Martin Edwards – Trent’s Own Case (страница 2)

The critics were kind to Trent’s Own Case. Torquemada, the Observer’s influential crime reviewer, was lavish in his praise, as were Milward Kennedy in the Sunday Times and Anthony Berkeley (under the name Francis Iles) in the Daily Telegraph. Later, the often acerbic Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor said in A Catalogue of Crime: ‘The problem is gripping and its solution good solid work’, and reckoned that it did not fall too far short of its legendary predecessor. In time, however, a reaction set in, which perhaps explains why the book has been absent from the shelves for so long. Bentley’s son Nicolas, a distinguished artist and himself an occasional crime writer, regretted that his father had allowed Warner Allen to talk him into producing the sequel. Inevitably, the story could hardly match Trent’s Last Case for originality or impact—very few books could. However, republication in the Detective Story Club now gives twenty-first century readers a welcome chance to judge this novel on its own merits.

MARTIN EDWARDS

January 2017

CHAPTER I

SOUTHWARD BOUND

‘I OUGHT to be going,’ Philip Trent said. ‘I’ve got an appointment, as I told you, and I mustn’t be late. You go on dining, Slick—have some of the crevettes Waldorf; they will bring the roses into your cheeks. If I come round with the car tomorrow about ten, will you be more or less ready?’

‘Less, I expect,’ Slick Patmore grumbled. ‘That is, if this ghastly weather doesn’t change in the night. A two-hours’ run through drizzle and chill is not my idea of a morning’s pleasure.’

‘It’s bound to change in the night,’ Trent assured him. ‘The only question is how many times it will change. That’s the exciting thing about a variable climate like ours; and it is at its best in April, as everybody knows. Oh to be in England, now that April’s there, and whoever wakes in England is entirely unaware whether it is going to rain cats and dogs or be gay with sunshine, birds and blossoms. Besides, it isn’t a question of pleasure for you and me tomorrow. It is duty, Slick, duty whose stern behest impels us to the deed of going to see Julian Pickett married.’

‘And drink his health in what old Blinky Fisher imagines to be champagne,’ Patmore added, moodily helping himself to another glass of La Tour–Figeac.

‘Why shouldn’t he have an imagination, just because he is a Canon of Glasminster?’ Trent asked. ‘He’ll need it, I should say, when he gives away his niece to Julian, and has to pretend that he has some sort of responsibility for a girl of the present time. Ha! I can see it now. “Who giveth this woman?” Come on, Blinky; to what green altar, O mysterious priest, lead’st thou that heifer? Probably he will have mislaid his spectacles, and will try to give Julian away.’

‘Didn’t you say you had an appointment?’ Patmore hinted.

Trent, descending the staircase of the Cactus Club, stood in the doorway and lighted a cigarette as he nerved himself to the task of going to see his favourite aunt off on the boat-train to Newhaven. It is a part of our island heritage, he mused, that at such times as we are on the point of leaving the country the weather is usually pretty beastly. As God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, so the Briton about to uproot himself from the native soil is upheld and solaced by the thought that the climate he is going to cannot possibly be so objectionable. An erroneous thought, perhaps; but what thoughts (he asked himself) are not so? This particular evening, at least, was quite noxious enough to warrant the rosiest anticipations of what it was going to be like anywhere across the Channel. Fortunate indeed was Aunt Judith!

As he looked out across Piccadilly, the air was full of a yellowish drizzle that had not character enough to be a fog. Behind the Green Park railings the trees showed vague drab outlines suggesting the scenery of a hell where the ache of dull depression reigned rather than any pain. Everywhere was that thin and scanty slime which modern cities dignify by the noble name of mud.

Trent glanced at the clock in the porter’s office. He had told Patmore the truth, and nothing but the truth; not the whole truth, which, after all, nobody ever tells, if only because there is not time. He had an appointment, and he must not be late, since the 8:20 from Victoria waited for no man; but the fact that he intended to be there a quarter of an hour beforehand, and the reasons for that decision, would not have interested his friend. Although Trent had, like most of us, a strong distaste for prolonged farewells, he knew that Aunt Judith expected the decent observance of any social rite; and fifteen minutes appeared to him to hit the happy mean between the over-assiduous and the perfunctory. During the brief drive to the station he might tax his brain—fond hope!—for some happy and original form of good-by.

As he buttoned his overcoat, the slamming of the door of a motor-car came from without. The swing-door of the entrance was pushed half open, and a tall man, roaring with laughter, paused with his foot on the threshold, and spoke over his shoulder. ‘Gute Nacht, du alte gute Kerl,’ he called, ‘und herzlichen Dank.’

‘Ach Quatsch!’ a harsh voice barked in reply as the car rolled away. ‘Wiederseh’n!’

The new comer pushed through the doors and moved with long strides across the hall. Trent knew the man well enough; so well as to want no conversation with him. A completely unashamed and unscrupulous egotist is not as a rule the best of company, even if one has not, as Trent had, a personal reason for objecting to his existence. There was, too, always the strong possibility that Eugene Wetherill would not try to be the best of company. The habits of that brilliant man of letters included a tendency to be gratuitously offensive, and Trent had had more than one unpleasant encounter with him before.

Turning his head as he reached the stairway, Wetherill caught sight of Trent and raised a hand in recognition. ‘You’re looking damnably serious,’ he observed with a wolfish grin. ‘It isn’t the sight of me, I hope, that has banished the winning smile. Forget your trouble, dear friend. All may yet be well. Forget our little disagreements in the past. Drown your sorrow with me at the bar—it’s astonishing what a lot can be drowned in one small absinthe cocktail.’

‘Thanks, but I’ve got to go,’ Trent said. He added, ‘You don’t look as if you had anything much to drown. If I look serious, you look quite pleased.’

‘So I am.’ Wetherill laughed as he removed his broad-brimmed black hat and white scarf so that it could be seen he was in evening dress beneath his overcoat. ‘Much pleased. Nothing to drown, as you remark with that infallible discernment of yours; so I shall have that drink purely as a matter of principle—not with any sordid utilitarian purpose. Pleased! I should think I am pleased. I did a good stroke of business yesterday, dear friend, and I haven’t got over it yet.’ He paused a moment, as if recollecting himself; then he went on: ‘Whenever that happens, I have an unreasonable impulse to forgive the world for being what it is, and mankind for being what they are.’

‘Including Eugene Wetherill, I hope,’ Trent suggested sympathetically. ‘You ought not to be too hard on yourself, you know—it’s a fatal tendency. Fight it. Don’t let it master you. I’ve got to tear myself away now, but remember my words.’ He hurried through the doorway and down the greasy pavement in the direction of Piccadilly.

Wetherill, he thought, was certainly in a state of high satisfaction about something. The expression of contempt which he usually wore was probably, like all the rest of his external appearance, a carefully studied effect; but this evening it had yielded place to a look of genuine pleasure, and Trent wondered what might be the cause of it. Anything that pleased Wetherill would be quite likely to have a very different effect upon more normal minds; and Trent happened to know—as a good many people, unfortunately, knew—of one stroke of business done by Wetherill with which few men would have cared to soil their hands. But that had been months ago; this was evidently something recent, and it was curious that Wetherill had plainly hesitated to say what it was. He was anything but secretive as a rule about his own affairs, even the most discreditable; he liked posing as a paragon of immorality. It was difficult to reckon with a man who boasted of having destroyed his own self-respect.

A massive policeman loomed up at the corner of Charles Street.

‘Not a nice night, Officer,’ Trent remarked.

‘That it isn’t, sir,’ rumbled the constable in a tone suggesting that the grimy mist had found its way beneath his heavy water-proofs and permeated all his being. ‘There’s some that seem to enjoy it, though. See those runners coming up the other side of the way? Gawd! Sooner them than me. Funny amusement, isn’t it, sir, on a night like this?’

‘Splendid for them, really,’ Trent said. ‘When they’ve had a rub down and a change they’ll be as happy as so many kings of the Persians. It is youth, Officer—youth footing swift to the dawn, or to the Polytechnic, or somewhere delightful. We ought to envy them.’