The Crimson Rambler Read online

  Table of Contents

  BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JOHN RUSSELL FEARN

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  INTRODUCING FEARN’S DETECTIVE FICTION

  The Crimson Rambler

  John Russell Fearn

  Wildside Press (2011)

  * * *

  Tags: Mystery, Detective, agatha christie, scotland yard, crime murder

  When Warner Darnworth is shot through the back of his head in his study while seated at his desk, Chief Inspector Gossage is called in to investigate. But the study door is securely locked on the inside with the only key, the closed window is tamper-proof, no weapon can be found, the movement of everyone in the house has been accounted for, and there are no traces of footprints in the garden outside. In other words, it's an impossible crime. Gossage finds plenty of family skeletons and motives that might have caused Darnworth's murder. But who actually killed the man—and more to the point, how? A classic locked-room mystery.

  BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JOHN RUSSELL FEARN

  1,000-Year Voyage: A Science Fiction Novel

  The Crimson Rambler: A Crime Novel

  Here and Now: A Science Fiction Novel

  THE CRIMSON RAMBLER

  JOHN RUSSELL FEARN

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1947 by John Russell Fearn

  Copyright © 2005 by Philip Harbottle

  Originally published under the pen name, Thornton Ayre.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  To My Good Friend,

  Matt Japp

  CHAPTER ONE

  LOCKED ROOM MURDER

  Hauling 250 pounds of flesh up the staircase leading to the office of Chief Inspector Douglas Gossage at Scotland Yard was not Divisional Inspector Craddock’s idea of fun. Sergeant Blair, the chief inspector’s right-hand man, opened the office door. His big, square-jawed face with the close-cropped black moustache broke into a grin of welcome.

  “Good morning, sir. Been expecting you.”

  Craddock was at his most grumpy as he entered the dingy office. It struck him that the place seemed even more cheerless than usual. November gloom outside with a persistent drizzle, grimy weather-smeared windows, a solitary though powerful electric light casting on steel filing cabinets, a big desk, and Sergeant Blair’s table and typewriter in the corner.

  “Saturday, November 2nd, 1946. The glamour of Scotland Yard!” Craddock summed up, and took off his hat. “’Morning, sir,” he added formally, moving across the office so that he stood beside the big desk

  “Liver, Craddock, or don’t you like working on Saturday mornings?”

  The man at the desk asked the question as he laid aside his pen. He smiled, too—an immense smile that was half complacent and half amused.

  “No, sir, liver’s all right. Just those infernal stairs and this dump you work in.”

  “If you don’t like it you shouldn’t get yourself mixed up in murders so complicated that they necessitate you coming here,” Chief Inspector Gossage commented.

  The divisional inspector sat down near the desk. What could be seen of Chief Inspector Gossage on the other side of it was very broad and tweed-suited, a tendency toward the prosaic being relieved by a savagely green tie. It was in contrast to the chief inspector’s brick-red complexion, an efflorescence which wandered unchecked far beyond the normal confines to the roots of his close-cropped grey hair and the back of his neck. World travel and years in the tropics had completely pickled his fair skin: Nor had long walks outdoors, both at his work and for pleasure, softened it any, either…. The wit at the Yard who had christened him ‘The Crimson Rambler’ was still anonymous, but whoever he was the phrase was deadly accurate.

  “Well, how’s the grass down in Godalming?” the chief inspector inquired presently, contemplating Craddock with bright blue eyes.

  “The grass?” Craddock could take things very literally sometimes. “I didn’t come this far—or this high up—to talk about the grass, sir. It’s this business at Darnworth Manor. Murder—sure as eggs. But I just don’t see how old Darnworth could have been murdered. It doesn’t make sense whichever way you look at it.”

  “He died in his study between seven and eight o’clock last evening and nobody did it, eh?” Gossage took off his glasses and peered at the paper he had just picked up. “No weapon was found and everybody has been accounted for. Study door locked on the inside, and the window was one of the sort you can’t tamper with—yet the old man got shot in the back of the head!”

  Gossage clipped his pince-nez back on his nose. “All right, suppose you try enlarging on your official statement.”

  Craddock hunched forward. “Darnworth Manor is a big, rambling place some hundreds of years old and recently brought up to date. It’s ten miles from Godalming and two and a half from Bexley, the nearest village. The next neighbour to the Darnworths is just outside the village—a veterinary surgeon by the name of Findley.”

  Gossage dragged a pipe with an overlong stem from his pocket and began to fill the bowl with tobacco.

  “Inspector Hoyle of the local force sent for me,” Craddock went on. “That was at 8:30. I arrived at the Manor at 8:45, taking with me the divisional surgeon, fingerprint boys, and a photographer. We found Warner Darnworth in the study, shot dead.”

  “Who let you in?”

  “Mrs. Darnworth.”

  “She had a second key, then?”

  “No. There’s only one key. She had the butler wriggle it out on to a piece of newspaper under the door on the other side. You know the trick. Then it was simple to open the door.”

  “Which means we’ve only Mrs. Darnworth’s word for it that the door was locked?”

  “And the butler’s. And other members of the family, too, because they were present when the key-wriggling was done. No doubt of it that the study door was locked on the inside. It was when the old man didn’t come out of his study to dinner at eight—and all the bangings on the study door couldn’t make him respond—that Mrs. Darnworth had the key wriggled out. They found Darnworth shot and sent for the police.”

  Gossage passed a thick, freckled hand over his convict haircut and said nothing.

  Craddock went on: “I searched the study, of course, when the boys had been over it for prints, and I had the house searched inside and out. No sign of a weapon anywhere. No trace of footprints in the garden, either. As for a weapon, I went on the assumption that it was a rifle. The doctor said it was a rifle shot as far as he could tell, but the details—the type of weapon, direction of fire, and so on, he couldn’t give until after the post-mortem. I told him to send the report on to you. Only points we could get were that Darnworth had not been shot from close at hand—and that he had been dead approximately an hour and a quarter: That is, he died about 7:30.”

  “Go on,” Gossage invited.

  “I questioned everyone in the house….”

  “Their stories being…?” Gossage picked up four sheets of paper neatly typed tha
t morning by Sergt. Blair. He took off his glasses to read them.

  “First, Mrs. Jessica Darnworth, wife of Warner Darnworth, was in her bedroom being dressed by the companion-help, one Louise. Right?”

  Craddock nodded.

  “Right,” he confirmed. “But she’s out of the running, sir. She’s an invalid—a paralytic—and has been for five years.”

  “I see. And Louise?”

  “Wishy-washy and faded. Fortyish. Thin-nosed type and avoids conversation.”

  Gossage put one of the papers back on the desk.

  “Sheila Darnworth, the younger daughter, was playing the piano. Elaine Darnworth, the elder daughter, was not at home at the time of her father’s death. Neither was Gregory Bride, her fiancé, staying there for the weekend. Sheila’s fiancé, Barry Crespin, was fast asleep in his bedroom at the time of the murder. Then there is Preston, the handyman-chauffeur…. To say nothing of the servants! That is the sum total of house residents and visitors?”

  Craddock nodded and Gossage put the papers down.

  The chief inspector said: “Here’s the divisional surgeon’s report, which you asked him to send on to me.” He handed it across and the divisional inspector read: “Post-mortem report (Warner Darnworth deceased): Death caused by entry of a pellet from an air rifle which pierced the skull bone and lodged in the occipital lobe. Death would be instantaneous. The shot, judging from the line of traverse through the skull, came diagonally from above. Pellet (extracted) of the waisted variety and has been handed to Firearms for examination.”

  “Air rifle!” Craddock exclaimed. “That never occurred to me!”

  Gossage tossed over another report. “Take a look at this.”

  “Firearms report on pellet presented for inspection (Warner Darnworth deceased): This is a sixteen-grain pellet from, very probably, the muzzle of a B.S.A. air rifle, which has a muzzle velocity of 600 feet per second. As such, easily capable of penetrating a skull bone at short range.”

  “More interesting still,” Craddock commented. “What else have we, sir?”

  “Report from ‘Dabs’,” Gossage said, studying it. “Only fingerprints worth mentioning seem to be those of the dead man. There are others, but they probably belong to the servants.”

  He put the fingerprint report down then hunched himself over three enlarged photographs of the dead man’s study. The first showed a white-haired man in a silk dressing gown seated in big swivel chair before the desk. He had not slumped across the desk, though his head had dropped forward until his chin touched his breast. His hands were still on the blotter, the fingers clenched and casting shadows on the blotter from the glow of the still lighted, downwardly turned desk light on his right.

  The second photograph showed the study in general. On the extreme left was the only door. Diagonal to it was a heavy bureau. Next, in left to right progression, came the floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with books, and the curtained window.

  Between the door and the commencement of the shelves, nearly on a line with the heavy Jacobean bookcase on the opposite side of the room, hung a twin-globed electrolier. At the far end of the room, and at the farthest point from the study door, near the window, was the desk at which the dead man was seated.

  Other appointments included two leather easy chairs, some ordinary hard-backed chairs, and a table in a corner. The only signs of heating were in the steam pipes before a built-up fireplace.

  The third photograph was an enlargement of the wound in the back of the man’s head, a wound that had slightly stained the white hair.

  The Crimson Rambler clipped the pince-nez back on his nose.

  “Now, these folks in the house. Mrs. Jessica Darnworth. An incurable paralytic?”

  “That’s her story and it seems to be true. We can check on the medical evidence if necessary. She has a wheelchair. I found her a particularly acid piece of work. About fifty-eight. I didn’t delve much into the cause of her invalidism. She says that she was in her bedroom until ten minutes to eight, and had been since six o’clock. Then she came downstairs—”

  “How? In a wheelchair?”

  “That,” Craddock said, “is where Preston comes in. The chauffeur-handyman. It’s part of his job to carry Mrs. Darnworth about, from wheelchair to bedroom, from wheelchair to car, and so on. He’s a taciturn, thin-faced customer with an irritating habit of running his words into one another. Probably wouldn’t stop at murder if he could make capital out of it.”

  “And what’s his story?”

  “He was in the main corridor in which Mrs. Darnworth’s bedroom is situated, between seven o’clock and ten to eight, and he never moved from there. He was waiting for Mrs. Darnworth to call him. Apparently he always does that from seven to eight each evening. At any time in that hour she might call him to take her downstairs. It was ten to eight when she did call him and he carried her to the wheelchair in the hall.”

  “And Louise? How does she fit in?”

  “She stayed behind for a moment or two after Mrs. Darnworth had been carried downstairs; then she followed.”

  “And Sheila played the piano and Elaine was out?” Gossage added. “This chap, Gregory Bride—why was he over for the weekend?”

  “He’s Elaine Darnworth’s fiancé, and he’s a scientific inventor. He lives in Godalming, has a house there, but he comes over to the manor a good many weekends. He arrived in his car at 4:30 yesterday afternoon. I understand he came over this weekend to see if old man Darnworth would finance some invention or other. Darnworth did a lot of that sort of thing.”

  “And what kind of a fellow is Bride?”

  “So-so.” Craddock raised and lowered heavy shoulders. “A bit stuffy. Very scientific, and high in the collar. He and Elaine Darnworth would make a bonny pair, I’d say. Both highbrow and standoffish.”

  “There’s this other chap—Barry Crespin. He, too, was over for the weekend. Any particular reason?”

  “He’s been coming every weekend for six months. He’s engaged to Sheila, the younger daughter. Not a bad sort of chap. Radio engineer and has a flat in the city.”

  “What was he doing in bed at 7:30 in the evening? Was he ill?”

  “No. The night before he had been repairing a radio. It took him until early in the morning to locate the fault and correct it. Yesterday he complained of feeling tired and went to bed in the evening. He left strict instructions with the manservant to call him for dinner—but if he were asleep, to let him stay asleep and not bother him. Well, he was asleep, so the servant says. He saw him in bed, and tip-toed out again.”

  Gossage asked: “Does anybody benefit from Darnworth’s death?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I don’t see how we can know until the will is proved.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  DARNWORTH MANOR

  Gossage got to his feet and strolled over to the window, so that his complete attire became visible. He was dressed in a golfing suit and the green tie looked less sensational when matched with the green socks clinging to his muscular calves. He was a powerfully built man, five feet ten inches tall, hardly any neck, and prosperously wide around the equator.

  “I kept the key to the study, sir, after locking it,” Craddock said, putting it on the desk. “There may be another one in the manor, but I’ll have to risk that. I also told the folks they could carry on normally, but just the same I left two men on the watch, pending your further orders.”

  Gossage gave a snort. “I was going to plant some liliums this weekend—first week in November’s the right time. Now instead I’ll have to hie me to Godalming and find out what all this is about.”

  Craddock got to his feet.

  “Naturally, sir, you’ll want me to work with you?”

  “Why should I?” Gossage asked blandly, putting the study key in his pocket.

  “Well, since I was called to—”

  “I don’t want you, or the local Inspector, or even the Angel Gabriel. You should know by now that I work with only one man—Sergeant Harry B
lair. That’s he in the corner. Or didn’t you ever hear of a chief inspector and sergeant working on their own?”

  “Of course,” Craddock assented stolidly. “Very often done, in fact, but—”

  “You divisional boys are usually jealous of a chief inspector invading your territory. You’ll only tolerate an area superintendent, and that because you have to. So, since you are stumped enough to come running for me you can stay out—and if I need you I’ll be after you quick enough….”

  “Yes, sir. As you say, sir.”

  Gossage looked across at Blair. “Harry, ring up Darnworth Manor and tell ’em we’ll be over to stay, arriving by lunch time. If we get nothing else out of it the country air will do us good. And Harry—dig out my murder bag from the locker, will you?”

  Sergeant Blair nodded and lifted the telephone. Craddock began to move away.

  “I’ll be seeing you again then, sir. Always glad to help in any way.”

  It was eleven o’clock when Chief Inspector Gossage and Sergeant Blair came within sight of their destination, after a fast drive through wet countryside. The house was apparently in the middle of a field and surrounded by bare, wintry-looking trees.

  “That be it, I wonder?” he asked, and Sergeant Blair studied it with profound disfavour.

  “Could be, sir—and, if it is, I’m not much impressed.” He shook his head dubiously. “Looks like one of those spookholes you see on the pictures—”

  Sergeant Blair turned into a lane and the car sped between hedges with sodden pastureland behind them. They passed a muddy-looking pond, a solitary tree with a branch like a bent elbow bending drearily over it—and bore left to discover that the residence was not in the middle of a field, but had quite extensive grounds about it, guarded by a high brick wall with a spiked iron railing on top of it. It was the undulation of the landscape that had conveyed the wrong impression.

  Blair stopped the car outside closed, wrought iron gates. He nodded to the stone pillars supporting them where, apparently of recent execution, there had been chiseled the words Darnworth Manor.