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

  “Need it be?” he asked. “I mean, can’t we have the bare essentials? After all, sir, you’re something of an old hand.”

  “Not so old as you’d think,” I said. “But the trouble is to know what essentials are. My trivialities might be your highly important clues, and vice versa.”

  “Yes,” he said, and gave a Whartonian pursing of the lips. A quick look at his watch and he was wondering if I could get through in an hour. I said it depended on Smith and his shorthand, and he said Smith was one of the fastest there were. Smith tried to look as if he hadn’t heard.

  Well, that was that, and I began. What you are going to read is what I told Goodman, but with many extras; in fact, your version will be ten times as long, though not so long, I hope, as to get near boredom. There are things like personal views, descriptions of people and places which he could either have guessed from my tone or which he knew already. There were also, I frankly admit, things which I couldn’t very well divulge to him, since I was far from sure about them myself. And since I had no statement prepared, I had to extemporise, and that doesn’t always make for clarity. The best I can say is that he was told a very few things he had no need of knowing, and I doubt if anything was left out that might have helped him solve the Case. Just one other thing I should make clear. You would hate to wade through a verbatim report as taken down by Smith, with its deviations from strict chronology, its necessary and disjointed harkings back, and Goodman’s interrupting questions and my answers and explanations. What you are going to have are the very relevant facts, and in chronological order. If I describe a place or a person it will not be for the sake of padding, but because the matter contains a vital clue. You, like Goodman, have a Case to solve, and it is for you, therefore, that every single piece of the jigsaw is now placed in full view on the table before you.

  As far as I was personally concerned, the whole business began with the arrival of two letters. The first was from my literary agent, Cuthbert Daine. Twenty years ago I wrote my first book, and it is ten years now since I wrote at all. A necessary word here about myself. I never was a professional author. By good fortune I had been left a reasonable income, but in those early days I took life and myself very seriously. I wanted to do something, and writing became a hobby. Not that I regarded myself as in any way superior to the professional writer—far from it. Except for the work which I am now doing for the Yard, there is nothing that would please me more than to try to write for a living. I even believe I could make a good shot at it, and maybe in my later years, when Beveridge and the Commissioners of Inland Revenue have relieved me of most of what I now possess, I may have to make that claim good.

  Daine was recommended to me as a literary agent, and not only did he sell that first book of mine but it happened to go remarkably well, and it was he thereafter who endeavoured, with indifferent success, to keep my nose on the literary grindstone. Four books was my total, for I had various interests and worked by fits and starts, but with all four he did uncommonly well, though I was only a small cog in his very big machine. Two of those books are out of print, but I still draw regular small royalties from the two others, which, having gone through the cheap editions, have come at last to rest in a well-known series—the Laurel Library—published by Parsley and Branch. It contains some fine titles, and, between ourselves, I’m mighty lucky to be found in it.

  Daine is one of those queer persons who may be said to possess dual personalities. Though my associations with him were almost all business ones, I rather liked him personally, even if the liking may be traced to that species of vanity that derives itself from successful sales and an agent’s blandishments. But quite a lot of people didn’t like him. Some went out of their way to warn me against him. In spite of his large and famous clientele, how could he keep up that superb flat in town with its lavish entertaining, and a certain even more expensive bachelor establishment he was rumoured to have in Brighton? But what Daine did with his money and his private life was no concern of mine, and an agent who was good enough for, among others, Austin Chaice, was certainly good enough for small fry like myself. All of which brings me back to those two letters.

  I was surprised to see Daine’s name at the bottom of the first, since I had no more books to sell and the fate of those I had written was no longer a matter of concern.

  Lovelands Barn,

  Beechingford.

  5-9-44.

  Dear Travers,

  Books, as you know, are selling remarkably well, and for some time I have had your own in mind. Last week I brought the matter to a head with Harold Parsley. He has had an unexpected windfall of paper and is prepared to reprint special editions of the two now in the Laurel Library. There are various matters arising out of all this which I should like to discuss with you before getting to work on the new contract. If you could make the matter one of urgency it would be to our mutual advantage, so perhaps you will let me know a convenient date.

  In that context, you will probably be hearing from Austin Chaice. He is engaged at the moment on—among other things—a kind of manual for budding authors of detective novels, a book which we think should do well both here and in America. In the course of his research—you know his fanaticisms about verisimilitude and local colour!—he chanced on your Kensington Gore and would like to use quotes. He would also like your expert opinion on certain technical matters concerned with the detection of crime. But, as I said, he will be writing to you himself.

  The point I want to make is that you could see both him and myself at the same time. You may remember that after my second bombing out, I moved down here with a very depleted staff into that annexe of his for which he has no use during the war, and which the Army was threatening to requisition. Am I right, by the way, in saying that Mrs. Chaice is a relation of your wife? She gave me that impression, and she certainly knows you well. That should add to the pleasure of your visit.

  Kind regards as ever,

  CUTHBERT DAINE.

  There was something definitely pleasing about the first part of that letter. It flattered my vanity, and, in my experience, few people have an amount of money which makes them indifferent to receiving more, and especially when the receipt involves no labour in return. But the second part of that letter gave me a curious disquiet. Luckily Austin Chaice’s letter had come by the same post.

  Lovelands,

  Beechingford.

  5-9-44.

  Dear Travers,

  I expect you will now have heard from Cuthbert Daine what a stickler I am for absolute authenticity. In a writing career of over twenty years I have never yet had a statement or any local colour of mine called in question, a record of which to be legitimately proud, and which I should like to maintain.

  To be perfectly frank, your Kensington Gore contains a lot of material which would be very valuable for me in a textbook I am writing for those—and they must be legion!—who think they could write a detective novel. I can hear your exclamation of dismay! But you are wrong, my dear Travers. I shall not be cluttering up the market and cutting my own throat. However conscientiously one writes books like this, it’s always with one’s tongue in one’s cheek. And after all, if all the Schools of Correspondence which advertise themselves produced authors in proportion to what one imagines to be the numbers of their credulous clients, then both you and I would long ago have been in the workhouse.

  As to the matter of authenticity which I mentioned—and boasted unpardonably about!—I should like your valuable help and first-hand advice on certain aspects of criminal investigation and procedure, for all of which I shall naturally be prepared to pay. I understand from Daine that you will be seeing him here almost at once. Perhaps you and I could settle matters at the same time.

  My wife often mentions you and will, needless to say, be delighted to see you here. She sends her remembrances and best wishes, and to your wife. Please accept my own, my dear Travers, and many thanks in anticipation.

  Yours sincerely,

 
AUSTIN CHAICE.

  Perhaps you see no reason for uneasiness over the general content of those two letters. You think perhaps that I should have been highly gratified at being considered of sufficient standing and competence to be regarded as an expert by one so famous as Austin Chaice. But long contact with Wharton and the deceits and sinfulness of this wicked world have made me suspicious of blandishments. Chaice’s ‘My dear Travers’ had even made me wince. The same detective sense had made me suspicious of the perfect dovetailing of those two letters. Why should two very important people like Daine and Chaice be so anxious to save my time? Be so keen, in other words, on my killing two birds at Beechingford with one stone. And when I came to think of it, the necessarily small reprints of my books would bring little financial profit to Daine. Why, amid all those books on Parsley and Branch’s list, had mine been chosen for reprint?

  So I read the two letters again and tried to make an analysis of both of them and their possible motives and of my own reactions. In the matter of the reprints, I decided that I was being too suspicious. Daine, as a conscientious agent, might consider that an author as insignificant as myself was entitled to as much consideration as the far more profitable and famous. And what about Kensington Gore and the use it might be to Chaice? Kensington Gore was a young man’s book, with all the faults of superficial brilliance and a straining after wit. It was, as its punning title may imply, a discussion of certain Murder Cases in which the victims had all been blue-blooded, a theme which gave ample scope for the brand of ironic pessimism which had been so popular at the time it was written.

  And yet when I thought the matter over, and the purposes for which Chaice intended to use the book, I couldn’t help but think it might perhaps be useful to him for occasional quotation and illustration. After all, it was a book that had even had the guarded blessings of the Yard. As for the request for expert advice, I saw ample reason for disquiet. If I were induced to part with confidences, even with an implicit statement that they must be treated as such, then I should be taking risks, for Chaice was as unreliable as they make them. For any profit or publicity of his own he would throw me overboard with never a hint of compunction. Chaice might have a brilliant kind of one-track mind, but I had no doubts of his instability, both mental and moral.

  And there was another thing—Beechingford, a town of twenty thousand people even in normal times, would have police authorities who would gladly give to a local lion all the information about police procedure and so on that Chaice could possibly make use of in his book. Why then call on me? The best I could say for him was that maybe he preferred not to be under any local obligation but to get his information from one of his own profession, so to speak, and kind.

  That led me to reviewing Chaice himself. I knew him well enough, or had done in the days before the war. I had never envied him, however, which is what few authors can say, though his income must have been well over ten thousand a year. Of the detective novel he was a master, and his output was large, and without loss of quality. It must be said of him, too, that, unlike Daine, he had no interests but his work; in fact, in his case, work and Chaice were the same thing. Publicity was his life-blood and he was the showman supreme. George Wharton’s tricks and showmanship were lovable and laughable as soon as you discerned the man beneath; Chaice’s were irritations that left him with few friends and innumerable enemies. In enmities he seemed to revel. While he had no real or scathing wit, he had instead a perfect inability to keep his mouth shut or to halt an unpleasant truth at the tip of his tongue. He delighted in the fact that he had made himself particularly obnoxious at his town club, and even made that club the scene of one of his novels. As for his eccentricities, they took the form of self-advertisement, occasional flamboyancies of dress, for instance, and endless letters to the Press.

  As for that sureness of local colour to which he referred, I thought of an example. A small army unit had its headquarters near Lovelands and Chaice helped himself to one of its typewriters. After a few days, when the local police had discovered nothing about the thief, he wrote to the local paper and to certain London ones, admitting that it was he who had taken the machine. His reasons were that all over the country there was scandalous laxity in the care of government property, and he had taken the machine to call the attention of the authorities to such laxity and the ease with which a mere amateur like himself could purloin a typewriter at will. When he was hauled up before the local beaks, he got off with honours, and then later divulged that he had also had a subsidiary motive for taking the typewriter—and that motive was that he was using the episode in a book, and had wanted his local colour to be implicitly correct! That, then, was Austin Chaice; not a man with whom I was anxious to renew any acquaintanceship, even if it would be he who was under an obligation.

  I fell then to thinking about Beechingford and that place of his called Lovelands. He had had it for a good many years and had transformed it from an ancient farmhouse to a rambling structure of a place, replete, as they say, with every convenience. But a lovely place for all that, and set in some ten acres of grounds and woodland. The farm buildings had been renovated and modernised. The large barn was used for an overflow of guests, and the smaller barn was an immense garage. It was the large barn that had been placed at Daine’s disposal. He had been Chaice’s agent from the very beginning, and to their mutual advantage. Daine must have made well over a thousand a year out of Chaice. And Chaice made far more than that out of Daine’s knack in acquiring foreign and film and serial rights, and his placing of shorts. Though the war had cut most of those, and drastically, and added as drastically to income tax, I doubted if Chaice were feeling anything of a pinch. His father—a big contractor in the last war—had left him plenty, and though he was a lavish spender he was a shrewd one, and as shrewd an investor.

  Lastly I thought about Constance Chaice. She was, as Daine had surmised, a cousin of my wife, and I had known her from her toddling days. Now she would be, as I calculated, in the early thirties. As a flapper she had been definitely spoilt and decidedly oversexed, and my wife—certainly no prude—had come to avoiding her like the devil. At twenty-one she married Charlie Greene, and there was a species of agreed divorce two years later. He was very cut up about it and, I believe, would have taken her back, for she was a damned attractive woman in those days. I say ‘in those days’, for the last time I had seen her was just before her second marriage. That was to a man named Fanting, whom she divorced just before this war. Shortly afterwards she married Chaice.

  Chaice’s own marital adventures were much along the same lines, except that his first wife died, and it was the second who divorced him. By his first wife he had a son and a daughter. The daughter I hadn’t met, but I knew the son, for he had been at the same school as a nephew of mine, and as they were friends, I happened at times to entertain the two of them in town. Martin Chaice had been a curious, self-centred sort of boy, and a bit neurotic, or so I had thought. I know that he used to choose, when invited, the queerest ways of spending an afternoon.

  I gave the whole matter a day’s thought and then mentioned it to George Wharton. There was a week’s leave due to me, though this and that had cropped up and the leave had been deferred again and again. Now there was nothing much doing in my line and he advised me to get away while the going was good and the weather not too bad. But he had to give me a backhanded remark or two about my being thought an expert. I could see he was a bit jealous.

  “Expert my foot!” I told him. “If I’d thought that, I’d have referred him to you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said George, with a vast assumption of modesty.

  “All Chaice wants is ordinary stuff. Tricks of the author’s trade.”

  I could see him softening, so I added that he ought to meet Chaice some time.

  “Far too busy,” he said, but in a tone that left open a considerable gap. “But talking about books, I might try my own hand one of these days.”

  “Oh no you don’t
,” I said. “No autobiography from you, George. You and I are opening a detective agency when this war’s over.”

  That was a project with which George and I were toying. But I took his advice about the leave and wrote that night to both Daine and Chaice, saying that unless anything happened I’d be down on the Friday by an early afternoon train.

  Two days later Daine rang me to say that Chaice had been horrified at the request I’d made for the name of a suitable hotel. Chaice, he said, had thought it implicit in his letter that I should stay at Lovelands where there was ample room. I said that was very good of him and I’d gratefully accept the offer. I was hoping, I added, to be back in town on the Monday. Daine said why the hurry. There was a golf-course near if I still played, a swimming-pool in the grounds at Lovelands and a fair bus service if one wanted to view the countryside. All I could add was that we’d have to see.

  That conversation took place just before I sat down to a service dinner at my flat. Two hours later the telephone went again.

  “Hallo?” I said.

  “Is that you, Uncle Ludo?”

  I gasped for a moment, then had an idea.

  “That you, Constance?”

  “But of course, darling. Didn’t you recognise my voice?”

  “I do now,” I said. It was charged with the same old ersatz seductiveness. A bit hoarse and croony and throaty, like Tallulah Bankhead’s. Indeed I remembered that she had first adopted it after seeing Tallulah.

  “But why the Uncle Ludo?” I added.

  “But, darling, didn’t I always call you that?” The voice now had a touch of the plaintive.

  “Maybe,” I said, with mock-reproof. “But you’re a big girl now. Hadn’t you better omit the fictitious uncle?”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “But honestly, darling, I’m simply thrilled to be seeing you again. We’re absolutely relying on you till Tuesday at the least.”