Knock, Murderer, Knock! Page 26

  “That all sounds okay to me,” agreed Palk, “but it wasn’t so easy for her to get to Winnie Marston in the treatment-rooms without being seen. She could get out all right, but how could she get in without running the risk of bumping into Nurse Hawkins or Mrs. Dawson?”

  “She was in there before Nurse Hawkins came, in the morning,” explained Mr. Winkley, “and hid inside the lavatory all the time Winnie was having treatment.”

  “Then it was moth-balls!” exclaimed the Inspector. “No, I’ve not gone mad too,” he laughed as he saw the surprise on their three faces. “You must have noticed that Miss Astill’s clothes always smell as if she has just taken them out of summer storage, and I thought I smelt mothballs in that lavatory, but Sergeant Jago said it was the disinfectant tablet. If I’d been Mr. Winkley, now, I should have gone about the Hydro sniffing, until my nose led me to Miss Astill.”

  “It’s just as well that you didn’t,” laughed Miss Lewis. “They all use moth-balls here, even the Colonel, and I think that the ones Lady Warme uses are the strongest.”

  “But if Miss Astill hid in the lavatory,” remarked the doctor, “she certainly did run the risk of being seen either by the nurse or by Miss Marston.”

  “She did, of course,” agreed Mr. Winkley, “but that would only have put off the murder for a time, and to Miss Astill, one day was as good as another, for she didn’t know that by the next day Winnie would no longer be in the Hydro. But as it happened, luck – or you may prefer to call it the law of probability – favoured her. She remained unobserved, and slipped out of the lavatory when Winnie was resting. It was to her that Winnie said, ‘Hello, what are you doing here?’ Winnie probably didn’t see Miss Astill come out of the lavatory, as her head was turned the other way; but even if she did, the usual long dull story so prevalent in the Hydro about cascara versus senna pods, or liquorice versus vegetable pills, would have explained her presence quite satisfactorily. She was entitled to be there, and Winnie wouldn’t have any cause to be suspicious.

  “The doctor says that she was almost certain to be feeling sleepy after the treatment, and Mrs. Marston told me that Winnie always curled herself up to sleep with her head pressed forward like a kitten’s, and death was instantaneous. Miss Astill ran very little risk of being seen when she came out of the rooms, because Mrs. Dawson was in the electric-room having treatment, and Nurse Hawkins was still upstairs with Lady Warme. If Matthews had come right into the ladies’ room, she would have slipped back into the lavatory again, and found the opportunity to escape after he left.”

  “What about Mrs. Napier?” asked Dr. Williams.

  “She didn’t go into the baths until much later. She probably saw the police arriving and followed them. She slipped into the cubicle when the Inspector was in the men’s department and the police doctor and photographer in the massage-room. She undressed in Winnie’s cubicle and waited to be discovered.”

  “Then when Nurse Hawkins said that she saw the curtain swaying and thought Miss Marston was dressing in the cubicle, the baths were really empty except for herself and Mrs. Dawson?” asked Palk.

  “Yes,” replied Mr. Winkley. “The curtains do sway in the draught, and it was only because she expected Winnie to be there that she assumed it was her movements which were causing the swaying. If she had not expected anyone to be there, she wouldn’t have noticed the curtains moving.”

  “Do you think she would still have murdered Winnie Marston if she had known she was already married to Matthews?” asked Miss Lewis.

  “No, I don’t,” said Mr. Winkley. “That’s the pity of it. Marriage is a sacred state to Miss Astill... the great enemy of the sins of the flesh... and as such she would have respected it.”

  “And poor Bobby’s murder?” asked the doctor.

  “That was the simplest of the lot. Miss Astill merely had to wait till Grace was out of sight and then slip quickly into the shrubbery. He was standing with his head bowed between his hands, as all children do when counting in Hide-and-Seek.

  “Oh, ’twas the foulest deed to slay that babe,

  And the most merciless that e’er was heard of!”

  Palk’s voice was deep and impressive.

  Mr. Winkley nodded his appreciation of the aptness of the quotation, and concluded:

  “I don’t need to explain about the handle we couldn’t find. You all saw it tonight.”

  “I ought to have found it at the very beginning,” growled Palk. “Why, she even brought that bag to the interview with her, and I turned the whole bag upside down on my table without suspecting it. The trouble was that although I was looking for a handle, I expected to find a superfluous one, and not one which was already serving as a handle.” He got up rather abruptly from his chair and knocked his pipe out against the side of the grate. “Well, Mr. Winkley, you seem to have cleared up every point,” he said. “I should like to come along and have a look at that department of yours at the Yard one day. I’m sorry to break up the party, but I must be getting back. I’ve a busy day in front of me today.” He made further movements indicative of leaving, and Mr. Winkley, glancing at Miss Lewis, got up, stretching his long legs.

  “I’ll come as far as the main door with you, Inspector,” he said, “then I’ll go up to bed. No, don’t you bother, old chap,” as the doctor moved forward to accompany them; but his protest did not prevent the doctor from walking with them along his private corridor as far as the double baize doors, where they stood chatting for a few minutes.

  When Dr. Williams returned he found his secretary curled up in an arm-chair, face in hands, sobbing broken-heartedly.

  “Why, Gwynneth!” he exclaimed, without realizing that it was the first time he had openly made use of her Christian name. “What’s the matter?”

  Miss Lewis lifted her head and fumbled for a handkerchief in the pocket of her dressing-gown. She turned away from him for a moment, then blew her nose, wiped her eyes, and stood up. The doctor thought that she looked very little like an efficient secretary, and very much like his daughter, Grace, at the end of a disappointing day.

  He moved close to her.

  “Won’t you tell me what it is?” he asked.

  Miss Lewis looked round, startled at his tone, smiled a little at what she saw in his eyes, and said:

  “Are you asking me as my employer or as my medical adviser?”

  Dr. Williams gave a snort – a blatant and finished snort which would have done credit to any one of the Hydro residents – and strode to the door. For one agonizing minute Miss Lewis thought that he had gone, but he strode back again. She did not raise her eyes.

  “I’m asking as a man, Gwynneth. I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time, but I didn’t realize it till Winkley’s foolhardy scheme put you into such danger tonight. I’m not attractive, I know. I’m over forty and I’ve been married before. I don’t fancy my chances, but I love you. Do you think you could ever care for me?”

  This time Miss Lewis looked straight into his eyes.

  “I am in love with you,” she said a little breathlessly. “I always have loved you, and everyone in the Hydro but yourself knows it.”

  For some time after that, neither of them spoke, and at the end of it, Miss Lewis looked less like an efficient secretary than ever. When they did speak again, their conversation was not very coherent, and it was not until some time afterwards that Miss Lewis ran to the mirror set in the overmantel and uttered little exclamations of dismay at her reflection.

  The doctor laughed at her.

  “You know that you look adorable,” he said. “I wonder what Grace will think about this.”

  Miss Lewis swung round.

  “Oh, Doctor!” she exclaimed. “I’d forgotten you have a daughter. Won’t she hate the idea of your marrying me?” She smiled provocatively at him and looked, as he had said, adorable, with her hair ruffled over the blue silk dressing-gown. “I suppose you do mean to marry me?”

  “I suppose I shall have to after having you alone in my
rooms at two o’clock in the morning, insufficiently clad by all Hydro standards. Think of the scandal about us already! And you’ll have to learn not to call me Doctor.”

  “Darling!” she exclaimed. “Whatever will the ‘inmates’ say about us now?”

  “That’s easy,” laughed Dr. Williams. “They’ll say, ‘What did I tell you? I always knew there was something between the doctor and his secretary!’ And, as usual, they’ll be right!”

  THE END

  About The Author

  Harriet Rutland was the pen-name of Olive Shimwell. She was born Olive Seers in 1901, the daughter of a prosperous Birmingham builder and decorator.

  Little is known of the author’s early life but in 1926 she married microbiologist John Shimwell, with whom she moved to a small village near Cork in Ireland. This setting, transplanted to Devon, inspired her first mystery novel Knock, Murderer, Knock! which was published in 1938. The second of Harriet Rutland’s mysteries, Bleeding Hooks, came out in 1940, and the third and last, Blue Murder, was published in November 1942. All three novels are remarkable for their black comedy, innovative plots, and pin-sharp portraits of human behaviour, especially concerning relationships between men and women.

  Olive and John were divorced in the early forties, and Olive apparently did not publish anything further. She died in Newton Abbot in 1962.

  Also by Harriet Rutland

  Bleeding Hooks

  Blue Murder

  Harriet Rutland

  Bleeding Hooks

  They grabbed their fishing bags, and made a dive for their rods which were standing, ready for use, outside the front door.

  “Well, tight lines!” they called over their shoulders.

  “Bleeding hooks!” grinned the Major.

  Gladys ‘Ruby’ Mumsby was more interested in fishermen than fish. When her corpse is discovered near a Welsh sporting lodge that is hosting a group of fly fishing enthusiasts, it seems one of them has taken an interest in her too – of the murderous kind. For impaled in the palm of her hand is a salmon fishing fly, so deep that the barb is completely covered. Her face is blue. It is thought at first she died of natural causes, but the detective Mr. Winkley, the Scotland Yard detective, almost immediately suspects otherwise. And what happened to the would-be magician's monkey that disappeared so soon after Mrs. Mumsby’s death?

  Bleeding Hooks was the second of Harriet Rutland’s sparkling mystery novels to feature the detective Mr Winkley. First published in 1940, this new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  ‘Once again a top-ranking yarn, in a story where the author introduces murder into a fishing paradise in Wales. Lots of rod and line marginalia add to incisive characterization and well hidden crime for a superior story.’ Kirkus Reviews

  ‘Murder method interesting, characters well drawn and likeable, sleuth unobtrusively slick and finish dramatic.’ Saturday Review

  Chapter 1

  General Sir Courtney Haddox, wearing a discoloured trench coat over innumerable out-at-elbow woollen cardigans, and a deflated fishing bag slung over this, entered the front door of The Fisherman’s Rest, walking a little stiffly in his heavy rubber waders. He stood for a moment, his tight skinned, purplish-tinged face thrust forward like an ill-tempered vulture’s, as he peered at the other end-of-season visitors who were already grouped round the catches of fish arranged on the floor in the centre of the hall.

  He heard his sister’s voice raised above the murmured conversation of them all. It had the croaking harshness of a corncrake’s, and, like a corncrake’s, seemed capable of going on for ever.

  “...because ‘Tight Lines!’ always seems to be such a silly expression,” she was saying, “and I do think that ‘Happy Landings’ would be much more suitable, because the line might be tight for a minute but you still might lose the fish, but if it were landed safely in the boat, you’d be sure to bring it in with you, but perhaps the Air Force thought of it first...”

  The General winced.

  For the hundredth time he regretted the impulse which had induced him to bring Ethel with him on his annual holiday to the little fishing hotel in the Welsh village of Aberllyn. From the first, her behaviour had proved almost unbearably embarrassing. Every morning she insisted on walking with him to the boat at the head of the lake, and waved him off with a red silk parasol. She inquired, in the ghillie’s hearing, whether he was wearing enough underclothing, and had once made him retire behind a wall to put on the ribbed bodybelt he had forgotten. And every evening she was waiting for his return to greet him with false gaiety, or to overwhelm him with undeserved praise.

  As soon as she saw him now, she broke off her conversation, a proceeding which entailed no difficulty since it was always so pointless, and bustled towards him.

  Her grey hair was cut in a thin fringe across a low forehead, and she wore a girlishly colourful Viennese frock singularly ill-suited to her horsy features and forty-eight years.

  “Any luck, dear?” she gushed, then, without appearing to notice the impatient shake of his head: “Mr. Gunn and I have been having a most interesting talk about huntin’ and fishin’ and shootin’ – at least, we hadn’t got to the shootin’ yet, had we?”

  General Haddox glanced at the loose-limbed, tousle-haired young man whose expression seemed clearly to indicate that where she was concerned he infinitely regretted the omission, and asked the inevitable question of the day.

  “Do any good today?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir,” replied Gunn. “Just a few brownies that the ghillie made me put back because they were under the pound. That ghillie has very large ideas, I can tell you. But Mr. Pindar hooked a salmon, and I shot a few hundred yards of film when he was playing it, so the day wasn’t entirely wasted.”

  “Did he, by Jove?” The General was suitably impressed. “I’ve been looking for salmon all day and never even saw one. Where did you get him?” he asked, turning to the bronzed, good-looking man who was standing with his arm linked through his wife’s.

  “Well, I didn’t get him at all as it happens.” he replied. “I hooked him by accident off the black rocks at the end of the lake on a ten-foot-six trout rod – Hardy’s ‘Perfection’, if you know the type – and a 3x cast.”

  “That would give you a bit of fun,” nodded the General.

  “It did. He made a swirl as big as a clothes-basket, and led me a hell of a dance for an hour and twenty minutes, then he broke me. I’m not feeling too pleased with myself, I can tell you. But we had no gaff, so I had to try and play him to a standstill.”

  “Hard luck!” said the General. “If your cast had been heavier you might have brought him in. I remember once –”

  They were interrupted by a squeal from Miss Haddox.

  “Oh, Courtney! Are these your fish? Why, they’re four beauties, and all speckled. They’re quite the nicest fish I’ve seen this evening. The others have such ugly jaws and look so black, but these are a lovely colour, all golden brown. And you said you hadn’t caught any. You naughty boy! My brother’s so modest,” she said, as she beamed at the little circle of people.

  The purplish tinge on the General’s face became almost royal in tone as she thus drew attention to the four brown trout which he, as a man who fished exclusively for salmon, should, by all the unwritten laws of fishing, have left in the lake.

  “Had to kill ’em. Swallowed the hook,” he murmured brokenly. “Don’t put them down here; give them to the cat,” he said sharply to the ghillie, who touched his cap with one sympathetic hand while he removed the offending brown trout with the other.

  The uncomfortable silence which followed was broken as the hall door swung open to admit Claude Weston, the youngest of all the visitors at present in the hotel. He threw his fishing bag on to the floor, regardless of a protesting rattle from his reel, flung his young, graceful body into a chair, and puffed out a weary sigh.

  “God, I’m tired!” he exclaimed, running a slender hand over his coppe
r-coloured hair.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Gunn. “No fish?”

  Claude’s gesture indicated despairing assent.

  “My father is bringing in a few miserable corpses,” he said. “He is also,” he added as an afterthought, “bringing in Mrs. Mumsby. She seems to have had all the luck.”

  “Did Major Jeans do any good on the upper lake?” asked General Haddox, addressing no one in particular.

  “I don’t think he’s in yet,” replied Mr. Pindar, “but I should call it a miracle if he brought much out of that little mountain lake today. The light was too bright.”

  “I like it a bit bright myself,” returned the General, “but then I only fish for salmon. The trouble today was that there wasn’t enough wind.”

  A tall, thin man, wearing the dark pin-stripe suit which betokened a recent arrival to the hotel, joined them.

  His skin was pink, his hair and moustache fair, the latter stained brown at the straight-clipped edge with nicotine, and matched by the skin between the first and second fingers of his left hand. His eyes, of a mild blue, regarded the fish with an interested and experienced look as he bent down to examine them more closely. In return, the eyes of the visitors expressed the curiosity which the fish were past feeling.

  “What did you do today?”

  It was Mr. Pindar who asked the superfluous question.