The Witness on the Roof Read online

  Annie Haynes

  The Witness on the Roof

  Glancing at her more closely, he noticed dark stains on her white gown. Horror-struck, he bent over her for a moment, and realised that it was unmistakably a corpse.

  Little Polly Spencer liked to visit her hiding place up on the London rooftops, to escape a scolding or worse from her stepmother. Peeping through a studio window, she sees what looks like a burglary. But signs of robbery are merely a cover for murder – and the young figure on the roof seemingly the only witness to the crime.

  Polly is sent to live with her well-born mother’s family, her secret kept from the police. More than a decade later, she has become Lady Warchester, the wife of a wealthy titled man—yet, in a world utterly removed from her childhood, she will finally face the pale-faced killer she glimpsed through the window all those years ago. And the danger of having seen too much is about to become acute…

  The Witness on the Roof (1925) is a classic of early golden age crime fiction. This new edition, the first in over eighty years, features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  “Miss Haynes has a sense of character; her people are vivid and not the usual puppets of detective fiction.” New Statesman

  The Mystery of the Missing Author

  Annie Haynes and Her Golden Age Detective Fiction

  The psychological enigma of Agatha Christie’s notorious 1926 vanishing has continued to intrigue Golden Age mystery fans to the present day. The Queen of Crime’s eleven-day disappearing act is nothing, however, compared to the decades-long disappearance, in terms of public awareness, of between-the-wars mystery writer Annie Haynes (1865-1929), author of a series of detective novels published between 1923 and 1930 by Agatha Christie’s original English publisher, The Bodley Head. Haynes’s books went out of print in the early Thirties, not long after her death in 1929, and her reputation among classic detective fiction readers, high in her lifetime, did not so much decline as dematerialize. When, in 2013, I first wrote a piece about Annie Haynes’ work, I knew of only two other living persons besides myself who had read any of her books. Happily, Dean Street Press once again has come to the rescue of classic mystery fans seeking genre gems from the Golden Age, and is republishing all Haynes’ mystery novels. Now that her crime fiction is coming back into print, the question naturally arises: Who Was Annie Haynes? Solving the mystery of this forgotten author’s lost life has taken leg work by literary sleuths on two continents (my thanks for their assistance to Carl Woodings and Peter Harris).

  Until recent research uncovered new information about Annie Haynes, almost nothing about her was publicly known besides the fact of her authorship of twelve mysteries during the Golden Age of detective fiction. Now we know that she led an altogether intriguing life, too soon cut short by disability and death, which took her from the isolation of the rural English Midlands in the nineteenth century to the cultural high life of Edwardian London. Haynes was born in 1865 in the Leicestershire town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, the first child of ironmonger Edwin Haynes and Jane (Henderson) Haynes, daughter of Montgomery Henderson, longtime superintendent of the gardens at nearby Coleorton Hall, seat of the Beaumont baronets. After her father left his family, young Annie resided with her grandparents at the gardener’s cottage at Coleorton Hall, along with her mother and younger brother. Here Annie doubtlessly obtained an acquaintance with the ways of the country gentry that would serve her well in her career as a genre fiction writer.

  We currently know nothing else of Annie Haynes’ life in Leicestershire, where she still resided (with her mother) in 1901, but by 1908, when Haynes was in her early forties, she was living in London with Ada Heather-Bigg (1855-1944) at the Heather-Bigg family home, located halfway between Paddington Station and Hyde Park at 14 Radnor Place, London. One of three daughters of Henry Heather-Bigg, a noted pioneer in the development of orthopedics and artificial limbs, Ada Heather-Bigg was a prominent Victorian and Edwardian era feminist and social reformer. In the 1911 British census entry for 14 Radnor Place, Heather-Bigg, a “philanthropist and journalist,” is listed as the head of the household and Annie Haynes, a “novelist,” as a “visitor,” but in fact Haynes would remain there with Ada Heather-Bigg until Haynes’ death in 1929.

  Haynes’ relationship with Ada Heather-Bigg introduced the aspiring author to important social sets in England’s great metropolis. Though not a novelist herself, Heather-Bigg was an important figure in the city’s intellectual milieu, a well-connected feminist activist of great energy and passion who believed strongly in the idea of women attaining economic independence through remunerative employment. With Ada Heather-Bigg behind her, Annie Haynes’s writing career had powerful backing indeed. Although in the 1911 census Heather-Bigg listed Haynes’ occupation as “novelist,” it appears that Haynes did not publish any novels in book form prior to 1923, the year that saw the appearance of The Bungalow Mystery, which Haynes dedicated to Heather-Bigg. However, Haynes was a prolific producer of newspaper serial novels during the second decade of the twentieth century, penning such works as Lady Carew’s Secret, Footprints of Fate, A Pawn of Chance, The Manor Tragedy and many others.

  Haynes’ twelve Golden Age mystery novels, which appeared in a tremendous burst of creative endeavor between 1923 and 1930, like the author’s serial novels retain, in stripped-down form, the emotionally heady air of the nineteenth-century triple-decker sensation novel, with genteel settings, shocking secrets, stormy passions and eternal love all at the fore, yet they also have the fleetness of Jazz Age detective fiction. Both in their social milieu and narrative pace Annie Haynes’ detective novels bear considerable resemblance to contemporary works by Agatha Christie; and it is interesting to note in this regard that Annie Haynes and Agatha Christie were the only female mystery writers published by The Bodley Head, one of the more notable English mystery imprints in the early Golden Age. “A very remarkable feature of recent detective fiction,” observed the Illustrated London News in 1923, “is the skill displayed by women in this branch of story-telling. Isabel Ostrander, Carolyn Wells, Annie Haynes and last, but very far from least, Agatha Christie, are contesting the laurels of Sherlock Holmes’ creator with a great spirit, ingenuity and success.” Since Ostrander and Wells were American authors, this left Annie Haynes, in the estimation of the Illustrated London News, as the main British female competitor to Agatha Christie. (Dorothy L. Sayers, who, like Haynes, published her debut mystery novel in 1923, goes unmentioned.) Similarly, in 1925 The Sketch wryly noted that “[t]ired men, trotting home at the end of an imperfect day, have been known to pop into the library and ask for an Annie Haynes. They have not made a mistake in the street number. It is not a cocktail they are asking for…”

  Twenties critical opinion adjudged that Annie Haynes’ criminous concoctions held appeal not only for puzzle fiends impressed with the “considerable craftsmanship” of their plots (quoting from the Sunday Times review of The Bungalow Mystery), but also for more general readers attracted to their purely literary qualities. “Not only a crime story of merit, but also a novel which will interest readers to whom mystery for its own sake has little appeal,” avowed The Nation of Haynes’ The Secret of Greylands, while the New Statesman declared of The Witness on the Roof that “Miss Haynes has a sense of character; her people are vivid and not the usual puppets of detective fiction.” Similarly, the Bookman deemed the characters in Haynes’ The Abbey Court Murder “much truer to life than is the case in many sensational stories” and The Spectator concluded of The Crime at Tattenham Corner, “Excellent as a detective tale, the book also is a charming novel.”

  Sadly, Haynes’ triumph as a detective novelist proved short lived. Around 1914, about the time of the outbreak of t
he Great War, Haynes had been stricken with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis that left her in constant pain and hastened her death from heart failure in 1929, when she was only 63. Haynes wrote several of her detective novels on fine days in Kensington Gardens, where she was wheeled from 14 Radnor Place in a bath chair, but in her last years she was able only to travel from her bedroom to her study. All of this was an especially hard blow for a woman who had once been intensely energetic and quite physically active.

  In a foreword to The Crystal Beads Murder, the second of Haynes’ two posthumously published mysteries, Ada Heather-Bigg noted that Haynes’ difficult daily physical struggle “was materially lightened by the warmth of friendships” with other authors and by the “sympathetic and friendly relations between her and her publishers.” In this latter instance Haynes’ experience rather differed from that of her sister Bodleian, Agatha Christie, who left The Bodley Head on account of what she deemed an iniquitous contract that took unjust advantage of a naive young author. Christie moved, along with her landmark detective novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), to Collins and never looked back, enjoying ever greater success with the passing years.

  At the time Christie crossed over to Collins, Annie Haynes had only a few years of life left. After she died at 14 Radnor Place on 30 March 1929, it was reported in the press that “many people well-known in the literary world” attended the author’s funeral at St. Michaels and All Angels Church, Paddington, where her sermon was delivered by the eloquent vicar, Paul Nichols, brother of the writer Beverley Nichols and dedicatee of Haynes’ mystery novel The Master of the Priory; yet by the time of her companion Ada Heather-Bigg’s death in 1944, Haynes and her once highly-praised mysteries were forgotten. (Contrastingly, Ada Heather-Bigg’s name survives today in the University College of London’s Ada Heather-Bigg Prize in Economics.) Only three of Haynes’ novels were ever published in the United States, and she passed away less than a year before the formation of the Detection Club, missing any chance of being invited to join this august body of distinguished British detective novelists. Fortunately, we have today entered, when it comes to classic mystery, a period of rediscovery and revival, giving a reading audience a chance once again, after over eighty years, to savor the detective fiction fare of Annie Haynes. Bon appétit!

  Curtis Evans

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  About the Author

  Also by Annie Haynes

  The Master of the Priory – Title Page

  The Master of the Priory – Chapter One

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  “NOW, POLLY, there you go again! Didn’t I promise you the worst thrashing you ever had in your life if you let little Tim out of your arms again? And there he is, crawling in the gutter, and his clean pinny all dirty, and you with one of them nasty, trashy fairy-tale books! I declare you forget everything. I’ll give you something to remember!”

  The speaker seized the frightened-looking child, who was cowering away from her against the wall and administered a series of shakes, punctuating them with rough blows aimed haphazard on the thin shoulders. Tim, the cause of the commotion, paused in the midst of his happy investigation of the contents of the gutter and set up a loud howl.

  A man’s shadow darkened the threshold.

  “Let be, missis, let be!” a gruff voice said. “What has the child been doing now? Haven’t I told you I won’t have her thrashed?”

  “Doing? Little need to ask that question, John Spencer—look at Tim out there! You are fair silly over the girl—”

  But the hand had relaxed its grip; little Polly waited for no more. Experience had taught her that, though her father might take her part at the time, her stepmother was sure to have her own way in the end. She ran out at the back of the house, past the stables, in which she could hear her father’s charges, the great Sir Robert Brunton’s carriage horses, stirring impatiently. With a passing feeling of wonder that Jim Gregory, her father’s underling, should be away from his post, she climbed up a ladder into the loft where the provender for the horses was kept.

  High above, almost hidden by the rough straw, there was a small round window. To get to it, holding by the bundles of straw, was an easy matter to Polly. She caught an echo of her stepmother’s voice in the yard as she popped through and, clambering by a water-pipe, made a perilous ascent to the roof of the nearest house. There, concealed by a high stack of chimneys, she presently sat down to review the situation.

  Mrs. Spencer was the only mother the child had ever known. John Spencer’s first wife had died in 1887, leaving him with two daughters—Evie, then just fifteen, and the week-old baby.

  It had been a sorry time for the man. Evie adored the baby, but her ideas of managing it, and the house, had been vague, and there had been no one to blame John Spencer when, a couple of years after his wife’s death, he had married the buxom cook in the establishment in which he was coachman—no one, that is to say, but Evie, who had resented her father’s second marriage passionately. There had been constant skirmishes between her and her stepmother until, when Polly was five years old, Evie had found the situation intolerable and had suddenly disappeared from home.

  Polly—whose memory of her sister was now merely a vague recollection of being cradled in tender arms, of loving kisses being pressed upon her cheeks—sometimes had letters and beautiful presents from Evie. The rest of the family had nothing. Her stepmother, loudly opining that the girl had gone to the bad, confiscated the presents; the letters, written very plainly so that the child might read them, Polly kept and conned over and over again until she knew them by heart. It was nice to feel that some one cared for her, even this dimly-remembered elder sister.

  She was thinking of that now as she sat hunched up behind the chimneys. She had had a letter from her sister the day before; perhaps that had helped to make her stepmother so cross, she reflected. Young as she was, she realized perfectly that the fact that Evie had so completely emancipated herself from her thraldom was exceedingly galling to Mrs. Spencer—almost as galling perhaps as that other fact which she had heard her father state in one of his rare fits of anger.

  “Leave the child alone!” he had growled. “You don’t understand her—how should you? Her mother was a lady born.”

  Polly thought of that now as she looked round with the air of a conqueror exploring some unknown world.

  Grove Street Mews ran at the back of Hinton Square, where the town house of her father’s employer was situated. At the opposite side, nearer where Polly had emerged, was Grove Street, a precinct which had undoubtedly known better days; fallen as it was, it still retained some remnants of past greatness in the shape of lofty rooms and large windows. It had, however, become the prey of the tenement owner, and each house harboured six or eight different tenants.

  It was on the roof of one of these Grove Street houses that Polly now found herself. Above her there arose another story a
nd yet another. Polly ran great danger of being seen as she picked her way carefully along. It was very dirty; soot and grime seemed to have found a final resting-place on the ledges. Looking down at her begrimed frock and pinafore, Polly shrugged her thin shoulders with unchild-like resignation. What did it matter? Her stepmother was sure to be angry anyhow.

  At first there was fascination enough in the roof itself—in climbing over the various little projections, skirting the chimneys, or watching the sparrows that sat looking at her with their unwinking black eyes, as if marvelling at this sudden invasion of their territory.

  But presently Polly grew more enterprising; she looked up at the long rows of windows. What were the people doing behind the blinds and curtains?

  Some of the sills were on a level with her head; raising herself on tiptoe she could just manage to see in. The first was a sitting-room; so much she had contrived to make out when there was a sound of an opening door, and with a little gasp of alarm she drew back.

  No sound came from the room, however; evidently she had passed unnoticed; and presently, regaining confidence, she crept along.

  At length she was stopped by the wall of the next story. Polly looked up at the overhanging eaves wistfully; it was impossible to think of getting up there, and she was about to turn back hopelessly when a window close at hand caught her attention—it was sufficiently low to be easy of access. Polly found herself unable to resist the temptation. Tiptoeing, she gazed through the lower pane. At first, by contrast with the sunshine outside, everything looked dark, but, becoming used to the dimness, the child saw that the room was a great bare-looking apartment. She was too ignorant to know that the big easel in the middle of the room, the stacks of unfinished canvases against the walls, the untidy litter of paints and tubes and rags on the centre table proclaimed it to be a studio, but something in its aspect attracted her.

  A tall man was standing with his back to the window; farther on, nearer the fireplace across the black rug, there lay what Polly thought was a heap of white drapery. But Polly scarcely noticed that; she was altogether absorbed in watching the man’s movements. There was something odd about the way he was seizing papers, photographs, books, tearing them, through and casting them hurriedly into the bright, open fire that burned on the hearth.