its ownership there was nothing unusual about the room where she was found. It smelled faintly of pot-pourri, and its charming furniture included some delightful period pieces. Its china and pictures had quality, its carpet was Chinese and its chairs were Chesterfield-soft and seductive.
Then there was the woman, in a charming afternoon frock, with a face like a surprised Madonna and hair like an aureola. She was wearing about a thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery, which would unquestionably have proved tempting, in short, to a burglar. There was no blood, no signs of a struggle. No vulgarity, but everything quiet and restrained, except for that deadly circle around her neck. Even the murderer was only a part of that general background—a quiet man, writing peacefully at a Queen Anne bureau.
Later, of course, there was to be the comparative vulgarity of a trial, even if it ended in a matter of minutes with the knowledge that the murderer was hopelessly insane. And the reason of it all—let me repeat—was a letter that was written to The Times.
To get to that letter we must leave the charm of that drawing-room in Hampstead and come nearer town to Porter Street, Mornington Crescent. In Victorian times the Crescent had dignity and aloofness. Porter Street still retained something of that dignity even if its Georgian houses had become offices and flats. It was in one of these flats that Lutley Prentisse was working on a certain June morning.
It would be more true to say that he should have been working. In front of his swivel chair were table and typewriter but he sat there with the tips of his fingers together and his brow wrinkled in thought. You would have needed no particular shrewdness to have guessed that he was a writer.
But he was a writer with a difference. His name was far from well-known. He had three novels to his credit, two having as their theme extramarital intrigue and the other concerned with one of those coteries to be found on the French Riviera. The last only had sold quite well—a matter of gratification to its author purely from pride of workmanship. Money is always useful, but his private income was about two thousand a year after taxes, and the handsome royalties he received from his publisher made no great difference.
The fact of the matter was that he had drifted into writing almost without knowing it, and primarily to escape from boredom. The first two years after his marriage had been a routine of which he had tired—Switzerland in mid-winter, the Riviera in Spring, golf in England in the summer and weekends at various house parties, with a week or two at Deauville or Le Touquet in early autumn. After that town—the club, theatres and the multitudinous rush and jigsaw fitting-in from morning till night.
All that was the life that suited Dorothy Prentisse so well. At golf Lutley was a shaky sixteen. She could give a low handicap man a good game and from the men’s tees at that. Her tennis was almost first-class. She played a really good hand at bridge—a bit aggressive, perhaps, but rarely a loser unless cards and partners were impossible. Lutley was a cautious bidder if ever there was one. He was good, however, for what he said, and never less.
But he took things less seriously. In golf the game counted, not the figures—or at least that was how things had been before his marriage. Maybe it was the almost venomous earnestness with which Dorothy did things that first began to make them pall.
In some ways you might have thought them an ill-sorted couple. He was short and sturdy, with quiet brown eyes, and a kind of intellectual shyness. She was tall for a woman, handsome in a glittering way and with qualities that would have made for attractiveness only to a man quite different from Prentisse—knowledge of the jargons and sporting chatter, and with it that shrewd judgment that knows when to be only a highly ornamental background.
At Cambridge Lutley had read history and, until his marriage, had contributed occasionally to various reviews. That particular writing had been a part of his leisure, but later, when the hectic life of his first married years had begun to seem aimless and even boring, he had thought with regret of the pleasure his earlier labours had given him. Out of it had come his attempt at a first novel, and its publication.
All this was just before the last war when money was money and life less demanding. As for his marriage, he had met Dorothy at the house of George Foster, an old Cambridge friend, and it so happened that she had been at school with George’s wife, Miriam. Dorothy’s father had just died—he had been vicar of Purfield Warren—and she had come into a reasonable sum of money.
Six months after that first meeting they were married. He was then thirty-one and she twenty-eight, though she claimed to be younger. It was a love match on his side if not on hers. Her friends agreed that he had married a most attractive woman, her enemies that she had done exceptionally well for herself. But it would have been hard to judge objectively the success or otherwise of that marriage. Lutley, one could see through: the woman he had wed was far more inscrutable. In public a softly-murmured ‘Darling!’ and a playful tap are no particular signs, especially when the other hand holds a liqueur glass drained for the eighth time.
When Prentisse at first, and almost surreptitiously, returned to his writing, his wife seemed neither to mind nor to be interested. After all, she had plenty of outside interests. On her first discovery of his new activity it had been: ‘Darling, how frightfully clever of you!’ and then, at intervals, ‘Oh, you poor dear, I hate to see you working so hard! Why don’t you stop now and rest?’ Then, on the publication of his first novel, ‘Darling, it’s too frightfully thrilling for anything!’
Thereafter it might have been said by the unkind that her tolerance or possible encouragement of his efforts was not unconnected with material considerations. But Prentisse apparently doted on her and generously provided that his earnings should be hers in the form of special presents.
But the Spring of 1947 had seen a slight deterioration in the warmth and closeness of their relationship. He was engaged on a new book which he definitely knew was good, and he refused to take his work to the Riviera. Dorothy had however kept to the routine and had gone to Menton with a small circle of friends that included Peter Claire and Miriam Foster.
Claire, a handsome, country club type man of about thirty-five, was a very old friend. Prentisse, in his own undemonstrative way, was very fond of him. The Prentisses saw a lot of him when he was in town and he often dined at the Hampstead house.
It was because he did not want to keep that house open during his wife’s absence that Prentisse had taken that Porter Street flat. Dorothy was away till the very end of May and then something happened. Her only sister had been taken seriously ill and she had gone down to Carnford to be with her.
That was not so unsettling for Prentisse as it might have been, for the book was not quite finished. A few days would see it with the publisher and he stayed on at the flat. In the morning he usually put in his best work, but that particular morning he was annoyed, and worried over what seemed a very trivial thing.
Before him was the morning’s edition of The Times and it was at a certain letter that he was scowling. A policeman had written rather indignantly on the treatment of his profession by writers of detective novels. The police, he affirmed, were treated like buffoons and authors rarely troubled to make themselves familiar with the real workings of either Scotland Yard or the C.I.D. departments of provincial forces.
But it was not the police and their methods that were worrying Lutley Prentisse, but the whole principle which the letter called in question. He himself had always been careful to use in his books such local colour as had been familiar and things with which he had had at least a working acquaintance, but in that novel, now almost finished, he had brought in something with which he was not familiar at all—a private detective agency.
The chapter that dealt with it had been written and he had taken a great deal for granted, not caring much whether or not an absolute verisimilitude had been achieved. A detective agency, for instance, would have an office. Well, such offices were surely pretty much alike, and in his novel its appearance had been guessed at. And so with the head of the firm, and the conversation, and all the things that go to make what one calls local colour.
Some people would have regarded the whole thing as utterly unimportant. There could be little connection between that letter and the chapter in question. They