The Decayed Gentlewoman Read online

  A Legal Fiction

  also published as The Decayed Gentlewoman

  E. X. Ferrars

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  A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0

  click for scan notes and proofing history

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  Contents

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  PUBLISHED FOR THE CRIME CLUB BY DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.

  GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK 110

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63-1821 Copyright © 1963 by M. D. Brown All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  I wish to express my gratitude to Professor T. B. Smith, Sheriff J. G. Wilson, and Mr. David Baxendall for the help they most generously gave me with this story, and at the same time to affirm that any blunders there may be in it are not the responsibility of these experts, but are wholly my own.

  A CRIME CLUB SELECTION

  An old family heirloom, a painting called The Decayed Gentlewoman, had been stolen from Colin Lockie two years before, and attempts to solve the crime had been fruitless. Now it had turned up in an auction room in a small English village, and Colin, fond of the old portrait since childhood, tried to buy it back.

  When a sinister-looking stranger, obviously not motivated by sentiment, paid an astonishing amount of money for the picture, Colin was intrigued—and more determined than ever to recover it. He set in motion the legal machinery for reclaiming his stolen property… and unwittingly set the scene for murder.

  Scene: Scotland and England

  CLASSIC PUZZLER

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  CHAPTER ONE

  ^ »

  As the train from Edinburgh crept into King’s Cross, the station loud-speaker was making one of its baffling announcements. The words, as usual, were swallowed up in echoes ringing round the great, grimy roof. Colin Lockie, coming bleary-eyed out of his second-class sleeper, paid no attention to the unintelligible voice. Wearing a grey tweed overcoat and carrying his briefcase, the only luggage he had brought with him, he edged his way along the corridor of the train and stepped out on to the platform. He was thinking of the bath and the breakfast that he was going to have in the station hotel. The very large breakfast, far larger than he ever thought of cooking for himself. He would have fruit juice, porridge, sausages and bacon, a lot of toast. Or should he have kippers instead of sausages?

  His mind was hovering between these alternatives when the loud-speaker spoke again. This time it sounded shockingly clear.

  “Will Dr. Colin Lockie please go at once to the station-master’s office?”

  Colin’s first startled thought was that it was a mistake. Then that this had been bound to happen sometime. It could not always be others to whom calamity happened. Sooner or later fate would knock at one’s own door. But it puzzled him who could have known that he would be on that train. And to whom was he so important that they would go to the trouble of having him summoned in that voice of doom? Feeling a little cold as he ran over the names of his nearest and dearest, he found that none of them seemed somehow quite near or dear enough to have faced the ordeal of coping with British Railways in its early morning torpor merely to reach him. So perhaps, after all, he had not heard the voice correctly. Perhaps it had not been his name that had been called.

  The voice immediately repeated it distinctly. “Will Dr. Colin Lockie please go at once to the stationmaster’s office?” It jerked him into action. He strode swiftly to the barrier. But there the press prevented him from moving on any faster than anyone else and he had time to make up his mind that although he was probably about to receive some very serious shock, he would behave calmly. He would walk on, would ask a porter where the stationmaster’s office was, would present himself there, take the blow, whatever it was, without change of expression, say a courteous “Thank you,” to the unfortunate official whose duty it had been to deal the blow, remove himself as fast as possible, and then…

  A vision of sausages and kippers swam before his eyes. The truth was, Colin was fiendishly hungry. He was a big young man with wide shoulders, powerful muscles, and a very active brain, and whatever his emotional state might be, his considerable strength took a good deal of keeping up.

  Finding his way to the stationmaster’s office without having to ask where it was, he went in and said to a young man behind a counter who was sleepily polishing his spectacles, “I’m Colin Lockie.”

  There was a pause. The clerk breathed on his spectacles and gave them another rub with his handkerchief.

  “Yes?” he said at last.

  “There was a message for me on the loud-speaker,” Colin said. “It told me to come here.”

  “Oh.” The clerk tried to smother a yawn. “Well, what did you say your name was?”

  “Colin Lockie.”

  “Lockie; All right.” The yawn escaped. “I’ll see.”

  He turned and wandered away.

  He was gone for less, probably, than half a minute. But it was a half minute during which Colin’s dread of what he was to hear had had time to mount to such a painful pitch that by the time the sleepy clerk returned, he hated him with all the force of his pounding heart.

  The man was reading what was written on a slip of paper.

  “Dr. Colin Lockie?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, will you telephone Miss Winter, Oldersfield 2571, immediately?”

  It meant nothing to Colin. He knew no Miss Winter. He did not know Oldersfield or anyone who lived there. He did not even know where Oldersfield was.

  “There’s been a mistake,” he said. “That can’t be the message for me.”

  “Oh,” the clerk said and turned the slip of paper over as if there might be something written on the back. Finding it blank, he turned it again and read it through slowly to himself. “Well,” he said at last, “it says it’s for Dr. Colin Lockie.”

  Holding himself in with an effort, Colin said, “Would you mind checking with whoever took the message? I think it must have got mixed up with another one.”

  “Oh,” the clerk said. “Well, all right.”

  He wandered away again.

  When he returned, he brought with him an elderly man with a cold, wide-awake stare which fastened on Colin’s face like a bitter draught.

  “Good morning, Doctor, there’s been no mistake, I can assure you,” he said. “I spoke to the lady myself. She convinced me the matter was of the greatest urgency, or I may say I should not have agreed to having the message given out over our loud-speaker system. We don’t make a habit of giving out trivial messages, as you’re no doubt aware, sir. She said it concerned an accident—”

  “Oh, but,” Colin interrupted, “I’m not that sort of doctor.”

  This had happened to him before. His landlady, for instance, misled by the way that Colin’s letters were addressed, was still unconvinced that the title of doctor, conferred on him five years ago by London University for his work on the development of vascular bundles in leaves, did not qualify him to treat her varicose veins.

  The second clerk had taken no notice of the interruption. “An accident, she said, at a place called Ard-something-or-other, in Scotland. She said the occupant of the car, who had disappeared and was thought to be suffering from loss of memory, had reappeared in Oldersfield and that you were urgently required there for identification purposes. That was the full message, sir. There’s been no mistake.”

  Colin stared. Normally his mind worked fairly fast and, except about such matters as what day of the week it was, or
where he had left his car keys, or how much money he had in the bank, it was not easy to confuse him. But he had not slept much on the train and now sense and nonsense overlapped so absurdly in the clerk’s statement that he felt as if he were on the edge of a dream.

  That accident at Ardachoil, if you could call it an accident, had happened two and a half years ago. And he had been the only passenger in the car. And he had recovered his memory quite fully as soon as he had recovered consciousness.

  But at least it seemed that the message was meant for him. “I see,” he said. “Thanks. By the way, where’s Oldersfield?” In Kent, they told him. Still bewildered, Colin took the slip of paper with Miss Winter’s name and telephone number on it and left the office.

  She had asked him to ring her up immediately, and that meant, he supposed, before he had even had a bath or breakfast, which was a pity. Still, it would be an easier thing to do from a quiet call box inside the hotel than in the noise of the station. Walking out into the station yard and the raw chill of the spring morning, he crossed to the hotel entrance, went in, made sure that he had enough change in his pockets for the call, and went to a telephone.

  As soon as the connection was made, he heard the receiver at the other end lifted. A woman’s voice said swiftly, “Oldersfield 2571.”

  It was so quick that she must have been waiting beside the telephone.

  “Miss Winter? I’m Colin Lockie,” he said. “You left a message—”

  “Colin!” Her voice sounded young, excited, and quite unfamiliar. “Colin, how wonderful that I’ve managed to get hold of you at last! I’ve been telephoning everywhere ever since yesterday afternoon and only been told you weren’t there. And so I thought I was going to have to act entirely on my own responsibility. You see, the sale starts at nine o’clock and she’s in Lot Seven, in among all the junk, so they’ll get there in no time at all. So I’ve got to know if you want me to go ahead and how high I can go.”

  “Please forgive me,” Colin said cautiously, “I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”

  “But you got my message. Didn’t you understand it? I made it as clear as I dared, without actually giving away that it wasn’t a matter of life and death. If they’d realized that, I thought, they mightn’t have given it out at all. So that’s why I put in the bit about the passenger who vanished from your car when those men knocked you out on the road from Ardachoil.”

  “There wasn’t any passenger,” Colin said.

  “There was the Decayed Gentlewoman, wasn’t there? Don’t you remember how we used to call her the Decayed Gentlewoman, Colin?”

  As she spoke that preposterous name, which he had probably not heard since he was a boy of fourteen or thereabouts, Colin’s mind seemed to go completely blank for a moment. Then all kinds of things came tumbling back into it.

  “Good God above,” he said softly, “you’re Ginny Jerrold.”

  There was a silence, then in a different and older-sounding voice, she said, “You mean you didn’t know whom you were speaking to?”

  “How could I?” he said. “I was told to ring up a Miss Winter. I never knew any Miss Winter.”

  “You mean you never heard…” She let the sentence fade, sounding sad that he knew so little.

  “Then it should have been Mrs. Winter,” he said. “You’re married.”

  “No. My mother married. I took my stepfather’s name. Years and years ago. Did you really hear nothing about it?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t, Ginny.”

  “Not even whispered rather surreptitiously, when you weren’t supposed to hear?”

  “Well, perhaps…”

  “No, you didn’t. I understand. Once those awful aunts of yours caught on about poor Mother, our names weren’t mentioned.”

  “I never actually knew what happened,” Colin said, “except that you stopped coming.”

  That was true. He had never understood what had happened to Ginny and her attractive, widowed mother. For a time they had been welcome guests at Ardachoil, then they had disappeared and apparently been easily forgotten by the three aunts who had provided Colin with a home during school holidays, while his parents—his father had been in the Colonial Service—travelled the earth.

  Yet the aunts normally cherished friendship. They were so loyal to every memory of it that they still sent Christmas cards to people whom they had not seen for thirty years. So the way that they had allowed Mrs. Jerrold and her daughter to vanish out of their lives had clearly required some explaining.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” Ginny Winter said. “I must hurry and tell you what’s happened now, or this call will cost you a fortune. I’m staying in Oldersfield at the moment, looking after Mother’s teashop for her, while she’s in Spain. And yesterday in a saleroom here I saw the Decayed Gentlewoman… No, wait a moment!” she added swiftly, as Colin started to speak. “I swear it’s the same picture, Colin. It’s in a different frame, and perhaps it’s even a bit more battered than I remembered, and I can’t think of any reason for its turning up here after getting stolen in the Highlands, but here it is, all the same. And my first thought was I ought to go to the police about it. Then I thought, why worry about that, when it would only lead to a lot of fuss and bother and she can’t be worth much, anyway? She isn’t, is she, Colin? It was your car those men were after, not what was inside it.”

  “Oh yes, the police decided they were two men who’d escaped from Barlinnie and wanted a car for a getaway,” said Colin. “But, listen, Ginny. This doesn’t really make sense. Don’t you think you’ve just turned up another copy of the same picture, whatever it is?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m absolutely certain it’s our Decayed Gentlewoman. I can’t explain why I’m so certain, any more than I could explain why—well, why I’d probably be certain it was you, if I suddenly saw you. Unless, of course, you’ve changed an awful lot. Have you changed an awful lot, Colin? You were a very large, very fat boy, with very pink cheeks.”

  “Was I? Then I haven’t changed much, I suppose,” he said. “What I mainly remember about you is your imagination.” God, yes, he thought, Ginny’s imagination!

  “I’m not imagining anything now,” she said. “I recognized her instantly, as I would an old friend. And the question is, do you want me to do anything about it? Shall I bid for her and see if I can get her back for your horrible aunts?”

  “If you’re sure…

  “I am sure.”

  “Then—yes, please, Ginny. I know they’d love to have her back.”

  “I warn you,” she told him, “you’ll have to buy two or three even more awful pictures along with her, and a cracked mirror and two sets of brass fire-irons and a rusty electric iron.”

  “All in Lot Seven?”

  “Yes. But I shouldn’t think the price for a collection like that could possibly go high, would you?”

  “Do you think ten pounds would cover it?”

  “Ten pounds?” Her voice shot up. “It’ll never go as high as that!”

  “Well, I could afford ten pounds. And thank you for all the trouble you’re taking.”

  “That’s all right, then. Now tell me,” she said, “where can I get in touch with you to let you know what happens?”

  “My Edinburgh address—”

  “I know your Edinburgh address. I meant today. I suppose—” She hesitated. “I suppose you couldn’t come down here yourself, Colin. When I heard you were going to be in London, I rather hoped you might be able to. I know you can’t get here in time for the sale, but it might be a good idea to come, all the same. I mean, if you don’t feel quite sure it’s the same picture when you see it, we could probably get Joe Lake —it’s in his saleroom—to take it back and offer it again. He’s a friend of my mother’s and I’m sure he’d do it for us. On the other hand, if it is the same picture, he might be able to tell you something about how he got hold of it.”

  “I’m awfully sorry,” Colin said, “I can’t manage it today. There�
�s something I’ve got to do…” With a slight shock, the thought of what he had come to London to do came back to him. “It’s something I can’t put off. And I’m going home again tonight.”

  “Oh dear, that’s a pity, when you’re actually so near for once.”

  “But I could ring you up again later today.”

  “Will you do that, then?”

  “What time?”

  “Any time.”

  “All right. And… Wait a minute!” He thought she was going to ring off and suddenly he knew that he did not want to leave the matter there. “Ginny, if it’s important, I haven’t absolutely got to go back to Edinburgh tonight. Perhaps I could come down to Oldersfield tomorrow.”

  “Well, we’ll talk about that when you ring up,” she said. “Good-bye.”

  “No, hold on! Tell me, Ginny, how did you ever hear about the car business and the picture disappearing?”

  But only the dialling tone buzzed impatiently at his ear. He had an impulse to ring her up again at once and repeat his question. He wanted to know how she knew so much about him. The attack on him and the theft of the car had been reported in the local press, but he was fairly sure that there had been no mention of the loss of the picture. But when he felt in his pockets for more change, he found that he had not enough for another call to Oldersfield. Giving up the idea of ringing Ginny up again just then, he emerged from the call box and went to have his bath and breakfast.

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  CHAPTER TWO

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  It was an invitation to read a paper to the Royal Society that had brought Colin to London that day. The paper was on differentiation in the apex of the shoot. He was not usually nervous when he had to talk about his work, but this was the first time that he had been invited to one of the Thursday afternoon meetings at Burlington House and there was a moment, as the President started to introduce him, when the portrait of Charles II on the wall seemed to leer with deadly humour straight at Colin, as if asking him what he thought he was doing there among all these learned men, and he felt that he would never be able to justify his presence.