Murder at the Manor by Martin Edwards

Author:Martin Edwards
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Published: 2015-10-07T19:00:00+00:00

The Message

on the Sun-Dial

J. J. Bell

John Joy Bell (1871–1934) was a Scot who studied chemistry at the University of Glasgow before becoming a journalist with the Glasgow Evening Times and a sub-editor for the Scots Pictorial. His stories and articles about working-class Scots were often written in the vernacular, and were very popular in their day. Wee Macgregor enjoyed particular success, but Bell’s sentimentalism is unlikely to appeal to fans of gritty realism.

This story provides a pleasing example of a trope of the genre, the “dying message clue”. This is a plot device beloved of detective novelists, and features in many of Ellery Queen’s novels and short stories, as well as in Agatha Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? Bell makes a good enough fist of the story to make one think it is a pity that his excursions into detective fiction were few and far between.

***

For a good many weeks the morning mail of Mr. Philip Bolsover Wingard had usually contained something unpleasant, but never anything quite so unpleasant as the letter, with its enclosure, now in his hand. And the letter was from his cousin, Philip Merivale Wingard, the man to whom he owed more benefits, and whom he hated more, than any man in the world. Certainly the letter was rather a shocking one to have place in the morning mail of a gentleman; but, oddly enough, it had never occurred to Bolsover, as he was commonly called to distinguish him from the other Philip, that he had long since forfeited his last rights to the designation.

The letter was dated from the other Philip’s riverside residence, and ran as follows:

Cousin Bolsover,

I send you herewith an appeal just received from a deeply injured woman, to whom you have apparently given my name, instead of your own. This ends our acquaintance. If you insist on a further reason, I would merely mention your forgery of my name to a bill for £500, which fact has also been brought to my notice this morning. In the face of these two crimes it does not seem worth while to remind you that for seven years I have tried to believe in you and to help you in a material way.

You will receive this in the morning, and it gives you forty-eight hours to be out of this country. Within that time there is a sailing for South Africa. My banker has received instructions to pay you £500, one half of which you shall send to the writer of the enclosed. On that condition, and so long as you remain abroad, your forgery is my secret. This is your last chance.

Philip Merivale Wingard.

Bolsover, enduring a sickness almost physical, reread the letter. The enclosure did not trouble him, except is so far as it looked like costing him £250. But the discovery of his forgery shook him, for it was a shock against which he had been altogether unprepared. He had not dreamed of the moneylender showing the bill, which was not due for six weeks, to his cousin.

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