The Mystery
of Horne’s Copse

Anthony Berkeley

Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893–1971), was, like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the new breed of crime writers who, from the 1920s onwards, broke fresh ground in the field. As Anthony Berkeley, he created Roger Sheringham, an amateur sleuth who was far from infallible—as in the superb “multiple solution” mystery The Poisoned Chocolates Case. Writing under the name Francis Iles, Cox wrote influential novels such as Malice Aforethought which focused on criminal psychology. Cicely Disappears, which was published under the name A. Monmouth Platts, is among the rarest and most sought-after detective novels.

“The Mystery of Horne’s Copse” was originally published as a serial in Home and County in 1931, which accounts for the short, snappy chapters and cliff-hanger endings. The story features both Sheringham and another regular Berkeley character, Chief Inspector Moresby, and its twists and turns illustrate why Agatha Christie, among others, heaped praise on the ingenuity of Berkeley’s mysteries.

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Chapter I

The whole thing began on the 29th of May.

It is over two years ago now and I can begin to look at it in its proper perspective; but even still my mind retains some echo of the incredulity, the horror, the dreadful doubts as to my own sanity and the sheer, cold-sweating terror which followed that ill-omened 29th of May.

Curiously enough the talk had turned for a few minutes that evening upon Frank himself. We were sitting in the drawing-room of Bucklands after dinner, Sir Henry and Lady Rigby, Sylvia and I, and I can remember the intensity with which I was trying to find a really convincing excuse to get Sylvia alone with me for half-an-hour before I went home. We had only been engaged a week then and the longing for solitary places with population confined to two was tending to increase rather than diminish.

I think it was Lady Rigby who, taking advantage of a pause in her husband’s emphatic monologue on phosphates (phosphates were at the time Sir Henry’s chief passion), asked me whether I had heard anything of Frank since he went abroad.

“Yes,” I said. “I had a picture postcard from him this morning. An incredibly blue Lake Como in the foreground and an impossibly white mountain at the back, with Cadenabbia sandwiched microscopically in between. Actually, though, he’s in Bellagio for a few days.”

“Oh,” said Sylvia with interest and then looked extremely innocent. Bellagio had been mentioned between us as a possible place for the beginning of our own honeymoon.

The talk passed on to the Italian lakes in general.

“And Frank really does seem quite settled down now, Hugh, does he?” Lady Rigby asked casually, a few minutes later.

“Quite, I think,” I replied guardedly; for Frank had seemed quite settled several times, but had somehow become unsettled again very soon afterwards.

Frank Chappell was my first cousin and incidentally, as I had been an only child and Ravendean was entailed, my heir. Unfortunately he had been, till lately, most unsatisfactory in both capacities. Not that there was anything bad in him, I considered he was merely weak; but weakness, in its results, can be as devastating as any deliberate villainy. It was not really his fault. He derived on his mother’s side from a stock which was, to put it frankly, rotten and Frank took after his mother’s family. He had not been expelled from Eton, but only by inches; he had been sent down from Oxford and his departure from the Guards had been a still more serious affair. The shock of this last killed my uncle and Frank had come into the property. It was nothing magnificent, falling far short of the resources attached to Ravendean, but plenty to allow a man to maintain his wife in very tolerable comfort. Frank had run through it in three years.

He had then, quite unexpectedly, married one of his own second cousins and, exchanging extravagance for downright parsimony, settled down with her to make the best of a bad job and put his heavily mortgaged property on its feet once more. In this, I more than suspected, he was directed by his wife. Though his cousin on the distaff side, Joanna showed none of the degeneracy of the Wickhams. Physically a splendid creature, tall and lithe and with a darkness of colouring that hinted at a Spanish ancestor somewhere in the not too remote past, she was no less vigorous mentally; under the charm of her manner one felt at once a well-balanced intelligence and a will of adamant. She was exactly the right wife for Frank and I had been delighted.

It was a disappointment to me that Sylvia did not altogether share my liking for Joanna. The Rigbys’ property adjoined mine and Frank’s was less than twenty miles away, so that the three families had always been on terms of intimacy. Sylvia did not actually dislike Joanna but it was clear that, if the thing were left to her, they would never become close friends and as Frank had always had a hearty dislike for me, it seemed that relations between Ravendean and Moorefield would be a little distant. I cannot say that the thought worried me. So long as I had Sylvia, nothing else could matter.

Frank had now been married something over two years and, to set the wreath of domestic virtue finally on his head, his wife six months ago had given birth to a son. The recuperation of Moorefield, moreover, had proceeded so satisfactorily that three weeks ago the pair had been able to set out on a long wandering holiday through Europe, leaving the child with his foster-mother. I have had to give Frank’s history in this detail, because of its importance in the strange business which followed that homely scene in the drawing-room of Bucklands that evening.

Sylvia and I did get our half-hour together in the end and no doubt we spent it as such half-hours always have been spent. I know it seemed a very short time before I was sitting at the wheel of my car, one of the new six-cylinder Dovers, and pressing the self-starter. It failed to work. On such trivialities do our destinies hang.

“Nothing doing?” said Sylvia. “The wiring’s gone, I expect. And you won’t be able to swing her; she’ll be much too stiff.” Sylvia’s grasp of the intricacies of a car’s interior had always astonished me. “You’d better take Emma.” Emma was her own two-seater.

“I think I’ll walk,” I told her. “Through Horne’s Copse it’s not much over a mile. It’ll calm me down.”

She laughed, but it was quite true. I had proposed to Sylvia as a sort of forlorn hope and I had not nearly become accustomed yet to the idea of being actually engaged to her.

It was a lovely night and my thoughts, as I swung along, turned as always then upon the amazing question: what did Sylvia see in me? We had a few tastes in common, but her real interest was cars and mine the study of early civilizations, with particularly kindly feelings towards the Minoan and Mycenean. The only reason I had ever been able to get out of her for her fondness was: “Oh well, you see, Hugh darling, you’re rather a lamb, aren’t you? And you are such a perfect old idiot.” It seemed curious, but I knew our post-war generation has the reputation of being unromantic.

My eyes had become accustomed to the moonlight, but inside Horne’s Copse everything was pitch black. It was hardly necessary for me to slacken my pace, however, for I knew every turn and twist of the path. The copse was not more than a couple of hundred yards long and I had reached, as I judged, just about the middle when my foot struck against an obstacle right in the middle of the track which nearly sent me flying to the ground.

I recovered my balance with an effort, wondering what the thing could be. It was not hard, like a log of wood, but inertly soft. I struck a match and looked at it. I do not think I am a particularly nervous man, but I felt a creeping sensation in the back of my scalp as I stood staring down by the steady light of the match. The thing was a body—the body of a man; and it hardly took the ominous black hole in the centre of his forehead, its edges spangled with red dew, to tell me that he was very dead indeed.

But that was not all. My match went out and I nerved myself to light another and hold it close above the dead face to assure myself that I had been mistaken. But I had not been mistaken. Incredibly, impossibly, the body was that of my cousin, Frank.

Chapter II

I took a grip on myself.

This was Frank and he was dead—probably murdered. Frank was not in Bellagio. He was here, in Horne’s Copse, with a bullet-hole in his forehead. I must not lose my head. I must remember the correct things to do in such a case and then I must do them.

“Satisfy oneself that life is extinct.”

From some hidden reserve of consciousness the phrase emerged and, almost mechanically, I proceeded to act on it. But it was really only as a matter of form that I touched the white face, which was quite cold and horribly clammy.

One arm was doubled underneath him, the other lay flung out at his side, the inside of the wrist uppermost. I grasped the latter gingerly, raising the limp hand a little off the ground as I felt the pulse, or rather, where the pulse should have been; for needless to say, nothing stirred under the cold, damp skin. Finally, with some half-buried recollection that as long as a flicker of consciousness remains, the pupils of the eyes will react to light, I moved one of my last matches backwards and forwards and close to and away from the staring eyes. The pupils did not contract the hundredth of a millimetre as the match approached them.

I scrambled to my feet.

Then I remembered that I should make a note of the exact time and this I did too. It was precisely eleven minutes and twenty seconds past twelve.

Obviously the next thing to do was to summon the police.

Not a doctor first, for the poor fellow was only too plainly beyond any doctor’s aid.

I am a magistrate and certain details of routine are familiar to me. I knew, for instance, that it was essential that the body should not be touched until the police had seen it; but as I had no-one with me to leave in charge of it, that must be left to chance; in any case it was not probable that anyone else would be using the right-of-way through Horne’s Copse so late. I therefore made my way, as fast as I dared in that pitch darkness, out of the copse and then ran at top speed the remaining half-mile to the house. As always I was in sound condition and I dare swear that nobody has ever covered a half-mile, fully clothed, in much quicker time.

I had told Parker, the butler, not to sit up for me and I therefore had to let myself in with my own latch-key. Still panting, I rang up the police station in Salverton, about three miles away and told them briefly what I had discovered. The constable who answered the telephone of course knew me well and Frank too and was naturally shocked by my news. I cut short his ejaculations, however, and asked him to send someone out to Ravendean at once, to take official charge. He undertook to rouse his sergeant immediately and asked me to wait at the house in order to guide him to the spot. I agreed to do so—and it was a long time before I ceased to regret it. It is easy to blame oneself after the event and easy for others to blame one too; but how could I possibly have foreseen an event so extraordinary?

The interval of waiting I filled up by rousing Parker and ringing up my doctor. The latter had not yet gone to bed and promised to come round at once. He was just the kind of man I wanted, for myself rather than Frank; my nervous system has never been a strong one and it had just received a considerable shock. Gotley was his name and he was a great hulking young man who had been tried for England at rugger while he was still at Guy’s and, though just failing to get his cap, had been accounted as a good a forward as any outside the team. For a man of that type he had imagination, too, intelligence and great charm of manner; he was moreover a very capable doctor. He had been living in the village for about four years now and I had struck up quite a friendship with him, contrary to my usual practice, for I do not make friends easily.

His arrival was a relief—and so was the whisky and soda with which Parker immediately followed his entrance into the library where I was waiting.

“This sounds a bad business, Chappell,” he greeted me. “Hullo, man, you look as white as a sheet. You’d better have a drink and a stiff one at that.” He manipulated the decanter.

“I’m afraid it has rather upset me,” I admitted. Now that there was nothing to do but wait I did feel decidedly shaky.

With the plain object of taking my mind off the gruesome subject Gotley embarked on a cheerful discussion of England’s chances in the forthcoming series of test matches that summer, which he kept going determinedly until the arrival of the police some ten minutes later.

These were Sergeant Afford whom, of course, I knew well and a young constable. The sergeant was by no means of the doltish, obstinate type which the writers of detective fiction invariably portray, as if our country police forces consisted of nothing else; he was a shrewd enough man and at this moment he was a tremendously excited man, too. This fact he was striving nobly to conceal in deference to my feelings for, of course, he knew Frank as well as myself and by repute as well as in person; but it was obvious that the practical certainty of murder, and in such a circle, had roused every instinct of the bloodhound in him: he was literally quivering to get on the trail. No case of murder had ever come his way before and in such a one as this there was, besides the excitement of the hunt, the certainty that publicity galore, with every chance of promotion, would fall to the lot of Sergeant Afford—if only he could trace the murderer before his Superintendent had time to take the case out of his hands.

As we hurried along the sergeant put such questions as he wished, so that by the time we entered the copse he knew almost as much of the circumstances as I did myself. There was now no need to slacken our pace, for I had a powerful electric torch to guide our steps. As we half ran, half walked along I flashed it continuously from side to side, searching the path ahead for poor Frank’s body. Somewhat surprised, I decided that it must lie further than I had thought; though, knowing the copse intimately as I did, I could have sworn that it had been lying on a stretch of straight path, the only one, right in the very middle; but we passed over the length of it and it was not there.

A few moments later we had reached the copse’s further limit and came to an irresolute halt.

“Well, sir?” asked the sergeant, in a tone studiously expressionless.

But I had no time for nuances. I was too utterly bewildered. “Sergeant,” I gasped, “it—it’s gone.”

Chapter III

There was no doubt that Frank’s body had gone, because it was no longer there; but that did not explain its remarkable removal.

“I can’t understand it, Sergeant. I know within a few yards where he was: on that straight bit in the middle. I wonder if he wasn’t quite dead after all and managed to crawl off the path somewhere.”

“But I thought you were quite sure he was dead, sir?”

“I was. Utterly sure,” I said in perplexity, remembering how icy cold that clammy, clay-like face had been.

The constable, who had not yet uttered a word, continued to preserve his silence. So also did Gotley. After a somewhat awkward pause the sergeant suggested that we should have a look round.

“Well, I can show you where he was, at any rate,” I said. “We can recognise the place from the dead matches I left there.”

We turned back again and the sergeant, taking my torch, examined the ground. The straight stretch was not more than a dozen yards long and he went slowly up it one side and back the other. “Well, sir, that’s funny; there isn’t a match anywhere along here.”

“Are you sure?” I asked incredulously. “Let me look.”

I took the torch, but it was a waste of time: not a match-stalk could I find.

“Rum go,” muttered Gotley.

I will pass briefly over the next hour, which was not one of triumph for myself. Let it be enough to say that search as we might on the path, in the undergrowth and even beyond the confines of the copse, not a trace could we discover of a body, a match-stalk, or anything to indicate that these things had ever been there.

As the power of my electric torch waned so did the sergeant’s suspicions of my good faith obviously increase. More than once he dropped a hint that I must have been pulling his leg and wasn’t it about time I brought a good joke to an end.

“But I did see it, Sergeant,” I said desperately, when at last we were compelled to give the job up as a bad one and turn homewards. “The only way I can account for it is that some man came along after I’d gone, thought life might not be extinct and carried my cousin bodily off with him.”

“And your burnt matches as well, sir, I suppose,” observed the sergeant woodenly.

Gotley and I parted with him and his constable outside the house; he would not come in, even for a drink. It was clear that he was now convinced that I had been playing a joke on him and was not by any means pleased about it. I had to let him carry the delusion away with him.

When they had gone I looked enquiringly at Gotley, but he shook his head. “My goodness, no, I’m not going. I want to go into this a little deeper. I’m coming in with you, whether you like it or not.”

As a matter of fact I did. It was nearly half-past one, but sleep was out of the question. I wanted to talk the thing out with Gotley and decide what ought to be done.

We went into the library and Gotley mixed us each another drink. I certainly needed the one he handed to me.

“Nerves still a bit rocky?” Gotley remarked, looking at me with a professional eye.

“A bit,” I admitted. I may add in extenuation that I was supposed to have been badly shell-shocked during the war. Certainly my nervous system had never been the same since. “I’m glad you don’t want to go. I want your opinion on this extraordinary business. I noticed you didn’t say much up there.”

“No, I thought better not.”

“Well, it’ll be light in just over an hour. I want to get back and examine that copse by daylight, before anyone else gets there. I simply can’t believe that there aren’t some indications that I was telling the truth.”

“My dear chap, I never doubted for one moment that you were telling what you sincerely thought was the truth.”

“No?” This sounded to me rather oddly put, but I didn’t question it for the moment. “Well, the sergeant did. Look here, are you game to stay here and come up with me?”

“Like a shot. If any message comes for me, they know at home where I am. In the meantime, let’s try to get some sort of a line on the thing. I thought your cousin was abroad?”

“So did I,” I replied helplessly. “In fact I had a card from him only this morning, from Bellagio.”

“Did he give the name of his hotel?”

“Yes, I think so. Yes, I’m sure he mentioned it.”

“Then I should wire there directly the post office opens and ask if he’s still there.”

“But he isn’t,” I argued stupidly. “How can he be?”

Gotley contemplated his tumbler. “Still, you know,” he said airily—rather too airily, “still, I should wire.”

The hour passed more quickly than I could have expected. I knew now that Gotley did not consider that I had been deliberately romancing, he suspected me merely of seeing visions; but he did not give himself away again and discussed the thing with me as gravely as if he had been as sure as I was that what I had seen was fact and not figment. As soon as the dawn began to show we made our way to the copse; for no message had arrived from the police station to throw any light on the affair.

Our journey, let me say briefly, was a complete failure. Not a single thing did we find to bear out my story—not a burnt match, a drop of blood, nor even a suspicious footprint on the hard ground.

I could not with decency retain Gotley any longer, especially as he was having more and more difficulty in concealing from me his real opinion. I made no comment or protestation. His own suggestion of the telegram to Bellagio could be left to do that; for I had now determined to adopt it in sheer self-defense, to prove that there was at least the fact of Frank’s absence to support me. If he had been in Horne’s Copse he could not be in Bellagio and, conversely, if he had suddenly left Bellagio, he could have appeared in Horne’s Copse.

I did not go to bed till past eight o’clock, at which hour I telephoned my telegram.

The rest of the day dragged. Sylvia telephoned after lunch to say that the chauffeur had now put my car right, but I put her off with a non-committal answer. The truth was that nothing would induce me to leave the house until the answer to my telegram had arrived.

Just after six o’clock it came.

I tore open the flimsy envelope with eager fingers. “Why the excitement?” it ran. “Here till tomorrow, then Grand Hotel, Milan. Frank.”

So Gotley had been right. I had been seeing visions.

Chapter IV

I sank into a chair, the telegram between my fingers.

But I had not been imagining the whole thing. It was out of the question. The details had been too vivid, too palpable. No, Gotley was wrong. I had seen someone—it might not have been Frank.

I hurried to the telephone and rang up Sergeant Afford. Had he heard anything more about last night’s affair? I might possibly have been mistaken in thinking the dead man my cousin. Had any other disappearance been reported? The sergeant was short with me. Nothing further had developed. He had been himself to the scene of the alleged death that morning and found nothing. He advised me, not too kindly, to think no more about the affair.

I began to feel annoyed. Now that it was proved that the body could not possibly have been Frank’s, my feeling towards it was almost resentment. Only by the chance of a defective wire on my car had I stumbled across it and the contact had resulted in suspicion on the part of the police of an uncommonly callous practical joke and the conviction on the part of my doctor that I was mentally unbalanced. The more I thought about it, the more determined I was that the mystery must be unveiled. I resolved to tell Sylvia the whole story that very evening.

Unlike Gotley, Sylvia asked plenty of questions; still more unlike him she accepted what I said as a statement of fact. “Rot, Hugh,” she said bluntly, when I told her of that young man’s suspicions. “If you say you saw it, you did see it. And anyhow, how could you possibly imagine such a thing? Hugh, this is terribly exciting. What are we going to do about it?” She took her own part in any subsequent action for granted.

I looked at her pretty gray eyes sparkling with excitement and, in spite of the gravity of the affair, I could not help smiling. “What do you suggest, dear?” I asked.

“Oh, we must get to the bottom of it, of course. We’ll make enquiries in the neighbourhood and go round all the hospitals, oh and everything.” As I had often noticed before, Sylvia had been able to translate into realities ideas which to me had remained a trifle nebulous.

So for the next few days we played at being detectives enquiring into a mysterious murder and traveled all over the country in pursuit of our ridiculous but delightful theories. We enjoyed ourselves tremendously; but if real detectives got no further in their cases than we did, the number of undetected murders would see a remarkable increase; for we discovered exactly nothing at all. No man resembling Frank had been seen in the vicinity; there was not the vaguest report of a man with a bullet wound in his forehead.

All we really did determine was that the man must have been dead (for that he had been dead I was absolutely convinced) for about four to six hours because, though the body was cold, the wrist I had held was still limp, which meant that rigor mortis had not set in. This information came from Gotley who gave it with a perfectly grave face and then quite spoilt the effect by advising us to waste no more time on the business. Sylvia was most indignant with him.

Perhaps it is not true to say that we discovered nothing at all, for one rather curious fact did come to light. Although we knew now that the man must have been dead at least four hours, must have died, that is, not later than eight o’clock, we found no less than three persons who had passed over the path between that hour and midnight; and at none of those times had he been there.

“There’s a gang in it,” Sylvia pronounced with enjoyment. “He was shot miles away, brought to the copse and then carried off again, all by the gang.”

“But why?” I asked, wondering at these peripatetic activities.

“Heaven only knows,” Sylvia returned helplessly.

And there, in the end, we had to leave it.

At least a month passed and my mysterious adventure gradually became just a curious memory. Gotley ceased to look at me thoughtfully and when I met him at the local flower show even Sergeant Afford showed by his magnanimous bearing that he had forgiven me.

At first, I must confess, I had tended to avoid Horne’s Copse at night, although it was much the shortest route between Bucklands and Ravendean. Then, as the memory faded, reason reasserted itself. By the third of July I had shed the last of my qualms.

That third of July!

There is a saying that history repeats itself. It did that night with a vengeance. Once again I had been dining at Bucklands. Before leaving home my chauffeur had found a puncture in one of the back tyres of the Dover and had put the spare wheel on. I risked the short journey without a spare, only to find, when it was time to go home, that another puncture had developed. Once again Sylvia offered me her own car: once again I refused, saying that I should enjoy the walk. Once again I set out with my mind busy with the dear girl I had just left and the happiness in store for me. That very evening we had fixed our wedding provisionally for the middle of September.

Indeed, so intent was I upon these delightful reflections, that I had got a third of the way through Horne’s Copse before I even called to mind the sinister connection which the place now held for me. It was not quite such a dark night as that other one, but inside the copse the blackness was as dense as before as I turned the last twist before the stretch of straight path in the centre.

“It was just about six yards from here,” I reflected idly as I walked along, “that my foot struck, with that unpleasant thud, against–”I stopped dead, retaining my balance this time with ease, as if I had subconsciously been actually anticipating the encounter. For my foot had struck, with just such another unpleasant thud, against an inert mass in the middle of the path.

With a horrible creeping sensation at the back of my scalp, I struck a match and forced myself to look at the thing in my way, though I knew well enough before I did so what I should see. And I was right. Lying across the path, with unnaturally disposed limbs and, this time, a small dagger protruding from his chest, was my cousin Frank.

Chapter V

The match flickered and went out and still I stood, rigid and gasping, striving desperately to conquer the panic which was threatening to swamp my reason.

Gradually, in the darkness, I forced my will to control my trembling limbs. Gradually I succeeded in restoring my brain to its natural functions. Here, I told myself deliberately, was the real thing. As for the other—vision, pre-knowledge, clairvoyance, or whatever it might have been, I had at the moment no time to find explanations; here I was in the presence of the real thing and I must act accordingly.

I suppose it can really have been scarcely more than a couple minutes before, restored to the normal, I felt myself not merely calm but positively eager to investigate. With fingers that no longer quivered I struck another match and bent over my unfortunate cousin. It did not even repel me this time to touch the cold, clammy face, glistening in the match-light with unnatural moisture, as I made sure that he really was dead.

It was with an odd sense of familiarity that I made my swift examination. Except for the dagger in his chest and the bloodstained clothes around it instead of the bullet wound in his forehead, everything was exactly the same as before and my own actions followed more or less their previous course. There was the same outflung arm, cold wrist uppermost, whose motionless pulse I could conveniently feel for; there were the staring eyes, unresponsive to the movements of my match; there was the damp, chilled skin of his face. It was only too plain that he was dead, without it being necessary for me to disarrange his clothing to feel his heart and I was again unwilling to do this, knowing how much the police dislike a body to be tampered with before they have examined it themselves.

But one thing further I did this time. I made sure that the body was, beyond all possibility of dispute, that of Frank himself. Frank had a scar on his left temple, just at the edge of the hair. I looked for the scar and I found it. Then I hurried home at the best speed I could, to ring up Sergeant Afford and Gotley. I was conscious as I did so of a rather ignoble feeling of triumph. But after all, self-vindication is a pleasant feeling.

Sergeant Afford himself was not at the police station, but to Gotley I spoke directly. “Right-ho,” he said with enthusiasm. “Really has happened this time, has it?”

“Yes,” I replied. “There’s no doubt this time. I shall want to go into that other affair with you some time. It must have been a vision of some kind, I suppose.”

“Yes, extraordinary business. And apparently not quite an accurate one. What about getting the Psychical Research Society on to it?”

“We might. In the meantime, I’m going back to the copse now. Meet me there. I’m taking no risks this time.”

Gotley promised to do so and we rang off.

As I passed out of the front door I looked at my watch. The time was three minutes to twelve. It had been twenty-one minutes to the hour within a few seconds, when I left the body. I walked back at a good pace and the journey took me about twelve minutes. In all, then, I was absent from the centre of Horne’s Copse for about half-an-hour. The importance of these figures will be apparent later.

I am not sure what motive prompted my return alone to the spot where I had left the body. I think I wanted, in some vague way, to keep guard over it, almost as if it might run away if left to itself. Anyhow I certainly had the feeling, as I had mentioned to Gotley, that this time I would take no chances.

I had my torch with me now and I turned it on as I reached the copse. It threw a powerful beam and as I turned the corner on to the straight I directed the light along to the further end. The whole dozen yards of straight path was thus illuminated, the undergrowth at the sides and the dense green foliage beyond the twist at the end. But that was all. Of Frank’s body there was no sign.

Incredulously I hurried forward, thinking that I must have been mistaken in my bearings; the body must have lain round the further corner. But neither round the corner was there any sign of it, nor anywhere along the path right to the further edge of the copse. Filled with horror, I retraced my steps, sweeping the surface of the ground with my beam. It was as I feared. Again there was not even a litter of spent matches to show where I had knelt by Frank’s remains.

In the middle of the path I halted, dazed with nameless alarm. Was my reason going? The thing was fantastic, inexplicable. If I had had my suspicions about the reality of my former experience, I had none concerning this one. I knew there had been a body; I knew I had handled it, physically and materially; I knew it was Frank’s—Frank who was supposed to be that moment in Rome. I knew all these things as well as I knew my own name, but…But the alternative simply did not bear thinking about.

But for all that, hallucinations…

And yet I felt as sane as ever I had been in my life. There must be some ordinary, simple, logical explanation…

I was still trying to find it when the police and Gotley arrived together.

I turned to meet them. “It’s gone!” I shouted. “Would you believe it, but the damned thing’s gone again. I saw him as plainly as I see you, with the dagger in his chest and the blood all round the wound—I touched him! And now there isn’t a sign that he was ever there at all. Damn it, the very matches have disappeared too.” I laughed, for really if you looked at it one way, the thing was just absurd.

Sergeant Afford eyed me austerely. “Is that so, sir?” he said, in his most wooden voice.

He was going to say more, but Gotley brushed him aside and took me by the arm.

“That’s all right, Chappell, old man,” he said, very soothingly. “Don’t you worry about it any more tonight. I’m going to take you home and fill you up with bromide and tomorrow we’ll go into it properly.”

Gotley thought I was mad, of course. After all it was only to be expected.

Chapter VI

“Ought I to marry, then?” I asked drearily. I had been trying for some minutes to summon up the courage to put this question.

It was the next evening and Gotley and I had been talking for over an hour. He had succeeded in convincing me. I had seen nothing, felt nothing, imagined everything. To pacify me he had telegraphed that morning to Frank in Rome; the answer, facetiously couched, had left no room for doubt.

Gotley had been perfectly open with me during the last hour. It was better, he said, to face this sort of thing frankly. The thing was not serious; I must have been overworking, or suffering from nervous strain of some kind. If I took things easily for a bit these hallucinations would disappear and probably never return. Above all, I must not brood over them.

“Ought I to marry, then, Gotley?” I repeated.

“Oh dear, yes. In time. No need to hurry about it.”

“You mean, not in September?”

“Well, perhaps not quite so soon. But later, oh, yes.”

“Is it fair? I mean, if there are children.”

“My dear chap,” Gotley said with great cheerfulness, “it’s nothing as bad as that. Nothing but a temporary phase.”

“I shall tell Sylvia.”

“Ye-es,” he agreed, though a little doubtfully. “Yes, you could tell Miss Rigby; but let me have a word with her too. And look here, why not go away somewhere with her and her mother for a bit of a holiday? That’s what you want. Drugs can’t do anything for you, but a holiday, with the right companionship, might do everything.”

And so, the next day, it was arranged.

I told Sylvia everything. She, of course, was her own loyal self and at first refused to believe a word of Gotley’s diagnosis. If I thought I had seen a body, then a body I had seen, and felt, and examined. Even Frank’s facetious telegram did not shake her. But her private talk with Gotley did, a little. She was not convinced, but she went so far as to say that there might be something in it, conceivably. In any case there was no reason why I should not have a holiday with herself and her mother, if that was what everyone seemed to want; but neither Sir Henry nor Lady Rigby were to be told a word about anything else. To this, though somewhat reluctantly, I agreed.

Nevertheless, rumours of course arose. Not that Gotley said a word, but I cannot think that Sergeant Afford was so discreet. When we got back, in August, from Norway, I was not long in gathering, from the curious looks which everywhere greeted me, that some at any rate of the cat had escaped from its bag.

I saw Gotley at once and he expressed his satisfaction with my condition. “You’ll be all right now,” he predicted confidently. “I shouldn’t go to that place at night for a bit yet, but you’d be all right now really, in any case.”

A couple of days later I had a letter from Frank. It was in answer to one I had written him from Norway, asking him, just as a matter of curiosity, exactly what he had been doing just before midnight on the 3rd of July, as I had had rather a strange dream about him just at that time. He apologised for not having answered earlier, but the hotel in Rome had been slow in forwarding my letter, which had only just now caught him up in Vienna, from which town his own letter was written. So far as he could remember, he was just coming out of a theatre in Rome at the time I mentioned: was that what I wanted? My recovery had been so far complete that I could smile at a couple of very typical spelling mistakes and then dismiss the matter from my mind.

That was on the 9th August. The next morning was a blazing day, the sort of shimmering, cloudless day that one always associates with the month of August and, about once in three years, really gets. I made a leisurely breakfast, read the newspaper for a little and then set off to keep an appointment with a farmer, a tenant of mine, concerning the re-roofing of his barn. The farm adjoined the Bucklands estate and lay about three miles away by road, but little over a mile if one cut through Horne’s Copse. It was a little hot for walking and I had intended to take the Dover, but a message reached me from the garage that something had gone mysteriously wrong with the carburetor and a new float would have to be obtained before I could take her out. Rather welcoming the necessity for exercise, I set off on foot.

As I approached Horne’s Copse I reflected how complete my recovery must be, for instead of feeling the slightest reluctance to pass through it I positively welcomed its prospect of cool green shade. Strolling along, my thoughts on the coming interview and as far as they well could be from the unhappy memories that the place held for me, I turned the last corner which hid from me the little length of straight path which had played so sinister a part in those memories—even, I think, whistling a little tune.

Then the tune froze abruptly on my lips and the warmth of the day was lost in the icy sweat of sheer terror which broke out all over me. For there at my feet, incredibly, impossibly, lay the body of Frank, the blood slowly oozing round the dagger that projected from his heart.

This time I stayed to make no examination. In utter panic I took to my heels and ran. Whither, or with what idea, I had no notion. My one feeling was to get away from the place and as soon and as quickly as possible.

Actually I came to my senses in a train, bound for London, with a first-class ticket clutched in my hand. How I had got there I had no conception but the vaguest. It had been a blind flight.

Fortunately the compartment was an empty one and I was able to take measures to control the trembling of my limbs before trying to take stock of the situation. I was not cured, then. Far from it. What was I to do?

One thing I determined. I would stay a few days in London now that I was already on the way there and, when I felt sufficiently recovered to tell my story coherently, consult some experienced alienist. Obviously I was no longer a case for Gotley.

It was no doubt (as I reflected in a strangely detached way), a part of my mania that I did not go to my usual hotel, where I was known, but sought out the most obscure one I could find. In an effort to shake off my obsession and complete the process of calming myself I turned after the meal into a dingy little cinema and tried to concentrate for three hours on the inanities displayed on the screen.

“Shocking murder in a wood!” screamed a newsboy almost in my ear, as I stood blinking in the sunlight outside again. Mechanically I felt for a copper and gave it to him. It was in a wood that I had seen…

And it was an account of the finding of Frank’s body that I read there and then, on the steps of that dingy cinema—Frank who had been found that morning in Horne’s Copse with a dagger in his heart.

“The police,” concluded the brief account, “state that they would be grateful if the dead man’s cousin, Mr. Hugh Chappell, who was last seen boarding the 11.19 train to London, would put himself in touch with them as soon as possible.”

Chapter VII

I turned and began to walk quickly, but quite aimlessly, along the pavement. The one idea in my mind at the moment was that nobody should guess, from any anxiety I might display, that I was the notorious Hugh Chappell with whom the police wished to get in touch as soon as possible. It never occurred to me to doubt that I was notorious, that my name was already on everyone’s lips and that not merely every policeman but even every private citizen was eagerly looking for me. Such is the effect of seeing one’s name, for the first time, in a public news sheet.

By and by my mind recovered from this temporary obsession and I began to think once more. So this time my hallucination had not been a hallucination at all. Frank had been killed—murdered, almost certainly: it was his body I had seen that morning. But what, then, of the two previous times I had seen that same body and even handled it? Or so I had fancied at the time. Obviously they were not the meaningless delusions that Gotley and, finally, I myself, had believed them to be; they really were definite pre-visions of the real event. It was most extraordinary.

In any case, be that as it might, my own immediate action was clear. I must return at once to Ravendean and offer Sergeant Afford any help in my power.

It did not take me much over half-an-hour to ring up my hotel, cancel my room and make my way to Paddington. There I found that a train was luckily due to start in ten minutes and, having taken my ticket, I strolled to the bookstall to see if any later edition with fuller details was yet on sale. As I approached the stall I noticed a figure standing in front of it which looked familiar to me. The man turned his head and I recognised him at once as a fellow who had been on my staircase at Oxford, though I had never known him well: his name was Sheringham and I had heard of him during the last few years as a successful novelist with an increasing reputation, Roger Sheringham.

I had not the least wish, at the present juncture, to waste time renewing old acquaintances, but as the man was now staring straight at me I could hardly do less than nod, with what pleasantness I could muster and greet him by name.

His response surprised me enormously. “Hullo, Hugo!” he said warmly, indeed with a familiarity I resented considering that we had never been on terms of anything but surnames before. “Come and have a drink.” And he actually took me by the arm.

“I’m sorry,” I said, a little stiffly, “I have a train to catch.” And I endeavoured to release myself.

“Nonsense!” he said loudly. “Plenty of time for a quick one.” I was going to reply somewhat peremptorily when, to my astonishment, he added in a hissing sort of whisper without moving his lips: “Come on, you damned fool.”

I allowed him to lead me away from the bookstall, completely bewildered.

“Phew!” he muttered, when we had gone about thirty yards. “That was a close shave. Don’t look round. That man in the grey suit who was just coming up on the left is a Scotland Yard man.”

“Indeed?” I said, interested but perplexed. “Looking for someone, you mean?”

“Yes,” Sheringham said shortly. “You. One of a dozen in this very station at this very minute. Let’s get out—if we can!”

I was surprised to hear that so many detectives were actually looking for me. Evidently the police considered my evidence of the first importance. I wondered how Sheringham knew and asked him.

“Oh, I’m in touch with those people,” he said carelessly. “Lord,” he added, more to himself than to me, “I wish I knew what to do with you now I’ve got you.”

“Well,” I smiled, “I’m afraid you can’t do anything at the moment. If you’re in touch with Scotland Yard, you’ll have heard about my poor cousin?” He nodded and I explained my intentions.

“I thought so,” he nodded, “seeing you here. Well, that confirms my own opinion.”

“What opinion?”

“Oh, nothing. Now look here, Chappell, I don’t want you to take this train. There’s another a couple of hours later which will do you just as well; there’s no particular urgency so far as you’re concerned. In the interval, I want you to come back with me to my rooms at the Albany.”

“But why?”

“Because I want to talk to you—or rather, hear you talk. And I may say I was about to travel down to your place by that same train for just that purpose.”

This was the most surprising news I had yet received. I demurred, however, at missing the train, but Sheringham was so insistent that at last I agreed to accompany him.

“We’d better get a taxi, then,” I remarked with, I fear, no very good grace.

“No,” Sheringham retorted. “We’ll go by tube.”

And by tube we went.

Sheringham took me into a very comfortable paneled sitting-room and we sat down in two huge leather armchairs.

“Now,” he said, “don’t think me impertinent, Chappell, or mysterious, and remember that I’m not only in touch with Scotland Yard but I have on occasions even worked with them. I want you to tell me, from beginning to end, in as much detail as you can, your story of this extraordinary business of your cousin’s death. And believe me, it’s entirely in your own interests that I ask you to do so, though for the present you must take that on trust.”

The request seemed to me highly irregular, but Sheringham appeared to attach such importance to it that I did, in fact, comply. I told him the whole thing.

“I see,” he said. “Thank you. And you proposed to go down and give the police what help you could. Very proper. Now I’ll tell you something, Chappell. What do you think they want you for? Your help? Not a bit of it. They want you in order to arrest you, for killing your cousin.”

“What!” I could only gasp.

“I have it from their own lips. Shall I tell you what the police theory is? That your two false alarms were the results of hallucinations, which left you with the delusion that you had a divine mission to kill your cousin and that, meeting him accidentally in the flesh in that same place you, under the influence of this mania, actually did kill him.”

Chapter VIII

For a minute or two Sheringham’s revelation of this hideous suggestion left me quite speechless with horror. I was beginning to stammer out a repudiation when he waved me into silence.

“My dear chap, it’s all right: I don’t believe anything of the sort. I never did and now I’ve seen and talked to you I do still less. You’re not mad. No, I’m convinced the business isn’t so simple as all that. In fact, I think there’s something pretty devilish behind it. That’s why I was on my way down to try to find you before the police did and ask you if I could look into things for you.”

“Good heavens,” I could only mutter, “I’d be only too grateful if you would. I’ve no wish to end my days in a madhouse. This is really terrible. Have you any ideas at all?”

“Only that those first two occasions were no more delusions than the last. You did see something that you were meant to see—either your cousin or somebody made up to resemble his. And the plot which I’m quite certain exists is evidently aimed against you as well as against your cousin. For some reason a certain person or persons do want you locked up in an asylum. At least, that seems the only possible explanation, with the result that the police are thinking exactly what they have been meant to think. Now, can you tell me of anyone who would benefit if you were locked up in a madhouse?”

“No one,” I said in bewilderment. “But Sheringham, how can it possibly be a deliberate plot? It was only by the merest chance on all those three occasions that I went through Horne’s Copse at all. Nobody could possibly have foreseen it.”

“Are you sure? On each occasion, you remember, you had to pass from one point to another, with Horne’s Copse as the nearest route, provided you were on foot. And on each occasion, you also remember, your car just happened to be out of action. You think that’s coincidence? I don’t.”

“You mean—you think my car had been tampered with?”

“I intend to have a word or two with your chauffeur; but I’m ready to bet a thousand pounds here and now what the implications of his answers will be—though doubtless he won’t realise it himself. What sort of a man is he, by the way? Sound?”

“Very. A first-rate mechanic and an excellent fellow. In fact, he has rather a sad story. Not that he’s ever told me a word himself; actually I had it from Frank who sent him along to me, not being able to find a job for him himself. He’s a public school and University man whose people lost all their money while he was up at Cambridge, where Frank knew him slightly. So, having a bent for engineering, he buckled down to it, worked his way through the shops and turned himself into a most efficient chauffeur.”

“Stout fellow,” Sheringham commented. “We may find him very useful. Now look here, Chappell, you’re absolutely convinced that the man you saw each time in Horne’s Copse was your cousin? You’re sure it wasn’t somebody disguised as him?”

“I’m practically certain,” I replied.

“Yes; well, we must check up on that; which means that someone must go abroad and cover the ground.”

“But you forget the telegrams I had from Frank.”

“Indeed I don’t,” Sheringham retorted. “A telegram’s no evidence at all.”

“But who is to go?”

“There you have me,” he admitted. “I simply can’t spare the time myself if I’m to go into things properly at this end, and we’ve got none of it to lose. I want to get the case cleared up before the police find you and we don’t know when that may be.”

“Oh! I’m to go into hiding, then?”

“Well, of course. Once arrested it’s the dickens of a job to get free again. We must put it off as long as we possibly can.”

“But where am I to hide?”

“Why, I thought here. Meadows, my man, is perfectly safe. Any objection?”

“None, indeed. This is extraordinarily good of you, Sheringham. I needn’t say how very grateful I am.”

“That’s all right, that’s all right. Now then, if I’m to do any good down in your neighbourhood I must put a few questions before I leave you. I’m going to catch that train.”

Sheringham hurriedly put his queries, some concerning my own affairs and Frank’s and some upon local conditions and personages and rushed off to catch his train. Before he went I obtained his promise to see Sylvia and secretly inform her of my plans and whereabouts, together with his own hopes of getting me out of this trouble, which I urged him to put as high as possible to save the poor girl anxiety. This he undertook to do and I was left alone.

It need not be said that my reflections were not pleasant ones; but rack my brains as I might, I could see no possible solution of the mystery of my cousin’s death, nor even discover the least bit of evidence to support Sheringham’s theory that some person or persons unknown, having murdered Frank, were now trying to get me confined as a homicidal lunatic. Who was there who could possibly benefit by this double crime?

To all practical purposes I was a prisoner in the Albany for an indefinite period. Outside the shelter of Sheringham’s rooms I did not dare to put my nose. And for all the company that the silent-footed, respectfully taciturn Meadows proved himself, I might just as well have been completely alone. The time hung heavily on my hands, in spite of the numbers of newspapers I examined, Meadows silently bringing me each fresh edition as it appeared. There was, however, little fresh to be found in the reports so far as real information went, though columns of balderdash were printed concerning myself, Frank and everything relevant and irrelevant to the case. The only piece of complete news was that the dagger with which Frank had been stabbed had been identified as my own dagger, from the wall in my library, a fact which lent superficial support to the police theory but, to me, more to Sheringham’s.

The latter had not been able to say how long he would be absent. Actually it was nearly forty-eight hours before he returned, looking considerably graver than when he departed.

I had jumped up eagerly to question him as to his success and his reply was anything but reassuring.

“I’ve found out a little, but not much. And the police have found out a good deal more. They’ve got evidence now which has made them change their theory completely. You’d better prepare for a shock, Chappell. They think now that you feigned the first two hallucinations in order to create the impression that you were mad and then, having established that, killed your cousin in extremely sane cold blood in accordance with a careful plan of murder, knowing that as a homicidal maniac you couldn’t be executed but would get off with a year or so in Broadmoor before proving that you’d recovered your sanity. That’s what we’re up against now.”

Chapter IX

I had still found no words to answer Sheringham’s appalling news when the door behind him opened and Sylvia herself appeared.

“Oh, Hugh!” she said, with a little cry and ran to me.

“She would come,” Sheringham said gloomily. “I couldn’t stop her. Well, I’ll go and unpack.” He left us alone together.

“Hugh dear,” Sylvia said, when our first disjointed greetings were over, “what does this terrible business all mean? Frank dead and you suspected of killing him! I knew all the time there was something dreadful behind those ‘hallucinations’ of yours, as that idiot of a Dr. Gotley would call them.”

“I can tell you one thing it must mean, darling,” I said sadly, “and that is that our engagement must be broken off. It wouldn’t be fair to you. Though when I’m cleared I shall —”

“Hugh!” she interrupted me indignantly. “How dare you say such a thing to me! What kind of a girl do you imagine I am? Engagement broken off indeed. Do you know why I’ve come up with Mr. Sheringham?”

“Well, no,” I had to admit.

But I was not destined to learn just then exactly why Sylvia had come up to London, for Sheringham himself followed his own discreet tap on the door into the room.

We settled down into a council of war.

“There’s no disguising the fact,” Sheringham said gravely, “that the position’s uncommonly serious, Chappell. The hunt for you is up, with a vengeance.”

“Look here,” I returned, “in that case I must leave your rooms. You could get into serious trouble for harbouring a wanted man, you know.”

“Oh, that,” Sheringham said scornfully. “Yes, you can go all right, but you’ll have to knock me out first. I’ll hold you here if necessary by main force.”

Sylvia’s face, which had become highly apprehensive at my remark, lightened again and she shot a grateful smile at our host.

“Then you really don’t think I should surrender to the police and let them hold me while you’re working?” I asked anxiously, for, magistrate as I was, the way in which I was evading arrest seemed to me just then almost more reprehensible than the ridiculous charge which was out against me.

“I do not,” Sheringham replied bluntly. “That is, not unless you want to turn a short story into a long one. Give me just a few days and I’ll clear the mystery up—granted one thing only.”

“And what’s that?”

“Why, that the agent we send abroad is able to establish the fact that your cousin was not at his hotel abroad on those first two occasions; because unless you’re completely mistaken in your identification, there can’t be any doubt about that, as a fact.”

“But wait a minute!” Sylvia cried. “Mr. Sheringham, that would mean that—that his wife is in it too.”

“Oh, yes,” Sheringham agreed carelessly. “Naturally.”

“Joanna!” I exclaimed. “Oh, that’s impossible.”

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” said Sylvia. “But why ‘naturally,’ Mr. Sheringham? Have you got a theory that brings her in?”

“Yes. My idea is that so far as your cousin and his wife were concerned, Chappell, the thing was a joke, just to give you a fright. Rather a gruesome joke, perhaps, but nothing more. He was home on business for a day or two and, with the help of somebody else, rigged himself up as a sham corpse. Then that unknown third person turned the joke against him most effectively by really killing him the third time. All we’ve got to do, therefore, is to find this mysterious person (which, with your cousin’s wife’s help, shouldn’t be difficult), and we’ve got the murderer.”

“Joanna’s on her way home now, of course,” Sylvia told me. “They expect her to arrive tonight or tomorrow. Mr. Sheringham’s going down again to see her.”

“I understand,” I said slowly, though I was not altogether sure that I did. “And supposing that she says that Frank was with her all the time and our agent confirms that?”

“Well, in that case there’s only one possible explanation: your identification was mistaken.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t,” I said. “And what’s more I’m equally sure that Frank was dead the first time of all—quite dead. I tell you, his face was icy cold and his heart wasn’t beating; I felt his pulse most carefully. It’s impossible that I could have been mistaken.”

“That does make things a little more difficult,” Sheringham murmured.

There was a gloomy little pause, which I broke to ask Sheringham what this fresh evidence was which the police imagined they had discovered against me. Apparently it amounted to the facts that, according to Jefferson, my chauffeur, the car had on each occasion shown every sign of having been deliberately tampered with (which Sheringham had expected), and by myself (which he had not); that the police had obtained my finger-prints from articles in the house and the finger-prints on the dagger corresponded with them; and that I had been heard to use threatening language as regards Frank—which so far as his escapades before marriage were concerned, was possibly in some degree true, though I could not in any way account for the finger-prints.

“Whom are you going to send abroad for us, Mr. Sheringham?” Sylvia asked suddenly, when our discussion on these points was over.

“Well, I’ve been thinking about that. It must be someone who knew the dead man and all the circumstances. In my opinion the very best thing would be for Hugh to go and act as his own detective. We can easily lay a trail to make the police think he’s still in London, so the foreign forces won’t be warned.”

“Hugh!” Sylvia echoed in surprise. “Well, really, that mightn’t be at all a bad idea. Though as to detecting…Still, I can do that part of it.”

“You?” we exclaimed in unison.

“Oh, yes,” said Sylvia serenely. “I shall go with him, of course.”

“But, darling,” I was beginning to expostulate.

“Which brings me back to my real reason for coming up to London, Hugh,” Sylvia went on with the utmost calmness. “It was so that we can get married at once, of course. Or at any rate, within the usual three days. It will have to be in false names, I’m afraid, owing to this fuss, but it’s just as legal and we can go through a ceremony again in our own names if you like after it’s all over. I’ve applied for the special license already, in the name of—” She began to giggle and dived into her handbag, from which she extracted a crumpled piece of paper. “Yes, Miss Arabella Whiffen. And you, darling, are Mr. Penstowe Stibb.”

Chapter X

And so, in spite of my misgivings, Sylvia and I actually were married three days later. In my own defence I may say that when Sylvia has really made her mind up to a thing…

How we got safely out of the country, while the police were feverishly chasing clues ingeniously laid by Sheringham to show that I was still in London, I do not propose to say. In the public interest such things are better kept quiet.

It was a strange honeymoon upon which we embarked, with its object of finding out whether or not Frank really had been abroad at the time when I had seen him (as I was now more convinced than ever that I had), lying dead in Horne’s Copse. Nor was there any time to lose. With only one night to break the journey in Bâle on the way, we went straight through to the Italian lakes. We did not, however, stay in Bellagio, where Frank had been (or said he had been), but at Cadenabbia opposite. For all we knew, we might encounter an English detective in Bellagio and we did not intend to remain in the danger zone longer than necessary.

We arrived at Cadenabbia late at night. The next morning, before crossing the lake to Bellagio, I received a letter from Sheringham, addressed to me in the assumed name in which we were traveling. Its contents were most disturbing:

DEAR STIBB,

I am keeping in close touch with S.Y. and they still have no doubt that London is the place. Meanwhile here is news.

Both the police and I have seen J. and she tells the same story to both of us: that her husband never came back to England at all, until the day before his death, when he had to return for a few hours to see in person to some business connected with the estate and left saying that he was going straight to you to ask you to put him up. That is bad enough, but this is worse. The police now think they have found a definite motive for you. They say you were in love with J. (Your late marriage, of course, would be put down to an act of panic.)

Now this information can have come from one person only, J. herself, so I tackled her about it. She was very reluctant to tell me anything but finally, while admitting the possibility that she might have been totally mistaken, did hint that in her opinion your attentions to her since her marriage have been a good deal more marked than one might have expected in the case of a man engaged to another girl. I need not tell you my own opinion that J. is a vain hussy and all this is pure moonshine due to her inordinate conceit; but I must admit that it would not sound at all a pretty story in court.

I am more than ever certain that everything now hinges on your being able to establish that F. was not where he pretended to be. So do your level best.

Yours, R.S.

P.S. J. is very bitter against you. She seems to have no doubt in her empty head that you did the deed.

“Well, I am blessed!” I exclaimed and showed the letter to Sylvia. “Really, I can’t imagine how Joanna can have got such an extraordinary idea into her head. I’m quite certain I never gave her the least grounds for it.”

Sylvia read the letter through carefully. “I never did like Joanna,” was all she said.

It can be imagined that, after this news, we were more anxious than ever to succeed in the object of our journey. It was, therefore, with a full realisation of the fateful issues involved that we approached the Grand Hotel in Bellagio, which Frank had given as his address there.

While Sylvia engaged the reception clerk in a discussion regarding terms for a mythical stay next year I, as if idly, examined the register. My heart sank. There was the entry for the date in question. “Mr. and Mrs. Francis Chappell,” unmistakably in Joanna’s handwriting. Apparently they had only stayed for two nights.

Concealing my disappointment, I turned to the clerk. “I believe some friends of ours were staying here last May. English, of course. I don’t suppose you remember them. The lady was very dark, with quite black hair and her husband was just about my build and not at all unlike me in face, except that he had a scar just here.” I touched my right temple.

“Was he a gentleman of fast temper—no, quick temper, your friend?” asked the clerk, who spoke excellent English, with a slight smile.

“Yes,” I agreed. “Occasionally perhaps he is. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. It was nothing at all,” said the clerk hastily. Too hastily, for it was evidently something. “Just something that displeased the gentleman. Quite natural. Yes, signor, I remember your friends very well. Their name is Chappell, is it not? And they went on from here to Milan. I remember he told me he got the scar playing cricket when a boy. Is it not so?”

“It is,” I said gloomily.

“You have a very good memory,” remarked Sylvia.

“It is my business,” beamed the clerk, evidently pleased with the compliment.

Disconsolately we made our way back across the lake to our hotel, where Sylvia vanished indoors to write a letter.

Rather to my surprise, considering how urgent our business was, Sylvia refused to go on to Rome the next day, nor even the day after that. She had always wanted to see the Italian lakes, she said and now she was here she was going to see them all. And see them all we did, Lugano, Maggiore and the rest at the cost of a day apiece. It was almost a week later before at last we found ourselves in Rome.

And there it seemed that our enquiries were to meet with just the same fate. The conversation with the hotel clerk was repeated almost word for word. Did he remember my friend? Certainly he did and again by name as well as behaviour (Frank seemed from the hints we had had to have traveled across Europe blazing a trail of fiery temper). There was no doubt at all about his having been there. Even the scar was once more in evidence.

Sylvia drew something out of her bag and pushed it across the counter. I saw what it was as she did so. It was a small but excellent photograph of Frank himself.

“Is that anything like Mr. Chappell?” she asked, almost carelessly.

The clerk took the photograph up and looked at it carefully. “It is like him, just a little. But it is not Mr. Chappell himself, as the Signora well knows. Oh, no.”

Sylvia glanced at me. “I knew you’d need someone with you to do the real detecting,” she said calmly, though her eyes were dancing.

Chapter XI

But that was not the end of my surprises.

Sylvia was contemplating the clerk thoughtfully. “Are you ever able to get away from here for the weekend?” she asked. “A long weekend?”

The man shook his head regretfully. “No, never. We do not have the English weekend in Italy.”

“Oh!” said Sylvia.

“Only a week’s holiday in a year we have. My holiday begins in three days time. I shall not be sorry.”

Sylvia brightened. “Look here, how would you like to go to England for your week’s holiday, all expenses paid?”

The man’s voluble answer left no doubt of his liking for the idea. Sylvia arranged the details with him there and then.

“My darling,” I said, when at last we were seated in a café a few streets away and could talk properly, “what on earth is it you’re doing and how did you know the man with Joanna wasn’t Frank at all?”

She gave me a superior smile. “It didn’t strike you as curious, Hugh, that both those men remembered Frank so well, what with his temper and his scar, about which he was so confidential, and the rest? It didn’t occur to you to wonder whether they remembered all the visitors at their hotels quite so thoroughly? It didn’t strike you as though Frank had almost gone out of his way to be remembered at those two places so clearly?”

“Go on. Rub it in. No, it didn’t.”

“Poor lamb! Well, why should it have? You haven’t got such a suspicious mind as I have. But all those things struck me. Also the fact that it was Joanna who signed the register. Very fishy, I thought. So I wrote off to Mr. Sheringham to get hold somehow of a photograph of Frank and send it to me poste restante at Rome. That’s why I insisted on staying so long on the lakes, to give it time to arrive.”

“Well, well,” I said. “I’m quite glad I married you. So what is our programme now?”

“I must write to Mr. Sheringham at once and tell him what we’ve discovered and that we’re bringing the witness back with us in two or three days’ time.”

“But why are we doing that?”

“I’m not going to let him go off on his holiday where we can’t get hold of him,” Sylvia retorted. “Besides, aren’t there things called affidavits that he’ll have to swear? Something like that. Anyhow, Mr. Sheringham will know, so to Mr. Sheringham he’s going.”

And to Mr. Sheringham, three days later, the man went. I think I have already hinted in this chronicle that when Sylvia makes up her mind to a thing…

Sheringham seemed scarcely less pleased to see him than us. He handed him over to Meadows with as much care as if he had been made of glass and might fall into pieces at any moment.

As soon as he had gone and Sylvia had received Sheringham’s congratulations on her perspicacity, I asked eagerly whether anything further had come to light at this end of the affair.

Sheringham smiled, as if not ill-pleased with himself. “I think I’ve made some progress, but I’d rather not say anything just at the moment. I’ve arrived at one decision, though, Chappell, and that is that you must now come out in the open.”

“Stop skulking?” I said. “I shall be only too pleased. I’ve nothing to hide and I dislike this hole and corner atmosphere I’ve been living in.”

“But is it safe?” Sylvia asked anxiously.

“On that we’ve got to take a chance,” Sheringham told her. “Personally, I think it will be. In any case, since getting your letter I’ve arranged a conference here this evening. I’m going to do my best to bring everyone into the open and with any luck developments may result.”

“Who’s coming?” I asked, a little uneasily. I was not sure that I cared for the sound of the word “conference.”

“Well, Mrs. Chappell, for one.”

“Joanna? Really, Sheringham, do you think it advisable—”

“And her brother, for another,” he interrupted me. “You know him, I expect?”

“Well, very slightly. I met him at the wedding. That’s all. I’ve heard of him, of course. Rather a—a—”

“Bad egg?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, bad egg or not he’s coming to support his sister in my omelet.”

“Yes, but what have you found out, Mr. Sheringham?” Sylvia insisted. “What have you been doing these last ten days?”

“What have I found out?” Sheringham repeated whimsically. “Well, where to buy ice in your neighbourhood, for one thing. Very useful, in this hot weather.”

Sylvia’s eyes dilated. “Mr. Sheringham, you don’t mean that Frank was killed right back in May and—and—”

“And kept on ice till August?” Sheringham laughed. “No, I certainly don’t. The doctor was quite definite that he hadn’t been dead for more than a couple of hours at the outside when he was found. And now don’t ask me any more questions, because I’m determined not to spoil my conference for you.”

It was by then nearly dinner time and Sheringham, refusing to satisfy our curiosity any further, insisted on our going off to dress. We had to take what heart we could from the fact that he certainly seemed remarkably confident.

Joanna and her brother, Cedric Wickham, were to arrive at nine o’clock. Actually they were a minute or two early.

The meeting, I need hardly say, was constrained in the extreme. From the expression of acute surprise on their faces it was clear that the other two had had no idea that we were to be present, a fact which Sheringham must have purposely concealed from us. Recovering themselves, Joanna greeted us with the faintest nod, her brother, a tall, good-looking fellow, with a scowl. As if noticing nothing in the least amiss, Sheringham produced drinks.

Not more than three minutes later there was a ring at the front door bell. The next moment the door of the room was opened, a large, burly man was framed in the doorway and Meadows announced: “Detective Chief Inspector Moresby.”

Expecting as I did to be arrested on the spot, I put as good a face on the encounter as I could, though I had a task to appear altogether normal as the C.I.D. man, after a positively benevolent nod to the others, advanced straight towards me. But all he did was to put out a huge hand and say: “Good evening, Mr. Chappell. And how are you, sir? I’ve been wanting to meet you for some time.” His blue eyes twinkled genially.

I returned his smile as we shook hands—a proceeding which Joanna and her brother watched decidedly askance. They too, I think, had been expecting to see me led off, so to speak, in chains.

“Now,” said Sheringham briskly, “I’m glad to say I’ve got news for you. A new witness. No credit to me, I’m afraid. Mrs. Hugh Chappell is responsible. We’ll have him in straightaway, shall we, and hear what he’s got to say.” He pressed the bell.

The Chief Inspector, as it were casually, strolled over to a position nearer the door.

I think our little Italian thoroughly enjoyed his great moment, though his English suffered a little under the strain. He stood for a moment in the doorway, beaming at us and then marched straight up to Cedric Wickham.

“Ah, it is a pleasure to meet antique faces again, non è vero? Good evening, Mr. Frank Chappell!”

Chapter XII

Joanna, her brother and Chief Inspector Moresby had gone.

Almost immediately, as it seemed, after the little Italian clerk’s identification of Cedric Wickham as the impersonator of Frank at Bellagio and Rome the room had appeared to fill with burly men, before whom the Chief Inspector had arrested Joanna and Cedric, the latter as the actual perpetrator of the murder and the former as accessory to it both before and after the fact. My own chauffeur, whose real name I now learned was Harvey, not that under which I had engaged him on poor Frank’s recommendation, was already under arrest as a further accessory.

It was a terrible story that Sheringham told Sylvia and myself later that evening.

“There were two plots in existence,” he said when we were settled in our chairs and the excitement of the treble arrest had begun to calm down. “The first was invented by your cousin himself, who called in his wife, his brother-in-law and Harvey to help him carry it out. The second was an adaptation by these three aimed against the originator of the first. Both, of course, were aimed against you, too.

“This was the first plot. I’m not quite clear myself yet on some of its details, but—”

At this point the telephone bell in the hall rang and Sheringham went out to answer it.

He was away a considerable time and when he returned it was with a graver face even than before.

“Mrs. Chappell has confessed,” he said briefly. “She puts all the blame on the other two. I have every doubt of that and so have the police, but I can give you her whole story now. It fills up the gaps in my knowledge of the case.” He sat down again in his chair.

“The first plot, then,” he resumed, “was aimed against you, Chappell, by your cousin. It did not involve murder, although it was designed to put your possessions in his hands. To put it shortly, Frank had worked hard for two years and he didn’t like it; what is more, he did not intend to work any longer. He determined to anticipate his inheritance from you. But, rotter though he was, he drew the line at murder. To get you shut up in a lunatic asylum for the rest of your life, with the result that he as your heir and next-of-kin would have the administering of your estate, was quite enough for his purpose.

“To achieve this result he hit on the idea of causing you several times to come across his apparently dead body, knowing that you would give the alarm and then, when the searchers and the police came, have no body to show for it. When this had happened three or four times, the suspicion that you were mad would become a certainty and the rest would follow. I think it only too likely that if the plan had been left at that it would almost certainly have succeeded.”

“The devil!” Sylvia burst out indignantly.

“I’m quite sure it would,” I agreed soberly. “The police were taken in and Gotley too and, upon my word, I was ready to wonder myself whether I wasn’t mad. But what I can’t understand is how he copied death so well. I hadn’t the slightest suspicion that he wasn’t dead. He not only looked dead, he felt dead.”

“Yes—in the parts you did feel, which were the ones you were meant to feel. If you’d slipped your hand inside his shirt and felt his actual heart, instead of only the pulse in his wrist, you’d have felt it beating at once.

“Anyhow, the way he and Harvey went about it was this. About an hour before you were expected, Frank gave himself a stiff injection of morphia. They couldn’t use chloroform, because of the smell. Harvey meantime was watching for you to start, having, of course, already put the car out of action so as to ensure your walking and through Horne’s Copse at that. As soon as you set out or looked like doing so, Harvey ran on ahead at top speed for the copse, which he would reach about ten minutes before you.

“Ready waiting for him there was a tourniquet, a bottle of atropine drops and a block of ice fashioned roughly to the shape of a mask and wrapped in a blanket. He clapped the ice over your cousin’s face and another bit over his right hand and wrist and fastened it there, put the tourniquet on his right arm above the elbow and slipped off the ice mask for a moment, when his hand was steadier, to put a few of the atropine drops into Frank’s eyes to render the pupils insensible to light. Then he arranged the limbs with the dead pulse invitingly upwards and so on, waited till he could actually hear you coming, and then whipped off the ice blocks and retreated down the path. After you’d gone to give the alarm, of course, he cleared the ground of your traces, match sticks and so on and carried Frank out of the way, coming back to smooth out any footprints he might have made in so doing.

“In the meantime, Joanna’s brother was impersonating Frank abroad, just in the unlikely event of your making any enquiries over there, though, as your wife very shrewdly spotted, he overdid his attempts to impress the memory of himself on the hotel staff. And, of course, she answered your telegrams. By the way, as an example of their thoroughness I’ve just heard that your cousin engaged two single rooms instead of one double one through the whole tour, so that the fact of it being done at Bellagio and Rome, where it was necessary, wouldn’t appear odd afterwards. Well, that’s the first plot and, as I say, it very nearly came off.

“The second was, in my own opinion, most probably instigated by Joanna herself, or Joanna and Harvey. Frank didn’t know, when he brought into his own scheme a man who would help because he was in love with Frank’s wife, that Frank’s wife was in love with him. You told me yourself that the Wickhams are rotten stock, though you didn’t think that Joanna was tainted. She was, worse than any of them (except perhaps her own brother), but morally, not physically. To take advantage of Frank’s plot by having him actually killed in the hope that you (if the evidence was rigged a little on the spot, which Harvey was in a position to do) would be hanged for his murder, was nothing to her.”

“Is that what was really intended?” Sylvia asked, rather white.

Sheringham nodded. “That was the hope, in which event of course her infant son would inherit and she would more or less administer things for him till he came of age, marrying Harvey at her leisure and with a nice fat slice of the proceeds earmarked for brother Cedric. If things didn’t go so well as that, there was always Frank’s original scheme to fall back on, which would give almost as good a result, though with that there was always the danger of your being declared sane again.”

“And the police,” I exclaimed, “were for a time actually bamboozled!”

“No,” Sheringham laughed. “We must give Scotland Yard its due. I learned today that, though puzzled, they never seriously suspected you, and what’s more, they knew where you were the whole time and actually helped you to get abroad, hoping you’d help them to clear up their case for them, and in fact you did.”

“How silly of them,” Sylvia pronounced. “When we were out of the country they lost track of us.”

“Yes?” said Sheringham. “By the way, did you make any friends on the trip?”

“No. At least, only one. There was quite a nice man staying at Cadenabbia who was actually going on to Rome the same day as we did. He was very helpful about trains and so on. We took quite a fancy to him, didn’t we, Hugh?”

“He is a nice fellow, isn’t he?” Sheringham smiled.

“Oh, do you know him? No, of course you can’t; you don’t even know who I mean.”

“Indeed I do,” Sheringham retorted. “You mean Detective Inspector Peters of the C.I.D., though I don’t think you knew that yourself, Mrs. Chappell.”