“Thinking of making one out of it, Mr. Payne?” Sir Bruton queried. “You never know. It might be topical.” The novelist gave him a shrewd look. “What a scoop it would be. On all the bookstalls, just in time for the trial. It would be jolly thin ice, of course. . . .”
“Who said anything about trials, young man?”
Rockley Payne grinned. Then his ingenuous face sobered. “One can’t use one’s friends, I suppose. There’s old Charles. . . . Anyhow, I’ve been forestalled, in a way. It’s what I came to tell you, Mr. Tuke. You see, I knew something about the family beforehand. Something these cousins don’t know.”
“From your contributor, perhaps?”
“Yes, Raymond told me. In the way of business. It had to do with a story. I nearly let it out at Miss Ardmore’s.” Mr. Payne paused to sip his cognac. Mrs. Tuke watched him with an indulgent smile, and wondered what his wife was like. Her husband lay back in his chair in his usual extended formation, and Sir Bruton brooded in a pop-eyed fashion over the peaceful scene.
“I didn’t know Raymond Shearsby at all well,” Payne went on. “In fact, we only met three times. When I wanted to rope him in again for the Ludgate he came to see me. That was eighteen months ago. He dropped in about a year later, and then I saw him again a few weeks back, in July. And that’s the real point. What he came about, I mean.”
“Then you saw him shortly before his death?” Harvey said.
“Just over a week before. It was the 19th. Well, a couple of months earlier he’d sent a story along. It was a long-short —seven or eight thousand words. It was about a pack of cousins, only there were five, not six, and a lot of money that was going to come to them. And then an uncle who was supposed to have been dead for years turned up. It ended in the style Shearsby was so good at—there were two or three solutions, and you were left wondering which was right. It was quite up to standard, and after a bit—you know what it is now, with your printers trying to claw along with two nonagenarians and a dog—I sent him the proofs. Actually, on the 15th of July. Oh, and by the way, Shearsby called the story Too Many Cousins. ”
“Almost disquietingly apt,” Mr. Tuke commented.
“You may well say so,” Rockley Payne agreed, his deceptively youthful face unwontedly serious. “Because this is what happened next. On the 17th Shearsby rang up to make an appointment. I’m only there at odd times, you know —when I’m snaffling a sandwich lunch, or after ministerial hours—so my secretary fixed up a time for the 19th. Shearsby duly rolled up. He said he’d come to withdraw the story. It couldn’t be published. He wanted all the proofs scrapped. And then the trouble came out. It was the first I’d heard about his family, but as you’ve guessed, he’d based the story on them.”
Harvey nodded. Sir Bruton’s fishlike stare was fixed on the youthful editor.
“You say the story was sent you a couple of months earlier,” he rumbled. “That would be some time after one of the bona fide cousins had been killed.”
“Yes. The army man called Dresser,” Payne said. “But Shearsby said he’d only just heard of that. He’d missed the paragraph in the papers about it, and he hadn’t seen Dresser for a couple of years. Anyway, to start with, he roughed out the whole business of his cousins and the money, and explained how it gave him the idea for the story. As he said, he’d covered up the facts so well, and shuffled the personnel about so thoroughly, that nobody would have spotted the connection, or cared two hoots about it if they did. Because all the characters were without stain or blemish—except one. The resurrected uncle. He was the villain of the piece, if there was one. Anyway, he was a bad hat.”
‘‘And what had happened to render the story unprintable,” Harvey inquired.
Rockley Payne gave him one of the quick acute looks which belied his irresponsible airs.
“I fancy you’ve spotted the skeleton,” he said with a smile. “Yes, a genuine Shearsby uncle had popped up. Or a second cousin, or something. The older generation, anyhow. The fellow was supposed to have died eighteen years ago. And he had been a bit of a bad hat. Shearsby never mentioned his name, but I gathered it was from him that he heard of Captain Dresser’s death, and I know I got the idea that the bad hat must be Dresser’s father. In other words, Cousin Martin of Miss Ardmore’s tale. And in the circumstances Shearsby felt it would be a bit injudicious to publish Too Many Cousins. Not that he could have had the faintest notion, poor chap,” said Rockley Payne, shaking his head, “how devilishly like the story things were going to pan out. All he was worried about was this fellow’s feelings, and the general awkwardness of sailing so near the truth.”
“He was quite sure about his facts, I suppose?” Harvey asked.
“Oh, lord, yes,” Payne replied. “You see, he’d met the man.”
PART
TWO
:
COMBINATIONS AND
PERMUTATIONS
CHAPTER X
WHETHER chief constables grind their teeth fast or slowly, the machinery of Scotland Yard, once put in motion, works rapidly and smoothly, even in wartime. The re-opening of the inquiries into the deaths of Raymond Shearsby and Mrs. Porteous was put in hand within half an hour of Harvey Tuke’s visit to the Assistant Commissioner on the morning of Monday, August the 21st.
Negotiations by telephone with the chief constables concerned, those of Hertfordshire and Surrey, conducted by Wray with the tact and persuasiveness of long practice, having reached the foregone conclusion that this new investigation would have to be undertaken by the Central Office, Detective-Inspector W. H. Vance was relieved of some dull researches connected with a corpse dredged from the River
