Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, July 1959

A Distinctive Flavor by Len Guttridge

It happened in England. But it was the kind of murder which would have set people to talking almost anywhere.

That’s a meerschaum you’ve got there, isn’t it? I thought so. I’ve got one just like it at home, but I never use it. It was given to me by a fellow who — well, I suppose you might say he was the cause of my giving up pipe smoking entirely.

Of course, you wouldn’t know about the Mayhew affair, would you? The only English killers who land in our newspapers are people like Heath and Haigh, multiple murderers with a flair for mutilation or acid baths. They are described as monsters and make good copy, I suppose.

There was nothing monstrous about Walter Mayhew in outward aspect. I first met him during the war when I was American liaison officer with a British occupation outfit. He was stocky, mild-mannered, had a slow smile and was never without a pipe. Neither was I in those days and the mutual addiction strengthened our friendship. We lost touch when he left the army but I met him later on in England. He was married by then and living in a seedy Teddington villa. He wasn’t happy.

“My wife is a witch,” he said when we paused outside his favorite pub, the Ace of Spades. “One of those women who can’t love. They have to own you. Know what I mean?”

I nodded, puffing on my briar. His appearance had changed noticeably since I’d last seen him. His face was thinner, paler. Gray streaked his hair. “Maude lost me long ago and doesn’t like it.” He smiled faintly. “She says I think more of my pipe collection than I do of her. She’s right, too. It makes for better company. Or a kind of refuge, maybe.”

I changed the subject and we talked about pipes and tobacco. He told me he was making some experimental attempts to grow his own. This surprised me for I didn’t think the climate or soil suitable. “There are difficulties,” he conceded. “But some chaps are doing it here and there.”

He described his pipe collection. “I’d like you to see it,” he said. Then he added with a scowl. “But Maude would create a scene if I took you home. She drove all my old army pals away.” I wondered why he had ever married her and he seemed to read my thoughts. “If I hadn’t been such a damned lonely fool.”

When I saw him next he was exultant. “She’s gone for the weekend. Up to Liverpool to stay with a bedridden sister. I’m free until Monday.” He was like a small boy given an unexpected holiday. “Now I can show you my pipes.”

We gathered three flagons of ale at the pub and set out for Walter’s home.

You wouldn’t call the neighborhood shabby but an air of genteel decay seemed to hover over it. Drawn, dark brown shades transformed the windows into closed eyes, as if each house was intent on keeping its own secrets. Walter’s was near the end of the block. He fitted his key into the lock with an eager impatience I found myself sharing.

Everything in the Mayhew home was over-sized as if the aim was to smother life. China ornaments cluttered up an excess of tables, the carpet was furrily thick, the wallpaper a colorful horror of formless flowers. Before the window a huge aspidistra blotted out daylight. I’d already decided whose tastes had dictated the choice of furnishings. With a single word and a gesture, Walter confirmed it. “Maude” he said.

Her likeness dominated one wall, in an enlarged enlargement, hideously framed, from which she glared at both of us. Once she might have been handsome. Now the lips were thinly cruel, the eyes contained oppression. Walter gazed at the portrait for several seconds. Then he turned its face to the wall.

He led me to the basement, crossed to an oaken closet and unlocked it. Two built-in blue lamps snapped on at once. He chuckled at my admiration. Walter’s pipes were no mere collector’s items. For one thing, they were friends to solace him when Maude became unendurable. But they also formed, on a quality basis alone, a most unusual treasure, exquisitely set against a black velvet drape, each pipe captioned with date and place of origin.

Two walrus-ivories from Siberia flanked a crimson pottery Ashanti bowl fashioned as a crocodile’s head. An eighteenth-century Dutch clay with a sixteen-inch stem was encircled by delicate French porcelains and rich brown meerschaums. A high-breasted amber nude, bowl flaring from between her shoulder-blades, stared haughtily at a pair of Bali fetish pipes. An assortment of briars, meerschaums, bamboos and clays surrounded a squat, tiny-bowled opium pipe. Walter took it from its bracket.

“Made from an infant’s thighbone,” he explained. “Seventeenth century. Probably by Chinese tribesmen but I’m not sure. Fascinating, don’t you think?”

He went on to show me the large box of prepared soil in which he had planted his tobacco seeds. “When they reach a good height I’ll transplant them in my back garden,” he explained.

It was a pleasant evening we spent, drinking, talking, and slowly reducing a bottle of passable sherry he had brought back from the army and kept from Maude. I left him standing on his doorstep, a rather forlorn figure, and only after turning the corner did I hear his door slam as he went inside to await Maude’s return.

Shortly afterwards I had to cross the Channel for an indefinite stay and I didn’t know when or if I’d see Walter again, so I journeyed to Teddington to make my farewell. It was Saturday, Walter’s pub night. He didn’t show up at his usual time, but I waited patiently, sipping warm beer and chatting with the Ace of Spades’ affable landlord.

Walter arrived quite late. His face was drawn. Instead of his customary pint of beer he ordered Scotch. When he gulped it down I noticed his hands were trembling.

“She wouldn’t let me be,” he muttered. “I returned her insults at first. After a while I gave up but she wouldn’t. She followed me to the basement and kept shouting.” He passed a hand over his face. “I went into the garden but she was there, too. She wouldn’t let me be.”

When he heard that I was leaving England, his lips began to tremble. The value he plainly attributed to our friendship moved me.

“Soon as I get the chance I’ll come by again,” I assured him.

“You might not. Listen,” he stood up and squared his shoulders. “I’d like you to have one of my pipes. Kind of a souvenir. Come home with me now and—”

I protested — less, I’m afraid, from a reluctance to diminish his collection by a single item than from a strong disinclination to meet Maude. I kept the reason to myself but Walter, suddenly defiant, said, “The hell with Maude. Anyway, she may have gone out.” He held up a hand. “I insist. We’ll have a goodbye drink at my place.”

We rode the bus. He talked cheerfully all the way but I knew he was praying Maude wouldn’t be at home. So was I.

Our prayers were answered. She had left a card propped on the mantelpiece which Walter read aloud. “You are not fit to live with. I despise and hate you. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

Walter laughed. I hadn’t really seen him laugh before but now he threw back his head and laughed. “Hope to God she means it,” he gasped. Then he laughed some more and was still laughing on his way to the cellar for the last of the sherry. Then he was silent. A loud cry like that of a scalded animal arose suddenly from somewhere downstairs. It ended in a torrent of curses. I ran down the stairs to him.

“Look... oh, my God, look, will you?” His voice broke. “See what that... that — see what she’s done.”

A ghastly display of spite confronted me. The closet lock had been forced, the velvet drape torn out, the pipes scattered. Several were chipped. The stem of the Dutch clay was snapped, three bowls crushed by a frenzied heel. It must have taken Walter half a lifetime to gather this proud store and now he knelt amid its ruin, almost sobbing with anger and disbelief.

I took his arm and helped him to his feet. “I know how you must feel. I’m really sorry, Walter.”

His eyes blazed. “If she comes back, if she ever comes back, I’ll...”

“Better relax,” I interrupted. “I want to leave you in a better mood than this.”

But there was fury in his eyes when I left and he clutched the wreckage of the thigh-bone pipe with a trembling, white-knuckled hand. On the way out I told myself that if Maude had any sense she wouldn’t show up here in a hurry. But I had barely turned the corner, my step slowed by an autumn fog, before a woman brushed past me, headed in the opposite direction. I caught only a fleeting glimpse of her face but hadn’t I seen it before, clumsily framed on Walter’s wall? I couldn’t be certain.

It was a year before I saw Walter again. I knew that it would be the last time, for I was on my way home to America. He looked like a new man, buoyantly content and living alone.

“She is in Liverpool with her sister,” he told me when I thought it politely proper to ask. “She’ll never worry me again, thank God.”

“You mean she isn’t coming back?”

“She never has and I don’t think she ever will.” He got up and strutted about his living room. “Bit of a change in the old place, what?”

He had certainly improved it. Bright new carpets, laden pipe racks, fresh coats of paint had worked wonders. The aspidistra and Maude’s huge portrait had vanished. In the basement he showed me the flue he had built for curing his tobacco. The postwar curtailment of tobacco purchases from America had forced many Englishmen to experiment in home cultivation. Walter was well advanced. His tobacco leaves were healthy-looking specimens, stacked in tightly bound bunches. Out in the garden, more grew within a carefully roped-off plot.

Later we sat and smoked. He was eager to hear my opinion of his product. “Got quite a tang,” I told him. “But it’s pretty good.”

It was, too, although it lacked the smooth coolness of a professionally prepared leaf and there was a pungency, a harsh biting quality, which took some getting used to. But soon I was smoking pipeful after pipeful with great relish. My evident delight in the product pleased him.

It was much later, after Walter’s drinks and perhaps an excess of smoking made us both drowse, that his words fretted in my mind. She never did come back. Hadn’t I seen her stalking through the fog that night? Still, she might have thought better of it, knowing how Walter must have felt following her insane slaughter of his pipes. She could have paused at the door, turned and gone away again. She must have, if it was really Maude whom I had seen. And if Walter was telling the truth, of course.

Next morning we said goodbye for the last time. At the door Walter said, “Hold on a minute. I’ve got something for you.”

While he was away, the postman had pushed a letter through the mail slot. I retrieved it and handed it to Walter when he returned, carrying a beautiful meerschaum which he pressed upon me. Then I left him, the pipe cool in my pocket and a crazy little puzzle worrying my brain. For the letter had been addressed to Maude Mayhew and my eye had caught the postmark too. It was Liverpool.

Walter was arrested six months later.

As I said, the trial wasn’t reported in our papers but the landlord of the Ace of Spades kept me informed and sent me local press clippings. A neighbor had grown suspicious during Maude’s long absence and, disbelieving Walter’s explanation that she had gone to her sister’s, traced the woman’s address and wrote. Maude, replied her sister, certainly was not in Liverpool but at home in Teddington with her husband. Occasionally they corresponded although, it was added, Maude’s letters had been uncommonly brief lately. Maude’s excuse for this, her sister went on, was a frequent fatigue which kept her letters short and, no doubt, accounted for the shakiness which had crept into her handwriitng.

The neighbor went to the police.

Walter admitted writing the letters to Liverpool in a simulation of Maude’s handwriting and it seemed obvious to the police that his only reason for so doing was to maintain the fiction of Maude’s continued existence — in other words, to conceal her departure. Why? And where was Maude?

They addressed the questions to Walter who responded politely with a confession of murder. “After she had been gone some months,” his statement read, “I got a letter from her asking for a reconciliation. But she wouldn’t come near the house before meeting me. She needed to know I wanted her back first. She asked to meet me at—” He named a nearby Thameside village where the tryst was kept. They strolled along the river bank until after dark.

“But she hadn’t changed. She was soon calling me filthy names again. I lost my temper, we struggled, she fell and hit her head on the stone. I got frightened so I pushed her in the river.”

He volunteered to show them where it happened.

When dragging operations in the area failed to disclose Maude, it was assumed that she had drifted out to sea. Walter was brought to trial, however, this not being the first time a murder charge was sustained in the absence of any trace of the victim. But the prosecution’s case, not very strong at the outset, was further weakened by Walter’s quiet-voiced account of his unhappy marriage.

When he told of Maude’s brutal attack upon his pipe collection a murmur of sympathy arose from three members of the jury known to be pipe smokers. Several of Walter’s neighbors gave evidence of the provocations he had suffered and the trial ended when the Judge heeded the jury’s mercy rider to its verdict of “guilty” and sent Walter to jail.

Public interest soon died and when, some months later, a female body impossible to identify was washed ashore in the Thames Estuary, only a three-line newspaper report linked it with the Mayhew case. All this did was to settle the consciences of an uneasy handful who might still think Maude was not dead, that murder had not been proved.

It was almost ten years later that Maude’s true whereabouts came to light — in fact, not long before the liberalization of England’s penal laws and Walter’s own impeccable behavior during imprisonment effected his release. I got the news from the faithful Ace of Spades landlord. The Mayhews’ old villa had been torn down to make way for a widened road. Workmen digging up the weed-choked remains of Walter’s little tobacco plantation found bones which were speedily identified as human.

Clearly, Maude had gone home that night. Still in the grip of rage, Walter impulsively struck and killed her. He had, after all, admitted to such. But his next move was dictated by a more subtle impulse, one which lifts his somewhat hackneyed method of body disposal into the realm of pure irony.

Or you might describe it simply as an experiment in fertilization; which I can testify was successful, although it was the memory of my too-eager sampling of Walter’s tobacco which drove me off pipe smoking.

That his tobacco crop, along with his pipes, had been Walter’s prime concern was I think emphasized by his invented story of the Thameside incident. Anything, he must have felt, to keep heavy-footed bobbies from trampling and poking over the plants he had tended so carefully that season.

The last news I had came, not from the Ace of Spades, but from Walter himself. It was written on stationery headed Mayhew’s Pipe and Tobacco Mart, Piccadilly, W.1. Business was good, I gathered, although he doesn’t go in for domestic cultivation any more but stocks up on popular Virginia brands. One thing I’m sure of, though. None of them will have the distinctive flavor of the leaf which Maude so effectively, and posthumously, nourished.