Dead Mrs Stratton (Jumping Jenny) rs-9 Read online

  Dead Mrs Stratton (Jumping Jenny)

  ( Roger Sheringham - 9 )

  Anthony Berkeley

  CONCERNING ROGER SHERINGHAM

  ROGER SHERINGHAM was born in 1891, in a small English provincial town near London where his father practised as a doctor; Roger therefore grew up in a familiar atmosphere of drugs and medical talk. He was an only child, and was educated in the usual English way for the sons of professional men; that is to say, he went first to a local day school, then at the age of ten as a boarder to a preparatory school, in Surrey; then at fourteen he won a small scholarship at one of the ancient smaller public schools which despise Eton and Harrow just as thoroughly as Eton and Harrow ignore them; and finally, in 1910, he went up to Merton College, Oxford, where he failed to win a scholarship. At Oxford he read classics and history, and took a second class in each, but distinguished himself more conspicuously by winning his blue in his last year for golf; he played rugby football for his college, but did not shine at it, and he lazed most of his summer terms away in a punt on the Cherwell. He was just able to take his degree before the war shut Oxford down like an extinguisher.

  Roger served from 1914 to 1918 in a sound line regiment, was wounded twice, not very seriously, and though recommended twice for the Military Cross and once for the D.S.O. was awarded nothing, which privately annoyed him a good deal.

  After the war he spent a couple of years trying to find out what nature had intended him to do in life; and it was only after spasmodic interludes as a schoolmaster, in business, and even as a chicken farmer, that by the merest chance he bought some pens, some ink, and some paper, and at enormous speed dashed off a novel. To his extreme surprise the novel jumped straight into the best - selling ranks both in England and America, and Roger had found his vocation. He exchanged his pens for a typewriter, engaged a secretary, and got down to it. He was always careful to treat his writing as a business and nothing else. Privately he had quite a poor opinion of his own books, combined with a horror of ever becoming like some of the people with whom his new work brought him into contact: authors who take their own work with such deadly seriousness, talk about it all the time, and consider themselves geniuses beside whom Wells and Kipling and Sinclair Lewis are just amateurs. For this reason he was always careful to keep his hobbies well in the front of his mind; and his chief hobby was criminology, which appealed not only to his sense of the dramatic but to his feeling for character.

  It had never occurred to him that he himself might have any gifts as a detective, though a love of puzzles of all kinds had been handed down to him by his father; so that when on a visit to a country house called Layton Court in 1924 his host was discovered one morning dead in his library, in circumstances pointing to suicide, it did not occur to Roger at once to make any investigations on his own account. It was only when certain points struck him as curious that his inquisitive nature asserted itself. The same thing happened at a town called Wychford, which was in a ferment over the arrest of the French wife of one of its leading citizens on a charge of poisoning her husband. The woman and her husband were both complete strangers to him, but Roger on the evidence in the newspapers decided that she was innocent, and really more for his own gratification than anything else set out to prove it. This case brought him the recognition of Scotland Yard and a certain amount of publicity; with the result that his hobby developed and he was soon in a position to take an active part in any case which interested him.

  Just as Roger - the - novelist had determined to avoid becoming like the worse specimens of that profession, so Roger - the - detective was anxious not to resemble the usual pompous and irritating detective of fiction - or rather, one should say, of the fiction at the time when he began his career, for the fashion in detectives has since altered considerably. He knew that he could never pose as one of the hatchet - faced, tight - lipped, hawk - eyed lot, while his natural loquaciousness would prevent him from ever being inscrutable. As a result he went perhaps too far to the other extreme and erred on the side of breeziness.

  In matters of detection Roger Sheringham knows his own limitations. He recognizes that although argument and logical deduction from fact are not beyond him, his faculty for deduction from character is a bigger asset to him; and he knows quite well that he is not infallible. He has, in point of fact, very often been quite wrong. But that never deters him from trying again. For the rest, he has unbounded confidence in himself and is never afraid of taking grave decisions, and often quite illegal ones, when he thinks that pure justice can be served better in this way than by twelve possibly stupid jurymen. Many people like him enormously, and many people are irritated by him beyond endurance; he is quite indifferent to both. Possibly he is a good deal too pleased with himself, but he does not mind that either. Give him his three chief interests in life, and he is perfectly happy - criminology, human nature, and good beer.

  DEAD MRS STRATTON (JUMPING JENNY)

  ANTHONY BERKELEY, 1933

  CHAPTER I

  THE GALLOWS TREE

  FROM the triple gallows three figures swung lazily, one woman and two men.

  Only a gentle creaking of their ropes sounded in the quiet night. A horn lantern, perched above the triangle of the crosspieces, swayed in the slight wind, causing the three shadows to leap and prance on the ground in a grotesque dance of death, like some macabre travesty of a slow - motion film in silhouette.

  "Very nice," said Roger Sheringham.

  "It is rather charming, isn't it?" agreed his host.

  "Two jumping jacks, I see, and one jumping jenny."

  "Jumping jenny?"

  "Doesn't Stevenson in Catriona call them jumping jacks? And I suppose the feminine would be jumping jenny."

  "I suppose it would."

  "Morbid devil, Ronald," Roger said curiously, "aren't you?"

  Ronald Stratton laughed. "Well, I thought at a murderer - and - victim party the least one could have was a gallows. It took me quite a long time to stuff those chaps with straw. Two of my suits, and an old dress dug up from goodness knows where. I may be morbid, but I am conscientious."

  "It's extremely effective," Roger said politely.

  "It is, rather, isn't it? You know, I should hate to be hanged. So very ignominious, to say the least. Really, Roger, I don't think murder's worth it. Well, let's go down and have a drink."

  The two men went towards the door, in a little gable of its own, which led from the big flat roof on which the gallows had been erected into the house. The little gable carrying the door projected at right angles from a larger one, and almost in the angle was a short flight of iron steps leading over the tiles and ending apparently in nothing. The glint of the bright moonlight on the metal caught Roger's eye, and he jerked his head towards it. "What's up there? Not another flat roof?"

  "Yes, a small one. I ran a flat across the top of those two parallel gables. They used to be an awful nuisance when there was any snow or stormy weather. I thought the flat would be rather pleasant as an observation point; one gets a big view from it. But I don't suppose I go up there once a year."

  Roger nodded, and the two passed through the doorway and down the flight of stairs which led from the roof. They crossed the top landing of an ancient well staircase, passed the open door of a very large room full of oak beams and dim corners in the gabled ceiling, where a dozen murderers and murderesses were dancing on a parquet floor to a very modern radio - gramophone, and walked into another room, scarcely less large, at the end of the landing.

  As they stepped into the lighted area, it could be seen that Roger's companion was picturesquely dressed in a black velvet suit and knee breeches; he and his younger brother, Da
vid Stratton, represented the Princes in the Tower. Roger himself, clinging, like most of the men present, to the conventional dinner jacket and black tie, had announced that he was Gentleman George Joseph Smith, of Brides - in - the - Bath fame, who did not know that he ought to have come in a white tie and tails.

  Stratton looked hospitable with bottles. "What will you have?"

  "What have you got?" asked his guest cautiously.

  Roger having been furnished with a tankard of old ale, and his host with a whiskey - and - soda, the two men leaned their backs against the heavy oak crossbeam of the wide open fireplace and, warming themselves pleasantly in the traditional masculine regions, continued to chat lightly upon sudden death.

  Roger did not know Ronald Stratton particularly well. Stratton was something of a dilettante: a man in young middle age, comparatively wealthy, who wrote detective stories because it amused him to do so. His detective stories were efficient, imaginative, and full of a rather gruesome humour. The idea of this party exactly carried out the light - handed treatment of death in his books. There were about a couple of dozen guests, certainly not more, and each one was supposed to represent a well - known murderer or his victim. The idea was not strictly original, but the embellishment of a gallows on the flat roof was, typically so.

  The party was nominally in honour of Roger, who, with half a dozen others, was staying in the house for the week - end; but Roger himself was not at all sure that he was not an excuse rather than a cause.

  Still he was not disposed to worry about that. He liked Stratton, who amused him; and the party, not yet an hour old, promised to be a good one. His eye wandered across the room to a far corner, where an exquisitely polished sofa table, loaded with decanters and glasses, was doing somewhat vulgar duty as a bar. Most of the other guests were dancing to the wireless in the adjoining ballroom, but by the bar Mrs. Pearcey was telling Dr. Crippen the story of her life.

  It was not the first time that Roger's eye had lingered on Mrs. Pearcey. Mrs. Pearcey seemed to invite the eyes of others to linger upon her: not indeed through her good looks, for she had few, nor through anything so coarse as ogling, but simply because she appeared determined that wherever she might be, she should be noticed.

  Roger, always on the lookout for types, was interested. He felt too that it was probably significant that the lady should have chosen the dowdy but undoubtedly striking role of Mrs. Pearcey rather than the showier costume part of Mary Blandy. There was a Mary Blandy, and undoubtedly Mrs. Pearcey was the more effective.

  He turned to Stratton. "Mrs. Pearcey over there ... I don't believe I've met her yet ... it is your sister - in - law, isn't it?"

  "It is." Ronald Stratton's voice had lost - its usual humorous tone and become flat and expressionless.

  "I thought so," Roger said carelessly and wondered why Stratton's voice should have changed like that. It was plain that he did not very much like his sister - in - law, but Roger thought that was hardly sufficient reason for such a very blank tone. However, it was obviously impossible to probe further.

  Stratton began to ask questions about the cases with which his guest had been connected. Roger replied without his customary enthusiasm. His ears were directed towards the low conversation on the other side of the room, which was not so much a conversation as a monologue. It was impossible to hear the words through the music which came from the ballroom, but the tone was eloquent; it meandered on and on, and Roger thought he could detect in it a note of noble endeavour thwarted, mingled with a deeper undercurrent of Christian resignation. He wondered what on earth the woman was talking about so interminably. Whatever it was, Dr. Crippen was plainly bored by it. Roger wished unblushingly that he could hear what it was all about.

  The dance came to an end, and some of the dancers drifted in to the bar. A large man, with one of those pleasant, nobbly faces, strolled up to Stratton and Roger. "Well, Ronald, my man . . ."

  "Hullo, Philip. Been doing your duty?"

  "No, yours. I've been dancing with your young woman. Perfectly charming, my dear fellow," said the newcomer, with an air of naive sincerity which was in itself charming.

  "That's rather what I think," Ronald grinned. "By the way, have you met Sheringham? This is Dr. Chalmers, Sheringham."

  "How do you do?" said the doctor, shaking hands with obvious pleasure. "Your name's very familiar to me."

  "Is it?" said Roger. "Good. It all helps sales."

  "Oh, I didn't say I'd gone so far as to buy one of your books. But I have read them."

  "Better and better," Roger grinned. Dr. Chalmers stayed for a few moments and then moved off to the bar to get his late partner a drink.

  Roger turned to Stratton. "That's a particularly nice man, isn't it?"

  "Yes," Stratton agreed. "His family and mine, and his wife's family, were all more or less brought up together; so the Chalmers are really about my oldest friends. Philip's elder brother was my contemporary, and Philip is really a closer friend of my brother's than mine, but I like him immensely. He's absolutely genuine, nearly always says just what he thinks, and is the only man I've ever met called Philip who isn't a prig. And more I can't say for any man."

  "Hear, hear," Roger agreed. "Hullo, is that the music? I suppose I'd better go and do a bit of duty. Introduce me to somebody I'd like to dance with, will you?"

  "I'll introduce you to my young woman," Stratton said, finishing off his drink.

  "Odd," Roger remarked idly. "I always used to think you were married."

  "I always used to be. Then we had a divorce. Now I'm going to do it again. You must meet my ex - wife some time. She's quite a nice person. She's here tonight, with her fiance. We're the best friends in the world."

  "Very sensible," Roger approved. "If I ever got married so that I could be divorced, I'm sure I should be so grateful to my wife that I'd want to be the best friends in the world with her."

  They walked together towards the ballroom. Roger noticed with interest that Mrs. Pearcey was just in front of them, with an unknown man. Evidently she had torn herself away from Dr. Crippen.

  "I say, Ronald!" A low, guarded voice had assailed them from behind. Turning about, they beheld Dr. Crippen, clinging, as it were desperately, to a large whiskey - and - soda. No one else remained at the bar.

  "Hullo, Osbert," said Stratton.

  "I say . . ." Dr. Crippen sidled towards them with a surreptitious air, as one not quite sure whether he is standing on solid ground again or not. "I say ..."

  "Yes?"

  "I say," said Dr. Crippen, with a confidential, guilty grin, "is your sister - in - law quite mad, Ronald? Eh? Is she?"

  "Quite," said Stratton equably. "Come on, Sheringham."

  Ronald Stratton's young woman proved to be a charming lady of about his own age, with very fair hair and a delightful smile, who admitted to two children of her own and the name of Mrs. Lefroy. She wore a seventeenth - century dress of white satin brocade, with a hooped skirt, which admirably set off her fair colouring.

  "You've been married before, then?" Roger asked conversationally, as they began to dance.

  "I still am," replied Mrs. Lefroy surprisingly. "At least, I think I am."

  Roger made an apologetic noise. "I somehow thought you were engaged to Ronald," he said lamely.

  "Oh, yes, I am," said Mrs. Lefroy brightly.

  Roger gave it up.

  "I've got my nisi" Mrs. Lefroy explained, "but not my absolute."

  "This seems to be quite a modern party," Roger observed mildly, swerving somewhat violently to avoid another couple who did not seem to know what they were doing. As they passed, he saw that the couple was composed, as to its feminine half, of Mrs. Pearcey, who was talking so earnestly to her partner that he was able to devote little attention to the steering of her.

  "Modern?" echoed Mrs. Lefroy. "Is it? Only as regards the Strattons and me, I think - if by 'modern' you mean not only readiness to recognize that you've made a mistake in your marriage, which is what most marr
ied couples always have done, but readiness to rectify it, which is what most of them still haven't the courage to do."

  "And yet you're ready to try again?"

  "Oh, yes. One mistake doesn't make a series. Besides, I never think a first marriage ought to count, do you? One's so busy learning how to be married at all that one can hardly help acquiring a kind of resentment against one's partner in error, And once resentment has crept in, the thing's finished. Anyhow, there one is, all nice and trained to the house, the complete article for the next comer. After all, one's got to cut one's teeth on something, but one doesn't cherish the dummy for the rest of one's life, does one?"

  She laughed, and Roger laughed too. "But nature provides a second set of teeth. Haven't they to be cut on another dummy?"

  "Oh, no, they just come, all ready cut. But I'm quite serious, Mr. Sheringham. One isn't the same person at thirty - four as one was at twenty - four, so why should one be expected to be suitable to the human being who fitted ten years earlier? Probably both of you have developed, on completely different lines. I think one should change partners when one's development is complete, except of course in the rare cases where the two do happen to have developed together."

  "You needn't apologize for your divorce, you know," Roger murmured.

  Mrs. Lefroy laughed again. "I wouldn't dream of doing any such thing. It just happens to be a subject I feel rather strongly about. What I think is that our marriage laws are all on the wrong lines. Marriage oughtn't to be easy and divorce difficult; it ought to be just the other way about. A couple ought to have to go up before a judge and say: 'Please, we've lived together for two years now and we're quite certain we're suited to each other. We've got our witnesses here to swear that ] we're terribly fond of each other and hardly ever quarrel, and we like the same things; and we're both quite healthy. We're certain we know our own minds, so please, can't we get married now?' And then they'd get their marriage nisi. And if by the end of six months the King's Proctor couldn't prove that they were unsuited after all, or didn't really love each other, or would be better apart, their marriage could be made absolute. Don't you think that's a very good idea?"