The Silk Stocking Murders Read online

  THE SILK STOCKING

  MURDERS

  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.

  THE SILK STOCKING

  MURDERS

  ANTHONY BERKELEY

  THE LANGTAIL PRESS

  LONDON

  This edition published 2010 by

  The Langtail Press

  www.langtailpress.com

  The Silk Stocking Murders © 1928 Anthony Berkeley

  ISBN 978-1-78002-015-0

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER

  I. A LETTER FOR MR. SHERINGHAM

  II. MR. SHERINGHAM WONDERS

  III. MISS CARRUTHERS IS DRAMATIC

  IV. TWO DEATHS AND A JOURNEY

  V. ENTER CHIEF INSPECTOR MORESBY

  VI. DETECTIVE SHERINGHAM, OF SCOTLAND YARD

  VII. GETTING TO GRIPS WITH THE CASE

  VIII. A VISITOR TO SCOTLAND YARD

  IX. NOTES AND QUERIES

  X. LUNCH FOR TWO

  XI. AN INTERVIEW AND A MURDER

  XII. SCOTLAND YARD AT WORK

  XIII. A VERY DIFFICULT CASE

  XIV. DETECTIVE SHERINGHAM SHINES

  XV. MR. SHERINGHAM DIVERGES

  XVI. ANNE INTERVENES

  XVII. AN UNOFFICIAL COMBINATION

  XVIII. “AN ARREST IS IMMINENT”

  XIX. MR. SHERINGHAM IS BUSY

  XX. ALARMS AND EXCURSIONS

  XXI. ANNE HAS A THEORY

  XXII. THE LAST VICTIM

  XXIII. THE TRAP IS SET

  XXIV. THE TRAP IS SPRUNG

  XXV. ROUND THE GOOD XXXX

  CHAPTER I

  A LETTER FOR MR. SHERINGHAM

  ROGER SHERINGHAM halted before the little box just inside the entrance of The Daily Courier’s enormous building behind Fleet Street. Its occupant, alert for unauthorised intruders endeavouring to slip past him, nodded kindly.

  “Only one for you this morning, sir,” he said, and produced a letter.

  With another nod, which he strove to make as condescending as the porter’s (and failed), Roger passed into the lift and was hoisted smoothly into the upper regions. The letter in his hand, he made his way through mazy, stone-floored passages into the dark little room set apart for his own use. Roger Sheringham, whose real business in life was that of a best-selling novelist, had stipulated when he consented to join The Daily Courier as criminological expert and purveyor of chattily-written articles on murder, upon a room of his own. He used it only twice a week, but he had carried his point. That is what comes of being a personal friend of an editor.

  Bestowing his consciously dilapidated hat in a corner, he threw his newspaper on the desk and slit open the letter.

  Roger always enjoyed this twice-weekly moment. In spite of his long acquaintance with them, ranging over nearly ten years, he was still able to experience a faint thrill on receiving letters from complete strangers. Praise of his work arriving out of the unknown delighted him; abuse filled him with combative joy. He always answered each one with individual care. It would have warmed the hearts of those of his correspondents who prefaced their letters with diffident apologies for addressing him (and nine out of ten of them did so), to see the welcome their efforts received. All authors are like this—and all authors are careful to tell their friends what a nuisance it is having to waste so much time in answering the letters of strangers, and how they wish people wouldn’t do it. All authors, in fact, are——. But that is enough about authors.

  It goes without saying that since he had joined The Daily Courier Roger’s weekly bag of strangers had increased very considerably. It was therefore not without a certain disappointment that he had received this solitary specimen from the porter’s hands this morning. A little resentful, he drew it from its envelope. As he read, his resentment disappeared. A little pucker appeared between his eyebrows. The letter was an unusual one, decidedly.

  It ran as follows:

  The Vicarage,

  Little Mitcham, Dorset.

  DEAR SIR,—You will, I hope, pardon my presumption in writing to you at all, but I trust that you will accept the excuse that my need is urgent. I have read your very interesting articles in The Daily Courier and, studying them between the lines, feel that you are a man who will not resent my present action, even though it may transfer a measure of responsibility to you which might seem irksome. I would have come up to London to see you in person, but that the expense of such a journey is, to one in my position, almost prohibitive.

  Briefly, then, I am a widower, of eight years’ standing, with five daughters. The eldest, Anne, has taken upon her shoulders the duties, of my dear wife, who died when Anne was sixteen; and she was, till ten months ago, ably seconded by the sister next to her in age, Janet. I need hardly explain to you that, on the stipend of a country parson, it has not been an easy task to feed, clothe and educate five growing girls. Janet, therefore, who, I may add, has always been considered the beauty of the family, decided ten months ago to seek her fortune elsewhere. We did our best to dissuade her, but she is a high-spirited girl, and, having made up her mind, refused to alter it. She also pointed out that not only would there be one less, mouth to feed, but, should she be able to obtain employment of even a moderately lucrative nature, she would be able to make a modest, but undoubtedly helpful, contribution towards the household expenses.

  Janet did carry out her intention and left us, going, presumably, to London. I write “presumably” because she refused most firmly to give us her address, saying that not until she was securely established in her new life, whatever that should be, would she allow us even to communicate with her, in case we might persuade her, in the event of her not meeting with initial success, to give up and come home again. She did however write to us occasionally herself, and the postmark was always London, though the postal district varied with almost every letter. From these letters we gathered that, though remaining confident and cheerful, she had not yet succeeded in obtaining a post of the kind she desired. She had, however, she told us, found employment sufficiently remunerative to allow her to keep herself in comparative comfort, though she never mentioned the precise nature of the work in which she was engaged.

  She had been in the habit of writing to us about once a week or so, but six weeks ago her letters ceased and we have not heard a word from her since. It may be that there is no cause for alarm, but alarm I do feel nevertheless. Janet is an affectionate girl and a good daughter, and I cannot believe that, knowing the distress it would cause us, she would willingly have omitted to let us hear from her in this way. I cannot help feeling that either her letters have been going astray or else the poor girl has met with an accident of some sort.

  My reasons, sir, for troubling you with all this are as follows. I am perhaps an old-fashioned man, but I do not care to approach the police in the matter and have Janet traced, when probably there is no more th
e matter than an old man’s foolish fancies; and I am quite sure that, assuming these fancies to have no foundation, Janet would much resent the police poking their noses into her affairs. On the other hand, if there has been an accident, the fact is almost certain to be known at the offices of a paper such as The Daily Courier. I have therefore determined, after considerable reflection, to trespass upon your kindness, on which of course I have no claim at all, to the extent of asking you to make discreet enquiries of such of your colleagues as might be expected to know, and acquaint me with the result. In this way recourse to the police may still be avoided, and news given me of my poor girl without unpleasant publicity or officialism.

  If you prefer to have nothing to do with my request, I beg of you to let me know and I will put the matter to the police at once. If, on the other hand, you are so kind as to humour an old man, any words of gratitude on my part become almost superfluous.—Yours truly,

  A. E. MANNERS.

  P. S.—I enclose a snapshot of Janet taken two years ago, the only one we have.

  “The poor old bird!” Roger commented mentally, as he reached the end of this lengthy letter, written in a small, crabbed handwriting which was not too easy to decipher.

  “But I wonder whether he realises that there are about eight thousand accidents in the streets of London every twelve months? This is going to be a pretty difficult little job.” He looked inside the envelope again and drew out the snapshot.

  Amateur snapshots have a humorous name, but they are seldom really as bad as reputed. This one was a fair average specimen, and showed four girls sitting on a sea-shore, their ages apparently ranging from ten to something over twenty. Under one of them was written, in the same crabbed hand writing, the word “Janet.” Roger studied her. She was pretty, evidently, and in spite of the fact that her face was covered with a very cheerful smile, Roger thought that he could recognise her from the picture should he ever be fortunate enough to find her.

  For as to whether he was going to look for her or not, there was no question. It had simply never occurred to Roger that he might, after all, not do so. Roger (whatever else he might be) was a man of quick sympathies, and that stilted letter, through whose formal phrases tragedy peeped so plainly, had touched him more than a little. But for the fact that an article had to be written before lunch-time, he would have set about it that very moment, without the least idea of how he was going to prosecute the search.

  As it was, however, circumstances prevented him from doing anything in the matter for another ninety minutes, and by that time his brain, working automatically as he wrote, had evolved a plan. He felt fairly certain that the girl was still in London, alive and flourishing, and had postponed writing home as the ties that bound her to Dorsetshire began to weaken; the old man’s anxiety was no doubt ill-founded, but that did not mean that it must not be relieved. Besides, the quest would prove a pretty little exercise for those sleuth-like powers which Roger was so sure he possessed. Nevertheless, unharmed and merely unfilial as he did not doubt the girl to be, it was easier to begin operations from the other end. If she had had an accident she would be considerably easier to trace than if she had not, and by establishing first the negative fact, Roger would be able the sooner to reassure the vicar. And as the only real clue he had was the snapshot, he had better start from that.

  Instead, therefore, of betaking himself to Piccadilly Circus in the blithe confidence that Janet Manners, like everybody else in London, would be certain to come along there sooner or later, he ran up two more flights of stairs in the same building, and, the snapshot in his hand, sought out the photo-graphic department of The Daily Courier’s illustrated sister,The Daily Picture.

  “Hullo, Ben,” he greeted the serious, horn-bespectacled young man who presided over the studio and spent most of his days in photographing mannequins, who left him cold, in garments which left them cold. “I suppose you’ve never had a photograph through your hands of this girl, have you? The one marked Janet.”

  The bespectacled one scrutinised the snapshot with close attention. Every photograph that appeared in The Daily Picture passed, at one time or another, through his hands, and his memory was prodigious. “She does look a bit familiar,” he admitted.

  “She, does, eh?” Roger cried, suddenly apprehensive. “Good man. Rack your brains. I want her placed, badly.”

  The other bent over the snapshot again. “Can’t you help me?” he asked. “In what connection would I have come across her? Is she an actress, or a mannequin, or a titled beauty, or what?”

  “She’s not a titled beauty, I can tell you that; but she might have been either of the other two. I haven’t the faintest notion what she is.”

  “Why do you want to know if we’ve ever had a photograph of her through here, then?”

  “Oh, it’s just a personal matter,” Roger said evasively. “Her people haven’t heard from her for a week or two and they’re beginning to think, she’s been run over by a bus or something like that. You know how fussy the parents of that sort of girl are.”

  The other shook his head and handed back the snapshot. “No, I’m sorry, but I can’t place her. I’m sure I’ve seen her face before, but you’re too vague. If you could tell me, now, that she had been run over by a bus, or had some other accident, or been something (anything to provide a peg for my memory to hang on) I might have been able to—wait a minute, though!” He snatched the photograph back and studied it afresh. Roger looked on tensely.

  “I’ve got it!” the bespectacled one proclaimed in triumph. “It was the word ‘accident’ that gave me the clue. Have you ever noticed what a curious thing memory is, Sheringham? Present it with a blank surface, and it simply slides helplessly across it; but give it just the slightest little peg to grip on, and——”

  “Who is the girl?” Roger interrupted.

  The other blinked at him. “Oh, the girl. Yes. She was a chorus-girl in one of the big revues (I’m sorry, I forget which) and her name was Unity Something-or-other. She—good gracious, you really don’t know?”

  Roger shook his head. “No. What?”

  “She was a friend of yours?” the other persisted.

  “No, I’ve never met her in my life. Why?”

  “Well, you see, she hanged herself four or five weeks ago with her own stocking.”

  Roger stared at him. “The deuce she did!” he said blankly. “Hell!”

  They looked at each other.

  “Look here,” said the photographer, “I can’t be certain it’s the same girl, you know. Besides, this one seems to be called Janet. But I tell you what: there was a photo of Unity Something published in The Picture at the time, a professional one. You could look that up.”

  “Yes,” said Roger, his thoughts on the letter he would have to write to Dorset if all this were true.

  “And now I come to think of it, I seem to remember something rather queer about the case. It was ordinary enough in most ways, but I believe they had some difficulty in identifying the girl. No relatives came forward, or something like that.”

  “Oh?”

  “The Picture didn’t pay much attention to it, beyond publishing her photo; rather out of our line, of course. But I expect The Courier had a report of the inquest. Anyhow, don’t take it for certain that I’m right; it’s quite possible that I’m not. Go down and look up the files.”

  “Yes” said Roger glumly, turning on his heel. “I will.”

  CHAPTER II

  MR. SHERINGHAM WONDERS

  ACUTELY disappointed, and not a little shocked, Roger made his way downstairs. His thoughts were centred mainly upon that pathetic household in Dorsetshire, to whom his letter must bring such tragedy; but Roger, like most of us, while able to feel for other people strongly enough was at heart an egoist, and it was this side of his nature which prompted the sensation of disappointment of which he was conscious. It was, he could not help feeling, most unfortunate that just when his help had been solicited as that of an able criminologist,
the problem should be whisked out of his hands in this uncompromising way.

  The truth was that Roger had been longing for an opportunity to put his detective capabilities into action once more. The letter had acted as a spur to his desires, coming as it did from one who evidently held the greatest respect for his powers in this direction. Roger himself had the greatest respect for his detective powers; but he could not disguise from himself the fact that others were obtuse enough to hold dissimilar views. Inspector Moresby, for instance. For the last nine months, ever since they had parted at Ludmouth after the Vane case, Inspector Moresby had rankled in Roger’s mind to a very considerable extent.

  And those nine months had been, from the criminologist’s point of view, deadly dull ones. Not an interesting murder had been committed, not even an actress had been deprived of her jewels. Without going so far as to question whether his detective powers might be getting actually rusty, Roger had been very, very anxiously seeking an opportunity to put them into action once more. And now that the chance had come, it had as swiftly disappeared.

  He began gloomily to turn back the pages of The Daily Picture file.

  It was not long before he found what he wanted. In an issue of just over five weeks ago there was, tucked neatly into a corner of the back page, a portrait of a young girl; the heading above it stated curtly: “Hanged Herself With Own Silk Stocking.” The letterpress below was hardly less brief. “Miss Unity Ransome, stated to be an actress, who hanged herself with her own silk stocking at her flat in Sutherland Avenue last Tuesday.”

  Roger pored over the picture. Like amateur snapshots, the pictures in an illustrated paper are considered fair game for the humorist. Whenever a painstaking humorist has to mention them he prefixes one of two epithets, “blurred” or “smudgy.” Yet the pictures in the illustrated dailies of to-day are neither blurred nor smudgy. They were once, it is true, perhaps so late as ten years ago, when the art of picture-printing for daily newspapers was an infant; nowadays they are astonishingly clear. One does wish sometimes that even humorists would move with the times. Roger had no difficulty in deciding that the two faces before him were of the same girl.