In At The Death Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Francis Duncan

  Title Page

  1. The Chief Inspector Collects His Bag

  2. The Body is on View

  3. The Lady is Troubled

  4. Dead Man’s Effects

  5. Home is the Sailor

  6. The Alibi Seems Complete

  7. The Chief Constable Presides

  8. Hint of a Secret Romance

  9. Disturbing Incident by Night

  10. The Lady Receives a Legacy

  11. The Prowler Vanishes

  12. Panic on a Cliff

  13. The Chief Constable Disapproves

  14. The Atmosphere Tends to Improve

  15. The Lady is Indignant

  16. Afternoon Call

  17. Explanation for an Alibi

  18. Coffee with Confidences

  19. The Lady Has Something to Hide

  20. The Chief Constable Goes Out to Tea

  21. Epilogue to Murder

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Mordecai Tremaine and Chief Inspector Jonathan Boyce are never pleased to have a promising game of chess interrupted – though when murder is the disrupting force, they are persuaded to make an exception.

  A quick stop at Scotland Yard to collect any detective’s most trusted piece of equipment – the murder bag – the pair are spirited away to Bridgton.

  No sooner have they arrived than it becomes clear that the city harbours more than its fair share of passions and motives…and one question echoes loudly throughout the cobbled streets: why did Dr Hardene, the local GP of impeccable reputation, bring a revolver with him on a routine visit to a patient?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Francis Duncan is the pseudonym for William Underhill, who was born in 1918. He lived virtually all his life in Bristol and was a ‘scholarship boy’ boarder at Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital school. Due to family circumstances he was unable to go to university and started work in the Housing Department of Bristol City Council. Writing was always important to him and very early on he published articles in newspapers and magazines. His first detective story was published in 1936.

  In 1938 he married Sylvia Henly. Although a conscientious objector, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in World War II, landing in France shortly after D-Day. After the war he trained as a teacher and spent the rest of his life in education, first as a primary school teacher and then as a lecturer in a college of further education. In the 1950s he studied for an external economics degree from London University. No mean feat with a family to support; his daughter, Kathryn, was born in 1943 and his son, Derek, in 1949.

  Throughout much of this time he continued to write detective fiction from ‘sheer inner necessity’, but also to supplement a modest income. He enjoyed foreign travel, particularly to France, and took up golf on retirement. He died of a heart attack shortly after celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1988.

  ALSO BY FRANCIS DUNCAN IN THE MORDECAI TREMAINE SERIES

  Murder Has a Motive

  Murder for Christmas

  So Pretty a Problem

  Behold a Fair Woman

  1

  THE CHIEF INSPECTOR COLLECTS HIS BAG

  IT WAS HALF past ten in the evening. Chief Inspector Jonathan Boyce, of Scotland Yard, was playing chess with Mordecai Tremaine; and a hundred and twenty miles away in the city of Bridgton a fledgling constable was discovering his first body.

  The Bridgton authorities were commendably prompt in deciding that it was more than a local affair. It is true that two unsolved murders in the area in less than six months may have developed in the Chief Constable a certain sensitivity to criticism; but whatever the reason the chess game was still in progress when the telephone rang in Mordecai Tremaine’s flat.

  Chief Inspector Boyce paused in the act of removing a bishop from the impudent threat of one of his companion’s foraging pawns.

  ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘that I had a feeling in my bones.’

  Mordecai Tremaine’s outstretched hand lifted the receiver to cut short the telephone’s insistent clamour. He said into the instrument:

  ‘Yes, he’s here. I’ll tell him.’

  Jonathan Boyce was already on his feet. Mordecai Tremaine waited expectantly. Behind the pince-nez that seemed, as always, to be sliding to disaster, his eyes were bright and yet oddly shadowed with doubt.

  After a moment or two the receiver went back. Boyce said:

  ‘All right, Mordecai. This is it.’

  Tremaine swallowed hard. He looked like a small boy who had been waiting eagerly in the pavilion for his turn to bat in the school eleven, and who, now that the testing time was upon him, found his stomach beset by butterflies.

  ‘Where?’ he said, trying to keep his voice steady.

  ‘Bridgton. We’ll get the details at the Yard. They’re sending a patrol car to pick us up.’

  There was a brusqueness in Boyce’s manner that had not been there before the telephone had interrupted what had been a promising game of chess. He was the policeman now, engaged already, as far as his mind was concerned, upon his official duties. But there was, nevertheless, affection in the grey eyes regarding his companion from under the wiry eyebrows.

  ‘You’re sure, Mordecai,’ he said, ‘you’re sure you want to go through with it?’

  ‘Yes, Jonathan,’ Tremaine said quietly, ‘I want to go through with it.’

  He knew what had prompted the remark. Boyce understood him. Understood the romantic and sentimental side of his nature that went with his enthusiasm for crime detection. Understood how the fascination of the chase was succeeded by a black despair when the end came.

  Maybe that was the way Boyce himself felt, although he was careful to betray no sign of it. For after all you couldn’t hunt murderers without paying the penalty in torture of the soul. You couldn’t hide from the fact that when you’d unravelled the problem that had been intriguing your mind it was a creature of flesh and blood whom you were delivering to judgment.

  In the patrol car that carried him through the dark streets towards Scotland Yard Tremaine leaned back against the leather upholstery and tried to find out whether he was certain that he wanted to go through with it. He was still trying to make up his mind when Jonathan Boyce came back under the archway at the Yard entrance with Sergeant Witham at his side carrying the murder bag.

  The murder bag! A thrill of excitement competed with his doubts. This was the outward sign, the visible proof that he was engaged upon the hunt.

  Somehow the sight of it resolved his fears. It emphasized the fact that he was a privileged spectator; that he was being given the opportunity of seeing what he had long desired—a murder case from the inside.

  As Boyce climbed back into the car with his sergeant Tremaine’s eyes remained fixed upon that prosaic-looking bag, which was by no means as ordinary as it seemed. There was always a murder bag packed and ready at the Yard available for just such an emergency as this when the next officer for duty on the rota of senior investigators should be called upon, at a moment’s notice, wherever he might be, to take up a new trail of murder.

  Each bag contained everything likely to be of assistance in the investigation. Tape measure, magnifying glass, dusting powder for finger-prints, scissors, tweezers, rubber gloves—the whole paraphernalia of what might be termed the first-aid equipment of detection made up its contents.

  It was the first time Tremaine had seen a murder bag at such close quarters, but it was not because he was a stranger to murder. He had been early upon the scene on more than one occasion when murder had been committed; Jonathan Boyce had, indeed, once described him as a m
urder-magnet, and the Press had been quick to give him a reputation as a solver of mysteries.

  The thought of that reputation sometimes made him quiver, for he knew his limitations, but it undoubtedly had its uses. For instance, it had been the means of persuading the Commissioner when Jonathan Boyce had asked that august gentleman whether Mordecai Tremaine might accompany him on his next case.

  It was not the Commissioner’s usual practice to allow members of the public to go into partnership with those of his senior officers who were on the murder rota; elderly retired tobacconists, no matter how great their enthusiasm for crime detection, were not as a rule encouraged to go gallivanting into things that didn’t concern them.

  It had been an achievement, therefore, to have obtained the right to be sitting here in a patrol car bearing one of those senior officers and his sergeant upon the first stage of a murder enquiry.

  There was no question, of course, of any publicity; the Commissioner’s blessing had not extended to newspaper headlines and a departure with trumpets. Mordecai Tremaine was expected to observe a decent humility, and to do nothing to encourage criticism of Scotland Yard.

  But a steady softening-up campaign on the part of Chief Inspector Boyce, during which he had poured praise of Tremaine into the Commissioner’s ear; and a dinner for two during which Tremaine had made a satisfying personal contact with the great man himself, had produced results. The Commissioner, agreeably surprised and not a little amused, to find that the amateur detective about whom the usually taciturn Boyce had become almost lyrical, was indeed the benevolent-looking and talkative elderly gentleman the newspaper reports had presented him to be, had agreed that the next time the Chief Inspector was required to make a sudden journey with the murder bag, Tremaine should go unobtrusively with him in the role of unofficial observer. From such a quarter, he had evidently told himself, no harm could come.

  Besides, in the communicative mellowness induced by a fine old after-dinner port, the Commissioner had become aware of Mordecai Tremaine’s sentimental soul and of his weakness for Romantic Stories. It had lured him into confessing that he, too, was a reader of the heart-stirring fiction supplied by that soothingly unsophisticated magazine—at least as often as he could seize upon a copy unobserved.

  Tremaine had wondered since—a little uncomfortably—whether the permission he had been granted was a reflection of the uneasiness in the Commissioner’s mind when he had awakened in the cold light of the following morning to the realization of just how much he had bared his heart. Had it possessed, he had asked himself, anything of the nature of a bribe?

  It was understandable that the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis should experience a certain reluctance to have his taste for romantic literature revealed to the world; was there an implied bargain, an expectation that consent should beget silence?

  Each time the thought had come Tremaine had dismissed it hastily. The bond of sympathy between fellow readers of Romantic Stories placed them above such unworthy considerations.

  He glanced out of the window of the car and saw that they were swinging left out of the Edgware Road into the darkness of Praed Street. A few more moments and they had halted outside the grey bulk of Paddington Station.

  Boyce glanced at his watch.

  ‘We’ve made it nicely. Come on, Mordecai. They’re holding the train for us for a few minutes.’

  Hurrying down the platform along the length of the crowded train, doors closed now and evidently on the point of departure, Tremaine felt importance welling up inside him. He was towering above all these quite ordinary midgets who were bestowing curious glances upon the little procession of which he was a part.

  But later, as he was half-dozing in one corner of the compartment as the train rattled and tore its way through the night, the illusion fell away from him. Once more he was a very unheroic mortal, tortured by doubts.

  Murder. You could read about it and discuss it with a certain sense of exhilaration, savouring the problems it presented, studying and dissecting the characters of murderer and victim; you could find in it an absorbing interest.

  It was when you came up against the thing in its actuality that its atmosphere changed; that from being a fascinating problem to intrigue the brain it turned into a dreadful darkness in which your mind was squeezed in a dry, numbing horror.

  What were they going to find at Bridgton? What kind of personality, what hopes and fears and desires had lain behind the inanimate assembly of blood and bone, flesh and muscle, that was awaiting them at the end of this swaying, unreal journey through empty countryside and sleeping towns in which only the street lights spoke of humanity?

  He had never stayed in the city although he had passed through it several times when he had been travelling to Wales or the north-west. He remembered it as a pleasant enough place, sprawling, after the manner of all industrial areas, but with the goods yards and smoking chimneys relieved by the hills upon which it stood, and by the river that brought the romance of the sea into its heart.

  He knew it, too, as the home of the sturdy and independent merchant venturers who had sent their argosies across the world in days when men had believed that unknown terrors lay in the western seas. And he knew it, also, his thoughts ran irrelevantly, as the scene of two unsolved murders that had, not long ago, held the headlines for a day or two and then been forgotten.

  Two murders. He struggled to recall what he had read, but his mind would take him no further. He was left only with frustration and depression.

  He opened his eyes and peered resentfully at Jonathan Boyce’s stocky form, stretched comfortably on the opposite seat; at the winking glow of Sergeant Witham’s pipe reflected in the window just beyond that impassive individual’s peacefully reclining head. Confound them both! Didn’t they have any feelings? Were they so little moved by the gravity of the business upon which they were engaged that they could sit thus calmly, speaking no word?

  He knew, even as the thoughts tumbled through his feverish mind, that he was being unfair. Witham might be a stranger to him, but Jonathan Boyce he knew well enough. It was not because he was cold-bloodedly unconcerned that Jonathan was silent. It was not because this was only one of many similar journeys he had made, so that he had come to regard such things as routine.

  If Jonathan had said no word of the errand upon which they were bent it was because that was the way he worked. He would discuss nothing until he had arrived upon the scene and could see for himself with all the facts available to his hand. He would take no risk of a chance remark or a theory evolved out of insufficient evidence remaining in his mind to lead him subtly astray when he came to examine his witnesses and begin the inevitable probing.

  It was fatal to start an investigation with a preconceived idea; however much one might conscientiously try to push it aside, it would persist insidiously—and sometimes obstinately—in holding the foreground. And all kinds of apparently solid facts would build themselves upon it to point in the wrong direction and perhaps allow the real criminal to escape in the confusion of thought.

  Tremaine closed his eyes again and did his best to allow the rhythmic pattern of the train’s passing to lull him into sleep. There was nothing to be gained by fretting his nerves to ribbons. He was committed now and he would soon find out what was in store for him.

  2

  THE BODY IS ON VIEW

  BRIDGTON, IN THE early hours of the morning and with a chill wind searching along the deserted streets and invading the station platform, was uninviting. Tremaine shivered as he followed his companions past the ticket barrier. The romantic exhilaration of Paddington had quite gone. He felt stiff, and begrimed with travel; he knew that he was beginning to show that he needed a shave.

  There was a car waiting just beyond the station entrance. A smooth black polish about it would have labelled it as a police car even if the uniformed constable had not been at the wheel to confirm it.

  A burly figure detached itself from the car and moved across
the pavement.

  ‘Chief Inspector Boyce?’ The voice was low, but firm with confidence. At Boyce’s affirmative nod: ‘Good morning, sir. Glad to see you. My name’s Parkin. Local inspector.’

  There were quick introductions. Boyce drew Tremaine forward.

  ‘This gentleman is Mr. Tremaine—Mordecai Tremaine.’

  Inspector Parkin’s eyes had already taken in, not without a flicker of surprise, the third member of the group, so obviously not the Scotland Yard stamp. He said:

  ‘Mr. Tremaine? Not—–?’

  ‘Yes,’ Boyce said. ‘The Mordecai Tremaine.’ Apart from the one slight emphasis his voice was expressionless. ‘He’ll be working with me—with the Commissioner’s approval but unofficially, of course.’

  ‘Quite so, sir,’ Inspector Parkin returned briskly. ‘Chief Constable sends his compliments,’ he added. ‘Thought you might like to go straight to the spot. Probably find him still there.’

  Boyce’s wiry eyebrows went up fractionally. If the Chief Constable was still on the scene of the crime it looked as though he had been making a night of it. Coupled with the speed with which the Yard had been contacted it was significant. Somebody, evidently, had ideas that this wasn’t any ordinary affair.

  ‘What’s the set-up?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t have time for any details before we came away. Chap named Hardene, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right, sir. Doctor Hardene. Doctor Graham Hardene.’

  ‘Big noise locally?’

  ‘Not exactly that. Good practice—among the right people. But nothing sensational.’ Inspector Parkin stole a brief glance at his companion. ‘Got to be a politician to make the headlines in these days—even in the provinces.’

  In the gloom he saw the curving smile that came and went in Jonathan Boyce’s face and he settled back with an inward relief. He thought it was going to be all right. This chap was human; they ought to be able to work together without the hullabaloo that sometimes happened when the Yard’s temperamental prima donnas came down lording it over the local men.