The Amateur Crime
by A. B. Cox
Contents
Prologue
I. The Nesbitt Combination
II. From Cocktails to Criminology
III. Mr. Priestley Is Adventurous
IV. Red Blood and Red Ink
V. Confusing the Issue
VI. Adventures of a Pair of Handcuffs
VII. Inspector Cottingham Smells Blood
VIII. Two into One Will Go
IX. George Says Nothing, Much
X. Laura Surpasses Herself
XI. Perspicacity of a Chief Constable
XII. Mr. Priestley Becomes an Uncle
XIII. Cynthia Begins to Smile
XIV. Interesting Scene in a Tool-Shed
XV. Various People Get Busy
XVI. Mr. Priestley Bursts a Bombshell
XVII. Awkward Predicament of Some Conspirators
XVIII. Mr. Priestley Solves His Last Problem
TO
MY SISTER
Prologue
The young man waved his arms violently. “You’re a cabbage!” he
shouted. “A turnip! A vegetable marrow! A—” He paused. “A snail!” he
concluded, relinquishing this horticultural catalogue.
Mr. Matthew Priestley blinked at him mildly through his glasses. “Am
I, Pat?” he asked, not without surprise.
“Yes, you are.” From his stand upon the hearthrug the young man
contemplated his host with extreme severity. “How old are you,
Priestley?” he demanded at length.
“Thirty-six,” apologised Mr. Priestley.
“Thirty-six!” repeated the young man with remarkable scorn. “And what
do you think people would take you for?”
“Thirty-five?” hazarded Mr. Priestley optimistically.
“Certainly not!” said the young man sharply. “Sixty-five, more like.”
“Oh, no, Pat,” protested Mr. Priestley, pained.
“At least sixty-five,” rejoined the young man firmly. “And no wonder.
Do you know what you are, Priestley?”
“Well, yes,” said Mr. Priestley, a little doubtfully, “I’m a cabbage,
and a vegetable-marrow, and a snail, and——”
“You’re a limpet!”
“A limpet as well?” said Mr. Priestley, with distress. “Now, what
makes you say that, Pat?”
“Well, look at you!” observed the young man shortly.
Mr. Priestley obeyed. “I seem much the same as usual,” he ventured.
“That’s the whole point!” the young man said with force. “You’re
always much the same as usual. Always!”
“I wear a different suit nearly every day,” Mr. Priestley protested
wistfully.
“You know what I mean. Look at you—thirty-six, and as set and
unenterprising as a man of sixty! Why don’t you move out of your
rotten little rut, man? Move about! See life! Have adventures!” The
young man ran a sensitive hand through his rather long black hair.
Mr. Priestley looked round the cosy bachelor room in the cosy bachelor
flat; if it was a rut, it was a remarkably pleasant one. “It’s curious
how restless love seems to make a man,” he observed mildly.
The young man stamped violently several times up and down the room.
“I’m not restless!” he exclaimed loudly. “I’m happy!”
“I see,” replied Mr. Priestley with humility. “Have another drink,
won’t you?”
The young man manipulated the decanter and siphon. “I do hate to see a
man vegetating,” he growled into his glass.
“I suppose it’s the result of getting engaged,” Mr. Priestley
meditated. “That sort of thing must be upsetting, no doubt.”
“It makes a fellow so happy, he wants to make his friends happy, too,”
the young man condescended to explain.
“But I am happy, Pat! Remarkably happy.”
“You’re nothing of the sort,” snapped the young man.
“Aren’t I?” queried Mr. Priestley in surprise. “Well, I certainly
thought I was.”
“Oh, yes,” said the young man with remarkable bitterness. “You think
you are, of course. But you’re nothing of the sort. How can you be? Is
a cabbage happy? Why don’t you live, man? Get about! Fall in love!
Have adventures!”
“But adventures don’t happen to me.”
“Of course they don’t. Because you never let them. If you saw an
adventure coming, you’d shut both eyes and wrap your head up in a rug.
You’re turning into a regular hermit, Priestley: that’s what’s the
matter with you. And hermits have a habit of becoming most
confoundedly dull.”
Soon after that the young man took his leave; and quite time, too.
After his departure Mr. Priestley sat for a few moments turning over
in his mind what had been said. Was it true that he was getting into a
rut? Was he a turnip? Was he in danger of becoming a hermit, and a
confoundedly dull hermit at that? He looked round his comfortable room
again and sighed gently. Certainly most of his interests were
concentrated in the flat—his books, for instance, and his china, and
his collection of snuff-boxes. It was equally certain that, with a
comfortable income which precluded his having to work for his living,
and a valet who looked after him better than a nurse, he found himself
very much more comfortable in his home than out of it. But did that
necessarily mean that he was a snail?
“Poof!” observed Mr. Priestley with mild decision. “Ridiculous! Pat
has just become engaged, to, as I understand, a charming and beautiful
girl, and his whole world is upset. Out of the exuberance of his
spirits he wants to upset everybody else’s world as well. Hermit,
indeed.”
And he reached happily for his Theocritus.
Thus, regardless of his doom, the little victim played.
Chapter I.
The Nesbitt Combination
On a certain soft evening in early April, Guy Nesbitt of Dell Cottage,
Duffley, Oxfordshire, was engaged in wrestling with his dress-tie.
Dress-ties did not take kindly to Guy. When a dress-tie found itself
encircling a collar belonging to Guy a devil entered into it. All
dress-ties were like this with Guy. They knew he had met his master,
and they became as wax in his hands. They melted, they drooped, they
languished, they slid, and the means they employed to prevent the ends
of their bows from ever coming even were a manifestation of the
triumph of matter over mind. A South African negro, seeing a dress-tie
pursuing its eel-like antics in Guy’s impotent hands would have had no
hesitation in falling down on his knees and worshipping it on the
spot, and quite rightly; one of Guy’s dress-ties could have given
pounds to any of the ju-ju’s of his native land and disposed of him in
half a round.
Giving up the unequal struggle, Guy dashed the victorious excrescence
to the floor, where it lay chortling gently, whipped another out of
the open drawer in front of him and strode to the door which separated
his dressing-room from his wife’s bedroom, muttering naughtily to
himself as he went. At the risk of becoming tedious, he must try to
give some idea of his appearance during the second-and-a-half occupied
by his journey.
Guy Nesbitt was a thin, tall man, almost an attenuated tall man, and
he carried himself just about as badly as a man can. His rather narrow
shoulders were invariably bowed like those of Atlas, and between them
his small, half-bald head shot forward at such an angle that, although
he was nearly always taller than his interlocutor, he gave the
impression of peering up at anybody he happened to be addressing over
his rimless pince-nez. In spite of the ribald observations of one of
his wife’s friends, Guy was not old; a mere thirty-one. But he had
looked exactly as he did now (which was forty-five) for the last five
years, and would probably continue to do so for the next twenty. The
other part of the candid friend’s remark was not inapt; he did look
exactly like a vulture, but a thoroughly benign and good-tempered old
vulture at that. Guy had never lost his temper in his life, a matter
which had caused his parents (he was an only son) considerable
satisfaction —for parents are notoriously short-sighted folk—and his
old nurse an equal perturbation.
For the rest he was delicate, but refused to admit it; possessed of a
private income with which he was generous beyond reason or logic; not
so much of a recluse as might have been expected, considering the
scholarly nature of his chief hobby, which was the minor poets of the
seventeenth century; and he wielded a nifty brassie and a surprisingly
ferocious tennis-racket. His manner was as much of a contradiction as
most of his other attributes; at times he was as prim and precise as
the maiden aunt of a Dean, at others he verged on the Rabelaisian. He
had a pretty wit, and he could make up his mind quickly.
“Blessed were the Picts and Scots, Cynthia,” he observed wistfully,
closing the door meticulously behind him. “They may have had trouble
at times with their sporrans, perhaps, but what is a mere sporran?”
Cynthia, seated in a kimono before her dressing-table, smiled at him
over her shoulder; she had a particularly sweet smile. She was a tall,
graceful girl of twenty-three, who bore every promise of turning later
into that most delightful of creatures, a charmingly gracious woman.
Gracious women are of two widely opposite kinds, one the most adorable
and one the most fell of their sex, and it is the presence or absence
of charm which makes or mars them. There was no fear of Cynthia
falling into the latter category.
Guy and Cynthia had been married for two years, which period had been
passed during the winters at Guy’s old home in Lincolnshire and in the
summers at their riverside cottage in Duffley, a quiet little village
on the Thames nearly mid-way between Oxford and Abingdon (it was
called a “cottage”). To outward appearances they were as incompatible
as a couple may well be, and they were extremely happy together. That
shows the value of outward appearances.
“A sporran, darling?” Cynthia repeated. “Don’t try to make me answer
that; you know how I hate admitting ignorance. All my life I’ve
wondered what a sporran is, and never had the courage to ask. It
seemed to be a thing that any decently educated person ought to know,
like French verbs, or what Edward the Somethingth said to the lady
whose garter he picked up, and that sort of thing. What _is_ a
sporran, Guy?”
Her husband stroked his chin reflectively. “Isn’t it something you
wear in your bonnet?” he hazarded.
“No, dear,” Cynthia told him gently. “That’s a bee. Well, never mind
about sporrans. Let’s get this grim piece of work over.” She pushed
back her chair and stood up. “I’ve been expecting you for the last ten
minutes.”
“I nearly did it myself to-night,” Guy said ruefully, handing her the
strip of black devilry, which instantly ceased to be diabolical at all
and, assuming an air of almost offensive rectitude, permitted Cynthia
to do with it as she would. “I must have got the ends within an inch
of each other at least half-a-dozen times.”
“There!” Cynthia stepped back and regarded her handiwork complacently.
“Not so bad for a first shot, I fancy. You are a ridiculous old
butterfingers, aren’t you?” She kissed the ridiculous old
butterfingers lightly on the end of his long nose and resumed her
seat.
“Well, well,” said the old butterfingers, and moved towards the door.
“Thank you, my dear.”
“Oh, don’t go, Guy. You’re practically ready, and there’s heaps of
time. Sit down and smoke a cigarette and watch me make myself
beautiful; there are some cigarettes in the box on the mantelpiece.”
“Sure you don’t mind, in here?”
Cynthia smiled at her husband again. If good manners never won fair
lady, they must have often come very near it. It warmed Cynthia’s
heart to reflect that this husband of hers was just as courteous to
her now, after two years of marriage, as on the very first day he ever
met her; how many women could say the same?
“As a very great treat, I think you might be allowed to, for once,”
she said, in a tender little voice that matched her smile, feeling
like a mother, and a wife, and a lover, and a sister, and all sorts of
other things as well towards this adorably helpless person, so
infinitely inferior to herself and at exactly the same time so
infinitely superior, whom she had elected to marry. “Now watch, and
I’ll show you what happens to sandy eyebrows when they get into my
toils. It’s supposed to be hopelessly bad policy, I know, but I have
no secrets from you, darling; not even toilet ones.”
“I won’t have my wife’s eyebrows insulted,” Guy retorted, dropping his
long, lean frame into an arm-chair. “They’re not sandy, they never
have been sandy, and they never will be sandy.”
“My dear old Guy,” laughed Cynthia, taking effective steps to clear
the brows in question of any lingering imputations of sandiness,
“you’d never notice if they were, so don’t pretend you would. Why, I
don’t believe you could even say off-hand what colour my eyes are.”
“My dear!” exclaimed her husband, with righteous indignation.
“Well—what colour are they then?”
Guy shifted a trifle uneasily in his chair. “A—a sort of
greeny-brown,” he said, somewhat defiantly.
“Commonly called hazel. Is that what you mean?”
“Hazel,” Guy nodded with some relief. “Yes.”
“Guy, you’re hopeless!” Cynthia laughed. “What sort of a husband do
you think you are? Really! Not to have the faintest idea of the colour
of his own wife’s eyes! Well, you might have said blue and been
complimentary at any rate.”
“Do you mean to say they’re not hazel?” her husband inquired.
Cynthia nodded with emphasis. “I should hope I do! They’re gray, my
poor child. If you don’t believe me, ask George to-night. I shouldn’t
call George a particularly observant man, but I think his powers will
probably have carried him that far. Guy, I think you’d better begin
rather hurriedly to talk about the weather.”
Guy began to laugh instead. He had a curious and rather fascinating
laugh. He laughed with a kind of guilty air, as if he knew he were
doing something he shouldn’t, but for the life of him could not help
it. His laughter was subdued but hearty, and reminded one irresistibly
of a small boy stealing jam.
“I meant gray,” said Mr. Guy Nesbitt, stealing jam.
Cynthia became engrossed in the intricacies of her beautifying
operations and the conversation languished.
Guy was the first to break the silence. “Looking forward to this
evening, darling?” he asked.
“Mps,” Cynthia murmured absently, busy with her comb. “Quite. I want
to meet Dora’s fiancé. I’d like to see her married, I must say; though
when it’s going to happen, goodness knows. In her last letter, she
said quite cheerfully that Pat couldn’t even raise the money for their
furniture yet, and apparently she saw little chance of his ever doing
so. Are you?”
“Very much. If Laura is anything like Dora (and being her sister I
take it she will be) we ought to have an amusing evening. This fellow
Pat Doyle sounds quite an entertaining sort of chap, too. I’ve never
met a journalist before, least of all an Irish journalist. The
combination ought to prove remarkable.”
Cynthia turned round to look at her husband. “You are a funny old
thing, you know,” she observed with a smile.
“So you frequently tell me, my dear. Why particularly in this
instance?”
“Well, you’re so unexpected. I should have expected you to hate
meeting strangers, but you positively revel in it.”
“Of course I do! I collect strangers. What you never seem to realise,
my otherwise admirable Cynthia, is that I am profoundly interested in
the human animal. I like to observe his little squirmings and watch
his reactions to all the ordinary, and still more to the extraordinary
things of life. And the more strangers I meet, the more I recognise
what a lot there is still to learn.”
“I’m glad I’m not a psychologist,” Cynthia returned. “It must be
awfully uphill work.”
“All women are psychologists,” retorted her husband sententiously.
“They may not know it, but applied psychology is part of their
stock-in-trade.”
“Humph!” Cynthia did not encourage her husband to air his views upon
women, about whom she considered he knew less than nothing. She
allowed him to call himself a psychologist because she was a kind and
tactful girl, but her own word for him so far as her sex was concerned
would have been idealist; and she had enough sex-loyalty not to wish
to shatter his illusions. “Well,” she went on, changing the subject
brightly, “hold the magnifying glass over Mr. Doyle as much as you
like, but I’ll just give you one word of advice before it’s too late;
beware of Laura, and beware of Dora, but above all, beware of Laura
and Dora!”
“And now,” said Guy, throwing the end of his cigarette carefully out
of the window, “explain that somewhat cryptic remark.”
“Well, you know Dora, don’t you?”
“Fairly well, I thought. She’s stayed with us—what was it?—three times
during the last two years.”
“Well, you know how demure and soulful she always looks, as if butter
wouldn’t melt in her mouth, when all the time it would disappear just
as fast as you could put it in with a shovel?”
“I know that Dora’s appearance is a little deceptive, yes,” gravely
agreed Guy, who knew all about his wife’s ideas regarding his own
views on her sex but would not have let her guess so for the world.
“Dora, if she wants to, can be a little demon,” amplified Cynthia
frankly. “Well, Laura is a worse edition of Dora, that’s all. Apart,
they’re demons, but together they’re positively diabolical. I warn
you.”
“Query,” Guy murmured, “when is a demon not diabolical? When it’s
apart.”
“And when should a purist cease to be pure?” smiled Cynthia. “In his
wife’s bedroom, I should have thought, at least.”
“Mrs. Nesbitt, you shock me,” Guy cackled in high glee. Cynthia’s
occasional lapses into pleasant vulgarity he privately considered one
of the most delightful things about her. He uncurled his length from
the chair. “Well, thank you for warning me. I’ll be on my guard
against this diabolical pair. Let us hope that the presence of her
fiancé will be a restraining influence upon Dora’s demoniacal
tendencies.”
“What a lot of long words my husband does know,” confided Cynthia to
her hair-brush. “Where are you off to now? They’re not due for another
twenty minutes.”
“I must see about the wine,” Guy replied reverently, and retired. Wine
and his wife were about the only two things in this world which Guy
really respected.