Bodies from the Library 3. Группа авторов

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       THE HAMPSTEAD MURDER

      Christopher Bush

      It can be an absorbing undertaking, when the means are available, to trace to their original sources events which have proved momentous and to discover how trivial were the small beginnings that set them in motion. Even the hydrogen bomb can be traced directly back to a murder in Sarajevo. All our lives are shot through with the most incredible of coincidences. You happen to change the direction of a walk and you meet someone who changes the direction of your life.

      The Hampstead Murder was a case in point. A man in Scotland wrote a letter to The Times and, by chance, The Times found it interesting enough to print. Because of that letter, which had nothing whatever to do with murder, a woman was strangled in a London suburb. You may not recall that murder. It created no excitement and never got into the headlines. The woman was found with a noose around her neck, and the killing could have been accomplished in a matter of seconds. As murders go, it was exceptionally swift and abrupt.

      Considering its ownership there was nothing unusual about the room where she was found. It smelled faintly of pot-pourri, and its charming furniture included some delightful period pieces. Its china and pictures had quality, its carpet was Chinese and its chairs were Chesterfield-soft and seductive.

      Then there was the woman, in a charming afternoon frock, with a face like a surprised Madonna and hair like an aureola. She was wearing about a thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery, which would unquestionably have proved tempting, in short, to a burglar. There was no blood, no signs of a struggle. No vulgarity, but everything quiet and restrained, except for that deadly circle around her neck. Even the murderer was only a part of that general background—a quiet man, writing peacefully at a Queen Anne bureau.

      Later, of course, there was to be the comparative vulgarity of a trial, even if it ended in a matter of minutes with the knowledge that the murderer was hopelessly insane. And the reason of it all—let me repeat—was a letter that was written to The Times.

      To get to that letter we must leave the charm of that drawing-room in Hampstead and come nearer town to Porter Street, Mornington Crescent. In Victorian times the Crescent had dignity and aloofness. Porter Street still retained something of that dignity even if its Georgian houses had become offices and flats. It was in one of these flats that Lutley Prentisse was working on a certain June morning.

      It would be more true to say that he should have been working. In front of his swivel chair were table and typewriter but he sat there with the tips of his fingers together and his brow wrinkled in thought. You would have needed no particular shrewdness to have guessed that he was a writer.

      But he was a writer with a difference. His name was far from well-known. He had three novels to his credit, two having as their theme extramarital intrigue and the other concerned with one of those coteries to be found on the French Riviera. The last only had sold quite well—a matter of gratification to its author purely from pride of workmanship. Money is always useful, but his private income was about two thousand a year after taxes, and the handsome royalties he received from his publisher made no great difference.

      The fact of the matter was that he had drifted into writing almost without knowing it, and primarily to escape from boredom. The first two years after his marriage had been a routine of which he had tired—Switzerland in mid-winter, the Riviera in Spring, golf in England in the summer and weekends at various house parties, with a week or two at Deauville or Le Touquet in early autumn. After that town—the club, theatres and the multitudinous rush and jigsaw fitting-in from morning till night.

      All that was the life that suited Dorothy Prentisse so well. СКАЧАТЬ