THE CHINA MAIL, SATURDAY, JULY 14, 1950.
Is Qualtrough watching The change
this morning?
By ROBERT PITMAN
AT 7.15 on the bleak January evening before the
murder a telephone rang at the chess club, The waitress who answered heard a voice she had not heard before. The voice's owner asked for a message to be given to one of the chess players. Then he gave his own name. "Qualtrough," said the voice of the stranger, "R. M. Qualtrough."
Mr Qualtrough?
Out of the 1930's comes a story to haunt us all
Who 1045
Twenty-eight years have gone pool. But for those who study crime the question still brings a certain shiver.
by since that evening in Liver-
on
It brings back a picture of anxious, the chess-player, apidly Insurance agent, jolting in a tramear through Liverpool's dark back-streets,
after
stranger's
Would message: Wallace please meet him at 25 search for the man who sent Menlove Gardens East to talk
the message.
MURDERED
tho scene It brings back
the chess-player's which
met weak, bespectacled eyes when he returned to his home in one of these streets and found his wife lying murdered in a swamp of blood.
about business on the following night.
Let us now follow Wallace us he
out goes
to find the mysterious Mr Qualtrough.
At 7.10 p.m. he boards u trum for the far side of Liverpool. in the darkness he finds his way to Menlove Gardens North, The choss-player's name: Wil- 1to explores Menlove Gardens ilam Herbert Wallace. Who West and South. He knocks on murdered Wallace's wife? The doors. He questions a police problem is raised again in a man. But he does not find Mr book Just published, TWO Qualtrough at 25 Menlove Gar- STUDIES IN CRIME, by Mrs dens East for a simple rearon: seult Bridges (Hutchinson, There is no such house and no 278). It is the most detailed ench street. examination of the Wallace care I have yet seen.
Thus William Heibert Wallace returned home. Soon his neigh bours hear him pounding on his own back door. Then they bear im ery: "Come and see. She
Let Yscult Bridges now pre- Rent the dossier for us. It opens late on a January afternoon in 1931 at the drab, terraced villa where the middle-aged Wallaces has been killed." had lived for almost all their married Ilves,
Indoors Julia Wallace awaits her husband's return from his Visurance round.
CURIOUS
Put yourself now into
the
that hls
Qualtrough.
The prosecution showed
actually on Wallace was way from his home to the chess- club when the mysterious phone They showed call was made. that the call-box it came from was one which he could reach,
And they showed that Wal- lace's reaction to the message- when he reached the chess club and heard was curious. He neled as if he were puzzled by the name Qualtrough. Yet be wrote it straight down into his correctly spelled, note-book, just as the stronger himacht had spelled it out over the phone.
Wallace, ft is true, dld nak about Qualtrough's address. But, when a chess-club friend who know all the Menlova Gardens streets said he had never heard of Menlove Gardens Eost, no notice. AL- position of the next-door couple Wallace took Once, before her marriage, as they followed Wallace back though usually meticulous, the had a nice house of her own into his house. The gas-mantles, did not bother in Harrogate, She was smartly just it, were spluttering into street map. dressed. She gave БГЕЛЕС musical parties,
wears
pale yellow light.
he
to consult a
The lack of bloodstains? The By that light they saw the prosecution suggested that for the murder Now for Julla things are not body of Julia Wallace with Its the purposes of
head. They the shattered
saw Wallace was naked-or perhaps | Eo good. She stili long. fared skirts of years Wallace hurrying from room to wore solely his raincoat, which before. Her underclothes are room, looking for signs of the was found under Julin's body.
Was there no other evidence pitifully patched and darned. marauder. They saw the violin
On the piano in Julia's front and the sheets of the Mozart against Wallace? Just one thing. 100m a violin les ready. A sonata lying untouched. Inevit- Mozart sonata is propped above bly they felt horror and pity. the keyboard. But there will
But the police felt little pily.
be no more Mozart for Julla, Within two weeks they arrested Consider the dtuation when Wallace for the murder of his her husband returns home. The wife, gag-lamp in the cul-de-Bac out-
What was the
case against
side is alrendy flickering. Wal- him? lace has nished his duty round. It did not depend on Birt he tells his wife that he usual sort of evidence.
still has a coli to make.
bloodstains were found
EVIDENCE
no
.pro-
The prosecution could produce no bloodstains, no weapon, motive. But they could duce Wallace. His cold manner the ed appalled the police surgeon, No who saw Wallace lean carefully on across his wife's body in order
the side-
On the previous night, on Wallace's clothes. No large in to Rick ash from his cigarette reaching his chess-club, he had surance policy was due to him into an ashtray on been given a message from a on his wife's death. Instead, board. stranger. The stranger's name: the case depended on the theory R. M. Qualtrough. The that Walliee himselt was Mr
FROM CROMWELL RD.
TO THE RITZ-BY WAY OF A TOP NOVEL
A WOMAN OF LETTERS.
15.
The same manner evidently When the oppalted the court. jury returned, 'Wallace Blood colinly, hat in hand, ready to walk out into the street. But they found him gulity. Only on appeal was he finally cleared of the 'charge.
What then was the truth? Like the police, Yseult Bridges belleves that Wallace did the murder. Unlike the police, she produces some streng evidence for motive. She finds it jus! below Wallace's own rius-in the condition of Wallace's right kidney.
"Let me explain.
Two years after the death of his wife Wallace died of kidney trouble. This disease-as other
writers have already pointed out could produce the kind of frenzy which clearly swept over Julla's murderer.
FEVERED
By March Cost, Collins, UNNINGLY concealed in an ingenious and CU
elegant casing of sufficiently "contemporary design, this is nothing else but an old-fashioned rags-to-riches romance, the success story of a lady: novelist. In a series of protracted flashbacks, But Mrs Bridges takes the Damaris Ure, known to her public as the exquisite Madame Ramary, recalls, as she lies in her apart ment in the Ritz, the stages of her climb to fame and fortune.
7
the
matter further. She has shown Wallace's death certificate to a
Harley Street surgeon, who
statos that Wallace's condition
might easily increaseda kila mental alertness, and make him
pervert or a genius." Were there any genius from Wallace? ̧
signs
of
Mrs Bridges says that there At the age of 50 this
An orphan, her childhood was and whom he hadn't been able
Comes spent first with her widowed to explain away. aunt and her three girl cousins war and disaster. She loses all in a London manse, then in the her money, hears that Galloway remote highland cottage left her is killed, gives up writing, and were, by her godmother, the mysteri- minks to the obscurity of the seedy insurance agent suddenly oua Miss Blount
eking out decided to learn to play the
Cromwell. Hood,
a few months It was there that she wrote living by addressing envelopes. violin. Within her first stories for a woman's. And then the great comeback he was tackling difficult Motart.
Then there
Wallace's magazine, in between acting as with a novel that acts on both the focal postwoman, humping sides of the Atlantic, is bought diary. Before his wife's death round her bag 14 or 18 miles a for the Alms, and is to be made his jottings
diny.
into a musical.
Streamlined
were becoming Increasingly philosophical and profound. When ho heard Her drst novel, an instant
Ibsen's "Master Builder", on muccess, rescued her from this. Hence the Rite, and her re- the radio he noted the play's In London she played the lady cullections; and then, slipping message about ambition and bountiful with her cousins, and out to buy a book round the love. He also wrote: “Curious, then went off to bask in a corner, whom should she find that Julia did not appreciata. All this time she was having benind the counter but Gallo-lela play. I am sure that she,
long-distanco affair with way, not dead after
all, but did not UTGST the later Galloway, the famous foreign blind and bravely not telling significance or real meaning." * correspondent" of the-- Glarlon, 'hert
Mrs Bridges aska: Could not who patently loved her but A warm-hearted novelist, this sort of mood lead to murder - would never, Lommit himself, with an eye for characters, Miss through "pity? Could
not Only" too lato, sho "tiacovora. Cost excels at what nim-makers make Wallace, with his - meblei why. --It suddenly comes to her tall "eutling" it is ible which powers oddly Lovered, contrari that he* 16o, like her old Hyes her, her place and her fals wife's prosent life with her guardian Miss Blount, wis a cheet of modern streamilsilog...... former, suluanon, and decide that alte worn better out. of 17- Could it not lend to the momant when thos bare feet" cama
Secret Service agent. That ex- Richard Lister
plains the other women, she had; ween film with one day in Romn❤
—London Kaprèss Service),
it
THE LADY WITH A SNAKE CURLED IN HER HAIR....
TN the mid-distance a British lion yawns. In the foreground 'foliage, and a snake sprout from the lady's head. But who la this lady with the Medusa hair-do ? It is Countess Mountbatten as seen in a portrait by Salvador Dali,
KROBANGUNANAUAKEATONIBILEEBISO
The portrait is reproduced in "THE CASE OF SALVADOR DALI,“ Sy Fleur Cowles, a massivo biography.. and defence of tho, rarely stald surrealist painter (Heinemann. 42%). The best thing in the book: a long quotation from Osbert Laticnater, who writes, of Dalla recent religious paintings, "It is as though a tont who normally offered 'artistle nudes' suddenly changed bis stock-in-trade to illuminated Mass-cards. Bot all produced by same firm. The same arbitrary compost- tion, the вате inevitable low liori- zon, the same lino- Team Anish. And just about as much religious feeling as Through the night of doubt and sorrow' played on a Wurlitzer in the Interval of a leg show."
Might there not have been a real stranger-a real Qualtrough who décuyed Wallace from his house?
the
по
Mrs Bridges, like the police, argues that
one would murder for the sake of a mure £4, which Wallace sald war missing after the crime,
Yet even recently elaborate murders have been planned for
not much more.
Or perhaps Julia Wallace was pleted on by someone who wanted to carry out a perfeel, motiveless murder?
in
Harry James
By LEONARD FEATHER
New York.
THERE is an apocryphal story making the rounds in jazz circles about the recent occasion when the Harry James and Count Basle bands were booked to spend an evening alternating on the same bandstand.
we
"All
ask for," Barda a jazz fan and lets us do what- rilegedly said, "is a chance 10. over we want. play our own arrangements first -before they dol"
In other words, the Harry James
band 15
The fellows are all 'proud to be in the band and they enjoy their work so much that we can communleate thia. spirit even to steners who are not jazz fans,"
James sloppeti thero
enthusing
an
such a jazz klek-and a Basle kick in particular-that are moments when you may matake the orchestra for that of the Count himself.
James, for years, famous for his sweet trumpet ("You Made Mc Love You," "Sleepy Lagoon "Ciribiribin"), Dow has a library packed with ar- rangements by Ernie Wilkins and Neat Hofti — both best known as writers for Basic.
It is typical of the secelerat ing trend towards 'jazz, among United States best bands.
"It started in April of last For who knows - Qual-year Harry told me, talking trough may not only have lived from the Flamingo Hotel in Las he may still be living.
Vegas where Makers are the talk of the
Why, he may even have been that rather elderly man staring
at your speculatively
Might not that same concern slowly padding down the nar- row
stairs and into the roum for his wife's poverty lead Wal- lace to go hurrying off-even on where the music lay?,
Well, perhaps it could. Yet, a possible wild goose chase ing. after reading the Bridges book, the hope of getting some busi I too have some questions.
ncss?
JACKY'S
DEARY
弟弟
JACKY MENDELSOHN
AGE 3/2
house
town.
his
about the band long enough to report on hle Grable, his stable the and Betty own nine. race- horses), and his two pretty daughters, aged 13 and 10.
Swinging on
Next October he may bring his family to New York and introduer the revitalised band to Easterners via the Waldorf Astoria.
"Yes, the musterit climate is better now for the big band jazz then it has been in many are an awful lot of big bands years," he agreed, 'Still, there "Music around that try to play jazz but
aren't swinging.,
"Ernie Wilkins began to write
from across the road this morn-for us; as a result we now have some great jazz in the books. What is more, the boss here is
-(London Express Service).
Saturday the Teacher took the WHOLE CLASS into A Country. [to Visit on
a REAL Farme
ast We Saw A man who was building
• When We got there he was,
•ON his LEGS
Horse Just mailing
SCHOOL BUS
EO
Me
"We are remembering soine- band- we stop swinging,we thing very important in our may as well stop playing
—(London Express Servicá),"
They got Lots of other Animals on a Farm, ALSO Lake Duck's & Chickens & Turkeys & Geese* But MOSTLY They got Cows Who They KEEP in A Pasture, which is How they get Pastureized,
CHEAP
You gotta say Geese When Your Talking as bout Lots of Gooses
Cows are good because But Liked the Pres best be they Give us Chocolate cause they COULD PLAY in the Malteds E-Screams MUD Without getting HoLLered & Lots of other food ONO
•·TOO HUMOROUS to Mention
Am other man was hiding in a That makes its own Road, Only After it already Drives overit, He Should Drive it Backwoops
Tractor, Which is Like Car
So
Working ON A Farm Must Make You awful hungry 1 Farmer was going into ent LUNCH of You Should of seen the Big FORK He Was CARRYing
(01953, 196 Foßres Sykrote, 315 World Trips Aurteng
after that we went home, if ADD VICE FOR Grow up think i'll Be a Farmer. That Why if I don't finish ALL MY CHILDRENS
my Vegetables, can sell theme
FOR SALE
-5-11
of You go to a Farm & You! Want the Animals to Lick Your BANDS Then Just don't Wash them from LUNCH.
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.