A Three Pipe Problem Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright & Information

  About the Author

  Dedication & Title Quote

  Introduction

  Chapter One The First Murder

  Chapter Two The Second Murder

  Chapter Three Enter Mr Sherlock Holmes

  Chapter Four The Great Man at Home

  Chapter Five Something About Karate

  Chapter Six The Haynes Family in The Morning

  Chapter Seven Rise and Slight Fall of a Great Detective

  Chapter Eight An Affair of the Heart

  Chapter Nine The Third Killing

  Chapter Ten Freddy Williams

  Chapter Eleven On the Studio Floor

  Chapter Twelve Sherlock Finds His Watson

  Chapter Thirteen How and Why

  Chapter Fourteen The Carrousel

  Chapter Fifteen Sherlock in Trouble

  Chapter Sixteen A Trap Unsprung

  Chapter Seventeen Debacle in Hyde Park

  Chapter Eighteen The Last Day of Life

  Chapter Nineteen Sherlock Lives

  Inspector Bland Titles

  Inspector Crambo Titles

  Joan Kahn-Harper Titles

  Sheridan Haynes

  Novels

  Non-Fiction

  Synopses of Symons' Titles

  Copyright & Information

  A Three Pipe Problem

  First published in 1975

  © Estate of Julian Symons; House of Stratus 1975-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Julian Symons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  1842329308 9781842329306 Print

  0755129695 9780755129690 Kindle

  0755129709 9780755129706 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Julian Symons was born in 1912 in London. He was the younger brother, and later biographer, of the writer A.J.A. Symons.

  Aged twenty five, he founded a poetry magazine which he edited for a short time, before turning to crime writing. This was not to be his only interest, however, as in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and held a distinguished reputation in each field. Nonetheless, it is primarily for his crime writing that he is remembered. His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day.

  Symons commenced World War II as a recognised conscientious objector, but nevertheless ended up serving in the Royal Armoured Corps from 1942 until 1944, when he was invalided out. A period as an advertising copywriter followed, but was soon abandoned in favour of full time writing. Many prizes came his way as a result, including two Edgar Awards and in 1982 he received the accolade of being named as Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America – an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. Symons then succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain’s Detection Club, a position he held from 1976 to 1985, and in 1990 he was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers for his lifetime’s achievement in crime fiction.

  He published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994; with the works combining different elements of the classic detective story and modern crime novel, but with a clear leaning toward the latter, especially situations where ordinary people get drawn into extraordinary series of events – a trait he shared with Eric Ambler. He also wrote two modern-day Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In A Three Pipe Problem the detective was ‘...a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character’. Several of Julian Symons' works have been filmed for television.

  Julian Symons died in 1994.

  Dedication & Title Quote

  For Ngaio Marsh,

  who gave me the title

  ‘What are you going to do then?’ I asked.

  ‘To smoke,’ he answered. ‘It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.’

  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

  Introduction

  The French call a typewriter une machine á ècrire. It is a description that could well be applied to Julian Symons, except the writing he produced had nothing about it smelling of the mechanical. The greater part of his life was devoted to putting pen to paper. Appearing in 1938, his first book was a volume of poetry, Confusions About X. In 1996, after his death, there came his final crime novel, A Sort of Virtue (written even though he knew he was under sentence from an inoperable cancer) beautifully embodying the painful come-by lesson that it is possible to achieve at least a degree of good in life.

  His crime fiction put him most noticeably into the public eye, but he wrote in many forms: biographies, a memorable piece of autobiography (Notes from Another Country), poetry, social history, literary criticism coupled with year-on-year reviewing and two volumes of military history, and one string thread runs through it all. Everywhere there is a hatred of hypocrisy, hatred even when it aroused the delighted fascination with which he chronicled the siren schemes of that notorious jingoist swindler, Horatio Bottomley, both in his biography of the man and fictionally in The Paper Chase and The Killing of Francie Lake.

  That hatred, however, was not a spew but a well-spring. It lay behind what he wrote and gave it force, yet it was always tempered by a need to speak the truth. Whether he was writing about people as fiction or as fact, if he had a low opinion of them he simply told the truth as he saw it, no more and no less.

  This adherence to truth fills his novels with images of the mask. Often it is the mask of hypocrisy. When, as in Death’s Darkest Face or Something Like a Love Affair, he chose to use a plot of dazzling legerdemain, the masks of cunning are startlingly ripped away.

  The masks he ripped off most effectively were perhaps those which people put on their true faces when sex was in the air or under the exterior. ‘Lift the stone, and sex crawls out from under,’ says a character in that relentless hunt for truth, The Progress of a Crime, a book that achieved the rare feat for a British author, winning Symons the US Edgar Allen Poe Award.

  Julian was indeed something of a pioneer in the fifties and sixties bringing into the almost sexless world of the detective story the truths of sexual situations. ‘To exclude realism of description and language from the crime novel’ he writes in Critical Occasions, ‘is almost to prevent its practitioners from attempting any serious work.’ And then the need to unmask deep-hidden secrecies of every sort was almost as necessary at the end of his crime-writing life as it had been at the beginning. Not for nothing was his last book subtitled A Political Thriller.

  H R F Keating

  Lo
ndon, 2001

  Chapter One The First Murder

  The crimes known to the press first as the Karate Killings and then as Sherlock Holmes’ Last Case, began one New Year’s Eve. On this evening of rain and blustering wind the usual things happened in central London. The gaiety was, as always, partly synthetic and partly real. The people swarming up the pavements of Regent Street and Oxford Street, straying all over the road, stopping cars, kissing their occupants and wishing them a Happy New Year, could be said to be looking for reality or desperately maintaining illusion. The young men and women who plunged naked into the Trafalgar Square fountain appeared to be enjoying themselves, although one had to be rushed off to hospital suffering from exposure. At parties people, some of whom had met for the first time, sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and then embraced warmly before driving home, often with more than the permitted amount of alcohol in their blood. In thousands of houses people with nowhere to go watched comedians on television wearing paper hats while they sang sentimental songs.

  It was a New Year’s Eve like any other. The police remained good-humoured in spite of the sparklers and bangers thrown at them. They turned a blind eye to motorists who had had one too many, except the minority involved in accidents. There was an average number of telephone calls from householders who returned home after singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with tears in their eyes, to find that burglars had not only forced locks and taken jewel cases, but had also scrawled obscene messages on bedroom walls. Several cases of incendiarism relating to shops and stores were reported, three of which proved to have been set to collect the insurance. There were a number of assaults, the result of quarrelsomeness through drink. And there was a murder.

  The dead man’s name was Charles Pole. He was forty-three years old, and he lived in Streatham, which may now be counted as one of London’s inner suburbs. The body had been found just before eleven o’clock on Streatham Common, just a few yards away from one of the lighted footpaths that cross it. He had been killed with one or more blows on the back of the neck. His wallet had not been touched, and no attempt had been made to search the body. Beside him there lay an unopened bottle of non-vintage port.

  Pole had worked for the past ten years in the research department of Fact Consultants Ltd, a firm that organised opinion polls. He lived in the upper part of a Victorian house just off the Common, with his wife Gillian. They had no children. The case was in the hands of Chief Superintendent Roger Devenish, and it was Devenish who talked to the widow. He knew that most murders are family affairs. Play the variations on a triangle of wife-husband-lover, or on a quartet of two married couples, and you soon came up with the right answer. But Sergeant Brewster’s inquiries in the neighbourhood had revealed no entanglement on the part of husband or wife, and certainly Gillian Pole gave little encouragement to such thoughts. She was a thin dark woman of forty, with a strained, intense expression accentuated by the way she wore her hair pulled away from her forehead. She told Devenish the story he had already heard from his sergeant. It was usual for the Poles to celebrate the New Year with a glass of port, and at ten o’clock they discovered that there was none in the apartment. Charles had said that he would go out and get a bottle. He had not taken the car, because it was not worth the trouble of getting it out of the garage. He had walked across the Common, and then – Devenish, who knew that Pole had been in to a local pub, had one drink and bought the bottle of port, nodded.

  ‘Mrs Pole, did your husband have an enemy? Or had he quarrelled with somebody recently?’

  ‘No enemies. We keep ourselves to ourselves.’

  ‘He didn’t have any affair you know of with a woman? Or drink too much? Or have any trouble at the office?’

  ‘Three questions. Three answers.’ Devenish had dropped ash from his cigarette on to the comer of a small table. Mrs Pole leaned forward and carefully pushed it into an ashtray. ‘There was no other woman in Charles’ life. There was no other man in mine. We have no children, which was a sorrow to us both, but we were happy together.’ She indicated the gleaming, empty screen across the room. ‘We watched a great deal in the evenings. Charles said it was important for his work, it helped him to understand the way people react to advertising.

  ‘The second question. Charles drank very little. We should have had two small glasses of port each if he had come back. No more.’ She looked as though she might be about to add to this, but went on. ‘Charles didn’t say much to me about his work at the office. So far as I know there was no trouble of any kind, but you would have to talk to the head of his department, Mr Mantleman.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’ Devenish gave her the rueful, worried smile which had charmed a good many women into rash remarks. ‘The problem is this, Mrs Pole. As you put it there seems absolutely no reason for your husband’s death. It looks like an altogether unprovoked attack – there’s no sign of any preliminary fight. Of course such things do happen, but generally a gang sets on to one man for some reason. Nobody saw that happen, and as I say there’s no sign of it on the ground. Apparently a man simply went up to your husband and made a murderous attack on him for no reason, and that seems very unlikely.’

  ‘I understand what you are saying, of course, but it is more important to you than to me.’

  ‘Really? I should have thought you’d have wanted to know who killed your husband.’

  She said impatiently, ‘Of course. But I have to get used to the idea that Charles is dead. And since his life was not insured, and I imagine his pension will be small, I have to think about making a living.’

  ‘You don’t know of anybody who hated him, perhaps somebody from the past?’

  She looked at him levelly. ‘Charles and I had no enemies. And very few friends. Perhaps we are not very interesting people.’

  The view that Charles Pole was not somebody likely to have made enemies was shared by Mantleman, a big bluff man with a taste for extravagant ties. Pole’s work had been the correlation of statistical material, he said. Devenish looked slightly baffled.

  ‘A lot of the work we do is for companies who are making tests of reaction to a new product. Let’s say a new line in after shave or baby powder is being put out in selected areas. When the results of this area testing come in they need detailed analysis. That’s the kind of thing Pole did, and he was good at it. He was careful, the sort who never gets to the office late or leaves early.’

  ‘Did he do confidential work of any kind?’

  ‘You’re thinking of industrial espionage, selling secrets?’ Mantleman laughed heartily. ‘The kind of thing we do isn’t that important. If anybody really wanted to get hold of information about reactions to Product X they could do it without too much trouble.’

  ‘Women?’

  ‘I suppose he knew they were different from men, but he never showed any sign of it.’

  ‘Drink? Anyone at the office dislike him?’

  ‘He’d have a drink or two, hardly ever more than two. He got quite skittish at the firm’s Christmas party after two or three sherries, but don’t get me wrong, I’ve never seen him drunk. What was the other thing you asked? Oh yes, trouble at the office. No, nobody disliked him, you couldn’t dislike him.’ Mantleman leaned forward. ‘Pole was the nearest thing you can get to a cipher, and how can you have strong feelings about a cipher? If it weren’t for his empty chair I’d have forgotten by now that he ever existed.’

  So Pole had been a cipher. In Devenish’s view most people were ciphers, and there must still have been a reason why this particular cipher was wiped out. The reason, however, was not apparent.

  The material gathered about Charles Pole made a slim file.

  Chapter Two The Second Murder

  Sir Pountney Gladson stood five foot three in his socks. He had a high, slightly shrill voice, and handwriting so large that he rarely got more than a dozen words on to a sheet of writing paper. His friends called Sir Pountney a character. His enemies, who were more numerous, used words of which mountebank was the kindest. His activi
ties were multifarious, and they only began with his work as a Member of Parliament for West Dorset. He was not seen often in the constituency, but when he did appear the occasion was always newsworthy. There was the time when his Lamborghini had joined the Fords and Jaguars of local farmers in blocking a main road as a protest against a reduction in farm subsidies, the day when he had given away a hundred fivers to a hundred inhabitants of a village, telling each of them to put the money on to Pountney Special, which couldn’t lose the Wokingham Stakes. The horse had duly won, and Sir Pountney’s name went into village legend.

  Sir Pountney was – what else was he? The list of his directorships filled half a column in Who’s Who, he was the president of the Union Jack League, chairman of the Motorists’ Society and of the group that called themselves Britain’s Heritage. In the House he made few speeches, but asked a great many of the kind of questions that make news. ‘Is my right honourable friend aware that his rigidly sectarian policies in relation to education have made him the most execrated man in public life in this country?’ was the kind of thing. Sir Pountney was much against the creeping Communist menace, and opposed also to long-haired students, and to spineless intellectuals who brought the sewer waste of the Continent to England’s green and pleasant land. He was in favour of fast cars and Rugby football and fox hunting, as representative of the British way of life. ‘There’s not much wrong with a man who drives fast, tackles clean, and doesn’t flinch at a five-foot hedge,’ he said once.

  At four a.m. on the seventh of January, Sir Pountney was found dead in Hamborne Mews in Mayfair, a hundred yards away from the Over and Under Club where he had ended the evening. He was at the steering wheel of his Lamborghini. He had been killed by a blow on the gullet, succeeded by one on the back of the neck.