The Gloucestershire Mystery (A Jules Poiret Mystery Book 24) Read online

  Mr. Simon Kiffin, the editor of the “Daily Mail,” sat at his desk, opening letters and making changes to the articles his reporters had sent in to the merry tune of a typewriter, worked by an energetic young lady.

  He was a short, fair man, in his shirt-sleeves, his movements were resolute, his mouth firm and his voice determined, but his round, rather babyish face had a bewildered look that rather contradicted all this. This impression was not altogether misleading. Like many pressmen in authority, his most familiar emotion was one of constant fear. He feared libel actions, lost advertisements, misprints, and losing his position at the newspaper.

  His day consisted of listening to the orders of the fearful proprietor of the paper, a senile old dowager, who had inherited the newspaper from her husband, and the very ambitious staff he had collected to run the paper, whom he more than once had to reign in as to not get the paper or himself into trouble of the legal kind.

  A letter from one of his most tenacious journalist lay before him on his desk, and quick and resolute as he normally was, he seemed almost to hesitate to open it. He took up another article instead, ran down it with his big blue eyes, and his red pencil, altered the word “adultery” to “impropriety,” and the word “Prostitute” to the word “Lady of the night.” He rang a bell and sent the now finished article downstairs to the production room.

  Then, with a weary eye, he ripped open the letter, which bore a postmark of Gloucestershire, and read as follows,

  Dear Kiffin, as I see you’re still working the “Errant sons of the Nobility” series, what about an article on that shady business of the Heffers of Stroud, or as the old women down here call it, the “Curse of the Heffers?” The head of the family is a certain Lord Stroud. He’s one of those stuffy old aristocrats, a stone-hearted tyrant, who wishes to halt all progress. It is quite within keeping with the series to cause some trouble for him. And I think I’m on the track of a story that will do just that.

  Of course I don’t believe in the old legend about Duke Joseph the Lancer of Gloucester. I know you don’t believe in anything, not even in real journalism. But the legend, you’ll probably remember, was about the poisoning of Lord Forde by his own wife Bridget. There was a lot of alleged witchcraft mixed up with it, and the story goes that a servant listening at the keyhole heard the truth in a talk between the Duke and Lady Bridget, and his ear with which he heard it grew large and monstrous as by magic. So awful was the secret. And though he had to be bought off with landholdings and a title, the elephant-shaped ear is still recurrent in his descendants. Well, you don’t believe in black magic, and if you did, you couldn’t talk about it in the newspaper. If a million shillings appeared suddenly in your office, you’d have to burn the banknotes to hush it up, lest the prestige of the newspaper was affected. But that is not here or there. The point is that there really is something strange about Lord Stroud and his family, something quite natural, I dare say, but quite abnormal. And the story about the ears seems true somehow. Maybe it’s a symbol or a delusion or even a hereditary disease. Who knows?

  The reason I point this story out to you is that to me it seems that we make a mistake in attacking the young aristocrats for living entirely for champagne and balls. Most readers rather admire theses fops for having a good time. I think we surrender too much when we admit that aristocracy is making the aristocrats happy. I suggest a series of articles pointing out how dreary, how inhuman, how downright diabolical is the very smell of some of these great houses. There are plenty of instances, but you couldn’t begin with a better one than the “Giant Ear of the Heffers.” By the end of the week I think I can get you the truth about it. Yours ever, Henry Pickston.”

  Mr. Kiffin thought for a moment, staring at the pencils and papers on his desk, then he called out in a strong, loud voice, in which every syllable sounded alike, “Miss Lyon, take down a letter to Mr. Pickston, please.”

  His assistant quickly put down her sandwich and sat down behind her typewriter.

  “Dear Pickston, I think it would do, copy should reach us second post Sunday. Yours, S. Kiffin.”

  This he articulated as if it were all one word, and Miss Lyon rattled it down as if it were all one word. Then he took up another article and his red pencil, and altered the word “supernatural” to the word “strange,” and the expression “repress” to the expression “remove.”

  Mr. Kiffin’s work continued its normal pace, until the ensuing Sunday found him at the same desk, dictating to the same typist, and using the same red pencil on the first instalment of Mr. Pickston’s revelations. The opening was a rambling rant about the evil secrets of nobles, and hidden despair among the high-born. Though written violently, it was in excellent English and after a few edits it was ready for the print edition.

  Pickston’s letter continued as follows, “I know it is the practice of journalists to put the conclusion of the story at the beginning and call it a headline. I know that journalism largely consists of saying “Lord Hyland Dead” to people who never knew that Lord Hyland was alive. This here correspondent thinks that this, like many other journalistic customs, is bad journalism, and that the “Daily Mail” has to set a better example in such cases. I wish to tell my story as it occurred, step by step. I will use the real names of the parties, who in most cases are ready to confirm my testimony. As for the headlines, think of some sensational titles as you see fit.

  It all started when I was waiting for my train back to London, when I felt hungry and it occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten since I had left Belfast. Just outside of the train station I found a restaurant and by the look of it I was not the only one with an empty stomach. It was full and the waiter was forced to give me a seat next to some other gentlemen, who looked like they might have lived a hundred years ago and were eating like horses. The restaurant is called the “Golden Lion.”

  Now that I know them all better, there is no difficulty about disentangling my first impressions of them, but just then they looked like three impenetrable statues. The dominant figure, both because he was bigger, and because he sat facing me, was a tall, fat man dressed completely in tweeds, with a sun-burnt visage, and a rather bothered look on his face. Looking at him more closely, I could see what it was that gave me the sense of antiquity. It was his military bearing and the horizontal lines across his forehead.

  It was easier to read the man at the right end of the table, who, to say the truth, was easy to read as a French dandy, a salesman of women’s garments, most probably, or perfume. He is short, has a huge stomach and moustache and uses dark shoe polish to make his hair seem fuller than it is.

  The third man, sitting next to me, had really more to do with it than the rest, though he was both slighter in physical presence, older and more inconsiderate in his dress. His thin limbs were clad in a very tight grey suit. His red face and pointy jaw was imprisoned in his stiff collar and neck-cloth more in the style of the olden days, and his hair was the most remarkable of all. It was blue black. The unusual color was all the more notable because his hair was also unnaturally full and curling, and he wore it long. He was smoking a pipe, to the annoyance of the Frenchman, who was rather enjoying his meal and savored every drop of wine he drank from the tall, old-fashioned wine-glasses.

  Being a hardened reporter, I had no trouble pumping these men for local gossip. The big man in tweeds seemed very learned, especially about local antiquities. He told me later that since his retirement from the army he ran the local museum. The small French perfumer, though he talked much less, surprised me with a yet wider culture. So we got on very well together, but the
third man, the old gentleman in the tight trousers, seemed rather distant and haughty, until I asked the retired soldier about the legends surrounding the Lords of Stroud.

  I thought to notice that the subject seemed to embarrass the soldier. The Frenchman, who had been eating and drinking incessantly, actually stopped eating for a good three seconds. However it broke the spell of the third man’s silence successfully. Speaking without restraint and with the passion and clarity of a highly educated gentleman, and puffing at intervals at his long churchwarden pipe, he began to tell me some of the most horrible stories I have ever heard in my life. A Heffer in a previous century had hanged his own father, and another had his wife dragged by the hair through the village by a horse, and another had set fire to a church full of priests, and so on.

  Some of the tales, indeed, are not fit for publication. And all this villainy came from his thin, genteel lips rather passionately, as he sat sipping the wine out of his tall, thin glass.

  I could see that the soldier opposite me was trying, if anything, to calm him down, but he evidently held the old gentleman in considerable respect, and could not venture to do so too abruptly. And the little dandy, though free from any such air of embarrassment, looked steadily at his food, and seemed to listen to the speech with great interest.

  “You don’t seem,” I said to the narrator, “to be very fond of the Heffer family.”

  He looked at me for a moment, his lips tight, but whitening and tightening, then he deliberately broke his long pipe and threw it on the table and stood up, the very picture of a perfect gentleman with the temper of a beast.

  “This gentleman,” he said, pointing at the former soldier, “will tell you whether I have cause to like it. The curse of the Heffers of old has lain a heavy burden on this country, and many have suffered from it. None has suffered from it more than I have.” And with that he strode out of the restaurant.

  “That is a strange old gentleman,” I said to the other two. “Do any of you happen to know what the Stroud family has done to him? Who is he?”

  The big man in tweeds was staring at me with the wild air of a baffled bear. He did not at first seem to take my question in. Then he said at last, “Don’t you know who he is? That is the Lord of Stroud.”

  “But,” I stammered, “if that is the lord, why does he hate his forefathers like that?”

  “He seems really to believe,” answered the big man, “that they have left a curse on him.” Then he added, with some irrelevance, “That’s why he wears a wig.”

  It was a few moments before the meaning dawned on me. “You don’t mean that fable about the elephant ear?” I demanded. “I’ve heard of it, of course, but surely it must be a superstitious tale spun out of something much simpler. I’ve always thought it was based on the fact that they used to cut off criminals’ ears in the fifteenth century.”

  “I hardly think it was that,” answered the keeper of local history thoughtfully, “but it is not outside nature for a family to have some deformity frequently reappearing such as one ear bigger than the other.” The big historian suddenly buried his big face in his big red hands, like a man trying to think out his duty. He groaned, “Understand that I have no reason to defend him. He’s been a tyrant to me as to everybody else in town. Don’t fancy because you see him sitting here amongst the public that he isn’t a lord in the worst sense of the word. He would fetch a servant a mile away to ring a dinner bell a yard off if it would summon another servant three miles away to fetch a matchbox three yards off.”

  “But he has not the valet to brush his clothes,” cut in the Frenchman, with a curious dryness, “for perhaps the valet would want to brush his wig, too.”

  The historian turned to him and seemed to forget my presence. The little man handed him his card and said, “My name, it is Poiret.”

  His card stated that he was a private detective, based in London.

  The big man was moved and, I think, a little heated with wine. “I don’t know how you know about the wig, Mr. Poiret,” he said, “but you are right. He lets the whole world do everything for him except dress him. Anybody is kicked out of the house without a warning who is so much as found anywhere near his bedroom door.”

  “He doesn’t seem a pleasant old party,” I remarked.

  “No,” replied Sergeant McDonald, as he introduced himself to the other fellow, Poiret, “and yet that is just the reason why you are unjust to him after all. Gentlemen, the lord does really feel bitterness about the curse that he uttered just now. He does, with sincere shame and terror, hide under that fake wig something he thinks would destroy any man, who beholds it. I know it is so, and I know it is not a mere hereditary disproportion in the features. I know it is worse than that, because one of his former servants told me. He was present at a scene that no man could invent. His former wife tried to defy the secret, and was scared away from here, never to be heard of again.”

  The French gentleman seemed more than a little interested and I wouldn’t be surprised that his presence in town had something to do with an investigation into the lord. I opened my mouth to speak, but McDonald went on, speaking hushedly. “I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Poiret, because it’s really more defending the poor lord than tarnishing his reputation. Did you ever hear of the time when he very nearly lost half his estates?”

  The detective shook his head, and the historian proceeded to tell the tale as he had heard it from his predecessor at the museum, who had been his patron and instructor, and whom he seemed to trust implicitly. Up to a certain point it was a common marital dispute between a husband and his wife. His wife had brought half the fortune into the marriage and being fed up with the lord’s harsh treatment of her, she had hired a solicitor and had proceeded with filing for divorce in court. The wife’s name was Margaret McPhee, but the lord always called her Mack, presumably in reference to her Scottish ancestry. At that time, she was not yet thirty. Her father had risen very rapidly, but from very dirty beginnings, being first a police informer in Glasgow, and then a money-lender. He had the sense, as I see it, to keep technically straight until he was ready to deal the final blow, marrying his daughter off to a lord. The daughter had the same shrewd and tough character. The blow fell at dinner one day, and the old servant, who told the historian the tale, said he would never forget the very look of the lampshades and the decanters, as the little wife, with a steady smile, proposed to the great landlord that he should grant her a divorce and they should split the estates between them. The lord sprang up angrily and pulled his wife up by the hair.

  “I’m glad of that,” she said, “for now I can take the whole estate. The law will give it to me.”

  Heffer, it seems, was white as ashes, but his eyes still blazed. “The law will give it you,” he said, “but you will not take it.”

  They struggled and the lord lost his hairpiece as he was not yet wearing the big wig then. She smashed a decanter on his bald head and he bled profusely. He grabbed her by the shoulders and head to calm her down, but as she looked at her husband’s bald head her eyes seemed to grow to the size of dinner plates. Bit by bit the wife, however, seemed to calm down and slowly sank down on her chair and slumped down on the table and cried. The servant was outside the dining room, looking through the keyhole. The lord, put on his hairpiece again and came out of the room and told him to tell the servants to go to bed as the mistress was unwell and that he would take her to her room as soon as she was able to walk.

  Well, you may say what you like and make it mean what you like. But McDonald swears it is the solemn fact that the wife, after that night simply ran from the house in the middle of the night and never reappeared in the countryside, and since then Lord Stroud has been feared more than he ever was, especially after all servants were let go and began spreading the tale.

  Now Sergeant McDonald told his story with rather wild theatrical gestures, and with a passion I think at least partisan. I was quite conscious of the possibility that the whole was the fantasy of an old bra
ggart, but before I end with this part of my investigation, I must add that McDonald’s story was confirmed by two other men. I learned from the old servant, who was looking through the keyhole that the story was correct. And I learned from the legal records of the wife’s solicitor and old newspapers that there was a lawsuit threatened, and at least begun, by one Margaret Heffer, born McPhee against the Lord of Stroud. I will write and post the rest tomorrow. It’s late.”

  Mr. Kiffin, of the Daily Mail, wrote some highly illegible words across the top of the copy, made some highly mysterious marks down the side of it, and called to Miss Lyon in the same loud, monotonous voice, “Take down a letter to Mr. Pickston.”

  “Dear Pickston, Your article will do, but I have had to change it a bit, as our public would never stand a dandy French detective in the story. We must keep our eyes on the suburbs. I’ve altered him to Mr. Pawray of London. Yours, S. Kiffin.”

  A day later the judicious editor was examining, with blue eyes that seemed to grow rounder and rounder, the second instalment of Mr. Pickston’s tale of black magic and mystery up North.

  It began with the words, “I have made an astounding discovery. I freely confess it is quite different from anything I expected to discover, and will give a much bigger shock to the public. I venture to say, without any vanity, that the words I now write will be read all over England and the Colonies. And yet I heard all I have to tell before I left this same restaurant in this same little town.

  I owe it all to detective Poiret. He’s an extraordinary man. The large historian had left the table, perhaps ashamed of his gossiping, perhaps anxious about the state of mind in which the lord had vanished. Anyway, he left, telling us he would try and find the lord. Poiret had picked up one of the lemons and was eyeing it with an odd pleasure.

  “The lemon, Monsieur, does it not have the lovely color?” he asked. “There is one thing Poiret, he does not like about the wig of the lord, the color.”

  “I don’t think I understand,” I answered.