossip. ‘Oh yes, sir. The gentleman as brought you down, sir’—she turned to Langley—‘he brought down several others before that. They was Americans too, I think.’

‘You mean they didn’t have an English accent, I suppose,’ Langley suggested drily.

‘Yes, sir; and they had such nice manners, like yourself,’ the girl said, quite unconscious of Langley’s confusion, and of the grins covertly exchanged between Trent and the superintendent, who now took up the running.

‘This respectable chauffeur of theirs—was he a small, thin man with a long nose, partly bald, always smoking cigarettes?’

‘Oh yes, sir; just like that. You must know him.’

‘I do,’ Superintendent Owen said grimly.

‘So do I!’ Langley exclaimed. ‘He was the man we spoke to in the churchyard.’

‘Did Mr and Mrs Verey have any—er—ornaments of their own with them?’ the superintendent asked.

Ellen’s eyes rounded with enthusiasm. ‘Oh yes, sir—some lovely things they had. But they was only put out when they had friends coming. Other times they was kept somewhere in Mr Verey’s bedroom, I think. Cook and me thought perhaps they was afraid of burglars.’

The superintendent pressed a hand over his stubby moustache. ‘Yes, I expect that was it,’ he said gravely. ‘But what kind of lovely things do you mean? Silver—china—that sort of thing?’

‘No, sir; nothing ordinary, as you might say. One day they had out a beautiful goblet, like, all gold, with little figures and patterns worked on it in colours, and precious stones, blue and green and white, stuck all round it—regular dazzled me to look at, it did.’

‘The Debenham Chalice!’ exclaimed the superintendent.

‘Is it a well-known thing, then, sir?’ the girl asked.

‘No, not at all,’ Mr Owen said. ‘It is an heirloom—a private-family possession. Only we happen to have heard of it.’

‘Fancy taking such things about with them,’ Ellen remarked. ‘Then there was a big book they had out once, lying open on that table in the window. It was all done in funny gold letters on yellow paper, with lovely little pictures all round the edges, gold and silver and all colours.’

‘The Murrane Psalter!’ said Mr Owen. ‘Come, we’re getting on.’

‘And,’ the girl pursued, addressing herself to Langley, ‘there was that beautiful red coat with the arms on it, like you see on a half crown. You remember they got it out for you to look at, sir; and when I brought in the tea it was hanging up in front of the tallboy.’

Langley grimaced. ‘I believe I do remember it,’ he said, ‘now you remind me.’

‘There is the canon coming up the path now,’ Ellen said, with a glance through the window. ‘I will tell him you gentlemen are here.’

She hurried from the room, and soon there entered a tall, stooping, old man with a gentle face and the indescribable air of a scholar.

The superintendent went to meet him.

‘I am a police officer, Canon Maberley,’ he said. ‘I and my friends have called to see you in pursuit of an official inquiry in connection with the people to whom your house was let last month. I do not think I shall have to trouble you much, though, because your parlourmaid has given us already most of the information we are likely to get, I suspect.’

‘Ah! That girl,’ the canon said vaguely. ‘She has been talking to you, has she? She will go on talking for ever, if you let her. Please sit down, gentlemen. About the Vereys—ah yes! But surely there was nothing wrong about the Vereys? Mrs Verey was quite a nice, well-bred person, and they left the place in perfectly good order. They paid me in advance, too, because they live in New Zealand, as she explained, and know nobody in London. They were on a visit to England, and they wanted a temporary home in the heart of the country, because that is the real England, as she said. That was so sensible of them, I thought—instead of flying to the grime and turmoil of London, as most of our friends from overseas do. In a way, I was quite touched by it, and I was glad to let them have the vicarage.’

The superintendent shook his head. ‘People as clever as they are make things very difficult for us, sir. And the lady never mentioned that her husband was a clergyman, I understand.

‘No, and that puzzled me when I heard of it,’ the canon said. ‘But it didn’t matter, and no doubt there was a reason.’

‘The reason was, I think,’ Mr Owen said, ‘that if she had mentioned it, you might have been too much interested, and asked questions which would have been all right for a genuine parson’s wife, but which she couldn’t answer without putting her foot in it. Her husband could do a vicar well enough to pass with laymen, especially if they were not English laymen. I am sorry to say, Canon, that your tenants were impostors. Their name was certainly not Verey, to begin with. I don’t know who they are—I wish I did—they are new to us and they have invented a new method. But I can tell you what they are. They are thieves and swindlers.’

The canon fell back in his chair. ‘Thieves and swindlers!’ he gasped.

‘And very talented performers too,’ Trent assured him. ‘Why, they have had in this house of yours part of the loot of several country-house burglaries which took place last year, and which puzzled the police because it seemed impossible that some of the things taken could ever be turned into cash. One of them was a herald’s tabard, which Superintendent Owen tells me had been worn by the father of Sir Andrew Ritchie. He was Maltravers Herald in his day. It was taken when Sir Andrew’s place in Lincolnshire was broken into, and a lot of very valuable jewellery was stolen. It was dangerous to try to sell the tabard in the open market, and it was worth little, anyhow, apart from any associations it might have. What they did was to fake up a story about the tabard which might appeal to an American purchaser, and, having found a victim, to induce him to buy it. I believe he parted with quite a large sum.’

‘The poor simp!’ growled Langley.

Canon Maberley held up a shaking hand. ‘I fear I do not understand,’ he said. ‘What had their taking my house to do with all this?’

‘It was a vital part of the plan. We know exactly how they went to work about the tabard; and no doubt the other things were got rid of in very much the same way. There were four of them in the gang. Besides your tenants, there was an agreeable and cultured person—I should think a man with real knowledge of antiquities and objects of art—whose job was to make the acquaintance of wealthy people visiting London, gain their confidence, take them about to places of interest, exchange hospitality with them, and finally get them down to this vicarage. In this case it was made to appear as if the proposal to look over your church came from the visitors themselves. They could not suspect anything. They were attracted by the romantic name of the place on a signpost up there at the corner of the main road.’

The canon shook his head helplessly. ‘But there is no signpost at that corner.’

‘No, but there was one at the time when they were due to be passing that corner in the confederate’s car. It was a false signpost, you see, with a false name on it—so that if anything went wrong, the place where the swindle was worked would be difficult to trace. Then, when they entered the churchyard their attention was attracted by a certain gravestone with an inscription that interested them. I won’t waste your time by giving the whole story—the point is that the gravestone, or rather the top layer which had been fitted onto it, was false too. The sham inscription on it was meant to lead up to the swindle, and so it did.’

The canon drew himself up in his chair. ‘It was an abominable act of sacrilege!’ he exclaimed. ‘The man calling himself Verey—’

‘I don’t think,’ Trent said, ‘it was the man calling himself Verey who actually did the abominable act. We believe it was the fourth member of the gang, who masqueraded as the Vereys’ chauffeur—a very interesting character. Superintendent Owen can tell you about him.’

Mr Owen twisted his moustache thoughtfully. ‘Yes; he is the only one of them that we can place. Alfred Coveney, his name is; a man of some education and any amount of talent. He used to be a stage-carpenter and property-maker—a regular artist, he was. Give him a tub of papier-mâché, and there was nothing he couldn’t model and colour to look exactly like the real thing. That was how the false top to the gravestone was made, I’ve no doubt. It may have been made to fit on like a lid, to be slipped on and off as required. The inscription was a bit above Alf, though—I expect it was Gifford who drafted that for him, and he copied the lettering from other old stones in the churchyard. Of course the fake sign-post was Alf’s work too—stuck up when required, and taken down when the show was over.

‘Well, Alf got into bad company. They found how clever he was with his hands, and he became an expert burglar. He has served two terms of imprisonment. He is one of a few who have always been under suspicion for the job at Sir Andrew Ritchie’s place, and the other two when the Chalice was lifted from Eynsham Park and the Psalter from Lord Swanbourne’s house. With what they collected in this house and the jewellery that was taken in all three burglaries, they must have done very well indeed for themselves; and by this time they are going to be hard to catch.’

Canon Maberley, who had now recovered himself somewhat, looked at the others with the beginnings of a smile. ‘It is a new experience for me,’ he said, ‘to be made use of by a gang of criminals. But it is highly interesting. I suppose that when these confiding strangers had been got down here, my tenant appeared in the character of the parson, and invited them into the house, where you tell me they were induced to make a purchase of stolen property. I do not see, I must confess, how anything could have been better designed to prevent any possibility of suspicion arising. The vicar of a parish, at home in his own vicarage! Who could imagine anything being wrong? I only hope, for the credit of my cloth, that the deception was well carried out.’

‘As far as I know,’ Trent said, ‘he made only one mistake. It was a small one; but the moment I heard of it I knew that he must have been a fraud. You see, he was asked about the oar you have hanging up in the hall. I didn’t go to Oxford myself, but I believe when a man is given his oar it means that he rowed in an eight that did something unusually good.’

A light came into the canon’s spectacled eyes. ‘In the year I got my colours the Wadham boat went up five places on the river. It was the happiest week of my life.’

‘Yet you had other triumphs,’ Trent suggested. ‘For instance, didn’t you get a Fellowship at All Souls, after leaving Wadham?’

‘Yes, and that did please me, naturally,’ the canon said. ‘But that is a different sort of happiness, my dear sir, and, believe me, nothing like so keen. And by the way, how did you know about that?’

‘I thought it might be so, because of the little mistake your tenant made. When he was asked about the oar, he said he had rowed for All Souls.’

Canon Maberley burst out laughing, while Langley and the superintendent stared at him blankly.

‘I think I see what happened,’ he said. ‘The rascal must have been browsing about in my library, in search of ideas for the part he was to play. I was a resident Fellow for five years, and a number of my books have a bookplate with my name and the name and arms of All Souls. His mistake was natural.’ And again the old gentleman laughed delightedly.

Langley exploded. ‘I like a joke myself,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be skinned alive if I can see the point of this one.’

‘Why, the point is,’ Trent told him, ‘that nobody ever rowed for All Souls. There never were more than four undergraduates there at one time, all the other members being Fellows.’

II
THE SWEET SHOT

‘NO; I happened to be abroad at the time,’ Philip Trent said. ‘I wasn’t in the way of seeing the English papers, so until I came here this week I never heard anything about your mystery.’

Captain Royden, a small, spare, brown-faced man, was engaged in the delicate—and forbidden—task of taking his automatic telephone instrument to pieces. He now suspended his labours and reached for the tobacco-jar. The large window of his office in the Kempshill clubhouse looked down upon the eighteenth green of that delectable golf course, and his eye roved over the whin-clad slopes beyond as he called on his recollection.

‘Well, if you call it a mystery,’ he said as he filled a pipe. ‘Some people do, because they like mysteries, I suppose. For instance, Colin Hunt, the man you’re staying with, calls it that. Others won’t have it, and say there was a perfectly natural explanation. I could tell you as much as anybody could about it, I dare say.’

‘As being secretary here, you mean?’

‘Not only that. I was one of the two people who were in at the death, so to speak—or next door to it,’ Captain Royden said. He limped to the mantelshelf and took down a silver box embossed on the lid with the crest and mottoes of the Corps of Royal Engineers. ‘Try one of these cigarettes, Mr Trent. If you’d like to hear the yarn, I’ll give it you. You have heard something about Arthur Freer, I suppose?’

‘Hardly anything,’ Trent said. ‘I just gathered that he wasn’t a very popular character.’

‘No,’ Captain Royden said with reserve. ‘Did they tell you he was my brother-in-law? No? Well, now, it happened about four months ago, on a Monday—let me see—yes, the second Monday in May. Freer had a habit of playing nine holes before breakfast. Barring Sundays—he was strict about Sunday—he did it most days, even in the beastliest weather, going round all alone usually, carrying his own clubs, studying every shot as if his life depended on it. That helped to make him the very good player he was. His handicap here was two, and at Undershaw he used to be scratch, I believe.

‘At a quarter to eight he’d be on the first tee, and by nine he’d be back at his house—it’s only a few minutes from here. That Monday morning he started off as usual—’

‘And at the usual time?’

‘Just about. He had spent a few minutes in the clubhouse blowing up the steward about some trifle. And that was the last time he was seen alive by anybody—near enough to speak to, that is. No one else went off the first tee until a little after nine, when I started round with Browson—he’s our local padre; I had been having breakfast with him at the vicarage. He’s got a game leg, like me, so we often play together when he can fit it in.

‘We had holed out on the first green, and were walking onto the next tee, when Browson said: “Great Scot! Look there. Something’s happened.” He pointed down the fairway of the second hole; and there we could see a man lying sprawled on the turf, face-down and motionless. Now there is this point about the second hole—the first half of it is in a dip in the land, just deep enough to be out of sight from any other point on the course, unless you’re standing right above it—you’ll see when you go round yourself. Well, on the tee, you are right above it; and we saw this man lying. We ran to the spot.

‘It was Freer, as I had known it must be at that hour. He was dead, lying in a disjointed sort of way no live man could have lain in. His clothing was torn to ribbons, and it was singed, too. So was his hair—he used to play bareheaded—and his face and hands. His bag of clubs was lying a few yards away, and the brassie, which he had just been using, was close by the body.

‘There wasn’t any wound showing, and I had seen far worse things often enough, but the padre was looking sickish, so I asked him to go back to the clubhouse and send for a doctor and the police while I mounted guard. They weren’t long coming, and after they had done their job the body was taken away in an ambulance. Well, that’s about all I can tell you at first hand, Mr Trent. If you are staying with Hunt, you’ll have heard about the inquest and all that, probably.’

Trent shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Colin was just beginning to tell me, after breakfast this morning, about Freer having been killed on the course in some incomprehensible way, when a man came to see him about something. So, as I was going to apply for a fortnight’s run of the course, I thought I would ask you about the affair.’

‘All right,’ Captain Royden said. ‘I can tell you about the inquest anyhow—had to be there to speak my own little piece, about finding the body. As for what had happened to Freer, the medical evidence was rather confusing. It was agreed that he had been killed by some tremendous shock, which had jolted his whole system to pieces and dislocated several joints, but had been not quite violent enough to cause any visible wound. Apart from that, there was a disagreement. Freer’s own doctor, who saw the body first, declared he must have been struck by lightning. He said it was true there hadn’t been a thunderstorm, but that there had been thunder about all that weekend, and that sometimes lightning did act in that way. But the police surgeon, Collins, said there would be no such displacement of the organs from a lightning stroke, even if it did ever happen that way in our climate, which he doubted. And he said that if it had been lightning, it would have struck the steel-headed clubs; but the clubs lay there in their bag quite undamaged. Collins thought there must have been some kind of explosion, though he couldn’t suggest what kind.’

Trent shook his head. ‘I don’t suppose that impressed the court,’ he said. ‘All the same, it may have been all the honest opinion he could give.’ He smoked in silence a few moments, while Captain Royden attended to the troubles of his telephone instrument with a camel-hair brush. ‘But surely,’ Trent said at length, ‘if there had been such an explosion as that, somebody would have heard the sound of it.’

‘Lots of people would have heard it,’ Captain Royden answered. ‘But there you are, you see—nobody notices the sound of explosions just about here. There’s the quarry on the other side of the road there, and any time after seven a.m. there’s liable to be a noise of blasting.’

‘A dull, sickening thud?’

‘Jolly sickening,’ Captain Royden said, ‘for all of us living near by. And so that point wasn’t raised. Well, Collins is a very sound man; but as you say, his evidence didn’t really explain the thing, and the other fellow’s did, whether it was right or wrong. Besides, the coroner and the jury had heard about a bolt from a clear sky, and the notion appealed to them. Anyhow, they brought it in death from misadventure.’

‘Which nobody could deny, as the song says,’ Trent remarked. ‘And was there no other evidence?’

‘Yes, some. But Hunt can tell you about it as well as I can; he was there. I shall have to ask you to excuse me now,’ Captain Royden said. ‘I have an appointment in the town. The steward will sign you on for a fortnight, and probably get you a game too, if you want one today.’

Colin Hunt and his wife, when Trent returned to their house for luncheon, were very willing to complete the tale. The verdict, they declared, was tripe. Dr Collins knew his job, whereas Dr Hoyle was an old footler, and Freer’s death had never been reasonably explained.

As for the other evidence, it had, they agreed, been interesting, though it didn’t help at all. Freer had been seen after he had played his tee-shot at the second hole, when he was walking down to the bottom of the dip towards the spot where he met his death.

‘But according to Royden,’ Trent said, ‘that was a place where he couldn’t be seen, unless one was right above him.’

‘Well, this witness was right above him,’ Hunt rejoined. ‘Over one thousand feet above him, so he said. He was an R.A.F. man, piloting a bomber from Bexford Camp, not far from here. He was up doing some sort of exercise, and passed over the course just at that time. He didn’t know Freer, but he spotted a man walking down from the second tee, because he was the only living soul visible on the course. Gossett, the other man in the plane, is a temporary member here, and he did know Freer quite well—or as well as anybody cared to know him—but he never saw him. However, the pilot was quite clear that he saw a man just at the time in question, and they took his evidence so as to prove that Freer was absolutely alone just before his death. The only other person who saw Freer was another man who knew him well; used to be a caddy here, and then got a job at the quarry. He was at work on the hillside, and he watched Freer play the first hole and go on to the second—nobody with him, of course.’

‘Well, that was pretty well established then,’ Trent remarked. ‘He was about as alone as he could be, it seems. Yet something happened somehow.’

Mrs Hunt sniffed sceptically, and lighted a cigarette. ‘Yes, it did,’ she said. ‘However, I didn’t worry much about it, for one. Edith—Mrs Freer, that is: Royden’s sister—must have had a terrible life of it with a man like that. Not that she ever said anything—she wouldn’t. She is not that sort.’

‘She is a jolly good sort, anyhow,’ Hunt declared.

‘Yes, she is; too good for most men. I can tell you,’ Mrs Hunt added for the benefit of Trent, ‘if Colin ever took to cursing me and knocking me about, my well-known loyalty wouldn’t stand the strain for very long.’

‘That’s why I don’t do it. It’s the fear of exposure that makes me the perfect husband, Phil. She would tie a can to me before I knew what was happening. As for Edith, it’s true she never said anything, but the change in her since it happened tells the story well enough. Since she’s been living with her brother she has been looking far better and happier than she ever succeeded in doing while Freer was alive.’

‘She won’t be living with him for very long, I dare say,’ Mrs Hunt intimated darkly.

‘No. I’d marry her myself if I had the chance,’ Hunt agreed cordially.

‘Pooh! You wouldn’t be in the first six,’ his wife said. ‘It will be Rennie, or Gossett, or possibly Sandy Butler—you’ll see. But perhaps you’ve had enough of the local tittle-tattle, Phil. Did you fix up a game for this afternoon?’

‘Yes; with the Jarman Professor of Chemistry in the University of Cambridge,’ Trent said. ‘He looked at me as if he thought a bath of vitriol would do me good, but he agreed to play me.’

‘You’ve got a tough job,’ Hunt observed. ‘I believe he is almost as old as he looks, but he is a devil at the short game, and he knows the course blindfolded, which you don’t. And he isn’t so cantankerous as he pretends to be. By the way, he was the man who saw the finish of the last shot Freer ever played—a sweet shot if ever there was one. Get him to tell you.’

‘I shall try to,’ Trent said. ‘The steward told me about that, and that was why I asked the professor for a game.’

Colin Hunt’s prediction was fulfilled that afternoon. Professor Hyde, receiving five strokes, was one up at the seventeenth, and at the last hole sent down a four-foot putt to win the match. As they left the green he remarked, as if in answer to something Trent had that moment said: ‘Yes; I can tell you a curious circumstance about Freer’s death.’

Trent’s eye brightened, for the professor had not said a dozen words during their game, and Trent’s tentative allusion to the subject after the second hole had been met merely by an intimidating grunt.

‘I saw the finish of the last shot he played,’ the old gentleman went on, ‘without seeing the man himself at all. A lovely brassie it was, too—though lucky. Rolled to within two feet of the pin.’

Trent considered. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘what you mean. You were near the second green, and the ball came over the ridge and ran down to the hole.’

‘Just so,’ Professor Hyde said. ‘That’s how you play it—if you can. You might have done it yourself today, if your second shot had been thirty yards longer. I’ve never done it; but Freer often did. After a really good drive, you play a long second, blind, over the ridge, and with a perfect shot you may get the green. Well, my house is quite near that green. I was pottering about in the garden before breakfast, and just as I happened to be looking towards the green a ball came hopping down the slope and trickled right across to the hole. Of course, I knew whose it must be—Freer always came along about that time. If it had been anyone else, I’d have waited to see him get his three, and congratulate him. As it was, I went indoors, and didn’t hear of his death until long afterwards.’

‘And you never saw him play the shot?’ Trent said thoughtfully.

The professor turned a choleric blue eye on him. ‘How the deuce could I?’ he said huffily. ‘I can’t see through a mass of solid earth.’

‘I know, I know,’ Trent said. ‘I was only trying to follow your mental process. Without seeing him play the shot, you knew it was his second—you say he would have been putting for a three. And you said, too—didn’t you?—that it was a brassie shot.’

‘Simply because, my young friend’—the professor was severe—‘I happened to know the man’s game. I had played that nine holes with him before breakfast often, until one day he lost his temper more than usual, and made himself impossible. I knew he practically always carried the ridge with his second—I won’t say he always got the green—and his brassie was the only club that would do it. It is conceivable, I admit,’ Professor Hyde added a little stiffly, ‘that some mishap took place and that the shot in question was not actually Freer’s second; but it did not occur to me to allow for that highly speculative contingency.’

On the next day, after those playing a morning round were started on their perambulation, Trent indulged himself with an hour’s practice, mainly on the unsurveyed stretch of the second hole. Afterwards he had a word with the caddymaster; then visited the professional’s shop, and won the regard of that expert by furnishing himself with a new midiron. Soon he brought up the subject of the last shot played by Arthur Freer. A dozen times that morning, he said, he had tried, after a satisfying drive, to reach the green with his second; but in vain. Fergus MacAdam shook his head. Not many, he said, could strike the ball with yon force. He could get there himself, whiles, but never for certainty. Mr Freer had the strength, and he kenned how to use it forbye.

What sort of clubs, Trent asked, had Freer preferred? ‘Lang and heavy, like himsel’. Noo ye mention it,’ MacAdam said, ‘I hae them here. They were brocht here after the ahccident.’ He reached up to the top of a rack. ‘Ay, here they are. They shouldna be, of course; but naebody came to claim them, and it juist slippit ma mind.’

Trent, extracting the brassie, looked thoughtfully at the heavy head with the strip of hard white material inlaid in the face. ‘It’s a powerful weapon, sure enough,’ he remarked.

‘Ay, for a man that could control it,’ MacAdam said. ‘I dinna care for yon ivorine face mysel’. Some fowk think it gies mair reseelience, ye ken; but there’s naething in it.’

‘He didn’t get it from you, then,’ Trent suggested, still closely examining the head.

‘Ay, but he did. I had a lot down from Nelsons while the fashion for them was on. Ye’ll find my name,’ MacAdam added, ‘stampit on the wood in the usual place, if yer een are seein’ richt.’

‘Well, I don’t—that’s just it. The stamp is quite illegible.’

‘Tod! Let’s see,’ the professional said, taking the club in hand. ‘Guid reason for its being illegible,’ he went on after a brief scrutiny. ‘It’s been obleeterated—that’s easy seen. Who ever saw sic a daft-like thing! The wood has juist been crushed some gait—in a vice, I wouldna wonder. Noo, why would onybody want to dae a thing like yon?’

‘Unaccountable, isn’t it?’ Trent said. ‘Still, it doesn’t matter, I suppose. And anyhow, we shall never know.’

It was twelve days later that Trent, looking in at the open door of the secretary’s office, saw Captain Royden happily engaged with the separated parts of some mechanism in which coils of wire appeared to be the leading motive.

‘I see you’re busy,’ Trent said.

‘Come in! Come in!’ Royden said heartily. ‘I can do this any time—another hour’s work will finish it.’ He laid down a pair of sharp-nosed pliers. ‘The electricity people have just changed us over to A.C., and I’ve got to rewind the motor of our vacuum cleaner. Beastly nuisance,’ he added, looking down affectionately at the bewildering jumble of disarticulated apparatus on his table.

‘You bear your sorrow like a man,’ Trent remarked; and Royden laughed as he wiped his hands on a towel.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do love tinkering about with mechanical jobs, and if I do say it myself, I’d rather do a thing like this with my own hands than risk having it faultily done by a careless workman. Too many of them about. Why, about a year ago the company sent a man here to fit a new main fuse-box, and he made a short-circuit with his screwdriver that knocked him right across the kitchen and might very well have killed him.’ He reached down his cigarette-box and offered it to Trent, who helped himself; then looked down thoughtfully at the device on the lid.

‘Thanks very much. When I saw this box before, I put you down for an R.E. man. Ubique, and Quo fas et gloria ducunt. H’m! I wonder why Engineers were given that motto in particular.’

‘Lord knows,’ the captain said. ‘In my experience, Sappers don’t exactly go where right and glory lead. The dirtiest of all the jobs and precious little of the glory—that’s what they get.’

‘Still, they have the consolation,’ Trent pointed out, ‘of feeling that they are at home in a scientific age, and that all the rest of the army are amateurs compared with them. That’s what one of them once told me, anyhow. Well now, Captain, I have to be off this evening. I’ve looked in just to say how much I’ve enjoyed myself here.’

‘Very glad you did,’ Captain Royden said. ‘You’ll come again, I hope, now you know that the golf here is not so bad.’

‘I like it immensely. Also the members. And the secretary.’ Trent paused to light his cigarette. ‘I found the mystery rather interesting, too.’

Captain Royden’s eyebrows lifted slightly. ‘You mean about Freer’s death? So you made up your mind it was a mystery.’

‘Why, yes,’ Trent said. ‘Because I made up my mind he had been killed by somebody, and probably killed intentionally. Then, when I had looked into the thing a little, I washed out the “probably”.’

Captain Royden took up a penknife from his desk and began mechanically to sharpen a pencil. ‘So you don’t agree with the coroner’s jury?’

‘No: as the verdict seems to have been meant to rule out murder or any sort of human agency, I don’t. The lightning idea, which apparently satisfied them, or some of them, was not a very bright one, I thought. I was told what Dr Collins had said against it at the inquest; and it seemed to me he had disposed of it completely when he said that Freer’s clubs, most of them steel ones, were quite undamaged. A man carrying his clubs puts them down, when he plays a shot, a few feet away at most; yet Freer was supposed to have been electrocuted without any notice having been taken of them, so to speak.’

‘H’m! No, it doesn’t seem likely. I don’t know that that quite decides the point, though,’ the captain said. ‘Lightning plays funny tricks, you know. I’ve seen a small tree struck when it was surrounded by trees twice the size. All the same, I quite agree there didn’t seem to be any sense in the lightning notion. It was thundery weather, but there wasn’t any storm that morning in this neighbourhood.’

‘Just so. But when I considered what had been said about Freer’s clubs, it suddenly occurred to me that nobody had said anything about the club, so far as my information about the inquest went. It seemed clear, from what you and the parson saw, that he had just played a shot with his brassie when he was struck down; it was lying near him, not in the bag. Besides, old Hyde actually saw the ball he had hit roll down the slope onto the green. Now, it’s a good rule to study every little detail when you are on a problem of this kind. There weren’t many left to study, of course, since the thing had happened four months before; but I knew Freer’s clubs must be somewhere, and I thought of one or two places where they were likely to have been taken, in the circumstances, so I tried them. First, I reconnoitred the caddymaster’s shed, asking if I could leave my bag there for a day or two; but I was told that the regular place to leave them was the pro’s shop. So I went and had a chat with MacAdam, and sure enough it soon came out that Freer’s bag was still in his rack. I had a look at the clubs, too.’

‘And did you notice anything peculiar about them?’ Captain Royden asked.

‘Just one little thing. But it was enough to set me thinking, and next day I drove up to London, where I paid a visit to Nelsons, the sporting outfitters. You know the firm, of course.’

Captain Royden, carefully fining down the point of his pencil, nodded. ‘Everybody knows Nelsons.’

‘Yes; and MacAdam, I knew, had an account there for his stocks. I wanted to look over some clubs of a particular make—a brassie, with a slip of ivorine let into the face, such as they had supplied to MacAdam. Freer had had one of them from him.’

Again Royden nodded.

‘I saw the man who shows clubs at Nelsons. We had a talk, and then—you know how little things come out in the course of conversation—’

‘Especially,’ put in the captain with a cheerful grin, ‘when the conversation is being steered by an expert.’

‘You flatter me,’ Trent said. ‘Anyhow, it did transpire that a club of that particular make had been bought some months before by a customer whom the man was able to remember. Why he remembered him was because, in the first place, he insisted on a club of rather unusual length and weight—much too long and heavy for himself to use, as he was neither a tall man nor of powerful build. The salesman had suggested as much in a delicate way; but the customer said no, he knew exactly what suited him, and he bought the club and took it away with him.’

‘Rather an ass, I should say,’ Royden observed thoughtfully.

‘I don’t think he was an ass, really. He was capable of making a mistake, though, like the rest of us. There were some other things, by the way, that the salesman recalled about him. He had a slight limp, and he was, or had been, an army officer. The salesman was an ex-serviceman, and he couldn’t be mistaken, he said, about that.’

Captain Royden had drawn a sheet of paper towards him, and was slowly drawing little geometrical figures as he listened. ‘Go on, Mr Trent,’ he said quietly.

‘Well, to come back to the subject of Freer’s death. I think he was killed by someone who knew Freer never played on Sunday, so that his clubs would be—or ought to be, shall we say?—in his locker all that day. All the following night, too, of course—in case the job took a long time. And I think this man was in a position to have access to the lockers in this clubhouse at any time he chose, and to possess a master key to those lockers. I think he was a skilful amateur craftsman. I think he had a good practical knowledge of high explosives. There is a branch of the army’—Trent paused a moment and looked at the cigarette-box on the table—‘in which that sort of knowledge is specially necessary, I believe.’

Hastily, as if just reminded of the duty of hospitality, Royden lifted the lid of the box and pushed it towards Trent. ‘Do have another,’ he urged.

Trent did so with thanks. ‘They have to have it in the Royal Engineers,’ he went on, ‘because—so I’m told—demolition work is an important part of their job.’

‘Quite right,’ Captain Royden observed, delicately shading one side of a cube.

‘Ubique!’ Trent mused, staring at the box-lid. ‘If you are “everywhere”, I take it you can be in two places at the same time. You could kill a man in one place, and at the same time be having breakfast with a friend a mile away. Well, to return to our subject yet once more; you can see the kind of idea I was led to form about what happened to Freer. I believe that his brassie was taken from his locker on the Sunday before his death. I believe the ivorine face of it was taken off and a cavity hollowed out behind it; and in that cavity a charge of explosive was placed. Where it came from I don’t know, for it isn’t the sort of thing that is easy to come by, I imagine.’

‘Oh, there would be no difficulty about that,’ the captain remarked. ‘If this man you’re speaking of knew all about H.E., as you say, he could have compounded the stuff himself from materials anybody can buy. For instance, he could easily make tetranitroaniline—that would be just the thing for him, I should say.’

‘I see. Then perhaps there would be a tiny detonator attached to the inner side of the ivorine face, so that a good smack with the brassie would set it off. Then the face would be fixed on again. It would be a delicate job, because the weight of the club-head would have to be exactly right. The feel and balance of the club would have to be just the same as before the operation.’

‘A delicate job, yes,’ the captain agreed. ‘But not an impossible one. There would be rather more to it than you say, as a matter of fact; the face would have to be shaved down thin, for instance. Still, it could be done.’

‘Well, I imagine it done. Now, this man I have in mind knew there was no work for a brassie at the short first hole, and that the first time it would come out of the bag was at the second hole, down at the bottom of the dip, where no one could see what happened. What certainly did happen was that Freer played a sweet shot, slap onto the green. What else happened at the same moment we don’t know for certain, but we can make a reasonable guess. And then, of course, there’s the question what happened to the club—or what was left of it; the handle, say. But it isn’t a difficult question, I think, if we remember how the body was found.’

‘How do you mean?’ Royden asked.

‘I mean, by whom it was found. One of the two players who found it was too much upset to notice very much. He hurried back to the clubhouse; and the other was left alone with the body for, as I estimate it, at least fifteen minutes. When the police came on the scene, they found lying near the body a perfectly good brassie, an unusually long and heavy club, exactly like Freer’s brassie in every respect—except one. The name stamped on the wood of the club-head had been obliterated by crushing. That name, I think, was not F. MacAdam, but W. J. Nelson; and the club had been taken out of a bag that was not Freer’s—a bag which had the remains, if any, of Freer’s brassie at the bottom of it. And I believe that’s all.’ Trent got to his feet and stretched his arms. ‘You can see what I meant when I said I found the mystery interesting.’

For some moments Captain Royden gazed thoughtfully out of the window; then he met Trent’s inquiring eye. ‘If there was such a fellow as you imagine,’ he said coolly, ‘he seems to have been careful enough—lucky enough too, if you like—to leave nothing at all of what you could call proof against him. And probably he had personal and private reasons for what he did. Suppose that somebody whom he was much attached to was in the power of a foul-tempered, bullying brute; and suppose he found that the bullying had gone to the length of physical violence; and suppose that the situation was hell by day and by night to this man of yours; and suppose there was no way on earth of putting an end to it except the way he took. Yes, Mr Trent; suppose all that!’

‘I will—I do!’ Trent said. ‘That man—if he exists at all—must have been driven pretty hard, and what he did is no business of mine anyway. And now—still in the conditional mood—suppose I take myself off.’

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