Buch lesen: «The Deductions of Colonel Gore»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Too Much Imagination

Chapter I. Into the Net

Chapter II. Too Much to Swallow

Chapter III. The Note in her Hand

Chapter IV. Gore is Frank

Chapter V. Bloodstained Linen

Chapter VI. Arling Makes a Confession

Chapter VII. Tastes of a Secretary

Chapter VIII. Spain Waxes Vehement

Chapter IX. What Really Happened

Also by Lynn Brock

The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

ALEXANDER PATRICK MCALLISTER’S literary career had had a very promising start. Born in Dublin in 1877 and educated at Clongowes Wood College, he later obtained an Honours Degree at the Royal University and was appointed chief clerk shortly after the inception of the National University of Ireland. His stage plays Irene Wycherly (1906) and At the Barn (1912), both written under the pseudonym Anthony P. Wharton, became great successes both in London and on Broadway.

Following these two hits, McAllister continued to write, but none of his subsequent plays could revive his early fame. He and his wife Cicely moved from London to Guildford, where they were to run a pub called The Jolly Farmer, and at the age of 46 he wrote his first detective novel, The Deductions of Colonel Gore (1924), under the pseudonym Lynn Brock. By this time, his early fame as a playwright had faded and he appears to have turned his hand to crime fiction simply to improve his finances at a time when detective books had begun to outsell all others. Nevertheless, the book was sold to William Collins in the UK and Harper & Brothers in the US, and became so successful that ‘Lynn Brock’ lived on to publish thirteen detective novels, seven of which featured his titular hero-detective Colonel Wickham Gore.

Brock’s complex plots and witty style won the praise of many critics including Dorothy L. Sayers and S. S. Van Dine, and his mysteries were often reprinted and widely translated. Despite their fame, however, the novels slid into obscurity shortly after the end of the Second World War—unjustly, some might suggest. Several recent reviews have criticised his novels as cliché-studded, dull affairs overloaded with Golden Age formulas and stereotypes. These reviews have missed the point: Brock actually played his part in the creation of those classic detective fiction patterns now so familiar and dear to us. He wasn’t a mere imitator of the genre, but rather experimented with existing formulas long before they became formulaic.

Comparison with some of his fellow-writers shows that Brock was an ‘early bird’ in the genre. Colonel Gore took the stage three years before Sherlock Holmes’ last appearance in ‘The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place’; he preceded the debut of S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance in The Benson Murder Case by two years, and Anthony Berkeley’s Roger Sheringham in The Layton Court Mystery, John Rhode’s Dr Priestley in The Paddington Mystery and Anthony Wynne’s Dr Hailey in The Mystery of the Evil Eye by one year. All these authors (and many more not mentioned here) established serial detectives in the fashion of the times, and Brock’s Colonel Gore appears to fit into this category remarkably well.

But was he really originally meant to be just another amateur detective with a military background like Philip MacDonald’s Anthony Gethryn, who made his debut in The Rasp the same year as Colonel Gore? It is reasonable to doubt that. Gore lacks too many of the typical characteristics of the traditional hero-detective. He is not a well-to-do super sleuth like Lord Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot. He has no profession that could help him solve crimes like the many doctors and scholars in the trade. He has no sidekick and no ally at Scotland Yard and, to cap it all, absolutely no talent for detecting! Gore makes mistakes. Many mistakes. In fact, he finds so many wrong solutions in The Deductions of Colonel Gore that the real solution ends up being the only one that is left.

T. S. Eliot called Gore ‘too stupid’. But he may have missed the parody in the title and the satirical undertones of Gore’s first adventure in his critique. The Deductions of Colonel Gore reminds one of Ronald A. Knox’s The Viaduct Murder (1925), where the four protagonists tumble from one wrong conclusion to the next trying to solve a murder on a golf course. Both books share the same tongue-in-cheek attitude towards the science of deduction and a tendency to spoof the methods of the great Sherlock Holmes. In fact, this similarity of approach suggests that Brock, like Knox, had intended to write a non-series book. Knox introduced a new detective in his next novel, The Three Taps (1927), whereas Brock—perhaps surprised by the success of his debut—elected for the security of continuing to develop his eponymous character. Colonel Gore’s Second Case (1925) shows Brock working to transform Gore into a sustainable serial protagonist, culminating in Gore finding a sidekick and, later in the series, establishing a detective agency in London. But all that is in the future.

Colonel Gore steps into his first adventure having just returned from Africa and looking forward to meeting many of his old friends. The story begins with a perfectly conventional dinner party. However, before the evening is over, ‘blackmail’ and ‘murder’ complete the guest list. These are not the only gruesome elements in the story. T. S. Eliot once mentioned the ‘extremely nasty people’ in Brock’s novels, and it is true that the author evokes a rather dark and pessimistic view of human nature. Nevertheless, The Deductions of Colonel Gore is a rip-roaring and, from today’s point of view, wonderfully old-fashioned mystery. It includes an archaic African murder weapon and a constantly confused detective who changes his mind about the possible culprit with each new clue he uncovers.

It is important to note that Brock’s stories contain some antiquated stereotypes of Jews and Africans. Such stereotypes would be intolerable in fiction written today, but were unfortunately not uncommon in the 1920s when these stories were published, and like similar writings of their era must be considered within their historical context.

The Deductions of Colonel Gore was reissued as Book 31 in Collins’ popular Detective Story Club in July 1930, and was joined by reprints of his second and third cases the following year. This new edition now includes for the first time the only published Colonel Gore short story, ‘Too Much Imagination’, which first appeared in Flynn’s weekly magazine on 30 January 1926. It follows Gore’s (by now more serious) deductions in a country house murder case. Connoisseurs of his adventures will be interested to note that the story appears to be a sketchy draft of Colonel Gore’s Third Case (1927, published in the USA as The Kink)—as well as the playful appearance of the author’s own home, The Jolly Farmer. It was in Guildford that McAllister wrote his first ‘Lynn Brock’ mystery and it is thus not surprising that most of his Colonel Gore adventures are set in or near Surrey.

In 1932, the innovative psychological novel Nightmare began a run of standalone books from Brock, although it was not quite the end for Gore: the Colonel returned after a break of ten years in his swan song, The Stoat: Colonel Gore’s Queerest Case (1940). Three years later, on 6 April 1943, Alexander Patrick McAllister died at the age of 66 at Herrison House, a hospital near the Dorset village of Charminster, ending a literary career very different from the one he had started, but no less successful for all that.

ROB REEF

February 2018

CHAPTER I

FOR just a moment following the sound of the door’s closing behind her husband’s entry Mrs Melhuish’s profile remained downbent in abstracted calculation to the bridge-block in her lap. A small forgetfulness, natural enough, perhaps, in a hostess’s last half-hour of anxiety before a duty dinner of importance. Yet, even twelve months ago, Sidney Melhuish remembered with passionate resentment, that absorbed, adorable little face would have flashed round, even in such an anxiety, in eager welcome to his coming. As they noted and weighed the momentary delay, his rather cold eyes hardened. Then, swiftly, they averted themselves. When Mrs Melhuish raised to him an expression of good-humoured perplexity, he was mildly absorbed in his finger-nails.

‘What a nuisance, Sidney. Mr Barrington has just rung up to say that Mrs Barrington can’t possibly come. Frightful earache, poor thing. I’ve been trying to work out my table. Do come and help me.’

Her air of charming, unruffled dismay was candour itself—beyond suspicion. And yet Melhuish was aware that for an instant as she spoke her smiling eyes had repeated once more the question they had asked of his so often of late. But of the hideous, the incredible suspicion that lurked behind it his clean-cut, gravely-smiling face betrayed no slightest hint as he moved behind her chair to inspect the much-altered plan of the dining-table which was drawn on the bridge-block.

For a moment or two they considered it in silence.

‘If I had had even another quarter of an hour’s notice—I know Beatrice Colethorpe would have stopped the gap for me. But even the amiable Beatrice would kick at a dinner-invitation of twenty minutes.’

She turned—Melhuish observed how instantly—as the door of the drawing-room reopened and Clegg announced the first of the evening’s guests.

‘Colonel Gore.’

No moment of feigned abstraction now—no summoning of her forces—no steadying of her nerves to meet his glance. Instead, a quick smile and gesture of vivid, frankest pleasure, in which his poisoned thought detected relief and eager escape from the danger of being alone with him.

Gore’s lean brown face reflected the cordiality of his hostess’s greeting, as she rose and went to meet him with outstretched hand.

‘“Early”, you commanded me. Therefore I have obeyed. Not too literally, I hope.’

Mrs Melhuish laughed as her hand slid into a clasp of fraternal heartiness.

‘Well, as you have kept us waiting for three years, I think we may acquit you of undue precipitation.’ She turned to her husband. ‘This, Sidney, is the one and only Wick.’

Gore’s twinkling gray eyes ran over his host in swift appraisement as they shook hands. In the four days for which he had been installed at the Riverside Hotel he had contrived to learn a good deal about Barbara Melhuish’s husband, and that swift, straight, shrewd glance of his assured him at once that his informants had not been mistaken. A bit frigid, Dr Sidney Melhuish—a bit solemn, perhaps—but one of the right sort. Steady, clean eyes—steady, clean mouth—plenty of jaw and chin. A man that knew his job and knew he knew it. He grinned his charming grin and took the hand of Pickles’s husband in a grip of steel. Thank the Lord, she hadn’t made a mess of it, as so many of the Old Lot had somehow contrived to do.

‘I know you very well by repute, Colonel Gore,’ Melhuish smiled cordially—few men could resist Wick Gore’s grin. ‘Indeed, it is only with the utmost difficulty, I assure you, that I refrain from addressing you as “Wick” straightaway.’

‘Why refrain?’ twinkled Gore. ‘Especially as I may confide to you that I have been in the habit of addressing your wife as “Pickles” since she was able to throw dolls and bottles and things at me out of a perambulator.’

‘Now, now,’ expostulated Mrs Melhuish. ‘No indiscretions, please.’

‘I apologise. I must remember that now I find you with a husband who believes not only that you are perfection, but that you always were.’

But his little pleasantry had somehow fallen flat, he perceived—as little pleasantries sometimes did. Melhuish, he divined, was a man to whom little pleasantries must be administered cautiously; no doubt, too, in three years of matrimony the light-hearted Pickles had acquired some of the seriousness of mind becoming to the wife of a rising physician.

‘I must get my table right. Do come and help me,’ said Mrs Melhuish hurriedly, returning to her diagram. ‘Mrs Barrington has developed bad earache and can’t come. We have just seven minutes to divide four women neatly and tactfully amongst five men. Let us concentrate our three powerful intellects. There—now I’ve drawn a nice new table. The blob at the top is Sidney.’

Gore glanced down at the first design, thus abandoned.

‘Barrington is coming then?’ he asked.

Mrs Melhuish nodded her golden head abstractedly.

‘Mrs Barrington insisted upon it, he said. Ah—I’ve got it.’ She scribbled some hasty initials. ‘There’s no help for it, Wick. You must divide Sylvia Arndale with Sir James. There—!

She held up her revised scheme for her husband’s consideration, and, when he had approved it with his grave smile, flitted from the room to superintend the rearrangement of her cards. It was nine years since Gore had seen her; but she had changed, he reflected, as he attended upon her exit, very little; if at all, for the better. Pickles must be just thirty now. Thirty … Extraordinary. His mind flashed back to the night of her coming-out dance—November, 1910. Twelve years ago—incredible. Ah, well—those days were done with, and the Pickles of them. With the faintest of sighs he turned to rejoin the lucky beggar who had, somehow, succeeded in capturing that airy miracle and putting it in charge of his socks and his servants and his dinner-parties. A good chap—a good-looking chap—a chap, perhaps, a tiny shade too old for her, but in every way plainly to the eye a chap to make her as happy and contented a wife as—well, as any intelligent wife was likely to be made.

‘You know most of the people who are coming to us this evening, Barbara assures me,’ said Melhuish.

‘All, I believe, except Barrington. I knew Mrs Barrington, of course, very well in the old days—when she was Miss Melville. She married just after the war, I think?’

‘Yes.’

A certain quality in the monosyllable attracted Gore’s attention.

‘Successfully, I hope? What part of the world does Barrington come from?’

‘Jamaica, I believe.’

Gore grinned.

‘Sounds like sugar. Money to money, I suppose. Always the way here in Linwood. Simply revolting the way it breeds in hereabouts. No chance whatever for the deserving poor, is there? I suppose old Melville came down with thirty or forty thousand at least?’ He sighed. ‘Lord—who wouldn’t be a son-in-law … in Linwood?’

For a moment Melhuish was absorbed in adjusting the rose shade of a light to his satisfaction.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, with that curious dryness of tone which his guest had already noticed, ‘I understand that the Melvilles disapproved of the marriage and made a very small settlement. Mr Barrington is a patient of mine—Mrs Barrington too, indeed. But I cannot claim what one would describe as an intimate acquaintance with either of them personally. My wife, no doubt, can tell you all about their affairs. As you are aware, of course, she and Mrs Barrington are very old friends—’

He paused. His smile was formally courteous, but unmistakably resolved to discuss Mrs Barrington and her husband in no further detail.

‘Right, my good man,’ reflected his insouciant guest, without resentment. ‘Keep your poker down your back if you think it makes you more impressive. A little bit sensitive, are you, because people are old friends of your wife’s and not of yours? Myself included, perhaps? Well, we’ve got to talk about something. Let’s try golf.’

But Melhuish, it became clear at once, regarded golf merely as an inducement to walk six miles on Sunday afternoon. Cheerfully Gore tried the by-election of the preceding week, fishing, the Panel System, and the Navy cuts. Mrs Melhuish returned to find the two men staring at the fire with the apparent conviction that in all the universe it alone held for them a common interest.

‘I did tell you, Wick, that Sir James Wellmore is our pièce de résistance this evening? Or did I? At any rate he is. We are awfully proud of him. He’s our show patient.’

‘You have met Sir James before, of course?’ Melhuish asked.

‘Once or twice—in the deplorably long ago—when he was not yet Sir James. When we were stationed out at Fieldbrook Barracks in nineteen-thirteen—just before we went to India—I remember he dined us and danced us and shot us in the most princely way. His first wife—she was still alive then—had, I recall, a penchant for the Services.’

Mrs Melhuish flashed a little teasing smile at him.

‘If I am not mistaken the present Lady Wellmore was addicted to the same pleasant vice in those days. Or was it the younger Miss Heathman who was the attraction?’

Gore’s teeth showed beneath his trim little wheaten moustache.

‘How happy could I have been with either,’ he laughed lightly. ‘I believe I did miss the chance of my lifetime then. Someone told me last night at the club that Angela Heathman’s income at present works out at just a shilling a minute. I’ve never stopped thinking about it since. If I hadn’t gone off so hopelessly, I—by Gad, I believe I’d chance my luck now.’

‘My dear Wick,’ laughed Mrs Melhuish, ‘Miss Heathman lives in the fourth dimension nowadays—or somewhere where there are better things than marriage and giving in marriage. Quite a difficult proposition, I should say, for a mercenary adventurer—even if he still has the smile of an angel and, still, no perceptible symptoms of a tum-tum.’

As their eyes met in smiling mutual approval, it seemed to Gore that nothing of their old camaraderie had faded, after all, in the passage of all those years. They had always looked at one another and chaffed one another just so, shrewdly yet with conviction of absolute understanding and sympathy, since the days when he had been a Harrovian of unusually misguided enterprise, and she the twinkling-legged bane of her nursemaid’s existence. It was pleasant to be back, if only for a little while, in one’s own country, and to find that one’s old place was still there, waiting for one. The chilling disillusionment that had invaded him steadily during the four days since his return was forgotten in a soothing content. From the radiant, piquant face of his hostess—smiling at him precisely as it had smiled at him twenty-five years before amongst the branches of forbidden apple-trees, with one eyebrow slightly higher than the other—his eyes turned to absorb the effect of the warmth and colour and dainty comfort of the big drawing-room that was her setting. And as they turned they met the eyes of her husband.

There was a moment of silence, and then Gore said, brightly, that it had looked quite like snow about five o’clock that afternoon. With that opinion the Melhuishs agreed, Mrs Melhuish with sparkling vivacity, her husband with considered conviction, as Clegg reappeared to announce the arrival of Mr and Mrs Arndale.

‘Good Lord,’ thought Gore, as he reared his graceful and admirably-tailored person from the most comfortable chair he had sat in for nine years. ‘The man thinks I’m an old flame of Pickles’s. I know he does. That’s why he has been watching me like a cat, is it? Fi-fi. Tut-tut. Pickles, Pickles … I hope I have not been mistaken in you?’

But no trace of these interior misgivings was visible as he shook hands with Cecil Arndale and his pretty, plump little wife. They, too, were part of the Old Days and the Old Lot—Sylvia Arndale and Barbara Melhuish were first cousins, and Cecil Arndale and he had been at Harrow together, though nearly three years separated them—and their pleasure at the meeting was as manifest as his own. In sixty seconds Mrs Arndale had reproached him for calling on two afternoons on which she had been out, informed him that she had made fifteen people buy his book, and secured him for dinner next day and a dance in the following week.

‘I went to see your film twice,’ she pouted, ‘and there you were, standing with hundreds and dozens of dead antelopes and things stacked all around you—and I never got as much as tsetse-fly’s whisker out of the lot. I shall never forget that you sent Barbara all those lovely stickers and beads and things as a wedding-present, and forgot me—me, who was once more than a sister to you—absolutely. Never, never.’

‘My dear Roly-Poly,’ grinned Gore placidly, ‘you forget that I sent you a very beautiful and costly flower-bowl when you were entitled to a wedding-present—which was, pray recollect, four years before I became a movie-star—’

‘For Heaven’s sake,’ cried Mrs Arndale, ‘don’t remind me how long I’ve been married to Cecil. It’s not fair to him, poor dear. It embitters me so, and he has a perfectly ghastly time when I’m embittered.’

Cecil Arndale laughed—a little foolishly, as he had always laughed, his rather prominent blue eyes glistening slightly in his large, brick-red face. He had grown fat, Gore observed—much too fat for a man of thirty-nine—and his fatness accentuated that slight weakness of mouth and chin that had always marred his good-humoured, healthy, conventional good looks. His laugh faded again instantly into abstraction; his blue eyes stared vacantly across the room, while his lips twisted and puckered and smoothed themselves out again restlessly. Too much food, Gore conjectured—altogether too much drink—too much money—too easy a life of it. Poor old Cecil. He had always threatened to go soft. With some little difficulty Gore suppressed the recollection that this hefty, healthy six-footer had spent the war in England, and, incidentally, doubled during it the fortune which he had inherited from his father. Well, someone had had to stay at home and build ships. Besides, Arndale had married in 1915. And anyhow all that was his own affair. Gore, who had been through the business from start to finish, was not disposed to overrate the advantages to be derived from that experience. He wondered a little, none the less, just what the plump, outspoken little Roly-Poly had thought, privately, of her spouse’s devotion to his business—say, in March, 1918.

‘How’s your brother?’ he asked her. ‘I fancied I caught a glimpse of a face that might have been his—brought up to date—passing me on the Promenade in a most vicious-looking two-seater. But I haven’t run into him yet, end-on, so to speak—’

‘Bertie? He lives just beside you. You’re staying at the Riverside, aren’t you? He has a flat in Selkirk Place at present—just across the way … at the other side of the Green. Number 73. You’ll find him there any morning up to lunch-time in bed.’

‘Still unattached?’

‘We hope so.’

‘What does he do all day?’

Mrs Arndale shrugged her pretty shoulders.

‘He plays a good deal of golf, I believe—races a good deal—hunts a little. If he happens not to be away, and if it’s too wet to do anything else, he runs down to the Yard in his car, smokes a cigarette, and runs back to change. I have calculated that on an average Bertie changes seven times a day.’

‘Oh, then he’s attached to the Yard now, is he?’

‘Cecil says so. I suppose Cecil knows. It’s his Yard.’

Arndale came out of his abstracted silence for a moment.

‘Bertie’s all right,’ he said. ‘Bit of an ass about women, that’s all.’

‘We all are, thank Heaven,’ smiled Gore—‘er … until we’re forty … or … er … thirty-nine.’

Arndale’s eyes regarded him blankly.

‘Eh? Thirty-nine? No. Bertie’s nothing like that …’ With a visible effort he concentrated upon his calculation. ‘Bertie’s thirty—or thirty-one. Why, hang it, old chap—I’m thirty-nine.’

He smiled vaguely and strolled away. Gore caught his wife’s eye.

‘What’s the trouble, Roly-Poly?’ he asked bluntly.

She shrugged.

‘Heaven knows. Cecil’s always like that now … I’m frightfully worried about it, really. It’s not money, I know. We’re simply revoltingly well-off … It’s some sort of blight … something mental.’ She smiled wryly. ‘Sometimes I think it’s I who am responsible for it … of course I’ve always known that I’m not the right person … And yet we get on quite well … He’s quite fond of me, really, in his way … Oh, don’t let us talk about it any more. Let’s talk about you. It’s so absolutely ripping to see your old phiz again, Wick.’

As she patted his arm with a little impulsive gesture the door reopened and Clegg announced the guests of honour.

‘Sir James and Lady Wellmore and Miss Heathman.’

While the Melhuishs chatted for a moment with the new arrivals Gore took stock of them with something like dismay. Wellmore, whom he remembered as a brisk, cheerful, keen-eyed middle-aged man, looked now every day of a tired, peevish, short-sighted sixty-five. Lady Wellmore—could that large-bosomed, broad-hipped, triple-chinned woman be the Phyllis Heathman of the old days? And that sallow, weary-eyed, bony-necked female with the nervously-flickering smile—could that be the once really quite pretty Angela? Good Lord.

His hostess’s voice claimed his attention.

‘You have met Colonel Gore before, Sir James, I think.’

Wellmore’s tired eyes rested on the younger man’s face perfunctorily, as he allowed his flabby, damp hand to be shaken.

‘Yes,’ he said briefly, ‘I remember you. Nineteen-thirteen. You were stationed at Fieldbrook Barracks. In the Westshires. One of the prettiest shots I ever saw. Been in Africa, haven’t you? Wonder you didn’t stay there instead of coming back to this filthy climate. My wife has your book. But I’ve no time to read books. Never had.’

He passed on towards the fireplace and bent to warm his hands at the cheerful blaze wearily, his back to the room. Chairman of the United Tobacco Company—owner of three millions—master of six thousand lives—he could afford to dispense with ceremony.

But Lady Wellmore was graciousness itself. She had simply revelled in his book—especially the parts about the pigmies—she considered the parts about the pigmies perfectly fascinating. And the film—perfectly wonderful. She had been absolutely thrilled when dear Barbara had told her that she was to meet him again that night. She rounded him up in a cul-de-sac formed by a small table, two chairs, the flank of the big piano, and her sister.

‘Angela, have you forgotten Colonel Gore? He has been regarding you with the most reproachful of eyes.’

Angela Heathman smiled nervously and held out a languid hand. At close quarters the sallow, haggard weariness of her face, with its drawn lips and shadowed eyes, was still more noticeable. Beside her sister’s florid exuberance her faded thinness was accentuated painfully. Her smile faded, her eyes looked beyond him in brooding abstraction. She said nothing—withdrew her hand listlessly, and appeared to have forgotten the existence of the people who surrounded her.