Grab Bag (21 page)

“I did not steal it. I bought it fair and square.”

“Perhaps you can show me a bill of sale, then? Ah no, I thought not. Let me tell you sir, the penalties for theft are severe in this country.”

He glared at the dumbfounded curator over his umbrella. “Since Lady Gwendolyn was taken from my home, I have been in touch with London art dealers. When your confederate turned up with her this afternoon and you followed up the visit with a bogus telephone call designed, no doubt, to increase the price they might be willing to pay, the fact was reported to me. I came at once to you, sir, hoping to make you see the error of your ways and avoid criminal prosecution for what I sincerely hope was a rash impulse and not the act of a hardened felon.”

Mr. Bargraves wrung his hands. “But I had nothing to do with any theft. I never saw that old bat before in my life. I paid her five thousand pounds in good faith.”

“If you paid her such a paltry fraction of the picture’s true worth, you hardly did so in good faith,” said Alexander severely. “As a self-styled expert in such matters, you must have realized at once that if she was willing to accept such a small figure, there must have been something fishy about the transaction. What was the woman’s name?”

“I … I don’t know.”

“Really, Mr. Bargraves,” a thin smile flitted across Alexander’s lips, “I don’t know what effect your taradiddle about an anonymous lady and a five-thousand pound transaction without a bill of sale will have on a jury, but I must say it does not convince me. And quite frankly, I do not care whether you are a thief or merely a receiver of stolen goods. My position is simply this: do I get my painting back
instanter
or do I call Scotland Yard at once?”

“Did you have any trouble with Mr. Bargraves?”

Miss Henrietta and her brother were enjoying a cup of cocoa in front of the drawing-room fire at the end of a trying but rewarding day.

“Not more than usual. He blustered of course, but after all, I had the truth on my side. I must say however, Henrietta, that he referred to you in language most unbecoming a man of his alleged position.”

“One can hardly blame him.” Miss Henrietta smiled. “The fox hardly expects to be bitten by the goose he is leading to the slaughter. It is curious how all of a pattern these people are, and how extraordinarily easy it is to find one in the right place at the right time.”

“The shocking fact of the matter is that there are a great many scoundrels in the world,” said Alexander. “Let me see, how many have we met so far? Forty-nine, I believe.”

“Fifty,” said Miss Henrietta. “Dear me, this is our golden anniversary.”

She looked around the pleasant room at the unbroken row of ancestral portraits, safely retrieved one after the other from the hands of the predators. Then she raised her cup of cocoa to Lady Gwendolyn, smiling down again from her place of honour over the mantelpiece. “It seems appropriate to say, many happy returns. And may we all still be together to celebrate our Diamond Jubilee.”

MY ORIGINAL TITLE FOR
this short-short was “A Lesson in Mycology.”
Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine
published it in May 1967 as “The Martinet.” Take your pick.

“Come along, Evangeline. You waste altogether too much time on that foolishness. A walk will do you good. Bring the
Mycologia.”

“Yes, Father.”

Evangeline had been trained to obey. She laid down her brushes, fetched her gathering basket and the beautiful old manuscript book in which a long-dead ancestor had depicted the mushrooms of the British Isles. Each one was hand-drawn and coloured, with its name and pertinent facts lettered beneath in a minute and elegant hand. It was a work of art, a museum piece. To Mr. Chadwick-Byrne, it was something to identify mushrooms by.

When she came back, she saw he had torn a strip off the drawing she’d been toiling over for the past two days, and rolled it into a spill to light his pipe. She knew better than to protest. Even though her watercolours were as expertly done as any in the
Mycologia,
a woman could never be a serious artist. Women existed only to be dutiful wives, or to keep house for their fathers if the wife had failed so far in her duty as to die before her time.

There had been no question of Evangeline’s marrying. Suitors had not been lacking twenty years ago. She’d been a sweetly pretty girl and the Chadwick-Byrnes were known to have money. But Mrs. Chadwick-Byrne was already ailing then, and the young men were not encouraged.

Now at sixty-eight, Mr. Chadwick-Byrne was a bluff, hearty man who showed every sign of living to ninety. He liked to be outdoors, hunting or taking nature walks of the sort that involved killing butterflies, taking birds’ nests, uprooting plants, and picking things he could take home and devour. He was particularly fond of mushrooming.

Evangeline might have enjoyed these walks if she had been allowed to drift peacefully down the woodland paths, stopping where the fancy seized her to sketch or simply enjoy the loveliness of a flower, a bird, a pattern of branches against the sky without having to identify, uproot, or gather into her basket; but her father did not tolerate slacking. Naturally she was not allowed to use the field glasses except as an infrequent and grudging favour, or to do the serious work of identifying specimens. Her job was to carry the basket, the reference books, the cyanide jars, and to hover close behind her father’s elbow, ready to hand them over as required.

Mushrooms were scarce that day. Mr. Chadwick-Byrne was annoyed. He did not exactly say the shortage was Evangeline’s fault, but he snapped at her for dawdling even more frequently than usual. She was quite exhausted and immensely relieved when they finally came upon a clump of bright orange fungi.

“Ah, chanterelles,” exclaimed the leader of the expedition.

“Do you really think so, Father?” Evangeline ventured. “I should have said—”

“When I want your opinion, I shall ask for it. Give me the
Mycologia.”

He flipped through the loose pages, regardless of their fragility. “Ah, there you are.
Cantharellus cibarius.
Beautiful specimens, perfect in every detail. Really, Evangeline, I had hoped, after all my patient efforts, to have taught you the rudiments of mycology. Here, see for yourself.”

He thrust the
Mycologia
at her and knelt to gather his find into the basket. Cowed, she admitted the mushrooms matched the illustration and must therefore be chanterelles, one of the great delicacies among the edible mushrooms. Considering the smallness of the patch, however, it was doubtful whether anybody but her father would get to enjoy them.

After the chanterelles, they found scarcely anything except a few puffballs which had burst and were therefore inedible, and one deadly white
Amanita phalliodes
around which Evangeline made a wide, shuddering circle. Nevertheless, Mr. Chadwick-Byrne returned to the house in fine fettle.

“Well, don’t stand there gibbering, Evangeline. Give the chanterelles to Mrs. Felt. We’ll have them for lunch, with an omelette.”

Mrs. Felt, who had cooked for them since Evangeline was a baby, peered doubtfully into the basket. “If you say so, sir.” She, too, knew better than to argue.

Neither his daughter nor his cook was surprised when Mr. Chadwick-Byrne helped himself so lavishly to mushrooms at the table that none were left for them. Both were horrified a while later when he collapsed in agony on the drawing-room rug. He was retching so violently that he could not gasp out instructions to call the doctor, and neither of them dared take the initiative until it was too late.

After it was all over, Mrs. Felt explained to the police that she hadn’t liked the look of those mushrooms.

“But the master was such a positive man, sir. It was no use trying to tell him anything once he’d made up his mind.”

The sergeant nodded. Mr. Chadwick-Byrne had been well-known in the village.

“And what did you think, Miss Chadwick-Byrne? I understand you were with your father when he picked them.”

“I … yes, I was. I did ask Father if he … I said I didn’t think … but he showed me the picture in
Mycologia
and said they were—”

“What is this
Mycologia?
Could I see it, please?”

“Yes, of course.” She fetched the precious portfolio and handed it over to him.

“Lovely thing, this. Ought to be in a museum.” The sergeant reached to turn a leaf of the yellowed parchment, hesitated. “Would you mind showing me which picture he identified the mushrooms from?”

She laid the book down on a small table and shuffled carefully through the drawings until she found the ones showing the trumpet-shaped cups of
Cantharellus cibarius.
“This is what Father said they were.”

Her faint accent on the word
said
caught the sergeant’s ear. “But you didn’t agree?”

She flushed. “Father was so much more knowledgeable than I, I couldn’t very well contradict him. But I did think they looked rather more like this picture here.” She found another plate.

“Clitocybe illudens.”
The sergeant made rather a hash of the Latin. “Jack o’ Lantern. Poisonous, Same colour, more or less the same shape, specially if they’d begun to go by, say. Tricky things, mushrooms. Well, it appears to me that you were right and your father wrong, Miss Chadwick-Byrne. You mustn’t take it too hard. Death by misadventure, I think we’re safe in saying.”

Death by pigheadedness would have been more like it. The things had probably tasted foul, but the old bastard would have died rather than admit he’d made a mistake. As in fact he had. And good riddance, as far as the sergeant was concerned.

After he had gone, Evangeline carried the
Mycologia
back up to her bedroom. From under her mattress she took the one page she’d slipped out of the portfolio before she carried it down. This was an exact replica of
Clitocybe illudens,
with each venomous gill and spore rendered in meticulous detail. Beneath it, in that same exquisite, spidery lettering to be found on all the other pages, ran the description:
Cantharellus cibarius,
Edible. She’d have to burn it, of course, but she hated to. It was far and away the best thing she’d ever done.

AN EXPLORATION OF CERTAIN
problems encountered by combining marriage with a career, when the career happens to be marriage. Published in
Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine,
January 1967. Reprinted in Murder in Mind, the 1967 anthology of stories by members of Mystery Writers of America, published by E. P. Dutton.

“That’s the man,” said the superintendent.

“Man?” The inspector’s usually cool voice held a spark of anger. “Swine, don’t you mean?”

“He’s a nasty one, all right. Four wives dead that we know about. Lord knows how many more we don’t. And we can’t lay a finger on him.”

“It’s abominable.”

Detective Inspector Fanshawe’s slender white fingers clenched so tightly around the photograph of the handsome young man with the wavy black hair that she came near to cracking the emulsion. This was almost the only sign of emotion her superior officer had ever seen her display.

“Men who prey on women,” she went on in her level, beautifully articulated voice, “deserve to be exterminated like rats.”

“Privately and personally, I couldn’t agree with you more.” Superintendent Pearsall sighed. “Our job would be a lot easier if we could do just that. Unfortunately, we have to keep muddling along, hoping to get some sort of lead on him while he’s busy courting his next victim.”

“It’s absolutely certain he does kill them, I suppose?”

“Four rich wives in five years and a handsome inheritance from each, not to mention the insurance settlements? Oh yes, I should say so. The problem is, how does he manage it?”

“They all died in automobile accidents, you say.”

“That’s right. And in not one of the crashes have we been able to turn up the slightest clue that the vehicle or the woman driving it had been tampered with in any way. In each case, the husband was away from home with an ironclad alibi for every minute of his time.”

“Which in itself is suspicious.”

“Exactly, but they’re all genuine. We haven’t been able to put so much as a dent in any one of them. There couldn’t have been any flummoxing of detour signs, or anything of that sort. On the books, Clayton Beardsley is innocent as a newborn babe. Possibly more so,” he added with a lugubrious attempt at humor, “if one subscribes to the doctrine of original sin.”

“But that’s nonsense, of course,” said Inspector Fanshawe crisply. “Wasn’t there even some point of similarity in the four accidents?”

“Well, it was a real smashup in every case. Bits and pieces of the car scattered everywhere. In one instance, another motorist was technically at fault. That was a rear-end collision at high speed. The Mrs. Beardsley of the moment was impaled on the steering wheel column. Very messy. Both people in the other car were killed, so it was impossible to be sure what really happened. One witness claimed she’d stopped short for some reason in the fast lane, and the other driver was coming too fast to swerve.”

“Surely nobody would be idiot enough to stop suddenly in a situation like that. Was there no possible clue as to why she did it?”

“None whatever. Most probably a sudden mechanical failure, though we couldn’t tell what it might have been. Or she may have been given a delayed-action drug, but there again nothing showed up in the autopsy.”

Inspector Fanshawe frowned. “Provoking. What happened to the others?”

“One simply went off the road at a bad curve and hit a tree. The other two both crashed over cliffs. The last wife had been drinking, as it appeared, but we couldn’t lay that on Beardsley. She’d had a history of alcoholism long before the marriage. Beautiful woman, though.”

He handed Inspector Fanshawe another photograph. She studied it in silence, then laid it back on the desk.

“Anything else?”

“Yes, the oddest part of all. In each case, the car had been in the garage for checkup and repairs just before it was wrecked. Two of the smashes happened when the victim was actually on her way home after having picked up the machine from the mechanic.”