The port had been round several times, and Wakefield’s temperamental dogmatism was by now somewhat inflamed by it.
‘Just the same,’ he said, irrupting on a discussion whose origin and purpose no one could clearly remember, ‘detective stories are anti-social, and no amount of sophistries can disguise the fact. It’s quite impossible to suppose that criminals don’t collect useful information from them, fantastic and far-fetched though they usually are. No one, I think’ – here he glared belligerently at his fellow-guests – ‘will attempt to contest that. And furthermore—’
‘I contest it,’ said Gervase Fen; and Wakefield groaned dismally. ‘For all the use criminals make of them, the members of the Detection Club might as well be a chorus of voices crying in the wilderness. Look at the papers and observe what, in spite of detective fiction, criminals actually do. They buy arsenic at the chemist’s, signing their own names in the Poisons Book, and then put stupendous quantities of it in their victims’ tea. They leave their fingerprints on every possible object in the corpse’s vicinity. They invariably forget that burnt paper, if it isn’t reduced to dust, can be reconstituted and read. They spend, with reckless abandon, stolen bank-notes whose serial numbers they must know are in the possession of the police …
‘No, on the whole I don’t think criminals get much help from detective stories. And if by any chance they are addicts, that fact by itself is almost certain to scupper them, since their training in imaginary crime which as a rule is extremely complicated – tends to make them over-elaborate in the contriving of their own actual misdeeds; and that, of course, means that they’re easy game … For instance, there was the Munsey case.’
‘It has always been my opinion,’ said Wakefield to the ceiling, ‘that after-dinner conversation should be general rather than anecdotal. Moreover—’
‘I’d known all the family slightly,’ Fen went on, unperturbed, ‘over quite a long period of years; but I suppose that it was George Munsey, the head of the house, whom I knew best. Chance threw us together in Milan in 1928, when I was lecturing at the University there and he was engaged in some prolonged financial transaction to do with motor-cars. And although his household, which I met later, proved to be a pleasant one, I never got to know any of its members well enough to be able to regard them as individuals – as other, I mean, than the natural appendages of George. George himself was a little, round, chuckling man who’d made money on the Stock Exchange; but I’ve always felt that he must have made it more or less accidentally, because he had none of that appalling narrowness which you normally get in people who are engaged in breeding money from money. On the contrary, in fact: George was a man with hobbies: collecting ghost stories; running a toy theatre which he made and wrote the plays for, himself; bird-watching; illuminated manuscripts; and heaven knows what not else, and that fact made him livelier and more intelligent and more human even than the average non-business-man – a novelist, for instance – whose interests are necessarily fairly wide. He was thirty-seven when I first encountered him; so that in 1947, when the events I’m speaking of occurred, he was getting on for sixty – though his cherubic looks belied that, and his baldness was the only sign of ageing in him that I could see.
‘I’d travelled up from Oxford to London to deal with some odd scraps of business and to get myself a new portable typewriter (eventually it was a second-hand one I bought, in Holborn). On the following morning I had to attend a Ministry of Education conference, and I was proposing to stay overnight at the Athenaeum. At lunch-time, however, I happened on George Munsey in the Authors’ Club bar, and when he heard how I was placed he suggested I should stay with him instead; it was several years since we’d met, and he said the family would never forgive him if he allowed me to go back to Oxford without paying them a visit. I warned him I’d have to do some work while I was in the house – there was a long memorandum to be typed out for presentation at the M. of E. conference – but he was quite agreeable to that; and so at about half past two in the afternoon I duly appeared on his doorstep, typewriter and all.
‘The Munseys’ house was in St John’s Wood: a tall, narrow, grey-stone place with a long, narrow, rather sooty strip of garden behind it. They don’t live there now; with a single exception, I’ve no idea of the whereabouts of any of them these days, and there are good reasons why I shouldn’t enquire. But in 1947 they were old-established residents who’d survived two wars and were well-known and popular in the neighbourhood. And I rang their bell with the vaguely guilty, vaguely nostalgic feeling one has about people from whom, for no adequate reasons, one has allowed oneself to drift apart.
‘I rang their bell; and the door was opened to me by Judith, the younger daughter.
‘George Munsey’s two daughters were both good-looking; but if I’d had to choose between them, I think I should have chosen Judith rather than Eleanor. Eleanor had the more dizzying figure of the two, but that, of course, is only a relative judgment: Judith’s figure, though without the heroic mouth-drying splendour of her sister’s, was still capable of making the average girl look as if she’d been hammered out of a milk-churn, and in addition to that her features were more beautiful than Eleanor’s. I’m sorry to be talking about nothing but externals; the trouble is that I didn’t then, and don’t now, really know much about the two girls’ characters – other, I mean, than such obvious facts as that Judith was noisy while Eleanor was quiet, and that Judith was energetic while Eleanor was lazy. There were three years between them – Judith, at twenty-two, being the younger; Judith was fair while Eleanor was dark; and Eleanor dressed better than Judith. None of which is very vivid, I’m afraid – but then, healthy, attractive young women aren’t very vivid, except in the flesh.
‘“Aha!” said Judith from the doorway. “The Great Man-hunter in person, how nice to see you again, I didn’t have so much embonpoint when you were here last, do you think it’s improved me, oh look let me take your things, I’m sorry everyone’s making that God-awful row but they’re playing Racing Demon, how long are you going to stay, come on in.”
‘So I went on in.
‘I ought to explain, at this point, that the Munseys were a well-to-do family, since Mrs Munsey and Judith and Eleanor had all inherited substantially from Mrs Munsey’s father, who had owned flour-mills. They kept no servants, however, preferring, on the whole, to lead a mildly Bohemian existence, looking after themselves. For some reason, they had never quite grasped the practical advantages, in a household, of the principle known to economists as Division of Labour, and when anything had to be done they tended all of them to try and do it simultaneously, frequently with disastrous results. But the atmosphere of their house was very friendly, and the shouts of irate laughter from the drawing-room were so characteristic of it that for a moment time was telescoped, and it seemed a matter of hours rather than of years since I’d been there last.
‘“Me,” said Judith, “I’m Doing Something In The Kitchen and you’d better not ask what it is because you’ll probably have to eat it later on, and now just dump your bags and that other thing, oh it’s a typewriter isn’t it, here and come and meet everyone, we’re stuck with Aunt Ellen these days did you know, I really can’t bear the woman” – this with a sudden access of genuine feeling which rather startled me – “but the others don’t seem to mind her so it’s hopeless to try and turn her out, if she’d only accept money instead of battening on us here I shouldn’t mind so much, but look at her now, she’s upstairs slaving away at a lot of rubbishy embroidery which she can’t do for nuts in the hope that someone’ll pay her a few shillings for it, and God knows I’d be willing to finance her myself if only she’d go away, you remember her don’t you?”
‘I did remember her. George Munsey’s sister Ellen was one of those desperately willing, desperately inefficient middle-aged women whom one associates with the Women’s Voluntary Services and an atmosphere of utter confusion: short-sighted eyes, wispy greying hair, and a walk like a cripple in a hurry. Her poverty, which was genuine enough, could, as Judith remarked, have been remedied easily out of the family resources if only she had not been obstinate about receiving direct help; as it was, she lodged with them free of charge, a situation which all of them except Judith endured very patiently; and Judith’s dislike of her hadn’t, I think, any rational basis, but was more in the nature of a violent temperamental aversion such as does sometimes crop up between dissimilar personalities. Aunt Ellen didn’t reciprocate it, by the way: if anything, she was rather fonder of Judith than of the others.
‘I didn’t, of course, take all of this in straight away; most of it emerged during conversation over the cards – and it was to the cards that Judith conducted me as soon as I’d deposited my things. There were four of them playing: George Munsey, his wife Dorothy, his eldest daughter Eleanor, and a young man who was a stranger to me, but who I gathered was occupying the second spare-bedroom. He had the sort of looks which people describe as “over-handsome”; his thick, curly, jet-black hair was heavily oiled; he chewed gum, and he was manifestly vain – though the vanity was too naïve to give serious offence, and it was relieved on occasion by a queer, earnest, dog-like, rather touching humility. Physically he was splendid. “This is Philip,” said Judith, introducing him. “In full, Philip Odell. His speciality” – here a glint of malice appeared in Judith’s eye – “his speciality is changing horses, or perhaps I should say mares, in mid-stream.”
‘“Judith,” said Mrs Munsey reproachfully. “The image is hardly – hardly—” But reproof tailed away into benevolence. Dorothy Munsey, vague, stately and benign, who had acquired something of a reputation as a poetess in the earlier twenties and lost it again, conclusively, in the later, was temperamentally incapable of rebuking anyone, and it was a wonder her daughters had grown up as unspoiled as they were. “What Judith means, Professor Fen—”
‘“Is that I,” said Odell, “have not been behaving like the perfect gentleman.” His hearty tones didn’t quite conceal his uneasiness, I thought. “The fact is, sir,” he went on, “that for a time I was engaged to Judith. But of course, she couldn’t stand me” – he showed very white teeth in a not altogether convincing laugh – “not for long, anyway. So that when Eleanor decided she could stand me, I got engaged to Eleanor. And there, as they say, the matter rests.”
‘“He felt,” Eleanor put in, “that it ought to be kept in the family. And since apart from Aunt Ellen I was the only other unattached female to be had—”
‘“Now, darling, you know very well I adore—” Odell checked himself abruptly. “Hell,” he said, “why wasn’t I brought up properly?” He grimaced. “It’s the gigolo in me,” he added ruefully, “that makes me want to gush in public. I’m sorry.”
‘And somehow I liked him for that.
‘I learned later that he was the owner of a chain of milk bars in the West End; and although clearly he was passionately interested in them, he took the Munseys’ gentle mockery on the subject in really very good part. I also gathered, indirectly, that in spite of what he’d said it was he rather than Judith who had been primarily responsible for the breaking-off of the first engagement. However, neither he nor Judith nor Eleanor seemed much discomfited by the exchange, and until the next day I wasn’t in the least aware of anything’s being amiss in the house at all.
‘In the meantime, we played cards.
‘I myself ought to have been working; but I have a fondness for Racing Demon, so when Judith had gone back to the kitchen I joined the game, and the five of us played uninterruptedly for the next two hours – George Munsey with gusts of helpless laughter at his own inefficacy, Eleanor lazily, Odell with great seriousness, and Mrs Munsey with her usual stately vagueness; so that it was always surprising when, as generally happened, Mrs Munsey came out on top. At half past four, on the Munseys’ departing in a body to make tea, I retrieved my new typewriter and settled down in the library to work. And there I stayed – recruited by food and drink which the family brought in to me at irregular intervals – until nearly midnight. I hadn’t any occasion to leave the library, so I’ve no idea what the others did with themselves; and I don’t remember that anything more eventful happened to me, during the remainder of the day, than having to put a new ribbon into my machine. By the time I’d finished my job they’d all gone to bed, and I wasn’t at all sorry to follow them.
‘But next morning, Odell being not yet up and the others unitedly engaged in cooking breakfast, Judith took me aside and confided to me certain matters which I must confess disturbed me a good deal.’
Fen leaned back, staring rather blankly at the roses in the centre of the dinner-table. ‘We went down the garden,’ he said, ‘so as to keep out of people’s way. There was a ramshackle tool-shed, I remember, and a few spiky cabbages, and dust on all the grass; and we could hear the clatter of plates from the kitchen. Judith, in slacks and a sweater, was unusually subdued: her conversation had some full stops in it for once. And the reason soon appeared.
‘“I – I don’t know whether I ought to be telling you this,” she said. “But it’s so like a Providence, you actually being here … Look, you’re not officially connected with the police, are you?”
‘“No.”
‘“I mean, anything I told you, you wouldn’t have to pass it on to them?”
‘“No, of course not,” I said uneasily. “But—”
‘“It’s about Philip, you see. Philip Odell. I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s his real – Well, but never mind that. The point is, you see, that last night something happened.”
‘“What sort of thing?”
‘“It – I say, you will keep this to yourself, won’t you? It’s something rather horrible, you see, and I – Oh damn, I’m havering – Well, anyway, here goes.”
‘And then it all came pouring out. Summarized – for conciseness’ and Wakefield’s sake – what it amounted to was this:
‘Judith had heard me come up to bed at midnight, and having finished her book, and being still sleepless, had set off, as soon as the closing of the bedroom door signalled me out of the way (since in spite of her talk she was quite a modest child, and apparently had very little on), to fetch a magazine from the hall. Arriving at the head of the stairs, however, she had looked down and seen Odell slip quietly out of the drawing-room – where they’d left him chewing gum and playing dice with himself – and into the library; from which shortly afterwards she heard the rattle of my typewriter, which I’d left down there. In the normal way she wouldn’t have thought much about this, but Odell’s manner had struck her as distinctly furtive, and she was curious to know what he was up to. She hid in the hall cloaks-closet, therefore, until after about ten minutes Odell emerged, still stealthily, and crept up to his room. Then she went into the library to see if she could find any indication of what he’d been doing there. Well, she did in fact find something, and in due course showed it to me, and—’
Fen broke off rather abruptly; and when after a moment he resumed, it was to say:
‘You know that when you’re using thin typing-paper you generally put a backing-sheet behind the sheet you’re actually typing on?’
Haldane nodded. ‘Yes, I know.’
‘That’s what Odell had done. And he’d left the backing-sheet in the waste-paper basket. And you could read what he’d typed by the indentations on it. And what he’d typed was not in the least pleasant.’
Fen paused to refill his glass. ‘As I recall it,’ he continued after drinking, ‘the message ran like this: “You remember what happened at Manchester on December 4th, 1945? So do I. But a thousand pounds might persuade me, I think, to forget about it. I’ll write again and tell you where to leave the money. It will be the worse for you if you try to find out who I am!”’
Haldane nodded again. ‘Blackmail,’ he murmured thoughtfully.
‘Quite so. Odell was the sort of person who might well be unscrupulous enough to try that particular game; and the Munseys – Aunt Ellen apart – were a good rich mine for that kind of mining: I don’t mean in the sense of their having dubious pasts, of course, but rather in the sense that each one of them was well off independently of the others. It all seemed plain enough – and yet somehow it was a bit too plain; and I got the impression that even Judith, distressed as she was, had inexplicit doubts about it. Besides, there was an odd thing about the message on that tell-tale backing-sheet, and that was its heading.’
‘Its heading?’
‘Yes. At the top of it there were four additional words typed: “The – quick – brown – fox”.’
There was an instant’s bemused silence. Someone said: ‘What on earth …?’
‘Yes. A little mystifying, I agree. But anyway, there it was – and there too, more importantly, was the impress of the blackmail note. And if in fact, despite Judith’s and my misty doubts, Odell was blackmailing someone in the house, then the situation required very delicate handling indeed. Judith wanted my advice, naturally enough’ (‘Tcha,’ said Wakefield) ‘as to what she ought to do. But I never had a chance to give it her, because it was at that point in our conversation that we heard Eleanor’s scream. Eleanor had gone to call her fiancé down to his breakfast, and had found him murdered in his bed.
‘Well, the police came, and the Ministry awaited me vainly, and as soon as the routine of the investigation was over, Superintendent Yolland took me into consultation. I was glad to get away from the family, I can tell you. Odell’s death had plainly strengthened the hypothesis that he was blackmailing one of them – that he had slipped the blackmail note under a certain door on his way to bed, I mean, and that the occupant of that room had guessed the blackmailer’s identity and decided to kill rather than pay; and I was finding it difficult to look any of the Munseys in the eye. Eleanor was in a state of hysterics; George Munsey was as fathomlessly miserable as only a normally jovial man can be; his wife’s usual vagueness had grown monstrously, so that she scarcely seemed to be present in the spirit at all; and Aunt Ellen’s well-meant efforts to be helpful were really, in the circumstances, quite exceptionally trying. Judith stayed outwardly more or less normal; but although she said nothing further to me about the subject of our conversation in the garden, I could see that in spite of her apparent self-possession she was horribly afraid.
‘Yolland proved to be a Devonshire man transplanted to London: slow, thorough and by no means unintelligent. But the facts he had to offer weren’t at all enlightening. Odell had been killed, while sound asleep, by a single blow on the forehead. The weapon was a heavy brass poker from the drawing-room, and no great strength would have been needed to wield it effectively. Death had occurred between five and six a.m. and had been instantaneous. There were no fingerprints, and no helpful traces of any kind.
‘Naturally, I felt bound to tell the superintendent what Judith had told me; and by way of response, he produced for my inspection two sheets of typing-paper which he’d found hidden away in one of Odell’s drawers. The first one I looked at bore, in faint and spidery typescript, the blackmail message I’ve already quoted – but not the odd superscription. The second sheet was identical with the first in every possible respect, except that it was addressed, like the backing-sheet Judith had found, to The Quick Brown Fox. And that being so—’
‘That being so,’ Wakefield interrupted, ‘you didn’t, I trust, have to do any very strenuous thinking in order to solve the mystery.’
Wakefield had been unnaturally silent during Fen’s narrative. And it now became immediately clear to everyone at the table that this silence had been due to some massive feat of cerebration on whose results he was proposing to lecture them.
‘You think the solution obvious?’ said Fen mildly.
‘I think it child’s play,’ said Wakefield with much complacency. ‘With what, after all, does one associate the words “the quick brown fox”? One associates them, of course, with the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, which has the peculiarity of containing all the letters of the alphabet. To cut a long story short, Odell wasn’t writing a blackmail note: he was copying one, in order to find if it had been typed on that particular typewriter.
‘In other words, Odell was not a blackmailer: he was a blackmailer’s victim.
‘He started to type out the Quick Brown Fox sentence, as a means of comparison, and then decided it would be simpler just to copy the complete message. And the original, together with his copy, was naturally enough found in his drawer. I take it that he wasn’t the man to accede meekly to blackmail, and that he’d made up his mind to find out who was threatening him; at which the blackmailer took fright and brained him while he slept … Any objections so far?’
But there were no objections – not even from Fen.
‘As to who the blackmailer was,’ Wakefield went on, ‘That’s easy, too. And for this reason:
‘As I understand it, both messages were in fact typed on Professor Fen’s machine.’ Fen assented. ‘Just so. Well then, between the time Professor Fen entered the house and the time Odell made his copy, what opportunity was there for anyone to use his typewriter? One, and one only – the period during which Professor Fen was playing Racing Demon in the drawing-room.
‘And – well, we know there were only two people who weren’t uninterruptedly engaged in that game: to wit, Judith, who was in the kitchen, and Aunt Ellen, who was upstairs. Judith we can eliminate on the simple grounds that if she’d been the blackmailer she’d scarcely have told Professor Fen what she did tell him. And that leaves Aunt Ellen … Did you ever find out anything about Odell and Manchester and that date?’
‘Yes,’ said Fen. ‘Odell – and that wasn’t his real name – had deserted from the Army on that date and in that place. And Aunt Ellen, who’d been in the A.T.S., had had to do, at one time, with the dossiers relating to deserters. In one of those dossiers she’d seen a photograph of Odell, and consequently she recognized him the first time he entered the house.’
‘She didn’t attempt to deny having recognized him?’
‘Oh no. She couldn’t very well deny it, because – having discreetly checked back to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake – she’d confided the facts to Judith after Odell became engaged to Eleanor; and Judith had advised her to do and say nothing, on the grounds that Odell had a first-rate fighting record, and that his desertion, at the end of the war, was therefore a technical rather than a moral offence.’
There was a hush while they assimilated this. Then: ‘Well, well … It really does seem,’ said someone unkindly, ‘as if Wakefield has made the grade for once.’
‘The problem was elementary,’ said Wakefield smugly – forgetting, in the utterance of this rash echo, the awful dooms which the gods have decreed for those whose self-confidence is premature. ‘I’m not asserting that on the case I’ve outlined you could convict Aunt Ellen of the murder – even though it’s pretty certain she did it. But she was arrested, I take it, for the blackmail?’
‘Oh dear, no. You see, Wakefield,’ said Fen with aggravating tolerance, ‘your answer to the problem, though immensely cogent and logical, has one grave defect: it doesn’t happen to be the right answer.’
Wakefield was much offended. ‘If it isn’t the right answer,’ he returned sourly, ‘that’s only because you’ve not given me all the relevant facts.’
‘Oh, but I have. You remember my telling you about changing the ribbon in my typewriter?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you remember my saying that one of the blackmail messages was in “a faint and spidery typescript”?’
‘So it would be, if it was typed in the afternoon, before you changed the ribbon.’
‘But you remember also, no doubt, my saying that apart from the words “the quick brown fox”, the second sheet was identical with the first in every possible respect?’
For once Wakefield was bereft of speech; he subsided, breathing heavily through his nose.
‘Therefore,’ said Fen, ‘both messages were in faint, spidery typescript. Therefore they were both typed while I was playing Racing Demon. And therefore Judith’s story about Odell and the typewriter and the blackmail was a deliberate pack of lies from beginning to end.’
Haldane was groping for comprehension. ‘You mean the two messages were planted in Odell’s drawer?’
‘Certainly. At the time of the murder.’
‘So that in fact Odell never either sent or received a blackmail note at all?’
‘Of course not. Neither he, nor anyone else.’
‘But the business about his being a deserter …’
‘That was genuine enough,’ said Fen. ‘But its only function in the affair was to provide Judith with raw material for her frame-up. The frame-up might well have come off, too, but for the chance of my changing the typewriter-ribbon. But for that, there’d have been no proof, other than Aunt Ellen’s word, that the blackmail attempt hadn’t in fact occurred. If Judith had had the sense to type the second copy of the message, the “quick brown fox” one, after I’d gone to bed … However, she didn’t.’
Fen twisted his glass between his fingers: drained it, and reached for the cigarette-box. ‘And I liked her,’ he murmured, as he struck a match. ‘That was the trouble. Until I knew the truth, I liked her very much, I liked all of them. But—’
‘But you told the police about changing the ribbon.’
Fen nodded briefly.
‘Yes. I told them; you see, I’d liked Odell, too …
‘Under examination, Judith broke down and confessed to the murder. She was frightened – I mentioned that, didn’t I? She’d bitten off very much more than she could chew. And since if she’d pleaded Not Guilty at her trial it would have come down to her word against mine, I was heartily relieved when she caved in. Her acting had certainly deceived me; and in a courtroom tussle between us she might easily have got the best of it. A plea of Guilty to a murder charge is very rare, of course, but it had the great advantage, in Judith’s case, of obscuring the cold-blooded attempt to incriminate Aunt Ellen, and so making possible a recommendation to mercy. So that in the end she wasn’t in fact executed; the death sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life.’
‘And her motive for the murder?’ Haldane asked.
‘Jealousy. She hated Odell for jilting her in favour of her sister; and if she hadn’t planted the messages in Odell’s room, and spun me her fairy-tales in a sophisticated, double-bluff attempt to incriminate Aunt Ellen, she might have got away with the killing.
‘But the trouble was, she was a reader of detective stories; and what she dreamed up – in the hope that everyone would make the deductions Wakefield has just been making, and probe no further – was in consequence a detective-story device … I hope no one will imagine I’m mocking at detective-story devices. In point of fact, I dote on them. But so long as criminals take them for a model, the police are going to have a very easy time; because, like the wretched Judith, your genuinely murderous addict will dig his cunning and complicated pits for the investigators, only, in the upshot, to fall head first into one of them himself.’