Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley (thriller book recommendations txt) 📖

At the word Trent struck his hands together with a muttered exclamation. The others looked at him in surprise.

“Chess!” repeated Trent. “Do you know,” he said, rising and approaching Marlowe, “what was the first thing I noted about you at our first meeting? It was your eye, Mr. Marlowe. I couldn’t place it then, but I know now where I had seen your eyes before. They were in the head of no less a man than the great Nikolay Korchagin, with whom I once sat in the same railway carriage for two days. I thought I should never forget the chess eye after that, but I could not put a name to it when I saw it in you. I beg your pardon,” he ended suddenly, resuming his marmoreal attitude in his chair.

“I have played the game from my childhood, and with good players,” said Marlowe simply. “It is an hereditary gift, if you can call it a gift. At the University I was nearly as good as anybody there, and I gave most of my brains to that and the O.U.D.S. and playing about generally. At Oxford, as I dare say you know, inducements to amuse oneself at the expense of one’s education are endless, and encouraged by the authorities. Well, one day toward the end of my last term, Dr. Munro of Queen’s, whom I had never defeated, sent for me. He told me that I played a fairish game of chess. I said it was very good of him to say so. Then he said, ‘They tell me you hunt, too.’ I said, ‘Now and then.’ He asked, ‘Is there anything else you can do?’ ‘No,’ I said, not much liking the tone of the conversation—the old man generally succeeded in putting people’s backs up. He grunted fiercely, and then told me that enquiries were being made on behalf of a wealthy American man of business who wanted an English secretary. Manderson was the name, he said. He seemed never to have heard it before, which was quite possible, as he never opened a newspaper and had not slept a night outside the college for thirty years. If I could rub up my spelling—as the old gentleman put it—I might have a good chance for the post, as chess and riding and an Oxford education were the only indispensable points.

“Well, I became Manderson’s secretary. For a long time I liked the position greatly. When one is attached to an active American plutocrat in the prime of life one need not have many dull moments. Besides, it made me independent. My father had some serious business reverses about that time, and I was glad to be able to do without an allowance from him. At the end of the first year Manderson doubled my salary. ‘It’s big money,’ he said, ‘but I guess I don’t lose.’ You see, by that time I was doing a great deal more than accompany him on horseback in the morning and play chess in the evening, which was mainly what he had required. I was attending to his houses, his farm in Ohio, his shooting in Maine, his horses, his cars, and his yacht. I had become a walking railway-guide and an expert cigar-buyer. I was always learning something.

“Well, now you understand what my position was in regard to Manderson during the last two or three years of my connection with him. It was a happy life for me on the whole. I was busy, my work was varied and interesting; I had time to amuse myself too, and money to spend. At one time I made a fool of myself about a girl, and that was not a happy time; but it taught me to understand the great goodness of Mrs. Manderson.” Marlowe inclined his head to Mr. Cupples as he said this. “She may choose to tell you about it. As for her husband, he had never varied in his attitude towards me, in spite of the change that came over him in the last months of his life, as you know. He treated me well and generously in his unsympathetic way, and I never had a feeling that he was less than satisfied with his bargain—that was the sort of footing we lived upon. And it was that continuance of his attitude right up to the end that made the revelation so shocking when I was suddenly shown, on the night on which he met his end, the depth of crazy hatred of myself that was in Manderson’s soul.”

The eyes of Trent and Mr. Cupples met for an instant.

“You never suspected that he hated you before that time?” asked Trent; and Mr. Cupples asked at the same moment, “To what did you attribute it?”

“I never guessed until that night,” answered Marlowe, “that he had the smallest ill-feeling toward me. How long it had existed I do not know. I cannot imagine why it was there. I was forced to think, when I considered the thing in those awful days after his death, that it was a case of a madman’s delusion, that he believed me to be plotting against him, as they so often do. Some such insane conviction must have been at the root of it. But who can sound the abysses of a lunatic’s fancy? Can you imagine the state of mind in which a man dooms himself to death with the object of delivering some one he hates to the hangman?”

Mr. Cupples moved sharply in his chair. “You say Manderson was responsible for his own death?” he asked.

Trent glanced at him with an eye of impatience, and resumed his intent watch upon the face of Marlowe. In the relief of speech it was now less pale and drawn.

“I do say so,” Marlowe answered concisely, and looked his questioner in the face. Mr. Cupples nodded.

“Before we proceed to the elucidation of your statement,” observed the old gentleman, in a tone of one discussing a point of abstract science, “it may be remarked that the state of mind which you attribute to Manderson—”

“Suppose we have the story first,” Trent interrupted, gently laying a hand on Mr. Cupples’s arm. “You were telling us,” he went on, turning to Marlowe, “how things stood between you and Manderson. Now will you tell us the facts of what happened that night?”

Marlowe flushed at the barely perceptible emphasis which Trent laid upon the word “facts”. He drew himself up.

“Bunner and myself dined with Mr. and Mrs. Manderson that Sunday evening,” he began, speaking carefully. “It was just like other dinners at which the four of us had been together. Manderson was taciturn and gloomy, as we had latterly been accustomed to see him. We others kept a conversation going. We rose from the table, I suppose, about nine. Mrs. Manderson went to the drawing-room, and Bunner went up to the hotel to see an acquaintance. Manderson asked me to come into the orchard behind the house, saying he wished to have a talk. We paced up and down the pathway there, out of earshot from the house, and Manderson, as he smoked his cigar, spoke to me in his cool, deliberate way. He had never seemed more sane, or more well-disposed to me. He said he wanted me to do him an important service. There was a big thing on. It was a secret affair. Bunner knew nothing of it, and the less I knew the better. He wanted me to do exactly as he directed, and not bother my head about reasons.

“This, I may say, was quite characteristic of Manderson’s method of going to work. If at times he required a man to be a mere tool in his hand, he would tell him so. He had used me in the same kind of way a dozen times. I assured him he could rely on me, and said I was ready. ‘Right now?’ he asked. I said of course I was.

“He nodded, and said—I tell you his words as well as I can recollect them—attend to this. ‘There is a man in England now who is in this thing with me. He was to have left tomorrow for Paris by the noon boat from Southampton to Havre. His name is George Harris—at least that’s the name he is going by. Do you remember that name?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘when I went up to London a week ago you asked me to book a cabin in that name on the boat that goes tomorrow. I gave you the ticket.’ ‘Here it is,’ he said, producing it from his pocket.

“‘Now,’ Manderson said to me, poking his cigar-butt at me with each sentence in a way he used to have, ‘George Harris cannot leave England tomorrow. I find I shall want him where he is. And I want Bunner where he is. But somebody has got to go by that boat and take certain papers to Paris. Or else my plan is going to fall to pieces. Will you go?’ I said, ‘Certainly. I am here to obey orders.’

“He bit his cigar, and said, ‘That’s all right; but these are not just ordinary orders. Not the kind of thing one can ask of a man in the ordinary way of his duty to an employer. The point is this. The deal I am busy with is one in which neither myself nor any one known to be connected with me must appear as yet. That is vital. But these people I am up against know your face as well as they know mine. If my secretary is known in certain quarters to have crossed to Paris at this time and to have interviewed certain people—and that would be known as soon as it happened—then the game is up.’ He threw away his cigar-end and looked at me questioningly.

“I didn’t like it much, but I liked failing Manderson at a pinch still less. I spoke lightly. I said I supposed I should have to conceal my identity, and I would do my best. I told him I used to be pretty good at make-up.

“He nodded in approval. He said, ‘That’s good. I judged you would not let me down.’ Then he gave me my instructions. ‘You take the car right now,’ he said, ‘and start for Southampton—there’s no train that will fit in. You’ll be driving all night. Barring accidents, you ought to get there by six in the morning. But whenever you arrive, drive straight to the Bedford Hotel and ask for George Harris. If he’s there, tell him you are to go over instead of him, and ask him to telephone me here. It is very important he should know that at the earliest moment possible. But if he isn’t there, that means he has got the instructions I wired today, and hasn’t gone to Southampton. In that case you don’t want to trouble about him any more, but just wait for the boat. You can leave the car at a garage under a fancy name—mine must not be given. See about changing your appearance—I don’t care how, so you do it well. Travel by the boat as George Harris. Let on to be anything you like, but be careful, and don’t talk much to anybody. When you arrive, take a room at the Hotel St Petersbourg. You will receive a note or message there, addressed to George Harris, telling you where to take the wallet I shall give you. The wallet is locked, and you want to take good care of it. Have you got that all clear?’

“I repeated the instructions. I asked if I should return from Paris after handing over the wallet. ‘As soon as you like,’ he said. ‘And mind this—whatever happens, don’t communicate with me at any stage of the journey. If you don’t get the message in Paris at once, just wait until you do—days, if necessary. But not a line of any sort to me. Understand? Now get ready as quick as you can. I’ll go with you in the car a little way. Hurry.’

“That is, as far as I can remember, the exact substance of what Manderson said to me that night. I went to my room, changed into day clothes, and hastily threw a few necessaries into a kit-bag. My mind was in a whirl, not so much at the nature of the business as at the suddenness of it. I think I remember telling you the last time we met”—he turned to Trent—“that Manderson shared the national fondness for doings things in a story-book style. Other things being equal, he delighted in a bit of mystification and melodrama, and I told myself that this was Manderson all over. I hurried downstairs with my bag and rejoined him in the library. He handed me a stout