The Case of the Missing Men: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Read online

  Christopher Bush

  The Case of the Missing Men

  ““This is something desperately secret,” she said. “Something I want you to do for me . . . But I can’t tell you now. It’s something I’m frightened about.”

  Ludovic Travers, consulting specialist for Scotland Yard, receives two invitations at once to visit Beechingford. One comes from Cuthbert Daine, his literary agent. Daine is an important and busy man, and it seems strange that he would want to see Travers personally about a matter that might have been handled by mail. The other invitation comes from Austin Chaice, the successful mystery writer. He is, he says, preparing a manual for detective story writers, and needs advice on certain points.

  The puzzlement aroused in Travers’s mind by these two letters is crystallized by a half-hysterical telephone call from Chaice’s attractive wife.

  Travers is prepared to find a delicate and involved situation at Beechingford—but not prepared for the murder of his host!

  The Case of the Missing Men was originally published in 1946. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  About the Author

  Titles by Christopher Bush

  The Case of the Flying Donkey – Title Page

  The Case of the Flying Donkey – Chapter One

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Winding down the War and Taking a New Turn

  Christopher Bush’s Ludovic Travers Mysteries, 1943 to 1946

  Having sent his series sleuth Ludovic “Ludo” Travers, in the third and fourth years of the Second World War, around England to meet murder at a variety of newly-created army installations—a prisoner-of-war camp (The Case of the Murdered Major, 1941), a guard base (The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel, 1942) and an instructor school (The Case of the Fighting Soldier, 1942)--Christopher Bush finally released Travers from military engagements in The Case of the Magic Mirror (1943), a unique retrospective affair which takes place before the outbreak of the Second World War. In the remaining four Travers wartime mysteries--The Case of the Running Mouse (1944), The Case of the Platinum Blonde (1944), The Case of the Corporal’s Leave (1945) and The Case of the Missing Men (1946)--Bush frees his sleuth to investigate private criminal problems. Although the war is mentioned in these novels, it plays far less of a role in events, doubtlessly giving contemporary readers a sense that the world conflagration which at one point had threatened to consume the British Empire was winding down for good. Yet even without the “novelty” of the war as a major plot element, these Christopher Bush mysteries offer readers some of the most intriguing conundrums in the Ludo Travers detection canon.

  The Case of the Missing Men (1946)

  “Oh, my God!” groaned Martin. “They’re discussing the detective novel again.”

  “Sometimes it drives one frantic at meals,” whispered Constance. . . .

  Harris mopped his brow. “And it’s a judgment on this house, sir, if you ask me. All this writing about murders. Nothing but murders.”

  The Case of the Missing Men (1946)

  In June 1947 Christopher Bush returned to American shores, virtually speaking, when his 30th Ludovic “Ludo” Travers detective novel, The Case of the Missing Men, which had appeared in Britain the previous year, was reprinted in the United States by Macmillan, publisher of, among British crime writers, E.R. Punshon, George Bellairs and a certain up-and-comer named Josephine Tey. The novel was well-received by American reviewers, with the result that for the next two decades almost all of Bush’s many Ludo Travers mysteries were reprinted in the US as well as the UK, making the prolific author, along with the similarly fecund Agatha Christie, Anthony Gilbert and John Dickson Carr, one of the post-WW2 era’s most durable writers of classic mystery rooted in the Golden Age of detective fiction. (Macmillan even reached back to publish, in 1949, Bush’s 28th mystery, The Case of the Platinum Blonde, originally published in the UK in 1944—an excellent if belated choice!)

  It is not difficult to comprehend why The Case of the Missing Men caught the eye of an American publisher, for it appealingly embraces classic tropes of classic mystery. In the novel we have a sort of house party murder where an amateur detective happens to be staying as a guest and the victim is a celebrated British mystery writer—one who just happens to have the initials “A.C.” Before readers leap to an unwarranted conclusion based on these initials, however, let me add that the murdered mystery writer is a man, Austin Chaice, who, except in the matter of his popularity, much less resembles Agatha Christie than he does Anthony Berkeley Cox (A.B.C.), an influential though eccentric Detection Club colleague of Christie and Christopher Bush who may already have been a satirical target of Bush in an earlier Ludo Travers novel, The Case of the Monday Murders. (See my introduction to the Dean Street Press reissue of that novel.)

  Having been invalided out of the army in the autumn of 1943 and now employed as a “haphazard sort of special consultant” to Scotland Yard (see The Case of the Corporal’s Leave, 1945), Ludovic Travers fatefully comes to stay in September 1944 at Lovelands, the Beechingford home of Austin Chaice at the behest of not only Chaice but his and Chaice’s literary agent, Cuthbert Daine. (It will be recalled by Bush readers that Ludo is the author of five books, variously dealing with economic and criminology--The Economics of a Spendthrift; The Stockbroker’s Breviary; World Markets; Kensington Gore; or, Murder for Highbrows; and Is This a Dagger?--and we learn in The Case of the Missing Men that Kensington Gore and another volume, presumably Is This a Dagger?, are still in print.) Perhaps inspired by the publication of Marie F. Rodell’s Mystery Writing: Theory and Technique (1943), Austin Chaice is writing a “how-to” manual for budding detective fiction authors, and he would like to use some quotations from Ludo’s book Kensington Gore and consult with him on “certain technical matters concerned with the detection of crime.”

  Soon Ludo is on his way to Lovelands, which upon his arrival there he finds is ironically rife with mutual suspicion and hatred. Present at the estate, besides Travers and Chaice, are Chaice’s wife Constance, a “decidedly oversexed” cousin of Travers’s wife Bernice, who is still away (as she has been for years now) nursing up north; Chaice’s children from his first marriage, Kitty, a spirited veteran of the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service), and Martin, an ineffectual and neurotic Oxford student turned down by the services on account of his perpetual migraine headaches; Chaice’s elder brother, Richard, perhaps just a bit barmy after having been bombed in the Blitz; Orford Lang, a failed detective novelist turned Chaice’s private secretary; and an elderly butler, Harris, attempting to run Lovelands with a much depleted domestic retinue. Also living on the estate is Cuthbert Daine, who at Chaice’s invitation has transferred his literary agency, after its second bombing-out in London, to the large converted barn at Lovelands.

  At Lovelands it becomes evident to Ludo that life revolves entirely around the caprices of the monstrously egotistical and even “sadistic” Austin Chaice and that growing rather restive under
the mystery writer’s regime are many of his subjects, such as Constance, who seems to find his merest touch repulsive; Martin, who spurns detective fiction and wants to be a modernist poet, a branch of literature his father in turn scorns; and Orford Lang, whose own fragile literary dreams have been thoughtlessly crushed by his employer. (“You know how it is,” Chaice contemptuously divulges to Ludo about Lang’s brief career as a crime writer, “Twelve or fourteen hundred sales and the cheapest rate. The poor devil would have starved on it. . . . Lucky for him . . . I offered him his present job.”)

  As Ludo perceptively puts it, after the great mystery writer is found strangled in his study: Lovelands “was completely centered round Austin Chaice and his work. His work dominated him. It was more of an obsession than work, because his very leisure was work. . . . A war on, mind you, and yet I never once heard anyone ask for the news.” There is, to be sure, no shortage of suspects in Chaice’s murder within his own household—yet there is also the strange matter of the missing man: an absconded individual named G.H. Preston, a next-door-neighbor and tenant of Chaice, with whom he had corresponded. Just what is Preston trying to hide, and just where has he hidden himself? Then there is a second murder at Lovelands, every bit as baffling as the first, and with it another man gone missing! Over the course of their long pursuit of ingenious criminal malefactors, Ludo Travers and his old friend, Superintendent George Wharton of Scotland Yard--with whom, we learn for the first time, Ludo plans to start a private detective agency after Wharton’s retirement--rarely have been presented with a murder problem as perplexing as this one: a wickedly clever conundrum that could well have been ripped from the pages of an Austin Chaice bestseller.

  Curtis Evans

  PART I

  CHAPTER I

  TWO LETTERS

  I waited for a moment at the door and gave a quick wipe to my glasses. That is a kind of nervous trick of mine when at a sudden loss, or on the edge of discovery, or faced with some unusual situation. But there was nothing nervously disquietening about that interview with Inspector Goodman. What was unusual was that I, who had assisted in the questioning of scores of witnesses and suspects in my time, was now about to be questioned. Maybe I was only wondering just what sort of hand Goodman would make of the job.

  I gave a tap at the door and opened it. My eyes went instinctively to the corner by the open desk where the body had been, then they rose for another look at Goodman. He was tall—about a couple of inches less than my six foot three—but weighing a good three stone more than myself, and beneath the tightness of his coat I could see that his weight was mostly muscle. A nasty customer in a scrap was my first impression of him.

  “Mr. L. Travers?” he said, and gave a quick look at his notebook. He had quite an attractive baritone voice and the tone was pleasant enough. Quite a good bedside manner, I told myself professionally.

  “That’s correct,” I said.

  “The L is for . . .?”

  “Ludovic,” I told him. “Just an old family custom.”

  I suppose I must have smiled. He gave an answering smile in which there was a certain diffidence, and then was waving me to a chair. He seemed rather puzzled about me, or so I thought, and under some circumstances I might have been amused. The situation certainly had ironic possibilities, and yet I didn’t feel the least amusement. Murder is a grim business and he’d a right to treat it seriously, and perhaps even more so had I.

  “Just how do you come to be in Beechingford?” was his first real question. “I ask that because I understand your address is St. Martin’s Chambers, in town.”

  He was peering at me with raised eyebrows, the sort of look that George Wharton would have made a whimsical one, and over the tops of antiquated spectacles.

  “It’s rather a long story,” I began. “I’m really here killing two birds with one stone. I mean, seeing both Mr. Chaice and Mr. Daine.”

  “You’re an author?” There was another and not unfriendly lift of the eyebrows.

  “I was, some years ago.”

  “But not now.”

  “Not now,” I echoed, and for a moment he seemed at a loss. Then he framed the next question.

  “What exactly are you doing now?”

  “That again is rather involved,” I said, and not out of cussedness, but just because I didn’t want to be obscure. “I was called up at the beginning of the war, then invalided out a year or so ago, and after that I carried on with certain work at Scotland Yard that I’d been doing for some years.”

  He looked so startled that I had to add that maybe I should have mentioned that straightaway.

  “Work at Scotland Yard,” he said. “Just what sort of work, sir?”

  “You know how it is,” I said. “They have all sorts of consultative experts, as they call ’em, on tap, and I was called in from time to time. These last few months I’ve been doing various jobs. They’re very short-handed, you know.”

  The door opened and his plain-clothes sergeant came in. His name, I had been told, was Smith, and he was carrying a fat notebook and had a pencil behind his ear. Goodman was at once getting to his feet.

  “Would you excuse me a minute or two, sir? There’s something I should have done.”

  He and Smith exchanged looks. Smith took the vacated seat at the desk, and just as Goodman was at the door I cleared my throat.

  “If you should happen to be ringing the Yard, Inspector, you might ask for Superintendent Wharton.”

  He didn’t like that at first, but then he grinned. I hadn’t intended to be clever or superior. I was looking after my own interests, so to speak, and trying to save time, and yet I could self-consciously tell myself that I might have done both in a different way.

  “You’ll excuse me, sir,” said Smith, and was at once busying himself with the back pages of his notebook.

  “You carry on,” I told him cheerfully, and took another look round the room.

  It was an airy, comfortable room. Through the window I could see the smooth lawn and beyond it the shrubbery and fringe of poplars that kept a privacy for the house from the small, if select, residential estate that lay beyond the back lane to the south. Through the open french window was coming the scent of roses from the beds that fronted the house. In the far garden corner I could see the thatch of the summerhouse that nestled in the shrubbery, and somewhere in the room itself a bee was droning clumsily. Then it found the open window and flew out, and my eyes went to the floor.

  The mess had been cleared up. The chair in which I was sitting was the one that had been overturned by the body, but there were chalk marks to show just where it had been. On the same red carpet was a chalk outline of the body itself, and a smaller one for the overturned vase, and a few single scrawls that represented the rucks made by the feet of struggling men. I wondered if Goodman had noticed the queer thing about those various marks or whether it would be unprofessional conduct on my part to point it out.

  Then my eyes fell on the telephone. It was an extension from the main telephone in the larger room where Chaice worked with his secretary, Orford Lang, to Chaice’s private sanctum where Smith and I then were. That’s why I had guessed that Goodman wanted to check up on me at the Yard. He hadn’t wanted me to hear and so had gone to the other room to make his enquiries. And there was every reason to make enquiries. No one could look less like a minion of the law than myself.

  That led me to wondering just what George Wharton would tell him. George and I had worked together for years, and though we could be everything from the facetious to the blasphemous to each other’s faces, we were a mutual admiration society when dealing with a third party. Viewed apart we were opposites, but together we were complementary and contrived to dovetail in. George takes a huge zest in his work, relieving the boredoms with a hundred tricks of showmanship and the playing of cameo dramas in which he is the leading man. He is all things to all men: stolid or furiously impatient, wily and tortuous or guilefully direct, dignified or skittish, bland, wheedling o
r superbly indignant in the same minute; homely and yet lousy with snobberies and humbug. And the most curious thing about it all is that George is the more likeable because of that repertoire of tricks. And one last thing, and one not to forget, is that he is the man for his job. It’s only the supermen who attain to the heights of the Big Five.

  What about myself, you may say. Well, I suppose I’m the opposite of George, except that in the course of years I’ve acquired some of his tricks. But mine is a helter-skelter, flibbertigibbet, crossword sort of brain that works quickly or not at all. The rest of my irritating peculiarities you will know long before you reach the end of this record. Perhaps the only thing George and I have in common is that neither of us looks the part we have to play. No false whiskers could disguise my lamp-post leanness and horn-rims. As for George, his immense walrus moustache and the hunched breadth of his shoulders and that black overcoat with the worn velvet collar give him the air of a harassed if somewhat superior man from the Prudential. But, as I said, we get along remarkably well on the whole. I know he has for me his likings and respects, even if they are only those of an Old Master for a useful apprentice. My own likings and respects are those of the apprentice who has come to know the Old Master only too well, but who would rather change his job than be kicked out of the studio.

  Goodman was the devil of a time, I thought, and just as I thought that, I heard his step outside. Smith vacated the seat and took another at the little table by the french window.

  “A clear bill?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” he told me, and gave an answering smile. “So if you’d be so good, sir, we’ll hear all you know about this business.”

  “It’ll be a longish tale,” I told him.