Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts Read online

  ‘He was D.O.R.A.’s husband in the flesh—a real old Nonconformist killjoy if ever there was one. The other chap was more ordinary, but he wasn’t quite like a Londoner, all the same. His face was large, and bronzed, as though he’d lived in the tropics. There was something about his soft hat, too, which gave that impression. His suit was of very thin brown stripy material, and his shirt and socks were silk. I could hardly take my eyes off old Killjoy, he was such a perfect type. He seemed to be acting up to my idea of him too. The Brown Man was evidently trying to urge something on him—but the old boy wouldn’t play. He sat there with his little mouth all buttoned up, just frowning down his nose, and shaking his head every now and then.

  ‘After a bit, Brown Man produced some papers out of a case and thrust them in front of Killjoy, but Killjoy wouldn’t play—not he. He just sat there as though he’d swallowed a poker with his knobbly hands clasped on top of his umbrella. He glanced sideways at the papers with one pale eye, and then looked sharply away again.

  ‘The Brown Man positively scowled at him—then he seemed to give it up. He slipped his papers back into the case, and sat, silent and sulky, for about three stations.

  ‘I couldn’t sit there staring all the time, so I started to study the advertisements again. When I did glance at the couple opposite I saw the Brown Man give old Killjoy the most curious look—it was a mixture of fear and hate. If looks could have killed, that old man would have dropped dead there and then, but he didn’t seem to notice. A few minutes later I caught the Brown Man looking sideways at him just that way again, then he dipped his hand quickly into his pocket and took out a little box. It looked like one of those Chinese puzzle boxes with doors that open on every side; quite a tiny thing but beautifully made. He thrust it at old Killjoy.

  ‘The old chap took it with a grudging look, the Brown Man tapped it twice with his finger-nail, and gave a curious, unpleasant laugh. The little box sprang open, and Killjoy almost smiled. ‘You haven’t got one like that,’ I heard the Brown Man say, and although I only caught his words faintly through the roar of the train, I could see the malicious way he said it.

  ‘Old Killjoy had propped his umbrella between his knees and was examining the box carefully. He sniffed at it, and seemed to like the smell—he sniffed again and held it to his long thin nose for about a minute, then he rested it on his bony knee while a puzzled look came over his prim face. After that he sniffed it two or three times more.

  ‘The train had run into Blackfriars Station, and the Brown Man stood up. With one hand he snatched the little box from Killjoy, and with the other thrust a packet of papers into the old man’s palm. Then he got out.

  ‘I had one more glimpse of him as the train moved off. He was standing on the platform staring at old Killjoy’s back, and there was that curious look of mingled fear and hate on his face again. He followed us with his eyes until we disappeared from view.

  ‘Killjoy looked stupidly at the papers for a moment, then he opened them out. He gave a little dry double cough, as though he was about to address a meeting, and began to read them through.

  ‘He didn’t like those papers—not one little bit, I could see that. After he’d been reading for a minute he wriggled his skinny neck as though his collar hurt him, and turned a nasty yellow colour.

  ‘For a second he put them down and stared across at me. His pale blue eyes seemed to be positively bulging. I thought he was going to have a fit. Then he went on reading again, and was still at it when I got out at the Mansion House.

  ‘That was the last I saw of Killjoy—but not of the man in brown. I had an appointment in the West End early that afternoon, so I lunched on my way back at Romano’s in the Strand. There he was, sitting at the very next table.

  ‘At first I couldn’t remember where I’d seen him—thought I’d met him somewhere—in business, you know. His face was just vaguely familiar. Then I suddenly remembered that it was only that morning I had seen him in the Tube. Just the same sort of coincidence as your running into Vera Nichols twice today.

  ‘He had a very different companion with him this time. It—or rather she—was a very pretty girl. Blue eyes, golden hair, a chic little hat, a real lovely. But the Brown Man didn’t seem at all happy or cheerful, as might have been expected. He seemed worried out of his wits—she was looking pretty anxious, too.

  ‘I was lunching on my own, so I had heaps of time to study them and I must confess I was interested although I didn’t want to appear rude. Snatches of their conversation came to me quite clearly.

  ‘ “I’ve done it,” he kept on saying to her in an excited voice, “I’ve done it,” and each time he beat a sharp tattoo on the table.

  ‘ “Oh, Jim,” she put a hand on his quickly, “it would be too ghastly if anything goes wrong.”

  ‘ “It won’t,” he said fiercely; “I’ve seen to that,” but he looked furtively up and down the restaurant as though he expected to see a policeman walk in at any moment.

  ‘She drew a quick sigh. “And it’s all over, Jim?—you’re certain?”

  ‘ “Sure as I’m sitting here,” he nodded. “The old devil simply wouldn’t see reason. He asked for it, and he got it.”

  ‘“Oh, Jim,” her blue eyes filled with tears, “I don’t know whether to be glad or sorry.”

  ‘ “I don’t care if he was your father,” the man broke out; “he was the meanest, rottenest old screw that ever lived—he had his chance and he wouldn’t take it—thank God I’ve seen the last of him.”

  ‘The girl looked round quickly, then she leaned forward and said in a whisper that only just reached my ears: “But—but—if they were to arrest you?”

  ‘He pushed away his plate with a jerky movement and shook his head. “They won’t. Why should they pick on me?”

  ‘ “Won’t there be an inquiry?” she hazarded.

  ‘ “Of course,” he replied impatiently; “but I shall leave on the night-boat. I was sailing, anyhow, in a couple of days—they won’t have a chance to drag me into it. You must join me in Paris when things have blown over.”

  ‘My waiter appeared with coffee at that moment, so I lost the next portion of the conversation. Then I found it difficult to pick up the threads, and I only got one other bit clearly before I realised that I must bolt if I was to be in time for my appointment. It was the girl who asked:

  ‘ “Will it be in the evening papers, Jim?”

  ‘ “Sure to be,” he nodded; “they wouldn’t miss a thing like this.”

  ‘As I went to my meeting I thought over that strange conversation. They were talking about old Killjoy, of course—the girl must be his daughter—but what had Brown Man done? And what was it that the old chap had asked for—and now got? Then there was that frightened whisper about arrest, and Brown Man’s talk of clearing off on the night-boat. It certainly looked as if there were dirty work somewhere.

  ‘Of course, if I hadn’t seen the Brown Man in the Underground to begin with, the whole conversation in the restaurant would have been meaningless as far as I was concerned. I doubt if I should ever have let my bad manners run away with me to the extent of listening at all.

  ‘When I got back to the flat that evening I grabbed the paper at once. I hadn’t the ghost of a notion what Killjoy’s name was, or the Brown Man’s either, but I thought, with any luck, I might stumble on something which might help me to identify one of them. The Brown Man had seemed so certain that whatever it was would be in the evening paper.

  ‘I hadn’t far to seek either; there it was glaring headlines. Look, here’s a cutting that I kept.

  ‘MYSTERIOUS DEATH ON UNDERGROUND

  TOBIAS MEAKIN DIES IN STRANGE CIRCUMSTANCES

  FRAUDULENT TRANSACTIONS ALLEGED AGAINST DIRECTORS OF MEAKIN, WILDE AND CO.

  At eleven-twenty today officials of the Underground discovered the body of a well-dressed man in an empty compartment, when one of the Company’s trains ran into Mark Lane Station. The body was later identified as that of Tobias Me
akin, chairman of the well-known house of Meakin, Wilde and Co., China merchants. Foul play was first suspected, since upon examination the police were of the opinion that Mr. Meakin’s death was the result of poison. In the afternoon, however, rumours were in circulation in the city that a series of frauds had been perpetrated by Mr. Meakin and other directors of his company. It is reported that a Mr. James Bondman, the Company’s Shanghai representative, who is at present in England, had threatened to make certain disclosures, and it is now believed that Mr. Meakin took his own life rather than face an inquiry. Mr. Meakin was a man of considerable wealth and maintained a large establishment at Richmond. He was an ardent prohibitionist, and a prominent member of the Anti-Saloon League. His collection of Chinese curios is said to be the finest in the country. He leaves one daughter, Miss Violet Meakin, but it is understood that the bulk of his fortune will go to swell the funds of those movements to which he devoted so much of his energy during his life. The police are anxious to get in touch with any person or persons who may have seen Mr. Meakin travelling to the city this morning. Will any such kindly communicate with New Scotland Yard?

  ‘There followed a long description, but, of course, I did not need that to recognise poor old Killjoy. It was he without a doubt—beyond a doubt, too, the little Chinese box had contained the subtle Oriental poison that had killed him when he sniffed it up. It was murder plain and simple.

  ‘Naturally I had no wish to go to Scotland Yard and be lugged in as principal witness at a murder trial, but what else could I do? I telephoned at once and they asked me to come down immediately—so off I went.

  ‘I told my story to a nice jovial inspector man, and very interested he was. Apparently they had made up their minds it was suicide. Old Meakin was actually holding in his hand a copy of the disclosures which Bondman had threatened to make when they found him.

  ‘Bondman, of course, was my friend of the brown suit, and those must have been the papers he handed to old Killjoy as he got out.

  ‘They circulated Bondman’s description, and put out an all-station call for him at once. The inspector rang up the following morning to tell me that they had pinched Bondman at the passport office, just about to take the Channel boat. Would I go down to the Yard and identify him as the man I had seen in the train.

  ‘It was a rotten job, and I just hated it. It’s no fun, you know, to be called in to swear to a man, when you know that on your word alone that man may hang—but there was nothing else for it.

  ‘They took me round the corner to Cannon Row police-station, and staged an identity parade. Brown Man was in it all right, and I picked him out at once; the poor devil was looking more worried than ever, and I didn’t wonder.

  ‘Of course, he swore that he hadn’t done the murder, but he admitted to having been in the Underground with Meakin and to having shown him the Chinese box. He admitted, too, that he had threatened to disclose the frauds—and he had disclosed them that same morning after he left the Underground.

  ‘When he was questioned about his conversation with the girl, he swore by all his gods that the only reason she was frightened that he might be arrested was in connection with the frauds. It seemed that he had been mixed up in them himself in a minor degree—that was the reason he gave for trying to get out of the country, once he had blown the old man up. Before I left the station I had a chat with the Inspector.

  ‘ “He’ll swing,” he told me with a grin. “We know he was keen on the girl—thought she’d inherit, too, maybe. Motive and opportunity—that’s the thing. Novelists may have all sorts of high-flown theories about crime, but if you can prove motive and opportunity in a case of murder, ninety-nine times out of a hundred you’ve got your man.”

  ‘But that wasn’t the end of it. Next morning my inspector man rang up again to say that Killjoy’s Chinese servant had committed suicide and left a confession behind.

  ‘That staggered me a bit, as you can imagine, but when I sat down to think it over I realised one thing; if there were traces of poison in Killjoy’s nose it was a hundred to one that he had sniffed it up out of Brown Man’s little box, and the servant’s suicide wasn’t going to help him, so I hurried off to get details.

  ‘I saw the police-surgeon and persuaded him to tell me about his report; Old Meakin had died by inhaling a noxious drug which had gone to his brain—so it seemed that my theory was right after all. Then, just as I was leaving, the Inspector arrived back from Richmond with the Chink’s confession. It stated that he had done Killjoy in by sprinkling an Oriental powder on his breakfast napkin—so, you see, the Brown Man got away with it after all.’

  ‘But how ghastly!’ exclaimed Wendy. ‘Do you realise, Dick, that if the Chinese hadn’t committed suicide that wretched man might have been hung, just because you happened to see him twice in one day?’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said slowly as I helped myself to another peg of Papa’s Scotch, ‘but the Chinese are queer people. Plenty of them will sell their lives for a hundred pounds if you send the money to their family and I saw the Brown Man’s face, remember, when he gave old Killjoy the box. It’s my belief that he ought to have swung—but his girl bought the Chink’s life to get him off.’

  STORY VI

  This, too, is an early story which was amongst the rejected but it differs from its half-dozen companions in that, although it lay forgotten with the rest for some seven years, it was at last taken out, duly re-written and published.

  The reason for this exception is that when I had written my first Ghost Hunter story I suddenly remembered this tale of a Scottish haunting. All I had to do was to dig it up and put Neils Orsen into it and there was Number 2 of the Ghost Hunter series. Otherwise the story remains unaltered.

  I would like, however, to add that the yarn owes much more to my wife than to myself. It was she who originally gave me the plot and put into the story all the nice touches of local colour which help so much to convey the lonely and inviolate beauty of the shores of the Moray Firth. Yet the plot was not altogether the product of her imagination. For some years she lived near Fort George and on more than one occasion when passing Castle Stuart at dusk—and once by moonlight—on her bicycle, pedalled with the fury of near-panic to escape the almost tangible and sinister influence which emanates from that ancient ruin.

  The Case of the Long-dead Lord

  ‘Thank God you’ve come,’ Bruce Hemmingway cried, as he gripped the hand of the little man for whom he’d been waiting on the platform at Inverness.

  ‘Your wire interested me,’ Neils Orsen replied with a gentle smile. ‘What’s this about my being a naturalist?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in a minute. Let’s go over to the hotel.’

  As the two men walked across the street they made an oddly assorted couple. Neils Orsen was small and lightly built, with transparently pale skin and large, luminous blue eyes. His domed head with a high intelligent brow and mass of soft fair hair appeared too large for his diminutive body. Hatless, dressed in pale grey, carrying a basket conspicuously labelled ‘Live Cat’, he made a striking contrast to the tall, dark-haired American by his side.

  Over coffee in the hotel Bruce explained while the Siamese cat, Past, sat on a chair beside them, lapping cream.

  ‘Arkon Clyde, a friend of mine from back home, has taken Castle Stuart for the shooting. I drew up the lease and as the Clydes have never been in Scotland before they asked me to see them settled in. At the moment there’s just the old man, who is completely absorbed in books, and his glamorous daughter Fiona; their guests don’t arrive for about a week. I’ve known the girl for some time; she’s typical of her generation; sensible, a bit hard-boiled, but full of fun. Yet, when I arrived two days after them, I found her all shot to pieces.

  ‘Well, that puzzled me quite a bit, but the only thing I could get out of her was that for the first time in her life she was suffering from the most appalling nightmares.

  ‘The day before yesterday I took her a walk to explore the ruins of the o
ld castle which are some two miles away. Leading to it there’s a lovely avenue of old beeches. We’d only got halfway along it when suddenly she stopped dead, and a queer look came into her eyes: “I’ve been here before,” she whispered to herself, then she began to mutter in what seemed to me like Gaelic. I took hold of her hands and shook her and she looked at me with wide, blinded eyes. As I called her name the spell seemed to snap. She just said she was tired of walking and wanted to go back

  ‘Maybe I’m wrong, but it didn’t seem to me a case for an ordinary doctor, so I asked Arkon if I might have a friend of mine who was a naturalist to stay for a few days, because I didn’t want them to know you are a ghost-hunter, and wired you that night.’

  ‘Has anything happened since?’ the little Swede asked in his careful English that held hardly a trace of accent.

  ‘No, nothing; except that she never goes into her room if she can help it and spends most of her time wandering alone round the grounds.’

  ‘Does she strike you as an imaginative young woman?’

  ‘Far from it. She has brains as well as looks and graduated in Law at Columbus.’

  Neils leaned back, placing the tips of his fingers together.

  ‘So she doesn’t like her room? Have you been into it?’

  ‘Yes; I even spent the night before last there, but I slept like a top and yesterday she insisted on returning to it. I can’t understand it—I’m sure she’s terrified of it and yet she refuses to move.’

  ‘The girl may be abnormally psychic; as neither you nor, apparently, her father are in the least disturbed.’

  ‘Oh, one thing I forgot. She said that her door wouldn’t stay shut. Well, the night I spent there it didn’t budge an inch. I know, because I fixed a piece of cotton over the opening and it wasn’t broken in the morning.’