The Rutland Gate Mystery

“At about three in the morning of Thursday 3 May, a police constable was on routine night patrol in West London. His beat took him through the small triangle of South Kensington that lies like a wedge between Hyde Park and Knightsbridge.

It was a solidly respectable area, and in the quiet middle watch of the night there was little for a beat constable to trouble himself with. London was sound asleep. He stopped a moment and savoured the sense of peaceful solitude. Even the weather had turned blessedly mild at last, England’s spring having arrived late, held back by an abnormally bitter April.

The constable’s peace of mind was blasted to fragments by a frantic shout and a clatter of running feet. He fumbled instinctively for a whistle and truncheon, but he’d barely got a hand on either before a figure hurled out of the pre-dawn gloom, nearly knocking him off his feet. The figure resolved itself into the shape of a young man, all dishevelled shirtsleeves and hair awry. In a state of terrified panic, he yammered incoherently into the constable’s face. Shaken, the embodiment of the law gathered his wits and dignity and tried to calm the man. It was hopeless: all he could get from him was babble about a friend called Peter.

It was clear that something somewhere was badly wrong. The constable allowed the young man – he was handsome and athletically built, his voice sounded American, and his clothes, despite being in disarray and inadequate to the early morning hour, were expensively cut – to lead him to the scene of the crisis. They ran all the way.

They came to a terrace of elegant Victorian townhouses overlooking the square at the bottom end of Rutland Gate. The front door of number 53 stood wide open. The young man ran up the steps, through the door, and on up the stairs.

Like many of the houses in this district, number 53 had been made down into flats. The young man took the stairs three at a time, the constable puffing in his wake. Outside flat 3 they found the porter in his night attire and a state of bewilderment. From him the constable at last got some information … ”

The constable goes on to encounter two locked doors before he finds a corpse. So might begin a Golden Age detective story – The Rutland Gate Mystery, perhaps. Except it is set in 1956 and is the opening of a biography. Incidentally “the porter in his night attire and a state of bewilderment” is an example of zeugma and syllepsis I think. The biography is Queer Saint, The Cultured Life of Peter Watson, by Adrian Clark and Jeremy Dronfield.