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“The trouble with being known as a writer of detective novels, is that people start to bring you mysteries. But I suppose you have to face something similar?”
“Makes one feel like a performin’ dog.”
“More like an actor playing Hamlet. Who’s just discovered the production has added in a tightrope-walking scene.”
“I take it such a scene was added in to your lecture today?”
“Afterwards, not during.”
“Sorry, didn’t mean to suggest they’d interrupt the proceedings. Was it the ‘I’ve got a stunning idea for a plot, you write it and we’ll split the proceeds’ type, or ‘only you can stop a grave injustice?’”
“The latter. With an additional suggestion that I of all people ought to sympathize with a woman wrongly accused of murder.”
“Well, let’s hear it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to propose marriage to her.”
“I fancy the young woman who brought me the problem might kill you if you did.”
“Ah.”
“Very earnest-seeming creature. Sylvia…something to do with Treasure Island. Sylvia Gunn? No, that’s a silly name. Ben. Sylvia Benn. Of course, one might want to save a friend or even a passing acquaintance from the gallows purely on principle. Or she might just be a very accomplished actress, and might have invented the whole thing to wind me up. I did note down the names and dates, though, so we can easily find out if it’s a real case. Right now I’m too comfortable to get up and fetch them, but the place is called Merlyn Coppice, or something, and the house is called Jacey End.
A man named—oh let’s call him Brown, for now—bought it seven or eight years back, lived there with his grown daughter. No other family except for a nephew who came to stay pretty often. Brown’s supposed to have been pretty well-fixed, but stingy. He’s the murder-victim, if you hadn’t already guessed.”
“I’d surmised something of the sort from your use of the past tense. And his daughter’s the accused? Since she’s the only woman in the case so far.”
“Yes, though there’s also a housekeeper. No maids.”
“The late Mr. Brown earned his reputation.”
“So it would seem. There was also a gardener, though. He’s dead as of last week, and much rests upon whether or not he was the second victim. You see, Miss Brown had already been arrested by then, and couldn’t have been the one to do him in. If he was. Sylvia Benn thinks he was—but I’m getting ahead of the story.
So, the murder happens on a Saturday. Brown’s been in his study since just after breakfast. The nephew’s down for the weekend. He’s an amateur photographer—”
“A talented one, like Bunter? Or just a kodak fiend?”
“Talented. Or at least he knows about cameras more complicated than a Brownie. He sets up his up on the back lawn mid-morning. The daughter, Miss Benn’s friend, is one of those health nuts, lots of yoga and sunbathing on the lawn. She goes out to the summer-house to do her yoga before lunch.
Just after noon, the housekeeper hears a shot from the study and goes to the door, but it’s locked. Don’t quirk your left eyebrow like that, darling, this isn’t that kind of mystery: Brown’s study is on the ground floor with the window open. I’m sorry, I can’t keep calling him Brown. I shall have to get my notebook—in a moment. Mm…”
“Now where was I?”
“A gunshot had just rung out from Brown’s study. So far, so Edgar Wallace.”
“Right. Now, let’s see…the Brown family is really named Maskelyne. The housekeeper gets the nephew—Trevor Maskelyne—he being closer to hand—who climbs in the window and finds his uncle slumped at his desk, shot in the back of the head. Young Maskelyne then unlocks the door to the hallway and tells the housekeeper to ring for the police while he runs to the summerhouse and gets his cousin.”
“Where was the gardener, in all this?”
“It was his day off.”
“By the way, I had much more sympathy for Maskelyne when he was plain Mr. Brown.”
“Me too. Anyway, everybody gives their statements to the police, and Miss Maskelyne says she’d been in the summer-house holding poses the whole time. No witnesses to back her up; but a weak alibi’s hardly damning in itself, and if the police think a midday break-in by a passing murderer sounds unlikely, they don’t say anything.
Then, a few days later, nephew Brown comes to them, saying he hadn’t wanted to get his cousin in any trouble at the time, and likely there’s some innocent explanation for it all, but having given the matter careful thought—”
“He’d decided to tattle on Miss Brown?”
“He had. And he does so. Says he’d been looking through his camera a few minutes before the gunshot, and saw her walking back to the house.”
“I don’t suppose even the village constabulary brings a charge of murder just because Trevor Maskelyne contradicts Miss Maskelyne’s statement. After all, he was contradictin’ his own from earlier.”
“He brought a photo he’d snapped when he saw her through his camera. Of course he had no reason to suspect anything at the time. Says he just thought it’d make a good candid shot.
Miss Maskelyne stuck to her story, and still does, but can’t explain the photo. And she used to have pretty frequent rows with her father. She’d crab about her allowance and he’d disapprove of her friends, round and round we go. Now, the preliminary inquiries found Maskelyne had been shot with his own gun that he kept in the desk drawer.”
“Prints wiped off?”
“Of course, and the gun neatly returned to its drawer.”
“So, who’d known Maskelyne kept it there?”
“Pretty much everybody. The daughter might well have the best motive, of course. But the whole case against her really rests on the photo giving the lie to her statement about being in the summerhouse; and if it were faked, it condemns the nephew. The gardener’s supposed to have thought there was something funny about the picture too. Oh yes, he died the day before the inquest—fumigating the greenhouse with something lethal—hydrogen cyanide most likely—and got a fatal dose of it himself.”
“Where is this famous photo? Can we have a look at it?”
The photo had, of course, been turned over as evidence by Trevor Maskelyne. The local press had run it on the front page. Papers with a larger circulation had determined the murder of a middle-class, middle-aged man of no particular celebrity to be column-filler at most. They had, however, included the photo, as there was little to the story without it. In the translation to newsprint, it had become a mere blurry image of a tall lank girl clad in beach pajamas.
“Crossing stage-left-to-stage-right, with a sub-palladian pile in the middle distance. Miss Maskelyne, apparently doubling back from the summerhouse just after noon, as evidenced from the shadows on the ground.”
“Wait—how do we know the photo was taken on the day of the murder?”
The transcripts of the coroner’s inquest into the death of Mr. H. C. Maskelyne (AKA Brown) do not mention the audience at the proceedings; or the odour of dust, perspiration and starched collars wilting in the heat of a stuffy village hall on a summer’s day. Nevertheless, something comes across of the suppressed excitement of the witnesses finally living a cherished dream of presenting testimony:
This is your late employer’s daughter in the photo?
Yes.
The photo shows her walking back to the house on the day of the murder?
Yes, I suppose.
What do you mean, you suppose?
Well, Miss Winnifred is carrying her new mascot in the photo, that she got the day before the murder. And she didn’t go out in the days after the murder, and so this photo must have been taken on the day.
Is there any doubt in your mind about that?
(pause) No, no.
Yet you had to think about it just then?
I just don’t want to say anything wrong.
Mrs. Sydney there’s no need for you to be afraid. If you can think of anything, any little detail niggling at your mind, then it’s important you tell us.
It’s nothing. I just thought the way she was holding the toy dog looked funny, but now I can’t see anything wrong with it. It must’ve just been in my mind.
“So, the ubiquitous Cousin Trevor had given Miss Maskelyne a stuffed toy dog for her birthday the night before. Undignified sort of present for a grown woman.”
“One of those mascots that came into fashion a few years ago, I’m guessing.”
“Well, I suppose it’d be quieter than a real lapdog, and about as mobile. Why couldn’t she just wear one of those fox furs with the head still on? Oh right— Maskelyne père would’ve griped at the expense.”
“Also I think the yoga types look askance on those sorts of worldly gewgaws—I agree with them on that point. Not exactly in the best of taste. Anyway, she’s got it with her in the photo. Everything in this affair seems to lead back to the cousin.”
“It does seem as though he might have set it all up. The estate’s not entailed, I take it?”
“Correct. No titles in the Maskelyne family, and since the land was purchased, not hereditary…”
“Simply being the nearest male relative doesn’t net him the boodle; assuming he is a greedy rotter who bumped off his uncle, he’d need to get his cousin out of the way as well. Vindication for the rights of women.”
“The photo and the negative, according to Miss Benn, have been examined for evidence of fakery, and none found.”
“None found so far. I think we ought to bring Bunter in one this one. Photography’s his game. And he’ll expect a bit of notice, if we’re all to drive down to Merlin Coppice first thing tomorrow. Now, if the housekeeper’s still alive, do we think that means the gardener came closer to figuring it out?”
It’s easy enough to get access to a case when one is a Lord and a renowned detective and one’s wife is a renowned mystery novelist and one’s brother-in-law is a Scotland Yard inspector, and by the following day Harriet, her husband, and Mr. Bunter were gathered over the photograph, watched respectfully by Merlin Coppice’s Chief Constable.
It showed a sharper version of the image the papers had run. The tall, lanky Miss Maskelyne carried her toy schnauzer—here obviously made of felt and buttons, not flesh and blood—in the crook of her arm. Her strong profile was not unhandsome, but as far as expression went, it was unreadable.
Behind her lay the house-front and the shrubberies before it, stark under sunlight rendered without colour, almost uncomfortably symmetrical. The most skilled Persian weavers will deliberately incorporate a tiny flaw in each rug, because perfection is the providence of Allah alone. The architect of Jacey End, and that of its gardens, had had no such humility.
Sylvia Benn was light-haired and sort of squashed-looking. Her eyes were almond-shaped, almond green in colour, and formed her most attractive feature. As soon as initial pleasantries were done with, she asserted that anyone who believed Winnifred Maskelyne could be a murderess either didn’t know Winnifred, or just wanted a scapegoat and was too biased and lazy to look any further into the matter.
She wouldn’t say old Nubby, the gardener, had particularly cared for Winnifred, or for any of the household; but then Nubby hadn’t particularly cared for anybody. Plants had been his people—if he could’ve married a rose-bush, he’d have done.
“A lay-botanist, as it were.”
Miss Benn supposed Nubby might have kept on at his job, even with his employer dead and Winnifred under arrest and everything up in the air. He was that dedicated. No, she didn’t know whether Nubby’d often fumigated the greenhouse, or what chemicals he’d used, but Accidental Death? Nubby’d been an expert, he wouldn’t have gone poisoning himself by mistake. There was something funny going on, and they couldn’t pin this one on Winnifred.
“Does Miss Maskelyne wear a wrist-watch?”
Of course Winnifred wore a wrist-watch. Didn’t every girl?
“But I suppose she takes it off when swimming, for instance. What about when she does her yoga thingummies?”
Winnifred did take it off for that; it wasn’t conducive to meditation. Winnifred was frightfully keen on meditation. As previously stated, she wasn’t capable of murdering anybody, much less her own father.
“One last strange question—you’ve been very patient, Miss Benn, with my nonsense—is Miss Maskelyne left-handed?”
Winnifred was not left-handed. Why, what had that to do with anything?
“What did you think of Miss Benn’s observations?”
“Well, I’d hardly call her unbiased. But I’m inclined to suspect Trevor rather than Winnifred Maskelyne. The business of waiting a few days to pull out the photograph. Give her just enough time to give her account, then the rug-pull.”
“He would have needed a day at least to go home, go to his darkroom and develop the photo, even if he didn’t—oh. You think he flipped the image, somehow, and counted on the symmetry of the house and the garden…That’s why you asked if she were left-handed.”
“It was very faint—we couldn’t see it at all in the newspaper version—but in the photograph Trevor Maskelyne presented as evidence against his cousin, there’s a tan line on her left wrist from a watch strap.”
“And she’d’ve been carrying the dog under the wrong arm. That’s why the housekeeper wavered; she could tell something just wasn’t right.”
“Rum thing, the way your eyes—or your subconscious, don’t know which—can just tell when something doesn’t match up to known reality, but can’t say what it is.”
“Curious incident of the dog in the arm. Will it wash, though? She might just have happened to use the opposite arm that day. Perhaps her elbow hurt from tennis. That leaves us the tan line on her wrist, and it’s awfully faint.”
“I’d certainly prefer to have more evidence. Bunter, could Trevor Maskelyne have flipped the photograph in the developing room?”
“Not without the ruse being easily discovered, my lord. That is, I presume he had to present the police with the film negatives along with the proof, or else raise their suspicions.”
“There’s no way he could have done it at the time he snapped the photo? With mirrors, or something?”
“With all due respect my lord, it would greatly help if I could examine the photograph again, alongside the negatives.”
“And so you shall.”
“Might I trouble your lordship for the loan of your magnifying lens?”
“Certainly. I say, Bunter, you look rather good with a monocle.”
“It seemed to me, my lord, that the images were somewhat more blurred than I would have expected. It might, of course, be a reflectiion on Mr. Maskelyne’s skill with the camera; but another possibility occurred to me, and indeed upon closer examination of the print, I believe the original roll of film was developed and printed with the images reversed. These reversed prints were then re-photographed to create a second roll of negatives that matched the altered images, and it was this roll that Mr. Maskelyne presented to the police as the one he’d used the day of the murder.”
“Well, I’d take your word for it, Bunter; you’re as expert a witness as I’ve ever seen. But will a jury, none of whom have seen the dedication with which you pull a shutter, believe it? Harriet, what do you think?”
“I’m still wondering what poor old Nubby saw in the image.”
“Well, darling, you’re the novelist. Try to imagine yourself in the place of an old gardener, in tune with the leaves and branches.”
“It doesn’t always work that way, but I shall give it a whirl.”
“In the meantime, we might still be able to link Maskelyne to Nubby’s accident in the green-house. Hang on, don’t they use cyanide in darkrooms?”
“They did in the wet-plate collodion process, my lord; but it’s seldom used today.”
“The leaves and branches.”
“Eh what?”
“Nubby trimmed those shrubberies, with a degree of mathematical accuracy I can’t begin to imagine. But if he knew the shrubs individually, maybe he could tell they didn’t look quite right in the photo. Except that brings us back to trying to prove it. After all, Trevor Maskelyne could just as easily have flipped every picture on the roll when he printed them out for re-photography.”
“Let’s hope he was just a little lazier than we are.”
“If only the photographic prints were larger. It’s hard to compare the fine details at this scale, but the time it’d take to prepare slides and enlarge—hold, wait a bit—I’ve a faint childhood memory of a kind of magic lantern that didn’t need slides. You could put anything inside it—well, anything that was small enough to fit, and wouldn’t melt or catch alight from the gas-bracket—and project it on a bedsheet, larger than life. Upside-down, unless it was something you could place in the lantern upside-down to begin with, so it’d be right way up when projected. Either of you ever hear of this kind of thing, or was it just some fever-dream?”
“No, you’re right. I think we built one at school, to demonstrate something about optics.”
“If I might interrupt your ladyship—the projector you describe exists. It operates in the same principle as a camera, but reversed.”
“Can we get one? Or make one out of a biscuit-tin, or something?”
“Planning to keep it as a fresco? No, no, don’t start with the technical details on how a fresco has to be done while the plaster’s still fresh, I know your tricks.”
“Parker, you are here as a witness, along with Merlin Coppice’s chief constable. The image of Jayce End projected upon the wall right now was taken the morning of the eleventh by Trevor Maskelyne. My man Bunter and my good lady wife, as you can see, are tracing the outlines of the house-front and the shrubberies.”I
(Crashing of stepladders and yardsticks, and occasional cursing from his Lordship, omitted here for the sake of the readers’ patience)
“All right, now this image is the same house, taken on the same day, also by Trevor Maskelyne. Let’s see if we can line ‘er up.”
(Minor difficulty with the lamp-cord—gas having given way to electric light in the time since the instructions for the magic lantern were first published—omitted for the same reason)
“There. There it is. The shrubberies are all the exact same height—but the one on the left—I mean on the right, when the image is the proper way ‘round—by the corner of the house, is just a bit wider.”
“Nubby must’ve had a good eye. It’s hardly seven-eighths of an inch difference, even after you blew to photograph up.”
“It’ll be a couple of inches, in reality. Your men can go to Jayce End with a measuring-tape and confirm it. Ought to be enough to damage the case against Winnifred Maskelyne, at any rate, and to justify an investigation of Trevor Maskelyne—mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.”