Summary
A mildewed manor on the mist-licked Thames becomes both stage and tomb for John Needham, last scion of a dynasty whose coffers have long echoed hollow. When news arrives that a nameless American boy—Thomas Creighton—has been entrusted to his care along with a bullion-bloated estate, Needham treats the windfall as a license to carouse. He ships the waif to a boarding-school oubliette and turns the ancestral pile into a gin-soaked carnival of roulette wheels, chorus girls, and chandelier-shaking waltzes. Years bleed away until a trans-Atlantic letter lands like a guillotine: the heir, now of age, demands an audit of every dissipated shilling. Ruin stares Needham in the face—debtors’ court, striped prison kit, the noose of public shame. Salvation, or so he believes, arrives in the form of Joseph Norbury, a mild provincial with a jawline identical once the mustache is sacrificed. The two doppelgängers share cigars, clubs, and confidences until Needham laces the claret with prussic acid, strips the corpse, and stages a tableau of suicide. He buries himself beneath Norbury’s identity, believing the world will accept the swap. Yet Parks, the valet whose loyalty is stitched to the gait of his master rather than the label on a calling card, sniffs the imposture. His quiet detective work unspools the fraud, cornering Needham in a fog-choked alley where the only exit is the same crystal poison once offered so hospitably.
Synopsis
John Needham is the last of a long line of profligate Englishmen and just in the nick of time to save him from beggary, comes word that he has been appointed guardian of Thomas Creighton, and placed in charge of the millions which have been left as the heritage of the boy. Packing young Creighton off to a boarding school, Needham takes possession of the Creighton estate and begins a life of riotous dissipation. Several years elapse, until one morning Needham receives a letter from America stating that young Creighton is coming home to demand possession of his estate and will require an accounting for every penny. Joseph Norbury lives in a quiet English village and reads the news that Needham has been appointed executor of the Creighton estate. Norbury's wife remarks that with his mustache off. Norbury could easily be taken for Needham. In after years Norbury moves to London, where he and Needham met at the same club and become fast friends. When Needham learns that he is to be called to account for his stewardship, he realizes that imprisonment faces him and to avoid disgrace, he undertakes to devise measures to commit murder. Having sent to the Creighton country seat the servants from the Creighton townhouse, he invites Norbury to visit him. During the evening, Needham contrives to drop poison into the wine which Norbury drinks and after Norbury falls dead upon the floor, Needham changes clothes with the corpse. The murderer then goes to Norbury's home and undertakes to pass himself off as Norbury. The papers next morning relate how John Needham has been found a suicide in the Creighton mansion. Upon discovery of the corpse, Parks, who has been Needham's valet, refuses to believe that the dead man was his master, and through this suspicion and some good detective work by Parks, Needham is subsequently accused of the crime. Taking advantage of momentary opportunity, Needham drinks some of the same poison which he had given to Norbury and dies.
