Margery Allingham's Mr Campion's Farewell Read online

  Margery Allingham’s

  Albert Campion returns in

  MR CAMPION’S FAREWELL

  Completed by

  Mike Ripley

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2014 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2014 by Mike Ripley.

  The right of Mike Ripley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Allingham, Margery, 1904–1966 author.

  Mr Campion’s farewell.

  1. Campion, Albert (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Private investigators–England–Fiction. 3. Detective

  and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Ripley, Mike author.

  823.9'12-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8383-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-506-3 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-532-1 (ePub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  Author’s Note

  Philip (‘Pip’) Youngman Carter married his childhood sweetheart Margery Allingham in 1927 and collaborated with her on her famous ‘Albert Campion’ novels which appeared to great acclaim during and beyond the ‘Golden Age’ of English crime fiction, where her contemporaries were Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. On Margery’s death in 1966, Youngman Carter completed her novel Cargo of Eagles (published 1968) and two further Campion books: Mr Campion’s Farthing and Mr Campion’s Falcon. He was at work on a third, which would have been the twenty-second Campion novel, when he died following an operation for lung cancer in November 1969.

  Pip’s fragment of manuscript, which contained revisions and minor corrections but no plot outline, character synopsis or plan, was bequeathed to Margery Allingham’s sister Joyce. When Joyce Allingham died in 2001, the manuscript was left to officials of the Margery Allingham Society (MAS) and published in the Society’s journal The Bottle Street Gazette under the title ‘Mr Campion’s Swansong’ in 2008-9.

  As a guest speaker at the Margery Allingham Society’s annual convention, I learned of Youngman Carter’s unfinished novel for the first time, despite being an avid Allingham fan for more than forty years and having lived within ten miles of Pip and Margery’s home in Tolleshunt d’Arcy in Essex for more than twenty. Needless to say, I was intrigued.

  In 2012 Barry Pike, Chairman of the Margery Allingham Society, took up my rash offer to complete Pip’s manuscript as an affectionate conclusion to the adventures of Albert Campion, one of the brightest stars in the rich firmament of British crime writing. To this end, I suggested Mr Campion’s Farewell rather than ‘Swansong’ and have attempted to follow Pip Youngman Carter’s style and approach rather than try a pastiche of Margery Allingham at her sharpest and funniest, which would have been difficult if not impossible. Dedicated devotees of Pip’s solo writings will recognise the influence of his 1963 travel book On To Andorra and his rather obscure 1960 short story Humble’s Box, for which I have to acknowledge Barry Pike’s detective skill in unearthing a copy. I must also thank Julia Jones, Margery Allingham’s biographer, and novelist Andrew Taylor for their encouragement after reading early drafts.

  I am immensely indebted to Roger Johnson, a Sherlockian scholar and Allingham devotee, not only for his astute editing skills but also for his map of ‘Lindsay Carfax’ which was Youngman Carter’s fictional creation, but reminded me instantly of the beautiful wool town of Lavenham in Suffolk. It was Lavenham’s history and architecture which were always in my mind as I wrote the book but nothing I (or Pip) wrote reflect the real people of Suffolk, or for that matter Cambridge, though the more astute reader will notice that St Ignatius College is inexplicably located on the site occupied today by Heffer’s Bookshop.

  I have set the novel in September 1969, as that would have been when Youngman Carter was drafting those early chapters. For the insatiably curious, or the collector of trivia, the full moon that month was on the 29th, which just happened to be my 17th birthday.

  Mike Ripley,

  Eight Ash Green, Essex.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Map

  Chapter 1: Sequel to a Nine Days’ Wonder

  Chapter 2: Who Knocks?

  Chapter 3: The Nine Carders

  Chapter 4: Nightcap

  Chapter 5: Crime Scene

  Chapter 6: Tourist Trade

  Chapter 7: School Dinners

  Chapter 8: A Call on an Inspector

  Chapter 9: Rough Shoot

  Chapter 10: Visiting Hours

  Chapter 11: The Professor of Nines

  Chapter 12: Digging Dirt

  Chapter 13: The Student of Owling

  Chapter 14: That Riviera Touch

  Chapter 15: The Man Who Hardly Troubled the Bank at Monte Carlo

  Chapter 16: As a Thieves in the Night

  Chapter 17: Detectives No Longer Required

  Chapter 18: Centre of the Web

  Chapter 19: Humble Pie

  Chapter 20: Mole Run

  Chapter 21: Board Meeting

  Chapter 22: Moonglow

  One

  Sequel to a Nine Days’ Wonder

  ‘I find it shocking,’ said Clarissa Webster. ‘Shocking, and, if you must know, rather frightening.’

  She pushed back the papers on her roll-top desk, put down an empty glass and lit a cigarette. The back room of the shop called appropriately The Medley, once the kitchen of a Tudor cottage, was part office, part store. Canvases, framed and unframed, lined one wall; cardboard cartons of artists’ materials, convex mirrors, bookends and tourist souvenirs were stacked in that curious disarray which suggests that it is part of a system understood only by its creator.

  She was past fifty but still handsome and well aware of her sex, with an easy charm that beckoned and comforted. Her customers, particularly if they were male, found her as irresistible and as memorable as the setting which had attracted them into her net. Sweet, sly, pretty Mrs Webster, a natural saleswoman who could convince any buyer that he had acquired a bargain – a future family heirloom – rather than an overpriced painting of a scene better left to coloured postcards.

  ‘Shocking?’

  The girl who had been engulfed in an armchair too low to the floor pulled herself out of it and straddled one of the squat square arms. Despite jeans and the painter’s smock worn for practical reasons, the results of which were smeared all over it, she merited more than a casual glance. Everything about her, from the short, almost cropped dark hair about a face which wa
s just too rounded for classic beauty, to the tips of her small spatulate fingers suggested an expert in her choice of work whatever it might be.

  ‘Shocking?’ she repeated. ‘Frightening? Putting it a bit high, aren’t you? You might say it’s crackingly silly publicity hunting. I’d call it a load of old codswallop myself.’

  Mrs Webster picked a thin paperback book from one of the heaps on her desk. The cover, a pale puce, swore violently with strident orange and green lettering. She held it at arm’s length.

  ‘Get with the Psalms,’ she read aloud, ‘by the Rev. Leslie Trump, vicar of Lindsay Carfax.’ She opened a page at random. ‘Get a load of this. “I was chuffed when they said let’s make the God-bothering shop.” That’s the kick-off of Psalm 122, in case you don’t know – according to Trump, the silly little ape.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought,’ said her companion, ‘that you were the religious type. You certainly never go to church. What makes you so hot and bothered?’

  The proprietress of The Medley poured herself two fingers of gin, adding water from a lustre jug.

  ‘How long have you been here, Eliza Jane?’ she asked. ‘Just over a year since you first appeared, I think. You’re the wrong generation – miles too young. History doesn’t mean a thing to you unless it repeats itself and bobs up to fetch you one across the chops. I couldn’t care less about Trump – I don’t even know him well enough to dislike him. What I don’t want just now is trouble. We can all do without another Nine Days’ Wonder which is what he’s asking for. Have a drink.’

  ‘Gobbledy-gook,’ said Eliza Jane. ‘Who gives a damn about what Trump says or does? He could blow till he burst without anyone paying attention. What Nine Days’ Wonder?’

  Mrs Webster moistened her lips from her glass and considered the slim figure perched on the chair through her convincing artificial eyelashes. She appeared to change the subject.

  ‘Ben Judd,’ she said after a pause. ‘I suppose you sleep with him from time to time – I would if I were your age – but are you thinking of shacking up with him? I mean do you intend to stay here for keeps?’

  The girl was clearly not embarrassed by the question.

  ‘I might. Ben is rather too fierce for me just now. He’s a real painter and my stuff drives him up the wall. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Not out of bitchy curiosity.’ Mrs Webster was thoughtful as she sipped her gin. ‘I’m going to tell you something and you can believe it or not as you choose. It’s always been unlucky to stick your neck out if you live here. That may sound completely mad to you, but it’s true. People who do anything which might tend to destroy our image have a pretty parroty time. Perhaps you haven’t been here long enough to notice that.’

  ‘You mean those deadbeats, the drop-out crowd, who thought they’d move in last summer?’

  ‘Them – and others. They weren’t the first.’

  ‘The Nine Days’ Wonder, then?’

  Mrs Webster blew a smoke ring into the air and poked a plump forefinger through it.

  ‘This village,’ she said, ‘as you very well know, is not a village at all – it’s a very nicely organised money-making machine. You’re part of it with your blissful trick of turning out old-world paintings of it by the dozen. I’m part of it with my arty-crafty racket. So is every man, woman and child in the place. We all live in and on Lindsay Carfax the unspoiled beauty spot of Merrie England as it never bloody well was except in Cloud Cuckooland. We could just as well be working in a film set and the drains would be less smelly.

  ‘We’ve been a carefully preserved gold mine for at least seventy years and it has never paid anyone to step out of line. People who do become accident-prone. One of Trump’s predecessors found that out in 1910 or thereabouts. He was the original Nine Days’ Wonder – or one of them.’

  ‘The dreaded elders of the village fixed him? The Gestapo in the form of Gus Marchant’s grandfather? What was he up to anyhow?’

  ‘My Aunt Thisbe, who raised me, always said he was a very dull earnest man with theories above his pocket. His name was Austin Bonus – it’s on the roll of clergy in the church – and he had an idea to establish a children’s home here: East End slum children, waifs and strays and so on. There was a lot of opposition to the scheme on account of it might be noisy and dirty, and bad for the Lindsay Carfax image as a haunt of ancient peace. Bonus fought for a bit and even raised some cash for his scheme – not from the village, I promise you, but from distant do-gooders.

  ‘Then one day he disappeared. It was just after Christmas and he was last seen at an old folks’ party at the Carders Hall. He was gone for nine days and when he turned up again he dropped the children’s home like a hot potato and carried on as if nothing had happened.’

  ‘No explanation?’

  ‘Nary a word. His wife was furious for a bit, they say, and some of the Church council weren’t entirely pleased but it all blew over. They restored the church roof instead and bought a very good organ. No one explained where the money had come from, but it must have cost a packet. Johnnie Sirrah wasn’t so lucky.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  Mrs Webster’s eyes became soft. She smiled like a cat remembering a dish of cream.

  ‘He was by way of being a boyfriend of mine – my first now I come to think of it. It was just before the war when everyone was clamouring for peace and yet doing nothing about it except going to Spain to join in the shooting there. Communism, pacifism, anti-bloodsportism, anti-clericalism, anti-vivisectionalism – you name it, we had it. He tried to organise the whole thing into one vast wail of anger, starting from here because this was supposed to be the deep heart of England, and he had just begun to get himself noticed in quite a big way by the press. I was only eighteen then and quite a dish, though I say it myself. I didn’t love him but I thought he’d do very nicely to begin with – he was a sort of challenge to any girl with growing pains. He taught me a thing or two and I never regretted it. Poor Johnnie.’

  She emptied her glass to his memory.

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He was found in the gravel pit at Saxon Mills with his head in the water and his neck broken. It’s quite a fall from the top and they said he’d been drinking, which was probably true. What nobody knows is why he went there at all. The odd thing was that it took them nine days to find him. We seem to like that number hereabouts.’

  ‘The ghastly Nine Day Festival of the Crafts?’

  Mrs Webster sighed. She had not thought about Johnnie Sirrah for many years and the sudden re-appearance of memory brought a twinge of emotion: not pain but surprise.

  ‘Nine oaks by the church, nine acres of the Common, nine steps to the Carders Hall. They used to say there were nine ways to Carfax but it’s not true any longer – there’s only one. The rest are just lanes leading nowhere in particular.’

  She stood up and closed the bottle. ‘If you’re not going to have one I shall put this away before I get a taste for it. By the way, could you knock me up a sort of Constable’s Haywain job? About thirty by twenty? Make it a Morland if you feel like it. The pond, the church and the Prentice House. You know the sort of thing – plenty of thick dark varnish. I’ve got a very good prospect in mind who won’t be over here for a month.’

  The girl made a mental calculation before answering.

  ‘It would take that long,’ she said. ‘Varnishes have to dry properly and then it has to be baked till it cracks nicely. I’ve got about four half-finished but they’re all what I call quickies. They wouldn’t suit.’ She flicked a direct glance at the other woman. ‘You wouldn’t try passing it for real?’

  ‘Just a sucker’s price, my dear,’ she said. ‘I never guarantee anything as genuine except the wood carvings and anyone can see they’re hand done. I shall get what I can for this one when I see how he shapes up as a buyer. I’ll come clean about it with you: fifty-fifty and nothing to be agreed in advance. OK? Are you off now?’

  Eliza Jane hesitated. ‘Well, I was,’
she said, ‘but you’ve just reminded me of something I heard out of the corner of my ear this morning when I was talking to Ben in the Woolpack. Someone has been missing from home for a couple of days and his landlady is wondering if he’s gone off on the toot and should she do anything about it. Or so they say.’

  Mrs Webster turned her head sharply.

  ‘Not little Trump, then. So who?’

  ‘Someone I’ve never heard of. His name is Walker – Lemmy Walker, I think they said – and he teaches at the Carders’ school for Juniors. Has he been bobbing his head up, or speaking out of turn?’

  ‘Now that is news,’ said Mrs Webster.

  The two men who were sitting in the hazy morning sunlight on the terrace of the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo appeared to have nothing in common except for the fact that they were both English. The older, a shrivelled bird-like figure wearing a linen jacket and a discoloured panama hat which had evidently been preserved at the back of a wardrobe against the owner’s return to the south of France, might have been a clergyman on holiday or the senior partner of a legal firm. Mr Marcus Fuller was in fact a house agent and a dealer in property.

  His companion, a lump of flesh, solid as a sack of sand, favoured an overbright blazer and fawn trousers. An unkind guess would have placed him as a North Country man, possibly a butcher, but although Augustine Marchant owned several shops, including a butcher’s, he had never handled a carcass in his life, and his voice in moments of stress betrayed his native Suffolk. He sat now, an arm on the balustrade, a John Collins in his hand, with his back to the hotel scanning the morning trickle of tourists into the Casino.

  ‘As mad as a flaming coot,’ he said. ‘I’ve always known it. And now you can see it for yourself.’

  The older man sniffed. He spoke in the dry clipped tones of the true pedant.

  ‘The Redcars have always enjoyed that reputation. They cultivate it, so to speak, as if it were a rare cactus or a special breed of Siamese cat. Her ladyship is no exception. Eccentric, if you like. But not mad – or only nor’ nor’ east in my opinion. There’s method in it, Gus, if you take the trouble to look for it.’