The Paddington Mystery Read online

  The spectacle of a young man in impeccable evening dress sitting in a luxuriously-furnished room in the heart of a particularly ill-favoured slum might reasonably have been considered a remarkable portent. But then, Harold Merefield—his name, by the way, was pronounced Merryfield, a circumstance which had led to his being known as ‘Merry Devil’ to certain of his boon companions at the Naxos Club—was, in every respect, a remarkable young man. It had always been understood that he was to succeed his father, an elderly widower and a respected family solicitor, in his provincial practice. However, on the outbreak of war he had secured a commission, and had served until the Armistice without distinction but with satisfaction to himself and his superior officers.

  Meanwhile his father had died, leaving far less than his only child had confidently expected. And on demobilisation Harold had found himself possessed of a small income, of which he could not touch the capital, an instinctive dislike of the prospect of hard work, and a promising taste for dissipation. His problem was so to reconcile these three factors as to gain the greatest pleasure from existence. He solved it in his own fashion. There were reasons which drew him towards London, and particularly towards Paddington. By a curious chance he saw the notice ‘Rooms to Let’ painted in sprawling letters on a board propped up in Mr Boost’s front garden. The idea tickled him; he could live here in such seclusion as he pleased, spending the minimum on rent and thereby reserving the maximum for pleasure. To this unpromising retreat he moved so much of his father’s furniture as the place would hold, the remainder he sold. His orbit in future was bounded by the Naxos Club on the one hand and Riverside Gardens on the other.

  But sometimes, deviating slightly from this appointed path, as a comet surprises astronomers by its aberrations, he touched other planes of existence. Revelling in the content of idleness as he did, he yet felt at long intervals that irresistible itch which impels the hand towards pen and paper. The eventual result was a novel, which, with engaging candour, he himself described as tripe. Tripe indeed it was, but tripe which by the method of its preparation had acquired a pronounced gamy flavour. It dealt with the lives and loves of the peculiar stratum of society which frequented the Naxos Club. To cut a long story short, Aspasia’s Adventures was accepted by a firm of publishers who, as the result of persistent effort, had acquired an honourable reputation for the production of this type of fiction. With certain necessary emendation, the substitution of innuendo for bald description, it was published, and brought its author a small sum in royalties, a few indignant references in the more hypocritical section of the Press, and an intimation from the publishers that they would be prepared to consider further works of a similar nature. But it brought more than this. It brought the means of quieting the last scruples of an almost anæsthetised conscience. Harold Merefield’s method of life was crowned by the justification of a Career.

  But it was not of his career that Harold was thinking as he lay in his comfortable chair. In fact, he found it difficult to think consecutively about anything at all. He knew that he was tired and sleepy, but the act of closing his eyes produced an unpleasant and nauseating sensation, in some way connected with rapidly-revolving wheels of fire. It wasn’t so bad if he kept them open. Certainly the flame of the candle refused to be focussed, and advanced and receded in the most irritating fashion. A wave of self-pity flowed over him. He was a wretched, lonely creature. Vere had forsaken him, Vere, the girl he had given such a good time to all these months. Vere’s form kept getting between him and the candle, tantalising, mocking him. Somewhere, in the dark corners of the room, another female form hovered, a reproach, a menace to his peace of mind. He laughed scornfully. Oh yes, it was all very well for April and her father to upbraid him as a rotter, to fling the authorship of Aspasia in his teeth. Why couldn’t they say straight out that Evan Denbigh was a more desirable match for April? Damned young prig! He hadn’t the guts of a louse.

  For a moment his fluttering thoughts lit upon the person of Evan Denbigh. His sweeping condemnation was followed by a wave of generosity. Good fellow, Denbigh, at heart, but not at all his sort. Hardworking, clever fellow, and all that. Of course, April would prefer him to a miserable lonely devil like himself. Let her marry him; he would take his revenge by showing them what he could do. He could write a best-seller if he put his mind to it. Yes, by Jove, he’d start now.

  He leapt from his chair, stood for a moment as though balancing himself on a narrow ledge, then sank back once more, dispirited. What was the use? Who cared what he did? April was beyond his reach, Vere had chucked him, the fire in the untidy grate was out long ago. There was nothing for it but to go to bed.

  Very deliberately, as though embarking upon an undertaking which required skill and concentration for its successful accomplishment, he climbed out of his chair, grasped the candlestick in an unsteady hand, and staggered towards the door which led into the bedroom at the back of the house. He negotiated the narrow doorway, laid the candle down on the dressing-table, and began to fumble at his collar and tie. All at once the extreme desirability of seeking a prone position impressed itself upon him. Curse these clothes! They seemed to hang upon him as an incubus, resisting every attempt of his groping fingers to divest himself of them. He flung his coat and waistcoat upon a chair, and turned with a sigh of relief towards the bed. He must lie down for a bit, his head was beginning to ache, he could finish undressing when he felt better.

  The candle threw a flickering light across the room. He could see a dark mass upon the bed, doubtless the suit he had thrown upon it when he was dressing that evening. He put out his hand to drag them off, and even as he did so stopped suddenly, as though a cold hand had gripped him. That dark mass was not his clothes at all. It was a man lying on his bed.

  The first shock over and certainty established, he chuckled foolishly. A man! If it had been a woman, now! Vere, perhaps, come all this way to beg his forgiveness. Of course, it couldn’t be. How could she have got in? He had given her a latchkey once, but the first thing she had done had been to lose it. How on earth had this fellow got in, then?

  Harold returned to the dressing-table to fetch the candle. This sort of thing was insufferable. Holding the candle over the bed he began to apostrophise his visitor.

  ‘Look here, my friend, I don’t so much mind finding you in my rooms like this, but I do draw the line at your turning me out of my own bed. Sleep here if you must, but sleep on the sofa next door and let me have the bed like a good fellow. I’ve had rather a hectic night of it.’

  The form on the bed made no sign of having heard him. Harold put his hand on its shoulder and withdrew it suddenly. The clothes he had touched were oozing water. With a thrill of horror Harold bent over still further and put the candle close to the man’s face. His eyes were open, glassy, staring at nothing. Shocked into horrified sobriety, Harold thrust his hand beneath the man’s soaked clothing, seeking the skin above the heart. It was cold and clammy, not the slightest pulsation could he feel stirring the inert body.

  For an instant he paused, fighting the sensation of physical sickness that surged through him. Then, as he was, stopping only to fling round him his discarded overcoat, he rushed from the house and dashed frantically to the police station.

  CHAPTER II

  IT was not until a week afterwards that Harold found leisure or courage to call upon Professor Lancelot Priestley. Leisure, because his time had been fully occupied, and that most unpleasantly, in attending the inquest and being interviewed by pertinacious officers who displayed an indecent curiosity as to his habits and acquaintances. Courage—well, Professor Priestley happened to be April’s father, and they had last parted as a result of a most regrettable incident.

  Professor Priestley had been a schoolfellow of his father, and the two had kept up a certain intimacy through early life. But while Merefield the elder had settled down comfortably to country solicitorship, Priestley, cursed with a restless brain and an almost immoral passion for the highest branches of mathem
atics, occupied himself in skirmishing round the portals of the Universities, occasionally flinging a bomb in the shape of a highly controversial thesis in some ultra-scientific journal. How long this single-handed warfare against established doctrine might have lasted there is no telling. But with characteristic unexpectedness Priestley solved his personal binomial problem by marrying a lady of some means, who, having presented him with April, conveniently died when the child was fourteen, perhaps of a surfeit of logarithms.

  Upon his marriage, Priestley had settled down, to use the term in a comparative sense. That is to say, he exchanged his former guerilla warfare for a regular siege. No longer were his weapons the bayonet and the bomb; he now employed the heavy artillery of lectures and weighty articles, with which he bombarded the supporters of all accepted theory. He claimed to be the precursor of Einstein, the first to breach the citadel of Newton. And as none of his acquaintances knew anything about these matters, he was not subjected to the annoyance of contradiction in his own house.

  The two friends, Merefield and Priestley, continued to see one another at frequent intervals. Priestley would take his little daughter down to stay in the country, Merefield would bring his boy up for a week in town, when April and Harold, much of an age, would be sent to the Zoo and Madame Tussaud’s and Earl’s Court Exhibition, under the careful tutelage of April’s governess. Their parents, presumably, alternated the conversation between the calculus of variations and the rights of heirs and assigns over messuages and tenements.

  It was perhaps unavoidable that one of those curious understandings, whose secrets adults fondly imagine are securely hidden from their offspring, should have been arrived at between the two. And in this case the understanding was less vague than usual. Anything indeterminate was a source of horror to the mathematician; anything loosely worded a reproach to the solicitor. It is not to be supposed that an agreement was actually drawn up, sealed, signed and delivered. But both these fond parents had firmly made up their minds that Harold was to marry April.

  Their children, more accommodating than children are apt to be, fell in willingly enough with this plan. It was, of course, only conveyed to them in hints, increasing in clarity as they approached years of discretion. The whole business was taken for granted; it was a postulate to which there could be no possible alternative. Then came the war, the death of Merefield the elder, and Harold’s strange aberration from his appointed path.

  There is no need to trace the widening of the breach, the outspoken condemnations of Professor Priestley, the subtler scorn of April. The crisis came one afternoon, when Harold had called at the house in Westbourne Terrace after lunching particularly well. Aspasia’s Adventures had been published a few days previously, and the occasion had called for a bottle by way of celebration. The first thing that met Harold’s eye on the table of the Professor’s study, into which he had been shown, was a copy of this sensational volume—it should be remarked that the publishers had seen fit to embellish it with a jacket upon which the heroine was displayed in male company in a lack of costume definitely startling. Harold’s interview with April’s father ended with the statement by the latter that he could not possibly contemplate the marriage of his daughter to a man whose dissipated manners had culminated in the production of such pornographic twaddle as this, to which Harold, emboldened by champagne, had retorted that April appeared to be adequately consoled by the company of that young cub Evan Denbigh, and that he proposed to go his own way as he pleased, anyhow. This short and heated interview had taken place some six months previously, and had been the last occasion on which he had passed the portals of the house in Westbourne Terrace.

  But it was now a very chastened Harold who pressed the bell-push, with that nervous touch which betrays a secret hope that the bell has not rung, and that a few more minutes of respite must therefore elapse before the ordeal. But, light as had been his touch, the bell had tinkled far away in the lower regions, and Mary, the old parlourmaid, to whom much was forgiven, appeared with startling suddenness.

  She, at least, was still on Harold’s side, retaining, perhaps, fond memories of secret orgies of candied peel in her pantry when the children were placed temporarily in her charge in the absence of the governess.

  ‘Gracious me, Master Harold, you are a stranger!’ she exclaimed. Then, with swift recollection of the respect due to one whose name had appeared so prominently in the papers during the last few days, she continued: ‘The Master’s in his study, sir, if you’ll kindly come this way—’

  Well, he was in for it now. The door opened and he was ushered in. The Professor, working at his desk in the window, started up at the sound of his name.

  ‘Come in, Harold, my boy,’ he exclaimed, holding out his hand. ‘Sit down and make yourself comfortable. I’m very glad of the opportunity of telling you how sorry we were to read of this—er—distressing occurrence.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Harold replied gratefully. ‘I felt I had to come round and talk to you about it.’

  He sat down in one of the leather chairs before the fire, and the Professor took the other.

  ‘I was waiting for you to come,’ said the latter quietly. ‘I would have come to you, but it seemed better you should come of your own accord. I think I can guess the shock it must have been to you.’

  Harold paused a minute. ‘I’ve been through a pretty rotten time in the last few days,’ he replied. ‘I suppose you’ve seen all about it in the papers?’

  The Professor nodded, and Harold continued despondently.

  ‘It’s made me pretty sick with myself and the way I’ve been living. Although I went straight to the police, they seemed to think I was in some way responsible for the man’s death. I had to answer a devil of a lot of questions as to my movements that evening. They found the taxi-driver who had driven me home; fortunately the man remembered me. But that didn’t satisfy them. They wanted to know where I had been spending my time before he picked me up. I wouldn’t tell them for a long time, until they pointed out that if they put me on my trial it was bound to come out.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you tell them?’ enquired the Professor.

  ‘Well—oh, I may as well make a clean breast of it, sir,’ replied Harold impulsively. ‘I’d been spending the evening at a place I particularly didn’t want to draw their attention to. It’s called the Naxos Club—drink after hours, and all that kind of thing, you know.’

  The Professor furrowed his brow in thought. ‘Naxos, Naxos?’ he repeated. ‘Ah yes, I remember a young woman of the name of Ariadne, had an—ah—adventure with Bacchus at an island of that name some years ago. A most suitable designation for your club, no doubt. So you had to divulge the secrets of this place to the police, had you?’

  ‘I only told them I’d been there,’ replied Harold. ‘Inspector Hanslet, who had charge of my case, said that if the taxi-driver was correct as to my condition when he drove me home the place would bear looking into. Next day he told me that my alibi was established, but that the members of the Naxos Club would have to seek another rendezvous in future. I’m afraid he must have had it raided.’

  ‘I’m afraid he must,’ commented the Professor drily. ‘A fact which will scarcely add to your popularity with your former associates. Take my advice and drop them, my boy. It isn’t too late to run straight, you know. You’ve had a nasty shock, and you may as well profit by it.’

  ‘I wish to God I could!’ exclaimed Harold. ‘I’m sick of the whole thing, sick of the rotten way I’ve behaved, thoroughly well ashamed of myself. I’d like to go straight, to find a decent job somewhere, but what the devil am I to do? This man’s death is still a mystery, they haven’t even found out who he was. The coroner made some pretty rotten remarks at the inquest, the police and everybody else seem to think that even if I didn’t kill him, I must know something about the business. No, I’m under suspicion—I know jolly well I’m being watched still. And you can’t expect anyone to take kindly to a fellow whose name has been unpleasantly
notorious in the papers for a week. No, sir it’s no good. I shall have to clear out of the country, and that’s what I came to ask you about.’

  The Professor paused a minute before replying. ‘I’m not surprised you look at it like that,’ he said at last. ‘The trouble you have have been through has not unnaturally got on your nerves. But, as a matter of fact, it is not so bad as you make out. I, for one, am completely convinced of your innocence, not because I have known you all your life, but from the logical facts of the case. Scientific reasoning is on your side, my boy.’

  He paused again, and Harold muttered his thanks for this frank testimonial. Then he continued, slowly and with some deliberation, as though he were expounding a thesis.

  ‘I agree that there are many who might be disposed to think you not altogether guiltless. The discovery of a dead man on one’s bed would certainly incline loose thinkers to a suspicion that there must be some connection between oneself and the deceased. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is so impervious to argument that the only way to refute it is by the demonstration of the true facts of the case. In this particular instance, this is the function of the police, but I very much doubt that they will proceed much further in the matter. They are solely concerned with the detection of crime. They may well argue that no crime was committed, since the result of the inquest was a verdict of “Death from natural causes”. In other words, my boy, if you want to clear yourself in the eyes of the world, you will have to unravel the mystery yourself.’