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THE HAMPSTEAD MURDER
Christopher Bush

It can be an absorbing undertaking, when the means are available, to trace to their original sources events which have proved momentous and to discover how trivial were the small beginnings that set them in motion. Even the hydrogen bomb can be traced directly back to a murder in Sarajevo. All our lives are shot through with the most incredible of coincidences. You happen to change the direction of a walk and you meet someone who changes the direction of your life.

The Hampstead Murder was a case in point. A man in Scotland wrote a letter to The Times and, by chance, The Times found it interesting enough to print. Because of that letter, which had nothing whatever to do with murder, a woman was strangled in a London suburb. You may not recall that murder. It created no excitement and never got into the headlines. The woman was found with a noose around her neck, and the killing could have been accomplished in a matter of seconds. As murders go, it was exceptionally swift and abrupt.

Considering its ownership there was nothing unusual about the room where she was found. It smelled faintly of pot-pourri, and its charming furniture included some delightful period pieces. Its china and pictures had quality, its carpet was Chinese and its chairs were Chesterfield-soft and seductive.

Then there was the woman, in a charming afternoon frock, with a face like a surprised Madonna and hair like an aureola. She was wearing about a thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery, which would unquestionably have proved tempting, in short, to a burglar. There was no blood, no signs of a struggle. No vulgarity, but everything quiet and restrained, except for that deadly circle around her neck. Even the murderer was only a part of that general background—a quiet man, writing peacefully at a Queen Anne bureau.

Later, of course, there was to be the comparative vulgarity of a trial, even if it ended in a matter of minutes with the knowledge that the murderer was hopelessly insane. And the reason of it all—let me repeat—was a letter that was written to The Times.

To get to that letter we must leave the charm of that drawing-room in Hampstead and come nearer town to Porter Street, Mornington Crescent. In Victorian times the Crescent had dignity and aloofness. Porter Street still retained something of that dignity even if its Georgian houses had become offices and flats. It was in one of these flats that Lutley Prentisse was working on a certain June morning.

It would be more true to say that he should have been working. In front of his swivel chair were table and typewriter but he sat there with the tips of his fingers together and his brow wrinkled in thought. You would have needed no particular shrewdness to have guessed that he was a writer.

But he was a writer with a difference. His name was far from well-known. He had three novels to his credit, two having as their theme extramarital intrigue and the other concerned with one of those coteries to be found on the French Riviera. The last only had sold quite well—a matter of gratification to its author purely from pride of workmanship. Money is always useful, but his private income was about two thousand a year after taxes, and the handsome royalties he received from his publisher made no great difference.

The fact of the matter was that he had drifted into writing almost without knowing it, and primarily to escape from boredom. The first two years after his marriage had been a routine of which he had tired—Switzerland in mid-winter, the Riviera in Spring, golf in England in the summer and weekends at various house parties, with a week or two at Deauville or Le Touquet in early autumn. After that town—the club, theatres and the multitudinous rush and jigsaw fitting-in from morning till night.

All that was the life that suited Dorothy Prentisse so well. At golf Lutley was a shaky sixteen. She could give a low handicap man a good game and from the men’s tees at that. Her tennis was almost first-class. She played a really good hand at bridge—a bit aggressive, perhaps, but rarely a loser unless cards and partners were impossible. Lutley was a cautious bidder if ever there was one. He was good, however, for what he said, and never less.

But he took things less seriously. In golf the game counted, not the figures—or at least that was how things had been before his marriage. Maybe it was the almost venomous earnestness with which Dorothy did things that first began to make them pall.

In some ways you might have thought them an ill-sorted couple. He was short and sturdy, with quiet brown eyes, and a kind of intellectual shyness. She was tall for a woman, handsome in a glittering way and with qualities that would have made for attractiveness only to a man quite different from Prentisse—knowledge of the jargons and sporting chatter, and with it that shrewd judgment that knows when to be only a highly ornamental background.

At Cambridge Lutley had read history and, until his marriage, had contributed occasionally to various reviews. That particular writing had been a part of his leisure, but later, when the hectic life of his first married years had begun to seem aimless and even boring, he had thought with regret of the pleasure his earlier labours had given him. Out of it had come his attempt at a first novel, and its publication.

All this was just before the last war when money was money and life less demanding. As for his marriage, he had met Dorothy at the house of George Foster, an old Cambridge friend, and it so happened that she had been at school with George’s wife, Miriam. Dorothy’s father had just died—he had been vicar of Purfield Warren—and she had come into a reasonable sum of money.

Six months after that first meeting they were married. He was then thirty-one and she twenty-eight, though she claimed to be younger. It was a love match on his side if not on hers. Her friends agreed that he had married a most attractive woman, her enemies that she had done exceptionally well for herself. But it would have been hard to judge objectively the success or otherwise of that marriage. Lutley, one could see through: the woman he had wed was far more inscrutable. In public a softly-murmured ‘Darling!’ and a playful tap are no particular signs, especially when the other hand holds a liqueur glass drained for the eighth time.

When Prentisse at first, and almost surreptitiously, returned to his writing, his wife seemed neither to mind nor to be interested. After all, she had plenty of outside interests. On her first discovery of his new activity it had been: ‘Darling, how frightfully clever of you!’ and then, at intervals, ‘Oh, you poor dear, I hate to see you working so hard! Why don’t you stop now and rest?’ Then, on the publication of his first novel, ‘Darling, it’s too frightfully thrilling for anything!’

Thereafter it might have been said by the unkind that her tolerance or possible encouragement of his efforts was not unconnected with material considerations. But Prentisse apparently doted on her and generously provided that his earnings should be hers in the form of special presents.

But the Spring of 1947 had seen a slight deterioration in the warmth and closeness of their relationship. He was engaged on a new book which he definitely knew was good, and he refused to take his work to the Riviera. Dorothy had however kept to the routine and had gone to Menton with a small circle of friends that included Peter Claire and Miriam Foster.

Claire, a handsome, country club type man of about thirty-five, was a very old friend. Prentisse, in his own undemonstrative way, was very fond of him. The Prentisses saw a lot of him when he was in town and he often dined at the Hampstead house.

It was because he did not want to keep that house open during his wife’s absence that Prentisse had taken that Porter Street flat. Dorothy was away till the very end of May and then something happened. Her only sister had been taken seriously ill and she had gone down to Carnford to be with her.

That was not so unsettling for Prentisse as it might have been, for the book was not quite finished. A few days would see it with the publisher and he stayed on at the flat. In the morning he usually put in his best work, but that particular morning he was annoyed, and worried over what seemed a very trivial thing.

Before him was the morning’s edition of The Times and it was at a certain letter that he was scowling. A policeman had written rather indignantly on the treatment of his profession by writers of detective novels. The police, he affirmed, were treated like buffoons and authors rarely troubled to make themselves familiar with the real workings of either Scotland Yard or the C.I.D. departments of provincial forces.

But it was not the police and their methods that were worrying Lutley Prentisse, but the whole principle which the letter called in question. He himself had always been careful to use in his books such local colour as had been familiar and things with which he had had at least a working acquaintance, but in that novel, now almost finished, he had brought in something with which he was not familiar at all—a private detective agency.

The chapter that dealt with it had been written and he had taken a great deal for granted, not caring much whether or not an absolute verisimilitude had been achieved. A detective agency, for instance, would have an office. Well, such offices were surely pretty much alike, and in his novel its appearance had been guessed at. And so with the head of the firm, and the conversation, and all the things that go to make what one calls local colour.

Some people would have regarded the whole thing as utterly unimportant. There could be little connection between that letter and the chapter in question. They would have argued that a private detective was most unlikely to read that particular chapter and that the man in the street, provided the book as a whole kept him reading into the small hours, would not care the proverbial tuppence about the niceties of local colour.

But such a view was contrary to Prentisse’s meticulous mind. He was also a man of impulses and curious obstinacies. That was why he suddenly made up his mind that the right thing to do would be to visit a detective agency and check up that chapter in the light of such new impressions as he might form. But the resolve brought also an annoyance.

There was the chance that his guesses in that chapter had been reasonably correct and that the chapter would not have to be re-written. But whether that were so or not, time would be wasted and just when he was fired with the urge to finish the book. To ignore the letter seemed sheer carelessness. That letter from the policeman might start a spate of inquiries into local colour. Heaven knew what people and professions would be writing to the Press about the gross errors they had unearthed. He could almost see one such letter—

Dear Sir,

Referring to the matter of local colour, I was very amused to find in a novel by Lutley Prentisse entitled ‘Tingling Symbols’ a statement that …

In any case that morning he was unable to settle down to work and just before noon he went along to his club. He ran into George Foster and they lunched together.

‘Was that Peter Claire I saw getting into a taxi just as I came in?’ Prentisse happened to ask.

‘That’s right,’ George said. ‘I was talking to him just before. He’s going down to Cambridge tomorrow to play for the Pilgrims against the Wanderers. A two-day match. Did you want to see him?’

‘Well, in a way—yes. I wanted him to give me an introduction to his brother. He’s a Chief Constable, as you probably know, and I hoped he might give me some local colour and save some rather tiresome inquiries.’

George Foster was probably the only man to whom he would have told that morning’s worries. George didn’t seem at all unhappy about it.

‘I don’t think a Chief Constable would help very much,’ he said. ‘Why not go to the fountainhead? I know a really good firm of private detectives who did an excellent job for a friend of mine. You go along and see them. Just make up some yarn or other. Just a simple job that won’t cost very much. That ought to give you the whole bag of tricks.’

Foster happened to remember the name of the firm and the approximate address, and that Friday afternoon Prentisse made a bold decision and went to Took Street. The taxi driver happened to know the number and on a door on the first floor Prentisse found what he wanted.

PERRING AND HOLT

PRIVATE INQUIRY AGENTS

He knocked, and the door was opened with instant and agreeable promptitude by a receptionist.

‘Can I see one of the principals, please?’ he asked.

‘Take a seat, sir, please,’ the young lady replied. ‘I think Mr Holt is free. Have you a card?’

A couple of minutes and he was in Holt’s room. It was a smallish office crammed with filing cabinets and reference books. There was the usual flat-topped desk and swivel chair. Holt, a dapper-looking youngish man, rose and held out a hand.

‘How d’you do, Mr Prentisse. Take a seat, will you? Cigarette? … And what precisely may we do for you?’

‘Well, er—’

Holt smiled reassuringly. ‘Secrets are safe with us, sir. We’re used to handling affairs of the utmost delicacy, and in the strictest of confidence. You can rely on us implicitly.’

Prentisse had to think quickly. The thoughts he had had were now in thin air. It would be crude to admit that he was in that room solely for the purpose of picking brains. When he did speak it was only to make time.

‘It’s a fairly trivial matter,’ he said.

‘It doesn’t matter to us, sir,’ Holt assured him. ‘Whatever the work, we can undertake it. And in strict confidence.’

His manner was suave and impressive. Prentisse thought of the use he had made in his novel of an imaginary detective agency and decided on something along the same lines.

‘Well’—there was still a certain diffidence in his manner—‘I take it you’re prepared to keep people under observation? Not necessarily to do with divorce, of course.’

‘Most certainly.’ He drew a pad towards him, and the pen was poised. ‘Name, sir?’ he inquired.

‘Lutley Prentisse.’

Holt smiled. ‘Not your name, sir,’ he said. ‘The name of the person it will be our task to watch.’

Prentisse smiled too, but not at that mistake he had made. An idea had come to him, and wrapped up in it were all the elements of the ludicrous.

‘Ah, yes, of course. The name is Peter Claire.’

‘Address?’

‘Three, Oudenarde Mansions, Kensington.’

‘And what exactly do you want, sir—and when?’

‘Just a report in confidence, by Monday, of what he does from now until then. You can manage that?’

‘Most decidedly. Where do you wish the report delivered?’

‘Five B, Porter Street, Mornington Crescent. About noon, if you can manage it.’

That was virtually all. As he walked down the stairs Prentisse was both gratified and mildly amused. He had been in the office of a detective agency and what he had seen and heard would involve only minor alterations in the carefully written chapter.

As to the amusement, it would certainly be uproariously funny if Peter, during his stay in Cambridge, discovered that a private detective was on his heels. And then suddenly he halted, and frowned. Annoying, too. The least thing he could do was to get hold of Peter and warn him. A knowledge of what was going to happen would make the joke the property of Peter as well as of himself.

From his flat he rang Oudenarde Mansions. Claire’s man, Daniels, answered the telephone. Mr Prentisse was just a few minutes too late. Mr Claire had just left by taxi. Yes, Daniels was certain he had gone to Cambridge. He’d definitely taken his golf bag and a weekend suitcase.

‘You know the hotel he’ll be staying at?’ Prentisse asked.

‘I don’t, sir,’ Daniels said. ‘All I know is that he’ll be back early on Monday.’

So that was that—though Prentisse was still glad he’d hit on Claire as a stalking-horse for Holt’s detective. A less intimate friend of the family would be highly indignant when he learned what had been going on. And Claire would learn, though now he must wait until Monday. So Prentisse sat down at the typewriter and wrote for Claire’s exclusive enlightenment an account of the whole thing.

… And that’s how it happened. It will be extremely amusing if you chance to spot the sleuth. In any case I’ll send you the report, innocuous though it will be. Until Monday then.

Yours as ever,

Lutley.

P.S. Why not have dinner with us on Monday? I’m expecting Dorothy back from Carnford. Her sister’s much better.

He went out at once and mailed the letter and as he walked back to the apartment he wondered if Peter’s reactions would be altogether what he himself had expected. Not that Peter hadn’t a sense of humour in a rather hearty way.

That evening he worked hard at the detective agency chapter and rewrote where the afternoon’s call on Holt seemed to require it. By Saturday he had the chapter well in hand and that afternoon he treated himself to a matinee.

In the evening he dined at his club and then went back to his apartment and outlined the final chapter of his novel. On the Sunday morning he went to the Hampstead house. Dorothy had everything arranged. Lunt, butler and general man, was there, as were the cook and the maid. It was from the house that he rang Carnford Hall.

Phipps, the butler, answered. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but Mrs Prentisse isn’t back yet from church. She should be in at any moment. Yes, sir, the mistress is practically herself again. The doctor’s very pleased. Just a moment, sir. I think I hear Mrs Prentisse now.’

A minute later Dorothy Prentisse was on the line.

‘That you, darling? How sweet of you to ring! Yes, I’ll be back early in the morning. I’m glad you found everything as it should be. But you shouldn’t have asked Peter to dinner. Well, I’d been looking forward to us having our evening together alone … A special reason? Well, we might find some special excuse and put him off. He won’t mind … Till tomorrow then, darling. ’Bye.’

Bright and early on Monday Holt himself arrived at the Porter Street apartment. He was like a man who had been given a job to do, and knew that he had done it well. From an unsealed envelope he produced several closely typed sheets.

Prentisse gave them a glance, tried to look impressed, and asked how much. Holt’s account was for just over eighteen pounds and Prentisse wrote him a cheque.

It was a lot of money, Prentisse thought ruefully, for the view of an office and a few minutes with Holt. It rather looked, in fact, as if Peter would have the laugh. Which reminded him. Peter would be at Oudenarde Mansions and he’d better be rung up at once. And then Prentisse couldn’t help wondering just how that sleuth of Holt’s had got to work and he took the typed sheets from the envelope and began casually to read.

The party was picked up almost on arrival and followed to Liverpool Street Station where he took the train for Wenton Junction. He was met by a small black sedan driven by a lady and the car was followed to Justin Friars, six miles away, where it entered the grounds of a smallish country house known as Friars House. Phillipson followed me and he and I shared the supervision from then on.

Prentisse stopped reading. He had wondered why Peter had not gone to Cambridge and he smiled to himself as he knew why. After all, Friars House was Peter’s, and Justin Friars was only some twenty miles from Cambridge. He knew it well enough. He had been there once or twice when he and Dorothy had been staying at Carnford Hall. It wasn’t more than a ten-minute run in a car. As for the woman, she was probably Peter’s married sister. Or wasn’t she still in India? Maybe she and her husband were home on leave. Curiosity made him read on.

There seemed to be no servants whatever in the house but observation was difficult. The couple did not appear until about eight-thirty that evening when they walked round the lawns and the borders and back through the long walk to the house. The woman was tallish, fair and about thirty by all appearances. Once or twice the couple were seen to embrace during their tour of the garden.

Prentisse was horrified. The woman was definitely not Peter’s sister and who she might be he had no idea. What he did know was that in beginning a joke he had committed an enormity. He had intruded unwarrantably into another man’s private life and the fact that it had been done under a lamentable misapprehension would not make it appear the less reprehensible. His face was flushed as he realised what he must at once do.