The Hanging Captain Read online

  Henry Wade and The Murder Room

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  The Hanging Captain

  Henry Wade

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  The Murder Room Introduction

  Title page

  I. THE FORTUNATE DRAGOON

  II. AFTER DINNER

  III. OFFICIALS

  IV. THE POLICE AT WORK

  V. “I AM RESPONSIBLE”

  VI. FATHER SPEYD

  VII. “LEAVE IT ALONE!”

  VIII. INQUEST

  IX. ADJOURNMENT

  X. GRACE NAWTEN

  XI. SIR CARLE VENNING

  XII. FOOTSTEPS

  XIII. BIRMINGHAM

  XIV. AN UNPROFITABLE INHERITANCE

  XV. TIME OF DEATH

  XVI. TRY AGAIN

  XVII. “TIME TO THINK”

  XVIII. MR. GOTTS

  XIX. UTILITY DANCERS

  XX. TIME TEST

  XXI. CONFESSION

  XXII. ANTI-CLIMAX

  XXIII. A GAME OF LAWN TENNIS

  XXIV. INSPECTOR LOTT’S WEEK-END

  XXV. THE CIGARETTE CASE

  XXVI. DOGGED DOES IT

  XXVII. THE COUNTY WINS

  Endnote

  Outro

  By Henry Wade

  About the author

  Copyright page

  I. THE FORTUNATE DRAGOON

  “A HANDSOME couple, don’t you think?”

  Sir James Hamsted appeared to give the matter careful consideration before replying solemnly:

  “They are, indeed. Mrs. Sterron, if I may be allowed to say so, possesses a genuine beauty which one sees too seldom in these days. Your brother is indeed a fortunate man.”

  Gerald Sterron smiled. His companion was a casual visitor, otherwise he might have hesitated before venturing upon that particular assertion.

  The two men were standing upon a sloping lawn which ran down to the grass tennis-court on which a man and woman, unconscious of the admiration they had evoked, were engaged in a hard-fought game, in which skill was nicely tempered with recklessness. Base-line rallies of immaculate length generally ended in one or other of the players trying to hit the cover off the ball and sending it crashing into the net-cord or soaring over the stop-nets at the end into the shrubbery beyond. The latter was generally the fate of Griselda Sterron’s attempted “winners,” whilst her opponent’s tactful efforts to prolong the set generally found a more controlled ending in the center.

  “Oh, heavens, there goes another! Gerald, would you be a dear?”

  Griselda’s laugh was infectious and, though her brother-in-law might have been regarded as immune from the attraction of her flushed face, there was a smile of genuine pleasure on his own as he pursued the soaring Slazenger into a clump of tangled weigela.

  His companion, Sir James Hamsted, too old and stiff now to take part in either game or pursuit, remained watching the flying figures of the players, as they dashed from side to side of the court or darted up to the net for the final smash. They were certainly an attractive pair to watch: Griselda Sterron, tall, well made, graceful as a professional dancer, her short chestnut hair curling back from a high forehead to cling lovingly round the slender nape of a neck now delicately flushed, brown eyes flashing with joy of the game, red lips slightly parted over even white teeth, arms, bare to the shoulder, dazzlingly lovely against the apple-green of her tennis frock, was a picture fair enough to hold the eye of any man; it was impossible to believe, now, that she was in her fortieth year, though when Sir James had first seen her on the previous evening he had thought her ill and tired. Then the disparity between her age and her husband’s had not been too apparent; now it must have been very noticeable if Herbert Sterron had been present.

  But it was not with her husband that Griselda was playing. Her opponent, hardly less striking in appearance than herself, was a tall, broad-shouldered man of forty-five. Black hair, close-cropped to hide a natural curl, framed a face of striking character. The short, battered nose of the fighter was in itself anything but beautiful, but taken with the square jaw, the straight brows, and the hard, blue eyes, it formed a picture of manly attraction that women had found difficult to resist. And opportunities of resistance had not been infrequent.

  “Quick on his feet for his size, isn’t he?” said Gerald Sterron, returned, somewhat disheveled, from his successful search.

  “Who exactly is he?”

  “Carle Venning; Sir Carle Venning to be up to date; he only succeeded last year.”

  “A neighbor?”

  “He is now. He’s been everybody’s neighbor in his time—a rolling stone, if ever there was one. But he’s rolled to some purpose—left his mark wherever he went.”

  “He sounds a young man of character.”

  Sir James’s prim phrases were in keeping with his appearance.

  “Oh, yes, plenty of character,” returned Sterron. “He’s had every chance to develop it. He was at some public school, but his father, who was a bit of a character himself, took him away early because he thought he was getting stereotyped and sent him round the world—on his own legs, not with a Cook’s courier. He crossed the Atlantic before the mast, I believe, sold papers in Chicago, got smashed up by a bronc in the West, found his way to Australia and dug for gold, made a small fortune before he was twenty-five and was robbed of it in a night on his way down to the coast. Then the War came and he stowed away on some boat to get back to England, got held up at Suez but managed to tack on to Lawrence, quarreled with him and made his way through Persia into Georgia, where the Reds caught him and tried three times to shoot him. He escaped each time and eventually joined Kolchak or Denikin—I forget which—and commanded a crowd of international scalliwags, soldiers of fortune like himself. When Kolchak failed he disappeared but turned up a year later in London. Nobody knows to this day what he did in that year, but he’s led a comparatively quiet life since then, hunting big game in different parts of the world.”

  “It seems curious to find such a man in your quiet part of the English countryside,” said Sir James.

  “Oh, he’s still hunting,” replied Sterron with a short laugh.

  Sir James threw a quick glance at his companion, but remained silent.

  “The joke is,” continued Sterron, “they’ve taken the opportunity of his coming home on his father’s death to make him High Sheriff of the county! A sense of humor that one hardly expects from the county bumpkins.”

  Sir James raised his eyebrows.

  “County bumpkins? The expression is strange to me.”

  Sterron shrugged his shoulders.

  “A combination of county big-wig and count
ry bumpkin, I suppose. Much the same thing, anyhow.”

  “You are not yourself a—county bumpkin?”

  “I? Oh, no, far from it. I’m a merchant—or was till a year or two ago. Shanghai. But I saw what was coming just before the others did and sold out while there was still something to sell—and Americans with dollars to buy it.”

  “But you live in England now? In town, perhaps?”

  “No, small house at Hindhead—next door to L.G., nearly. We aren’t either of us bumpkins—whatever else we may be.”

  Sterron laughed, but his companion appeared unamused.

  “But this appointment of Sir Carle Venning’s,” he persisted. “Why do you describe it as a joke? The office, surely, is a sinecure. Some money and two or three Assizes a year?”

  “Yes, but nominally responsible for the administration of law and order! A man like that!”

  “Is he disorderly? A law-breaker?”

  Sterron opened his mouth to reply, but paused. After a time he went on:

  “I don’t know the details of his career sufficiently well to say, but he is certainly without fear and—I suspect—without scruple. What he wants he will get.”

  Sir James nodded.

  “Yes, his physiognomy suggests that,” he replied.

  The set had ended and the two players, talking eagerly and intimately, strolled across to a bench beside which was a table with a tray of iced drinks. Sir James Hamsted, feeling perhaps that, while a game might be watched, a tête-à-tête conversation might not, turned away up the lawn towards the carriage drive.

  “I have some letters to post,” he said. “I will stroll down to the village.”

  “The box in the hall is cleared in time for the next post,” said Sterron.

  “A walk will be not unwelcome; the afternoon is cooler now.”

  With an imperceptible shrug Gerald Sterron let him go; the man, however distinguished his career, was an old-fashioned bore. He himself lit a cigarette and strolled up the garden towards the house. As he walked, his mind followed a chain of thought which had been started by his late companion’s remark about his brother’s good fortune. It was, perhaps, a natural, if rather rash, assumption. To be the husband of so lovely a creature as Griselda and the owner of the historic Ferris Court were foundations enough upon which to build a fairy-tale of good fortune.

  Twenty years ago there was no one in his world who would not have envied young Herbert Sterron. At the age of thirty-three, the dashing Dragoon captain, rich, popular, already the owner of Ferris, but well launched on a successful military career, had captured beautiful Griselda Hewth in the height of her first, victorious London season, sweeping her away from under the guns of rival dukes and diamond merchants. For three years the young couple—for Herbert Sterron was still young, though fifteen years older than his wife—had followed in the full tide of pre-War social life, ideally happy, popular, with all the world before them. Then suddenly he had resigned his commission, carried Griselda off to Ferris and buried himself and her in the inaccessible country in which his family home lay. There were rumors of illness, of money troubles, even of marital quarrels, but nobody knew anything—only that the pair had disappeared. The one known cause of possible unhappiness was their childlessness (in those days people expected and wished to have children), but this seemed hardly reason enough for voluntary banishment.

  The War came and Herbert Sterron rejoined his regiment, but almost before his old comrades had had time to notice the change in him he had been passed unfit for active service and drafted to a remount depot on the French coast. There or thereabouts he had remained until the Armistice sent him back to Ferris Court—and his young wife. For Griselda had remained with him through whatever tribulations had caused his disappearance from their world, though after the War it soon became apparent to their old friends that she remained with him on principle rather than by inclination. For, though she had not lost her beauty, Griselda was a changed woman; her friendships and affections had taken on an unstable—almost a fickle—quality, while her natural high spirits had developed into something very like hysteria.

  Until two years ago, Gerald Sterron had hardly seen his brother and sister-in-law since their marriage. His business, prosperous until after the War, had kept him closely tied to China and, owing to the prior claims of the senior partner, his share in that conflict had been limited to a nominal defense of the Shanghai Bund. Their letters had been few and guarded, so that it had been a severe shock to him, when he had returned to England two years previously, to find his brother (senior by little more than a year) an old and haggard man, sullen in spirit, violent in temper, and utterly changed from the care-free, high-spirited dragoon whom he had seen marry lovely Griselda Hewth.

  As for Ferris Court, the Tudor home of twelve generations of Sterrons, that second pillar upon which the good fortune of Herbert Sterron had appeared to rest, a glance at the garden was sufficient hint of the shadow which overhung the fine old house. Weed-encumbered beds and paths, untrimmed edges, overgrown shrubberies, told their tale of straitened means—or neglect sprung from a broken spirit.

  His mind, full of memories of his childhood, when these lawns and flowerbeds were weedless and immaculate, when sleek gardeners jostled each other at every turn and glasshouses gave forth their rich crops of fruit in season and out, Gerald walked disconsolately along the reproachful paths. The garden had been laid out in terraces, cleverly divided by borders of flowering shrubs which yet disclosed vistas of view from end to end. Now the shrubs had shot up in search of a sun which the crowding of their neighbors denied them, so that each part of the garden was shut completely from the rest—except at one spot on a higher terrace from which a view of the tennis-court below was still obtainable, and here Gerald Sterron found his brother.

  Herbert Sterron had always been a big man, perfect specimen of a Heavy Dragoon; now, the muscle which had kept him fit and active had changed to fat, his shoulders drooped, the flesh of his face hung in pouches from eyes and jowl. He still wore the pre-War cavalryman’s heavy mustache, but it failed to hide the deep lines which dragged down the corners of his mouth and gave his once handsome face a morose expression. Just now, when his brother joined him, there was a flash of anger in his dark eyes that rather improved than marred his appearance.

  Captain Sterron was standing on the neglected terrace, looking down through a gap in the shrubs at the figures of his wife and her companion, sitting on the small bench in intimate conversation. He hardly noticed his brother’s approach.

  “Shrubberies want thinning out a bit, Herbert,” said Gerald, brushing from his gray flannel trousers some traces of his late explorations.

  Herbert shot his brother a quick look, then turned his eyes back to the court as if a magnet were drawing them.

  “Damned swash-buckler!” he muttered angrily.

  The object and the intensity of his feelings were too obvious to be ignored, even if Gerald had felt inclined to be tactful.

  “Venning? Fine figure of a man, isn’t he?”

  “Fine . . . ! My God, he’ll look fine before I’ve finished with him!”

  Gerald laughed.

  “I should leave him alone if I were you,” he said. “He’d break you up in about thirty seconds.”

  Herbert Sterron turned his gaze back upon his brother, a crafty gleam replacing, and not improving, the previous look of anger.

  “Oh, I shan’t play into his hands,” he said. “I’ll break him without touching him!”

  Gerald carefully filled and lit his pipe, watching the expressions on his brother’s face with detached interest as he did so.

  “Very laudable—perhaps desirable. But how are you going to set about it?”

  Herbert eyed his brother cautiously, as if balancing the pros and cons of confidence; apparently the pros had it, aided, no doubt, by the natural pride of creation.

  “Two ways,” he said; “either would do, but one might suit me better than the other.”

&nbsp
; “Let’s hear it then.” Gerald stifled a yawn—perhaps a tactical yawn.

  “Divorce! He’s trying to become respectable—county gentleman, High Sheriff, perhaps Lord Lieutenant some day. Divorce’ll smash all that!”

  “It certainly would, but . . .”

  Herbert Sterron broke in, not listening to him:

  “He’d have to marry her. He likes her hanging round his neck for an hour or two now, I don’t doubt, but how’ll he like it for a lifetime, eh? How’ll he like that?”

  His brother eyed him distastefully.

  “It’s difficult to believe you were once an officer and . . . a gentleman, Herbert,” he said coolly. “In any case, you’ll never divorce her. You couldn’t live here alone and you wouldn’t get any other woman to marry you, let alone live with you.”

  Herbert flinched as if his brother had struck him. His face whitened, but the color quickly flooded back into it.

  “Wouldn’t I?” he exclaimed. “Wouldn’t I? You wait. I . . .” he broke off, as if he regretted having said so much.

  “And what’s your alternative plan?” asked Gerald. “A bit more effective than the other, I hope.”

  A grin of almost malignant enjoyment spread over Herbert Sterron’s lined face.

  “So effective that I might positively not enjoy it myself,” he said, then turned on his heel and slouched away.

  Gerald Sterron watched his brother’s retreating form till it disappeared round a corner, then turned himself and strolled towards the house, frowning as if in disapproval of the malicious imaginings to which he had been treated. Almost mechanically he mounted the shallow stone steps of each familiar terrace and picked his way through the rose garden towards the side door of the old house. In the dark passage—dark by contrast with the sun outside—he almost collided with a young woman carrying a handful of papers.

  “Oh, Mr. Sterron, I’m so sorry!” exclaimed the girl, “I’m trying to find Captain Sterron to sign some letters before the post goes.”

  “He went towards the west walk; you’ll probably find him in the pigeon house, Miss Nawten.”