Murder in the Basement Read online

  MURDER IN THE

  BASEMENT

  Born in 1893, Anthony Berkeley (Anthony Berkeley Cox) was a British crime writer and a leading member of the genre’s Golden Age. Educated at Sherborne School and University College London, Berkeley served in the British army during WWI before becoming a journalist. His first novel, The Layton Court Murders, was published anonymously in 1925. It introduced Roger Sheringham, the amateur detective who features in many of the author’s novels including the classic Poisoned Chocolates Case. In 1930, Berkeley founded the legendary Detection Club in London along with Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts and other established mystery writers. It was in 1938, under the pseudonym Francis Iles (which Berkeley also used for novels) that he took up work as a book reviewer for John O’London’s Weekly and The Daily Telegraph. He later wrote for The Sunday Times in the mid 1940s, and then for The Guardian from the mid 1950s until 1970. A key figure in the development of crime fiction, he died in 1971.

  MURDER IN THE BASEMENT

  ANTHONY BERKELEY

  THE LANGTAIL PRESS

  LONDON

  This edition published 2011 by

  The Langtail Press

  www.langtailpress.com

  Murder in the Basement © 1932 Anthony Berkeley

  ISBN 978-1-78002-147-8

  MURDER IN THE

  BASEMENT

  TO

  GLYNN and NANCY

  PROLOGUE

  Young Mr. Reginald Dane drew his wife into a corner of the higgledy-piggledy drawing-room.

  “I say,” he whispered, with a cautious eye on the hall. “I say, darling, how much do you think I ought to give these men?”

  “Haven’t the least idea, darling,” Molly Dane whispered back. “Ten shillings, would you think?”

  “Between the three of them?” Reginald whispered doubtfully. “Better spring a quid, hadn’t I? They get pretty big tips, these chaps.”

  “That ought to be plenty.”

  Young Mr. Dane nodded in a conspirator-like way and, emerging from the corner, walked with an air of extreme carelessness towards a large man with a walrus moustache, who was hovering in an intent manner just inside the open front door. The large man affected to start in astonishment at perceiving Reginald approaching him.

  “Think you’ll find everything quite satisfactory now, sir,” said the large man, very deferentially.

  Reginald nodded. He did not say that, to his certain knowledge, every single article of furniture, so carefully labelled in advance with the name of the room for which it was destined, had been put in a wrong one, so that he and Molly would have to spend several laborious hours in sorting them out. Young Mr. Dane was not one to make unnecessary fuss. He simply said:

  “Oh, yes. Quite. Most satisfactory. Perfectly. Excellent. Er—here you are.”

  A look of bland amazement passed over the walrus moustache as its owner caught sight of Reginald’s outstretched hand.

  “Well, thank you, sir,” he said, in tones of great wonder. “Thank you kindly.”

  “That’s for—er—that’s among the three of you, you know.”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Very good of you, I’m sure.”

  “Not at all,” said Reginald, and fled.

  “Was it enough?” asked his wife anxiously, as he rejoined her in the little drawing-room.

  “Oh, yes, I think so,” Reginald replied nonchalantly. “He seemed quite pleased.”

  Side by side they peeped through the uncurtained window.

  With much banging and clattering the three men were closing up the end of the big furniture-van. One took his place at the wheel, one got up beside him, the third climbed into the back, and with a rapt, thirsty look on their faces the three emissaries of Ate drove away. If ever Ate returned to earth it would surely be in the guise of a furniture-remover. There is something so fateful about a furniture-van. Relent-lessness urges it forward, and Destiny sits at the wheel.

  Mr. Reginald Dane slipped an arm about his wife’s waist. “Well, darling, here we are,” he observed.

  “We are, darling,” his wife agreed.

  “Sorry the honeymoon’s over, and all that?”

  His wife smiled, and shook her head.

  Looking down into her smiling, upturned face, young Mr. Dane saw that it was good. He kissed it.

  “So now let’s go and look round all this semi-detached messuage or tenement known to men as 4, Burnt Oak Road, Lewisham, in the county of Middlesex,” said Reginald, quoting, somewhat inaccurately, from memory.

  With solemn steps as befitted such a ceremonial, their arms about each other’s waists, Mr. and Mrs. Dane made their state progress from room to room. And wherever they looked, in spite of the disorder, in spite of the furniture so wrongly disposed, in spite of a wicked scratch on the brand-new dining-room table—lo! it was good.

  Then Molly went off to make some tea in their new kitchen, and Reginald wandered in the direction of the front door. He opened it and planted himself in the little porch outside, and his eyes travelled proudly over the tiny strip of front garden at his feet. After that he went and planted himself in the French windows that opened out of the dining-room at the back and surveyed the minute garden there, with its pocket-handkerchief lawn and its ragged little beds, now flowerless whatever had once been in them, for the month was the depressing one of January. But to Reginald it was more beautiful than Kew in June.

  “There’s even a cellar, you remember,” chanted Reginald, now at the kitchen door. “I’m going to have a look at it.”

  Molly, busy with buttered toast, nodded brightly. “Don’t get too dirty, darling. Hadn’t you better wait till after tea? Why not see if you can get some of the curtains up now?”

  “Curtains!” said Reginald with scorn. “When there might be a chest of gold forgotten in the cellar. You never know what people may leave behind. Darling, you must see that I couldn’t possibly have tea till I know for certain whether there’s a chest of gold in the cellar or not.”

  He opened the door under the stairs, and ran down the flight of narrow steps.

  It was not a large cellar certainly, but then it is something to have a cellar at all in a semi-detached villa in the suburbs. Moreover this particular cellar was lit by electric light. Reginald turned the switch and regarded the eight-by-ten cell of whitewashed brick with high approval; even the cobwebs, hanging in thick festoons from every available projection, seemed to him the most satisfactory cobwebs he had ever seen. Draped round a bottle of old port, for instance. . .

  In a moment Reginald had furnished the whole cellar with row upon row of delectable bottles.

  Well, it really would make a perfect wine-cellar. The temperature was just about right, and the air seemed dry. The lime-wash on the walls was firm and hard, and the brick floor showed no signs of dampness. Except perhaps in one corner; the corner remote from the entrance. Reginald went across to look at it.

  Certainly that corner was a little curious. There was a slight depression in the floor there—a long, narrow depression, about five feet by fifteen inches, where the bricks seemed to have been laid not quite so evenly as over the rest of the floor. Reginald kicked the projecting edge of one idly, but it was quite firm.

  Then something else caught his eye. Elsewhere the floor was frankly dirty, with a fine, dark-grey dust; but near one end of the depression, more towards the centre of the cellar, was a round patch of quite different colour, a light grey, through which the redness of the bricks did not show as it did on the rest of the floor. With sudden interest Reginald bent down and examined it.

  Then he whistled, and began to look
at the remainder of the floor with intentness. As if suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, finding something that he was looking for, he bent down again and ran his hand once or twice over some bricks in the very middle of the floor, examining the result on his finger-tips. Finally, with a loud whoop, he bounded up the cellar steps and into the kitchen.

  “I’ve found it, darling! I’ve found our chest of gold! ”

  Molly, pouring boiling water into the tea-pot, looked up, “What?”

  “Well, perhaps it mayn’t be a chest of gold, but it’s something. Someone’s been hiding something in the cellar, under the floor, and bricked it up again. Come and look.”

  “But the toast will get cold.”

  “Blow the toast! Put it under the grid. Darling, you must come.”

  Molly came.

  In the cellar Reginald proudly explained. “See that depression? That’s where it is. And see that light-coloured patch? That’s where they mixed the mortar to cement the bricks in again. Must be. And see this patch just here? Look—it’s earth! Someone had those bricks up not so long ago, dug a hole underneath, piled the earth here, and cached something. When he put the earth back again he didn’t stamp it down tight enough, and it’s sunk; hence that depression. Darling, I’m convinced there’s a chest of gold under this floor.”

  “Much more likely to have been a plumber, playing with the drains,” replied Mrs. Dane, who was a matter-of-fact young woman.

  “Anyhow, I’m going to see. I noticed a rusty old pickaxe in the garden. I’m going to have those bricks up.” He bounded up the stairs again.

  “But, darling, tea’s ready,” wailed his wife after him.

  Reginald carried out his excavations alone. Not all the chests of gold in the world can dash a cup of tea from a woman’s lips.

  Sipping contentedly in the higgledy-piggledy drawing-room, Molly listened to the blows of the pickaxe, and smiled secretly. After a while they ceased, but Reginald did not appear. At last she went to the top of the cellar stairs and called to him.

  “Well, darling, is it a chest of gold?”

  Her husband’s voice came up to her, oddly shaky.

  “Don’t come down, Molly. There—there’s something pretty beastly here. I must get a policeman.”

  PART I

  CHAPTER I

  By half-past six the remainder of the bricks and covering earth had been removed by the two constables, with their pickaxes and spades, and the body was fully exposed. Under the directions of the police surgeon it was lifted out of the shallow grave and laid on the floor of the cellar.

  “There’s no need for your men to stay here,” Chief Inspector Moresby told the divisional inspector, for the atmosphere in the cellar was close. “They can wait upstairs, or in the garden.”

  Thankfully the two lumbered up the cellar stairs with their tools.

  “You’d all better go upstairs,” grunted the police surgeon as he bent to examine the body. “It’s none too pleasant here.”

  “Well, we can’t do any good watching you, doctor, and that’s a fact,” assented Chief Inspector Moresby. “Come on, both of you.”

  He led the way out of the cellar, and Sergeant Afford, whom Moresby had brought with him from headquarters, and Inspector Rice followed him.

  Young Mr. and Mrs. Dane were hovering anxiously in the hall.

  “Is it—is there someone really there?” quavered the latter.

  The chief inspector laid a large and kindly hand on the shoulder of each. “It’s a bad business, I’m afraid; I won’t disguise it from you. About as bad as it can be.”

  “A nice end to a honeymoon,” said young Mr. Dane, with a rather shaky laugh. “What is it, inspector?”

  “It’s a woman.”

  “Oh-h-h-h-h,” Molly Dane shuddered.

  The chief inspector became practical. “Just moved in, haven’t you? Now I’m going to make a suggestion. You’re not straight here yet, I see; carpets not down and so on. Is there somewhere you could go to for a night or two— friends perhaps, who could put you up? We shall be in and out of here for a day or two, you see, and it won’t be very nice for you; then you can come back when we’ve finished—and I’ll get one of my men to give you a hand with your carpets and so on. What do you say? Is it a bargain? ”

  “I don’t feel I could ever come back,” said Molly:

  “We could go to my wife’s people,” Reginald replied.

  “They live in London. And our suit-cases aren’t even unpacked yet.”

  “Then that’s arranged,” beamed the chief inspector. “I’ll send my sergeant round with you in the car, to explain. That’s fine. Now, what about those suit-cases? No point in delaying.”

  Within ten minutes Mr. and Mrs. Dane had set off in a police car on the long ride from Lewisham to Hampstead, escorted, quite unnecessarily Mr. Dane felt, by Sergeant Afford. But then Mr. Dane did not know that the sergeant’s real mission was to explain not so much to Mrs. Dane’s people as to the local detective division, and add the request that a quiet eye be kept upon the pair while they were in Hampstead. Scotland Yard cannot afford to take anything or anybody at its appearance-value.

  In the meantime Chief Inspector Moresby was talking, in the higgledy-piggledy drawing-room, to a stout man with a face like a very gloomy full moon. This was Superintendent Green, from Scotland Yard, who had arrived just as the Danes were leaving.

  “About six inches deep, she was. The earth had been packed over her, and the bricks laid again over that. You’ll see for yourself, Mr. Green.”

  “Nude, you say?”

  “Except for her gloves. I’d say she was dressed in outdoor things, and the clothes were taken away to prevent identification. The murderer just didn’t bother about her gloves.”

  Green nodded. “That’s probably it. Not going to make our job any easier. It’s not likely we’ll get anything from the gloves, especially as he left them.”

  “There’ll probably be some distinguishing marks on the body, sir,” Moresby opined. “Ah, here’s Dr. Remington. This is Superintendent Green, doctor, from headquarters. Well? Have you found anything to help us?”

  The doctor, a tall, sparse man with a stoop, carefully shut the door behind him. “Not much, I’m afraid, chief inspector. The body’s in an advanced stage of decomposition, as no doubt you saw. The features certainly aren’t recognisable. I’d say she’s been buried there for six months at the least.”

  The two police officers looked glum. Six months meant a very cold trail to be followed.

  “Age?” asked Superintendent Green laconically.

  “I can’t put it nearer than that she was a young, or comparatively young, woman. Say twenty-three to thirty. Well nourished. Healthy, so far as I can see superficially. Teeth in good condition.”

  “No stoppings?”

  “Not one.”

  The superintendent frowned. Dentists’ work is one of the surest ways of identifying an unknown corpse. “What class would you put her in?”

  “There again I can hardly tell you. The hands are too far gone to enable me to say whether she was accustomed to work with them, but her gloves look good. I took them off, by the way. I expected you’d want them at once. They’re very much stained, but they’re all there is in the way of an external clue.”

  “Thanks. Yes, we’ll want to get to work on them at once. She was shot, the chief inspector tells me?”

  “Through the back of the head,” nodded the doctor.

  “The bullet passed through, and came out of the forehead.”

  “Ah! We’ll have to find that bullet, Moresby.”

  “I had a bit of a look round, as soon as we saw she’d been shot,” Moresby said dubiously. “I haven’t found it yet.”

  “Any idea of the calibre, doctor?”

  “Fairly large, I think. At a guess, and as near as I can put it at pr
esent, I should suggest a .45 service revolver.”

  The detectives looked still more gloomy. So many officers retained their service revolvers after the war, and omitted to take out licences for them, that to trace a shot from one of them, even given the bullet with its distinctive markings, is almost impossible; and when the bullet is missing . . .

  “Any birthmarks, or scars on the body?” asked the superintendent.

  “So far as I’ve been able to see yet, neither. If there were I doubt if they would still be decipherable. There’s not much skin left, you know.”

  “This looks as if it was going to be a job,” grumbled Moresby.

  “Too early for the doctor to say yet,” Superintendent Green remarked. “We must wait till we’ve got your full report, doctor. Can you wait a few minutes? I’ll go down with the chief inspector and have a look at the body, and then we’ll get it along to the mortuary at once. Ready, Moresby?”

  The two detectives went down to the cellar on their gruesome mission.

  In the dining-room the divisional inspector and his sergeant had begun a painstaking search of the house, not really with the expectation of finding anything to throw light on the tragedy, but simply because nothing must be left to chance. The two constables were still thankfully inhaling fresh air in the front garden, chatting with their colleague at the gate, whose orders were to admit no one.

  A very few minutes sufficed the superintendent for his examination of the body, and he learned from it nothing at all. A rough shroud was then fashioned out of bits of felt and brown paper left by the furniture-removers, and arrangements put in hand for getting it to the mortuary.

  “Phew!” said the chief inspector, as he descended again to the cellar with the superintendent. “That’s a bit better. Now we can look round properly. You think she was shot here, Mr. Green? ”