The Fortescue Candle

An Anthony Bathurst Mystery

Brian Flynn

• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781913527549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

"The gentleman in Number Fifty-four-Mr. Griggs-'e's been murdered!"

Albert Griggs, the Secretary of State for Home Affairs, is considering an important case. Two brothers have killed a servant-girl in the course of a robbery. Griggs looks at the facts carefully and comes to his final decision - he will not overturn the death penalty.

Was it this execution that led to Griggs being found shot in a hotel room? Or the fact that he had been accused by taking liberties with a certain young lady? Griggs had many enemies - and one of them hated him enough to murder him. But when Anthony Bathurst investigates, he finds something even more perplexing - how is the murder linked to the poisoning of Daphne Arbuthnot, an actress, on stage in the middle of a performance? And how is the Ku Klux Klan involved?

The Fortescue Candle was originally published in 1936. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Steve Barge.

CHAPTER I
THE FIRST PORTRAIT

The Rt. Honourable Albert S. Griggs, M.P., Secretary of State for Home Affairs, sat at ease and personal comfort in the library of his house at Great Astill in the county of Kent. For one thing, he had just dined—and dined well—and for another, he had, in the earlier part of the day, put through an astute piece of business in a little matter of oil that must ultimately, should there be any reliance on precedents, prove extremely lucrative to him. As he turned the cigar in his mouth he felt that his horizon was beautifully clear—save for that one rather troublesome problem that must be settled within the next twenty-four hours at the most generous estimate.

The Home Secretary frowned at the mental reminder. It was the affair of those two brothers condemned to death a month or so ago at Marthwaite in Yorkshire. A girl had been murdered. A servant in the house which these two men, intent upon burglary, had entered late in the evening. The defence—and it had been in extremely capable hands—was that the two men had left the house with the stolen articles at least an hour before the murder had taken place. The medical evidence had been a little conflicting and on this account the counsel for the defence had built strong hope. But the verdict had been for the Crown and the appeal that inevitably followed had been dismissed.

The Home Secretary had reached the stage of his final decision. He was now the sole arbiter of life and death for two fellow-creatures. He had the various documents of the case in front of him. He had also a glass of old brandy which he enjoyed from time to time with the cool and appreciative savour of the connoisseur. He prided himself on what he described as his positive reaction to humanity. It may be observed that he was inordinately fond of the word “reaction”. He read with care and deliberation the judicial comments on the Marthwaite case of the Hon. Sir Maurice Ogden Bromley—the Mr. Justice Bromley who had passed sentence of death on the two men concerned. The two men who now lay in condemned cells at Armley Gaol—the lives of whom were now balanced on the palm of his hand.

The Home Secretary, as he read, shook his head slowly. Truly, this was a terrible, almost affrighting responsibility. Greater than should ever be allotted to the individual. He went through the papers methodically.

Let us take stock of him as he does so. Age—the late fifties. Medium height. Brown, bird-like eyes that were always restless. He wore a new light suit. As it happened, his wife and two daughters were away. He had dined alone and had therefore decided not to change. He knew his own mind. He had the courage of his opinions. “A politician,” he said, “was gone to-day but ’ere to-morrow. Keep your eye, then, on the to-morrow.” He looked spruce sartorially and alert mentally. Although on this occasion his face was slightly flushed, it was not altogether unpleasant. Fleshy and congested perhaps—but good-natured. His shoulders were bulky and thick-set, and even his waistcoat seemed to crease in folds of flesh. A doctor, looking at him carefully and noting the pounding of his temporal arteries and the darkish suffusion of his forehead, would have quickly diagnosed high blood-pressure. “But,” as the Home Secretary himself would have said, had he been informed of the fact, “can you wonder at it? Look at the strenuous life I lead! My motto—as you know—’as always been service for others . . . ahem! . . .”

He turned again to the notes and comments of Mr. Justice Bromley. Then, for a second time, he referred to that dignitary’s summing up. The Lord Chief Justice, at the Court of Appeal, in reply to the counsel for the appellants, had emphatically stated that in his opinion there had been no misdirection to the jury whatever, and that his learned brother’s summing-up had been admirably fair and just to the two accused men. His two colleagues, it may be said, had entirely agreed with him.

The Home Secretary sipped his old brandy again. These condemned brothers had been unemployed. Men with idle hands and wasted faculties, men whose economic circumstances must be, to some extent, on the conscience of the country. Not that they were on his conscience . . . far from it . . . he’d always been sympathetic . . . to the genuine unemployed. To men whose failure had been no fault of their own. Of course—there were men who . . . his fingers flicked somewhat impatiently at the papers in front of him.

“Walter Fowles . . . aged twenty-nine . . . and Harper Fowles . . . aged twenty-six . . . the elder married . . . with two children. . . . Harper Fowles . . . single.”

Albert S. Griggs tossed the stub of his cigar into the fire-place and brushed at his nose with his fingers. The habits of the years are difficult to break, and it must be admitted that this particular action was an improvement upon the predecessor for which it had been substituted.

He betook himself to the settee and arranged himself thereon with a maximum of comfort. Before coming to a decision he would read again the notes on the evidence of Dr. Newbiggin, the doctor who had been first called to the body of the dead girl, discovered huddled up on the hearthrug in front of the burnt-out fire in the kitchen. Death had resulted, Dr. Newbiggin stated, from a fracture of the skull caused by three heavy blows from a blunt instrument—such as a poker, for instance. The kitchen poker, however, that lay in the fender, bore no traces of having been used by the murderers. No other weapon of a similar nature had been found in their possession or proved by evidence to have been in their possession.

On the other hand, however, there were on the kitchen linoleum footmarks that fitted the boots of the two condemned brothers . . . who did not deny having been in the kitchen, after they had ransacked the upper rooms of the house. The purpose for which they had entered the kitchen was to obtain food and drink. They had left the house, they swore, at twenty-two minutes past eleven with the spoils of the burglary and without having even as much as “set eyes” on the girl who had been killed. There were spots of blood, however, on the waistcoat of the younger brother, Harper Fowles, and this damning fact had weighed heavily in the scale against the two men. The man’s explanation of this blood-stain . . . a previous attack of nose-bleeding that he had been unable to staunch . . . the Rt. Hon. A.S. Griggs shook his head dubiously as he read . . . that particular gag had been pulled so many times before. He determined to concentrate, for the time being at least, on Dr. Newbiggin’s evidence as to the probable time that the dead girl had been murdered.

Called to the body about five forty-five on the following morning, the doctor had given it as his opinion that death had taken place “somewhere about six hours previously,” that is to say, about a quarter to twelve. The Home Secretary brought himself to the condition of mental calculation. A quarter to twelve. Eleven forty-five. The Fowles brothers swore that they had left the house at eleven twenty-two and stood up in the witness-box extremely well to a merciless examination from the Crown counsel.

Griggs knitted his brows. The margin to spare was very small. A bare twenty-three minutes! And two men’s lives at stake. Again he shook his head. After all, this doctor chap’s statement, at the best, was but an opinion and an approximation at that. The jury, however, had regarded it as antagonistic to the defence’s theory. It lent strong colour, indeed, to the accusation put forward by the Crown—that the murdered girl had surprised the two housebreakers, in all probability, on the point of exit, and that they had almost instantaneously struck the girl down and made their escape. The weapon that had been used had probably been thrown into the Marthwaite canal, postulated the Crown, although all attempts made on the part of the Police to find it had proved unsuccessful.

Griggs again went through the salient points of the case. The condemned men had each a relatively bad record. Each brother had served a term of imprisonment. For robbery. But—let it be stated—without violence. Griggs stressed the fact mentally. He turned up the papers with which the Police had supplied him that dealt with Harper Fowles’s previous conviction.

Strange! Undeniably strange! A maidservant had figured prominently in this affair. After having been tied to a chair, this girl had shown signs of faintness and physical collapse and Harper Fowles, realizing her distress, had actually filled a glass with water and handed it to her. With regard to this action the Home Secretary evolved a grim jest. “Not robbery with violence. On the contrary, rather, robbery with extreme consideration.” But—the facts of this previous case against Harper Fowles were definitely disturbing. Criminals, in the Home Secretary’s experience, usually ran true to form. They rarely varied as to general principles of method. Here were distinct differences.

The Home Secretary, as has been stated, was a firm believer in, and keen student of, psychology. Was there a reasonable doubt? Had the Crown proved its case beyond the vestige of reasonable question? They were the points which he had to consider. Four of His Majesty’s Justices had already given their expert opinions.

He searched amongst his papers for the photographs of the two men that he had specially requisitioned. The faces at which he looked were of ordinary, commonplace type. In fact, the elder Fowles was surprisingly like the young member for East Hammersley, young Victor Bowman. Funny . . . he hadn’t noticed the resemblance before, although Fowles’s face had been in the Press constantly for some time now. Strange how Fate plays with men for pieces. It was but an infinitesimal difference that so often lay between the two impostors, Triumph and Disaster.

The Home Secretary pulled moodily at his upper lip. He must avoid the quicksands of sentiment. He glanced at the clock. H’m—getting late, as he feared. He rose, put the various papers on the table again, and walked across the room to the fire-place. He must decide—the die of Justice must be cast one way or the other. He looked up at the ceiling and came to his decision. A scrawled phrase on the top document told the whole story. He could find no reason why he should interfere with the course of Justice. The Home Secretary had decided that Walter Fowles and Harper Fowles must die . . . be taken to a place whence they came and be hanged by the neck . . .

CHAPTER II
NO CHAPEL

The morning of Wednesday, March 3rd, broke wet and wild. The sky was sullen. Its red streaks which the wind had seemingly whipped into the cheeks of the clouds boded ill for the hours that were to come, and for the shepherds that were to live through them.

A knot of people had gathered outside Armley Gaol because there were two men within the precincts of the prison who were doomed to die that morning. They would walk from their cells to the execution-shed . . . at different times . . . and . . . The hangman, with his little bag, had shuffled through the gloom on the previous evening, and all was ready within the prison for the last grim scenes to be enacted.

Neither Walter Fowles, nor Harper Fowles, his younger brother, was calm—or, by any means, resigned to the inevitable. Each, indeed, burned with the blaze of resentment. The Chaplain, kindly and low-toned, had pleaded with each of the condemned men for the conditions of confession and repentance. The brothers had sturdily and steadily resisted him and his ministrations. Their souls flamed with the sense of the injustice that was being meted out to them.

The stilled hush that hung over the gaol was eloquent evidence of the state of affairs that prevailed within. Outside, a tall, lean, heavy-jowled man who rode a bicycle joined the group of people who were standing waiting, and after a fragment of conversation upon dismounting, he turned away from them and stood with his cycle on the fringe of the expectant crowd. His face was heavy and brooding. With a high-beaked nose and strongly jutting chin. The line of his jaw was clearly defined in its rigidity and his black eyes smouldered.

Several people in the knot of watchers noticed him and nudged others to a closer attention. Whispers passed from mouth to mouth concerning the man’s identity. But he paid no heed. He stood in silence, watching the high brick walls of the prison that separated the living from those about to die. He constantly looked at his watch. He accepted a handbill demanding the abolition of capital punishment, and he read the handbill before screwing it up and tossing it away. Beyond that, he made no movement.

At twenty minutes to nine, a detachment of the Salvation Army arrived, and a grey-bearded man, rallying his forces, led in prayer. The tall man flung a contemptuous glance in his direction. His long, upper lip curled disdainfully. But the man of blood and fire came to the end of the prayer and announced, with a strange enthusiasm, the first line of a hymn. The tall man who watched, wheeled his bicycle a few yards further away and his face contracted in a spasm of pain. He brushed his eyes with his hand.

The quavering voices of the singers rose in the hymn and, as though in protest, there came a burst of wind and flecks of stinging rain. The whole crowd, however, braved the weather. Coat-collars were turned up and caps pulled farther down . . . that was all that happened.

The Army sang on steadfastly and yet pathetically. The man by the bicycle gripped the handlebars and set his teeth. He had just glanced at his watch. The clock of Armley Gaol began to strike the hour. The crowd silently counted the nine strokes that quivered on the morning air.

One by one, each with a kind of shy, halting awkwardness, the men outside the prison removed their hats and caps, and stood bare-headed in the wind and rain, waiting for something which not one of them, if suddenly called upon, would have been able to describe adequately. A girl of the Army suddenly went on her knees.

Fifteen minutes of oppressive silence passed. The people who watched from outside seemed to have been placed under a spell, with the evil of the enchantment predominating. Except the tall man who stood by the bicycle. He was apart—in every sense of the word. Cut off from all of them. Separated and distinct. The part that he played was different from the parts that were being played by all the others.

He stood there in a state of splendid isolation. The forms of fear that during the night had filled the empty corridors of Armley Gaol now danced their grisly masque around him. He saw them clearly as they tripped on pointed tread and they mocked—alas—not the moon—but him.

Suddenly a door, that appeared from the distance to have been let into the prison wall, opened and a man came out. He held a paper in his hand. He turned his back on the silent crowd and affixed the paper to the door as a public notice. This accomplished, he returned to the prison by the way that he had come.

The more curious of the watching crowd surged forward.

“Sentence of death . . . passed upon Walter and Harper Fowles . . . was carried out . . .” Cold and stark and cruel were the words.

The Salvation Army leader raised his voice to lead in yet another prayer. Many of his comrades knelt with the girl who had knelt before.

The man who had stood apart raised his hand passionately to high heaven. His face was contorted with an emotion upon which it was not good for humanity to look. He mouthed words. But there was none near who could hear the words. Agony, hatred, and soul-crucifixion writhed and twisted on the man’s face, like the serpents that lashed themselves as the coils of Medusa’s hair. He stood there, an isolated figure, in the wind and rain under that angry, sullen sky.

After a time he put his cap back on his head and buttoned his coat more closely to him. His face now had changed. It had become the face of a man who had, after travail, dedicated his soul to a mighty purpose. The crowd watched him—wide-eyed and staring—as he hunched his shoulders and rode away.

At the inquest that was held upon the two brothers some hours later medical evidence stated with pontifical exactitude that “Death, in each instance, had been instantaneous.” When the Governor was asked by an indiscreet juror as to whether either, or both, of the condemned men had left a confession, he had replied that he was not required by duty to answer that question. He glared at the juryman as he made the statement.

Twenty-two miles away, the tall man wheeled his cycle into a shed and knocked at the door of a squalid house. A dark, slow-footed, heavy-browed woman came to the door. Her face looked as though every feeling had been mercilessly hammered out of it. Dull despair brooded in her eyes, and her cheeks were stained by tears.

She followed the man who had entered silently, into the kitchen.

“No miracle occurring—your boys have gone,” he said harshly.

She nodded, as an idiot nods. Then sat and wept silently with shuddering sobs.

“But the case, please God, hasn’t finished yet.”

“What do you mean?” she gasped wonderingly.

“Never mind what I mean! To-morrow is also a day.”

But the woman stared blankly and shook her head. She didn’t understand. What she did understand, though, terrified her . . . she was frozen in her grief for the sons of her womb.

CHAPTER III
THE SECOND PORTRAIT

The Rt. Honourable Albert S. Griggs, M.P., Secretary of State for Home Affairs, sat at ease and personal comfort in the library of his house at Great Astill in the county of Kent. If such a thing were possible, he exuded even more self-satisfaction than usual. At the particular moment of description, he found himself in the direct and lineal descent from the illustrious John Horner, the producer of plums.

He caught sight of his reflection in the mirror that hung opposite to him, and it says much for his condition that he actually extracted pleasure from the sight that he saw there. He had always been easily pleased in some dire...