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Two Bottles of Relish: The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories
Lord Dunsany
Lord Dunsany mixes reality with fantasy in this forgotten collection of modern detective stories. Some are macabre, others have a lighter and more amusing touch, but every story stimulates the imagination and reveals the acknowledged master of the short story at his very best.SMETHERS is a travelling salesman for Numnumo, who make a relish for meats and savouries. He shares a flat with an Oxford graduate called Linley, who fancies himself as a detective and to whom Scotland Yard is inclined to turn if they encounter a particularly challenging mystery. When a pretty young girl disappears and her lodger is suspected of murdering her, two bottles of Numnumo relish are the only clues, and Smethers is sent to gather more information . . .Amongst the hundreds of fantasy stories for which the Irish dramatist, poet and writer Lord Dunsany became deservedly famous there was one solitary little book of detective stories. Selected by Ellery Queen as an ‘unequivocal keystone’ in the history of crime writing, this quirky collection is a mixture of the masterful and the macabre, a book that lovers of detective stories and tales of the unexpected will want to savour.
Copyright (#u23c28962-5a56-51eb-b64a-7711682743ce)
Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain as The Little Tales of Smethers by Jarrolds 1952
Copyright © The Trustees of the Dunsany Wills Trust 1952
Lord Dunsany asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Introduction by Ellery Queen from Queen’s Quorum: A History of the Detective-Crime Short Story as Revealed by the 125 Most Important Books Published in this Field since 1845 published by Biblo and Tannen, New York, 1948
Cover design and illustration by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008159368
Ebook Edition © November 2016 ISBN: 9780008159375
Version: 2016-08-23
Table of Contents
Cover (#u0d0bef71-c904-5f6a-98ca-eafe43e1567f)
Title Page (#u2911afc5-a3e5-53a1-b3e4-3501e599593e)
Copyright (#u8fff921b-54fe-51ef-b509-f3ca76dbff38)
Introduction (#uc145ffd4-f339-5f05-8961-633270b3a1a8)
The Two Bottles of Relish (#u0c6b6e22-919c-5676-8f16-491e8c59f0f0)
The Shooting of Constable Slugger (#ude2b9e34-e800-54f6-9e48-ee0f53ed5971)
An Enemy of Scotland Yard (#u51bd067b-a7de-5ddb-ba09-b3b7122d202c)
The Second Front (#ubfca05f2-8f0e-56e3-ac5f-44423b5e1186)
The Two Assassins (#uf8ec4065-6631-53e0-b285-e24aafc36022)
Kriegblut’s Disguise (#u420634f2-e583-5d00-bda3-235311b84179)
The Mug in the Gambling Hell (#u93394e36-124f-588b-a6e3-43dbcb97532b)
The Clue (#u57f47268-7465-54ce-bf5d-4f50cef5c869)
Once Too Often (#ud527746e-f084-57e7-9fb2-647a2f0e3fe9)
An Alleged Murder (#u8cdc25a1-f256-548e-b99e-3e35d5b7a75e)
The Waiter’s Story (#ud8313b24-2a74-5ad1-924e-a8b8af22c959)
A Trade Dispute (#u92eddb90-6f11-54b6-aaed-25c45c2cf6a1)
The Pirate of the Round Pond (#udf55abb8-6dee-504d-8eca-1a619e45e764)
A Victim of Bad Luck (#u4551f164-27b9-5fe6-a9dc-3a42854dfb1a)
The New Master (#u6520e81b-9ca5-52f9-96d5-a83bb622ff6d)
A New Murder (#u7cd24bcb-e9c3-51c1-ad51-aa520089b0dc)
A Tale of Revenge (#ue4d6498e-0d4c-5bfd-ad45-e2fb5cbe6818)
The Speech (#uec4627be-cd97-591b-8206-52d670e86b40)
The Lost Scientist (#u78c0a5ba-a105-539c-ae70-677c48b0e89f)
The Unwritten Thriller (#u0eefbc2e-3d43-52d6-95d5-e4da10aa7bed)
In Ravancore (#u9695a9f0-3c14-5231-ab1f-11e0cf994797)
Among the Bean Rows (#u644bbd1f-ee4a-5c39-ba6a-09c6034ec2fe)
The Death-Watch Beetle (#u3e3853d7-70d6-5f66-8cf6-940db67e2868)
Murder by Lightning (#u9bc48350-6d12-55d5-88fc-3426d69d102d)
The Murder in Netherby Gardens (#u7248d0d7-a015-5d83-a785-a20886d37b45)
The Shield of Athene (#u23b608b6-29a6-520c-95bf-c6674c121c01)
About the Book (#u7fa5ff68-e98f-5b73-b53c-0aebe990b547)
About the Author (#u505ae0e7-d355-5dc4-9668-817d2f285131)
About the Publisher (#u79ef501a-a857-5c47-a689-9ca7c2d9c17b)
INTRODUCTION (#u23c28962-5a56-51eb-b64a-7711682743ce)
ONE of the most unforgettable short stories of detection-and-horror ever written—Lord Dunsany’s ‘The Two Bottles of Relish’, about detective Linley—first appeared in book form in an anthology titled Powers of Darkness (London: Philip Allan, 1934). The story, an unqualified tour de force, has an interesting and revealing history. Lord Dunsany was amused to notice that people were reading gruesome stories of murder in preference to his own more delicate tales. He wondered if he could write a story ‘gruesome enough for them’. So, with ’tec tongue in cheek but writing with grim seriousness, Lord Dunsany fashioned ‘The Two Bottles of Relish’.
The story proved ‘gruesome enough’—indeed, it far exceeded Lord Dunsany’s original intent. Editors were fascinated by the tale, but they frankly confessed that it made them ill. As a matter of fact, no male editor in England or America would publish the story. Finally, a woman dared—Lady Rhondda, who printed it in Time and Tide, November 12-19, 1932. Lord Dunsany has always thought that Lady Rhondda, a militant feminist, published the story as an example of sheer realism, saying to herself, ‘That is just how men do treat women.’ Gradually the widespread nausea (to use Lord Dunsany’s own phrase) seems to have worn off …
Lord Dunsany informs us that there are seven other tales about detective Linley, and that he hopes to include all eight in his 1951 volume of short stories. Needless to say, this book, when published, will be selected for Queen’s Quorum, for if Lord Dunsany had written only the very first tale of detective Linley, without the seven ‘sequels’, this single achievement would have earned Mr Linley’s creator a permanent seat at King Edgar’s Round Table.
ELLERY QUEEN
1948
THE TWO BOTTLES OF RELISH (#u23c28962-5a56-51eb-b64a-7711682743ce)
SMETHERS is my name. I’m what you might call a small man, and in a small way of business. I travel for Numnumo, a relish for meats and savouries; the world-famous relish I ought to say. It’s really quite good, no deleterious acids in it, and does not affect the heart; so it is quite easy to push. I wouldn’t have got the job if it weren’t. But I hope some day to get something that’s harder to push, as of course the harder they are to push, the better the pay. At present I can just make my way, with nothing at all over; but then I live in a very expensive flat. It happened like this, and that brings me to my story. And it isn’t the story you’d expect from a small man like me, yet there’s nobody else to tell it. Those that know anything of it besides me, are all for hushing it up. Well, I was looking for a room to live in in London when first I got my job; it had to be in London, to be central; and I went to a block of buildings, very gloomy they looked, and saw the man that ran them and asked him for what I wanted; flats they called them; just a bedroom and a sort of a cupboard. Well, he was showing a man round at the time who was a gent, in fact more than that, so he didn’t take much notice of me, the man that ran all those flats didn’t, I mean. So I just ran behind for a bit, seeing all sorts of rooms, and waiting till I could be shown my class of thing. We came to a very nice flat, a sitting-room, bedroom and bathroom, and a sort of little place that they called a hall. And that’s how I came to know Linley. He was the bloke that was being shown round.
‘Bit expensive,’ he said.
And the man that ran the flats turned away to the window and picked his teeth. It’s funny how much you can show by a simple thing like that. What he meant to say was that he’d hundreds of flats like that, and thousands of people looking for them, and he didn’t care who had them or whether they all went on looking. There was no mistaking him, somehow. And yet he never said a word, only looked away out of the window and picked his teeth. And I ventured to speak to Mr Linley then; and I said, ‘How about it, sir, if I paid half, and shared it? I wouldn’t be in the way, and I’m out all day, and whatever you said would go, and really I wouldn’t be no more in your way than a cat.’
You may be surprised at my doing it; and you’ll be much more surprised at him accepting it; at least, you would if you knew me, just a small man in a small way of business; and yet I could see at once that he was taking to me more than he was taking to the man at the window.
‘But there’s only one bedroom,’ he said.
‘I could make up my bed easy in that little room there,’ I said.
‘The hall,’ said the man looking round from the window, without taking his tooth-pick out.
‘And I’d have the bed out of the way and hid in the cupboard by any hour you like,’ I said.
He looked thoughtful, and the other man looked out over London; and in the end, do you know, he accepted.
‘Friend of yours?’ said the flat man.
‘Yes,’ answered Mr Linley.
It was really very nice of him.
I’ll tell you why I did it. Able to afford it? Of course not. But I heard him tell the flat man that he had just come down from Oxford and wanted to live for a few months in London. It turned out he wanted just to be comfortable and do nothing for a bit while he looked things over and chose a job, or probably just as long as he could afford it. Well, I said to myself, what’s the Oxford manner worth in business, especially a business like mine? Why, simply everything you’ve got. If I picked up only a quarter of it from this Mr Linley I’d be able to double my sales, and that would soon mean I’d be given something a lot harder to push, with perhaps treble the pay. Worth it every time. And you can make a quarter of an education go twice as far again, if you’re careful with it. I mean you don’t have to quote the whole of the Inferno to show that you’ve read Milton; half a line may do it.
Well, about that story I have to tell. And you mightn’t think that a little man like me could make you shudder. I soon forgot about the Oxford manner when we settled down in our flat. I forgot it in the sheer wonder of the man himself. He had a mind like an acrobat’s body, like a bird’s body. It didn’t want education. You didn’t notice whether he was educated or not. Ideas were always leaping up in him, things you’d never have thought of. And not only that, but if any ideas were about, he’d sort of catch them. Time and again I’ve found him knowing just what I was going to say. Not thought-reading, but what they call intuition. I used to try to learn a bit about chess, just to take my thoughts off Numnumo in the evening, when I’d done with it. But problems I never could do. Yet he’d come along and glance at my problem and say, ‘You probably move that piece first,’ and I’d say, ‘But where?’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, one of those three squares.’ And I’d say, ‘But it will be taken on all of them.’ And the piece a queen all the time, mind you. And he’d say, ‘Yes, it’s doing no good there: you’re probably meant to lose it.’
And, do you know, he’d be right.
You see, he’d been following out what the other man had been thinking. That’s what he’d been doing.
Well, one day there was that ghastly murder at Unge. I don’t know if you remember it. But Steeger had gone down to live with a girl in a bungalow on the North Downs, and that was the first we had heard of him.
The girl had £200, and he got every penny of it and she utterly disappeared. And Scotland Yard couldn’t find her.
Well I’d happened to read that Steeger had bought two bottles of Numnumo; for the Otherthorpe police had found out everything about him, except what he did with the girl; and that of course attracted my attention, or I should have never thought again about the case or said a word of it to Linley. Numnumo was always on my mind, as I always spent every day pushing it, and that kept me from forgetting the other thing. And so one day I said to Linley, ‘I wonder with all that knack you have for seeing through a chess problem, and thinking of one thing and another, that you don’t have a go at that Otherthorpe mystery. It’s a problem as much as chess,’ I said.
‘There’s not the mystery in ten murders that there is in one game of chess,’ he answered.
‘It’s beaten Scotland Yard,’ I said.
‘Has it?’ he asked.
‘Knocked them endwise,’ I said.
‘It shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. And almost immediately after he said, ‘What are the facts?’
We were both sitting at supper and I told him the facts, as I had them straight from the papers. She was a pretty blonde, she was small, she was called Nancy Elth, she had £200, they lived at the bungalow for five days. After that he stayed there for another fortnight, but nobody ever saw her alive again. Steeger said she had gone to South America, but later said he had never said South America, but South Africa. None of her money remained in the Bank, where she had kept it, and Steeger was shewn to have come by at least £150 just at that time. Then Steeger turned out to be a vegetarian, getting all his food from the greengrocer; and that made the constable in the village of Unge suspicious of him, for a vegetarian was something new to the constable. He watched Steeger after that, and it’s well he did, for there was nothing that Scotland Yard asked him that he couldn’t tell them about him, except of course the one thing. And he told the police at Otherthorpe five or six miles away, and they came and took a hand at it too. They were able to say for one thing that he never went outside the bungalow and its tidy garden ever since she disappeared. You see, the more they watched him the more suspicious they got, as you naturally do if you’re watching a man; so that very soon they were watching every move he made, but if it hadn’t been for his being a vegetarian they’d never have started to suspect him, and there wouldn’t have been enough evidence even for Linley. Not that they found out anything much against him, except that £150 dropping in from nowhere; and it was Scotland Yard that found that, not the police of Otherthorpe. No, what the constable of Unge found out was about the larch-trees, and that beat Scotland Yard utterly, and beat Linley up to the very last, and of course it beat me. There were ten larch-trees in the bit of a garden, and he’d made some sort of an arrangement with the landlord, Steeger had, before he took the bungalow, by which he could do what he liked with the larch-trees. And then, from about the time that little Nancy Elth must have died, he cut every one of them down. Three times a day he went at it for nearly a week, and when they were all down he cut them all up into logs no more than two foot long and laid them all in neat heaps. You never saw such work. And what for? To give an excuse for the axe was one theory. But the excuse was bigger than the axe: it took him a fortnight, hard work every day. And he could have killed a little thing like Nancy Elth without an axe, and cut her up too. Another theory was that he wanted firewood, to make away with the body. But he never used it. He left it all standing there in those neat stacks. It fairly beat everybody.
Well, those are the facts I told Linley. Oh, yes, and he bought a big butcher’s knife. Funny thing, they all do. And yet it isn’t so funny after all; if you’ve got to cut a woman up, you’ve got to cut her up; and you can’t do that without a knife. Then, there were some negative facts. He hadn’t burned her. Only had a fire in the small stove now and then, and only used it for cooking. They got on to that pretty smartly, the Unge constable did, and the men that were lending him a hand from Otherthorpe. There were some little woody places lying round, shaws they call them in that part of the country, the country people do, and they could climb a tree handy and unobserved and get a sniff at the smoke in almost any direction it might be blowing. They did that now and then and there was no smell of flesh burning, just ordinary cooking. Pretty smart of the Otherthorpe police that was, though of course it didn’t help to hang Steeger. Then later on the Scotland Yard men went down and got another fact, negative but narrowing things down all the while. And that was that the chalk under the bungalow and under the little garden had none of it been disturbed. And he’d never been outside it since Nancy disappeared. Oh, yes, and he had a big file besides the knife. But there was no sign of any ground bones found on the file, or any blood on the knife. He’d washed them of course. I told all that to Linley.
Now I ought to warn you before I go any further; I am a small man myself and you probably don’t expect anything horrible from me. But I ought to warn you this man was a murderer, or at any rate somebody was; the woman had been made away with, a nice pretty little girl too, and the man that had done that wasn’t necessarily going to stop at things you might think he’d stop at. With the mind to do a thing like that, and with the long thin shadow of the rope to drive him further, you can’t say what he’d stop at. Murder tales seem nice things sometimes for a lady to sit and read all by herself by the fire. But murder isn’t a nice thing, and when a murderer’s desperate and trying to hide his tracks he isn’t even as nice as he was before. I’ll ask you to bear that in mind. Well, I’ve warned you.
So I says to Linley, ‘And what do you make of it?’
‘Drains?’ said Linley.
‘No,’ I says, ‘you’re wrong there. Scotland Yard has been into that. And the Otherthorpe people before them. They’ve had a look in the drains, such as they are, a little thing running into a cesspool beyond the garden; and nothing has gone down it, nothing that oughtn’t to have, I mean.’
He made one or two other suggestions, but Scotland Yard had been before him in every case. That’s really the crab of my story, if you’ll excuse the expression. You want a man who sets out to be a detective to take his magnifying glass and go down to the spot; to go to the spot before everything; and then to measure the footmarks and pick up the clues and find the knife that the police have overlooked. But Linley never even went near the place and he hadn’t got a magnifying glass, not as I ever saw, and Scotland Yard were before him every time.
In fact they had more clues than anybody could make head or tail of. Every kind of clue to show that he’d murdered the poor little girl; every kind of clue to show that he hadn’t disposed of the body; and yet the body wasn’t there. It wasn’t in South America either, and not much more likely in South Africa. And all the time, mind you, that enormous bunch of chopped larch wood, a clue that was staring everyone in the face and leading nowhere. No, we didn’t seem to want any more clues, and Linley never went near the place. The trouble was to deal with the clues we’d got. I was completely mystified; so was Scotland Yard; and Linley seemed to be getting no forwarder; and all the while the mystery was hanging on me. I mean, if it were not for the trifle I’d chanced to remember, and if it were not for one chance word I said to Linley, that mystery would have gone the way of all the other mysteries that men have made nothing of, a darkness, a little patch of night in history.
Well, the fact was Linley didn’t take much interest in it at first, but I was so absolutely sure that he could do it, that I kept him to the idea. ‘You can do chess problems,’ I said.
‘That’s ten times harder,’ he said sticking to his point.
‘Then why don’t you do this?’ I said.
‘Then go and take a look at the board for me,’ said Linley.
That was his way of talking. We’d been a fortnight together, and I knew it by now. He meant go down to the bungalow at Unge. I know you’ll say why didn’t he go himself, but the plain truth of it is that if he’d been tearing about the countryside he’d never have been thinking, whereas sitting there in his chair by the fire in our flat there was no limit to the ground he could cover, if you follow my meaning. So down I went by train next day, and got out at Unge station. And there were the North Downs rising up before me, somehow like music.
‘It’s up there, isn’t it?’ I said to the porter.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Up there by the lane; and mind to turn to your right when you get to the old yew-tree, a very big tree, you can’t mistake it, and then …’ and he told me the way so that I couldn’t go wrong. I found them all like that, very nice and helpful. You see it was Unge’s day at last; everyone had heard of Unge now; you could have got a letter there any time just then without putting the county or post-town; and this was what Unge had to show. I dare say if you tried to find Unge now …; well, anyway, they were making hay while the sun shone.
Well, there the hill was, going up into sunlight, going up like a song. You don’t want to hear about the Spring, and all the may rioting, and the colour that came down over everything later on in the day, and all those birds; but I thought, ‘What a nice place to bring a girl to.’ And then when I thought that he’d killed her there, well, I’m only a small man, as I said, but when I thought of her on that hill with all the birds singing, I said to myself, ‘Wouldn’t it be odd if it turned out to be me after all that got that man killed, if he did murder her.’ So I soon found my way up to the bungalow and began prying about, looking over the hedge into the garden. And I didn’t find much, and I found nothing at all that the police hadn’t found already, but there were those heaps of larch-logs staring me in the face and looking very queer.
