A Man Called Jones Read online

  Copyright & Information

  A Man Called Jones

  First published in 1479

  © Estate of Julian Symons; House of Stratus 1947-2011

  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

  1842329138 9781842329139 Print

  075512894X 9780755128945 Kindle

  0755128958 9780755128952 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.

  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

  London, 2001

  Dedication

  For My Mother

  Characters in the Story

  Hargreaves Advertising Agency

  EDWARD HARGREAVES Founder of the Agency

  LIONEL HARGREAVES His elder son

  RICHARD HARGREAVES His younger son

  GEORGE TRACY Creative Director

  JACK BOND Production Manager

  CHARLES SINCLAIR Copy Chief

  JEAN ROGERS Copywriter

  ONSLOW Another copywriter

  MUDGE Studio artist

  MISS PEACHEY Receptionist

  MISS BERRY Her friend

  Outside the Agency

  MR JONES A mystery

  MRS LACEY A landlady

  EVE MARCHANT An actress

  MYRTLE MONTAGUE Another actress

  JOSEPH VAN DIEREN An art agent

  POLLY LINES His secretary

  ARNOLD CARRUTHERS A freelance artist, cousin of Lionel and Richard Hargreaves

  WILLIAM WESTON Lawyer to the Hargreaves family

  EDGAR SINCLAIR Brother of Charles

  JULIA BOND Wife of Jack Bond

  JACKSON/WILLIAMS Servants in the Hargreaves family

  DETECTIVE-INSPECTOR BLAND Of Scotland Yard

  DETECTIVE-SERGEANT FILBY

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15

  Chapter One 6.15 to 6.45 p.m.

  Charles Sinclair paused for a moment on the steps of the house in Redfern Square, and looked at his watch. A fine mist of rain blurred the dial, and he had to hold it close to his face before he saw that the time was 6.15. He shivered involuntarily as he hesitated, for some reason that he could not have named, before the open door of the house; as he turned, with a second decisive shiver, to go in he heard his name called and the figure of Jack Bond, jaunty and overdressed, appeared through the drizzling rain. Bond’s dark face was rich with malice, and he tapped the steps with the silver-headed cane which he used, a little unnecessarily Sinclair thought, to conceal a slight limp. His voice, like his manner, was unsympathetic, harsh and grating and curiously unfriendly.

  ‘I hope you feel it an honour to enter these portals, Sinclair? To step upon rich carpets that have been trod by all the advertising talents of Great Britain?’ Sinclair grunted. ‘As our American friends say, a pretty nifty joint.’ Bond bent down to examine with comical carefulness the plain red hair carpet. ‘But the old man’s been practising economy in the hall. The pile carpets are kept for the places where they matter.’

  Sinclair found himself annoyed, as he frequently found himself annoyed, by Bond’s facetiousness. ‘What sort of carpet do you expect to find in a hall?’

  ‘My dear chap,’ Bond protested, ‘here I expect flunkeys on every side, bearing salvers of beaten gold on which we shall drop the cards we haven’t got, so that we may be announced suitably. And here comes the flunkey. But no salver. Very disappointing. My hat, certainly,’ he said, giving to the man a hat with a small red feather in it, ‘and my stick and case.’ He passed over a small brown leather attaché-case. ‘And here we are,’ he said, as another servant opened a large white panelled door, ‘entering the scene of revelry. How delightful – by which I mean, of course, how dull – to see the old familiar faces we saw an hour ago.’

  The scene was hardly one of revelry. The room they entered was fully forty feet long, and some sixty people were standing in it, looking rather depressed than gay. In front of a pair of folding doors there was an improvised bar, w
ith two bartenders. An enormous iced birthday cake with twenty-five candles stood on a buhl table: this cake commemorated the twenty-fifth birthday of the nationally-famous Hargreaves Advertising Agency. And when people thought of this Agency with admiration, distaste or envy, they did not think of it as Hargreaves & Hargreaves, which was its established name now that Edward Hargreaves had taken his eldest son into partnership; they thought of the Agency in terms of the initials EH, which stood for Edward Hargreaves.

  Among these thousands EH was in a small way a legend. He never spoke of his past life, but it was known, or at least said with all the familiarity of truth, that he had been a newspaperboy, an invoice clerk, a gravedigger’s mate and a maker of model aeroplanes, before he was twenty-one: and he had not merely held those jobs, but had been dismissed from all of them. The steps by which he had started his climb to wealth and success were hidden: but when at the age of forty he came from America to his native country he brought a few thousand pounds and some unexpected ideas with him. It was said that these ideas were not always what the conventional might call respectable; that Edward Hargreaves, in those early days, was not only a little smarter than any of his competitors, but that his smartness might, in any more tediously ethical occupation, have put him in some very awkward situations. But those stories were all of the past and lent, in a way, a flavour of romance to the name of Edward Hargreaves. Nobody could deny that now, at sixty-five, EH had become conservative, traditional, a Grand Old Man of advertising. His knighthood was expected yearly by his staff. He had married twice; the first thin, faded woman who had borne him two sons, and whose presence in the household had become less and less noticeable until at last she seemed less to have died than simply to have vanished from a scene where her presence was no longer required. A year after her death, when he was sixty-two years of age, EH had married a girl of twenty-two, who met her death in a yachting accident within six months of their marriage. Such was Edward Hargreaves, the owner of the Hargreaves Agency. On the Agency’s twenty-fifth birthday a party was being given, a cake was being cut, and a speech was being made; dancing was to follow the speech.

  All the members of the staff had been invited, from the other directors down to the girls in the Accounts Department, who giggled whenever anyone over the age of thirty spoke to them; only the messenger-boys had been given a pound note each, and told to go out and enjoy themselves. The invitation was an order: but there would in any event have been little inclination to refuse, since all the women on the staff were anxious to show how delightful they looked away from the office and in evening dress, and almost all the men thought it might improve their standing if it were known that they had been to a party at the old man’s house in Redfern Square. ‘Evening Dress – Optional’ had been marked clearly on the cards which, in order to give the occasion importance, had been sent by post to each member of the staff: but very few, Sinclair saw, had decided to avail themselves of the option. He got a glass of sherry and a biscuit, and sipped the sherry reflectively, while he looked round.

  The party, he thought, could hardly be called a success at the moment. Little departmental groups had gathered together, and were talking almost in whispers. The four Accounts girls, quite overcome by the occasion, were giggling together over their gin and grapefruit. Onslow and Mudge, two young copywriters, were standing firmly together in front of the buffet, and drinking hard and fast. Mrs Rodgers, who looked after copy from what everyone except Sinclair, who had charge of the Copy Department, called the woman’s angle, was talking to Tracy, the Creative Director, and Bond. Lionel, the other Hargreaves in the name, was standing at the side of the room, near the windows, fiddling with a small box on a table. There was no sign of EH or his youngest son, Richard. Sinclair was debating which of the several little groups he should join, when Lionel Hargreaves beckoned to him. Lionel was a well-built, fair man of thirty-five, with a weakly handsome, sensual face, an amiably supercilious manner, and, Sinclair had always thought, very little aptitude for advertising. He greeted Sinclair with the friendly condescension of a duke who is being pleasant to a baronet.

  ‘Looking lost over there, Sinclair. Devilish bore these things, aren’t they?’ The question was almost rhetorical, and Sinclair did not answer it. ‘You know what the old man’s like, though – loves that touch of ceremonial.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Sinclair said. EH couldn’t do without the ceremonial.’

  Lionel ran a finger round his collar. He was wearing a dinner-jacket. ‘I could do without it myself, and without these damned monkey jackets, too.’ There was a particularly loud giggle from one of the Account girls, and Lionel’s eye strayed towards them. ‘That girl – what’s her name – Miss Gardner. Got a fine figure, hasn’t she? Pity she giggles so much.’

  Sinclair was rather short. ‘She’s engaged to be married.’

  ‘Is she now. Hell of a thing, marriage – can land you in a devil of a mess. Certainly has me.’ Lionel suddenly looked alarmed, as if he had said something he had not intended. ‘This buhl furniture and these Aubusson carpets now – I don’t like that kind of thing, do you? Ornate.’

  ‘It helps with the ceremonial – and it must have cost a mint of money.’

  ‘Money, oh ah, yes.’ Lionel’s attention had wandered. With an almost visible effort he pulled it back to Sinclair and laid his hand on the box which stood on the table by his side. ‘Never been here before, have you?’ he asked, and although it could not be said that his tone was offensive, it was too noticeably that of the lord of the manor congratulating one of his retainers on a step up in the world to be agreeable to Sinclair, whose ‘No’ was rather stiff. ‘You won’t have seen any of the old man’s musical-boxes, then.’ He lifted the rosewood lid of the box on the table, and Sinclair saw a long brass cylinder with small spikes sticking out of it, which impinged on a steel comb. At the back of the box sat three little figures with drumsticks in their hands and drums in front of them. Sinclair, although he was annoyed by Lionel’s manner, was too interested to be sulky. He bent close to look at the box and said, ‘Charming.’ Lionel moved a switch at one side of the box, and stood back with a slightly self-satisfied smile. The cylinder revolved, the figures beat on their drums, and the box gave a pleasant. tinkling rendering of ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland.’ Heads in the room turned towards them, talking stopped for the necessary and polite few seconds and then recommenced. Bond left Tracy and Mrs Rogers, and joined them in looking at the musical-box. ‘My word,’ he said. ‘That’s a fine box – one of the best forte-pianos I’ve seen. I didn’t know the old man went in for such things.’

  Lionel affected a faint surprise. ‘You know about these things, do you, Bond? Shouldn’t have thought they were your line of country.’

  Bond’s laugh was loud. ‘Precious few things that aren’t my line of country. Always been interested in mechanical devices, and these musical-boxes are damned ingenious things. Does the old man collect them?’ Lionel did not answer, and it was plain that his abstraction was such that he really had not heard what was said. ‘Where is the old man, by the way?’

  ‘He’ll be along,’ Lionel said vaguely. ‘Had to go to some meeting or other. But he wouldn’t miss this for worlds – gives him a chance to perform you know.’

  ‘My word,’ Bond said, ‘look at Tracy and Mrs Rogers over there – they are going it, aren’t they? I left them because I thought they’d like to be al-o-o-ne.’ He exaggerated the last word comically. Sinclair looked across the room and saw that Tracy and Mrs Rogers were certainly engaged in what seemed to be earnest conversation.

  ‘Don’t know what you’re damned well talking about,’ Lionel said.

  ‘Well, I do think it’s a bit scandalous. Jean Rogers is all very well, but, after all, Tracy is supposed to hold a certain position in the firm. I don’t know what EH would say if he knew about it.’