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The Love Detectives

‘The Love Detectives’ was first published in the USA as ‘At the Crossroads’ in Flynn’s Weekly, 30 Oct 1926, and then as ‘The Magic of Mr Quin No. 1: At the Cross Roads’ in Storyteller, December 1926.

Little Mr Satterthwaite looked thoughtfully across at his host. The friendship between these two men was an odd one. The colonel was a simple country gentleman whose passion in life was sport. The few weeks that he spent perforce in London, he spent unwillingly. Mr Satterthwaite, on the other hand, was a town bird. He was an authority on French cooking, on ladies’ dress, and on all the latest scandals. His passion was observing human nature, and he was an expert in his own special line – that of an onlooker at life.

It would seem, therefore, that he and Colonel Melrose would have little in common, for the colonel had no interest in his neighbours’ affairs and a horror of any kind of emotion. The two men were friends mainly because their fathers before them had been friends. Also they knew the same people and had reactionary views about nouveaux riches.

It was about half past seven. The two men were sitting in the colonel’s comfortable study, and Melrose was describing a run of the previous winter with a keen hunting man’s enthusiasm. Mr Satterthwaite, whose knowledge of horses consisted chiefly of the time-honoured Sunday morning visit to the stables which still obtains in old-fashioned country houses, listened with his invariable politeness.

The sharp ringing of the telephone interrupted Melrose. He crossed to the table and took up the receiver.

‘Hello, yes – Colonel Melrose speaking. What’s that?’ His whole demeanour altered – became stiff and official. It was the magistrate speaking now, not the sportsman.

He listened for some moments, then said laconically, ‘Right, Curtis. I’ll be over at once.’ He replaced the receiver and turned to his guest. ‘Sir James Dwighton has been found in his library – murdered.’

‘What?’

Mr Satterthwaite was startled – thrilled.

‘I must go over to Alderway at once. Care to come with me?’

Mr Satterthwaite remembered that the colonel was chief constable of the county.

‘If I shan’t be in the way –’ He hesitated.

‘Not at all. That was Inspector Curtis telephoning. Good, honest fellow, but no brains. I’d be glad if you would come with me, Satterthwaite. I’ve got an idea this is going to turn out a nasty business.’

‘Have they got the fellow who did it?’

‘No,’ replied Melrose shortly.

Mr Satterthwaite’s trained ear detected a nuance of reserve behind the curt negative. He began to go over in his mind all that he knew of the Dwightons.

A pompous old fellow, the late Sir James, brusque in his manner. A man that might easily make enemies. Veering on sixty, with grizzled hair and a florid face. Reputed to be tight-fisted in the extreme.

His mind went on to Lady Dwighton. Her image floated before him, young, auburn-haired, slender. He remembered various rumours, hints, odd bits of gossip. So that was it – that was why Melrose looked so glum. Then he pulled himself up – his imagination was running away with him.

Five minutes later Mr Satterthwaite took his place beside his host in the latter’s little two seater, and they drove off together into the night.

The colonel was a taciturn man. They had gone quite a mile and a half before he spoke. Then he jerked out abruptly. ‘You know ’em, I suppose?’

‘The Dwightons? I know all about them, of course.’ Who was there Mr Satterthwaite didn’t know all about? ‘I’ve met him once, I think, and her rather oftener.’

‘Pretty woman,’ said Melrose.

‘Beautiful!’ declared Mr Satterthwaite.

‘Think so?’

‘A pure Renaissance type,’ declared Mr Satterthwaite, warming up to his theme. ‘She acted in those theatricals – the charity matinee, you know, last spring. I was very much struck. Nothing modern about her – a pure survival. One can imagine her in the doge’s palace, or as Lucrezia Borgia.’

The colonel let the car swerve slightly, and Mr Satterthwaite came to an abrupt stop. He wondered what fatality had brought the name of Lucrezia Borgia to his tongue. Under the circumstances –

‘Dwighton was not poisoned, was he?’ he asked abruptly.

Melrose looked at him sideways, somewhat curiously. ‘Why do you ask that, I wonder?’ he said.

‘Oh, I – I don’t know.’ Mr Satterthwaite was flustered. ‘I – It just occurred to me.’

‘Well, he wasn’t,’ said Melrose gloomily. ‘If you want to know, he was crashed on the head.’

‘With a blunt instrument,’ murmured Mr Satterthwaite, nodding his head sagely.

‘Don’t talk like a damned detective story, Satterthwaite. He was hit on the head with a bronze figure.’

‘Oh,’ said Satterthwaite, and relapsed into silence.

‘Know anything of a chap called Paul Delangua?’ asked Melrose after a minute or two.

‘Yes. Good-looking young fellow.’

‘I daresay women would call him so,’ growled the colonel.

‘You don’t like him?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I should have thought you would have. He rides very well.’

‘Like a foreigner at the horse show. Full of monkey tricks.’

Mr Satterthwaite suppressed a smile. Poor old Melrose was so very British in his outlook. Agreeably conscious himself of a cosmopolitan point of view, Mr Satterthwaite was able to deplore the insular attitude toward life.

‘Has he been down in this part of the world?’ he asked.

‘He’s been staying at Alderway with the Dwightons. The rumour goes that Sir James kicked him out a week ago.’

‘Why?’

‘Found him making love to his wife, I suppose. What the hell –’

There was a violent swerve, and a jarring impact.

‘Most dangerous crossroads in England,’ said Melrose. ‘All the same, the other fellow should have sounded his horn. We’re on the main road. I fancy we’ve damaged him rather more than he has damaged us.’

He sprang out. A figure alighted from the other car and joined him. Fragments of speech reached Satterthwaite.

‘Entirely my fault, I’m afraid,’ the stranger was saying. ‘But I do not know this part of the country very well, and there’s absolutely no sign of any kind to show you’re coming onto the main road.’

The colonel, mollified, rejoined suitably. The two men bent together over the stranger’s car, which a chauffeur was already examining. The conversation became highly technical.

‘A matter of half an hour, I’m afraid,’ said the stranger. ‘But don’t let me detain you. I’m glad your car escaped injury as well as it did.’

‘As a matter of fact –’ the colonel was beginning, but he was interrupted.

Mr Satterthwaite, seething with excitement, hopped out of the car with a birdlike action, and seized the stranger warmly by the hand.

‘It is! I thought I recognized the voice,’ he declared excitedly. ‘What an extraordinary thing. What a very extraordinary thing.’

‘Eh?’ said Colonel Melrose.

‘Mr Harley Quin. Melrose, I’m sure you’ve heard me speak many times of Mr Quin?’

Colonel Melrose did not seem to remember the fact, but he assisted politely at the scene while Mr Satterthwaite was chirruping gaily on. ‘I haven’t seen you – let me see –’

‘Since the night at the Bells and Motley,’ said the other quietly.

‘The Bells and Motley, eh?’ said the colonel.

‘An inn,’ explained Mr Satterthwaite.

‘What an odd name for an inn.’

‘Only an old one,’ said Mr Quin. ‘There was a time, remember, when bells and motley were more common in England than they are nowadays.’

‘I suppose so, yes, no doubt you are right,’ said Melrose vaguely. He blinked. By a curious effect of light – the headlights of one car and the red tail-light of the other – Mr Quin seemed for a moment to be dressed in motley himself. But it was only the light.

‘We can’t leave you here stranded on the road,’ continued Mr Satterthwaite. ‘You must come along with us. There’s plenty of room for three, isn’t there, Melrose?’

‘Oh rather.’ But the colonel’s voice was a little doubtful. ‘The only thing is,’ he remarked, ‘the job we’re on. Eh, Satterthwaite?’

Mr Satterthwaite stood stock-still. Ideas leaped and flashed over him. He positively shook with excitement.