The Footsteps at the Lock

Book 637: Murder Room

by Ronald Knox

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

At first sight the case looks simple enough to private investigator Miles Bredon. Two cousins on a boat trip on the River Thames: Derek with a £50,000 reason for surviving the next two months until he inherits a legacy; Nigel with a £50,000 reason for getting rid of him and inheriting the money himself. When Derek disappears, Nigel naturally falls under suspicion - not least because he has a train of alibis that is almost too perfect. But where is the body? And if this is not murder, whose is the photograph of a body slumped in a boat, and who left the wet footprints at the lock?

Release date: September 6, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 256

Sample

IT is an undeniable but a mystifying fact of natural ethics that a man has the right to dispose of his own property at death. They can do him no good
now, those ancestral acres, those hard-won thousands, nor may any of the trees he planted, save the grim cypress, follow their ephemeral master; yet before the partnership of hand and mind is
altogether dissolved, a brief flourish at the tail of a will may endow a pauper or disinherit a spendthrift, may be frittered away in the service of a hundred useless or eccentric ends. No good to
him – at least, there was once a theory that a man might be happier in the after state for the use of his means here, but we have abolished all that long since; no good to him, but much to
expectant nephews and nieces, much to life-boat funds and cats’ homes, much to the Exchequer, wilting for lack of death-duties. Of all this he is the arbiter. Yet we have it on the authority
of all the copybooks that money does far more harm in the world than good; why, then, do we leave the direction of that harm to the one man who, ex hypothesi, will be out of the way when it
happens? Why let the testator arrange for the unworthy squandering of his property, when he is to have no tenure in it henceforward except the inalienable grave?

Such doubts, entirely methodical in character, are suggested by the last will and testament of Sir John Burtell, a barrister of some note in his day, that is, in the latter years of Queen
Victoria. A safe man, with no itch for politics or ambition for titles, he retired soon after the death of the Great Queen, leaving the world open to his two sons, John and Charles, then in the
flower of their age. He came of a sound stock, and found, besides, some zest in country pursuits; nor, in the end, was it years that carried him off, but the severe influenza epidemic of 1918. By
that time, his two sons had predeceased him. Both took their commissions in 1915; both were killed two years later. John’s wife had died long since, Charles’s widow alienated the old
man’s sympathies by marrying again and settling in the United States. His will, therefore, on which this story turns, left the bulk of his property, some fifty thousand pounds, to his elder
grandson Derek; in the event of his death it was to revert to Charles’s son Nigel.

So far, you might have thought the old gentleman would cheat the lawyers and die intestate. But certain conditions attached to the will made it a document of importance. The testator reflected
that one child was an orphan, the other fatherless and as good as motherless; that they had to grow to manhood with no parental supervision in times of great unsettlement. Very wisely, then, he
left the fifty thousand (which was not the whole, but the bulk of the legacy) in trust, until such time as Derek (or, failing him, Nigel) should reach the age of twenty-five. Meanwhile, the boys
were rare visitors to their grandfather’s house, and scarcely welcome ones; a kind of precocious boredom in their manner exasperated the old gentleman, none the less bitterly because it was
assumed to be typical of a period. The avital thunders about politics, art, morals, and religion may be supposed to have formed the grandsons’ character by repulsion. Derek lived, mostly,
with old friends of the family in the South of France, who let him run wild on the facile excuse that ‘anyhow, the boy will have money’. Nigel, who never took to his step-relations, was
little better handled; an exile when at home, an unappreciated rebel at school, he flung himself, with a pathetic illusion of originality, into the career of an aesthete.

The two cousins met little, whether before or after their grandfather’s death; there was little in the character of either to make it desirable. They went to different schools, neither of
which (since schools have a reputation to lose) I intend to specify. But Oxford, though her critics have been unkindly of late, has too broad a back to need the shelter of anonymity. Both
matriculated at the older University, both at Simon Magus College. Election to colleges is a mystery, as election should be; but the two years which Derek had misspent there might surely have
warned the fellows against risking a second experiment with Nigel. On the other hand, Derek was a normal creature, though morose in disposition, idiotically extravagant, and with a strict
periodicity of drunkenness. There was nothing in him, it must be admitted, which gave promise of Nigel’s unendurable affectations.

Derek was dissolute with a kind of lumpish unimaginativeness which may infect youth in any century. If he gambled to excess, it was because nobody had succeeded in introducing him to any other
method by which you could kill time until the age of twenty-five. If he drank, it was with the stupid man’s haste to forget and to disguise his own dullness. His dress, his manner, his
associates were of the equestrian world; but his taste was neither for horses nor for horsemanship, only for horsiness. With the Dean he was continually in conflict; but there was a regularity in
his irregularities, you knew beforehand just when he would be drunk, and just how drunk he would be; and there is that in the academic mind which appreciates consistency in whatever direction. He
was not clever enough to devise organized mischief; he was too indolent (it seemed) to bear malice; he accepted his fines, his gatings, and a couple of rustications with the complacency of the
school-boy who ‘takes punishment well’. He made little stir in the University world, and it is probable that during the whole period of his residence he never had an enemy, except his
cousin.

Nigel’s perceptions were infinitely more acute, his faults infinitely less excusable. He had grown up in the aftermath of war, under the infection of disillusionment. He looked out upon a
world of men (school-masters especially) who had fought and bled for the sake of certain simple emotions, with a submerged jealousy which took the form of resentment. These others had had the
opportunity which was denied to him, of exploiting the full possibilities of manhood; he would console himself for the loss by denying that the opportunity was worth having. They had been born to
set the world right; he would retaliate on the cursed spite of his late nativity by doing his best to put the world out of joint again. He would rebel against everything his neighbours bowed down
to; would embrace every form of revolt, however tawdry, however trite; he would have no aim or ideal except to shock. At school, he had the sense to keep his powder dry, to lock up his splenetic
poems, to revenge himself upon his uncongenial surroundings by the secret satisfaction of an undivulged irony. ‘Loony Burtell’ they called him; and he was content, like another Brutus,
to bide his time.

Among all her immemorial traditions, Oxford cherishes none staler than that of aestheticism. A small group in each generation lights upon the same old recipe for setting the Isis on fire, and
(since undergraduate memory only lives three years) is satisfied that it is a group of lonely pioneers. Nigel had read Wilde at school; he pillaged epigrams from Saki without appreciating that
ironic reservation which is his charm. He offered absinthe to all his visitors, usually explaining that he did not really care for it, but kept it in his rooms in order to put temptation in the way
of his scout. He painted his walls a light mauve, and hung them with a few squares of blank cartridge paper on which he was always threatening to do crayon drawings; the beauty of art, he said, lay
in its promise; its fulfilment only brought disillusion. He talked in a very slow drawl, with a lisp and – a slight stammer which he had cultivated to perfection. He never attended lectures;
the dons did not understand, he complained, that undergraduates come up to Oxford in order to teach. He was desperately callow, and quite inordinately conceited.

The older Universities tolerate everything. There are times, and there are Colleges, at which the essential rowdyism of youth clothes itself in a mantle of righteous Philistine indignation, and
breaks up the aesthetic group with circumstances of violence. But you can fool some of the people some of the time; and at Simon Magus men cared little what their neighbours did, short of the
bagpipes. Nigel found disciples, or at least comrades-in-arms for his movement, in that home of impossible unbeliefs. If you were the kind of person who liked that kind of thing, that was the kind
of thing you liked. A round dozen of half-literary, half-histrionic young men from various colleges frequented his rooms, debated on the cut of clothes, and read out their compositions to each
other. They spoke of themselves, almost reverently, as ‘the men who had made bad’; they declared it their mission to encourage immorality amongst the undergraduates, Bolshevism amongst
the scouts, and suicide amongst the dons. It was their favourite creed that England, and indeed all the English-speaking races, were the spoke in the world’s wheel. ‘Why should I admire
the country I was born in?’ expostulated Nigel; and indeed the reason alleged seemed inadequate. His favourite method of denunciation was to say, ‘I don’t like it; it’s
un-foreign’.

It will easily be imagined that little sympathy was wasted between the two cousins. Not, indeed, that the desperate poses of the younger could affect the elder with any sense of personal
concern. Oxford is a broad stream, in which the varied regatta of life can be managed without jostling. Derek himself was too listless to condemn any form of behaviour; and his friends, though they
agreed among themselves that Nigel was the kind of thing which wasn’t done, never dreamed of holding his cousin responsible for him. But the arrival of a namesake in the same college is never
welcome; your letters go astray, well-meaning people mix you up, and send invitations to the wrong man. The two were, moreover, somewhat alike; the male strain was strong in the Burtell family, and
a resemblance had survived closer than is usual between cousins. Each was dark and rather short; either, in a general way, insipidly good-looking; each had a pink-and-white complexion. It irritated
Derek to be addressed, sometimes, as if he were Nigel’s brother; it irritated him still more when Nigel’s casual acquaintances saw him at a distance and saluted him by mistake. He
ostentatiously avoided his cousin, and even, as far as he might, the mention of his name.

Nigel, on his part, was not slow to appreciate this neglect in the attitude of his senior, or to devise means of retaliation. He identified his cousin as a centaur, and referred to him sadly as
a kind of family failing. All the forms of abstinence he displayed were dictated to him by this repulsion. ‘I can’t get drunk,’ he would say; ‘people would be certain to
mistake me for the Centaur, and I might be too drunk to explain.’ ‘No, I don’t play cards; there is such an intolerable look of Victorian virtue about the Queen of Spades; it
would be dreadful to sit opposite her night after night. Besides, the Centaur plays cards.’ ‘I am really going to work this term; then even the Master’s wife will hardly be able
to mistake me for the Centaur again.’ They say the University is a microcosm, and it is certainly a microphone; remarks like these, not always conceived in the best of taste, came round to
Derek, and fanned, from time to time, the dull embers of his resentment.

After a year of this, Derek went down; but the feud did not stop there. Nigel spent his vacations in London; and London is even a worse place than Oxford for avoiding your dislikes. Kind, but
imperceptive, hostesses threw the two cousins together. Neither had scaled any particular social heights, but each straddled on that uneasy ridge which connects Chelsea with Mayfair. Derek,
conscious of his own conversational limitations, was for ever being reminded of his cousin’s existence. ‘Oh yes, charming fellow; but have you met Nigel?’ ‘Do tell me, Mr
Burtell, what is your brilliant cousin Nigel doing now?’ These hollow insipidities of conversation were whip-lashes to Derek’s self-esteem. But there was worse behind it. In certain
subterraneous walks of London society, both cousins were well known; and in that world, careless of principle and greedy of originality, Nigel shone, a precocious proficient. Without heart, without
worth, he dazzled feminine eyes with his reputed accomplishments. There was a woman who committed suicide; she was a drug-fiend, and nothing was published in the papers; but there were those, and
Derek was among them, who believed that Nigel’s callousness had been the cause of the tragedy.

Meanwhile, Nigel was running his course at Oxford: he celebrated his twenty-first birthday by a kind of mock funeral, at which he lay, in ghastly splendour, on a black catafalque, while his
friends stood over him and drank absinthe to the memory of his departed youth. Derek was more than two years his senior; was in measurable distance, therefore, of his promised inheritance; and
others besides the solicitors began to speculate as to the ultimate destination of the fifty thousand pounds. Derek’s Oxford bills were still largely unpaid; meanwhile, he lived recklessly
beyond his modest income, secure in the consciousness of the fortune that awaited him. He ran up bills in London; and, when these new creditors proved more importunate than the old, he applied for
financial help to strangers, less Gentile than genteel. More than one promoter of private loans found an excellent business opening in a young man who was no longer a minor, and who had less than
two years to wait before he was assured of a substantial capital sum. So things went on, with cordial feelings on both sides, until a faint tremor of apprehension fell upon the creditors’
hearts. The loans were being piled up in a reckless way; already the fifty thousand was almost swallowed up; and Derek, as if conscious that the future had no longer any competence to offer him,
was ruining his health in a way which suggested that he would not long survive the accession to his forestalled inheritance. His drinking bouts were now almost continual; rumour whispered that he
also drugged. Whether he lived beyond the age of twenty-five was a matter of total indifference to society at large. That he should live until he was twenty-five was the earnest prayer of a handful
of gentlemen not addicted to the practices of religion. If Derek should die before his twenty-fifth birthday, the fifty thousand would go to Nigel, and the money-lenders would have no assets to
satisfy their claims. Panic-stricken, they came together, and met Derek’s further appeals for accommodation with a peremptory stipulation that he should insure his life.

With discreet hesitations, a well-known Insurance Company declined to take the risk. Their doctor, with raised eyebrows, protested that he had never seen so young a constitution so seriously
undermined. If Mr Burtell took care of himself, he had no doubt a reasonable chance of achieving his twenty-fifth birthday, but . . . to tell the truth, he was not fully satisfied either of Mr
Burtell’s will to do so, or of his power, if he had the will, to break with his bad habits. ‘With a chap like Derek,’ commented Nigel, to whom the circumstances were reported,
‘the world wants to be insured against his life rather than his death.’ But there is a way out of every impasse, and usually it is the Indescribable. In case the reader is not
already acquainted with the name and the character of this vast insurance agency, let him recall the name of that millionaire who recently flew to Nova Zèmbla, paying as he did so a shilling
per second by way of insurance money . . . Yes, that was the Indescribable. Human ingenuity has still failed to imagine any form or any degree of danger which the Indescribable are not prepared
(for a consideration) to underwrite. The fact that Derek Burtell was not legitimate business made no difference to them. For a very reasonable premium they backed him to reach the age of
twenty-five, without showing any curiosity as to his further destiny.

One condition, however, they did make – even the Indescribable makes conditions. Mr Burtell must really put himself under the direction of a medical adviser. . . No, unfortunately it would
not be possible for their own doctor to undertake the task. (It is a matter of honour, and indeed of income, with the Indescribable’s doctor to refuse every other form of practice.) But if Mr
Burtell had no objection, they would like to see him put himself in the hands of Dr Simmonds, a man in whom he could have every confidence, a man, indeed, who had made a life-long study of acrasia.
So it was that, when he was within a month or so of his all-important twenty-fifth birthday, and when his cousin was just preparing, without any notable regrets on either side, to take his degree
and go down from Oxford, Derek found himself closeted in Dr Simmonds’ consulting-room in Wigpole Street.

‘Open air, that’s what you want,’ Dr Simmonds was saying. ‘Open air. Take your mind off the need for stimulants, and set you up again physically. See?’

‘I suppose you want me to take a confounded sea-voyage,’ grumbled Derek. ‘You fellows always seem to want to send a man to the ends of the earth, in the hope that he’ll
be dead before he comes back.’

Dr Simmonds shuddered. He was not exactly an official of the Indescribable Company, but he was (how shall we say it?) in close touch with them; and the idea of such a valuable life, with such a
short time to run, being exposed to the chances of wind and wave did not impress him favourably.

‘Why no, not a sea-voyage. Take a sea-voyage, and the first thing you know you’ll find you’re edging round to the saloon. Don’t mind my speaking frankly, do you? No, it
must be open air . . .