Mystery in the Channel Read online

  Mystery in the Channel

  Freeman Wills Crofts

  With an Introduction

  By Martin Edwards

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Originally published in 1931 by W. Collins Sons & Co.

  Copyright © 2016 Estate of Freeman Wills Crofts

  Introduction copyright © 2016 Martin Edwards

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library

  First E-book Edition 2016

  ISBN: 9781464206726 ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

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  Contents

  Mystery in the Channel

  Copyright

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Select Bibliography

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Introduction

  Mystery in the Channel is a classic crime novel with a strikingly modern sub-text. The story begins with a shocking discovery. The captain of the Newhaven to Dieppe steamer spots a small pleasure yacht lying motionless in the water, and on closer inspection, sees a body lying on the deck. When members of his crew go aboard the yacht, they find not one male corpse but two. Both men have been shot, but there is no sign of either the murderer or the pistol.

  The dead men, it quickly emerges, were called Moxon and Deeping, and they were chairman and vice-chairman respectively of the firm of Moxon General Securities, one of the largest financial houses in the country. Inspector Joseph French of Scotland Yard is called in, reporting directly to the Assistant Commissioner, Sir Mortimer Ellison. French soon discovers that Moxon’s is on the brink of collapse. One and a half million pounds have gone missing, and so has one of the partners in the business. Moxon and Deeping seem to have been fleeing the country with their ill-gotten gains, but who killed them, and how? French faces one of the toughest challenges of his career, and in a dramatic climax, risks his life in a desperate attempt to ensure that justice is done.

  Mystery in the Channel was originally published in 1931, at a calamitous time for the world economy. Moxon’s was a well-established and reputable firm, but had struggled ‘as a result of the generally depressed conditions… Then before they could get right there came the Wall Street crash and after it the Hatry crash’. A number of the firm’s partners were, Ellison says bitterly, ‘Figureheads… At least, that’s the excuse now. Knew nothing about what was going on. It’s a lovely system! They were got in because they had handles to their names, to create public confidence. Public confidence!’ His sympathies lie with ‘all the innocent people who are going to suffer through these dirty scoundrels’.

  Freeman Wills Crofts had a closer understanding of business life than many crime writers of his or any other generation, and several of his mysteries unfold against a corporate background. He was a natural conservative, but it is plain from his novels that he shared Ellison’s scorn for the unacceptable face of capitalism. Time and again (even in this book’s penultimate paragraph), he shows empathy with ‘the thousands of unfortunate people who had entrusted their money to the firm, and of whom many are irretrievably ruined’. Nor does Crofts overlook the consequences for luckless members of the Moxon’s workforce: ‘The failure was for them an overwhelming blow. Not only were their cherished beliefs thus rudely shattered, but the same cataclysm took from them their means of support.’ It is thought-provoking to compare Crofts’ observations with analysis of the global financial crisis more than three-quarters of a century later. His critique of the figureheads in Moxon’s might equally be applied to some non-executive directors of financial institutions in the early years of the twenty-first century.

  Detective stories written during the Golden Age of Murder between the two world wars have long been stereotyped (especially by people who have not bothered to read much of the best work of the period) as dry, intellectual puzzles which paid little or no heed to the real world. The truth is rather different, and is more complicated and interesting. Crofts’ work is a case in point. As a writer, he seldom indulged in literary flourishes, and this helps to explain why his books have often been dismissed as ‘humdrum’. Yet he had deeply held spiritual convictions, which are evident in several of the novels he wrote during that fascinating but fearful decade, the Thirties, most directly in another mystery republished as a British Library Crime Classic, Antidote to Venom.

  Trains and boats and planes keep passing by in many of Crofts’ books, and Mystery in the Channel contains a good deal of information about sailing (some of it rather technical) that is crucial to the plot. By profession, Crofts was an engineer, and his practical turn of mind proved invaluable when it came to creating ingenious murder mysteries – and describing how patient detective work could solve them. In this book, he sets out his credo: ‘Detection is very much like any other constructive work. The solution of every difficulty becomes the premise of a further problem. Such work advances by the overcoming of a never-ending series of difficulties, each of which is raised by the preceding success.’

  Freeman Wills Crofts (1879–1957) was an Irishman who, at the age of fifty, retired from a career in the railways and moved to Surrey to write full-time. By then, he had become one of the most highly regarded detective novelists, and for the rest of his life, he continued to design complex mysteries to test the wits of the affable but extremely persistent Inspector French.

  In person, Crofts was reserved but kindly, and nobody seems to have had a bad word to say about him. Even Dorothy L. Sayers, an often acerbic critic, and a writer who aspired to literary heights in a way that Crofts did not, called him ‘one of the most honest craftsmen in existence. He leaves no flats unjoined.’ A modest and unassuming man, Crofts no doubt regarded that as high praise. Writing about Inspector French, he once admitted, ‘He’s not very brilliant. In fact, many people call him dull.’ But criminals under-estimate French at their peril. And Freeman Wills Crofts was a capable crime writer who has himself been under-estimated for too long.

  Martin Edwards

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  Chapter I

  Death on the High Seas

  The captain lowered his six-diameter prism binoculars.

  “Not moving, is she, Mr. Hands?”

  “Doesn’t seem to be, sir,” said the second officer, who was also the officer in charge.

  The steamer was the Southern Railway Company’s Chichester and she was half-way to France
on her usual day trip from Newhaven to Dieppe. A fine boat she was, the Company’s newest for that route, and she was doing her steady three and twenty knots with scarcely a quiver to indicate the enormous power that was being unleashed in the cavernous holds far down below her decks.

  It was a pleasant afternoon towards the end of June. The sea was like the proverbial glass, well burnished, and with a broad track of dazzling sparkles where the sun caught the tiny wavelets. A slight haze filled the air, not enough to be called a fog, but enough to blot out the horizon and everything above two or three miles distant. Hot it was; indeed, but for the breeze caused by the steamer’s motion, it would have been grilling. It was just the day for luxuriating with closed eyes in a deck chair, and the rows of recumbent figures which covered every scrap of clear space on the decks showed that the passengers fully realised the fact.

  There was quite a crowd on board. It was well into the holiday season and besides the ordinary passengers the members of more than one conducted tour were making the crossing. The labels on their suit-cases sorted them into sheep and goats. Here was a party on the way to spend a week in lovely Lucerne, there a group bound for the castles of the Loire, while still others were contenting themselves with a long week-end in Paris.

  The object which had attracted the attention of the ship’s officers was a small pleasure yacht which lay right ahead. As she was heading across their bows, they thought at first she would have pulled clear of their track long before they came up. But a few seconds’ inspection showed that she was lying motionless. A shift of helm to pass behind her stern was therefore necessary, and the second officer crossed to the wheel-house and called sharply, “Starb’rd two degrees!” to the quartermaster at the wheel. As he returned, the captain again lowered his glasses.

  “A fifty-foot petrol launch, British built, I should say,” he observed. “Can’t see her flag. Can you?”

  “No, sir,” the second officer answered, gazing in his turn. “Nor can I see any one on deck.”

  “Navigating from the wheel-house,” the captain rejoined, “if that hump forward is a wheel-house and not merely sidelight screens.”

  “A wheel-house, I fancy, sir. But I can’t see any one in it.”

  “Scarcely close enough yet.”

  With this the second officer dutifully agreed. There was silence for a moment and then Mr. Hands went on, “She must be broken down, sir, surely. Else why should she lie there?”

  “Not asking for help at all events,” Captain Hewitt replied. He paused, searching the yacht with his glasses. “That is a wheel-house,” he went on. “I can see the wheel. There’s no one there.”

  “Too high and mighty to keep a look out, I suppose,” the second officer said disgustedly. “And then they’re surprised if anything goes wrong. Of course if it does, it’s the other fellow’s fault.”

  The captain did not reply. He was still fixedly examining the tiny vessel, which they were now rapidly approaching. She was obviously a pleasure yacht, well kept, from the brilliant flashes which leaped from her brasswork and the dazzling white of her paint. Every moment she grew in size, while objects aboard took on form and definition. Her deserted decks could now be seen with the naked eye. Soon they would be up with her.

  Suddenly the captain’s regard grew more intense.

  “What do you make of that dark thing near the companion?” he asked sharply.

  Mr. Hands also stared intently.

  “Uncommonly like a man, sir. By Jove, yes, it is a man! Lying in a heap on the deck. Good God, sir! He must be either ill or dead!”

  “It doesn’t look too well.” Captain Hewitt glanced down at his passengers. “Pity to wake up all these sleeping beauties,” he went on, “but I’m afraid there’s no help for it. Give her a call, Mr. Hands.”

  An ear-splitting roar went out from the foghorn. As a breeze ruffles the surface of a cornfield, so a little movement passed over the deck as the occupants of the chairs opened their eyes, sat up, glanced round, muttered imprecations, and once more resigned themselves to sleep.

  But the blast awakened no answer from the yacht.

  “There doesn’t seem to be any one else on board,” the captain went on. “It looks like something badly wrong. I don’t like the way that figure is lying bunched up in a heap. And what’s that dark mark beside it? Seems very like blood to me. Give them another call, Mr. Hands.”

  Two more raucous blasts roared out, reawakening the deck chair enthusiasts and even sending some of the more energetic to the rail in search of the cause of so unwonted an outrage.

  Still there was no response from the yacht. The man on the deck made no movement nor did any one else appear. The shining brass wheel could now be plainly seen in its tiny wheel-house, deserted.

  “It’s blood, that mark is, as sure as we’re alive,” said Hands. “A pretty bad wound to have bled like that.”

  The yacht was now close by. The powerful glasses reduced the distance to a few yards.

  “Yes, it’s blood right enough,” the captain agreed after another look. “Damn it, we’ll have to stop. Chap may not be dead, and in any case we can’t leave that outfit bobbing around to put a hole in somebody’s bows. Ring down, Mr. Hands.”

  While the second officer rang his engines to “Stop!” and then a few seconds later to “Full Speed Astern!” the captain turned to the able seaman in attendance.

  “Tell Mr. Mackintosh I want him here at once. And get the chief steward to find out if there’s a doctor on board and send him here also.”

  For a moment all was ordered confusion. Whistles resounded, bells rang, figures hurried to and fro. A slight continuous tremor ran through the ship as if overwhelming activities were in progress below. From the safety valve pipes on the funnels came an appalling roar of escaping steam. Quickly men approached one of the starboard lifeboats, politely moved the passengers back, and uncoiled ropes and knocked out wedges. The canvas boat cover vanished with incredible speed, the chocks fell aside, and the patent davits moved forwards. In a few seconds the boat, already manned, was swinging motionless over the sea.

  By this time the passengers were awake to a man, or rather to a woman, and were pressing to the rail to see the fun. A little buzz of talk had broken out. Jokes were cracked, while those behind pushed forward, clamouring for information from those in front. Glasses and cameras were brought out and hopes of a thrill were expressed. Then as the yacht with its sinister burden floated into view, voices were hushed and all stood silent, overawed by the presence of tragedy.

  There was indeed something dramatic in the situation which stirred the imagination of even the most prosaic. The little yacht, with its fine lines and finish, its white deck and gleaming brasswork, its fresh paint and brightly coloured club flag, looked what it so obviously was, a rich man’s toy, a craft given over to pleasure. On such the tragic and the sordid were out of place. Yet now they reigned supreme. The space which should fittingly have resounded with the laughs of pretty women and the voices of immaculately clad men, was empty, empty save for that hunched figure and that sinister stain with its hideous suggestion.

  Such thoughts, however, were far from the minds of the ship’s officers. With ordered haste they carried on. Discreet inquiries among the men in the smoking-room had found a doctor, and he had been hurried to the bridge. The third officer, Mr. Mackintosh, had just preceded him.

  “Dr. Oates?” the captain was saying. “Very good of you to help us. Mr. Mackintosh, I want you to board that yacht and see what’s the matter. If the man is alive, send him across with the doctor. If not, let him stay. If there’s no one else there keep a couple of men and work her to Newhaven. Take a megaphone and let me know how things are and, if necessary, I’ll send you help from Dieppe. And for the Lord’s sake look sharp. We’re late already.”

  In a few moments the boat had been lowered to the water, the falls cast off, and Mr. Mackintosh
and his party were slowly rising and falling beside the Chichester’s towering side. “Give way, lads,” invited Mackintosh, and the Chichester with its rows of staring faces began to fall slowly back.

  “Not often a cross-Channel boat halts in mid-career like this,” Dr. Oates essayed, when they were fairly under way.

  “I only mind it happening once before,” Mackintosh admitted. “That was when we sighted the Josephine. You didna see about her in the papers? She was a tr-r-ramp, an eight-hundred-ton coaster, from Grimsby to Havre with oils and paints. My wor-rd, she was a sight! We saw the smoke of her ten miles off, going up like a volcano.”

  “Burnt out?”

  “Burnt out? Aye, I think she was burnt out. I never saw, before nor since, flames rising like yon. You’d ha’ thought they were a mile high. The paint, you know.”

  “Any one lost?”

  “No. They were in the boats and we picked them up. Say, doctor, that’s a tidy enough yacht. The Nymph, Folkestone,” he read. “What do you make her? A bit under fifty feet, I’d say. A good sea boat, but old-fashioned. She’s twenty years old, if she’s a day. Nowadays they give them higher bows and lower sterns. Eight to ten knots, I reckon. Likely a new motor; she’d be built for steam.”

  “Strong, but not comely, she looks to me.”

  Mackintosh nodded. “I reckon you’re no so far wrong, though, mind you, she’s well finished. Now, doctor, we’ll see what we shall see.” The yacht swung up alongside. “Easy on there. Easy does it.”

  A man bow and stern grappled with boathooks and in a moment the two craft lay together, rising and falling easily on the swell. Mackintosh stood up, unhooked the gangway section of the yacht’s rail, and swung himself aboard. Dr. Oates followed more circumspectly.

  A moment’s glance showed that the deck really was deserted save for the sinister figure near the companion. Closer inspection only confirmed the previous impression of the taste and wealth which had gone to the furnishing of the little vessel. The deck was broken only by the wheel-house, two skylights, two masts, and the companion, leaving an extraordinarily large promenading area for the size of the boat. The wheel-house was well forward, about eight feet from the bows. Then came a skylight, the saloon from its size, then the companion, and lastly a smaller skylight, apparently a cabin. Round the deck was a railing of polished teak on dazzlingly white supports, from which hung four lifebuoys, bearing the words, “M.Y. Nymph, Folkestone,” in neat black letters. The deck was holy-stoned to the palest sand colour, and everything that could be polished glittered like gold.