Seven Dead Read online

  Seven Dead

  J. Jefferson Farjeon

  With an Introduction

  by Martin Edwards

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Originally published in 1939 by Collins

  © 1939 The Estate of J. Jefferson Farjeon

  Introduction copyright © 2018 Martin Edwards

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library

  First E-book Edition 2018

  ISBN: 9781464209093 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

  Seven Dead

  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

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  More from this Author

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  Introduction

  J. Jefferson Farjeon’s most precious literary gift, his ability to conjure up atmospheric and compelling scenarios, was never more vividly displayed than in Seven Dead. It is a challenge to think of any opening situation in a crime novel more extraordinary than that which Ted Lyte discovers after climbing through a back window of Haven House. Ted is a petty thief and pickpocket who plucks up the courage to try his hand at housebreaking. One of the windows of the apparently deserted house is shuttered, and its door is closed, with a key in the lock. When he turns the key, he is greeted by a sight as shocking as it is bizarre.

  Seven dead people, six men and one woman, are in the shuttered room, “revealed with a cruel starkness by the unnatural artificial light”. Two of the men are dressed like sailors; the solitary female corpse is wearing a man’s clothes: “She might have been attractive once. She was not attractive now.” As Detective Inspector Kendall observes, “This has Madame Tussaud’s beaten. I expect they’d like it for their Chamber of Horrors.” As Kendall says, the seven people are “emaciated, filthily clothed, ill assorted, and with nothing on any of them to identify any one of them”. The mystery deepens when a crumpled piece of paper is found, bearing an enigmatic message: With apologies from the Suicide Club. An even more cryptic clue is written in pencil on the other side of the sheet. And on the wall of the dining room hangs a picture of a pretty young girl—but a bullet has been put through her heart.

  Kendall has been taken to the scene by Ted Lyte, in the company of a young man called Thomas Hazeldean whom Ted encountered during his terrified flight from Haven House. Kendall previously appeared in Farjeon’s Thirteen Guests—another title in the British Library’s series of Crime Classics—and Hazeldean contrasts him with the type of Great Detective so popular in the fiction of the time: “What I liked about him was that he didn’t play the violin, or have a wooden leg, or anything of that sort. He just got on with it.”

  Kendall was, then, conceived as a relatively realistic police detective, rather as Farjeon’s contemporary Freeman Wills Crofts conceived his series cop, Inspector Joseph French. But Farjeon was much less interested than Crofts in chronicling the minutiae of painstaking police procedure. His imagination was more vivid and romantic, and Seven Dead is by no means a conventional story of a police investigation. Much of the story focuses on Hazeldean’s own search for the truth. This young fellow, a journalist and a yachtsman, is driven by his fascination with the girl in the picture. She is now a young woman, Dora Fenner, a member of the family which owns Haven House, and it seems that she has, for reasons unknown, fled across the Channel to Boulogne. On impulse, Hazeldean sails for France in the hope of finding her and solving the mystery.

  Intriguingly, this concept of a sleuth who becomes obsessed with a painting of a young and beautiful member of the opposite sex resurfaced—just three years after Seven Dead was published—in a much more famous story, Laura by Vera Caspary, which in 1944 was adapted into a notable film noir. The two stories could scarcely be more different, but the coincidence is striking.

  Seven Dead appeared at a time when Farjeon was at the peak of his popularity, but inevitably his reputation faded with the passage of time, and has only revived following the republication of titles such as Mystery in White, Thirteen Guests and The Z Murders in the Crime Classics series. One of the pleasures associated with my role as Series Consultant to the British Library has been the chance to talk to family members and others associated with the literary estates of writers of the past, and these discussions have expanded my knowledge and understanding of the lives and work of authors who certainly deserve to be remembered.

  Joseph Jefferson Farjeon (1883–1955) is a case in point. His estate is now in the care of Edward Vandyck, who has kindly shared with me a memoir written by Alison Coate, who had a lifelong friendship with the Farjeon family, and in particular Joe Farjeon and his daughter Joan. Alison describes Farjeon—whose father, Benjamin, was himself a successful writer—as acutely sensitive, gentle, and unselfish, but also as a chronic worrier who was deeply troubled by the hatred he felt for his father’s fiery outbursts of temper. Joe was a capable sportsman in his schooldays, with a particular love of cricket that is reflected in Seven Dead by the presence of a cricket ball in Haven House—yet another of the mysterious clues to the puzzle.

  Prompted by his father, Joe Farjeon took up acting, but he soon realised that his nervous temperament was ill-suited to a career on the stage. He fell in love with an American girl, Frances Antoinette (“Fan”) Wood, and they married in 1910; Joan was born three years later. He was deemed physically unfit for service in the First World War, and struggled to earn a living as a journalist before trying his hand at fiction and writing plays. He turned the corner as a result of the success of No. 17, a play that was filmed twice; he also later novelised it.

  “Yet even at the height of his success”, Alison Coates wrote, “Joe’s fear of not being able to earn enough drove him on. He was rarely far from his typewriter.” He became a prolific novelist, but kept striving to ensure that his standards never slipped, and was meticulous in checking his work for errors. His professionalism meant that his fiction was generally a cut above that of many of his peers, who were more willing to sacrifice quality in the pursuit of quantity. And, though his books were for many years out of print, there is an eternal appeal about the gift of storytelling, a gift which Joe Farjeon possessed in full measure—as this unorthodox mystery illustrates in the liveliest fashion.

  Martin Ed
wards

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  Chapter I

  Behind the Shutters

  This is not Ted Lyte’s story. He merely had the excessive misfortune to come into it, and to remain in it longer than he wanted. Had he adopted Cardinal Wolsey’s advice and flung away ambition, continuing to limit his illegal acts to the petty pilfering and pickpocketing at which he was fairly expert, he would have spared himself on this historic Saturday morning the most horrible moment of his life. The moment was so horrible that it deprived him temporarily of his senses. But he was not a prophet; all he could predict of the future was the next instant, and that often wrongly; and the open gate, with the glimpse beyond of the shuttered window, tempted him.

  He hadn’t had much luck lately. He had been brooding on that dismal fact while searching for flotsam and jetsam along the deserted shore. Pretty well all he had found there was mud, and it was mud, coupled perhaps with the depressing sound of a fog-horn out at sea, that had driven him inland near Havenford Creek. But a shuttered window suggested brighter possibilities. It suggested an unoccupied house. If he could summon a little courage—it was lack of courage that prevented him from becoming a Napoleon of his trade—he might find a bit of all right behind those shutters! Wot abart it?

  He glanced up and down the lane. The glance was satisfactory. Not a soul in sight. Not even a house—beyond this one. He glanced again at the open gate. It was swinging slightly on faintly squeaking hinges. Nasty sound. Almost as nasty as the fog-horn. Ted was susceptible to any form of nastiness just now, for it was a long while since his last square meal, and an empty stomach plays havoc with your manhood. Still, till you lived in a world where people looked after you, you had to work for your living.

  So he took a breath and trespassed. Now he was beyond the gate, standing on gravel, and the gate was squeaking behind him instead of ahead of him. It was not nice smooth gravel. It was rough, with weeds growing out of it. It looped round an untidy plot of grass. You could go round whichever way you chose to the front porch—if you chose. Ted wasn’t quite sure whether you chose. As he stared at the house, the house—two-storeyed, grey-bricked, half-dressed in dilapidated vines—stared back with one eye closed. The closed eye was the shuttered window on the right of the porch. There was no shutter over the window on the left. The uninvited guest got an unpleasant sensation that the house was winking at him.

  Still, other signs were more favourable. There was no movement anywhere. There was no chimney-smoke. There was no dog. These omissions were too valuable to ignore in the state of the exchequer, and they decided him to take the risk. All that remained, therefore, was to find the way to get in.

  He gave a quick glance behind him, to make sure that the short length of visible lane beyond the swinging gate was still empty, then hastened round the path to the porch. The front door, of course, was no good to him. Nor was the shuttered window. All the other windows in the front of the house were closed and locked, and he hesitated to break one till he had exhausted other less noisy possibilities. Not being a professional house-breaker, he had no implements to assist him. A professional could have sliced a circle out of the glass in a jiffy.

  In the hope of finding an open window he went round the house. On the left was a narrow way between the wall and a high hedge, but somehow or other he didn’t like the look of it, and chose a lawn on the right. The lawn stretched from the house to a long tangle of dark trees, and a french window opened on to it. The french window, like the window on the right of the front porch, was shuttered behind its glass.

  “Wunner why they’ve shuttered one side of the ’ouse and not t’other?” ruminated Ted.

  Had he known the reason, his knees would not have carried him any farther.

  In happy ignorance, he passed the french window. The lawn, which needed scything, extended beyond the back of the house, ending at a little gate that led into a wood. Beyond the wood was the low cliff that dropped to Havenford Creek. But Ted was not interested in the scenery or the geography; it was the house itself that grimly fascinated him, and at the back, to his pleasant surprise, he found what he was looking for. A little window had not been securely fastened, and on being pushed inwards, it provided an aperture just large enough for a small man to slip through.

  Ted was a small man, and fifteen seconds after the discovery he had dropped on to a scullery floor.

  His first sensation was of intense relief. When you are breaking into a house you feel as though the whole world is watching you, but once you have entered, the world is shut outside. You pause for a few seconds to get back your breath and to enjoy the comforting privacy of close walls. To a man of Ted’s fragile calibre, however, the sense of comfort is short-lived; and once he had fully realised that he had achieved his object of getting into the house, the next urgent object appeared to be to get out of it. Still, if he were ever to look himself in the face again, never the most cheering of occupations, he could not leave until he had secured some sort of a prize.

  Sitting on his impulse to fly before the occasion demanded it, he stole softly out of the scullery. He did not need a plan of the house to find the larder. Instinct took him there, and appetite kept him there. For a few minutes Ted Lyte was completely happy. In fact, cheese and bread make such a difference to a man that when he emerged he did not see why he should not benefit by a handful of silver spoons as well. He knew a fellow who got rid of all the silver spoons you could find for him.

  Leaving the larder quarters, he crept into the front hall. Here, ahead of him, was the front door at which he had stared so anxiously from the gravel path outside. How much bigger the door looked now—funny that—somehow. And here, on each side of him, was a door. And there were the stairs.

  Well—which? The doors or the stairs? Silver below and jewellery above. That was the way of it, wasn’t it? Why not both?

  The cheese was operating.

  He moved towards the staircase. Get the top done first and work downwards. Yes, that was it! But something worried him as he reached the staircase and put his soiled boot on the first worn stair, and he paused. What was worrying him?

  He paused for five anxious seconds trying to discover what was worrying him. Not knowing was the worst worry of the lot! It wasn’t just the silence, was it? No. He wanted silence. It wasn’t the opposite, then—a noise? Had he heard a noise? He listened so hard that it hurt, even clenching his teeth with the idea that that would help. He heard nothing. The silence persisted. Not that. Was it the sort of heavy, suffocating atmosphere? No, again. Any one doing this kind of a job for the first time would feel a bit weak and wobbly. Even after half a pound of bolted cheddar.

  Ah! Got it! He knew what it was. With a novice’s inefficiency he was doing this the wrong way about. Get downstairs done first, and work up! What had worried him was that somebody might pop out of one of these doors while he was on the top floor, and then he’d be caught. Mug!

  Of the two doors, one was ajar, and the other was closed, with the key in the lock. The door that was ajar was on his right. That would be the unshuttered front window. The door with the key was on his left. That would be the shuttered room. He had turned round from the stairs, and now had his back to them while studying the geography.

  He went first to the room with the door ajar. After listening at the crack, he pushed the door wide and looked into a dining-room. In his hurry to get to the sideboard he tripped, caught hold of a chair and went over with it. The sound of the fall was thunderous. He felt sure it could be heard for miles around. But it produced no disastrous results, so he picked himself up, sucked a scraped knuckle, and completed the interrupted journey to the sideboard.

  The sideboard drawers yielded a small harvest. He left the room with a dozen silver spoons and forks added to his normal meagre weight.

  Was this enough? Yes. That tumble had shaken him, and the fog-horn had started up again—he could just hear it
moaning its two mournful notes in the distance—and the heavy suffocating quality of the atmosphere seemed to be increasing. Yes, quite enough. He had filled his stomach well and his pockets modestly, and this kind of thing wasn’t really in his line.

  But as he looked at the door with the key, the itch of curiosity got hold of him, and he found himself moving towards it. That shuttered room—he’d have to take just a peep. It was the shutters that had first drawn his attention to the house. There might be something interesting behind them, and he was no longer worried by the question of an occupant. If there had been any one in the room, or the house, the noise of that fall in the dining-room would have brought them along!

  Maybe he’d find an ornament or two to add to the forks and spoons.

  He turned the handle. The door did not open. Locked. He turned the key. Now the door opened.

  He had expected darkness. He looked into a blaze of electric light…

  Ted Lyte never remembered leaving that house. The next thing he remembered was being out of it; and, as if he had not been given horror enough, he woke into a fresh nightmare. As he sped to the gate that still swung and groaned on its rusty hinges he heard footsteps speeding after him.

  The shock of this produced a second period of oblivion, and once again he swooned mentally, although his legs kept on running. Had there been any spectators of this unique race, they might have imagined they were witnessing a new form of paper-chase, in which the trail was spoons and forks instead of paper. Ted’s pockets were plentifully supplied with holes, and in the violence of his flight he shed much ballast. But there were no spectators on that lonely lane. For half a mile, pursued and pursuer had the road to themselves.

  During the first part of the race Ted looked like winning. His velocity was volcanic, which was not surprising, since he imagined he was being pursued by Death itself. Then his pursuer gained ground, and gradually the gap between them shortened. It was the sound of the footsteps close behind him that finally brought him to and inspired his last frenzied spurt. He spurted into the widespread arms of a new enemy, who loomed abruptly ahead. He found himself flattened against a massive chest. His pursuer, shooting into his back, completed the sandwich.