Let Him Lie Read online

  Ianthe Jerrold

  Let Him Lie

  A GOLDEN AGE MYSTERY

  Murder begins with the death of a kitten...

  Artist Jeanie Halliday is thrilled to move into a country cottage of her own, next door to the home of her dear childhood friend Agnes. But the countryside idyll isn’t quite what she might have expected: Agnes is suddenly and unaccountably unfriendly for one thing; and then the neighbours are a little peculiar – old Mr Fone, obsessed with burial mounds; the scandalous Hugh Barchard; and an estranged mother taken to brandishing pistols around.

  Soon after the feline victim is found, a shot is heard – the corpse of Robert Molyneux, Agnes’s husband, is discovered with a bullet in his brain. Was Molyneux a meddler in sacred places, a secret lothario… or simply a man who knew too much? And how does the unfortunate cat fit in? It will fall to Jeanie to assist the local police superintendent and fit the pieces of a baffling mystery.

  Let Him Lie is a classic golden age detective story from 1940, written by a queen of the form. It includes a new introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  Introduction

  A full decade after the publication of Ianthe Jerrold’s The Studio Crime (1929) and Dead Man’s Quarry (1930), both of which titles have been republished by Dean Street Press, another Jerrold detective novel, penned by the author under the pseudonym “Geraldine Bridgman,” finally appeared in print. Let Him Lie, Jerrold’s evocatively titled third detective novel, was issued in 1940 by William Heinemann, the prestigious English publisher of both Margery Allingham’s critically applauded mystery novels and John Dickson Carr’s ingenious Sir Henry Merrivale detective series (the latter published under Carr’s “Carter Dickson” pseudonym). During the ten-year interval between the publication of Dead Man’s Quarry and Let Him Lie, Ianthe Jerrold had produced five mainstream novels; and presumably her adoption for her new mystery of the Geraldine Bridgman pen name—a transposition of the middle and last parts of her full name, Ianthe Bridgman Jerrold--was a move on her part to distinguish her more “serious” writing from any future fictional mystery mongering that she might perform.

  John Christmas, Jerrold’s brilliant amateur sleuth in The Studio Crime and Dead Man’s Quarry, is nowhere to be found in Let Him Lie, his place having been taken by a young woman whom the author likely never viewed as a potential series character. The decade of the 1930s increasingly saw a movement in mystery fiction away from the improbable Great Detective figure of romance to more naturalistic depictions of characters impacted by crime, in the style of the realistic mainstream novel. Saddled in their mysteries with the popular Golden Age investigators Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion and Roderick Alleyn, the British Crime Queens Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh never could bring themselves to banish the figure of the male Great Detective from their books (though after the Second World War Margery Allingham came close with Campion and Christie would write fewer books about Poirot). However, by 1940 Ianthe Jerrold obviously felt sufficiently empowered with her new detective novel to send John Christmas, already inactive for ten years, to the sleuthing sidelines. While readers of The Studio Crime and Dead Man’s Quarry may miss Christmas, they nevertheless should derive much enjoyment from Let Him Lie, a superb vintage English country mystery.

  In Let Him Lie the amateur detective figure is not some colorful and eccentric investigative genius but rather a young former art student named Jeanie Halliday, recently settled “in proud and lonely independence” at Yew Tree Cottage, the rustic Gloucestershire residence she purchased from her idolized ex-schoolmistress, Agnes Molyneux (formerly Agnes Drake) and her new husband, Robert Molyneux, owners of Cleedons, “that most comfortable of small Elizabethan manor-houses tacked on to the remains of a medieval castle.” Currently Jeanie Halliday is disturbed not merely by the round of dreary repairs that her new domicile requires (“Who would have thought that making oneself the owner of a small, a very small, cottage could involve one in such fearful, and such dull, expenditure? Jeanie had looked forward to buying a grandfather clock, a carved coffer, a four-post bed; and here she was spending all her substance on things like step-ladders and gum-boots and smoking chimneys and loose roof-tiles.”), but also by her friend Agnes’s disillusioning transformation into a capricious and supremely self-centered lady of the manor. When the seemingly inoffensive Robert Molyneux is discovered shot dead in the orchard on the grounds of Cleedons, Jeanie discovers to her mortification that there is no shortage of suspects in his murder, including Agnes herself. Superstitious local villagers avidly speculate that Robert Molyneux was struck down by unearthly forces on account of his plan to open Grim’s Grave, an ancient local tumulus enshrouded in mists of legend, but the rational Jeanie is a believer in more material explanations. Jeanie eventually will discover the truth behind the crime, putting her in peril of her life. Would she have been wiser to have let truth lie?

  Let Him Lie is an impressive detective novel with a strong sense of character and place penned by an author making effective use of her knowledge of period domestic architecture, archaeology and art. Ianthe Jerrold’s twin sisters Daphne and Phyllis were flower painters who had once resided together in a London art studio, and in the 1930s Ianthe Jerrold and her husband, George Menges, a brother of the celebrated concert violinist Isolde Menges, acquired Cwmmau (pronounced “Cooma”) Farmhouse, a rambling seventeenth-century timbered residence in Herefordshire (adjoining Gloucestershire, the setting of Let Him Lie), spending much of their time there—all of which provided Jerrold with ample material on which to draw when she wrote her accomplished third mystery. Comparing favorably with other naturalistic detective novels produced in the late Thirties and early Forties by Christie, Allingham and Marsh, as well as by such talented newcomers to British mystery fiction as Christianna Brand, Elizabeth Ferrars, Dorothy Bowers and Harriet Rutland, Let Him Lie, happily disinterred after seventy-five years by the enterprising Dean Street Press, should find an appreciative audience today among devotees of classic English mystery.

  Curtis Evans

  Chapter One

  DEATH OF A KITTEN

  “Oh dear, oh dear!” said Jeanie Halliday sadly, picking her way over cart-ruts which one night’s downpour seemed to have turned from iron to butter-icing. “I shall have to buy some gum-boots!”

  She sighed deeply, for she saw no end to the things she would have to buy before she could settle down at Yew Tree Cottage in proud and lonely independence. A pair of steps, two more buckets, an oil-stove, a saw, a screw-driver—the list was endless. Worse, a builder’s bill long as a medieval court-roll unwound itself every night on the darkness before she dropped off to sleep. Who would have thought that making oneself the owner of a small, a very small, cottage could involve one in such fearful, and such dull, expenditure? Jeanie had looked forward to buying a grandfather clock, a carved coffer, a four-post bed; and here she was spending all her substance on things like step-ladders and gum-boots and smoking chimneys and loose roof-tiles.

  She ought to have employed a surveyor, of course. She saw that now. But Agnes Molyneux had seemed in such a hurry to sell the cottage. And Jeanie had loved it so at first sight, and had feared to be discouraged by the prosaic criticisms of a surveyor. Her old lawyer’s remarks had been quite discouraging enough! She loved it still, but with more reproach than rapture in her love, like a lover continuing in thrall to a mistress fair without and false within.

  At the gate which opened upon the footpath to Cleedons Manor she paused, with some idea of going up to the house and telling Agnes about the smoking parlour chimney at Yew Tree Cottage. But what was the use? At this hour, Agnes was probably resting, or trying on clothes. And Agnes seemed to see no reason, anyway, why she should
be held responsible for the dilapidated condition of Yew Tree Cottage. She was perfectly within her rights, of course. Jeanie had rashly bought the cottage, and must make the best of it, smoke and all. She decided to walk on along the road and find little Sarah Molyneux at the stables and inspect the kittens, as they had arranged between them; for it seemed that Jeanie as a householder was doomed to add a kitten to her other responsibilities.

  As she walked along, she thought about Agnes and tried hard not to be both sad and resentful. Miss Agnes Drake had been very kind to Jeanie Halliday some years ago, when Jeanie Halliday had been a lonely, impulsive schoolgirl and Miss Drake a mistress on the staff of a large private school. And Jeanie had formed for the aloof, gentle Miss Drake one of those fond, unreasoning, lasting attachments which parentless children so readily and sometimes so incomprehensibly bestow. They had both been lonely people, for Miss Drake also was parentless and had recently been bereaved of a much-loved younger sister. Jeanie had transferred to the elder woman some of her feeling for her dead mother, and Miss Drake had seen in Jeanie, and often commented on, a resemblance to the young sister she had lost. No one had rejoiced more than Jeanie when, in her last year at school, Miss Drake had left to marry Robert Molyneux, an elderly Gloucestershire land-owner she had met on a holiday abroad. Jeanie herself, leaving school soon afterwards to study painting in Paris, had not seen her friend for some years, but had fitfully bombarded her with long affectionate letters, and had accepted with joy an invitation to visit Cleedons and renew this affection of her school-days. She had fallen in love with Cleedons, that most comfortable of small Elizabethan manor-houses tacked on to the remains of a medieval castle. She had fallen in love with the grey stones and golden field-flowers and wide skies of the Gloucestershire countryside, and with the charming grey stone cottages that stand modestly along the quiet lanes. Finally, she had fallen very violently in love with little, empty Yew Tree Cottage and finding Agnes anxious to sell it, had bought it all in an afternoon for three hundred pounds and disregarded the ensuing groans and wordy remonstrances of her old family lawyer. She told herself, and him, that she had done a very practical, sensible thing. She wanted to settle down somewhere in the country and paint. And why not here, near darling Agnes?

  It was only recently, since she had come to take up her residence at Yew Tree Cottage, that she had begun to wonder whether she had really been so practical and sensible, whether a studio in London would not have been a wiser investment, and finally and most searchingly, whether she really wanted to live near Agnes and whether darling Agnes were darling Agnes any longer?

  For Agnes was altered. Or Jeanie was altered. Or both of them. And poor Jeanie was beginning to perceive that Mrs. Molyneux had no wish nor intention at all of playing a motherly part towards the old pupil she had once been so kind to. She was kind but distant. Friendly, but casual. No longer, it seemed, did Jeanie remind her of her lost sister. She seemed quite to have forgotten her sister, and her former loneliness, and Jeanie’s affection for her, in the satisfactions of being Mrs. Robert Molyneux, mistress of a spacious country household.

  “It’s horrible when people change,” thought Jeanie, with quite a lump in her throat, kicking a stone down the lane and badly grazing the toe of her shoe. Agnes in prosperity seemed to have shrunk and withered instead of expanding and blooming. The cool reserve which had characterised her in her teaching days seemed to have grown into a positive secretiveness, as though she feared continually, and wished to forestall, demands on her generosity. The fastidious care she used to bestow upon her clothes seemed to have become an insatiable vanity for ever occupied with dress and beauty treatments. It was horrible when people changed. And horrible when one changed oneself and found only the workings of a critical cool judgment where once had operated the warm impulses of the heart.

  Foolish Jeanie found quite a haze in front of her eyes. She firmly reminded herself that Yew Tree Cottage was an adorable little cottage, that the Cotswold country was just what she had always wanted to paint, and that there were plenty of other people in the world she could be friends with, besides Agnes Molyneux.

  In Cole Harbour Wood, that lay off the road to Jeanie’s left, a man was cutting down trees. She heard the sharp thudding of the axe strokes, and paused at a gate to see if she could catch a glimpse of the woodman. All country labours had a charm for her. She stood a moment or two watching the labourer at his work on the edge of the wood some distance away, enjoying the rhythmic swing of the axe, the powerful easy lift of arms and shoulders, watching the white chips fly out, noting how late the hard thud of impact came to her ears, as if it were the echo of the impact-sound, and not the sound itself. Down came the axe, and an instant later, almost as it rose again, thud! came the sound. Jeanie hoped that Cole Harbour Wood was not going to be entirely cut down, for she was looking forward to exploring in the spring under its tall larches and silvery oaks.

  The sudden stir and gallop of a pony at grass the other side of the hedge took Jeanie’s enchanted eye as she walked on, and she watched the endearing rough-maned creature kick up his hoofs and gallop off towards Grim’s Grave, that great bell-barrow crowned with firs which stood up so steep and round among the irregular contours of the fields.

  “Suppose Agnes had lived when that tumulus was made,” thought Jeanie, “what would she have done then, with only a bit of fur and a string of clay beads to make herself lovely with?”

  Jeanie was, she was aware, shockingly ignorant of archaeology, as that queer Mr. Fone, who lived at Cole Harbour House, had informed her at dinner at Cleedons not very long ago. She had horrified him by supposing that the men of the Neolithic Age were skin-clad savages who spent their time lurking in caves and cracking one another’s skulls. He had informed her sternly that they were as civilised as herself and in some ways more so. A queer, rather alarming man, Neighbour Fone. But Jeanie liked him. And she liked his house, Cole Harbour House, whose roof she saw above the surrounding trees ahead of her. A comfortable house, a light, pleasant house, made to take a painter’s eye, with its plum-coloured bricks and lavish creepers and the arch-shaped windows of its low, built-out library.

  “And here’s the great Neolith himself,” said Jeanie, as a man emerged from a shed near Cole Harbour gate, carrying a sheet of heavy lead. But she was mistaken, for this man walked upright without the sticks that helped poor William Fone along. It was Hugh Barchard, Mr. Fone’s secretary, nurse, companion, general factotum. Jeanie called to him as she approached the gate.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Barchard.”

  He propped his piece of sheet lead against the gate.

  “Afternoon, Miss Halliday. Nasty wet night it was.”

  “Yes, outdoors and in,” agreed Jeanie. “The rain’s been coming down my parlour chimney, and the smoke’s simply awful. The builder’s there to-day, bricking the ingle-nook in. Pity to brick in an ingle-nook, but I’m not a haddock. I’m having a new hob-grate. Very Adamy and recherché.”

  “It’s the chimney wants a new cowl on it. I wouldn’t go spending a lot of money till you’ve had that seen to.”

  “The builder says the chimney’s incurable, except by putting in a high grate and bricking it round.”

  Barchard stuck out a dubious under-lip. He was a wiry colonial with an agreeable lack of the English countryman’s usual self-consciousness.

  “Well, Miss Halliday, if you put a high grate and have a coal fire in it just under the cross-beam of the chimney-breast you may be having the place burnt down one of these days.”

  “Oh Heaven, don’t say that! The builder’s going to put asbestos sheeting over the beam.”

  “I wouldn’t risk it, even so.”

  “But what am I to do?” cried Jeanie in despair. “Is there anything in life worse than a smoking chimney?”

  Barchard grinned faintly, as though he could think of many worse things.

  “It used to smoke a bit in my day, I admit. We used to sit in the kitchen, mostly. I used to live at Yew Tree m
yself, I dare say you’ve heard.”

  “I know,” said Jeanie, as casually as possible, for she had also heard that Hugh Barchard had lived at Yew Tree Cottage to the great scandal of the countryside, with a lady to whom he had not been married. “Did the roof leak in your day?”

  “Only after snow. I expect one or two of the tiles had slid off.”

  “One or two! Great Heavens, the roof of Yew Tree Cottage has the secret of perpetual motion!”

  “Ah, those old roofs can’t be depended on. We’ve got the same trouble here, only ours is rotted leads—worse in a way. This flat roof here’s always giving trouble. I’ve been up there most of the morning laying new lead, but there’s no end to the repairing once the leads start going.”

  “You could have a roof-garden up there,” said Jeanie, glancing at the long room built out by some early nineteenth-century owner from the side of the square Queen Anne house, and admiring the pleasant “gothick” glazing bars of its tall windows and the swelling balusters of the stone parapet that ran round the flat roof.

  “Mr. Fone does spend quite a lot of his time up there, though there isn’t anything in the garden line,” said Barchard. “You get a splendid view down over the hills from up there. You see a lot of burial mounds.”

  Jeanie laughed.

  “Burial mounds! Is that Mr. Fone’s idea of a splendid view?”

  Hugh Barchard smiled, taking up his heavy sheet of lead. He had a pleasant smile that wrinkled the skin about his eyes.

  “Mr. Fone’s interested in the lay-out of the mounds. He thinks there used to be roadways in Neolithic times running from one to another of them all over the country.”

  “Rather third-class roads by now, I should imagine,” said Jeanie cheerfully. “Mr. Fone ought to go up in a balloon. They say you can see all sorts of extraordinary things buried under the earth if you only go high enough up in the air.”