Murder Gone Mad

They came in. The small hall was suddenly packed with human bodies.

‘This,’ said Mr Colby looking at his wife and somehow edging clear, ‘is Mr Harvey. Harvey, this is Mrs Colby.’

‘Very pleased,’ said Mr Harvey, ‘to meet you.’

‘So am I, I’m sure,’ said Mrs Colby. She was a plump and pleasant and bustling little person who yet gave an impression of placidity. Her age might have been anywhere between twenty-eight and forty. She was pretty and had been prettier. She stood looking from her husband to her husband’s friend and back again.

Mr Colby, whose christian name was George, was forty-five years of age, five feet five and a half inches in height, forty-one and a half inches round the belly and weighed approximately ten stone and seven pounds. He had pleasing and kindly blue eyes, a good forehead and a moustache which seemed, although really it was not out of hand, too big for his face.

Mr Harvey was forty years old, six feet two inches in height, thirty inches round the chest and weighed, stripped, nine stone and eleven pounds. Mr Harvey was clean-shaven. He was also bald. His face, at first sight rather a stern, harsh, hatchet-like face, was furrowed with a myopic frown and two deep-graven lines running from the base of his nose to the corners of his mouth. When Mr Harvey smiled, however, which was quite frequently, one saw, as just now Mrs Colby had seen, that he was a man as pleasant and even milder natured than his host.

‘This,’ said Mr Colby throwing open the second door in the right-hand wall, ‘is the sitting-room. Come in, Harvey, ol’ man.’

Mr Harvey squeezed his narrowness first past his hostess and then his host.

‘You coming in, dear?’ said Mr Colby.

His wife shook her head. ‘Not just now, father. I must help Rose with the supper.’

‘Where’s the boy?’ said Mr Colby.

‘Upstairs,’ said the boy’s mother, ‘finishing his home lessons. It’s the Boys’ Club Meeting after supper and he wants to get the work done first.’

‘If we might,’ said Mr Colby with something of an air, ‘have a couple of glasses …’

Mrs Colby bustled away. Mr Colby went into the sitting-room with his friend. Mr Colby impressively opened a cupboard in the bottom of the writing desk and took from the cupboard a black bottle and a syphon of soda water. Mrs Colby entered with a tray upon which were two tumblers. She set the tray down upon the side table. She raised the forefinger of her right hand; shook it once in the direction of her husband and once, a little less roguishly, at Mr Harvey.

‘You men!’ said Mrs Colby.

Mr Colby and his guest lay back in their chairs, their feet stretched before the fire. In each man’s hand was a tumbler. They were very comfortable, a little pompous and entirely happy. To them, when the glasses were nearly empty, entered Master Lionel Colby; a boy of eleven years, well-built and holding himself well; a boy with an engaging round face and slightly mischievous, wondering blue eyes which looked straight into the eyes of anyone to whom he spoke. Lionel obviously combined in his person, and also probably in his mind, the best qualities of his parents. He shook hands politely with Mr Harvey. He reported, with some camaraderie but equal politeness, his day’s doings to his father.

‘Homework done?’ said Mr Colby.

Lionel shook his head. ‘Not quite all, daddy. I came down because mother told me to come and say how-do-you-do to Mr Harvey.’

Mr Colby surveyed his son with pride. ‘Better run up and finish it, son. Then come down again. What are you going to do at the Boys’ Club tonight?’

The round cheeks of Lionel flushed slightly. Lionel’s blue eyes glistened. ‘Boxing,’ said Lionel.

The door closed gently behind Lionel.

‘That,’ said Mr Harvey with genuine feeling, ‘is a fine boy, Colby!’

Mr Colby made those stammering, slightly throaty noises which are the middle-class Englishman’s way when praised for some quality or property of his own.

‘A fine boy!’ said Mr Harvey again.

‘A good enough lad,’ said Mr Colby. His tone was almost offensively casual. ‘Did I happen to tell you, Harvey, that he was top of his class for the last three terms and that the headmaster, Dr Farrow, told me himself that Lionel is one of the best scholars he’d had in the last twenty years? Not, mind you, Harvey, that he isn’t good at games. He’s captain of the second eleven and they tell me he’s going to be a very good boxer. I must say—although it isn’t really for me to say it—that a better, quieter, more loving lad it’d be difficult to find in the length and breadth of Holmdale.’

‘A fine boy!’ said Mr Harvey once more.

III

At nine o’clock in the Trumpington Hall, Master Lionel Colby had the immense satisfaction of having proved himself so immeasurably superior to his opponent, a boy three years older and a full stone heavier than himself, that Sergeant Stubbs had stopped the bout.

‘I only wish,’ said Lionel to himself, ‘that dad and mum had been there.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ said Lionel aloud to his cronies, with a self-condemnatory swagger quite delicious, ‘I didn’t realise I was hitting so hard.’

At nine o’clock in the Holmdale Theatre—a building so modern in conception, so efficient in arrangement, and so pleasantly strange in decoration that earnest Germans made special trips to England to see it—the curtain was going down upon the first act of the Yeomen of the Guard as performed by the Holmdale Mummers. With supers, the cast of the Yeomen of the Guard, as performed by the Holmdale Mummers, amounted to seventy-four. There were in the theatre somewhere between two hundred and fifty and three hundred people, two hundred and twenty-two of whom were relatives of the cast.

At nine o’clock in the library of The Hospice, which was the large house of Sir Montague Flushing, K.B.E., the chairman of the Holmdale Company Limited, Sir Montague himself, was concluding a small and informal speech to those six of his fellow directors who had, that night, dined with him. Sir Montague was saying:

‘… and so I think that we may, gentlemen, very fairly congratulate ourselves upon drawing near to the conclusion of a very successful year. It is true that this year, as in the past, we have been unable to pay any dividend upon Ordinary Shares. It is also true that we have had to mortgage a thousand acres of building land on the Collingwood site, but, in opposition to these two facts, we have the increased and ever increasing influx of citizens. We have the success of our (a), (b) and (d) building schemes and we have the satisfaction of knowing that before many more months are out we shall be a fully self-contained borough with an Urban District Council of its own.

‘I am sure you will join with me, gentlemen, in giving thanks to Mr Dartmouth for his untiring efforts towards this very desirable end. When I tell you that Mr Dartmouth is to be the Clerk to the new Urban District Council, nominally giving up his position as Secretary to the Company, I am sure that you will appreciate how very helpful the new situation may prove.’

Sir Montague sits down. There is no clapping because this is an informal meeting, but there is a hearty and hive-like bumble of appreciation. Sir Montague’s manservant—the only manservant in Holmdale as this is the only library—makes slow and steady round. The glasses of Sir Montague, the Managing Director, Mr Dartmouth, the Company’s Secretary who is soon to be Clerk to the Council, and the other Directors—Mr Archibald Barley, Colonel Fairfax, Mr Cuthbert Mellon, Mr Ernest May and Mr Charles E. Lordly—are filled. A prosperous enough gathering of men who have, in the manner of all big fish in small ponds, persuaded themselves that their pond is the world.

At nine o’clock in the Maxton Hall, which is on The Other Side, Mr James Wildman is concluding a speech to an earnest audience. Mr Wildman is saying:

‘… And now to come to the peroration of my remarks. I can only hope that I have done some little service to the cause, by making certain-sure that all of my audience tonight will be fighting heart and soul, tooth and nail for the Silk Workers. (Applause.)

‘Before I sit down I should like to add to my final and concluding remarks the final statement that before I sit down I should like to say that, in conclusion, and quite apart from my proper subject, it would give me great pleasure to add that I consider Holmdale Garden City (What’s that, Mr Chairman?). I beg your pardon, ladies and gentlemen, I should have said Holmdale, that I consider Holmdale to be a proper move in the right direction. It has not been my pleasure and privilege to visit this salubrious spot before this occasion of this, my auspicious visit tonight, but now that I have paid a visit to Holmdale Gar … I beg your pardon, Mr Chairman, to Holmdale, I feel that it would not be right for me to conclude my remarks and to sit down without expressing my appreciation of the very salubrious qualities of this … er … Holmdale. It seems to me that here you have pleasant homes for jaded workers; pleasant homes set in delightfully rusticating surroundings. It seems to me, in fact, that here you have the beginning of what some of our more educated friends would call the millennium. When I looked about me on my pleasant walk here with Mr Todd here up from the station to this hall where I was to address you tonight I took the opportunity of keeping—as I always do—my eyes open. What I saw was a very pleasant, clean and delightful town set down in the heart of England’s fair green countryside. It has been my painful lot, Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, to have most of my life’s work laid down in the paths of the great cities, and I cannot tell you, I cannot even hope to properly or even with any degree of truthfulness tell you how much I opened my eyes at this very aptly named Holmdale of yours. It is, if I may coin the phrase, Holmdale by name and Holmdale by nature. It is a home town of little, clean, nice, decent, orderly homes; homes for that backbone of England, the working man … God bless him!’

At nine o’clock in the Baden-Powell Drill Hall, Mr William Farthingale had amassed so many points in the Progressive Whist Drive, organised by the Holmdale Mothers’ Protective Aid Society, that it seemed almost certain that he would run away with the first prize of a massive pair of ebony and silver-backed hair brushes. At nine o’clock in No. 3, Pettifers Lane, Mrs Sterling was, not without grumbling, cooking the late supper of her husband who worked at the Holmdale Electricity Supply Company. At nine o’clock in No. 14, Prester Avenue, Mrs Tildesly-Marshall was announcing to the guests in her drawing-room that Mr Giles Freshwater would now sing—Miss Sophie May accompanying—Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’, after which we will have a little bridge. At nine o’clock in Claypits Road, Miss Ursula Finch, the part proprietor and sole editor of the Holmdale Clarion, locked up the Clarion’s office. At nine o’clock in the surgery of No. 10 Broad Walk, Dr Arthur Reade was assuring the wife of Mr Fox-Powell, the solicitor, that there would be no addition to the family. At nine o’clock in Links Lane, Albert Rogers was kissing Mary Fillimore. At nine o’clock in the parlour of The Cottage in High Collings, Mr Julius Wetherby was having his nightly quarrel with Mrs Julius Wetherby. At nine o’clock in The Laurels Nursing Home, which was on the corner of Collingwood Road and Minters Avenue, Mrs Walter Stilson, wife of the Reverend Walter Stilson, was being delivered of a son. At nine o’clock in the drawing-room of No. 4 Tall Elms Road, Mrs Rudolph Sharp, having been assailed three times that day by an inner agony, was drafting, for the eye of her solicitors, a codicil to her will. And at nine o’clock down by the station, Percy Godly, the black sheep son of Emanuel Godly, the tea-broker, whose house, just outside the bounds of the town at Links Corner, was the envy of all Holmdale, was missing the last train to London.

It was at ten-fifteen that Mrs George Colby first evinced signs of more than normal perturbation. She and her husband and the long and saturnine-seeming Mr Harvey had finished their last rubber of wagerless dummy.

Mrs Colby got suddenly to her feet. Her chair fell with a soft crash to lie asprawl upon the blue carpeted floor. In a voice which sounded somehow as if she were having difficulty with her breath, Mrs Colby said:

‘George! I—I—don’t like it! What can’ve happened to him? George, it’s a quarter past ten!’

Mr Colby looked at his watch. Mr Colby looked at the clock upon the mantelpiece. Mr Colby consulted Mr Harvey. Mr Colby, after two minutes, came to the conclusion that a quarter past ten was irrevocably the time.

‘Don’t you remember, dear,’ said Mr Colby, ‘that time when he didn’t come back until just before ten. The boxing had gone on rather longer than usual. You remember I wrote a stiff P.C. to that Mr Maclellon about it—’

‘I know. I know,’ said Mrs Colby, stooping down and picking up her chair. ‘I know, but it isn’t a few minutes to ten now, George. It’s a quarter past!’ She suddenly left off fumbling with her chair and as suddenly was gone from the room. The door slammed to behind her.

‘I expect,’ said Mr Harvey, looking at his host, ‘that the lad’s up to some devilment. A fine lad that and, personally, Colby, I’ve no use for a boy that hasn’t a bit of the devil in him. I remember when I was a lad—’

‘Clara,’ said Mr Colby, ‘gets that worked up.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘All the same, Harvey, ol’ man, it’s late for the nipper. Have a drink? I’d go out only I expect that’s where Clara’s gone. She’ll find him all right playing Tig at the end of the street or something.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Harvey, and laughed with due heartiness.

The door opened again. A small rush of air blew cool upon the back of Mr Colby’s neck. Mr Colby turned. He saw Mrs Colby. She wore a coat about her plump and admirable shape and a hat pulled anyhow upon her head. But she did not go out. Instead, she dropped in the chair which just now she had left, and, gripping her hands with tightly interlocked fingers one about the other, sat breathlessly still and said:

‘I don’t feel up to it, George. You go and see.’

George looked at his Clara. ‘Tired, my dear?’ said George. ‘We’ll go instead, eh, Harvey?’

‘A breath of fresh,’ said Mr Harvey facetiously, ‘is just what the doctor ordered.’

There was a hard, black frost. After the warmth of the little parlour, the cold air outside caught at their breath. They both coughed.

‘A snorter of a night!’ said Mr Colby.

‘It is,’ agreed Mr Harvey, ‘that!’

They turned left out of the little red door. They turned up the path to the narrow passage which joins The Keep to Heathcote Rise. Out of the passage Mr Colby turned to his right.

‘The Trumpington Hall,’ said Mr Colby, ‘is just up here. Matter of three or four hundred yards.’

‘Ah!’ said Mr Harvey. ‘Quite.’

They did not get so far as the Trumpington Hall. There are two street lamps in the quarter mile length of Heathcote Rise. The first was behind Mr Colby and Mr Harvey as they left the mouth of The Keep. The second was about two hundred yards from the mouth of The Keep. They were walking upon the raised side path and as they came abreast this lamp, Mr Colby, as seemed his habit when passing street lamps, paused to take out the great silver watch. Mr Harvey, halting too, happened to glance over Mr Colby’s plump shoulder and down into the road.

‘My—God!’ said Mr Harvey.

‘What’s that!’ said his companion sharply. ‘What’s that!’

But Mr Harvey was gone. With an agility which would at any other time have been impossible to him, he had dropped down into the road and was now half-way out into the broad thoroughfare. Mr Colby, despite the cold, bony fingers of fear clutching at his vitals, scrambled after.

Mr Harvey was on his knees in the middle of the road, but he was within the soft, yellow radiance cast by the lamp. He was bending over something.

Mr Colby came trotting. Mr Colby halted by Mr Harvey’s shoulder.

Mr Harvey looked up sharply. ‘Get away!’ he said. ‘Get away!’

But Mr Colby did not get away. He was standing like a little, plump statue staring down at the thing beside which Mr Harvey knelt.

‘Oh!’ said Mr Colby in a whisper which seemed torn from him. And then again: ‘Oh!’

What he looked at—what Mr Harvey was looking at—was Lionel.

And Lionel lay an odd, twisted, sturdy little heap on the black road and where Lionel’s waistcoat should have been was something else. Mr Harvey picked up one of Lionel’s hands. It was cold like the road upon which it was lying.

CHAPTER II

I

THE next day—Saturday—was a windless day of hard frost and bright sunshine. The sort of day, in fact, which had been used to fill the placid heart of Mr Colby with boyish joy. But now Mr Colby’s heart was black.

Mr Colby sat, a huddled and shrunken little figure, at the table in his tiny dining-room. The chair upon the other side of the table was occupied by Miss Ursula Finch, the editor and owner of the Holmdale Clarion. Miss Finch was small and neat and brisk. Miss Finch’s age might have been thirty-three but probably was ten years more than this. Miss Finch was severely smart in a tweedy-well-tailored manner. Miss Finch’s pencil was busy among the rustling pages of her notebook, for Miss Finch was her own star reporter. But the eager, piquant face of Miss Finch was clouded with most unbusinesslike sympathy. And although her questions rattled on and on and her pencil flew, the eyes of Miss Finch were suspiciously bright.

It seemed suddenly to Mr Colby that he could not stand any more. Miss Finch had asked him a question. He did not answer it. He sat staring across the little room at the yellow distempered wall. First, all those policemen asking questions. What time did he leave? What time did you expect him back? Where was he going? What was he doing? Why was he doing it? What time did you start to look for him? Did anyone go with you to look for him? Where did you find him? How did you find him? Do you know anyone who bears enmity against yourself or him? If so, why? If not, why not? How? Who? Where? What? When? And now, this woman—although she was nicer than the policemen—now this woman, asking her questions. The same questions really, only put differently and more, as a man might say, intimate …

Mr Colby thought of the bedroom immediately above this room where he sat; the bedroom where, on the double bed, Mrs Colby lay a huddled and vacantly staring heap …

Mr Colby got to his feet. His chair slid back along the boards with a grating clatter. He said:

‘I’m sorry, miss. I can’t tell you any more. I want—I want—’ Mr Colby shut his mouth suddenly. He sat down again with something of a bump and remained sitting, his folded hands squeezed between his knees. He looked at the floor.

Miss Finch shut her note-book with a decisive snap and put round it its elastic band. She rose from her chair. Automatically Mr Colby, a well-mannered little person, got to his feet. Miss Finch came round the table in an impulsive rush. ‘I ought,’ said Miss Finch, ‘to have something awful done to me for worrying you, Mr Colby, upon such a dreadful day as this must be for you. But I would like you to understand, Mr Colby, that however much of a ghoulish nuisance I may seem, I may really be doing something to help. It may not seem like that to you at the moment. But it really is. You see, Mr Colby, nowadays the Press, by throwing what you might call a public light on things, helps authorities to … to … to find the monsters responsible for—’

‘Oh, please!’ said Mr Colby, holding out his hand as if to protect himself from a blow.

Miss Finch, with an impulsive gesture, seized the hand in both of hers and pressed it. ‘You poor man!’ she said.

Mr Colby withdrew his hand. Mr Colby opened the door for Miss Finch. In the hall Miss Finch halted and collected her stubby umbrella and tucked it martially beneath her left arm. She said:

‘If there is anything I can do for you or Mrs Colby—in a purely private capacity, I mean, Mr Colby—I do hope you will let me know … You wouldn’t like me, I suppose, to run up and sit with Mrs Colby for a little while? It would only be a little, because I’m so busy …’

Mr Colby shook his head dumbly. He opened the street door and shut it, a second later, upon the well-tailored back of Miss Finch. He wandered back to his dining-room and sat down once more at his dining-table and sighed and swallowed very hard and put his head in his hands.

II

‘Do they,’ asked Sir Montague Flushing of his manservant, ‘insist upon seeing me personally?’

Spender bowed gravely. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘And you have put them in …?’ said Sir Montague.

‘In the library, sir.’

Sir Montague blew out his cheeks and frowned. Sir Montague paced up and down the carpet. He said at last, half to himself:

‘These newspaper men are a public nuisance!’

‘Should I, sir,’ suggested Spender, ‘tell them that you are too busy to see them?’

‘No,’ said Sir Montague. ‘No. No. No. I suppose I must see ’em. What papers did you say they came from?’

‘One of the—er—gentlemen, sir,’ said Spender, ‘stated that he represented The Evening Mercury. The other was from The Wire.

‘I see. I see,’ said Sir Montague.

(Extract from The Evening Mercury, dated Saturday,

24th November.)

THE HOLMDALE MURDER

etc., etc.

(From our Special Correspondent.)

Holmdale, Saturday

Stranger and stranger grows the mystery of the murdered schoolboy, whose body was found at ten o’clock last night in the middle of a peaceful roadway in Holmdale Garden City. The problem that faces the police is no small one. The boy—Lionel Frederick Colby, of 4 The Keep, Holmdale—had left home at about 7.30 p.m. to visit the Boys’ Club, whose meetings are held in the Trumpington Hall. He had been in good spirits when he left home and had arrived at twenty-five minutes to eight at the Boys’ Club. Here he had spent the evening in the usual way, and had notably distinguished himself in the boxing competition which was held that night. He left the Hall with a number of companions when the Club meeting closed at 9.20. Half-way back towards his home—The Keep, which is off Heathcote Rise, is not more than five or six minutes’ walk from the Hall—Lionel remembered, according to two of his friends who have been interviewed by the Police, that he had left his gymnasium shoes and sweater behind. His companions had tried to dissuade him from going back, telling him that he would not find the place open. Lionel, who was a boy of great determination, stated that he had promised his mother not to forget the sweater as she wanted to wash it the next day. One of the boys, Charles Coburn (13) of 28 Lochers Avenue, Holmdale, stated to the police that he remembered Lionel saying that he would be able to climb in at a window. He left Coburn and the other boys in the middle of Heathcote Rise at approximately 9.25. At about a quarter past ten, Mr Colby, the boy’s father, together with a guest (Mr Harvey) went out to see whether they could find Lionel. They walked down Heathcote Rise towards Trumpington Hall, but half-way on this journey—beside a street lamp—they made the appalling discovery.

Police Theories

As was reported in earlier editions, the wound which caused Lionel Colby’s death had apparently been made by a very sharp implement, probably a long knife. The stomach had been slit open from bottom to top. Death must have been instantaneous. The night was hard and frosty, and it was not possible therefore to find any trace such as footmarks, etc. The police are certain, however, that the murder was done on the spot where the body was found, as all traces of blood, etc., point to this conclusion.