Still Dead

Book 523: Murder Room

by Ronald Knox

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

After Colin Reiver is acquitted of responsibility for killing a child in a car accident he sets out on a sea cruise in the hope that it might ease local feeling and the voice of his own conscience.

But when a few days after his departure Colin is found dead by the roadside, Miles Bredon, investigator for the Indescribable Insurance Company, must travel to Scotland to establish precisely when the death occurred. The body has disappeared and reappeared in the space of forty-eight hours and a large insurance premium is at stake.

Release date: September 6, 2012

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

Chapter One

THE REIVERS OF DORN

AS THE IDEAL STATE slowly greets the eye of a bewildered public, and we realize with ever-deepening assurance that all is
for the best in the best of all possible worlds, the draughts of modern progress (it will be admitted) are inclined to make us creep closer together for warmth. We like to live in smaller houses, in
which patent kitchenettes replace those long, chilly passages, as if we would draw our homes close about our ears against the wind. The clerk who once was content to be semi-detached and pay rent
now owns, on the instalment system, a small bungalow out in a field where the buses pass; the gaunt mansions of the more fashionable suburbs advertise their emptiness with rotting boards that
appeal for an imaginary purchaser, and their occupants live in dumpy maisonettes, a quarter of the size, compensating themselves for the loss with an undeniable garage and a few yards of crazy
pavement. Meanwhile, those greater householders whose, once, were the dreaming parks and Georgian piles we have all coveted, have abandoned the expense of their upkeep and crowded into London
flats, with a fine mews outlook and a postal address which looks respectable enough if you omit the 95B. All the more gratefully, once and again, you come across old
families in the country who still keep up, by hook or by crook, the external appearance of splendour; keep the palings sound and the paths weeded and the roof tiled by prodigies, sometimes, of
self-denial, and make it possible for the local guide-book, even in these days, to talk of “stately homes.” In a few more decades of land-taxation and death-duties these, too, will
have abandoned the struggle; and the fields will go out of cultivation altogether for lack of a squirearchy, until we ride down the hedges with tanks and cultivate it all, Soviet-fashion, by slave
labour. Or will a few of the old landowners be left, financed by public subscription, to impress the American visitor—a delicate return for the reserves in which he keeps his surviving Red
Indians?

In Scotland, especially, you will meet with these inhabitants of the past. Perhaps the Scot has a larger share of feudal pride; perhaps Edinburgh has not the same metropolitan lure as London;
perhaps it is merely that even in these days you may hope to let shootings. Of such were the Reivers of Dorn, the family which concerns us in this history. They lived where they had lived before
Bannockburn, and gave themselves no airs about it. A family curse, perhaps exaggerated by local rumour, condemned the property, so it was said, to pass always by indirect descent. There was a
story, too, that the death of the heir was always made known, by presentiment, to his family. Certainly an impressive majority of Reivers had died childless, or outlived their heirs. This very fact
contributed, it may be supposed, to perpetuate their attachment to the soil; the property was entailed, and the head of the family was naturally disinclined to break or commute the entail for the
sake of cousins with whom, as a rule, he was not on speaking terms. Donald Reiver, who piloted the estate through the perplexities of the Great War and the difficulties of the times which followed,
had quarrelled thoroughly with his cousin Henry, so long since that the very causes of the dispute were almost forgotten. And the quarrel was kept alive by the fact of neighbourhood; the Henry
Reivers were settled near by, in the same county, and frequent meetings on public occasions fostered the disharmony.

The estate of Dorn was no sinecure to its owner. It was inextricably associated with surrounding farms, so that he must have some tincture of husbandry; it had been thickly planted with woods,
so that he must needs turn forester; there was a tangle of sporting rights, and it was undermined at one point by a sorrowful inheritance of coal. Besides this, laird after laird had introduced on
to the estate whatever at his own date was latest in modern improvements; the little territory could have faced a siege, so resolutely had it aimed at self-sufficiency. The milk of its dairies
overflowed into neighbouring towns, its hens laid their eggs for distant markets; no meat was carved in the house, no cheese was cut, but what its native vigour had supplied; it boasted not only
a house carpenter but an estate blacksmith. Strange outhouses met the eye at every corner of the policies : here a water-tower, here an electric light power-station, here a miniature sewage-farm, here an ice-house, replenished cumbrously, each winter, with cartloads of ice, which every summer saw melted away or put to use. To own such a property is to be owned by it; you have scarcely the
residuum of time you can devote to public service or to self-cultivation. You labour like a highly paid works-manager, turning endlessly the wheels of industry in a vicious circle of production and
consumption.

For such activities, while his wife lived, Donald Reiver was sufficient, and took pleasure in the exercise. Yet those who knew him best realized that he worked with the mechanical dexterity of
the accomplished juggler, and was consoled only by the tacit self-congratulation which accompanies success; his heart was not in it. To play the squire with conviction, you must have the prospect
of handing over the inheritance to a son who will value it not less than yourself. At Dorn, it was no secret that the young laird was ill fitted to step into his father’s shoes. Colin Reiver,
“Donald Colin” by baptism, was intermittently an invalid; weakness of the lungs made him a bad life, and Cousin Henry might reasonably have hoped to stand at his grave-side, even had
there been no family curse to fortify him in the opinion. But, even if Colin lived to inherit, it was impossible to imagine his inheriting with gusto. All the energies of the father seemed to have
gone into his daughter, Mary; she was already married to a prosperous man of business, and the conditions of the entail ruled her out of the succession. Her brother was an insignificant creature,
of whom you could only complain that he was exasperatingly undervitalized. A school-master who observed “That boy, Reiver, has no passions” was held to have written his epitaph. He
was placid without being good-tempered, silent without being meditative, stolid without being reliable. He looked at you with eyes that hardly seemed to register human interest, assented to your
observations with an indifference ruder than contradiction. He smiled rarely, and when he did so it was with the air of one amused by a private joke of his own. He was not ill-formed, not
ill-looking; he had learned, at a good public school, the kind of superficial manners a good public school can teach. But it was impossible to like him; and, though the life of Dorn was outwardly
peaceable enough, you could not spend three days there without perceiving that the heir was a constant source of irritation to his own father. The fondness of parental love may be blind to every
fault of temperament, may excuse every lapse of morals; it finds no pasture to feed on in the stony soil of indifference.

The offence was aggravated because Colin did not pretend to the least interest in his family or its estates. He could shoot, and did shoot intermittently; but the pheasants might have been
starlings for all he cared about their history or prospects. He fished sometimes, but he could scarcely have told you where the rights of Dorn marched with those of its neighbours. And as for the
business side of the estate, the farms, the stock, the timber, they meant no more to him than the intricacies of Tacitus’ Germania, which he was supposed to be studying at Oxford, and
that was little. Appeals to family pride and to self-interest were alike unavailing; he parried them with a few cheap Socialist sentiments, picked up at a college debating society, or a defeatist
conviction that in ten years’ time life would be impossible for the landowner. Did you storm at him, he looked back at you with the injured eyes of a cat refusing to be dislodged from its
retreat under a sofa; “You may kill me,” they seemed to say, “but nothing will ever make me understand.”

Donald Reiver, a good-natured but quite unimaginative father, came at last to give up his son as hopeless, but without pardoning the inefficiency. Nor was it only that he feared what might
follow when Colin succeeded him; if Colin never lived to succeed him, as many hoped he would not, the property would survive, but it would survive in the hands of strangers, and Donald’s
widow would be left portionless. The management of the estate left no margin for saving; he had no other source of revenue from which to provide for her. It tortured him to think of her living in
some cottage on the grounds, the despised pensioner of Cousin Henry. Somehow, he must back himself against the event, otherwise desirable, of his son’s predeceasing him; and he did not need
the advice of his lawyer, Mr. Gilchrist, to tell him what that necessity pointed to. Colin’s life must be insured heavily, and the future was safe. Let the family curse take its effect; it
would be felt by the family as a blessing, hardly in disguise.

If I seem too persistent in calling the attention of my readers to the existence of the Indescribable Insurance Company, it is only because the activities of that Company are so ubiquitous, so
far-reaching, as to make it crop up everywhere in the history of modern crime. Nor let me be accused of advertising it; you might as well set out to advertise the Bank of England. All insurance
is, in a sense, gambling; the Indescribable plunges, and makes plunging pay. The most incalculable events—whether a seaside resort will have a good season next year, whether a fashion in
hats will survive the spring, whether a given film will be banned by the censorship—have all been reduced by its experts into terms of actuarial arithmetic. The most gigantic
risks—those of a parachutist out to make records, or those of a police-spy in Chicago—can be underwritten, at a price. If the Company has a fault, it is that of insisting rather too
rigorously on the letter of its bond; premiums have to be paid on the nail, claims lodged within a specified time, loss suffered under certain prescribed conditions, or it is no use. But an
element of red-tape is inseparable, as we see, from big business; you do not expect a multiple store to let you pay “next time you are passing.”

Cousin Henry’s recorded comment, “What, insured him with the Indescribable?  No idea the little beast was as groggy as all that,” expressed a legitimate surprise. The
ordinary reason for insuring with the Indescribable was because nobody else would take you on. Colin, though his was a bad life, was no desperate case; but the estate had already had dealings with
the Company, and it was thought politic to keep up the connexion. After a bewildering cross-examination on his history, habits, and tendencies, and the probable causes of mortality among his
great-aunts, his life was insured for a royal sum, which added several hundreds a year to the existing charges on the estate. For the first time since his extreme youth, Colin was regarded as an
asset.

The arrangement had hardly been in force for a year when the reason for it was suddenly removed. Mrs. Reiver died, and with her death the whole situation changed for the worse. It is the first
art of motherhood to be a buffer-state between the husband and the children, and Colin’s mother had done her best. Now, except for occasional visits from Mary Hemerton, the married daughter
of the house, father and son lived together, at uncomfortably close quarters. Colin “went into the City” for a time, but a very few months sufficed to betray his want of aptitude;
then he lived at home, with an almost insolent air of waiting for his unwelcome inheritance. He had nothing in common with the neighbours, who would have tolerated any other eccentricity than the
absence of an enthusiasm for shooting. The result was that he began, insensibly, to unclass himself in their eyes by a cynical fondness for low company; in Cousin Henry’s unsympathetic phrase he “went native.” In England, the fireside of the village public-house has a place,
always, for the Tony Lumpkin; ale is a good leveller, and the intrusion of “the quality” into the public bar is not suspected as a condescension. But the Scot, when he drinks in
public, drinks with more embarrassment; he has no abandon in his conviviality; and, though politically he is by nature a democrat, he expects more of the laird’s family than the
Englishman expects of the squire’s. Colin, soaking whisky among the tenants and workmen of his father’s estate, won no good marks for affability; his glass, from the necessity of
keeping up appearances, wanted ever more frequent replenishing, and he sank before the year was out into the unlovely habits of the dram-drinker. The family curse, it seemed, would have an easy
prey, and the Indescribable was due to lose its money.

But if Cousin Henry was unmoved when he heard that Colin had taken to drink, it was otherwise when news reached him that the laird, on his side, had taken to religion. “Feller just on
sixty, when he gets religion like that, gets it bad; full-time job, that’s where the trouble comes in. You mark my words, the estate will start going back from now on. Likely as not,
he’ll get to think the world’s coming to an end, and then who’s going to look after the coverts?” For a moment, indeed, it did look as if Donald Reiver was going to take
an unhealthy interest in the measurements of the Pyramids. That lure he avoided, but did not fall back on a “safe” creed. Modern Presbyterianism, however satisfactory in meeting the
needs of sensible men, is lean diet for the devotee. And the old laird, though he had ever been on good terms with the Kirk, had laid no foundations for a fanaticism; if he was to deflect his
energies to the promotion of a cult, it must be something unmistakably dynamic. He ran into it quite accidentally, when visiting a spa for his health; a chance interview, a handful of
introductions, and he was swept off his feet into the newest of all revivals. He came home with a new vocabulary, a new orientation, with all the fervours of a convert.

There is a story that an elderly Catholic, after enquiring minutely into the religious observances of a pious sodality, and finding them, evidently, more exacting than he had thought, summed up
his impressions in the formula, “It sounds to me just the thing for my boy Tom.” Probably old Mr. Reiver had some idea that the movement he had embraced, cradled as it was among the
youth of the universities and designed, evidently, to appeal to youth, might reach Colin and infect, for the first time, that sluggish nature with an enthusiasm. But this was not primarily intended; nor did the bored indifference with which his ideas were actually greeted in the home circle daunt his ardour. He surrounded himself with fellow-devotees; and Dorn, while the universities were
in recess, took rank among the recognized meeting-places of the movement.

There had been some doubt, after his wife’s death, whether Mr. Reiver would continue to pay the premiums on the insurance policy—I am sorry to harp so much on this subject, but it
nearly concerns our story. Mary was provided for, and he had nobody else to think of, once Colin was gone; those annual payments, now, seemed like throwing good money after bad. But his interest
in “the Circles” decided him at once to continue them; he could look forward, if he lived long enough, to being a religious benefactor; and nobody dislikes that
rôle, however much we affect to despise the loaves and fishes. The estate, which he had no power to will away, was neglected meanwhile, as Cousin Henry had predicted that it would be;
but the results of such neglect did not immediately become apparent, while departmental officials looked after woods and coverts, farm and garden, as before. The coverts were still shot, dinner
parties were still given, and the neighbours looked leniently on Mr. Reiver’s enthusiasm; after all, it was not as if he had gone over to Rome, like young Ogilvie at Malloch.

You must picture him as a fine old gentleman, not yet beginning to feel the weight of years; a little behind the times in continuing to wear side-whiskers that emphasized a slight touch of
foolish benevolence in the look of him. To see him at his most characteristic, you should watch him reading a chapter to the assembled household at family prayers, in the manner of last century;
or going round the house to lock up, the last thing at night, with hardly less of ceremonial in the performance. A man not born to do great things, but kindly and blameless; not deserving
certainly, were the apportioning of merit and reward our business, to be involved in mystery and tragedy on the threshold of his old age.

Chapter Two

COLIN GOES ON HIS TRAVELS

THE FIRST ACT in the story I will take leave to tell in the words of old Mr. Reiver himself; he described it in a letter
to his daughter Mary, whom he was expecting (with her husband) for a Christmas visit.

MY DEAREST MARY,

This is to know whether there is any chance that you and Vincent could make it convenient to come here before the time we fixed on; indeed, as soon as possible. We
are in great trouble here through Colin’s reckless driving in that new sports car of his, which I always said (if you remember) was unsuited to these narrow roads. He went out driving
yesterday with an Oxford friend of his, young Denis Strutt, who is staying here; and on the way back he was responsible for a fatal accident, one very tragic in itself and very difficult for
me. I don’t know if you will remember Robert Wishaw, Hugh’s young son, a bonny boy whom you must often have seen playing round the lodge; a great favourite and, I fear, an only
child. He must have been coming back from school by himself when Colin’s car ran straight into him, dragging him along the road and killing him on the spot. What makes it worse is that
Colin had been drinking, there is no doubt, at an hotel; though young Strutt says “not more than enough to keep out the cold; not enough to do anybody any harm.” Poor boy, he was
sobered enough when he came in, but I doubt what his state was at the time of the accident, and Strutt, I am sorry to say it, is not a reliable young fellow—good-natured indeed, but
without any tincture of religion.

Colin lies open to the charge of homicide, and there have been so many accidents round here lately that it is difficult to take lenient views. If he is acquitted,
there is some ground for hope that all will be for the best as far as he is concerned. You will understand what I mean when I say that the shock of this wretched business seems to have woken
him up; he has come out of that lethargy of his we all have such good reason to know, and is full of horror at what he has done; I sometimes hope, of repentance. He talks very regretfully
of his past, and of the misuse made of his opportunities; he faces the prospect of evil times with a resignation surprising in one who has had so little serious background to his life. And, to
tell the truth, his manner towards myself has grown almost affectionate. I could wish that the great difference in my own life had come sooner, so that I might have been able to help him
against the repressions of his youth.

Wishaw has taken it hardly, and cannot be blamed if he does so. His manner is perfectly respectful, but he has given notice of resignation, and I fear that I shall not
be able to induce him to reconsider it. He talks of going out to join his niece in America. What I dread is the ill-feeling which all this will create among the men on the estate; not for my
own sake, but for Colin’s when he comes to succeed—it may be, before long. That is where we so need your help; all the people on the estate cherish a great respect for you, perhaps
more than you know; and your influence, radiating from here, will do all the good in the world just now. Pray ask Vincent if he cannot make it convenient to antedate his visit; or, if he is
kept down in the South, let you come on ahead. There is much more to talk of besides; but this cruel news has driven everything out of my head. If one did not know that everything is
meant, it would be hard to take these things in the right spirit.

Hugh Wishaw, it should be explained, was the head gardener at Dorn; a grim, morose widower, peerless at his craft and a pillar of the local kirk, but with little human contact save for the
paternal love now wrenched from him. It was typical, you felt, of Colin’s genius for doing the wrong thing that the victim of his recklessness should have been the son of a tenant on the
estate, and such a tenant. The evidence looked black against him; no other vehicle had been on the road, the turning was an easy one, and the car remained undamaged, except for a mudguard bent
against a telegraph post when he ran up, too late, on to the bank. His record gave colour to the suspicion that he was the worse for drink when he took the road home. B. . .