The Polo Ground Mystery Read online

  Such was the first account published in the early issues of the Evening Bulletin of the mysterious shooting of Sutton Armadale, the well-known London financier, racehorse owner, stockbreeder, and yachtsman, to whom the Press invariably referred as the “millionaire sportsman” whenever they had occasion to mention his name in their columns. Later editions added the further stimulating paragraph:

  It was subsequently discovered that the secret safe in the library where Mrs. Armadale usually kept her jewels, especially her famous rope of pearls, valued at £20,000, had been rifled and that the rope of pearls was missing. The window of the library was open, and a mask, such as is sometimes worn by burglars, was found lying on the floor of the library between the safe and the window. From the evidence in hand it would appear that the financier surprised the burglar shortly after he had rifled the safe and gave chase. Mr Armadale, it is clear, eventually overtook him as he was making his way across the polo ground and was shot by the bandit when the latter found escape impossible.

  The daily papers on the following morning gave lengthier accounts of the mysterious affair, but these were rather an ornate expansion of the descriptive reporter than a fuller record of the facts. The Daily Report, in which Sutton Armadale was financially interested, gave up nearly a column of its precious space to a sketch of his career. The following extracts are instructive, but the writer responsible for the sketch probably wrote with his tongue in his cheek. Again, this may be a magnanimous view of his activity; it is so difficult to know:

  No man who held such immense financial power and was such an outstanding figure in the sporting life of this country had such a meteoric rise to fame as Mr. Sutton Armadale. His rapid ascent from obscurity to the dazzling pinnacle of a phenomenal business success was solely due to his immense energy and his inherent ability for carrying through a deal.

  There is something about the vagueness of that phrase “inherent ability for carrying through a deal” which is conducive to uneasy reflection. The reader is inclined to feel that the acquisition of immense wealth is not quite so simple a matter as all that, and instinctively decides that the use of the word “inherent” is a palpable trick to conceal the writer’s unblushing ignorance of his subject. The biographer goes on to state with sustained confidence:

  He lived for work only, though his principal interest apart from his immense financial undertakings lay in the field of sport. He was a first-class shot, and used to practise at polo whenever he had a moment to spare from business. By his keenness he had made himself into a very fine exponent of this difficult and hazardous game.

  He concludes this Press epicedium on a popular if rather reckless note:

  Mr. Sutton Armadale always believed in paying large salaries to every one in his employ and was as generous in private life as he was in public.

  The statement is encouraging. Yet the news value of even a millionaire sportsman’s death is a delicately relative affair to a modern daily paper, and Sutton Armadale’s startling exit from the arena of his activities was crowded into insignificance by other and more alarming news which burst with reverberating effect over London on that bright August morning. The headline, “Amazing Share Slump in Well-known Companies,” stretched like a signal of flags across the whole width of the Daily Report’s principal news page, and a sub-title screamed that “millions of invested money” were affected. (That the Report subsequently reduced this hint of countless millions to a definite figure and assured the public that they had from the first advised a wise abstention from anything in the nature of panic is irrelevant and deceived no one.) It was the first warning note to the world of what is now known as “The Great Braby Crash,” a crash which resulted in a long term of penal servitude for that arresting personality, Raymond Braby, and left behind it a hideous trail of suicides by poison, coal-gas, disinfectants, fire-arms, and—cold water. Under this alarming headline, inset among the letter-press, was a portrait of Raymond Braby himself. To those who were fortunately not involved in the disaster there was something grimly ludicrous in this genial apparition of the cause of all the trouble smiling serenely from the midst of the havoc he had created. It led one to believe that on the morning of the disaster, when the glittering castle of Braby’s hopes and dreams crumbled away and vanished before his vision as if beneath the dread wand of some evil magician, he must have savoured some morsel of cynical relish when he glanced at his copy of the Daily Report. For there, figuratively, the bugles sounding the last post over the grave of his own lurid career had effectually drowned the editorial requiem over the very corpse of his old enemy in the field of money-getting; in this hour of catastrophe he had positively hustled his dead, if successful, rival into a smaller space in one of the latter’s own newspapers. For during their lives Braby and Armadale had been sworn business foes. And now? Well, “the tumult and the shouting dies, the captains and the kings depart!”

  It must be humiliating even to millionaire sportsmen to learn in some moment of blinding illumination that the “paths of glory lead but to the grave.” Whether such a moment of revelation had been granted to Sutton Armadale during the last days of his life no one will ever know; but, if it had, his more intimate friends could imagine him in that crisis of discovery quietly smiling, a pugnacious light in his blue eyes, his rather pronounced chin thrust out defiantly, and his hand wandering in search of his cigar-case. For Sutton Armadale was (if those intimate friends are to be believed) a sportsman in a sense quite different from that which is implied by the connection of the term with the possession of great wealth. To own a racing stud, to lead a winner into the paddock to the plaudits of successful backers, to be sufficiently wealthy to experience little excitement in betting, to be a member of the National Sporting Club, to possess a luxurious yacht, to tilt his hat at a rakish angle, to smoke cigars incessantly in public, to wear perennially an exquisite buttonhole—may be some of the outward and visible signs of sportsmanship. Sutton Armadale exhibited some of these stigmata, but he also possessed much of the inward and spiritual grace. He knew no fear; though he worshipped rank and title he was never obsequious to a superior or insolent to an inferior; he was never known to desert a friend in any possible circumstances; he always strove to be fair to an enemy. He always displayed a lively contempt for a sneak or a lick-spittle; he was genuinely sorry for a timorous man and loved a brave one. He gloried in a risk, however great the risk might be, often flouting chance with a suspicion of swagger, and in the midst of a cheery cynicism he had always shown, contradictorily enough, an unexpected regard for that adolescent type of romance which flavours, more or less, every revue and musical comedy and much of the popular literature of to-day. At fifty—he was killed on the eve of his birthday—he was one of the most distinguished-looking men in the City. Tall, broad-shouldered, active as a cat, his ruddy, cheerful countenance, his shrewd, sparkling blue eye, his ready tongue always alive with a quip or a caustic remark, made him a man whom anyone would be glad to call a friend. About all really big men in any walk of life there are unmistakable signs of greatness. The very movements of Sutton Armadale’s body, its sense of strength and firmness in repose, his high cheek-bones, aquiline nose, square, pugnacious jaw, and unflinching eye all displayed that one quality which marks every genuinely successful man, namely, confidence, realized confidence in his own powers. This confidence in his own judgment never failed him, and he possessed the magic of being able to instil it in all those who were fortunate enough to be associated with him in business. But there was more than one Sutton Armadale. The business man of the city was an altogether different man from the Armadale of private or social life. Like most of those engaged in the incessant fight of making and retaining wealth, he treasured a different set of ethical values on the commercial side of his existence, and it seemed contradictory that a man, implacable in securing the last farthing of an advantage in some specific business deal, should a few hours later in his club draw a cheque for a thousand pounds in favour of some insistent charity in whic
h he was not very greatly interested. But this duality is not uncommon in men, and the millionaire sportsman of social life could in business transactions be as ruthless and pitiless as a tiger. At a meeting of the directors of the many trusts or companies with which he was associated, where were gathered the shrewdest and hardest financial brains of London, he would trample down hostile opposition with a cold ferocity which made the boldest fear him. Few dared to challenge the plans of a man whose judgment had been invariably attended with success. Under the intoxicating spell of making money all those kindly, humane, and lovable facets of Sutton Armadale’s magnetic social personality vanished and a demon appeared seized with an unquenchable lust for money and power. He had therefore incurred bitter hatreds and wakened in equally rapacious and determined men an ineradicable animosity—a never-sleeping desire for revenge. Yet opposition merely steeled his resolve and inspired him to livelier defiance, for fear was a sensation to which he was a stranger. As Captain Rickaby (known as “Fruity”) Fanshaugh, one of his most intimate friends, relates, the only occasion on which Sutton Armadale was thoroughly scared was that of his proposal to the young and beautiful Angela Daunay, whom he married two years prior to his tragic death.

  And now that colossus of business was no more! The spirit which had ridden unperturbed over many a nerve-racking financial crisis, which had flung itself with inflexible will and superb courage into every commercial struggle in which it had become involved, had slipped quietly out of the riven flesh without even a curse of defiance or a threat of reprisal. The indomitable leader in many a hard-fought battle had been despatched, almost ignominiously it seemed, by a predatory brother in a bolder, if less intellectual, field of acquisition.

  The significance of the event was probably never more succinctly sketched than in a conversation between two clerks travelling comfortably in the Tube to their assured if arduous toil.

  “Well, Harry boy, it appears that Mr. Sutton Armadale wasn’t immortal after all! Bit of a sell, isn’t it?”

  “You’re right, Bill. His sudden death calls up to me a picture of a dashing skater, arms outstretched, skimming the ice on twinkling steel. Then, all of a sudden, there’s a round hole in the ice—rather a funny sort of hole, to be sure—and his nibs has vanished. Silence. Nothing more!”

  “A few bubbles, perhaps, departing effervescence, so to speak. We’ll be fair and grant him that. I’ll see you at Mooney’s at one o’clock.”

  And that was all!

  In the City of London, however, the air was electrical. The shares of the various companies connected with Raymond Braby were cascading downwards to undreamed-of levels, and the awful tenseness that had permeated the financial atmosphere of the previous week had given way to the first thunderous crashes of the impending storm. Round Throgmorton Street the facts were beginning to filter out, and outside the Stock Exchange a hatless and jabbering crowd were excitedly discussing the momentous situation. When the news of the violent death of Sutton Armadale became more widely known, it was at once assumed that it had some sinister and immediate connection with the Braby debacle by all those speculators whose nerves had been frayed to an intolerable sensitiveness by the vagaries of the market in the Braby Group. For some hours financial circles, as the Evening Bulletin subsequently put it, “were staggered” by the announcement of the tragedy. Shares in the Armadale companies and trusts were recklessly thrown by the more timorous holders on the market and prices began to drop ominously. But not for long. Some Rupert of finance, quick to seize his opportunity and armed with surer information, flung himself gallantly into the fray and rallied the shaken squadrons to, as Pepys would have worded it, his “great content.” It was beginning to gain credence before night closed on that eventful day that the sudden shooting of Sutton Armadale had no material connection with the synchronous Braby collapse, and all those investors who had pinned their faith to the millionaire sportsman were congratulating themselves, a trifle nervously, perhaps, on their own sound judgment of Armadale’s financial stability and integrity. It was recorded, however, that one who had stood to lose all his possessions had the Armadale concerns tottered to ruin was ungrateful enough to remark:

  “By God, I’m thankful, but damme if I ever liked the angle at which Sutton always wore his topper. A trifle, you may think, but psychologically pregnant. It always put the wind up me!”

  The final editions of the evening papers announced the stupendous news that Mr. Raymond Braby had been arrested and that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of his partner and right-hand man, whose whereabouts at the moment were unknown. Dealings in the Braby shares were now being transacted at absurd prices. After the Exchange closed, 15s. shares were offered at half a crown in the street and nobody would buy, and through thousands of once bright little homes in Great Britain there stole the appalling conviction that all the hard renunciations of life, bitter oblations to the great God of Security, had been in vain. Those symbols of wealth which they had treasured as the visible rewards of the worship of that deity were so much waste paper. Ruin, to paraphrase Wilde, was drawing the curtains of their beds!

  Meanwhile at Nuthill, a resident at the White Hart Hotel, but a stranger to the district, had been behaving in a very singular fashion. He had breakfasted on brandy and continued to drink brandy steadily until lunch. He lunched on brandy and became morosely drunk. John Salt, it appeared, bore some deep-seated and wholly irrational hatred to all financiers, whom he kept calling with increasing difficulty “silk-hatted sneak-thieves.” He was foolish enough to remark when he heard of Sutton Armadale’s death, which had occurred not a mile distant from the inn, that it “served the perisher damned well right too!” Later in the afternoon, in a grimly drunken mood, he loudly boasted to a crowded bar that he himself had “bumped the slab-jawed swindler off,” and was promptly arrested. Growing sober under the cooling effects of police interrogation, he proved his complete innocence and was discharged. Of such incongruous stuff is the fabric of life woven!

  Chapter Two

  Anthony Vereker, known as Algernon, unabbreviated, to his intimate friends, sat in the comfortable studio of his flat in Fenton Street, W., with the morning papers strewn on a table in front of him. He was bending over the table, leaning on his left hand and glancing at the various reports of the shooting of Mr. Sutton Armadale. Taking a pair of scissors from a small drawer of a large cabinet in which he kept his assortment of canvases, watercolour papers, and tubes of paint, he cut out these reports, placed them side by side in the centre of the table, and hurled the remainder of the several journals in an untidy heap on the floor. Then he drew a chair to the table, lit a cigarette, and for about half an hour was absorbed in a close comparison of the text of the cuttings. Having mentally digested the principal features of the tragedy he thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets and flung himself back in his chair. At this moment the door bell of his flat rang with a series of short, insistent peals which terminated in a sustained and irritating resonance.

  “Hell’s bells!” he exclaimed impatiently as he heard Albert, his man-servant, hurry to answer the summons.

  “Mr. Ricardo would like to see you, sir.”

  “Show him in, Albert,” said Vereker, and a smile erased the frown of impatience that had momentarily clouded his brow.

  “Well, Ricky, I’m glad to see you, my boy. Come in and make yourself at home.” Noticing the unusual gravity of his friend’s demeanour, he asked, “What’s the matter? In trouble again?”

  Manuel Ricardo wearily flung his hat, gloves, and stick on to a settee before replying.

  “I’ve come to stay,” he said gloomily.

  “You’re welcome as ever, but I thought you’d just moved into new digs.”

  “I moved out again this morning.”

  “Cleared out bag and baggage, eh?” laughed Vereker.

  “It’s not quite as magnificent as all that. You see, the landlady is sitting tight on my trunks till—till—”

  “I see clearly. N
ever mind, we’ll remove her later. What was the cause of the trouble or who?”

  “Who? Rachmaninoff!”

  “A fellow-lodger?” asked Vereker, bewildered.

  “No, the composer and his damnable prelude. Some musical student in the next house with his instrument of torture against my wall. Morning, noon, and far into the night—a whole week of the prelude and nothing but the prelude. Worked it up into a prelude to insanity. It was an incitement to murder as an interlude. I was getting dangerous!”

  Ricardo’s glance fell on the newspaper cuttings arranged on the studio table.

  “Ah, the Armadale case! I thought it would put the kibosh on your painting. What about the Spring Show? Going to give it a miss?”

  “No, I’m sending in three exhibits. That one on the easel’s an oil. Finished it yesterday.”

  Ricardo walked lazily over to the painting and studied it for some seconds.

  “Algernon, this is an outrage! I presume your modern art critic would call it architectural painting and say that you had enlarged your formal experience! Of all the gaseous nonsense ever mumbled by fatuous nincompoops... ’struth, I prefer Luke Fildes. What’s it supposed to represent, anyway?”

  “I’ve tried to visualize a scene from the Athenian Thesmophoria. The women, as you will remember, walked with phallic emblems in their hands and uttered obscenities. Those feasts symbolized the magic of fertility...”

  “Good Lord above!” exclaimed Ricardo piously, and added quietly, “A pretty conceit, Algernon, but to-day, outside the Church the idea’s moribund. If you could elaborate something similar about birth control it would be more modish. I’m glad you’re returning to crime detection. The saving grace of murder is that it’s non-controversial. After your picture I think I’d like a cocktail.”