Double Cross Purposes

Book 203: Murder Room

by Ronald Knox

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The Hon. Vernon Lethaby is a flamboyant, headline-seeking exhibitionist with extravagant tastes and an allowance that barely covers his racing debts. In an unlikely partnership with middle-aged Canadian adventurer Joe 'Digger' Henderson, he strikes out for the Highlands of Scotland to hunt for Prince Charlie's treasure, which, according to legend, is interred on the isle of Erran. But Lathaby doesn't trust his partner, and has taken out insurance to cover him against being swindled. Enter Miles Bredon, who is sent by his employer to ensure than neither of them defrauds the Indescribable Insurance Company. An unidentified body burned in a garage, maps, photographs and a missing key sustain this clever tale of financial skulduggery until the final pages.

Release date: September 6, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 256

Sample

“THAT’S THE ISLAND.”

It seemed an eternity since they had left the main road. Main roads, in whatever part of the world you follow them, are much of a muchness, and carry with them at least the illusion of speed.
Your landmarks are far apart – hills, rivers, towns, signposts, petrol stations, and the beastlier kind of hotels. The scenery is for your subconsciousness; all that immediately concerns you
is the white ribbon of the road itself, and the milestones clicking past. But these lesser tracks, in the Highlands of Scotland especially, were too full of incident, for all their loneliness, to
lull you with the opiate of monotony. Now you would be perched over the steep side of a loch, now buried in a gloom of trees, now diving under unexpected railway-bridges; droves of sheep
interfered with you, and droves of schoolchildren, hardly less inextricable, and still more inexplicable in this lonely country-side. There seemed to be a kirk for every mile, a school for every
three miles; nor did the estate of any landed gentleman let you off without at least three inconspicuous lodges, at each of which a trim notice warned you to make allowances for the owner’s
habit of sudden egress. The low stone wall which seemed, on either side, to be their unremitting companion gave them glimpses, now of standing crops achieving a late maturity, now of sheep browsing
on heathery braes, now of fir-copses unprotected against marauding picnickers, now of stagnant estuaries. The last ten miles had felt like a full half of their journey.

At last it was becoming clear that they were leaving the low ground. Nature does not waste on the Highlands the lush fertility of our English hedgerows; it would be out of keeping (she seems to
feel) with the standards of a more frugal race. But there had been bluebells and scabious by the roadside, yellow clusters of stinking willie in the fields, and fountain-like glimpses of foxgloves
by the fallen logs in the woodland. Now, even these became rarer : heather and bog-myrtle overflowed into the ditches; gorse and broom took the place of brambles. They were coasting along the
high-water-mark of that brave flood of cultivation which washes up so far, but no further, on the hill-side; only the rare crofts, with their defiant patches of headlong tillage, interrupted its
native barrenness; and the woods grew thicker, their gloom more profound, to show that they were cultivated not for amenity or for sport, but as marketable timber. Sudden bridges, with crazy
parapets, spanned innumerable burns, and little freshets of hill-water spattered down, from their right, on to the roadway. The air, that had never been stagnant with the summer warmth, grew keener
as they approached the heights.

Why there should have been a kirk in that lonely corner of civilisation, it taxed the wit of the Southerner to imagine. Only four or five crofts were in sight, widely scattered; at least two of
these, by the law of averages, must contain inmates who disapproved, for obscure reasons, of the particular doctrines which it preached. Yet here it was, with its doors of glossy pitch-pine shut to
the visitor, its glazed windows in an approach to the Gothic manner, its trim manse and glebe behind it. Older, apparently, than the road itself; or why did the road run between church and
churchyard? The churchyard of Glendounie (for by that name the neglected hamlet is called) has perhaps the finest natural situation of any burial-place in Christendom. Away from the road, it comes
to an abrupt end at the top of a steep, steep cliff, that overhangs the Dounie a hundred and fifty feet below. The road runs at a tangent to a sharp bend in the river’s course, so that
nothing has prepared the traveller for this revelation. And, just at the extreme edge of the curve, just where the place of graves overhangs it, the river descends by a steep fall, of no great
height, yet famous as a haunt of beauty from the gnarled and hollowed rocks which surround it. As you stand on that brink, with the river before you laying bare the recesses of earth, with the
incessant thunder of the falls in your ears, the tombs behind you take their place in the scheme of things, and the old text about the dead being caught up into the air seems, for once, more than a
distant imagination.

Above the falls, about a quarter of a mile distant, the river flowed in two branches, separated by a wooded island that narrowed to a rocky point as it looked downstream. The highest part of it,
and the furthest that could now be seen, rose to some two hundred feet; the slope towards the left was rapid, towards the right almost precipitous, the whole breadth being only some few hundred
yards. How it came to be there, was a conjecture for the geologist; the true course of the stream lay evidently to the left, coming round in a slight curve; on the right it was almost straight,
as if the bed of it were a gap that had parted in a huge landslip, or as if the river, impatient of its détour, had found some natural fault and dug itself a canal through the living
rock. You could see from the ripples that there were shallows both to left and right of the cape, where the river swirled over rock barriers and held up the heavy boats they use for fishing. From
this angle, the island looked altogether deserted; you could not see the one house there is on it, or the bridge across the further stream that connects it with the mainland. It lay in a cup
formed by the steep cliffs which rose on either side, a hundred feet or more high, from the trench of Dounie to the heather and the hills.

“That’s the island.” The man who had spoken was a young man of thirty or so, healthy in complexion and handsome, if a trifle effeminate, in looks. He stood out on the
hill-crest like a monument to the skill of the English tailor who had dressed him so exactly right for a holiday in Scotland. His companion, a man much nearer middle age, could boast rather of
dogged and hard-bitten features; the eyes were too small, and apt to register suspicion. As for his dress, it was much like the other’s, but gave itself away by overdoing the thing at almost
every point. The plus-fours were a little too baggy, the coat too obtrusively homespun, the tweed just too violent. They stood together on the very edge of the platform, hard by where a monument,
newly erected in hideous pink granite, recorded the decease, at the age of fifty-one, of Angus McAlister, deeply respected by all who knew him. (It is the ambition of the Scot to be respected in
death, as it is the illusion of the Englishman that he is loved.)

“It’s a tidy bit of an island,” said this older man, “and I’ve seen some. But you said there’s a bridge on to it; where does that come in?”

“Round the curve, to our left; you can’t see it from here. It used to be a crazy wooden affair, but now it’s a sound piece of building in concrete, and the floods
don’t sweep it away any more. The house is about a quarter of the way up the hill; just behind one of those big larches, so you can’t see that either. It’s a lonely sort of place
still.”

“That won’t do any harm. You know, you seem to like all this publicity, newspaper men hanging round in the lounge of the hotel and kissing you good-bye at the station. If it
affords you any pleasure, go ahead with it, but don’t expect me to be matey with your journalist friends. And the less you ask them to stay week-ends up in these parts, the more I’ll
like it. When I’m doing a job, I like to stick hard at it, not having to pass the time of day with interviewers and tell ’em what my reactions are. Specially a job of this sort, where
you’re never certain that things’ll work out according to schedule. No, the great lonely forests are good enough for me; and thank God this is beginning to look more like it.
What’s that smoke yonder, though, to the right, see?”

“You mean on this bank of the river? Not on the island? Yes, I see; that’ll be tinkers, I expect; there’s no house near. Dreams Castle’s further on, where
we’re going now; you can’t see it yet.”

“Nothing on the other side of the river – where the bridge is?”

“Only just the gardener’s place; if you mean at the bridge itself. Beyond that, but about two miles beyond, is Strathdounie Lodge; that’ll be let for the shooting :
fishing too probably. Strathdounie village is beyond that again, a mile or more, if I remember right. God, how this place seems asleep, compared with little old London; I can’t see a shack
that wasn’t here fifteen years ago.”

“Fishing, you say? I don’t like that so much. How do they do it in these parts; net the river, I suppose?”

“Good God, no; not this time of the year. All you’ll get on this beat is a couple of rods, and just a fisherman to mind the boat. I don’t say that you won’t get
them coming up and down a good bit; but think what it would be like on an English river, with a great blasted angling club holding competitions all along the bank, Saturday afternoons.”

“Still, it means a man can’t go out to do a bit of gardening, as you might say, without having a boating party cruising past and taking a kindly interest in him. That’s
not my money. Tell you what it is, Lethaby, I wish to God you’d have done this thing on the quiet, instead of having us put it in all the newspapers. Seems to me they’ll be running
pleasure-cruises before we know where we are.”

“Trouble is, Henderson, you haven’t got a blameless conscience, like me. As for the boating facilities, look at that line of rapids across the end of the island, and tell me
who’s going to navigate one of these old fishing-tubs down it – let alone up it? No, there’ll be one beat above the island, and another below it; and there’s too much
broken water about to make the fishing good round the island itself. All we’ll have to do is to keep our eyes skinned if we’re operating at either end. And that, after all, remains to
be seen.”

“You bet it does. And I’ll tell you another thing; I don’t see myself spending the rest of my life grubbing up pig-nuts on a God-forsaken island like this unless
I’ve got clear sailing orders. I know something about soils, and I don’t mind telling you that it doesn’t take long, in a landscape like this, to get down to rock; so it’s
not such a hopeless position as it looks. All the same there are few worse jobs than looking for something that isn’t there when you don’t quite know where it is. We’ve got to see
that chart, Lethaby, and get a shot or two on the quiet, if we’re going to make anything of this proposition; that is, if we’re going to do it on the square. Tell me about that chart;
where’s it kept? What sort of light?”

“How do I know? I keep on telling you, it’s years since I was at Dreams, and the place has changed hands since then. Chances are, the beastly plan’s been sold with a lot
of other junk, and it would mean hunting through all the second-hand shops of Inverness to find the track of it. If not, who’s going to guarantee that old Airdrie will have kept the place
just as it was? The more I think of it, the less hope I see of getting a squint at that plan. All I know is, it must have hung in the front hall or somewhere close by when I knew the place, about
the time I left school, because it’s mixed up in my mind with a lot of coats and hats and things – brings back a smell of mackintosh, you know, when I try to remember it. The bother is,
it may be in some cubby-hole off the main entrance, where there’d be no light at all. Then, bang goes your idea of a photograph, and I don’t see how we’d ask to have a look at the
thing without making the old boy suspicious.”

“Would it be in a frame?”

“Can’t remember. Why? Were you thinking of lifting it? I must say, I don’t much like the idea of being given in charge for larceny. No, we’ve got to trust our
luck, Henderson, old man; that’s the fun of a show like this. I never could bear a certainty.”

“That’s all very well for you; you’ve got your allowance and your flat in town, and nothing to do but sit pretty and make love to chorus girls. I’ve got my living
to make; and I didn’t cry off that Riga proposition merely to come and help you revisit the scenes of your youth and get the mackintosh smell right. No, sir, this show is going to pay my
fare somehow, if it doesn’t do anything more. I haven’t any great urge to turn this Airdrie man into a millionaire, and it isn’t going to be done if I can help it. Let him look
out for his own furniture, that’s all. I’m going to get a good look at that chart, if it’s on the premises; don’t you make any mistake about that.”

“You’re building too much on it, you know, Henderson. It may be a straightforward honest-to-God map, and those figures on it may mean just anything.”

“Well, if we back a loser there, we’ve got to get busy somehow else. Meantime, we ought to be on the road if we’re going to make half-past four at this Dreams
place.”

“Were you ruminating on the beauties of nature?” broke in a friendly voice behind them. They turned, to find a cheerful, red-faced man with a grizzled moustache
contemplating them with a twinkle of amusement; his clerical collar, tentatively supported by the rest of his costume, proclaimed him the guardian of the enclosure. “I’m sorry to
disturb you, gentlemen; but it’s the time I lock up the gate here, to keep ill folk out of the churchyard. It’s a fine sight, is it not, the island?”

Lethaby raised his hat in salutation. “I knew it years ago, sir,” he said, “and I just came to have another look at it. Yes, it’s not easy to beat that for a
view.”

“And what’s more,” proceeded the intruder, “we’ve woken up to find ourselves become famous in the night, with all this talk in the newspapers.
That’s the island you’ll have read about, where the English gentlemen are coming to dig up the treasure.” Then, a light suddenly dawning on him, “You’ll excuse
me, sir, but I think I have the advantage of you from your photographs. Is it not the Honourable Vernon Lethaby I’m speaking to?”

“I congratulate you, sir,” replied the young man; “up to now, I had not known it was possible to trace a resemblance between those photographs and their original.
You should have been a detective. Since I am unmasked, may I introduce my accomplice, Mr. Henderson?” Mr. Henderson’s pleasure in meeting the stranger was duly affirmed, with
little corroboration from his appearance.

“It’s a queer thing,” said the minister, “that I should have met you just now; for I was thinking about you only a minute ago, when I crossed the road and
saw your car. So you’re a believer in the story of Prince Charlie’s treasure, are you, Mr. Lethaby?” Nor did the reverend gentleman give him an interval for reply, well
knowing that in conversation it is the initiative that counts. He was something of a learned man, and had written, of course, a history of the district. On the period of the ’45, especially,
he was an expert; and he would not lightly dismiss his audience – audiences, it must be supposed, being somewhat rare in Glendounie. “Mind you,” he went on,
“there’s not a shadow of doubt that Prince Charlie did come this way. Not a shadow of doubt about that. But the question is, do you see, did he leave anything behind him?
That’s the question. Now, you’ll say it’s likely enough that there was money and may be jewellery sent over to him from France; mind you, I’m not denying that. And
you’ll say he was in a hurry to leave these parts, and not much time to pack up his luggage before he started; that’s true enough. But you’ve got to set against that first of
all, the fact that the red-coats never found it; and they didn’t leave treasure lying about if they could help it, I tell you. And then there’s the Strathspiel family, that had Dreams
Castle all those years. Let’s see, you’ll be a relative of theirs, Mr. Lethaby, and I’m not saying a word against them, but” – and here he grasped the young man
confidentially by the lapel of his coat – “the Strathspiel family knew the value of money as well as other folk, and they wouldn’t have left money lying in Erran Island if
it was to be had for the digging. Now, I’m not grudging you a holiday on the island; but I’m not very confident that you’ll pay the expenses of the let out of what you find
there. Perhaps it’ll be all for the best, because you won’t bring down the curse on you either.”

“A curse, is there?” asked Lethaby.

“Deary me, didn’t you know that? Yes, that’s the legend hereabouts, that the treasure’s there still, but the man who finds it will bring bad luck on himself and
wish he’d left it be. Yes, Mr. Lethaby, great riches can be a curse to any of us, but – well, I see you’re wearying to be away; don’t let me keep you here
chattering.”

“We can’t take you anywhere?” suggested Lethaby as he climbed into the car. “We’re going to call at Dreams.”

“No, thank you, I’m not going that way myself. If you’re a wee bit late for your tea, just tell Sir Charles you’ve been having a crack with the minister of
Glendounie; he’ll know what that means. Good day, sir, good day to you both.” They parted with a waving of hands; but the violence with which Henderson started the car had almost the
force of an expletive.

It is but just that the reader should be formally introduced to the two principal characters already mentioned; the more so, because one of them, Vernon Lethaby, was the sort of person it is
quite impossible to hush up. You might as well try to hush up the Test Match, or the Albert Memorial. Everybody who read the cheap papers – and most people do – was familiar with his
name. If you had asked people why it was so familiar, they would perhaps have found some difficulty in assigning an adequate reason for the circumstance. He was not, he had never been, an athlete;
he did not fly the Atlantic, or race at Brooklands. He hadn’t stood for Parliament; he hadn’t written a book; he didn’t paint, even badly. He was a golfer with an indifferent
handicap, he danced and played bridge adequately; in politics, he was just an ordinary Communist, of the type fashionable in Chelsea. He had never saved anybody from drowning, or won the Irish
sweepstake, or seen a ghost, or performed any other feat which would have legitimately distinguished him from his fellows. A good many of his contemporaries were better looking, a good many were
worse living. It was doubtful whether he would get half a column of obituary in The Times.

For all that, he was news. That strange, crooked mirror which distorts the world for our entertainment, the cheap Press, had discovered that he possessed, or perhaps decreed that he should
possess, publicity value. Nor was this, I am sorry to say, altogether unconnected with the fact that he was the son, although he was only the youngest son, of a peer. We have long ceased to be an
aristocratic nation, settling down into a régime of avowed plutocracy. Let the scion of a noble house pursue any of those honourable callings which were open to his ancestors –
we take no notice of him. In the House of Commons, he will be lucky if he struggles through to an under-secretaryship; in the Army, he is put down as a good-natured fellow who, of course, does not
mean to treat the Army as a career; in the Church, he is ignored, because nobody can remember whether he is the Rev. the Hon., or the Hon. the Rev. It is the same with his pastimes; that he
should hunt and shoot and go to race-meetings we expect as a matter of course, and if he excels in any of these departments he gets little credit for it. But once you get into the news, the
ordinary rough-and-tumble of news, your title becomes an added aureole to the performance. “Countess Robbed” makes a better headline than “£5,000 Jewel
Haul”; you will be a “Peer in Motor Mishap” if you so much as graze the other man’s bonnet; “Earl’s Son in Court” and
“Titled Shoplifter” will refresh the palate of the most jaded reader, and even “Decree for Baronet,” while losing its rarity value, has not altogether lost
its appeal. To be born the son of a Duke is, in itself, nothing; you would have done far better to be born a quadruplet. But, having been born the son of a Duke, to get into any kind of trouble or
indulge in any kind of notorious eccentricity is to be in the public eye at once. What then had Vernon Lethaby done, that the public should delight him, not to honour, but to a kind of
good-humoured contempt? He had lived among people richer than himself, and got more than he gave in the way of entertainment; he had mixed with people cleverer than himself, and borrowed their
epigrams, or dined out on their anecdotes. You found his portrait in the illustrated papers, now looking like a Polar bear at St. Moritz, now like a plucked chicken at Cap d’Antibes; dancing
in aid of the Distressed Governesses, dining for the Earthquake Victims, sometimes even going to a party just for the fun of the thing. But the illustrated papers are not real publicity; they are
only a step towards it. He had danced and dined, to be sure; but what had he done?

The gossip-writers, if you came to look into it, were responsible. Vernon Lethaby, as the reader will have gathered by now, was not the sort of man to do anything violently sensational. But he
was always ready to do something mildly sensational – ready to do it, if it were only to oblige a gossip-writing friend who was hard up for material. He would keep a leopard cub as a pet, or
row on the Serpentine in a grey top-hat, or allow a rumour to be put about that he was engaged to a well-known film-actress, or give a cocktail party to two dozen pavement artists – things
like that, they would tell you in Fleet Street, he did better than anybody else in London. Sometimes he would branch out further, and almost succeed in being amusing – as when he rode a camel
to his club for a bet, or when he sent out invitations for a party on April the first, in the name of a well-known hostess, to the two hundred worst answerers in London; or when he travelled a
hundred miles in a Bath chair along one of the most crowded arterial roads out of London, holding up the cars or waving them leave to pass, as the mood took him.

The adventure upon which he was at present engaged was not, his friends said, just one of his follies. He was genuinely in want of money, for the allowance referred to above did not do much more
than cover his racing debts; nor could he bring himself to leave the flat in London, and bury himself in a remote Perthshire country house, which his aunt lent him on the strict condition that he
might not let or lend it. This aunt on his mother’s side belonged to the Strathspiel family, as the minister, with the genealogical flair of his countrymen, had realised; and the
house, now shut up, was little better than a repository of Jacobite relics, handed down as heirlooms. These, too, were unsaleable, and indeed of little intrinsic value; so it is perhaps hardly
surprising that his thoughts should have turned to those more negotiable relics which, tradition said, lay interred in the Isle of Erran. Sir Charles Airdrie, its present owner, was a Glasgow man
who had done well in shipping; if arrangements could be made with him, it was evidently more appropriate that Prince Charlie’s treasure should come back to an heir, albeit by law Salic, of
the Strathspiel race. There was, however, nothing furtive or underhand about Lethaby’s way of going to work. On the contrary, he had given exclusive interviews to the Sunday papers about it;
the Isle of Erran was on all men’s lips; and if the expense had not been too considerable, he would have had a cinema operator on the spot to record the progress of his expedition.

Such publicity was, as we have seen, little to the mind of his partner in the enterprise, a Colonial by the name of Henderson whom he had picked up at a boxing-match, and treated, for a month or
so past, with that extreme familiarity which decadent members of an aristocracy will always show to their undesirable friends. Joe Henderson, called “Digger” Henderson by
his intimates, made no secret of the fact that his career had been an adventurous one; its most respectable phase, to judge by the readiness with which he talked about it, was when he acted as a
wholesale importer of whisky into the United States of America at a time when such goods were contraband. His residence in Canada during this time had infected his speech with an intonation, and
with a set of locutions, for which northern America must be held responsible; but the basis of his utterance suggested earlier contact with the Antipodes; and in the absence of more precise
details, he would describe himself as having been born all over the British Empire. He came to London as the representative of a Mexican oil concern which did not encourage questions as to its
whereabouts or antecedents, and he can hardly have expected to move, as he did, almost from the first, in the best society of Chelsea. In our patriotic determination to take the Dominions to our
bosom, we are apt to do so without references; finding that the man does not speak like ourselves, we forget to ask whether he speaks as an educated man would in the part of the world he comes
from; we do not expect him to have been at any particular school, or to show any interest in the . . .