Peter Lovesey - A Case of Spirits

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‘He claimed that somebody had come into the study while he was in trance. He was most indignant about it, and only calmed down when we suggested it must have been a spirit. All the people in the house except my wife were present in the library, you see.’

‘That was what you supposed at the time, sir.’

‘Good God, I’d forgotten! It could have been Quayle who interrupted him-or even you!’

‘Not me, sir, I assure you, but Professor Quayle is a possibility. Quite an engaging one. I followed him into the house through the back door. You ought to have a word with your servants about that, sir. We spend a lot of time in the Force reminding people about doors they haven’t locked. Anyway, I think the professor must have heard me in pursuit, because he was nowhere to be seen by the time I got up here from the basement. It’s my guess now that he let himself in through the study door to give me the slip. He probably couldn’t see a thing when he first came in.’

‘Of course!’ said Nye excitedly. ‘The silly blighter cracked his foot against the transformer and shot 400 volts into Brand, poor beggar.’

‘Impossible!’ said Probert with a glare. ‘Brand was perfectly all right when we pulled aside the curtain. The accident happened later, between the time when we withdrew and closed the curtain for the second time and when the Sergeant came in through the library door. At that time Quayle was definitely not in the study.’

‘He’d given me the slip, sir,’ said Cribb. ‘The next I heard from him was the creaking of a floorboard upstairs after we discovered what had happened in here. He couldn’t get out through the basement because Captain Nye was down there switching off the current, so he went upstairs instead.’

‘As we discovered,’ said Probert.

‘As I did,’ his wife corrected him.

‘What nobody has made clear,’ said Alice, ‘is why Professor Quayle came into the house at all. If it wasn’t to assist Mr Brand, as now seems clear, what was the purpose of his presence here?’

Cribb shot an inquiring glance at his superior. ‘I was rather hoping to extract that information from the professor himself, miss. If Inspector Jowett was proposing to collect statements from you all, I wondered if I might be spared to put some questions across the kitchen table downstairs. Only, of course, if you were planning things that way, sir.’

Jowett nodded, the first positive thing he had achieved in ten minutes. ‘That was precisely what I was coming to, Sergeant.’

‘Thank you, sir. It looks like being a long night, so while I’m down there, I’ll put the kettle on, if I may. I’ll stand it on the range beside the professor and see which one sings first.’

As it turned out, the interview could not take place in the kitchen. Hitchman, the Proberts’ deaf maidservant, had returned from her evening off and was threatening the professor with a meat-hook when Cribb got down there. The kitchen was her domain and she was clearly quite intractable, so he side-stepped her, unlocked the professor, marched him upstairs and obtained the key to the picture-gallery from Probert.

‘Sit down, sir,’ he said, poking the professor in the chest with sufficient firmness to park him in the flirtation settee. ‘I shan’t join you. Nothing personal intended, but I like to see a man’s eyes when I ask him questions. In case you wondered, we ain’t here to look at the ladies on the wall, and I don’t propose to compete with ’em.’ He pulled the draw-string at the side of one of Dr Probert’s naked goddesses, who was partially in view, then smartly turned about, pointed a finger at Quayle and asked ‘What have you done with the Etty?’

‘The what?’ asked Quayle, in a voice so thin nobody would have believed it had harangued an audience from the platform of the Store Street Hall.

Sleeping Nymph and Satyrs. Occupied a place on the wall behind you until last Friday week. Dr Probert wants it back. I hope it ain’t mutilated.’

‘I don’t know anything about this, Constable.’

‘Sergeant, if you please. Cribb’s the name. Don’t waste my time. I want some sleep tonight. Etty was the artist, you see.’

‘I don’t think I have heard of him.’

‘That’s evident,’ said Cribb, ‘or you wouldn’t have walked out with the canvas you did. There’s better things on these walls than Ettys, I can tell you. You and I might say there isn’t much to choose between buxom wenches in the buff, but we’d be wrong. There’s some here worth ten of your Ettys. French ones. No man of culture would have helped himself to an English nymph when there was madamoiselles to be had. And why take only one, when you could have had an armful? You gave so much away, you see. You’re no picture-thief. You can’t even cut a canvas neatly off its frame. You’re a raw beginner, Professor, no doubt of it.’

Quayle said nothing, but his tongue raced nervously round his lips, moistening them.

‘It was the same at Miss Crush’s,’ Cribb went on. ‘You took a piece of common Royal Worcester when you could have had a priceless Minton. It was plain to me that you knew as much about china as you did about nudes, or housebreaking. You made a shocking mess of Dr Probert’s pantry, climbing in through all the biscuits and pearl barley, didn’t you? So it didn’t take a Scotland Yard man to work out that the thief wasn’t a professional cracksman.

‘How did I come to suspect you? Well, at first I did what you intended-I suspected Peter Brand instead. It was obvious the thief was primed. He knew the only favourable times to rob the houses: when the owners were out visiting. Consider the sequence of events. On October 15th there’s a seance at Miss Crush’s at which Brand and Dr Probert are guests. The doctor very civilly invites Miss Crush back to his house for a return seance on October 31st. She attends, and so does Brand. During the evening Dr Probert makes reference to a lecture he is going to give, which his wife and daughter will attend. The seance comes to an end, Brand leaves, and an hour later so does Miss Crush. When she gets home she discovers the theft of her vase. On November 6th, the night of the lecture, the Proberts’ house is broken into, and a picture stolen. Who can I suspect but Brand, the only person other than the doctor and Miss Crush who was present at both seances and knew when to execute the burglaries?’

‘It seems a reasonable inference to make,’ said Quayle, guardedly. ‘He is of humble extraction, as you must have gathered from his occasional lapses of speech. His father was a common cabman, I believe. A person of that class admitted suddenly to the residences of the well-to-do is subject to certain temptations, is he not?’

‘Ah,’ said Cribb, putting up a forefinger. ‘That’s what you wanted me to think, and so I did for a short time. Until I clapped my eyes on you, Professor.’

‘Where was this?’

‘Don’t look so alarmed. It wasn’t in Probert’s garden. It was legitimate enough at the time-your lantern lecture at the Store Street Hall.’

‘You were there?’

‘My assistant is Constable Thackeray, the man with the handcuffs.’

‘I might have guessed.’

‘You might, sir. You looked a trifle worried when Peter Brand removed the handcuffs from the envelope, as I recall, but so did Brand, of course. I must be fair. Before that, though, I was already starting to turn things over in my mind. It seemed to me that Peter Brand was a young man with ambition. He was earning something of a reputation in the metropolis. What was it? Spirit-writing in Camberwell and the levitation of a suite of furniture in Hampstead? At any rate, there can’t be many mediums of twenty capable of sharing the billing with you at the Store Street Hall.’

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