Peril at Cranbury Hall

By John Rhode and Curtis Evans

A shady operator is targeted for death and needs help from a professor with an “uncanny ability to ferret out the truth” (The New York Times).
 
An expert in alternative medicine is creating a clinic in Cranbury Hall that promises to cure fatigue, and Arnold Gilroy is happy to invest in this promising moneymaking venture.
 
Unfortunately, his brother Oliver has just finished a stint in prison for fraud—and has weaseled his way into running Cranbury Hall while pursuing some nefarious business on the side. Before long, he’s been grazed by a bullet—and Dr. Lancelot Priestley will have to step in before the killer strikes again, with more success this time, in this Golden Age British mystery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Jan 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781504072816

John Rhode

John Rhode was born Cecil John Charles Street in 1884. He was the author of 140 novels under the names John Rhode, Miles Burton, and Cecil Wade before his death in 1964.

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Introduction

by Curtis Evans

During the Golden Age of detective fiction, which spanned the years between the first and second world wars, England’s Maj. Cecil John Charles Street was one of the best-known and most accomplished writers of classical, puzzle-oriented mystery tales. Under his most famous pseudonym, the punning John Rhode, John Street was especially admired for his fiendishly clever, yet scientifically rigorous murder methods.

If Major Street’s drinking buddy and fellow detective novelist, the ingenious American expatriate John Dickson Carr, was the Golden Age’s lord of the locked room mystery, Street himself was vintage mystery’s master of murder means. The murder plots Street intricately devised in his John Rhode tales typically revolve around diabolically deadly applications of science and engineering; they are in the impeccable manner of his lauded predecessor R. Austin Freeman, creator of the greatest rival of Sherlock Holmes, medical jurist Dr. John Thorndyke.

For Golden Age readers interested in credible scientific detection of material facts, Street’s John Rhode was, along with Anglo-Irish railroad engineer Freeman Wills Crofts and Scottish chemist Alfred Walter Stewart (aka J. J. Connington), the preeminent mystery author of his generation. Golden Age crime writer and critic E. R. Punshon tellingly dubbed John Rhode Public Brain Tester No. 1.

The man who became John Rhode was born in Gibraltar on May 3, 1884, the son of Gen. John Alfred Street, a veteran of the First Opium and Crimean Wars who for five years in the 1870s had commanded British forces in Ceylon, and the general’s much younger second wife, Caroline Maria Bill, a daughter of wealthy landed gentleman, Charles Horsfall Bill. Young John’s father enjoyed but a brief retirement in England, passing away somewhat suddenly at his residence Uplands in Woking, Surrey, in 1889, when John was only five. Caroline Street thereupon relocated with John to live with her father at nearby Firlands, a home comfortably staffed with seven domestics.

For a time John Street followed in his distinguished late father’s martial footsteps, graduating from Wellington College (originally founded to educate sons of deceased army officers) and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and receiving a commission from the Royal Artillery in 1903. However, at twenty-two he transferred from the regular army into the special reserves three years later. That same year Street wed twenty-four-year-old Hyacinth Maud Kirwan, a daughter of a major in the Royal Artillery.

Although possessed of ample private means, Street—who since adolescence had been fascinated with mechanics and applied science (on his father’s side of the family he descended from Rev. John Jardine, a noted figure in the Scottish Enlightenment)—spent the years before the outbreak of the First World War as chief engineer of the Lyme Regis Electric Light & Power Company.

After killing shots were fired at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, and the great nations of Europe went to war in August, England called John Street back into military service. Perhaps for Street public conflict provided relief from private sorrows. Performing with bravery and distinction on the western front as a forward observation officer in the Royal Garrison Artillery, special reserve, Captain Street was wounded three times and received the Military Cross. From April to November 1918, Street, having been promoted to the rank of major, headed the MI7b, a branch of British Military Intelligence devoted to the production of press propaganda and the study of foreign presses. He later served as an information officer at the headquarters of the British administration in Ireland, Dublin Castle, between 1919 and 1921, where he controversially became what one Irish authority has called the senior British propagandist in Dublin Castle during the Black and Tan War [or Irish War of Independence].

During the Great War, Street revealed a literary bent in 1916 publishing two well-received volumes of memoirs of his frontline experiences in the conflict, With the Guns and The Making of a Gunner, which he followed with a semi-autobiographical war novel in 1917, The Worldly Hope. After returning to England in 1921, Street began publishing books on contemporary European politics, reflecting his recent immersion in intelligence work. (Today he might have become a frequent guest on 24/7 cable news programs and even, heaven forbid, a serial tweeter.)

1924 presaged a pivotal shift in Street’s writing career when he published, in addition to the political treatises East of Prague and The Treachery of France, two crime thrillers, A. S. F. and The Double Florin, the latter under the pseudonym John Rhode, an obvious play on his own surname.

With the emergence of his first Dr. Lancelot Priestley detective novel, The Paddington Mystery, the following year, Street firmly established his career as a mystery writer. Over the next thirty-five years he would produce, primarily under his two major pseudonyms, John Rhode and Miles Burton, over 140 mystery novels (mostly classical tales of detection), an average rate of four a year, making him one of the most prolific pure detective fiction writers in the history of the genre.

Priestley, the series detective in most of the seventy-seven John Rhode novels, is an acerbic and disputatious scientist (a mathematician in the earliest novels) with a penchant, not unknown in learned gentlemen in detective fiction of his day, for amateur crime investigation. Likely, Street derived his greatest detective’s surname, in a nod to the Age of Enlightenment, from eighteenth-century English chemist and natural philosopher Joseph Priestley, author of The History and Present State of Electricity (1767).

In the earlier Priestley novels the elderly doctor is ambulatory and gets out to inspect crime scenes himself, along with his loyal secretary, Harold Merefield (who is also Priestley’s son-in-law, having married the widowed scientist’s flippant flapper daughter, April, who then promptly vanished from the books). Later on in the series, however, Priestley becomes almost entirely a classic armchair sleuth, a thinking machine brilliantly elucidating the complex criminal problems brought before him by his attendant policemen: Inspector (later Superintendent) Hanslet and, as the series progresses, Hanslet’s younger, posher, college-educated underling, James Jimmy Waghorn, who over the course of the series falls in love, marries, and becomes a superintendent himself.

Two other characters who appear multiple times in the John Rhode novels are eminent pathologist Sir Alured Faversham and Dr. Mortimer Oldland, the latter of whom eventually comes to serve, along with a now-retired Hanslet, as a participant in Priestley’s weekly post-prandial ratiocinative round tables. During these, the trio of inquisitive old men, with Harold and Jimmy in devoted attendance, analyze Waghorn’s latest murder investigations (if deemed sufficiently intriguing). Invariably the dogged Priestly sagely guides Waghorn to the criminal culprit, after having chided him for having fallen yet again for the fatal allure of conjecture.

After the Great War, Major Street found happiness with another, more congenial woman in his life: Eileen Annette Waller, a daughter of a prominent native Irish electrical and civil engineer. John and Eileen enjoyed a peripatetic life together, residing snugly in a series of villages in southern and central England and taking leisurely cruises in the Baltic, Mediterranean, and Caribbean Seas. The couple, who married after Maud Street’s demise in 1949, remained together until John’s own death at the age of eighty on December 8, 1964. England’s grand old man of mystery remained remarkably productive until near the end of his life, publishing his last Priestley detective novel in 1961, just three years before his passing. Indeed, so immense was John Street’s plotting capacity that he once drolly invited mystery writer Christianna Brand, a brilliant younger comember of the Detection Club who confessed to him that she was suffering from writer’s block: My dear, come down to my place—I’ve got rows and rows of my books, look though them and use one of my plots, you’re most welcome. Unquestionably the good major had murderous imagination to spare.

Chapter 1

Mr. Gilroy’s office was situated in the very centre of that curious labyrinth which lies to the eastward of Fetter Lane, between Fleet Street and Holborn. You approached it by a narrow alley, running between high walls on either side, which echoed your footsteps as though you were passing through a tunnel. Set in one of these walls was an inconspicuous door, hearing a pitted brass plate. And on this plate was engraved in old-fashioned characters the words Gilroy, Archer and Gilroy, Solicitors.

The alley was dignified by the name of Yeoman’s Court, and above the door the number 7 was carved upon the stone lintel. Why these things were so was beyond conjecture. The alley had long since ceased to bear any resemblance to a court, and the high walls which enclosed it were unbroken but for the door of Mr. Gilroy’s office. From behind them came the dull roar of machinery, for this was the very heart of the printing trade.

It had never occurred to Mr. Gilroy to move to a more fashionable neighbourhood. The firm of Gilroy had been established in Yeoman’s Court in the days when the City of London was a residential district, and had remained there ever since. The original Gilroy had lived in the upper floors of Number 7 above his office. His descendants had continued to do so, until a more than usually enterprising Gilroy had removed his personal possessions to a house in the aristocratic suburb of Dulwich, somewhere in the middle of the last century.

The present Mr. Gilroy hated change. He had inherited the business, the office in Yeoman’s Court, the house in Dulwich, and had settled into them without making any alterations in their traditional routine. He was a man close upon fifty, a widower without children. In appearance he was short, inclined to stoutness, and his rather heavy face was puckered with wrinkles. His chief occupation was to enjoy the good things of life, and he secretly regarded his profession rather as a hobby than as his principal object in life. He could afford to do so, for his predecessors had accumulated considerable profits from their services to their clients, which had been invested in unimpeachable securities. Mr. Gilroy had no inclination to add to this capital by his own labours. He was content to enjoy the income, and he did so to the last penny.

The still powerful sun of a late summer afternoon poured into Yeoman’s Court, and the narrow alley radiated heat from its brick walls and stone flags. Mr. Gilroy, returning from a prolonged lunch, mopped his brow with an air of irritation as he paused outside the door of Number 7. He had been a fool for not staying at home on such a day. There was very little for him to do in the office, and the pleasant house at Dulwich would have been deliciously cool and restful. He rang the bell impatiently, and barely nodded at the clerk who opened it. But the man, having closed the door, stepped deferentially up to his employer. Dr. Richards is waiting to see you, sir, he said. I showed him into your room. He’s been waiting there about ten minutes.

At the sound of the name a slight frown passed rapidly across Mr. Gilroy’s features. Tom Richards was an old friend and client of his, and at any other time he would have been delighted to see him. But there was a certain significance about his visit to the office just now. Mr. Gilroy had very little doubt that he had come to discuss an unpleasant subject, a subject which for the past month or more he had done his best to exclude from his thoughts. And Mr. Gilroy, lover of ease as he was, hated unpleasant subjects almost as much as he hated personal discomfort.

However, he merely nodded. With a firm step he walked across the hall, and opened the panelled door of his private office. It was a large and lofty room, thickly carpeted, and furnished with a massive polished table and several very comfortable chairs. One wall was occupied by a glass-fronted bookcase, containing row upon row of bulky books bound in leather. Opposite this, arranged in neat piles, were dozens of enamelled tin boxes, on which were painted the names of long-deceased clients of the firm. It was rarely that Mr. Gilroy opened either the bookcase or the boxes. They stood there mainly to impress clients; the outward and visible sign of the solicitor’s profession.

As Mr. Gilroy opened the door, a man sitting in one of the chairs looked up sharply. Dr. Almayne Richards appeared very much younger than Mr. Gilroy, although, as a matter of fact, there were not more than two or three years between their ages. Dr. Richards was tall, with a spare and active frame which enhanced his tallness. His carefully brushed black hair surmounted a sharp and alert face, from which a pair of dark eyes looked out searchingly. The whole aspect of the man radiated efficiency, an efficiency which inspired immediate confidence in the constant stream of patients which thronged his consulting-room in Harley Street.

The rise to fame of Dr. Thomas Almayne Richards had been almost meteoric. He had had no private means of his own, and, having qualified in his profession, he could afford nothing better than to establish himself in an obscure country practice. In this inconspicuous niche he had remained for a dozen years or so, until one day, to the astonishment of everybody, he sold his practice and appeared in Harley Street, announcing that he had saved sufficient money to justify this new venture. Money he certainly had, or he could never have survived the expense of the first couple of years after his removal. But it was not immediately apparent how he had saved it out of his practice in a small provincial town.

Dr. Richards had begun his Harley Street venture about seven years before his present visit to Mr. Gilroy’s office. He was now an eminently successful physician. Society, male and female, but mostly female, flocked to his doors, and was followed by those who strove to ape the ways of Society. But, in spite of this recognition on the part of the public, Dr. Richards had somehow failed to secure the approval of the medical profession. Not that this worried him. He laughingly ascribed the cause to jealousy, and pointed to the long list of distinguished names in his appointment book. After all, his business in life was to attract patients.

Mr. Gilroy, seeing his visitor, greeted him cordially, but not without a shade of anxiety in his tone. Hullo, Tom, I didn’t expect to see you here! he exclaimed. It’s very good of you to come and look me up. I thought you were tied to your consulting-room.

I’m finishing a week’s holiday, or I certainly should not have had time to hang about here, waiting for you to finish your lunch, replied Dr. Richards. As I’ve often told you, you do yourself too well. You ought to put yourself in my hands, Arnold. In a month I’d make you fitter than you’ve ever been in your life.

I can’t afford your fees, remarked Mr. Gilroy, dryly, as he sat down in a chair before the table. However, I don’t suppose that you came here to talk about my health. As I know you’re a busy man, suppose we get to business.

There was a moment’s pause, during which the frown on Mr. Gilroy’s face deepened. He dreaded the subject that he felt sure his visitor was about to raise, but, since there was no escape, he had made up his mind to face it as cheerfully as he could. Dr. Richards, however, drew an expensive cigar from his case and lighted it carefully before replying.

You remember Professor Verclaes, of course? he asked suddenly.

Mr. Gilroy moved uneasily in his chair. I know the name, he replied slowly. It’s been in the papers fairly often during the last year or two. But I don’t think I’ve met the man himself. He paused awkwardly. Hasn’t he got a daughter? he blurted out suddenly.

He has a daughter, Muriel, said Dr. Richards. But we are not concerned with her for the moment. You say that you’ve seen Professor Verclaes’ name in the papers. In that case, you probably know that he is an eminent research worker, and that he has from time to time made certain sensational discoveries, which have led to the new treatment of various diseases. For instance, he claims to have discovered that fatigue, both mental and physical, is due to a toxin, and that it is possible to prevent it by inoculation. The popular Press made quite a feature of his announcement a short time ago.

Yes, I remember reading something about it not very long ago, replied Mr. Gilroy. I wondered if there was anything in it. I find that I get terribly tired myself after a long and busy day in the office this weather.

You eat and drink too much, remarked Dr. Richards brutally. It’s your digestion that gets tired, not your brain. However, that’s your business, not mine. To return to Professor Verclaes. He’s a Belgian by birth, and most of his early life was spent on the Continent. He married an Englishwoman, who died when their only child was six or seven years old. At the outbreak of war he came to live in England, where he has been ever since.

Mr. Gilroy nodded. The trend which the conversation was taking puzzled him. Dr. Richards glanced at the solicitor and smiled.

You’ll see what I’m driving at in a moment, he said. While I was still practising in the country I met Professor Verclaes, whose research was at that time greatly hampered for want of money. I managed to—to put him in the way of securing funds, and he has been very grateful to me ever since. He has frequently informed me of his discoveries some time before they were publicly announced.

No doubt you found your connection with Professor Verclaes very useful? suggested Mr. Gilroy.

Very, replied Dr. Richards. But it is this latest theory of his in which I am particularly interested, this inoculation, against fatigue. Why, man, even you must see that there’s a fortune in it!

Then, in your opinion, this treatment fulfils all the claims that Verclaes makes for it? exclaimed Mr. Gilroy eagerly.

Dr. Richards shrugged his shoulders. That I really can’t say, he replied dryly. Jo be quite frank with you, Arnold, I don’t think it matters much, one way or the other. The British public is quite prepared to support any fad, provided that it is sufficiently well advertised. I spend half my life recommending things to my patients, not because they will do them any good, but because it pleases the people who come to me to take a remedy that happens to be the fashion.

Again Mr. Gilroy nodded, this time with a knowing smile.

Now, see how Verclaes’ theory suits my patients, continued Dr. Richards. The great majority of them have nothing on earth the matter with them. All they want is good wholesome work, and because they have never tried that simple remedy, they complain of being so tired that they can hardly stand up. Now, perhaps, you see what a gold-mine there is in this idea of Verclaes’!

Of course, replied Mr. Gilroy. You inoculate them, and charge a thundering fee for doing so.

But Dr. Richards shook his head impatiently. You’re not within a mile of it, he said. Simple inoculation would be no good, it wouldn’t carry enough conviction with it. If the idea is to catch on, it must involve a regular course of treatment. Verclaes must open a home, to which patients are sent to undergo the anti-fatigue treatment. I should think that a fortnight’s course at a couple of hundred guineas, would suit most of them.

But surely your patients wouldn’t pay all that to go into a home, where they would be subject to all sorts of restrictions! exclaimed Mr. Gilroy.

The whole point of the home would lie in the absence of restrictions, replied Dr. Richards. It would, in fact, be a sort of combined hotel and casino, disguised as a private house. In a private house you can do what you like, drink cocktails all night, or play baccarat or any other game that takes your fancy. Of course, no charge would be made for drinks or amusements; they would all form part of the cure. Can’t you see what a success the place would be? I should begin by sending all my best known patients there, and the whole of the fashionable world would follow them like sheep.

Mr. Gilroy smiled at his friend’s enthusiasm. It certainly sounds as though there might be something in it, he said. Verclaes might make a very handsome profit off his home. But, if you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t altogether see where you come in.

Don’t you? replied Dr. Richards. It’s simple enough. The home would nominally be owned by Verclaes; his name, judiciously boosted in the Press, would be a great attraction. Actually, though, the place would be owned by a syndicate, of which I should be the principal shareholder. I’ve talked the matter over with Verclaes, and he’s quite prepared to lend his name to it, for a consideration. I’m ready to find the capital, and it’s the details of the scheme that I’ve come here to discuss with you to-day.

An expression of relief swept over Mr. Gilroy’s face. He had had, all this time, an uncomfortable feeling that Dr. Richards was leading, by some tortuous channel, up to the subject he dreaded. But, now that it was clear that his visit was purely of a business nature, his manner became considerably more brisk and alert.

I see, I see, he said. You want my assistance in forming this syndicate?

That’s about it, replied Dr. Richards. I’ve settled the preliminaries with Verclaes, and I think that we’ve found the place to suit us. I’m not the man to let the grass grow under my feet, as you know. Verclaes lives near Reading, and not far from him there’s a big place for sale, Cranbury Hall. Did you ever hear of it?

I seem to remember that it was put up for auction some months ago, said Mr. Gilroy.

That’s right. It was withdrawn as the reserve was not reached. It’s a fine looking place, just what we want, with about fifty bedrooms. From what Verclaes tells me, it’s been empty for some years, but a caretaker has been looking after it, and it’s in pretty good repair. I’ve only seen it in the distance; naturally, I don’t want to be seen poking about the place. I want you to conduct the negotiations for me. And, by the way, you can have a small share in the syndicate, if you like.

I don’t usually indulge in speculative investments, remarked Mr. Gilroy cautiously. Still, since you’re convinced that it’s a good thing, Tom, that might make a difference. In any case, I will certainly act for you in the purchase of Cranbury Hall. Would you like me to take steps immediately?

I’d like you to have a look at the place first, replied Dr. Richards. I expect you know a decent and reliable architect. Get an order to view in your own name, and take him with you. Between you, you ought to be able to get a rough idea of what it will cost to put the place in first-class repair. Then, when you’ve bargained with the vendors and fixed a price, we shall have some idea of how much capital the syndicate will have to raise.

I’ll do that with pleasure, said Mr. Gilroy. I expect you would like me to arrange matters at once? I know the very man to take down with me, as it happens. Unfortunately, it is rather difficult for me to get away from the office just now. My head clerk left me last week, and so far I have found nobody to replace him.

Your head clerk? enquired Dr. Richards quickly. What, Valentine Norton, do you mean?

Yes, that’s the man, replied Mr. Gilroy in mild astonishment. I didn’t know that you knew him.

I can’t say that I knew him, said Dr. Richards carelessly. I’ve met him on the rare occasions when I have come here to see you, and I’ve a wonderful memory for names. One acquires it in my profession.

It’s most annoying, continued Mr. Gilroy. He had been with me ever since I became a partner in the firm, and that’s a good many years ago. Would you believe it, he came to me suddenly one morning, and told me that he’d made up his mind to retire at once. It seems that a few years ago he came into some money by the death of some relative or other, and he decided to spend the rest of his life travelling.

Indeed? Where is he now? enquired Dr. Richards.

I have no idea, replied Mr. Gilroy. When he took his leave of me, he told me that his plans were not yet settled. Of course, I have felt it only right to pay him a pension, which he asked me to pay into his bank. I gather that it is unlikely that I shall ever set eyes upon him again.

Well, anyhow, his departure won’t prevent you going down to Cranbury Hall within the next few days, I hope? suggested Dr. Richards.

Oh, no, I can manage that, replied Mr. Gilroy. I shall have to get in touch with Harrison—that’s the architect I spoke of. It’s Monday to-day. I think I could manage to go down to Cranbury Hall on Thursday.

He raised his eyes as he spoke, and for the first time looked intently at Dr. Richards. A queer smile passed over the latter’s face at his words, and he glanced at the solicitor almost as though he was about to ask some question. But he evidently thought better of it. Thursday will be quite time enough, if it suits you, he remarked idly.

Then we’ll call that settled, said Mr. Gilroy. I shall drive down there, and pick up Harrison, who lives at Hounslow, on the way. We’ll let you have a report, between us, early next week.

Dr. Richards stayed a few minutes longer, explaining some of the details of the organization of the projected house, and then took his leave. After his departure, Mr. Gilroy sat for a long time, drawing curious geometrical patterns on the blotting-paper before him. How much did Tom Richards know? Why had he not broached the distasteful topic? Was it due to natural delicacy? Hardly. Tom had never been a man to allow delicacy to stand in the way of outspokenness.

After all, Mr. Gilroy thought, he had given Tom every chance, had even supplied him with a lead, had he wished to take it. He had deliberately suggested Thursday, wondering whether Tom would make any comment upon his choice of that day. And Tom had said nothing, though it had been quite plain from his expression that he knew of the event which was to take place.

Many things would have to be faced on Thursday, things once very carefully hidden, and now almost forgotten. There was the matter of Muriel Verclaes, for one thing. It was extraordinary that her name should have been mentioned by Tom, just at the time when Mr. Gilroy’s own thoughts were concerned with her. And then this enterprise of which Tom spoke so confidently. What were the true relations between him and Muriel’s father?

Mr. Gilroy’s thoughts returned to the commission with which Tom had entrusted him, and to the conversation between them. If this was a fair sample of Tom’s methods, it was pretty obvious why he was not regarded with any great respect by the medical profession. And why