Christopher Quarles: College Professor and Master Detective

by Percy James Brebner

CHAPTER VII
THE DEATH-TRAP IN THE TUDOR ROOM

I had not been to Chelsea for some weeks—indeed, I had not been in town, business having kept me in the country—and I returned to find a letter from Quarles which had been waiting for me for three days.

Several cases were in my hands just then—affairs of no great difficulty nor any particular interest—and only in one case had I had any worry. This trouble was due, not so much to the case itself as to the fact that it had brought me in contact with another detective named Baines, who would persist in treating me as a rival. He was as irritating as Quarles himself could be on occasion, and was entirely without the professor's genius. To be candid, I may admit Baines had some excuse. Circumstances brought me into the affair at the eleventh hour, and he was afraid I should reap where he had planted.

It was a strange business from first to last, and one I am never likely to forget.

A man, riding across an open piece of country near Aylesbury early one morning, came upon a motor cyclist lying near his machine on the roadside. The machine had been reduced to scrap-iron. The man, who was dressed in overalls, seemed to have been killed outright by a blow on the head. Since the man still wore his goggles, and there was no sign of a struggle, Baines argued, and reasonably, I think, that death was not the result of foul play. That he had been run into by a motor car, and that the people in the car had either not stopped to see what damage was done, or, having seen it, feared to give information, was perhaps giving too loose a rein to imagination.

However, this was Baines's idea; and he had succeeded in hearing of a car with only one man in it which had been driven through Aylesbury at a furious pace on the night when a second and similar tragedy occurred, this time near Saffron Walden.

The man had been killed in the same fashion, he wore goggles and overalls, and the machine was smashed, though not so completely. Neither of the men had been identified. In the first case, there might be a reason for this, as the man was a foreigner. In the second case, the man was an Englishman. Both the machines were old patterns, and of a cheap make, carried fictitious numbers, and Baines had been unable to find out where they had been purchased.

He held to his theory of the car, but was now inclined to think that the cyclists had been purposely driven into. Granted a certain shape of bonnet—and the car driven through Aylesbury appeared to have this shape—he contended that, in endeavoring to avoid the collision, a cyclist would be struck in exactly the manner indicated by the appearance of the head. He was therefore busy trying to trace a devil-mad motorist.

The discovery of a dead chauffeur on a lonely road near Newbury now brought me into the affair. He had apparently been killed in precisely the same manner as the victims of the Aylesbury and Saffron Walden tragedies; and so I was brought in contact with Baines. From the first he scorned my arguments and suggestions. It seemed to me that this third tragedy went to disprove his theory of a madly driven motor car, but he insisted that it was only a further proof. Was it not possible, he asked, that the mad owner of the car, believing that his chauffeur knew the truth, had killed him to protect himself? I asked him how he supposed the car had been driven at the chauffeur in order to injure him, exactly as it had injured men on cycles. When Baines answered that the chauffeur was probably on a cycle at the time, I wanted to know why, in this case, the motorist had gathered up the broken machine and taken it away. In short, we quarreled over the affair, and Baines was furious when I was able to prove that in neither case was the wrecked cycle a complete machine. True, in one case, only some trivial pieces were missing which might have been driven into the ground by the force of the fall; but in the other an important part was wanting, without which the machine could not have been driven.

I came to the conclusion that there had been foul play, that the broken machines were a blind, and that the men had been brought to the places where they were found after they were dead.